The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians. Janice Hadlow
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The atmosphere of apprehension and excitement in London had reached fever pitch well before Charlotte had even set out from Mecklenburg. The announcement of the royal wedding had been followed by news of a great victory in India, where the British and French were contesting for supremacy in the subcontinent. The capture of Pondicherry, the principal French base in the south, marked a decisive upturn in British fortunes, and had inflamed the national mood of manic self-congratulation even further. Even the usually detached Walpole was caught up in the celebratory atmosphere. ‘I don’t know where I am,’ he confessed. ‘It is all royal marriages, coronations and victories; they come tumbling so over one another from distant parts of the globe that it looks just like the handiwork of a lady romance writer to whom it costs nothing but a little false geography to make the Great Mogul fall in love with a Princess of Mecklenburg and defeat two marshals of France as he rides post on an elephant to his nuptials.’39
The man at the centre of the mounting excitement sought to sublimate his eager impatience into practical organisation. George began to assemble the Hanoverian family jewels so they could be worn by his new wife, paying his uncle the Duke of Cumberland £50,000 to buy out Cumberland’s share of his inheritance. The result was a collection of extraordinary richness. At the end of July, the Duchess of Northumberland was granted a discreet opportunity to examine it by Lady Bute, who had temporary custody of it, presumably in her role as the overseer of Charlotte’s trousseau. The duchess, a wealthy woman well supplied with jewels of her own, was astonished by what she saw. ‘There are an amazing number of pearls of a most beautiful colour and prodigious size. There are diamonds for the facings and robings of her gown, set in sprigs of flowers; her earrings are three drops, the diamonds of an immense size and fine water. The necklace consists of large brilliants set around … The middle drop of the earring costs £12,000.’40
George also appointed a household for his wife-to-be, a substantial establishment that included six Ladies of the Bedchamber, six Maids of Honour and six lower-ranking waiting women. The future queen was also provided with chamberlains, pages, gentleman ushers, surgeons, apothecaries, ‘an operator for teeth’ and two ‘necessary women’. As well as a Master of the Horse, other staff included a treasurer, law officers and her own band of German musicians. At the top of this structure, he placed two intimidating women: the Duchess of Ancaster was to be Mistress of the Robes, the Duchess of Hamilton, Lady of the Bedchamber. Both were experienced beauties, veterans of court life, worldly sophisticates who might not have been the obvious choices to reassure and support a callow seventeen-year-old on her first arrival in a strange country; they were, in effect, Charlotte’s introduction to the female world in which she would now be expected to make a life for herself, for the king had charged them with the task of crossing the Channel and accompanying the future queen home. Neither duchess was very happy about the idea, and neither proved the easiest of passengers. The Duchess of Hamilton insisted that her tame ass should accompany her on the journey, so that she should not be deprived of the medicinal benefits of its milk. ‘The Duchess of Ancaster,’ Walpole noted, ‘only takes a surgeon and a midwife, as she is breeding and subject to hysteric fits.’41
The fleet assembled to carry the reluctant duchesses across to Germany sailed from Harwich and arrived at the mouth of the Elbe on 14 August 1761. On the 22nd, Charlotte was ready to embark. She had no experience of the sea – indeed, she had probably never seen it before – and therefore little idea what to expect on her journey. Her first voyage turned out to be anything but a smooth one. The weather was bad from the beginning, with gales, rain and thunder making the small fleet’s progress slow and haphazard. As the days went on with no sign of the English coast, the discomfort of the journey took its toll, and the duchesses were soon observed ‘to be very much out of order’; however, a very different story was told of Charlotte’s response to the ordeal.42 ‘The queen was not at all affected with the storm, but bore the sea like a truly British queen,’ gushed one contemporary press account; Walpole heard that she had been ‘sick but half an hour; sung and played on the harpsichord all the voyage, and been cheerful the whole time’.43
In reality, Charlotte seems to have found the voyage just as prostrating as all the other passengers. When Lord Anson, who captained the Royal Charlotte, finally arrived in Harwich on 7 September, he wrote immediately to the Admiralty explaining that ‘the princess being much fatigued made it absolutely necessary to land her royal highness here’, and plans for a triumphal procession up the Thames to London were quietly abandoned. From Harwich she travelled to Colchester, where she was presented with a gift of candied eringo root – a kind of sea holly – which must have given her a rather strange idea of what was considered a delicacy in her new homeland. She spent the night at the home of Lord Abercorn in Witham, where she ate her first formal English dinner, with Lord Harcourt standing on one side of her chair and Lord Anson on the other, and the door ‘wide open, that everybody might have the pleasure and satisfaction of seeing her’.44
After that, it was onwards to London, to St James’s Palace and her destiny. The marriage ceremony was to take place that very evening. No wonder that, as her destination approached, she had little to say. ‘When she caught the first glimpse of the palace, she grew frightened and turned pale; the Duchess of Hamilton smiled – the princess said, “My dear Duchess, you may laugh, you have been married twice but it is no joke to me.”’45
There was little time for reflection. As soon as her arrival in town had been confirmed, all the city’s pent-up desire for celebration exploded into a cacophony of sound. ‘Madame Charlotte is this instant arrived!’ scribbled Walpole as a delighted postscript to one of his omnipresent letters. ‘The noise of coaches, chaises, horsemen, mob that have been to see her pass through the parks is so prodigious that I cannot distinguish the guns. I am going to be dressed, and before seven shall launch into the crowd. Pray for me!’46 Walpole was not the only well-connected spectator determined to satisfy his curiosity. Everyone wanted to see the first meeting of the king and the princess. The Countess of Harrington watched it from over her garden wall, and passed on what she had seen to the Countess of Kildare, who in turn described it to her husband. Introduced to the king, Charlotte ‘threw herself at his feet, he raised her up, embraced her and led her through the garden up the steps into the palace’.47
Some later reminiscences asserted that at the moment of their meeting, the king had been shocked by Charlotte’s appearance. ‘At the first sight of the German princess,’ wrote one particularly hostile commentator, ‘the king actually shrank from her gaze, for her countenance was of that cast that too plainly told of the nature of the spirit working within.’48 Yet there is no suggestion in any contemporary account that George was disappointed in what he saw. Walpole, never disposed to be charitable, described Charlotte on first seeing her as ‘sensible, cheerful and … remarkably genteel’.49
After the formal greetings, George led Charlotte into St James’s to present her to his family. In pride of place was his mother Augusta; also present were his three sisters and three brothers, and his uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, welcomed back into the family now that his nephew sat securely on his throne. Charlotte was conducted to a lavish dinner which included partridges stuffed with truffles, venison in pastry, and sweetbreads. While the royals ate, the court began to assemble in preparation for the wedding ceremony. Most, including Walpole and the Duchess of Northumberland, arrived at around seven o’clock. They had a long wait, on an exceptionally hot evening.
‘The night was sultry,’ wrote Walpole, dashing off his impressions of the event. ‘About ten, the procession began to move towards the chapel and at eleven they all came into the Drawing Room.’50 Then Charlotte appeared for the first time in a public role