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

George’s behaviour helped to usher in precisely the situation he had feared: soon, the prince stood at the centre of an organised coalition of ambitious politicians keen to use his grievances as a means of attacking his father’s administration. Far from being a token figurehead, the prince was an active participant in the development of an opposition strategy, doing all he could to attract supporters to his cause. He was successful in luring some of the brightest talents of the rising generation into his orbit; recognising that time was on his side, he did all he could to win over the young. His friend and adviser Lord Egmont said he had even tried to attract into his camp the headmaster of Westminster School, as it was considered such a breeding ground for the politicians of the future.

Slowly, the prince began to feel his potential strength. When Robert Walpole’s government found itself unable to carry the controversial Excise Bill through Parliament in 1737, Frederick declined to come to his father’s assistance by ordering his supporters to vote with the ministers. It was his first public clash with the king. Walpole, alarmed at the precedent it set for the future, tried to coax him towards more dutiful behaviour by offering to raise the vexed issue of his allowance with Parliament. But Frederick was not interested; he was not to be bought off with promises, and was prepared to wait for a better opportunity to emerge.

The king did not react well to his son’s defiance. For some time he had not spoken to Frederick. Now, when forced into his company, he could not be brought to make the smallest acknowledgement of his presence. ‘Whenever the prince was in a room with the king,’ observed Hervey, ‘it put one in mind of stories one has heard of ghosts that appear to part of the company and are invisible to the rest; and in this manner, wherever the prince stood, though the king passed ever so near, it always seemed as if the king thought the place the prince filled a void space.’55 George later told Hervey that he had once asked Caroline whether she thought ‘the beast was his son’. He did not mean to impugn her fidelity; drawing perhaps on the same vision of the world that fuelled his belief in vampires, he explained that he thought Frederick might be what the Germans called ‘a Wechselbalg’ – a changeling.56

George’s exasperation was increased by the apparent indifference with which his son appeared to receive the snubs and insults meted out to him. While his father fumed at St James’s, Frederick turned with annoyingly blithe unconcern to his own pleasures. He was a skilled cricketer, captaining the Surrey team and – to Hervey’s fastidious disgust – regularly playing alongside gardeners and grooms. He shared with most of his family a passionate love of music, although, unlike his father, he liked to perform as well as listen. He was an accomplished cellist and in 1734 gave impromptu concerts once or twice a week at Kensington Palace for anyone who turned up to enjoy them – including, noted a horrified Hervey (who compared Frederick to Nero playing his fiddle), ‘all the underling servants and rabble of the palace’.57 Like his mother, he loved books and read widely in subjects ranging from politics to philosophy to theology. Like her too, he relished an argument and was a sharp and nimble debater. Frederick even dabbled in writing himself. When he and Hervey were still friends, they had produced an undistinguished drama, The Modish Couple, which lasted only a few nights when performed on stage, and had closed amidst protests from a furious audience demanding their money back.

In 1734, the prince approached the king and asked permission to marry. George refused at first, citing Frederick’s ‘childish and silly’ behaviour as his justification; he vetoed a plan for the prince to reopen negotiations for the Princess of Prussia, famously remarking that he did not think grafting a coxcomb on to a halfwit would improve the breed. But on returning from one of his regular trips to Hanover in 1736, George announced that during his visit, he had seen the Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, and thought she would make a suitable wife for his son. The prince answered ‘with great duty, decency and propriety, that whatever his majesty thought a proper match for his son would be acceptable to him’. In the midst of his affair with Mme de Wallmoden, the king was keen to return to Hanover as soon as possible, and demanded that the match take place immediately.

A few months later, Augusta arrived in London. She was seventeen years old, gawky, naive and alone: she ‘suffered to bring nobody but a single man with her’. Hervey observed she was ‘rather tall and had health and youth enough in her face, joined to a very modest and good-natured look, to make her countenance not disagreeable’; but his practised seducer’s eye found ‘her arms long, and her motions awkward, and in spite of all her finery of jewels and brocade’ she had ‘an ordinary air which trappings could not cover or exalt’.58 She spoke not a word of English; her mother explained that it had not been thought necessary to teach her, believing that ‘the Hanover family having been above twenty years on the throne, to be sure most people in England must now speak German’.59

Nervous and inexperienced as she was, Augusta made a good beginning by prostrating herself on the floor in front of the king, who found this extreme form of respect entirely to his liking. She summoned enough courage to support herself through the rigours of the marriage ceremony, and she endured the jocular formality of a public wedding night with a man she had never met before with phlegmatic resignation. The young couple were led to their chamber and undressed with great ceremony. Once they were established in bed, the court processed past them, offering congratulations and ribald remarks about what was to come next. The prince was observed to eat glass after glass of jelly, which was thought to be an aphrodisiac; ‘every time he took one’, Hervey noted disdainfully, ‘turning about and laughing and winking at some of his servants’. He also wore a nightcap ‘some inches higher than any grenadiers cap in the whole army’. The next morning, the queen gossiped away to Hervey ‘with her usual enjoyment, on the glasses of jelly and the nightcap’, saying that one had made her sick and the other had made her laugh. They both thought Augusta looked so refreshed that ‘they concluded she had slept very sound’.60

The prince’s marriage marked a new phase in the deterioration of relationships within the royal family, and brought out into the open the covert warfare that had been waged between parents and son for so many years. Now Frederick felt himself strong enough to go on the offensive, and did so through the medium of his naive young wife. Whenever the couple attended chapel, the prince ensured that they always arrived after the king and queen. To reach her seat, Augusta had to push past Caroline and oblige her to get up. It took a direct order from the king to put a stop to this petty campaign of attrition. Caroline did not blame her new daughter-in-law, saying that she knew she ‘did nothing without the prince’s order’. There was no harm in Augusta, Caroline assured Hervey: ‘she never meant to offend, was very modest and very respectful’, but it was ‘her want of understanding’ that made her such exhausting company. She was perhaps not surprised to hear from one of her daughters that Augusta spent a large part of each day ‘playing with a great jointed baby’, dressing and undressing it in full view of an incredulous crowd of servants, who, like the queen, thought a married woman should be beyond playing with dolls.

When the prince announced that his wife was pregnant, Caroline simply refused to believe it. She had for some time harboured doubts about her son’s capacity to sire a child; now her curiosity developed into a strange, fixed obsession. She insisted to Hervey that she did not believe the marriage had ever been consummated, and questioned him remorselessly to discover what he knew about Frederick’s sexual prowess. It was a subject she had already discussed directly with her son, who, she told Hervey, ‘sometimes spoke of himself in these matters as if he were Hercules, and at other times as if he were four-score’. Frederick had recently confided in her details ‘of an operation that he had had performed upon him by his surgeon’, and added that he had ‘got nasty distempers by women’; but she suspected both were lies intended to distract attention from the reality of his impotence. She was sure little Fitzfrederick, the prince’s alleged child by Anne Vane, was really Hervey’s. Hervey replied that Fitzfrederick was not his child and that from what Anne Vane had told him, he assured Caroline there was no reason why he should not be Frederick’s. ‘She used to describe the prince in these matters as ignorant to a degree inconceivable, but not impotent.’61

Unconvinced, Caroline asked for a second opinion: could Hervey ‘get some intelligence’ from Lady Dudley, who ‘has slept with half the town’ and might know if Frederick ‘was like other men or not’? When Hervey refused to do so, the queen tried another approach. Had Frederick ever asked him to father a child on his behalf? Hervey told her he had not. If he had been asked, Caroline persisted, would such a thing be possible? Hervey thought it might be, but only if the marriage had actually been consummated, ‘for though I believe I may put one man upon her for another’, he doubted whether he could fool a woman who had never had a lover. Would it be possible to deceive her if both men were agreed to carry out the plan? It would take about a month, mused Hervey, during which ‘I would advise the prince to go to bed several hours after his wife, and to pretend to get up with a flux several times in the night, to perfume himself always with the same predominant smell, and by the help of these tricks, it would be very easy.’ It would be easier if the man was the same size as the husband and did not speak during the process. Caroline was so shocked by the ease with which Hervey thought the deception might be managed that she delivered a rare rebuke to him: ‘I love you mightily, my dear Lord Hervey, but if I thought you would get a little Hervey on the Princess of Saxe-Gotha … I could not bear it, nor do I know what I should be capable of doing.’62

Caroline seems to have convinced herself that her son was preparing some deception in relation to his wife’s pregnancy, whether at the point of conception or delivery. As the months went by, she questioned Augusta about her condition, but could get no sensible answers from her. To everything she asked – how long she had been pregnant, when she expected to give birth – the princess replied simply that she did not know. The prince had clearly instructed her to tell his mother nothing. But Caroline was determined the couple would not evade her scrutiny. She knew Frederick wanted the birth to take place at St James’s, rather than at Hampton Court where the family were currently in residence. Wherever it happened, Caroline was certain she would be there: ‘At her labour I positively will be … I will be sure it is her child.’63

She had reckoned without her son’s lunatic determination to outwit her. On 31 July 1736, the prince and princess dined formally with the king and queen at Hampton Court. Later that night, the princess’s labour began. Frederick immediately ordered a carriage to take his wife, himself, three of the princess’s ladies and Vreid, the man-midwife, to London, away from the prying eyes of his mother. Augusta’s waters broke as the prince carried her down the corridor. Ignoring the princess’s desperate pleas to be left where she was, Frederick bundled his labouring wife into the coach, all the time murmuring, ‘Courage, courage’ in her ear. It was quite the worst thing Frederick ever did in his life, and he was lucky that Augusta did not die as a result of his actions. ‘At about ten this cargo arrived in town,’ wrote Hervey. ‘Notwithstanding all the handkerchiefs that had been thrust up Her Royal Highness’s petticoats in the coach, her clothes were in such a state with the filthy inundations which attend these circumstances … that the prince ordered all the lights put out that people might not see … the nasty oracular evidence of his folly.’ There were no sheets in the unprepared house, so Augusta was finally delivered between two tablecloths. At nearly eleven o’clock, she gave birth to ‘a little rat of a girl, about the bigness of a large toothpick case’.64

After the birth the prince informed his parents, back at Hampton Court, what had happened. The queen could not believe it; the king was furious, shouting, ‘You see now, with all your wisdom how they have outwitted you! This is all your fault! A false child will be put upon you and how will you answer to your children!’65 Pausing only to dress and to pick up Lord Hervey, Caroline went immediately to London, where she spoke politely to the exhausted princess and kissed the tiny baby. She said nothing to Frederick, other than to observe that ‘it was a miracle the princess and the child had not been killed’.66 Then she turned around and returned to Hampton Court. She had no doubts, she told Hervey, that the ‘poor ugly little she-mouse’ she had seen at St James’s was indeed the princess’s child. Had it been ‘a brave, jolly boy I should not have been cured of my suspicions’. But her relief that there had been ‘no chairman’s brat’ wished on them did nothing to make the birth an event that brought the family together.

Frederick named his new daughter Augusta, pointedly failing to pay his mother the compliment of naming the first-born girl in her honour. But even without the ill feeling surrounding her arrival, there would have been no reconciliation between the generations. Some time before her birth, Frederick had decided to raise again the long-disputed issue of his allowance in Parliament, and against all expectations, he had been successful in making the subject a Commons motion. His father’s response to the prospect of having his financial affairs publicly (and no doubt critically) discussed was predictably apoplectic. Caroline’s reaction was more surprising. It had been plain for some time that her attitude to Frederick had hardened considerably. When Hervey asked her if her views on her son had indeed changed over the last year, Caroline agreed most vehemently that they had, telling him that she now believed ‘my dear firstborn is the greatest ass and the greatest liar and the greatest canaille and the greatest beast in the world, and I most heartily wish he was out of it’.67

Now Caroline exploded, releasing a pent-up torrent of reproach and resentment. ‘Her invectives against her son were of the incessant and of the strongest kind,’ wrote Hervey, who witnessed them at first hand. As the parliamentary vote drew nearer, and the prospect of the prince’s victory looked more likely, the queen’s rage grew increasingly intemperate. She and her unmarried daughter, Caroline, worked themselves up into ever more passionate denunciations of Frederick. ‘They neither of them made much ceremony of wishing a hundred times a day that the prince might drop down dead of an apoplexy, the queen cursing the hour of his birth, and the princess declaring she grudged him every hour he continued to breathe.’ The young Caroline, who was said to nurture a deep and unrequited passion for Lord Hervey, had quickly absorbed her parents’ hostility towards her eldest brother; she claimed always to have detested him, provoked by his duplicity, his selfishness and his demeaning and destructive pursuit of money. She told Hervey ‘that he was a nauseous beast (those were her words) who cared for nobody but his nauseous self’, adding that Hervey was a fool for ever having loved him. When the prince refused the political mediations of Robert Walpole, saying he was determined to pursue his claim, the queen declared her son was ‘the lowest, stinking coward in the world … I know if I was asleep, or if he could come behind me, he is capable of shooting me through the head, or stabbing me in the back’.68

On the day of the vote, even the usually unshockable Hervey was taken aback by the venom of the queen’s attack. As Frederick walked across a courtyard, Caroline watched him. ‘Reddening with rage, she said, “Look, there he goes – that wretch! – that villain! – I wish the ground would open this moment and sink that monster to the lowest reaches of hell.”’ Seeing Hervey’s startled face she added: ‘You stare at me; but I assure you that if my wishes and prayers had any effects; and the maledictions of a mother signified anything, his days would not be very happy or very long.’69 In the end, the prince lost the motion by the narrow margin of thirty votes; but it was too late now for anything to mend the gulf that divided him from the rest of his family.

There was a tragic echo of the past in what happened next. The king decided Frederick’s behaviour had been so provocative that he was to be expelled from the precincts of all the royal palaces. He instructed Hervey, in his role as Vice Chamberlain, to make the necessary arrangements. Hervey based his actions on the instructions that had been drawn up to manage the ejection of George and Caroline from the same palaces almost twenty years before. There was, however, one area in which the king did not intend to follow the harsh example of his father. ‘Sir Robert Walpole told Lord Hervey that the resolution was to leave the child with the princess, and not to take it (as the late king had taken the king’s children upon the quarrel in the last reign) lest any accident might happen to this little royal animal.’70 Hervey went about his task with gusto, and admitted that he ‘was not a little pleased with a commission that put it in his power to make use of the king’s power and authority to gratify and express his resentment against the prince’.71 But even he was surprised when the king expressly refused to allow Frederick and Augusta any ‘chests or other such things’ from the royal apartments. When Hervey said that surely he did not mean them to carry away their clothes in linen baskets, George retorted: ‘Why not? A basket is good enough for them.’72

On the day of the prince’s departure, Hervey joined the royal family as they sat round the breakfast table contemplating what was about to happen. ‘I am weary of the puppy’s name,’ declared the king. ‘I wish I was never to hear it again, but at least I shall not be plagued any more with seeing his nasty face.’ He told Caroline that he could forgive everything he had done to him, but could never forget the injury done to her. ‘I never loved the puppy well enough to have him ungrateful to me but to you he is a monster and the greatest villain ever born.’ Princess Caroline, elaborating on what was a familiarly obsessive theme, hoped her brother would burst so that they could mourn ‘with smiling faces and crepe and hoods for him’. The queen was adamant that she was unmoved by her son’s impending exile: ‘God knows in my heart, I feel no more for him than if he was no relation, and if I was to see him in hell, I should feel no more for him than I should for any rogue that was there.’ And yet, she added, ‘once I would have given up all my other children for him. I was fond of that monster, I looked on him as if he had been the happiness of my life, and now I wish that he had never been born … I hope in God I shall never see the monster’s face again.’73 She never did.

*

‘There was a strange affectation of incapacity of being sick that ran through the royal family,’ Hervey observed, ‘which they carried so far that no one of them was more willing to own any other of the family being ill than to acknowledge themselves to be.’ Hervey had seen the king ‘get out of his bed choking and with a sore throat and in a high fever, only to dress and have a levee’. He expected Caroline to do the same. ‘With all his fondness for the queen, he used to make her in the like circumstances commit the like extravagances.’74

Throughout the summer of 1737, Hervey noticed that Caroline was often unwell. On 9 November, whilst inspecting her newly completed library at St James’s Palace, she was taken seriously ill. ‘She called her complaint the colic, her stomach and bowels giving her great pain. She came home, took Daffy’s elixir, but … was in such pain and so uneasy with frequent retchings to vomit, that she went to bed.’ Like the dutiful warhorse she was, she forced herself to attend that day’s formal Drawing Room, but she admitted to Lord Hervey that she was not ‘able to entertain people’ and prepared to take her leave. Before she could do so, the king reminded her that she had not spoken to the Duchess of Norfolk. The queen ‘made her excuses’ to the duchess, ‘who was the last person she ever spoke to in public’, then retired to her room.75

Hervey, of course, went with her. He was, as he proudly recalled, ‘never out of the queen’s apartment for above four or five hours at most during her whole illness’. He loved Caroline as much as he loved anyone, except Ste; but he did not allow his affection to get in the way of his merciless reporter’s eye. The candid details of her suffering that fill his account of the queen’s long and painful death demonstrate how hard it was to die with dignity in the eighteenth century, and how little medicine could do, either to cure or to alleviate distress. It also illustrates very poignantly the strength of the complicated ties that had bound Caroline to her husband for so long, and the true depth of his feelings for her. He never showed her so clearly that he loved her as when she was dying; but even then, his passion was tempered by anger – an impotent frustration in the face of her weakness and suffering that was, in its own warped way, what it had always been – a furious demonstration of his need for her.

From the beginning of her sickness, George refused to leave his wife. He had his bedding brought into her room and laid it on the floor, so that he could be near her. Sometimes, ‘inconveniently to both himself and the queen’, he would ‘lay on the queen’s bed all night in his nightgown, where he could not sleep, nor she turn around’.76 He scolded her when pain made her shift about in bed. ‘How the devil should you sleep when you can never lie still a moment? … Nobody can sleep in that manner and that is always your way; you never take the proper method to get what you want and then you wonder that you have it not.’77 He begged her to eat, and although she could not hold anything in her stomach, she tried to take something to please him. When she brought it up, ‘he used peevishly to say, “How is it possible that you should not know whether you like a thing or not? If you do not like it, why do you call for it?”’ Once, in front of an appalled Hervey, he told her she looked like a calf whose throat had just been cut.

Hervey thought these ‘sudden sallies of temper’ were ‘unaccountable’. He did not understand that they were a product of George’s increasing desperation, for his anger mounted as his wife grew steadily worse. At first, no one knew exactly what was wrong. She would not allow any doctors to attend her and permitted no one to examine her. When they were alone, Hervey often heard her cry: ‘I have an ill which nobody knows of!’ He took that to mean ‘nothing more than she felt what she could not describe’.

Her husband knew better. As days went by, and Caroline ‘complained more than ever of the racking pains she felt in her belly’, George decided enough was enough. He whispered to her that ‘he was afraid her illness proceeded from a thing he had promised never to speak of to her again; but that her life being in danger’, he was obliged to tell everything he knew. Caroline ‘begged and entreated him with great earnestness that he would not’, but the king sent for Ranby the surgeon ‘and told him that the queen had a rupture at her navel, and bid him examine her’. It took Ranby only a few minutes to confirm the diagnosis. Caroline ‘made no answer but lay down and turned her head to the other side, and as the king told me, he thinks it was the only tear she shed while she was ill’.78

George told Hervey that he had first noticed the injury fourteen years before, after Caroline had given birth to their last child, Louisa. She told him ‘it was nothing more than what was common for almost every woman to have had after a hard labour’. When it did not improve, he had urged her to consult a doctor, but she refused and begged him to say no more about it. When he came back from his extended trip to Hanover in 1736, he thought it had become much worse. He told her he was certain it was a rupture. Caroline responded with uncharacteristic fury, ‘telling me it was no such thing, and that I fancied she had a nasty distemper, which she was sure she had not, and spoke more peevishly to me than she had ever done in her life’. The more he begged her to ‘let somebody see it’, the more determined she became to reveal it to no one. ‘I at last told her I wished she might not repent her obstinacy, but promised her I would never mention this subject to her again as long as I lived.’ These conversations took place at the height of the king’s passionate affair with Mme de Wallmoden, and even the determinedly unimaginative George suspected that his infidelity had coloured the way his words had been received by his hurt and resentful wife. ‘In as plain insinuations as he could,’ he told Hervey that Caroline believed it was because of her injury that he had ‘grown weary of her person’. Hervey was astonished that ‘an ill-timed coquetry at fifty-four that would hardly have been acceptable at twenty-five’ had been allowed to exacerbate the queen’s complaint; but he was forced to accept the truth of it. ‘Several things she afterwards said to the king in her illness … plainly demonstrated how strongly these apprehensions of making her person distasteful to the king had worked upon her.’79