The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians. Janice Hadlow
Читать онлайн книгу.
increase daily,’ Munchausen told his brother, ‘and he has today calculated how long it will take for this letter to reach mon cher frère and for him to send an answer.’13
When the much-awaited dispatch arrived, it was a great disappointment. It had little positive to say about Caroline’s character, asserting that her own mother had described her ‘as stubborn and ill-tempered to the greatest degree’. The same report was, however, far more encouraging about the other candidate, ‘giving a very amiable character of the Princess of Strelitz’. George was encouraged, insisting that he did not share Munchausen’s anxieties about the limitations of her upbringing. It was her character that mattered to him, not her background. He told Bute that if she was as sensible as was reported, ‘a little of England’s air will soon give her the deportment necessary for a British queen’.14
The relaxed jocularity of George’s tone defined the attitude with which he set about the prosecution of what he called ‘my business’. Indeed, as the search for a spouse progressed, there is a definite sense in his correspondence that he was rather enjoying it. For such a timid and inexperienced man, the prospect of making an unhindered choice from a parade of marriageable young women, none of whom was likely to reject him, was clearly an attractive one. In the role of prospective husband, he found a new confidence, secure in his worth and in the power of his position. He had no difficulty in outlining the qualities necessary to satisfy him, nor in rejecting candidates who failed to live up to his very exacting requirements. As a spouse, he intended to be an altogether more assertive character than he had been as a son. In finding the partner he thought he deserved, he showed himself capable of making decisions with none of the anxiety or lethargy that had paralysed his actions in earlier life. This was an enterprise in which George did not intend to fail.
In the spring, the king’s search began to move towards a conclusion. In May, Caroline of Darmstadt was finally and decisively eliminated from his thinking, as disturbing new facts emerged about her family. The apparent piety of her father and his court had at first seemed attractive to George, who hoped his wife would share his own strong Christian convictions. But fresh information put a far darker complexion on the family’s spiritual pursuits. The king was horrified to learn that the Prince of Darmstadt had been drawn into the orbit of a group of religious visionaries who had driven him to the edge of reason. George had been told that these ‘visionnaires’ had ‘got about the princess’s father, have persuaded him to quit his family in great measure, lest the hereditary princess should prevent their strange schemes; they have brought the prince very near the borders of madness, and draw his money to that degree from him, that his children are often in want of necessaries such as stockings, etc.’. He had also discovered that ‘this princess was talked of last year’ for another prince, who had ‘refused her on account of her strange father and grandfather’.15 Was George prepared to take a risk another man had already declined?
He brooded for a fortnight, then on 20 May he wrote to Bute with his final decision: ‘The family of the Princess of Darmstadt has given me such melancholy thoughts of what may perhaps be in the blood.’ The possibility of madness was not an inheritance any ruler wanted to import into his bloodline, and put an end to the candidacy of Caroline of Darmstadt. As a result, the seventeen-year-old Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who had begun as a complete outsider – little more than a chance addition to Munchausen’s list – ended up bearing away the crown. ‘I trouble my Dearest Friend with the enclosed account of the Princess of Strelitz,’ wrote George. ‘I own it is not in every particular as I could wish, but yet I am resolved to fix here.’16
*
In the eighteenth century, Mecklenburg-Strelitz was considered very much a rural backwater. The duchy was then about the size of Sussex, and in the hierarchy of German princely states was in the second or perhaps even third division. Such was its reputation for mud and provinciality that it was sometimes referred to by heavy-handed contemporary jokers as ‘Mecklenburg-Strawlitter’. In 1736, when he was still Crown Prince of Prussia, Frederick the Great paid a surprise call on the Mecklenburg dukes, arriving unannounced at the family castle of Mirow. There was little evidence of the Prussian military discipline that reigned in Berlin. He wrote to his father that, ‘Coming on to the drawbridge, I perceived an old stocking-knitter disguised as a grenadier, with his cap, cartridge and musket laid aside so that they might not hinder his knitting.’ Gaining access to the castle proved a task in itself. ‘After knocking almost half an hour to no purpose, there peered out at last an exceedingly old woman. She was so terrified that she slammed the door in our faces.’ When Frederick finally met someone with enough self-possession to take him to the ducal family, he was promptly invited to dinner.
At the duke’s table, Frederick was surprised to see some of the ladies darning stockings during the meal.17 He was even more shocked to discover that sewing was not an activity confined to the female members of the family. The duke himself was a passionate devotee of needlework, said to embroider his own dressing gowns in his spare time, having achieved considerable skill in the art through years of practice. This was an eccentric pursuit for an aristocratic man (Frederick clearly thought it evidence of mild derangement) but neither the duke nor his relatives seemed embarrassed by it. On the contrary, over supper, madness formed the principal subject of discussion. ‘At table, there was talk of nothing but of all the German princes who are not right in their wits – as Mirow himself is reputed to be. There was Weimar, Gotha, Waldeck, Hoym and the whole lot brought on the carpet; and after our good host had got considerably drunk, he lovingly promised me that he and his whole family will come to visit me.’18 It was fortunate for George III’s future wife that none of these rumours reached the ears of the king, finely attuned as they were to any hint of inherited mental instability.
This was the world into which Princess Sophia Charlotte was born in 1744. The embroidering duke was her grandfather. Life was quiet for the Mecklenburg family in their compact palace, so small that Frederick had mistaken it for the parsonage. Charlotte had four brothers and an elder sister, Christiane (who at twenty-five was considered too old to be a wife for the twenty-two-year-old George III). Her father’s death, in 1752, when she was only eight, must have disturbed the placid passing of the days, but little else seems to have impacted on an early life distinguished by its lack of event. ‘The princess lived in the greatest retirement,’ one contemporary observer noted. ‘She dressed only in a robe de chambre, except on Sundays, on which day she put on her best gown and after service, which was very long, took an airing in a coach and six, attended by guards. She was not yet allowed to dine in public.’19 Charlotte’s mornings were devoted to the reigning family passion, sewing, in one of its many ornamental forms; she was inducted into the discipline of the needle very early, and never lost her taste for it when she was both older and grander. ‘Queen Charlotte, as we know, always had her piece of work in hand,’ recalled one of her more unctuous biographers. What had been in her grandfather adduced as possible evidence of insanity was regarded in Charlotte as an admirable demonstration of female industry. Her sewing skills, however, did not displace more academically minded pursuits. Charlotte’s mother took the education of her daughters seriously, and by the time Charlotte was seven she was already in the schoolroom. The sisters were instructed by Mme de Grabow, a poet whose local fame had earned her the title of ‘the German Sappho’.20 Besides teaching poetic composition and the rudiments of French – then considered an essential part of a polite education – Mme de Grabow also gave lessons in Latin. This was an unusual subject for girls: classical learning was generally considered the exclusive preserve of masculine study. Charlotte and Christiane were also taught theology by a Dr Gentzner, but the study of religion seems to have been secondary to his real passion, which was natural history. He was an accomplished botanist who awakened a similar enthusiasm in Charlotte. From her youth, she was a keen collector of plant specimens, preserving those she found most interesting in voluminous sketch books.
By