As the education of George and Charlotte’s sons drew to a close, they had been pushed away from their family with a haste that seemed designed to put as much distance as possible, both physical and emotional, between them and their erstwhile home. With the exception of the increasingly embittered Prince of Wales, the brothers were scattered around Europe, and were never to live again as full-time members of the domestic household. With their daughters, the opposite was the case. Their generous education had expanded their minds, but promised them no experience of life beyond the narrow confines of their family. Charlotte admitted this was not at all the kind of life she wanted for them. ‘I regret more and more,’ she wrote to her brother, ‘by the day, very considerably not having any company except my children. We enjoy ourselves together, but all conversation cannot be animated conversation, and our life is too close and too good and too retired for us to know the world.’ She confessed that she often found the rhythm of their days challenging, ‘even with the aid of religion, which comes to my assistance’. How could such an arid existence benefit her girls, or prepare them for their futures? ‘I fear for my daughters day after day,’ she concluded sadly. ‘It is necessary to know the world in order to judge it, and see how to behave.’109 Charlotte was perceptive enough to understand the problem: her daughters were growing up denied the chance to engage with society, but it was unthinkable she would do anything about it. She had told Mary Hamilton that she considered herself ‘totally void of any wish or desire contrary to the opinions of those I live with’.110 In this context, that meant the king, and until he was prepared to consider an alteration in his daughters’ circumstances, it was inconceivable that anything would change.
CHAPTER 9
Numberless Trials
THROUGHOUT THE 1770S AND EARLY 1780s, as the queen struggled against the encroaching despondency she suspected was inseparable from her royal role, her husband was weighed down by a very different but equally heavy burden. If Charlotte felt thwarted by the isolation of her life, the confined existence imposed upon her by her rank, the king grappled with pressures in the public world that called upon all his powers of resilience and determination, and yet seemed impervious to solution. These were the years in which George faced a greater challenge to his authority than at any other time during his reign. The conflict between the American colonies and the government in London resulted in political and ideological turmoil of a kind not seen in British life since the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Cherished assumptions about the nature of liberty and the rights of Crown and Parliament were blown away as old alliances shifted, new relationships were formed and the constitutional landscape was reimagined in an entirely unexpected way. The crisis also struck a blow at George’s carefully constructed vision of kingship, demonstrating the limitations of its effectiveness when faced with a direct confrontation. His inability to deliver an outcome that he believed was both right and just instilled in him an anger and unhappiness as acute as anything felt by his wife.
The sense of having failed in an endeavour which was central to his conception of himself as a man and a monarch was hard enough to bear; but George’s frustration was made more acute by the prolonged misery of the experience itself. For nearly a decade he was involved on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis with the most intractable political problem of the time, dealing with issues and individuals for which he felt little intrinsic sympathy or understanding. Unlike his ministers, he could not look yearningly to the ultimate escape route provided by resignation; and his conscientious character meant he was never off duty. If Charlotte’s discontents arose from too remote a relationship with the public world, the king suffered from never being allowed to escape its demands. ‘The numberless trials and constant torments I meet with in public life must certainly affect any man,’ he observed bitterly in 1780, ‘and more poignantly me, as I have no wish but to fulfil my various duties.’ Under the impact of his trials and torments, George’s character, never naturally cheerful, hardened into a settled pessimism. He had no expectation that his situation would ever change or improve. ‘The experience of now near twenty years has convinced me, that however long it may please the Almighty to extend my days, yet I have no reason to expect any diminution of my public anxiety.’ Only one aspect of his life offered any respite from the perpetual harassments of a role from which, he had gloomily concluded, only death could eventually release him: ‘Where am I therefore to turn for comfort but indeed to the bosom of my own family?’1
He had no doubt that Charlotte would not fail him. Whatever doubts about the meaning of her life assailed her in private, she remained loyal and devoted to George’s interests. ‘As to your mother,’ he told his eldest son with patent satisfaction, ‘I can truthfully say, that in nineteen years, I have never had the smallest reason but to thank heaven for having directed my choice among the princesses then for me to marry to her; indeed, I could not bear up if I did not find in her a feeling friend to whom I can unbosom my griefs.’2
One of his wife’s chief virtues, in George’s eyes, was that she never made trouble. The same could not be said for his sons. All the royal family were affected in different ways by the fallout from their father’s unhappiness in these years, but it was in the king’s relations with the princes that the collateral damage of his public frustrations was immediately apparent. The king once described his sons as ‘the instruments I look for, in assistance in putting this country into any degree of prosperity’. George intended that the boys should one day act as dependable outriders of his will, taking from his shoulders some of the burdens of government under which he laboured so relentlessly. He was convinced this could only happen if they showed by their actions that they shared his vision of modern monarchy, of kingship characterised by duty, service and moral example. Their commitment to the professions he had chosen for them was regarded by him as a crucial indicator of their worthiness to assist him in that task. Did they apply themselves to their studies? Did they behave with propriety and moderation? Did they display a selfless dedication to improvement? Only by satisfying their father’s high standards in all aspects of conduct would they be regarded as having deserved the right to be considered as potential confidants and apprentices. ‘They must,’ he insisted, ‘by their behaviour convince me they are deserving of such trust.’ Judged on these terms, their father decided that, with the possible exception of his favourite, Frederick, all his older sons had failed both him and the monarchy itself. He would struggle on alone.
It was unlucky for his sons – and indeed for their father – that so many of them grew into maturity in the years during which the king was under such intense political pressure. Under the strain of prolonged anxiety, the paternal affection that had been so visible a part of George’s character when the boys were young evaporated with disconcerting speed. By the time the American War of Independence was over in 1783, George’s sons were as alienated and distant from their parents as the Thirteen Colonies had been from the mother country in the midst of the conflict. The politics of the conflict mirrored the divisions that now ran through the heart of the king’s family; but those politics had themselves helped create those rifts, by impacting so profoundly upon the king’s state of mind.
From the earliest days of his reign, the practice of politics had not come easily to George III. As a young man plagued by chronic shyness, he had found many of his public responsibilities painful to perform. It was observed that at formal audiences he was often more uncomfortable than those lined up to meet him. He was even less at ease in private encounters; he was nervous with his first ministers, particularly those of forceful and blustering personality, such as George Grenville, whose bullying aggression in the early years of his reign the king never forgot nor forgave.3 As he became more experienced, his confidence grew and he felt increasingly able to assert his views, though he never became an enthusiastic practitioner of the political arts. Other men might find pleasure and excitement in the drama and self-aggrandisement that was the defi
ning tone of so much of eighteenth-century politics; George never did, and actively disapproved of those who pursued flamboyant, highly coloured careers.
He found it impossible to work with William Pitt. The architect of British victory in the Seven Years War, Pitt was a formidable strategist, an impassioned and dazzling orator, dubbed ‘the Great Commoner’ by an idolising populace which cheered and huzza’d him wherever he went. George thought Pitt unsound, disapproving of what he regarded as his demagoguery and his expensive foreign policy ambitions, and resented Pitt’s attempts to ‘manage’ him. He retreated into the obstinate non-cooperation that was his response to all ministers with whom he disagreed, and Pitt’s premiership was short-lived. It was not until 1770, nearly a decade after his accession, that George finally found a man with whom he felt he could do business: Frederick, Lord North.
North did not make a particularly good impression when first encountered. He was a large, dishevelled and not very attractive figure. ‘Nothing could be more coarse or clumsy or ungracious than his outside,’ recalled Horace Walpole. ‘Two large prominent eyes that rolled about to no purpose (for he was utterly short-sighted), a wide mouth, thick lips, and an inflated visage gave him an air of a blind trumpeter.’4 Somewhat woundingly for the king, North was considered to resemble him so closely in appearance that it was rumoured – without any foundation – that the politician was in fact George’s illegitimate half-brother. But if North’s looks did him no favours, his character charmed everyone who met him. He was clever, good-tempered, witty and, a rare attribute in a politician, entirely devoid of malice. He enjoyed a happy home life surrounded by a family famous for their entertaining repartee. ‘It was impossible to experience dullness in his society,’ wrote the diplomat Nathaniel Wraxall.5 Everyone liked North, including the king. It helped that they had known each other since childhood, North’s father having acted as a Lord of the Bedchamber to Prince Frederick. George also responded to North’s quiet professional competence, his undoubted and unobtrusive mastery of political business. North’s reputation is now so associated with the loss of America that it is hard to see him as master of anything, but in the judgement of the political historian John Cannon, he was ‘ambitious, hard-working and efficient … a master of political tactics’.6
North had been in the House of Commons all his adult life, and understood its management better than any of his contemporaries. He was never a showy speaker, but he was a powerful debater, and his carefully marshalled arguments ushered many contentious bills through the chamber. He was associated with a number of projects close to the king’s heart. He had led the government’s attack on John Wilkes, and piloted the unpopular Royal Marriages Bill through an unsympathetic Commons. As a man of business, North’s credentials were excellent, and George was delighted when he accepted the highest offices: he held, at the same time, the positions of first minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons. Once established in power, the king never wavered in his support for him, making him a Knight of the Garter, the most prestigious chivalric order. More practically, in 1777, he paid off North’s huge personal debts of over £20,000. ‘I want no return,’ George told him, ‘but your being convinced that I love you as well as a man of worth, as I esteem you as a minister.’7
Like the king himself, North was a hard worker, and held down his demanding posts with a prodigious amount of effort. ‘His labours are immense,’ wrote one of his colleagues, ‘and such as few constitutions could bear.’8 But North’s many virtues did not compensate for some ominous key failings. He was chronically indecisive, as he himself acknowledged. ‘I never could, nor can decide between different opinions,’ he confessed to the king in 1778. More worryingly, he suspected that he lacked the killer instinct that was required in an effective leader. He did not, he observed perceptively, possess ‘the authority of character’ that marked out a great premier. Above all, as even his supporters recognised, he was not a man to construct or deliver a grand, all-encompassing strategy. ‘Your majesty’s service’, he later told the king, ‘requires a man of great abilities, who can choose decisively, and carry his determination authoritatively into execution … I am certainly not that man.’9 The absence of these more forceful, driving qualities in North’s character was, of course, one of the reasons why George found him so congenial. However, these weaknesses were to be ruthlessly exposed as the king and his minister were gradually overwhelmed by events neither of them was really qualified to control.
*
Trouble had been brewing in America for almost a decade when, in 1773, a group of discontented Boston citizens, dressed as Mohawk warriors, seized chest after chest of tea from the deck of the East Indiaman that had imported them, and hurled them into Boston Harbor. It was a dramatic gesture of a kind very common in the practice of popular politics in the English-speaking eighteenth-century world; but it was to have a significance that reached far beyond the theatricality of the event itself. Two years later, at Concord, Massachusetts, British military forces clashed directly with American colonists in the first engagement of what could soon be called nothing else but war. By July 1776, the Declaration of Independence had given the colonial opposition to British rule an intellectual coherence, a unifying principle, and a clearly articulated goal.
In 1778, the emergence of Britain’s oldest adversary, France, as the key ally of the young republic brought a global dimension to the conflict. The French, joined by the Spanish in 1779, fought the British at sea as well as on land, opening up new spheres of operations in the West Indies, stretching already hard-pressed British resources, and immeasurably improving the prospects for American success. The defeat of the army commanded by General Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781 effectively signified the end of British rule in what had once been the Thirteen Colonies and heralded the establishment of a new sovereign state. It had taken less than a decade for Britain’s American empire, settled over a century and a half before, to be pulled apart.
The consequences were felt in every aspect of British life. The practices of diplomacy, trade, warfare and politics were all turned upside down and inside out by a shift in the balance of power that would have been thought inconceivable only twenty years previously. And its impact was felt with even greater force elsewhere, particularly in France, where Louis XVI’s support for a war of independence abroad bankrupted the monarchy at home and led to the revolution that overthrew it. What happened in America between 1775 and 1783 genuinely changed the world. It also almost destroyed George III’s kingship, and left him with a sense of failure from which he never fully recovered.
As with so many of the issues that bedevilled the first twenty years of George’s reign, the roots of the crisis could be traced back to the 1763 Treaty of Paris which had ended both the Seven Years War and the political career of George’s mentor, Lord Bute. The treaty’s provisions determined that, as a consequence of British victories in Canada, the French surrendered all their North American territories. The cost of defending these new possessions thus devolved to the government in London, which took the view that, as the American colonies were the most direct beneficiaries of safer northern borders, they should bear some of the cost of maintaining them. To raise the necessary revenues, a series of taxes was imposed on luxury goods imported into the colonies.
Unsurprisingly, this was not a popular decision, and, faced with a chorus of colonial complaint, in the mid-1760s the government capitulated and withdrew all the levies, except the hugely profitable duty on tea. This was retained partly to protect the revenue stream it generated, but also to make a political point. The disgruntled Americans had asserted that new taxes could be imposed on them only with the direct agreement of their own representatives. The London government did not accept this principle, and held on to the tea duty as a symbolic demonstration of the right to tax Americans under the same rules that regulated the payment of taxes by Britons in the mother country. Many British taxpayers had no more direct representation in Parliament
than their American counterparts. The unreformed House of Commons was infamously irrational in its definitions of what constituted representation. In populous places such as Westminster and Liverpool, relatively large numbers of men (women were, of course, excluded from the franchise) had the right to vote. In stark contrast, Manchester, an expanding town of comparatively recent growth, had no MPs at all, whilst run-down rural constituencies often boasted only a handful of voters whose loyalties could be bought by any rich purchaser with parliamentary ambitions. Defenders of the system argued that these anomalies were largely irrelevant; it did not really signify how individual Members were elected. What mattered was the status of the Commons as a united entity, for it was in the body of the House as a whole that true representation was to be found. The House of Commons did not derive its authority from a direct relationship with electors; it represented everyone, whether they had a vote or not. The British were, in constitutional terms, ‘virtually represented’. For those who accepted this formula as justifying the absence of dedicated MPs for Manchester, it was hard to see why colonial America should be treated any differently.
In the early days of their opposition, some American campaigners hoped to circumvent what they saw as the intransigence of a parliament elected on such dubious grounds by appealing directly to the king to consider the natural justice of their case. Some were even prepared to contemplate a form of qualified direct rule, which placed colonial assemblies directly under George’s protection. Other European rulers – the ‘enlightened despots’ of Prussia, Austria and Russia – might have jumped at the opportunity to oversee a modernising project which came with the tantalising prospect of concentrating more power in royal hands, but George was not interested. From the outset, he regarded American unrest as an attack on the sovereignty of Parliament, and advocated the adoption of the sternest possible response. ‘The colonies must either submit or triumph,’ he wrote. ‘I do not wish to come to severer measures, but we must not retreat.’ He hoped that a swift application of ‘vigorous measures’ would soon bring the Americans ‘to a due submission to the mother country’.10 In the early stages of the conflict, the king’s view was shared by many of the political class. The historian Edward Gibbon reflected much of the national mood in his hostility to American claims and his support for firm action. ‘I am more and more convinced that we have both right and power on our side,’ he wrote; ‘we are now arrived at the decisive moment of persevering or of losing forever both our trade and our empire.’11
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