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Although Frederick was only forty-two when he wrote the document, the 1740s had been a punishing decade for him and his followers. They had enjoyed some successes, most notably, and most pleasing from the perspective of Leicester House, the fall of George II’s favoured minister Robert Walpole in 1742. The prince did not entirely engineer Walpole’s defeat, but when begged by the king to save him, he refused to help the stricken politician. It had proved hard to capitalise on such triumphs. George II had denied Frederick a role in the army, both in the Continental wars of the mid-1740s and during the Jacobite rising of 1745. On both occasions he was forced to watch, humiliated, from the sidelines as his father and his younger brother William, Duke of Cumberland, rode to victory respectively at Dettingen and Culloden. Then, in 1747, Frederick’s followers were roundly defeated at the general election.
By the end of the decade, he was forced to come to terms with the ambivalence of his position. As Prince of Wales he was master of an alternative court, with over two hundred household posts at his disposal and the promise of preferment once he, eventually, came to power; but although he might be able to undermine or even destroy administrations, he could never be part of them himself. He could break, but he could not build; or at least, not until the king died. Dodington, now acting as one of the prince’s advisers, counselled waiting; but as he approached middle age, Fredrick’s appetite for the struggle seems, surely and steadily, to have ebbed away. Perhaps he suspected that the chances of achieving his ambitions were always going to be limited by the circumstances of his birth. He knew that, unlike his son, he could never be ‘an Englishman born and bred’, and gradually, he began to transfer his hopes for the fulfilment of his long-term goals beyond the possibilities offered by his own reign, concentrating instead on that of his heir. Writing his letter of ‘Instructions’ marked the beginning of that process. It was a sign of both what he hoped his son might one day achieve, and what he had gradually abandoned for himself. And if it marked the level of his ambitions for George, it was also perhaps a measure of his concern. He spelt out his blueprint for the future with such clarity perhaps because he had begun to doubt whether, without such precise guidance, the boy would ever be capable of achieving it. For, as he grew older, George did not seem to anyone – and possibly not even to his father – quite the stuff of which successful kings were made.
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Though never a voluble child, with age George became steadily shyer, more awkward and withdrawn. He was ‘silent, modest and easily abashed’, said Louisa Stuart, whose father, the Earl of Bute, was one of Frederick’s intimate circle. She maintained that George’s parents, frustrated by his reticence, much preferred his brother Edward. ‘He was decidedly their favourite, and their preference of him to his elder brother openly avowed.’21 (#litres_trial_promo) Edward was everything his older brother was not: confident, cheerful, talkative and spirited. Horace Walpole, who knew Edward well in later life, described him tellingly as ‘a sayer of things’. His natural confidence, thought Louisa Stuart, ‘was hourly strengthened by encouragement, which enabled him to join in or interrupt conversation and always say something which the obsequious hearers were ready to applaud’. It was very different for his diffident elder brother. ‘If he ever faltered out an opinion, it was passed by unnoticed; sometimes it was knocked down at once with – “Do hold your tongue, George, don’t talk like a fool.”’22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Frederick, it seemed, for all his genuine affection for his children, was still Hanoverian enough to prefer the spare to the heir. He was never deliberately harsh to his mute and anxious eldest son; but he was often exasperated by his unresponsiveness, and failed to understand its causes. He insisted to the boy that his ‘great fault’ was ‘that nonchalance you have of not caring enough to please’.23 (#litres_trial_promo) He did not see that there was not a scrap of insouciance in George’s make-up, and that his son’s diffidence arose not from nonchalance but from a paralysing lack of confidence in his ability to fulfil his destiny. For Louisa Stuart, Frederick was less to blame than his wife. Beneath the compliant surface she presented to the world, Augusta nurtured a severe and unflinching personality, with a strong tendency to judge others harshly. It was Augusta, she said, who was ‘too impressed by vivacity and confidence’ and who failed to see that ‘diffidence was often the product of a truly thoughtful understanding’. She did not recognise the true strengths of her stolid elder son, ‘whose real good sense, innate rectitude, unspeakably kind heart, and genuine manliness of spirit were overlooked in his youth, and indeed, not appreciated till a much later time’.24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Had Frederick lived, the warmth of the genuine affection he felt for all his children might eventually have buoyed up the spirits of his tremulous heir; George might have matured under the protection of a father who, for all his criticism of his son’s shortcomings and lack of insight into their causes, nevertheless saw the protection of the boy’s long-term interests as his most important responsibility. But at the beginning of March 1751, the prince caught a cold. A week later, on the 13th, Dodington noted in his diary that ‘the prince did not appear, having a return of pain in his side’.25 (#litres_trial_promo) He was probably suffering from pneumonia. For a few days, he seemed to improve. Augusta, who was five months pregnant, informed Egmont that Frederick ‘was getting much better, and only wanted time to recover his strength’. She added that ‘he was always frightened for himself when he was the least out of order, but that she had laughed him out of it, and would never humour him in these fancies’. She hoped her attempts to raise his spirits had worked as Frederick now declared that ‘he should not die in this bout, but for the future, would take more care of himself’.26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Dodington called at Leicester House on the 20th, and he too was reassured on hearing that Frederick ‘was much better and had slept eight hours the night before’. Everyone’s optimism was unfounded. Later that night, at a quarter to ten, Frederick died. The end came with shocking swiftness. Dodington reported that ‘until half an hour before he was very cheerful, asked to see some of his friends, ate some bread and butter and drank coffee’.27 (#litres_trial_promo) Walpole heard a similar story. The prince seemed to be over the worst and beginning to improve when he was suddenly overcome with a fit of coughing. At first, Dr Wilmot, who attended him, thought this was a good sign, telling him hopefully: ‘Sir, you have brought up all the phlegm; I hope this will be over in a quarter of an hour, and that your highness will have a good night.’ But Hawkins, the second doctor, was less optimistic, declaring ominously: ‘Here is something I don’t like.’ The cough became increasingly violent. Frederick, panicking, declared that he was dying. His German valet, who held him in his arms, ‘felt him shiver and cried, “Good God! The prince is going.” The princess, who was at the foot of the bed, snatched up a candle, but before she got to him, he was dead.’28 (#litres_trial_promo) He was forty-four years old.
The king received the news of Frederick’s death as he sat playing cards. George had not remarried; he had kept his promise to his dying queen, taking a mistress rather than a wife. He had sent for Mme de Wallmoden, who divorced her husband and in 1740 was given the title of the Countess of Yarmouth. It was to her that the king turned first. ‘He went down to Lady Yarmouth looking extremely pale and shocked, and only said, “Il est mort!”’29 (#litres_trial_promo) Once the horror of the moment had passed, the king, who was too self-absorbed to be a hypocrite, did not pretend to be grieved. He had hated his son for years, and his sudden and unexpected death provoked no remorse for his behaviour. As 1751 drew to a close, he commented with characteristic candour: ‘This has been a fatal year to my family. I have lost my eldest son, but I was glad of it.’30 (#litres_trial_promo) It was his final comment on a relationship which had begun in suspicion, matured into vicious acrimony and ended with estrangement. He felt neither guilt nor regret for what had happened, and never referred to Frederick again.
The prince’s funeral was the final reflection of his father’s disdain. It was, thought Dodington, a shameful affair, ‘which sunk me so low that for the first hour, I was incapable of making any observation’. No food was provided for those of his household who stood loyally by Frederick’s body as he lay in state; they ‘were forced to bespeak a great cold dinner from a common tavern in the neighbourhood’. No arrangements had been made to shelter mourners from the rain as they walked from the House of Lords to Westminster Abbey. The funeral service itself ‘was performed without anthem or organ’ and neither the king nor Frederick’s brother the Duke of Cumberland attended.31 (#litres_trial_promo) Even in the performance of his last duty to his son, George II could find no generosity of spirit.
He appeared in a better light on his first visit to Frederick’s bereaved wife and children, when he was clearly moved by their stricken condition. ‘A chair of state was provided for him,’ reported Walpole, ‘but he refused it; and sat by the princess on the couch, embraced and wept with her. He would not suffer Lady Augusta to kiss his hand, but embraced her, and gave it to her brothers, and told them, “They must be brave boys, obedient to their mother, and deserve the fortune to which they were born.”’32 (#litres_trial_promo) It was a rare display of emotional sympathy from the king; but as the family sat huddled in their misery, they all knew that significant decisions must now be made about their future.
The most obvious solution would have been for the king to take over the upbringing and education of the young prince, bringing the boy to live with him at St James’s. At the same time, it might have been expected that the Duke of Cumberland would be made regent. As the king’s eldest surviving son, he would have been well placed to act for his father during his frequent absences in Hanover, and to be appointed guardian to the young George if the king had died while he was still a minor. In the event, none of these arrangements ever happened. They had been rendered politically impossible by the momentous events of 1745/46, the consequences of which were to have a profound effect on the lives of George, Augusta and indeed all of Frederick’s remaining family.
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William, Duke of Cumberland, was loved by his parents with an intensity matched only by their disdain for his brother Frederick. Mirroring the actions of George I, it was rumoured that George II had once consulted the Lord Chancellor to discover if it would be constitutionally possible to disinherit his eldest son in favour of William. The disappointing answer he was said to have received did nothing to weaken the affection he felt for Cumberland, who shared many of his interests, particularly his passion for the army. Cumberland had been given all the military experience that Frederick persuaded himself he craved and had been denied. He was a capable soldier and at the age of only twenty-three was appointed captain general. ‘Poor boy!’ commented Walpole, ‘he is most Brunswickly happy with all his drums and trumpets.’33 (#litres_trial_promo) When Charles Edward Stuart raised his standard in Scotland in 1745, Cumberland was the obvious candidate to put down a rebellion aimed directly at the survival of the Hanoverian dynasty. His reputation would never recover from the victory he won.
The possibility of regime change seemed a very real one as Bonnie Prince Charlie’s troops swept first through Scotland and then through northern England in the winter of 1745. As Carlisle, Lancaster and Preston fell, panic engulfed London. Even Horace Walpole was shaken out of his usual pose of ironic detachment, putting all his trust in the duke’s ‘lion’s courage, vast vigilance … and great military genius’.34 (#litres_trial_promo) After Charles Stuart made the unexpected decision to turn back at Derby, Cumberland chased his army back to Scotland, where the two forces met on 16 April 1746 at Culloden. The duke’s victory over the exhausted Jacobites was total, and the aftermath of the battle exceptionally brutal, as Cumberland’s soldiers bayoneted wounded survivors. This was only a prelude to an extensive campaign of terror, intended by Cumberland to eradicate all possibility of another uprising. ‘Do not imagine,’ the duke wrote, ‘that threatening military execution and other things are pleasing to do, but nothing will go down without it. Mild measures will not do.’35 (#litres_trial_promo) He was not alone in thinking extreme actions were called for. ‘I make no difficulty of declaring my opinion,’ declared Lord Chesterfield, ‘that the commander-in-chief should be ordered to give no quarter but to pursue the rebels wherever he finds ’em.’36 (#litres_trial_promo) Cumberland’s troops pursued the defeated Scots into the glens and remote settlements of the Highlands, burning and murdering as they went, killing not just men of fighting age, but women, children, and even the cattle that supported them.
At first, Cumberland was fêted for the completeness of his victory. Handel composed See, the Conquering Hero Comes to mark his triumph; the duke was mobbed in the street, celebrated as the defender of constitutional monarchy. But as accounts began to arrive in London describing the methods by which he had achieved his success – and as the initial relief at the removal of the Jacobite threat began to fade – a sense of popular unease mounted. The atrocities appalled a public who, with the threat of a restored Stuart monarchy now behind them, did not feel liberty had been best protected by uncontrolled rape and murder. Simultaneously, suspicion of what Cumberland’s true intentions might be began to mount. At the head of a vicious and unstoppable army, what might he not attempt? Could he use it to break opposition as thoroughly in England as he had done in Scotland, and seize power for himself?
Frederick, who saw Cumberland’s success as a direct threat to him, did all he could to fuel hostility to his brother. He financed a pamphlet laying out in detail all the excesses committed by Cumberland’s troops, and his adviser Egmont wrote another, arguing that the emboldened duke’s next step would indeed be to mount a coup d’état. This was a complete fiction, but a very powerful one, that struck alarm into the hearts of otherwise rational politicians for nearly twenty years. In eighteen months, Cumberland was transformed in the public perception from conquering hero to ‘the Butcher’, a cruel German militarist with tyrannical ambitions and, unless his access to power was closely controlled, both the desire and the means to make them real.
So overwhelming was this scenario, even at the time of Frederick’s death five years after Culloden, that it made Cumberland unemployable in England. The king railed impotently against what he regarded as the traducing of his favourite, declaring that ‘it was the lies they told, and in particular this Egmont, about my son, for the service he did this country, which raised the clamour against him’; but he knew nothing could be done about it.37 (#litres_trial_promo) He understood the political realities well enough to understand that Cumberland could never now be made regent. The disgraced duke bore his exclusion stoically in public – ‘I shall submit because the king commands it’ – but in private confessed himself deeply humiliated, wishing ‘that the name William could be blotted out of the English annals’.38 (#litres_trial_promo)
If he could not name Cumberland regent, the king had little choice but to appoint an otherwise most unlikely candidate, Augusta, who now held the title of princess dowager. And if she was thought competent to act in that capacity, he could hardly justify removing his heir from her control. Thus, against all expectation, the young Prince George was allowed to stay in the company of his mother. This decision was to have an extraordinary effect on the shaping of his character; as much as the premature death of his father, it was to determine the kind of man he became. Had he been exposed, while still a boy, to the worldly challenges of life at George II’s court, very different aspects of his personality might have emerged. Instead, he was allowed to retreat with Augusta into an increasingly remote and cloistered existence.
His mother’s intention was to protect him, and George – anxious and easily intimidated – was keen to be protected. He had responded to news of his father’s death with a sense of shock so profound that it was physical in its intensity. ‘I feel it here,’ he declared, laying his hand on his chest, ‘just as I did when I saw the two workmen fall from the scaffold at Kew.’39 (#litres_trial_promo) He did not like his grandfather, whom he rightly suspected was irritated by his shyness and lack of confidence. (On one occasion, the king’s frustration may have taken more violent form; a generation later, walking round Hampton Court, George III’s son, the Duke of Sussex, mused: ‘I wonder in which one of these rooms it was that George II struck my father? The blow so disgusted him that he could never afterwards think of it as a residence.’40 (#litres_trial_promo)) But when George II arrived at Leicester House in the days after Frederick’s death, ‘with an abundance of speeches and a kind behaviour to the princess and the children’, his sympathy seemed so genuine that even the cautious prince was partially won over. He declared that ‘he should not be frightened any more with his grandpa’.41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Despite this, it is hard to believe that George II could ever have changed the habits of a lifetime and transformed himself into the steady, supportive father figure of which his heir stood in such deep need over the next few years. Certainly the prince did not think so. For all the king’s new-found concern, his timid grandson had no wish to test the depth of his solicitude by joining him at St James’s. He made it clear he preferred to live with his mother. Yet, although the prospect of staying with Augusta no doubt offered security to a young boy badly in need of solace, it was far from an ideal solution. The life Augusta made for her son, isolated from the world he would one day be expected to dominate, did nothing to prepare him for the role that his father’s death had made so terrifyingly imminent. The complicated politics that had ensured George remained in his mother’s care may not, in the long run, have done him much of a favour.
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Until Frederick’s sudden death, the defining quality of Augusta, Princess of Wales, was her apparent passivity. She seemed to have no real personality of her own, but was entirely under the control of her husband. Hervey, who once memorably described her as ‘this gilded piece of royal conjugality’, claimed that she played no active role in his political life. Frederick, he reported, had once observed that ‘a prince should never talk to a woman of politics’ and that ‘he would never make himself the ridiculous figure his father had done in letting his wife govern him or meddle with business, which no woman was fit for’.42 (#litres_trial_promo) George II, on the other hand, who always suspected there was more to his daughter-in-law than met the eye, used to declare: ‘You none of you know this woman, and none of you will know her until after I am dead!’43 (#litres_trial_promo)
The king was not wrong in alleging that Augusta was not quite the demure innocent she seemed. For all Frederick’s protestations, she was no stranger to his political ambitions during the late 1740s. She hosted the dinners at which he and his supporters thrashed out their strategies and engineered their alliances; she was discreet, trustworthy and, above all, unquestioningly loyal, identifying herself completely with her husband’s strategising. Significantly, it was to Augusta, and not to one of his trusted advisers, that Frederick entrusted his ‘Instructions’, encapsulating the programme he expected his eldest son to implement in due course, and it was she who was charged with explaining them to his heir and keeping them fresh in his mind. And after Frederick’s shocking demise, it was she who took brisk and immediate measures to destroy any incriminating material that might compromise his followers and his family.
As the historian John Bullion has shown, in the hours immediately following his death, she showed herself to be more of a politician than any of his dazed friends. While Frederick lay dead in the next room, she summoned Lord Egmont and outlined a decisive plan of action to be followed in the next few vital hours. ‘She did not know, but the king might seize the prince’s papers – they were at Carlton House – and that we might be ruined by these papers.’ She probably had in mind a document Frederick had drawn up in 1750 that was a blueprint for action in the event of the king’s death and described in some detail appointments that were to be made and policies followed. She gave Egmont the key to three trunks, told him to retrieve the papers and bring them back to her; she even gave him a pillowcase in which to carry them. When Egmont returned, she burnt the papers in front of him. Only then did she begin to consider what to do about her husband’s body, or inform the king of his death.44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Having dealt with the most pressing threat to her family’s security, she proceeded to manage her father-in-law too. When he arrived at Leicester House, ‘she received him alone, sitting with her eyes fixed: thanked the king much, and said she would write as soon as she was able; and in the meantime, recommended her miserable self and children to him’.45 (#litres_trial_promo) Always pleased to be treated with the respect he thought he deserved, the king warmed to her submission, as she must have known he would. ‘The king and she both took their parts at once; she, of flinging herself entirely in his hands, and studying nothing but his pleasure; but minding what interest she got with him to the advantage of her own and the prince’s friends.’46 (#litres_trial_promo) When she heard that the king had decided to allow George to stay with her, she did not forget to write and tell him how thankful she was.
Although Augusta was astute enough to have kept hold of her son, she had no idea what to do with him once she had him. She had no vision for his development, no sense of how best to equip him to face his destiny with confidence. She was not a strategic thinker; without imaginative leadership, Augusta’s instincts were always defensive. She had neither the desire nor the capacity to forge alliances or build networks of friendship and support for her son. Hers was an inward-looking nature, suspicious of those she did not know and habitually secretive. Dodington, who came to know her very well, thought the defining quality of her character was prudence, ‘not opening herself much to anybody, and of great caution to whom she opens herself at all’.47 (#litres_trial_promo) As a result, her motives were often opaque, and her true feelings more so. Lord Cobham thought her ‘the only woman he could never find out; all he discovered about her was that she hated those she paid court to’.48 (#litres_trial_promo)
If she was an enigma, she was an increasingly sombre one. No longer obliged to accompany Frederick into the wider world, she quickly lost the habit of pleasure; she went nowhere and saw no one. But she did not appear to miss the life that had been taken from her with such cruel suddenness. Instead, she seemed to relish the opportunity to dispense with the trappings of her old existence, and emerge as a sober woman of early middle age, unencumbered now by the obligation to please or conciliate anyone but herself. Nothing illustrates more starkly the gulf between these two versions of Augusta than two contrasting portraits. In 1736, she was painted in a conventionally fashionable pose. Overwhelmed by the stiff ornateness of her dress, she is a tiny doll-like figure, rigid and stranded in the gloom of an oppressive grey interior. Of her personality, there is no sense at all. In 1754, when Augusta chose her own artist, the result could not have been more different. Jean-Etienne Liotard’s portrait is not an image designed to flatter. Augusta is simply dressed; she wears no jewellery, and her hair is pulled back sharply from her forehead. Its defining quality is its cool candour. Augusta’s gaze is wary; her whole posture suggests a guarded, watchful reticence. She does not seem a woman eager for enjoyment or delight; and it is perhaps possible to read in her expression a hint of the debilitating combination of anxiety and suspicion with which she came to view the world in the long years of her widowhood.
These were not the happiest qualities on which to build a family life, and it must have been quickly apparent to Augusta’s children that, as the halo of their father’s warmth and sociability dimmed, their world grew inexorably chillier. The amateur theatricals, the compulsory team sports, the trips and treats and jokery, the noise and lively bustle of their father’s daily round all gradually ebbed away. They were replaced by a carefully cultivated seclusion, in which all the pleasures were small ones.
One of the few people allowed to intrude into this increasingly remote and withdrawn existence was George Dodington, whom Augusta adopted as chief confidant after her husband’s death. A much-tried member of Frederick’s entourage, Dodington’s greatest asset was his understanding of the practical business of politics, drawn from a lifetime of holding office and the management of parliamentary interests, although he had many other sterling qualities: he was loyal, witty and humane, an ugly man with a complicated love life and a naive enthusiasm for extravagant grandeur. Walpole described his house in Hammersmith as a monument to rich, bad taste, crammed full of marble busts and statues, and dominated by a fireplace decorated with marble icicles. It is not hard to see why Frederick, with his predilection for the eccentric, should have enjoyed his company. That Augusta too soon came to value and rely upon him is further testament to her carefully concealed political acumen. Beneath his unprepossessing exterior, Dodington nurtured a sharp mind and a wealth of experience. He was an excellent ally for a woman who believed herself more or less friendless, a seasoned adviser who could help her navigate her way through the difficulties that lay ahead. Perhaps Augusta also recognised in him some of the warmth and conviviality that was in such short supply elsewhere in her household.
Dodington clearly missed his late patron’s relaxed expansiveness. He often struggled to penetrate Augusta’s ingrained reticence, but did all he could to support and encourage her. He recorded his somewhat stuttering progress in his diary, a rueful chronicle of his efforts to persuade Augusta to adopt what he saw as politic courses of action. It was not an easy task. He soon saw there was no chance at all that Frederick’s death might have opened the way for a serious reconciliation with the rest of the royal family. Beneath the blandly compliant surface she presented to her in-laws throughout her married life, Augusta hid a settled dislike and disrespect for all her Hanoverian relations which was evident from the earliest days of her widowhood. In 1752, she and Dodington were enjoying a gossip about the Dorset family. Dodington opined that ‘there were oddnesses about them that were peculiar to that family, and that I had often told them so. She said that there was something odd about them, and laughing, [she] added that she knew but one family that was more odd, and she would not name that family for the world.’49 (#litres_trial_promo) It was a rare moment of playfulness – and the only instance of Augusta’s laughter in the whole of Dodington’s diary. Her antipathy was usually expressed with far greater resentment, seen most starkly in her attitude to the king. As Frederick’s wife, she had shared in all the humiliations that had been heaped upon him by his father; then, for over a decade, she had witnessed all her husband’s attempts to harass and embarrass George through the medium of politics. Her husband’s hostility and suspicion had defined her attitude to her father-in-law for twenty years, and continued to do so long after he was dead.
Augusta knew these were views that could have no outward expression. She told Dodington she fully understood ‘that, to be sure, it was hers and her family’s business to keep well with the king’.50 (#litres_trial_promo) In public, she assiduously cultivated the role of dutiful daughter-in-law, obedient and tractable; but in private, she had nothing but contempt for her father-in-law. She was bitterly angry that George had refused to settle Frederick’s debts, which she considered a slight to his posthumous reputation, and furious when he refused to release to her the revenues from the Duchy of Cornwall that he had claimed for himself after the prince’s death. As she described how she had berated and harangued the king on the vexed subject, Dodington’s politician’s spirits sank; he was not surprised to hear that George rarely visited now. His absence did nothing to make Augusta’s heart grow fonder. Over a period of six months, Dodington heard her speak favourably of the king only once, and considered it so remarkable that he made a special note of it.
She was equally dismissive of the Duke of Cumberland, whom she referred to with heavy irony as ‘her great, great fat friend’, and who had also refused to assist in paying Frederick’s debts.51 (#litres_trial_promo) She rebuffed all his attempts to build a friendship with his nephew. Augusta rarely missed an opportunity to mock or belittle the duke. ‘The young Prince George had a great appetite; he was asked if he wanted to be as gross as his uncle? Every vice, every condescension was imputed to the duke, that the prince might be stimulated to avoid them.’52 (#litres_trial_promo) More seriously, Augusta accepted absolutely the popular belief – encouraged so assiduously by her husband – that Cumberland harboured unconstitutional designs on the throne. She drilled these into Prince George, who, as the sole obstacle standing in the way of such ambitions, regarded his uncle with nervous trepidation. Once, during a rare meeting alone with his nephew, Cumberland pulled down some weapons he had displayed on his wall to show the young prince; George ‘turned pale, and trembled and thought his uncle was going to murder him’. Cumberland was horrified and ‘complained to the princess of the impressions that had been instilled into the child against him’.53 (#litres_trial_promo) It was not until after he succeeded to the throne that George shook off the distrust of his uncle nurtured in him by his mother.
Augusta soon found herself without friends. She could not seek the support of opposition politicians except at the risk of provoking the king to remove the prince from her care, and she was too deeply imbued with her husband’s opinions to seek allies from within the royal family. It was a tricky situation for which Dodington could see no immediate resolution. He begged Augusta not to act precipitately, and she assured him that she would do nothing rash and had made no dangerous alliances, insisting that she had ‘no connexions at all’. Dodington found this only too easy to believe. Isolated as she was, without friends, family or supporters, there was little he could offer her except patience, meaning she had no choice but to wait for the king to die. In the privacy of his diary, Dodington was more pessimistic about her prospects, recording his stark belief that she must ‘become nothing’.
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As Frederick’s family drifted gradually but inexorably away from both their surviving royal relations and the active political heartland, they had only themselves to rely upon for company. In the mid-1750s, all Augusta and Frederick’s children were still alive; fourteen years separated the eldest, Augusta, from the youngest, baby Caroline, born five months after her father’s death and named to please her grandfather. In the 1930s, the historian Romney Sedgwick commented that ‘as a eugenic experiment, the marriage could not be considered a success’. His remark, though callous, contained an element of truth. Five of Frederick and Augusta’s offspring died either in childhood or in their twenties, and two were sickly from birth. Elizabeth, the second daughter, was thought by Walpole to have been the most intelligent of all the family – ‘her parts and applications were extraordinary’ – but her figure ‘was so very unfortunate that it would have been impossible for her to be happy’.54 (#litres_trial_promo) She died in 1759, probably from appendicitis. Louisa, the third daughter, died at nineteen, having suffered from such bad health that even her aunt, Princess Amelia, ‘thought it happier for her that she was dead’.55 (#litres_trial_promo) The youngest son, Frederick, ‘a most promising youth’, according to Walpole, died at sixteen of consumption.
Prince George was considered to be one of the best looking of Frederick’s family; he was also, as a child and a young man, among the healthiest. His elder sister Augusta, whose grasp on life had seemed so tenuous after the thoughtless theatrics surrounding her birth, grew into an equally resilient child, although her looks were never much admired. Walpole thought ‘she was not handsome, but tall enough, and not ill-made; with the German whiteness of hair and complexion so glaring in the royal family, and with their thick yet precipitate Westphalian accent’.56 (#litres_trial_promo) She was eager, lively and boisterous, resembling her brother Edward in her love of a joke. William, Duke of Gloucester, the third brother, was as fair as Augusta and Edward, but of a very different disposition. Walpole, who knew him well, summed him up as ‘reserved, serious, pious, of the most decent and sober deportment’. He closely resembled his eldest brother, whose favourite sibling he later became. Henry, who became Duke of Cumberland after his uncle’s death, was small like his father ‘but did not want beauty’. He had, however, ‘the babbling disposition of his brother York, though without the parts or condescension of the latter’. His youth, concluded Walpole severely, ‘had all its faults, and gave no better promises’.57 (#litres_trial_promo) The toddler Caroline was remarkable at this stage only for her beauty; the ‘German whiteness’ that contemporaries found so ‘glaring’ in her brothers and sisters had in her become a golden blonde. Taken together with her blue eyes and round, pink face, she was by far the prettiest of the family.
Dodington’s diary is peppered with glimpses of ‘the children’, flitting silently round the edges of the world in which he and Augusta occupied centre stage. Always mute, they move as an undifferentiated royal pack. ‘The children’ are sent to prayers; ‘the children’ come in to dine; ‘the children’ retire. Occasionally, the older siblings emerged from the group and joined their mother in simple, family pleasures and games. Dodington was excessively proud of his occasional invitations to join the family in such informal moments, and recorded them with palpable satisfaction. In November 1753, he went to Leicester House ‘expecting a small company and a little music; but found no one but Her Royal Highness. She made me draw up a stool, and sit by the fire with her. Soon after came the Prince of Wales and Prince Edward and then the Lady Augusta, all quite undressed, and took their stools and sat round the fire with us. We sat talking of familiar occurrences of all kinds till between 10 and 11, with ease and unreservedness and unconstraint, as if one had dropped into a sister’s house that had a family to pass the evening.’
Gentle, unforced intimacy of this kind represented Augusta’s household at its best. But while Dodington strongly approved of such warm domestic scenes, he knew in his heart that they were only part of what was required to prepare the older boys for their future lives. He added a wistful postscript to his lyrical description of his quiet night at home with royalty. ‘It was much to be wished,’ he wrote, ‘that the princes conversed familiarly with more people of a certain knowledge of the world.’58 (#litres_trial_promo) At a time when George should have been learning how to conduct himself in society, he was utterly removed from it. By 1754, when George was sixteen, even Augusta had begun to worry that the narrow existence she had created for her son was failing him. She confessed to Dodington that she too ‘wished he saw more company – but whom of the young people were fit?’59 (#litres_trial_promo) She recognised that her eldest son needed more experience of life, but could not reconcile this with her increasingly dark vision of what lay beyond the secure walls of home. For Augusta, whose character took on an ever bleaker cast in the years after her husband’s death, the world was a wicked and threatening place and it was her first duty to protect her children from its wiles. Wherever she looked, she saw only moral bankruptcy. She complained at great length to Dodington of the ‘universal profligacy’ of the youthful aristocrats who might, in other circumstances, have become her children’s friends. The men were bad enough, but the women were even worse, ‘so indecent, so low, so cheap’.60 (#litres_trial_promo) Beyond the inner circle of the family, everyone’s behaviour, motives and desires were suspect; no one was really to be trusted. Exposed to temptation, even her own sons might not have the inner strength to resist it. The preservation of an untested virtue, secured by isolation and retirement, was thus the key foundation of their upbringing. ‘No boys,’ commented William, Duke of Gloucester, in middle age, ‘were ever brought up in a greater ignorance of evil than the king and myself … We retained all our native innocence.’61 (#litres_trial_promo) In the end, Augusta’s instinctual desire to protect her children from the lures of the world proved stronger than her rational understanding that they must one day learn to master it.
If Prince George’s social and family life did little to equip him for the future, he was equally unprepared in almost every other practical dimension of kingship. As a young man, he was bitter about the failings he believed had left him so exposed. ‘I will frankly own,’ he wrote in 1758, ‘that through the negligence, if not wickedness of those around me in earlier days … I have not that degree of knowledge and experience of business one of my age might reasonably have acquired.’62 (#litres_trial_promo) His formal education had certainly been a haphazard affair. After Frederick’s death, it was underpinned by no coherent plan and driven by political considerations as much as by the desire to equip the boy with a foundation of useful knowledge. The king had replaced George’s tutors with his own appointees; only George Scott, who did most of the actual teaching, survived as part of the new team. As the prince’s governor, George II appointed his friend Simon, Earl Harcourt, a loyal courtier whose principal task was to ensure that the prince was encouraged neither to venerate nor to follow the policies of his dead father. He was otherwise undistinguished, memorably described by Walpole as ‘civil and sheepish’.63 (#litres_trial_promo) Thomas Hayter, Bishop of Norwich, filled the role of preceptor. His pupil had nothing but contempt for him, describing him in later life as ‘unworthy … more fitted to be a Jesuit than an English bishop’.64 (#litres_trial_promo) A third new appointment was Andrew Stone, who became sub-governor. Stone, like Harcourt, was a political choice; he was the fixer and general factotum of the Duke of Newcastle, who served regularly as George II’s first minister, and could be expected to pass back to St James’s detailed reports of events at Leicester House.
Under this top-heavy array, George and his brother Edward were set to work. Their lessons began at seven in the morning, and ranged, as they had always done, well beyond the traditional curriculum. However, the more modern subjects – including science, which George particularly enjoyed – did not displace the traditional concentration on the classics. Caesar’s Commentaries remained a familiar if unwelcome feature of the princes’ daily routine, much to George’s frustration. ‘Monsieur Caesar,’ he wrote in the margins of one of his laborious translations, ‘je vous souhaite au diable.’ (‘I wish you to hell.’65 (#litres_trial_promo)) As his later life was to demonstrate, George had a lively mind, and as an adult would find pleasure in a wide range of intellectual pursuits; but he found little to engage his imagination in what he was taught as a boy. He lacked the aptitude to master ancient languages, and was, in general, poor at rote learning. His fascination for practical and mechanical tasks was regarded as further evidence of his intellectual dullness. Only in music did he shine, playing the German flute with self-absorbed pleasure. All the siblings were accomplished amateur musicians, the girls singing and playing the harpsichord. The love of music was one of the few passions he shared with his father, and one which would outlast his sanity. In all other areas of educational endeavour, especially those that required feats of memory, George was generally regarded as a failure, his apathy and inattention exasperating his instructors.
Augusta knew, as did almost everyone else in the political world, that her eldest son was not making the progress expected of him: ‘His education had given her much pain. His book-learning she was no judge of, but she supposed it small or useless.’66 (#litres_trial_promo) She thought her sons had not been well served by their instructors. Bishop Hayter may have been ‘a mighty learned man’, but he did not seem to Augusta ‘to be very proper to convey knowledge to children; he had not the clearness she thought necessary … his thoughts seemed to be too many for his words’.67 (#litres_trial_promo) She told Dodington that she had repeatedly attempted to challenge Lord Harcourt directly about what was happening, but he simply avoided her. She finally cornered him one night at St James’s, ‘and got between the door and him, and took him by the coat’; even then the slippery earl escaped her grasp with a platitude. She disliked Harcourt, not only for his elusiveness, but because he ‘always spoke to the children of their father and his actions in so disrespectful a manner as to send them to her almost ready to cry’.68 (#litres_trial_promo)
Stone, in contrast, ‘always behaved very well to her and the children and though it would be treason if it were to be known, always spoke of the late prince with the greatest respect’.69 (#litres_trial_promo) But even he seemed to have a curious idea of what was required of him. ‘She once desired him to inform the prince about the constitution,’ wrote Dodington, ‘but he declined it, to avoid giving offence to the Bishop of Norwich. That she had mentioned it again, and he had declined it, as not being his province.’ When Dodington asked Augusta what Stone’s province was, ‘she said she did not know, she supposed to go before him upstairs, to walk with him, sometimes seldomer to ride with him and then to dine with him’.70 (#litres_trial_promo)
George’s tutors had reason to be nervous when called upon to offer interpretations of the constitution to the heir to the throne. At the end of 1752, Harcourt and Hayter turned on their colleagues Stone and Scott and accused them of Jacobite sympathies, claiming they were covertly indoctrinating George with absolutist principles. They offered no real evidence for their charges, and could persuade neither the king nor his first minister, Newcastle, to believe them. Both promptly resigned, but the recriminations surrounding the affair dragged on for over a year, and were not resolved until Stone had appeared before the Privy Council and the matter had been raised in the House of Lords. It was easy for Dodington to declare with passion that ‘what I wanted most was that his Royal Highness should begin to learn the usages and knowledge of the world; be informed of the general frame and nature of government and the constitution, and the general course and manner of business’.71 (#litres_trial_promo) But, as the cautious Stone had understood when he refused Augusta’s direct invitation to do just that, attempting the political education of princes was a far riskier undertaking than teaching them Latin.
With the departure of Harcourt and Hayter, the king was determined to make one last effort to turn his fourteen-year-old grandson into the kind of heir he thought he deserved. Prince George’s hesitant and self-conscious appearances at the formal Drawing Rooms did not impress his grandfather, who had forgotten many of the tender professions he had made at the time of Frederick’s death. Unless taken in hand, he feared the prince would be fit for nothing but to read the Bible to his mother. He approached James, Earl Waldegrave, who had been a Lord of the Bedchamber in his household, and asked him to become the prince’s new governor. Confident, experienced and expansive, Waldegrave was a very different character from the ineffectual Harcourt, and his sophisticated presence introduced an unfamiliar flavour into Augusta’s circle. At first, everyone seemed to welcome both it and him, and Waldegrave used this early advantage to effect something of a revolution in the prince’s education. He recognised immediately that the most important task was to engage George’s fitful attention, and sought to do this by offering him a vision of knowledge that went beyond the traditional forms of learning his pupil found so unengaging. ‘As a right system of education seemed impossible,’ Waldegrave recalled in his Memoirs, ‘the best which could be hoped for was to give him true notions of common things; to instruct him by conversation, rather than books; and sometimes, under the disguise of amusement, to entice him to the pursuit of more serious studies.’72 (#litres_trial_promo)
Waldegrave thought that George might work harder if he enjoyed himself more. Unlike any of his previous instructors, he was convinced that beneath the habitual indolence, the prince had potential. The present glaring shortcomings in his character were, Waldegrave believed, less a reflection of his true nature and more the inevitable product of the circumscribed life he led: ‘I found HRH uncommonly full of princely prejudices, contracted in the nursery and improved by the society of bedchamber women and pages of the back-stairs.’73 (#litres_trial_promo) Wider experience of the world might cure many of the faults that others had found so intractable.
As time went on, however, it became clear to Waldegrave that the kind of change he advocated – a relaxation of the regime of seclusion, a more active participation in society – would never be countenanced by Augusta. For all her anxieties about her eldest son’s education, she would not sacrifice any of her own prejudices to see it improved. She did not expect her authority to be challenged by her son’s governor. She explained to Dodington that she considered the post – and Waldegrave, while he occupied it – ‘as a sort of pageant, a man of quality for show, etc.’.74 (#litres_trial_promo) Faced with her blank resistance, Waldegrave’s new measures ran slowly but steadily into the ground. Although he was supported in his endeavours by ‘men of sense, men of learning and worthy good men’, Waldegrave eventually concluded he could do nothing to make a real difference: ‘The mother and the nursery always prevailed.’75 (#litres_trial_promo)
By the mid-1750s, George’s formal education had done little more than confirm in the self-conscious boy an even greater sense of his own shortcomings. Morbidly aware of his faults, especially those of ‘lethargy’ and ‘indolence’ with which he was so often charged, he seemed incapable of rousing himself to do anything about them. He had, thought Waldegrave, ‘a kind of unhappiness in his temper, which if it be not conquered before it has taken too deep a root, will be a source of frequent anxiety’. The prince’s apparent preference for solitude concerned Waldegrave, especially as he suspected the boy chose to be alone the better to contemplate his misery: ‘he becomes sullen and silent and retires to his closet, not to compose his mind by study, or contemplation, but merely to indulge the melancholy enjoyment of his own ill humour’.76 (#litres_trial_promo) He had no friends except his brother Edward, to whom he was very close. To everyone else, he revealed nothing of himself. The retired life he and his mother shared had certainly not forged a strong emotional bond between them. When Dodington asked her ‘what she took the real disposition of the prince to be’, Augusta replied that Dodington ‘knew him almost as well as she did’.77 (#litres_trial_promo)
As he drifted irrevocably towards a destiny that terrified him, George retreated further and further into a private world of remote introspection. Transfixed with apprehension by the prospect before him, lethargy overwhelmed him. Neither his tutors nor his family knew what to do about it, or understood that his much-criticised indolence was less a sign of laziness than a strategy to avoid engaging with a future he knew he could not avoid. By the time he was sixteen, in 1754, he had erected around himself a tough carapace of emotional detachment which no one could penetrate. But George’s life was about to be transformed by someone who would instil in him a new vision of who he was; and, for the first time, offer the anxious boy an inspirational idea of what he might become. He encountered the man who would change his life for ever.
*
John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, was a well-connected aristocrat related to some the grandest names in Scottish politics, including the powerful Dukes of Argyll. For a man whose career was so dominated by the fact of his Scottishness, he spent a surprising amount of his early life in England. He was educated at Eton alongside Horace Walpole, who was later to paint such a malign picture of him in his Memoirs of the Reign of King George III. Bute married early, and for love: in 1736, at the age of twenty-three, he eloped with the only daughter of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The girl’s furious father refused to make any financial provision for his disobedient daughter and her new husband. When his irascible father-in-law died some twenty years later, Bute inherited all his money and became extremely rich; but as a young man, he was always short of funds. Contemporaries were certain that only poverty – or ‘a gloomy sort of madness’ – could have induced him to take up residence on the remote island that bore his name. In the years before the Romantics induced the literate public to admire the wilderness, it was assumed no sensible modern man would choose to live so far from civilisation. Bute’s critics, of whom even in his earliest days there were many, asserted that his personality was ideally suited to his faraway, chilly home. ‘His disposition,’ one remarked, ‘was naturally retired and severe.’78 (#litres_trial_promo) Others mocked his pomposity and high opinion of himself, his ‘theatrical air of the greatest importance’, his ‘look and manner of speaking’ which, regardless of the subject, ‘was equally pompous, slow and sententious’.79 (#litres_trial_promo) On his island, Bute pursued the literary and scientific studies that were the mark of the aristocratic eighteenth-century intellectual, including ‘natural philosophy, mines, fossils, a smattering of mechanics, a little metaphysics’. His enemies claimed that this was all typical self-aggrandisement and that he had in fact ‘a very false taste in everything’.80 (#litres_trial_promo) It was true that Bute was something of an intellectual dilettante, but in the field of botany, which was his great passion, he possessed real authority. His nine-volume Botanical Tables Containing the Families of British Plants, completed in 1785, created a system of classification that was a genuine contribution to scholarship.
In 1746, Bute left his island and headed south, hoping perhaps to improve his financial prospects. Once in London, he was soon noticed, but it was not the power of his mind that attracted attention. ‘Lord Bute, when young possessed a very handsome person,’ recalled the politician and diplomat Nathaniel Wraxall, ‘of which advantage he was not insensible; and he used to pass many hours a day, as his enemies asserted, occupied in contemplating the symmetry of his own legs, during his solitary walks by the Thames.’81 (#litres_trial_promo) Bute’s portraits – in which his legs are indeed always displayed to advantage – confirm that he was a very attractive man. Tall, slim and with a dark-eyed intensity of expression, it is not hard to see why he was so sought after. It may have been his looks that caught the eye of the Prince of Wales. It was said that Bute first met Frederick at Egham races, when the prince invited him in from a rainstorm to join the royal party at cards. Soon he was a regular attendee at all the prince’s parties, and had unbent sufficiently to play the part of Lothario in one of Frederick’s private theatrical performances. The prince seemed to enjoy his company, and Bute was admitted to the inner circle of his court. Walpole asserted that Frederick eventually grew tired of Bute’s pretensions, ‘and a little before his death, he said to him, “Bute, you would make an excellent ambassador in some proud little court where there is nothing to do.”’82 (#litres_trial_promo) But whatever his occasional frustrations, Frederick thought enough of the earl to make him a Lord of the Bedchamber in his household, and it was only the prince’s sudden demise that seemed to put an end to Bute’s ambitions, as it did to those of so many others.
After Frederick’s death, Bute stayed in contact with his widow. Augusta shared his botanical interests, and he advised her on the planting of her gardens at Kew. He is never mentioned in Dodington’s diary, perhaps because Dodington correctly identified him as a rival for Augusta’s confidence. As the years passed, Bute’s influence grew and grew, until, by 1755, he had supplanted Dodington and all other contenders for the princess’s favour. He had also won over her son, and without telling anyone, least of all the king, Augusta quietly instructed Bute to begin acting as George’s tutor. For all his experience in the ways of courts, Waldegrave, the official incumbent, seems to have had no idea what was happening until it was too late. Once he realised just how thoroughly he had been supplanted, Waldegrave was determined to leave with as much dignity as he could muster. The king pressed Waldegrave to stay. He was resolutely opposed to the inclusion of Bute – an intimate of Frederick’s – in the household of his grandson, particularly in a position of such influence; but Waldegrave knew there was nothing to be done. In 1756, the prince reached the age of eighteen and could no longer be treated as a child. Reluctantly, the king bowed to the inevitable, and Bute was appointed Groom of the Stole, head of the new independent establishment set up for George. To show his displeasure, the king refused to present Bute with the gold key that was the badge of his new office, but gave it to the Duke of Grafton – who slipped it into Bute’s pocket and told him not to mind.
When Horace Walpole wrote his highly partisan account of the early reign of George III, he maintained that there was far more to Bute’s appointment than anyone had realised at the time; it was, he claimed, the opening act in a plot aimed to do nothing less than suborn the whole constitution. In Walpole’s version of events, Augusta and Bute – ‘a passionate, domineering woman and a favourite without talents’ – conspired together to bring down the established political settlement. They intended first to indoctrinate the supine heir with absolutist principles, and then to marginalise him by ensuring his isolation from the world. All this was to be achieved in the most gradual and surreptitious manner. Ignorant and manipulated, George would remain as titular head of state; but behind him, real power would reside in the hands of Bute and Augusta. To add an extra frisson to a story already rich in classical parallels, Walpole insisted that Augusta and Bute were lovers, ‘his connection with the princess an object of scandal’. Elsewhere he was more blunt, declaring: ‘I am as much convinced of an amorous connexion between Bute and the princess dowager as if I had seen them together.’83 (#litres_trial_promo)
Related with all the passion he could muster, in Walpole’s hands this proved to be a remarkably potent narrative. For nearly two hundred years, until interrogated and revised by the work of twentieth-century historians, it was to influence thinking about George’s years as Prince of Wales and as a young king; and the reputations of Bute and Augusta are still coloured by Walpole’s bilious account of their alleged actions and motives. But in writing the Memoirs, Walpole’s purpose was scarcely that of a disinterested historian. First and foremost, he wrote to make a political point. Walpole was a Whig, passionately opposed to what he saw as the autocratic principles embraced by his Tory opponents, who, he had no doubt, desired nothing so much as to restore the pretensions and privileges of the deposed Stuarts. He was, he said, not quite a republican, but certainly favoured ‘a most limited monarchy’, and was perpetually on the lookout for evidence of plots hatched by the powerful and unscrupulous to undermine the hard-won liberties of free-born Britons. To that extent, the Memoirs, couched throughout in a tone of shrill outrage quite unlike Walpole’s accustomed smooth, ironic style, are best considered as a warning of what might happen rather than an account of what did – a chilling fable of political nightmare designed to appal loyal constitutionalists. Less portentously, Walpole also wrote to pay off a grudge. He considered he had been wronged by Bute, who had refused to grant him a sinecure Walpole believed he was owed: ‘I was I confess, much provoked by this … and took occasion of fomenting ill humour against the favourite.’84 (#litres_trial_promo)
Much of what resulted from this incendiary combination of intentions was simply nonsense, and often directly contradicted what Walpole had himself written in earlier days. In truth, there was no plot; Augusta was not ‘ardently fond of power’; neither she nor Bute was scheming to overturn the constitution; and it is extremely unlikely that they were lovers. But if the central proposition of Walpole’s argument was a fiction, that did not mean that everything he wrote was pure invention. The Memoirs exerted such a powerful appeal because Walpole drew on existing rumours that were very widely believed at the time; and because, sometimes, beneath Walpole’s wilder assertions there lay buried a tiny kernel of truth.
Thus, Walpole seemed on sure ground when describing the isolation in which George had been brought up, and the extraordinary precautions taken to keep him away from wider intercourse with the world. He was correct in his assertion that much of this policy had been driven by Augusta. He was wrong about her motives – the extreme retirement she imposed on her son was a protective cordon sanitaire, not a covert means of dominating him – but the prince’s isolation was observable to everyone in the political world, and of as much concern to Augusta’s few allies as it was to her enemies. Walpole was also right to assert that within the secluded walls of Kew and Leicester House, the future shape of George’s kingship was indeed the subject of intense discussion; but these reflections were directed towards an outcome very different from Walpole’s apocalyptic image of treasonous constitutional conspiracy. Finally, he was accurate in his suspicion that there was a passionate relationship at the heart of the prince’s household. But it was not, in fact, the one he went on to describe with such relish.
The stories about Bute and Augusta had been in circulation long before Walpole’s Memoirs appeared. Waldegrave, who never forgot or forgave the way he was humiliatingly ejected from his post around the prince, seems to have been the origin of many of them. ‘No one of the most inflammable vengeance, or the coolest resentment could harbour more bitter hatred than he did for the king’s mother and favourite,’ wrote Walpole with a hint of appalled admiration.85 (#litres_trial_promo) For the rest of her life, as a result of these rumours, Augusta was mercilessly pilloried as a brazen adulteress; in newspapers, pamphlets, and above all in satirical caricatures, she was depicted as Bute’s mistress. One print showed her as a half-naked tightrope walker, skirt hitched up to her thighs, suggestively penetrated by a pole with a boot (a play on Bute’s name) attached to it. It was hardly surprising that Prince George was horrified ‘by the cruel manner’ in which his mother was treated, ‘which I will not forget or forgive till the day of my death’.86 (#litres_trial_promo)
However, for all the salacious speculation surrounding their relationship, it seems hard to believe that Bute and Augusta ever had an affair. Although Augusta clearly admired the attractive earl, writing to him with an enthusiasm and warmth that few of her other letters betray, to embark on anything more than friendship would have been quite alien to her character. She was too cautious, too conscious of her standing in the world, too controlled and reserved to have taken the extraordinary risk such a relationship would have entailed. But, in the complex interplay of the political and the personal that transformed the tone of Augusta’s family in the latter years of the 1750s, there was one person who surrendered himself entirely to an unexpected and completely overpowering affection. The diffident young Prince George had finally found someone to love.
Bute had been acting as George’s informal tutor for less than a year before it was plain that he had achieved what no one had been able to do before: win the trust and affection of the withdrawn prince. Augusta was delighted. ‘I cannot express the joy I feel to see he has gained the confidence and friendship of my son,’ she wrote in the summer of 1756, with uncharacteristically transparent pleasure.87 (#litres_trial_promo) The prince himself was equally fervent, writing almost ecstatically to Bute that ‘I know few things I ought to be more thankful to the Great Power above, than for having pleased Him to send you and help me in these difficult times.’88 (#litres_trial_promo)
This was the first of many letters the prince wrote to Bute over nearly a decade; its tone of incredulous gratitude, its sense of sheer good fortune at the very fact of Bute’s presence, was one that would be replicated constantly over the years. Their correspondence illuminates the painful intensity of George’s feelings for the earl, from his speedy capitulation to the onslaught of Bute’s persuasive charm, to the submissive devotion that characterised the prince’s later relationship with this charismatic, demanding and sometimes mercurial figure. George’s letters also offer a remarkably candid picture of his state of mind as a young man. He opened his heart to Bute in a way he had done to no one before, and would never do again after he and the earl had parted. Many of his letters make uncomfortable reading; they reveal an isolated and deeply unhappy character, consumed by a sense of his own inadequacies, and desperate to find someone who would lead him out of the fog of despair into which he was sinking. George knew he was drifting, fearful and rudderless, towards a future which approached with a horrible inevitability. He was very quickly convinced that Bute was the only person who could deliver him from the state of paralysed inertia in which he had existed since his father’s death. ‘I hope, my dear Lord,’ he wrote pleadingly, ‘you will conduct me through this difficult road and bring me to the goal. I will exactly follow your advice, without which I will inevitably sink.’89 (#litres_trial_promo)
He knew he needed someone to supply the determination and resilience in which he suspected he was so shamefully deficient. He was delighted – and profoundly relieved – to find a mentor to whom he could surrender himself absolutely, to whose better judgement he could happily submit. Without such a guide, he believed his prospects looked bleak indeed. ‘If I should mount the throne without the assistance of a friend, I should be in the most dreadful of situations,’ he assured the earl in 1758.90 (#litres_trial_promo)
Bute also offered George genuine warmth and affection. His enthusiastic declarations of regard, his energetic and apparently disinterested commitment to his wellbeing, exploded into the prince’s arid, sentimental life. George’s devotion to Bute soon became the most important relationship in his life. ‘I shall never change in that, nor will I bear to be the least deprived of your company,’ he insisted vehemently.91 (#litres_trial_promo) The growing intensity of the prince’s feelings was reflected not just in the content of his letters to Bute, but also in the way he addressed him. At first, he was ‘my dear Lord’, a term of conventional courtly politeness; soon this warmed into ‘my dear Friend’; but very quickly, the strength of the prince’s feelings were made even plainer. All obstacles, he wrote to the earl with unembarrassed devotion, could and would be overcome, ‘whilst my Dearest is near me’.92 (#litres_trial_promo) Bute was not just mentor and role model to the prince; he was also the first person to unearth George’s hitherto deeply buried but strong emotions.
Bute broke through the prince’s habitual reserve partly by what he did, and partly by who he was. He was a compellingly attractive figure to a fatherless, faltering boy: handsome, assured and experienced, he was everything George knew he was not. Augusta, who was suspicious of almost everyone, admired and respected Bute, and the earl was unequivocal in his praise of George’s dead father, declaring that he had gloried in being known as Frederick’s friend. Unlike many of his predecessors, Bute actually seemed to like the prince, and he approached the prospect of training him for kingship with a galvanising enthusiasm. ‘You have condescended to take me into your friendship,’ he told the prince, ‘don’t think it arrogance if I say I will deserve it.’93 (#litres_trial_promo) Bute’s breezy optimism about the task before him was in stark contrast to the dour resignation of previous instructors. ‘Use will make everything easy,’ he confidently assured his faltering charge.94 (#litres_trial_promo)
Leaving Latin behind at last, George and Bute embarked on a course of more contemporary study. Bute encouraged the prince to investigate finance and economics, and together they read a series of lectures by the jurist William Blackstone that was to form the basis of his magisterial work on the origins of English common law. Bute even ventured confidently where Andrew Stone had feared to tread. George’s essay, ‘Thoughts on the English Constitution’, included opinions that might have reassured Walpole, had he read it, so impeccably Whiggish were its sentiments. The Glorious Revolution had, the prince wrote, rescued Britain ‘from the iron rod of arbitrary power’, while Oliver Cromwell was described, somewhat improbably by the heir to the throne, as ‘a friend of justice and virtue’.95 (#litres_trial_promo)
Whilst Bute’s more liberal definition of ‘what is fit for you to know’ undeniably piqued George’s interest, it was his bigger ideas that consolidated his hold over the prince and secured his pre-eminent place in George’s mind and heart. The most significant of these was one which would transform the prince’s prospects and offer him a way out of the despondency that had threatened to overwhelm him since his father’s death. In the late 1750s, Bute proposed nothing less than a new way of understanding the role of monarchy, offering George an enticingly credible picture of the kind of ruler he might aspire to become. For the first time he was presented with a concept of kingship that seemed within his capacity to achieve, that spoke to his strengths rather than his failings. It changed the nature of George’s engagement, not just with Bute but, more significantly, with himself. It gave him something to aim for and believe in; the delivery of this vision was ‘the goal’ that George believed was the purpose of his partnership with Bute. Indeed, it far outlasted his relationship with the earl; until his final descent into insanity half a century later, it established the principles by which he lived his life as a public and private man.
In Bute’s ideal, the role of the king was not simply to act as an influential player in the complex interplay of party rivalry that dominated politics in mid-eighteenth-century Britain. It was the monarch’s job to rise above all that, to transcend faction and self-interest, and devote himself instead to the impartial advancement of the national good. This was not an original argument; it derived from Henry, Viscount Bolingbroke’s extremely influential Idea of a Patriot King, written in 1738 (though not published until 1749). Frederick had been much taken with Bolingbroke’s ideas, and the ‘Instructions’ he wrote as a political testimony for his son drew strongly on many of Bolingbroke’s conclusions, but Frederick was primarily concerned with the practical political implications of Bolingbroke’s ideas. The ‘Instructions’ is mostly a list of recommendations intended to secure for a king the necessary independence to escape the control of politicians, most of which revolve around money: don’t fight too many wars, and separate Hanover, a drain on resources, from Great Britain as soon as possible.
Bute too was interested in the exercise of power; but, always drawn towards philosophy, he was even more fascinated by its origins, and sought to formulate a coherent, modern explanation for the very existence of kingship itself. Choosing those measures which best reflected the ambitions of a ‘patriot’ king was secondary, in his mind, to establishing the justification by which such a king held the reins of government in the first place. For Bute, the answer was simple: it was the virtue of the king – the goodness of his actions, as both a public and a private man – that formed the source of all his power. Virtue was clearly the best protection for an established ruler; a good king was uniquely positioned to win the love and loyalty of his people, making it possible for him to appeal credibly to the sense of national purpose that went beyond the narrower interests of party politicians. But the connection between morals and monarchy went deeper than that. Virtue was not just an attribute of good kingship; it was also the quality from which kings derived their authority. And the virtues Bute had in mind were not cold civic ones peculiar to the political world, of necessity and expediency. They were the moral standards which all human beings were held to, those which regulated the actions of all decent men and women. Kingship offered no exemption from moral conduct; on the contrary, more was expected of kings because so much more had been given to them. Moral behaviour in the public realm was therefore indivisible from its practice in the private world. To be a good king, it was essential to try to be a good man.
The place where private virtue was most clearly expressed, for Bute as for most of his contemporaries, was within the family. Here, in the unit that was the basic building block of society, the moral life was most easily and most rewardingly to be experienced. The good king would naturally enjoy a family life based on shared moral principles. Indeed, for Bute, authority had itself actually originated within the confines of the family. ‘In the first ages of the world,’ as he explained to George, private and public virtue had been one and the same thing; in this pre-political Eden, there was no distinction between the two, as government and family were not yet divided: ‘Parental fondness, filial piety and brotherly affection engrossed the mind; government subsisted only in the father’s management of the family, to whom the eldest son succeeding, became at once the prince and parent of his brethren.’
Everything began to go wrong when families lost their natural moral compass: ‘Vice crept in. Love, ambition, cruelty with envy, malice and the like produced unnatural parents, disobedient children, diffidence and hatred between near relations.’ It all sounded remarkably like the home lives of George’s Hanoverian predecessors, as Bute perhaps intended that it should. The failure of self-regulating family virtue forced men to create artificial forms of authority – ‘hence villages, towns and laws’ – but as communities grew bigger, their rulers moved further and further away from the moral principles that were the proper foundation of power. The consequences were dire, both for the ruled and their rulers: ‘Unhappy people, but more unhappy kings.’96 (#litres_trial_promo) The amoral exercise of power ruined those who practised it. ‘They could never feel the joy arising from a good and compassionate action … they could never hear the warm, honest voice of friendship, the tender affections and calls of nature, nor the more endearing sounds of love, but here, the scene’s too black, let me draw the curtain.’97 (#litres_trial_promo)
For Bute, the lesson of history was clear: good government originated in the actions of good men. What was needed now, he concluded, was a return to such fundamental first principles. He summed up his programme succinctly: ‘Virtue, religion, joined to nobility of sentiment, will support a prince better and make a people happier than all the abilities of an Augustus with the heart of Tiberius; the inference I draw from this is, that a prince ought to endeavour in all his thoughts and actions to excel his people in virtue, generosity, and nobility of sentiment.’ This is the source of his authority and the justification for his rule. Only then will his subjects feel that ‘he merits by his own virtue and not by the fickle dice of fortune the vast superiority he enjoys above them’.98 (#litres_trial_promo)
George embraced Bute’s thinking enthusiastically – and also perhaps with a sense of relief. He might have doubts about his intellectual capacity, and about his ability to dominate powerful and aggressive politicians, but he was more confident of legitimising his position by the morality of his actions. He suspected he was not particularly clever, but he was enough of his mother’s son to believe that he could be good – and perhaps more so than other men. He grasped at this possibility, and never let it go. It rallied his depressed spirits, jolted him out of a near-catatonic state of despair. It gave him a belief in himself and an explanation for his strange and unsettling destiny. It invested his future role with a meaning and significance it had so profoundly lacked before.
Bute’s vision of kingship transformed George’s perception of his future and shaped his behaviour as a public man for the rest of his life. Inevitably, it also dictated the terms on which his private life was conducted. He was unsparing in his interpretation of what the virtuous life meant for a king. He rarely flinched from the necessity to do the right rather than the pleasurable or easy thing, and he insisted on the absolute primacy of duty over personal desire and obligation over happiness. In time, these convictions came to form the essence of his personality, the DNA of who he was; and when he came to have a family, the lives of his wife and children were governed by the same rigorous requirements of virtue. As a father, a husband, a brother or a son, he was answerable to the same immutable moral code that governed his actions as a king. Bute taught him that in his case, the personal was always political; and it was a lesson he never forgot.
All this was to come later, however. When he took up his post, Bute was acutely aware of just how far short his charge fell from the princely ideal that was the central requirement of his monarchical vision. From the moment of his arrival, he set out to rebuild the prince’s tentative, disengaged personality, using a potent combination of threat and affection to do so. His first target was the prince’s lethargy, the subject of so much ineffectual criticism from Waldegrave and previous tutors. Bute was tenacious in his attempts to persuade George to show some energy and commitment to his studies; but it was a slow process, and one which required all the earl’s considerable powers of persuasion. By 1757, he had begun to make some progress, and the prince assured him: ‘I do here in the most solemn manner declare that I will entirely throw aside this my greatest enemy, and that you shall instantly find a change.’99 (#litres_trial_promo) It was not just George’s academic dilatoriness that Bute sought to tackle; he also attempted to root out other potentially damaging aspects of his personality that might compromise his authority when he came to be king. His pathological and disabling shyness must and would be conquered. Again, George declared himself ready to take up the challenge. He promised Bute that he was now determined to ‘act the man in everything, to repeat whatever I am to say with spirit and not blushing and afraid as I have hitherto’.100 (#litres_trial_promo)
Although George confessed he was sometimes ‘extremely hurt, at the many truths’ Bute told him, he did not doubt that Bute’s ‘constant endeavours to point out these things in me that are likely to destroy any attempts at raising my character’ were for his own good, ‘a painful, though necessary office’.101 (#litres_trial_promo) They were also, in George’s eyes, a sign of the depth of Bute’s regard for him, since only someone who really loved him would be prepared to criticise him so readily. ‘Flatterers, courtiers or ministers are easily got,’ his father had explained to him in his ‘Instructions’, ‘but a true friend is hard to be found. The only rule I can give you to try them by, is that they will tell you the truth.’ If George discovered such an honest man, he should do all he could to keep him, even if that required him to bear ‘some moments of disagreeable contradictions to your passions’.102 (#litres_trial_promo)
George had no difficulty in submitting to Bute’s comprehensive programme of self-improvement, sadly convinced that all the criticisms were deserved. His opinion of himself could not have been lower. He was, he confessed, ‘not partial to myself’, regularly describing both his actions and himself as despicable. ‘I act wrong perhaps in most things,’ he observed, adding that he might be best advised to ‘retire, to some distant region where in solitude I might for the rest of my life think on the faults I have committed, that I might repent of them’.103 (#litres_trial_promo) He was afraid that he was ‘of such an unhappy nature, that if I cannot in good measure alter that, let me be ever so learned in what is necessary for a king to know, I shall make but a very poor and despicable figure’.104 (#litres_trial_promo) When he contemplated his many shortcomings and failures, he was amazed that Bute was prepared to remain with him at all.
The idea that Bute might leave – that his patience with his underachieving charge might exhaust itself – threw the prince into paroxysms of anxiety. Bute seems often to have deployed the idea of potential abandonment as a means of reminding George of the totality of his dependency. The merest suggestion of it was enough, George admitted, to ‘put me on the rack’, declaring that the prospect was ‘too much for mortal man to bear’.105 (#litres_trial_promo) His self-esteem was so low that George was sure that if Bute were to depart, he would have only himself to blame. ‘If you should resolve to set me adrift, I could not upbraid you,’ he wrote resignedly, ‘as it is the natural consequence of my faults, and not want of friendship in you.’106 (#litres_trial_promo) George was endlessly solicitous about Bute’s health: the possibility of losing him through illness or even death was a horrifying prospect that loomed large in George’s nervous imagination; his letters are full of enquiries and imprecations about the earl’s wellbeing. When Bute and his entire family fell seriously ill with ‘a malignant sore throat’, the prince was beside himself with worry. He took refuge in his conviction that ‘you, from your upright conduct, have some right to hope for particular assistance from the great Author of us all’.107 (#litres_trial_promo) It was inconceivable that God would not value Bute’s virtues as highly as George did; when the earl recovered, George presented his doctors with specially struck gold medals of himself to mark his appreciation of their care.
From the mid-1750s to the time of his accession, the entire object of George’s existence was to reshape and remodel himself into the type of man who could fulfil the role of king, as Bute had so alluringly redefined it; but this internal reformation was not accompanied by a change in his way of life. He remained closeted at home with his mother and the earl, and for all Bute’s desire to reform the prince’s personality, he left many of George’s deepest beliefs untouched – partly because he shared some of them himself. One of the reasons George found Bute so congenial was because he endorsed so much of the vision of the world that the prince had inherited from his mother. For all his confidence in the righteousness of his prescriptions, and for all the energy and enthusiasm with which he argued them, there was in Bute himself a core of austerity and reserve. He was not a naturally sociable man, preferring to judge society – often rather severely – than to engage with it. He had a natural sympathy with the suspicion and apprehension with which Augusta encountered anything beyond the narrow bounds of her immediate family. He offered George no alternative perspective, but instead confirmed the prince’s pessimism about the moral worth and motives of others, a bleak scepticism that was to endure throughout his life. ‘This,’ wrote George, ‘is I believe, the wickedest age that ever was seen; an honest man must wish himself out of it; I begin to be sick of things I daily see; for ingratitude, avarice and ambition are the principles men act by.’108 (#litres_trial_promo)
Bute’s counsels did nothing to dilute the mix of fear and contempt with which the prince contemplated the world he must one day join. ‘I look upon the majority of politicians as intent on their own private interests rather than of the public,’ George wrote with grim certainty.109 (#litres_trial_promo) William Pitt, his grandfather’s minister, was ‘the blackest of hearts’. His uncle, Cumberland, was still, George believed, capable of mounting a coup d’état to prevent his accession: ‘in the hands of these myrmidons of the blackest kind, I imagine any invader with a handful of men might put himself on the throne and establish despotism here’.110 (#litres_trial_promo) He had fully absorbed Augusta’s deep-seated hostility to his grandfather and, like her, could not find a good word to say about ‘this Old Man’. George II’s behaviour was ‘shuffling’ and ‘unworthy of a British monarch; the conduct of this old king makes me ashamed of being his grandson’.111 (#litres_trial_promo) There was only one man deserving of George’s confidence, and that was Bute. ‘As for honesty,’ he told Bute, ‘I have already lived long enough to know you are the only man I shall ever meet who possesses that quality and who at all times prefers my interest to their own; if I were to utter all the sentiments of my heart on that subject, you would be troubled with quires of paper.’112 (#litres_trial_promo)
By 1759, Bute’s ascendancy over the prince seemed complete. The prospect of translating their political ideas into practice once George II was dead offered a beacon of hope which sustained them through adversity – it had been agreed at the very outset of their relationship that Bute was to become First Lord of the Treasury when George was king. But in that year, the earl’s authority was challenged from a direction that neither he and nor perhaps George himself had anticipated.
*
In the winter, conducting one of his regular inventories of George’s state of mind, Bute became convinced the prince was hiding something from him. Pressed to declare himself, George was cautious at first, but eventually began a hesitant explanation of his mood. At first, he confined himself to generalities. ‘You have often accused me of growing grave and thoughtful,’ he confessed. ‘It is entirely owing to a daily increasing admiration of the fair sex, which I am attempting with all the philosophy and resolution I am capable of, to keep under. I should be ashamed,’ he wrote ruefully, ‘after having so long resisted the charms of those divine creatures, now to become their prey.’113 (#litres_trial_promo) There was no doubt that the twenty-one-year-old George was still a virgin. His younger brother Edward, far more like his father and grandfather in his tastes, had eagerly embarked on affairs as soon as he had escaped the schoolroom, but George had thus far remained true to his mother’s principles of self-denial and restraint. Walpole believed that if she could, Augusta would have preferred to keep her son perpetually away from the lures of designing women: ‘Could she have chained up his body as she did his mind, it is probable that she would have preferred him to remain single.’ But the worldly diarist thought he knew the Hanoverian temperament well enough to be convinced this was an impossible objective. ‘Though his chastity had hitherto remained to all appearances inviolate, notwithstanding his age and sanguine complexion, it was not to be expected such a fast could be longer observed.’114 (#litres_trial_promo) Certainly this was how the prince himself felt, confessing to Bute that he found repressing his desires harder and harder. ‘You will plainly feel how strong a struggle there is between the boiling youth of 21 years and prudence.’ He hoped ‘the last will ever keep the upper hand, indeed if I can but weather it, marriage will put a stop to this conflict in my breast’.115 (#litres_trial_promo)
As Bute suspected, George’s disquiet reflected something more than a general sense of frustration. Incapable of concealing anything of importance from Bute, he wrote another letter which confessed all. ‘What I now lay before you, I never intend to communicate to anyone; the truth is, the Duke of Richmond’s sister arrived from Ireland towards the middle of November. I was struck with her first appearance at St James’s, and my passion has increased every time I have since beheld her; her voice is sweet, she seems sensible … in short, she is everything I can form to myself lovely.’ Since then, his life had hardly been his own: ‘I am grown daily unhappy, sleep has left me, which was never before interrupted by any reverse of fortune.’ He could not bear to see other men speak to her. ‘The other day, I heard it suggested that the Duke of Marlborough made up to her. I shifted my grief till I retired to my chamber where I remained for several hours in the depth of despair.’ His love and his intentions were, he insisted, entirely honourable: ‘I protest before God, I never have had any improper thoughts with regard to her; I don’t deny having flattered myself with hopes that one day or another you would consent to my raising her to a throne. Thus I mince nothing to you.’116 (#litres_trial_promo)
Lady Sarah Lennox, daughter of the Duke of Richmond (which title her brother inherited), was almost as well connected as George himself. Her grandfather was a son of Charles II and his mistress Louise de Kérouaille. She had four sisters, three of whom had done very well in the marriage market. The eldest, Caroline, was wife to the politician Henry Fox, and mother to Charles. Emily had married the Earl of Kildare, and Louisa had made an alliance with an Irish landowner, Thomas Connolly. From her youth, Sarah was one of the liveliest members of a famously lively family. As a very small child, she had caught the eye of George II. He had invited her to the palace where she would watch the king at his favourite pastime, ‘counting his money which he used to receive regularly every morning’. Once, with heavy-handed playfulness, he had ‘snatched her up in his arms, and after depositing her in a large china jar, shut down the lid to prove her courage’.117 (#litres_trial_promo) When her response was to sing loudly rather than to cry, he was delighted.
When her mother died, Sarah went to live with her sister, Lady Kildare, in Ireland. She did not return to court until she was fourteen. George II, who had not forgotten her, was pleased to see her back, but ‘began to joke and play with her as if she were still a child of five. She naturally coloured up and shrank from this unaccustomed familiarity, became abashed and silent.’ The king was disappointed and declared: ‘Pooh! She’s grown quite stupid!’118 (#litres_trial_promo)
Those who found themselves on the receiving end of his grandfather’s insensitivity aroused the sympathy of the Prince of Wales. ‘It was at that moment the young prince … was struck with admiration and pity; feelings that ripened into an attachment which never left him until the day of his death.’119 (#litres_trial_promo) That was the account Sarah gave to her son in 1837, and which he transcribed with reverential filial piety. In letters she wrote to her sisters at the time, Sarah was not so sentimental. After her first meeting with George, she described her clothes – blue and black feathers, black silk gown and cream lace ruffles – with far more detail than her encounter with the prince. She hardly spoke to him at all. Too shy to approach her directly, the prince had instead approached her older sister Caroline, stumbling out unaccustomed praises of her beauty and charm.
George was not the only man to find Sarah Lennox mesmerisingly attractive. It was hard to pin down the exact nature of her appeal, which was not always apparent at first sight. Her sisters failed to understand it at all. ‘To my taste,’ wrote Emily, ‘Sarah is merely a pretty, lively looking girl and that is all. She has not one good feature … her face is so little and squeezed, which never turns out pretty.’120 (#litres_trial_promo) Her brother-in-law Henry Fox thought otherwise. ‘Her beauty is not easily described,’ he wrote, ‘otherwise than by saying that she had the finest complexion, the most beautiful hair, and prettiest person that was ever seen, with a sprightly and fine air, a pretty mouth, remarkably fine teeth, and an excess of bloom in her cheeks, little eyes – but that is not describing her, for her great beauty was a peculiarity of countenance that made her at the same time different from and prettier than any other girl I ever saw.’121 (#litres_trial_promo) Horace Walpole saw her once as she acted in amateur theatricals at Holland House; his detached connoisseur’s eye caught something of her intense erotic promise: ‘When Lady Sarah was all in white, with her hair about her ears and on the ground, no Magdalen by Caravaggio was half so lovely and expressive.’122 (#litres_trial_promo) Sarah, unfazed by the comparison to a fallen woman, declared its author ‘charming’. She liked Walpole, she said with disarming honesty, because he liked her.
This cheerful willingness to find good in all those who found good in her no doubt smoothed her encounters with the awkward Prince of Wales. They met at formal Drawing Rooms and private balls, and George’s attention was so marked that it was soon noticed by the sharp-eyed Henry Fox. At this point, he did not take it seriously; it was no more than an opportunity for a good tease. ‘Mr Fox says [George] is in love with me, and diverts himself extremely,’ Sarah told Emily wryly.123 (#litres_trial_promo)
Bute, however, knew that George’s feelings were anything but a joke. Having declared them to his mentor, George was now desperate to know whether Sarah Lennox could be considered a suitable candidate for marriage. It seems never to have occurred to him that this was a decision he might make for himself. He submitted himself absolutely to Bute’s judgement, assuring him that no matter what the earl concluded, he would abide by his decision. He hoped for a favourable answer, but insisted that their relationship would not be affected if it were not so: ‘If I must either lose my friend or my love, I shall give up the latter, for I esteem your friendship above all earthly joy.’124 (#litres_trial_promo) The rational part of him must have known what Bute’s answer would be. It was inconceivable that he should marry anyone but a Protestant foreign princess; an alliance between the royal house and an English aristocratic family would overthrow the complex balance of political power on which the mechanics of the constitutional settlement depended.
To marry into a family that included Henry Fox was, if possible, even more outrageously improbable. Henry was the brother of Stephen Fox, the lover of Lord Hervey, the laconic Ste, who had been driven into a jealous fury by the ambiguous relationship between Hervey and Prince Frederick. Henry Fox was one of the most controversial politicians of his day: able, amoral and considered spectacularly corrupt, even by the relaxed standards of eighteenth-century governmental probity. A man described by the Corporation of the City of London as a ‘public defaulter of unaccounted millions’ was unlikely to prove a suitable brother-in-law to the heir to the throne. Bute’s judgement was therefore as unsurprising as it was uncompromising: ‘God knows, my dear sir, I with the utmost grief tell it you, the case admits of not the smallest doubt.’ He urged George to consider ‘who you are, what is your birthright, what you wish to be’. If he examined his heart, he would understand why the thing he hoped for could never happen. The prince declared himself reluctantly persuaded that Bute was right. ‘I have now more obligations to him than ever; he has thoroughly convinced me of the impossibility of ever marrying a countrywoman.’ He had been recalled to a proper sense of duty. ‘The interest of my country shall ever be my first care, my own inclinations shall ever submit to it; I am born for the happiness or misery of a great nation, and consequently must often act contrary to my passions.’125 (#litres_trial_promo)
George’s renunciation was made easier by the fact that he did not see the object of his passion for some months. The next time he did so, he was no longer Prince of Wales but king. George II died in October 1760; Sarah Lennox went to court in 1761, when all the talk was of the impending coronation. As soon as he saw her again, all George’s hard-won resolution ebbed away, as ‘the boiling youth’ in him made him forget all the promises he had made to Bute. Despite his undertaking to give her up, he took the unprecedented step of declaring to her best friend the unchanged nature of his feelings for Sarah. One night at court, he cornered Lady Susan Fox-Strangways, another member of the extensive Fox clan. The conversation that followed was so extraordinary that Lady Susan repeated it to Henry Fox, who transcribed it. The king asked Lady Susan if she would not like to see a coronation. She replied that she would.
K: Won’t it be a finer sight when there is a queen?
LS: To be sure, sir.
K: I have had a great many applications from abroad, but I don’t like them. I have had none at home. I should like that better.
LS: (Nothing, frightened)
K: What do you think of your friend? You know who I mean; don’t you think her fittest?
LS: Think, sir?
K: I think none so fit.
Fox then said that George ‘went across the room to Lady Sarah, and bid her ask her friend what he had been saying and make her tell her all’.126 (#litres_trial_promo)
The fifteen-year-old Sarah, never very impressed by George’s attentions, had been conducting a freelance flirtation of her own, which had just come to an end, and she was in no mood to be polite to other suitors, even royal ones. When George approached her at court soon after, she rebuffed all his attempts to discuss the conversation he had had with Lady Susan. When he asked whether she had spoken to her friend, she replied monosyllabically that she had. Did she approve of what she had heard? Fox reported that ‘She made no answer, but looked as cross as she could. HM affronted, left her, seemed confused, and left the Drawing Room.’127 (#litres_trial_promo)
Fox worked away, trying to discover the true state of George’s feelings for Lady Sarah. Despite the unfortunate snub, they seemed to Fox as strong as ever. He was less certain, however, of where they might lead. Fox told his wife that he was not sure whether George really intended to marry her, adding that ‘whether Lady Sarah shall be told of what I am sure of, I leave to the reader’s discretion’.128 (#litres_trial_promo) If a crown was out of the question, it might be worth Sarah settling for the role of royal mistress. At the Birthday Ball a few months later, Fox’s hopes of the ultimate prize revived once more. ‘He had no eyes but for her, and hardly talked to anyone else … all eyes were fixed on them, and the next morning all tongues observing on the particularity of his behaviour.’129 (#litres_trial_promo) But after over a year of encouraging signals, there was still no sign of any meaningful declaration from the king. Determined to bring matters to a head, Lady Sarah was sent back to court with very precise instructions to do all she could to extract from her vague suitor some concrete sense of his intentions. As she explained to Lady Susan, Fox had coached her to perfection: ‘I must pluck up my spirits, and if I am asked if I have thought of … or if I approve of … I am to look him in the face and with an earnest but good-humoured countenance, say “that I don’t know what I ought to think”. If the meaning is explained, I must say “that I can hardly believe it” and so forth.’ It was all very demanding. ‘In short, I must show I wish it to be explained, without seeming to suggest any other meaning; what a task it is. God send that I may be enabled to go through with it. I am allowed to mutter a little, provided that the words astonished, surprised, understand and meaning are heard.’130 (#litres_trial_promo)
