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

by David Cohen

  Phillips said of the Prince that ‘his tailor or bootmaker will occupy his mind’ quite as much as an important politician.

  By now, the Prince owed fabulous amounts to money lenders. He often sent his chef to handle some of the more delicate negotiations with his creditors. Mr and Mrs King, a decent Lutheran mother and a somewhat bourgeois-minded father, despaired of their eldest.

  When the Prince turned twenty-one, he received a grant of £60,000 from Parliament and an annual income of £50,000 from his father, but these huge sums were not enough for his extravagances. His stables alone cost £31,000 a year. Mr and Mrs King lectured, reasoned and nagged, but George would not cut his spending or reduce his use of laudanum. One memoir in 1783 criticised the King for treating his son with ‘ill-judged parsimony’, which was bound to lead to trouble. Just as earlier heirs had done, the Prince soon sided with the opposition, now headed up by the formidable Charles Fox, one of the greatest orators ever to grace the House of Commons. Fox was also a hopeless gambler, so he and the Prince had much in common. Meanwhile, the King became furious at what he saw as his son’s betrayal.

  George and Charlotte also despaired of their son’s romantic adventures. Instead of settling down with a nice German wife, the Prince first fell in love with one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, Miss Hamilton, who discouraged him. Then he fell for Mary Robinson, an actress who had played Perdita. He signed many notes to her as ‘Florizel’, a nickname that stuck. Referring to actresses, Miss Hamilton warned that ‘a female in that line has too much trick’ and might well be dangerous to him. The King just thought his son had been ‘a thoughtless boy’ in dealing with Mary and looked on her and other young women as temptresses. He could not sustain that illusion for long as his son then became infatuated with Maria Fitzherbert, who was even more unsuitable. Six years older than the Prince, Mrs Fitzherbert was also a Roman Catholic. It seems the Prince was doing everything he could to upset his parents. He was not content to enjoy Mrs Fitzherbert as his mistress; he wanted to marry her. That would cause problems.

  The Royal Marriages Act of 1772 obliged any heir to obtain the monarch’s consent to any marriage. Knowing his father would never give that, the Prince decided to marry Mrs Fitzherbert in secret at her house in Mayfair. If news of this marriage leaked out, there would be uproar and the Prince would never receive another sou, either from the King or Parliament.

  The daughters of Mr and Mrs King

  Fortunately, the experience of the King and Queen with their daughters was much happier. The girls were more restrained than the boys and the diarist Fanny Burney has left many charming details of their behaviour. She wrote most about the Princess Royal, who was born in 1766 and their youngest Princess Amelia, who was born in 1783. The King ‘dotes on her’, Fanny noted, and the Queen allowed her to carry Amelia in her arms to her sentimental father.

  In February 1786, Fanny was playing a game which involved putting Amelia in a phaeton and driving about boisterously. The young Princess was in no mood to understand or accommodate when Fanny was tired.

  ‘Do come and play with me,’ Princess Amelia insisted and kept on pulling at Fanny’s gown.

  ‘We shall disturb the King, Ma’am,’ Fanny said, hoping to quieten the little girl.

  But Papa did not intimidate his little daughter. Princess Amelia dashed over to him while he was talking earnestly to a Mr Smelt and called, ‘Papa, go!’

  ‘What?’ cried the King.

  ‘Go, Papa, go you must,’ the Princess insisted. So Papa the King took his little daughter in his arms and began playing with her and kissing her. When a few days later Amelia burned one of her fingers playing with wax, the King ‘watched the advancement of her pain with great solicitude’. But he could also rib his daughter in the nicely teasing way of good parents, for he jested that Princess Amelia ‘would not be denied. Miss Burney is now the first in favour with her.’

  Having fun with his daughters did not solve the King’s problems with his oldest son, though. In 1787, Charles Fox proposed to obtain a huge parliamentary grant to deal with George’s never-ending debts but London society was fizzing with rumours that the Prince had secretly married. Fox denounced these rumours as lies which, of course, did not please Mrs Fitzherbert. The Prince was trapped between his furious wife, his furious parents and an equally furious Parliament. Meanwhile, the King and Queen had heard the rumours and were beside themselves with their son, who accused them of not understanding him.

  Eventually, Parliament granted the Prince £161,000 to settle his debts and £60,000 for improvements to Carlton House. Despite these fabulous sums, the Prince still felt aggrieved because his father refused to give him any place in the running of the country.

  George III’s crisis

  In 1788, the personal crisis for which George’s reign is best remembered took place when he suffered a breakdown of sorts. The arguments as to whether the King was mad, suffering from porphyria or had been poisoned by arsenic in the cosmetics he used have never been finally resolved. Arsenic is the current favourite as samples of the King’s hair were examined in 2005 and revealed high levels of the poison. The King certainly behaved in ways he had never done before. For example, he made his first and only attempt to seduce a woman other than his wife. Charlotte accepted that her usually loving husband was literally not in his right mind. What she – and the country – saw as a tragedy, their eldest son regarded as an opportunity, though.

  By November, the King could not fulfil his duties. Descriptions of his behaviour suggest he was manic as he sometimes spoke for hours without stopping. Far odder, it was claimed that he shook hands with a tree, thinking the oak was the King of Prussia. That may have been exaggerated as it is more usual for schizophrenics in a florid state to say they are Christ or Napoleon. The nearest well-documented example is perhaps in the case histories of Oliver Sacks, who is a neurologist, not a psychiatrist. In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Sacks describes a patient who did just that, but the man’s problem was organic and he never recovered.

  R. D. Laing and many other psychiatrists have claimed there are some rational reasons for even the oddest symptoms and this seems a useful view as to what happened next. On 5 November 1788, the King attacked his son and tried to smash his head against a wall. One observer claimed foam was coming from the King’s mouth and his eyes were so bloodshot that they looked like currant jelly. The assault was put down to madness rather than fury at the way his son had behaved for the past ten years. Perhaps it was no accident that the King chose Guy Fawkes Day to attack his son: Guy Fawkes had, after all, wanted to get rid of an earlier King.

  There were bitter battles between doctors as to who should have the honour of dealing with the ‘royal malady’. Eventually, a fierce ‘mad doctor’, Francis Willis, was chosen. Willis had the Queen’s confidence at first and put George in a straitjacket. A special chair was constructed to hold the King down. Sometimes, Willis applied poultices which were supposed to draw out ‘evil humours’. Willis became harsher and sometimes even had the King beaten to force the evil humours out. The Prince, who had been flogged so much as a boy, appears to have enjoyed the fact that his father was being punished.

  As the King could not fulfil his duties, Parliament had to appoint a Regent. The leaders of the main parties, Charles Fox and the younger Pitt, wrangled over the terms. Fox suggested the Prince’s powers should include the power to appoint the Prime Minister. Pitt refused to agree because he was afraid that the Regent would remove him from office for the Prince was far closer to Fox.

  Then a miracle happened. Or a tragedy, at least as far as the Prince was concerned: the King recovered for no apparent reason, which made his son unhappy, although he had to pretend otherwise. The Queen even stopped the Prince seeing his father twice because she thought a visit from his son would be upsetting and might trigger a new bout of the ‘royal malady’. The Prince did write polite letters which rejoiced in his father’s recovery but he and some cronies, including Jac
k Payne, went to the fashionable club, Brooks, on 17 February 1790. Payne imitated the King’s behaviour and ‘howled like a monkey’. The King was as mad as ever, they all grinned.

  The miracle was that, despite Willis’s treatment, George recovered – and quite suddenly. When the King became well enough to resume his duties, his eldest son was disappointed. The extent to which the Queen’s relationship with her once-adored son had changed is clear in one further detail. When she arranged a concert to celebrate the King’s recovery, she did not wish her son to attend. She reminded him that the concert was to thank those who had stayed loyal to the King during his illness: the Prince simply did not fit the bill.

  A naval father

  From the early 1780s, George III and Queen Charlotte were concerned that the Prince would corrupt the younger children and did their best, in particular, to keep his brothers away from him. George’s third son was quite close to his brother when they were young, but William then became the first royal Prince sent to join the Navy to gain experience of the world. No previous Prince had even been in actual command of a canoe.

  When he joined the HMS Prince George, William was just thirteen years old. He learned how to navigate, keep the men in order and even how to cook. He was treated like all the other young would-be officers but he was the only one to be accompanied by a tutor. The tutor could not prevent William from being arrested with shipmates after a drunken brawl in Gibraltar, but, as soon as the authorities realised they had jailed a Prince of the royal blood, they released him with profuse apologies.

  Twenty-two of the King’s letters to Prince William were discovered in 2008 and, while they hardly compare with James I’s Basilikon Doron, they offer an affectionate mix of good advice and typical royal anxieties. The King told Prince William:

  You are now launching into a scene of life where you either prove an Honour, or a Disgrace to your Family; it would be very unwelcoming of the love I have for my children, if I did not at this serious moment give you advice [on] how to conduct yourself.

  George III advised his son to behave humbly.

  Though when at home a Prince, on board of the Prince George you are only a Boy learning the Naval profession; but the Prince so far accompanies you that what other Boys do, you must not. It must never be out of your thoughts that more Obedience is necessary from You to Your superiors in the Navy, more politeness to your Equals, and more good nature to your Inferiors than from those who have not been told that these are essential for a Gentleman.

  William did well in the Navy and was promoted to lieutenant. He served during the American War of Independence and George Washington entertained the idea of seizing him while the Prince was visiting New York. The British got wind of the scheme, however, and assigned guards to escort William and so the plot was foiled.

  William eventually became one of Nelson’s captains, which delighted the King. Nelson himself had a good opinion of the Prince: ‘In his professional line, he is superior to two-thirds, I am sure, of the [Naval] list; and in attention to orders, and respect to his superior officer, I hardly know his equal.’ William was finally made a rear admiral but then his sea career did not progress any further, which he found very frustrating.

  Though William and George III enjoyed a better relationship than most Hanoverian sons had with their fathers, the frustrated rear admiral now put pressure on his father and he did so in a way that no other royal ever seems to have done. William threatened to run for the House of Commons for the constituency of Totnes in Devon. This might have been marvellous political theatre and precedent – imagine if Prince Charles or Princess Anne offered themselves for election – but George III was appalled by the prospect. William was much easier to buy off than his elder brother, though. The rear admiral settled for being made Duke of Clarence and St Andrews and Earl of Munster. His father apparently grumbled, ‘I well know it is another vote added to the Opposition.’

  In 1791, William started to live with an Irish actress, Dorothea Bland, who called herself ‘Mrs Jordan’. For the next twenty years, they produced children as enthusiastically as Mr and Mrs King did. All their ten (who were, of course, illegitimate) were given the surname ‘FitzClarence’ after their father’s Duchy. Rather like his own father, William seems to have enjoyed a quiet home life. He told a friend: ‘Mrs Jordan is a very good creature, very domestic and careful of her children. To be sure she is absurd sometimes and has her humours but there are such things more or less in all families.’ The phrase is telling as it makes it very clear that William did not see Dorothea as a mistress but to all purposes as his wife. He seems especially to have looked forward to family get-togethers, as Mrs Jordan wrote: ‘We shall have a full and merry house this Christmas, ’tis what the dear Duke delights in.’ The King accepted the fact that his son was living in sin but thought, typically, that this particular state justified halving Mrs Jordan’s allowance.

  It is not surprising George III was constantly worried about the debts that his sons ran up. By the mid-1790s, the Prince of Wales owed moneylenders something like £630,000 – almost £50 million in today’s money. His father refused to bail him out, so the only solution was for the Prince of Wales to marry a rich wife, which provoked more conflict between the Prince and his long-suffering parents.

  The tragicomedy of the wife George III chose for his son

  The Prince of Wales was given the choice of two possible brides; both were German and George’s first cousins. Princess Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was the daughter of Queen Charlotte’s brother, while Caroline of Brunswick was his father’s sister’s daughter. Caroline did not have a good reputation; the Queen had heard rumours that she had become the lover of an Irish officer in her father’s army. Ironically, this made her an excellent choice as far as the Prince’s latest mistress, Lady Jersey, was concerned. She believed Caroline would be less of a rival than Louise and persuaded the Prince that she was the best woman for him.

  Prince George sent one of his courtiers to Brunswick to inspect Caroline. James Harris found the would-be bride dressed in a slovenly way and thought she had not washed for days. Her coarse language also disturbed him, but, instead of coming back to London to warn George that he might be making a terrible mistake, Harris devoted himself to improving Caroline. After four months, he thought she was presentable and brought her to England. George was not impressed, however, as, the moment he saw Caroline, he said, ‘Harris, I am not well, pray get me a glass of brandy.’ For her part, Caroline was equally unimpressed and complained George’s portrait had obviously been painted years earlier and that he did not look so dashing now. ‘I think he is very fat and nothing like as handsome,’ she declared. The night before the wedding, George sent his brother, William, to tell Mrs Fitzherbert that she was the only woman he would ever love. He then proceeded to get roaring drunk – it was apparently the only way he could face the wedding.

  Some time later, George said that he and Caroline only had sex three times, but that was sufficient for her to congratulate her husband on how large his penis was. She could only know that, he concluded, if she had slept with other men; his parents had made him marry a harlot. The royal couple separated within weeks, though they remained under the same roof. Three times was enough, however, as Caroline became pregnant. Nine months after the wedding, she gave birth to a daughter. Expert Queen Charlotte was involved in the preparations for the birth and told the Chamberlain not to order the cradle he intended to buy. Communication went through a palace official, it seems, as Charlotte instructed him to tell her eldest son: ‘I, as an experienced woman in such matters, say it should be without rockers to it.’

  Prince George became very anxious during the last stage of his wife’s labour because producing an heir would bolster his own position. He invited many grandees to attend the birth, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chancellor, the Lord President, four dukes and Lord Jersey, the husband of his mistress. Jersey carried a letter to the King and Queen, saying Caroline had given birth
to ‘an immense girl’.

  George III was delighted and the girl was called Charlotte after the Queen. Ignoring the friction between his son and daughter-in-law, the King added: ‘You are both young and I trust will have many children.’ It was a forlorn hope. Three days after Charlotte was born, George made a will in which he left his fortune to Mrs Fitzherbert, ‘who is my wife in the eyes of God and who is, and ever will be such in mine.’ The Prince added: ‘To her who is called Princess of Wales I leave one shilling.’ The will was not just hostile to Caroline but, implicitly, to his parents who had arranged the marriage. It was not the final insult, though: the Prince’s will also stated that Caroline should play no part in bringing up their child. When she complained, George banned her from seeing their daughter unless a nurse and governess were present.

  As the immense baby Charlotte grew up, both her parents tried to use her as a pawn in their ongoing battle. In August 1797, her mother left Carlton House and rented a house in Blackheath in south London. She claimed to be a devoted mother, but Charlotte saw very little of her; George was even less interested. When Charlotte was eight, he moved her out of his own home into Montague House, which was next door. There, Charlotte grew up with little contact with either parent and was looked after by strangers. She had one of the bleakest of all royal childhoods.

  George III’s life is threatened; his son’s reactions

  I have argued that, by comparison with most people, royals endure rather more life events, and few are more upsetting than assassination attempts. George III was attacked twice. The first attempt was in 1786. The would-be assassin was Margaret Nicholson, who he treated rather kindly, insisting she needed a mad doctor as she had tried to kill him with a kitchen knife that was hopelessly blunt. Relations between the King and the Prince were already so bad that Charlotte did not tell her son either that his father had been attacked, or that he had survived. Then, in May 1800, George III was shot at in the Drury Lane Theatre – just as his grandfather had been in 1716. The assassin missed but the attack, perhaps to the Prince of Wales’s chagrin, did not trigger a new bout of the royal malady; that only happened ten years later.