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

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СКАЧАТЬ wife. If Walpole arrived for an audience with the king when Caroline was present, she would curtsey politely and offer to leave. Walpole argued that George was entirely deceived by this carefully choreographed piece of theatre, declaring naively to his first minister: ‘there, you see how much I am governed by my wife, as they say I am’. Caroline played her own part to perfection. ‘Oh sir,’ she replied, ‘I must indeed be vain to pretend to govern Your Majesty.’8 But as George’s comments reveal, the idea that it was Caroline and not he who drove forward the business of government was not confined to the inner sanctum of the court. With evident satisfaction, Hervey transcribed into his journals a popular poetic jibe that summed up the perceived balance of power between George II and his wife:

      You may strut, dapper George, but ’twill all be in vain,

      We know ’tis Queen Caroline and not you that reign –

      You govern no more than Don Philip of Spain,

      Then if you would have us fall down and adore you,

      Lock up your fat spouse, as your dad did before you.9

      Recent scholarship has tended to turn a sceptical eye on some of the more extravagant claims made for Caroline’s role as the éminence grise of British politics. Historians have suggested that both Hervey and Walpole had their own reasons for accentuating her role and diminishing that of her husband; as Caroline’s most devoted admirer, Hervey was keen to elevate her virtues in comparison to what he regarded as the emptier pretensions of her husband. Sir Robert Walpole, too, was strongly identified with Caroline, having allied himself with her very early in her husband’s reign. He had quickly recognised that it was she who exerted the most influence over the king and had worked very hard to recruit her into his orbit. With characteristic bluntness, he later congratulated himself in having taken ‘the right sow by the ear’. Once established as her ally, it suited him to talk up her influence, thus magnifying his own access to the apparent wellsprings of power. It was also perhaps the case that George was unlucky in those areas of policy in which he did excel. The image of George II as an ineffectual ruler, overshadowed by his wife, was made more credible by the relative indifference of so many of his new subjects to those areas in which he exerted genuine influence: military strategy and the complicated politics of princely Germany. Both were of some significance to the exercise of kingship in eighteenth-century Europe; but neither Hervey nor Walpole was particularly interested in them, and until recently, most historians have tended to share their perceptions.

      George’s reputation has been considerably enhanced by a new interest in these aspects of his reign; but in re-evaluating his role, it would be wrong to excise Caroline altogether from the landscape of political life. When the king was away on his frequent and often lengthy trips to his Hanoverian electorate, on every occasion until her death, it was Caroline who was given responsibility for heading the Regency Council which governed in George’s absence.10 This involved her directly in the daily business of politics, and required her to spend a great deal of time in the company of politicians. Her relationship with the wily and effective Sir Robert Walpole spanned a decade, and was built on a foundation of wary but mutual respect that ended only with her final illness. As Hervey observed, Caroline positively enjoyed political life. Her philosophical readings had given her an interest in the theory of political organisation, and she liked to reflect on the constitutional peculiarities of her adopted home. ‘My God,’ she once declared to Hervey, ‘what a figure this poor island would make in Europe if it were not for its government! … Who the devil do you think would take you all, or think you worth having, that had anything else, if you had not your liberties?’11

      Caroline was astute enough to recognise that this was the kind of eulogy a British monarch was required to deliver in order to retain the affections of the people; but it does not seem to have been a particularly honest reflection of her private opinions. Hervey thought that in her heart, the queen’s politics were closer to those of her husband. George was suspicious of the constitutional settlement over which he was obliged to preside, and ‘looked upon all the English as king-killers and republicans, grudged them their riches as well as their liberty [and] thought them all overpaid’. He much preferred the way things were done in Hanover, for ‘there he rewarded people for doing their duty and serving him well, but here he was obliged to enrich people for being rascals and buy them not to cut his throat’.12 To Hervey, Caroline expressed similar frustrations with the limits of royal power, as the Glorious Revolution had defined it, complaining that in England, a king was ‘no more than the humble servant of Parliament, the pensioner of his people, and a puppet of sovereignty that was forced to go to them for every shilling he wanted, that was obliged to court those who were always abusing him, and could do nothing himself’.13 In public, she was far more measured. ‘The business of princes,’ she declared, ‘is to make the whole go on, and not to encourage or suffer silly, impertinent, personal piques between their servants to hinder the business of government being done.’14 For Caroline, the world of politics as she understood it bore a striking resemblance to the life she had made for herself at home. In the end, both came down to questions of management.

      Whatever the reality of Caroline’s political role, it is hard to imagine that George was indifferent to the powerful contemporary perception that in matters of government, it was she and not he who was in charge. For a man whose self-esteem was so dependent on the respect and admiration of others, this must have been a painful experience. To be found wanting in the arena where men – and royal men in particular – were expected to excel, unchallenged by even the brightest of women, was particularly humiliating. In the public world, as he came to recognise, there seemed little he could do about it. The more he denied it, the more it seemed as if it might be true. But George knew that there were other areas of his and Caroline’s life together where he remained effortlessly dominant, where his primacy was secure and uncompromised: in the most intimate dimension of their private world there was no question whose will it was that governed, and who was required to submit to it.

      From the earliest years of their marriage, George had taken mistresses. He did so not because he did not love Caroline, but because he was afraid that otherwise it might look as if he loved her too much. Horace Walpole thought he ‘was more attracted by a silly idea he entertained of gallantry being becoming, than by a love of variety’. His infidelities made him seem more a man of the world and less of a besotted husband. When he was Prince of Wales, George followed long-established tradition in selecting his lovers from the household of his wife. He did not go about the process with great subtlety. Having decided to approach Mary Bellenden, one of Caroline’s Maids of Honour – ‘incontestably the most agreeable, the most insinuating, and the most likeable woman of her time’ – George favoured the direct method. Knowing that she could not pay her bills, he sat beside her one night and ‘took out his purse and counted his money. He repeated the numeration; the giddy Bellenden lost her patience, and cried out, “Sir, I cannot bear it! If you count your money any more, I will go out of the room.”’15 In the end Mary Bellenden’s poverty conquered her irritation; but the time she spent as George’s mistress turned out to be unrewarding in every way. He was too mean to make her relationship financially rewarding, too disengaged to give her any real pleasure, and unwilling to award her the status of Principal Mistress. As soon as she could, Mary Bellenden found a husband to marry, and exchanged the role of unhappy royal mistress for that of respectable wife.

      She was succeeded in the post by Lady Suffolk, whom George and Caroline had known since the early days of their marriage in Hanover. She had been Mrs Howard then, and had arrived at their court accompanied by a violent and drunken husband, and so poor that she had been forced to sell her own hair to raise money. She was beautiful, СКАЧАТЬ