Augusta knew, as did almost everyone else in the political world, that her eldest son was not making the progress expected of him: ‘His education had given her much pain. His book-learning she was no judge of, but she supposed it small or useless.’66 She thought her sons had not been well served by their instructors. Bishop Hayter may have been ‘a mighty learned man’, but he did not seem to Augusta ‘to be very proper to convey knowledge to children; he had not the clearness she thought necessary … his thoughts seemed to be too many for his words’.67 She told Dodington that she had repeatedly attempted to challenge Lord Harcourt directly about what was happening, but he simply avoided her. She finally cornered him one night at St James’s, ‘and got between the door and him, and took him by the coat’; even then the slippery earl escaped her grasp with a platitude. She disliked Harcourt, not only for his elusiveness, but because he ‘always spoke to the children of their 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.
*
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 d
aughter 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 was ideally suited to his faraway, chilly home. ‘His disposition,’ one remarked, ‘was naturally retired and severe.’78 Others mocked his pomposity and high opinion of himself, his ‘theatrical air of the greatest importance’, his ‘look and manner of speaking’ which, regardless of the subject, ‘was equally pompous, slow and sententious’.79 On his island, Bute pursued the literary and scientific studies that were the mark of the aristocratic eighteenth-century intellectual, including ‘natural philosophy, mines, fossils, a smattering of mechanics, a little metaphysics’. His enemies claimed that this was all typical self-aggrandisement and that he had in fact ‘a very false taste in everything’.80 It was true that Bute was something of an intellectual dilettante, but in the field of botany, which was his great passion, he possessed real authority. His nine-volume Botanical Tables Containing the Families of British Plants, completed in 1785, created a system of classification that was a genuine contribution to scholarship.
In 1746, Bute left his island and headed south, hoping perhaps to improve his financial prospects. Once in London, he was soon noticed, but it was not the power of his mind that attracted attention. ‘Lord Bute, when young possessed a very handsome person,’ recalled the politician and diplomat Nathaniel Wraxall, ‘of which advantage he was not insensible; and he used to pass many hours a day, as his enemies asserted, occupied in contemplating the symmetry of his own legs, during his solitary walks by the Thames.’81 Bute’s portraits – in which his legs are indeed always displayed to advantage – confirm that he was a very attractive man. Tall, slim and with a dark-eyed intensity of expression, it is not hard to see why he was so sought after. It may have been his looks that caught the eye of the Prince of Wales. It was said that Bute first met Frederick at Egham races, when the prince invited him in from a rainstorm to join the royal party at cards. Soon he was a regular attendee at all the prince’s parties, and had unbent sufficiently to play the part of Lothario in one of Frederick’s private theatrical performances. The prince seemed to enjoy his company, and Bute was admitted to the inner circle of his court. Walpole asserted that Frederick eventually grew tired of Bute’s pretensions, ‘and a little before his death, he said to him, “Bute, you would make an excellent ambassador in some proud little court where there is nothing to do.”’82 But whatever his occasional frustrations, Frederick thought enough of the earl to make him a Lord of the Bedchamber in his household, and it was only the prince’s sudden demise that seemed to put an end to Bute’s ambitions, as it did to those of so many others.
After Frederick’s death, Bute stayed in contact with his widow. Augusta shared his botanical interests, and he advised her on the planting of her gardens at Kew. He is never mentioned in Dodington’s diary, perhaps because Dodington correctly identified him as a rival for Augusta’s confidence. As the years passed, Bute’s influence grew and grew, until, by 1755, he had supplanted Dodington and all other contenders for the princess’s favour. He had also won over her son, and without telling anyone, least of all the king, Augusta quietly instructed Bute to begin acting as George’s tutor. For all his experience in the ways of courts, Waldegrave, the official incumbent, seems to have had no idea what was happening until it was too late. Once he realised just how thoroughly he had been supplanted, Waldegrave was determined to leave with as much dignity as he could muster. The king pressed Waldegrave to stay. He was resolutely opposed to the inclusion of Bute – an intimate of Frederick’s – in the household of his grandson, particularly in a position of such influence; but Waldegrave knew there was nothing to be done. In 1756, the prince reached the age of eighteen and could no longer be treated as a child. Reluctantly, the king bowed to the inevitable, and Bute was appointed Groom of the Stole, head of the new independent establishment set up for George. To show his displeasure, the king refused to present Bute with the gold key that was the badge of his new office, but gave it to the Duke of Grafton – who slipped it into Bute’s pocket and told him not to mind.
When Horace Walpole wrote his highly partisan account of the early reign of George III, he maintained that there was far more to Bute’s appointment than anyone had realised at the time; it was, he claimed, the opening act in a plot aimed to do nothing less than suborn the whole constitution. In Walpole’s version of events, Augusta and Bute – ‘a passionate, domineering woman and a favourite without talents’ – conspired together to bring down the established political settlement. They intended first to indoctrinate the supine heir with absolutist principles, and then to marginalise him by ensuring his isolation from the world. All this was to be achieved in the most gradual and surreptitious manner. Ignorant and manipulated, George would remain as titular head of state; but behind him, real power would reside in the hands of Bute and Augusta. To add an extra frisson to a story already rich in classical parallels, Walpole insisted that Augusta and Bute were lovers, ‘his connection with the princess an object of scandal’. Elsewhere he was more blunt, declaring: ‘I am as much convinced of an amorous connexion between Bute and the princess dowager as if I had seen them together.’83
Related with all the passion he could muster, in Walpole’s hands this proved to be a remarkably potent narrative. For nearly two hundred years, until interrogated and revised by the work of twentieth-century historians, it was to influence thinking about George’s years as Prince of Wales and as a young king; and the reputations of Bute and Augusta are still coloured by Walpole’s bilious account of their alleged actions and motives. But in writing the Memoirs, Walpole’s purpose was scarcely that of a disinterested historian. First and foremost, he wrote to make a political point. Walpole was a Whig, passionately opposed to what he saw as the autocratic principles embraced by his Tory opponents, who, he had no doubt, desired nothing so much as to restore the pretensions and privileges of the deposed Stuarts. He was, he said, not quite a republican, but certainly favoured ‘a most limited monarchy’, and was perpetually on the lookout for evidence of plots hatched by the powerful and unscrupulous to undermine the hard-won liberties of free-born Britons. To that extent, the Memoirs, couched throughout in a tone of shrill outrage quite unlike Walpole’s accustomed smooth, ironic style, are best considered as a warning of what might happen rather than an account of what did – a chilling fable of political nightmare designed to appal loyal constitutionalists. Less portentously, Walpole also wrote to pay off a grudge. He considered he had been wronged by Bute, who had refused to grant him a sinecure Walpole believed he was owed: ‘I was I confess, much provoked by this … and took occasion of fomenting ill humour against the favourite.’84
Much of what resulted from this incendiary combination of intentions was simply nonsense, and often directly contradicted what Walpole had himself written in earlier days. In truth, there was no plot; Augusta was not ‘ardently fond of power’; neither she nor Bute was scheming to overturn the constitution; and it is extremely unlikely that they were lovers. But if the central proposition of Walpole’s argument was a fiction, that did not mean that everything he wrote was pure invention. The Memoirs exerted such a powerful appeal because Walpole drew on existing rumours that were very widely believed at the time; and because, sometimes, beneath Walpole’s wilder assertions there lay buried a tiny kernel of truth.
Thus, Walpole seemed on sure ground when describing the isolation in which George
had been brought up, and the extraordinary precautions taken to keep him away from wider intercourse with the world. He was correct in his assertion that much of this policy had been driven by Augusta. He was wrong about her motives – the extreme retirement she imposed on her son was a protective cordon sanitaire, not a covert means of dominating him – but the prince’s isolation was observable to everyone in the political world, and of as much concern to Augusta’s few allies as it was to her enemies. Walpole was also right to assert that within the secluded walls of Kew and Leicester House, the future shape of George’s kingship was indeed the subject of intense discussion; but these reflections were directed towards an outcome very different from Walpole’s apocalyptic image of treasonous constitutional conspiracy. Finally, he was accurate in his suspicion that there was a passionate relationship at the heart of the prince’s household. But it was not, in fact, the one he went on to describe with such relish.
The stories about Bute and Augusta had been in circulation long before Walpole’s Memoirs appeared. Waldegrave, who never forgot or forgave the way he was humiliatingly ejected from his post around the prince, seems to have been the origin of many of them. ‘No one of the most inflammable vengeance, or the coolest resentment could harbour more bitter hatred than he did for the king’s mother and favourite,’ wrote Walpole with a hint of appalled admiration.85 For the rest of her life, as a result of these rumours, Augusta was mercilessly pilloried as a brazen adulteress; in newspapers, pamphlets, and above all in satirical caricatures, she was depicted as Bute’s mistress. One print showed her as a half-naked tightrope walker, skirt hitched up to her thighs, suggestively penetrated by a pole with a boot (a play on Bute’s name) attached to it. It was hardly surprising that Prince George was horrified ‘by the cruel manner’ in which his mother was treated, ‘which I will not forget or forgive till the day of my death’.86
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