The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians

DEATH HAD COME SUDDENLY UPON George II, with very little regard for his dignity. Horace Walpole heard that the last day of the king’s life had been conducted with the same punctiliousness which had marked all his actions. At six in the morning he had been served his breakfast chocolate. ‘At seven, for everything with him was exact and periodic, he went to his closet to dismiss it.’ When he did not emerge from his private lavatory, his valet, Schroeder, grew alarmed. Drawing closer to the door, he ‘heard something like a groan. He ran in, and found the king on the floor.’ He had cut the right side of his face as he collapsed. Schroeder may have been the author of the laconic coded note hurriedly sent to the young Prince of Wales informing him what had happened to his grandfather. The stricken king did not respond to his valet, nor to the anxious ministrations of his servants, who carried him back to the more decorous surroundings of his bedroom. By the time they had summoned his spinster daughter Amelia, he was beyond help. Amelia’s sight was very poor, and when she saw her father laid on his bed she did not realise he was already dead. Walpole was told that ‘they had not closed his eyes’. Amelia bent down, ‘close to his face and concluded he spoke to her, though she could not hear him – guess what a shock when she found out the truth’.1

George II was the first reigning monarch to have died in England for nearly fifty years. His funeral was intended to be an event both sombre and imposing, reflecting the dignity of the office of kingship and the mourning of a bereaved nation. It was held at night, and began with suitable solemnity, accompanied by muffled drum rolls and bells tolling in the darkness. Walpole, who could never resist the lure of a ceremony, was present throughout the proceedings. He thought the early stages were very impressive, and was moved, despite himself, by the severe choreography that marked the coffin’s journey to Westminster Abbey. But once inside the chapel, he was sorry to see that discipline and decorum fell apart: ‘No order was observed; people sat or stood where they could or would; the yeoman of the guard were crying out for help, oppressed by the immense weight of the coffin; the bishop read sadly, and blundered in the prayers.’ The dead king, with his obsessive devotion to the niceties of correct behaviour, would have been appalled. Walpole noticed that only the Duke of Cumberland – the chief mourner and the son George II had loved above all his other children – behaved as his father would have wished. ‘His leg extremely bad, yet forced to stand upon it nearly two hours; his face bloated and distorted by his late paralytic stroke … Yet he bore it all with firm and unaffected countenance.’

The same could not be said for the Duke of Newcastle, who had served as the late king’s first minister, and whose grief was flamboyantly unconstrained. ‘He fell back into a fit of crying the moment he came into the chapel, and flung himself back in his stall, the Archbishop hovering over him with a smelling-bottle.’ The sardonic Walpole noticed that Newcastle’s distress did not prevent him from surreptitiously making himself as comfortable as he could in cold and clammy circumstances. When Cumberland tried to shift his position, ‘feeling himself weighed down, and turning round, he found it was the Duke of Newcastle standing on his train to avoid the chill of the marble’.2

For all the incipient disorder that so often overwhelmed even the most sober eighteenth-century spectacles, the final act of the funeral was a moment of genuine pathos. The king had always intended that he would be buried alongside his long-dead wife. Now, as his remains were placed in the grave next to hers, it was apparent that their two coffins had been constructed without sides, so that their bones would eventually mingle. Twenty-three years after her death, George and Caroline were united once more.

Mourning for George II was subdued. His death had been expected for so long – he was seventy-six when he died, the oldest king to sit on the throne since Edward the Confessor – that the public response to it was inevitably muted. The Duke of Newcastle, whose tears were perhaps more heartfelt than Walpole allowed, was one of the few who seemed genuinely moved, declaring that he ‘had lost the best king, the best master, the best friend that ever a subject had’.3 Most other verdicts were distinctly cooler; in many of his obituaries, it was George’s least attractive characteristics – his parsimony, his boorishness and his proudly declared lack of intellectual refinement – which featured most prominently. Walpole thought his disdain for the literary world had a very direct and adverse impact on his posthumous reputation, musing that if he had pensioned more writers, he might have enjoyed a better press at the time of his death. As it was, George had never laid himself out to court approval, and his character was not one that attracted easy plaudits or unmixed admiration. In death, as in life, he remained a difficult man to love.

However, there were some among his contemporaries who looked beyond his very visible failings and eccentricities and recognised qualities of greater worth. Lord Waldegrave, once the reluctant governor to the unhappy Prince of Wales, was convinced that with time, ‘those specks and blemishes that sully the brightest characters’ would be forgotten and George would be remembered as a king ‘under whose government the people have enjoyed the greatest happiness’.4 Elizabeth Montagu, an intellectual with no inherent admiration for kings, was another who praised the late king’s somewhat undervalued virtues: ‘With him, our laws and liberties were safe; he possessed to a great degree the confidence of his people and the respect of foreign governments; and a certain steadiness of character made him of great consequence in these unsettled times.’ He had not, she admitted, been a particularly heroic figure – ‘his character would not afford subject for epic poetry’ – but she thought him none the worse for that. Indeed, she wondered if his lack of interest in the lofty and the ideal was not his best quality, praising his conviction that ‘common sense [was] the best panegyric’.5

The old king was certainly not much regretted by the man who succeeded him. Relations between George II and his heir had not been good in the years leading up to his death. The unstoppable ascendancy of Bute had alarmed the king, who distrusted him, and the fervency of the prince’s devotion left no room in his emotional life for any other male authority figure. In private, the young George was intimidated and repelled by the king’s loud, blustering invective; in his public role, he longed, as had his father before him, to be released from the frustrations which curtailed his political actions as Prince of Wales. Only his grandfather’s death could deliver him from this limbo, and he and Bute awaited the inevitable with ill-disguised eagerness. In 1758, when George II fell seriously ill, one observer commented on the excitement with which the prince’s household greeted the news, ‘how sure’ they were ‘that it was all over, and in what spirits they were in’.6

As his opinion of the king sank ever lower, the prince was determined that there was one area of his life over which his grandfather should have no influence. ‘I can never agree to marry whilst this Old Man lives,’ he told Bute. ‘I will rather undergo anything ever so disagreeable than put my trust in him for a matter of such delicacy.’ It was probably for this reason that, even after Bute had decisively scuppered his hopes of marrying Sarah Lennox, he made no public move to find a more acceptable spouse. In private, however, he was more pragmatic, preparing for the inescapable eventuality of an arranged marriage even as he carried on his doomed flirtation with the unattainable Sarah. Safely secluded from any potential interference from his grandfather, the prince had begun to explore more realistic matrimonial prospects. Closeted with his mother, he was spending his evenings ‘looking in the New Berlin Almanack for princesses, where three new ones have been found, as yet unthought of’.7

When the much-anticipated moment of his grandfather’s death finally arrived, one of George’s first acts was to promote the issue of his marriage to the top of his personal agenda. He had maintained an extraordinary discipline over his desires, but did not intend to wait any longer than was absolutely necessary to become a virtuous and properly satisfied husband. Even before the old king’s funeral had taken place, George summoned Baron Munchausen, the Hanoverian minister in London, and instructed him to begin investigating potential candidates for the vacant position of Queen of England.

George had a very clear idea of the kind of woman he was looking for: he hoped to find a helpmeet and a companion who would share his vision of a morally regenerated monarchy, and who would be happy to play her allotted role in his great domestic project. Physical attraction did not rank particularly high on his list of requirements; and he was not interested in women of fashion, influenced perhaps by his great-grandfather’s unhappy experience with a high-maintenance beauty. He told Munchausen he hoped his future wife would have a good general understanding, but stipulated she should have no taste for politics. He had no desire to be managed in public life by an intellectual superior, which he suspected had been his grandfather’s fate. Not over-confident in the strength of his own character, the attributes he sought in a woman were mild, calm, unassuming ones; but equally he hoped for something more than mere colourless docility. He was keen to find a spouse who would actively appreciate his seriousness of mind, and welcome the continence and discipline which he intended should be the defining qualities of his adult life. A strong religious sense, a deep-rooted understanding of the importance of duty, and a willingness unhesitatingly to identify her interests with his own were also of prime importance. Years before, his mother had rejected a princess proposed by the old king as a possible wife for his grandson: Augusta was concerned the girl would take after her mother, intriguing, meddling and ‘the most sarcastical person in the world’. She knew ‘such a character would not do for George’. A loud, uncooperative, pleasure-seeking woman ‘would not only hurt him in his public life but make him uneasy in his private situation’.8 George knew his mother was right. If he was to have any chance of reforming kingship from within, a great deal depended on his finding the right wife.

The pool of possibilities was not large: a British king had to marry a Protestant, ruling out an alliance with the great nation states of France and Spain. George II’s daughters had taken husbands from Holland and Denmark, and a princess of Denmark was briefly considered, until she was discovered to be already promised, and dropped out of the running. Otherwise, George concentrated his search entirely within German principalities and dukedoms. Germany was the spiritual home of his dynasty; it had provided wives for his father, grandfather and great-grandfather; he was personally related to many of the ducal and princely rulers, and through them could expect to access useful knowledge about the characters and dispositions of potential brides. Germany was not only known territory for George; it was also one in which he was unequivocally the dominant suitor. He was an incomparably attractive catch, ruling a country that was richer and more powerful than most of the small princely states put together. There was little doubt that anyone he approached would consent to his invitation; the only difficulty lay in deciding whom to ask.

When the king first approached him, Munchausen had been able to think of only two princesses who might match his requirements. One, Elizabeth of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, was the younger sister of the girl who had been proposed to George as a potential wife by his grandfather several years before, and briskly rejected. Elizabeth was only fourteen, but her youth was only part of the reason George was reluctant to consider her. Her prospects were irrevocably tainted in his eyes by the old king’s attempts to bring about the earlier alliance, and he was obstinately prejudiced against the whole family as a result. Munchausen’s only other immediate candidate was Frederica Louise of Saxe-Gotha. She was nineteen – a suitable age – and Munchausen had heard many good things about her; however, he felt constrained to add that, like her mother, she was reputed to be very interested in philosophy. George replied with some vehemence that this description made the princess repugnant to him from every point of view.9 He added that he was not at all discouraged by the shortcomings of these first contenders, assuring Munchausen that, perhaps as a result of his study of the New Berlin Almanack, he knew there were many other princesses to consider.

Bute later presented Munchausen with a list, drawn up in George’s handwriting, of the marriageable princesses who had caught his eye. Armed with these names, Munchausen was directed to begin the search in earnest. He was told to ask his brother, chief minister in Hanover, to make discreet enquiries about the character and disposition of all the women on the list. Bute emphasised that speed was of the essence. The king wanted the matter resolved as soon as possible, and so, for his own reasons, did Bute. He had seen how severely Sarah Lennox had tried George’s determination not to involve himself with women, and understood that marriage could be delayed no longer. Both he and Augusta had done all they could to instil in the young man a deep-seated conviction that it was one of his most important duties to avoid entanglements with designing females, and, responsive as he always was to the pull of obligation, George had so far complied; but both anticipated with apprehension the possible advent of a mistress, with her own agenda to pursue and her own relatives to advance. A lover was thus far more to be feared than a wife, and it was not surprising that Bute confided to Munchausen that he could not be happy until he saw the young king happily married. He dreaded the danger of his being led astray, he told the minister, out of the good way in which he had been at such pains to keep him.10

Munchausen’s brother, himself an experienced politician, responded immediately to the sense of urgency communicated by both George and Bute and sent back a report containing his initial findings on the front-runners. Frederica of Saxe-Gotha, whose philosophical interests had so dismayed the king, was firmly dismissed: Munchausen had heard she was scarred by smallpox; he confided privately to his brother that she was rumoured to be deformed. More promising was Philippa of Schwedt, sixteen years old and a niece of Frederick the Great. Caroline of Darmstadt was considered to be worth further investigation. Munchausen was keen to keep Elizabeth of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel as a possibility, despite discouraging signals from the king. She was reputed to be very beautiful. It was true she was young, but Munchausen insisted she was very well developed for her age, although he admitted it might require a proper medical opinion to determine her potential childbearing capacity.11

Almost as an afterthought, Munchausen added an idea of his own: Sophia Charlotte, of the tiny duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, looked promising. He had heard she was quiet, unassuming, of unimpeachable respectability, and was said to have been very properly educated by her mother, ‘une princesse d’un esprit solide’. He undertook to find out more about all the princesses, preferably from those who had actually met them, and, if possible, from an Englishman, who might be expected to have a better understanding of the king’s taste. His own preference was for the Princesses of Brunswick and Schwedt; he doubted whether any of the others had been brought up in circumstances of sufficient grandeur to prepare them for the role of Queen of England.12 George and Bute did not entirely agree. Having read Munchausen’s report, they instructed him to concentrate on the Princesses of Schwedt, Darmstadt and Mecklenburg-Strelitz, and to consider the Brunswick princess only if all other options failed. Bute told Munchausen her youth counted against her, but Munchausen believed it was the continued association of her family with George II’s wishes that had set the king’s mind against her. George, it seemed, and as he declared, was determined not to be ‘be-Wolfenbüttled’.

It took Munchausen some weeks to complete the next stage of his enquiries, and it was not until January 1761 that a detailed report arrived in London. It put an end to the chances of Philippa of Schwedt. Although she was said to be handsome, it also described her as ‘d’une humeur opiniatre et peu prévenante’: ‘stubborn’ and ‘inconsiderate’ were not words George wanted to hear used about a prospective wife, and her name disappeared from his thinking. ‘I am under the greatest obligation to your brother,’ he told Munchausen. ‘What would I have risked if I had not hit upon so honest a man. I now abandon the idea.’ That left only the Princesses of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and Darmstadt. Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was said to have a very good character, but Munchausen was still anxious that, having been raised in a very small, undistinguished court, she was too provincial to be seriously considered. The king’s own preference, at this point, was for Caroline of Darmstadt; if further reports on her were favourable, he confided to Bute that she would be his choice. Meanwhile, he continued to urge haste on everyone concerned. ‘The king’s longing and impatience increase daily,’ Munchausen told his brother, ‘and he has today calculated how long it will take for this letter to reach mon cher frère and for him to send an answer.’13

When the much-awaited dispatch arrived, it was a great disappointment. It had little positive to say about Caroline’s character, asserting that her own mother had described her ‘as stubborn and ill-tempered to the greatest degree’. The same report was, however, far more encouraging about the other candidate, ‘giving a very amiable character of the Princess of Strelitz’. George was encouraged, insisting that he did not share Munchausen’s anxieties about the limitations of her upbringing. It was her character that mattered to him, not her background. He told Bute that if she was as sensible as was reported, ‘a little of England’s air will soon give her the deportment necessary for a British queen’.14

The relaxed jocularity of George’s tone defined the attitude with which he set about the prosecution of what he called ‘my business’. Indeed, as the search for a spouse progressed, there is a definite sense in his correspondence that he was rather enjoying it. For such a timid and inexperienced man, the prospect of making an unhindered choice from a parade of marriageable young women, none of whom was likely to reject him, was clearly an attractive one. In the role of prospective husband, he found a new confidence, secure in his worth and in the power of his position. He had no difficulty in outlining the qualities necessary to satisfy him, nor in rejecting candidates who failed to live up to his very exacting requirements. As a spouse, he intended to be an altogether more assertive character than he had been as a son. In finding the partner he thought he deserved, he showed himself capable of making decisions with none of the anxiety or lethargy that had paralysed his actions in earlier life. This was an enterprise in which George did not intend to fail.

In the spring, the king’s search began to move towards a conclusion. In May, Caroline of Darmstadt was finally and decisively eliminated from his thinking, as disturbing new facts emerged about her family. The apparent piety of her father and his court had at first seemed attractive to George, who hoped his wife would share his own strong Christian convictions. But fresh information put a far darker complexion on the family’s spiritual pursuits. The king was horrified to learn that the Prince of Darmstadt had been drawn into the orbit of a group of religious visionaries who had driven him to the edge of reason. George had been told that these ‘visionnaires’ had ‘got about the princess’s father, have persuaded him to quit his family in great measure, lest the hereditary princess should prevent their strange schemes; they have brought the prince very near the borders of madness, and draw his money to that degree from him, that his children are often in want of necessaries such as stockings, etc.’. He had also discovered that ‘this princess was talked of last year’ for another prince, who had ‘refused her on account of her strange father and grandfather’.15 Was George prepared to take a risk another man had already declined?

He brooded for a fortnight, then on 20 May he wrote to Bute with his final decision: ‘The family of the Princess of Darmstadt has given me such melancholy thoughts of what may perhaps be in the blood.’ The possibility of madness was not an inheritance any ruler wanted to import into his bloodline, and put an end to the candidacy of Caroline of Darmstadt. As a result, the seventeen-year-old Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who had begun as a complete outsider – little more than a chance addition to Munchausen’s list – ended up bearing away the crown. ‘I trouble my Dearest Friend with the enclosed account of the Princess of Strelitz,’ wrote George. ‘I own it is not in every particular as I could wish, but yet I am resolved to fix here.’16

*

In the eighteenth century, Mecklenburg-Strelitz was considered very much a rural backwater. The duchy was then about the size of Sussex, and in the hierarchy of German princely states was in the second or perhaps even third division. Such was its reputation for mud and provinciality that it was sometimes referred to by heavy-handed contemporary jokers as ‘Mecklenburg-Strawlitter’. In 1736, when he was still Crown Prince of Prussia, Frederick the Great paid a surprise call on the Mecklenburg dukes, arriving unannounced at the family castle of Mirow. There was little evidence of the Prussian military discipline that reigned in Berlin. He wrote to his father that, ‘Coming on to the drawbridge, I perceived an old stocking-knitter disguised as a grenadier, with his cap, cartridge and musket laid aside so that they might not hinder his knitting.’ Gaining access to the castle proved a task in itself. ‘After knocking almost half an hour to no purpose, there peered out at last an exceedingly old woman. She was so terrified that she slammed the door in our faces.’ When Frederick finally met someone with enough self-possession to take him to the ducal family, he was promptly invited to dinner.

At the duke’s table, Frederick was surprised to see some of the ladies darning stockings during the meal.17 He was even more shocked to discover that sewing was not an activity confined to the female members of the family. The duke himself was a passionate devotee of needlework, said to embroider his own dressing gowns in his spare time, having achieved considerable skill in the art through years of practice. This was an eccentric pursuit for an aristocratic man (Frederick clearly thought it evidence of mild derangement) but neither the duke nor his relatives seemed embarrassed by it. On the contrary, over supper, madness formed the principal subject of discussion. ‘At table, there was talk of nothing but of all the German princes who are not right in their wits – as Mirow himself is reputed to be. There was Weimar, Gotha, Waldeck, Hoym and the whole lot brought on the carpet; and after our good host had got considerably drunk, he lovingly promised me that he and his whole family will come to visit me.’18 It was fortunate for George III’s future wife that none of these rumours reached the ears of the king, finely attuned as they were to any hint of inherited mental instability.

This was the world into which Princess Sophia Charlotte was born in 1744. The embroidering duke was her grandfather. Life was quiet for the Mecklenburg family in their compact palace, so small that Frederick had mistaken it for the parsonage. Charlotte had four brothers and an elder sister, Christiane (who at twenty-five was considered too old to be a wife for the twenty-two-year-old George III). Her father’s death, in 1752, when she was only eight, must have disturbed the placid passing of the days, but little else seems to have impacted on an early life distinguished by its lack of event. ‘The princess lived in the greatest retirement,’ one contemporary observer noted. ‘She dressed only in a robe de chambre, except on Sundays, on which day she put on her best gown and after service, which was very long, took an airing in a coach and six, attended by guards. She was not yet allowed to dine in public.’19 Charlotte’s mornings were devoted to the reigning family passion, sewing, in one of its many ornamental forms; she was inducted into the discipline of the needle very early, and never lost her taste for it when she was both older and grander. ‘Queen Charlotte, as we know, always had her piece of work in hand,’ recalled one of her more unctuous biographers. What had been in her grandfather adduced as possible evidence of insanity was regarded in Charlotte as an admirable demonstration of female industry. Her sewing skills, however, did not displace more academically minded pursuits. Charlotte’s mother took the education of her daughters seriously, and by the time Charlotte was seven she was already in the schoolroom. The sisters were instructed by Mme de Grabow, a poet whose local fame had earned her the title of ‘the German Sappho’.20 Besides teaching poetic composition and the rudiments of French – then considered an essential part of a polite education – Mme de Grabow also gave lessons in Latin. This was an unusual subject for girls: classical learning was generally considered the exclusive preserve of masculine study. Charlotte and Christiane were also taught theology by a Dr Gentzner, but the study of religion seems to have been secondary to his real passion, which was natural history. He was an accomplished botanist who awakened a similar enthusiasm in Charlotte. From her youth, she was a keen collector of plant specimens, preserving those she found most interesting in voluminous sketch books.