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

Britain’s confidence on the international stage was mirrored by a similarly robust sense of self-worth at home. César de Saussure, a Swiss traveller who visited Britain in 1727, was struck even then by the unshakeable sense of pride the British displayed in themselves and all their works: ‘I do not think that there is a people more prejudiced in its own favour than the British people. They look upon foreigners in general with contempt and think nothing is done as well elsewhere as it is in their own country.’5 The British had no difficulty in identifying the source of their good fortune: their political liberty, guaranteed to them by birthright and history, and enshrined in a constitutional settlement which protected them equally from the despotism of absolutist kings and the anarchy of the mob. De Saussure observed that the English ‘value this gift more than all the joys of life, and would sacrifice everything to retain it’. Nor was this passionate attachment confined to the political classes. Even the poor, who could not vote, ‘will give you to understand that there is no country in the world where such perfect freedom may be enjoyed as in England’.6

Liberty was not an unmixed blessing, however. Whilst foreign visitors found much to admire in the constitutional freedoms the British enjoyed, they were far more ambivalent when confronted with the impact of these ideas on the mass of the population. The assertive, aggressive, unapologetic behaviour of the urban poor, particularly in London, shocked observers used to more decorous (or more cowed) communities. De Saussure thought ordinary Londoners disrespectful, rowdy and threatening, ‘of a very brutal and insolent nature, and very quarrelsome’. He was horrified by their habitual drunkenness and casual violence, but was most disturbed by their lack of respect for their social superiors. He noted – perhaps as a result of painful personal experience – that a finely dressed man, especially one ‘with a plume in his hat or his hair tied in a bow’, risked verbal abuse and worse if he walked alone through the poorer streets. On holidays such as Lord Mayor’s Day, ‘He is sure, not only of being jeered at and being be-spattered with mud, but, as likely as not, dead dogs and cats will be thrown at him, for the mob makes a provision beforehand of these playthings, so that they may amuse themselves with them on the great day.’7

The energetically expressed opinions of the crowd frequently went far beyond contempt for the sartorial pretensions of the rich. Mobilised in large numbers, the freeborn Englishman was given to demonstrations of popular feeling that were often violent. Issues of political and religious controversy (particularly those which were thought to undermine the dual foundations of British freedom – the Protestant settlement and a limited monarchy) brought men and women on to the streets to make their views loudly known. Throughout the eighteenth century, the threat of disorder and disturbance was as much a part of the life of British politics as the parliamentary vote. As they went about the process of government, the great and the good were abused, threatened and sometimes physically manhandled; parades were staged, effigies burnt, stones thrown, windows broken, carriages overturned, property destroyed; there were injuries and sometimes deaths. The practice of liberty could be a rough business on the streets of George III’s Britain.

If Britain in 1760, was a volatile and sometimes intimidating place, it was also an increasingly wealthy one. Almost every visitor commented on the general air of comfortable prosperity that manifested itself in the clean and well-appointed private houses, the luxurious inns and, above all, in the quality of the roads. Unlike most European highways, these were well engineered and very extensive, linking not just the great cities, but smaller market towns and villages. They were paid for by tolls, and regularly maintained. Foreigners were amazed to discover that travel, such an ordeal everywhere else, had in large areas of England become a leisurely communal pleasure. One bemused observer noted that even on a Sunday evening, the roads outside London were packed with people on the move, visiting, travelling, or simply taking the air. ‘Carriages of every kind … succeeded each other without interruption and with such rapidity that the whole picture looked like magic; it certainly showed a degree of wealth and extent of population, of which one had no notion in France.’8

From the moment of their arrival, travellers to Britain were struck by the sheer busyness of the place. They were astonished by the air of perpetual activity, not just on the roads, but in the teeming streets; in the ports dominated by the masts of tightly packed ships; on the new canal systems, thronged with burdened barges; in the parks and pleasure gardens, where rich and poor mingled in huge numbers in pursuit of a good time. In fact, mid-eighteenth-century Britain had yet to experience the rapid growth in population that would see its towns and cities grow to unprecedented size in the next hundred years. There were around 7.5 million people living in England, Scotland and Wales in 1750. France, a much larger country, supported far greater numbers; in the same year, its population reached 25 million. The universal impression of Britain as a crowded, bustling community arose less from the absolute numbers of its inhabitants than from a far more significant development – the extraordinary size and influence of its capital city.

Although Britain was not yet a heavily populated country, it was already a strongly metropolitan one. London doubled in size between 1600 and 1800; by the end of the seventeenth century, it was the largest city in western Europe. By 1750, only 2.5 per cent of Frenchmen lived in Paris; in comparison, London housed 11 per cent of the population.9 An unprecedented proportion of Britons were Londoners, whether by birth or immigration. Still more had some experience of metropolitan life, even if they subsequently left it behind them. It has been calculated that one in six of the population of mid-eighteenth-century Britain had lived in London at some stage in their lives.10 The magnetic attraction of the capital was overwhelming, especially to foreign visitors. Most travellers went straight there, and few ventured beyond the southern counties which were already becoming the capital’s dependent hinterlands. Their experiences were dominated by the time they spent in the capital, which shaped profoundly their perceptions of the country as a whole.

The lure of London was not confined to foreigners. Like so many other ambitious young men of the time, James Boswell was convinced that the only proper existence for an eager striver like himself was one lived to the full in London. He could not wait to leave his native Edinburgh behind and embrace all the possibilities London offered. Arriving at its outskirts in 1762, he was beside himself with anticipation, declaring that ‘I was all life and joy!’ As his carriage descended Highgate Hill, ‘I gave three huzzas and we went briskly in.’11 It was Boswell’s great patron Samuel Johnson – himself a grateful emigrant from the staid Midlands – who famously linked the appetite for London’s pleasures to the enjoyment of life itself. From his first arrival in town, Boswell did all he could to demonstrate the truth of Johnson’s observation. Subject headings from the index to the London Journal that Boswell wrote during his stay between November 1762 and August 1763 give a taste of the capital’s gamey appeal: ‘Artists exhibitions, billiards, bleeding, Bow St magistrates court, card-playing, catch singing, circulating library, cock-fighting, concert, damning a play, Guards on parade, horseback rides, intrigues, Newgate prison, prostitution, royal menagerie, Mrs Salmon’s waxworks, surgeons and their fees, Tyburn, execution at, watermen rowing for prizes.’12

London’s reputation as the place where anything was on offer and where everything seemed achievable was then, as it is now, the key to much of its pungent attraction. But it promised far more than entertaining diversions. The growth of the capital was driven by the extraordinary number of roles it performed. It was the focus of the nation’s politics. The king lived there, it was where Parliament assembled, and it was there that the political classes expected to fight their battles and win their arguments. At court at St James’s, in the government offices at Whitehall, the debating chambers at Westminster, they planned their strategies and marshalled their supporters; in the conversations of the coffee houses and taverns, in the great mansions of aristocratic grandees and sometimes on the volatile, riotous streets, the successes and failures of their policies were forcibly and mercilessly assessed. London was also a magnet for anyone interested in the making and management of that other great lever of power: money. The capital was home to Europe’s most sophisticated banking system, and to the busiest, most innovative and ambitious financial markets in the world. The wealthy moneymen of the City of London – known derisively as ‘Cits’, whose nouveau-riche antics were ruthlessly caricatured by contemporary satirists – had long overtaken the Dutch as the brokers, bankers and insurers of international choice. But London’s commerce went far beyond the buying and selling of money. It was a thriving market place for the selling of goods as well as services. It was a great port, a major destination for shipping, whose crowded forests of masts packed into the Thames docks astonished foreign visitors and were a striking visual reminder of the other great preoccupation of eighteenth-century Britons: trade.

The whole of Europe benefited from an upturn in international trade in the middle years of the eighteenth century, but no nation did so with such spectacular results as Britain. British merchants dealt in a vast and ever-expanding range of goods. New essentials – such as tea, coffee and sugar – came into the country, whilst a host of exports – from textiles to metalwares to Josiah Wedgwood’s competitively priced china – flowed out.

Other British entrepreneurs undertook a darker business. Slavery was ‘one of the staple trades of Englishmen’, and the great ports of Bristol and Liverpool were largely built on its tainted dividends.13 The huge returns generated by such ventures, whether trading in people or in things, ramped up confidence, creating a perfect storm of enthusiasm for the very idea of commerce itself. ‘There never was,’ observed Samuel Johnson, ‘from earliest ages, a time in which trade so much engaged the attention of mankind, or commercial gain was sought after with such general emulation.’14 In Britain this was experienced with particular intensity; the nation’s sense of itself as a great trading nation was, in the mid-eighteenth century, firmly and irrevocably embedded in its identity as a free and enterprising people. Part of the appeal was a simple one: trade made a great number of investors a great deal of money, but it played a role in the construction of an idea of Britishness that went far beyond the advantage of individual profit. The fruits of commercial enterprise were widely believed to underwrite all the constitutional advantages which made Britain so specially favoured among nations. The private wealth it generated, which could not be taken away by taxation unless approved by Parliament, acted as a bulwark against the ambitions of despotic power at home. A poor and hungry people was not a free people, and was easily corrupted by the bribes or threats of overmighty rulers. The profits of trade paid for a strong navy, which kept the seas safe for British exports abroad, but, unlike a standing army, could never be used to threaten the integrity of domestic politics. It delivered a prosperity which, as early economists already understood, kept the wheels and ploughs of industry turning. There was no aspect of the distinctive British way of life which it did not touch. It was little wonder that at every convivial supper or political gathering of the period, once a toast had been drunk to the king, it was the invocation ‘To trade’s increase!’ that was greeted with the most heartfelt and passionate sense of shared feeling.

The wealth produced from the profits of trade was to be seen in all the great commercial centres of Britain – Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow – which expanded rapidly in the 1760s and beyond. The influence of new money was also evident in the development of pleasure resorts such as Bath and Cheltenham, towns which existed largely as a way to spend profits made elsewhere. Then as now, it was through property – the building, designing and furnishing of houses – that individual prosperity found its most visible expression. These were the years in which the urban centres of Britain were rebuilt and re-imagined as the rich, the genteel and the polite moved surely and steadily out of the old city quarters, leaving behind their uncomfortable proximity with dirty trades and the insolent poor, constructing for themselves new houses built in terraces and squares, on clean, classical lines, punctuated by parks and gardens. Across the monied hotspots of Britain, the process was endlessly and elegantly replicated, from Edinburgh to Dublin to Newcastle, creating a vision of town life whose ordered, light and spacious appeal endures to this day.

The changes to the landscape of mid-eighteenth-century life were not confined to the cities. There was as yet little obvious sign of the revolution in industrial production that would transform Britain out of all recognition during George III’s long reign. In the valleys of Coalbrookdale and the iron foundries of Wales, in the workshops of the Midlands and the mills of Lancashire, new technologies were being developed – engines, looms and furnaces – which would recast the relationship between humanity and the natural world, ushering in production on a hitherto unimaginable scale; but it would be at least another twenty years before these became the dominant and visible signature of British economic expansion.

But for most contemporaries, it was the farm, not the factory, which, after trade, was seen as the most forceful engine of change. For over a generation, it had been improvements in agriculture which had underpinned prosperity. The green, rural countryside that forms such an elegiac backdrop to so much Georgian art was in fact one of the most intensively managed landscapes in Europe. The application of scientific methods to farming – especially new fertilisation techniques which overcame the need to let fields lie fallow for years at a time – transformed crop yields and increased profits, providing a tempting incentive to consolidate smaller holdings into larger and more efficient businesses. For some, the result of these changes was impoverishment: families who had once owned small plots of land were forced off them and into the day labour market, subject to the fluctuating needs of the season and the whims of the farmer’s overseer. For others, the result was cheaper food and much more of it. This left them with more disposable income to spend; for perhaps the first time in history, significant numbers of ordinary people had money to buy goods beyond the basic necessities of life. Their purchases in turn put more money into the hands of those who made the things they bought, and the outcome was a steady but significant increase in both the wealth and buying power of ‘the poor and middling sorts’.

This steady diffusion of prosperity was obvious to anyone visiting Britain. Every observer noted that there was clearly a good deal of new money around. Among the very rich, it was apparent in the construction of great new country houses, and in the seemingly limitless demand for luxurious objects to put in them: clocks and carpets, portraits and brocades, china and silverware, chairs, tables and sideboards. What struck foreign visitors most powerfully, however, was the degree to which the middle classes, and even some of the poor, shared in the general sense of improved wellbeing. In the opinion of one German writer in the 1770s, the ‘luxury’ enjoyed by the middle and lower classes ‘had risen to such a pitch as never before seen in the world’.15 A few years later, a Russian traveller compared the general wellbeing he saw in London with the gulf between rich and poor he had witnessed in France. ‘How different this is from Paris! There vastness and filth, here simplicity and astonishing cleanliness; there wealth and poverty in continual contrast, here a general air of sufficiency; there palaces out of which crawls poverty, here tiny brick cottages with an air of dignity and tranquillity, lord and artisan almost indistinguishable in their immaculate dress.’16

As he went on to remind his readers, squalor and poverty were of course still to be found in eighteenth-century England, but most foreign observers agreed that a larger proportion of the British now seemed to have escaped the worst deprivations that were the general experience of the European poor. Back in the 1720s, de Saussure had observed with surprise that ‘the lower classes are usually well dressed, wearing good cloth and linen. You never see wooden shoes in England, and the poorest individuals never go with naked feet.’17 Indeed, in England, the wearing of ‘wooden shoes’ was indelibly associated with the desperate poverty held to be the inevitable product of life under Catholic absolute monarchies. The passionate cry of: ‘No popery and no wooden shoes!’, which so often resounded through the streets of eighteenth-century London, was an expression of the conviction held by even the poorest Britons that they enjoyed a standard of living of which their foreign counterparts could only dream.

The small prosperity of small people created the demand for ever larger numbers of affordable goods. British manufacturers soon showed themselves eager and adaptable enough to supply them. Unlike many of its grander European competitors, the British market did not just cater to the super-rich – to ‘the magnificence of princes’. It was just as interested in selling to new customers, less wealthy but more numerous. Matthew Boulton, the great Birmingham-based producer of the buckles and buttons that were an essential part of every eighteenth-century wardrobe, had no doubt which of the two kinds of buyer he valued most. ‘We think it of far more consequence to supply the People than the Nobility only … We think that they will do more towards supporting a great Manufactory than all the Lords of The Nation.’18 Boulton understood that an entire new market had emerged, a new generation of purchasers, looking to achieve their own moderately priced vision of the good life, and he and others were ready and willing to supply it. ‘Thus it is,’ wrote the clergyman and economist Josiah Tucker, ‘that the English … have better conveniences in their houses and affect to have far more in quantity of clean, neat furniture and a greater variety, such as carpets, screens, window curtains, chamber bells, polished brass locks, fenders etc., (things hardly known abroad amongst persons of such rank) than are to be found in any country in Europe.’19 These simple and often extraordinarily resilient objects, designed to appeal to the taste of modest eighteenth-century buyers, were made in such numbers that any frequenter of modern auction rooms or antique shops will be familiar with them. Those that have survived the uses and abuses of 250 years are often beautiful to look at and still desirable things to own. They are also mute witness to the power of a quiet revolution which began to transform British experience just as George III began his reign. He was the first king to rule over a nation of consumers.

The Britain in which the young king acceded in 1760 was an assertive and forceful society, sometimes brash and overbearing in the robustness of its self-belief. It was not an easy place in which to be poor, vulnerable, sensitive or a failure; but for those who could stand the pace, and who were not among the losers crushed by the relentlessness of its forward movement, the experience of being British in the mid-eighteenth century was dominated by a sense of energetic exhilaration, an acute consciousness of an upward trajectory towards levels of international power and domestic wealth that were unthinkable only a generation before. The experience of the nation thus mirrored that of its inhabitants; both now found themselves in possession of assets that had arrived with swift and surprising speed. Horace Walpole caught the mood perfectly. ‘You would not know your country again,’ he wrote to a friend who had long lived abroad. ‘You left it as a private island living upon its means. You would find it now capital of the world.’20

*

In such circumstances, the accession of a youthful king, whose vitality seemed to reflect the ambition of the country he ruled, was greeted with unconstrained enthusiasm. George II had been on the throne since 1727. He was an old man, aged seventy-six at the time of his death, who belonged to the old world. Of the new monarch, Philip, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, usually the most detached and cynical of observers, wrote that he was the king of ‘his united and unanimous people, and enjoys their confidence and love to such a degree that were I not as fully convinced as I am of His Majesty’s heart and the moderation of his will, I should tremble for the liberties of my country’.21

Impressions of the young man at the centre of this whirlwind of attention were universally positive, contrasting his affability with the curmudgeonly attitudes of his elderly predecessor. Walpole, who rushed to court to get an early look at his new ruler, was pleased with what he found: ‘This sovereign don’t stand in one spot, with his eyes fixed royally on the ground and dropping bits of German news; he walks about and speaks to everybody.’22

The polite and considerate monarch had not yet grown into the bulky figure he would become in early middle age, the familiar image of florid imperturbability whose prominent blue eyes gaze so resolutely from later portraits. Although he was not conventionally handsome, the Duchess of Northumberland, who knew him well, described him tactfully as ‘tall and robust, more graceful than genteel’. The family tendency towards fat, against which George struggled diligently throughout his life, meant that he would never look the part of either romantic hero or fashion plate. He had strong, white teeth, evidently enough of a rarity, even in aristocratic circles, to merit approving comment by a number of observers. His hair, when neither powdered nor hidden beneath a wig, was considered one of his best points. It was, the duchess recorded, ‘a light auburn, which grew very handsomely to his face’. She also admired his clear and healthy complexion, but noted that in common with others of his age, ‘he had now and then a few pimples out’. For the duchess, however, it was George’s demeanour that mattered more. ‘There was a noble openness in his countenance, blended with a cheerful good-natured affability,’ which trumped his prosaic appearance and even gave him a certain fugitive charm.23 The portrait that best captures the elusive quality of George’s appeal was made a few years before his accession by the Swiss painter Jean-Etienne Liotard. Delicately rendered in pastels, it does not flatter – the man George would later become is visible in the round lineaments of his face, the fullness of his mouth and the protuberance of his eyes – but it captures brilliantly the clear-eyed, healthy, pink-and-white freshness of his youthful self.

George’s looks were only part of the story. In the opening weeks of his reign, admiration for the new king’s ‘open and honest countenance’ was exceeded only by approval of the unstudied excellence of his behaviour. Everyone who saw him in the immediate aftermath of his grandfather’s death commented on the considerate correctness of all his actions. ‘He has behaved with the greatest propriety, dignity and decency,’ observed Walpole.24 He knew how to carry himself respectfully at solemn moments, but onlookers were also struck by his ability to strike a lighter note. His unforced, natural warmth of character was particularly admired. Lady Susan Fox-Strangways, who saw him often at court, approvingly observed in him ‘a look of happiness and good humour that pleases everyone – and me in particular’.25

The grace and cheerfulness that George displayed in these days of excitement and promise were more than the temporary product of a moment; he was an essentially good-hearted man, who tried to observe the decencies of gentlemanly behaviour even in the darkest and most trying times of his reign. However, the polite, easy candour celebrated by so many observers in those early days was only part of who he really was. There was a sombre, more thoughtful cast to his character, which Liotard’s portrait caught as acutely as it did the new-minted freshness of his features. The young George stares watchfully out from the canvas, with an air of wary self-containment. This is a serious man, with a serious purpose in mind – there is no hint of frivolity or light-heartedness in his measured expression. For all its tenderness, it is also an image of quiet, sustained – even steely – determination; and it was a better indicator of what lay in George’s mind as he contemplated the future than all the benign gestures with which he navigated the immediate aftermath of his grandfather’s death. For George III came to the throne determined to do more than merely replace George II. He aspired to be not just the next king, but a new kind of king.