The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  When the much-awaited dispatch arrived, it was a great disappointment. It had little positive to say about Caroline’s character, asserting that her own mother had described her ‘as stubborn and ill-tempered to the greatest degree’. The same report was, however, far more encouraging about the other candidate, ‘giving a very amiable character of the Princess of Strelitz’. George was encouraged, insisting that he did not share Munchausen’s anxieties about the limitations of her upbringing. It was her character that mattered to him, not her background. He told Bute that if she was as sensible as was reported, ‘a little of England’s air will soon give her the deportment necessary for a British queen’.14

  The relaxed jocularity of George’s tone defined the attitude with which he set about the prosecution of what he called ‘my business’. Indeed, as the search for a spouse progressed, there is a definite sense in his correspondence that he was rather enjoying it. For such a timid and inexperienced man, the prospect of making an unhindered choice from a parade of marriageable young women, none of whom was likely to reject him, was clearly an attractive one. In the role of prospective husband, he found a new confidence, secure in his worth and in the power of his position. He had no difficulty in outlining the qualities necessary to satisfy him, nor in rejecting candidates who failed to live up to his very exacting requirements. As a spouse, he intended to be an altogether more assertive character than he had been as a son. In finding the partner he thought he deserved, he showed himself capable of making decisions with none of the anxiety or lethargy that had paralysed his actions in earlier life. This was an enterprise in which George did not intend to fail.

  In the spring, the king’s search began to move towards a conclusion. In May, Caroline of Darmstadt was finally and decisively eliminated from his thinking, as disturbing new facts emerged about her family. The apparent piety of her father and his court had at first seemed attractive to George, who hoped his wife would share his own strong Christian convictions. But fresh information put a far darker complexion on the family’s spiritual pursuits. The king was horrified to learn that the Prince of Darmstadt had been drawn into the orbit of a group of religious visionaries who had driven him to the edge of reason. George had been told that these ‘visionnaires’ had ‘got about the princess’s father, have persuaded him to quit his family in great measure, lest the hereditary princess should prevent their strange schemes; they have brought the prince very near the borders of madness, and draw his money to that degree from him, that his children are often in want of necessaries such as stockings, etc.’. He had also discovered that ‘this princess was talked of last year’ for another prince, who had ‘refused her on account of her strange father and grandfather’.15 Was George prepared to take a risk another man had already declined?

  He brooded for a fortnight, then on 20 May he wrote to Bute with his final decision: ‘The family of the Princess of Darmstadt has given me such melancholy thoughts of what may perhaps be in the blood.’ The possibility of madness was not an inheritance any ruler wanted to import into his bloodline, and put an end to the candidacy of Caroline of Darmstadt. As a result, the seventeen-year-old Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who had begun as a complete outsider – little more than a chance addition to Munchausen’s list – ended up bearing away the crown. ‘I trouble my Dearest Friend with the enclosed account of the Princess of Strelitz,’ wrote George. ‘I own it is not in every particular as I could wish, but yet I am resolved to fix here.’16

  *

  In the eighteenth century, Mecklenburg-Strelitz was considered very much a rural backwater. The duchy was then about the size of Sussex, and in the hierarchy of German princely states was in the second or perhaps even third division. Such was its reputation for mud and provinciality that it was sometimes referred to by heavy-handed contemporary jokers as ‘Mecklenburg-Strawlitter’. In 1736, when he was still Crown Prince of Prussia, Frederick the Great paid a surprise call on the Mecklenburg dukes, arriving unannounced at the family castle of Mirow. There was little evidence of the Prussian military discipline that reigned in Berlin. He wrote to his father that, ‘Coming on to the drawbridge, I perceived an old stocking-knitter disguised as a grenadier, with his cap, cartridge and musket laid aside so that they might not hinder his knitting.’ Gaining access to the castle proved a task in itself. ‘After knocking almost half an hour to no purpose, there peered out at last an exceedingly old woman. She was so terrified that she slammed the door in our faces.’ When Frederick finally met someone with enough self-possession to take him to the ducal family, he was promptly invited to dinner.

  At the duke’s table, Frederick was surprised to see some of the ladies darning stockings during the meal.17 He was even more shocked to discover that sewing was not an activity confined to the female members of the family. The duke himself was a passionate devotee of needlework, said to embroider his own dressing gowns in his spare time, having achieved considerable skill in the art through years of practice. This was an eccentric pursuit for an aristocratic man (Frederick clearly thought it evidence of mild derangement) but neither the duke nor his relatives seemed embarrassed by it. On the contrary, over supper, madness formed the principal subject of discussion. ‘At table, there was talk of nothing but of all the German princes who are not right in their wits – as Mirow himself is reputed to be. There was Weimar, Gotha, Waldeck, Hoym and the whole lot brought on the carpet; and after our good host had got considerably drunk, he lovingly promised me that he and his whole family will come to visit me.’18 It was fortunate for George III’s future wife that none of these rumours reached the ears of the king, finely attuned as they were to any hint of inherited mental instability.

  This was the world into which Princess Sophia Charlotte was born in 1744. The embroidering duke was her grandfather. Life was quiet for the Mecklenburg family in their compact palace, so small that Frederick had mistaken it for the parsonage. Charlotte had four brothers and an elder sister, Christiane (who at twenty-five was considered too old to be a wife for the twenty-two-year-old George III). Her father’s death, in 1752, when she was only eight, must have disturbed the placid passing of the days, but little else seems to have impacted on an early life distinguished by its lack of event. ‘The princess lived in the greatest retirement,’ one contemporary observer noted. ‘She dressed only in a robe de chambre, except on Sundays, on which day she put on her best gown and after service, which was very long, took an airing in a coach and six, attended by guards. She was not yet allowed to dine in public.’19 Charlotte’s mornings were devoted to the reigning family passion, sewing, in one of its many ornamental forms; she was inducted into the discipline of the needle very early, and never lost her taste for it when she was both older and grander. ‘Queen Charlotte, as we know, always had her piece of work in hand,’ recalled one of her more unctuous biographers. What had been in her grandfather adduced as possible evidence of insanity was regarded in Charlotte as an admirable demonstration of female industry. Her sewing skills, however, did not displace more academically minded pursuits. Charlotte’s mother took the education of her daughters seriously, and by the time Charlotte was seven she was already in the schoolroom. The sisters were instructed by Mme de Grabow, a poet whose local fame had earned her the title of ‘the German Sappho’.20 Besides teaching poetic composition and the rudiments of French – then considered an essential part of a polite education – Mme de Grabow also gave lessons in Latin. This was an unusual subject for girls: classical learning was generally considered the exclusive preserve of masculine study. Charlotte and Christiane were also taught theology by a Dr Gentzner, but the study of religion seems to have been secondary to his real passion, which was natural history. He was an accomplished botanist who awakened a similar enthusiasm in Charlotte. From her youth, she was a keen collector of plant specimens, preserving those she found most interesting in voluminous sketch books.

  By the time she was in her early teens, Charlotte had already developed the bookish tastes that would
stay with her for the rest of her life. She was a voracious reader, devouring serious works of literature, theology and philosophy; whatever she could beg, buy or borrow she would consume with an intensity that belied her otherwise docile demeanour. But her intellectual journeys were undertaken alone. The remoteness of Mecklenburg ensured she had no access to sophisticated thinking of the kind that had so stimulated Queen Caroline. Her parents were committed Lutherans who viewed with deep suspicion any form of study which sought to question the foundations of sacred truths. There was no Leibniz at the small, rural court to stretch her mind, and no protective cadre of like-minded, clever women to encourage her curiosity. Perhaps as a result of her intellectual isolation, Charlotte drew very different conclusions from her reading. Without the debate and provocation that had encouraged Caroline to explore unorthodox opinion, Charlotte’s values were unchallenged by what she read. Unlike Caroline, who was always suspected of harbouring suspiciously radical ideas about the truth of revealed religion, Charlotte’s intellectual explorations never undermined the traditional beliefs in which she had been so scrupulously raised. Her studies made her a bluestocking,21 but she was never a philosophe. While she immersed herself in the products of the Enlightenment, she did not endorse its implied social and political progressivism. She once returned a copy of one of Voltaire’s book to a correspondent, announcing primly: ‘I do not want anything more of his.’22

  Her moral world remained that of her parents and grandparents, in which obligation was more important than personal happiness, and religion was the only meaningful expression of faith. She was a conservative, politically, morally and spiritually, most at ease in the confines of the established order, and unsettled by any attempts to undermine its power. These were qualities which would have appealed very strongly to George, who prized them in himself. Nor would he have been necessarily dismayed by her literary interests. It was not so much intellectual capacity itself which he distrusted in women, as the desire to give it a public, and above all a political, meaning. Charlotte never sought to build a reputation for herself as a clever woman; hers were private passions, pursued with decorous and entirely characteristic self-effacement. Indeed, when Colonel David Graeme, sent by the king to Mecklenburg to begin the formal negotiations for her hand, first met her he was underwhelmed by her accomplishments. He thought she spoke French ‘but middling well’, and was surprised that she had no knowledge at all of English. He saw too, as Munchausen had warned, she possessed little of the social polish that more urbane girls of her age and status could usually command. That Charlotte had talents, Graeme was sure; he just did not believe they had been fostered as they deserved. Only one of her skills truly impressed him: he was intrigued to discover that she had taught herself to play the glockenspiel, an instrument of which Graeme had never heard. It produced, he explained, ‘a bright and agreeable sound’.23

  Two weeks after George had made his decision to ‘fix here’, he had instructed Graeme, a friend of Bute’s, to set out for the duchy, taking with him the formal offer of marriage. It was a slow journey, the roads ‘either overflowing with water or deep sand’, and it took Graeme more than a fortnight to get there. When he arrived, he was horrified to find that the widowed Duchess of Mecklenburg, to whom he had been told to explain his mission, was seriously ill. A series of ‘violent cramps’ had, he wrote to Bute, confined her to bed and ‘deprived her of speech’.24 Graeme carried with him a letter from the Dowager Princess Augusta, proposing her son as a husband for Charlotte. Unable to carry the document directly to the duchess, he entrusted it to Charlotte’s sister Christiane, who read it to her sick mother. When Graeme met the rest of the family at dinner later that night, it was plain that everyone now knew about the offer of marriage except the person most concerned by it. They had decided to tell Charlotte nothing, so that ‘by having no disturbance in her mind, she would converse more freely’, and Graeme could observe her natural behaviour. Unconscious of his scrutiny, Charlotte clearly acquitted herself well and some time after dinner was informed of the possible future that awaited her.

  How she responded to this extraordinary announcement is not known. The story that she sat stoically silent, unmoved, without looking up from her sewing, is probably apocryphal. Her family were certainly far less restrained. They recognised what an unlooked-for opportunity had fallen into their laps, and were desperate to grasp it with both hands. Only Christiane must have found it hard to join in the general rejoicing. The terms of the marriage treaty forbade any other member of Charlotte’s family from marrying an English subject; having been thwarted in his own desire to marry ‘a countrywoman’, the king wanted no ambitious British in-laws intriguing from the sidelines. This put an abrupt end to Christiane’s romance with the Duke of Roxburghe, who had met her whilst travelling in Germany, and ‘had formed an attachment to her which was returned’.25 Unable to marry each other, neither Christiane nor the duke ever married anyone else. He dedicated his life to the collection of rare books; she became a cloistered royal spinster, an unacknowledged casualty of her younger sister’s marital good fortune.

  Christiane’s fate registered not at all on the rest of the Mecklenburg family, who hastened to reply to a list of questions posed in Augusta’s letter. Alongside the formal declarations of the princess’s age, religion and availability – her brother eagerly confirmed that she was engaged to no one else – Graeme sent back to London a more intimate report of his own. Intended for the king’s eyes, this was in effect a candid, first-hand portrait of Charlotte. Inevitably, it began with an assessment of her looks. No one ever thought Charlotte a beauty, and throughout her life her supposed plainness was remorselessly and woundingly satirised. In middle age, she was depicted in cruel caricatures as a crow-like hag, or a bony, miserly witch, an emaciated spider, all arms, legs and chin. Even as a young woman, she was often described as plain and charmless. Recalling her first arrival in England, the diarist Sylvester Douglas, Lord Glenbervie, thought Charlotte presented a very unappealing figure: ‘She was very ill-dressed, and wore neither rouge nor powder … her hair used to be combed tight over a roller, which showed the skin through the roots, than which nothing can be more frightful.’26

  Graeme’s pen portrait of her was more kind. She was very slender, he wrote, and of medium height; her complexion was ‘delicate and fine, with an abundance of red, not to be called a high bloom but as much as, in my opinion, there should be at her age, and sufficient to relieve the lustre of a very fine white’. Her hair, one of her best features, was a pale brown. Her nose was acceptable in shape and size, but her mouth, later to attract the delighted attention of the caricaturists, was, he admitted, ‘rather large’. She had a little growing still to do. She was just seventeen, and ‘the appearance of her person is not quite that of a woman fully formed, nor may it be expected at her age, though the bosom is full enough for her age and person’. She was, he had been told, healthy, and carried herself well, ‘the whole figure straight, genteel and easy, all her actions and carriage natural and unaffected’. In conclusion, he declared, as so many others were to later do, that ‘she is not a beauty’, but ‘what is little inferior, she is amiable, and her face rather agreeable than otherwise’.27

  If Graeme was cautious in his careful evaluation of Charlotte’s looks, he was far more effusive in his description of her character. The more time he spent with her, the more he grew to like her. He warmed to her artlessness, and was delighted when she sent him a bowl of cherries as a present. When her sick mother died only days after the marriage offer had been received, Graeme was moved by Charlotte’s ‘flowing tears’; she confided in him that the duchess’s last words had been a wish for her happiness, and declared herself ready ‘to render herself worthy of that station … before tears again stopped her utterance’. Throughout her grief, he noted with approval, she showed ‘not the least spark of hauteur’. Her unworldly rectitude amused him. He was amazed to discover with what detail she had researched the services of the Anglican Chur
ch before solemnly assuring him that she would have no difficulty in conforming to them. He could not imagine that she could be so seriously attached to ‘some inessential points’ that they would prevent her ‘paving the way to a throne’.28

  If she was sometimes guilty of taking herself too seriously, this was not the dominant note in her character; as a young woman, Charlotte was lively and even playful in company. Lord Harcourt admitted that ‘our queen that is to be’ had seen very little of the world, but thought she demonstrated qualities more important than those of sophistication and experience. ‘Her good sense, vivacity and cheerfulness, I daresay will recommend her to the king and to the whole British nation.’29 Charlotte certainly demonstrated a fervent desire to win the approval of both her future husband and her prospective subjects. When the British navy won a victory in the West Indies in July 1761, she wrote enthusiastically to Graeme, describing how she and her sister had danced till midnight to celebrate. Her feelings, she wrote, were exactly those that the wife of the King of Great Britain should be, sharing in the happiness of not just the king himself, ‘but of all his worthy nation … there are times when the heart speaks, and this is how my heart feels this morning’. Graeme forwarded her letter to Bute as proof of her ‘frank open heart’, adding his hope that ‘her good humour and good spirits’ should never ‘suffer any interruption or change’.30