Bath, July 2014
Epigraphs
‘But it is a very strange family, at least the children – sons and daughters’
SYLVESTER DOUGLAS, Lord Glenbervie, diarist
‘No family was ever composed of such odd people, I believe, as they all draw different ways, and there have happened such extraordinary things, that in any other family, public or private, are never heard of before’
PRINCESS CHARLOTTE, daughter of George IV
‘Laughing, [she] added that she knew but one family that was more odd, and she would not name that family for the world’
PRINCESS AUGUSTA, mother of George III
Prologue
FORTY-FOUR YEARS AFTER THE EVENT took place that altered his life for ever, George III could still recall with forensic clarity exactly how it happened. On Saturday 25 October 1760, he had set off from his house in Kew to travel to London. He had not gone far when he was stopped by a man he did not recognise, who pulled a note out of his pocket and handed it to him. It was, George remembered, ‘a piece of coarse, white-brown paper, with the name Schroeder written on it, and nothing more’. He knew instantly what this terse and grubby communication signified. It was sent by a German servant of his elderly grandfather, George II; using ‘a private mark agreed between them’, it informed the young man that the old king was dying, and that he should prepare to inherit the crown.1
To avoid raising alarm, George warned his entourage to say nothing about what had passed, and began to gallop back to Kew. Before he reached home, a second messenger approached him, bearing a letter from his aunt Amelia, the old king’s spinster daughter. With blunt punctiliousness, she had addressed it ‘To His Majesty’; George did not need to open it to understand that his grandfather was dead and that he had come into his inheritance. Amelia was probably the first person to call him by the title he would now bear for the rest of his life. With a similarly precise observation of the formalities, he signed his reply to her ‘GR’ – Georgius Rex. When he had set out for London that morning, he was the Prince of Wales, a young man of twenty-two embarking on a day of ordinary business, with no reason to suppose the life of perpetual anticipation and apprehension which he had endured since childhood was about to come to an end. The message contained in that ‘coarse, white-brown paper’ changed all that, turning him into the ruler of one of the most powerful nations in the world. ‘A most extraordinary thing is just happened to me,’ he scribbled breathlessly in a letter he wrote immediately after receiving the news.2 He was right. His long apprenticeship was over. He was king at last, and the mission for which he had been preparing himself for so many years could now begin in earnest.
*
The prospects for the new reign looked exceptionally bright. ‘No British monarch,’ the diarist Horace Walpole later declared, ‘has ascended the throne with so many advantages as George III.’3 The new king was very fortunate in his timing. Had his predecessor died just a few years earlier, Walpole’s bullish optimism would have been inconceivable. Since the mid-1750s, Britain had been embroiled in a territorial struggle between the monarchies of Europe which, by 1756, had metamorphosed into a conflict of international proportions. During the Seven Years War, in North America, the Caribbean and India, the British fought the French in a clash of would-be global superpowers to establish strategic mastery over whole continents. Things started badly for the British, but with the appointment of the buccaneering William Pitt as first (later known as ‘prime’) minister in 1757, the tide was decisively turned. In the course of a year, the French surrendered valuable sugar-producing islands in the West Indies, lost the Battle of Quebec, which challenged their cherished pre-eminence in Canada, and saw their fleet decisively beaten by the Royal Navy at Quiberon Bay. It was hardly surprising that 1759 became known as ‘the year of victories’. As news of fresh triumphs continued to roll in, even the British themselves seemed somewhat taken aback by the scale and speed of their achievement. When the French capitulated at Pondicherry in 1761, which effectively forced them out of India, Walpole was not sure he could absorb any more success. ‘I don’t know how the Romans did, but I cannot support two victories every week.’4
Britain’s confidence on the international stage was mirrored by a similarly robust sense of self-worth at home. César de Saussure, a Swiss traveller who visited Britain in 1727, was struck even then by the unshakeable sense of pride the British displayed in themselves and all their works: ‘I do not think that there is a people more prejudiced in its own favour than the British people. They look upon foreigners in general with contempt and think nothing is done as well elsewhere as it is in their own country.’5 The British had no difficulty in identifying the source of their good fortune: their political liberty, guaranteed to them by birthright and history, and enshrined in a constitutional settlement which protected them equally from the despotism of absolutist kings and the anarchy of the mob. De Saussure observed that the English ‘value this gift more than all the joys of life, and would sacrifice everything to retain it’. Nor was this passionate attachment confined to the political classes. Even the poor, who could not vote, ‘will give you to understand that there is no country in the world where such perfect freedom may be enjoyed as in England’.6
Liberty was not an unmixed blessing, however. Whilst foreign visitors found much to admire in the constitutional freedoms the British enjoyed, they were far more ambivalent when confronted with the impact of these ideas on the mass of the population. The assertive, aggressive, unapologetic behaviour of the urban poor, particularly in London, shocked observers used to more decorous (or more cowed) communities. De Saussure thought ordinary Londoners disrespectful, rowdy and threatening, ‘of a very brutal and insolent nature, and very quarrelsome’. He was horrified by their habitual drunkenness and casual violence, but was most disturbed by their lack of respect for their social superiors. He noted – perhaps as a result of painful personal experience – that a finely dressed man, especially one ‘with a plume in his hat or his hair tied in a bow’, risked verbal abuse and worse if he walked alone through the poorer streets. On holidays such as Lord Mayor’s Day, ‘He is sure, not only of being jeered at and being be-spattered with mud, but, as likely as not, dead dogs and cats will be thrown at him, for the mob makes a provision beforehand of these playthings, so that they may amuse themselves with them on the great day.’7
The energetically expressed opinions of the crowd frequently went far beyond contempt for the sartorial pretensions of the rich. Mobilised in large numbers, the freeborn Englishman was given to demonstrations of popular feeling that were often violent. Issues of political and religious controversy (particularly those which were thought to undermine the dual foundations of British freedom – the Protestant settlement and a limited monarchy) brought men and women on to the streets to make their views loudly known. Throughout the eighteenth century, the threat of disorder and disturbance was as much a part of the life of British politics as the parliamentary vote. As they went about the process of government, the great and the good were abused, threatened and sometimes physically manhandled; parades were staged, effigies burnt, stones thrown, windows broken, carriages overturned, property destroyed; there were injuries and sometimes deaths. The practice of liberty could be a rough business on the streets of George III’s Britain.
If Britain in 1760, was a volatile and sometimes intimidating place, it was also an increasingly wealthy one. Almost every visitor commented on the general air of comfortable prosperity that manifested itself in the clean and well-appointed private houses, the luxurious inns and, above all, in the quality of the roads. Unlike most European highways, these were well engineered and very extensive, linking not just the great cities, but smaller market towns and villages. They were paid for by tolls, and regularly maintained. Foreigners were amazed to discover that travel, such an ordeal everywhere else, had in large areas of England become a leisurely communal pleasure. One bemused observer noted that even on a Sunday evening, the r
oads outside London were packed with people on the move, visiting, travelling, or simply taking the air. ‘Carriages of every kind … succeeded each other without interruption and with such rapidity that the whole picture looked like magic; it certainly showed a degree of wealth and extent of population, of which one had no notion in France.’8
From the moment of their arrival, travellers to Britain were struck by the sheer busyness of the place. They were astonished by the air of perpetual activity, not just on the roads, but in the teeming streets; in the ports dominated by the masts of tightly packed ships; on the new canal systems, thronged with burdened barges; in the parks and pleasure gardens, where rich and poor mingled in huge numbers in pursuit of a good time. In fact, mid-eighteenth-century Britain had yet to experience the rapid growth in population that would see its towns and cities grow to unprecedented size in the next hundred years. There were around 7.5 million people living in England, Scotland and Wales in 1750. France, a much larger country, supported far greater numbers; in the same year, its population reached 25 million. The universal impression of Britain as a crowded, bustling community arose less from the absolute numbers of its inhabitants than from a far more significant development – the extraordinary size and influence of its capital city.
Although Britain was not yet a heavily populated country, it was already a strongly metropolitan one. London doubled in size between 1600 and 1800; by the end of the seventeenth century, it was the largest city in western Europe. By 1750, only 2.5 per cent of Frenchmen lived in Paris; in comparison, London housed 11 per cent of the population.9 An unprecedented proportion of Britons were Londoners, whether by birth or immigration. Still more had some experience of metropolitan life, even if they subsequently left it behind them. It has been calculated that one in six of the population of mid-eighteenth-century Britain had lived in London at some stage in their lives.10 The magnetic attraction of the capital was overwhelming, especially to foreign visitors. Most travellers went straight there, and few ventured beyond the southern counties which were already becoming the capital’s dependent hinterlands. Their experiences were dominated by the time they spent in the capital, which shaped profoundly their perceptions of the country as a whole.
The lure of London was not confined to foreigners. Like so many other ambitious young men of the time, James Boswell was convinced that the only proper existence for an eager striver like himself was one lived to the full in London. He could not wait to leave his native Edinburgh behind and embrace all the possibilities London offered. Arriving at its outskirts in 1762, he was beside himself with anticipation, declaring that ‘I was all life and joy!’ As his carriage descended Highgate Hill, ‘I gave three huzzas and we went briskly in.’11 It was Boswell’s great patron Samuel Johnson – himself a grateful emigrant from the staid Midlands – who famously linked the appetite for London’s pleasures to the enjoyment of life itself. From his first arrival in town, Boswell did all he could to demonstrate the truth of Johnson’s observation. Subject headings from the index to the London Journal that Boswell wrote during his stay between November 1762 and August 1763 give a taste of the capital’s gamey appeal: ‘Artists exhibitions, billiards, bleeding, Bow St magistrates court, card-playing, catch singing, circulating library, cock-fighting, concert, damning a play, Guards on parade, horseback rides, intrigues, Newgate prison, prostitution, royal menagerie, Mrs Salmon’s waxworks, surgeons and their fees, Tyburn, execution at, watermen rowing for prizes.’12
London’s reputation as the place where anything was on offer and where everything seemed achievable was then, as it is now, the key to much of its pungent attraction. But it promised far more than entertaining diversions. The growth of the capital was driven by the extraordinary number of roles it performed. It was the focus of the nation’s politics. The king lived there, it was where Parliament assembled, and it was there that the political classes expected to fight their battles and win their arguments. At court at St James’s, in the government offices at Whitehall, the debating chambers at Westminster, they planned their strategies and marshalled their supporters; in the conversations of the coffee houses and taverns, in the great mansions of aristocratic grandees and sometimes on the volatile, riotous streets, the successes and failures of their policies were forcibly and mercilessly assessed. London was also a magnet for anyone interested in the making and management of that other great lever of power: money. The capital was home to Europe’s most sophisticated banking system, and to the busiest, most innovative and ambitious financial markets in the world. The wealthy moneymen of the City of London – known derisively as ‘Cits’, whose nouveau-riche antics were ruthlessly caricatured by contemporary satirists – had long overtaken the Dutch as the brokers, bankers and insurers of international choice. But London’s commerce went far beyond the buying and selling of money. It was a thriving market place for the selling of goods as well as services. It was a great port, a major destination for shipping, whose crowded forests of masts packed into the Thames docks astonished foreign visitors and were a striking visual reminder of the other great preoccupation of eighteenth-century Britons: trade.
The whole of Europe benefited from an upturn in international trade in the middle years of the eighteenth century, but no nation did so with such spectacular results as Britain. British merchants dealt in a vast and ever-expanding range of goods. New essentials – such as tea, coffee and sugar – came into the country, whilst a host of exports – from textiles to metalwares to Josiah Wedgwood’s competitively priced china – flowed out.
Other British entrepreneurs undertook a darker business. Slavery was ‘one of the staple trades of Englishmen’, and the great ports of Bristol and Liverpool were largely built on its tainted dividends.13 The huge returns generated by such ventures, whether trading in people or in things, ramped up confidence, creating a perfect storm of enthusiasm for the very idea of commerce itself. ‘There never was,’ observed Samuel Johnson, ‘from earliest ages, a time in which trade so much engaged the attention of mankind, or commercial gain was sought after with such general emulation.’14 In Britain this was experienced with particular intensity; the nation’s sense of itself as a great trading nation was, in the mid-eighteenth century, firmly and irrevocably embedded in its identity as a free and enterprising people. Part of the appeal was a simple one: trade made a great number of investors a great deal of money, but it played a role in the construction of an idea of Britishness that went far beyond the advantage of individual profit. The fruits of commercial enterprise were widely believed to underwrite all the constitutional advantages which made Britain so specially favoured among nations. The private wealth it generated, which could not be taken away by taxation unless approved by Parliament, acted as a bulwark against the ambitions of despotic power at home. A poor and hungry people was not a free people, and was easily corrupted by the bribes or threats of overmighty rulers. The profits of trade paid for a strong navy, which kept the seas safe for British exports abroad, but, unlike a standing army, could never be used to threaten the integrity of domestic politics. It delivered a prosperity which, as early economists already understood, kept the wheels and ploughs of industry turning. There was no aspect of the distinctive British way of life which it did not touch. It was little wonder that at every convivial supper or political gathering of the period, once a toast had been drunk to the king, it was the invocation ‘To trade’s increase!’ that was greeted with the most heartfelt and passionate sense of shared feeling.
The wealth produced from the profits of trade was to be seen in all the great commercial centres of Britain – Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow – which expanded rapidly in the 1760s and beyond. The influence of new money was also evident in the development of pleasure resorts such as Bath and Cheltenham, towns which existed largely as a way to spend profits made elsewhere. Then as now, it was through property – the building, designing and furnishing of houses – that individual prosperity found its most visible expression. These were the years in w
hich the urban centres of Britain were rebuilt and re-imagined as the rich, the genteel and the polite moved surely and steadily out of the old city quarters, leaving behind their uncomfortable proximity with dirty trades and the insolent poor, constructing for themselves new houses built in terraces and squares, on clean, classical lines, punctuated by parks and gardens. Across the monied hotspots of Britain, the process was endlessly and elegantly replicated, from Edinburgh to Dublin to Newcastle, creating a vision of town life whose ordered, light and spacious appeal endures to this day.
The changes to the landscape of mid-eighteenth-century life were not confined to the cities. There was as yet little obvious sign of the revolution in industrial production that would transform Britain out of all recognition during George III’s long reign. In the valleys of Coalbrookdale and the iron foundries of Wales, in the workshops of the Midlands and the mills of Lancashire, new technologies were being developed – engines, looms and furnaces – which would recast the relationship between humanity and the natural world, ushering in production on a hitherto unimaginable scale; but it would be at least another twenty years before these became the dominant and visible signature of British economic expansion.
But for most contemporaries, it was the farm, not the factory, which, after trade, was seen as the most forceful engine of change. For over a generation, it had been improvements in agriculture which had underpinned prosperity. The green, rural countryside that forms such an elegiac backdrop to so much Georgian art was in fact one of the most intensively managed landscapes in Europe. The application of scientific methods to farming – especially new fertilisation techniques which overcame the need to let fields lie fallow for years at a time – transformed crop yields and increased profits, providing a tempting incentive to consolidate smaller holdings into larger and more efficient businesses. For some, the result of these changes was impoverishment: families who had once owned small plots of land were forced off them and into the day labour market, subject to the fluctuating needs of the season and the whims of the farmer’s overseer. For others, the result was cheaper food and much more of it. This left them with more disposable income to spend; for perhaps the first time in history, significant numbers of ordinary people had money to buy goods beyond the basic necessities of life. Their purchases in turn put more money into the hands of those who made the things they bought, and the outcome was a steady but significant increase in both the wealth and buying power of ‘the poor and middling sorts’.
The Strangest Family Page 2