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

By the time she was in her early teens, Charlotte had already developed the bookish tastes that would stay with her for the rest of her life. She was a voracious reader, devouring serious works of literature, theology and philosophy; whatever she could beg, buy or borrow she would consume with an intensity that belied her otherwise docile demeanour. But her intellectual journeys were undertaken alone. The remoteness of Mecklenburg ensured she had no access to sophisticated thinking of the kind that had so stimulated Queen Caroline. Her parents were committed Lutherans who viewed with deep suspicion any form of study which sought to question the foundations of sacred truths. There was no Leibniz at the small, rural court to stretch her mind, and no protective cadre of like-minded, clever women to encourage her curiosity. Perhaps as a result of her intellectual isolation, Charlotte drew very different conclusions from her reading. Without the debate and provocation that had encouraged Caroline to explore unorthodox opinion, Charlotte’s values were unchallenged by what she read. Unlike Caroline, who was always suspected of harbouring suspiciously radical ideas about the truth of revealed religion, Charlotte’s intellectual explorations never undermined the traditional beliefs in which she had been so scrupulously raised. Her studies made her a bluestocking,21 but she was never a philosophe. While she immersed herself in the products of the Enlightenment, she did not endorse its implied social and political progressivism. She once returned a copy of one of Voltaire’s book to a correspondent, announcing primly: ‘I do not want anything more of his.’22

Her moral world remained that of her parents and grandparents, in which obligation was more important than personal happiness, and religion was the only meaningful expression of faith. She was a conservative, politically, morally and spiritually, most at ease in the confines of the established order, and unsettled by any attempts to undermine its power. These were qualities which would have appealed very strongly to George, who prized them in himself. Nor would he have been necessarily dismayed by her literary interests. It was not so much intellectual capacity itself which he distrusted in women, as the desire to give it a public, and above all a political, meaning. Charlotte never sought to build a reputation for herself as a clever woman; hers were private passions, pursued with decorous and entirely characteristic self-effacement. Indeed, when Colonel David Graeme, sent by the king to Mecklenburg to begin the formal negotiations for her hand, first met her he was underwhelmed by her accomplishments. He thought she spoke French ‘but middling well’, and was surprised that she had no knowledge at all of English. He saw too, as Munchausen had warned, she possessed little of the social polish that more urbane girls of her age and status could usually command. That Charlotte had talents, Graeme was sure; he just did not believe they had been fostered as they deserved. Only one of her skills truly impressed him: he was intrigued to discover that she had taught herself to play the glockenspiel, an instrument of which Graeme had never heard. It produced, he explained, ‘a bright and agreeable sound’.23

Two weeks after George had made his decision to ‘fix here’, he had instructed Graeme, a friend of Bute’s, to set out for the duchy, taking with him the formal offer of marriage. It was a slow journey, the roads ‘either overflowing with water or deep sand’, and it took Graeme more than a fortnight to get there. When he arrived, he was horrified to find that the widowed Duchess of Mecklenburg, to whom he had been told to explain his mission, was seriously ill. A series of ‘violent cramps’ had, he wrote to Bute, confined her to bed and ‘deprived her of speech’.24 Graeme carried with him a letter from the Dowager Princess Augusta, proposing her son as a husband for Charlotte. Unable to carry the document directly to the duchess, he entrusted it to Charlotte’s sister Christiane, who read it to her sick mother. When Graeme met the rest of the family at dinner later that night, it was plain that everyone now knew about the offer of marriage except the person most concerned by it. They had decided to tell Charlotte nothing, so that ‘by having no disturbance in her mind, she would converse more freely’, and Graeme could observe her natural behaviour. Unconscious of his scrutiny, Charlotte clearly acquitted herself well and some time after dinner was informed of the possible future that awaited her.

How she responded to this extraordinary announcement is not known. The story that she sat stoically silent, unmoved, without looking up from her sewing, is probably apocryphal. Her family were certainly far less restrained. They recognised what an unlooked-for opportunity had fallen into their laps, and were desperate to grasp it with both hands. Only Christiane must have found it hard to join in the general rejoicing. The terms of the marriage treaty forbade any other member of Charlotte’s family from marrying an English subject; having been thwarted in his own desire to marry ‘a countrywoman’, the king wanted no ambitious British in-laws intriguing from the sidelines. This put an abrupt end to Christiane’s romance with the Duke of Roxburghe, who had met her whilst travelling in Germany, and ‘had formed an attachment to her which was returned’.25 Unable to marry each other, neither Christiane nor the duke ever married anyone else. He dedicated his life to the collection of rare books; she became a cloistered royal spinster, an unacknowledged casualty of her younger sister’s marital good fortune.

Christiane’s fate registered not at all on the rest of the Mecklenburg family, who hastened to reply to a list of questions posed in Augusta’s letter. Alongside the formal declarations of the princess’s age, religion and availability – her brother eagerly confirmed that she was engaged to no one else – Graeme sent back to London a more intimate report of his own. Intended for the king’s eyes, this was in effect a candid, first-hand portrait of Charlotte. Inevitably, it began with an assessment of her looks. No one ever thought Charlotte a beauty, and throughout her life her supposed plainness was remorselessly and woundingly satirised. In middle age, she was depicted in cruel caricatures as a crow-like hag, or a bony, miserly witch, an emaciated spider, all arms, legs and chin. Even as a young woman, she was often described as plain and charmless. Recalling her first arrival in England, the diarist Sylvester Douglas, Lord Glenbervie, thought Charlotte presented a very unappealing figure: ‘She was very ill-dressed, and wore neither rouge nor powder … her hair used to be combed tight over a roller, which showed the skin through the roots, than which nothing can be more frightful.’26

Graeme’s pen portrait of her was more kind. She was very slender, he wrote, and of medium height; her complexion was ‘delicate and fine, with an abundance of red, not to be called a high bloom but as much as, in my opinion, there should be at her age, and sufficient to relieve the lustre of a very fine white’. Her hair, one of her best features, was a pale brown. Her nose was acceptable in shape and size, but her mouth, later to attract the delighted attention of the caricaturists, was, he admitted, ‘rather large’. She had a little growing still to do. She was just seventeen, and ‘the appearance of her person is not quite that of a woman fully formed, nor may it be expected at her age, though the bosom is full enough for her age and person’. She was, he had been told, healthy, and carried herself well, ‘the whole figure straight, genteel and easy, all her actions and carriage natural and unaffected’. In conclusion, he declared, as so many others were to later do, that ‘she is not a beauty’, but ‘what is little inferior, she is amiable, and her face rather agreeable than otherwise’.27

If Graeme was cautious in his careful evaluation of Charlotte’s looks, he was far more effusive in his description of her character. The more time he spent with her, the more he grew to like her. He warmed to her artlessness, and was delighted when she sent him a bowl of cherries as a present. When her sick mother died only days after the marriage offer had been received, Graeme was moved by Charlotte’s ‘flowing tears’; she confided in him that the duchess’s last words had been a wish for her happiness, and declared herself ready ‘to render herself worthy of that station … before tears again stopped her utterance’. Throughout her grief, he noted with approval, she showed ‘not the least spark of hauteur’. Her unworldly rectitude amused him. He was amazed to discover with what detail she had researched the services of the Anglican Church before solemnly assuring him that she would have no difficulty in conforming to them. He could not imagine that she could be so seriously attached to ‘some inessential points’ that they would prevent her ‘paving the way to a throne’.28

If she was sometimes guilty of taking herself too seriously, this was not the dominant note in her character; as a young woman, Charlotte was lively and even playful in company. Lord Harcourt admitted that ‘our queen that is to be’ had seen very little of the world, but thought she demonstrated qualities more important than those of sophistication and experience. ‘Her good sense, vivacity and cheerfulness, I daresay will recommend her to the king and to the whole British nation.’29 Charlotte certainly demonstrated a fervent desire to win the approval of both her future husband and her prospective subjects. When the British navy won a victory in the West Indies in July 1761, she wrote enthusiastically to Graeme, describing how she and her sister had danced till midnight to celebrate. Her feelings, she wrote, were exactly those that the wife of the King of Great Britain should be, sharing in the happiness of not just the king himself, ‘but of all his worthy nation … there are times when the heart speaks, and this is how my heart feels this morning’. Graeme forwarded her letter to Bute as proof of her ‘frank open heart’, adding his hope that ‘her good humour and good spirits’ should never ‘suffer any interruption or change’.30

For others, it was her calm good temper that attracted most plaudits. Munchausen, to whom more than anyone she owed her good fortune, was struck by the sweetness of her disposition, if not the polish and sparkle of her conversation. ‘It cannot be pretended she should entertain people in a brilliant manner,’ he observed, ‘but she is gracious and kind to everyone.’ He noticed that her servants and entourage adored her and that ‘never since her tenderest childhood did she arouse in anyone the slightest ill humour’.31 Charlotte’s marriage prospects had plucked her from obscurity and made her an object of political interest to other European states. Baron Wrangel, a Swedish diplomat reporting on her to his government, painted a similar picture of placid good temper and innocence. ‘She has a good and generous heart … but no idea of the value of money.’ She spent a lot of her time with servants, and was unguarded in her conversations with them, a fact that might, he thought, be used to gather intelligence about her; but she was not herself either a strategist or schemer. ‘She has no knowledge of politics, and no idea of intrigues, or of the interests of princes.’ That, he believed, was one of the reasons she had been chosen, since ‘she will never involve Britain in the affairs of the Continent’.32 To some extent, Wrangel was correct in his analysis. The relative insignificance of Mecklenburg meant that in marrying one of its princesses, George was unlikely to become embroiled in the complicated pattern of alliance and dispute that dominated relationships between the larger and more powerful German princely states.

But it was Charlotte’s character as much as her dynastic neutrality that consolidated her appeal for the king. It was her simplicity, upon which all who met her commented with such approval, her lack of sophistication, of contention or wilfulness, that commended her most strongly to Graeme and, through his reports, to her future husband. Young, inexperienced, untutored in the ways of courts or politics, her naivety emerged not as the disadvantage Munchausen had feared, but as her most powerfully attractive quality, an enticingly blank page for a man to write upon. She was ‘mild’, ‘soft and pliable’, Graeme enthused, ‘capable of taking any impression, of being moulded into any form’.33 Little similar flexibility was to be expected from her husband, who saw himself as the secure stake around which his wife would twine. George would supply the worldly judgement and direction their relationship would require; he did not hope or wish to find such qualities in his wife. Charlotte’s lack of looks, money, sophistication and influence counted for nothing; on the contrary, they amplified the key promise of her pliability – and it was that which ultimately secured her the crown.

‘The more I resolve in my mind the affair, the more I wish to have it immediately concluded,’ wrote George to Bute at the end of June. Now he had made his choice, he was impatient to be married; but he was also keen to spare his bride the prospect of having to face both coronation and wedding services in intimidating succession. The coronation was planned for September. He hoped Charlotte could arrive in London a month beforehand, allowing time for the wedding and a short honeymoon. With no time to lose, the machinery of government and protocol was put in motion, and the Privy Council was summoned to meet on 8 July. When they assembled, they were informed of the king’s intention ‘to demand in marriage the Princess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, a princess distinguished by every eminent virtue and amiable endowment’. This was the meeting that so shocked Henry Fox and put an abrupt end to Sarah Lennox’s royal romance. It caught even the unflappable Walpole by surprise, and as a result he had only the baldest news about the impending nuptials to pass on to his extensive network of correspondents. ‘All I can tell you of truth is that Lord Harcourt goes to fetch the princess and comes back as her Master of the Horse. She is to be here in August, and the coronation on the 22nd September.’34

The choice of Lord Harcourt as the official charged with negotiating the marriage treaty, and bringing Charlotte to her new home in England, was surprising – Harcourt himself confessed that ‘this office I expected about as much as I did the Bishopric of London, then vacant’. His last contact with the king had been as his louche and ineffectual governor, when George was Prince of Wales. It was Harcourt who had so successfully and infuriatingly given the dowager princess the repeated brush-off, despite all her persistent attempts to pin him down and find out exactly what he was doing with her son. It was a mystery to everyone why George had chosen him, but somehow fitting that the appointment seems to have arisen from what Harcourt had not done rather than as the result of some more positive action. The king was said to have told Harcourt that as he was the only man not to have solicited him for a place when he inherited the throne, he had always had it in mind to do something for him. It was definitely a plum of a job; Harcourt was given the title Master of the Horse to the new queen’s household, and was granted the huge sum of £4,000 to pay for his trip.

He arrived in Strelitz on 14 July. The next day, final details were agreed and the marriage treaty was ‘despatched away to England’. Harcourt was pleased to see how hard the ducal family had exerted themselves to mark the occasion and was particularly impressed by a grand banquet, held the night the treaty was signed. The palace and gardens were lit with 40,000 lamps; even the small town of Neustrelitz illuminated its lanes and backstreets to celebrate. To conclude the event, Charlotte made a speech of thanks which ended with a formal leave-taking of her family. It ‘so forcibly impressed many of the bystanders that their wet cheeks could only tell what they felt’. Colonel Graeme – who was among the damp-eyed spectators – was moved to uncharacteristic emotion, writing to Bute that he was convinced ‘no marriage can afford a greater prospect of happiness’.35 When the day came to leave, Charlotte departed in great style. Lord Harcourt’s carriage led the way, followed by Charlotte’s; in the third carriage came ‘the ladies’, including two ‘femmes des chambres’, Juliana Schwellenberg and Johanna Hagerdorn. George had been reluctant to allow Charlotte to bring any of her old servants with her to England. ‘I own I hope they will be quiet people,’ he told Bute gloomily, ‘for by my own experience I have seen these women meddle much more than they ought to do.’36

Back in London, the king’s enthusiasm mounted daily. He had acquired a portrait of Charlotte and was said to be ‘mighty fond of it, but won’t let any mortal look at it’.37 Although George had little interest in fashion, he concerned himself in the provision of a suitable wardrobe for his bride. ‘Graeme ought to get a very exact measure of her,’ he told Bute, ‘accompanied with a very explicit account of every particular, that her clothes may be made here.’38 He knew that the styles of a remote German court would not survive the critical scrutiny of the London beau monde. The usual method of ordering clothes by proxy was to send one’s stays to the dressmaker, who would use them as a form of measurement, but such was the austerity of Charlotte’s upbringing that she had only a single pair, which clearly could not be spared. Graeme sent her measurements instead, passing them on to Lady Bute, who was to ensure that new gowns – and presumably a few extra pairs of stays – would be waiting for Charlotte when she arrived in England.

The atmosphere of apprehension and excitement in London had reached fever pitch well before Charlotte had even set out from Mecklenburg. The announcement of the royal wedding had been followed by news of a great victory in India, where the British and French were contesting for supremacy in the subcontinent. The capture of Pondicherry, the principal French base in the south, marked a decisive upturn in British fortunes, and had inflamed the national mood of manic self-congratulation even further. Even the usually detached Walpole was caught up in the celebratory atmosphere. ‘I don’t know where I am,’ he confessed. ‘It is all royal marriages, coronations and victories; they come tumbling so over one another from distant parts of the globe that it looks just like the handiwork of a lady romance writer to whom it costs nothing but a little false geography to make the Great Mogul fall in love with a Princess of Mecklenburg and defeat two marshals of France as he rides post on an elephant to his nuptials.’39

The man at the centre of the mounting excitement sought to sublimate his eager impatience into practical organisation. George began to assemble the Hanoverian family jewels so they could be worn by his new wife, paying his uncle the Duke of Cumberland £50,000 to buy out Cumberland’s share of his inheritance. The result was a collection of extraordinary richness. At the end of July, the Duchess of Northumberland was granted a discreet opportunity to examine it by Lady Bute, who had temporary custody of it, presumably in her role as the overseer of Charlotte’s trousseau. The duchess, a wealthy woman well supplied with jewels of her own, was astonished by what she saw. ‘There are an amazing number of pearls of a most beautiful colour and prodigious size. There are diamonds for the facings and robings of her gown, set in sprigs of flowers; her earrings are three drops, the diamonds of an immense size and fine water. The necklace consists of large brilliants set around … The middle drop of the earring costs £12,000.’40

George also appointed a household for his wife-to-be, a substantial establishment that included six Ladies of the Bedchamber, six Maids of Honour and six lower-ranking waiting women. The future queen was also provided with chamberlains, pages, gentleman ushers, surgeons, apothecaries, ‘an operator for teeth’ and two ‘necessary women’. As well as a Master of the Horse, other staff included a treasurer, law officers and her own band of German musicians. At the top of this structure, he placed two intimidating women: the Duchess of Ancaster was to be Mistress of the Robes, the Duchess of Hamilton, Lady of the Bedchamber. Both were experienced beauties, veterans of court life, worldly sophisticates who might not have been the obvious choices to reassure and support a callow seventeen-year-old on her first arrival in a strange country; they were, in effect, Charlotte’s introduction to the female world in which she would now be expected to make a life for herself, for the king had charged them with the task of crossing the Channel and accompanying the future queen home. Neither duchess was very happy about the idea, and neither proved the easiest of passengers. The Duchess of Hamilton insisted that her tame ass should accompany her on the journey, so that she should not be deprived of the medicinal benefits of its milk. ‘The Duchess of Ancaster,’ Walpole noted, ‘only takes a surgeon and a midwife, as she is breeding and subject to hysteric fits.’41

The fleet assembled to carry the reluctant duchesses across to Germany sailed from Harwich and arrived at the mouth of the Elbe on 14 August 1761. On the 22nd, Charlotte was ready to embark. She had no experience of the sea – indeed, she had probably never seen it before – and therefore little idea what to expect on her journey. Her first voyage turned out to be anything but a smooth one. The weather was bad from the beginning, with gales, rain and thunder making the small fleet’s progress slow and haphazard. As the days went on with no sign of the English coast, the discomfort of the journey took its toll, and the duchesses were soon observed ‘to be very much out of order’; however, a very different story was told of Charlotte’s response to the ordeal.42 ‘The queen was not at all affected with the storm, but bore the sea like a truly British queen,’ gushed one contemporary press account; Walpole heard that she had been ‘sick but half an hour; sung and played on the harpsichord all the voyage, and been cheerful the whole time’.43

In reality, Charlotte seems to have found the voyage just as prostrating as all the other passengers. When Lord Anson, who captained the Royal Charlotte, finally arrived in Harwich on 7 September, he wrote immediately to the Admiralty explaining that ‘the princess being much fatigued made it absolutely necessary to land her royal highness here’, and plans for a triumphal procession up the Thames to London were quietly abandoned. From Harwich she travelled to Colchester, where she was presented with a gift of candied eringo root – a kind of sea holly – which must have given her a rather strange idea of what was considered a delicacy in her new homeland. She spent the night at the home of Lord Abercorn in Witham, where she ate her first formal English dinner, with Lord Harcourt standing on one side of her chair and Lord Anson on the other, and the door ‘wide open, that everybody might have the pleasure and satisfaction of seeing her’.44

After that, it was onwards to London, to St James’s Palace and her destiny. The marriage ceremony was to take place that very evening. No wonder that, as her destination approached, she had little to say. ‘When she caught the first glimpse of the palace, she grew frightened and turned pale; the Duchess of Hamilton smiled – the princess said, “My dear Duchess, you may laugh, you have been married twice but it is no joke to me.”’45

There was little time for reflection. As soon as her arrival in town had been confirmed, all the city’s pent-up desire for celebration exploded into a cacophony of sound. ‘Madame Charlotte is this instant arrived!’ scribbled Walpole as a delighted postscript to one of his omnipresent letters. ‘The noise of coaches, chaises, horsemen, mob that have been to see her pass through the parks is so prodigious that I cannot distinguish the guns. I am going to be dressed, and before seven shall launch into the crowd. Pray for me!’46 Walpole was not the only well-connected spectator determined to satisfy his curiosity. Everyone wanted to see the first meeting of the king and the princess. The Countess of Harrington watched it from over her garden wall, and passed on what she had seen to the Countess of Kildare, who in turn described it to her husband. Introduced to the king, Charlotte ‘threw herself at his feet, he raised her up, embraced her and led her through the garden up the steps into the palace’.47