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

Their outlook was one with which George III instinctively identified. He was socially conservative, sexually restrained, dutiful, exacting and often painfully self-aware. He was also loyal, decent and hungry for emotional warmth, if supplied on his own terms, and by a woman who would not intimidate or overwhelm him. The template towards which he was drawn, both by his character and his sense of his public mission, placed wedlock at the very pinnacle of human emotional experience. ‘This state,’ wrote the clergyman Wetenhall Wilkes in a bestselling pamphlet first published in 1741, and still in print when George and Charlotte were married twenty years later, ‘is the completest image of heaven we can ever receive in this life, productive of the greatest pleasures we can enjoy on this earth.’6

This was a vision of matrimony in which, whilst considerations of property and money were not ignored, it was the harmony of the couple at its centre that mattered most. It was a union into which both partners entered willingly, with an equal commitment to making it work, a marital joint-enterprise in which husband and wife were both prepared to sacrifice individual needs and desires in order to secure the success of the wider family project. Both were prepared to involve themselves in the interests of the other, since shared tastes and mutually satisfying pursuits were considered to be the strongest bedrock upon which a happy marriage rested. Inside the partnership, the most propitious emotional climate was considered to be one of steady affection rather than volcanic eruptions of feeling. A firm endeavour to please was thought more significant than physical attraction, and generosity of spirit and mildness of temper most important of all.

The degree to which this model of matrimony – once dubbed by academics ‘the companionate marriage’ – was a new phenomenon which emerged in the mid-eighteenth century has been one of the most hotly contested debates in social history in recent years. Little credence is now given to the once widely accepted assertion that, before this date, most marriages were cold, commercial contracts, dominated by financial considerations, arranged by parents, and with little room within their bounds for affection. Nor is it now generally accepted that after about 1750 there was a universal warming up of the married state, with love becoming the principal basis for entering into wedlock. But whilst, in practice, marriage continued to contain within itself examples of success and failure, the concern to get things right, to try to identify the best possible preconditions for a stable and lasting relationship, was an obsessive preoccupation of many eighteenth-century writers, thinkers and moralists.

In the latter years of the eighteenth century, the poets and novelists of the Romantic movement celebrated the wilder transports of feeling as the means by which lovers underwent the most transcendent of human experiences, but an earlier generation took a more sceptical view. Most were concerned to balance the appeal of romantic love with a more pragmatic assessment of what made marriage work. Every mid-century writer offering advice to young people insisted that, despite what novels told them, unbridled passion was not a suitable foundation on which to build a stable relationship. Love, of the more turbulent kind at least, was a transient affair, not to be confused with the more solid virtues of lasting affection. They distrusted what they regarded as disorderly and disruptive emotions. The kind of desire later so powerfully celebrated by the Brontë sisters, which hurtled through ordinary life like a disruptive hurricane, was not at all to the taste of earlier moralists, who disapproved of its intemperate volatility and thought it a most unsuitable basis for the long-haul demands of married life. ‘When you are of an age to think of settling,’ wrote one mother to her daughter in an entirely typical example of maternal advice, ‘let your attentions be placed in a sober, steady, religious man who will be tender and careful of you at all times.’7

A sensible parent would always have preferred the unexciting virtues of a George III – kindly, decent, disciplined – to the febrile glamour of a Grafton. In a society where only the richest and most powerful were able to contemplate divorce, choosing a suitable spouse was a matter of enormous significance. The perils involved in finding the right man is the subject of every one of Jane Austen’s books, whose plots usually turn on the difficulties of distinguishing the genuinely worthy candidate from competitors of greater superficial attraction but less true value. To amplify the pitfalls, her novels usually feature a bitter portrait of an ill-matched couple, with Pride and Prejudice’s Mr and Mrs Bennett perhaps the most poignant example of the destructive effects of the fateful attraction of opposites. As Austen understood, there were no second chances in Georgian marital experience, except those supplied by the capricious agency of death.

If it was a good idea to choose a partner by the application of sense rather than sensibility, it was just as important to have a realistic expectation of what even the best marriage could deliver. A life of uninterrupted bliss was not to be looked for. Those most likely to enjoy the fruits of a successful marriage were those who set a limit on their aspirations for it. Writing to a close friend who had just announced her plans to marry, the bluestocking Elizabeth Carter was certain she was too intelligent to fall into such a trap, observing primly that ‘you have too much sense to form any extravagant and romantic expectations of such a life of rapture as is inconsistent with human nature’. Carter was confident that her friend would enjoy far greater – if perhaps rather chillier – benefits as a result: ‘The sober and steady mutual esteem and affection, from a plan of life regulated upon principles of duty will be yours.’8 Wetenhall Wilkes warned his readers that ‘The utmost happiness we can expect in this world is contentment, and if we aim at anything higher, we shall meet with nothing but grief and disappointment.’9

Most of those to whom Wilkes and his many counterparts directed their arguments were, on the whole, people like themselves: thoughtful, literate, leisured, with some property and income to dispose, with the time and means to make considered decisions about matrimony. They were not poor – for those without assets, marital choices were fewer and starker – but neither were they the great monied magnates who so often considered themselves beyond the reach of regulation and advice. In most cases, it was ‘the middling sort’ who were most engaged, both as practitioners and commentators, in debates about what constituted a good marriage; but even amongst the aristocracy, some partnerships were built upon foundations of which Wilkes and his many supporters would have entirely approved.

William Petty married Sophia Carteret in 1765. He was the Earl of Shelburne, she was an earl’s daughter. They were not quite as rich as the Devonshires, but by any other standards, their income was huge. They owned property in London, Bath and Ireland, and their principal residence was Bowood in Wiltshire, a magnificent country house remodelled by Robert Adam. Within these majestic settings, they carved out for themselves a genuinely loving union, marked by shared interests, kindness and consideration, and, above all, a mutual commitment to the grand marital project.

Shelburne was one of those sober men who had looked forward to wedlock, and had been determined to make his marriage work. Like George III, he had had a difficult childhood, and was determined to create a happier world for his wife and children. In his public life, he was an ambitious politician, who was to serve the king briefly as first minister between 1782 and 1783, but in private, he was a thoughtful intellectual with a taste for the classics. In these scholarly pursuits, he found a willing partner in his wife. Sophia had been raised amongst educated women, and liked nothing more than to spend the evenings reading with her husband. Closeted in their apartments, away from the severe grandeur of the principal rooms, the couple jointly made their way through Thucydides or the works of David Hume. In this quiet intimacy, they enjoyed their happiest moments. ‘Spent the whole evening tête-à-tête in my dressing room,’ wrote Sophia in her diary. ‘Nothing can be more comfortable than we have hitherto been.’10