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

Caroline was not the first royal wife to find herself married to a man whose mind did not match her own. Her Berlin mentor, Sophia Charlotte, found little common intellectual ground with her own princely husband, who, like Caroline’s George, preferred the study of pageantry and military decorations to the contemplation of big ideas. ‘Leibniz talked to me today of the infinitely little,’ Sophia once remarked. ‘My God, as though I did not know enough about that already.’39 Such a comment would never have escaped Caroline’s lips. She decided early in their marriage that her intellect, of which she was justifiably proud, would never be used to undermine her husband, but would be dedicated instead to the strengthening and consolidation of their partnership. From the day she married George, she saw the preservation of their union and the advancement of their interests as the paramount duty of her role as his wife. She began as she meant to go on. As soon as she arrived in Hanover as a married woman, she took lessons in English, and persuaded her learning-averse husband to do the same. Leibniz heard that Caroline ‘had a decided turn for that language’ and that George was also making excellent progress. While he never lost his ‘his bluff Westphalian accent’, George was, Walpole thought, later to speak the language with far more ‘correctness’ than his wife. Caroline’s determination to master the language of the people she would one day rule was only part of a wider campaign to win their hearts and minds. She had already begun to plan for the moment when her father-in-law would inherit the British crown, and she and George would become Prince and Princess of Wales. The British envoy to Hanover noted that she behaved with special courtesy to British visitors; she employed British ladies in her household; ordered English novels to read; and had even begun to drink tea.

Her father-in-law viewed all these acts with the deepest suspicion, believing, with some justification, that his son and daughter-in-law were seeking to secure their own position at the cost of his own. When Queen Anne’s government somewhat unwisely offered the title of Duke of Cambridge to Prince George, his father was incensed, seeing it as a sign that his future British subjects sought the favour of his son more than they did his own. It hardened his resolve to treat the prince ‘as a person of no consequence’; nor did it make him feel more warmly disposed towards Caroline. Recognising her intelligence, he was convinced she encouraged the prince in what he regarded as acts of defiance, and referred to her as ‘cette diablesse Mme la Princesse’.

Caroline’s success in providing the dynasty with a male heir in 1707 did nothing to alter her father-in-law’s hostile attitude. On the contrary, the rejoicings in both England and Hanover that greeted the baby Frederick’s arrival only increased his suspicion of their popularity, and he refused to pay for any celebrations to mark the child’s birth. The appearance of a succession of other children – all daughters – between 1709 and 1713 was similarly ignored; and by the time the long-awaited call to Britain arrived in 1714, with the death of Queen Anne, the breach between the king and the prince was wider than ever.

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The future George I arrived in London first, accompanied by his son. The three young princesses came next, with Caroline herself following on last. Her tardy departure perhaps reflected a reluctance to leave her only son, who, George I had decreed, would not travel with the rest of the family to London. Frederick was to stay in Hanover as a living reminder to the Hanoverians that their ruling family had not deserted them. Although he was only seven years old, Frederick was expected to preside over state functions, sitting alongside a large portrait of his elector grandfather propped up on a chair. He was not to see his family again for nearly fourteen years.

Once in London, it was quickly evident that the new king would much rather have stayed in Hanover with his grandson and his portrait. His new subjects were far from united in welcoming the incoming ruling family, some of them making their preference for the exiled Stuarts very apparent by word, gesture or riot. George I, for his part, was equally unenthused. He disliked England and its inhabitants from the start. It was soon noticed that ‘the king has no predilection for the English nation and never receives in private any English of either sex’, preferring to spend his time with his mistress, smoking a pipe and drinking German beer.40 His inability to speak the language isolated him – he was said to conduct political business with Robert Walpole in Latin – and he did not understand the complicated and somewhat ambivalent status of an English king, which left him with the strong conviction that the first objective of his new countrymen was to rob and insult him. The French ambassador reported that such was George’s dislike of his new kingdom that he did not consider it anything more ‘than a temporary possession to be made the most of whilst it lasts, rather than a perpetual inheritance to himself and his family’.41

His son and his wife took a very different view. From the moment of their arrival, they strove to do all they could to impress and conciliate their new countrymen. The prince, though not yet completely fluent in English, showed a winning desire to improve, and would help himself out when words failed him ‘with a world of action’. He and Caroline were effusive in their praise for their new homeland, the prince calling the English ‘the best, the handsomest, the best shaped, the best natured and lovingest people in the world; if anyone would make their court to him, it must be by telling him he was like an Englishman’.42 Caroline, who was already regarded as ‘so charming that she could make anyone love her if she would’, employed a more vivid turn of phrase, declaring that she ‘would as soon live on a dunghill as return to Hanover’.43

It was hardly surprising that, as the courtier Peter Wentworth observed: ‘I find all backward in speaking to the king but ready enough to speak to the prince.’44 King George could not fail to be aware of the contrast between his embattled and unpopular position, and that of his son and daughter-in-law. The result was inevitable. The Duchess of Orléans, an avid transmitter of all the royal gossip of Europe, heard that things had gone from bad to worse between George I and his son. ‘His quarrel with the Prince of Wales gets worse every day. I always thought him harsh when he was in Germany, but English air has hardened him still more.’45

George and Caroline must bear some of the blame for what happened next. In making the contrast between their own reception and that of George I quite so plain, they had not, perhaps, behaved in the most tactful manner; they had burnished their own reputations and secured their own interests with scant consideration for the impact it would have on the new king. They must have realised their actions would elicit some response from a man whose brooding character they both knew very well. But they cannot have expected him to strike against them in the way that he did, in an action that was to echo miserably through the family for the rest of their lives.

It began with what should have been a celebration. On 13 November 1717, Caroline gave birth to a second son, a long-awaited boy after so many daughters, and the first Hanoverian to be born in Britain. The prince was delighted, and made arrangements for a grand christening. He asked his father and his uncle, the Prince-Bishop of Osnabrück, to stand as the baby’s godfathers. To this the king initially agreed; but just before the ceremony, the king insisted that the prince-bishop be replaced by the Duke of Newcastle, a politician he knew his son particularly disliked. Furious at what he perceived as a gross humiliation, the young George smouldered his way through the proceedings, held in Caroline’s bedroom. Walpole heard from his friend Lady Suffolk, who had been one of the shocked spectators, exactly what followed: ‘No sooner had the bishop closed the ceremony, than the prince crossing the feet of the bed in a rage, stepped up to the Duke of Newcastle, and holding up his hand and forefinger in a menacing attitude, said, “You are a rascal, but I shall find you out,” meaning in broken English, “I shall find a time to be revenged.”’46 Newcastle, deeply disconcerted, asserted that the prince had challenged him to fight a duel, a very serious offence within the precincts of a royal palace. He complained to the king, who had been present but had not understood a word of what was said. George I immediately decided to regard his son’s words in the worst possible light. He told the prince to consider himself under arrest and confined both George and Caroline to their apartments.

Prince George, alarmed by the escalating gravity of the situation, wrote an unequivocally submissive letter to his father, admitting that he had used those words to Newcastle, but denying that they were intended to provoke a duel and begging forgiveness. The king was unmoved; he ordered the prince to leave the palace immediately. The princess, he said, could remain only if she promised to have no further communication with her husband. He then informed the distraught couple that under no circumstances would their children leave with them. Even the newborn baby was to be left behind. ‘You are charged to say to the princess,’ declared the king to his son, ‘that it is my will that my grandson and my granddaughters are to stay at St James’s.’47 When Caroline declined to abandon her husband, the baby prince, only a few weeks old, was taken from his mother’s arms. The couple’s daughters, aged nine, seven and five, were sent to bid their parents a formal farewell. The princess was so overwrought that she fainted; her ladies thought she was about to die.

Separated from their children and exiled from their home, the couple composed a desperate appeal to the king. It made no difference. Saying that their professions of respect and subservience were enough ‘to make him vomit’, the elder George demanded that the prince sign a formal renunciation of his children, giving them up to his guardianship. When he refused, the king deprived the prince and princess of their guard of honour, wrote to all foreign courts and embassies informing them that no one would be welcomed by him who had anything to do with his son, and ordered anyone who held posts in both his and his son’s households – from chamberlain to rat-catcher – to surrender one of them, for he would employ nobody who worked for the prince.

At St James’s, Caroline’s baby son, taken away from his mother in such distressing circumstances, suddenly fell ill. As the child grew steadily worse, the doctors called in to treat him begged the king to send for his mother. He refused to do so, until finally persuaded that if the boy died, it would reflect extremely badly on him. He relented enough to permit the princess to see her child, but with the proviso that the baby must be removed to Kensington, as he did not want her to come to St James’s. The journey proved too much for the weakened child, and before his frantic mother could get to him, he died, ‘of choking and coughing’, on 17 February 1718. In her grief, Caroline was said to have cried out that she did not believe her son had died of natural causes; but a post-mortem – admittedly undertaken by court physicians who owed their livings to the king – seemed to show that the child had a congenital weakness and could not have lived long.

The distraught parents were unable to draw any consolation from their surviving children. Their son Frederick was far away in Hanover; their daughters were closeted in St James’s, where the king, clearly thinking the situation a permanent one, had appointed the widowed Countess of Portland to look after them. They were not badly treated; but, having effectively lost both her sons, Caroline found the enforced separation from her daughters all but unbearable. The prince wrote constantly to his father, attempting to raise sympathy for his wife’s plight: ‘Pity the poor princess and suffer her not to think that the children which she shall with labour and sorrow bring into the world, if the hand of heaven spare them, are immediately to be torn from her, and instead of comforts and blessings, be made an occasion of grief and affliction to her.’ Eventually the king relented, and allowed Caroline to visit her daughters once a week; but he would not extend the same privilege to his son. ‘If the detaining of my children from me is meant as a punishment,’ the prince wrote sadly, ‘I confess it is of itself a very severe method of expressing Your Majesty’s resentment.’48 Six months later, the prince had still been denied any opportunity to see his daughters. Missing their father as much as he missed them, the little girls picked a basket of cherries from the gardens at Kensington, and managed to send them to him with a message ‘that their hearts and thoughts were always with their dear Papa’.49 The prince was said to have wept when he received their present.

Not content with persecuting his son by dividing his family, the king also pursued him with all the legal and political tools at his disposal. When he attempted to force the prince to pay for the upkeep of the daughters he had forcibly removed from him, George sought to raise the legality of the seizure in the courts, but was assured that the law would favour the king. His father’s enmity seemed to know no rational bounds. In Berlin, the king’s sister heard gossip that he was attempting to disinherit the prince on the grounds that he was not his true child. He was certainly known to have consulted the Lord Chancellor to discover if it was possible to debar him from succeeding to the electorate of Hanover; the Chancellor thought not. This unwelcome opinion may have driven him to consider less orthodox methods of marginalising his son. Years later, when the old king was dead and Caroline was queen, she told Sir Robert Walpole that by chance she had discovered in George I’s private papers a document written by Charles Stanhope, an Undersecretary of State, which discussed a far more direct method of proceeding. The prince was ‘to be seized and Lord Berkeley will take him on board ship and convey him to any part of the world that Your Majesty shall direct’.50 Berkeley was First Lord of the Admiralty in 1717, and his family held extensive lands in Carolina. Like the Hanover disinheritance plan, it came to nothing, and relied for its veracity entirely on Caroline’s testimony; but it is a measure of the king’s angry discontent with his son that such a ludicrous scheme could seem credible, even to his hostile and embittered daughter-in-law.

When Sir Robert Walpole came to power a few years later, in 1721, relations between the king and his son’s family were still deadlocked in bitter hostility. The new first minister was convinced the situation, at once tragic and ridiculous, would have to change. Not only was it damaging to the emotional wellbeing of all those caught up in it; more worryingly, to Walpole’s detached politician’s eye, it also posed a threat to the precarious reputation of the newly installed royal house. This was not how the eighteenth century’s supreme ministerial pragmatist thought public life should be conducted; if the king and his son could not be brought to love each other, they could surely be made to see the benefits of a formal reconciliation that would ensure some degree of political calm. Walpole worked on the king with all his unparalleled powers of persuasion; he did the same with the prince, and made some progress with both. But it was Caroline who proved most resistant to his appeals. She demanded that the restoration of her children be made a condition of any public declaration of peace with her father-in-law. In the face of Walpole’s protestations that George I would never agree, and that it was better to take things step by step, she was implacable. ‘Mr Walpole,’ she assured him, ‘this is no jesting matter with me; you will hear of my complaints every day and hour and in every place if I have not my children again.’51

Horace Walpole thought Caroline’s ‘resolution’ was as strong as her understanding – and left to herself, it seems unlikely that she would ever have given up her demands for her children’s return – but she was undermined by the person from whom she might have expected the most support. The prince, tempted by the offer of the substantial income Walpole had squeezed out of the king, and an apparently honourable way out of the political wilderness, was prepared to compromise, and, despite his wife’s opposition, accepted terms that did not include the restitution of his daughters. He and Caroline would be allowed to visit the girls whenever they wished, but they were to remain living with their grandfather at St James’s Palace. Caroline was devastated. The courtier Lady Cowper witnessed her grief: ‘She cried and said, “I see how these things go; I must be the sufferer at last, and have no power to help myself; I can say, since the hour that I was born, that I have never lived a day without suffering.”’52

Caroline’s outburst said as much about her future prospects as her present unhappiness. Her husband had demonstrated in the most painful way possible that he lacked her capacity both for deep feeling and for consistent, considered action. It was not that George did not love his daughters – he was genuinely distressed by their absence, and felt the loss of their company – but he was not prepared to sacrifice all his interests on their behalf. Nor, much as he loved his wife, would he allow her openly to dictate how he should behave in the public sphere. It was a hard lesson that Caroline took much to heart. Even on matters that touched them in the very core of their being, the prince could not necessarily be depended upon to do either the right or the politic thing. That did not make her abandon the partnership to which she had committed when she married him, but she was compelled to accept that what could not be achieved by the open alliance of equals might be much better delivered by management and manipulation.

The king expressed a similar view when the reconciliation was finally achieved, and the prince was formally received by his father in a ceremony that reminded Lady Cowper of ‘two armies in battle array’. George I saw his son privately for only a painful ten minutes, but devoted over an hour to haranguing his daughter-in-law on her failures. ‘She could have made the prince better if she would,’ he declared; and he hoped she would do so from now on. Caroline had reached much the same conclusion. For the next twenty years, she did all she could to ensure that her husband was encouraged and persuaded to follow paths that she believed served the best interests of their crown. By the time Lord Hervey watched her do it, she had turned it into a fine art. ‘She knew … how to instil her own sentiments, whilst she affected to receive His Majesty’s; she could appear convinced whilst she was controverting, and obedient when she was ruling; by this means, her dexterity and address made it impossible for anybody to persuade him what was truly the case, and that while she was seemingly in every occasion giving up her opinion to his, she was always in reality turning his opinion and bending his will to hers.’53

In one sense, it was not an unsuccessful policy. Her patience and self-effacement ensured that Caroline was able to achieve much of what she wanted in her management of her husband. Above all, she preserved the unity of their partnership. Throughout all their tribulations, in private and in public, she strained every sinew to prevent any permanent rupture dividing them. Whether the threat came from a discontented father, a predatory mistress, an unsatisfactory child, or a potentially disruptive politician, Caroline devoted all her skills to neutralising any possibility of a serious breach between them. It was clear to her that they were infinitely stronger as a like-minded couple than as competing individuals who would inevitably become the focus for antagonistic and destructive opposition. But although in later years she took some pride in the tireless efforts she had directed to maintaining their solidarity, she was aware that it had not been achieved without cost. To be locked into a pattern of perpetual cozening and cajolery was wounding and exhausting for her and demeaning for her husband. It kept them together; but it was not the best foundation upon which to base a marriage. In the end, despite the strength of the feelings that united them, both she and George were, in their different ways, warped and belittled by it.

As Caroline had feared, her elder daughters were never restored to her while the old king lived. She went on to have other children: William in 1721, Mary in 1723 and finally Louisa in 1724. But it was not until George I died, in 1727, from a stroke suffered while travelling through the German countryside he loved, that Anne, Amelia and Caroline came back to live with their parents again. By then it was too late to establish the stable home life that Caroline had hoped to provide for them. Before they had been taken from her, she had been a careful mother to her girls. ‘No want of care, or failure or neglect in any part of their education can be imputed to the princess,’ her husband had written in one of his many fruitless appeals to his father.54 Caroline’s daughters would never waver in their devotion to her; but their long estrangement from their father – and the constant criticism of his behaviour which they heard from their grandfather for nearly a decade – meant that on their return his eldest daughters regarded him with distinctly sceptical eyes. When they saw for themselves how he treated their mother – the strange mixture of obsession and disdain, passion and resentment, respect and rudeness, the destructive combination of warring emotions that had come to characterise George’s attitude to his wife – any tenderness they once had for him soon evaporated. It was hardly an attractive vision of domestic happiness with which to begin a new reign.

CHAPTER 2

A Passionate Partnership

GEORGE AND CAROLINE WERE AT their summer retreat at Richmond Lodge on 25 June 1727, when Robert Walpole arrived with the news of George I’s death. It was the middle of a hot day, and the royal couple were asleep; their attendants were extremely reluctant to wake them, but George was eventually persuaded to emerge from his bedroom and discover that he was now king.

It was only seven months since George’s estranged mother had died in the castle at Ahlden. Although George could never bring himself to speak about Sophia Dorothea, he did make a single gesture towards her memory that suggests much of what he felt but could not say. The day after the news arrived of his father’s death, the courtier Lady Suffolk told Walpole she was startled ‘at seeing hung up in the new queen’s dressing room a whole-length portrait of a lady in royal robes; and in the bed-chamber a half-length of the same person, neither of which Lady Suffolk had seen before’.1 The pictures were of Sophia Dorothea. Her son must have salvaged them from the general destruction of all her images ordered by his father a generation before. ‘The prince had kept them concealed, not daring to produce them in his father’s lifetime.’ Now George was king, and his mother was restored – albeit without comment – to a place of honour within the private heart of the family. Walpole heard that if she had lived long enough to witness his accession, George ‘had purposed to have brought her over and declared her queen dowager’. Her death had denied him the opportunity to release his mother from her long captivity, to act as the agent of her freedom. Perhaps it was some small satisfaction to see her image where he had been unable to see her person; it was certainly a gesture of defiance towards the man who kept her from him, and a declaration of loyalty and affection towards his mother that he had never been able to make while his father lived.

The new king and queen were crowned in October, in a typically eighteenth-century ceremony that combined grandeur with chaos. Tickets were sold in advance for the event, and small booths erected around Westminster for the selling of coffee to the anticipated crowds.2 The Swiss traveller de Saussure went to watch and noted that it took two hours for the royal procession to wend its way to the abbey. Handel’s Zadok the Priest – which would be performed at every subsequent coronation – was given its first airing in the course of the ceremony, at which George and Caroline appeared sumptuously clothed and loaded down with jewellery, some of it, as it later appeared, borrowed for the day. The choristers were not considered to have acquitted themselves well – at one point, they were heard to be singing different anthems. After the ceremony was over and the grander participants had left, de Saussure watched as a hungrier crowd moved methodically over the remains of the event, carrying away anything that could be either eaten or sold.3