The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians. Janice Hadlow
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tissue, trimmed with silver and covered with diamonds, set off with a little cap of purple velvet. But for all its magnificence, Charlotte’s outfit was a very poor fit; clearly, the measurements sent across from Mecklenburg had proved no substitute for the more accurate sizing that stays would have provided. The dress, burdened with heavy jewels, was far too large for Charlotte’s slender frame. It was of course Walpole who recorded that her ‘violet velvet mantle … which was attempted to be fastened on her shoulders by a bunch of pearls dragged itself and almost the rest of her clothes halfway down her waist’.51 The unhappy result was that ‘the spectators knew as much of her upper half as the king himself’.52
Struggling with her clothes, the princess was led by the Duke of York through the assembled crowd of courtiers towards the chapel where the wedding was to take place. As she made her way, her nerve began to fail her and her hands shook. ‘Courage, Princess, courage,’ urged the duke.53 An even more intimidating experience followed, as she was plunged into a heaving rout of intensely curious strangers. She had enough self-possession to kiss the peeresses, as etiquette demanded, but Lady Augusta, the king’s sister, was ‘forced to take her hand and give it to those who were to kiss it’.54
In a reversal of tradition, protocol demanded that the princess arrive first at the altar and wait for the king. When he entered, the service began. It was conducted in English, as George had required. The Archbishop of Canterbury later remembered: ‘I called on him and the queen only by their Christian names. When I asked them the proper question, the king answered solemnly, laying his hand on his breast, and suggested to her to answer, “Ich will,” which she did: but spoke audibly in no other part of the service.’55 The marriage began as it was to continue, with George instructing his wife while she remained silent.
‘The instant the king put on the ring,’ reported the Duchess of Northumberland, ‘a rocket was let fly from the top of the chapel as a signal for the discharge of the Park and Tower guns, which were immediately fired.’ The princess had rallied somewhat. ‘She talks a great deal,’ observed Walpole, ‘is easy, civil, and not disconcerted.’ Her French, he thought, was only ‘tolerable’ but ‘she exchanged much of that, and also of German, with the king and the Duke of York’.56 She was also able to display her other accomplishments. ‘The royal supper not being ready, the queen (at the king’s request) played very prettily on the harpsichord,’ and sang to the assembled family, who did not, the duchess had been told, ‘get to bed till three in the morning’.57
To Charlotte, brought up in the staid uneventfulness of Mecklenburg, the day must have seemed as if it would never end. At its close, however, she was spared the ordeal endured by Augusta, her new mother-in-law, and other princesses before her. When she and the king entered their bedroom, they did so alone, and closed the door behind them. Their marriage was undeniably a public event, but what happened afterwards was private, with none of the public ribaldry that had accompanied George’s parents on their wedding night. Walpole heard that the abandonment of the old rituals had been at Charlotte’s insistence. ‘The queen was very averse to going to bed, and at last articled that no one should retire with her but the Princess of Wales, and her two German women, and that no one should be admitted afterwards but the king.’ When the dowager princess returned from the couple’s bedchamber, she asked the Duke of Cumberland to sit with her for a while. The duke was tired and tetchy, and refused with bad grace. ‘What should I stay for?’ he demanded. ‘If she cries out, I cannot help her.’58
Later, George and Charlotte were to find it much harder to navigate their way through the imprecise distinctions between the two dimensions of royal life – that which they inhabited as man and wife, and that which they occupied as king and queen – but the privacy of their first night together was a declaration of the optimism with which the pair entered the marriage state. Their union would not be like those of their predecessors: it would start in the way it was meant to go on – as a genuine partnership, forged in private intimacy.
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The day after the wedding, Charlotte was presented at an official Drawing Room, designed to introduce her to the great and the good of the court. Walpole thought that George seemed in great spirits and delighted with his wife, talking to her ‘continually, with the greatest good humour. It does not promise,’ he noted with rare generosity, ‘as if they two would be the most unhappy persons in England, from this event.’59 A celebration ball was held that night where, according to the Duchess of Northumberland, ‘everything was vastly well conducted; nor was it too hot, notwithstanding there were a vast many people, all very magnificently dressed’. In the midst of the minuets and country dances, the duchess was touched to see the king doing all he could to please his new wife. ‘His Majesty this evening showed the most engaging attention towards the queen, even the taking of snuff (of which Her Majesty is very fond) which he detests and it made him sneeze prodigiously.’60 At a second Drawing Room the following day, the duchess heard from George himself how very pleased he was. ‘The king this day did me the honour to tell me that he thought himself too happy.’61
Gradually, Charlotte began to relax a little. Even the news that the aged, half-blind, Jacobite Earl of Westmorland had mistaken Sarah Lennox for the queen and tried to kiss her hand in error did not cast a pall over the proceedings. Sarah had pulled back her hand in horror, declaring, ‘I am not the queen, sir!’ ‘No,’ declared one wit, ‘she is only the Pretender.’
None of this seems to have disturbed Charlotte’s increasing assurance. She was even confident enough to turn a small social embarrassment into a mild joke. As the Duchess of Northumberland and other ladies ‘attended Her Majesty back to her dressing room, her train caught the fender and drew it into the middle of the room. I disengaged her. She laughed very heartily and told me a droll story of the Princess of Prussia having drawn a lighted billet out of the chimney and carrying it through the apartment, firing the mat all the way.’62
‘You don’t presume to suppose, I hope,’ wrote Walpole to a distant correspondent a few days after the wedding, ‘that we are thinking of you, and wars and misfortunes and distresses in these festival times. Mr Pitt himself would be mobbed if he talked of anything but clothes and diamonds and bridesmaids.’63 With the first round of ceremonies over, the royal couple spent a few days taking trips to Richmond and Kew. They clearly enjoyed themselves, since they were to return in later life, spending many summers at Kew, and establishing their growing family there, in what was regarded as a healthy rural outpost of London.
While they admired the views of the Thames, and the gardens William Kent had designed for George’s grandmother Queen Caroline, elsewhere the preparations for the coronation continued apace. Walpole, whose appetite for royal ceremony was all but sated, complained of ‘the gabble one heard about it for six weeks before’, and referred to the whole event as ‘a puppet show’, but could not entirely divorce himself from the rising tide of excitement. ‘If I was to entitle ages, I would call this the century of crowds,’ he mused as people from across the country began to flood into London.64
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Coronation Day began early. The Duchess of Northumberland ‘rose at half past four, went to the queen’s apartment at Westminster’. There she found Charlotte, once more weighed down with jewels, dressed with stiff formality complete with mother-of-pearl fan, but with her hair worn girlishly loose, discreetly supplemented with ‘coronation locks’, a false hair piece that had cost six guineas.65
The event opened