The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  This steady diffusion of prosperity was obvious to anyone visiting Britain. Every observer noted that there was clearly a good deal of new money around. Among the very rich, it was apparent in the construction of great new country houses, and in the seemingly limitless demand for luxurious objects to put in them: clocks and carpets, portraits and brocades, china and silverware, chairs, tables and sideboards. What struck foreign visitors most powerfully, however, was the degree to which the middle classes, and even some of the poor, shared in the general sense of improved wellbeing. In the opinion of one German writer in the 1770s, the ‘luxury’ enjoyed by the middle and lower classes ‘had risen to such a pitch as never before seen in the world’.15 A few years later, a Russian traveller compared the general wellbeing he saw in London with the gulf between rich and poor he had witnessed in France. ‘How different this is from Paris! There vastness and filth, here simplicity and astonishing cleanliness; there wealth and poverty in continual contrast, here a general air of sufficiency; there palaces out of which crawls poverty, here tiny brick cottages with an air of dignity and tranquillity, lord and artisan almost indistinguishable in their immaculate dress.’16

  As he went on to remind his readers, squalor and poverty were of course still to be found in eighteenth-century England, but most foreign observers agreed that a larger proportion of the British now seemed to have escaped the worst deprivations that were the general experience of the European poor. Back in the 1720s, de Saussure had observed with surprise that ‘the lower classes are usually well dressed, wearing good cloth and linen. You never see wooden shoes in England, and the poorest individuals never go with naked feet.’17 Indeed, in England, the wearing of ‘wooden shoes’ was indelibly associated with the desperate poverty held to be the inevitable product of life under Catholic absolute monarchies. The passionate cry of: ‘No popery and no wooden shoes!’, which so often resounded through the streets of eighteenth-century London, was an expression of the conviction held by even the poorest Britons that they enjoyed a standard of living of which their foreign counterparts could only dream.

  The small prosperity of small people created the demand for ever larger numbers of affordable goods. British manufacturers soon showed themselves eager and adaptable enough to supply them. Unlike many of its grander European competitors, the British market did not just cater to the super-rich – to ‘the magnificence of princes’. It was just as interested in selling to new customers, less wealthy but more numerous. Matthew Boulton, the great Birmingham-based producer of the buckles and buttons that were an essential part of every eighteenth-century wardrobe, had no doubt which of the two kinds of buyer he valued most. ‘We think it of far more consequence to supply the People than the Nobility only … We think that they will do more towards supporting a great Manufactory than all the Lords of The Nation.’18 Boulton understood that an entire new market had emerged, a new generation of purchasers, looking to achieve their own moderately priced vision of the good life, and he and others were ready and willing to supply it. ‘Thus it is,’ wrote the clergyman and economist Josiah Tucker, ‘that the English … have better conveniences in their houses and affect to have far more in quantity of clean, neat furniture and a greater variety, such as carpets, screens, window curtains, chamber bells, polished brass locks, fenders etc., (things hardly known abroad amongst persons of such rank) than are to be found in any country in Europe.’19 These simple and often extraordinarily resilient objects, designed to appeal to the taste of modest eighteenth-century buyers, were made in such numbers that any frequenter of modern auction rooms or antique shops will be familiar with them. Those that have survived the uses and abuses of 250 years are often beautiful to look at and still desirable things to own. They are also mute witness to the power of a quiet revolution which began to transform British experience just as George III began his reign. He was the first king to rule over a nation of consumers.

  The Britain in which the young king acceded in 1760 was an assertive and forceful society, sometimes brash and overbearing in the robustness of its self-belief. It was not an easy place in which to be poor, vulnerable, sensitive or a failure; but for those who could stand the pace, and who were not among the losers crushed by the relentlessness of its forward movement, the experience of being British in the mid-eighteenth century was dominated by a sense of energetic exhilaration, an acute consciousness of an upward trajectory towards levels of international power and domestic wealth that were unthinkable only a generation before. The experience of the nation thus mirrored that of its inhabitants; both now found themselves in possession of assets that had arrived with swift and surprising speed. Horace Walpole caught the mood perfectly. ‘You would not know your country again,’ he wrote to a friend who had long lived abroad. ‘You left it as a private island living upon its means. You would find it now capital of the world.’20

  *

  In such circumstances, the accession of a youthful king, whose vitality seemed to reflect the ambition of the country he ruled, was greeted with unconstrained enthusiasm. George II had been on the throne since 1727. He was an old man, aged seventy-six at the time of his death, who belonged to the old world. Of the new monarch, Philip, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, usually the most detached and cynical of observers, wrote that he was the king of ‘his united and unanimous people, and enjoys their confidence and love to such a degree that were I not as fully convinced as I am of His Majesty’s heart and the moderation of his will, I should tremble for the liberties of my country’.21

  Impressions of the young man at the centre of this whirlwind of attention were universally positive, contrasting his affability with the curmudgeonly attitudes of his elderly predecessor. Walpole, who rushed to court to get an early look at his new ruler, was pleased with what he found: ‘This sovereign don’t stand in one spot, with his eyes fixed royally on the ground and dropping bits of German news; he walks about and speaks to everybody.’22

  The polite and considerate monarch had not yet grown into the bulky figure he would become in early middle age, the familiar image of florid imperturbability whose prominent blue eyes gaze so resolutely from later portraits. Although he was not conventionally handsome, the Duchess of Northumberland, who knew him well, described him tactfully as ‘tall and robust, more graceful than genteel’. The family tendency towards fat, against which George struggled diligently throughout his life, meant that he would never look the part of either romantic hero or fashion plate. He had strong, white teeth, evidently enough of a rarity, even in aristocratic circles, to merit approving comment by a number of observers. His hair, when neither powdered nor hidden beneath a wig, was considered one of his best points. It was, the duchess recorded, ‘a light auburn, which grew very handsomely to his face’. She also admired his clear and healthy complexion, but noted that in common with others of his age, ‘he had now and then a few pimples out’. For the duchess, however, it was George’s demeanour that mattered more. ‘There was a noble openness in his countenance, blended with a cheerful good-natured affability,’ which trumped his prosaic appearance and even gave him a certain fugitive charm.23 The portrait that best captures the elusive quality of George’s appeal was made a few years before his accession by the Swiss painter Jean-Etienne Liotard. Delicately rendered in pastels, it does not flatter – the man George would later become is visible in the round lineaments of his face, the fullness of his mouth and the protuberance of his eyes – but it captures brilliantly the clear-eyed, healthy, pink-and-white freshness of his youthful self.

  George’s looks were only part of the story. In the opening weeks of his reign, admiration for the new king’s ‘open and honest countenance’ was exceeded only by approval of the unstudied excellence of his behaviour. Everyone who saw him in the immediate aftermath of his grandfather’s death commented on the considerate correctness of all his actions. ‘He has behaved with the greatest propriety, dignity and decency,’ observed Walpole.24 He knew how to carry himself respectfully at solemn moments, but onl
ookers were also struck by his ability to strike a lighter note. His unforced, natural warmth of character was particularly admired. Lady Susan Fox-Strangways, who saw him often at court, approvingly observed in him ‘a look of happiness and good humour that pleases everyone – and me in particular’.25

  The grace and cheerfulness that George displayed in these days of excitement and promise were more than the temporary product of a moment; he was an essentially good-hearted man, who tried to observe the decencies of gentlemanly behaviour even in the darkest and most trying times of his reign. However, the polite, easy candour celebrated by so many observers in those early days was only part of who he really was. There was a sombre, more thoughtful cast to his character, which Liotard’s portrait caught as acutely as it did the new-minted freshness of his features. The young George stares watchfully out from the canvas, with an air of wary self-containment. This is a serious man, with a serious purpose in mind – there is no hint of frivolity or light-heartedness in his measured expression. For all its tenderness, it is also an image of quiet, sustained – even steely – determination; and it was a better indicator of what lay in George’s mind as he contemplated the future than all the benign gestures with which he navigated the immediate aftermath of his grandfather’s death. For George III came to the throne determined to do more than merely replace George II. He aspired to be not just the next king, but a new kind of king.

  As heir to the crown, George had spent much of his youth transfixed by the inevitability of his destiny, trying to comprehend what was expected of him. What was the true purpose of kingship in the modern world? Why had he been called upon to undertake this extraordinary and unasked-for burden? How could he discharge it as providence intended, fulfilling his duty to God, to himself and to his subjects? The answers to these questions, he eventually concluded, encompassed far more than the narrowly political concerns that had absorbed the energies of his predecessors. Their obsession with the day-to-day management of political business, the ups and downs and ins and outs of ministerial fortunes, had obscured the unique and singular meaning of sovereignty. The job of a king, George had decided, was no less than to graft moral purpose on to the nation’s polity. It was his role to act as the conscience of the country, and the guardian of its true interests. He was, George believed, the active agent of principle in public life, a figure intimately connected with the daily workings of politics and yet with a significance far beyond them. It was his duty to remind politicians what the point of politics was and, through his interventions and understanding, to direct them beyond their personal and party interests towards a larger and more lasting common good.

  This interpretation of his task did more than influence George’s public life; it also profoundly shaped his sense of his duties as a private man. How could a king act as a moral compass to others if he did not live a moral life himself? George’s idea of kingship thus reached far beyond a purely public dimension; it contained within itself a powerful personal imperative too. There was a direct connection between his actions in the political world and his conduct at home. He could not act as a force for good in the national interest if he was unable to live by right principles in his private life.

  George’s desire to see these ideas reflected in his actions as king was to put a great deal of pressure on the established order of politics in the years immediately after his accession; but it was their impact on the intimate world of the royal family that would prove far more revolutionary and of much greater lasting significance. He knew that to deliver the moral authority he needed to justify his vision, he would need to create a new kind of family life for himself. This meant redefining the personal relationships at its heart, reshaping what it meant to be a royal husband, wife, son or daughter. This would involve a greater emphasis on meeting high moral standards, a greater stress on duty, obligation and conscience. But he would also attempt to introduce into these roles something of the human warmth and emotional authenticity he believed non-royals found in them, hoping to provide for his wife and his children the solace and affection that seemed so singularly lacking in the lives of his immediate predecessors.

  Because in becoming a new kind of king, George recognised that he would also have to become a new kind of Hanoverian. He understood that his idea of kingship required him to turn his back on his family’s past, rejecting a malign inheritance of emotional dysfunction that had been handed down from generation to generation. Both his great-grandfather, George I, and grandfather, George II, had hated their sons with a passion bordering on madness. None of his male relations had been faithful to his wife. Every Hanoverian prince kept a succession of mistresses with scant concern for the feelings of his spouse, who responded with either mute resignation or loud and furious cries of dismay. The children of these unhappy unions were, unsurprisingly, rarely happy themselves. Drawn into feuds between their parents, they were angry, jealous and disaffected. They schemed and quarrelled between themselves and seemed destined to repeat the behaviour that had destroyed any chance of contentment for their parents. As George saw it, this legacy of amoral, cynical behaviour had warped and corrupted the Hanoverians, crippling their effectiveness as rulers and making their private lives miserable. It had made them bad kings and bad people. It had set husband against wife, father against son, sister against brother. It had thwarted their ambitions and corrupted their affections, leaving in its wake nothing but bitterness.

  George planned to put an end to the whole painful cycle. On the very day he became king, he sent for his uncle, William, Duke of Cumberland, the victor of Culloden, with whom he had had many differences in the past, and announced his intention to outlaw the old habits of spite and bad faith. Walpole heard that George had been most explicit in signalling the magnitude of the change, telling the duke that ‘it had not been common in their family to live well together, but that he was determined to live well with all his family’.26 It was such a public declaration that everyone appreciated its significance.

  George’s intention to reform the way his family related to one another underpinned all the decisions he made about his private life in the years that followed. It dictated his choice of a wife, and shaped the ambitions he had for their relationship within marriage. It influenced his attitude to fatherhood, and was the foundation upon which he based the upbringing of his small children. It governed the way the young princes and princesses were educated and laid down a pattern of behaviour they were expected to follow as adults. Alongside his profound Christian faith – another distinction that marked him out from his forebears – it informed almost every action he took in relation to his intimate, personal world.

  At one level, his devotion to the project grew out of something deeper than conscious strategy; it was a manifestation of the most enduring aspects of his personality, a reflection of the qualities of exacting, dutiful conscientiousness that were indivisible from his character. George acted as he did because he was who he was. But his desire for change owed as much to his sense of history as to the promptings of his nature. He was profoundly aware of his family’s failings and believed passionately that it was his duty to reject the pattern of behaviour they had bequeathed to him. For that reason, the lives of George’s predecessors are worth exploring, in all their dissolute, chaotic extraordinariness. They were the mirror image of everything George thought valuable and true in human relationships – a dark vision of just how wrong things could go when all sense of discipline, restraint and honest affection was lost. To appreciate what motivated the most upright of the Hanoverians, it is necessary to understand something of the people against whom he so firmly defined himself.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Strangest Family

  GEORGE III’S FIRST SPEECH FROM the throne was a resounding declaration of his particular fitness to take up the task before him. ‘Born and educated in this country,’ he pronounced, ‘I glory in the name of Britain.’1 It was not a statement any of his immediate predecessors could have made, which was of cours
e precisely why he said it. From the very earliest days of his reign, he sought to mark himself out from his Hanoverian forebears. Neither George I nor George II had been born in Britain, and neither ever thought of the country as home. Their true Heimat was Hanover, a princely state in northern Germany in whose flat farmlands the dynasty had its ancestral roots. They both thought of themselves first and foremost as electors of Hanover; their kingship of England, Scotland and Ireland came very much second in their hearts.

  When George III became monarch, the family had been somewhat reluctantly seated on the throne for only forty-six years. The crown of Great Britain had not been a prize they had expected to inherit, but they had done so with the death of Queen Anne in 1714. Anne was the daughter of James II, the last Stuart king, who was forced off his throne in 1688 when his Catholicism became unacceptable to the Protestant English. In the Glorious Revolution that followed, the Dutch prince William of Orange, nephew and son-in-law of the deposed James, was invited to become king, with the stipulation that henceforth, only a Protestant could become sovereign, a qualification still in force today. Anne, who succeeded the childless William, was known with cruel irony as ‘the teeming Princess of Denmark’. Her pregnancies were many, but, despite an appalling catalogue of gynaecological endurance, she had no living children to show for it; she lost five babies in infancy and suffered thirteen miscarriages. When her only surviving child, the eleven-year-old Duke of Gloucester, died in 1700, it was clear that an heir must be looked for elsewhere.