The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians. Janice Hadlow
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Frederick’s tastes shaped the leisure hours of his children, he was just as active in managing their education. He himself drew up a scholastic timetable, ‘The Hours of the Two Eldest Princes’, which laid out when and what George and Edward were to be taught, and appointed the Reverend Francis Ayscough as their tutor. Ayscough, a doctor of divinity, was not very inspiring, but the boys made steady progress under his instruction, and by the time he was eight, George could speak and write English and German. Frederick had the two boys painted with their tutor, who looms above them, formal in black clerical dress. Grey classical pillars rise behind them. The overwhelming impression is of chilly dourness; this was not, it seems, an atmosphere in which learning was likely to deliver either pleasure or excitement.
Then, in 1749 – the same year that the carefully coached eleven-year-old George delivered his eulogy on English liberty – Frederick replaced Ayscough with a far abler man. George Lewis Scott was a barrister and an extremely accomplished mathematician, and his arrival signified the prince’s intention to accelerate his sons’ academic progress. Their working day was long – they were required to translate a passage from Caesar’s Commentaries before breakfast – and the curriculum broad, including geometry, arithmetic, dancing and French. Greek was introduced for the first time, and after dinner, the boys were to read ‘useful and entertaining books, such as Addison’s works, and particularly his political papers’.17
The more demanding timetable reflected a new sense of urgency that had entered Frederick’s thinking, particularly in relation to his eldest son. At the beginning of 1749, he had composed a paper intended for the guidance of his heir. Its intentions were clearly set out in the title the prince gave it: ‘Instructions for my son George, drawn by myself, for his good, and that of my family, for that of his people, according to the ideas of my grandfather and best friend, George I.’ It was addressed directly and personally to his son. If Frederick were to die before he could himself elaborate on its contents to the boy, it was to be held by Augusta, ‘who will read it to you from time to time, and will give it to you when you come of age to get the crown’. ‘My design,’ Frederick promised, ‘is not to leave you a sermon as is undoubtedly done by persons of my rank. ’Tis not out of vanity I write this; it is out of love to you, and to the public. It is for your good and for that of the people you are to govern, that I leave this to you.’18 What followed was a detailed blueprint for good government, as seen through Frederick’s eyes. It sought to impress on George the nature of his future duties as king, head of his family, and father of the people. It stressed the importance of identifying himself with the country he would one day rule (‘Convince the Nation that you are not only an Englishman born and bred, but that you are also this by inclination’).19 It urged him to decrease the national debt, and to separate the electorate of Hanover from Great Britain to minimise involvement in European wars.20 Such policies would reduce expenditure, making the king more solvent, less dependent on forging alliances with political parties, and free to pursue policies of his own devising. These, Frederick asserted, would be more likely to reflect the true national interest than the existing system, reliant as it was on the management of a host of often conflicting and selfish sectional interests. When presented to his son later as part of a wider constitutional framework, these were ideas that would prove very compelling to the young George; but what prompted his father to articulate them at that time, in a form that suggested so powerfully a kind of political last will and testament?
Although Frederick was only forty-two when he wrote the document, the 1740s had been a punishing decade for him and his followers. They had enjoyed some successes, most notably, and most pleasing from the perspective of Leicester House, the fall of George II’s favoured minister Robert Walpole in 1742. The prince did not entirely engineer Walpole’s defeat, but when begged by the king to save him, he refused to help the stricken politician. It had proved hard to capitalise on such triumphs. George II had denied Frederick a role in the army, both in the Continental wars of the mid-1740s and during the Jacobite rising of 1745. On both occasions he was forced to watch, humiliated, from the sidelines as his father and his younger brother William, Duke of Cumberland, rode to victory respectively at Dettingen and Culloden. Then, in 1747, Frederick’s followers were roundly defeated at the general election.
By the end of the decade, he was forced to come to terms with the ambivalence of his position. As Prince of Wales he was master of an alternative court, with over two hundred household posts at his disposal and the promise of preferment once he, eventually, came to power; but although he might be able to undermine or even destroy administrations, he could never be part of them himself. He could break, but he could not build; or at least, not until the king died. Dodington, now acting as one of the prince’s advisers, counselled waiting; but as he approached middle age, Fredrick’s appetite for the struggle seems, surely and steadily, to have ebbed away. Perhaps he suspected that the chances of achieving his ambitions were always going to be limited by the circumstances of his birth. He knew that, unlike his son, he could never be ‘an Englishman born and bred’, and gradually, he began to transfer his hopes for the fulfilment of his long-term goals beyond the possibilities offered by his own reign, concentrating instead on that of his heir. Writing his letter of ‘Instructions’ marked the beginning of that process. It was a sign of both what he hoped his son might one day achieve, and what he had gradually abandoned for himself. And if it marked the level of his ambitions for George, it was also perhaps a measure of his concern. He spelt out his blueprint for the future with such clarity perhaps because he had begun to doubt whether, without such precise guidance, the boy would ever be capable of achieving it. For, as he grew older, George did not seem to anyone – and possibly not even to his father – quite the stuff of which successful kings were made.
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Though never a voluble child, with age George became steadily shyer, more awkward and withdrawn. He was ‘silent, modest and easily abashed’, said Louisa Stuart, whose father, the Earl of Bute, was one of Frederick’s intimate circle. She maintained that George’s parents, frustrated by his reticence, much preferred his brother Edward. ‘He was decidedly their favourite, and their preference of him to his elder brother openly avowed.’21 Edward was everything his older brother was not: confident, cheerful, talkative and spirited. Horace Walpole, who knew Edward well in later life, described him tellingly as ‘a sayer of things’. His natural confidence, thought Louisa Stuart, ‘was hourly strengthened by encouragement, which enabled him to join in or interrupt conversation and always say something which the obsequious hearers were ready to applaud’. It was very different for his diffident elder brother. ‘If he ever faltered out an opinion, it was passed by unnoticed; sometimes it was knocked down at once with – “Do hold your tongue, George, don’t talk like a fool.”’22
Frederick, it seemed, for all his genuine affection for his children, was still Hanoverian enough to prefer the spare to the heir. He was never deliberately harsh to his mute and anxious eldest son; but he was often exasperated by his unresponsiveness, and failed to understand its causes. He insisted to the boy that his ‘great fault’ was ‘that nonchalance you have of not caring enough to please’.23 He did not see that there was not a scrap of insouciance in George’s make-up, and that his son’s diffidence arose not from nonchalance but from a paralysing lack of confidence in his ability to fulfil his destiny. For Louisa Stuart, Frederick was less to blame than his wife. Beneath the compliant surface she presented to the world, Augusta nurtured a severe and unflinching personality, with a strong tendency to judge others harshly. It was Augusta, she said, who was ‘too impressed by vivacity and confidence’ and who failed to see that ‘diffidence was often the product of a truly thoughtful understanding’. She did not recognise the true strengths of her stolid elder son, ‘whose real good sense, innate rectitude, unspeakably kind heart, and genuine manliness of spirit were overlooked in his youth, and indeed, not appreciated till a much later time’.24
Had Frederick lived, the warmth of the genuine affection