The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians. Janice Hadlow
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of one of his laborious translations, ‘je vous souhaite au diable.’ (‘I wish you to hell.’65) As his later life was to demonstrate, George had a lively mind, and as an adult would find pleasure in a wide range of intellectual pursuits; but he found little to engage his imagination in what he was taught as a boy. He lacked the aptitude to master ancient languages, and was, in general, poor at rote learning. His fascination for practical and mechanical tasks was regarded as further evidence of his intellectual dullness. Only in music did he shine, playing the German flute with self-absorbed pleasure. All the siblings were accomplished amateur musicians, the girls singing and playing the harpsichord. The love of music was one of the few passions he shared with his father, and one which would outlast his sanity. In all other areas of educational endeavour, especially those that required feats of memory, George was generally regarded as a failure, his apathy and inattention exasperating his instructors.
Augusta knew, as did almost everyone else in the political world, that her eldest son was not making the progress expected of him: ‘His education had given her much pain. His book-learning she was no judge of, but she supposed it small or useless.’66 She thought her sons had not been well served by their instructors. Bishop Hayter may have been ‘a mighty learned man’, but he did not seem to Augusta ‘to be very proper to convey knowledge to children; he had not the clearness she thought necessary … his thoughts seemed to be too many for his words’.67 She told Dodington that she had repeatedly attempted to challenge Lord Harcourt directly about what was happening, but he simply avoided her. She finally cornered him one night at St James’s, ‘and got between the door and him, and took him by the coat’; even then the slippery earl escaped her grasp with a platitude. She disliked Harcourt, not only for his elusiveness, but because he ‘always spoke to the children of their father and his actions in so disrespectful a manner as to send them to her almost ready to cry’.68
Stone, in contrast, ‘always behaved very well to her and the children and though it would be treason if it were to be known, always spoke of the late prince with the greatest respect’.69 But even he seemed to have a curious idea of what was required of him. ‘She once desired him to inform the prince about the constitution,’ wrote Dodington, ‘but he declined it, to avoid giving offence to the Bishop of Norwich. That she had mentioned it again, and he had declined it, as not being his province.’ When Dodington asked Augusta what Stone’s province was, ‘she said she did not know, she supposed to go before him upstairs, to walk with him, sometimes seldomer to ride with him and then to dine with him’.70
George’s tutors had reason to be nervous when called upon to offer interpretations of the constitution to the heir to the throne. At the end of 1752, Harcourt and Hayter turned on their colleagues Stone and Scott and accused them of Jacobite sympathies, claiming they were covertly indoctrinating George with absolutist principles. They offered no real evidence for their charges, and could persuade neither the king nor his first minister, Newcastle, to believe them. Both promptly resigned, but the recriminations surrounding the affair dragged on for over a year, and were not resolved until Stone had appeared before the Privy Council and the matter had been raised in the House of Lords. It was easy for Dodington to declare with passion that ‘what I wanted most was that his Royal Highness should begin to learn the usages and knowledge of the world; be informed of the general frame and nature of government and the constitution, and the general course and manner of business’.71 But, as the cautious Stone had understood when he refused Augusta’s direct invitation to do just that, attempting the political education of princes was a far riskier undertaking than teaching them Latin.
With the departure of Harcourt and Hayter, the king was determined to make one last effort to turn his fourteen-year-old grandson into the kind of heir he thought he deserved. Prince George’s hesitant and self-conscious appearances at the formal Drawing Rooms did not impress his grandfather, who had forgotten many of the tender professions he had made at the time of Frederick’s death. Unless taken in hand, he feared the prince would be fit for nothing but to read the Bible to his mother. He approached James, Earl Waldegrave, who had been a Lord of the Bedchamber in his household, and asked him to become the prince’s new governor. Confident, experienced and expansive, Waldegrave was a very different character from the ineffectual Harcourt, and his sophisticated presence introduced an unfamiliar flavour into Augusta’s circle. At first, everyone seemed to welcome both it and him, and Waldegrave used this early advantage to effect something of a revolution in the prince’s education. He recognised immediately that the most important task was to engage George’s fitful attention, and sought to do this by offering him a vision of knowledge that went beyond the traditional forms of learning his pupil found so unengaging. ‘As a right system of education seemed impossible,’ Waldegrave recalled in his Memoirs, ‘the best which could be hoped for was to give him true notions of common things; to instruct him by conversation, rather than books; and sometimes, under the disguise of amusement, to entice him to the pursuit of more serious studies.’72
Waldegrave thought that George might work harder if he enjoyed himself more. Unlike any of his previous instructors, he was convinced that beneath the habitual indolence, the prince had potential. The present glaring shortcomings in his character were, Waldegrave believed, less a reflection of his true nature and more the inevitable product of the circumscribed life he led: ‘I found HRH uncommonly full of princely prejudices, contracted in the nursery and improved by the society of bedchamber women and pages of the back-stairs.’73 Wider experience of the world might cure many of the faults that others had found so intractable.
As time went on, however, it became clear to Waldegrave that the kind of change he advocated – a relaxation of the regime of seclusion, a more active participation in society – would never be countenanced by Augusta. For all her anxieties about her eldest son’s education, she would not sacrifice any of her own prejudices to see it improved. She did not expect her authority to be challenged by her son’s governor. She explained to Dodington that she considered the post – and Waldegrave, while he occupied it – ‘as a sort of pageant, a man of quality for show, etc.’.74 Faced with her blank resistance, Waldegrave’s new measures ran slowly but steadily into the ground. Although he was supported in his endeavours by ‘men of sense, men of learning and worthy good men’, Waldegrave eventually concluded he could do nothing to make a real difference: ‘The mother and the nursery always prevailed.’75
By the mid-1750s, George’s formal education had done little more than confirm in the self-conscious boy an even greater sense of his own shortcomings. Morbidly aware of his faults, especially those of ‘lethargy’ and ‘indolence’ with which he was so often charged, he seemed incapable of rousing himself to do anything about them. He had, thought Waldegrave, ‘a kind of unhappiness in his temper, which if it be not conquered before it has taken too deep a root, will be a source of frequent anxiety’. The prince’s apparent preference for solitude concerned Waldegrave, especially as he suspected the boy chose to be alone the better to contemplate his misery: ‘he becomes sullen and silent and retires to his closet, not to compose his mind by study, or contemplation, but merely to indulge the melancholy enjoyment of his own ill humour’.76 He had no friends except his brother Edward, to whom he was very close. To everyone else, he revealed nothing of himself. The retired life he and his mother shared had certainly not forged a strong emotional bond between them. When Dodington asked her ‘what she took the real disposition of the prince to be’, Augusta replied that Dodington ‘knew him almost as well as she did’.77
As he drifted irrevocably towards a destiny that terrified him, George retreated further and further into a private world of remote introspection. Transfixed with apprehension