On the day of the vote, even the usually unshockable Hervey was taken aback by the venom of the queen’s attack. As Frederick walked across a courtyard, Caroline watched him. ‘Reddening with rage, she said, “Look, there he goes – that wretch! – that villain! – I wish the ground would open this moment and sink that monster to the lowest reaches of hell.”’ Seeing Hervey’s startled face she added: ‘You stare at me; but I assure you that if my wishes and prayers had any effects; and the maledictions of a mother signified anything, his days would not be very happy or very long.’69 In the end, the prince lost the motion by the narrow margin of thirty votes; but it was too late now for anything to mend the gulf that divided him from the rest of his family.
There was a tragic echo of the past in what happened next. The king decided Frederick’s behaviour had been so provocative that he was to be expelled from the precincts of all the royal palaces. He instructed Hervey, in his role as Vice Chamberlain, to make the necessary arrangements. Hervey based his actions on the instructions that had been drawn up to manage the ejection of George and Caroline from the same palaces almost twenty years before. There was, however, one area in which the king did not intend to follow the harsh example of his father. ‘Sir Robert Walpole told Lord Hervey that the resolution was to leave the child with the princess, and not to take it (as the late king had taken the king’s children upon the quarrel in the last reign) lest any accident might happen to this little royal animal.’70 Hervey went about his task with gusto, and admitted that he ‘was not a little pleased with a commission that put it in his power to make use of the king’s power and authority to gratify and express his resentment against the prince’.71 But even he was surprised when the king expressly refused to allow Frederick and Augusta any ‘chests or other such things’ from the royal apartments. When Hervey said that surely he did not mean them to carry away their clothes in linen baskets, George retorted: ‘Why not? A basket is good enough for them.’72
On the day of the prince’s departure, Hervey joined the royal family as they sat round the breakfast table contemplating what was about to happen. ‘I am weary of the puppy’s name,’ declared the king. ‘I wish I was never to hear it again, but at least I shall not be plagued any more with seeing his nasty face.’ He told Caroline that he could forgive everything he had done to him, but could never forget the injury done to her. ‘I never loved the puppy well enough to have him ungrateful to me but to you he is a monster and the greatest villain ever born.’ Princess Caroline, elaborating on what was a familiarly obsessive theme, hoped her brother would burst so that they could mourn ‘with smiling faces and crepe and hoods for him’. The queen was adamant that she was unmoved by her son’s impending exile: ‘God knows in my heart, I feel no more for him than if he was no relation, and if I was to see him in hell, I should feel no more for him than I should for any rogue that was there.’ And yet, she added, ‘once I would have given up all my other children for him. I was fond of that monster, I looked on him as if he had been the happiness of my life, and now I wish that he had never been born … I hope in God I shall never see the monster’s face again.’73 She never did.
*
‘There was a strange affectation of incapacity of being sick that ran through the royal family,’ Hervey observed, ‘which they carried so far that no one of them was more willing to own any other of the family being ill than to acknowledge themselves to be.’ Hervey had seen the king ‘get out of his bed choking and with a sore throat and in a high fever, only to dress and have a levee’. He expected Caroline to do the same. ‘With all his fondness for the queen, he used to make her in the like circumstances commit the like extravagances.’74
Throughout the summer of 1737, Hervey noticed that Caroline was often unwell. On 9 November, whilst inspecting her newly completed library at St James’s Palace, she was taken seriously ill. ‘She called her complaint the colic, her stomach and bowels giving her great pain. She came home, took Daffy’s elixir, but … was in such pain and so uneasy with frequent retchings to vomit, that she went to bed.’ Like the dutiful warhorse she was, she forced herself to attend that day’s formal Drawing Room, but she admitted to Lord Hervey that she was not ‘able to entertain people’ and prepared to take her leave. Before she could do so, the king reminded her that she had not spoken to the Duchess of Norfolk. The queen ‘made her excuses’ to the duchess, ‘who was the last person she ever spoke to in public’, then retired to her room.75
Hervey, of course, went with her. He was, as he proudly recalled, ‘never out of the queen’s apartment for above four or five hours at most during her whole illness’. He loved Caroline as much as he loved anyone, except Ste; but he did not allow his affection to get in the way of his merciless reporter’s eye. The candid details of her suffering that fill his account of the queen’s long and painful death demonstrate how hard it was to die with dignity in the eighteenth century, and how little medicine could do, either to cure or to alleviate distress. It also illustrates very poignantly the strength of the complicated ties that had bound Caroline to her husband for so long, and the true depth of his feelings for her. He never showed her so clearly that he loved her as when she was dying; but even then, his passion was tempered by anger – an impotent frustration in the face of her weakness and suffering that was, in its own warped way, what it had always been – a furious demonstration of his need for her.
From the beginning of her sickness, George refused to leave his wife. He had his bedding brought into her room and laid it on the floor, so that he could be near her. Sometimes, ‘inconveniently to both himself and the queen’, he would ‘lay on the queen’s bed all night in his nightgown, where he could not sleep, nor she turn around’.76 He scolded her when pain made her shift about in bed. ‘How the devil should you sleep when you can never lie still a moment? … Nobody can sleep in that manner and that is always your way; you never take the proper method to get what you want and then you wonder that you have it not.’77 He begged her to eat, and although she could not hold anything in her stomach, she tried to take something to please him. When she brought it up, ‘he used peevishly to say, “How is it possible that you should not know whether you like a thing or not? If you do not like it, why do you call for it?”’ Once, in front of an appalled Hervey, he told her she looked like a calf whose throat had just been cut.
Hervey thought these ‘sudden sallies of temper’ were ‘unaccountable’. He did not understand that they were a product of George’s increasing desperation, for his anger mounted as his wife grew steadily worse. At first, no one knew exactly what was wrong. She would not allow any doctors to attend her and permitted no one to examine her. When they were alone, Hervey often heard her cry: ‘I have an ill which nobody knows of!’ He took that to mean ‘nothing more than she felt what she could not describe’.
Her husband knew better. As days went by, and Caroline ‘complained more than ever of the racking pains she felt in her belly’, George decided enough was enough. He whispered to her that ‘he was afraid her illness proceeded from a thing he had promised never to speak of to her again; but that her life being in danger’, he was obliged to tell everything he knew. Caroline ‘begged and entreated him with great earnestness that he would not’, but the king sent for Ranby the surgeon ‘and told him that the queen had a rupture at her navel, and bid him examine her’. It took Ranby only a few minutes to confirm the diagnosis. Caroline ‘made no answer but lay down and turned her head to the other side, and as the king told me, he thinks it was the only tear she shed while she was ill’.78
George told Hervey that he had first noticed the injury fourteen years before, after Caroline had given birth to their last child, Louisa. She told him ‘it was nothing more than what was common for almost every woman to have had after a hard labour’. When it did not improve, he had urged her to consult a doctor, but she refused and begged him to say no more about it. When he came back from his extended trip to Hanover in 1736, he thought it had become much worse. He
told her he was certain it was a rupture. Caroline responded with uncharacteristic fury, ‘telling me it was no such thing, and that I fancied she had a nasty distemper, which she was sure she had not, and spoke more peevishly to me than she had ever done in her life’. The more he begged her to ‘let somebody see it’, the more determined she became to reveal it to no one. ‘I at last told her I wished she might not repent her obstinacy, but promised her I would never mention this subject to her again as long as I lived.’ These conversations took place at the height of the king’s passionate affair with Mme de Wallmoden, and even the determinedly unimaginative George suspected that his infidelity had coloured the way his words had been received by his hurt and resentful wife. ‘In as plain insinuations as he could,’ he told Hervey that Caroline believed it was because of her injury that he had ‘grown weary of her person’. Hervey was astonished that ‘an ill-timed coquetry at fifty-four that would hardly have been acceptable at twenty-five’ had been allowed to exacerbate the queen’s complaint; but he was forced to accept the truth of it. ‘Several things she afterwards said to the king in her illness … plainly demonstrated how strongly these apprehensions of making her person distasteful to the king had worked upon her.’79
Caroline suffered from an umbilical hernia, a condition in which internal pressure or congenital weakness forces part of the intestine through the stomach wall. As she told George, it can be caused by difficult labour, or through other side effects of pregnancy. Now it can be resolved by an operation usually simple enough to be performed as day surgery. In the eighteenth century, there was little that could be done. The doctors debated how best to proceed. One proposed ‘cutting a hole in her navel big enough to thrust the gut back into its place, which Ranby opposed, saying all the guts, on such an operation, would come out of the body, in a moment, on to the bed’. The wound had begun to mortify, and Caroline was subjected to a great deal of pointless agony as the doctors tried to cut away the infected areas around it. But they all knew there was nothing useful that could be done; and Ranby soon told George that the queen could not survive.
Caroline knew it too. She had declared from the beginning of her illness that she was dying. She summoned her family around her to take leave of them, and said goodbye to them one by one. ‘She took a ruby ring from her finger that the king had given her at her coronation and putting it on his said, “This is the last thing I have to give you – naked I came to you and naked I go from you.”’ As the king wept, she urged him to marry again, ‘upon which his sobs began to rise, and his tears to fall with double vehemence. Whilst in the midst of this passion, wiping his eyes and sobbing between every word, he got out the answer. “Non – j’aurai – des – maîtresses.” To which the queen made no other reply than “Mon Dieu! Cela n’empêche pas.”’80 In death, Caroline was as resigned as she had been in life to the curious mixture of passion and selfishness with which her husband had declared his devotion to her.
There was one conspicuous absentee from her deathbed farewells. As soon as he heard his mother was ill, Frederick asked permission to come and see her. George was incensed, telling Hervey that if the prince appeared at St James’s, ‘I order you to go to the scoundrel, and tell him I wonder at his impudence for daring to come here … Bid him go about his business, for his poor mother is not in a condition to see him now act his false, whining cringing tricks.’81 However, when the queen asked if there had been any messages from Frederick, the king relented. He would do anything to please his dying wife, even to the extent of admitting his hated son back into the house from which he had been so recently ejected. He told Caroline ‘that if she had the least mind to see her son, he had no objection to it, and begging her to do just what she liked’. Caroline was implacable. She told George she would not see him again, and that if she grew worse ‘and was weak enough to talk of seeing him, I beg, sir, that you will conclude that I dote and rave’. She did neither; Hervey reported that until the moment of her death she never spoke of the prince ‘but always with detestation’. She told the king and her daughter that ‘at least I shall have one comfort in having my eyes eternally closed – I shall never see that monster again’.
She finally died, after ten days of suffering, on 20 November. George ‘kissed the face and hands of the lifeless body several times’ and went silently to his apartments, which he did not leave for several weeks. He took Hervey with him, and ‘during this retirement … showed a tenderness of which the world thought him utterly incapable’. Everything he did and said, thought Hervey, proved how much he had loved and admired the woman he had lost. Hervey was amazed to hear the usually blunt and unsentimental king describe so feelingly what she had meant to him, ‘the tender manner in which he related a thousand old stories relating to his first seeing the queen, his marriage with her, the way in which they had lived at Hanover, his behaviour to her when she had had smallpox and his risking his life by getting it off her (which he did) rather than leave her’.82
He also recalled more recent times, ‘and repeated every day, her merits in every capacity with regard to him’. Unsurprisingly, he praised her complete submission to his will. ‘He firmly believed, she never, since he first knew her, ever thought of anything she was to do or say, but with the view of doing or saying it in what manner it would be most agreeable to his pleasure or serviceable to his interest.’ But he also acknowledged ‘that she had been of more use to him as a minister than any other body had ever been to him or any other prince’. It was an astute assessment of Caroline’s virtues in the public world; yet it was in her role as the lodestone of his private world that he knew he would miss her most. ‘She was the best wife, the best mother, the best companion, the best friend and the best woman that ever was born.’ He firmly believed that ‘he had never seen her out of humour in his life, though he had passed more hours with her than he believed any two other people in the world had ever passed together, and that he had never been tired in her company one minute’. He concluded with a compliment which Caroline would surely have understood was the highest accolade he could bestow on her: ‘He was sure that he could have been happy with no other woman upon earth for a wife, and that if she had not been his wife, he had rather had her for his mistress than any other woman he had ever been acquainted with.’83
George and Caroline’s had been an unconventional kind of marriage; but George could say, with some justification, that it had delivered for him an experience of happiness that had been so conspicuously denied to his mother and father. Even at their worst times, he and Caroline had never been less than a partnership, one which, for all the turbulence within it, was held together by the powerful dynamic of their mutual attraction. But they had extended none of that sense of inclusiveness to their son, and as George sat grieving for his wife, he might have reflected that he found himself in much the same position as his father had been before him: a man alone, alienated from a son he distrusted and despised. It would now be left to the generation that came after them to try to repair what George and Caroline had left undone. Frederick’s wife Augusta was pregnant again by the time the queen died. Caroline did not live to see the birth of her first grandson in June 1738. Frederick named the baby George, after his grandfather. It remained to be seen whether he had learnt more from the treatment he had received at the hands of his parents than George and Caroline had done; and whether he could prevent the legacy of bitterness that had so darkened his own life from surfacing to cast a similar shadow over that of his son.
CHAPTER 3
Son and Heir
FREDERICK AND AUGUSTA’S FIRST SON, George, was born on 24 May 1738 at Norfolk House in St James’s Square. He was a seven months’ child, and ‘so weakly at the time of his birth, that serious apprehensions were entertained that it would be impossible to rear him’.1 He was baptised that night, noted the diarist Lord Egmont, ‘there being a doubt that he could live’, but like his sister before him, the baby George clung tenaciously to life.2 In later years, he had no doubt whom he
had to thank for his survival: Mary Smith, his wet nurse, ‘the fine, healthy, fresh-coloured wife of a gardener’. When she died in 1773, George was still conscious of the debt of gratitude he bore her. ‘She suckled me,’ he recalled, ‘and to her great attention my having been reared is greatly owing.’3 When told that etiquette made it impossible for the infant George to sleep with her, she had ‘instantly revolted, and in terms both warm and blunt, she thus expressed herself: “Not sleep with me! Then you may nurse the boy yourselves!”’4 The forthright Mary Smith won the battle, and with it the unwavering affection of the prince.
In 1743, Frederick moved his growing family – another son Edward had been born in 1739, and six other children were to follow, in almost annual succession over the next decade – to a bigger establishment. Leicester House, a large but ugly building, stood on the north side of what is now Leicester Square. It was not the most fashionable of neighbourhoods, being rather too near louche Soho for the politest society, and Frederick was by far its grandest inhabitant. His neighbours were businessmen, musicians and artists, most notably William Hogarth who had his studios across the square at number 32. Frederick was not short of places to live – he spent a great deal of money on nearby Carlton House, and rented properties for the summer on the Thames at Kew and at Cliveden – but it was Leicester House that became his principal residence. It was where he held informal court, assembling around him a group of ambitious young men who were as impatient as he was with his father’s government. With their support, Leicester House became the basis for Frederick’s political operations, the campaign headquarters from which he directed his attacks on the king’s ministers with such sustained effort that the term ‘Leicester House’ soon became synonymous with the very idea of princely political opposition. But the Soho property was also a family home; all Frederick and Augusta’s children grew up there, and their eldest son George seems to have retained an affection for it; he used it as his London house until very shortly before he became king.
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