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

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СКАЧАТЬ inclination’).19 It urged him to decrease the national debt, and to separate the electorate of Hanover from Great Britain to minimise involvement in European wars.20 Such policies would reduce expenditure, making the king more solvent, less dependent on forging alliances with political parties, and free to pursue policies of his own devising. These, Frederick asserted, would be more likely to reflect the true national interest than the existing system, reliant as it was on the management of a host of often conflicting and selfish sectional interests. When presented to his son later as part of a wider constitutional framework, these were ideas that would prove very compelling to the young George; but what prompted his father to articulate them at that time, in a form that suggested so powerfully a kind of political last will and testament?

      Although Frederick was only forty-two when he wrote the document, the 1740s had been a punishing decade for him and his followers. They had enjoyed some successes, most notably, and most pleasing from the perspective of Leicester House, the fall of George II’s favoured minister Robert Walpole in 1742. The prince did not entirely engineer Walpole’s defeat, but when begged by the king to save him, he refused to help the stricken politician. It had proved hard to capitalise on such triumphs. George II had denied Frederick a role in the army, both in the Continental wars of the mid-1740s and during the Jacobite rising of 1745. On both occasions he was forced to watch, humiliated, from the sidelines as his father and his younger brother William, Duke of Cumberland, rode to victory respectively at Dettingen and Culloden. Then, in 1747, Frederick’s followers were roundly defeated at the general election.

      By the end of the decade, he was forced to come to terms with the ambivalence of his position. As Prince of Wales he was master of an alternative court, with over two hundred household posts at his disposal and the promise of preferment once he, eventually, came to power; but although he might be able to undermine or even destroy administrations, he could never be part of them himself. He could break, but he could not build; or at least, not until the king died. Dodington, now acting as one of the prince’s advisers, counselled waiting; but as he approached middle age, Fredrick’s appetite for the struggle seems, surely and steadily, to have ebbed away. Perhaps he suspected that the chances of achieving his ambitions were always going to be limited by the circumstances of his birth. He knew that, unlike his son, he could never be ‘an Englishman born and bred’, and gradually, he began to transfer his hopes for the fulfilment of his long-term goals beyond the possibilities offered by his own reign, concentrating instead on that of his heir. Writing his letter of ‘Instructions’ marked the beginning of that process. It was a sign of both what he hoped his son might one day achieve, and what he had gradually abandoned for himself. And if it marked the level of his ambitions for George, it was also perhaps a measure of his concern. He spelt out his blueprint for the future with such clarity perhaps because he had begun to doubt whether, without such precise guidance, the boy would ever be capable of achieving it. For, as he grew older, George did not seem to anyone – and possibly not even to his father – quite the stuff of which successful kings were made.

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      Though never a voluble child, with age George became steadily shyer, more awkward and withdrawn. He was ‘silent, modest and easily abashed’, said Louisa Stuart, whose father, the Earl of Bute, was one of Frederick’s intimate circle. She maintained that George’s parents, frustrated by his reticence, much preferred his brother Edward. ‘He was decidedly their favourite, and their preference of him to his elder brother openly avowed.’21 Edward was everything his older brother was not: confident, cheerful, talkative and spirited. Horace Walpole, who knew Edward well in later life, described him tellingly as ‘a sayer of things’. His natural confidence, thought Louisa Stuart, ‘was hourly strengthened by encouragement, which enabled him to join in or interrupt conversation and always say something which the obsequious hearers were ready to applaud’. It was very different for his diffident elder brother. ‘If he ever faltered out an opinion, it was passed by unnoticed; sometimes it was knocked down at once with – “Do hold your tongue, George, don’t talk like a fool.”’22

      Frederick, it seemed, for all his genuine affection for his children, was still Hanoverian enough to prefer the spare to the heir. He was never deliberately harsh to his mute and anxious eldest son; but he was often exasperated by his unresponsiveness, and failed to understand its causes. He insisted to the boy that his ‘great fault’ was ‘that nonchalance you have of not caring enough to please’.23 He did not see that there was not a scrap of insouciance in George’s make-up, and that his son’s diffidence arose not from nonchalance but from a paralysing lack of confidence in his ability to fulfil his destiny. For Louisa Stuart, Frederick was less to blame than his wife. Beneath the compliant surface she presented to the world, Augusta nurtured a severe and unflinching personality, with a strong tendency to judge others harshly. It was Augusta, she said, who was ‘too impressed by vivacity and confidence’ and who failed to see that ‘diffidence was often the product of a truly thoughtful understanding’. She did not recognise the true strengths of her stolid elder son, ‘whose real good sense, innate rectitude, unspeakably kind heart, and genuine manliness of spirit were overlooked in his youth, and indeed, not appreciated till a much later time’.24

      Had Frederick lived, the warmth of the genuine affection he felt for all his children might eventually have buoyed up the spirits of his tremulous heir; George might have matured under the protection of a father who, for all his criticism of his son’s shortcomings and lack of insight into their causes, nevertheless saw the protection of the boy’s long-term interests as his most important responsibility. But at the beginning of March 1751, the prince caught a cold. A week later, on the 13th, Dodington noted in his diary that ‘the prince did not appear, having a return of pain in his side’.25 He was probably suffering from pneumonia. For a few days, he seemed to improve. Augusta, who was five months pregnant, informed Egmont that Frederick ‘was getting much better, and only wanted time to recover his strength’. She added that ‘he was always frightened for himself when he was the least out of order, but that she had laughed him out of it, and would never humour him in these fancies’. She hoped her attempts to raise his spirits had worked as Frederick now declared that ‘he should not die in this bout, but for the future, would take more care of himself’.26

      Dodington called at Leicester House on the 20th, and he too was reassured on hearing that Frederick ‘was much better and had slept eight hours the night before’. Everyone’s optimism was unfounded. Later that night, at a quarter to ten, Frederick died. The end came with shocking swiftness. Dodington reported that ‘until half an hour before he was very cheerful, asked to see some of his friends, ate some bread and butter and drank coffee’.27 Walpole heard a similar story. The prince seemed to be over the worst and beginning to improve when he was suddenly overcome with a fit of coughing. At first, Dr Wilmot, who attended him, thought this was a good sign, telling him hopefully: ‘Sir, you have brought up all the phlegm; I hope this will be over in a quarter of an hour, and that your highness will have a good night.’ But Hawkins, the second doctor, was less optimistic, declaring ominously: ‘Here is something I don’t like.’ The cough became increasingly violent. Frederick, panicking, declared that he was dying. His German valet, who held him in his arms, ‘felt him shiver and cried, “Good God! The prince is going.” The princess, who was at the foot of the bed, snatched up a candle, but before she got to him, he was dead.’28 He was forty-four years old.

      The king received the news of Frederick’s death as he sat playing cards. George had not remarried; he had kept his promise to his dying queen, taking a mistress rather than a wife. He had sent for Mme de Wallmoden, who divorced her husband and in 1740 was given the title of the Countess of Yarmouth. СКАЧАТЬ