The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  George’s reputation has been considerably enhanced by a new interest in these aspects of his reign; but in re-evaluating his role, it would be wrong to excise Caroline altogether from the landscape of political life. When the king was away on his frequent and often lengthy trips to his Hanoverian electorate, on every occasion until her death, it was Caroline who was given responsibility for heading the Regency Council which governed in George’s absence.10 This involved her directly in the daily business of politics, and required her to spend a great deal of time in the company of politicians. Her relationship with the wily and effective Sir Robert Walpole spanned a decade, and was built on a foundation of wary but mutual respect that ended only with her final illness. As Hervey observed, Caroline positively enjoyed political life. Her philosophical readings had given her an interest in the theory of political organisation, and she liked to reflect on the constitutional peculiarities of her adopted home. ‘My God,’ she once declared to Hervey, ‘what a figure this poor island would make in Europe if it were not for its government! … Who the devil do you think would take you all, or think you worth having, that had anything else, if you had not your liberties?’11

  Caroline was astute enough to recognise that this was the kind of eulogy a British monarch was required to deliver in order to retain the affections of the people; but it does not seem to have been a particularly honest reflection of her private opinions. Hervey thought that in her heart, the queen’s politics were closer to those of her husband. George was suspicious of the constitutional settlement over which he was obliged to preside, and ‘looked upon all the English as king-killers and republicans, grudged them their riches as well as their liberty [and] thought them all overpaid’. He much preferred the way things were done in Hanover, for ‘there he rewarded people for doing their duty and serving him well, but here he was obliged to enrich people for being rascals and buy them not to cut his throat’.12 To Hervey, Caroline expressed similar frustrations with the limits of royal power, as the Glorious Revolution had defined it, complaining that in England, a king was ‘no more than the humble servant of Parliament, the pensioner of his people, and a puppet of sovereignty that was forced to go to them for every shilling he wanted, that was obliged to court those who were always abusing him, and could do nothing himself’.13 In public, she was far more measured. ‘The business of princes,’ she declared, ‘is to make the whole go on, and not to encourage or suffer silly, impertinent, personal piques between their servants to hinder the business of government being done.’14 For Caroline, the world of politics as she understood it bore a striking resemblance to the life she had made for herself at home. In the end, both came down to questions of management.

  Whatever the reality of Caroline’s political role, it is hard to imagine that George was indifferent to the powerful contemporary perception that in matters of government, it was she and not he who was in charge. For a man whose self-esteem was so dependent on the respect and admiration of others, this must have been a painful experience. To be found wanting in the arena where men – and royal men in particular – were expected to excel, unchallenged by even the brightest of women, was particularly humiliating. In the public world, as he came to recognise, there seemed little he could do about it. The more he denied it, the more it seemed as if it might be true. But George knew that there were other areas of his and Caroline’s life together where he remained effortlessly dominant, where his primacy was secure and uncompromised: in the most intimate dimension of their private world there was no question whose will it was that governed, and who was required to submit to it.

  From the earliest years of their marriage, George had taken mistresses. He did so not because he did not love Caroline, but because he was afraid that otherwise it might look as if he loved her too much. Horace Walpole thought he ‘was more attracted by a silly idea he entertained of gallantry being becoming, than by a love of variety’. His infidelities made him seem more a man of the world and less of a besotted husband. When he was Prince of Wales, George followed long-established tradition in selecting his lovers from the household of his wife. He did not go about the process with great subtlety. Having decided to approach Mary Bellenden, one of Caroline’s Maids of Honour – ‘incontestably the most agreeable, the most insinuating, and the most likeable woman of her time’ – George favoured the direct method. Knowing that she could not pay her bills, he sat beside her one night and ‘took out his purse and counted his money. He repeated the numeration; the giddy Bellenden lost her patience, and cried out, “Sir, I cannot bear it! If you count your money any more, I will go out of the room.”’15 In the end Mary Bellenden’s poverty conquered her irritation; but the time she spent as George’s mistress turned out to be unrewarding in every way. He was too mean to make her relationship financially rewarding, too disengaged to give her any real pleasure, and unwilling to award her the status of Principal Mistress. As soon as she could, Mary Bellenden found a husband to marry, and exchanged the role of unhappy royal mistress for that of respectable wife.

  She was succeeded in the post by Lady Suffolk, whom George and Caroline had known since the early days of their marriage in Hanover. She had been Mrs Howard then, and had arrived at their court accompanied by a violent and drunken husband, and so poor that she had been forced to sell her own hair to raise money. She was beautiful, elegant, cultivated and entertaining (as an elderly woman, grand and formidable, she was one of Horace Walpole’s most valued friends). For over a decade she was George’s principal mistress. She was also one of the queen’s bedchamber women, which meant that wife and mistress spent a great deal of time in each other’s company, an experience neither of them enjoyed.

  The difficulties of the situation would have been exacerbated by George’s indifference to the established rules of polite behaviour. He conducted his affair without the slightest attempt at discretion. With the methodical exactitude that characterised everything he did, he made his way to Lady Suffolk’s apartment at seven every evening, in full view of the court. If he found he was too early, he would pace about, looking at his watch, until it was exactly the right time for their assignation to begin. Perhaps it was some consolation to Caroline that this hardly suggested a relationship driven by great passion. Hervey thought the king kept it up ‘as a necessary appurtenance to his grandeur as a prince rather than an addition to his pleasure as a man’. He added that there were many at court who doubted whether the couple had a sexual relationship at all.16 Whatever the nature of the affair, it certainly did not seem to cool George’s ardour for his wife; and the much-tried Lady Suffolk often found herself caught in the crossfire of his angry attraction for Caroline. ‘It happened more than once,’ reported Walpole, ‘that the king, coming in to the room while the queen was dressing, has snatched off the handkerchief, and turning rudely to Mrs Howard, has cried, “Because you have an ugly neck yourself, you seek to hide the queen’s!”’17

  Hervey thought that for all the offence Lady Suffolk’s presence gave to the queen’s dignity, Caroline had, with some effort, resigned herself to her rival’s existence. ‘Knowing the vanity of her husband’s temper, and that he must have some woman for the world to believe he lay with, she wisely suffered one to remain in that situation whom she despised, and had got the better of, for fear of making room for a successor whom he might really love, and who might get the better of her.’18 Certainly, when, in 1734, the king finally tired of his now middle-aged mistress, and Lady Suffolk sought to avoid the inevitable by quitting the court before she was asked to leave, it was Caroline who tried to persuade her to stay. In a lengthy private interview she urged her ‘to take a week to consider of the business. And give me your word that you will not read any romances in that time.’19 Lady Suffolk was not to be won over. She had had enough of her half-affair with a man she suspected had only ever wanted her as a mistress in order to demonstrate his independence from his wife. The king, who complained to Caroline that he could not understand ‘why you will not let me part wit
h an old deaf woman, of whom I am weary’, was pleased to see her go.

  Although Caroline’s daughters were similarly glad to see Lady Suffolk – whom they all hated – disappear from their own and their mother’s lives, it was their father towards whom they felt the most animus, despising him for his humiliating treatment of the queen. Anne, the cleverest and most outspoken of the sisters, made it the basis of a lasting and deeply felt dislike of the king, on which she would often expatiate to Hervey, venting her disdain in a resounding, freeform litany of the many things that she hated about him. ‘His passion, his pride, his vanity, his giving himself airs about women, the impossibility of being easy with him, his affectation of heroism, his unreasonable, simple, uncertain, disagreeable and often shocking behaviour to the queen, the difficulty of entertaining him, his insisting upon other people’s conversation who were to entertain him being always new and his own always the same thing over and over again …’20 The depth of her contempt for George made her hope he would not stay too long without a mistress. ‘I wish with all my heart he would take somebody else,’ she told Hervey, ‘that Mama might be a little relieved from the ennui of seeing him forever in her room.’21 This was to happen sooner than Anne can have imagined, and with consequences for her mother that she would never have wished for.

  Among George II’s most jealously guarded pleasures were the regular visits he made back to his electorate – trips he called his Hanover-reisen. Caroline did not go with him, staying instead in Britain as his regent; she never saw Germany again after leaving in 1714. While at Herrenhausen in 1735, George met Amalie von Wallmoden, a young, fashionable married woman. He fell in love with her at first sight, with an immediacy and intensity that resembled his first meeting with Caroline some thirty years earlier. It was soon clear to everyone that his passion for ‘the Wallmoden’ was of an entirely different order to anything he had felt for previous lovers. He was soon in the grip of a powerful obsession for her that dominated all his thoughts.

  Caroline knew this better than anyone else, because George wrote to tell her all about it. Whenever he was away, George wrote constantly to his wife, with letters ‘of sometimes sixty pages, and never less than forty, filled with an hourly account of everything he saw, heard thought or did’. Hervey thought this correspondence ‘crammed with minute trifling circumstances unworthy of a man to write, but even more of a woman to read’.22 George would sometimes instruct Caroline to show relevant passages ‘to the fat man’, which meant that the portly politician Robert Walpole saw for himself a great deal of what passed between the couple. He knew, as a result, that there was virtually nothing the king did not tell the queen, including all the most intimate details of his love affairs. Their correspondence also revealed that George required far more from Caroline than a dignified complaisance in the face of his infidelities; he also expected her to assist him in the pursuit of promising new affairs. ‘There was one letter,’ Walpole told Hervey, ‘in which he desired the queen to contrive, if she could, that the prince of Modena, who was to come at the latter end of the year to England, might bring his wife with him; and the reason he gave, was that he had heard her highness was pretty free with her person.’ It therefore came as no surprise to the queen to now receive ‘so minute a description’ of her husband’s new mistress, ‘that had the queen been a painter she might have drawn her rival’s picture at 600 miles distance’.23

  At first, Caroline attempted to dismiss George’s new affair as she had done those that preceded it, but when he lingered on in Hanover, she began to grow increasingly concerned. And when at last he arrived reluctantly back in London, summoned home by his anxious ministers, she realised just how serious the situation had become, and to what degree her carefully managed primacy in his eyes was now threatened by his mistress in Germany.

  Caroline might have imagined that she had already experienced most of what a royal marriage could require from a royal wife, but the humiliations, both public and private, she was now to endure at her husband’s hands were beyond anything she had yet encountered. George had always treated her brusquely in public. Hervey thought he was ‘perpetually so harsh and rough, that she could never speak one word uncontradicted, nor do any act unreproved’.24 Caroline’s response was to retreat into a posture of even greater submission, but her abnegation served only to spur George into even greater irritation. However innocuous the subject of conversation, the king would direct it into an attack on his wife. When Hervey and Caroline tried to draw him into a discussion on whether it was right to tip servants when one visited the houses of friends, that too turned into a rant, with the king declaring that the queen should not be venturing beyond her home in pursuit of pleasure. His whole family came under the lash of his ill humour. A few days later, he ‘snubbed the queen, who was drinking chocolate, for being always stuffing; the princess Emily [as Amelia was informally known] for not hearing him, the princess Caroline for being grown fat, the Duke of Cumberland for standing awkwardly, Lord Hervey for not knowing what relation the Prince of Sultzbach was to the elector Palatine, then carried the queen to walk, and be re-snubbed, in the garden’. On the rare occasions when the king’s mood lightened, ‘it was only to relate the scenes of his happy loves when he was at Hanover’.25 George had brought over from Germany a series of paintings that depicted ‘all his amorous amusements’ with Mme de Wallmoden, which he had framed and placed in the queen’s dressing room. In the evenings, before an embarrassed Hervey and a ‘peevish’ Caroline, ‘he would take a candle in his own royal hand, and tell … the story of these pictures’. To distract the queen, Hervey would ‘make grimaces’ over the king’s shoulder; but his jokes did little to rouse her spirits. George did not understand why his wife could not enter his amours with the same enthusiasm he did. ‘You must love the Wallmoden,’ he once instructed her, ‘for she loves me.’

  When the king returned to Hanover the following year, it looked to an apprehensive Hervey as though Caroline had finally had enough and, provoked beyond endurance, intended to adopt a less conciliatory policy towards her husband. She began to write to him less regularly, and her letters, which had previously run to thirty pages or more, now barely exceeded seven or eight. When news reached England that Mme de Wallmoden had given birth to a son, Hervey feared that Caroline might lose control of her husband altogether. He ‘begged Sir Robert Walpole to do something or other to prevent her going on in a way that would destroy her’. Walpole thought ‘that nothing could ever quite destroy her power with the king’; but he was merciless in the advice he subsequently dispensed to a tearful Caroline: she must abandon any attempt to express her displeasure, or declare her own injured feelings. ‘It was too late in her life to try new methods, and she was never to hope now to keep her power with the king by reversing those methods by which she had gained it.’ She must conquer her bitterness and replace indignation with submission. ‘Nothing but soothing, complying, softening, bending, and submitting could do any good.’ And he added a final directive to his comprehensive recipe of humiliation: ‘She must press the king to bring this woman to England. He taught her this hard lesson till she wept.’26

  The strategist in Caroline could see the benefits of having George back in Britain again, where he would be susceptible to her influence; but the aggrieved, betrayed wife in her resisted. The struggle between the two warring dimensions of Caroline’s character was short and sharp, and it was the queen and the politician who emerged victorious. Caroline wrote ‘a most submissive and tender letter’ to George ‘assuring him she had nothing but his interest and his pleasure at heart’ and making ‘an earnest request that he would bring Mme de Wallmoden to England, giving assurances that his wife’s conduct to his mistress should be everything he desired’.27 As Robert Walpole had predicted, once Caroline had declared her utter surrender to his will, George’s hostility began to melt away. He replied immediately with a host of conciliatory expressions. ‘You know my passions, my dear Caroline. You understand my frailties. There is no
thing hidden in my heart from you.’ Robert Walpole, who was shown the letter, told Hervey that ‘it was so well written, that if the king was only to write to women and never to strut or talk to them, he believed His Majesty would get the better of all the men in the world with them’.28

  When the king at last returned to London, ‘the warmest of all his rays were directed at the queen. He said no man ever had so affectionate and meritorious a wife or so faithful an able a friend.’ Mme de Wallmoden ‘seemed to those who knew the king best to be quite forgot’.29 Aged over fifty, Caroline had managed to seduce her straying husband home again. That was undoubtedly a triumph of sorts, but she could not have been unaware of the high price she had paid – and indeed, had always paid – for the maintenance of their precarious marital status quo. There were many things she knew her husband admired about her: her energy; her beauty, even; could he but admit it, the intellect that she had so tirelessly directed towards the success of their partnership – but none of this mattered as much to George as her willingness to deny all her best qualities in an absolute emotional submission to his will. He knew that with a glance or a frown, and above all with the threat of departure, he could bring her to heel; in the private heartland of their marriage, true power resided firmly where it had always been – in his hands.