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

Sophia Dorothea was hustled away to a remote castle at Ahlden, Lower Saxony, where she was kept isolated in the strictest confinement. Letters from her were found at Königsmark’s house, and shown to her father who, as a result of what they disclosed, effectively abandoned her. Her mother was refused access to her. Immured alone at Ahlden, she was questioned over and over again about the precise nature of her relationship with Königsmark. She always denied that she had committed what she called ‘le crime’, but the couple’s correspondence contradicted her assertions. In them, Königsmark made it clear how much he hated the thought of Sophia Dorothea having sex – or, as he put it, ‘monter à cheval’ – with her husband. In her replies, Sophia Dorothea reassured him that George was a very poor lover in comparison with himself, and added vehemently that she longed for George to die in battle. It is probable that George was shown these letters, which may explain some of the harshness with which Sophia Dorothea was treated in the months that followed.15

At first, it was hard to know what to do with George’s errant wife. In the end, she was persuaded to become the unwitting author of her own misery. She was encouraged to ask for a separation from her husband, which she did almost willingly, on the grounds that ‘she despaired of ever overcoming the aversion the prince has for several years evinced towards her’.16 It is unlikely she knew at this stage that Königsmark was dead; naively, she may still have hoped to be reunited with him after a separation had taken place. Armed with his wife’s declaration, in December 1694, George was quickly able to obtain a divorce. Sophia Dorothea hoped that afterwards she would be allowed quietly ‘to retire from the world’, expecting to live with her mother at Celle; instead she was returned to Ahlden, where she was locked up and, in all but name, imprisoned.

Any reminders of Sophia Dorothea’s presence were ruthlessly and systematically erased from the Hanoverian court. Her name was struck out of prayers, and all portraits of her taken down. She had become a non-person, and disappeared into a confinement from which she would never emerge. She had not been allowed to say goodbye to her children – twelve-year-old George and seven-year-old Sophia Dorothea – before she was taken away. She would not see them again. Her name was never mentioned to them, and they were forbidden to speak of her. She was permitted to take portraits of them with her, which she regarded as her most precious possessions. When Ernst August died, and her ex-husband inherited his title, she wrote to him, begging to be allowed to see her children. He did not reply. ‘He is so cold, he turns everything to ice,’ commented the Duchess of Orléans sadly.

For the first two years, Sophia Dorothea was held entirely inside the Ahlden castle. Later, she was able to walk outside for half an hour a day. George did not deprive her of money and she lived in some luxury, dressed in the fashionable clothes she had always loved. There were few people to admire them, however. No visitors were permitted. Sophia’s only contact with her family was through the eighty-one pictures of her relations that she had hung on her walls, including one of her ex-husband. She did not read a letter that had not been scrutinised by her gaoler first. Surrounded by a small entourage of elderly ladies, Sophia went nowhere unattended. The boredom of her life seems to have overwhelmed her, and she sought sensation wherever she could find it. On rare outings in her state carriage, she always asked to have the horses driven at the highest possible speed. Her mother, who had been tireless in her appeals to see her daughter, was eventually allowed to visit her; but after her death, Sophia Dorothea saw no one. In 1714, when George crossed the North Sea to take up his new responsibilities in Britain, it was suggested to him that he might now relax the conditions under which his ex-wife dragged out her existence; but he was implacable. Sophia Dorothea endured this shadow of a life for thirty-one years. In 1726, she became seriously ill. Her attendants tried to raise her spirits by showing her the portraits of her children, but when this much relied-upon source of comfort failed, they realised she was dying. A few days later, she was dead.

If George was troubled by guilt at any point throughout her long exile, he gave no sign of it. He never commented on his ill-starred marriage, nor its tragic end. He did not marry again, but lived in apparently placid contentment with Melusine von Schulenberg, whom he later ennobled as the Duchess of Kendal.

Yet there remained in George’s carefully preserved, quiet life an unignorable reminder of a partnership he had never wanted, and which had caused him such public humiliation. The two children he had fathered with Sophia Dorothea could not be expunged or denied. His daughter he seems to have regarded benignly, although she played almost no part in his daily life; but his relationship with his son could not be similarly consigned to the margins of his public world. As his heir, the young Prince George represented a dynastic and political fact which George was compelled to acknowledge. But he could not – and would not – be brought to love the boy.

*

As a child, the prince had been very attractive. An English visitor to Hanover said he had ‘a very winning countenance’. He was small and slender, with fair hair and pale skin, a lively and inquisitive boy. ‘He speaks very gracefully, and with the greatest easiness imaginable, nor does his great vivacity let him be ignorant of anything.’17 He was highly strung, racked by intense emotions, much subject to ‘blushes and tears’. It was impossible not to see in the son the image of his mother, and this sealed his father’s inveterate dislike for him. In later life, Prince George acknowledged in the most matter-of-fact way that his father ‘had always hated him and used him ill’. Disdain, ridicule and indifference were familiar fare. He could think of only one occasion when the old man had found anything complimentary to say about him, and despite its characteristically barbed quality, he quoted it with poignantly transparent pride. As the courtier and diarist, John, Lord Hervey, recounted: ‘When Lord Sunderland had tried to fix some lie on him, the late king (his father) had answered, “No, no. I know my son; he is not a liar, he is mad, but he is an honest man.”’18

It was hardly surprising that by the time he was an adult, George disliked his father as much as his father seemed to despise him. It was plain to everyone who considered it that the great, undiscussed, unresolved nightmare of Sophia Dorothea’s ruined life lay at the heart of their mutual resentment. ‘Whether the prince’s attachment to his mother embittered his mind against his father,’ mused Walpole, ‘or whether hatred of his father occasioned his devotion to her, I do not pretend to know.’19 Prince George was as silent on the painful subject of Sophia Dorothea as was his father. Hervey, who knew him very well when he was king, noticed that although ‘he discoursed so constantly and so openly of himself’, there was one subject that was never brought up. He touched on everything ‘except what related to his mother, whom on no occasion I ever heard him mention, not even inadvertently, or indirectly, as if such a person never existed’.20

Prince George grew into a volatile and unpredictable young man. His temper, which worsened as he grew older, was always explosive. Unlike his taciturn father, who suppressed his brooding antagonisms, his son’s rages were more flamboyant affairs. Always a great talker, the prince’s volubility ran away with him when he was cross; anger provoked in him diatribes of eloquent fury. When words failed him, he was known to throw his wig off and kick it around the room in frustration. It was hardly surprising that, as the Duchess of Marlborough recorded, he was sometimes considered ‘a little bit cracked’.21 In comparison with his father, who never said more than he needed to, George was effusive, in bad moods and good. His happiness was expressed with as much noise and passion as his anger, as anyone who antagonised him soon discovered. His feelings were always strong, and his inability to control them often made him appear ridiculous.

Beneath the frequent empty bluster, though, were more solid qualities. He was genuinely brave, not afraid to do what he thought was right, even at the cost of his reputation. He did not bear political grudges, and had little of his father’s unforgiving rancour. Horace Walpole believed ‘he had fewer sensations of revenge … than any man who ever sat upon a throne’.22 His physical courage was considerable. Trained as a soldier, he served as a cavalry officer with John, 1st Duke of Marlborough, at the Battle of Oudenarde in 1708, when he was twenty-four. He was engaged in the thick of the fighting, charging at the head of his troops, and, when his horse was shot from under him, he mounted another and plunged back into the mêlée. Marlborough thought he had behaved with distinction, and wrote to tell his father so.23 But the elder George refused to allow his son a permanent military role, which bitterly disappointed the prince and did nothing to improve relations between them.

For the rest of his life, George remained devoted to the soldierly ideal. Nothing interested him more than the business of warfare – from grand strategy to the design of a medal or the cut of a uniform. He jealously guarded his right to make senior army appointments, and his love of pomp and pageantry was perhaps a way of staying close to a world from which politics excluded him. In his forties, the desire to be back in the field still burnt just as brightly as it had in his youth. Hervey recalled that he declared ‘almost daily and hourly’ to Sir Robert Walpole that ‘it was with his sword alone that he desired to keep the balance of Europe; that war and action were his sole pleasures; that age was coming on fast to him … He could not bear, he said, the thought of growing old in peace.’ In response, Walpole patiently pointed out that ‘it would not be a very agreeable incident for the King of Great Britain’ to find himself ‘running again through Westphalia with 70,000 Prussians at his heels’.24 (George had his way in the end: in 1743, when he was sixty, and Walpole was no longer around to thwart him, he led troops victoriously into battle once more, against the French at Dettingen near Frankfurt. He was the last British king to do so, a fact that would have delighted him perhaps more than any other accolade.)

George was never a scholar, and loved to boast of his disdain for intellectual ideas. ‘He often used to brag of the contempt he had for books and letters,’ recalled Hervey, ‘saying how much he hated all that stuff from his infancy.’ He said he despised reading even as a child, because he ‘felt as if he was doing something mean and below him’.25 But for all his distrust of the outward manifestations of the life of the mind, George’s antipathy concealed a sharp intellect. He spoke four languages – German, English, French and Italian – and had a quick tongue in all of them. He was a ready deliverer of woundingly pungent phrases or mocking observations, some of which suggested that he read rather more than he was prepared to admit. Like all his family, he loved music (he would become a devoted patron of Handel), but he had no patience with abstract analytical thinking. He was untouched by the new ideas of the Enlightenment that excited so many of his contemporaries, and seems to have been as little interested in traditional religious beliefs as in the philosophical attitudes that had just begun to undermine them. Like his father, he had no real religious feeling, and throughout his life he demonstrated a steady indifference to all things spiritual – with a single exception: he was, as Horace Walpole incredulously reported, prey to a host of superstitious and supernatural fears. ‘He had yet implicit faith in the German notion of vampires,’ the diarist noted, ‘and has more than once been angry with my father for speaking irreverently of these imaginary bloodsuckers.’26

George was not an easy man to understand. Bravery and bombast, principle and passion struggled for mastery in his nature, yet beneath the often grating bravado that defined so much of his behaviour, there occasionally emerged a glimpse of a rather different man: calmer, less swayed by the intensity of feelings he found so hard to control, a more reflective character capable of far greater emotional acuity than he usually revealed. For most of his life, George kept those parts of his personality hidden beneath the image he had created of himself as a blunt, instinctual, plain-speaking man of action. The contrast between this persona and the remote, sinuous unreachableness that defined his father’s character could not have been more extreme. By his every word and action, George sought to present himself as a very different kind of man, demonstrating both to himself and to those about him that he was not destined to repeat the destructive mistakes of his predecessor. He would do things differently; and nowhere more so than in the selection of a wife.

Prince George told his father that he would not make a purely political marriage, but expected to have some say in the choice of a suitable spouse. Somewhat surprisingly, his declaration met with no opposition; perhaps the elder George, lacking in empathy though he was, had no wish to repeat the disastrous outcome of his own forced match. It did not take his son long to fix on the woman he thought would suit him. Caroline, daughter of the Margrave of Ansbach, was highly sought after in the German marriage market. Tall and stately, with an abundance of fair hair and a substantial bosom (said to be the finest in Europe), she had recently refused a very impressive offer from the Archduke Charles, heir to the Holy Roman Emperor. She had baulked at the prospect of converting to Catholicism, and had thus waved goodbye to one of the oldest and grandest of royal titles. Her reputation for beauty – and also for intelligence, for she was said to have debated the issue of her possible religious conversion with incisive skill – was probably well known to George, as Caroline had for many years lived in the Berlin household of his father’s sister, Sophia Charlotte, queen in Prussia. Orphaned aged thirteen, Caroline had grown up under the protection of George’s aunt and his grandmother, Electress Sophia of Hanover. The electress had long hoped to see her grandson married to Caroline, although she ‘doubted that God will let me be so happy’. She did everything she could to force God’s hand, though, and was clearly successful in piquing the young George’s interest in marrying her protégée. ‘I think the prince likes the idea also,’ she observed hopefully, ‘for in talking to him about her, he said “I am very glad that you desire her for me.”’27

When George raised the possibility of marrying Caroline, his father insisted his son should meet her first, and suggested that he do so in disguise, so that he could make an honest assessment of her person and character. In June 1705, George obediently travelled to Ansbach, where he was presented to the unsuspecting Caroline as a Hanoverian nobleman. He was smitten at their very first meeting. As intemperate in passion as in so much else, George insisted for the rest of his life that he had fallen in love with Caroline the moment he saw her. Without declaring himself, he hurried back to Hanover, and urged his father to open negotiations for her hand. Uncharacteristically compliant, the elder George agreed without argument. Significantly, he was concerned to ensure that Caroline shared his son’s enthusiasm for the match, stressing to the diplomatic negotiators that ‘her inclinations should be assured first of all’.28 It did not take long for everyone to be satisfied on that point. Once the identity of the young man whom she had met under such unusual circumstances was explained, it was clear that Caroline had seen something she liked in the intense, emphatic stranger. Perhaps she was impressed by the directness of his desire for her. Perhaps the prospect of marrying the heir presumptive to the British crown appealed more than becoming Holy Roman Empress; she was always considered an ambitious woman, and marriage to George undoubtedly promised access to considerable power and influence, with the additional benefit that it did not require her to become a Catholic. Perhaps she simply felt she could not refuse another well-connected marital prospect. For whatever reason, her consent was quickly given; and George and Caroline were married in Hanover in the early autumn.

Their marriage could not have been more different from that of George’s parents. From the very beginning, his young wife was the central focus of his life. In 1707, when she contracted smallpox, he nursed her throughout the illness, imperilling his own health as a consequence. Two years later, when Caroline gave birth to their eldest daughter, Anne, he wrote her a loving letter from which the warmth of his affection still radiates. ‘The peace of my life depends on knowing you in good health, and upon the conviction of your continued affection for me. I shall endeavour to attract it,’ he assured her, ‘by all imaginable passion and love, and I shall never omit any way of showing you that no one could be more wholly yours.’29 Theirs was a partnership founded on passion – on George’s side at least. ‘It is certain,’ wrote Horace Walpole, ‘that the king always preferred the queen’s person to any other woman; nor ever described his idea of beauty, but that he drew a picture of his wife.’30 For the rest of his life, Caroline exerted a physical attraction over him that was never truly extinguished, even when her youthful prettiness had been compromised by childbearing and her stately dignity edged into fat. Caroline was proud of her sexual hold over her husband; when she was over fifty, she showed Robert Walpole a letter George had written to her from Hanover which ‘spoke of his extreme impatience for their meeting; and in a style that would have made one believe him the rival of Hercules’ vigour and her of Venus’ beauty, her person being mentioned in the most exalted strains of rapture’.31

Caroline responded to the blitzkrieg of George’s passion by surrendering herself entirely to it. She never looked at another man, and did everything she could to keep her mercurial husband satisfied. Her submission to him went far beyond the purely physical. From the day of her marriage until the day she died, over thirty years later, she rarely had a thought or performed an action that was not designed in some way to please him: ‘To him she sacrificed her time, for him she breathed every inclination; she looked, spake and breathed but for him, was a weathercock to every blast of his uncertain temper.’32 Whether she did this out of love, or whether as a means of exercising through her husband the power and influence otherwise denied her as a woman, was the subject of constant speculation. Most thought that power played a large part in her calculations.

The complicated intensity of their relationship fascinated all those who witnessed it, and many contemporaries sought to explain and unpick its curious dynamic, the strange combination of attraction, manipulation and destructiveness that characterised their life together. For all the self-absorption of the couple at its centre, this was far from a conventionally happy marriage. Between George’s sexual thraldom and Caroline’s self-abnegating submission, some very dark currents seemed to flow; and many of those who found themselves caught in the eddies and undertows thus created were permanently damaged by the experience, not least the couple’s children, none of whom could be said to have emerged happily from the private world their parents created for themselves.

Perhaps theirs would have always been a marriage characterised by internal tension. It was, in many ways, an example of the attraction of opposites. They did not even look very well matched. Caroline was far taller than her husband, whose lack of height, slender build and love of overdressed magnificence inevitably attracted the epithet ‘dapper’. She was dignified and magisterial, though large in later life. One observer likened Caroline and her Maids of Honour, all dressed in pink, making their way through a crowded court, to a lobster pursued by shrimps. Caroline had little interest in the physical pursuits that George enjoyed, although she gamely accompanied him on his favourite stag hunts. Left to herself, Caroline preferred less punishing activities. She was a dedicated and accomplished gardener, later laying out and improving the parks at Richmond and Kew. George, who did not share her interest, refused to look at her ambitious plans, declaring that he ‘did not care how she flung away her own revenue’. He did not know that, having long ago exhausted her own resources in pursuing her gardening passions, she had persuaded Robert Walpole to subsidise her projects from Treasury funds.

While Caroline had no idea how to manage her own income, and was always in debt, George’s attitude to expenditure was very different: he was a compulsive hoarder of cash, regarded by most people who knew him as mean in a way unbefitting the grandeur of his position. Although his sympathies could be engaged by worthy causes – he contributed £2,000 to help establish London’s Foundling Hospital – George was always a more reluctant donor than his wife. It was all but impossible to prise money out of his hands; he even sought to wriggle out of annuities he had promised to pay his own daughters. Hervey thought it was hard to say whether passion for armies or for money predominated in his mind: ‘he could never have enough of either, and could seldom be persuaded to part with either, though he had more of both than he had any occasion to employ’.33

Walpole once observed that George would rather have found a guinea in his pocket than have a work of literature dedicated to him. In contrast to the resolute philistinism of her husband, Caroline was completely at home in the world of books and ideas. She had ‘read a great deal’, noted Hervey with approval. ‘She understood good writing too, in English, the harmony of numbers in verse, the beauty of style in prose, and the force and propriety of terms much better than anyone who has only heard her speak English would ever have thought possible. She had a most incredible memory, and was learned both in ancient and modern history as the most learned men.’34 Caroline was an intellectual woman who had been raised among other intellectual women. In the household in which she had grown up, the Electress Sophia and her daughter Sophia Charlotte had created a remarkable salon in which the greatest minds of their generation were invited to discuss the philosophical questions of the day. As a girl, Caroline had been an eager participant in the debates and arguments that dominated the days of these thoughtful princesses. The mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz acted as the resident in-house thinker of the Hanoverian women at Sophia Charlotte’s palace. He liked the young Caroline, although he sometimes found himself at the sharp end of her wit and thought her a little too fond of scoring points of argument at the expense of others. ‘I have a most bitter tongue,’ confessed Caroline in later years. There was little evidence here of the traditional pursuits of royal women – the fascination with scandal, needlework, dress and display that Caroline described dismissively as ‘paltry’. Instead, Sophia Charlotte turned her mind to bigger questions – ‘the why of why’, as Leibniz called it. No subject was off limits, and a scepticism towards traditional theology was much in evidence. (On her deathbed, Sophia Charlotte, who died at the age of only thirty-seven, refused the ministrations of a priest. ‘Do not pity me,’ she told those gathered around her, including a heartbroken Caroline; ‘I am going at last to satisfy my curiosity about the origin of things which even Leibniz could never explain to me, to understand space, infinity, being and nothingness.’35)

This was not a world in which Caroline’s husband would have felt at ease. Although Walpole believed George’s ‘understanding was not near so deficient as it was imagined’, intellectual discussion bored and unsettled him.36 When she became queen, Caroline sought to recreate in London the salon she had found so stimulating as a girl in Berlin; but the scorn of her husband cast a shadow over her efforts. Hervey noted with regret that she did not dare allow herself to indulge in the philosophical discussions she so enjoyed, ‘for fear of the king, who often rebuked her for dabbling in all that learned nonsense (as he called it)’.37 Nor did he share her artistic interests. Once, when George was away in Hanover, Caroline and Hervey took ‘several very bad pictures out of the great Drawing Room at Kensington, and put very good ones in their place’. When George returned he was furious, and insisted that Hervey have ‘every new picture taken away and all the old ones replaced’. When asked if any of the newly transplanted paintings might be allowed to remain, the king was adamant all must go, especially ‘the picture with the dirty frame over the door, and the three nasty little children’. Thus dismissing Van Dyck’s masterly portrait of the children of Charles I, he told the disdainful Hervey that he especially wanted the painting of his ‘gigantic fat Venus’ returned. ‘I am not as nice as your lordship. I like my fat Venus much better than anything you have given me instead of her.’38