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

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By the time John, Lord Hervey, joined George and Caroline’s court in 1730, the couple had been on the throne for three years, and married for twenty-five. The patterns of their lives, both as king and queen and husband and wife, were thus very well established when Hervey began to chronicle them. Hervey’s official court title was vice chamberlain. He later described his job dismissively as one that required him to do no more than ‘to carry candles and set chairs’, but in practice, it was a far from nominal office, giving him direct responsibility for the management and upkeep of all the royal palaces. It certainly did not imply any shortcomings in social status. Hervey was extremely well connected, heir to the Earl of Bristol, and an aristocrat of unimpeachable Whig principles. He was also a man who made a career from defying expectations and outraging traditional moralists. There was nothing conventional about any aspect of Hervey’s life.

Even in a family considered remarkable for the production of extraordinary people – Lady Mary Wortley Montagu once declared that ‘this world consists of men, women and Herveys’ – he stood out above the rest. He married one of the most beautiful women of his generation, and had eight children by her; he conducted casual affairs with a host of other fashionable ladies of the court; but the great love of his life was another man. His sexuality was a barely concealed secret. Slight and slender, he had been considered outstandingly attractive as a young man. In later life, he used cosmetics to enhance his fading looks, with results that were not always successful. Inevitably, Hervey attracted attention, not all of it admiring. The Duchess of Marlborough once referred scornfully to his ‘painted face with not a tooth in his head’.4 In spiteful verse, Alexander Pope described him as an ‘amphibious thing’, ‘a painted child of dirt that stinks and stings’. He was caricatured everywhere in prose as ‘Lord Fanny’. One of his many enemies described him as a ‘delicate little hermaphrodite, a pretty little Master Miss’.5

Perhaps it was the complexities of his own life that gave Hervey such a profound curiosity for the oddities of others. Certainly, it seems to have been what kept him so firmly in George and Caroline’s orbit for so many years. His warmest relationship was with Caroline, with whom he spent nearly all his time. He was a clever man, well read and accomplished, equally at home in the worlds of politics, ideas and culture. Caroline, starved of intellectual companionship, found him stimulating and amusing, enjoying his dry, mordant humour which closely reflected her own. Both loved to gossip, and could be unsparing in the cruelty of the comments they directed at those they disliked. The queen indulged her favourite to an extraordinary degree, encouraging his frankness and sharing some of her most intimate thoughts with him. Alone among her courtiers, he was encouraged to contradict her. According to his own account, she soon came to consider Hervey as indispensable to her happiness, calling him ‘her child, her pupil and her charge’.6

Although Hervey’s principal loyalty was always to Caroline, he was just as interested in her husband, who seems to have regarded the constant presence in his household of this unusual figure entirely benignly. For all his loudly declared prejudices, George II was not, it seems, much troubled by the private lives of those around him. Perhaps he simply did not notice, as his self-absorption gave him little interest in contemplating the behaviour of others. In this, he was very different from Hervey, who found the family he lived with endlessly fascinating. Throughout his time at court he kept a detailed journal of everything that he witnessed there. He later assembled the entries into a memoir that contained everything he thought important or illuminating about the years he had spent in such intimate proximity with the royal family. The result was a three-volume work dominated by two overpowering central figures. Hervey records in compelling detail, over nearly a thousand pages, the words and actions of George and Caroline, who emerge as the flawed anti-heroes of his writings, appallingly larger than life; and, as Hervey effortlessly demonstrated, caught in a web of deceit, obsession and self-destruction that bound them together just as powerfully as it destroyed them. Hervey was George and Caroline’s Boswell; the work he left behind him is a portrait of the dark and often bitter thing their marriage had become.

Hervey did not pretend to be objective in his judgements. He was always, at heart, Caroline’s man, magnifying her good qualities – especially her wit and intelligence – whilst contrasting them with the boorish outbursts of her irritable husband. George is not well served by Hervey’s account of him, which makes much of his bumptiousness and self-regard, and has less to say about his more admirable characteristics: his diligence, his bravery, his occasional flashes of genuine charity. And yet for all the bright colouration of Hervey’s rendering, neither George nor Caroline emerges from his pages as a caricature. George is depicted as a complicated figure, defensive of his own virtues, naively unaware of the impression his behaviour makes on others, exacting, punctilious, somewhat of a bore; but also honest, pragmatic, and capable of considerable tenderness when his emotions were engaged. Above all, Hervey captured the deep ambivalence of his feelings for his wife – at once passionately in love and yet uneasy and ashamed at the degree of his dependency on her.

In Caroline, Hervey depicted a woman of strong and subtle intellect, the possessor of a forceful mind too often bent to trivial purposes. She could be wickedly funny, and perceptive – entertaining company for those who could keep up and were not provoked by her sharp tongue. This was the Caroline whom Hervey adored, the queenly wit who could cap a classical quotation whilst laughing unashamedly at his gossip. But he was not afraid to record a steelier side of her personality, a brusque hardness that sometimes shocked even the worldly Hervey with its cruel edge. The power of her hatred impressed itself upon him as much as the strength of her mind. And yet it was her situation that most evoked his pity: a woman who had concealed the cleverness that defined her beneath a lifelong subjection to the smallest and most mundane of her husband’s wishes, the better to manipulate him into doing what she wished; and who, as a result, became as much her husband’s victim as his puppet master.

Hervey had no doubt that, whatever it had cost her to establish it, Caroline’s influence extended way beyond the intimate family circle. As soon as George II was crowned, ‘the whole world began to feel that it was her will which was the sole spring on which every movement in the court turned; and though His Majesty lost no opportunity to declare that the queen never meddled with his business, yet nobody believed it … since everybody knew that she not only meddled with business, but directed everything that fell under that name, either at home or abroad’.7 Horace Walpole’s account seems to confirm Hervey’s assertion that Caroline was indeed a discreet but efficient manipulator of influence, a hidden power behind the throne. Walpole asserted that his father, Sir Robert, would often discuss matters of policy privately with the queen before raising them with the king. Both understood the importance of concealing their machinations from George, who was extremely sensitive to any suggestion of interference from his wife. If Walpole arrived for an audience with the king when Caroline was present, she would curtsey politely and offer to leave. Walpole argued that George was entirely deceived by this carefully choreographed piece of theatre, declaring naively to his first minister: ‘there, you see how much I am governed by my wife, as they say I am’. Caroline played her own part to perfection. ‘Oh sir,’ she replied, ‘I must indeed be vain to pretend to govern Your Majesty.’8 But as George’s comments reveal, the idea that it was Caroline and not he who drove forward the business of government was not confined to the inner sanctum of the court. With evident satisfaction, Hervey transcribed into his journals a popular poetic jibe that summed up the perceived balance of power between George II and his wife:

You may strut, dapper George, but ’twill all be in vain,

We know ’tis Queen Caroline and not you that reign –

You govern no more than Don Philip of Spain,

Then if you would have us fall down and adore you,

Lock up your fat spouse, as your dad did before you.9

Recent scholarship has tended to turn a sceptical eye on some of the more extravagant claims made for Caroline’s role as the éminence grise of British politics. Historians have suggested that both Hervey and Walpole had their own reasons for accentuating her role and diminishing that of her husband; as Caroline’s most devoted admirer, Hervey was keen to elevate her virtues in comparison to what he regarded as the emptier pretensions of her husband. Sir Robert Walpole, too, was strongly identified with Caroline, having allied himself with her very early in her husband’s reign. He had quickly recognised that it was she who exerted the most influence over the king and had worked very hard to recruit her into his orbit. With characteristic bluntness, he later congratulated himself in having taken ‘the right sow by the ear’. Once established as her ally, it suited him to talk up her influence, thus magnifying his own access to the apparent wellsprings of power. It was also perhaps the case that George was unlucky in those areas of policy in which he did excel. The image of George II as an ineffectual ruler, overshadowed by his wife, was made more credible by the relative indifference of so many of his new subjects to those areas in which he exerted genuine influence: military strategy and the complicated politics of princely Germany. Both were of some significance to the exercise of kingship in eighteenth-century Europe; but neither Hervey nor Walpole was particularly interested in them, and until recently, most historians have tended to share their perceptions.

George’s reputation has been considerably enhanced by a new interest in these aspects of his reign; but in re-evaluating his role, it would be wrong to excise Caroline altogether from the landscape of political life. When the king was away on his frequent and often lengthy trips to his Hanoverian electorate, on every occasion until her death, it was Caroline who was given responsibility for heading the Regency Council which governed in George’s absence.10 This involved her directly in the daily business of politics, and required her to spend a great deal of time in the company of politicians. Her relationship with the wily and effective Sir Robert Walpole spanned a decade, and was built on a foundation of wary but mutual respect that ended only with her final illness. As Hervey observed, Caroline positively enjoyed political life. Her philosophical readings had given her an interest in the theory of political organisation, and she liked to reflect on the constitutional peculiarities of her adopted home. ‘My God,’ she once declared to Hervey, ‘what a figure this poor island would make in Europe if it were not for its government! … Who the devil do you think would take you all, or think you worth having, that had anything else, if you had not your liberties?’11

Caroline was astute enough to recognise that this was the kind of eulogy a British monarch was required to deliver in order to retain the affections of the people; but it does not seem to have been a particularly honest reflection of her private opinions. Hervey thought that in her heart, the queen’s politics were closer to those of her husband. George was suspicious of the constitutional settlement over which he was obliged to preside, and ‘looked upon all the English as king-killers and republicans, grudged them their riches as well as their liberty [and] thought them all overpaid’. He much preferred the way things were done in Hanover, for ‘there he rewarded people for doing their duty and serving him well, but here he was obliged to enrich people for being rascals and buy them not to cut his throat’.12 To Hervey, Caroline expressed similar frustrations with the limits of royal power, as the Glorious Revolution had defined it, complaining that in England, a king was ‘no more than the humble servant of Parliament, the pensioner of his people, and a puppet of sovereignty that was forced to go to them for every shilling he wanted, that was obliged to court those who were always abusing him, and could do nothing himself’.13 In public, she was far more measured. ‘The business of princes,’ she declared, ‘is to make the whole go on, and not to encourage or suffer silly, impertinent, personal piques between their servants to hinder the business of government being done.’14 For Caroline, the world of politics as she understood it bore a striking resemblance to the life she had made for herself at home. In the end, both came down to questions of management.

Whatever the reality of Caroline’s political role, it is hard to imagine that George was indifferent to the powerful contemporary perception that in matters of government, it was she and not he who was in charge. For a man whose self-esteem was so dependent on the respect and admiration of others, this must have been a painful experience. To be found wanting in the arena where men – and royal men in particular – were expected to excel, unchallenged by even the brightest of women, was particularly humiliating. In the public world, as he came to recognise, there seemed little he could do about it. The more he denied it, the more it seemed as if it might be true. But George knew that there were other areas of his and Caroline’s life together where he remained effortlessly dominant, where his primacy was secure and uncompromised: in the most intimate dimension of their private world there was no question whose will it was that governed, and who was required to submit to it.

From the earliest years of their marriage, George had taken mistresses. He did so not because he did not love Caroline, but because he was afraid that otherwise it might look as if he loved her too much. Horace Walpole thought he ‘was more attracted by a silly idea he entertained of gallantry being becoming, than by a love of variety’. His infidelities made him seem more a man of the world and less of a besotted husband. When he was Prince of Wales, George followed long-established tradition in selecting his lovers from the household of his wife. He did not go about the process with great subtlety. Having decided to approach Mary Bellenden, one of Caroline’s Maids of Honour – ‘incontestably the most agreeable, the most insinuating, and the most likeable woman of her time’ – George favoured the direct method. Knowing that she could not pay her bills, he sat beside her one night and ‘took out his purse and counted his money. He repeated the numeration; the giddy Bellenden lost her patience, and cried out, “Sir, I cannot bear it! If you count your money any more, I will go out of the room.”’15 In the end Mary Bellenden’s poverty conquered her irritation; but the time she spent as George’s mistress turned out to be unrewarding in every way. He was too mean to make her relationship financially rewarding, too disengaged to give her any real pleasure, and unwilling to award her the status of Principal Mistress. As soon as she could, Mary Bellenden found a husband to marry, and exchanged the role of unhappy royal mistress for that of respectable wife.

She was succeeded in the post by Lady Suffolk, whom George and Caroline had known since the early days of their marriage in Hanover. She had been Mrs Howard then, and had arrived at their court accompanied by a violent and drunken husband, and so poor that she had been forced to sell her own hair to raise money. She was beautiful, elegant, cultivated and entertaining (as an elderly woman, grand and formidable, she was one of Horace Walpole’s most valued friends). For over a decade she was George’s principal mistress. She was also one of the queen’s bedchamber women, which meant that wife and mistress spent a great deal of time in each other’s company, an experience neither of them enjoyed.

The difficulties of the situation would have been exacerbated by George’s indifference to the established rules of polite behaviour. He conducted his affair without the slightest attempt at discretion. With the methodical exactitude that characterised everything he did, he made his way to Lady Suffolk’s apartment at seven every evening, in full view of the court. If he found he was too early, he would pace about, looking at his watch, until it was exactly the right time for their assignation to begin. Perhaps it was some consolation to Caroline that this hardly suggested a relationship driven by great passion. Hervey thought the king kept it up ‘as a necessary appurtenance to his grandeur as a prince rather than an addition to his pleasure as a man’. He added that there were many at court who doubted whether the couple had a sexual relationship at all.16 Whatever the nature of the affair, it certainly did not seem to cool George’s ardour for his wife; and the much-tried Lady Suffolk often found herself caught in the crossfire of his angry attraction for Caroline. ‘It happened more than once,’ reported Walpole, ‘that the king, coming in to the room while the queen was dressing, has snatched off the handkerchief, and turning rudely to Mrs Howard, has cried, “Because you have an ugly neck yourself, you seek to hide the queen’s!”’17

Hervey thought that for all the offence Lady Suffolk’s presence gave to the queen’s dignity, Caroline had, with some effort, resigned herself to her rival’s existence. ‘Knowing the vanity of her husband’s temper, and that he must have some woman for the world to believe he lay with, she wisely suffered one to remain in that situation whom she despised, and had got the better of, for fear of making room for a successor whom he might really love, and who might get the better of her.’18 Certainly, when, in 1734, the king finally tired of his now middle-aged mistress, and Lady Suffolk sought to avoid the inevitable by quitting the court before she was asked to leave, it was Caroline who tried to persuade her to stay. In a lengthy private interview she urged her ‘to take a week to consider of the business. And give me your word that you will not read any romances in that time.’19 Lady Suffolk was not to be won over. She had had enough of her half-affair with a man she suspected had only ever wanted her as a mistress in order to demonstrate his independence from his wife. The king, who complained to Caroline that he could not understand ‘why you will not let me part with an old deaf woman, of whom I am weary’, was pleased to see her go.

Although Caroline’s daughters were similarly glad to see Lady Suffolk – whom they all hated – disappear from their own and their mother’s lives, it was their father towards whom they felt the most animus, despising him for his humiliating treatment of the queen. Anne, the cleverest and most outspoken of the sisters, made it the basis of a lasting and deeply felt dislike of the king, on which she would often expatiate to Hervey, venting her disdain in a resounding, freeform litany of the many things that she hated about him. ‘His passion, his pride, his vanity, his giving himself airs about women, the impossibility of being easy with him, his affectation of heroism, his unreasonable, simple, uncertain, disagreeable and often shocking behaviour to the queen, the difficulty of entertaining him, his insisting upon other people’s conversation who were to entertain him being always new and his own always the same thing over and over again …’20 The depth of her contempt for George made her hope he would not stay too long without a mistress. ‘I wish with all my heart he would take somebody else,’ she told Hervey, ‘that Mama might be a little relieved from the ennui of seeing him forever in her room.’21 This was to happen sooner than Anne can have imagined, and with consequences for her mother that she would never have wished for.

Among George II’s most jealously guarded pleasures were the regular visits he made back to his electorate – trips he called his Hanover-reisen. Caroline did not go with him, staying instead in Britain as his regent; she never saw Germany again after leaving in 1714. While at Herrenhausen in 1735, George met Amalie von Wallmoden, a young, fashionable married woman. He fell in love with her at first sight, with an immediacy and intensity that resembled his first meeting with Caroline some thirty years earlier. It was soon clear to everyone that his passion for ‘the Wallmoden’ was of an entirely different order to anything he had felt for previous lovers. He was soon in the grip of a powerful obsession for her that dominated all his thoughts.

Caroline knew this better than anyone else, because George wrote to tell her all about it. Whenever he was away, George wrote constantly to his wife, with letters ‘of sometimes sixty pages, and never less than forty, filled with an hourly account of everything he saw, heard thought or did’. Hervey thought this correspondence ‘crammed with minute trifling circumstances unworthy of a man to write, but even more of a woman to read’.22 George would sometimes instruct Caroline to show relevant passages ‘to the fat man’, which meant that the portly politician Robert Walpole saw for himself a great deal of what passed between the couple. He knew, as a result, that there was virtually nothing the king did not tell the queen, including all the most intimate details of his love affairs. Their correspondence also revealed that George required far more from Caroline than a dignified complaisance in the face of his infidelities; he also expected her to assist him in the pursuit of promising new affairs. ‘There was one letter,’ Walpole told Hervey, ‘in which he desired the queen to contrive, if she could, that the prince of Modena, who was to come at the latter end of the year to England, might bring his wife with him; and the reason he gave, was that he had heard her highness was pretty free with her person.’ It therefore came as no surprise to the queen to now receive ‘so minute a description’ of her husband’s new mistress, ‘that had the queen been a painter she might have drawn her rival’s picture at 600 miles distance’.23

At first, Caroline attempted to dismiss George’s new affair as she had done those that preceded it, but when he lingered on in Hanover, she began to grow increasingly concerned. And when at last he arrived reluctantly back in London, summoned home by his anxious ministers, she realised just how serious the situation had become, and to what degree her carefully managed primacy in his eyes was now threatened by his mistress in Germany.

Caroline might have imagined that she had already experienced most of what a royal marriage could require from a royal wife, but the humiliations, both public and private, she was now to endure at her husband’s hands were beyond anything she had yet encountered. George had always treated her brusquely in public. Hervey thought he was ‘perpetually so harsh and rough, that she could never speak one word uncontradicted, nor do any act unreproved’.24 Caroline’s response was to retreat into a posture of even greater submission, but her abnegation served only to spur George into even greater irritation. However innocuous the subject of conversation, the king would direct it into an attack on his wife. When Hervey and Caroline tried to draw him into a discussion on whether it was right to tip servants when one visited the houses of friends, that too turned into a rant, with the king declaring that the queen should not be venturing beyond her home in pursuit of pleasure. His whole family came under the lash of his ill humour. A few days later, he ‘snubbed the queen, who was drinking chocolate, for being always stuffing; the princess Emily [as Amelia was informally known] for not hearing him, the princess Caroline for being grown fat, the Duke of Cumberland for standing awkwardly, Lord Hervey for not knowing what relation the Prince of Sultzbach was to the elector Palatine, then carried the queen to walk, and be re-snubbed, in the garden’. On the rare occasions when the king’s mood lightened, ‘it was only to relate the scenes of his happy loves when he was at Hanover’.25 George had brought over from Germany a series of paintings that depicted ‘all his amorous amusements’ with Mme de Wallmoden, which he had framed and placed in the queen’s dressing room. In the evenings, before an embarrassed Hervey and a ‘peevish’ Caroline, ‘he would take a candle in his own royal hand, and tell … the story of these pictures’. To distract the queen, Hervey would ‘make grimaces’ over the king’s shoulder; but his jokes did little to rouse her spirits. George did not understand why his wife could not enter his amours with the same enthusiasm he did. ‘You must love the Wallmoden,’ he once instructed her, ‘for she loves me.’