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

When the king returned to Hanover the following year, it looked to an apprehensive Hervey as though Caroline had finally had enough and, provoked beyond endurance, intended to adopt a less conciliatory policy towards her husband. She began to write to him less regularly, and her letters, which had previously run to thirty pages or more, now barely exceeded seven or eight. When news reached England that Mme de Wallmoden had given birth to a son, Hervey feared that Caroline might lose control of her husband altogether. He ‘begged Sir Robert Walpole to do something or other to prevent her going on in a way that would destroy her’. Walpole thought ‘that nothing could ever quite destroy her power with the king’; but he was merciless in the advice he subsequently dispensed to a tearful Caroline: she must abandon any attempt to express her displeasure, or declare her own injured feelings. ‘It was too late in her life to try new methods, and she was never to hope now to keep her power with the king by reversing those methods by which she had gained it.’ She must conquer her bitterness and replace indignation with submission. ‘Nothing but soothing, complying, softening, bending, and submitting could do any good.’ And he added a final directive to his comprehensive recipe of humiliation: ‘She must press the king to bring this woman to England. He taught her this hard lesson till she wept.’26

The strategist in Caroline could see the benefits of having George back in Britain again, where he would be susceptible to her influence; but the aggrieved, betrayed wife in her resisted. The struggle between the two warring dimensions of Caroline’s character was short and sharp, and it was the queen and the politician who emerged victorious. Caroline wrote ‘a most submissive and tender letter’ to George ‘assuring him she had nothing but his interest and his pleasure at heart’ and making ‘an earnest request that he would bring Mme de Wallmoden to England, giving assurances that his wife’s conduct to his mistress should be everything he desired’.27 As Robert Walpole had predicted, once Caroline had declared her utter surrender to his will, George’s hostility began to melt away. He replied immediately with a host of conciliatory expressions. ‘You know my passions, my dear Caroline. You understand my frailties. There is nothing hidden in my heart from you.’ Robert Walpole, who was shown the letter, told Hervey that ‘it was so well written, that if the king was only to write to women and never to strut or talk to them, he believed His Majesty would get the better of all the men in the world with them’.28

When the king at last returned to London, ‘the warmest of all his rays were directed at the queen. He said no man ever had so affectionate and meritorious a wife or so faithful an able a friend.’ Mme de Wallmoden ‘seemed to those who knew the king best to be quite forgot’.29 Aged over fifty, Caroline had managed to seduce her straying husband home again. That was undoubtedly a triumph of sorts, but she could not have been unaware of the high price she had paid – and indeed, had always paid – for the maintenance of their precarious marital status quo. There were many things she knew her husband admired about her: her energy; her beauty, even; could he but admit it, the intellect that she had so tirelessly directed towards the success of their partnership – but none of this mattered as much to George as her willingness to deny all her best qualities in an absolute emotional submission to his will. He knew that with a glance or a frown, and above all with the threat of departure, he could bring her to heel; in the private heartland of their marriage, true power resided firmly where it had always been – in his hands.

It is true that Caroline had very few options in responding to George’s behaviour, as she had no desire to follow her mother-in-law into the post-marital wilderness; but her desire to keep the affections of her errant husband was more than simply the product of pragmatic considerations. She was genuinely distressed by his temporary abandonment of her, and was delighted when he came back. She was proud that the king had returned not only to court, but also to her bed, joyfully informing Robert Walpole of the fact so that he could appreciate the completeness of her victory. George was a difficult man to love, and he tried the fortitude of his wife severely in the thirty years they spent together. Yet during all that time, he remained the dominating figure in her life, crowding out all competing emotional claims. When forced by her father-in-law to make the appalling choice between her husband and her daughters, Caroline had unhesitatingly chosen George, declaring ‘her children were not a grain of sand compared to him’.30 It was not that she did not care for her girls; she loved her daughters deeply, but it was her relationship with her husband that occupied all her time and absorbed all her emotional energy. There was not much room left for anyone else.

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If the relationship between George and Caroline was complex, and not conducive to happiness, it was as nothing compared to the misery that resulted from their dealings with Frederick, their eldest son. Some of the problems they encountered were not entirely of their own making; the operation of eighteenth-century politics inevitably placed the heir to the throne in opposition to his father. On reaching maturity he soon became the focus around which disgruntled politicians gathered, eager to stake their claim to the future. He could make a great deal of trouble for the king and his ministers if he was disposed to do so, and very few heirs found themselves able to resist that temptation. All this George and Caroline knew very well from their own difficult days as Prince and Princess of Wales; once they inherited the crown, however, they expunged all recollection of that period from their joint memory, and expected their son to behave with a political rectitude that had not characterised their own behaviour when they occupied his position. But their attitude to the prince went far beyond the discontents and difficulties that came with their constitutional roles. They treated Frederick with a venom that exceeded any legitimate political frustration, and conceived a hatred for him that became almost pathological in its intensity.

As with so much Hanoverian unhappiness, its origins lay in the actions of George I. He had kept his small grandson in Hanover, forbidding his parents to visit him there, and allowing them no say in his education and upbringing. When Frederick was sixteen, George I had begun to negotiate a marriage between his grandson and the Princess of Prussia. In a gesture of deliberate and insulting exclusion, the boy’s father was not consulted, nor even informed of the project. Back in England, the younger George watched the king load on to Frederick a host of honours and titles which had never been extended to him, and began to wonder whether it would be Frederick and not himself who would eventually inherit the electorate. None of these slights made him look fondly on his absent son. As the Duchess of Orléans astutely commented, it seemed to guarantee that the filial hatred that had defined one generation would be passed on to the next: ‘The young prince in Hanover may not meet with much love, for if the Prince of Wales has to bear his mother’s sins, perhaps he may have to answer for the grandfather’s.’31

In the years the young prince had been separated from his family, distance had not made his father’s heart grow fonder. Frederick grew up a remote cipher, a blank page on which George could project all the anger he felt against his own father, with whom the boy was forever damagingly identified. He did not know him, and felt nothing for him but the suspicion he instinctively reached for when faced with a rival of unknown and possibly damaging intent. He showed no desire at all to bring the young man back into his life. When he succeeded to the throne, it had been widely expected that Frederick would immediately be summoned to attend the coronation; but it took a parliamentary address to persuade the new king to do so.

After a long and hazardous journey through the winter landscapes of north Germany, the young prince finally arrived in England in December 1727. He was greeted with scant ceremony and a very cool welcome. When he reached London, there were no officials to greet him and no royal coach to transport him to St James’s Palace; he was obliged to hire a hackney coach and make his own way to his mother’s apartments.32 At first, he and his estranged family seem to have managed their new and somewhat uncomfortable proximity with some success. Frederick spent time with his mother, in private and in public, and played his part well at formal events such as the celebrations for the queen’s birthday. The king was satisfied too, but for rather different reasons. In his early encounters, he had found the inoffensive reality of his son far less intimidating than the threatening image he had conjured up in the boy’s absence. ‘He was quite pleased with him, as a new thing, felt him quite in his power.’ He was said to have told Robert Walpole, with a tellingly contemptuous air: ‘I think this is a son I need not be much afraid of.’33

Whilst he took pains to behave well under the scrutinising eyes of his parents, the twenty-one-year-old Frederick was keen to take advantage of the opportunities London offered, in characteristically Hanoverian style. He had left behind him in Germany an established mistress, Mme d’Elitz, who was said to have served both his father and his grandfather as lovers before him; now he turned his attentions further afield. He began affairs with an opera singer, with the daughter of an apothecary, and with a woman who played the hautboy. One night, venturing into St James’s Park in search of female company, he met a girl who robbed him of his wallet, twenty-two guineas and his royal seal; he was forced to advertise for the seal’s return, promising that no questions would be asked of whoever brought it back to him. In all these encounters he retained a combination of adolescent innocence and boastfulness, qualities he was not to lose until well beyond his first youth. ‘He was not over nice in his choice,’ commented Lord Egmont, who became a close friend, ‘and talks more of his feats in this way than he acts.’34 He was rowdy and boisterous at times; with a group of other rich young men, he would race through the night-time streets, breaking the windows of respectable householders. The eccentric Duchess of Buckingham was said to have fired grapeshot at him when her glass was broken. She placed an advertisement in the Daily Gazette, ‘to assure those who offered insults of this kind to her or her house that they should be received suitably to their conduct, and not to their rank’.35 For the rest of his life Frederick never lost his taste for somewhat crude practical jokes and pranks; a strategically placed bucket of water emptied on the head of an unsuspecting friend would always raise a laugh from him.

In later years, when their hostility to their son was firmly established, George and Caroline were keen to suggest that his behaviour had been wicked and untrustworthy from his very earliest days. Caroline once confided to Robert Walpole, with tears in her eyes, the opinion of Frederick’s old tutor in Hanover, whom she said had told her that her son had ‘the most vicious nature and false heart that ever man had, nor are his vices those of a gentleman but the mean, base tricks of a knavish footman’.36 But while Frederick was hardly a paragon of goodness, there is little to suggest that he committed sins any worse than those common to young men of his age and situation. Others who met him did not share his tutor’s apocalyptically bleak judgement. The intrepid traveller Lady Mary Worley Montagu had been introduced to him when he was a child in Hanover and found ‘something so very engaging and easy in his behaviour that he needs no advantage of rank to appear impressed’.37 A decade later, Lady Bristol, Lord Hervey’s mother, met the prince during his first weeks in London, and had been equally impressed. He was, she thought, ‘the most agreeable young man that it is possible to imagine, without being the least handsome, his person very little, but very well made and genteel, a liveliness in his eyes that is indescribable, and the most obliging address that can be conceived’.38

From the moment Hervey himself arrived back in England from a Grand Tour of Italy in 1729, he laid siege to the prince, doing all he could to win his affection. Frederick fell as quickly under Hervey’s spell as his mother was later to do. A few years older than the prince, Hervey was all the things the rather gauche young man was not – well travelled, assured, articulate, sophisticated, naturally at home in the elegant world. By the time Hervey’s third son was born in 1730, the two men were such close friends that, with the prince’s blessing, Hervey named the boy after him. They were seen everywhere together and supported each other through a variety of tribulations. When Hervey, whose health was always troublesome, collapsed ‘as if I had been shot’ in a fit at the prince’s feet, Frederick abandoned all other commitments to stay with his friend until he recovered. ‘The prince sat with me all day yesterday,’ Hervey wrote with satisfaction, ‘and has promised to do so again today.’39 Hervey returned the favour when Frederick in his turn fell ill. After he recovered, he presented Hervey with a gold snuffbox bearing his portrait and invited him down to his country retreat at Kew, where they played at ninepins all day. They were now so close that they had dropped any formal titles; the prince wrote to Hervey in playful tones as ‘my dear chicken’ or ‘my lord chicken’.40

By the summer of 1731, the relationship between Hervey and Frederick had become so intimate and so affectionate that Hervey’s established lover began to grow uneasy about it. Stephen Fox – known to his friends as Ste – was the brother of the politician Henry Fox and the uncle of the famous Charles. He and Hervey had been involved in a passionate affair for nearly five years, even though Ste shared few of Hervey’s interests. Where Hervey was happiest in the intrigue and incident of the city, Ste was a dedicated countryman, who could rarely be persuaded to leave his Somerset estate. Hervey’s wife Molly, who knew all about their relationship, said that ‘unless one could be metamorphosed into a bird or a hare, [Ste] will have nothing to say to one’.41 When they were apart, Hervey wrote constantly to Ste, doing all he could to convey his love for him in words. ‘I hear you in the deadliest silence and see you in the deepest darkness,’ he assured him. ‘For my own part, my mind never goes naked but in your territories.’42 Now Ste began to wonder whether the prince was edging him out of Hervey’s affections. When Hervey unguardedly told Ste how much he cared for the prince, Ste exploded in an outburst of jealousy and recrimination. Shocked by Ste’s response, Hervey did all he could to mollify his wounded feelings. ‘When I said I loved 7 [his codeword for the prince] as much as I loved you, I lied egregiously; I am as incapable of wishing to love anybody else so well as I am of wishing to love you less.’43 He insisted that Ste would always be his only real love, assuring him ‘that since first I knew you I have been yours without repenting, and still am, and ever shall be undividedly, and indissolubly yours’. Eventually, the storm passed.

While it is hard to know how conscious Frederick was of the effect he had on Hervey, it is difficult to imagine that he had no understanding of the emotions he had stirred up. When Hervey wrote to Frederick describing himself as Hephaistion, every educated man of the time would have known that Hephaistion was the male lover of a great prince, Alexander the Great. It is also perhaps significant that the pages which cover the period of greatest intimacy between Hervey and Frederick were removed and destroyed by Hervey’s grandson when he inherited Hervey’s memoirs. Considering the graphic and unflinching nature of what he left untouched, the excised section must have contained details he regarded as even more scandalous than what remains.

In the end, it was a row over a woman, not a man, that put an end to Frederick and Hervey’s friendship. None of the three men involved in the complicated triangle that played itself out in 1731–32 saw their relationship with each other as debarring them from affairs with women. All three married, and between them they produced a tribe of children. Down in Somerset, Ste preferred hunting and shooting to the active pursuit of women; neither Frederick nor Hervey saw any reason to interrupt their more conventional predatory habits. ‘What game you poach, sir,’ Hervey wrote archly to the prince, ‘what you hunt, what you catch, or what runs into your mouth, I don’t pretend to guess.’44 But when he discovered that Frederick had successfully seduced a woman he regarded as a conquest of his own, Hervey was incensed.

Anne Vane, one of Queen Caroline’s Maids of Honour, had been Hervey’s mistress since 1730. She was not considered much of a prize. ‘She is a fat and ill-shaped dwarf,’ said one uncharitable witness, ‘who has nothing good to recommend her that I know.’45 It was hardly a passionate affair; Hervey described her to Ste as ‘a little ragout that, though it is not one’s favourite dish, will prevent one either dying of hunger or choosing to fast’.46 Yet when he discovered that the prince had set her up in a house in Soho he was furious. It was not a thwarted sense of possessiveness on Hervey’s part. Anne Vane had so many lovers that when she became pregnant, three men claimed paternity of the baby, though it was the prince who was widely considered best entitled to that credit. Hervey was more hurt by what he considered the prince’s betrayal than Anne Vane’s faithlessness. When Frederick began to spend more and more time with Anne and less and less with his old friend, Hervey’s anger turned to desperation. In a last-ditch attempt to win back the favour that was so visibly ebbing away, he wrote a blistering letter to his ex-mistress, threatening to tell the prince everything he knew about her unless she promised to help reinstate him in Frederick’s good books. Anne collapsed with shock, and on her recovery, showed the letter to Frederick, who was extremely angry and never forgave Hervey. The breach between the two men was immediate and irrevocable; their years of friendship were swept away and replaced by volleys of insult and invective, claim and counterclaim, professions of outraged honour and betrayed loyalty. In the summer of 1732, Anne gave birth to a son, who was ostentatiously named Fitzfrederick. Frederick installed her in a palatial house in Grosvenor Square and gave her an annual allowance of £3,000.47 It was a very public demonstration of the transfer of his affections.

Reluctantly accepting that he had no real future with the son, Hervey now concentrated his attention on Frederick’s mother, who responded eagerly to his overtures. When the prince protested that ‘it was extremely hard a man the whole world knew had been so impertinent to him, and whom he never spoke to, should be picked out by the queen for her constant companion’, his complaints were ignored. Hervey later maintained that despite their quarrel, he would sometimes take Frederick’s side, arguing his case before the prince’s increasingly ill-disposed parents. He was candid enough to admit that he did this not as ‘an affectation of false generosity but merely from prudence and regard to himself’. He knew, he said, how common it was in families ‘for suspended affection to revive itself’ and did not want to find himself excoriated by both sides of a reunited dynasty.48 But as relations between the prince and his parents grew more bitter, Hervey took full advantage of the opportunities offered by his position around the queen to take revenge upon his erstwhile friend. He became one of the prince’s greatest enemies in a household in which there was considerable competition for that title, egging Caroline on to ever greater and more shocking declarations of anger and disgust with Frederick.

In the end he supplanted the prince in every aspect of his mother’s affection. As Caroline knew, Hervey disliked his own mother, whom he thought a loud and silly woman. ‘Your mother,’ she once told him, ‘is a brute that deserves just such a beast as my son. I hope I do not; and I wish with all my soul we could change, that they who are alike might go together, and that you and I might belong to one another.’49 Hervey, who did all he could to present himself to Caroline as the child she truly deserved, once ventured to suggest the possibility directly. ‘Supposing I had had the honour to be born Your Majesty’s son –’ ‘I wish to God you had,’ interrupted the queen. Few conversations could have given him such a sense of deep and vengeful satisfaction.

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In later years, there was a great deal of speculation about what had provoked the hatred that came to define the relations between the king and queen and their eldest son. Lord Hardwicke, the Lord Chancellor from 1737 to 1756, hinted at the existence of ‘certain passages between him and the king’ that he said were ‘of too high and secret a nature’ ever to be placed in writing. But for all the desire to find a single compelling explanation for their behaviour, there was in fact no one decisive event which produced the rapid decline in even nominal goodwill between George, Caroline and Frederick.

Instead, it was a number of considerations that exacerbated an already unhappy situation. The family history of suspicion, betrayal and distrust weighed heavily upon Frederick’s parents. There were few examples in their own past of disinterested, affectionate conduct or calm self-effacement to guide or inspire them. George’s temper was irritable and easily provoked, especially by those he thought should be unquestioningly subordinate to his will. These private discontents were magnified by a political culture which anticipated and indeed positively rewarded a separation of interests between the king and his heir. Once embarked upon, it was all but impossible to prevent these public breaches from taking on a very personal dimension. ‘It ran a little in the blood of the family to hate the eldest son,’ summarised Horace Walpole, with succinct understatement.50 But as Walpole also understood, there was a more immediate trigger for the king’s first eruption of fury at his son, and that issue was money.

When Frederick came of age, George II allowed him around £40,000 per annum from the Civil List. Frederick considered this inadequate, especially when compared to the £100,000 his father had received when he was Prince of Wales. Even Hervey had some sympathy with Frederick’s position. He pointed out to Caroline that ‘the best friends to her, the king and the administration were of the opinion that the prince had not enough money allowed him, and whilst he was so straitened in his circumstances, it was impossible he should ever be quiet’.51 Hervey hoped that the queen would work her magic upon her husband and persuade him to adopt a more generous stance. Caroline was, at this point, better disposed towards Frederick than her husband, preferring to think of him as badly advised rather than malicious in intent. ‘Poor creature,’ she told Hervey, ‘with not a bad heart, he is induced by knaves and fools to blow him up to do things that are as unlike an honest man as a wise one.’52 Caroline insisted that she had often interceded on his behalf with his father, assuring Frederick that ‘she wanted nothing so much as their being well together.’ She had, she declared, ‘sunk several circumstances the king had not seen and softened things that he had’ in order to present her son in the best possible light. She did this even though she saw no signs that Frederick appreciated her efforts. When Hervey told her that ‘it always had been his opinion, and still was so, that the prince loved Her Majesty in his heart’, she was sceptical. She agreed that ‘he has no inveterate hatred to me, but for love, I cannot say I see any great signs of it’.53

The king’s response was both more straightforward and more hostile. He had no sympathy with his son’s demands. Frederick had already run up huge debts in Hanover which he had no prospect of repaying without his father’s help. George also argued that the larger allowance he had received as Prince of Wales had been required to support a growing family, whilst his son was responsible for no one but himself. Frederick’s persistence in pursuing a comparable sum confirmed all his father’s early apprehensions about the ambition and opportunism of his heir; he suspected the cash was intended to further Frederick’s political ends, financing an opposition that would inevitably be directed against him. Soon the king refused to speak to his son at all. ‘He hated to talk of him almost as much as to talk to him,’ observed Hervey; but he made his feelings known by ‘laying it on him pretty thick’ in more oblique references. ‘One very often sees a father a very brave man, and the son a scoundrel,’ the king once declared to a group of embarrassed listeners, ‘a father very honest and his son a great knave; the father a man of truth and the son a great liar; in short, a father that has all sorts of good qualities and a son that is good for nothing.’ Hervey noticed that the king stopped short, ‘feeling that he had pushed it too far’, and noted that in some cases ‘it was just the reverse, and that very disagreeable fathers sometimes had very agreeable men for their sons. I suppose,’ remarked Hervey, ‘that in this case he thought of his own father.’54