The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians. Janice Hadlow
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anything else, if you had not your liberties?’11
Caroline was astute enough to recognise that this was the kind of eulogy a British monarch was required to deliver in order to retain the affections of the people; but it does not seem to have been a particularly honest reflection of her private opinions. Hervey thought that in her heart, the queen’s politics were closer to those of her husband. George was suspicious of the constitutional settlement over which he was obliged to preside, and ‘looked upon all the English as king-killers and republicans, grudged them their riches as well as their liberty [and] thought them all overpaid’. He much preferred the way things were done in Hanover, for ‘there he rewarded people for doing their duty and serving him well, but here he was obliged to enrich people for being rascals and buy them not to cut his throat’.12 To Hervey, Caroline expressed similar frustrations with the limits of royal power, as the Glorious Revolution had defined it, complaining that in England, a king was ‘no more than the humble servant of Parliament, the pensioner of his people, and a puppet of sovereignty that was forced to go to them for every shilling he wanted, that was obliged to court those who were always abusing him, and could do nothing himself’.13 In public, she was far more measured. ‘The business of princes,’ she declared, ‘is to make the whole go on, and not to encourage or suffer silly, impertinent, personal piques between their servants to hinder the business of government being done.’14 For Caroline, the world of politics as she understood it bore a striking resemblance to the life she had made for herself at home. In the end, both came down to questions of management.
Whatever the reality of Caroline’s political role, it is hard to imagine that George was indifferent to the powerful contemporary perception that in matters of government, it was she and not he who was in charge. For a man whose self-esteem was so dependent on the respect and admiration of others, this must have been a painful experience. To be found wanting in the arena where men – and royal men in particular – were expected to excel, unchallenged by even the brightest of women, was particularly humiliating. In the public world, as he came to recognise, there seemed little he could do about it. The more he denied it, the more it seemed as if it might be true. But George knew that there were other areas of his and Caroline’s life together where he remained effortlessly dominant, where his primacy was secure and uncompromised: in the most intimate dimension of their private world there was no question whose will it was that governed, and who was required to submit to it.
From the earliest years of their marriage, George had taken mistresses. He did so not because he did not love Caroline, but because he was afraid that otherwise it might look as if he loved her too much. Horace Walpole thought he ‘was more attracted by a silly idea he entertained of gallantry being becoming, than by a love of variety’. His infidelities made him seem more a man of the world and less of a besotted husband. When he was Prince of Wales, George followed long-established tradition in selecting his lovers from the household of his wife. He did not go about the process with great subtlety. Having decided to approach Mary Bellenden, one of Caroline’s Maids of Honour – ‘incontestably the most agreeable, the most insinuating, and the most likeable woman of her time’ – George favoured the direct method. Knowing that she could not pay her bills, he sat beside her one night and ‘took out his purse and counted his money. He repeated the numeration; the giddy Bellenden lost her patience, and cried out, “Sir, I cannot bear it! If you count your money any more, I will go out of the room.”’15 In the end Mary Bellenden’s poverty conquered her irritation; but the time she spent as George’s mistress turned out to be unrewarding in every way. He was too mean to make her relationship financially rewarding, too disengaged to give her any real pleasure, and unwilling to award her the status of Principal Mistress. As soon as she could, Mary Bellenden found a husband to marry, and exchanged the role of unhappy royal mistress for that of respectable wife.
She was succeeded in the post by Lady Suffolk, whom George and Caroline had known since the early days of their marriage in Hanover. She had been Mrs Howard then, and had arrived at their court accompanied by a violent and drunken husband, and so poor that she had been forced to sell her own hair to raise money. She was beautiful, elegant, cultivated and entertaining (as an elderly woman, grand and formidable, she was one of Horace Walpole’s most valued friends). For over a decade she was George’s principal mistress. She was also one of the queen’s bedchamber women, which meant that wife and mistress spent a great deal of time in each other’s company, an experience neither of them enjoyed.
The difficulties of the situation would have been exacerbated by George’s indifference to the established rules of polite behaviour. He conducted his affair without the slightest attempt at discretion. With the methodical exactitude that characterised everything he did, he made his way to Lady Suffolk’s apartment at seven every evening, in full view of the court. If he found he was too early, he would pace about, looking at his watch, until it was exactly the right time for their assignation to begin. Perhaps it was some consolation to Caroline that this hardly suggested a relationship driven by great passion. Hervey thought the king kept it up ‘as a necessary appurtenance to his grandeur as a prince rather than an addition to his pleasure as a man’. He added that there were many at court who doubted whether the couple had a sexual relationship at all.16 Whatever the nature of the affair, it certainly did not seem to cool George’s ardour for his wife; and the much-tried Lady Suffolk often found herself caught in the crossfire of his angry attraction for Caroline. ‘It happened more than once,’ reported Walpole, ‘that the king, coming in to the room while the queen was dressing, has snatched off the handkerchief, and turning rudely to Mrs Howard, has cried, “Because you have an ugly neck yourself, you seek to hide the queen’s!”’17
Hervey thought that for all the offence Lady Suffolk’s presence gave to the queen’s dignity, Caroline had, with some effort, resigned herself to her rival’s existence. ‘Knowing the vanity of her husband’s temper, and that he must have some woman for the world to believe he lay with, she wisely suffered one to remain in that situation whom she despised, and had got the better of, for fear of making room for a successor whom he might really love, and who might get the better of her.’18 Certainly, when, in 1734, the king finally tired of his now middle-aged mistress, and Lady Suffolk sought to avoid the inevitable by quitting the court before she was asked to leave, it was Caroline who tried to persuade her to stay. In a lengthy private interview she urged her ‘to take a week to consider of the business. And give me your word that you will not read any romances in that time.’19 Lady Suffolk was not to be won over. She had had enough of her half-affair with a man she suspected had only ever wanted her as a mistress in order to demonstrate his independence from his wife. The king, who complained to Caroline that he could not understand ‘why you will not let me part with an old deaf woman, of whom I am weary’, was pleased to see her go.
Although Caroline’s daughters were similarly glad to see Lady Suffolk – whom they all hated – disappear from their own and their mother’s lives, it was their father towards whom they felt the most animus, despising him for his humiliating treatment of the queen. Anne, the cleverest and most outspoken of the sisters, made it the basis of a lasting and deeply felt dislike of the king, on which she would often expatiate to Hervey, venting her disdain in a resounding, freeform litany of the many things that she hated about him. ‘His passion, his pride, his vanity, his giving himself airs about women, the impossibility of being easy with him, his affectation of heroism, his unreasonable, simple, uncertain, disagreeable and often shocking behaviour to the queen, the difficulty of entertaining him, his insisting upon other people’s conversation who were to entertain him being always new and his own always the same thing over and over again …’20 The depth of her contempt for George made her hope he would not stay too long without a mistress. ‘I wish with all my heart he would take somebody else,’ she told Hervey, ‘that Mama might be a little relieved from the