The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians. Janice Hadlow
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of a father who, for all his criticism of his son’s shortcomings and lack of insight into their causes, nevertheless saw the protection of the boy’s long-term interests as his most important responsibility. But at the beginning of March 1751, the prince caught a cold. A week later, on the 13th, Dodington noted in his diary that ‘the prince did not appear, having a return of pain in his side’.25 He was probably suffering from pneumonia. For a few days, he seemed to improve. Augusta, who was five months pregnant, informed Egmont that Frederick ‘was getting much better, and only wanted time to recover his strength’. She added that ‘he was always frightened for himself when he was the least out of order, but that she had laughed him out of it, and would never humour him in these fancies’. She hoped her attempts to raise his spirits had worked as Frederick now declared that ‘he should not die in this bout, but for the future, would take more care of himself’.26
Dodington called at Leicester House on the 20th, and he too was reassured on hearing that Frederick ‘was much better and had slept eight hours the night before’. Everyone’s optimism was unfounded. Later that night, at a quarter to ten, Frederick died. The end came with shocking swiftness. Dodington reported that ‘until half an hour before he was very cheerful, asked to see some of his friends, ate some bread and butter and drank coffee’.27 Walpole heard a similar story. The prince seemed to be over the worst and beginning to improve when he was suddenly overcome with a fit of coughing. At first, Dr Wilmot, who attended him, thought this was a good sign, telling him hopefully: ‘Sir, you have brought up all the phlegm; I hope this will be over in a quarter of an hour, and that your highness will have a good night.’ But Hawkins, the second doctor, was less optimistic, declaring ominously: ‘Here is something I don’t like.’ The cough became increasingly violent. Frederick, panicking, declared that he was dying. His German valet, who held him in his arms, ‘felt him shiver and cried, “Good God! The prince is going.” The princess, who was at the foot of the bed, snatched up a candle, but before she got to him, he was dead.’28 He was forty-four years old.
The king received the news of Frederick’s death as he sat playing cards. George had not remarried; he had kept his promise to his dying queen, taking a mistress rather than a wife. He had sent for Mme de Wallmoden, who divorced her husband and in 1740 was given the title of the Countess of Yarmouth. It was to her that the king turned first. ‘He went down to Lady Yarmouth looking extremely pale and shocked, and only said, “Il est mort!”’29 Once the horror of the moment had passed, the king, who was too self-absorbed to be a hypocrite, did not pretend to be grieved. He had hated his son for years, and his sudden and unexpected death provoked no remorse for his behaviour. As 1751 drew to a close, he commented with characteristic candour: ‘This has been a fatal year to my family. I have lost my eldest son, but I was glad of it.’30 It was his final comment on a relationship which had begun in suspicion, matured into vicious acrimony and ended with estrangement. He felt neither guilt nor regret for what had happened, and never referred to Frederick again.
The prince’s funeral was the final reflection of his father’s disdain. It was, thought Dodington, a shameful affair, ‘which sunk me so low that for the first hour, I was incapable of making any observation’. No food was provided for those of his household who stood loyally by Frederick’s body as he lay in state; they ‘were forced to bespeak a great cold dinner from a common tavern in the neighbourhood’. No arrangements had been made to shelter mourners from the rain as they walked from the House of Lords to Westminster Abbey. The funeral service itself ‘was performed without anthem or organ’ and neither the king nor Frederick’s brother the Duke of Cumberland attended.31 Even in the performance of his last duty to his son, George II could find no generosity of spirit.
He appeared in a better light on his first visit to Frederick’s bereaved wife and children, when he was clearly moved by their stricken condition. ‘A chair of state was provided for him,’ reported Walpole, ‘but he refused it; and sat by the princess on the couch, embraced and wept with her. He would not suffer Lady Augusta to kiss his hand, but embraced her, and gave it to her brothers, and told them, “They must be brave boys, obedient to their mother, and deserve the fortune to which they were born.”’32 It was a rare display of emotional sympathy from the king; but as the family sat huddled in their misery, they all knew that significant decisions must now be made about their future.
The most obvious solution would have been for the king to take over the upbringing and education of the young prince, bringing the boy to live with him at St James’s. At the same time, it might have been expected that the Duke of Cumberland would be made regent. As the king’s eldest surviving son, he would have been well placed to act for his father during his frequent absences in Hanover, and to be appointed guardian to the young George if the king had died while he was still a minor. In the event, none of these arrangements ever happened. They had been rendered politically impossible by the momentous events of 1745/46, the consequences of which were to have a profound effect on the lives of George, Augusta and indeed all of Frederick’s remaining family.
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William, Duke of Cumberland, was loved by his parents with an intensity matched only by their disdain for his brother Frederick. Mirroring the actions of George I, it was rumoured that George II had once consulted the Lord Chancellor to discover if it would be constitutionally possible to disinherit his eldest son in favour of William. The disappointing answer he was said to have received did nothing to weaken the affection he felt for Cumberland, who shared many of his interests, particularly his passion for the army. Cumberland had been given all the military experience that Frederick persuaded himself he craved and had been denied. He was a capable soldier and at the age of only twenty-three was appointed captain general. ‘Poor boy!’ commented Walpole, ‘he is most Brunswickly happy with all his drums and trumpets.’33 When Charles Edward Stuart raised his standard in Scotland in 1745, Cumberland was the obvious candidate to put down a rebellion aimed directly at the survival of the Hanoverian dynasty. His reputation would never recover from the victory he won.
The possibility of regime change seemed a very real one as Bonnie Prince Charlie’s troops swept first through Scotland and then through northern England in the winter of 1745. As Carlisle, Lancaster and Preston fell, panic engulfed London. Even Horace Walpole was shaken out of his usual pose of ironic detachment, putting all his trust in the duke’s ‘lion’s courage, vast vigilance … and great military genius’.34 After Charles Stuart made the unexpected decision to turn back at Derby, Cumberland chased his army back to Scotland, where the two forces met on 16 April 1746 at Culloden. The duke’s victory over the exhausted Jacobites was total, and the aftermath of the battle exceptionally brutal, as Cumberland’s soldiers bayoneted wounded survivors. This was only a prelude to an extensive campaign of terror, intended by Cumberland to eradicate all possibility of another uprising. ‘Do not imagine,’ the duke wrote, ‘that threatening military execution and other things are pleasing to do, but nothing will go down without it. Mild measures will not do.’35 He was not alone in thinking extreme actions were called for. ‘I make no difficulty of declaring my opinion,’ declared Lord Chesterfield, ‘that the commander-in-chief should be ordered to give no quarter but to pursue the rebels wherever he finds ’em.’36 Cumberland’s troops pursued the defeated Scots into the glens and remote settlements of the Highlands, burning and murdering as they went, killing not just men of fighting age, but women, children, and even the cattle that supported them.
At first, Cumberland was fêted for the completeness of his victory. Handel composed See, the Conquering Hero Comes to mark his triumph; the duke was mobbed in the street, celebrated as the defender of constitutional monarchy. But as accounts began to arrive in London describing the methods by which he had