The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  But their alliance was, as the king suspected, based on more than a shared taste for pleasure. He also saw that Fox had recruited the prince into the informal political opposition of which Fox was the de facto leader. When George reached the age of twenty-one, Fox advised him on the complex and increasingly rancorous negotiations over the arrangements with his father for an independent income and separate establishment. In 1784, Fox fought the Westminster election, standing against a ministerial candidate in one of the liveliest pieces of political theatre of the entire decade, during which the Duchess of Devonshire famously kissed tradesmen whilst campaigning with a fox’s brush in her hat. The prince wore Fox’s colours of Washingtonian blue and buff, and threw dinners and fêtes to encourage his supporters, at which toasts hostile to the king’s government – and sometimes to the king himself – were frequently drunk. At Brooks’s club, Walpole reported that the king had been the subject of bets which even the diarist considered in dubious taste, as Fox and his circle ‘proposed wagers on the duration of his reign’.26 Elsewhere, Fox was said to have referred to the king as Satan, and, like the Americans, regarded him as personally responsible for the debacle of the War of Independence, observing that it was ‘intolerable that it should be in the power of one block-head to do so much mischief’.27

  The king did not decide to destroy the Fox–North coalition solely because he disliked Fox and resented his influence over his son, but his hatred undoubtedly contributed in some measure towards his appetite for its demise. Once the peace treaty with America had been finally concluded in September 1783, the king saw no further use for an administration he had only ever tolerated for reasons of temporary expediency. When Fox introduced an ambitious bill to reform the cumbersome East India Company – an unwieldy amalgam of business enterprise and political machine through which much of the ruling of the burgeoning empire in the East was conducted – the king saw his opportunity. George supported the bill’s many critics, who feared Fox’s plans were no more than ‘a job’ to place valuable imperial patronage in the hands of the Whigs, and declared that anyone supporting it would be regarded unfavourably by himself. The result was the defeat of the bill on its second reading in the Lords, and the subsequent collapse of the Fox–North coalition. Amidst furious complaints from its supporters that the king had acted unconstitutionally in declaring his opinions so openly, the twenty-four-year-old William Pitt was appointed to head the new government, a post he was to hold for seventeen years. Using the methods he had learnt from Henry Fox a generation before, George had engineered with Foxite efficiency the removal of Fox’s son from power. (Charles Fox was not to hold the reins again until 1806, when he was a sick man nearing the end of his life, a pale shadow of the leader he might have been in 1784.) The king had no regrets over what had happened. ‘I am perfectly composed,’ he told Pitt, ‘as I have the self-satisfaction of feeling I have done my duty.’28

  He was, as yet, unable to summon up quite the same degree of equanimity towards events in America. Although he was a model of graceful resignation when he formally received John Adams as ambassador of the new American state in 1785, the king’s formal politeness concealed a great deal of inner turmoil. Privately, George agonised over responsibility for the dismemberment of his patrimony. His continual insistence that it was not his fault – ‘I should be miserable indeed if I did not feel that no blame on that account can be laid at my door’ – suggests that he was, in reality, far from convinced by the strength of his own arguments in that respect.29 He told himself that his attempts to do his duty had been frustrated at every turn by dilatory ministers, ineffectual generals and the duplicity of the colonists themselves, against whose collective failings no man could have prevailed. Yet beneath his bluster was a spirit-sapping conviction that he had been tried and found wanting. On at least two occasions during the conflict, his unhappiness had been so profound that he was driven to consider abdication as the only way out. In March 1783, faced with the prospect of defeat and the humiliation of negotiating an end to the war, he drafted a note to the Prince of Wales, informing him of his plans ‘to resign the crown, my dear son, to you, quitting this my native country forever, and returning to the dominions of my forefathers’. Once established in Hanover, ‘your mother, whose excellent qualities appear stronger to me every day, will certainly instantly prepare for joining me, with the rest of my children’.30

  In the event, the proposed family exodus did not take place, and George hunkered down to endure what could be neither mended nor avoided; but the ‘numberless trials’ he endured during this most difficult decade tested his powers of personal resilience to the utmost, and reinforced his conviction that he would never find either peace or satisfaction in his life as a public man. It was only in the private world that fulfilment and tranquillity were to be looked for; from his family alone could he expect the solace of unconditional support. The difficulties of imposing his will on the national stage made him all the more determined to countenance no opposition to the vision of ordered happiness he envisaged for his wife and children at home. What had begun as a positive ideal of betterment increasingly evolved into an embattled refuge from the strain and pressure of a role that seemed sometimes beyond endurance. The dark years he spent coming to terms with the loss of America only increased the value George placed upon a well-regulated, harmonious family life; but, as he discovered, those qualities were as hard to find at Windsor and Kew as they were in Westminster and Washington.

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  The most punishing blows that fell upon the family in these years were not, in fact, delivered by politics, but by the operation of that malign chance to which all eighteenth-century parents were terrifyingly subject. In 1782, George and Charlotte had fourteen living children. Although they had suffered from the usual ailments, including such potentially serious illnesses as whooping cough, they were, in general, a robust and healthy brood. In defiance of the mournful attrition of the young and vulnerable witnessed in most other families, the king and queen had not lost a single child in twenty years. But with the birth of their last son, their incredible good fortune evaporated.

  Alfred, born in 1780 when Charlotte was thirty-six, was a delicate baby from the start. He suffered from ‘eruptions’ on his face, and a persistent cough that defied all attempts to cure it. In the spring of 1782, when he was not quite two years old, the little prince’s doctors recommended sea air and bathing as a potential restorative. Lady Charlotte Finch, still presiding over the royal nurseries two decades after her original appointment, accompanied the boy to Deal Castle on the Kent coast. She took with her a characteristic reading list of ‘Antonio de Salis in Spanish’ (complete with a dictionary ‘without which I should not attempt it’), and Mme de Genlis’s Adèle et Théodore. She cared for Alfred with great tenderness, her fervent desire to nurse him back to health apparent in all the letters she sent to her friend Mary Hamilton back at court. ‘I think there is no doubt of the sea-bathing agreeing with him,’ she wrote hopefully in May. ‘His nights are so much amended, and his appetite so good that he must gain ground.’ He even seemed to enjoy the ceremonial firing of the great guns that so shook the castle that all the windows had to be opened beforehand: ‘Prince Alfred is, upon that occasion, very courageous and seems to like it.’31

  As spring turned to summer, Alfred appeared to improve. ‘He now bathes two days out of three, which seems to agree with him,’ wrote Lady Charlotte in early July, ‘and he is certainly clearer in the face than I have seen him since we came here.’32 But only two weeks later, her bulletins took on a more sombre tone. Alfred had again been troubled by fever, ‘and he has a wan, dropping look’. He could no longer be persuaded to walk and she asked for ‘the little chaise at the Queen’s House’ to be sent down for his use, as ‘being constantly in arms, as he cannot walk, must be bad for him’.33 It was soon clear that for all Lady Charlotte’s tireless and devoted efforts, Alfred was growing steadily worse, and she and the little boy returned to Windsor. There, on 2
0 August, he died.

  Lady Charlotte was desolated; but having seen two of her own young daughters sicken and die, she was more accustomed to resignation in the face of grief. Alfred, like her girls, was now in a far better place; ‘the reflection on the happiness of the dear little object of all this sorrow must be our great consolation’.34 She stayed with Alfred’s body until the undertakers came to remove it, cutting locks of his hair to be sent to his mother and sisters. Finally, his tiny coffin was taken away, ‘an office it was impossible to perform without feeling it tenderly, as indeed everybody seemed to do that was present at the scene. It closed with such endless happiness for him, that ’tis for ourselves only that we lament it.’35

  The queen had not visited her ailing son during his stay at Deal. She may have felt her first duty lay with the king, who had so insistently declared his need for her presence at his side in such trying times. Perhaps she closed her eyes to the severity of Alfred’s condition, hoping, as she had done with her son Ernest years before, that a refusal to countenance the worst outcome for a sick child would allow her to preserve the mask of regal self-possession, that she always adopted in times of trial. Whatever the reasons for her absence, she was certainly not indifferent to Alfred’s death. She ‘cried vastly’ when he died, and sought, as Lady Charlotte had done, to assuage her misery with the conviction that at least his pain was now over. ‘My fears and hopes are finished once and for all,’ she told her brother Charles sadly; ‘God being satisfied that this little angel should suffer no more in future days, he fell asleep with all possible tranquillity.’ She would not allow herself to wish that his life had been longer, especially if that meant he would have endured more pain; therefore ‘I must give thanks to Providence for having acted as it did.’ Charles had himself lost two wives and many young children to early deaths. Charlotte acknowledged that ‘as a family of fourteen children’ they had been fortunate to have ‘been struck’ only once; ‘thus I must submit without murmur’.36

  At court, Miss Goldsworthy admired the queen’s fortitude. She tried to imitate it, although she confessed to Mary Hamilton she did not find it easy. ‘The certainty of the dear angel’s happiness is certainly the greatest comfort, but to you I will own that this sad scene has taken deep root in my heart, and time alone will soften it.’ All Miss Goldsworthy could do as she watched Alfred’s parents grieve was to hope ‘this is the only trial that they will experience’ of such a deeply distressing kind.37 Everyone around them was struck by the extent of George and Charlotte’s grief; but the king, although moved and saddened, confessed that if it had been his son Octavius who had died, then he would have died too.

  Octavius, as his name suggested, was George and Charlotte’s eighth son. Born in 1779, he was a bright, lively and happy boy, with the family’s distinctive fair hair and blue eyes. Mrs Papendiek thought him exceptionally attractive, ‘a lovely child of sweet disposition, [who] showed every promise of future goodness’. The king was devoted to him, and spent a great deal of time in his company, playing with him on the floor, as he had done with his other children, and even seeking ways to involve him in more grown-up pleasures. On Easter Mondays, when the king always went stag hunting, ‘this sweet little prince used to appear in the appropriate uniform with all the paraphernalia of long whip, etc., the king calling out, “Turn out the little huntsman also!”’38 George had Octavius painted by Benjamin West holding a sword almost as long as the prince was tall; but even the smallest hint of future military ardour is utterly subverted by the boy’s huge hat, short trousers and appealingly winning smile.

  In April 1783, when he was four years old – and eights months after the death of little Alfred – Octavius was inoculated against smallpox alongside his young sisters. Louisa Cheveley, who worked with Mary Hamilton in the royal nursery, reported on the 23rd that all had gone as planned. ‘You certainly would have heard if there has been any alteration in the health of the dear little royals – but they continue very well,’ she assured her friend.39 Three days later, she was still closely monitoring their progress, waiting for the spots to develop that denoted the successful preventative introduction of a mild form of the virus into the children’s systems. ‘Your dear little favourite Princess Sophia is in the finest way possible; Prince Octavius is in not so forward a state – I hope tomorrow it will make its appearance.’40 A week later, Mary Hamilton was horrified to receive a shockingly unexpected note from one of the nursery assistants. ‘I am sorry and much distressed to inform you that dear Prince Octavius, at twelve o’clock last night was released from this abode of sin and sorrow.’41 A letter from Lady Charlotte Finch followed, confirming the terrible news: ‘Prince Octavius died last night, and indeed, from the time he was taken ill, there was never any hope of his recovery.’42

  Mrs Papendiek heard that ‘this dear child and most interesting boy was supposed to have caught cold just when the eruption should have come out, the king having taken him into the gardens late in the evening towards sunset’. He died, she believed, ‘apparently from suffocation, which nothing could relieve’.43 However, Mrs Cheveley, who nursed Octavius, was adamant that his death was not a result of the inoculation. ‘It is but right to tell you,’ she wrote to Mary Hamilton, ‘that the smallpox had nothing to do in the death of Prince Octavius.’ He had, she insisted, recovered fully from its effects, and was perfectly well before being suddenly stricken. It was this which made his death so shockingly impossible to comprehend. ‘Good God, when one thinks this misfortune was so entirely begun and ended in forty-eight hours – and that the dear child was as well and in as good spirits last Thursday as ever he was in his life – it appears to me a dream. I can scarcely believe the scenes I have been through.’ It was, she concluded, ‘such a blow as no language could describe, and could I do it, I would not, to you’.44

  The other attendants who had loved and cared for Octavius were equally devastated. When his coffin was taken to Westminster Abbey to be buried, ‘at the door stood His Royal Highness’s wet nurse, who entreated to be allowed to enter, which was granted’. The king, in his grief, was much touched by hers, and made sure a letter was written to her saying how much he had felt ‘her dutiful attentions’. Everyone was paralysed by the horror of suffering a second tragic loss in a year. Miss Planta told Mary Hamilton that ‘my heart bleeds for the king and queen’, and noted sadly that ‘the princesses are all very much affected, indeed, the grief is universal’.45 The Prince of Wales was as moved as his sisters by the tragedy, the warmth of his feelings for his young siblings being one of his more attractive traits. At the end of May, he wrote to Frederick in Germany, ‘consoling with you for the loss of our poor, dear little brother’. Frederick had been gone so long that he could not have appreciated Ocatvius’s virtues, but ‘had you known what a sweet child he was, you would have felt his loss as severely as I did, and indeed, for that reason, I am glad you did not know him’.46

  In the days after Octavius’s death, Mrs Cheveley observed that both George and Charlotte had been ‘afflicted beyond expression’. They had tried to temper their misery by ‘a resignation and submission to the divine will that makes their grief as amiable as it is edifying’.47 Christian fortitude, it seemed, had helped both king and queen past the initial pain, but whilst both may have done all they could to submit to what could not be changed, neither was as resigned as they appeared.

  Charlotte’s steely self-control hid a grief that was still woundingly raw years after the deaths of Alfred and Octavius. In 1785, she wrote a letter of condolence to Lady Pembroke, who had herself recently lost a child: ‘I know that I need not add that I have and do now feel very strongly for your loss,’ confided the queen, ‘twice have I felt what you feel, the last time without the least preparation for the stroke, for in less than eight and forty hours, was my son Octavius, in perfect health, taken sick and struck with death immediately. Religion was my only support at this time, and I hope my dear Lady Pembroke found it likewise.’ There was no comfort to be had in the
face of such otherwise inexplicable loss except that provided by God. ‘He is our strength, our only comforter, our friend and our father,’ she insisted. Faith alone had given her the strength to endure. ‘To him therefore it is owing that we are enabled to go through the difficulties of life with cheerfulness and bear our misfortunes with resignation.’48

  The king tried his utmost to emulate his wife’s heroic resignation, but with less success. ‘There will be no Heaven for me if Octavius is not there,’ he had declared bitterly at the time of the tragedy, and time proved no healer.49 Some months later in that fateful year of 1783, and during the final stages of the American War of Independence, he told Lord Dartmouth that every day that passed ‘only increases the chasm I do feel for that beloved object’.50 Octavius’s fate was, he told his son William, ‘a subject that very much fills my mind, and I own it has strongly convinced me how very transitory all enjoyments are in this world, but it the stronger convinces me that fulfilling every duty is the only real comfort, and that our rewards must be looked for in another, not this world’.51

  Some of the king’s unquenchable misery was directed into constructing a suitable memorial for his lost sons. Only a week after Octavius’s death, George and Charlotte, together with their older daughters, had dutifully attended the Royal Academy to witness the unveiling of Thomas Gainsborough’s ambitious group portrait of the entire family, on which he had been at work for nearly two years. There among the fifteen figures depicting the king, queen and all their children (with the exception of the absent Frederick), was a sparkling miniature of the charming, sweet-natured Octavius. Alfred was there too, painted by Gainsborough from memory, a smiling toddler in a simple sash with short wispy hair. At the sight of their dead brothers, the princesses cried without restraint, and both their parents were visibly moved. Perhaps inspired by this unintended tribute, the king commissioned Benjamin West to paint a more allegorical commemoration. In his Apotheosis of Prince Octavius, the young prince is seen being welcomed to heaven by Alfred in an image of fraternal warmth and happiness which clearly gave great comfort to the family. Nothing, however, made any real impact on the submerged agony of the king’s grief. Five years later, when illness had unhinged his mind, in his delusions it was Octavius for whom he constantly called, imagining that a bolster which he held in his arms was, in reality, his much-missed ‘little huntsman’.