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

by David Cohen

  ‘Mad King George III and his son

  Frederick’s twelve-year-old son now became heir to the throne. As usual with the House of Hanover, his father preferred his younger brother. George had been seen as something of a dunce but he became the most diligent and perhaps the craftiest of the Hanoverian Kings when it came to manipulating the ego-driven politicians of his era. As a parent, George III is perhaps best known for performing what might be called the ‘reverse Oedipus’. According to Freud, sons want to kill their fathers. George III took the conflict between Hanoverian fathers and their sons to a new extreme as he tried to kill the Prince of Wales. He was thought to be mad at the time but it could be argued that he knew perfectly well what he was doing – his boy had finally driven him to serious violence.

  The first two Hanoverian Kings and cricketing-mad Frederick were acutely aware that they were foreigners. George III spoke German to his mother but he was born in England and did not speak English with an accent. When he was ten, he took part in a family production of Joseph Addison’s play Cato and said in a specially written prologue: ‘What, tho’ a boy! It may with truth be said, A boy in England born, in England bred.’ He would use those lines again.

  Augusta had very little faith in the education that George II provided for her son once he became his heir. She told Bubb Dodington, a major landowner who had loaned Frederick substantial sums of money, she did not know what they taught the boy but ‘she was afraid it was not much’. Augusta sensed she should let her boy play with other children, but she was afraid because of the ‘profligate way’ so many aristocratic children were being brought up. Now that he was Prince of Wales, George became even more isolated from boys of his own age. Lord Waldegrave, grandson of the doctor who had delivered the Old Pretender, became George’s governor and complained that ‘the mother and the nursery always prevailed’.

  Waldegrave did not have a flattering view of the boy. He thought George was honest, but he had a dull spirit. He gave a subtle analysis of his charge, noting that: ‘His want of application and aversion to business would be far less dangerous, was he eager in the pursuit of pleasure; for the transition from pleasure to business is both shorter and easier than from a state of total inaction.’ Astutely, he noted that George would often withdraw to be alone ‘not to compose his mind by study or contemplation but merely to indulge the melancholy enjoyment of his own ill humour’. George did not like Waldegrave any more than Waldegrave liked him and later sniped that his governor was a ‘depraved worthless man’.

  Augusta appealed to the Earl of Bute for help in teaching her son; Bute had been a friend of Frederick’s and had married Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s daughter. Her choice caused tension with the King, who disliked Bute for a number of reasons. He was Scottish and George II worried that any Scot truly yearned for the return of the Young Pretender, the grandson of James II. Bute was also unusually well educated and a good botanist. He believed Augusta’s son should study science as well as history, which would teach him the duties of a constitutional monarch, which the Hanoverians still had trouble understanding.

  Bute became far more than a tutor; he became a substitute father and, as a teenager, George often tried to justify his behaviour to him. For example, he wrote to Bute: ‘It is very true that ministers have done everything they can to provoke me, that they have called me a harmless boy ...’ Then he complained: ‘They have also treated my mother in a very cruel manner (which I shall neither forget nor forgive to the day of my death) because she is so good as to come forward and to preserve her son from the many snares that surround him.’ George promised Bute that he would ‘ever remember the insults done to my mother’ and also to defend his tutor.

  By his teenage years, George realised that he was lazy and added: ‘I will throw off that indolence which if I don’t soon get the better of will be my ruin.’ An angry young man, he was mainly angry at himself. He should be given some credit for being self-critical, though. On 25 March 1757, he admitted to Bute, ‘I am conscious of my own indolence’, which was ‘my greatest enemy’ and only a good friend like Bute would have tolerated it. Again, the Prince promised to fight this flaw in himself and ‘you will instantly find a change’. A few weeks later, George begged Bute to have patience and promised that he would ‘apply with the greatest assiduity if that is possible to regain the many years I have fruitlessly spent’.

  In 1759, George fell in love with Lady Sarah Lennox, but Bute advised against the match and George meekly accepted his veto. ‘I am born for the happiness or misery of a great nation,’ he wrote, ‘and consequently must often act contrary to my passions.’

  George II died two weeks before his seventy-seventh birthday and his 22-year-old grandson became King in 1760. Though naturally nervous, George III was politically more astute than might have been expected. The boy who had recited the lines about being born and bred in England now made much of that in his accession speech. He offered a variation on the words he had spoken in Addison’s play, trumpeting: ‘Born and educated in this country, I glory in the name of Britain.’ Hanover was a pesky principality on the unattractive mainland of Europe, which was packed with foreigners. It was ‘a horrid electorate which has always lived on the vitals of this country’. Up yours, Fritz, in effect! Insulting the Germans was far more effective in winning public confidence than his father’s toying with cricket.

  Finding the young King a wife now became a priority and an obsession for his mother. For all his diatribes against foreigners, George let his foreign mother choose a foreign wife for him. Augusta of Saxe-Gotha settled on Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who was seventeen years old, only a year older than Augusta had been when she married Frederick. Charlotte was hardly one of the most desirable Princesses of Europe. Virtually no one had heard of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, which was easily confused with the larger but equally unmemorable principality of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. Mecklenburg-Strelitz had been established after a dispute with yet another puny principality, the duchy of Mecklenburg-Custrow. To make matters even more ridiculously Ruritanian, there were two Dukes of Mecklenburg who did not recognise each other. Sadly, they do not seem to have challenged each other to a duel but, had they done so, they would probably have used make-believe swords.

  The Strelitz duchy was one of the most backward regions of the Hapsburg Empire. Charlotte’s family was so poor that she could bring no dowry. She was a devout Lutheran, however, and, though no striking beauty, at least she had white and even teeth. Charlotte was also reasonably intelligent and lively. She had one tremendously useful attribute, too: she came from a family that bred prodigiously. She was the eighth of ten children and her great-grandfather had nineteen children by two wives – and twelve of them survived. Her family genes were top class.

  At the end of August 1761 Charlotte set out for England. The King sent Admiral Anson to bring his bride over from Rostock. Anson had sailed the Pacific so he should have been able to cope with bringing a ship across the North Sea but he seems to have lost his bearings. What should have been a three-day cruise turned into a nine-day nightmare. Anson was supposed to make for Greenwich, where a grand reception was waiting for the future Queen, but, instead, he docked at Harwich. The next morning, Charlotte had to travel to London on the rickety Essex roads, but she was resilient. When she finally got to St James’s Palace, she behaved with considerable grace, though she did not prostrate herself as Augusta had done when she met the royal family for the first time. The next day, the total strangers, Charlotte and George, were married.

  Against the odds, the marriage was happy and the couple coyly called each other ‘Mr and Mrs King’. George III was not interested in the usual Hanoverian vices – women, gambling and fashion. He pottered about his palace grounds often dressed like a farmer and never visited Germany after he became King; in fact, he never went beyond the south of England. Weymouth was his favourite holiday resort.

  Mr and Mrs King had fifteen children: nine sons and six daughters. Their firs
t child, a boy, was born a year after the wedding and in a splendid bed which cost £3,780, an unusual luxury as George was stingy. He had managed to live on his income as Prince of Wales, something that would influence his attitude to his sons. Other than for the Prince of Wales, he did not make any provision for his children until 1778, by which time two of them were in their teens.

  The arrangements Charlotte made for the birth of her first child suggest she had very definite ideas on giving birth. She insisted on moving to St James’s Palace because the ventilation was better in the palace there. The labour lasted just five hours. Her son was given a spoonful of purging mixture as soon as he was born and ‘was quiet and looked extremely well’.

  The country celebrated: guns were fired at the Tower, bonfires lit and large quantities of liquor distributed free. Mother and baby thrived, though the baby had some sort of fainting fit on 22 August. After being given a little peppermint water, however, Prince George recovered at once.

  Charlotte seems to have been a child-bearing diva. Her second son, Frederick, was born so quickly that there was no time for the doctor to arrive, which annoyed the physician. Frederick soon became his father’s favourite, which sowed the seeds of the poor relationship between the King and his oldest boy. Charlotte’s third son, William, was born on 21 August 1765. His mother returned from a dinner in Richmond feeling a little unwell and popped him out without any fuss a few hours later. When she was thirty-three weeks pregnant with her fourth child, the Queen danced merrily with the King of Denmark. She danced even longer – till 4.45 a.m. on the King’s birthday on 4 June 1771 – just before she gave birth to their eighth child. The splendid genes were working.

  Charlotte also had a clear sense of her duties as a mother. She carped that she could never quite trust the attendants because ‘it is impossible for servants however true they may be in their affections to have the feelings of a parent’. Like most aristocrats of the era, she did, however, use wet nurses. She was so successful at producing healthy children that, when her eighth son, Octavius, died at the age of four, it was said that she finally became a true mother. It was almost as if seeing a child die young was a rite of passage. She lost her next son when he was a small boy, too.

  Wet nurses and flogging

  In his Royal Confinements, Dewhurst argues wet nurses often endangered children, which makes it all the more remarkable that thirteen of Charlotte’s children survived. Many wet nurses did not wash properly and if they did not feel like feeding the child, or were not producing milk, gave babies cow’s milk without boiling to sterilise it – the idea of sterilisation would not be accepted for another seventy-five years. Wet nurses also often fed babies ‘pap’, a form of gruel made by soaking meal or bread in water, or cereal cooked in broth. The nurse chewed the pap first, which could spread infections. A number of doctors tried to persuade aristocratic women not to use wet nurses, but with relatively little success. W M. Craig, who wrote a fawning biography of Charlotte, reminded his ‘fair and amiable countrywomen of the sacred obligation that they are under to sustain and strengthen the children they bring into the world with the all sufficient nutriment of their own bosoms’. Vanity was the problem, he argued. ‘Is there anyone so enchanted by the public admiration of her own beauty as to prefer it to the thankful smiles of a lovely infant that clings close to her breast?’

  Craig excused the Queen from any such vanity. Charlotte had ‘caught the tenderness of maternal feelings on her landing in this country’ and ‘grieved she could not be to her son all that a mother should be’ but she had so many royal duties. So she ‘submitted and endeavoured to make amends by a most scrupulous attention to other points in watching over the young Prince’. That ‘most scrupulous attention’ would turn out to be not good enough to prevent her young Prince from being one of the most absurd monarchs to place his backside on the throne.

  When Prince George was born, there was no parade of potential wet nurses as there had been in 1689 when Mrs Pack was chosen. Margaret Scott, a descendant of the Buccleuch family, was chosen and she was still in milk as she had recently given birth to her twelfth child. Mrs Scott was very proud of her Buccleuch ancestry and took it upon herself to interfere in the nursery until the Prince was weaned. The King liked her, but Charlotte did not and she learned the lesson: all her other wet nurses were not so well connected as Mrs Scott.

  Charlotte adored her eldest son and was charmed by his precocity. When he was four and was asked what he was doing, George replied, a philosopher in embryo, ‘I make reflections.’ His mother decided to teach him the rudiments of German, English and counting herself with the help of a governess, Lady Charlotte Finch. George was a good pupil and, by the time he was eight, he could speak French, German and Italian as well as English. The clever boy basked in his mother’s love. But queens were not supposed to teach their children. The King interfered and insisted his son be handed over to more conventional teachers. Prince George was obviously spoilt, but he had been willing to learn from his mother; the separation changed him and he became a difficult pupil.

  The King was extremely upset when one of the new teachers, a M. de Salzas, would not explain why he refused to carryon teaching the Prince; the reality was that the boy had become impossible. More discipline was the answer, the King assumed. He handed his son over to two clergymen, Dr Markham and Cyril Jackson. They were given ‘the injunction to treat him as they would any other private gentleman and to flog him whenever he deserved it’. They did so with little pity. The Prince blamed his father and it could be argued that he never quite recovered from being so brutally treated.

  When George was fourteen, the King again changed the Prince’s tutors but his son was by then hot-headed and quite unwilling to accept discipline. His new teachers, Bishop Hurd and Reverend Arnold, tried to flog him and his brother William but the Princes would not let them. In fact, George grabbed the cane and tried to give their teachers six of the best. Arnold, who seems to have been stronger than the Bishop, ‘tore the weapon from his hand and roughly administered to him the punishment with which they had been threatened’. Years later, George’s sister Sophia told a friend that she had seen her two oldest brothers ‘held by their arms to be flogged like dogs with a long whip’. The children were flogged not just when they were lazy or disobedient; William was even flogged for having asthma. Perhaps it is not surprising that the King’s fourth son, Edward, became infamous for his brutality towards the men under his command.

  There is no evidence that George III was sadistic but he seems to have believed thrashing would teach his sons not to be arrogant or lazy, and he may have believed he would have been less lazy in his teens, had Bute thrashed him. The last King who had been thrashed so often and with such conviction had been James I, who grew up to be an exceptionally intelligent and hard-working man. Hardly any of George and Charlotte’s children might be said to have possessed those qualities.

  I have suggested that intelligent children are more likely not to be traumatised should they be abused. One benefit of studying the long history of the royals is that it highlights the inadequacies of psychological theory, Research by the National Children’s Home shows that one-third of men who sexually abuse children were sexually abused themselves but this prompts the question: why do two-thirds of abused boys not repeat the pattern? Intelligence is part of the answer, I have suggested, but it does not explain why George and William or, later, George V and his brother Eddy turned out to have such different personalities.

  T. H. White condemned George as a ‘poltroon’, but the novelist J. B. Priestley was kinder and said in The Prince of Pleasure that George was not the ‘cold-hearted libertine which he was so often reputed to be but he was really a soft-hearted overgrown boy. So far as he was a man, he was not a bad one but a foolish one.’ Neither author got near the truth, it seems. Like Henry VIII, George was a narcissist but, unlike the Tudor, he would become a frustrated narcissist.

  From his loving mother, George also picked up one
destructive interest. Charlotte was very concerned about her children’s health and believed in the then fashionable remedies of bleeding and cupping. Her son became addicted to these. Sadly, they were not his only addictions. By the time he was seventeen, the Prince set about exploring London’s low life. He made two unfortunate friends: Jack Payne and the Duke of Cumberland, who is described in a memoir by Lloyd as ‘a good natured but feeble minded man’, whose whole life was devoted to ‘weakness and dissipation.’ Dissipation became the Prince’s greatest hobby.

  In 1781 George was given a separate establishment – in other words, a grand house with servants of his own. He flung himself with zest into debauch, getting drunk, chasing women and gambling. At the end of the eighteenth century, two new crazes which had not been available previously – opium and nitrous oxide (or laughing gas) – became fashionable. After the young chemist Humphry Davy tested the effects of nitrous oxide on himself, many aristocrats gave laughing-gas parties. The effects of both opium and laudanum on writers and artists between 1770 and 1820 have been studied in works such as Hayter’s Opium and the Romantic Imagination but no one seems to have examined use by the aristocracy in any detail. The Prince used laudanum constantly and it affected his behaviour. Until De Quincey published his classic Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in 1821, few people even thought opium harmful. The artist Thomas Phillips (who produced some classic illustrations of George IV and whose work is on display in the National Portrait Gallery) gave a good contemporary account of the Prince, and could be describing someone whose wayward behaviour was influenced by drug use:

  The Prince is influenced by caprice and has no steadiness. He has the power of giving a proper answer to whoever addresses him on any subject but nothing fixes him. The person who last spoke to him makes an apparent impression but it is gone when the next person or subject comes before him.