For many sober, conscientious, diligent young men, it was not through such expensive and ephemeral amusements that they hoped to establish their identity and position in the world; it was marriage with some respectable young woman which would allow them truly to come into their own and make their way in life. Marriage was not a burden to be endured, a restraint to be kicked against, but a prize towards which they endlessly planned and schemed. ‘My imagination was excited with pleasurable ideas of what was coming,’ wrote one eager groom for whom the longed-for day was at last in sight; ‘There was not one thing on earth which gave me the slightest anxiety or doubt! Nothing but a delightful anticipation of happiness and independence!’5 The yearning to find the right wife, with whom they could establish a home and raise a family, was, for men like these, an all-consuming desire, its achievement a source of lasting satisfaction.
Their outlook was one with which George III instinctively identified. He was socially conservative, sexually restrained, dutiful, exacting and often painfully self-aware. He was also loyal, decent and hungry for emotional warmth, if supplied on his own terms, and by a woman who would not intimidate or overwhelm him. The template towards which he was drawn, both by his character and his sense of his public mission, placed wedlock at the very pinnacle of human emotional experience. ‘This state,’ wrote the clergyman Wetenhall Wilkes in a bestselling pamphlet first published in 1741, and still in print when George and Charlotte were married twenty years later, ‘is the completest image of heaven we can ever receive in this life, productive of the greatest pleasures we can enjoy on this earth.’6
This was a vision of matrimony in which, whilst considerations of property and money were not ignored, it was the harmony of the couple at its centre that mattered most. It was a union into which both partners entered willingly, with an equal commitment to making it work, a marital joint-enterprise in which husband and wife were both prepared to sacrifice individual needs and desires in order to secure the success of the wider family project. Both were prepared to involve themselves in the interests of the other, since shared tastes and mutually satisfying pursuits were considered to be the strongest bedrock upon which a happy marriage rested. Inside the partnership, the most propitious emotional climate was considered to be one of steady affection rather than volcanic eruptions of feeling. A firm endeavour to please was thought more significant than physical attraction, and generosity of spirit and mildness of temper most important of all.
The degree to which this model of matrimony – once dubbed by academics ‘the companionate marriage’ – was a new phenomenon which emerged in the mid-eighteenth century has been one of the most hotly contested debates in social history in recent years. Little credence is now given to the once widely accepted assertion that, before this date, most marriages were cold, commercial contracts, dominated by financial considerations, arranged by parents, and with little room within their bounds for affection. Nor is it now generally accepted that after about 1750 there was a universal warming up of the married state, with love becoming the principal basis for entering into wedlock. But whilst, in practice, marriage continued to contain within itself examples of success and failure, the concern to get things right, to try to identify the best possible preconditions for a stable and lasting relationship, was an obsessive preoccupation of many eighteenth-century writers, thinkers and moralists.
In the latter years of the eighteenth century, the poets and novelists of the Romantic movement celebrated the wilder transports of feeling as the means by which lovers underwent the most transcendent of human experiences, but an earlier generation took a more sceptical view. Most were concerned to balance the appeal of romantic love with a more pragmatic assessment of what made marriage work. Every mid-century writer offering advice to young people insisted that, despite what novels told them, unbridled passion was not a suitable foundation on which to build a stable relationship. Love, of the more turbulent kind at least, was a transient affair, not to be confused with the more solid virtues of lasting affection. They distrusted what they regarded as disorderly and disruptive emotions. The kind of desire later so powerfully celebrated by the Brontë sisters, which hurtled through ordinary life like a disruptive hurricane, was not at all to the taste of earlier moralists, who disapproved of its intemperate volatility and thought it a most unsuitable basis for the long-haul demands of married life. ‘When you are of an age to think of settling,’ wrote one mother to her daughter in an entirely typical example of maternal advice, ‘let your attentions be placed in a sober, steady, religious man who will be tender and careful of you at all times.’7
A sensible parent would always have preferred the unexciting virtues of a George III – kindly, decent, disciplined – to the febrile glamour of a Grafton. In a society where only the richest and most powerful were able to contemplate divorce, choosing a suitable spouse was a matter of enormous significance. The perils involved in finding the right man is the subject of every one of Jane Austen’s books, whose plots usually turn on the difficulties of distinguishing the genuinely worthy candidate from competitors of greater superficial attraction but less true value. To amplify the pitfalls, her novels usually feature a bitter portrait of an ill-matched couple, with Pride and Prejudice’s Mr and Mrs Bennett perhaps the most poignant example of the destructive effects of the fateful attraction of opposites. As Austen understood, there were no second chances in Georgian marital experience, except those supplied by the capricious agency of death.
If it was a good idea to choose a partner by the application of sense rather than sensibility, it was just as important to have a realistic expectation of what even the best marriage could deliver. A life of uninterrupted bliss was not to be looked for. Those most likely to enjoy the fruits of a successful marriage were those who set a limit on their aspirations for it. Writing to a close friend who had just announced her plans to marry, the bluestocking Elizabeth Carter was certain she was too intelligent to fall into such a trap, observing primly that ‘you have too much sense to form any extravagant and romantic expectations of such a life of rapture as is inconsistent with human nature’. Carter was confident that her friend would enjoy far greater – if perhaps rather chillier – benefits as a result: ‘The sober and steady mutual esteem and affection, from a plan of life regulated upon principles of duty will be yours.’8 Wetenhall Wilkes warned his readers that ‘The utmost happiness we can expect in this world is contentment, and if we aim at anything higher, we shall meet with nothing but grief and disappointment.’9
Most of those to whom Wilkes and his many counterparts directed their arguments were, on the whole, people like themselves: thoughtful, literate, leisured, with some property and income to dispose, with the time and means to make considered decisions about matrimony. They were not poor – for those without assets, marital choices were fewer and starker – but neither were they the great monied magnates who so often considered themselves beyond the reach of regulation and advice. In most cases, it was ‘the middling sort’ who were most engaged, both as practitioners and commentators, in debates about what constituted a good marriage; but even amongst the aristocracy, some partnerships were built upon foundations of which Wilkes and his many supporters would have entirely approved.
William Petty married Sophia Carteret in 1765. He was the Earl of Shelburne, she was an earl’s daughter. They were not quite as rich as the Devonshires, but by any other standards, their income was huge. They owned property in London, Bath and Ireland, and their principal residence was Bowood in Wiltshire, a magnificent country house remodelled by Robert Adam. Within these majestic settings, they carved out for themselves a genuinely loving union, marked by shared interests, kindness and consideration, and, above all, a mutual commitment to the grand marital project.
Shelburne was one of those sober men who had looked forward to wedlock, and had been determined to make his marriage work. Like George III, he had had a difficult childhood, and was determined to create a happier world for his wife an
d children. In his public life, he was an ambitious politician, who was to serve the king briefly as first minister between 1782 and 1783, but in private, he was a thoughtful intellectual with a taste for the classics. In these scholarly pursuits, he found a willing partner in his wife. Sophia had been raised amongst educated women, and liked nothing more than to spend the evenings reading with her husband. Closeted in their apartments, away from the severe grandeur of the principal rooms, the couple jointly made their way through Thucydides or the works of David Hume. In this quiet intimacy, they enjoyed their happiest moments. ‘Spent the whole evening tête-à-tête in my dressing room,’ wrote Sophia in her diary. ‘Nothing can be more comfortable than we have hitherto been.’10 The Shelburnes had two children, but in giving birth to a third, Sophia died, at the age of only twenty-five. The earl never really recovered from her loss. He had carved on her tomb ‘her price was above rubies’. It is impossible not to believe the words came from the heart.
The Shelburne marriage showed that affectionate, mutually supportive marriages were achievable not only by the middle classes. Aristocrats too could aspire to a model of matrimony that placed a loving alliance of husband and wife firmly at its heart. Perhaps the most surprising example of this is to be found in the later life of the Duke of Grafton. After his divorce, he cast off Nancy Parsons and married again. This time, Grafton proved a model husband, fathering twelve children. In 1789, the scandals of two decades before forgotten, he published a pamphlet urging a total reformation in the moral behaviour of the upper classes.
George’s reserved and punctilious character would never have allowed him to follow the examples of the Devonshires or the Graftons, but he knew he would have no difficulty in conforming to the requirements of an alternative vision of conjugal life. The wedded happiness enjoyed by the Shelburnes – bookish, reserved, intimately self-absorbed – was exactly to his taste. This was the pattern he intended to follow in his own marriage, and he had done all he could to ensure that he would achieve it. Although he had no opportunity to get to know his wife before he married her, he sought out a woman whose character seemed likely to suit his own. Like other discerning suitors, he had rejected partners possessed of greater beauty or better connections in favour of a mild, obliging temper. He did this because he hoped his would be no aridly formal arrangement, but, as far as he could ensure it, a genuine union of like minds. He entered the married state eagerly, never doubting for a moment that it was within its bounds that he would achieve lasting happiness. From the outset, he was dedicated to the longest of long terms. Before he had even seen Charlotte, George declared to Bute that he hoped he would be united with her for the rest of their lives.
*
Once safely and irrevocably joined to his new wife, the king set about creating the foundations for their future. They were to start their married life in St James’s Palace, then the principal royal residence in central London. Originally built in the sixteenth century by Henry VIII, it had been subjected to numerous alterations over the years, and by the 1760s was a rambling warren of jumbled styles and tastes. Foreign visitors used to grander royal residences found it unprepossessing on the outside; within, it was neglected and shabby. George himself once referred to it as ‘that dust trap’.11 When Walpole was shown around it in 1758, he was astonished to find Queen Caroline’s bedroom had been left as it had been at the time of her death twenty years before, ‘down to the wood that had been laid for the fire on the day she died’.12
George fitted out a suite of rooms which included a bedchamber for which the royal furniture-makers built ‘a very large mahogany four-post bedstead’ with Corinthian columns. It took seven hundred yards of blue damask to cover the posts and make new valances and curtains. Five new mattresses were also ordered, stuffed with fine wool and the ‘best curled hair’.13 There was no dedicated bathroom, but there was a specially built tub, and in their dressing room the king had placed a selection of soaps, tooth sponges and lavender water. A flannel mat protected the carpets of Charlotte’s closet when the hairdresser puffed powder on to her hair. Carved and gilded stands were bought for ‘large glass basins of gold-fish’ to stand upon; a card table was installed for the queen’s German attendant, Mrs Schwellenberg, who was a keen player, and a small cushion was made for Charlotte’s little dog, Presto, who followed her wherever she went.
From their smartened-up base at St James’s, the young couple sallied out to show themselves to the world. In the early days of their marriage, they went everywhere together. It was a matter of surprise to Continental observers how frequently aristocratic English spouses were to be found in each other’s company. ‘Husband and wife are always together and share the same society,’ noted the French traveller François de La Rochefoucauld somewhat incredulously. ‘The very richest people do not keep more than four or six carriage horses, since they pay their visits together. It would be as ridiculous to do otherwise in England as it would be to go everywhere with your wife in Paris.’14 George and Charlotte went together to a variety of public events. They were regular attendees at the theatre, particularly when the comedies the king preferred were performed. He was said to be ‘in roars of laughter’ when they watched David Garrick star in The Rehearsal. Charlotte loved the opera, and in the week after her marriage, declared her intention of attending productions once a week. When she proved true to her word, the opera’s managers were forced to shift their timetables to accommodate her. Years later, Charlotte was to confide to her brother that she thought the standard of opera in London extremely poor, and that most of the singers sounded like parrots. She wisely kept these thoughts to herself, however, and in public showed nothing but enthusiasm for the musical productions of her newly adopted home.
Walpole thought it was Charlotte’s taste for entertainment that drove much of the couple’s sociability in the first days of their marriage. ‘The queen is so gay that we shall not want sights,’ he wrote, noting that ‘two nights ago she carried the king to Ranelagh’, the more decorous of London’s two pleasure gardens.15 The king’s father had been a frequent visitor, but without the persuasion of his new wife it was unlikely his staider son would have chosen to go. George’s presence there, against his natural inclination to avoid public revelry, was a real declaration of his willingness to please.
Their regular domestic entertainments were more low key, and focussed strongly on family. Once a week, George took his new wife with him on his visits to his mother. On Wednesdays, the queen held a regular concert, in a room that had been specially equipped for musical performance. ‘The queen and Lady Augusta play on the harpsichord and sing, the Duke of York plays on the violincello and Prince William on the flute.’ George did not perform in company, but only in private with Charlotte. ‘The king never plays in concert,’ noted the Duchess of Northumberland, ‘but when they are alone, he sometimes accompanies her on the German flute.’16
George and Charlotte’s shared interests made their moments of privacy all the more valuable to them. Their love of music was one of the strongest bonds between them in these early years. The queen played ‘very prettily’ on the harpsichord and took singing lessons twice a week from Johann Christian Bach, son of the great composer. When the eight-year-old Mozart visited London in 1764, he and Charlotte played a duet together; he later dedicated some of his early sonatas to her. The king and queen were great readers and, like the Shelburnes at Bowood, spent many agreeable hours in George’s growing library. Both were drawn to works of history and theology, and read easily in French and German. As Charlotte’s English improved, she began to add the literature of her new homeland to the European titles she had hitherto enjoyed. The couple even had similar tastes in food. Terrified of succumbing to the family obesity, George was always extremely cautious about the amount he ate; but, like his wife, his natural preference was for simple, hearty meals prepared with the minimum of fuss. In 1762, the Duchess of Northumberland set down in her diary a typical royal menu: ‘Their Majesties’ constant table
at this time was as follows, a soup removed with a large joint of meat and two other dishes such as pie or a broiled fowl and the like.’ Accompaniments included ‘pastry, spinach and sweetbreads, macaroons, scalloped oysters and the like’.17
These private pleasures perhaps seemed all the more precious because they were so rare. From the beginning of their marriage, quiet intimacy was something George and Charlotte had to fight to achieve. Most of their time was spent in full exposure to an intense and unblinking popular curiosity. In the performance of the formal duties that absorbed so much of their time, they were permanently on display; most of their private life was conducted in a semi-public world, where their behaviour was endlessly recorded, dissected and interpreted. The court was full of observers; many of the people closest to the royal couple hurried away from every encounter to place their impressions on paper, to be passed around friends and acquaintances, and discussed yet again at a distance.
St James’s was a perfect embodiment of the contradictions and difficulties that surrounded George and Charlotte’s attempts to carve out a domestic life for themselves. For all George’s attempts to turn it into a home, it remained, first and foremost, a place of public business. All major royal events were held there; but most significantly, it was the venue for the twice-weekly Drawing Rooms that played such a crucial role in the rhythm of elite social and political life. Men and women both attended, in their best clothes, to compete for the notice and approbation of the king and queen. Politicians, military men and even the occasional author went there to further their interests, to demonstrate possession of favour or to attempt to recover it; women to confirm their position in polite society, or to be introduced into it via formal presentation to the queen. In theory, it was an exclusive gathering; in practice, it was very loosely policed, and anyone with the proper court dress and an appropriate air of command could talk their way in. ‘I have got admittance a hundred times in my life,’ boasted the MP George Selwyn, ‘by ordering a door-keeper in a peremptory way to admit two gentlemen who have happened to stand near me in a crowd, and have been astonished at their access and my impudence.’18
The Strangest Family Page 22