The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

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  Though never a voluble child, with age George became steadily shyer, more awkward and withdrawn. He was ‘silent, modest and easily abashed’, said Louisa Stuart, whose father, the Earl of Bute, was one of Frederick’s intimate circle. She maintained that George’s parents, frustrated by his reticence, much preferred his brother Edward. ‘He was decidedly their favourite, and their preference of him to his elder brother openly avowed.’21 Edward was everything his older brother was not: confident, cheerful, talkative and spirited. Horace Walpole, who knew Edward well in later life, described him tellingly as ‘a sayer of things’. His natural confidence, thought Louisa Stuart, ‘was hourly strengthened by encouragement, which enabled him to join in or interrupt conversation and always say something which the obsequious hearers were ready to applaud’. It was very different for his diffident elder brother. ‘If he ever faltered out an opinion, it was passed by unnoticed; sometimes it was knocked down at once with – “Do hold your tongue, George, don’t talk like a fool.”’22

  Frederick, it seemed, for all his genuine affection for his children, was still Hanoverian enough to prefer the spare to the heir. He was never deliberately harsh to his mute and anxious eldest son; but he was often exasperated by his unresponsiveness, and failed to understand its causes. He insisted to the boy that his ‘great fault’ was ‘that nonchalance you have of not caring enough to please’.23 He did not see that there was not a scrap of insouciance in George’s make-up, and that his son’s diffidence arose not from nonchalance but from a paralysing lack of confidence in his ability to fulfil his destiny. For Louisa Stuart, Frederick was less to blame than his wife. Beneath the compliant surface she presented to the world, Augusta nurtured a severe and unflinching personality, with a strong tendency to judge others harshly. It was Augusta, she said, who was ‘too impressed by vivacity and confidence’ and who failed to see that ‘diffidence was often the product of a truly thoughtful understanding’. She did not recognise the true strengths of her stolid elder son, ‘whose real good sense, innate rectitude, unspeakably kind heart, and genuine manliness of spirit were overlooked in his youth, and indeed, not appreciated till a much later time’.24

  Had Frederick lived, the warmth of the genuine affection he felt for all his children might eventually have buoyed up the spirits of his tremulous heir; George might have matured under the protection of a father who, for all his criticism of his son’s shortcomings and lack of insight into their causes, nevertheless saw the protection of the boy’s long-term interests as his most important responsibility. But at the beginning of March 1751, the prince caught a cold. A week later, on the 13th, Dodington noted in his diary that ‘the prince did not appear, having a return of pain in his side’.25 He was probably suffering from pneumonia. For a few days, he seemed to improve. Augusta, who was five months pregnant, informed Egmont that Frederick ‘was getting much better, and only wanted time to recover his strength’. She added that ‘he was always frightened for himself when he was the least out of order, but that she had laughed him out of it, and would never humour him in these fancies’. She hoped her attempts to raise his spirits had worked as Frederick now declared that ‘he should not die in this bout, but for the future, would take more care of himself’.26

  Dodington called at Leicester House on the 20th, and he too was reassured on hearing that Frederick ‘was much better and had slept eight hours the night before’. Everyone’s optimism was unfounded. Later that night, at a quarter to ten, Frederick died. The end came with shocking swiftness. Dodington reported that ‘until half an hour before he was very cheerful, asked to see some of his friends, ate some bread and butter and drank coffee’.27 Walpole heard a similar story. The prince seemed to be over the worst and beginning to improve when he was suddenly overcome with a fit of coughing. At first, Dr Wilmot, who attended him, thought this was a good sign, telling him hopefully: ‘Sir, you have brought up all the phlegm; I hope this will be over in a quarter of an hour, and that your highness will have a good night.’ But Hawkins, the second doctor, was less optimistic, declaring ominously: ‘Here is something I don’t like.’ The cough became increasingly violent. Frederick, panicking, declared that he was dying. His German valet, who held him in his arms, ‘felt him shiver and cried, “Good God! The prince is going.” The princess, who was at the foot of the bed, snatched up a candle, but before she got to him, he was dead.’28 He was forty-four years old.

  The king received the news of Frederick’s death as he sat playing cards. George had not remarried; he had kept his promise to his dying queen, taking a mistress rather than a wife. He had sent for Mme de Wallmoden, who divorced her husband and in 1740 was given the title of the Countess of Yarmouth. It was to her that the king turned first. ‘He went down to Lady Yarmouth looking extremely pale and shocked, and only said, “Il est mort!”’29 Once the horror of the moment had passed, the king, who was too self-absorbed to be a hypocrite, did not pretend to be grieved. He had hated his son for years, and his sudden and unexpected death provoked no remorse for his behaviour. As 1751 drew to a close, he commented with characteristic candour: ‘This has been a fatal year to my family. I have lost my eldest son, but I was glad of it.’30 It was his final comment on a relationship which had begun in suspicion, matured into vicious acrimony and ended with estrangement. He felt neither guilt nor regret for what had happened, and never referred to Frederick again.

  The prince’s funeral was the final reflection of his father’s disdain. It was, thought Dodington, a shameful affair, ‘which sunk me so low that for the first hour, I was incapable of making any observation’. No food was provided for those of his household who stood loyally by Frederick’s body as he lay in state; they ‘were forced to bespeak a great cold dinner from a common tavern in the neighbourhood’. No arrangements had been made to shelter mourners from the rain as they walked from the House of Lords to Westminster Abbey. The funeral service itself ‘was performed without anthem or organ’ and neither the king nor Frederick’s brother the Duke of Cumberland attended.31 Even in the performance of his last duty to his son, George II could find no generosity of spirit.

  He appeared in a better light on his first visit to Frederick’s bereaved wife and children, when he was clearly moved by their stricken condition. ‘A chair of state was provided for him,’ reported Walpole, ‘but he refused it; and sat by the princess on the couch, embraced and wept with her. He would not suffer Lady Augusta to kiss his hand, but embraced her, and gave it to her brothers, and told them, “They must be brave boys, obedient to their mother, and deserve the fortune to which they were born.”’32 It was a rare display of emotional sympathy from the king; but as the family sat huddled in their misery, they all knew that significant decisions must now be made about their future.

  The most obvious solution would have been for the king to take over the upbringing and education of the young prince, bringing the boy to live with him at St James’s. At the same time, it might have been expected that the Duke of Cumberland would be made regent. As the king’s eldest surviving son, he would have been well placed to act for his father during his frequent absences in Hanover, and to be appointed guardian to the young George if the king had died while he was still a minor. In the event, none of these arrangements ever happened. They had been rendered politically impossible by the momentous events of 1745/46, the consequences of which were to have a profound effect on the lives of George, Augusta and indeed all of Frederick’s remaining family.

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  William, Duke of Cumberland, was loved by his parents with an intensity matched only by their disdain for his brother Frederick. Mirroring the actions of George I, it was rumoured that George II had once consulted the Lord Chancellor to discover if it would be constitutionally possible to disinherit his eldest son in favour of William. The disappointing answer he was said to have received did nothing to weaken the affection he felt for Cumberland, who shared many of his interests, particularly his passion for the army. Cumberland had been
given all the military experience that Frederick persuaded himself he craved and had been denied. He was a capable soldier and at the age of only twenty-three was appointed captain general. ‘Poor boy!’ commented Walpole, ‘he is most Brunswickly happy with all his drums and trumpets.’33 When Charles Edward Stuart raised his standard in Scotland in 1745, Cumberland was the obvious candidate to put down a rebellion aimed directly at the survival of the Hanoverian dynasty. His reputation would never recover from the victory he won.

  The possibility of regime change seemed a very real one as Bonnie Prince Charlie’s troops swept first through Scotland and then through northern England in the winter of 1745. As Carlisle, Lancaster and Preston fell, panic engulfed London. Even Horace Walpole was shaken out of his usual pose of ironic detachment, putting all his trust in the duke’s ‘lion’s courage, vast vigilance … and great military genius’.34 After Charles Stuart made the unexpected decision to turn back at Derby, Cumberland chased his army back to Scotland, where the two forces met on 16 April 1746 at Culloden. The duke’s victory over the exhausted Jacobites was total, and the aftermath of the battle exceptionally brutal, as Cumberland’s soldiers bayoneted wounded survivors. This was only a prelude to an extensive campaign of terror, intended by Cumberland to eradicate all possibility of another uprising. ‘Do not imagine,’ the duke wrote, ‘that threatening military execution and other things are pleasing to do, but nothing will go down without it. Mild measures will not do.’35 He was not alone in thinking extreme actions were called for. ‘I make no difficulty of declaring my opinion,’ declared Lord Chesterfield, ‘that the commander-in-chief should be ordered to give no quarter but to pursue the rebels wherever he finds ’em.’36 Cumberland’s troops pursued the defeated Scots into the glens and remote settlements of the Highlands, burning and murdering as they went, killing not just men of fighting age, but women, children, and even the cattle that supported them.

  At first, Cumberland was fêted for the completeness of his victory. Handel composed See, the Conquering Hero Comes to mark his triumph; the duke was mobbed in the street, celebrated as the defender of constitutional monarchy. But as accounts began to arrive in London describing the methods by which he had achieved his success – and as the initial relief at the removal of the Jacobite threat began to fade – a sense of popular unease mounted. The atrocities appalled a public who, with the threat of a restored Stuart monarchy now behind them, did not feel liberty had been best protected by uncontrolled rape and murder. Simultaneously, suspicion of what Cumberland’s true intentions might be began to mount. At the head of a vicious and unstoppable army, what might he not attempt? Could he use it to break opposition as thoroughly in England as he had done in Scotland, and seize power for himself?

  Frederick, who saw Cumberland’s success as a direct threat to him, did all he could to fuel hostility to his brother. He financed a pamphlet laying out in detail all the excesses committed by Cumberland’s troops, and his adviser Egmont wrote another, arguing that the emboldened duke’s next step would indeed be to mount a coup d’état. This was a complete fiction, but a very powerful one, that struck alarm into the hearts of otherwise rational politicians for nearly twenty years. In eighteen months, Cumberland was transformed in the public perception from conquering hero to ‘the Butcher’, a cruel German militarist with tyrannical ambitions and, unless his access to power was closely controlled, both the desire and the means to make them real.

  So overwhelming was this scenario, even at the time of Frederick’s death five years after Culloden, that it made Cumberland unemployable in England. The king railed impotently against what he regarded as the traducing of his favourite, declaring that ‘it was the lies they told, and in particular this Egmont, about my son, for the service he did this country, which raised the clamour against him’; but he knew nothing could be done about it.37 He understood the political realities well enough to understand that Cumberland could never now be made regent. The disgraced duke bore his exclusion stoically in public – ‘I shall submit because the king commands it’ – but in private confessed himself deeply humiliated, wishing ‘that the name William could be blotted out of the English annals’.38

  If he could not name Cumberland regent, the king had little choice but to appoint an otherwise most unlikely candidate, Augusta, who now held the title of princess dowager. And if she was thought competent to act in that capacity, he could hardly justify removing his heir from her control. Thus, against all expectation, the young Prince George was allowed to stay in the company of his mother. This decision was to have an extraordinary effect on the shaping of his character; as much as the premature death of his father, it was to determine the kind of man he became. Had he been exposed, while still a boy, to the worldly challenges of life at George II’s court, very different aspects of his personality might have emerged. Instead, he was allowed to retreat with Augusta into an increasingly remote and cloistered existence.

  His mother’s intention was to protect him, and George – anxious and easily intimidated – was keen to be protected. He had responded to news of his father’s death with a sense of shock so profound that it was physical in its intensity. ‘I feel it here,’ he declared, laying his hand on his chest, ‘just as I did when I saw the two workmen fall from the scaffold at Kew.’39 He did not like his grandfather, whom he rightly suspected was irritated by his shyness and lack of confidence. (On one occasion, the king’s frustration may have taken more violent form; a generation later, walking round Hampton Court, George III’s son, the Duke of Sussex, mused: ‘I wonder in which one of these rooms it was that George II struck my father? The blow so disgusted him that he could never afterwards think of it as a residence.’40) But when George II arrived at Leicester House in the days after Frederick’s death, ‘with an abundance of speeches and a kind behaviour to the princess and the children’, his sympathy seemed so genuine that even the cautious prince was partially won over. He declared that ‘he should not be frightened any more with his grandpa’.41

  Despite this, it is hard to believe that George II could ever have changed the habits of a lifetime and transformed himself into the steady, supportive father figure of which his heir stood in such deep need over the next few years. Certainly the prince did not think so. For all the king’s new-found concern, his timid grandson had no wish to test the depth of his solicitude by joining him at St James’s. He made it clear he preferred to live with his mother. Yet, although the prospect of staying with Augusta no doubt offered security to a young boy badly in need of solace, it was far from an ideal solution. The life Augusta made for her son, isolated from the world he would one day be expected to dominate, did nothing to prepare him for the role that his father’s death had made so terrifyingly imminent. The complicated politics that had ensured George remained in his mother’s care may not, in the long run, have done him much of a favour.

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  Until Frederick’s sudden death, the defining quality of Augusta, Princess of Wales, was her apparent passivity. She seemed to have no real personality of her own, but was entirely under the control of her husband. Hervey, who once memorably described her as ‘this gilded piece of royal conjugality’, claimed that she played no active role in his political life. Frederick, he reported, had once observed that ‘a prince should never talk to a woman of politics’ and that ‘he would never make himself the ridiculous figure his father had done in letting his wife govern him or meddle with business, which no woman was fit for’.42 George II, on the other hand, who always suspected there was more to his daughter-in-law than met the eye, used to declare: ‘You none of you know this woman, and none of you will know her until after I am dead!’43

  The king was not wrong in alleging that Augusta was not quite the demure innocent she seemed. For all Frederick’s protestations, she was no stranger to his political ambitions during the late 1740s. She hosted the dinners at which he and his supporters thrashed out their strategies and engineered their alliances; she was discreet, trustworthy
and, above all, unquestioningly loyal, identifying herself completely with her husband’s strategising. Significantly, it was to Augusta, and not to one of his trusted advisers, that Frederick entrusted his ‘Instructions’, encapsulating the programme he expected his eldest son to implement in due course, and it was she who was charged with explaining them to his heir and keeping them fresh in his mind. And after Frederick’s shocking demise, it was she who took brisk and immediate measures to destroy any incriminating material that might compromise his followers and his family.

  As the historian John Bullion has shown, in the hours immediately following his death, she showed herself to be more of a politician than any of his dazed friends. While Frederick lay dead in the next room, she summoned Lord Egmont and outlined a decisive plan of action to be followed in the next few vital hours. ‘She did not know, but the king might seize the prince’s papers – they were at Carlton House – and that we might be ruined by these papers.’ She probably had in mind a document Frederick had drawn up in 1750 that was a blueprint for action in the event of the king’s death and described in some detail appointments that were to be made and policies followed. She gave Egmont the key to three trunks, told him to retrieve the papers and bring them back to her; she even gave him a pillowcase in which to carry them. When Egmont returned, she burnt the papers in front of him. Only then did she begin to consider what to do about her husband’s body, or inform the king of his death.44

  Having dealt with the most pressing threat to her family’s security, she proceeded to manage her father-in-law too. When he arrived at Leicester House, ‘she received him alone, sitting with her eyes fixed: thanked the king much, and said she would write as soon as she was able; and in the meantime, recommended her miserable self and children to him’.45 Always pleased to be treated with the respect he thought he deserved, the king warmed to her submission, as she must have known he would. ‘The king and she both took their parts at once; she, of flinging herself entirely in his hands, and studying nothing but his pleasure; but minding what interest she got with him to the advantage of her own and the prince’s friends.’46 When she heard that the king had decided to allow George to stay with her, she did not forget to write and tell him how thankful she was.