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

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СКАЧАТЬ father and his actions in so disrespectful a manner as to send them to her almost ready to cry’.68

      Stone, in contrast, ‘always behaved very well to her and the children and though it would be treason if it were to be known, always spoke of the late prince with the greatest respect’.69 But even he seemed to have a curious idea of what was required of him. ‘She once desired him to inform the prince about the constitution,’ wrote Dodington, ‘but he declined it, to avoid giving offence to the Bishop of Norwich. That she had mentioned it again, and he had declined it, as not being his province.’ When Dodington asked Augusta what Stone’s province was, ‘she said she did not know, she supposed to go before him upstairs, to walk with him, sometimes seldomer to ride with him and then to dine with him’.70

      George’s tutors had reason to be nervous when called upon to offer interpretations of the constitution to the heir to the throne. At the end of 1752, Harcourt and Hayter turned on their colleagues Stone and Scott and accused them of Jacobite sympathies, claiming they were covertly indoctrinating George with absolutist principles. They offered no real evidence for their charges, and could persuade neither the king nor his first minister, Newcastle, to believe them. Both promptly resigned, but the recriminations surrounding the affair dragged on for over a year, and were not resolved until Stone had appeared before the Privy Council and the matter had been raised in the House of Lords. It was easy for Dodington to declare with passion that ‘what I wanted most was that his Royal Highness should begin to learn the usages and knowledge of the world; be informed of the general frame and nature of government and the constitution, and the general course and manner of business’.71 But, as the cautious Stone had understood when he refused Augusta’s direct invitation to do just that, attempting the political education of princes was a far riskier undertaking than teaching them Latin.

      With the departure of Harcourt and Hayter, the king was determined to make one last effort to turn his fourteen-year-old grandson into the kind of heir he thought he deserved. Prince George’s hesitant and self-conscious appearances at the formal Drawing Rooms did not impress his grandfather, who had forgotten many of the tender professions he had made at the time of Frederick’s death. Unless taken in hand, he feared the prince would be fit for nothing but to read the Bible to his mother. He approached James, Earl Waldegrave, who had been a Lord of the Bedchamber in his household, and asked him to become the prince’s new governor. Confident, experienced and expansive, Waldegrave was a very different character from the ineffectual Harcourt, and his sophisticated presence introduced an unfamiliar flavour into Augusta’s circle. At first, everyone seemed to welcome both it and him, and Waldegrave used this early advantage to effect something of a revolution in the prince’s education. He recognised immediately that the most important task was to engage George’s fitful attention, and sought to do this by offering him a vision of knowledge that went beyond the traditional forms of learning his pupil found so unengaging. ‘As a right system of education seemed impossible,’ Waldegrave recalled in his Memoirs, ‘the best which could be hoped for was to give him true notions of common things; to instruct him by conversation, rather than books; and sometimes, under the disguise of amusement, to entice him to the pursuit of more serious studies.’72

      Waldegrave thought that George might work harder if he enjoyed himself more. Unlike any of his previous instructors, he was convinced that beneath the habitual indolence, the prince had potential. The present glaring shortcomings in his character were, Waldegrave believed, less a reflection of his true nature and more the inevitable product of the circumscribed life he led: ‘I found HRH uncommonly full of princely prejudices, contracted in the nursery and improved by the society of bedchamber women and pages of the back-stairs.’73 Wider experience of the world might cure many of the faults that others had found so intractable.

      As time went on, however, it became clear to Waldegrave that the kind of change he advocated – a relaxation of the regime of seclusion, a more active participation in society – would never be countenanced by Augusta. For all her anxieties about her eldest son’s education, she would not sacrifice any of her own prejudices to see it improved. She did not expect her authority to be challenged by her son’s governor. She explained to Dodington that she considered the post – and Waldegrave, while he occupied it – ‘as a sort of pageant, a man of quality for show, etc.’.74 Faced with her blank resistance, Waldegrave’s new measures ran slowly but steadily into the ground. Although he was supported in his endeavours by ‘men of sense, men of learning and worthy good men’, Waldegrave eventually concluded he could do nothing to make a real difference: ‘The mother and the nursery always prevailed.’75

      By the mid-1750s, George’s formal education had done little more than confirm in the self-conscious boy an even greater sense of his own shortcomings. Morbidly aware of his faults, especially those of ‘lethargy’ and ‘indolence’ with which he was so often charged, he seemed incapable of rousing himself to do anything about them. He had, thought Waldegrave, ‘a kind of unhappiness in his temper, which if it be not conquered before it has taken too deep a root, will be a source of frequent anxiety’. The prince’s apparent preference for solitude concerned Waldegrave, especially as he suspected the boy chose to be alone the better to contemplate his misery: ‘he becomes sullen and silent and retires to his closet, not to compose his mind by study, or contemplation, but merely to indulge the melancholy enjoyment of his own ill humour’.76 He had no friends except his brother Edward, to whom he was very close. To everyone else, he revealed nothing of himself. The retired life he and his mother shared had certainly not forged a strong emotional bond between them. When Dodington asked her ‘what she took the real disposition of the prince to be’, Augusta replied that Dodington ‘knew him almost as well as she did’.77

      As he drifted irrevocably towards a destiny that terrified him, George retreated further and further into a private world of remote introspection. Transfixed with apprehension by the prospect before him, lethargy overwhelmed him. Neither his tutors nor his family knew what to do about it, or understood that his much-criticised indolence was less a sign of laziness than a strategy to avoid engaging with a future he knew he could not avoid. By the time he was sixteen, in 1754, he had erected around himself a tough carapace of emotional detachment which no one could penetrate. But George’s life was about to be transformed by someone who would instil in him a new vision of who he was; and, for the first time, offer the anxious boy an inspirational idea of what he might become. He encountered the man who would change his life for ever.

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      John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, was a well-connected aristocrat related to some the grandest names in Scottish politics, including the powerful Dukes of Argyll. For a man whose career was so dominated by the fact of his Scottishness, he spent a surprising amount of his early life in England. He was educated at Eton alongside Horace Walpole, who was later to paint such a malign picture of him in his Memoirs of the Reign of King George III. Bute married early, and for love: in 1736, at the age of twenty-three, he eloped with the only daughter of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The girl’s furious father refused to make any financial provision for his disobedient daughter and her new husband. When his irascible father-in-law died some twenty years later, Bute inherited all his money and became extremely rich; but as a young man, he was always short of funds. Contemporaries were certain that only poverty – or ‘a gloomy sort of madness’ – could have induced him to take up residence on the remote island that bore his name. In the years before the Romantics induced the literate public to admire the wilderness, it was assumed no sensible modern man would choose to live so far from civilisation. Bute’s critics, of whom even in his earliest days there were many, asserted that his personality СКАЧАТЬ