Although Augusta was astute enough to have kept hold of her son, she had no idea what to do with him once she had him. She had no vision for his development, no sense of how best to equip him to face his destiny with confidence. She was not a strategic thinker; without imaginative leadership, Augusta’s instincts were always defensive. She had neither the desire nor the capacity to forge alliances or build networks of friendship and support for her son. Hers was an inward-looking nature, suspicious of those she did not know and habitually secretive. Dodington, who came to know her very well, thought the defining quality of her character was prudence, ‘not opening herself much to anybody, and of great caution to whom she opens herself at all’.47 As a result, her motives were often opaque, and her true feelings more so. Lord Cobham thought her ‘the only woman he could never find out; all he discovered about her was that she hated those she paid court to’.48
If she was an enigma, she was an increasingly sombre one. No longer obliged to accompany Frederick into the wider world, she quickly lost the habit of pleasure; she went nowhere and saw no one. But she did not appear to miss the life that had been taken from her with such cruel suddenness. Instead, she seemed to relish the opportunity to dispense with the trappings of her old existence, and emerge as a sober woman of early middle age, unencumbered now by the obligation to please or conciliate anyone but herself. Nothing illustrates more starkly the gulf between these two versions of Augusta than two contrasting portraits. In 1736, she was painted in a conventionally fashionable pose. Overwhelmed by the stiff ornateness of her dress, she is a tiny doll-like figure, rigid and stranded in the gloom of an oppressive grey interior. Of her personality, there is no sense at all. In 1754, when Augusta chose her own artist, the result could not have been more different. Jean-Etienne Liotard’s portrait is not an image designed to flatter. Augusta is simply dressed; she wears no jewellery, and her hair is pulled back sharply from her forehead. Its defining quality is its cool candour. Augusta’s gaze is wary; her whole posture suggests a guarded, watchful reticence. She does not seem a woman eager for enjoyment or delight; and it is perhaps possible to read in her expression a hint of the debilitating combination of anxiety and suspicion with which she came to view the world in the long years of her widowhood.
These were not the happiest qualities on which to build a family life, and it must have been quickly apparent to Augusta’s children that, as the halo of their father’s warmth and sociability dimmed, their world grew inexorably chillier. The amateur theatricals, the compulsory team sports, the trips and treats and jokery, the noise and lively bustle of their father’s daily round all gradually ebbed away. They were replaced by a carefully cultivated seclusion, in which all the pleasures were small ones.
One of the few people allowed to intrude into this increasingly remote and withdrawn existence was George Dodington, whom Augusta adopted as chief confidant after her husband’s death. A much-tried member of Frederick’s entourage, Dodington’s greatest asset was his understanding of the practical business of politics, drawn from a lifetime of holding office and the management of parliamentary interests, although he had many other sterling qualities: he was loyal, witty and humane, an ugly man with a complicated love life and a naive enthusiasm for extravagant grandeur. Walpole described his house in Hammersmith as a monument to rich, bad taste, crammed full of marble busts and statues, and dominated by a fireplace decorated with marble icicles. It is not hard to see why Frederick, with his predilection for the eccentric, should have enjoyed his company. That Augusta too soon came to value and rely upon him is further testament to her carefully concealed political acumen. Beneath his unprepossessing exterior, Dodington nurtured a sharp mind and a wealth of experience. He was an excellent ally for a woman who believed herself more or less friendless, a seasoned adviser who could help her navigate her way through the difficulties that lay ahead. Perhaps Augusta also recognised in him some of the warmth and conviviality that was in such short supply elsewhere in her household.
Dodington clearly missed his late patron’s relaxed expansiveness. He often struggled to penetrate Augusta’s ingrained reticence, but did all he could to support and encourage her. He recorded his somewhat stuttering progress in his diary, a rueful chronicle of his efforts to persuade Augusta to adopt what he saw as politic courses of action. It was not an easy task. He soon saw there was no chance at all that Frederick’s death might have opened the way for a serious reconciliation with the rest of the royal family. Beneath the blandly compliant surface she presented to her in-laws throughout her married life, Augusta hid a settled dislike and disrespect for all her Hanoverian relations which was evident from the earliest days of her widowhood. In 1752, she and Dodington were enjoying a gossip about the Dorset family. Dodington opined that ‘there were oddnesses about them that were peculiar to that family, and that I had often told them so. She said that there was something odd about them, and laughing, [she] added that she knew but one family that was more odd, and she would not name that family for the world.’49 It was a rare moment of playfulness – and the only instance of Augusta’s laughter in the whole of Dodington’s diary. Her antipathy was usually expressed with far greater resentment, seen most starkly in her attitude to the king. As Frederick’s wife, she had shared in all the humiliations that had been heaped upon him by his father; then, for over a decade, she had witnessed all her husband’s attempts to harass and embarrass George through the medium of politics. Her husband’s hostility and suspicion had defined her attitude to her father-in-law for twenty years, and continued to do so long after he was dead.
Augusta knew these were views that could have no outward expression. She told Dodington she fully understood ‘that, to be sure, it was hers and her family’s business to keep well with the king’.50 In public, she assiduously cultivated the role of dutiful daughter-in-law, obedient and tractable; but in private, she had nothing but contempt for her father-in-law. She was bitterly angry that George had refused to settle Frederick’s debts, which she considered a slight to his posthumous reputation, and furious when he refused to release to her the revenues from the Duchy of Cornwall that he had claimed for himself after the prince’s death. As she described how she had berated and harangued the king on the vexed subject, Dodington’s politician’s spirits sank; he was not surprised to hear that George rarely visited now. His absence did nothing to make Augusta’s heart grow fonder. Over a period of six months, Dodington heard her speak favourably of the king only once, and considered it so remarkable that he made a special note of it.
She was equally dismissive of the Duke of Cumberland, whom she referred to with heavy irony as ‘her great, great fat friend’, and who had also refused to assist in paying Frederick’s debts.51 She rebuffed all his attempts to build a friendship with his nephew. Augusta rarely missed an opportunity to mock or belittle the duke. ‘The young Prince George had a great appetite; he was asked if he wanted to be as gross as his uncle? Every vice, every condescension was imputed to the duke, that the prince might be stimulated to avoid them.’52 More seriously, Augusta accepted absolutely the popular belief – encouraged so assiduously by her husband – that Cumberland harboured unconstitutional designs on the throne. She drilled these into Prince George, who, as the sole obstacle standing in the way of such ambitions, regarded his uncle with nervous trepidation. Once, during a rare meeting alone with his nephew, Cumberland pulled down some weapons he had displayed on his wall to show the young prince; George ‘turned pale, and trembled and thought his uncle was going to murder him’. Cumberland was horrified and ‘complained to the princess of the impressions that had been instilled into the child against him’.53 It was not until after he succeeded to the throne that George shook off the distrust of his uncle nurtured in him by his mother.
Augusta soon found herself without friends. She could not seek the support of opposition politicians except at the risk of provoking the king to remove the prince from her care, and she was too deeply imbued with her husband’s o
pinions to seek allies from within the royal family. It was a tricky situation for which Dodington could see no immediate resolution. He begged Augusta not to act precipitately, and she assured him that she would do nothing rash and had made no dangerous alliances, insisting that she had ‘no connexions at all’. Dodington found this only too easy to believe. Isolated as she was, without friends, family or supporters, there was little he could offer her except patience, meaning she had no choice but to wait for the king to die. In the privacy of his diary, Dodington was more pessimistic about her prospects, recording his stark belief that she must ‘become nothing’.
*
As Frederick’s family drifted gradually but inexorably away from both their surviving royal relations and the active political heartland, they had only themselves to rely upon for company. In the mid-1750s, all Augusta and Frederick’s children were still alive; fourteen years separated the eldest, Augusta, from the youngest, baby Caroline, born five months after her father’s death and named to please her grandfather. In the 1930s, the historian Romney Sedgwick commented that ‘as a eugenic experiment, the marriage could not be considered a success’. His remark, though callous, contained an element of truth. Five of Frederick and Augusta’s offspring died either in childhood or in their twenties, and two were sickly from birth. Elizabeth, the second daughter, was thought by Walpole to have been the most intelligent of all the family – ‘her parts and applications were extraordinary’ – but her figure ‘was so very unfortunate that it would have been impossible for her to be happy’.54 She died in 1759, probably from appendicitis. Louisa, the third daughter, died at nineteen, having suffered from such bad health that even her aunt, Princess Amelia, ‘thought it happier for her that she was dead’.55 The youngest son, Frederick, ‘a most promising youth’, according to Walpole, died at sixteen of consumption.
Prince George was considered to be one of the best looking of Frederick’s family; he was also, as a child and a young man, among the healthiest. His elder sister Augusta, whose grasp on life had seemed so tenuous after the thoughtless theatrics surrounding her birth, grew into an equally resilient child, although her looks were never much admired. Walpole thought ‘she was not handsome, but tall enough, and not ill-made; with the German whiteness of hair and complexion so glaring in the royal family, and with their thick yet precipitate Westphalian accent’.56 She was eager, lively and boisterous, resembling her brother Edward in her love of a joke. William, Duke of Gloucester, the third brother, was as fair as Augusta and Edward, but of a very different disposition. Walpole, who knew him well, summed him up as ‘reserved, serious, pious, of the most decent and sober deportment’. He closely resembled his eldest brother, whose favourite sibling he later became. Henry, who became Duke of Cumberland after his uncle’s death, was small like his father ‘but did not want beauty’. He had, however, ‘the babbling disposition of his brother York, though without the parts or condescension of the latter’. His youth, concluded Walpole severely, ‘had all its faults, and gave no better promises’.57 The toddler Caroline was remarkable at this stage only for her beauty; the ‘German whiteness’ that contemporaries found so ‘glaring’ in her brothers and sisters had in her become a golden blonde. Taken together with her blue eyes and round, pink face, she was by far the prettiest of the family.
Dodington’s diary is peppered with glimpses of ‘the children’, flitting silently round the edges of the world in which he and Augusta occupied centre stage. Always mute, they move as an undifferentiated royal pack. ‘The children’ are sent to prayers; ‘the children’ come in to dine; ‘the children’ retire. Occasionally, the older siblings emerged from the group and joined their mother in simple, family pleasures and games. Dodington was excessively proud of his occasional invitations to join the family in such informal moments, and recorded them with palpable satisfaction. In November 1753, he went to Leicester House ‘expecting a small company and a little music; but found no one but Her Royal Highness. She made me draw up a stool, and sit by the fire with her. Soon after came the Prince of Wales and Prince Edward and then the Lady Augusta, all quite undressed, and took their stools and sat round the fire with us. We sat talking of familiar occurrences of all kinds till between 10 and 11, with ease and unreservedness and unconstraint, as if one had dropped into a sister’s house that had a family to pass the evening.’
Gentle, unforced intimacy of this kind represented Augusta’s household at its best. But while Dodington strongly approved of such warm domestic scenes, he knew in his heart that they were only part of what was required to prepare the older boys for their future lives. He added a wistful postscript to his lyrical description of his quiet night at home with royalty. ‘It was much to be wished,’ he wrote, ‘that the princes conversed familiarly with more people of a certain knowledge of the world.’58 At a time when George should have been learning how to conduct himself in society, he was utterly removed from it. By 1754, when George was sixteen, even Augusta had begun to worry that the narrow existence she had created for her son was failing him. She confessed to Dodington that she too ‘wished he saw more company – but whom of the young people were fit?’59 She recognised that her eldest son needed more experience of life, but could not reconcile this with her increasingly dark vision of what lay beyond the secure walls of home. For Augusta, whose character took on an ever bleaker cast in the years after her husband’s death, the world was a wicked and threatening place and it was her first duty to protect her children from its wiles. Wherever she looked, she saw only moral bankruptcy. She complained at great length to Dodington of the ‘universal profligacy’ of the youthful aristocrats who might, in other circumstances, have become her children’s friends. The men were bad enough, but the women were even worse, ‘so indecent, so low, so cheap’.60 Beyond the inner circle of the family, everyone’s behaviour, motives and desires were suspect; no one was really to be trusted. Exposed to temptation, even her own sons might not have the inner strength to resist it. The preservation of an untested virtue, secured by isolation and retirement, was thus the key foundation of their upbringing. ‘No boys,’ commented William, Duke of Gloucester, in middle age, ‘were ever brought up in a greater ignorance of evil than the king and myself … We retained all our native innocence.’61 In the end, Augusta’s instinctual desire to protect her children from the lures of the world proved stronger than her rational understanding that they must one day learn to master it.
If Prince George’s social and family life did little to equip him for the future, he was equally unprepared in almost every other practical dimension of kingship. As a young man, he was bitter about the failings he believed had left him so exposed. ‘I will frankly own,’ he wrote in 1758, ‘that through the negligence, if not wickedness of those around me in earlier days … I have not that degree of knowledge and experience of business one of my age might reasonably have acquired.’62 His formal education had certainly been a haphazard affair. After Frederick’s death, it was underpinned by no coherent plan and driven by political considerations as much as by the desire to equip the boy with a foundation of useful knowledge. The king had replaced George’s tutors with his own appointees; only George Scott, who did most of the actual teaching, survived as part of the new team. As the prince’s governor, George II appointed his friend Simon, Earl Harcourt, a loyal courtier whose principal task was to ensure that the prince was encouraged neither to venerate nor to follow the policies of his dead father. He was otherwise undistinguished, memorably described by Walpole as ‘civil and sheepish’.63 Thomas Hayter, Bishop of Norwich, filled the role of preceptor. His pupil had nothing but contempt for him, describing him in later life as ‘unworthy … more fitted to be a Jesuit than an English bishop’.64 A third new appointment was Andrew Stone, who became sub-governor. Stone, like Harcourt, was a political choice; he was the fixer and general factotum of the Duke of Newcastle, who served regularly as George II’s first minister, and could be expected to pass back to St James’s detailed reports of events a
t Leicester House.
Under this top-heavy array, George and his brother Edward were set to work. Their lessons began at seven in the morning, and ranged, as they had always done, well beyond the traditional curriculum. However, the more modern subjects – including science, which George particularly enjoyed – did not displace the traditional concentration on the classics. Caesar’s Commentaries remained a familiar if unwelcome feature of the princes’ daily routine, much to George’s frustration. ‘Monsieur Caesar,’ he wrote in the margins of one of his laborious translations, ‘je vous souhaite au diable.’ (‘I wish you to hell.’65) As his later life was to demonstrate, George had a lively mind, and as an adult would find pleasure in a wide range of intellectual pursuits; but he found little to engage his imagination in what he was taught as a boy. He lacked the aptitude to master ancient languages, and was, in general, poor at rote learning. His fascination for practical and mechanical tasks was regarded as further evidence of his intellectual dullness. Only in music did he shine, playing the German flute with self-absorbed pleasure. All the siblings were accomplished amateur musicians, the girls singing and playing the harpsichord. The love of music was one of the few passions he shared with his father, and one which would outlast his sanity. In all other areas of educational endeavour, especially those that required feats of memory, George was generally regarded as a failure, his apathy and inattention exasperating his instructors.
The Strangest Family Page 14
