Bringing Them Up Royal: How the Royals Raised their Children from 1066 to the Present Day

by David Cohen

  To avoid such embarrassment, the King expelled his son from St James’s Palace, but he was so angry he added a nasty twirl of revenge. He got advice from the leading judges as to whether he could keep control of the Prince and Princess of Wales’s children and not allow them to leave St James’s Palace. In what may have been the first custody case in English law, the judges said the King had the right to keep his grandchildren and deny their parents access. George I did not hesitate to do so.

  Meanwhile, George and Caroline were desperate to see their children. They once secretly visited the palace and Caroline fainted and George ‘cried like a child’. The King called Caroline ‘cette diablesse Madame la Princesse’ (the devilish Princess) but she could intimidate him because she was intelligent. When she pleaded to be allowed to see her children, the King allowed both parents to ‘enjoy’ what social workers today would call a ‘supervised access visit’ once a week. The Prince wrote abject letters in which he apologised for any offence he had caused His Majesty; his father did not answer. Father and son were now truly at war.

  Then comedy turned to tragedy. George William, whose christening had caused the row, fell ill when he was three months old. He was choking and coughing all the time. It would have been sensible to move him to the country, where the air was much fresher but the King did not allow that. Caroline and George were at their son’s side when the infant died in February 1718.

  After these rows, the Prince started to support the King’s political enemies. In siding against him, his son set a pattern for the next century, where the heir would often be conspiring against the monarch who, in return, often dreamed of getting rid of his troublesome son.

  The King visited Hanover and his mistress again from May to November 1719. This time, he did not even make his son guardian of the kingdom, but established a regency council. It was yet another humiliating rebuff.

  In 1720, the English economy was nearly wrecked by the South Sea Bubble, the crazy speculation in shares in a company which offered the mirage of riches from the Pacific. Sir Robert Walpole, who is generally held to be England’s first Prime Minister, realised the country must have stability and encouraged the King and his son to settle their differences. Neither man was exactly keen and the Prince was soon disillusioned. First, his father did not make him Regent when he returned to Hanover to see his mistress yet again. Second, he would still not allow George and Caroline to have their three daughters back.

  The King was cruel but his son was not easy himself, as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu dissected:

  The fire of his temper appeared in every look and gesture; which, being unhappily under the direction of a small understanding, was every day throwing him upon some indiscretion. He was naturally sincere, and his pride told him that he was placed above constraint; not reflecting that a high rank carries along with it a necessity of a more decent and regular behaviour than is expected from those who are not set in so conspicuous a light. He was so far from being of that opinion, that he looked on all the men and women he saw as creatures he might kick or kiss for his diversion; and whenever he met with any opposition in those designs, he thought his opposers impudent rebels to the will of God, who created them for his use, and judged of the merit of all people by their ready submission to his orders.

  The ‘kick or kiss’ Prince succeeded when his father died on 11 June 1727, on his way to Hanover. Caroline and George’s three daughters were finally allowed to go home to their parents. While the girls knew they should be overjoyed, they did not find it easy to adjust to the mother and father they did not know well.

  The new King decided not to attend his father’s funeral in Hanover. His English subjects were pleased because they saw this as proof that George II loved England more than Hanover. There was a final twist to the rows between father and son: George II suppressed his father’s will because it attempted to split his ‘empire’ so that one grandson would inherit Britain and another would inherit Hanover. Both British and Hanoverian ministers considered the will unlawful, as George I did not have the legal power to choose his successors personally. Critics supposed that George II hid the will to avoid paying out his father’s legacies.

  The relationship between the new King and his eldest son was also antagonistic but there was the added complication that George I had refused to allow Frederick to come to London. The orthodox view is that children who are left by their parents are angry at them but this separation had made the parents also angry towards their son: they left Frederick waiting in Hanover for another year. When he finally arrived in London in 1728, he was twenty-one years old and had not seen his parents for fourteen years.

  Only weeks after he arrived, Frederick started to plot against his parents. His first gambit was theatrical. He backed the Opera of the Nobility as a rival to Handel’s royal opera. More seriously, he imitated his own father’s less than filial behaviour and sponsored a court of ‘opposition’ politicians. George II called his eldest son ‘a half-witted coxcomb’. James Parton, who in 1868 wrote one of the first biographies of Victoria, sniped that George II’s eldest son was ‘stupid even for a Prince’.

  The King chooses his son’s wife

  The great cricket writer C. L. R. James wrote: ‘What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?’ Frederick, like many immigrants, sensed that one way to understand his new country was to understand its favourite sport. By 1728, that was cricket.

  Frederick quickly became genuinely enthusiastic. He bet on games, formed his own team sometimes and even played himself, though he was not much of a batsman or bowler. In August 1732, the Whitehall Evening Post reported that Frederick attended ‘a great cricket match’ at Kew. The next year, he gave a guinea to each player in a Surrey v. Middlesex game. Luckily, the Hanoverians did not persuade their German subjects to take up cricket, which would no doubt have resulted in Germany winning Test after Test.

  It sometimes seems the Hanoverians could have written the ultimate text on how to provoke sibling rivalry. George II’s favourite son was not his eldest boy but his younger brother so the King now studied whether it might be possible for Frederick to succeed only in Britain, while William would become Elector of Hanover. But George II was wilier than his father and did not think he could just issue a fiat; he was learning English ways.

  Soon after he arrived in England, Frederick became friendly with Lord Hervey, a minor aristocrat whom Alexander Pope satirised as ‘Sporus’. Hervey was extremely effeminate ‘as to even bring his sex into question’, according to a friend he later quarrelled with, William Pulteney. Pulteney was being unnecessarily vitriolic – Hervey had eight children by his wife and also shared a mistress, Anne Vane, with Frederick. Hervey and the Prince even wrote a play together under the pseudonym Captain Bodkin, but it was so dreadful it was only staged once. A few years later, the two men fell out and Hervey wrote bitterly that Frederick was ‘false ... never having the least hesitation in telling any lie that served his present purpose’.

  In terms of the history of royal parenting, what is remarkable is that Frederick’s parents would have agreed. Most of the period from 1730 to 1742 was taken up with new and vicious family battles between George II, his wife and their eldest son.

  Naturally, Frederick did not see himself as half-witted or false. He encouraged the poet James Thomson to write a masque, Alfred, which hinted at some connection between Frederick, who had never even taken part in a battle, and Alfred the Great, who had defeated the Vikings. Ironically, Frederick also urged Thomson to write a song that has endured: ‘Rule Britannia’. Again, this could be seen as a typical attempt on the part of an immigrant to endear himself to his new country.

  Inevitably, Frederick and his parents quarrelled about his future wife. The first potential bride was Lady Diana Spencer, an ancestor of the modern Princess Diana and the favourite grandchild of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, the woman who had been Queen Anne’s domineering friend. The Duchess offered the massive dowry of £100,000. Frederick was deepl
y in debt and enthusiastic, but the King and Walpole forbade the marriage. The last thing either wanted was for Frederick to become independently wealthy, which would make him less dependent on them. The second would-be bride was Wilhelmine, daughter of Frederick of Prussia, who would also bring a handsome dowry, The King was not keen on this match either but continued talks for diplomatic reasons. Frustrated by the delay, Frederick sent his own envoy to the Prussian court. When the King discovered his son had taken this initiative, he scuppered the marriage plan.

  An instance of Oedipal contortions

  The most scandalous author on the sexual mores of the eighteenth century was Giacomo Casanova, who did sometimes sleep with both a mother and her daughter, or daughters. Not even Casanova described a family where a mother discussed the sexual prowess of her son, though. As far as I know, Freud did not do so; nor did those pioneers of sexology Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing or Kinsey. Again, the long royal case history provides something unique.

  In the 1730s, Frederick’s mother became convinced that her son was impotent and discussed the issue with Hervey. He claimed Frederick sometimes referred to himself as Hercules or ‘as if he were the late King Poland’. That monarch, Augustus the Strong, was supposed to have fathered 354 children, which accounted for his nickname, but Frederick was clearly uncertain as to his potency. Hervey also told the Queen that her son sometimes suffered ‘with a despondency of having children and in so pathetic a tone that he is ready to cry and seems to think it is impossible’. At times, Caroline realised this conversation was hardly one a mother should have and begged Hervey to change the subject, but on many other occasions she insisted on discussing Frederick’s sexuality further. Hervey once informed the Queen that Anne Vane, the woman he had shared with Frederick, had confided that the Prince was extremely ignorant ‘to a degree inconceivable but not impotent and my firm belief is that he is as capable of having children as any man in England’. At one point, the Queen asked Hervey if he could find out from Lady Dudley (who was supposed to have slept with half the men in London) whether her son ‘was like other men or not’.

  Finally, in 1736, the half-witted, and perhaps impotent, coxcomb was married to the sixteen-year-old Augusta of Saxe-Gotha. Frederick did not choose her, of course: his father did. But Frederick was so deeply in debt that he had to accept. When she first met her in-laws, Augusta prostrated herself on the floor, a gesture which impressed George II and Queen Caroline. Frederick also seemed pleased by Augusta. During the wedding, he fortified himself with several glasses of jelly (Frederick had perhaps heard that his mother doubted he could make love to a woman).

  The young couple did not have an easy time on their wedding night. Caroline insisted on being present while Augusta undressed. Frederick then arrived. Hervey reported: ‘Everyone passed through their bedchamber to see them where there was nothing remarkable but the Prince’s nightcap which was some inches higher than any grenadier guard’s in the whole army.’ The couple were finally allowed some privacy in which to start their marriage.

  There is a possible and perverse interpretation of Frederick’s mother’s behaviour. Caroline had not seen her eldest son from when he was seven years old. Mothers are sometimes attracted to their sons. The interest Caroline showed in her son’s sexuality may mean she had some desire, conscious or unconscious, to sleep with him. There is no clear evidence for this speculation but it does make some sense, given her behaviour. (Freud’s friend Princess Marie Bonaparte, the aunt of Prince Philip, seriously contemplated sleeping with her son.)

  Caroline’s obsession with her son’s prowess in bed continued after the marriage. Hervey reports that the Queen asked him whether it might be possible for Frederick to arrange for another man to lie with Augusta without his wife realising it.

  ‘Nothing so easy,’ Hervey assured the Queen. ‘Is it possible?’ the Queen mused.

  Hervey then suggested an ingenious method. For a month, he said, ‘I would advise the Prince to go to bed several hours after his wife.’ The Prince should spray himself with a powerful perfume so that he wafted a distinctive scent. He should then get up again, saying he had to urinate and sprinkle a waiting double with the same perfume (the highly scented double needed to be much the same size as the Prince). The double would then get into bed with Augusta and she, Hervey believed, would be fooled because of the scent. The Prince’s substitute could then make love to Augusta and, of course, get her pregnant. Hervey was not joking and the Queen did not take it as a joke.

  Frederick’s marriage also had financial implications. He told Anne Vane that they could not carry on as lovers and gave her a pension of £1,500, with a bonus of £20,000 on the day she married someone else. Having made these promises, Frederick asked his father to ask Parliament for a better allowance, but the King refused. In the end, a compromise was reached but Frederick felt humiliated and got his revenge when his father fell badly ill with piles and a fever in January 1737. Frederick spread the rumour that the King was dying so George II had to rise from his sick bed and attend a number of society events to prove his death was far from impending.

  The family could not stop deceiving and detesting one another, it seems. So, when Frederick told his parents that Augusta was pregnant, the Queen did not believe it for one moment. She went to see her daughter-in-law and was made even more sceptical when Augusta was vague about when she was due to give birth. ‘For my part I do not see she is big,’ the Queen told Hervey.

  The Queen then insisted that the baby be born at Hampton Court, where she and the King were living, so inevitably, their son wanted the child born somewhere else. When Augusta started her labour, her husband sneaked her out of Hampton Court in the middle of the night to make sure his parents could not witness the birth. After the suspicions surrounding the birth of the Old Pretender, royal births were witnessed by members of the family and senior courtiers to guard against ‘suppositious’ children in warming pans. George II and the Queen were horrified when they learned that their son had whisked Augusta away and made her travel along bumpy roads in a carriage that shook wildly. They dashed to St James’s.

  The Queen was relieved to discover that Augusta had given birth without witnesses to a ‘poor, ugly little she-mouse’ rather than to a ‘large, fat, healthy boy’. Her attitude and these unpleasant games poisoned the relationship between mother and son still further; Frederick was banished from the King’s court.

  The row led to a frantic exchange of letters in August 1737, as Frederick tried to mend fences with his parents. He wanted the King to know that his son was his most devoted servant, but George II told him that he thought taking Augusta out of Hampton Court ‘to be such a deliberate indignity’, which His Majesty ‘resents to the highest degree’. For the next three weeks, Frederick grovelled to no avail. On 10 September, the King condemned ‘this extravagant and undutiful behaviour’ and refused to accept that his son was sorry, given the many instances where Frederick had offended him for years. ‘It is my pleasure that you leave St James’s,’ the King concluded, as soon as that did not cause Augusta any inconvenience. In an attempt to further humiliate his son, he also allowed the correspondence to be published.

  Caroline fell fatally ill in November 1737. On her deathbed she uttered one of the least loving assessments a mother ever spoke. She said, ‘At least I shall have one comfort in having my eyes eternally closed, I shall never have to see that monster again.’ Now the sins of one generation ricocheted on the next.

  Frederick got his own inevitable revenge. When Augusta became pregnant again in 1738, he removed his whole family from the Palace. The baby was so weak he was not expected to live. George, however, stubbornly stayed alive. Stubbornness would be one of his characteristics until he died, eighty-one years later. The birth of an heir to Frederick guaranteed the succession of the House of Hanover but George II and his son remained hostile towards each other.

  Frederick’s innings – the word seems fitting, given his passion for cricket – was finally ended
by an abscess on the lung in 1751. The abscess is usually attributed to a blow by a cricket or a real tennis ball, but there is no proof of this macabre, albeit attractive idea. If it were true, Frederick would be yet another heir who died not just before his time but also as a result of violence. In his study of the Georges, the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray quoted an obituary poem, which shows the esteem – or not – in which the Prince was held.

  Here lies Fred

  Who was alive and is dead

  Had it been his father

  I had much rather

  Had it been his brother

  Still better than another

  Had it been his sister

  No one would have missed her

  Had it been the whole generation

  Still better for the nation

  But since ‘tis only Fred

  Who was alive and is dead

  There’s no more to be said

  Poor Fred was not just unkind but unfair, according to Veronica Baker-Smith in her aptly named 2008 study, Royal Discord. She argues Fred has been ‘undeservedly’ consigned to a mere ‘footnote in history’. Few parents, she suggests, have so maligned one of their children.