The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians

Some later reminiscences asserted that at the moment of their meeting, the king had been shocked by Charlotte’s appearance. ‘At the first sight of the German princess,’ wrote one particularly hostile commentator, ‘the king actually shrank from her gaze, for her countenance was of that cast that too plainly told of the nature of the spirit working within.’48 Yet there is no suggestion in any contemporary account that George was disappointed in what he saw. Walpole, never disposed to be charitable, described Charlotte on first seeing her as ‘sensible, cheerful and … remarkably genteel’.49

After the formal greetings, George led Charlotte into St James’s to present her to his family. In pride of place was his mother Augusta; also present were his three sisters and three brothers, and his uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, welcomed back into the family now that his nephew sat securely on his throne. Charlotte was conducted to a lavish dinner which included partridges stuffed with truffles, venison in pastry, and sweetbreads. While the royals ate, the court began to assemble in preparation for the wedding ceremony. Most, including Walpole and the Duchess of Northumberland, arrived at around seven o’clock. They had a long wait, on an exceptionally hot evening.

‘The night was sultry,’ wrote Walpole, dashing off his impressions of the event. ‘About ten, the procession began to move towards the chapel and at eleven they all came into the Drawing Room.’50 Then Charlotte appeared for the first time in a public role in England, dressed in an elaborate wedding gown which was subjected to a scrutiny almost as intense as that directed upon her looks. The dress was made of silver tissue, trimmed with silver and covered with diamonds, set off with a little cap of purple velvet. But for all its magnificence, Charlotte’s outfit was a very poor fit; clearly, the measurements sent across from Mecklenburg had proved no substitute for the more accurate sizing that stays would have provided. The dress, burdened with heavy jewels, was far too large for Charlotte’s slender frame. It was of course Walpole who recorded that her ‘violet velvet mantle … which was attempted to be fastened on her shoulders by a bunch of pearls dragged itself and almost the rest of her clothes halfway down her waist’.51 The unhappy result was that ‘the spectators knew as much of her upper half as the king himself’.52

Struggling with her clothes, the princess was led by the Duke of York through the assembled crowd of courtiers towards the chapel where the wedding was to take place. As she made her way, her nerve began to fail her and her hands shook. ‘Courage, Princess, courage,’ urged the duke.53 An even more intimidating experience followed, as she was plunged into a heaving rout of intensely curious strangers. She had enough self-possession to kiss the peeresses, as etiquette demanded, but Lady Augusta, the king’s sister, was ‘forced to take her hand and give it to those who were to kiss it’.54

In a reversal of tradition, protocol demanded that the princess arrive first at the altar and wait for the king. When he entered, the service began. It was conducted in English, as George had required. The Archbishop of Canterbury later remembered: ‘I called on him and the queen only by their Christian names. When I asked them the proper question, the king answered solemnly, laying his hand on his breast, and suggested to her to answer, “Ich will,” which she did: but spoke audibly in no other part of the service.’55 The marriage began as it was to continue, with George instructing his wife while she remained silent.

‘The instant the king put on the ring,’ reported the Duchess of Northumberland, ‘a rocket was let fly from the top of the chapel as a signal for the discharge of the Park and Tower guns, which were immediately fired.’ The princess had rallied somewhat. ‘She talks a great deal,’ observed Walpole, ‘is easy, civil, and not disconcerted.’ Her French, he thought, was only ‘tolerable’ but ‘she exchanged much of that, and also of German, with the king and the Duke of York’.56 She was also able to display her other accomplishments. ‘The royal supper not being ready, the queen (at the king’s request) played very prettily on the harpsichord,’ and sang to the assembled family, who did not, the duchess had been told, ‘get to bed till three in the morning’.57

To Charlotte, brought up in the staid uneventfulness of Mecklenburg, the day must have seemed as if it would never end. At its close, however, she was spared the ordeal endured by Augusta, her new mother-in-law, and other princesses before her. When she and the king entered their bedroom, they did so alone, and closed the door behind them. Their marriage was undeniably a public event, but what happened afterwards was private, with none of the public ribaldry that had accompanied George’s parents on their wedding night. Walpole heard that the abandonment of the old rituals had been at Charlotte’s insistence. ‘The queen was very averse to going to bed, and at last articled that no one should retire with her but the Princess of Wales, and her two German women, and that no one should be admitted afterwards but the king.’ When the dowager princess returned from the couple’s bedchamber, she asked the Duke of Cumberland to sit with her for a while. The duke was tired and tetchy, and refused with bad grace. ‘What should I stay for?’ he demanded. ‘If she cries out, I cannot help her.’58

Later, George and Charlotte were to find it much harder to navigate their way through the imprecise distinctions between the two dimensions of royal life – that which they inhabited as man and wife, and that which they occupied as king and queen – but the privacy of their first night together was a declaration of the optimism with which the pair entered the marriage state. Their union would not be like those of their predecessors: it would start in the way it was meant to go on – as a genuine partnership, forged in private intimacy.

*

The day after the wedding, Charlotte was presented at an official Drawing Room, designed to introduce her to the great and the good of the court. Walpole thought that George seemed in great spirits and delighted with his wife, talking to her ‘continually, with the greatest good humour. It does not promise,’ he noted with rare generosity, ‘as if they two would be the most unhappy persons in England, from this event.’59 A celebration ball was held that night where, according to the Duchess of Northumberland, ‘everything was vastly well conducted; nor was it too hot, notwithstanding there were a vast many people, all very magnificently dressed’. In the midst of the minuets and country dances, the duchess was touched to see the king doing all he could to please his new wife. ‘His Majesty this evening showed the most engaging attention towards the queen, even the taking of snuff (of which Her Majesty is very fond) which he detests and it made him sneeze prodigiously.’60 At a second Drawing Room the following day, the duchess heard from George himself how very pleased he was. ‘The king this day did me the honour to tell me that he thought himself too happy.’61

Gradually, Charlotte began to relax a little. Even the news that the aged, half-blind, Jacobite Earl of Westmorland had mistaken Sarah Lennox for the queen and tried to kiss her hand in error did not cast a pall over the proceedings. Sarah had pulled back her hand in horror, declaring, ‘I am not the queen, sir!’ ‘No,’ declared one wit, ‘she is only the Pretender.’

None of this seems to have disturbed Charlotte’s increasing assurance. She was even confident enough to turn a small social embarrassment into a mild joke. As the Duchess of Northumberland and other ladies ‘attended Her Majesty back to her dressing room, her train caught the fender and drew it into the middle of the room. I disengaged her. She laughed very heartily and told me a droll story of the Princess of Prussia having drawn a lighted billet out of the chimney and carrying it through the apartment, firing the mat all the way.’62

‘You don’t presume to suppose, I hope,’ wrote Walpole to a distant correspondent a few days after the wedding, ‘that we are thinking of you, and wars and misfortunes and distresses in these festival times. Mr Pitt himself would be mobbed if he talked of anything but clothes and diamonds and bridesmaids.’63 With the first round of ceremonies over, the royal couple spent a few days taking trips to Richmond and Kew. They clearly enjoyed themselves, since they were to return in later life, spending many summers at Kew, and establishing their growing family there, in what was regarded as a healthy rural outpost of London.

While they admired the views of the Thames, and the gardens William Kent had designed for George’s grandmother Queen Caroline, elsewhere the preparations for the coronation continued apace. Walpole, whose appetite for royal ceremony was all but sated, complained of ‘the gabble one heard about it for six weeks before’, and referred to the whole event as ‘a puppet show’, but could not entirely divorce himself from the rising tide of excitement. ‘If I was to entitle ages, I would call this the century of crowds,’ he mused as people from across the country began to flood into London.64

*

Coronation Day began early. The Duchess of Northumberland ‘rose at half past four, went to the queen’s apartment at Westminster’. There she found Charlotte, once more weighed down with jewels, dressed with stiff formality complete with mother-of-pearl fan, but with her hair worn girlishly loose, discreetly supplemented with ‘coronation locks’, a false hair piece that had cost six guineas.65

The event opened with a procession from Westminster Hall to the abbey. When George and Charlotte arrived at the abbey door it was immediately clear that the ceremony promised to be just as chaotic as the late king’s funeral. From the outset, nothing ran to plan, or to time. Many key props were missing: ‘In the morning, they had forgot the sword of state, the chairs for the king and queen and their canopies.’ When the king complained about the poor management, the Earl Marshal, who was responsible for organising the day, promised him solemnly that ‘the next coronation would be regulated in the most exact manner imaginable’.66 Gradually, however, things began to fall into place. At the abbey, the king’s entry was greeted by the choir of Westminster School, who sang ‘Vivat Regina Charlotte!’ and ‘Vivat Georgius Rex!’ ‘There was all sorts of music,’ enthused one spectator, who had travelled down from Yorkshire for the day. ‘It was a grand sound.’67

Alongside the nobility and courtiers, the abbey was packed with more ordinary visitors who had squeezed themselves into its precincts with the settled intention of enjoying every moment of what promised to be a long and satisfying day. One of those was the young William Hickey, whose father, a prosperous City lawyer, ‘had engaged one of the nunneries, as they are called, in Westminster Abbey, for which he paid fifty guineas’.68 The Hickey family was stationed in a panelled bolt-hole right up in the roof, from which they commanded ‘an admirable view of the whole interior of the building’. They had anticipated the affair would be a long one, and had therefore arrived properly prepared. ‘Provisions, consisting of cold fowls, ham, tongues, different meat pies, wines and liquors of various sorts were sent into the apartment the day before, and two servants were allowed to attend.’ The twelve-strong party had found it an ordeal just getting to the abbey at all. ‘Opposite the Horse Guards, we were stopped exactly an hour without moving a single inch. As we approached the abbey, the difficulties increased.’ Crushed together by the crowds, coaches were constantly ‘running against each other, whereby glasses and panels were demolished without number, the noise of which, accompanied by the screeches of the terrified ladies, was at times truly terrific’. The Hickey family took six hours to get to their niche, where they were glad to find ‘a hot and comfortable breakfast waiting for us all’.

Some five hours later, at one o’clock, the king and queen at last arrived. Hickey had ‘a capital view’ of the actual crowning, but like almost everyone else in the abbey, he could not hear a word of what the archbishop was saying, and so decided that this was the perfect opportunity to enjoy lunch. ‘As many thousands were out of the possibility of hearing a single syllable, they took that opportunity to eat their meal, when the general clattering of knives, forks, plates and glasses that ensued, produced a most ridiculous effect, and a universal bout of laughter followed.’69

Whatever else had been overlooked, some provision had been made for the more basic needs of the ceremony’s principal players. For Walpole, ‘of all the incidents of the day, perhaps the most diverting was what happened to the queen. She had a retiring chamber, with all the conveniences, prepared behind the altar. She went thither – in the most convenient, what found she but – the Duke of Newcastle!’70 After about five hours, the coronation was finally over. The procession assembled again and, at about six o’clock, marched back to Westminster Hall for the banquet. The Duchess of Northumberland found the walk back through the dark and cold extremely trying. She was impatient for a meal, which she felt was now long overdue. ‘No dinner to eat … instead of profusion of geese etc., not wherewithal to fill one’s belly.’71 The coronation’s organisers had planned the long delays as a prelude to a gesture intended to amaze the guests as they re-entered Westminster Hall. More than 3,000 candles had been suspended from the ceiling of the hall; they were designed to be illuminated instantly by a complicated system of flax tapers, but the whole enterprise almost ended in disaster. The poet Thomas Gray, who was sitting in the hall, described how ‘the instant the queen’s canopy entered, fire was given to all the lustres at once by trains of prepared flax, that reached from one to another’; then, ‘it rained fire upon the heads of nearly all the spectators (the flax falling in large flakes) and the ladies (queen and all) were in no small terrors’.72

As the guests brushed the charred remnants of flax out of their clothes and hair, there was plenty to distract them. The banquet finally arrived – three services of over a hundred dishes – and the royal party devoted themselves to their food. Gray noticed that the king and queen ‘both eat like farmers’, as they tucked into the venison served to them on gold plates. As nothing had been provided for the many spectators to eat, baskets and knotted handkerchiefs were lowered from the crowded balconies, and heaved back up weighted down with cold chickens or bottles of wine. For the second time during the Coronation Day, the event had turned into an informal shared feast.

When the banquet was over, the king and queen returned to St James’s Palace to share a prosaic supper of bread and milk with a little gruel. There seems little doubt they did so with quiet, unaffected relief. In the previous few weeks, Charlotte had acquitted herself as well as anyone could expect. She had travelled across Europe to marry a stranger, and found him to be neither cold prig nor louche debauchee, but instead a serious, steady young man who had so far treated her with nothing but respectful affection. He, for his part, had found for himself a woman who, if she was neither a great beauty nor overburdened with fashionable accomplishments, had so far displayed a gratifying willingness to admire, esteem and obey him. No wonder the king was pleased.

In early September, when Charlotte, as yet unseen by him, was still crossing the turbulent North Sea, George had written hopefully to Bute, ‘I now think my domestic happiness [is] in my own power.’73 Now that the idea of a wife had turned into the reality of Charlotte, he was even more confident that married life, so long anticipated, would deliver everything he expected from it.

CHAPTER 5

A Modern Marriage

THE CARE WITH WHICH GEORGE had chosen his wife was a measure of the optimism with which he viewed the prospects for his marriage. He had always intended that it should be more than a purely dynastic union. Unlike so many of his royal predecessors, he was determined to find within it a personal happiness which would enrich and transform his private life. But he also hoped that his relationship with his new queen would have a public meaning too. It was central to his mission as king to set an example of virtuous behaviour that could inspire his subjects to replicate it in their own lives. The conduct of his marriage would be the strongest possible declaration of the principles in which he believed, a beacon of right-thinking and good practice which would illustrate in the most personal way what could be achieved when consideration, kindness and respect were established at the heart of the conjugal experience. In pursuing this ideal, George was not alone. Many other young couples of his generation sought to find in their marriages the qualities of affection and loyalty the king set out to achieve in his own partnership. In his attitude to this most important relationship, George was perhaps less royally unique and more reflective of the aspirations of many of his subjects than in almost any other dimension of his life.

This was not, however, always apparent in the marital practices of those closest to the king in social status. Among the upper reaches of the aristocracy, instances abounded of married couples displaying spectacular and well-publicised indifference to any of the established standards of moral probity. Plutocratic levels of wealth and a blithe sense of entitlement fostered a serene disregard for the marital conventions that regulated the actions of poorer, smaller people. The great aristocrats made their own rules. Lady Harley, the Countess of Oxford, had so many children by so many different lovers that her brood was dubbed the Harleian Miscellany, after the famous collection of antiquarian books. Her husband was unperturbed by her affairs, declaring that he found her ‘frank candour’ to be ‘so amiable’ that he entirely forgave her.1 In the Pembroke marriage, it was the earl who was the unfaithful partner, eloping with his mistress but sending the baby boy produced by the liaison back to the family home, where he was affectionately cared for by Pembroke’s much-tried countess.

A higher-profile example of marital conventions turned upside down was the talk of the country for most of its thirty-year duration. The relationship between the 5th Duke of Devonshire and his duchess, Georgiana, was a crowded one by any standards, including not only the ducal husband and wife but also Elizabeth Foster, who joined the Devonshire household as the duchess’s best friend – some said lover – and eventually came to preside over it as the duke’s acknowledged mistress, the mother of two of his children and, after Georgiana’s death, his second wife. Unlike the long-suffering Lady Pembroke, who Horace Walpole thought had all the purity of a Madonna, Georgiana pursued her own relationships, most notably with the politician Charles Grey, by whom she had a daughter. The baby was raised by Grey’s parents, but Georgiana’s legitimate children were brought up at Chatsworth alongside those of her husband and his mistress.

For all its very public indifference to accepted standards, the Devonshire marriage came to an end in the traditional way, with the death of one of the partners. This was not the case with a relationship whose noisy dissolution scandalised a mesmerised public, and seemed to some outraged observers to have rewarded bad behaviour on all sides. The union of the Duke and Duchess of Grafton was a typical elite match. Augustus Fitzroy was heir to the Grafton dukedom; Anne Liddell was a rich man’s daughter who brought a huge dowry of £40,000 to her new husband. It looked as though money had been the prime consideration in arranging the marriage, but the duchess claimed that she and the duke had been very much in love when first married in 1756. Whatever had brought them together, the Graftons were not happy for long. The duchess was soon complaining of the duke’s gambling, drinking and adultery, and, perhaps hoping to shock him into better behaviour, she left him and retreated to her father’s house. It proved a huge miscalculation on her part. Grafton immediately took up with Nancy Parsons, described by Horace Walpole as ‘a girl distinguished by a most uncommon degree of prostitution’, who was said to have earned a hundred guineas in a single week ‘from different lovers, at a guinea a head’.2 The duchess asked for, and received, a formal separation, whereupon the duke installed Nancy Parsons in her rooms and allowed her to wear the duchess’s jewels and preside over her dinner table.

As a separated woman, only the most unimpeachable conduct would have shored up the duchess’s tottering reputation; but she was only twenty-eight in 1765, and perhaps felt it was a little early to retire from the world, especially given the humiliating way in which she had been replaced by Nancy Parsons. Soon her ‘flirtations’ were the subject of disapproving gossip. She dallied with the Duke of Portland, who married someone else without telling her first. Then, in 1767, she met the Earl of Ossory at Brighton. They began an affair, and she found herself pregnant with his child. Despite his own well-publicised adultery, Grafton was outraged; perhaps his recent appointment as first minister had hardened his usually fluid moral resolve. He prosecuted the duchess for adultery and won. She was persuaded not to counter-sue in return for a generous allowance, and her agreement to hand over into Grafton’s care the children from their marriage, who were taken from her as she lay in bed about to give birth to Ossory’s baby. The Graftons were divorced by an Act of Parliament in 1769; three days later, the duchess married Ossory.

It was this last chapter in the duchess’s chequered story that provoked most disapproval from guardians of conventional values. Princess Amelia, George II’s plain-speaking spinster daughter, observed grimly that ‘the frequency of these things amongst people of the highest rank had become a reproach to the nation’. She particularly objected to the duchess’s remarriage, as it suggested that an adulterous affair could be transformed, via the agency of divorce, into a state of respectable matrimony. Princess Amelia was not the only member of the royal family who disapproved, especially when the reputation to be washed clean was that of the woman involved. The courtier and diarist Lady Mary Coke overheard the king ask the Lord Chancellor, the country’s most senior legal officer, whether ‘something might be thought of that would prevent the very bad conduct of the ladies, of which there had been very many instances lately’. Later she heard a rumour that ‘His Majesty proposed a bill should be brought in, to prevent ladies divorced from their husbands from marrying again’.3

In the event, nothing more was heard of the king’s desire to enforce female fidelity through parliamentary legislation, but George did all he could, by every other means at his disposal, to signal his distaste for the brittle, serial immorality practised so flamboyantly by so many of his loose-living aristocratic peers. The image of the worldly, sophisticated womaniser who took his pleasure with insouciant disregard for his marriage vows had been extremely attractive to George’s father and grandfather, both of whom believed that their masculinity was enhanced by the tang of a little adultery; but George was immune to its appeal. He conformed to a very different eighteenth-century type, and, as a result, looked towards a very different vision of the married state. As the historian Amanda Vickery has shown, not all eighteenth-century men were amoral pleasure-seekers, drawing their gratification from the bottle, the hunt or the gaming table, believing, as Horace Walpole wrote of the Duke of Grafton, that ‘the world should be postponed for a whore and a horse-race’.4

For many sober, conscientious, diligent young men, it was not through such expensive and ephemeral amusements that they hoped to establish their identity and position in the world; it was marriage with some respectable young woman which would allow them truly to come into their own and make their way in life. Marriage was not a burden to be endured, a restraint to be kicked against, but a prize towards which they endlessly planned and schemed. ‘My imagination was excited with pleasurable ideas of what was coming,’ wrote one eager groom for whom the longed-for day was at last in sight; ‘There was not one thing on earth which gave me the slightest anxiety or doubt! Nothing but a delightful anticipation of happiness and independence!’5 The yearning to find the right wife, with whom they could establish a home and raise a family, was, for men like these, an all-consuming desire, its achievement a source of lasting satisfaction.