The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians. Janice Hadlow
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clear that the ceremony promised to be just as chaotic as the late king’s funeral. From the outset, nothing ran to plan, or to time. Many key props were missing: ‘In the morning, they had forgot the sword of state, the chairs for the king and queen and their canopies.’ When the king complained about the poor management, the Earl Marshal, who was responsible for organising the day, promised him solemnly that ‘the next coronation would be regulated in the most exact manner imaginable’.66 Gradually, however, things began to fall into place. At the abbey, the king’s entry was greeted by the choir of Westminster School, who sang ‘Vivat Regina Charlotte!’ and ‘Vivat Georgius Rex!’ ‘There was all sorts of music,’ enthused one spectator, who had travelled down from Yorkshire for the day. ‘It was a grand sound.’67
Alongside the nobility and courtiers, the abbey was packed with more ordinary visitors who had squeezed themselves into its precincts with the settled intention of enjoying every moment of what promised to be a long and satisfying day. One of those was the young William Hickey, whose father, a prosperous City lawyer, ‘had engaged one of the nunneries, as they are called, in Westminster Abbey, for which he paid fifty guineas’.68 The Hickey family was stationed in a panelled bolt-hole right up in the roof, from which they commanded ‘an admirable view of the whole interior of the building’. They had anticipated the affair would be a long one, and had therefore arrived properly prepared. ‘Provisions, consisting of cold fowls, ham, tongues, different meat pies, wines and liquors of various sorts were sent into the apartment the day before, and two servants were allowed to attend.’ The twelve-strong party had found it an ordeal just getting to the abbey at all. ‘Opposite the Horse Guards, we were stopped exactly an hour without moving a single inch. As we approached the abbey, the difficulties increased.’ Crushed together by the crowds, coaches were constantly ‘running against each other, whereby glasses and panels were demolished without number, the noise of which, accompanied by the screeches of the terrified ladies, was at times truly terrific’. The Hickey family took six hours to get to their niche, where they were glad to find ‘a hot and comfortable breakfast waiting for us all’.
Some five hours later, at one o’clock, the king and queen at last arrived. Hickey had ‘a capital view’ of the actual crowning, but like almost everyone else in the abbey, he could not hear a word of what the archbishop was saying, and so decided that this was the perfect opportunity to enjoy lunch. ‘As many thousands were out of the possibility of hearing a single syllable, they took that opportunity to eat their meal, when the general clattering of knives, forks, plates and glasses that ensued, produced a most ridiculous effect, and a universal bout of laughter followed.’69
Whatever else had been overlooked, some provision had been made for the more basic needs of the ceremony’s principal players. For Walpole, ‘of all the incidents of the day, perhaps the most diverting was what happened to the queen. She had a retiring chamber, with all the conveniences, prepared behind the altar. She went thither – in the most convenient, what found she but – the Duke of Newcastle!’70 After about five hours, the coronation was finally over. The procession assembled again and, at about six o’clock, marched back to Westminster Hall for the banquet. The Duchess of Northumberland found the walk back through the dark and cold extremely trying. She was impatient for a meal, which she felt was now long overdue. ‘No dinner to eat … instead of profusion of geese etc., not wherewithal to fill one’s belly.’71 The coronation’s organisers had planned the long delays as a prelude to a gesture intended to amaze the guests as they re-entered Westminster Hall. More than 3,000 candles had been suspended from the ceiling of the hall; they were designed to be illuminated instantly by a complicated system of flax tapers, but the whole enterprise almost ended in disaster. The poet Thomas Gray, who was sitting in the hall, described how ‘the instant the queen’s canopy entered, fire was given to all the lustres at once by trains of prepared flax, that reached from one to another’; then, ‘it rained fire upon the heads of nearly all the spectators (the flax falling in large flakes) and the ladies (queen and all) were in no small terrors’.72
As the guests brushed the charred remnants of flax out of their clothes and hair, there was plenty to distract them. The banquet finally arrived – three services of over a hundred dishes – and the royal party devoted themselves to their food. Gray noticed that the king and queen ‘both eat like farmers’, as they tucked into the venison served to them on gold plates. As nothing had been provided for the many spectators to eat, baskets and knotted handkerchiefs were lowered from the crowded balconies, and heaved back up weighted down with cold chickens or bottles of wine. For the second time during the Coronation Day, the event had turned into an informal shared feast.
When the banquet was over, the king and queen returned to St James’s Palace to share a prosaic supper of bread and milk with a little gruel. There seems little doubt they did so with quiet, unaffected relief. In the previous few weeks, Charlotte had acquitted herself as well as anyone could expect. She had travelled across Europe to marry a stranger, and found him to be neither cold prig nor louche debauchee, but instead a serious, steady young man who had so far treated her with nothing but respectful affection. He, for his part, had found for himself a woman who, if she was neither a great beauty nor overburdened with fashionable accomplishments, had so far displayed a gratifying willingness to admire, esteem and obey him. No wonder the king was pleased.
In early September, when Charlotte, as yet unseen by him, was still crossing the turbulent North Sea, George had written hopefully to Bute, ‘I now think my domestic happiness [is] in my own power.’73 Now that the idea of a wife had turned into the reality of Charlotte, he was even more confident that married life, so long anticipated, would deliver everything he expected from it.
CHAPTER 5
THE CARE WITH WHICH GEORGE had chosen his wife was a measure of the optimism with which he viewed the prospects for his marriage. He had always intended that it should be more than a purely dynastic union. Unlike so many of his royal predecessors, he was determined to find within it a personal happiness which would enrich and transform his private life. But he also hoped that his relationship with his new queen would have a public meaning too. It was central to his mission as king to set an example of virtuous behaviour that could inspire his subjects to replicate it in their own lives. The conduct of his marriage would be the strongest possible declaration of the principles in which he believed, a beacon of right-thinking and good practice which would illustrate in the most personal way what could be achieved when consideration, kindness and respect were established at the heart of the conjugal experience. In pursuing this ideal, George was not alone. Many other young couples of his generation sought to find in their marriages the qualities of affection and loyalty the king set out to achieve in his own partnership. In his attitude to this most important relationship, George was perhaps less royally unique and more reflective of the aspirations of many of his subjects than in almost any other dimension of his life.
This was not, however, always apparent in the marital practices of those closest to the king in social status. Among the upper reaches of the aristocracy, instances abounded of married couples displaying spectacular and well-publicised indifference to any of the established standards of moral probity. Plutocratic levels of wealth and a blithe sense of entitlement fostered a serene disregard for the marital conventions that regulated the actions of poorer, smaller people. The great aristocrats made their own rules. Lady Harley, the Countess of Oxford, had so many children by so many different lovers that her brood was dubbed the Harleian Miscellany, after the famous collection of antiquarian books. Her husband was unperturbed by her affairs, declaring that he found her ‘frank candour’ to be ‘so amiable’ that he entirely forgave