The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians. Janice Hadlow
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to George’s behaviour, as she had no desire to follow her mother-in-law into the post-marital wilderness; but her desire to keep the affections of her errant husband was more than simply the product of pragmatic considerations. She was genuinely distressed by his temporary abandonment of her, and was delighted when he came back. She was proud that the king had returned not only to court, but also to her bed, joyfully informing Robert Walpole of the fact so that he could appreciate the completeness of her victory. George was a difficult man to love, and he tried the fortitude of his wife severely in the thirty years they spent together. Yet during all that time, he remained the dominating figure in her life, crowding out all competing emotional claims. When forced by her father-in-law to make the appalling choice between her husband and her daughters, Caroline had unhesitatingly chosen George, declaring ‘her children were not a grain of sand compared to him’.30 It was not that she did not care for her girls; she loved her daughters deeply, but it was her relationship with her husband that occupied all her time and absorbed all her emotional energy. There was not much room left for anyone else.
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If the relationship between George and Caroline was complex, and not conducive to happiness, it was as nothing compared to the misery that resulted from their dealings with Frederick, their eldest son. Some of the problems they encountered were not entirely of their own making; the operation of eighteenth-century politics inevitably placed the heir to the throne in opposition to his father. On reaching maturity he soon became the focus around which disgruntled politicians gathered, eager to stake their claim to the future. He could make a great deal of trouble for the king and his ministers if he was disposed to do so, and very few heirs found themselves able to resist that temptation. All this George and Caroline knew very well from their own difficult days as Prince and Princess of Wales; once they inherited the crown, however, they expunged all recollection of that period from their joint memory, and expected their son to behave with a political rectitude that had not characterised their own behaviour when they occupied his position. But their attitude to the prince went far beyond the discontents and difficulties that came with their constitutional roles. They treated Frederick with a venom that exceeded any legitimate political frustration, and conceived a hatred for him that became almost pathological in its intensity.
As with so much Hanoverian unhappiness, its origins lay in the actions of George I. He had kept his small grandson in Hanover, forbidding his parents to visit him there, and allowing them no say in his education and upbringing. When Frederick was sixteen, George I had begun to negotiate a marriage between his grandson and the Princess of Prussia. In a gesture of deliberate and insulting exclusion, the boy’s father was not consulted, nor even informed of the project. Back in England, the younger George watched the king load on to Frederick a host of honours and titles which had never been extended to him, and began to wonder whether it would be Frederick and not himself who would eventually inherit the electorate. None of these slights made him look fondly on his absent son. As the Duchess of Orléans astutely commented, it seemed to guarantee that the filial hatred that had defined one generation would be passed on to the next: ‘The young prince in Hanover may not meet with much love, for if the Prince of Wales has to bear his mother’s sins, perhaps he may have to answer for the grandfather’s.’31
In the years the young prince had been separated from his family, distance had not made his father’s heart grow fonder. Frederick grew up a remote cipher, a blank page on which George could project all the anger he felt against his own father, with whom the boy was forever damagingly identified. He did not know him, and felt nothing for him but the suspicion he instinctively reached for when faced with a rival of unknown and possibly damaging intent. He showed no desire at all to bring the young man back into his life. When he succeeded to the throne, it had been widely expected that Frederick would immediately be summoned to attend the coronation; but it took a parliamentary address to persuade the new king to do so.
After a long and hazardous journey through the winter landscapes of north Germany, the young prince finally arrived in England in December 1727. He was greeted with scant ceremony and a very cool welcome. When he reached London, there were no officials to greet him and no royal coach to transport him to St James’s Palace; he was obliged to hire a hackney coach and make his own way to his mother’s apartments.32 At first, he and his estranged family seem to have managed their new and somewhat uncomfortable proximity with some success. Frederick spent time with his mother, in private and in public, and played his part well at formal events such as the celebrations for the queen’s birthday. The king was satisfied too, but for rather different reasons. In his early encounters, he had found the inoffensive reality of his son far less intimidating than the threatening image he had conjured up in the boy’s absence. ‘He was quite pleased with him, as a new thing, felt him quite in his power.’ He was said to have told Robert Walpole, with a tellingly contemptuous air: ‘I think this is a son I need not be much afraid of.’33
Whilst he took pains to behave well under the scrutinising eyes of his parents, the twenty-one-year-old Frederick was keen to take advantage of the opportunities London offered, in characteristically Hanoverian style. He had left behind him in Germany an established mistress, Mme d’Elitz, who was said to have served both his father and his grandfather as lovers before him; now he turned his attentions further afield. He began affairs with an opera singer, with the daughter of an apothecary, and with a woman who played the hautboy. One night, venturing into St James’s Park in search of female company, he met a girl who robbed him of his wallet, twenty-two guineas and his royal seal; he was forced to advertise for the seal’s return, promising that no questions would be asked of whoever brought it back to him. In all these encounters he retained a combination of adolescent innocence and boastfulness, qualities he was not to lose until well beyond his first youth. ‘He was not over nice in his choice,’ commented Lord Egmont, who became a close friend, ‘and talks more of his feats in this way than he acts.’34 He was rowdy and boisterous at times; with a group of other rich young men, he would race through the night-time streets, breaking the windows of respectable householders. The eccentric Duchess of Buckingham was said to have fired grapeshot at him when her glass was broken. She placed an advertisement in the Daily Gazette, ‘to assure those who offered insults of this kind to her or her house that they should be received suitably to their conduct, and not to their rank’.35 For the rest of his life Frederick never lost his taste for somewhat crude practical jokes and pranks; a strategically placed bucket of water emptied on the head of an unsuspecting friend would always raise a laugh from him.
In later years, when their hostility to their son was firmly established, George and Caroline were keen to suggest that his behaviour had been wicked and untrustworthy from his very earliest days. Caroline once confided to Robert Walpole, with tears in her eyes, the opinion of Frederick’s old tutor in Hanover, whom she said had told her that her son had ‘the most vicious nature and false heart that ever man had, nor are his vices those of a gentleman but the mean, base tricks of a knavish footman’.36 But while Frederick was hardly a paragon of goodness, there is little to suggest that he committed sins any worse than those common to young men of his age and situation. Others who met him did not share his tutor’s apocalyptically bleak judgement. The intrepid traveller Lady Mary Worley Montagu had been introduced to him when he was a child in Hanover and found ‘something so very engaging and easy in his behaviour that he needs no advantage of rank to appear impressed’.37 A decade later, Lady Bristol, Lord Hervey’s mother, met the prince during his first weeks in London, and had been equally impressed. He was, she thought, ‘the most agreeable young man that it is possible to imagine, without being the least handsome, his person very little, but very well made and genteel, a liveliness in his eyes that is indescribable, and the most obliging address that can be conceived’.38
From the moment Hervey himself arrived back in England from a Grand Tour of Italy in 1729, he laid siege to the prince, doing all he could