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

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СКАЧАТЬ it was certainly a gesture of defiance towards the man who kept her from him, and a declaration of loyalty and affection towards his mother that he had never been able to make while his father lived.

      The new king and queen were crowned in October, in a typically eighteenth-century ceremony that combined grandeur with chaos. Tickets were sold in advance for the event, and small booths erected around Westminster for the selling of coffee to the anticipated crowds.2 The Swiss traveller de Saussure went to watch and noted that it took two hours for the royal procession to wend its way to the abbey. Handel’s Zadok the Priest – which would be performed at every subsequent coronation – was given its first airing in the course of the ceremony, at which George and Caroline appeared sumptuously clothed and loaded down with jewellery, some of it, as it later appeared, borrowed for the day. The choristers were not considered to have acquitted themselves well – at one point, they were heard to be singing different anthems. After the ceremony was over and the grander participants had left, de Saussure watched as a hungrier crowd moved methodically over the remains of the event, carrying away anything that could be either eaten or sold.3

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      By the time John, Lord Hervey, joined George and Caroline’s court in 1730, the couple had been on the throne for three years, and married for twenty-five. The patterns of their lives, both as king and queen and husband and wife, were thus very well established when Hervey began to chronicle them. Hervey’s official court title was vice chamberlain. He later described his job dismissively as one that required him to do no more than ‘to carry candles and set chairs’, but in practice, it was a far from nominal office, giving him direct responsibility for the management and upkeep of all the royal palaces. It certainly did not imply any shortcomings in social status. Hervey was extremely well connected, heir to the Earl of Bristol, and an aristocrat of unimpeachable Whig principles. He was also a man who made a career from defying expectations and outraging traditional moralists. There was nothing conventional about any aspect of Hervey’s life.

      Even in a family considered remarkable for the production of extraordinary people – Lady Mary Wortley Montagu once declared that ‘this world consists of men, women and Herveys’ – he stood out above the rest. He married one of the most beautiful women of his generation, and had eight children by her; he conducted casual affairs with a host of other fashionable ladies of the court; but the great love of his life was another man. His sexuality was a barely concealed secret. Slight and slender, he had been considered outstandingly attractive as a young man. In later life, he used cosmetics to enhance his fading looks, with results that were not always successful. Inevitably, Hervey attracted attention, not all of it admiring. The Duchess of Marlborough once referred scornfully to his ‘painted face with not a tooth in his head’.4 In spiteful verse, Alexander Pope described him as an ‘amphibious thing’, ‘a painted child of dirt that stinks and stings’. He was caricatured everywhere in prose as ‘Lord Fanny’. One of his many enemies described him as a ‘delicate little hermaphrodite, a pretty little Master Miss’.5

      Perhaps it was the complexities of his own life that gave Hervey such a profound curiosity for the oddities of others. Certainly, it seems to have been what kept him so firmly in George and Caroline’s orbit for so many years. His warmest relationship was with Caroline, with whom he spent nearly all his time. He was a clever man, well read and accomplished, equally at home in the worlds of politics, ideas and culture. Caroline, starved of intellectual companionship, found him stimulating and amusing, enjoying his dry, mordant humour which closely reflected her own. Both loved to gossip, and could be unsparing in the cruelty of the comments they directed at those they disliked. The queen indulged her favourite to an extraordinary degree, encouraging his frankness and sharing some of her most intimate thoughts with him. Alone among her courtiers, he was encouraged to contradict her. According to his own account, she soon came to consider Hervey as indispensable to her happiness, calling him ‘her child, her pupil and her charge’.6

      Although Hervey’s principal loyalty was always to Caroline, he was just as interested in her husband, who seems to have regarded the constant presence in his household of this unusual figure entirely benignly. For all his loudly declared prejudices, George II was not, it seems, much troubled by the private lives of those around him. Perhaps he simply did not notice, as his self-absorption gave him little interest in contemplating the behaviour of others. In this, he was very different from Hervey, who found the family he lived with endlessly fascinating. Throughout his time at court he kept a detailed journal of everything that he witnessed there. He later assembled the entries into a memoir that contained everything he thought important or illuminating about the years he had spent in such intimate proximity with the royal family. The result was a three-volume work dominated by two overpowering central figures. Hervey records in compelling detail, over nearly a thousand pages, the words and actions of George and Caroline, who emerge as the flawed anti-heroes of his writings, appallingly larger than life; and, as Hervey effortlessly demonstrated, caught in a web of deceit, obsession and self-destruction that bound them together just as powerfully as it destroyed them. Hervey was George and Caroline’s Boswell; the work he left behind him is a portrait of the dark and often bitter thing their marriage had become.

      Hervey did not pretend to be objective in his judgements. He was always, at heart, Caroline’s man, magnifying her good qualities – especially her wit and intelligence – whilst contrasting them with the boorish outbursts of her irritable husband. George is not well served by Hervey’s account of him, which makes much of his bumptiousness and self-regard, and has less to say about his more admirable characteristics: his diligence, his bravery, his occasional flashes of genuine charity. And yet for all the bright colouration of Hervey’s rendering, neither George nor Caroline emerges from his pages as a caricature. George is depicted as a complicated figure, defensive of his own virtues, naively unaware of the impression his behaviour makes on others, exacting, punctilious, somewhat of a bore; but also honest, pragmatic, and capable of considerable tenderness when his emotions were engaged. Above all, Hervey captured the deep ambivalence of his feelings for his wife – at once passionately in love and yet uneasy and ashamed at the degree of his dependency on her.

      In Caroline, Hervey depicted a woman of strong and subtle intellect, the possessor of a forceful mind too often bent to trivial purposes. She could be wickedly funny, and perceptive – entertaining company for those who could keep up and were not provoked by her sharp tongue. This was the Caroline whom Hervey adored, the queenly wit who could cap a classical quotation whilst laughing unashamedly at his gossip. But he was not afraid to record a steelier side of her personality, a brusque hardness that sometimes shocked even the worldly Hervey with its cruel edge. The power of her hatred impressed itself upon him as much as the strength of her mind. And yet it was her situation that most evoked his pity: a woman who had concealed the cleverness that defined her beneath a lifelong subjection to the smallest and most mundane of her husband’s wishes, the better to manipulate him into doing what she wished; and who, as a result, became as much her husband’s victim as his puppet master.

      Hervey had no doubt that, whatever it had cost her to establish it, Caroline’s influence extended way beyond the intimate family circle. As soon as George II was crowned, ‘the whole world began to feel that it was her will which was the sole spring on which every movement in the court turned; and though His Majesty lost no opportunity to declare that the queen never meddled with his business, yet nobody believed it … since everybody knew that she not only meddled with business, but directed everything that fell under that name, either at home or abroad’.7 Horace Walpole’s account seems to confirm Hervey’s assertion that Caroline was indeed a discreet but efficient manipulator of influence, a hidden power behind the throne. Walpole asserted that his father, Sir Robert, would often discuss matters of policy privately with the queen before raising them with the king. Both understood the importance of concealing their СКАЧАТЬ