The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians. Janice Hadlow
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mounted another and plunged back into the mêlée. Marlborough thought he had behaved with distinction, and wrote to tell his father so.23 But the elder George refused to allow his son a permanent military role, which bitterly disappointed the prince and did nothing to improve relations between them.
For the rest of his life, George remained devoted to the soldierly ideal. Nothing interested him more than the business of warfare – from grand strategy to the design of a medal or the cut of a uniform. He jealously guarded his right to make senior army appointments, and his love of pomp and pageantry was perhaps a way of staying close to a world from which politics excluded him. In his forties, the desire to be back in the field still burnt just as brightly as it had in his youth. Hervey recalled that he declared ‘almost daily and hourly’ to Sir Robert Walpole that ‘it was with his sword alone that he desired to keep the balance of Europe; that war and action were his sole pleasures; that age was coming on fast to him … He could not bear, he said, the thought of growing old in peace.’ In response, Walpole patiently pointed out that ‘it would not be a very agreeable incident for the King of Great Britain’ to find himself ‘running again through Westphalia with 70,000 Prussians at his heels’.24 (George had his way in the end: in 1743, when he was sixty, and Walpole was no longer around to thwart him, he led troops victoriously into battle once more, against the French at Dettingen near Frankfurt. He was the last British king to do so, a fact that would have delighted him perhaps more than any other accolade.)
George was never a scholar, and loved to boast of his disdain for intellectual ideas. ‘He often used to brag of the contempt he had for books and letters,’ recalled Hervey, ‘saying how much he hated all that stuff from his infancy.’ He said he despised reading even as a child, because he ‘felt as if he was doing something mean and below him’.25 But for all his distrust of the outward manifestations of the life of the mind, George’s antipathy concealed a sharp intellect. He spoke four languages – German, English, French and Italian – and had a quick tongue in all of them. He was a ready deliverer of woundingly pungent phrases or mocking observations, some of which suggested that he read rather more than he was prepared to admit. Like all his family, he loved music (he would become a devoted patron of Handel), but he had no patience with abstract analytical thinking. He was untouched by the new ideas of the Enlightenment that excited so many of his contemporaries, and seems to have been as little interested in traditional religious beliefs as in the philosophical attitudes that had just begun to undermine them. Like his father, he had no real religious feeling, and throughout his life he demonstrated a steady indifference to all things spiritual – with a single exception: he was, as Horace Walpole incredulously reported, prey to a host of superstitious and supernatural fears. ‘He had yet implicit faith in the German notion of vampires,’ the diarist noted, ‘and has more than once been angry with my father for speaking irreverently of these imaginary bloodsuckers.’26
George was not an easy man to understand. Bravery and bombast, principle and passion struggled for mastery in his nature, yet beneath the often grating bravado that defined so much of his behaviour, there occasionally emerged a glimpse of a rather different man: calmer, less swayed by the intensity of feelings he found so hard to control, a more reflective character capable of far greater emotional acuity than he usually revealed. For most of his life, George kept those parts of his personality hidden beneath the image he had created of himself as a blunt, instinctual, plain-speaking man of action. The contrast between this persona and the remote, sinuous unreachableness that defined his father’s character could not have been more extreme. By his every word and action, George sought to present himself as a very different kind of man, demonstrating both to himself and to those about him that he was not destined to repeat the destructive mistakes of his predecessor. He would do things differently; and nowhere more so than in the selection of a wife.
Prince George told his father that he would not make a purely political marriage, but expected to have some say in the choice of a suitable spouse. Somewhat surprisingly, his declaration met with no opposition; perhaps the elder George, lacking in empathy though he was, had no wish to repeat the disastrous outcome of his own forced match. It did not take his son long to fix on the woman he thought would suit him. Caroline, daughter of the Margrave of Ansbach, was highly sought after in the German marriage market. Tall and stately, with an abundance of fair hair and a substantial bosom (said to be the finest in Europe), she had recently refused a very impressive offer from the Archduke Charles, heir to the Holy Roman Emperor. She had baulked at the prospect of converting to Catholicism, and had thus waved goodbye to one of the oldest and grandest of royal titles. Her reputation for beauty – and also for intelligence, for she was said to have debated the issue of her possible religious conversion with incisive skill – was probably well known to George, as Caroline had for many years lived in the Berlin household of his father’s sister, Sophia Charlotte, queen in Prussia. Orphaned aged thirteen, Caroline had grown up under the protection of George’s aunt and his grandmother, Electress Sophia of Hanover. The electress had long hoped to see her grandson married to Caroline, although she ‘doubted that God will let me be so happy’. She did everything she could to force God’s hand, though, and was clearly successful in piquing the young George’s interest in marrying her protégée. ‘I think the prince likes the idea also,’ she observed hopefully, ‘for in talking to him about her, he said “I am very glad that you desire her for me.”’27
When George raised the possibility of marrying Caroline, his father insisted his son should meet her first, and suggested that he do so in disguise, so that he could make an honest assessment of her person and character. In June 1705, George obediently travelled to Ansbach, where he was presented to the unsuspecting Caroline as a Hanoverian nobleman. He was smitten at their very first meeting. As intemperate in passion as in so much else, George insisted for the rest of his life that he had fallen in love with Caroline the moment he saw her. Without declaring himself, he hurried back to Hanover, and urged his father to open negotiations for her hand. Uncharacteristically compliant, the elder George agreed without argument. Significantly, he was concerned to ensure that Caroline shared his son’s enthusiasm for the match, stressing to the diplomatic negotiators that ‘her inclinations should be assured first of all’.28 It did not take long for everyone to be satisfied on that point. Once the identity of the young man whom she had met under such unusual circumstances was explained, it was clear that Caroline had seen something she liked in the intense, emphatic stranger. Perhaps she was impressed by the directness of his desire for her. Perhaps the prospect of marrying the heir presumptive to the British crown appealed more than becoming Holy Roman Empress; she was always considered an ambitious woman, and marriage to George undoubtedly promised access to considerable power and influence, with the additional benefit that it did not require her to become a Catholic. Perhaps she simply felt she could not refuse another well-connected marital prospect. For whatever reason, her consent was quickly given; and George and Caroline were married in Hanover in the early autumn.
Their marriage could not have been more different from that of George’s parents. From the very beginning, his young wife was the central focus of his life. In 1707, when she contracted smallpox, he nursed her throughout the illness, imperilling his own health as a consequence. Two years later, when Caroline gave birth to their eldest daughter, Anne, he wrote her a loving letter from which the warmth of his affection still radiates. ‘The peace of my life depends on knowing you in good health, and upon the conviction of your continued affection for me. I shall endeavour to attract it,’ he assured her, ‘by all imaginable passion and love, and I shall never omit any way of showing you that no one could be more wholly yours.’29 Theirs was a partnership founded on passion – on George’s side at least. ‘It is certain,’ wrote Horace Walpole, ‘that the king always preferred the queen’s person to any other woman; nor ever described his idea of beauty, but that he drew a picture of his wife.’30 For the rest of his life, Caroline exerted a physical attraction over him that was never truly extinguished, even when her youthful prettiness