The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  However, as news of repeated military setbacks arrived with discouraging regularity from America, public enthusiasm for the war ebbed away. Defeats, such as that at Saratoga in 1777, when General Burgoyne was forced to surrender his entire army to colonial forces, were humiliating examples of British impotence; whilst victories, such as the taking of New York and Philadelphia, failed to deliver the longed-for knockout blow. In London, the political temperature steadily rose. Critics of the government attacked the ineffectual prosecution of the war, and railed at its escalating cost. Some also began to raise more worrying ideological questions. Was it right that Britain, justly proud of her own struggles to achieve liberty, was so busily (if unsuccessfully) engaged in attempting to extinguish similar efforts across the Atlantic?

  The king was unmoved by such arguments. He never altered his conviction that it was the colonists who were attempting to subvert the delicate balance of powers which guaranteed Britain’s unique constitutional settlement. This left his ministers very little room for manoeuvre. The skills which had served North so well in negotiating the passage of many a tricky parliamentary bill were useless in the face of the entrenched positions taken up by both George and the colonial powers. A powerful political force of nature like William Pitt, who possessed both grand vision and strength of will, might have managed it; but North, with his essentially compliant character, failed to evolve a strategy that offered any alternative to the highest possible stakes of total victory or total defeat. Even his attempts to appeal to the king, as one practical man of business to another, came to nothing. When North attempted to persuade George that the nation could not afford the cost of much more war, George, usually so attentive to financial considerations, was dismissive. ‘I have heard Lord North frequently drop that the advantages to be gained from this contest could never repay the expense,’ he observed coldly. He would not accept his first minister’s timid attempts to sway him. It was, he believed, his sacred duty to uphold at all costs the principles he had sworn to protect in his coronation oath, and to make every human effort to preserve the integrity of his inheritance. To his critics, the king persevered in an obstinate denial to accept the reality of the situation. For George, his refusal to countenance defeat was a matter of personal honour, a manifestation of his deepest beliefs about his royal mission.

  The uncompromising nature of the king’s position was well known, and he was soon irrevocably associated with the aggressive prosecution of the war, both at home and abroad. In America he became a demonised figure, thought to bear a heavy personal responsibility for the death and destruction occurring in the colonies. The Declaration of Independence contains a lengthy recapitulation of his offences, not just as a head of state but as a malignly motivated individual, describing him as ‘a prince whose character is marked by every act which may define a tyrant’, and ‘one who is unfit to rule a free people’.12 Attacks of this kind must have been particularly painful to George, who saw himself as the defender of established liberties in the face of unjustified and potentially dangerous incursions. They hit him where it would hurt most, as they were intended to.

  George increasingly saw himself as an isolated and persecuted figure, vilified abroad and left to carry much of the responsibility at home in driving forward the prosecution of the war. One of his principal tasks was shoring up the faltering commitment of his first minister. From the very beginning of the conflict, North had suspected that he was not qualified to be a wartime leader, and had made repeated requests to be allowed to resign. After the disaster at Saratoga, he declared to George that ‘capital punishment itself is … preferable to that constant anguish of mind which he feels from consideration that his continuance in office is ruining His Majesty’s affairs’. Although persuaded by the king to reconsider and go back to work, North continued to insist that he was not up to the job. The workload overwhelmed him, and he could not cope with the constant anxiety and fear of failure. He was, he said, ‘oppressed with a thousand griefs’. His desperate pleas to be released from office must surely have reminded George of similarly miserable requests made by Lord Bute in 1763. North maintained that ‘his present distress of mind’ was such ‘that he would soon be unfit for the performance of any ministerial duty’.13 The king, tougher than he had been nearly twenty years before, refused to contemplate North’s resignation. ‘No man has a right to talk of leaving me at this hour … Are you resolved … at the hour of danger to desert me?’ North refused to rally, declaring that he could not understand, ‘after so many proofs of his unfitness for his situation’, why George was determined to keep him in office, ‘though the almost certain consequence will be the ruin of his Majesty’s affairs’.14

  George would never have allowed himself to indulge in such obvious despair – his sense of responsibility would have made that seem a capitulation – but there can be no doubt that the burden of the conflict pressed heavily on him. This was not just in relation to the making of decisions, or coping with setbacks and criticism; the war also added hugely to the weight of bureaucratic, administrative tasks which fell upon his shoulders. From the first days of his reign, George had shown himself doggedly devoted to the unglamorous nuts and bolts of royal business. He was a tireless reader and writer of official letters, managing his vast correspondence without a secretary until his sight began to fail him in 1804. He tackled diligently the daily tide of documents which required his attention – diplomatic dispatches, reports of parliamentary proceedings, communications from government departments – annotating their margins with his comments and marking his usually terse replies with the exact time, to the minute, of their receipt. As the principal fount of official patronage, he was the subject of endless supplication for appointments and promotions, not just at court and in government, but also in the Church, the universities and in all branches of the armed services. Over the years, he had built up considerable reserves of knowledge about the virtues and shortcomings of almost everyone in the public sphere, which he applied, not always without prejudice, in making his decisions.

  Now this already prodigious workload was made even more demanding by the additional requirements of war. George was endlessly occupied, responding at all hours of the day and night not just to dramatic shifts in the political and military situation, but also to more prosaic issues of recruitment, supply and the provision of funds. In her letters to her brother Charles, the queen noted with concern the strain this extra work imposed upon her husband, the hours spent communing with ministers and listening to the gloomy reports of generals. She did what she could to support him, even attending reviews and military inspections at his side, although she disliked all such empty spectacles, and usually tried to avoid them if she could. The extraordinary nature of the times made all such selfish considerations irrelevant; everything, she told Charles, had been changed by the extremity of the situation. The atmosphere of general anxiety had become so all-pervasive that she confessed it had even driven her to abandon her prime directive of political non-engagement. ‘Truthfully, my dear brother, I speak, I hear, I read and I dream only of war; thus do I believe that imperceptibly, I am becoming political, despite myself.’15

  Charlotte’s new-found preparedness to engage with politics did not, in fact, extend far beyond involving herself with renewed energy in projects undertaken by her immediate family. Alongside her active and public support for her husband’s exertions, she was also able to rejoice in the bravery of her son William, who was the only one of the family to experience the American war at first hand. When, in 1779, the teenage prince joined the navy, the risk of his seeing action was already, as Charlotte recognised, quite high. She endeavoured to prepare herself for that possibility as best she could. ‘I can only make myself behave like a Greek or Roman mother,’ she wrote ruefully to her brother, although she confessed that her attempts to display severe classical resignation were only partly successful. ‘I don’t want to be distant from him, I don’t want to see him put in a place where he could be killed
or injured.’ But if he had to fight, she hoped very much that he would acquit himself honourably. ‘I confess to you, that I would be well pleased, if in an action, my son did not fail to do his duty.’16

  In January 1780, both Charlotte’s hopes and fears were realised. The fourteen-year-old prince was present at a battle off the Portuguese coast at Cape St Vincent, in which a British fleet destroyed a number of Spanish warships. William witnessed a seventy-gun Spanish warship, with a crew of six hundred men, blow up under fire. ‘I felt a horror all over me,’ he admitted later.17 His mother’s response was less equivocal; she was, for once, able to express a rare, unqualified pride in the conduct of one of her boys. ‘My son William was in the midst of fire,’ she wrote excitedly to Charles, ‘and the Admiral told me he behaved bravely and spiritedly.’18 William was later stationed at British military headquarters in New York, and was thus the only British royal to visit the city whilst it was still under rule from London. He wrote to his father that he was greeted by ‘an immense concourse of people who appeared very loyal, continually crying out “God bless King George!”’19

  The cheering inhabitants of New York were not alone in their pro-British sympathies. Recent scholarship has estimated that between 15 and 20 per cent of Americans – about 500,000 people – thought of themselves as loyalists; but the tide of events had turned decisively against them. When General Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in October 1781, it was clear to almost everyone that the war was lost. The news reached England on 25 November, and Lord North reacted with a combination of horror and relief, declaring: ‘Oh God! It is all over!’20

  Even in the face of such an apparently decisive setback, the king, who shared none of his first minister’s sense of release, was reluctant to concede final defeat. The consequences of surrender were, for him, still too momentous to contemplate. ‘No consideration shall ever make me, in the smallest degree, an instrument that would annihilate the rank in which this British Empire stands among the European states, and would render my own situation in this country unsustainable.’21 For a few months, George clung to the hope that something could be rescued from the ruins of his American policy, but in February 1782 the House of Commons passed a motion against ‘the further prosecution of an offensive war on the continent of America’. With little political support for its continuance, the war was, as North had seen, effectively over, and the exhausted premier was at last allowed to resign. As he had always feared, his reputation would be forever overshadowed by the part he played in the loss of America; but the king was more generous to his fallen minister than posterity would be. When North finally departed to spend more time with his family, George thought of him with affection. During his illness in 1788, North was often in the king’s disordered mind, as a correspondent explained to the retired politician. ‘In his conversation, he often said he loved you, that you was his friend, that though you once deserted … he never could forget how you stood by him in the time of trouble.’22

  George’s trials did not, however, end with the cessation of hostilities. Although the guns were no longer firing, it proved almost impossible to manage an official closure to the conflict. The king struggled unsuccessfully to find an administration that was acceptable to him whilst also commanding sufficient political support to push a peace treaty through a discontented and restive Commons. A rickety government, led by the Marquess of Rockingham, proved as fragile as everyone had expected it to be, and collapsed in 1783. George, already pummelled and demoralised by military humiliation, was now confronted with a very bitter political pill to swallow. With few other options, he had turned to his old ally Lord North to rescue him from his difficulties. North, always happier dealing with parliamentary rather than global crises, was prepared to return to power, but only if he was allowed to do so as part of a most unlikely partnership. In North’s opinion, the only viable administration was one built on the alliance of himself and Charles James Fox, the man who had hitherto been regarded as his great political opponent. North was convinced that only by acting alongside Fox, who had opposed the war from the outset, could a satisfactory peace be negotiated with the Americans. No one but North could possibly have persuaded George to accept the idea of such ‘an unnatural and factious coalition’. Under his old friend’s coaxing, he eventually agreed to accept the inevitable, though it was an arrangement he hated. He was not yet reconciled to the cessation of a conflict that Fox came into office determined to bring to an end. Fox had been one of the most influential critics of the war, and had not hesitated to blame the king for its unwise and unsuccessful prosecution. In having to accept such an unwelcome ally, George felt that he had been ‘managed’, an experience he loathed, and one that brought out his worst instincts. His dislike went far beyond political differences, however; he personally detested the man he was now required to accept as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.

  *

  Charles James Fox was one of the great presiding deities of eighteenth-century politics. He began his career as an orthodox Whig, an aristocratic defender of the liberties secured by the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and a vigilant, eagle-eyed exposer of any attempts by the Crown to exceed its prerogative and trample on the rights of free-born Englishmen. However, his politics, like those of so many of his generation, were transformed by the great revolutions of the century, in America and then in France. For men like Fox, these great upheavals changed for ever ideas of what liberty and freedom meant, expanding their reach and meaning far beyond that envisaged by the century-old constitutional settlement on which British politics rested. For many Whigs – especially those on the radical side of the party – these new revolutionary impulses seemed an exciting development that marked the next stage in the growth of freedom, and they embraced them with great fervour. Fox was a passionate advocate of the American cause, an eloquent champion of colonial rights, and a forceful objector to the British military mission. He even dressed in the buff and blue colours adopted by General Washington’s army as he toasted its victories in rowdy and well-reported dinners of like-minded associates.

  His political views alone would have been enough to make him unpalatable to the king; but there was a strong personal dimension to George’s hatred of Fox. He was the son of Henry Fox, on whose unscrupulous mastery of the dark political arts the king had been forced to rely to achieve the peace treaty of 1763 which ended the Seven Years War, at much cost to his conscience and sense of himself as a moral agent in the business of government. Henry Fox had also played a subtle but influential role in George’s youthful liaison with Sarah Lennox, about which the adult king harboured a complicated sense of denial and embarrassment that he preferred not to contemplate. The use of bribery to suborn Members of Parliament and his infatuation with an unsuitable young woman were humiliating examples of personal weakness and shame for the king, and Fox senior had been witness to both.

  Fox’s son, Charles, was, in the king’s eyes, even worse. He was a libertine in every sense of the word, a man with no interest in the carefully regulated moral universe in which George was so thoroughly immersed. He was an obsessive gambler on a grand scale, playing sometimes for twenty-four hours at a time, losing huge sums with all the negligent panache expected of a louche, insouciant man of the world. On one occasion, he and his brother were said to have lost the truly enormous sum of £32,000 in one night.23 Only the vastness of his father’s dubiously acquired fortune prevented him following so many of his contemporaries into complete financial ruin. He was a hard drinker too, an uninhibited consumer of every kind of pleasure, the human cost of which was only too visible in his large, shabby, unkempt figure. The fastidious Horace Walpole noted with fascinated horror Fox’s ‘bristly black person’, his dirty, untidy unshaven appearance, ‘rarely purified by any ablutions’, instantly recognisable in any caricature by his fleshy, stubbled face and huge, untrimmed black eyebrows, his shirt often hanging open to reveal the hairy chest beneath.24 Despite his lack of physical appeal, he was an energetic and su
ccessful pursuer of women, who were entranced by his charisma and his seductive personal charm. He was prodigiously clever and effortlessly witty, and was proud of his ability to ‘talk his looks away’. He deployed these gifts with equal effectiveness in the House of Commons, where he was a skilled and highly effective debater, and in salons and drawing rooms, where he captivated male and female alike. The glamorous and febrile Duchess of Devonshire, who was an intimate of his, described his conversation ‘like a brilliant player of billiards, the strokes follow one another, piff, puff’.25 His womanising proved less long-lasting than his devotion to gambling, however, and in 1795 he quietly married Mrs Elizabeth Armistead, who had served time as a mistress of the Prince of Wales, and was instantly recognisable amongst Fox’s well-connected circle by the strong cockney accent she never lost.

  George hated everything about Charles Fox – his beliefs, his behaviour and his paternity were all regarded with baleful disapproval by the resentful king – but it was Fox’s relationship with his heir that completed George’s enmity. The Prince of Wales idolised Fox, regarding him – in everything except his indifference to clothes and hygiene – as the model of rakish, gentlemanly sophistication. The king correctly believed that Fox encouraged his son to drink, to gamble, to spend recklessly and to share mistresses with him. The prince was a regular visitor to Fox’s home in St James’s and was regularly seen in his company at Brooks’s club and at a host of other parties, dinners and entertainments.