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

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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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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.

*

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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.

*

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

Caroline suffered from an umbilical hernia, a condition in which internal pressure or congenital weakness forces part of the intestine through the stomach wall. As she told George, it can be caused by difficult labour, or through other side effects of pregnancy. Now it can be resolved by an operation usually simple enough to be performed as day surgery. In the eighteenth century, there was little that could be done. The doctors debated how best to proceed. One proposed ‘cutting a hole in her navel big enough to thrust the gut back into its place, which Ranby opposed, saying all the guts, on such an operation, would come out of the body, in a moment, on to the bed’. The wound had begun to mortify, and Caroline was subjected to a great deal of pointless agony as the doctors tried to cut away the infected areas around it. But they all knew there was nothing useful that could be done; and Ranby soon told George that the queen could not survive.

Caroline knew it too. She had declared from the beginning of her illness that she was dying. She summoned her family around her to take leave of them, and said goodbye to them one by one. ‘She took a ruby ring from her finger that the king had given her at her coronation and putting it on his said, “This is the last thing I have to give you – naked I came to you and naked I go from you.”’ As the king wept, she urged him to marry again, ‘upon which his sobs began to rise, and his tears to fall with double vehemence. Whilst in the midst of this passion, wiping his eyes and sobbing between every word, he got out the answer. “Non – j’aurai – des – maîtresses.” To which the queen made no other reply than “Mon Dieu! Cela n’empêche pas.”’80 (#litres_trial_promo) In death, Caroline was as resigned as she had been in life to the curious mixture of passion and selfishness with which her husband had declared his devotion to her.

There was one conspicuous absentee from her deathbed farewells. As soon as he heard his mother was ill, Frederick asked permission to come and see her. George was incensed, telling Hervey that if the prince appeared at St James’s, ‘I order you to go to the scoundrel, and tell him I wonder at his impudence for daring to come here … Bid him go about his business, for his poor mother is not in a condition to see him now act his false, whining cringing tricks.’81 (#litres_trial_promo) However, when the queen asked if there had been any messages from Frederick, the king relented. He would do anything to please his dying wife, even to the extent of admitting his hated son back into the house from which he had been so recently ejected. He told Caroline ‘that if she had the least mind to see her son, he had no objection to it, and begging her to do just what she liked’. Caroline was implacable. She told George she would not see him again, and that if she grew worse ‘and was weak enough to talk of seeing him, I beg, sir, that you will conclude that I dote and rave’. She did neither; Hervey reported that until the moment of her death she never spoke of the prince ‘but always with detestation’. She told the king and her daughter that ‘at least I shall have one comfort in having my eyes eternally closed – I shall never see that monster again’.

She finally died, after ten days of suffering, on 20 November. George ‘kissed the face and hands of the lifeless body several times’ and went silently to his apartments, which he did not leave for several weeks. He took Hervey with him, and ‘during this retirement … showed a tenderness of which the world thought him utterly incapable’. Everything he did and said, thought Hervey, proved how much he had loved and admired the woman he had lost. Hervey was amazed to hear the usually blunt and unsentimental king describe so feelingly what she had meant to him, ‘the tender manner in which he related a thousand old stories relating to his first seeing the queen, his marriage with her, the way in which they had lived at Hanover, his behaviour to her when she had had smallpox and his risking his life by getting it off her (which he did) rather than leave her’.82 (#litres_trial_promo)

He also recalled more recent times, ‘and repeated every day, her merits in every capacity with regard to him’. Unsurprisingly, he praised her complete submission to his will. ‘He firmly believed, she never, since he first knew her, ever thought of anything she was to do or say, but with the view of doing or saying it in what manner it would be most agreeable to his pleasure or serviceable to his interest.’ But he also acknowledged ‘that she had been of more use to him as a minister than any other body had ever been to him or any other prince’. It was an astute assessment of Caroline’s virtues in the public world; yet it was in her role as the lodestone of his private world that he knew he would miss her most. ‘She was the best wife, the best mother, the best companion, the best friend and the best woman that ever was born.’ He firmly believed that ‘he had never seen her out of humour in his life, though he had passed more hours with her than he believed any two other people in the world had ever passed together, and that he had never been tired in her company one minute’. He concluded with a compliment which Caroline would surely have understood was the highest accolade he could bestow on her: ‘He was sure that he could have been happy with no other woman upon earth for a wife, and that if she had not been his wife, he had rather had her for his mistress than any other woman he had ever been acquainted with.’83 (#litres_trial_promo)

George and Caroline’s had been an unconventional kind of marriage; but George could say, with some justification, that it had delivered for him an experience of happiness that had been so conspicuously denied to his mother and father. Even at their worst times, he and Caroline had never been less than a partnership, one which, for all the turbulence within it, was held together by the powerful dynamic of their mutual attraction. But they had extended none of that sense of inclusiveness to their son, and as George sat grieving for his wife, he might have reflected that he found himself in much the same position as his father had been before him: a man alone, alienated from a son he distrusted and despised. It would now be left to the generation that came after them to try to repair what George and Caroline had left undone. Frederick’s wife Augusta was pregnant again by the time the queen died. Caroline did not live to see the birth of her first grandson in June 1738. Frederick named the baby George, after his grandfather. It remained to be seen whether he had learnt more from the treatment he had received at the hands of his parents than George and Caroline had done; and whether he could prevent the legacy of bitterness that had so darkened his own life from surfacing to cast a similar shadow over that of his son.

CHAPTER 3

Son and Heir

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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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) ‘Pray God,’ he once wrote, more wistfully, ‘that you may grow in every respect above me – good night, my dear children’.14 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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?