The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  Horace Walpole thought Caroline’s ‘resolution’ was as strong as her understanding – and left to herself, it seems unlikely that she would ever have given up her demands for her children’s return – but she was undermined by the person from whom she might have expected the most support. The prince, tempted by the offer of the substantial income Walpole had squeezed out of the king, and an apparently honourable way out of the political wilderness, was prepared to compromise, and, despite his wife’s opposition, accepted terms that did not include the restitution of his daughters. He and Caroline would be allowed to visit the girls whenever they wished, but they were to remain living with their grandfather at St James’s Palace. Caroline was devastated. The courtier Lady Cowper witnessed her grief: ‘She cried and said, “I see how these things go; I must be the sufferer at last, and have no power to help myself; I can say, since the hour that I was born, that I have never lived a day without suffering.”’52

  Caroline’s outburst said as much about her future prospects as her present unhappiness. Her husband had demonstrated in the most painful way possible that he lacked her capacity both for deep feeling and for consistent, considered action. It was not that George did not love his daughters – he was genuinely distressed by their absence, and felt the loss of their company – but he was not prepared to sacrifice all his interests on their behalf. Nor, much as he loved his wife, would he allow her openly to dictate how he should behave in the public sphere. It was a hard lesson that Caroline took much to heart. Even on matters that touched them in the very core of their being, the prince could not necessarily be depended upon to do either the right or the politic thing. That did not make her abandon the partnership to which she had committed when she married him, but she was compelled to accept that what could not be achieved by the open alliance of equals might be much better delivered by management and manipulation.

  The king expressed a similar view when the reconciliation was finally achieved, and the prince was formally received by his father in a ceremony that reminded Lady Cowper of ‘two armies in battle array’. George I saw his son privately for only a painful ten minutes, but devoted over an hour to haranguing his daughter-in-law on her failures. ‘She could have made the prince better if she would,’ he declared; and he hoped she would do so from now on. Caroline had reached much the same conclusion. For the next twenty years, she did all she could to ensure that her husband was encouraged and persuaded to follow paths that she believed served the best interests of their crown. By the time Lord Hervey watched her do it, she had turned it into a fine art. ‘She knew … how to instil her own sentiments, whilst she affected to receive His Majesty’s; she could appear convinced whilst she was controverting, and obedient when she was ruling; by this means, her dexterity and address made it impossible for anybody to persuade him what was truly the case, and that while she was seemingly in every occasion giving up her opinion to his, she was always in reality turning his opinion and bending his will to hers.’53

  In one sense, it was not an unsuccessful policy. Her patience and self-effacement ensured that Caroline was able to achieve much of what she wanted in her management of her husband. Above all, she preserved the unity of their partnership. Throughout all their tribulations, in private and in public, she strained every sinew to prevent any permanent rupture dividing them. Whether the threat came from a discontented father, a predatory mistress, an unsatisfactory child, or a potentially disruptive politician, Caroline devoted all her skills to neutralising any possibility of a serious breach between them. It was clear to her that they were infinitely stronger as a like-minded couple than as competing individuals who would inevitably become the focus for antagonistic and destructive opposition. But although in later years she took some pride in the tireless efforts she had directed to maintaining their solidarity, she was aware that it had not been achieved without cost. To be locked into a pattern of perpetual cozening and cajolery was wounding and exhausting for her and demeaning for her husband. It kept them together; but it was not the best foundation upon which to base a marriage. In the end, despite the strength of the feelings that united them, both she and George were, in their different ways, warped and belittled by it.

  As Caroline had feared, her elder daughters were never restored to her while the old king lived. She went on to have other children: William in 1721, Mary in 1723 and finally Louisa in 1724. But it was not until George I died, in 1727, from a stroke suffered while travelling through the German countryside he loved, that Anne, Amelia and Caroline came back to live with their parents again. By then it was too late to establish the stable home life that Caroline had hoped to provide for them. Before they had been taken from her, she had been a careful mother to her girls. ‘No want of care, or failure or neglect in any part of their education can be imputed to the princess,’ her husband had written in one of his many fruitless appeals to his father.54 Caroline’s daughters would never waver in their devotion to her; but their long estrangement from their father – and the constant criticism of his behaviour which they heard from their grandfather for nearly a decade – meant that on their return his eldest daughters regarded him with distinctly sceptical eyes. When they saw for themselves how he treated their mother – the strange mixture of obsession and disdain, passion and resentment, respect and rudeness, the destructive combination of warring emotions that had come to characterise George’s attitude to his wife – any tenderness they once had for him soon evaporated. It was hardly an attractive vision of domestic happiness with which to begin a new reign.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Passionate Partnership

  GEORGE AND CAROLINE WERE AT their summer retreat at Richmond Lodge on 25 June 1727, when Robert Walpole arrived with the news of George I’s death. It was the middle of a hot day, and the royal couple were asleep; their attendants were extremely reluctant to wake them, but George was eventually persuaded to emerge from his bedroom and discover that he was now king.

  It was only seven months since George’s estranged mother had died in the castle at Ahlden. Although George could never bring himself to speak about Sophia Dorothea, he did make a single gesture towards her memory that suggests much of what he felt but could not say. The day after the news arrived of his father’s death, the courtier Lady Suffolk told Walpole she was startled ‘at seeing hung up in the new queen’s dressing room a whole-length portrait of a lady in royal robes; and in the bed-chamber a half-length of the same person, neither of which Lady Suffolk had seen before’.1 The pictures were of Sophia Dorothea. Her son must have salvaged them from the general destruction of all her images ordered by his father a generation before. ‘The prince had kept them concealed, not daring to produce them in his father’s lifetime.’ Now George was king, and his mother was restored – albeit without comment – to a place of honour within the private heart of the family. Walpole heard that if she had lived long enough to witness his accession, George ‘had purposed to have brought her over and declared her queen dowager’. Her death had denied him the opportunity to release his mother from her long captivity, to act as the agent of her freedom. Perhaps it was some small satisfaction to see her image where he had been unable to see her person; it was certainly a gesture of defiance towards the man who kept her from him, and a declaration of loyalty and affection towards his mother that he had never been able to make while his father lived.

  The new king and queen were crowned in October, in a typically eighteenth-century ceremony that combined grandeur with chaos. Tickets were sold in advance for the event, and small booths erected around Westminster for the selling of coffee to the anticipated crowds.2 The Swiss traveller de Saussure went to watch and noted that it took two hours for the royal procession to wend its way to the abbey. Handel’s Zadok the Priest – which would be performed at every subsequent coronation – was given its first airing in the course of the ceremony, at which George and Caroline appeared sumptuously clothed and loaded down with jewellery, some of it, as it later appeared, borrowed for t
he day. The choristers were not considered to have acquitted themselves well – at one point, they were heard to be singing different anthems. After the ceremony was over and the grander participants had left, de Saussure watched as a hungrier crowd moved methodically over the remains of the event, carrying away anything that could be either eaten or sold.3

  *

  By the time John, Lord Hervey, joined George and Caroline’s court in 1730, the couple had been on the throne for three years, and married for twenty-five. The patterns of their lives, both as king and queen and husband and wife, were thus very well established when Hervey began to chronicle them. Hervey’s official court title was vice chamberlain. He later described his job dismissively as one that required him to do no more than ‘to carry candles and set chairs’, but in practice, it was a far from nominal office, giving him direct responsibility for the management and upkeep of all the royal palaces. It certainly did not imply any shortcomings in social status. Hervey was extremely well connected, heir to the Earl of Bristol, and an aristocrat of unimpeachable Whig principles. He was also a man who made a career from defying expectations and outraging traditional moralists. There was nothing conventional about any aspect of Hervey’s life.

  Even in a family considered remarkable for the production of extraordinary people – Lady Mary Wortley Montagu once declared that ‘this world consists of men, women and Herveys’ – he stood out above the rest. He married one of the most beautiful women of his generation, and had eight children by her; he conducted casual affairs with a host of other fashionable ladies of the court; but the great love of his life was another man. His sexuality was a barely concealed secret. Slight and slender, he had been considered outstandingly attractive as a young man. In later life, he used cosmetics to enhance his fading looks, with results that were not always successful. Inevitably, Hervey attracted attention, not all of it admiring. The Duchess of Marlborough once referred scornfully to his ‘painted face with not a tooth in his head’.4 In spiteful verse, Alexander Pope described him as an ‘amphibious thing’, ‘a painted child of dirt that stinks and stings’. He was caricatured everywhere in prose as ‘Lord Fanny’. One of his many enemies described him as a ‘delicate little hermaphrodite, a pretty little Master Miss’.5

  Perhaps it was the complexities of his own life that gave Hervey such a profound curiosity for the oddities of others. Certainly, it seems to have been what kept him so firmly in George and Caroline’s orbit for so many years. His warmest relationship was with Caroline, with whom he spent nearly all his time. He was a clever man, well read and accomplished, equally at home in the worlds of politics, ideas and culture. Caroline, starved of intellectual companionship, found him stimulating and amusing, enjoying his dry, mordant humour which closely reflected her own. Both loved to gossip, and could be unsparing in the cruelty of the comments they directed at those they disliked. The queen indulged her favourite to an extraordinary degree, encouraging his frankness and sharing some of her most intimate thoughts with him. Alone among her courtiers, he was encouraged to contradict her. According to his own account, she soon came to consider Hervey as indispensable to her happiness, calling him ‘her child, her pupil and her charge’.6

  Although Hervey’s principal loyalty was always to Caroline, he was just as interested in her husband, who seems to have regarded the constant presence in his household of this unusual figure entirely benignly. For all his loudly declared prejudices, George II was not, it seems, much troubled by the private lives of those around him. Perhaps he simply did not notice, as his self-absorption gave him little interest in contemplating the behaviour of others. In this, he was very different from Hervey, who found the family he lived with endlessly fascinating. Throughout his time at court he kept a detailed journal of everything that he witnessed there. He later assembled the entries into a memoir that contained everything he thought important or illuminating about the years he had spent in such intimate proximity with the royal family. The result was a three-volume work dominated by two overpowering central figures. Hervey records in compelling detail, over nearly a thousand pages, the words and actions of George and Caroline, who emerge as the flawed anti-heroes of his writings, appallingly larger than life; and, as Hervey effortlessly demonstrated, caught in a web of deceit, obsession and self-destruction that bound them together just as powerfully as it destroyed them. Hervey was George and Caroline’s Boswell; the work he left behind him is a portrait of the dark and often bitter thing their marriage had become.

  Hervey did not pretend to be objective in his judgements. He was always, at heart, Caroline’s man, magnifying her good qualities – especially her wit and intelligence – whilst contrasting them with the boorish outbursts of her irritable husband. George is not well served by Hervey’s account of him, which makes much of his bumptiousness and self-regard, and has less to say about his more admirable characteristics: his diligence, his bravery, his occasional flashes of genuine charity. And yet for all the bright colouration of Hervey’s rendering, neither George nor Caroline emerges from his pages as a caricature. George is depicted as a complicated figure, defensive of his own virtues, naively unaware of the impression his behaviour makes on others, exacting, punctilious, somewhat of a bore; but also honest, pragmatic, and capable of considerable tenderness when his emotions were engaged. Above all, Hervey captured the deep ambivalence of his feelings for his wife – at once passionately in love and yet uneasy and ashamed at the degree of his dependency on her.

  In Caroline, Hervey depicted a woman of strong and subtle intellect, the possessor of a forceful mind too often bent to trivial purposes. She could be wickedly funny, and perceptive – entertaining company for those who could keep up and were not provoked by her sharp tongue. This was the Caroline whom Hervey adored, the queenly wit who could cap a classical quotation whilst laughing unashamedly at his gossip. But he was not afraid to record a steelier side of her personality, a brusque hardness that sometimes shocked even the worldly Hervey with its cruel edge. The power of her hatred impressed itself upon him as much as the strength of her mind. And yet it was her situation that most evoked his pity: a woman who had concealed the cleverness that defined her beneath a lifelong subjection to the smallest and most mundane of her husband’s wishes, the better to manipulate him into doing what she wished; and who, as a result, became as much her husband’s victim as his puppet master.

  Hervey had no doubt that, whatever it had cost her to establish it, Caroline’s influence extended way beyond the intimate family circle. As soon as George II was crowned, ‘the whole world began to feel that it was her will which was the sole spring on which every movement in the court turned; and though His Majesty lost no opportunity to declare that the queen never meddled with his business, yet nobody believed it … since everybody knew that she not only meddled with business, but directed everything that fell under that name, either at home or abroad’.7 Horace Walpole’s account seems to confirm Hervey’s assertion that Caroline was indeed a discreet but efficient manipulator of influence, a hidden power behind the throne. Walpole asserted that his father, Sir Robert, would often discuss matters of policy privately with the queen before raising them with the king. Both understood the importance of concealing their machinations from George, who was extremely sensitive to any suggestion of interference from his wife. If Walpole arrived for an audience with the king when Caroline was present, she would curtsey politely and offer to leave. Walpole argued that George was entirely deceived by this carefully choreographed piece of theatre, declaring naively to his first minister: ‘there, you see how much I am governed by my wife, as they say I am’. Caroline played her own part to perfection. ‘Oh sir,’ she replied, ‘I must indeed be vain to pretend to govern Your Majesty.’8 But as George’s comments reveal, the idea that it was Caroline and not he who drove forward the business of government was not confined to the inner sanctum of the court. With evident satisfaction, Hervey transcribed into his journals a popular poetic jibe that summed up the perc
eived balance of power between George II and his wife:

  You may strut, dapper George, but ’twill all be in vain,

  We know ’tis Queen Caroline and not you that reign –

  You govern no more than Don Philip of Spain,

  Then if you would have us fall down and adore you,

  Lock up your fat spouse, as your dad did before you.9

  Recent scholarship has tended to turn a sceptical eye on some of the more extravagant claims made for Caroline’s role as the éminence grise of British politics. Historians have suggested that both Hervey and Walpole had their own reasons for accentuating her role and diminishing that of her husband; as Caroline’s most devoted admirer, Hervey was keen to elevate her virtues in comparison to what he regarded as the emptier pretensions of her husband. Sir Robert Walpole, too, was strongly identified with Caroline, having allied himself with her very early in her husband’s reign. He had quickly recognised that it was she who exerted the most influence over the king and had worked very hard to recruit her into his orbit. With characteristic bluntness, he later congratulated himself in having taken ‘the right sow by the ear’. Once established as her ally, it suited him to talk up her influence, thus magnifying his own access to the apparent wellsprings of power. It was also perhaps the case that George was unlucky in those areas of policy in which he did excel. The image of George II as an ineffectual ruler, overshadowed by his wife, was made more credible by the relative indifference of so many of his new subjects to those areas in which he exerted genuine influence: military strategy and the complicated politics of princely Germany. Both were of some significance to the exercise of kingship in eighteenth-century Europe; but neither Hervey nor Walpole was particularly interested in them, and until recently, most historians have tended to share their perceptions.