The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians. Janice Hadlow
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sentiments, whilst she affected to receive His Majesty’s; she could appear convinced whilst she was controverting, and obedient when she was ruling; by this means, her dexterity and address made it impossible for anybody to persuade him what was truly the case, and that while she was seemingly in every occasion giving up her opinion to his, she was always in reality turning his opinion and bending his will to hers.’53
In one sense, it was not an unsuccessful policy. Her patience and self-effacement ensured that Caroline was able to achieve much of what she wanted in her management of her husband. Above all, she preserved the unity of their partnership. Throughout all their tribulations, in private and in public, she strained every sinew to prevent any permanent rupture dividing them. Whether the threat came from a discontented father, a predatory mistress, an unsatisfactory child, or a potentially disruptive politician, Caroline devoted all her skills to neutralising any possibility of a serious breach between them. It was clear to her that they were infinitely stronger as a like-minded couple than as competing individuals who would inevitably become the focus for antagonistic and destructive opposition. But although in later years she took some pride in the tireless efforts she had directed to maintaining their solidarity, she was aware that it had not been achieved without cost. To be locked into a pattern of perpetual cozening and cajolery was wounding and exhausting for her and demeaning for her husband. It kept them together; but it was not the best foundation upon which to base a marriage. In the end, despite the strength of the feelings that united them, both she and George were, in their different ways, warped and belittled by it.
As Caroline had feared, her elder daughters were never restored to her while the old king lived. She went on to have other children: William in 1721, Mary in 1723 and finally Louisa in 1724. But it was not until George I died, in 1727, from a stroke suffered while travelling through the German countryside he loved, that Anne, Amelia and Caroline came back to live with their parents again. By then it was too late to establish the stable home life that Caroline had hoped to provide for them. Before they had been taken from her, she had been a careful mother to her girls. ‘No want of care, or failure or neglect in any part of their education can be imputed to the princess,’ her husband had written in one of his many fruitless appeals to his father.54 Caroline’s daughters would never waver in their devotion to her; but their long estrangement from their father – and the constant criticism of his behaviour which they heard from their grandfather for nearly a decade – meant that on their return his eldest daughters regarded him with distinctly sceptical eyes. When they saw for themselves how he treated their mother – the strange mixture of obsession and disdain, passion and resentment, respect and rudeness, the destructive combination of warring emotions that had come to characterise George’s attitude to his wife – any tenderness they once had for him soon evaporated. It was hardly an attractive vision of domestic happiness with which to begin a new reign.
CHAPTER 2
GEORGE AND CAROLINE WERE AT their summer retreat at Richmond Lodge on 25 June 1727, when Robert Walpole arrived with the news of George I’s death. It was the middle of a hot day, and the royal couple were asleep; their attendants were extremely reluctant to wake them, but George was eventually persuaded to emerge from his bedroom and discover that he was now king.
It was only seven months since George’s estranged mother had died in the castle at Ahlden. Although George could never bring himself to speak about Sophia Dorothea, he did make a single gesture towards her memory that suggests much of what he felt but could not say. The day after the news arrived of his father’s death, the courtier Lady Suffolk told Walpole she was startled ‘at seeing hung up in the new queen’s dressing room a whole-length portrait of a lady in royal robes; and in the bed-chamber a half-length of the same person, neither of which Lady Suffolk had seen before’.1 The pictures were of Sophia Dorothea. Her son must have salvaged them from the general destruction of all her images ordered by his father a generation before. ‘The prince had kept them concealed, not daring to produce them in his father’s lifetime.’ Now George was king, and his mother was restored – albeit without comment – to a place of honour within the private heart of the family. Walpole heard that if she had lived long enough to witness his accession, George ‘had purposed to have brought her over and declared her queen dowager’. Her death had denied him the opportunity to release his mother from her long captivity, to act as the agent of her freedom. Perhaps it was some small satisfaction to see her image where he had been unable to see her person; it was certainly a gesture of defiance towards the man who kept her from him, and a declaration of loyalty and affection towards his mother that he had never been able to make while his father lived.
The new king and queen were crowned in October, in a typically eighteenth-century ceremony that combined grandeur with chaos. Tickets were sold in advance for the event, and small booths erected around Westminster for the selling of coffee to the anticipated crowds.2 The Swiss traveller de Saussure went to watch and noted that it took two hours for the royal procession to wend its way to the abbey. Handel’s Zadok the Priest – which would be performed at every subsequent coronation – was given its first airing in the course of the ceremony, at which George and Caroline appeared sumptuously clothed and loaded down with jewellery, some of it, as it later appeared, borrowed for the day. The choristers were not considered to have acquitted themselves well – at one point, they were heard to be singing different anthems. After the ceremony was over and the grander participants had left, de Saussure watched as a hungrier crowd moved methodically over the remains of the event, carrying away anything that could be either eaten or sold.3
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By the time John, Lord Hervey, joined George and Caroline’s court in 1730, the couple had been on the throne for three years, and married for twenty-five. The patterns of their lives, both as king and queen and husband and wife, were thus very well established when Hervey began to chronicle them. Hervey’s official court title was vice chamberlain. He later described his job dismissively as one that required him to do no more than ‘to carry candles and set chairs’, but in practice, it was a far from nominal office, giving him direct responsibility for the management and upkeep of all the royal palaces. It certainly did not imply any shortcomings in social status. Hervey was extremely well connected, heir to the Earl of Bristol, and an aristocrat of unimpeachable Whig principles. He was also a man who made a career from defying expectations and outraging traditional moralists. There was nothing conventional about any aspect of Hervey’s life.
Even in a family considered remarkable for the production of extraordinary people – Lady Mary Wortley Montagu once declared that ‘this world consists of men, women and Herveys’ – he stood out above the rest. He married one of the most beautiful women of his generation, and had eight children by her; he conducted casual affairs with a host of other fashionable ladies of the court; but the great love of his life was another man. His sexuality was a barely concealed secret. Slight and slender, he had been considered outstandingly attractive as a young man. In later life, he used cosmetics to enhance his fading looks, with results that were not always successful. Inevitably, Hervey attracted attention, not all of it admiring. The Duchess of Marlborough once referred scornfully to his ‘painted face with not a tooth in his head’.4 In spiteful verse, Alexander Pope described him as an ‘amphibious thing’, ‘a painted child of dirt that stinks and stings’. He was caricatured everywhere in prose as ‘Lord Fanny’. One of his many enemies described him as a ‘delicate little hermaphrodite, a pretty little Master Miss’.5
Perhaps it was the complexities of his own life that gave Hervey such a profound curiosity for the oddities of others. Certainly, it seems to have been what kept him so firmly in George and Caroline’s orbit for so many years. His warmest relationship