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

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СКАЧАТЬ For over a decade she was George’s principal mistress. She was also one of the queen’s bedchamber women, which meant that wife and mistress spent a great deal of time in each other’s company, an experience neither of them enjoyed.

      The difficulties of the situation would have been exacerbated by George’s indifference to the established rules of polite behaviour. He conducted his affair without the slightest attempt at discretion. With the methodical exactitude that characterised everything he did, he made his way to Lady Suffolk’s apartment at seven every evening, in full view of the court. If he found he was too early, he would pace about, looking at his watch, until it was exactly the right time for their assignation to begin. Perhaps it was some consolation to Caroline that this hardly suggested a relationship driven by great passion. Hervey thought the king kept it up ‘as a necessary appurtenance to his grandeur as a prince rather than an addition to his pleasure as a man’. He added that there were many at court who doubted whether the couple had a sexual relationship at all.16 Whatever the nature of the affair, it certainly did not seem to cool George’s ardour for his wife; and the much-tried Lady Suffolk often found herself caught in the crossfire of his angry attraction for Caroline. ‘It happened more than once,’ reported Walpole, ‘that the king, coming in to the room while the queen was dressing, has snatched off the handkerchief, and turning rudely to Mrs Howard, has cried, “Because you have an ugly neck yourself, you seek to hide the queen’s!”’17

      Hervey thought that for all the offence Lady Suffolk’s presence gave to the queen’s dignity, Caroline had, with some effort, resigned herself to her rival’s existence. ‘Knowing the vanity of her husband’s temper, and that he must have some woman for the world to believe he lay with, she wisely suffered one to remain in that situation whom she despised, and had got the better of, for fear of making room for a successor whom he might really love, and who might get the better of her.’18 Certainly, when, in 1734, the king finally tired of his now middle-aged mistress, and Lady Suffolk sought to avoid the inevitable by quitting the court before she was asked to leave, it was Caroline who tried to persuade her to stay. In a lengthy private interview she urged her ‘to take a week to consider of the business. And give me your word that you will not read any romances in that time.’19 Lady Suffolk was not to be won over. She had had enough of her half-affair with a man she suspected had only ever wanted her as a mistress in order to demonstrate his independence from his wife. The king, who complained to Caroline that he could not understand ‘why you will not let me part with an old deaf woman, of whom I am weary’, was pleased to see her go.

      Although Caroline’s daughters were similarly glad to see Lady Suffolk – whom they all hated – disappear from their own and their mother’s lives, it was their father towards whom they felt the most animus, despising him for his humiliating treatment of the queen. Anne, the cleverest and most outspoken of the sisters, made it the basis of a lasting and deeply felt dislike of the king, on which she would often expatiate to Hervey, venting her disdain in a resounding, freeform litany of the many things that she hated about him. ‘His passion, his pride, his vanity, his giving himself airs about women, the impossibility of being easy with him, his affectation of heroism, his unreasonable, simple, uncertain, disagreeable and often shocking behaviour to the queen, the difficulty of entertaining him, his insisting upon other people’s conversation who were to entertain him being always new and his own always the same thing over and over again …’20 The depth of her contempt for George made her hope he would not stay too long without a mistress. ‘I wish with all my heart he would take somebody else,’ she told Hervey, ‘that Mama might be a little relieved from the ennui of seeing him forever in her room.’21 This was to happen sooner than Anne can have imagined, and with consequences for her mother that she would never have wished for.

      Among George II’s most jealously guarded pleasures were the regular visits he made back to his electorate – trips he called his Hanover-reisen. Caroline did not go with him, staying instead in Britain as his regent; she never saw Germany again after leaving in 1714. While at Herrenhausen in 1735, George met Amalie von Wallmoden, a young, fashionable married woman. He fell in love with her at first sight, with an immediacy and intensity that resembled his first meeting with Caroline some thirty years earlier. It was soon clear to everyone that his passion for ‘the Wallmoden’ was of an entirely different order to anything he had felt for previous lovers. He was soon in the grip of a powerful obsession for her that dominated all his thoughts.

      Caroline knew this better than anyone else, because George wrote to tell her all about it. Whenever he was away, George wrote constantly to his wife, with letters ‘of sometimes sixty pages, and never less than forty, filled with an hourly account of everything he saw, heard thought or did’. Hervey thought this correspondence ‘crammed with minute trifling circumstances unworthy of a man to write, but even more of a woman to read’.22 George would sometimes instruct Caroline to show relevant passages ‘to the fat man’, which meant that the portly politician Robert Walpole saw for himself a great deal of what passed between the couple. He knew, as a result, that there was virtually nothing the king did not tell the queen, including all the most intimate details of his love affairs. Their correspondence also revealed that George required far more from Caroline than a dignified complaisance in the face of his infidelities; he also expected her to assist him in the pursuit of promising new affairs. ‘There was one letter,’ Walpole told Hervey, ‘in which he desired the queen to contrive, if she could, that the prince of Modena, who was to come at the latter end of the year to England, might bring his wife with him; and the reason he gave, was that he had heard her highness was pretty free with her person.’ It therefore came as no surprise to the queen to now receive ‘so minute a description’ of her husband’s new mistress, ‘that had the queen been a painter she might have drawn her rival’s picture at 600 miles distance’.23

      At first, Caroline attempted to dismiss George’s new affair as she had done those that preceded it, but when he lingered on in Hanover, she began to grow increasingly concerned. And when at last he arrived reluctantly back in London, summoned home by his anxious ministers, she realised just how serious the situation had become, and to what degree her carefully managed primacy in his eyes was now threatened by his mistress in Germany.

      Caroline might have imagined that she had already experienced most of what a royal marriage could require from a royal wife, but the humiliations, both public and private, she was now to endure at her husband’s hands were beyond anything she had yet encountered. George had always treated her brusquely in public. Hervey thought he was ‘perpetually so harsh and rough, that she could never speak one word uncontradicted, nor do any act unreproved’.24 Caroline’s response was to retreat into a posture of even greater submission, but her abnegation served only to spur George into even greater irritation. However innocuous the subject of conversation, the king would direct it into an attack on his wife. When Hervey and Caroline tried to draw him into a discussion on whether it was right to tip servants when one visited the houses of friends, that too turned into a rant, with the king declaring that the queen should not be venturing beyond her home in pursuit of pleasure. His whole family came under the lash of his ill humour. A few days later, he ‘snubbed the queen, who was drinking chocolate, for being always stuffing; the princess Emily [as Amelia was informally known] for not hearing him, the princess Caroline for being grown fat, the Duke of Cumberland for standing awkwardly, Lord Hervey for not knowing what relation the Prince of Sultzbach was to the elector Palatine, then carried the queen to walk, and be re-snubbed, in the garden’. On the rare occasions when the king’s mood lightened, ‘it was only to relate the scenes of his happy loves when he was at Hanover’.25 George had brought over from Germany a series of paintings that depicted ‘all СКАЧАТЬ