The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians. Janice Hadlow
Читать онлайн книгу.
incendiary combination of intentions was simply nonsense, and often directly contradicted what Walpole had himself written in earlier days. In truth, there was no plot; Augusta was not ‘ardently fond of power’; neither she nor Bute was scheming to overturn the constitution; and it is extremely unlikely that they were lovers. But if the central proposition of Walpole’s argument was a fiction, that did not mean that everything he wrote was pure invention. The Memoirs exerted such a powerful appeal because Walpole drew on existing rumours that were very widely believed at the time; and because, sometimes, beneath Walpole’s wilder assertions there lay buried a tiny kernel of truth.
Thus, Walpole seemed on sure ground when describing the isolation in which George had been brought up, and the extraordinary precautions taken to keep him away from wider intercourse with the world. He was correct in his assertion that much of this policy had been driven by Augusta. He was wrong about her motives – the extreme retirement she imposed on her son was a protective cordon sanitaire, not a covert means of dominating him – but the prince’s isolation was observable to everyone in the political world, and of as much concern to Augusta’s few allies as it was to her enemies. Walpole was also right to assert that within the secluded walls of Kew and Leicester House, the future shape of George’s kingship was indeed the subject of intense discussion; but these reflections were directed towards an outcome very different from Walpole’s apocalyptic image of treasonous constitutional conspiracy. Finally, he was accurate in his suspicion that there was a passionate relationship at the heart of the prince’s household. But it was not, in fact, the one he went on to describe with such relish.
The stories about Bute and Augusta had been in circulation long before Walpole’s Memoirs appeared. Waldegrave, who never forgot or forgave the way he was humiliatingly ejected from his post around the prince, seems to have been the origin of many of them. ‘No one of the most inflammable vengeance, or the coolest resentment could harbour more bitter hatred than he did for the king’s mother and favourite,’ wrote Walpole with a hint of appalled admiration.85 For the rest of her life, as a result of these rumours, Augusta was mercilessly pilloried as a brazen adulteress; in newspapers, pamphlets, and above all in satirical caricatures, she was depicted as Bute’s mistress. One print showed her as a half-naked tightrope walker, skirt hitched up to her thighs, suggestively penetrated by a pole with a boot (a play on Bute’s name) attached to it. It was hardly surprising that Prince George was horrified ‘by the cruel manner’ in which his mother was treated, ‘which I will not forget or forgive till the day of my death’.86
However, for all the salacious speculation surrounding their relationship, it seems hard to believe that Bute and Augusta ever had an affair. Although Augusta clearly admired the attractive earl, writing to him with an enthusiasm and warmth that few of her other letters betray, to embark on anything more than friendship would have been quite alien to her character. She was too cautious, too conscious of her standing in the world, too controlled and reserved to have taken the extraordinary risk such a relationship would have entailed. But, in the complex interplay of the political and the personal that transformed the tone of Augusta’s family in the latter years of the 1750s, there was one person who surrendered himself entirely to an unexpected and completely overpowering affection. The diffident young Prince George had finally found someone to love.
Bute had been acting as George’s informal tutor for less than a year before it was plain that he had achieved what no one had been able to do before: win the trust and affection of the withdrawn prince. Augusta was delighted. ‘I cannot express the joy I feel to see he has gained the confidence and friendship of my son,’ she wrote in the summer of 1756, with uncharacteristically transparent pleasure.87 The prince himself was equally fervent, writing almost ecstatically to Bute that ‘I know few things I ought to be more thankful to the Great Power above, than for having pleased Him to send you and help me in these difficult times.’88
This was the first of many letters the prince wrote to Bute over nearly a decade; its tone of incredulous gratitude, its sense of sheer good fortune at the very fact of Bute’s presence, was one that would be replicated constantly over the years. Their correspondence illuminates the painful intensity of George’s feelings for the earl, from his speedy capitulation to the onslaught of Bute’s persuasive charm, to the submissive devotion that characterised the prince’s later relationship with this charismatic, demanding and sometimes mercurial figure. George’s letters also offer a remarkably candid picture of his state of mind as a young man. He opened his heart to Bute in a way he had done to no one before, and would never do again after he and the earl had parted. Many of his letters make uncomfortable reading; they reveal an isolated and deeply unhappy character, consumed by a sense of his own inadequacies, and desperate to find someone who would lead him out of the fog of despair into which he was sinking. George knew he was drifting, fearful and rudderless, towards a future which approached with a horrible inevitability. He was very quickly convinced that Bute was the only person who could deliver him from the state of paralysed inertia in which he had existed since his father’s death. ‘I hope, my dear Lord,’ he wrote pleadingly, ‘you will conduct me through this difficult road and bring me to the goal. I will exactly follow your advice, without which I will inevitably sink.’89
He knew he needed someone to supply the determination and resilience in which he suspected he was so shamefully deficient. He was delighted – and profoundly relieved – to find a mentor to whom he could surrender himself absolutely, to whose better judgement he could happily submit. Without such a guide, he believed his prospects looked bleak indeed. ‘If I should mount the throne without the assistance of a friend, I should be in the most dreadful of situations,’ he assured the earl in 1758.90
Bute also offered George genuine warmth and affection. His enthusiastic declarations of regard, his energetic and apparently disinterested commitment to his wellbeing, exploded into the prince’s arid, sentimental life. George’s devotion to Bute soon became the most important relationship in his life. ‘I shall never change in that, nor will I bear to be the least deprived of your company,’ he insisted vehemently.91 The growing intensity of the prince’s feelings was reflected not just in the content of his letters to Bute, but also in the way he addressed him. At first, he was ‘my dear Lord’, a term of conventional courtly politeness; soon this warmed into ‘my dear Friend’; but very quickly, the strength of the prince’s feelings were made even plainer. All obstacles, he wrote to the earl with unembarrassed devotion, could and would be overcome, ‘whilst my Dearest is near me’.92 Bute was not just mentor and role model to the prince; he was also the first person to unearth George’s hitherto deeply buried but strong emotions.
Bute broke through the prince’s habitual reserve partly by what he did, and partly by who he was. He was a compellingly attractive figure to a fatherless, faltering boy: handsome, assured and experienced, he was everything George knew he was not. Augusta, who was suspicious of almost everyone, admired and respected Bute, and the earl was unequivocal in his praise of George’s dead father, declaring that he had gloried in being known as Frederick’s friend. Unlike many of his predecessors, Bute actually seemed to like the prince, and he approached the prospect of training him for kingship with a galvanising enthusiasm. ‘You have condescended to take me into your friendship,’ he told the prince, ‘don’t think it arrogance if I say I will deserve it.’93 Bute’s breezy optimism about the task before him was in stark contrast to the dour resignation of previous instructors. ‘Use will make everything easy,’ he confidently assured his faltering charge.94
Leaving Latin behind at last, George and Bute embarked on a course of more contemporary study. Bute encouraged the prince to investigate finance and economics, and together they read a series of lectures by the jurist William Blackstone that was to form the basis of his magisterial work on the origins of English common law. Bute even