Lady Charlotte did all she could to prepare her charges for the inevitability of their destiny, orchestrating little events to accustom them to the idea of being on show. In the summer of 1766, to mark the fourth birthday of the Prince of Wales, she staged a theatrical performance for the king and queen in which their three sons all took part. The eldest prince ‘danced a hornpipe in a sailor’s dress’; Frederick, aged three, accompanied him in a harlequin costume, whilst William, barely more than a baby, was dressed as ‘a mademoiselle’. A year before, the infant George had held his first formal audience, when, under the watchful eye of his governess, he received a delegation from the Society of Ancient Britons. Lady Charlotte described in her diary how they arrived ‘wearing three ostrich feathers in their hats’, as a mark of respect to the Prince of Wales. They presented a formal address, after which the prince ‘spoke a short answer to them’ and ‘gave them, from my hands, a purse with a hundred guineas’. Satisfied, the Ancient Britons ‘kissed his hand, and marched away as they came, in procession, with music.’13 When required to meet the Britons again, in 1768, Lady Charlotte was delighted to see the ease with which her young charge received his guests, exclaiming to her friend Lady Mary Coke that George had ‘made his answer … without so much as looking at her, and spoke as distinctly as if he had been twenty years of age’.14
Even when they were not on formal show, the royal children were rarely free from scrutiny. They lived in an atmosphere of intense and all-pervasive public curiosity; their looks, behaviour, tastes and conversation were constantly and minutely observed, described and commented upon. The Duchess of Northumberland and Lady Mary Coke, whose diaries give such rich accounts of court life in the period, were only two of a squadron of inquisitive courtiers who patrolled the periphery of the royal family’s privacy, intrigued by any details they could discover. Even the nursery offered no sanctuary. Lady Mary was often invited to visit, and had no scruples about recording what she saw. She was an ardent royalist, almost fanatically devoted to the idea of monarchy, but she could be unsparing in her criticisms of the royals themselves, even the youngest members of the family. The hapless Princess Royal attracted her disapproving attention from her earliest days. ‘I own I think her a very plain child,’ she wrote dismissively in 1768, when the little girl was only two.15 For Royal’s eldest brother, however, Lady Mary had nothing but praise, painstakingly noting his every saying and observation. She thought him quite exceptional, charming, clever, polite and amusing. ‘I see no fault in the Prince of Wales, thinking him one of the finest boys I ever knew.’16
It was no doubt easier to cope with this kind of attention if it was informed by admiration rather than disapproval, but the awareness of being on constant display was unlikely to nurture in the royal children a sense of carefree innocence. In this, as in many other ways, there were limits in the degree to which their upbringing could conform to fashionable contemporary models of child-rearing. The requirements of royalty too often trumped the desire for a more natural experience. Nothing could be more antithetical to the new ideas of childhood than the development of a formal image that they were obliged to adopt, an artificial dignity behind which the child’s true identity was hidden or suppressed; but the royal children learnt very early that this was an essential part of their development.
In 1772, the Duchess of Northumberland saw the two eldest princes presented to their parents in full possession of their polished, polite, public identities. The boys, aged ten and nine, were ‘both dressed exactly alike, their hair without curl or powder, otherwise they were full-dressed, had swords and crimson velvet, (without even a gold or silver button) dressed coats with plain gold tissue waistcoats’. Their behaviour matched the style of their clothes. ‘They both accosted the king and queen in a most respectful manner. If anything,’ added the duchess, ‘I thought too formal.’17 What troubled her was the incongruence between the boys’ demeanour as children and as representatives of royalty. In a past world where formality was the touchstone of most elite behaviour, the gap between the princes’ two roles would have been a small one; now it had widened into a great abyss, fraught with difficulties for those who had to negotiate its often confusing and contradictory demands. This was as true for the king and queen as it was for the young princes.
*
As they grew older, the demands of the formal, regulated life pressed hard on George and Charlotte’s attempts to create a more intimate, relaxed space for themselves. On the same day that she watched the deferential presentation of the princes, the Duchess of Northumberland noted regretfully how much the behaviour of their parents too had changed. A decade after their marriage, the pressure of custom and tradition had squeezed out many of the small informalities that had been such an important feature of their early life together, and had defined their relationship, not just with each other, but also with those around them. ‘Formerly, the queen had made the tea herself and the king carried it about to the ladies,’ mused the duchess, but now, two pages performed the task. Etiquette had edged out easy simplicity. The duchess also noticed that the king no longer took off his formal clothes when he came into more friendly company: ‘Another difference I remarked was that formerly, the moment the Drawing Room was over, the king used to strip into his frock, whereas this evening he appeared full-dressed.’18
Even in some of the most private areas of their life, George and Charlotte seem to have gradually given up the struggle to preserve the informality and homeliness they had once so prized. ‘The king shaves his head and has put on a wig,’ reported the duchess in 1772; ‘he had always worn one till he was married, but after that, at the request of the queen, he let his hair grow, which became him extremely.’19 The exchange of a natural look loved by his wife for an artificial style prescribed by custom could not say more about the slow encroachment of obligation and expectation on the optimism with which George and Charlotte had embarked on their life together.
It was surely not a coincidence that in the very year the duchess noted the alterations in the king and queen’s way of life, the couple made a conscious attempt to preserve what remained of their original secluded intimacy. ‘We are going to move this summer to Kew,’ Charlotte told her brother in March; ‘it will be better and more private.’20 The move was made easier by the death, a month before, of the king’s mother.
Augusta had lived an increasingly retired life since her son came to the throne, rarely attending court and making few public appearances. It had been clear for some time that she was seriously ill with cancer of the throat. As stubborn and secretive in sickness as she had been in health, Augusta would not acknowledge her condition, either to her children or her servants, and refused to consult a doctor. Walpole reported, with cruel detail, that ‘she could swallow but with the greatest difficulty, and not enough to maintain life. At times, the disease oozed too plentifully from her mouth to be disguised. And her sufferings and her struggles to hide them, were so much beyond her strength that she frequently fainted and was thought dead.’21 George and Charlotte were assiduous in visiting her every Saturday evening between six and eight. When it was clear she could not long survive, they arrived a day early, unannounced. ‘Hearing they were come,’ wrote Walpole, ‘the princess rose, dressed herself, and attempted to walk to meet them, but was … [too] weak and unable.’ The king and queen remained until ten, when Augusta ‘signed to them to retire as usual’. They refused to leave, and stayed with her until six o’clock in the morning, when she died, with what Charlotte told her brother was ‘the greatest possible ease’.22 Even Walpole, who had been one of Augusta’s fiercest critics and who had done more than anyone else to blacken her reputation, admired her bravery in her last days, declaring that ‘her fortitude was invincible’.23
More than anyone else, except Lord Bute, Augusta had been responsible for shaping her son’s character and destiny. It is impossible to know what George really felt about this complex woman, with her cool, undemonstrative character, her impenetrable
reserve, and her iron determination concealed behind a mask of imperturbability. It is hard to see much evidence of warm affection in their relationship; but as long as she lived, he was tireless in defending her character against slurs and slander, and never treated her with anything less than the utmost respect and duty. Now she was gone, he felt able to sever a link with life as he had lived it for the decade since his marriage. His mother’s death made it possible for him to establish a new home for his family away from a metropolitan existence he found increasingly uncongenial. It also offered a more direct opportunity. Augusta’s house in Kew was now available; George quickly decided to take it over himself.
The king and queen had been regular visitors to Richmond since the earliest days of their marriage. Kew, just a few miles away, was in many ways an obvious destination for them. They liked the Thames-side scenery, and the relative isolation of the Surrey location: far enough from London to retain a whiff of the countryside, but sufficiently close to make communication with the capital straightforward. Augusta’s old property was too plain and unpretentious to deserve the name of ‘palace’; usually known simply as the White House, in 1772 it was full of furniture and objects which had been there for years, including statues, pictures and ‘old tapestries’. Once these were cleared away, Charlotte had the house thoroughly redecorated in the modern style; under the eye of Mrs Tunstall, the housekeeper, the nursery was papered in red, white and green, and apartments fitted up for the king and queen.
The White House was not large enough to absorb all the royal children, so the boys were established in three separate residences clustered around Kew Green. Soon their attendants joined them; Lady Charlotte Finch was an early arrival, followed by a regiment of other household servants. Mrs Charlotte Papendiek, whose father was a royal page, was one of many who migrated out to Kew in George and Charlotte’s footsteps. Her father was given a house that had been ‘originally fitted out by the king for his mother, the Princess Dowager of Wales’. Mrs Papendiek remembered that ‘the walls of the drawing room of this house were decorated with prints pasted on paper, collected and arranged by this fond son, with a print of Lord Bute in his robes of state over the fireplace’.24
Once it became clear that the royal family intended to make Kew a second home, a lively colony of artisans, entrepreneurs and courtiers moved there too. Painters, fashionable doctors, riding masters and dressmakers flocked into the village. Cottages were taken for the gardeners, stable staff and others whose labour supported what had quickly become a kind of extended royal compound. They formed a tightly knit community in which everyone knew their place, including the son of the local farmer, who ‘lived upon housebreaking and footpad robberies’, but had declared his intention to do nothing to disturb the tranquillity of Kew: ‘Blows and murder belongs not to my gang, and if I am allowed to take my beer here on the green … I shall take care that no harm happens here. I know the bearings of the place.’25
For its comfortable inhabitants, Kew was a vision of life with all the unpleasantness and disorder excised from its calm and picturesque vistas, a bucolic contrast with harsher realities that held sway elsewhere. When Augusta was buried at Westminster Abbey, Walpole watched ‘as the populace huzzaed for joy and treated her memory with much disrespect’. It was reported that the black silk hangings adorning her coffin were pulled down and thrown around by the London crowd. Such acts were unimaginable in the place Charlotte was later fondly to describe as ‘loyal little Kew’. It was soon regarded by all the royal family as a haven from trouble, a retreat from their urban, court-based life. Inevitably, it attracted large numbers of genteel sightseers. The extensive gardens were opened to the public every Thursday, and Mrs Papendiek remembered Kew Green ‘covered with carriages, more than £300 being often taken on the bridge on Sundays’. One of the major attractions for such prosperous visitors was the chance to catch a glimpse of their rulers. ‘Their Majesties were to be seen at the windows, speaking to their friends and the royal children amusing themselves in their own gardens. Parties came up by water too, with bands of music.’26
In the midst of such crowds, life at Kew hardly constituted the secluded retreat that George and Charlotte had perhaps longed for, but the onlookers who surrounded them there were well mannered and polite, and the image of royalty they had come hoping to see was one of relaxed informality. As a result, it was at Kew that the family were most able to leave behind them the formal regality that dominated so much of their life in London. Fanny Burney, who lived there as part of the household from 1785, thought Kew the most private of all the royal residences: ‘The royal family are here always in so very retired a way that they live like the simplest gentlefolks. The king has not even an equerry with him, nor the queen any lady to attend her when she goes in her airings.’27 George and Charlotte lived there with as little ostentation as possible. The queen wore her plainest clothes, and spent the time released from her elaborate toilette in occupations she found more fulfilling. Her lifelong interest in botany was nurtured by her proximity to the famous gardens, established by her predecessor Queen Caroline, which flourished under her active patronage. She acquired many rare and exotic specimens, in whose progress she took an active and informed interest. Like other fashionable gardeners, she even tried to grow her own tea, and wrote to her obstetrician William Hunter in his role as a collector of natural curiosities, asking him to supply her with suitable plants.28
Above all, she was free to spend more time directly overseeing the wellbeing of her children. ‘Every morning,’ recalled Mrs Papendiek, ‘they were expected at breakfast, from the eldest to the youngest, which the wet nurse herself took in.’ Under Charlotte’s supervision, ‘the medical man saw them, and invariably directed the meals of the day, including those of the wet nurse’. There were two surgeons always on call ‘to watch the constitutions of the royal children’.29 Later in the day, parents and children reassembled to spend more time together. ‘In the country at Kew, after their early dinner at four o’clock, the king and queen usually have their family about them in full liberty, and enjoying themselves with their attendants and often visitors suited to their different ages.’ There were more organised pleasures too, such as ‘birthday entertainments, dances and fireworks … and a constant variety of amusements adapted to their several tastes, the elder princes and princesses attending the small evening parties of the queen at Kew on the same pattern as when at London’.30
For Charlotte in particular, Kew appeared to offer the prospect of genuine escape from the pressures of life at court. But the chance of establishing it as a settled alternative existence were compromised by two considerations: Kew was only ever a summer retreat – generally, the family decamped there in May and returned to winter in London; then, only four years after their arrival at the White House, the king turned his thoughts towards a potentially new base of operations.
Since boyhood, he had been fascinated by the decayed, ancient stronghold of Windsor Castle. Now he began to make active plans to restore it, with a view to making it inhabitable for himself and the queen. Besides its historic associations, it offered several opportunities which Kew did not: the surrounding countryside promised better riding and hunting, and the land around the castle seemed suitable for carrying out the large-scale agricultural projects in which George was increasingly interested. Like many husbands before and since, the king satisfied his own desires by projecting them on to his wife. ‘The king has given me a house,’ wrote Charlotte to her brother in May 1776, ‘which we would very much like to furnish and stay in for a couple of days each week, and thus my life shall be very much in the country manner.’31 The tone of faint resignation in her letter reflects Charlotte’s very limited appetite for a fully rural existence. Although she was anything but an urban sophisticate, she did not share her husband’s passion for the harsher realities of country life. The king loved being in the saddle, and would ride for hours, covering punishing distances and difficult terrain. Charlotte rarely, if ever, rode
, preferring gentle ‘airings’ in her carriage. Unlike her husband and many of her daughters, neither was she a walker. She had no taste for bucolic authenticity in any form, always preferring what she described to her brother as ‘that which is called COMFORT’.32
George was advised that renovating apartments in the castle itself would be both protracted and expensive. Instead he began work on two buildings adjacent to it. Queen Anne’s Garden House, on the south side of the castle, was the first to be converted. It was renamed the Queen’s Lodge when completed. In 1779, another property, the Lower Lodge, was acquired and remodelled specifically to house the royal couple’s growing family. Obedient as ever to the strong feelings of the king, Charlotte did her best to share his enthusiasm for the new Windsor house. It stood just beyond the castle, and had originally been built for Queen Anne. The couple spent their first night there in July 1776. ‘The house will be charming in the future, when the woodwork has taken on another face, which it has not done since Queen Anne put it there,’ she told her brother bravely.33 The king felt no such misgivings. He began a plan of building, designed to establish Windsor – which he once described as ‘the place I love best in the world’ – as the true home of his dynasty. He took a close interest in the progress of the refurbishments, and may even have drawn up some of the design plans himself, though none now survive. He had always been interested in architecture, which appealed to his exacting, meticulous nature, and the making of precise architectural drawings remained one of his chief pleasures throughout his life.
The Strangest Family Page 29
