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

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СКАЧАТЬ In the evenings, before an embarrassed Hervey and a ‘peevish’ Caroline, ‘he would take a candle in his own royal hand, and tell … the story of these pictures’. To distract the queen, Hervey would ‘make grimaces’ over the king’s shoulder; but his jokes did little to rouse her spirits. George did not understand why his wife could not enter his amours with the same enthusiasm he did. ‘You must love the Wallmoden,’ he once instructed her, ‘for she loves me.’

      When the king returned to Hanover the following year, it looked to an apprehensive Hervey as though Caroline had finally had enough and, provoked beyond endurance, intended to adopt a less conciliatory policy towards her husband. She began to write to him less regularly, and her letters, which had previously run to thirty pages or more, now barely exceeded seven or eight. When news reached England that Mme de Wallmoden had given birth to a son, Hervey feared that Caroline might lose control of her husband altogether. He ‘begged Sir Robert Walpole to do something or other to prevent her going on in a way that would destroy her’. Walpole thought ‘that nothing could ever quite destroy her power with the king’; but he was merciless in the advice he subsequently dispensed to a tearful Caroline: she must abandon any attempt to express her displeasure, or declare her own injured feelings. ‘It was too late in her life to try new methods, and she was never to hope now to keep her power with the king by reversing those methods by which she had gained it.’ She must conquer her bitterness and replace indignation with submission. ‘Nothing but soothing, complying, softening, bending, and submitting could do any good.’ And he added a final directive to his comprehensive recipe of humiliation: ‘She must press the king to bring this woman to England. He taught her this hard lesson till she wept.’26

      The strategist in Caroline could see the benefits of having George back in Britain again, where he would be susceptible to her influence; but the aggrieved, betrayed wife in her resisted. The struggle between the two warring dimensions of Caroline’s character was short and sharp, and it was the queen and the politician who emerged victorious. Caroline wrote ‘a most submissive and tender letter’ to George ‘assuring him she had nothing but his interest and his pleasure at heart’ and making ‘an earnest request that he would bring Mme de Wallmoden to England, giving assurances that his wife’s conduct to his mistress should be everything he desired’.27 As Robert Walpole had predicted, once Caroline had declared her utter surrender to his will, George’s hostility began to melt away. He replied immediately with a host of conciliatory expressions. ‘You know my passions, my dear Caroline. You understand my frailties. There is nothing hidden in my heart from you.’ Robert Walpole, who was shown the letter, told Hervey that ‘it was so well written, that if the king was only to write to women and never to strut or talk to them, he believed His Majesty would get the better of all the men in the world with them’.28

      When the king at last returned to London, ‘the warmest of all his rays were directed at the queen. He said no man ever had so affectionate and meritorious a wife or so faithful an able a friend.’ Mme de Wallmoden ‘seemed to those who knew the king best to be quite forgot’.29 Aged over fifty, Caroline had managed to seduce her straying husband home again. That was undoubtedly a triumph of sorts, but she could not have been unaware of the high price she had paid – and indeed, had always paid – for the maintenance of their precarious marital status quo. There were many things she knew her husband admired about her: her energy; her beauty, even; could he but admit it, the intellect that she had so tirelessly directed towards the success of their partnership – but none of this mattered as much to George as her willingness to deny all her best qualities in an absolute emotional submission to his will. He knew that with a glance or a frown, and above all with the threat of departure, he could bring her to heel; in the private heartland of their marriage, true power resided firmly where it had always been – in his hands.

      It is true that Caroline had very few options in responding to George’s behaviour, as she had no desire to follow her mother-in-law into the post-marital wilderness; but her desire to keep the affections of her errant husband was more than simply the product of pragmatic considerations. She was genuinely distressed by his temporary abandonment of her, and was delighted when he came back. She was proud that the king had returned not only to court, but also to her bed, joyfully informing Robert Walpole of the fact so that he could appreciate the completeness of her victory. George was a difficult man to love, and he tried the fortitude of his wife severely in the thirty years they spent together. Yet during all that time, he remained the dominating figure in her life, crowding out all competing emotional claims. When forced by her father-in-law to make the appalling choice between her husband and her daughters, Caroline had unhesitatingly chosen George, declaring ‘her children were not a grain of sand compared to him’.30 It was not that she did not care for her girls; she loved her daughters deeply, but it was her relationship with her husband that occupied all her time and absorbed all her emotional energy. There was not much room left for anyone else.

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      If the relationship between George and Caroline was complex, and not conducive to happiness, it was as nothing compared to the misery that resulted from their dealings with Frederick, their eldest son. Some of the problems they encountered were not entirely of their own making; the operation of eighteenth-century politics inevitably placed the heir to the throne in opposition to his father. On reaching maturity he soon became the focus around which disgruntled politicians gathered, eager to stake their claim to the future. He could make a great deal of trouble for the king and his ministers if he was disposed to do so, and very few heirs found themselves able to resist that temptation. All this George and Caroline knew very well from their own difficult days as Prince and Princess of Wales; once they inherited the crown, however, they expunged all recollection of that period from their joint memory, and expected their son to behave with a political rectitude that had not characterised their own behaviour when they occupied his position. But their attitude to the prince went far beyond the discontents and difficulties that came with their constitutional roles. They treated Frederick with a venom that exceeded any legitimate political frustration, and conceived a hatred for him that became almost pathological in its intensity.

      As with so much Hanoverian unhappiness, its origins lay in the actions of George I. He had kept his small grandson in Hanover, forbidding his parents to visit him there, and allowing them no say in his education and upbringing. When Frederick was sixteen, George I had begun to negotiate a marriage between his grandson and the Princess of Prussia. In a gesture of deliberate and insulting exclusion, the boy’s father was not consulted, nor even informed of the project. Back in England, the younger George watched the king load on to Frederick a host of honours and titles which had never been extended to him, and began to wonder whether it would be Frederick and not himself who would eventually inherit the electorate. None of these slights made him look fondly on his absent son. As the Duchess of Orléans astutely commented, it seemed to guarantee that the filial hatred that had defined one generation would be passed on to the next: ‘The young prince in Hanover may not meet with much love, for if the Prince of Wales has to bear his mother’s sins, perhaps he may have to answer for the grandfather’s.’31

      In the years the young prince had been separated from his family, distance had not made his father’s heart grow fonder. Frederick grew up a remote cipher, a blank page on which George could project all the anger he felt against his own father, with whom the boy was forever damagingly identified. He did not know him, and felt nothing for him but the suspicion he instinctively reached for when faced with a rival of unknown and possibly damaging intent. He showed no desire at all to bring the young man back into his life. When he succeeded to the throne, it had been widely expected that Frederick would immediately be summoned to attend the coronation; but it took a parliamentary address to persuade the new king to do so.

      After a long and hazardous journey through the winter landscapes of north Germany, СКАЧАТЬ