For others, it was her calm good temper that attracted most plaudits. Munchausen, to whom more than anyone she owed her good fortune, was struck by the sweetness of her disposition, if not the polish and sparkle of her conversation. ‘It cannot be pretended she should entertain people in a brilliant manner,’ he observed, ‘but she is gracious and kind to everyone.’ He noticed that her servants and entourage adored her and that ‘never since her tenderest childhood did she arouse in anyone the slightest ill humour’.31 Charlotte’s marriage prospects had plucked her from obscurity and made her an object of political interest to other European states. Baron Wrangel, a Swedish diplomat reporting on her to his government, painted a similar picture of placid good temper and innocence. ‘She has a good and generous heart … but no idea of the value of money.’ She spent a lot of her time with servants, and was unguarded in her conversations with them, a fact that might, he thought, be used to gather intelligence about her; but she was not herself either a strategist or schemer. ‘She has no knowledge of politics, and no idea of intrigues, or of the interests of princes.’ That, he believed, was one of the reasons she had been chosen, since ‘she will never involve Britain in the affairs of the Continent’.32 To some extent, Wrangel was correct in his analysis. The relative insignificance of Mecklenburg meant that in marrying one of its princesses, George was unlikely to become embroiled in the complicated pattern of alliance and dispute that dominated relationships between the larger and more powerful German princely states.
But it was Charlotte’s character as much as her dynastic neutrality that consolidated her appeal for the king. It was her simplicity, upon which all who met her commented with such approval, her lack of sophistication, of contention or wilfulness, that commended her most strongly to Graeme and, through his reports, to her future husband. Young, inexperienced, untutored in the ways of courts or politics, her naivety emerged not as the disadvantage Munchausen had feared, but as her most powerfully attractive quality, an enticingly blank page for a man to write upon. She was ‘mild’, ‘soft and pliable’, Graeme enthused, ‘capable of taking any impression, of being moulded into any form’.33 Little similar flexibility was to be expected from her husband, who saw himself as the secure stake around which his wife would twine. George would supply the worldly judgement and direction their relationship would require; he did not hope or wish to find such qualities in his wife. Charlotte’s lack of looks, money, sophistication and influence counted for nothing; on the contrary, they amplified the key promise of her pliability – and it was that which ultimately secured her the crown.
‘The more I resolve in my mind the affair, the more I wish to have it immediately concluded,’ wrote George to Bute at the end of June. Now he had made his choice, he was impatient to be married; but he was also keen to spare his bride the prospect of having to face both coronation and wedding services in intimidating succession. The coronation was planned for September. He hoped Charlotte could arrive in London a month beforehand, allowing time for the wedding and a short honeymoon. With no time to lose, the machinery of government and protocol was put in motion, and the Privy Council was summoned to meet on 8 July. When they assembled, they were informed of the king’s intention ‘to demand in marriage the Princess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, a princess distinguished by every eminent virtue and amiable endowment’. This was the meeting that so shocked Henry Fox and put an abrupt end to Sarah Lennox’s royal romance. It caught even the unflappable Walpole by surprise, and as a result he had only the baldest news about the impending nuptials to pass on to his extensive network of correspondents. ‘All I can tell you of truth is that Lord Harcourt goes to fetch the princess and comes back as her Master of the Horse. She is to be here in August, and the coronation on the 22nd September.’34
The choice of Lord Harcourt as the official charged with negotiating the marriage treaty, and bringing Charlotte to her new home in England, was surprising – Harcourt himself confessed that ‘this office I expected about as much as I did the Bishopric of London, then vacant’. His last contact with the king had been as his louche and ineffectual governor, when George was Prince of Wales. It was Harcourt who had so successfully and infuriatingly given the dowager princess the repeated brush-off, despite all her persistent attempts to pin him down and find out exactly what he was doing with her son. It was a mystery to everyone why George had chosen him, but somehow fitting that the appointment seems to have arisen from what Harcourt had not done rather than as the result of some more positive action. The king was said to have told Harcourt that as he was the only man not to have solicited him for a place when he inherited the throne, he had always had it in mind to do something for him. It was definitely a plum of a job; Harcourt was given the title Master of the Horse to the new queen’s household, and was granted the huge sum of £4,000 to pay for his trip.
He arrived in Strelitz on 14 July. The next day, final details were agreed and the marriage treaty was ‘despatched away to England’. Harcourt was pleased to see how hard the ducal family had exerted themselves to mark the occasion and was particularly impressed by a grand banquet, held the night the treaty was signed. The palace and gardens were lit with 40,000 lamps; even the small town of Neustrelitz illuminated its lanes and backstreets to celebrate. To conclude the event, Charlotte made a speech of thanks which ended with a formal leave-taking of her family. It ‘so forcibly impressed many of the bystanders that their wet cheeks could only tell what they felt’. Colonel Graeme – who was among the damp-eyed spectators – was moved to uncharacteristic emotion, writing to Bute that he was convinced ‘no marriage can afford a greater prospect of happiness’.35 When the day came to leave, Charlotte departed in great style. Lord Harcourt’s carriage led the way, followed by Charlotte’s; in the third carriage came ‘the ladies’, including two ‘femmes des chambres’, Juliana Schwellenberg and Johanna Hagerdorn. George had been reluctant to allow Charlotte to bring any of her old servants with her to England. ‘I own I hope they will be quiet people,’ he told Bute gloomily, ‘for by my own experience I have seen these women meddle much more than they ought to do.’36
Back in London, the king’s enthusiasm mounted daily. He had acquired a portrait of Charlotte and was said to be ‘mighty fond of it, but won’t let any mortal look at it’.37 Although George had little interest in fashion, he concerned himself in the provision of a suitable wardrobe for his bride. ‘Graeme ought to get a very exact measure of her,’ he told Bute, ‘accompanied with a very explicit account of every particular, that her clothes may be made here.’38 He knew that the styles of a remote German court would not survive the critical scrutiny of the London beau monde. The usual method of ordering clothes by proxy was to send one’s stays to the dressmaker, who would use them as a form of measurement, but such was the austerity of Charlotte’s upbringing that she had only a single pair, which clearly could not be spared. Graeme sent her measurements instead, passing them on to Lady Bute, who was to ensure that new gowns – and presumably a few extra pairs of stays – would be waiting for Charlotte when she arrived in England.
The atmosphere of apprehension and excitement in London had reached fever pitch well before Charlotte had even set out from Mecklenburg. The announcement of the royal wedding had been followed by news of a great victory in India, where the British and French were contesting for supremacy in the subcontinent. The capture of Pondicherry, the principal French base in the south, marked a decisive upturn in British fortunes, and had inflamed the national mood of manic self-congratulation even further. Even the usually detached Walpole was caught up in the celebratory atmosphere. ‘I don’t know where I am,’ he confessed. ‘It is all royal marriages, coronations and victories; they come tumbling so over one another from distant parts of the globe that it looks just like the handiwork of a lady romance writer to whom it costs nothing but a little false geography to make the Great Mogul fall in love with a Princess of Mecklenburg and defeat two marshals of France as he rides post on an elephant to his nuptials.’3
9
The man at the centre of the mounting excitement sought to sublimate his eager impatience into practical organisation. George began to assemble the Hanoverian family jewels so they could be worn by his new wife, paying his uncle the Duke of Cumberland £50,000 to buy out Cumberland’s share of his inheritance. The result was a collection of extraordinary richness. At the end of July, the Duchess of Northumberland was granted a discreet opportunity to examine it by Lady Bute, who had temporary custody of it, presumably in her role as the overseer of Charlotte’s trousseau. The duchess, a wealthy woman well supplied with jewels of her own, was astonished by what she saw. ‘There are an amazing number of pearls of a most beautiful colour and prodigious size. There are diamonds for the facings and robings of her gown, set in sprigs of flowers; her earrings are three drops, the diamonds of an immense size and fine water. The necklace consists of large brilliants set around … The middle drop of the earring costs £12,000.’40
George also appointed a household for his wife-to-be, a substantial establishment that included six Ladies of the Bedchamber, six Maids of Honour and six lower-ranking waiting women. The future queen was also provided with chamberlains, pages, gentleman ushers, surgeons, apothecaries, ‘an operator for teeth’ and two ‘necessary women’. As well as a Master of the Horse, other staff included a treasurer, law officers and her own band of German musicians. At the top of this structure, he placed two intimidating women: the Duchess of Ancaster was to be Mistress of the Robes, the Duchess of Hamilton, Lady of the Bedchamber. Both were experienced beauties, veterans of court life, worldly sophisticates who might not have been the obvious choices to reassure and support a callow seventeen-year-old on her first arrival in a strange country; they were, in effect, Charlotte’s introduction to the female world in which she would now be expected to make a life for herself, for the king had charged them with the task of crossing the Channel and accompanying the future queen home. Neither duchess was very happy about the idea, and neither proved the easiest of passengers. The Duchess of Hamilton insisted that her tame ass should accompany her on the journey, so that she should not be deprived of the medicinal benefits of its milk. ‘The Duchess of Ancaster,’ Walpole noted, ‘only takes a surgeon and a midwife, as she is breeding and subject to hysteric fits.’41
The fleet assembled to carry the reluctant duchesses across to Germany sailed from Harwich and arrived at the mouth of the Elbe on 14 August 1761. On the 22nd, Charlotte was ready to embark. She had no experience of the sea – indeed, she had probably never seen it before – and therefore little idea what to expect on her journey. Her first voyage turned out to be anything but a smooth one. The weather was bad from the beginning, with gales, rain and thunder making the small fleet’s progress slow and haphazard. As the days went on with no sign of the English coast, the discomfort of the journey took its toll, and the duchesses were soon observed ‘to be very much out of order’; however, a very different story was told of Charlotte’s response to the ordeal.42 ‘The queen was not at all affected with the storm, but bore the sea like a truly British queen,’ gushed one contemporary press account; Walpole heard that she had been ‘sick but half an hour; sung and played on the harpsichord all the voyage, and been cheerful the whole time’.43
In reality, Charlotte seems to have found the voyage just as prostrating as all the other passengers. When Lord Anson, who captained the Royal Charlotte, finally arrived in Harwich on 7 September, he wrote immediately to the Admiralty explaining that ‘the princess being much fatigued made it absolutely necessary to land her royal highness here’, and plans for a triumphal procession up the Thames to London were quietly abandoned. From Harwich she travelled to Colchester, where she was presented with a gift of candied eringo root – a kind of sea holly – which must have given her a rather strange idea of what was considered a delicacy in her new homeland. She spent the night at the home of Lord Abercorn in Witham, where she ate her first formal English dinner, with Lord Harcourt standing on one side of her chair and Lord Anson on the other, and the door ‘wide open, that everybody might have the pleasure and satisfaction of seeing her’.44
After that, it was onwards to London, to St James’s Palace and her destiny. The marriage ceremony was to take place that very evening. No wonder that, as her destination approached, she had little to say. ‘When she caught the first glimpse of the palace, she grew frightened and turned pale; the Duchess of Hamilton smiled – the princess said, “My dear Duchess, you may laugh, you have been married twice but it is no joke to me.”’45
There was little time for reflection. As soon as her arrival in town had been confirmed, all the city’s pent-up desire for celebration exploded into a cacophony of sound. ‘Madame Charlotte is this instant arrived!’ scribbled Walpole as a delighted postscript to one of his omnipresent letters. ‘The noise of coaches, chaises, horsemen, mob that have been to see her pass through the parks is so prodigious that I cannot distinguish the guns. I am going to be dressed, and before seven shall launch into the crowd. Pray for me!’46 Walpole was not the only well-connected spectator determined to satisfy his curiosity. Everyone wanted to see the first meeting of the king and the princess. The Countess of Harrington watched it from over her garden wall, and passed on what she had seen to the Countess of Kildare, who in turn described it to her husband. Introduced to the king, Charlotte ‘threw herself at his feet, he raised her up, embraced her and led her through the garden up the steps into the palace’.47
Some later reminiscences asserted that at the moment of their meeting, the king had been shocked by Charlotte’s appearance. ‘At the first sight of the German princess,’ wrote one particularly hostile commentator, ‘the king actually shrank from her gaze, for her countenance was of that cast that too plainly told of the nature of the spirit working within.’48 Yet there is no suggestion in any contemporary account that George was disappointed in what he saw. Walpole, never disposed to be charitable, described Charlotte on first seeing her as ‘sensible, cheerful and … remarkably genteel’.49
After the formal greetings, George led Charlotte into St James’s to present her to his family. In pride of place was his mother Augusta; also present were his three sisters and three brothers, and his uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, welcomed back into the family now that his nephew sat securely on his throne. Charlotte was conducted to a lavish dinner which included partridges stuffed with truffles, venison in pastry, and sweetbreads. While the royals ate, the court began to assemble in preparation for the wedding ceremony. Most, including Walpole and the Duchess of Northumberland, arrived at around seven o’clock. They had a long wait, on an exceptionally hot evening.
‘The night was sultry,’ wrote Walpole, dashing off his impressions of the event. ‘About ten, the procession began to move towards the chapel and at eleven they all came into the Drawing Room.’50 Then Charlotte appeared for the first time in a public role in England, dressed in an elaborate wedding gown which was subjected to a scrutiny almost as intense as that directed upon her looks. The dress was made of silver tissue, trimmed with silver and covered with diamonds, set off with a little cap of purple velvet. But for all its magnificence, Charlotte’s outfit was a very poor fit; clearly, the measurements sent across from Mecklenburg had proved no substitute for the more accurate sizing that stays would have provided. The dress, burdened with heavy jewels, was far too large for Charlotte’s slender frame. It was of course Walpole who recorded that her ‘violet velvet mantle … which was attempted to be fastened on her shoulders by a bunch of pearls dragged itself and almost the rest of her clothes halfway down her waist’.51 The unhappy result was that ‘the spectators knew as much of her upper half as the king himself’.52
Struggling with her clothes, the princess was led by the Duke of York through the assembled crowd of courtiers towards the chapel where the wedding was to take place. As she made her way, her nerve began to fail her and her hands shook. ‘Courage, Princess, courage,’ urged the duke.53 An even more intimidating experience followed,
as she was plunged into a heaving rout of intensely curious strangers. She had enough self-possession to kiss the peeresses, as etiquette demanded, but Lady Augusta, the king’s sister, was ‘forced to take her hand and give it to those who were to kiss it’.54
In a reversal of tradition, protocol demanded that the princess arrive first at the altar and wait for the king. When he entered, the service began. It was conducted in English, as George had required. The Archbishop of Canterbury later remembered: ‘I called on him and the queen only by their Christian names. When I asked them the proper question, the king answered solemnly, laying his hand on his breast, and suggested to her to answer, “Ich will,” which she did: but spoke audibly in no other part of the service.’55 The marriage began as it was to continue, with George instructing his wife while she remained silent.
‘The instant the king put on the ring,’ reported the Duchess of Northumberland, ‘a rocket was let fly from the top of the chapel as a signal for the discharge of the Park and Tower guns, which were immediately fired.’ The princess had rallied somewhat. ‘She talks a great deal,’ observed Walpole, ‘is easy, civil, and not disconcerted.’ Her French, he thought, was only ‘tolerable’ but ‘she exchanged much of that, and also of German, with the king and the Duke of York’.56 She was also able to display her other accomplishments. ‘The royal supper not being ready, the queen (at the king’s request) played very prettily on the harpsichord,’ and sang to the assembled family, who did not, the duchess had been told, ‘get to bed till three in the morning’.57
The Strangest Family Page 20
