The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians. Janice Hadlow
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little she-mouse’ she had seen at St James’s was indeed the princess’s child. Had it been ‘a brave, jolly boy I should not have been cured of my suspicions’. But her relief that there had been ‘no chairman’s brat’ wished on them did nothing to make the birth an event that brought the family together.
Frederick named his new daughter Augusta, pointedly failing to pay his mother the compliment of naming the first-born girl in her honour. But even without the ill feeling surrounding her arrival, there would have been no reconciliation between the generations. Some time before her birth, Frederick had decided to raise again the long-disputed issue of his allowance in Parliament, and against all expectations, he had been successful in making the subject a Commons motion. His father’s response to the prospect of having his financial affairs publicly (and no doubt critically) discussed was predictably apoplectic. Caroline’s reaction was more surprising. It had been plain for some time that her attitude to Frederick had hardened considerably. When Hervey asked her if her views on her son had indeed changed over the last year, Caroline agreed most vehemently that they had, telling him that she now believed ‘my dear firstborn is the greatest ass and the greatest liar and the greatest canaille and the greatest beast in the world, and I most heartily wish he was out of it’.67
Now Caroline exploded, releasing a pent-up torrent of reproach and resentment. ‘Her invectives against her son were of the incessant and of the strongest kind,’ wrote Hervey, who witnessed them at first hand. As the parliamentary vote drew nearer, and the prospect of the prince’s victory looked more likely, the queen’s rage grew increasingly intemperate. She and her unmarried daughter, Caroline, worked themselves up into ever more passionate denunciations of Frederick. ‘They neither of them made much ceremony of wishing a hundred times a day that the prince might drop down dead of an apoplexy, the queen cursing the hour of his birth, and the princess declaring she grudged him every hour he continued to breathe.’ The young Caroline, who was said to nurture a deep and unrequited passion for Lord Hervey, had quickly absorbed her parents’ hostility towards her eldest brother; she claimed always to have detested him, provoked by his duplicity, his selfishness and his demeaning and destructive pursuit of money. She told Hervey ‘that he was a nauseous beast (those were her words) who cared for nobody but his nauseous self’, adding that Hervey was a fool for ever having loved him. When the prince refused the political mediations of Robert Walpole, saying he was determined to pursue his claim, the queen declared her son was ‘the lowest, stinking coward in the world … I know if I was asleep, or if he could come behind me, he is capable of shooting me through the head, or stabbing me in the back’.68
On the day of the vote, even the usually unshockable Hervey was taken aback by the venom of the queen’s attack. As Frederick walked across a courtyard, Caroline watched him. ‘Reddening with rage, she said, “Look, there he goes – that wretch! – that villain! – I wish the ground would open this moment and sink that monster to the lowest reaches of hell.”’ Seeing Hervey’s startled face she added: ‘You stare at me; but I assure you that if my wishes and prayers had any effects; and the maledictions of a mother signified anything, his days would not be very happy or very long.’69 In the end, the prince lost the motion by the narrow margin of thirty votes; but it was too late now for anything to mend the gulf that divided him from the rest of his family.
There was a tragic echo of the past in what happened next. The king decided Frederick’s behaviour had been so provocative that he was to be expelled from the precincts of all the royal palaces. He instructed Hervey, in his role as Vice Chamberlain, to make the necessary arrangements. Hervey based his actions on the instructions that had been drawn up to manage the ejection of George and Caroline from the same palaces almost twenty years before. There was, however, one area in which the king did not intend to follow the harsh example of his father. ‘Sir Robert Walpole told Lord Hervey that the resolution was to leave the child with the princess, and not to take it (as the late king had taken the king’s children upon the quarrel in the last reign) lest any accident might happen to this little royal animal.’70 Hervey went about his task with gusto, and admitted that he ‘was not a little pleased with a commission that put it in his power to make use of the king’s power and authority to gratify and express his resentment against the prince’.71 But even he was surprised when the king expressly refused to allow Frederick and Augusta any ‘chests or other such things’ from the royal apartments. When Hervey said that surely he did not mean them to carry away their clothes in linen baskets, George retorted: ‘Why not? A basket is good enough for them.’72
On the day of the prince’s departure, Hervey joined the royal family as they sat round the breakfast table contemplating what was about to happen. ‘I am weary of the puppy’s name,’ declared the king. ‘I wish I was never to hear it again, but at least I shall not be plagued any more with seeing his nasty face.’ He told Caroline that he could forgive everything he had done to him, but could never forget the injury done to her. ‘I never loved the puppy well enough to have him ungrateful to me but to you he is a monster and the greatest villain ever born.’ Princess Caroline, elaborating on what was a familiarly obsessive theme, hoped her brother would burst so that they could mourn ‘with smiling faces and crepe and hoods for him’. The queen was adamant that she was unmoved by her son’s impending exile: ‘God knows in my heart, I feel no more for him than if he was no relation, and if I was to see him in hell, I should feel no more for him than I should for any rogue that was there.’ And yet, she added, ‘once I would have given up all my other children for him. I was fond of that monster, I looked on him as if he had been the happiness of my life, and now I wish that he had never been born … I hope in God I shall never see the monster’s face again.’73 She never did.
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‘There was a strange affectation of incapacity of being sick that ran through the royal family,’ Hervey observed, ‘which they carried so far that no one of them was more willing to own any other of the family being ill than to acknowledge themselves to be.’ Hervey had seen the king ‘get out of his bed choking and with a sore throat and in a high fever, only to dress and have a levee’. He expected Caroline to do the same. ‘With all his fondness for the queen, he used to make her in the like circumstances commit the like extravagances.’74
Throughout the summer of 1737, Hervey noticed that Caroline was often unwell. On 9 November, whilst inspecting her newly completed library at St James’s Palace, she was taken seriously ill. ‘She called her complaint the colic, her stomach and bowels giving her great pain. She came home, took Daffy’s elixir, but … was in such pain and so uneasy with frequent retchings to vomit, that she went to bed.’ Like the dutiful warhorse she was, she forced herself to attend that day’s formal Drawing Room, but she admitted to Lord Hervey that she was not ‘able to entertain people’ and prepared to take her leave. Before she could do so, the king reminded her that she had not spoken to the Duchess of Norfolk. The queen ‘made her excuses’ to the duchess, ‘who was the last person she ever spoke to in public’, then retired to her room.75
Hervey, of course, went with her. He was, as he proudly recalled, ‘never out of the queen’s apartment for above four or five hours at most during her whole illness’. He loved Caroline as much as he loved anyone, except Ste; but he did not allow his affection to get in the way of his merciless reporter’s eye. The candid details of her suffering that fill his account of the queen’s long and painful death demonstrate how hard it was to die with dignity in the eighteenth century, and how little medicine could do, either to cure or to alleviate distress. It also illustrates very poignantly the strength of the complicated ties that had bound Caroline to her husband for so long, and the true depth of his feelings for her. He never showed her so clearly that he loved her as when she was dying; but even then, his passion was tempered by anger – an impotent frustration in the face of her weakness and suffering that was, in its own warped