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

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СКАЧАТЬ est mort!”’29 Once the horror of the moment had passed, the king, who was too self-absorbed to be a hypocrite, did not pretend to be grieved. He had hated his son for years, and his sudden and unexpected death provoked no remorse for his behaviour. As 1751 drew to a close, he commented with characteristic candour: ‘This has been a fatal year to my family. I have lost my eldest son, but I was glad of it.’30 It was his final comment on a relationship which had begun in suspicion, matured into vicious acrimony and ended with estrangement. He felt neither guilt nor regret for what had happened, and never referred to Frederick again.

      The prince’s funeral was the final reflection of his father’s disdain. It was, thought Dodington, a shameful affair, ‘which sunk me so low that for the first hour, I was incapable of making any observation’. No food was provided for those of his household who stood loyally by Frederick’s body as he lay in state; they ‘were forced to bespeak a great cold dinner from a common tavern in the neighbourhood’. No arrangements had been made to shelter mourners from the rain as they walked from the House of Lords to Westminster Abbey. The funeral service itself ‘was performed without anthem or organ’ and neither the king nor Frederick’s brother the Duke of Cumberland attended.31 Even in the performance of his last duty to his son, George II could find no generosity of spirit.

      He appeared in a better light on his first visit to Frederick’s bereaved wife and children, when he was clearly moved by their stricken condition. ‘A chair of state was provided for him,’ reported Walpole, ‘but he refused it; and sat by the princess on the couch, embraced and wept with her. He would not suffer Lady Augusta to kiss his hand, but embraced her, and gave it to her brothers, and told them, “They must be brave boys, obedient to their mother, and deserve the fortune to which they were born.”’32 It was a rare display of emotional sympathy from the king; but as the family sat huddled in their misery, they all knew that significant decisions must now be made about their future.

      The most obvious solution would have been for the king to take over the upbringing and education of the young prince, bringing the boy to live with him at St James’s. At the same time, it might have been expected that the Duke of Cumberland would be made regent. As the king’s eldest surviving son, he would have been well placed to act for his father during his frequent absences in Hanover, and to be appointed guardian to the young George if the king had died while he was still a minor. In the event, none of these arrangements ever happened. They had been rendered politically impossible by the momentous events of 1745/46, the consequences of which were to have a profound effect on the lives of George, Augusta and indeed all of Frederick’s remaining family.

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      William, Duke of Cumberland, was loved by his parents with an intensity matched only by their disdain for his brother Frederick. Mirroring the actions of George I, it was rumoured that George II had once consulted the Lord Chancellor to discover if it would be constitutionally possible to disinherit his eldest son in favour of William. The disappointing answer he was said to have received did nothing to weaken the affection he felt for Cumberland, who shared many of his interests, particularly his passion for the army. Cumberland had been given all the military experience that Frederick persuaded himself he craved and had been denied. He was a capable soldier and at the age of only twenty-three was appointed captain general. ‘Poor boy!’ commented Walpole, ‘he is most Brunswickly happy with all his drums and trumpets.’33 When Charles Edward Stuart raised his standard in Scotland in 1745, Cumberland was the obvious candidate to put down a rebellion aimed directly at the survival of the Hanoverian dynasty. His reputation would never recover from the victory he won.

      The possibility of regime change seemed a very real one as Bonnie Prince Charlie’s troops swept first through Scotland and then through northern England in the winter of 1745. As Carlisle, Lancaster and Preston fell, panic engulfed London. Even Horace Walpole was shaken out of his usual pose of ironic detachment, putting all his trust in the duke’s ‘lion’s courage, vast vigilance … and great military genius’.34 After Charles Stuart made the unexpected decision to turn back at Derby, Cumberland chased his army back to Scotland, where the two forces met on 16 April 1746 at Culloden. The duke’s victory over the exhausted Jacobites was total, and the aftermath of the battle exceptionally brutal, as Cumberland’s soldiers bayoneted wounded survivors. This was only a prelude to an extensive campaign of terror, intended by Cumberland to eradicate all possibility of another uprising. ‘Do not imagine,’ the duke wrote, ‘that threatening military execution and other things are pleasing to do, but nothing will go down without it. Mild measures will not do.’35 He was not alone in thinking extreme actions were called for. ‘I make no difficulty of declaring my opinion,’ declared Lord Chesterfield, ‘that the commander-in-chief should be ordered to give no quarter but to pursue the rebels wherever he finds ’em.’36 Cumberland’s troops pursued the defeated Scots into the glens and remote settlements of the Highlands, burning and murdering as they went, killing not just men of fighting age, but women, children, and even the cattle that supported them.

      At first, Cumberland was fêted for the completeness of his victory. Handel composed See, the Conquering Hero Comes to mark his triumph; the duke was mobbed in the street, celebrated as the defender of constitutional monarchy. But as accounts began to arrive in London describing the methods by which he had achieved his success – and as the initial relief at the removal of the Jacobite threat began to fade – a sense of popular unease mounted. The atrocities appalled a public who, with the threat of a restored Stuart monarchy now behind them, did not feel liberty had been best protected by uncontrolled rape and murder. Simultaneously, suspicion of what Cumberland’s true intentions might be began to mount. At the head of a vicious and unstoppable army, what might he not attempt? Could he use it to break opposition as thoroughly in England as he had done in Scotland, and seize power for himself?

      Frederick, who saw Cumberland’s success as a direct threat to him, did all he could to fuel hostility to his brother. He financed a pamphlet laying out in detail all the excesses committed by Cumberland’s troops, and his adviser Egmont wrote another, arguing that the emboldened duke’s next step would indeed be to mount a coup d’état. This was a complete fiction, but a very powerful one, that struck alarm into the hearts of otherwise rational politicians for nearly twenty years. In eighteen months, Cumberland was transformed in the public perception from conquering hero to ‘the Butcher’, a cruel German militarist with tyrannical ambitions and, unless his access to power was closely controlled, both the desire and the means to make them real.

      So overwhelming was this scenario, even at the time of Frederick’s death five years after Culloden, that it made Cumberland unemployable in England. The king railed impotently against what he regarded as the traducing of his favourite, declaring that ‘it was the lies they told, and in particular this Egmont, about my son, for the service he did this country, which raised the clamour against him’; but he knew nothing could be done about it.37 He understood the political realities well enough to understand that Cumberland could never now be made regent. The disgraced duke bore his exclusion stoically in public – ‘I shall submit because the king commands it’ – but in private confessed himself deeply humiliated, wishing ‘that the name William could be blotted out of the English annals’.38

      If he could not name Cumberland regent, the king had little choice but to appoint an otherwise most unlikely candidate, Augusta, who now held the title of princess dowager. And if she was thought competent to act in that capacity, he could hardly justify removing his heir from her control. Thus, against all expectation, the young Prince George was allowed to stay in the company of his mother. СКАЧАТЬ