After the queen’s death, the Duke of York was placed in charge of the king’s care, and became his most frequent non-medical visitor. When he called at Windsor towards the end of 1819, he found his father at the harpsichord, ‘singing with as strong and firm a voice as I ever heard him, and seemed as happy and cheerful as possible’. His appetite was good, but Frederick noticed he had become ‘greatly emaciated within the last twelve months’. The duke concluded that ‘we can no longer look forward with any confidence to his being preserved to us for any length of time’.218 A month later, he had lost his few remaining teeth, and was ‘reduced almost to a skeleton’. At Christmas, after such a long period of relative placidity, the king fell once more into ‘a paroxysm’ of frantic activity. For over fifty hours, he was unable to sleep or rest. The Duke of York was summoned, as the doctors feared the king’s constitution was at last failing under this final onslaught. He was with him when he died on 29 January 1820. There was no sign that he recognised him, but the eighty-one-year-old king would surely have been glad to know that his beloved Frederick was by his side at the end. The last words he was heard to utter were ‘an application for some jelly’.219
*
George was buried at Windsor, the place he had come to think of as his family’s home. It was said that over 30,000 people travelled down to the castle to see him interred in St George’s Chapel. His long absence from the world had not meant that he was forgotten. ‘Never, I believe,’ wrote Nathaniel Wraxall, ‘did any prince … leave behind him a memory more cherished by his subjects! Confined as he was to his apartments, unseen except by his medical attendants … yet his people have clung to his memory with a sort of superstitious reverence, as if, while he still continued an inhabitant of the earth, his existence suspended or averted national calamities.’220 In London, the shops shut as a mark of respect. Even the poor were seen to wear small marks of mourning. Once George had been the focus of passionate hostility, his passage through London’s streets accompanied by jeers and hissing, or even more intimidating silence; in death, the prevailing tone was one of sympathy, respect and a great sense of loss. He had reigned for fifty-nine years, longer than any other British king. Few of his subjects could remember any other monarch. Even those who disliked him were accustomed to him, and no one looked forward to his successor with much enthusiasm. ‘How much better it is to weep over departed excellence,’ wrote Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, ‘than to be harassed by living profligacy.’221
With George’s death, the great political and moral experiment that had begun with his accession to the throne came finally to an end. He had hoped to find a new way for the royal family to live, both with each other, and within the ‘peculiar situation’ they occupied in the world. He had been determined to break what he rightly saw as the malign tradition of Hanoverian family dysfunction, which had passed a legacy of hatred and division down the generations, and replace it with a private world characterised by the more humane emotions – affection, harmony, comfort – all of which had taken on a greater prominence in the lives of his subjects, as the emotional climate had shifted. As so many of his contemporaries sought a greater, richer fulfilment from their relationships with each other as husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters, George, in his own way, did the same. On the foundation of this stable family life, he sought to remake the monarchy in the refracted glow of its virtues. The royal role, for George, was defined by service and duty, a sense of obligation to those he ruled. It was the task of the royal family to show they were worthy of the great task Providence had allotted them by embodying in themselves all the best qualities of their subjects. Their role did not exempt them from the rules by which others lived, as so many of his predecessors had believed; on the contrary, it required them to act as beacons of probity, examples for others to follow, a mirror in which the nation saw and recognised the best it could be.
This was the great mission to which George’s life as both a public and private man was dedicated. In the immediate aftermath of his death, it was not clear that it would survive his passing. George IV operated by a very different moral compass from that of his parents. His court, especially in its latter years, more closely resembled that of George II than George III. There was no queen. His hated wife Caroline had died suddenly in 1821, her extraordinary career of international vagabondage and unsuitable lovers culminating in a trial for adultery engineered by her furious husband, determined she should never be crowned beside him. Instead, within the gloomily lavish interiors of Brighton, an increasingly sick and indolent king was dominated by a succession of strong-minded mistresses. If his daughter had succeeded him when he died in 1830, things might have been different. Perhaps the lost queen Charlotte, with Leopold by her side, might have carried into the next generation all the domestic virtues so celebrated by her grandparents, which she herself had so eagerly embraced after her happy marriage. But her early death meant the succession passed to her uncles and their lines. Frederick, Duke of York, died in 1827 without issue. He and his duchess had lived apart for years, she consoling herself for her lack of children with a huge menagerie of animals on which she lavished all her affection.
This meant that on the death of George IV, the crown passed to his younger brother William, Duke of Clarence. Bluff, cheerful, uncomplicated, William was in many ways the most faithful of the elder royal princes, producing ten illegitimate children on whom he doted, and living in happy contentment with the comic actress Dorothy Jordan for twenty years. But neither she nor her children were acceptable as the wife or heirs of a king, and despite his affection for her, William had few qualms about pensioning her off and in 1818 marrying the far more suitable Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen. Plain but good-hearted, she was a loving, supportive wife, and William’s kindness to her suggested that in different circumstances, he might have worked as hard as his father had before him to make a success of an arranged marriage. But for all the unexpected success of their relationship, William IV and his queen did not produce any heirs. After the sad loss of a baby daughter, there were no other children. This meant that, on William’s death in 1837, it was Victoria, the daughter of George and Charlotte’s fourth son Edward, Duke of Kent, who became queen.
George III’s dilatoriness in finding suitable spouses for his children, combined with the capricious impact of fertility and mortality on those who did marry, meant that none of his immediate descendants was qualified either by character or situation to carry his monarchical project into the next generation. But in the reign of his granddaughter Victoria, his ideas were finally realised. She was the true inheritor of his thinking. Like George, she was naturally dutiful, with a strong moral sense. Her famous remark upon being told she had become queen – that she intended ‘to be good’ – would have met with George’s wholehearted approval. Like him too, she was passionate but faithful, loyal but obstinate, inclined to pronounce judgement, and with a will of steel beneath an apparently calm demeanour that brooked little contradiction to her sense of what constituted right behaviour. She was neither as clever nor as cultivated as her grandfather, and she lacked entirely his occasional flashes of self-knowledge, his taste for wit and irony and occasional turn of a genuinely comic phrase; but like him she was lucky in her choice of a partner, finding in Albert, as George had done in Charlotte, a committed supporter in driving forward an image of the monarchy constructed to reflect the domestic virtues of the people over whom she reigned.
Victoria’s is the name associated most closely with the values that have given the British monarchy much of its resilience over the last two hundred years. A sense of duty and obligation as its prevailing ideals, erected on a foundation of family stability, a willingness to identify itself wholeheartedly with the preoccupations and beliefs of the solid heartland of the population – these were the qualities that helped keep British sovereigns on their thrones when the revolutions of the mid-nineteenth century, the upheavals of the early 1900s, the conflagrations arising from th
e First World War and the global conflicts of the 1930s and 1940s toppled almost every other royal house in Europe. Many of these ideas were originally those of George III. He was the first British king to understand that these were the values which would best protect the institution of monarchy, and the first whose character and circumstances made it possible for him to establish them at the heart of his conception of his role. Others may have received more credit for this revolution in royal thinking; but George III was the trailblazer, the king who carved out the ideology that justified it, and, for over half a century, did all he could to live by its rules. In some ways, the continued existence of the monarchy itself is the best testimony to the success of what he himself knew was an enormous undertaking, the effective re-engineering of one of the central institutions of British life. In this respect at least, his great royal experiment left a legacy with which he himself would surely have been entirely satisfied.
The political outcome was, however, only one aspect of George’s programme of royal reformation. He also hoped to change the experiences of those destined to live out their lives within its exacting framework, hoping to infuse into the often arid relationships that had been the lot of so many of his predecessors something of the warmth and affection that contemporary thinking believed was an essential quality of human existence. In this, his achievement was more ambivalent. There was little doubt that he was a far better family man than his father, his grandfather or his great-grandfather had been. Where they were practised serial adulterers, for whom a succession of mistresses was a necessary concomitant of their status as a man and a prince, he was rigidly – if sometimes painfully – faithful. He did not always find fidelity easy. As his outbursts during his illnesses suggest, he was a man of strong feelings, with deep attractions to other women, but he had seen for himself at first hand the results of this kind of liaison, the jealousy, bitterness and recrimination it produced. Above all, infidelity disrupted the established order of things, confusing existing hierarchies, allowing undue influence to flourish. Adultery was messy, chaotic, productive of deep unhappiness and, perhaps most powerfully for George, disrespectful to both God and himself. As a result, he was disinclined to follow in the footsteps of all his male relations. He was that rarest of things, a faithful royal husband who, when in good health, treated his wife with a respect and consideration many of her royal counterparts would have envied.
In his attitude to his family, he was again a great improvement on either George I or George II. He would never have treated his children with the eccentric perversity which both men exhibited towards their sons and daughters. George III could be selfish, narrow-minded and insensitive, but he was never deliberately cruel. He displayed qualities in his private life which his predecessors neither possessed nor valued; at his best, he was decent, loyal and kind. These virtues were most apparent when he was the father of a large young family. He was tirelessly solicitous for his children’s wellbeing, taking time away from the pressures of his public role to visit them in their scattered quarters before breakfast and last thing at night. When they were small, sweet and malleable, he loved them with an open-hearted cheerfulness, abandoning his dignity to join them in their games. It is impossible to imagine George II surrendering his self-regard to play on the carpet with a lively toddler, or taking the trouble to send his daughter a delightfully eccentric present of a nutmeg-grater shaped as a shoe; when, on one of his rare absences from home, George III took care to arrange this gift for Amelia, it was accompanied by the loving note ‘from your dear Papa’.
Yet, despite the pleasure he took in informality and affection, George III found it hard to abandon the authority over his family that had been such an important part of the old domestic dispensation. For all its humanity, his benevolence was in practice as absolute as the harsher regimes of his grandfather and great-grandfather. He expected total conformity to the vision of family life he had implemented and, as his brothers, sons and daughters discovered, he was implacable in his opposition to any action that deviated from it. He was not much troubled with feelings of doubt, convinced that it was the exercise of his will and the assiduous consideration of his interests which alone could ensure the success of the great family project in which he was so passionately engaged. His love for his wife and children never led him to acknowledge that their desires might occasionally and legitimately conflict with his own.
As a result, for all his good intentions, there was a whiff of familial despotism in George’s behaviour. He justified his actions by reference to the importance of the outcome – the ends, in his eyes, legitimised the means – but the lives of all his children were, in the end, blighted by his insistence on total emotional obedience. His struggles to enforce it with his sons ruined his relationship with nearly all of them. Only the adored Frederick, and the mild and compliant Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, who lived most of his adult life abroad, escaped the icy and sometimes terrifying blasts of his displeasure. The Prince of Wales bore the brunt of his father’s anger and disappointment. Though the prince’s behaviour was often provocative and irresponsible, the king was reluctant to tailor his management of his eldest son to accommodate his obvious weaknesses and his increasingly squandered talents. The king was always keener to enforce rules that did little to bring out the best in the intelligent but lazy prince than in finding ways to nurture his virtues. Although his relationship with the Prince of Wales was always the most troubled – George III conspicuously failed to break the Hanoverian tradition of discord with his heir – the king’s younger sons too paid the price for their father’s inflexibility and rigidity. It took the inoffensive and inexperienced Augustus nearly half a lifetime to recover from the treatment meted out to him after his clandestine marriage to Lady Augusta Murray. The remaining brothers, William, Edward and Ernest, found themselves constantly lectured for their failings and on the receiving end of their father’s unpredictable and capricious temper. Plucked from the professions they loved, or forced into roles they disliked, excluded for many years from returning home and conscious that each had failed to live up to the standards he expected from them, not one of them followed willingly in George’s footsteps by becoming a morally upright paterfamilias of the kind their father had been.
George’s daughters might be said to have suffered as much from their father’s kindness as their brothers did from his misdirected intensity. He loved his daughters in a way that he found hard to love his sons, especially after the princes were old enough to defy him. He admired the sisters’ piety, their loyalty and their profound sense of duty. He basked in their boundless consideration for him, their unqualified adoration and love. From them he derived much of the comfort that sustained him through the crises and difficulties of his later life, not least the disabling horror of his repeated illnesses. But for all the warmth of his feelings, the king’s daughters always sensed a conditionality about their father’s love, a suspicion that his affection might alter if they were to try to change. The princesses’ task was to remain fixed for ever in the roles he had assigned them. He loved his daughters all the more because, unlike his sons, they remained the same dutiful, devoted acolytes at the shrine of paternal affection that they had always been. This was how George liked things; he could see no reason for such a satisfying relationship to take on different or more complicated forms. He did not want to consider the idea that the princesses might seek objects for their love other than himself. They were such excellent and extraordinary daughters that he would not entertain the thought of their becoming other men’s wives. As Royal once acknowledged, their father had always loved little girls best. Their unmarried status consigned them to a condition of perpetual infantilism; in refusing to consider the possibility of marriage, he ensured that even as grown women, they could still be treated rather like children, subject to his will and obliged to put his happiness before their own.
It is hard to deny that, whatever his ambitions, the king’s attempt to establish a new kind of family life for
himself and his children was at best a qualified success. No one reading the letters of his daughters, begging to be allowed the opportunity to find happiness beyond the limitations of the life he had prescribed for them, can fail to feel the waste and suffering of such thwarted lives. And yet, for all the unhappiness his children endured, there was something positive that they inherited from their father’s endeavours to reshape the nature of family life – an affection and sympathy for each other. This did not mean that they spent their lives in perpetual harmony: on the contrary, as Princess Charlotte had observed, ‘they all draw their own separate ways’, and the relationships between the brothers and sisters were often marked by conflict, betrayal and indifference. But, despite the many divisions and arguments that pushed and pulled them apart, some of the unity and affection that had been instilled in them back in the remote days of their Kew childhood survived intact throughout their lives.
In 1827, when he had been properly king for seven years, George IV sent an invitation to the Princess Royal in Württemberg, asking her to visit him in England. Royal was far from well, suffering from the same heart problems that had killed her mother. She was, by her own admission, enormous, and could hardly walk, ‘my breath being so short that I must be carried downstairs as well as upstairs’.222 Despite her many incapacities, and with no husband alive to prevent her (Frederick had died over a decade earlier), she was as determined to make the difficult journey across Europe to see her brother. His health was bad as hers, and she must have known this was her last opportunity to see him.
The Strangest Family Page 81
