Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court

by Lucy Worsley

  But Prince Frederick was a little short-sighted, in two senses. His slightly protuberant eyes were myopic, and he was also a little lazy in his outlook upon life. He lacked integrity and tended to take the easy way out of problems. ‘His best quality was generosity,’ it was said, and ‘his worst, insincerity, and indifference to truth’.10

  The sharp and cynical John Hervey, witness of Prince Frederick’s formative years, was certainly not the best person to provide firm moral guidance. With kind guardianship and good advice, this boy could have been a fine king. Yet Frederick’s childhood was even more damaging than that of an orphan: he was a child deserted and positively disliked by his parents.

  His birth had taken place in Hanover’s Leine Palace in 1707, and he was dogged by rumour about its exact circumstances. Because of the coolness between Queen Anne and the Electoral family of Hanover, there had been no official British witness present during Caroline’s labour. The English envoy to Hanover found this ‘unaccountable’ and ‘very extraordinary’.11

  It would indeed have been a wise precaution to have had one present, given all the trouble that rumours about an impostor baby had caused when the unpopular James II’s son was born. When his Catholic wife, Mary of Modena, had fortuitously produced a healthy boy, English Protestants claimed that a lapse in palace surveillance had allowed a live infant to be slipped in to replace a dead, miscarried child. The king’s enemies spread it about that a surrogate baby boy had been smuggled into the queen’s bed in a warming pan. Many people believed the scandal, and the incident became an important step along the road to James II’s eventual overthrow.

  Still, such rumours usually originated from political enemies. It reveals the depth of George II’s bad feeling towards Prince Frederick that he referred to his own son as a ‘Wechselbalg’, or changeling, or as ‘the Griff’. The latter may have simply meant that Frederick looked like a griffin, but the word can also mean a person of mixed race (a suggestion which cast grave aspersions upon Caroline’s character and conduct).12

  In 1714, when the Hanoverians came over to London en masse, George I insisted that Frederick’s parents should leave their seven-year-old son behind. There were actually very good political reasons for this. A significant figure from the family was needed as its representative in Hanover, and Caroline was expected to have British-born heirs to follow. Yet to the little boy it must have felt like his parents were abandoning him.

  Prince Frederick was placed in the care of his uncle, George I’s younger brother. Hanover remained his main concern, although he was also taught English and sent packets of parliamentary papers and models of British warships in preparation for his future role as king of Britain.13 Tittle-tattle claimed that Frederick’s sexual education was provided by one Madame d’Elitz from the Schulenburg family, completing a hat-trick that she’d begun by seducing Frederick’s grandfather, George I, and then George II.14 (‘There’s nothing new under the sun, or the grandson either,’ people said.)

  During the long summer holidays, when George I returned to lime-lapped Herrenhausen, grandfather and grandson grew close. Prince Frederick called his grandfather his ‘best friend’, demonstrating that they had an intimate relationship which his absent father inevitably resented.15

  When George I died, Frederick was left to languish in Hanover until his father’s bewilderingly sudden command to uproot himself and come to England for the first time at the end of 1728, when he was twenty-one.

  There was some compensation for Prince Frederick in the thought that in London he might have more chance of meeting his dashing, grown-up friend John Hervey once again.

  *

  And now, with Prince Frederick in England, the trouble really began. Just as George II in his own day as Prince of Wales had formed the focus for the Opposition in Parliament, all the politicians opposed to Sir Robert Walpole’s long regime began to gather round the prince.

  The sound political reasons for having left Prince Frederick behind in Hanover for so long were lost in a fog of resentment on Frederick’s side, and impatience on his father’s. By 1734, it was thought that the ‘misunderstanding between the father and son had increased to a very alarming degree’ and that Prince Frederick had been ‘encouraged by the opposition’ to create an ‘open rupture’.16

  To outsiders it was obvious that the politicians hoped to divide, and therefore to rule, the royal family.17 But Prince Frederick’s rather passive stupidity meant that he was putty in the hands of his advisors. As Molly Hervey observed, his very servants sought ‘to aggravate everything’. ‘Poor man!’ she exclaimed. ‘He does not see that every stroke that is aimed at his father recoils upon him.’18

  Opinion was sharply divided on Prince Frederick, and even in the present day there is no clear consensus. His doctor enjoyed his ‘pleasant facetious humour, which is easy and natural to him’.19 The novelist Tobias Smollett found him ‘a tender and obliging husband, a fond parent, kind master, liberal, generous, candid and humane’.20 All this was to the prince’s credit, and perhaps in any other family he could have flourished.

  At the same time, diametrically opposed views of Prince Frederick also existed. A potential bride of the prince’s was warned that he had a ‘very narrow mind’ and no self-discipline. ‘Provided you can have the complaisance to put up with his debauches,’ she was told, ‘you may then govern him entirely’ and ‘be more king than he’.21 His old tutor thought the prince possessed ‘the most vicious nature and the most false heart that ever man had, nor are his vices the vices of a gentleman, but the mean base tricks of a knavish footman’.22 His parents – and eventually even his friend John Hervey – came to share this view.

  It was becoming horribly clear that conflict between a king and his son would form the permanent backdrop to eighteenth-century court and political life. In private the courtiers tried to please the king by describing his son as ‘so awkward a fellow and so mean a looking scoundrel’.23 In public, though, Prince Frederick was ‘no more talked of now than if he had never been born’.24 Whenever he appeared in the same room as his father, he went unacknowledged: ‘it put one in mind of stories one has heard of ghosts that appear to part of the company and are invisible to the rest’.25

  *

  In the Hanover that Prince Frederick had now also left behind, business continued to tick over smoothly. Money sent from Britain kept its army strong, its residents were far better-educated than their British equivalents, and Hanover’s well-organised burghers planned European firsts such as systematic street signs and gas street lighting. At the royal palace the table was laid each day as if the family were still in residence, and, although absent, George II maintained ‘the same number of gentlemen, pages, domestics, and guards; and the same number of horses, grooms, & c. in his stables’.26 Like George I, he returned to this haven of prosperous and peaceful deference as often as possible for holidays.

  Relations between Britain and Hanover certainly lay at the forefront of his mind when his father died in 1727, and this was evidenced by the strange affair of George I’s will.

  The document was produced by the Archbishop of Canterbury at a council meeting early on in the new king’s reign, but George II grabbed it and made sure that it was never seen again. He also searched out and destroyed copies lodged on the continent. A pension paid to the Dowager Duchess of Brunswick was assumed to have been a payment for conveniently ‘losing’ the copy deposited with her husband.27

  The historian Horace Walpole (son of Sir Robert) would later call this suppressing of the will ‘an indelible blot’ upon George II’s memory.28 He assumed that the king had wanted avariciously to avoid handing over the various legacies his father had dictated.

  However, one of these legacies was indeed paid, at least in some small part. The Duchess of Kendal, George I’s former mistress Melusine von der Schulenberg, received a bequest from the king, and used it to buy a villa in Isleworth, Middlesex.

  One of her and George I’s daughters made a respectable m
arriage to Lord Chesterfield. But Melusine’s new son-in-law considered that she and her daughter had been cheated of a much larger intended legacy through the mysterious business of the missing will. After he had fallen from favour at court, Chesterfield had nothing to lose by challenging the generosity and legality of the payments made to his mother-in-law, and eventually he accepted £20,000 to settle the matter out of court.29

  However, the real reason why George II concealed the contents of his father’s will was that it contained the radical proposal to separate the countries of Britain and Hanover. The will decreed that after Prince Frederick’s death the territories should be divided, Britain going to Frederick’s (as then unborn) elder son and Hanover to a younger son. Whether the Act of Settlement actually allowed George I to make these decisions is questionable.30

  Modern historians think that George II suppressed this will because he had a quite different plan in mind: for Prince Frederick to take over Hanover, while Frederick’s younger and more favoured British-born brother, William Augustus, would rule Britain.31 It would indeed have been sensible to separate Britain and Hanover, given their very different needs, but it also looks like George II was motivated by spite to do Prince Frederick down and to give his second and preferred son the bigger, better job. He didn’t trust his eldest son to become a successful king of Great Britain.

  In the event, interest in the issue of separating the two countries melted away. Prince Frederick’s son and grandsons, George III, George IV and William IV, would go on ruling both of them. Britain and Hanover had a single ruler until 1837, when Queen Victoria lost the German state only because of her gender. Salic law, current in Germany, decreed that women could not inherit. Hanover eventually went its own separate way under one of Queen Victoria’s numerous uncles.

  *

  The relationship between Prince Frederick and his mother Caroline was even more complicated. When she had first been forced to abandon him in 1714, Caroline felt acute pain at being parted from her first-born child. She would closely question returning travellers who had seen him – ‘the Princess sent for me in private, and ask’d me a thousand questions of her little Frederick’ – and begged all her European contacts for frequent updates.32 The Duchess of Orléans, for example, fished for news that Prince Frederick was well, so that she could at least ‘give his poor mother that much comfort’.33

  Little by little, though, Caroline came to love her newer, British-born children. And, over time, Prince Frederick became associated in her mind with her hated father-in-law, George I, because of the summer holidays the two of them spent alone together in Hanover.

  Frederick’s arrival in London at the end of 1728, and his reunion with his parents, was very low key. He came ‘privately in a hackney coach’ to St James’s Palace and almost sneaked inside through the back door.34 Despite being fully grown, Frederick was not given a home of his own but lived with his younger brother and sisters in the various royal establishments.

  After six years of this subordinate life, he arranged an audience with his father to ask for various improvements to his situation. But Prince Frederick’s request to fight the French was turned down, his demand for a greater income of his own was met with silence and his desire to get married was parried with the suggestion of the mad (and to Frederick unacceptable) Princess Charlotte of Denmark.

  Prince Frederick had nevertheless set his heart upon marriage, which would bring with it an indisputable need for him to have a separate establishment and larger income. He was rather reckless with money and had left many debts in Hanover. So, after the Danish fiasco and further harassment, George II came up with a second and sounder suggestion for a bride.

  During the king’s trip to Hanover in 1735, Princess Augusta of the tiny state of Saxe-Gotha had come to his attention as a potential daughter-in-law. Within a year, the flaxen-haired but otherwise unprepossessing Princess Augusta – ‘pretty much markt with the small pox’ – was brought from Saxe-Gotha into this most dysfunctional of royal families.35

  One courtier described Augusta’s figure as ‘a good deal awry, her arms long, and her motions awkward’. In spite of all her fine jewels and brocade, the princess had a touchingly ‘ordinary air, which no trappings could cover or exalt’. Augusta made up for her lack of grandeur with an amiable personality: she had ‘a very modest and good-natured look’.36 Another observer also confirmed that ‘the Princess is neither handsome nor ugly, tall nor short, but has a pretty lively countenance enough’.37 In addition to these qualifications, she looked likely to ‘deliver robust children’ and had started menstruating at the early age of eleven.38

  The April wedding of Prince Frederick and Princess Augusta was the great event of 1736, and consisted of the usual parade of fabulous fashions and immensely long parties. Even a family celebration, though, created tension between father and son, for George II fell into a rage at the drawing-room’s ‘thin appearance on his birthday’. People were not more richly dressed, he was tactlessly told, because they were saving their fine clothes for his son’s wedding. This was certain to trigger jealous ructions, as ‘His Majesty’s temper’, whenever sharpened, ‘was seldom put in a sheath’.39

  Poor, pleasant Princess Augusta was married to her not-particularly-handsome prince, a man she’d barely met, a mere forty-eight hours after landing in England. The ceremony took place in the chapel at St James’s Palace. Augusta’s trembling neck could barely support her weighty new crown, ‘set all over with diamonds’. Her heavy robe was ‘crimson velvet, turn’d back with several rows of ermine’, and her train carried by four silver-clad ladies.40

  It was clear she didn’t understand what was going on. In the backwater of Saxe-Gotha, Princess Augusta’s mother had neglected to include English lessons in her daughter’s educational programme, wrongly assuming that the Hanoverians would have had everyone in England speaking German after so many years in charge. In consequence Princess Augusta had ‘not one word of English, and few of French’.41 Queen Caroline had to translate the wedding service into her ear, and prompt her responses.

  Caroline also gave the bride a piece of pragmatic but depressing advice. ‘Avoid jealousy,’ she told Princess Augusta, and ‘be easy in regard to amours’.42 Caroline explained that her own happy marriage was entirely due to this. Her daughter-in-law must have felt that her new life as Princess of Wales was going to be far from a fairy tale.

  At the wedding feast Prince Frederick ate an extraordinary amount of jelly because it was thought to have aphrodisiac qualities, and afterwards the wedding guests had the dubious pleasure of trooping into the newly married couple’s bedchamber ‘to see them abed’.43 Caroline’s daughters the princesses had undressed Augusta, and all the ‘quality were admitted to see the bride and bridegroom sitting up in bed surrounded by all the Royal Family’.44 Prince Frederick’s nightcap, according to his disparaging mother, was ridiculously tall.

  Caroline also thought that Princess Augusta looked surprisingly well rested the next morning, as if her son had failed to do his marital duty.45

  Despite this inauspicious beginning, the ingénue Augusta was rather a success as Princess of Wales. Prince Frederick grew very fond of her, and Caroline, feeling sorry for her, gave her generous presents, such as ‘a most beautiful hat, curiously made of feathers in imitation of a fine Brussels lace’.46 Princess Augusta set to work upon her language skills and was soon able to ‘talk freely to the ladies in good English, which entirely won their hearts’.47 In fact, her English was quickly superior to the rest of the royal family’s, despite their long residence in Britain.48

  She even managed to stay on reasonable terms with her parents-in-law by acting as Prince Frederick’s submissive and innocent little wife. Augusta was careful to be always ‘very modest and very respectful’, and, in Caroline’s opinion, ‘there was no sort of harm in her’.49

  People jokingly began to call her ‘Princess Prudence’.

  *

  Caroline and her son, though, remain
ed constantly at odds. This was partly because they still lived almost on top of each other. Prince Frederick and Princess Augusta were often (if not continuously) in residence at Kensington Palace. They moved there in May 1736 to begin their married life alongside Caroline and the other royal children, and Princess Augusta ‘kept her drawing-room and he his levée there constantly every Monday morning’.50

  No wonder hatreds ran high in such a closed little world. As John Hervey wrote from Kensington, ‘I hardly ever go out of these walls, which, by the identity of faces they enclose, one should imagine belonged rather to a Turkish Seraglio than an English Palace.’51

  Nevertheless, Prince Frederick and Princess Augusta occupied a very commodious apartment, a large, almost self-contained house built in the 1720s to the north-west of the main palace complex (it would later become the conjugal home of the present-day Prince of Wales and his first wife Diana). This house of Prince Frederick’s, with its own ‘Great Stair’, its ‘Presence Chamber’ and its ‘Coffee Room’, gave its name to ‘Prince of Wales’s Court’ in the palace.52

  Prince Frederick was a talented performer upon the violoncello, although he had to squint hard to read the music with his feeble eyes. He occasionally gave informal evening concerts at Kensington Palace. In John Hervey’s opinion this was a lowbrow, inelegant and unseemly hobby for a prince, but there is much to savour in his snapshot of Frederick at Kensington, ‘seated close to an open window of his apartment, with his violoncello between his legs, singing French and Italian songs to his own playing for an hour or two together, whilst his audience was composed of all the underling servants’.

  As darkness fell, the lights of the apartment illuminated Prince Frederick beautifully, and the court below gradually filled up with all the servants, grateful for the music:

  the colonnade below being filled with all the footmen, scullions, postillions, apple-women, shoe-boys and lower order of domestics, whilst the first floor windows were thronged with chambermaids and valets de chambre, and the garret, like the upper gallery, stuffed with laundry maids and their gallants.53