Behind the Palace Doors

by Michael Farquhar

  It was only when Frederick tried to marry his cousin Princess Wilhelmina of Prussia—in essence, conducting his own foreign policy†—that he was allowed to come to England, where he might be more carefully controlled. The welcome was not exactly warm. Frederick barely knew his mother and father and would soon find out how horrible they really were.

  George II was a boorish, oversexed bully who, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote, “looks on all men and women he sees as creatures he might kiss or kick for his diversion.” Queen Caroline of Ansbach, who shared her husband’s hatred for their eldest son, was a brilliant politician but grasping and manipulative. “Her predominant passion was pride,” Lord Hervey wrote, “and the darling pleasure of her soul was power.” Caroline indulged the king’s lusty forays outside the marriage, even discussing with him in vivid detail the relative merits of his unattractive mistresses,‡ all the while pursuing her own political agenda with Prime Minister Robert Walpole. A popular verse of the time satirized the royal power structure:

  You may strut, dapper George, but ’twill all be in vain,

  We all know ’tis Queen Caroline, not you, that reign.

  George and Caroline had once been outcasts from the court of George I, establishing their own alternative court at their London residence, Leicester House, where they made fun of the oafish king and nurtured opposition to his government. But the glitter and excitement that surrounded them as Prince and Princess of Wales all but disappeared once George II came to the throne. The king established a stultifying routine in which nearly every activity was militaristically timed—down to when he would sleep with his mistress. “No mill horse ever went on a more constant track or a more unchanging circle,” Lord Hervey wrote.

  Prince Frederick, by contrast, brought a refreshing lack of pretense with him from Hanover, as well as spontaneity, generosity, and charm. “I am extremely pleased that I can tell you without flattery or partiality that our young prince has all the accomplishments that ’tis possible to have at his age,” Lady Montagu wrote to a friend, “with an air of sprightliness and understanding, and something so very engaging and easy in his behaviour, that he needs not the advantage of his rank to appear charming.” All of London seemed enamored with the affable, sometimes outrageous prince, which distressed his parents no end. “My God!” Queen Caroline exclaimed. “Popularity always makes me sick, but Fretz’s popularity makes me vomit.”

  The hostility of the king and queen toward their son was reflected in his allowance, which was about half of what George II enjoyed when he was Prince of Wales. Frederick was also kept far away from any matters of state, which left him plenty of time for mischief. His debts were enormous and his dalliances indiscriminate. Indeed at one point he managed to impregnate not only his mistress, Anne Vane, but her chambermaid as well. Furthermore, like his own father in the previous reign, the prince was beginning to attract opponents of the king’s policies. A mighty rift was growing, one that nearly destroyed the great composer George Frideric Handel when he was dragged into it.

  When it came to culture, George II was a Philistine.§ Nevertheless he loved Handel, who composed the music for his coronation. The king and queen, along with their daughter Princess Anne, faithfully attended his operas at the King’s Theatre, where the socially ambitious gathered to bask in the royal presence. Handel came to represent the very essence of refinement. Recognizing this, Frederick set out to wound his father by ruining his favorite composer. The prince and his supporters established a rival opera company at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, run first by the Italian composer Giovanni Battista Bononcini, then by another Italian, Nicola Porpora. Talent was lured away from Handel’s theater, as well as patronage by the younger nobility, among whom Frederick was far more popular than his father. On many nights the King’s Theatre was nearly empty, forcing Handel to spend more and more money in an effort to keep competitive and stay afloat. His nerves, to say nothing of his wallet, took a severe beating. And though the opera wars eventually ended peacefully, the clash between King George and Prince Frederick only grew in ferocity.

  Frederick married sixteen-year-old Augusta of Saxe-Gotha in 1736 and wanted an income for his new wife. He also wanted an increase in his own paltry allowance, which could be reduced at the whim of his father. So, he appealed to Parliament. The king and queen trembled with rage when they learned that their son had maneuvered around them; it would be a tremendous blow to their prestige if he prevailed. Lord Hervey recorded Queen Caroline’s reaction as she watched Frederick walking across a palace courtyard:

  “Look there he goes—that wretch! That villain! I wish the ground would open up and sink the monster to the lowest hole in hell. You stare at me, but I can assure you if my wishes and prayers had any effect, and that the maledictions of a mother signified anything, his days would not be very happy or very many.”

  Anxious as the king and queen were about the political consequences if Frederick succeeded in Parliament, they couldn’t bring themselves to simply pay the prince what the king himself received when he was in the same position. Thus, the matter did go before both the Commons and the House of Lords, and thanks in part to some well-placed bribes by the king, Frederick lost. His parents were thrilled. They wanted to toss him out of St. James’s Palace as punishment for his insolence but were dissuaded only by Walpole’s suggestion that the popular prince on the loose—made a martyr by his mother and father—might become too potent a political force. Still, they were determined to make their son’s life as miserable as possible.

  When Frederick announced that his young wife was pregnant, the couple was ordered to Hampton Court so that the king and queen could keep a closer eye on them and also avoid any popular acclamation of the birth in London. Of course the atmosphere was toxic, and as Augusta prepared to deliver, Frederick was determined to whisk her away from his noxious parents. The couple escaped under cover of darkness and made their way back to St. James’s Palace by coach. By the time they arrived, Princess Augusta was in labor.

  Meanwhile, back at Hampton Court, the king and queen were awakened with the news that Frederick and Augusta had escaped. Queen Caroline had suggested that her son was impotent and was therefore determined to be present at the birth to assure that a changeling wasn’t proffered as legitimate royal issue. “At her labour I positively will be,” she declared, “let her lie-in be where she will.” Caroline, her daughters, and the rest of the royal retinue raced off to London, where they were amiably greeted by Frederick and told that the child, a baby girl, had already been delivered. After seeing the little princess, Queen Caroline pronounced herself satisfied that the baby was indeed Frederick’s.

  “I owe … I had my doubts upon the road that there would be some juggle,” she said afterward. “And if, instead of this poor, little, ugly she-mouse, there had been a brave, large, fat, jolly boy, I should not have been cured of my suspicions. Nay, I believe that they would have been so much increased, or rather, that I should have been confirmed in my opinion, that I should have gone about this house like a mad woman, played the devil, and insisted on knowing what chairman’s brat he [Frederick] had bought.”

  Running away with one’s wife in labor was not as bad as, say, abandoning one’s seven-year-old son in another country. But for King George and Queen Caroline it was an act of unforgivable defiance. “I hope in God that I shall never see the monster’s face again,” ranted the queen, while the king gleefully plotted his revenge—even as he appointed himself godfather to the new baby. “This extravagant and undutiful behaviour in so essential a point as the birth of an heir to my crown is such an evidence of your premeditated defiance of me,” the king wrote, “and such a contempt of my authority and of the natural right belonging to your parents, as cannot be excused by the pretended innocence of your intentions, nor palliated or disguised by specious words only.”

  The prince and his little family were banished from all the royal palaces. Notice was then given to all foreign diplomats and members of the n
obility that anyone who paid their respects to the Prince and Princess of Wales would no longer be welcome in the king’s presence. “Thank God tomorrow night the puppy will be sent out of my house,” King George rejoiced on the eve of his son’s removal.

  It was a precipitous decision, reminiscent of the king’s own banishment by George I, and it rebounded badly. The opposition rallied around Frederick, just as it had around George II when he was Prince of Wales. Furthermore, it was utterly ineffective in its intent to harm the prince. On the contrary, Frederick reveled in the freedom he found far away from his father and his suffocating court. Worst of all, his popularity soared.

  Queen Caroline expressed her desire never to see her son again. And in the end she got her wish. Two months after Frederick’s banishment, she lay dying. The prince asked that he might visit his mother and comfort her in her illness, but King George wouldn’t hear of it. “He wants to come and insult his poor dying mother,” the indignant monarch roared. “But she shall not see him. I could never let that villain come near her. And whilst she has her senses she would never desire it. No. No! He shall not come and act any of his silly plays here, false, lying, cowardly, nauseous puppy.”

  Caroline’s deathbed scene was touching as she bade farewell to the children she liked and urged her husband to remarry. (“No,” the king sobbed. “I shall have mistresses.”) As for Frederick, the queen was unmoved, stating that “at least I shall have one comfort in having my eyes eternally closed: I shall never see that monster again.”

  After siring eight more children,‖ including the future King George III, Prince Frederick died in 1751 at the relatively young age of forty-four. “This has been a fatal year to my family,” George II wrote several months later. “I lost my eldest son, but was glad of it.”

  * Those sweet sentiments have also been attributed to Frederick’s mother, Queen Caroline of Ansbach.

  † George II had this to say about nixing the proposed match: “I did not think that ingrafting my half-witted coxcomb upon a mad woman would improve the breed.”

  ‡ “No woman comes amiss of him if she were but very willing and very fat,” was one devastating commentary on the king’s tastes.

  § So was his father. “I hate all boets and bainters,” George I famously remarked.

  ‖ Frederick was, by all accounts, a much kinder father than his own father had been. “He played the father and husband well,” a contemporary observed, “always most happy in the bosom of his family, left them with regret and met them again with smiles, kisses and tears.”

  19

  George II (1727–1760):

  Bonnie Prince Charlie

  I have taken a firm resolution to conquer or to die.

  —CHARLES EDWARD STUART,

  AKA BONNIE PRINCE CHARLIE

  The first two Hanoverian kings of Britain faced regular threats from the Catholic heirs of the previous Stuart dynasty, who had been barred from the throne by the Act of Settlement in 1701. The most dangerous of these periodic uprisings was the one led by Charles Edward Stuart in 1745.

  George II had a far greater cause for concern than his despised son, Frederick, when, in 1745, a dashing remnant of the old Stuart royal dynasty—popularly known as Bonnie Prince Charlie—rose up and came dangerously close to capturing his kingdom. Though the enterprise ultimately ended in a bloody massacre (overseen by the one son King George actually did like), it was filled with enough daring and adventure to make the charismatic Stuart claimant a legend.

  Charles Edward Stuart, the would-be conqueror, also known as the Young Pretender,* was the grandson of James II, the Catholic king with autocratic tendencies, and the son of James Edward Stuart, or the Old Pretender, whose birth in 1688 helped precipitate the Glorious Revolution that swept King James off his throne (see Chapter 14).

  The exiled Stuarts had made numerous attempts to reclaim the crown since James II’s ignominious flight from England in 1688, all of which had been spectacular failures. This left the Old Pretender—or King James III, as he called himself after the death of his father in 1701—utterly dejected and in a near constant state of melancholy as he tried to maintain the pretense of majesty in his shadow court. “For me,” the Old Pretender groaned to his officers after one of his many failed attempts to capture the crown, “it is no new thing to be unfortunate, since my whole life from my cradle has been a constant series of misfortunes.” It was an honest assessment, but hardly an inspiring one.

  In contrast to his brooding, morose father, Charles Edward Stuart practically pulsated with vigor and was driven to take up the cause the demoralized Old Pretender had all but abandoned. The Young Pretender’s infectious spirit and bold ambition rallied people around him and left them in awe of his princely qualities. “There is … such an unspeakable majesty diffused through his whole mien as it is impossible to have any idea without seeing,” one young Scot enthused after meeting Charles in Rome. “He appears to be born and endowed for something extraordinary.”

  Another of the Young Pretender’s supporters, Arthur Elphinstone, Lord Balmerino, praised him effusively, even as he faced the executioner’s axe for having supported the Stuart cause: “I am not a fit hand to draw his character. I shall leave that to others. But I must beg leave to tell you the incomparable sweetness of his nature, his affability, his compassion, his justice, his temperance, his patience, and his courage are virtues seldom to be found in the person. In short he wants [lacks] no qualifications requisite to make a great man.”

  Greatness was the Young Pretender’s most ardent desire, because he believed it was his birthright as a Stuart prince. But the chances of achieving it looked dismal in 1744, when Charles, aged twenty-three, began his quest to capture King George II’s throne for his father. Early that January he had slipped away from a hunting party outside Rome, where “James III” had his court-in-exile, and secretly made his way to France, all the while evading agents of King George who would be eager to capture or kill him. The French were to be his allies in the effort to restore the Stuart monarchy, but just as preparations for the invasion of England neared completion, wicked storms destroyed much of the French fleet and prompted King Louis XV to withdraw his support.

  Charles was stuck in France, “imprisoned,” as he put it, without money or prospects—and saddled with a fractious group of supporters. “You may well imagine how out of humour I am,” the Young Pretender wrote to his father in Rome, “when for comfort I am plagued out of my life with tracasseries [petty bickering] from our own people, who as it would seem would rather sacrifice me and my affairs than fail in any private view.” It was a rare display of pique for the normally exuberant youth.

  Rather than endure enforced idleness in France, and all its attendant miseries, Charles decided to invade on his own, declaring that he was “determined to come the following summer to Scotland, though with a single footman.” It was an audacious plan for the penniless Pretender, the kind of “rash or ill-conceived project,” his father warned, that “would end in your ruin and that of all those who would join with you in it.” Charles, however, would not be deterred.

  “I have, above six months ago, been invited by our friends to go to Scotland,” the Young Pretender wrote to the Old, “and to carry what money and arms I could conveniently get; this being, they are persuaded, the only way of restoring you to the crown, and them to their liberties.” The challenge would be daunting, Charles conceded, but the time had come for action lest their Stuart supporters, or Jacobites, lose faith in his ability to lead. “If a horse which is to be sold if spurred does not skip, nobody would care to have him, even for nothing,” Charles argued; “just so my friends would care very little to have me, if after such usage as all the world is sensible of, I should not show that I have life in me.”

  With some covert help from the French government, the Young Pretender was able to amass arms, several hundred men, and two ships, and, on July 16, 1745, the tiny invasion force set out for Scotland. “Let what will happen,” Charles
boldly declared to his father. “The stroke is struck, and I have taken a firm resolution to conquer or to die, and stand my ground as long as I shall have a man remaining with me.”

  That stout resolution would serve Charles well when, en route to Scotland, an English warship attacked and left him without the French gunship that carried most of the men, arms, and provisions he had planned to use in his quest to conquer Britain. The ragtag remnants of his invasion party would hardly be enough now to rally much support in Scotland. Indeed, soon after landing in the midst of what was described as “a very wet dirty night,” without shelter, Charles learned that the promised assistance of several clan chiefs from the Highlands would not be forthcoming.

  Undaunted by this sorry state of affairs, Charles dismissed suggestions that he return to France until such a time as his prospects improved. “I am come home, sir,” he said to one skeptical Scot, “and I will entertain no notion at all of returning to that place from whence I came, for that I am persuaded my faithful Highlanders will stand by me.”

  His faith was gradually vindicated as some Highlanders came to recognize his unshakable determination and gathered in ever increasing numbers under his banner. Charles seemed to understand the soul of the Scots, especially of the fierce clansmen of the north, and spoke to it. He appealed to their native pride, which had been severely battered by the hated Hanoverians since the union of Scotland with England in 1707. He presented himself as their prince; the heir of an ancient line of Scots kings, who had come, despite all odds, to fight that bulgy-eyed foreign usurper, George II.

  For this, Bonnie Prince Charlie was rewarded with astonishing loyalty, even though many Scots were still not prepared to follow him. Clan chiefs pledged never to abandon him, while soldiers became so devoted that, according to one contemporary, “there was scarce a man among them that would not have readily run on certain death if his [Charles’s] cause might have received any advantage.”