His decision came as a shock to everyone except the king. George had known for some time that Bute had come to hate the political world he had once hoped to dominate. He begged him to reconsider, but Bute was determined to go. In a long letter he wrote to a friend a few months before his final departure, the earl laid out his reasons for leaving. The peace treaty was signed, ‘the king has his sceptre in his hand … and the helm, that demanded a bold, venturous hand may, at this peace, be managed by a child’. His health, he declared, was failing under ‘the eternal, unpleasant labour of the mind and the impossibility of finding hours for exercise, the little time I get to sleep’. It was a shattering sense of disillusionment with the practical reality of politics that had made it impossible for him to carry on. He could no longer bear to be tainted by his involvement with men and measures that repelled him. ‘In my opinion,’ he wrote bitterly, ‘the Angel Gabriel could not at present govern this country, but by means too long practised and such as my soul abhors.’ As he could tolerate it no longer, ‘therefore, in the bosom of victory’, he went.37
George was devastated. Bute’s resignation was ‘the most cruel political blow that could have happened to me’.38 He knew it marked the end of the great joint project of moral renewal which they had discussed, planned and longed for over the past decade. ‘I own I had flattered myself that when the peace was once established, my D Friend would have assisted me in purging out corruption … and that when we were both dead, our memories would have been esteemed to the end of time.’ Now none of this would happen, for George could not do it alone. ‘Instead of reformation, the ministers being vicious, the country will grow, if possible, worse, let me attack the irreligious, the covetous, etc. etc. as much as I please, that will have no effect.’39 Contemplating the departure of the man who had dominated his life for so long, the king was said to have sat for hours ‘with his head reclining in his arm, without speaking a word’.40 He never used the term ‘betrayal’, but it hovered in the air nonetheless. When called upon to give up the pursuit of private happiness for the greater good, George had done so uncomplainingly, in obedience to Bute’s dictum that the sacrifice of Sarah Lennox was a necessary one. Now it appeared that Bute was unable – or unwilling – to do the same for him.
For a while after his departure, Bute and the king continued to correspond, with George still seeking the earl’s advice as if nothing had changed. Their relationship staggered on, more polite form than substance, until, in 1766, George dealt it the final blow. He declined to meet Bute, who was still politically toxic, in order to avoid offending his current ministers. The earl could not believe it. He wrote to the king, begging him not to throw away the true affection that bound them together, even if he had no further role to play in public life. ‘I say, sir, suffer me in this humiliated position to possess your friendship, independent of your power. I have never merited being deprived of that, which consists in the operation of the heart and soul … Alas, my dear Sovereign, what other view or selfish purpose can I have? I have forever done with this bad public, my heart is half broke, and my health ruined … The warmest wish I have remaining is to see you happy, respected and adored.’41 George did not reply, and Bute did not write again.
The Dowager Princess Augusta once had a haunting dream: ‘The window was open, and the moon, which was level to it, shook with a tremulous motion before her eyes, to her great disquiet. She bade Lord Bute to try and fix it. Extending his arms to stop its motion, it burst in his hands into a thousand fiery splinters, upon which, turning to the princess, he said reproachfully, “See, Madam, what you have brought me to.”’42 In the years he spent with Augusta and her son, Bute had done all he could ‘to try and fix it’. He had offered George a credible vision of the kind of king he could be, and in doing so had transformed George’s idea of himself and his destiny. But by leaving as he did, he confirmed many of George’s deepest fears about the mutability of personal relationships. If leaving was an option, it was one that would be exercised eventually, with whatever professions of regret. ‘I shall never meet with a friend in business again,’ the king wrote mournfully upon his mentor’s resignation.43 In fact, Bute was probably the only friend George would ever have, in business or outside it. After the earl’s departure, he did not look for one again. In future, all his significant emotional investments would be made amongst those who shared the lifelong obligation to the royal project. It was not by finding new friends that George hoped to fill the void left by Bute, but by turning to his family and, above all, to his wife.
For many years after Bute’s ignominious departure, George’s administrations were unstable and the source of much unhappiness to the young king, who considered himself bullied and oppressed by ministers forced upon him by political necessity. As George floundered, seemingly unable to find a way to work with anyone other than Bute, the popular mood grew increasingly hostile towards him. The corrupt means by which the peace had been achieved still rankled with both politicians and the press; accusations now circulated, asserting that the king’s behaviour was unconstitutional and threatened the sovereignty of Parliament. The ill-advised decision to prosecute one of his most imaginatively abrasive critics, the formidable antagonist John Wilkes, made a difficult situation worse. It gave previously inchoate resentment a focus for its anger, and provoked rioting and disorder so violent and so widespread that it seemed to threaten the survival of the established system of government itself.
George was neither immune nor protected from the hurricane-like impact of popular political disapproval. The highly personalised invective that accompanied it was directed towards him with as much venom as it had once been towards Bute. Any appearance in public was an opportunity to insult or provoke him. On his way to visit his mother, ‘the mob asked him if he was going to take suck’.44 George and Charlotte were once at the theatre when the alarm for fire was raised. In the stalls, the result was mayhem, and some of the audience were injured; but far above in the royal box, Charlotte was unperturbed, assuming the chaos was no more than business as usual; ‘she had not heard the expression of fire, and imagined they were saying impertinences to the king’.45 Silence was just as potent a method of indicating disapproval. On his way to a City dinner, the king rode through wordless crowds who, once he had passed, cheered loudly and pointedly for their favourite, the successful wartime first minister, William Pitt. ‘When he goes to the theatre, or goes out, or goes to the House, there is not a single applause,’ noted Walpole.46 The alternating experience of sinister silence or vociferous complaint was a seemingly inevitable aspect of royal experience, one that was simply to be ignored or endured.
In such circumstances, it is not surprising that George regarded the calm pleasures of his married life with such relief. It was also perhaps inevitable that he should come to associate his conjugal happiness with ideas of retreat and retirement. The private world he built with Charlotte was to be utterly distinct from the difficulties of his public existence. Her role was not to act as partner in resolving his problems, but to provide escape from them. George had no desire to see his wife drawn into the political factions and allegiances that permeated every crack and crevice of elite life. Nor had he any wish to see her follow in the footsteps of his grandmother, the busy, clever and managing Queen Caroline. Even his own mother, whose supposed political objectives were the subject of endless speculation, and whose alleged relationship with Lord Bute exposed her to public abuse of the crudest kind, was not considered a suitable role model for his wife. Indeed, if the Duke of Gloucester, the king’s younger brother, is to be believed, George specifically warned Charlotte against having any dealings with the dowager princess. ‘The very day the queen arrived,’ the duke told Walpole, ‘three hours afterwards when she was gone to be dressed for the wedding, I was left alone with the king, and he told me he had already given her a caution not to be alone with my mother, for she was an artful woman, and would try to govern her.’47
Whether as a result of the king’s i
nstructions or of the princess dowager’s own self-contained and inward-looking nature, Charlotte was never on familiar terms with her mother-in-law. Nor did she build a relationship with George’s eldest sister. Princess Augusta saw herself as a stout defender of the hegemony of the royal family, and had waged a doughty campaign against what she saw as Sarah Lennox’s pretensions, laughing in her face in an attempt to warn her away from her infatuated brother. Walpole thought she was loud, indiscreet and ‘much inclined to meddle in the private politics of the court’.48 These qualities may have persuaded the king to extend to his sister the same chilly detachment he insisted Charlotte observe in regard to his mother. It was certainly the case that Charlotte and Augusta were never friends; thirty years later, Augusta was still complaining about her sister-in-law, describing her as ‘an envious and intriguing spirit’, who had disliked her mother and herself, ‘was extremely jealous of them’ and had alienated the king’s affections from her.49
George’s proscriptions extended far beyond his immediate family. In his anxiety to place his wife beyond politics, he erected around her a powerful social exclusion zone which left her in splendid isolation at the centre of the court over which she was expected to preside. In the early years of her marriage, Charlotte had no real friends at all, and was equally alone among the ladies of the court. The Ladies of the Bedchamber, whom she saw most regularly, were far older than the young queen, and having intrigued and campaigned for their positions around her, were often thoroughly bored with the role once they had secured it. One of them, Lady Egremont, described the dullness of the mornings they spent sitting in a formal circle around the queen with nothing to do but examine what each of them was wearing. ‘She represented it as a very triste affair,’ sniffed Lady Mary Coke primly.50 With little else to think about, the ladies occupied themselves with the elegant prosecution of turf wars over excruciating issues of precedence. ‘I went to court,’ recorded the Duchess of Northumberland, a seasoned combatant in such battles, ‘and the queen called before Lady Bolingbroke, who was lady-in-waiting, came in. The Duchess of Ancaster going in, I stepped before her and said I was the lady-in-waiting, which nettled her so much she would not speak to me after. The queen,’ she noted with satisfaction, ‘was very gracious.’51
The duchess’s diaries are peppered with references to Charlotte’s ‘graciousness’. She admired her ladies’ dresses; she politely showed them her jewels; she played and sang, smilingly acknowledging their praise. As Charlotte later explained to Lady Harcourt, her studied politeness was as much a result of the king’s direction as her carefully imposed aloofness, for ‘he allowed and encouraged me to be civil to all’.52 Her goodwill was of necessity spread very evenly amongst those around her; anything expressive of an emotion warmer than bland disinterest on the queen’s part led to nothing but strife. The mildest indication of genuine preference was sufficient to provoke gossip and recrimination for weeks. When Lady Bolingbroke appeared to have attracted Charlotte’s favour, news of it became the subject of endless speculation and it was immediately reported that ‘the other ladies, particularly Lady Egremont’, were extremely jealous.53
Many years later, Charlotte considered George had been absolutely correct to insist that she held herself apart from those around her and made no close connections: ‘I am not only sensible that he was right, but I feel thankful for it from the bottom of my heart.’54 But as a young bride in a strange country, surrounded by the scrutiny of the ambitious, and forbidden to build friendships with those she found more sympathetic, it must have been a demanding proscription to obey. Isolated behind her enforced graciousness, Charlotte was a lonely figure in those early days. It was perhaps not surprising that, in the absence of other connections, her relationship with one of her servants became one of the most important in her life.
Juliana Schwellenberg was one of the two ‘German women’ Charlotte had brought over to England with her. Mrs Schwellenberg was in theory one of the queen’s assistant dressers, but she rarely did any actual dressing herself; instead, she was in charge of Charlotte’s Wardrobe – a significant department of the household – overseeing ‘the persons therein employed and the regulation of the expenditure’. She insisted on being addressed as ‘Madame’, and liked to think of herself as ‘Female Mentor to the queen’.55 From the moment of her arrival, she was a controversial figure. In an early memoir of Charlotte, published shortly after her death in 1818, Mrs Schwellenberg was described as ‘a well-educated woman, extremely courteous in her manner … devotedly attached to the illustrious family with whom she lived’. Others found her less amenable. The novelist Fanny Burney, who suffered at her hands when she was at court in the 1780s, and disliked her as a result, created a picture of Mrs Schwellenberg in her journals as a true comic monster, an appallingly compelling mix of petty cruelties and absurd self-aggrandisement. She was unpopular with Charlotte’s other servants, and involved in a wearying succession of rows and feuds. The king had always resented her presence and, after yet another explosion in the queen’s household, he was reported to have ‘desired she should be dismissed, and return to Germany with an allowance suitable to her position in that country’.56 With surprising defiance, Charlotte begged him to reconsider. George relented, but made it a condition of her reprieve that Mrs Schwellenberg ‘should not resist his commands, nor influence the queen’s mind upon any subject’.57
‘The Schwellenberg’, as she was universally known, successfully weathered not just the king’s disapproval, but that of almost everyone else at court. Impervious to decades of criticism and complaint, secure in the unwavering protection of the queen, she remained in her service until the day she died in 1797. Though she could never be described as Charlotte’s friend, she was a loyal and devoted companion, and in her early days in England, the queen had few enough of those. She was a link with Charlotte’s old home, almost the only person at court who had known Mecklenburg, and who missed its low-key charms. Above all, she was, with a single-minded intensity, dedicated entirely to the queen. She had no interest in cultivating wider alliances, impressing or conciliating other people, as her widespread unpopularity demonstrated. All that mattered was the preservation of her primacy with Charlotte. For all her eccentricities and shortcomings, Mrs Schwellenberg offered the queen a relationship in which Charlotte always came first, in which there could be no question of other, hidden allegiances. It was hardly surprising that Charlotte could not bear the prospect of losing her.
Charlotte’s isolation grew more pronounced as the years went by. By the mid-1760s, it was apparent that her husband’s passionate desire for a life of domestic retirement was not a passing phase but the guiding principle by which he intended to govern their time together. The rhythm of their year was soon well established. They spent the winter, whilst Parliament sat, in the luxurious privacy of Buckingham House. In the summer, they retreated to the even greater seclusion of Richmond Lodge in the countryside south-west of London, where they were reputed to spend their days very modestly. ‘The court,’ wrote Walpole in 1764, ‘makes a strange figure. The recluse life led at Richmond, which is carried on to such an excess of privacy and economy, that the queen’s friseur waits on them at supper, and four pounds only of beef are allowed for their soup, disgusts all sorts of people.’58
Walpole voiced a common contemporary response to the king and queen’s increasing lack of visibility – a sense of disappointment that they had failed to deliver on their early promise to act as a lively focus for aristocratic life, using their place at the pinnacle of the pyramid of polite society to nurture a resurgence of cultural energy and excitement. Put simply, they had not turned out to be as much fun as everyone had hoped. Manipulating the facts to serve his own purpose, Walpole argued that the royal couple’s seclusion had been forced upon them by Bute and his ally the princess dowager, the better to prosecute their intentions to subvert the constitution. Augusta, he asserted, had imposed ‘strict laws of retirement’ on her son. ‘He was accessible to none
of his court, but at the stated hours of business and ceremony; nor was any man but the favourite … allowed to converse with the king.’59 This argument was nonsense, as Walpole himself well knew; but like so many of his pronouncements, the hollowness of his conclusions were disguised by the strength of the evidence he submitted to support them. As the Duchess of Northumberland’s diary suggests, Walpole was not the only observer to find something both puzzling and troubling in the extremity of the king and queen’s insular existence. ‘His Majesty,’ she wrote, ‘was certainly naturally of a most cheerful, even sociable disposition, and a clear understanding, yet he lived in the utmost retirement.’60 She, like Walpole, blamed Bute. Others attributed the king’s taste for seclusion to the way he had been brought up, and linked it directly to the habits he had acquired under his mother’s tutelage. But as one well-placed observer maintained, these explanations were only part of a more complicated story.
Years later, the Duke of Gloucester, the king’s brother, declared that, contrary to what was popularly supposed, ‘the retired life the king and queen led for the many first years of their marriage’ was ‘entirely the king’s doing’.61 The duke conceded that his mother, Augusta, had instilled in her eldest son an early distaste for loud, unregulated sociability – ‘he had been locked up till he married, and taught to have a bad opinion of the world’ – but maintained that George’s preference for solitude arose from something more than habit. He sought out retirement, Gloucester thought, not just because it was what he was used to, but because it provided the best possible circumstances in which he could shape and mould the affections of his malleable young wife: ‘That he was delighted in having under his own training a young innocent girl of 17, for such was the queen when she arrived, and that he determined she should be wholly devoted to him and that she have no other friend or society.’ The king’s prohibition of all other relationships was designed, in Gloucester’s opinion, to make himself the uncontested focus of all her affections, to ensure she would ‘depend on him and him alone’. It was to ensure the exclusivity of her love that Charlotte’s early married years were spent largely alone, ‘except for the Ladies of the Bedchamber, in a funeral circle’. For most of the time, ‘she never had a soul to speak to except the king’.62
The Strangest Family Page 24