The king was very frustrated by his inability to limit admission to the palace to those he thought had a right to be there. Then, in the summer of 1762, an incident occurred that demonstrated the impossibility of securing even the most private places in his life from unauthorised public access. ‘I can’t help troubling my dear friend with a very disagreeable subject,’ he wrote to Lord Bute in July. ‘On Saturday morning, a mean fellow came to [the bedchamber woman-in-waiting] Mrs Brudenell’s room, and took nothing out of her drawers but the key to the queen’s rooms, and made off into the passage.’ Fortunately, he was seized by servants, but they ‘very foolishly released him on restoring it’.19 That night he was found again, lingering outside the queen’s bedchamber. This time he was taken to the guards’ room, where he was questioned. The Duchess of Northumberland reported that ‘he said he came to see the king and queen and not to steal. Dropped some hints about how easy it would be to do the king a mischief. No arms, but an uncommonly long penknife upon him. Asked if he should not have been sorry to have alarmed the queen, he said why should she be alarmed? He meant her no ill … Asked if he should not be sorry to offend the king, said no, he was but a man like himself, and had but one life to lose, no more than he had.’20 George, who would always be phlegmatic when faced with attempts on his own life, was horrified by the implied threat to the queen. ‘If my dear friend sees what may be done,’ he implored Bute, ‘I wish he would order some steps to be taken.’21
In fact, George had concluded some time before that he must move out of St James’s, and had been searching for a home more suitable to the married life he wanted for himself and Charlotte. Walpole had been anxious he might settle at Hampton Court, bringing all the bustle of court life far too close to his own quiet Thames-side house; but the king hated the old Tudor palace, perhaps because it was there that George II was said to have struck him. When it caught fire in 1770, he declared ‘he should not be sorry had it been burnt down’.22 Walpole breathed a sigh of relief: ‘Strawberry Hill will remain in possession of its own tranquillity, and not become a cheesecake house to the palace; all I ask of princes is not to live within five miles of me.’23
Rather than relocating to an existing royal palace, George planned to buy something new and soon fixed upon a house built in 1702, standing in a fine position at the end of The Mall. Built of warm red brick, adorned with lead statues of classical worthies on its roof, and emblazoned on all four walls with mottoes in gold text, Buckingham House was a striking building. Surrounded by fields, it was, as one of its golden texts declared, rus in urbe. It was owned by Sir Charles Sheffield, a descendant of the Duke of Buckingham, who drove a hard bargain. The king paid £28,000 for the lease, a sum considered exorbitant by Lord Talbot, the Lord Steward, who, George observed to Bute, ‘attacked the price given for the new house and everything that regards it’. That George, usually so careful with money, was prepared to lay out so much to secure the property was a measure of its importance to him. ‘Bucks House,’ he explained to Bute, ‘is not meant for a palace, but as a retreat.’24
In many ways, this was George and Charlotte’s first true home, and George began its refurbishment in 1762 with enormous energy and enthusiasm. ‘I am so glad Sir Charles can remove so soon,’ he wrote eagerly to Bute. ‘The gardeners cannot begin too soon; all I want for the present is to have the outward walls planted, and a gravel walk round. I should imagine trees could be brought from Kensington that would nearly do.’25 The gold mottoes, too exuberant for the king’s plain taste, were to be painted over. He was horrified to discover that Sir Charles’s servants had been bribed by the curious to let them see inside before the king and queen moved in and that it was now ‘quite dirty’. Nothing escaped the king’s attention, or diminished his desire to get the job done quickly. Inevitably, he turned to Bute – who in his day job was now George’s first minister – to expedite matters. ‘I send my Dear Friend a list of what is immediately wanted, I beg these things may be immediately put in hand, there is one article I had forgot, that is grates in all rooms that are furnished … I have not touched upon what is necessary for enabling meat to be warmed up in the kitchen as that is an article I am totally unacquainted with.’ It was unlikely the lofty and ascetic Bute would have been able to enlighten him. ‘I cannot lay down my pen,’ the king concluded breathlessly, ‘without afresh recommending dispatch in preparing these things.’26
The result of all these efforts was a house furnished in a style of richly restrained elegance. It sought to blend grandeur with modern comforts, but it could never be described as simple or homely. Like the Shelburnes, George and Charlotte did not consider the pursuit of domestic happiness incompatible with interiors that reflected their elevated status. Walpole heard that the king and queen were ‘stripping the other palaces to furnish’ their new home, and Buckingham House was soon crammed with art treasures. Charlotte’s apartments were laid out on the first floor, the most desirable space in any eighteenth-century house. Her drawing room was decorated in green and gold, the walls lined in a darker green damask specially chosen as a suitable background on which to display the Raphael cartoons, brought from Hampton Court. Elsewhere, the ceiling was decorated with a work by Gentileschi, representing the Muses paying court to Apollo. On the ground floor, the king had built for himself a grand new library and a ‘mathematical room’ which displayed his growing collection of clocks, coins and maps.
More personal touches were provided by the furniture made specially for the new house. The king ordered for Charlotte a music desk ‘with a loose mahogany board to lie on the top, for the queen to draw off’; there were stands for bird cages, two ‘mahogany houses for a turkey monkey’ and a ‘square deal tub’ in which to wash the queen’s dog. There was also ‘a very handsome mahogany bookcase’ that cleverly concealed its true purpose. On one side was a door that, when opened, led discreetly into a hidden water closet.27 Outside, with a view of the fields where the king kept cows and sheep, was a scented carnation garden where the queen sat in warm weather. From the very beginning, the new palace was always strongly associated with Charlotte and her taste, and it was soon known as the Queen’s House, a name it was to keep for the next fifty years.
In 1767, Caroline Girle, who had been among the crowds at the coronation and had since become a royal sightseer of remarkable persistence, ‘went to see what is rather difficult to see at all, the queen’s palace’. In the five years since George and Charlotte had moved in, the new house had become a sophisticated, opulent and comfortable home. Caroline noted the ‘the capital pictures, the finest Dresden and other china, cabinets of more minute curiosities’. Managing to inspect even the queen’s bedroom, she counted twenty-five watches, ‘all highly adorned with jewels’ in a case next to her bed. But what really impressed her was the fact that even though it was March, ‘every room was full of roses, carnations, hyacinths, etc., dispersed in the prettiest manner imaginable in jars and different flower pots and stands’. She was also ‘amazed to find so large a house so warm, but fires, it seems, are kept the whole day, even in closets’.28 Buckingham House might not have presented the most flamboyant face to the world – the exacting La Rochefoucauld thought it was ‘without ornamentation or architectural distinction’ – but inside it was a model of discreet luxury that only the very largest amounts of money could achieve.
Within this setting of restrained richness, George and Charlotte soon established a private routine of extreme simplicity. Whenever they could, they abandoned their elaborate formal court dress for plainer, more comfortable clothes. Charlotte left her hair unpowdered and even persuaded George to abandon his wig. ‘The king and queen’s manner of life was very methodical and regular,’ observed the Duchess of Northumberland. They spent as much time as they could alone together, a state they could best achieve by retreating to their bedroom. ‘Whenever it was in their power, they went to bed by 11 o’clock,’ wrote the duchess, who kept far later hours herself. ‘The necessary woman first warming the bed, th
ey had every night coals, chips etc., set by the chimney and they burnt a lamp in their room and had set by it a small wax taper.’ The couple clearly slept in the same bed together, and seem to have done so for many years. George got up at dawn, as he was to do for the rest of his life. ‘The king’s alarum waked him before five o’clock, when he rose and lighted the fire, and went to bed again until the clock struck five, and by that time, the fire being a little burnt up, he rose and dressed himself, and went into the queen’s dressing room, where he wrote till eight. What he wrote, no one knew.’ When the queen got up and joined her husband, ‘they breakfasted together, and that over, the king went downstairs. Their table was neither sumptuous nor elegant, and they always dined tête-à-tête.’ The king, the duchess noted with amazement, ‘at breakfast drank only one cup of tea and never ate anything’.29
Once the working day began, the king’s time was not his own, and George’s diligent attention to business meant that the hours left unoccupied to spend with Charlotte were limited. But when free to choose, he demonstrated unequivocally that what he really wanted was to be left alone with his wife. His fine home, renovated at huge expense, was designed to offer as much opportunity as possible for the pursuit of contented domestic retirement. There seems little doubt that the king’s feelings for the woman at the centre of this meticulously created world were deep and genuine. When George fell ill in 1762, it was suggested that he leave London to improve his health. He told Bute bluntly this was impossible unless Charlotte accompanied him: ‘Nothing in this world could make me go without her.’ His love for his wife was as strong a feeling as any he had ever experienced. ‘I know,’ he confided in Bute, ‘that the loss of her I have now would break my heart.’30
George’s growing emotional involvement with his wife did not, in the first years of his marriage, do anything to lessen his dependency on Bute. The earl continued to play a central part in the king’s life, not just as his political mentor, but also as a source of advice and support on his new-found responsibilities as a family man. George took few steps, even on the most trivial matters, without seeking the approval of his old friend. Did Bute think ‘there was is any impropriety in my seeing Henry V at Covent Garden, in which the coronation is introduced?’ He urged the earl to give the matter his speediest attention: ‘I wish he would send me a line by ten o’clock tonight.’31 If the queen’s brother were to visit London, where was he to be lodged? ‘I ask my Dear Friend, whether, being a younger brother, he may not with propriety live in a private house, what leads me to think this is that even my younger brothers do so.’32 Issues of ‘propriety’ loomed large in George’s mind; the difficulty of making the right decision made him anxious and he yearned for Bute’s endorsement. Even small gestures of intimacy were, for the cautious and punctilious king, pregnant with unseen consequences, and routinely submitted to Bute’s consideration. In May 1762, George wrote: ‘The queen wishes very much that I would give her my picture in enamel to wear at her side in place of a watch. I see no impropriety in it, but wish he would, if he sees any, send me a word.’33 What Charlotte thought of her husband’s relationship with Bute is not known. The Duchess of Northumberland noted without further comment that after his marriage, the king still kept the earl’s picture, ‘in full-length, in his private closet’.34
*
The collapse of this relationship would be, without doubt, the single most significant event of George’s early manhood, and a trauma which marked the king’s character for the rest of his life. The abrupt, self-willed departure of Bute, and George’s inability to prevent it, inflicted a deep wound on the king’s sense of self and his relationship with others. The end of their partnership was as painful as a divorce, and neither man would ever be quite the same again.
This sad dissolution was all the more painful because, by 1761, everything promised so well. As soon after his accession as George could manage it, Bute had been appointed first minister: the earl now held the reins of government in his hands, and was at last in a position to turn the ideas he and George had discussed for so many years into practical politics. Both knew their first step would be to put an end to the Seven Years War, a conflict that had raged around the globe, encompassing conflict in Europe, naval battles in the West Indies and General Wolfe’s victory in Quebec. As a proxy struggle for mastery between Britain and France, it had delivered a succession of strategic victories which made it popular amongst noisy patriots, but it was regarded by Bute and George as both bloody and expensive, draining national resources and undermining the crown by increasing debt. A king in thrall to City financiers, and the politicians who represented their views, could hardly pursue the public good with the disinterested energy Bute and George intended; but securing a peace treaty proved harder than either of them imagined, and the bruising apprenticeship it offered in the grubby realities of eighteenth-century politics, international and domestic, was to destroy the relationship between them that had been cemented with such deep affection over so many years.
The peace project was unpopular, and Bute’s attempts to argue its virtues in Parliament failed. He was a poor speaker, and had no network of supporters on whom he could depend. Gradually, he concluded that if the Commons could not be persuaded to vote for peace, they must be convinced by other, cruder means. To the king’s horror, Bute recommended bringing into government Henry Fox, whose shady reputation had been a significant factor in rejecting his close relation Sarah Lennox. Fox was the undisputed master of corrupt parliamentary practice, and Bute was sure he could deliver the peace that no one else could. The king reluctantly agreed. ‘We must call in bad men to govern bad men,’ he commented gloomily.
Fox’s methods were as successful as Bute had suspected and the king had feared they would be. He offered pensions and salaried posts in government to win over supporters; to the less delicate, he offered straightforward cash payments, operating from the House of Commons pay office, and spending over £250,000 in bribes. At the same time, Fox engineered the dismissal of the Whig supporters of the war from almost every public office they held. The Duke of Devonshire, known as ‘the prince of Whigs’, was sacked from his job as Lord Chamberlain in the king’s household. Whig dukes lost the lord lieutenancies of counties; Whig admirals fell from the Admiralty Board; even doormen and messengers who had gained their places through Whig patronage lost them overnight. In the space of a few days, Fox had ‘turned out everyone whom Whig influence had brought into power except the king’.35
With the removal of all opposition so efficiently arranged, the peace was approved by the House of Commons by a majority of 319 votes to 65. It was a victory, but one in which neither the king nor Bute took much pleasure. This was not how they had imagined achieving ‘the goal’ in quieter days at Leicester House. The easy success of Fox’s unashamed venality depressed Bute; but he was even more horrified by the venom with which he was now attacked as the chief architect of such an unpopular policy. ‘The press is, with more vehemence than I ever knew, set to work against Lord Bute,’ observed Sarah Lennox. ‘The fire is fed with great industry and blown by a national prejudice which is inveterate and universal. He is most scurrilously abused as being a Scotsman and a favourite.’36 In caricature after caricature, Bute was insultingly portrayed with all the attributes thought by the English to distinguish the Scots. He was shown as an impoverished wearer of a threadbare kilt, which managed to be both ludicrous and suggestive; he was depicted as an unprincipled, unashamed seeker of power and money, who would stop at nothing to achieve his ends. In one print, he is seen creeping into the dowager princess’s bedroom at night; in another he pours poison into the sleeping king’s ear. He would connive at adultery and even regicide, the caricaturists maintained, if either served his purposes.
Yet the violence of the press was as nothing compared to the physical intimidation to which Bute was exposed on the streets of London. Eighteenth-century politics was a feral business, and unpopular politicians were roughly handled by crowds as well as
by newspapers and in prints. In 1761, on his way to the lord mayor’s annual banquet, Bute’s coach was recognised by his enemies who surrounded it with ‘groans, hisses, yells, shouts of “No Scotch rogues!”, “No Butes!”’ The coach was pelted with mud and stones, and Bute feared he was about to be hauled out himself when the constables finally arrived. From then on, he surrounded himself with a posse of hired hard men, ‘a gang of ruffians and bruisers’, to protect him. Despite his precautions, he was attacked again in 1762 as he passed through the streets towards Westminster for the state opening of Parliament. This time, Walpole thought Bute had been lucky to have escaped with his life. The earl had had enough: in April 1763, he resigned.
The Strangest Family Page 23