The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  ‘I did not love my children when they were young,’ George II once admitted; ‘I hated to have them running into my room.’34 In this, as in so many other ways, George III was very different from his grandfather. ‘The king loves little babies,’ one observer noted approvingly.35 When his children were toddlers, he was an unaffectedly fond and surprisingly informal father. Mrs Scott remembered how the king would ‘at times shed the dignity of a monarch in the natural impulse of a parent’ and get down on to the floor in order to play with his young sons. Mrs Mary Delany, a close friend of the family, watched ‘as the king carried around in his arms, by turns, Princess Sophia and the last Prince, Octavius’. Although Mrs Delany was very much of an older generation, she had nothing but praise for this open, uninhibited display of parental affection. ‘I never saw more lovely children; nor a more pleasing sight than the king’s fondness for them, and the queen’s; they seem to have but one mind, and that is to have everyone happy around them. The king brought in his arms the little Octavius to me, who held out his hand to play with me, which, on my taking the liberty to kiss, he made me kiss his cheek.’36 Nearly twenty years later, George’s enthusiasm for playing with his smallest children seemed undiminished: in 1785, Mrs Delany spent an evening at Windsor with George and Charlotte and their youngest child, ‘the beautiful babe Amelia’, who took huge pleasure ‘in playing with the king upon the carpet’.37

  George was far from unique in both the strength of his feelings for his children and his willingness to show them. The domestic ideal was as attractive and as powerful for eighteenth-century men as it was for women. A man was never more of a man than when he was to be seen at the head of a fine family of numerous healthy children, and the pride and affection felt by fathers for their broods shine out from contemporary letters and diaries and infused all social classes. The aristocrat William Finch described to his wife his own well-meaning attempts to live up to the modern fatherly ideal. He and ‘the pretty boy’ played together when alone. ‘He was cook in the kitchen this morning and dressed a dinner for me and when I had dined, I said, thank you Master Cook, He thought I had said Nasty Cook and I assure you, it was a good while before I could make it up.’38 William Ramsden, a London schoolteacher, took open, glowing pleasure in the company of his son. Sitting ‘on the arm of my wife’s easy chair’ in the nursery, contemplating his little boy, Ramsden felt his was ‘a situation I would not change with the King of Prussia, no, not with a man a million times more to be envied, George the third, King of Great Britain’.39

  George himself worked very hard to ensure that the pressures of his public role did not entirely crowd out pleasures of the kind so treasured by Ramsden. He was a regular visitor to his children’s nursery, arriving before the official duties of the day claimed him, ‘at the early hour of five in the morning, gently tapping at the door of their apartments to enquire how they spent the night’.40 Even during the Gordon Riots of 1780, which saw London erupt in violence, prisons burning, the House of Commons barricaded and civil authority all but collapse, the king found time ‘to see his children, on whom he fondly doted’.41 When he went to Portsmouth in 1778 to review the fleet, the queen wrote to tell him how badly he was missed by his young daughter, Mary. ‘She desired me to call dear Papa; but after telling her that could not be, she desired to be lifted up and she called for at least half an hour, Papa coming, Papa comes! But seeing she was disappointed by receiving no answer, I desired her to tell me what I should say to the king in case I should write and she answered, Miny [Mary’s nickname] say goody Papa, poor Papa.’42

  The queen’s relationship with her children was just as conscientious as that of the king. She was painstaking in her practical concern for their health and welfare: one of Charlotte’s earliest biographers noted with approval her determination to be a real presence in her children’s world, ‘not leaving them, as some would have done, to the management of attendants, but indulging herself in their innocent prattle, sharing in their little amusements, and leading them carefully into the first paths of knowledge’.43 The close personal attention Charlotte took in the direction of her children’s upbringing soon made her a model of modern maternal solicitude, neatly summed up by a poem written in 1779:

  The queen, they say,

  Attends her nursery every day,

  And like a common mother, shares

  In all her infants’ little cares.44

  The punctiliousness of Charlotte’s care of her children’s minds and their bodies reflected her conviction that this was one of the most important duties of motherhood. But she found it much harder than her husband to lose herself in play and the informal pleasures of parenthood. She was more restrained in her dealings with her children, in public at least, rarely indulging in boisterous demonstrations of affection. The easy, relaxed displays of intimacy which characterised George’s relationship with his young children were not Charlotte’s style. Indeed, her very presence was sometimes enough to stop them. Mrs Scott, the Prince of Wales’s wet nurse, maintained that ‘on the approach of the queen (at all times dignified and strict, especially with the Duke of York), His Majesty would assume a royal demeanour’ and put an end to the games on the floor.45

  Charlotte’s somewhat chilly restraint, her refusal to lose the dignity of the queen to the spontaneity of motherhood, does not necessarily indicate want of deep feelings on her part, so much as an inability to express them in public. Over the years, her husband had become far less self-conscious, acquiring a degree of imperturbability that gave him the confidence to abandon the constraints of formal behaviour when it suited him. Charlotte never mastered this very important royal skill. Her exacting, dutiful temperament shrank away from the gaze of observers, and she quickly learnt to conceal or subdue her inner feelings. Very early in her career as a parent, she imposed on herself a rigorous discipline which hid her emotions beneath an air of superficial calm. She refused to parade her feelings to satisfy the curiosity of those around her. When her fifth son, Ernest, was taken severely ill, and was thought to be dying, Charlotte’s iron self-control amazed the curious Lady Mary Coke. ‘I make no doubt of the queen’s concern,’ she confided to her journal, ‘but I am surprised it does not appear more. The day I saw her, she did not seem as if anything gave her uneasiness.’46 The preservation of a bland outward equanimity, gracious but impenetrable, did not allow much opportunity for the unguarded expression of strong affections.

  Many aristocratic families of George and Charlotte’s generation who were trying to raise their children in the modern style felt the pressures between their public and private roles. For the queen, the tensions between her two identities were acute. One observer noted that Charlotte was only free to act as a mother ‘whenever those duties did not interfere with public duties, or any plans or wishes of the king’.47 The close relationship that bound the king and queen together meant that George liked to have his wife by his side in every appropriate moment. She attended not just the twice-weekly Drawing Rooms, but also went with him on official trips, to military reviews and other ceremonial events. She was expected to be on duty for more pleasurable expeditions too, for visits to the theatre or to the musical concerts that formed such an important part of their lives. If George and Charlotte’s marriage had been more typical of an arranged, royal alliance, the queen might have had more free time to deploy as she wished; but she and the king did not live the separate existences so common amongst those of their peers who were less happily married. This meant, as Charlotte herself so often wistfully declared, ‘my time is not my own’. The primacy of her obligation to the king severely limited her ability to do anything else at all.

  Rousseau and his followers offered a vision of motherhood as a kind of profession. It was one that Charlotte would surely have embraced, had she not already had a job, and one which she recognised, from her earliest days as a parent, would always prevent her from becoming a true model of modern motherhood. She could establish the principles by which her family would be rai
sed; she could monitor their development, ensuring the most rigorous attention to their health and welfare; she could provide the moral compass by which their growing minds were to be steered; and whenever her other duties allowed, she could sweep into the nursery and see for herself how her prescriptions were working out in practice. But as she herself understood, Charlotte was essentially an overseer; the ideas were hers, but the detailed implementation of them would have to be managed by someone else. She needed someone who shared her vision, who understood her priorities, whom she could trust absolutely, and who had the authority and experience to implement her thinking. She needed, above all, someone who would offer the consistent, daily presence that she could not. In a world where her calling as a mother was constantly trumped by her duties as a wife and queen, she needed a proxy. In Lady Charlotte Finch, she found one.

  CHAPTER 7

  Private Lives

  LADY CHARLOTTE FINCH WAS APPOINTED governess to the Prince of Wales only four days after his birth in August 1762. In addition to being well connected (she was the second daughter of the impecunious Earl of Pomfret), her intellectual qualifications were unimpeachable. Horace Walpole, whose standards were high, thought her ‘a woman of remarkable sense and philosophy … the cleverest girl in the world’.1 She had been painstakingly educated, her studies supplemented by travels across Europe with her rather rackety family. She was a voracious reader, consuming works of philosophy, history and theology in a formidable variety of languages. Walpole was impressed to discover she spoke ‘the purest Tuscan, like any Florentine’.2 In middle age, armed with only a dictionary and a great deal of determination, she taught herself to read Spanish. Her literary pursuits had not undermined her religious faith; she was a committed Christian, with a strong sense of moral purpose.

  Charlotte Finch shared so many of the queen’s interests and preoccupations that it was not surprising that Charlotte liked and admired her; she was the first of a long line of similarly minded, clever women invited into her household, and in many ways proved the most successful. She was exactly the kind of concerned, scholarly mother the queen would have chosen to be herself, if her rank had allowed it. When her own children were small, Lady Charlotte dedicated herself entirely to their upbringing, spending all her time with them. ‘I rise at seven, and by eight have all my little ones about me in my dressing room … We read our Psalms and Chapter together, then at nine we go for breakfast, after which the children walk for an hour, then the three eldest come into my room and read to me the History of Scotland.’3 The day progressed, taking in French, more history, some drawing and the reading of fairy tales together after dinner (which Rousseau, with his deep-seated distrust of all fiction, would never have countenanced).

  But Lady Charlotte’s apparently calm and contented family life had a bleaker side to it. Although her marriage to William Finch was for many years very happy – they had four children and he was an affectionate and engaged father – as he grew older, his behaviour grew increasingly erratic and violent. It was eventually rumoured that this once charming and likeable man had beaten his wife and attempted to throw her down the stairs, upon which the couple separated. As a result, Lady Charlotte was left to face the second tragedy in her life alone. In 1765, two of her adored daughters died young from tuberculosis, enduring long and painful periods of illness which their desperate mother could do nothing to assuage. ‘It pleased Almighty God to take my dear child Frances to himself, this day a little before 5 o’clock in the evening,’ she wrote bleakly in her diary.4 Lady Charlotte knew from her own bitter experience how fragile was the happiness provided by children and family, and how quickly it could slip from one’s grasp.

  Despite all her difficulties, she proved a stable and loving presence in the lives of her royal charges. Child after child passed through her hands, all treated with the same ‘constant, affectionate care’ that she had brought to the raising of her own family. When they were young, she was probably the most important figure in the lives of George and Charlotte’s children; long after they were grown up, they continued to speak of ‘Lady Cha’, as they all called her, with the warmest love and respect. When she was over fifty and living far away from home in Germany, the Princess Royal still kept Lady Cha’s portrait in her room ‘as my constant companion, and I never fail two or three times a day looking on that dear countenance I owe so much to’.5 When Lady Charlotte died in 1813, Princess Mary declared simply that she was ‘everything to me and all my dear brothers and sisters … my first friend, whose friendship I valued far beyond what I can describe’.6

  Lady Cha worked hard to make a comfortable and secure home for the royal children. She oversaw all the practical tasks that non-royal mothers increasingly undertook themselves, but which the queen had not the time to do. She ordered their clothes, organised their games, bought their toys, and watched over their illnesses; she even put them to bed at night. Every aspect of their lives, great and small, came under her all-encompassing control. Her bond with the two eldest boys was particularly strong: she referred to them in her diary as ‘my dear little princes’, and cared for them tenderly when they were in the least unhappy or ‘disordered’ – including monitoring them with special attentiveness as they navigated the perils of inoculation.

  George and Charlotte were enthusiastic advocates of this relatively new insurance against smallpox, and had all their children vaccinated. Before Edwin Jenner perfected the use of cowpox, the process was a lengthy and often dangerous one. Charlotte Papendiek, the young daughter of one of the queen’s attendants, was inoculated alongside Prince William in 1768, and as an old woman remembered how painful it had been. A measured dose of infected material was introduced to the patient via ‘two points in the arm … made with the point of a lancet through which a thread was dragged several times under the skin and this on both arms’.7 The child was then sent home to remain in bed for about ten days, preferably in the dark, until the disease showed itself. When the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York underwent the procedure, it was Lady Charlotte who undressed them and put them to bed. (Some days later, the Duchess of Northumberland heard that the prince had been asked if he was not bored with spending so much time in bed. ‘He answered, “Not at all, I lie and make reflections.” … He was then only three years and seven months old, but the forwardest child in understanding I ever saw.’8)

  In the same year, Lady Charlotte began to instruct the prince and his brother Frederick in reading and writing. To engage the boys’ attention, she used a set of alphabetical counters made of ivory, each with a letter on one side, and a picture of an object beginning with that letter on the other. She was clearly an able teacher; only a year later, the six-year-old Prince of Wales had made sufficient progress to write his first proper letter. In a large unformed hand, it was addressed to the queen. ‘My dear Mama,’ he wrote; ‘Nothing could make me so happy as Your Majesty’s letter, and I will always endeavour to follow the good advice you give me in it, being Your Majesty’s most dutiful son, George P.’9 It was the beginning of a lifetime of correspondence in which Charlotte urged her eldest son to live up to her standards of behaviour; few of his later replies were so innocently eager to please.

  Lady Charlotte strove to replicate for the royal children the cheerful intimacy that had characterised the upbringing of her own family, creating in the nursery a private world that was as warm and informal as possible. In one respect, she was considered by some to have succeeded only too well. By the early 1770s, the behaviour of the princes had become a byword for boisterousness. In 1774, Lady Mary Coke heard that the queen’s brother, Ernest, who was visiting from Mecklenburg, nearly lost an eye as a result of his nephews’ uninhibited horseplay: ‘Three of the younger ones were playing with him; one fell behind him, another was on one side of him, and a third he held by the hand.’ When the youngest prince fell over, Ernest ‘tried to prevent it, by which he lost his poise and could not recover himself, and finding that if he fell backwards he must fall upon the chil
d, he threw himself forward and came down with his eye against a chair or a table’. Lady Mary was pleased to hear that ‘providentially, the sight of his eye is saved’, but for a while the hapless Ernest presented ‘a terrible sight, from the blood having fallen down behind his eye’.10 Years later, household attendants were still recalling with a shudder the ‘loudness and … force’ of the young princes’ voices. One of the king’s equerries stated that ‘there was something in the violence of their animal spirits that would make him accept no post or pay to live with them’.11

  The wildness of the princes’ behaviour in private may have been a response to the formality of their lives in the public sphere. Lady Charlotte strove to build a safe space in which the children could experience as many of the unique pleasures of childhood as possible; but she could not prevent the outside world from making its presence powerfully felt. The contrast between the relaxed atmosphere of the nursery and the rigidity and pomp of the court could not have been greater, and from their earliest days, the children were expected to navigate it, shedding the carefree persona of the natural child and putting on the dignified bearing of a prince. This was particularly true of the Prince of Wales, who, as the heir, was on display from the very moment of his birth. Only a few hours after his delivery, he was ‘brought out and shown to all’.12 Some days later, placed in a grand state cradle, the lord mayor and a long line of City dignitaries filed past to pay their respects. These were the opening acts of a lifetime spent in the unflinching intensity of the public gaze.