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

CHAPTER 3

Son and Heir

FREDERICK AND AUGUSTA’S FIRST SON, George, was born on 24 May 1738 at Norfolk House in St James’s Square. He was a seven months’ child, and ‘so weakly at the time of his birth, that serious apprehensions were entertained that it would be impossible to rear him’.1 He was baptised that night, noted the diarist Lord Egmont, ‘there being a doubt that he could live’, but like his sister before him, the baby George clung tenaciously to life.2 In later years, he had no doubt whom he had to thank for his survival: Mary Smith, his wet nurse, ‘the fine, healthy, fresh-coloured wife of a gardener’. When she died in 1773, George was still conscious of the debt of gratitude he bore her. ‘She suckled me,’ he recalled, ‘and to her great attention my having been reared is greatly owing.’3 When told that etiquette made it impossible for the infant George to sleep with her, she had ‘instantly revolted, and in terms both warm and blunt, she thus expressed herself: “Not sleep with me! Then you may nurse the boy yourselves!”’4 The forthright Mary Smith won the battle, and with it the unwavering affection of the prince.

In 1743, Frederick moved his growing family – another son Edward had been born in 1739, and six other children were to follow, in almost annual succession over the next decade – to a bigger establishment. Leicester House, a large but ugly building, stood on the north side of what is now Leicester Square. It was not the most fashionable of neighbourhoods, being rather too near louche Soho for the politest society, and Frederick was by far its grandest inhabitant. His neighbours were businessmen, musicians and artists, most notably William Hogarth who had his studios across the square at number 32. Frederick was not short of places to live – he spent a great deal of money on nearby Carlton House, and rented properties for the summer on the Thames at Kew and at Cliveden – but it was Leicester House that became his principal residence. It was where he held informal court, assembling around him a group of ambitious young men who were as impatient as he was with his father’s government. With their support, Leicester House became the basis for Frederick’s political operations, the campaign headquarters from which he directed his attacks on the king’s ministers with such sustained effort that the term ‘Leicester House’ soon became synonymous with the very idea of princely political opposition. But the Soho property was also a family home; all Frederick and Augusta’s children grew up there, and their eldest son George seems to have retained an affection for it; he used it as his London house until very shortly before he became king.

George II never visited. He remained estranged from his son, although with the death of Queen Caroline some of the furious antipathy that had characterised their relationship ebbed away. The king occupied himself with his cards, his mistress and his military campaigns. His only engagement with Frederick was through the distancing formalities of party politics, where the two fought out their differences by ministerial and opposition proxies. They took care never to meet. Horace Walpole was once at a fashionable party where the usual precautions had somehow failed, and Frederick and his father were both embarrassingly present (‘There was so little company that I was afraid they would be forced to walk about together’), but this was a rare occurrence.5 Beyond the public stage of politics, the prince and the king lived carefully segregated existences.

Although he was now both paterfamilias and politician, Frederick continued to conduct his life with the same breezy goodwill and indifference to criticism that had so infuriated his parents when he was younger. If his ability to tell people what they wanted to hear coined him a reputation for duplicity, and his relaxed attitude to matters of political principle led to accusations of inconstancy, he was also singularly lacking in the anger and suppressed rage that had characterised so much of his parents’ lives. If he was resentful at their treatment of him, he concealed it very well; in public he appeared to be entirely unmarked by their baroque hostility. He was the least bitter of the early Hanoverians and, as such, seemed to have the best opportunity to the break the inheritance of dynastic unhappiness which his parents had passed on to him with such relish. In many ways, and with profound consequences for the development of his eldest son’s character, Frederick rose to the challenge. In his attitude to his wife and family, he represents a crucial and often underestimated bridge between the very different worlds of George II and George III.

Frederick’s conception of family life did not, however, extend to the practice of conjugal fidelity. He was his father’s son in that, at least. One of his favourites was Grace, Lady Middlesex, whom Horace Walpole described as ‘very short, very plain, and very yellow’. But, as Walpole saw, none of these affairs really mattered; they certainly did not disrupt the settled ecology of Frederick’s marriage, as those of his father had done: ‘Though these mistresses were pretty much declared, he was a good husband.’ Augusta, sensibly in Walpole’s opinion, ignored the transient lovers and reaped the benefits as a result. ‘The quiet inoffensive good sense of the princess (who had never said a foolish thing, nor done a disobliging one since the day of her arrival) … was always likely to have preserved her ascendancy over him.’6 Frederick’s relationship with his wife had none of the obsessive, jealous intensity that marked his father’s feelings for his mother; nor did it have about it the toxic undercurrents that damaged so many of those who came into too close contact with his parents’ passion.

His marriage was entirely lacking in the drama that characterised George and Caroline’s union, yet there is little doubt that Frederick loved and desired his wife. The prince, who was proud of his literary talents, wrote a series of verses to Augusta celebrating her physical charms, including ‘those breasts that swell to meet my love,/That easy sloping waist, that form divine’. But as the poem made clear, it was not her body for which her husband most admired her: ‘No – ’tis the gentleness of mind, that love,/so kindly answering my desire/ … That thus has set my soul on fire.’7 It was Augusta’s mild, unchallenging personality that Frederick found particularly appealing. From the earliest days of their marriage he had been delighted to discover that his wife was everything his mother was not: calm and pliable, with no discernible tastes or ambitions other than those her husband encouraged her to share. Her docility was one of her chief attractions, as Augusta herself seems clearly to have understood. Throughout their marriage, she never did or said anything to discommode or contradict him. One of the prince’s friends, in a parody of Frederick’s uxorious verses, added to the list of Augusta’s virtues ‘that all-consenting tongue,/that never puts me in the wrong’.8

Augusta’s willingness to please extended not just to what she said but also to what she did. She patiently indulged her husband in all his interests and foibles; in return, he found a place for her at the centre of his life. She accompanied him on all his excursions. Sometimes twice a week, they went to formal masquerades at Ranelagh pleasure gardens, where the princess, usually very modestly dressed, appeared ‘covered with diamonds’. Augusta gamely joined her husband in his pursuit of less grand entertainments. They went together to investigate the infamous Cock Lane Ghost, whose alleged spectral manifestation drew large crowds nightly (though the spirit failed to appear for them). She was also a dutiful participant in the pranks that Frederick enjoyed so much, reacting with the expected surprise when taken by him to visit a fortune teller, who turned out to be their children’s dancing master in heavy disguise. The politician George Dodington, who occupied a prominent place in the prince’s entourage, joined them on a typical day out in June 1750: ‘To Spitalfields, to see the manufactures of silk, and to Mr Carr’s shop in the morning. In the afternoon, the same company … to Norwood Forest to see a settlement of gypsies. We returned and went to Bettesworth the conjuror’s in hackney coaches – not finding him, we went in search of the little Dutchman, but were disappointed; and concluded by supping with Mrs Cannon, the princess’s midwife.’9

If the princess found Frederick’s pursuit of the eccentric and the exotic exhausting, she would never have said so. Perhaps she took more pleasure in their shared botanical interests. She and Frederick laid out the foundations of what is now Kew Gardens, jointly commissioning a summerhouse in the fashionable Chinese style, decorated with illustrations of the life of Confucius. Like her mother-in-law, Augusta’s only real extravagance was her spending on the gardens, where she built on the work Caroline had begun, erecting an orangery and completing the famous pagoda.

She played a less significant part in her husband’s other interests. For all his enduring fascination with low-life, Frederick was also a sophisticated consumer of high culture and keen to be seen as an urbane and discerning man of taste. He was a patron of the architect William Kent, and employed him to remodel the interior of his houses in his severe, classical style. In contrast to his father’s boasted indifference to the quality of the paintings that hung on his walls, Frederick was a thoughtful collector of pictures, buying two Van Dycks and two landscapes by Rubens. Horace Walpole, who was not well disposed to the prince, regarded his artistic ambitions as mere pretension until Frederick asked to see the catalogue Walpole had drawn up of his father’s extensive art collection at Houghton Hall in Norfolk. To his surprise, Walpole was impressed by the prince’s knowledge and appreciation: ‘He turned to me and said such a crowd of civil things that I did not know what to answer; he commended the style of quotations; said I had sent him back to his Livy.’10

Frederick was his mother’s son in his respect for intellectuals, if in little else. Like her, he enjoyed the company of writers. A keen amateur author himself (besides the poem written for Augusta and the disastrous play co-written with Hervey, he had a host of other works to his name), he sought out the company of John Gay, whose Beggar’s Opera, with its attack on Robert Walpole and the king, was attractive to him both culturally and politically, and James Thomson, whose poem The Seasons was hugely popular in the 1730s, and often visited Alexander Pope at his home in Twickenham. When Pope fell asleep in the middle of one of Frederick’s disquisitions on literature, the prince was not offended but stole discreetly away.

Built on the foundation of their stable marriage, and enlivened by the energy and diversity of the prince’s interests, Frederick and Augusta’s household was a comparatively happy place in which to raise children. It was certainly an improvement on Frederick’s, or indeed on his father’s, experiences of childhood. There seems little doubt that this was a conscious effort on Frederick’s part; he was determined to create for his own family the life he had never enjoyed himself as a boy. He was an attentive and affectionate parent, who enjoyed the company of his wife and children and was not afraid to show it. ‘He played the part of the father and husband well,’ wrote one appreciative visitor, ‘always happy in the bosom of his family, left them with regret and met them again with smiles, kisses and tears.’11 When the Bishop of Salisbury went to dinner with Frederick and Augusta, he was impressed to see that afterwards the children were called in, ‘and were made to repeat several beautiful passages out of plays and poems’ whilst their proud parents looked on. Beguiled by this unaccustomed image of royal family harmony, the bishop declared ‘he had never passed a more agreeable day in his whole life’.12 Frederick was particularly attached to his two eldest boys. When he was away, he was a diligent correspondent, his letters suffused with a warm informality. Writing to ‘dear George’ in 1748, he signed himself ‘your friend and father’. To ‘dear Edward’ he ‘rejoiced to find that you have been so good both. Pray God it may continue. Nothing gives a father who loves his children so well as I do so much satisfaction as to hear they improve, or are likely to make a figure in this world.’13 ‘Pray God,’ he once wrote, more wistfully, ‘that you may grow in every respect above me – good night, my dear children’.14

Frederick involved himself in every aspect of his children’s lives. In the country, whether at Kew or Cliveden, he arranged sports for them. There were skittles and rounders – played inside the house if wet, amidst the formal elegance of William Kent’s interiors. Everyone, including the girls, played cricket. All visitors were expected to join in, with neither age, dignity nor excess weight conferring exemption. When the rotund politician Dodington visited Kew in October 1750, he found himself reluctantly conscripted into a game. Further exercise for the royal children was provided by gardening. Each of them had a small plot to tend, but tilling the soil was not confined to the young. Here too, as the unhappy Dodington discovered, guests were compelled to do their bit, hoeing and digging with the rest of the family. ‘All of us, men, women and children worked at the same place,’ Dodington noted on 28 February 1750, adding the mournful postscript, ‘Cold dinner.’15 Having endured the perils of the cricket pitch and the rigours of the garden plot, visitors were also expected to join willingly in the practical jokes and horseplay for which Frederick never lost his taste. Dodington, who was almost as fat as he was tall, once allowed Frederick to wrap him in a blanket and roll him downstairs. The prince’s inner circle was not a place where ambitious politicians could expect to stand on their dignity.

In the evenings, the prince staged elaborate nightly theatricals in which all the family took part. Dodington recorded each night’s offering in his diary; the range of works was extensive, encompassing the classics – Macbeth, Tartuffe, Henry IV – to forgotten lighter pieces such as The Lottery or The Morning Bride. James Quin, a London actor, was recruited to coach the royal children in their performances. Many years later, when George III made his first speech from the throne as king, Quin commented with pride that ‘’Twas I that taught the boy to speak.’16 One of Frederick’s favourite pieces was Addison’s Cato, whose Prologue, with its enthusiastic endorsement of the principles of political liberty, was usually given to the young George to recite, as he did for the first time in 1749 at the age of eleven.

Should this superior to my years be thought,

Know – ’tis the first great lesson I was taught,

What, tho’ a boy! It may in truth be said,

A boy in England bred,

Where freedom becomes the earliest state,

For there the love of liberty’s innate.

If Frederick’s tastes shaped the leisure hours of his children, he was just as active in managing their education. He himself drew up a scholastic timetable, ‘The Hours of the Two Eldest Princes’, which laid out when and what George and Edward were to be taught, and appointed the Reverend Francis Ayscough as their tutor. Ayscough, a doctor of divinity, was not very inspiring, but the boys made steady progress under his instruction, and by the time he was eight, George could speak and write English and German. Frederick had the two boys painted with their tutor, who looms above them, formal in black clerical dress. Grey classical pillars rise behind them. The overwhelming impression is of chilly dourness; this was not, it seems, an atmosphere in which learning was likely to deliver either pleasure or excitement.

Then, in 1749 – the same year that the carefully coached eleven-year-old George delivered his eulogy on English liberty – Frederick replaced Ayscough with a far abler man. George Lewis Scott was a barrister and an extremely accomplished mathematician, and his arrival signified the prince’s intention to accelerate his sons’ academic progress. Their working day was long – they were required to translate a passage from Caesar’s Commentaries before breakfast – and the curriculum broad, including geometry, arithmetic, dancing and French. Greek was introduced for the first time, and after dinner, the boys were to read ‘useful and entertaining books, such as Addison’s works, and particularly his political papers’.17

The more demanding timetable reflected a new sense of urgency that had entered Frederick’s thinking, particularly in relation to his eldest son. At the beginning of 1749, he had composed a paper intended for the guidance of his heir. Its intentions were clearly set out in the title the prince gave it: ‘Instructions for my son George, drawn by myself, for his good, and that of my family, for that of his people, according to the ideas of my grandfather and best friend, George I.’ It was addressed directly and personally to his son. If Frederick were to die before he could himself elaborate on its contents to the boy, it was to be held by Augusta, ‘who will read it to you from time to time, and will give it to you when you come of age to get the crown’. ‘My design,’ Frederick promised, ‘is not to leave you a sermon as is undoubtedly done by persons of my rank. ’Tis not out of vanity I write this; it is out of love to you, and to the public. It is for your good and for that of the people you are to govern, that I leave this to you.’18 What followed was a detailed blueprint for good government, as seen through Frederick’s eyes. It sought to impress on George the nature of his future duties as king, head of his family, and father of the people. It stressed the importance of identifying himself with the country he would one day rule (‘Convince the Nation that you are not only an Englishman born and bred, but that you are also this by inclination’).19 It urged him to decrease the national debt, and to separate the electorate of Hanover from Great Britain to minimise involvement in European wars.20 Such policies would reduce expenditure, making the king more solvent, less dependent on forging alliances with political parties, and free to pursue policies of his own devising. These, Frederick asserted, would be more likely to reflect the true national interest than the existing system, reliant as it was on the management of a host of often conflicting and selfish sectional interests. When presented to his son later as part of a wider constitutional framework, these were ideas that would prove very compelling to the young George; but what prompted his father to articulate them at that time, in a form that suggested so powerfully a kind of political last will and testament?