The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians. Janice Hadlow
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to her father who, as a result of what they disclosed, effectively abandoned her. Her mother was refused access to her. Immured alone at Ahlden, she was questioned over and over again about the precise nature of her relationship with Königsmark. She always denied that she had committed what she called ‘le crime’, but the couple’s correspondence contradicted her assertions. In them, Königsmark made it clear how much he hated the thought of Sophia Dorothea having sex – or, as he put it, ‘monter à cheval’ – with her husband. In her replies, Sophia Dorothea reassured him that George was a very poor lover in comparison with himself, and added vehemently that she longed for George to die in battle. It is probable that George was shown these letters, which may explain some of the harshness with which Sophia Dorothea was treated in the months that followed.15
At first, it was hard to know what to do with George’s errant wife. In the end, she was persuaded to become the unwitting author of her own misery. She was encouraged to ask for a separation from her husband, which she did almost willingly, on the grounds that ‘she despaired of ever overcoming the aversion the prince has for several years evinced towards her’.16 It is unlikely she knew at this stage that Königsmark was dead; naively, she may still have hoped to be reunited with him after a separation had taken place. Armed with his wife’s declaration, in December 1694, George was quickly able to obtain a divorce. Sophia Dorothea hoped that afterwards she would be allowed quietly ‘to retire from the world’, expecting to live with her mother at Celle; instead she was returned to Ahlden, where she was locked up and, in all but name, imprisoned.
Any reminders of Sophia Dorothea’s presence were ruthlessly and systematically erased from the Hanoverian court. Her name was struck out of prayers, and all portraits of her taken down. She had become a non-person, and disappeared into a confinement from which she would never emerge. She had not been allowed to say goodbye to her children – twelve-year-old George and seven-year-old Sophia Dorothea – before she was taken away. She would not see them again. Her name was never mentioned to them, and they were forbidden to speak of her. She was permitted to take portraits of them with her, which she regarded as her most precious possessions. When Ernst August died, and her ex-husband inherited his title, she wrote to him, begging to be allowed to see her children. He did not reply. ‘He is so cold, he turns everything to ice,’ commented the Duchess of Orléans sadly.
For the first two years, Sophia Dorothea was held entirely inside the Ahlden castle. Later, she was able to walk outside for half an hour a day. George did not deprive her of money and she lived in some luxury, dressed in the fashionable clothes she had always loved. There were few people to admire them, however. No visitors were permitted. Sophia’s only contact with her family was through the eighty-one pictures of her relations that she had hung on her walls, including one of her ex-husband. She did not read a letter that had not been scrutinised by her gaoler first. Surrounded by a small entourage of elderly ladies, Sophia went nowhere unattended. The boredom of her life seems to have overwhelmed her, and she sought sensation wherever she could find it. On rare outings in her state carriage, she always asked to have the horses driven at the highest possible speed. Her mother, who had been tireless in her appeals to see her daughter, was eventually allowed to visit her; but after her death, Sophia Dorothea saw no one. In 1714, when George crossed the North Sea to take up his new responsibilities in Britain, it was suggested to him that he might now relax the conditions under which his ex-wife dragged out her existence; but he was implacable. Sophia Dorothea endured this shadow of a life for thirty-one years. In 1726, she became seriously ill. Her attendants tried to raise her spirits by showing her the portraits of her children, but when this much relied-upon source of comfort failed, they realised she was dying. A few days later, she was dead.
If George was troubled by guilt at any point throughout her long exile, he gave no sign of it. He never commented on his ill-starred marriage, nor its tragic end. He did not marry again, but lived in apparently placid contentment with Melusine von Schulenberg, whom he later ennobled as the Duchess of Kendal.
Yet there remained in George’s carefully preserved, quiet life an unignorable reminder of a partnership he had never wanted, and which had caused him such public humiliation. The two children he had fathered with Sophia Dorothea could not be expunged or denied. His daughter he seems to have regarded benignly, although she played almost no part in his daily life; but his relationship with his son could not be similarly consigned to the margins of his public world. As his heir, the young Prince George represented a dynastic and political fact which George was compelled to acknowledge. But he could not – and would not – be brought to love the boy.
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As a child, the prince had been very attractive. An English visitor to Hanover said he had ‘a very winning countenance’. He was small and slender, with fair hair and pale skin, a lively and inquisitive boy. ‘He speaks very gracefully, and with the greatest easiness imaginable, nor does his great vivacity let him be ignorant of anything.’17 He was highly strung, racked by intense emotions, much subject to ‘blushes and tears’. It was impossible not to see in the son the image of his mother, and this sealed his father’s inveterate dislike for him. In later life, Prince George acknowledged in the most matter-of-fact way that his father ‘had always hated him and used him ill’. Disdain, ridicule and indifference were familiar fare. He could think of only one occasion when the old man had found anything complimentary to say about him, and despite its characteristically barbed quality, he quoted it with poignantly transparent pride. As the courtier and diarist, John, Lord Hervey, recounted: ‘When Lord Sunderland had tried to fix some lie on him, the late king (his father) had answered, “No, no. I know my son; he is not a liar, he is mad, but he is an honest man.”’18
It was hardly surprising that by the time he was an adult, George disliked his father as much as his father seemed to despise him. It was plain to everyone who considered it that the great, undiscussed, unresolved nightmare of Sophia Dorothea’s ruined life lay at the heart of their mutual resentment. ‘Whether the prince’s attachment to his mother embittered his mind against his father,’ mused Walpole, ‘or whether hatred of his father occasioned his devotion to her, I do not pretend to know.’19 Prince George was as silent on the painful subject of Sophia Dorothea as was his father. Hervey, who knew him very well when he was king, noticed that although ‘he discoursed so constantly and so openly of himself’, there was one subject that was never brought up. He touched on everything ‘except what related to his mother, whom on no occasion I ever heard him mention, not even inadvertently, or indirectly, as if such a person never existed’.20
Prince George grew into a volatile and unpredictable young man. His temper, which worsened as he grew older, was always explosive. Unlike his taciturn father, who suppressed his brooding antagonisms, his son’s rages were more flamboyant affairs. Always a great talker, the prince’s volubility ran away with him when he was cross; anger provoked in him diatribes of eloquent fury. When words failed him, he was known to throw his wig off and kick it around the room in frustration. It was hardly surprising that, as the Duchess of Marlborough recorded, he was sometimes considered ‘a little bit cracked’.21 In comparison with his father, who never said more than he needed to, George was effusive, in bad moods and good. His happiness was expressed with as much noise and passion as his anger, as anyone who antagonised him soon discovered. His feelings were always strong, and his inability to control them often made him appear ridiculous.
Beneath the frequent empty bluster, though, were more solid qualities. He was genuinely brave, not afraid to do what he thought was right, even at the cost of his reputation. He did not bear political grudges, and had little of his father’s unforgiving rancour. Horace Walpole believed ‘he had fewer sensations of revenge … than any man who ever sat upon a throne’.22 His physical courage was considerable. Trained as a soldier, he served as a cavalry officer with John, 1st Duke of Marlborough, at the Battle of Oudenarde in 1708, when he was twenty-four. He was engaged