Before the end of 1762, Charlotte was pregnant again. Hunter was pleased to be called upon to attend, but found there was very little for him to do. Her labour, when it came in August 1763, was once more short, but not as sharp as her first. ‘After complaining lightly for about two hours, she was delivered, with three pains, of a fine boy.’ Hunter was pleased with a second successful result, but embarrassed that the speedy turn of events had meant ‘there was not time to call the proper people together’. He blamed this lapse in professionalism on Mrs Draper, with whom he was again working, in what was clearly an increasingly uneasy partnership. The midwife insisted it was not her fault, telling Hunter that ‘the pains continued so trifling that she did not imagine the queen was near delivery till three strong pains came suddenly and close together and finished it’. Hunter was not convinced. ‘This she said,’ he confided to his journal, his scepticism apparent in each heavily underlined word.15
The new baby was another healthy son, Frederick, later given the title Duke of York. ‘He looked well,’ reported Hunter, ‘but was not as large as the Prince of Wales when born.’ This time Hunter’s advice seems to have been taken more seriously by Charlotte, who seemed far readier to adopt his post-partum practice. Only five days after the birth, Hunter was pleased to hear from the king ‘that the queen had been down on the couch near two hours, without feeling in the least weak’. He was confident she was now totally converted to his regime.16
It was widely rumoured that Charlotte suffered a miscarriage at Richmond some time in 1764, but this proved a rare occurrence for her. A third pregnancy ran as smoothly as her first two, producing another boy, William, born in August 1765. To have delivered three flourishing sons in almost as many years was an achievement many eighteenth-century mothers would have envied; but to have secured the succession to the throne with such generous insurance against disaster surely gave Charlotte a sense both of satisfaction and profound gratitude. Across Europe, other princesses struggled year after year in exhausting and often futile attempts to supply the longed-for male heir, sacrificing their health in the process. The queen knew very well how desperate and destructive this desire could become. Her much-loved brother Charles shared none of Charlotte and George’s prolific good luck in the production of sons. Charles’s wife gave birth to daughter after daughter, none of whom could inherit the Mecklenburg duchy. In 1776, Charlotte wrote ruefully to him to congratulate him on the birth of yet another dynastically redundant girl: ‘I had hoped that it might be a son, but God directs in all things, and that pleasure is reserved for another time.’17 When, after three more labouring years, the princess finally gave birth to a boy, Charlotte was both delighted and relieved: ‘Nothing in the world could give such pleasure and cause me such joy.’ She hoped her brother would find in him ‘all the joy and satisfaction I find in mine’. Her eldest sons were thriving, especially the Prince of Wales, who was ‘as strong and well built as General Freytag, only a little bigger and very kind’.18 But Charles’s family would prove far less robust than Charlotte’s sturdy brood: his first wife did not survive yet another pregnancy; a second son died in infancy; and in 1785, Charles’s second wife, sister to his first, also lost her life in childbirth. Charlotte did not have to look far to realise how fortunate her own experience had been.
Confident in the healthy profusion of their sons, and with an irony that would not have been lost on their miserable Mecklenburg relations, George and Charlotte now wanted nothing so much as a daughter. When the queen was again pregnant in 1766, Lady Mary Coke, that well-connected habitué of the court, was assured by the four-year-old Prince of Wales that the coming baby would definitely be ‘a little princess’. In the extensive journal in which she recorded with painstaking scrupulousness every detail of her encounters with the royal family, Lady Mary confessed her surprise at the family’s hunger to provide themselves with a girl. ‘I find that the king and queen are very desirous it should be one,’ she noted, adding with incredulity that ‘they hope they shall have no more sons.’19 On 29 September, their wishes were gratified with the birth of Charlotte Augusta. The king and queen were instantly delighted with their baby girl and gave her the title of Princess Royal, which could be borne only by the eldest daughter of the monarch. This grand dignity soon eclipsed her own name; all her life she was known simply as ‘Royal’, which came to define the most important elements of her dignified and self-conscious character.
Royal had been ushered into the world as briskly as her brothers had been, but this time without the assistance of Mrs Draper. A few weeks before the event, Lady Mary Coke had heard that ‘the queen was to be brought to bed by Dr Hunter, instead of the old woman, but that it was kept as great a secret as if the fate of the country depended on this change’.20 For the first time, Hunter was in sole charge of the birth. A Mrs Johnson was employed as an assistant, but very much in a subordinate capacity. Hunter, who was to preside over every one of Charlotte’s confinements until old age and incapacity made it impossible, was finally established as the source of all authority, both inside and outside the bedchamber.
The doctor was in attendance the following year when the queen’s fourth son Edward – ‘the largest child the queen has ever had’ – was born. He was on duty again in 1768, when the smooth, conciliating manner for which he was so famous almost foundered in the face of the king’s intense desire for another daughter. As Charlotte’s confinement drew near, Hunter gamely attempted to prepare George for the possibility that such an outcome could not be guaranteed. Lady Mary Coke reported that he had suggested tentatively to the king that ‘whoever sees those lovely princes above stairs must be glad to have another’, to which George replied: ‘Dr Hunter, I did not think I could be angry with you but I am; and I say, whoever sees that lovely child the Princess Royal above stairs must wish to have the fellow to her.’ Fortunately for Hunter, the baby was indeed another girl, ‘the prettiest child the queen had had, but very small’. Her father did not mind the child’s size; all that mattered was its sex. ‘The king told Dr Hunter that he forgave him, and appeared extremely happy.’21 Ten days after the birth, Lady Mary heard that the new baby was to be called ‘Augusta, or Elizabeth, though the Prince of Wales has a mind it should be Louisa, and says he has desired it of the king; though whether he has as yet power with His Majesty to obtain his request, I really don’t know’.22 In this, as in so many things to come, the king did not see eye to eye with his eldest son; the new princess was named Augusta.
In 1770, the queen gave birth to a third daughter, Elizabeth. The celebrations that marked her arrival were muted in comparison to those that had greeted the Prince of Wales, or even the eldest sister Royal. The addition of a new child to the ever-expanding nursery had become almost an annual event, one to be marked by thankfulness for the healthy survival of mother and child, but not deserving of any special commemoration. Elizabeth was Charlotte’s seventh child; as Charlotte dutifully followed what was now the accustomed rhythm of Hunter’s post-natal regimen, she could not have known that she was not even halfway through a reproductive marathon that was to last for another thirteen years. A clutch of princes followed Elizabeth: Ernest in 1771, Augustus in 1773 and Adolphus in 1774. They were succeeded by two princesses, Mary in 1776 and Sophia in 1777, and two final princes, Octavius in 1779 and Alfred in 1780. Until the birth of her last child, Amelia, in 1783, Charlotte was pregnant on a more or less continuous basis for over two decades, with rarely more than an eighteen-month break between her deliveries. She had fifteen children, of whom thirteen would survive infancy. She had started early, of course: she was only eighteen when the Prince of Wales was born. The gap between her age and his was smaller than the twenty-one years that separated him from his youngest sister.
*
The size of their family was of immense significance in the creation of George and Charlotte’s public persona. It was a vivid demonstration of their commitment to domestic values, a declaration of their devotion to each other, and a tribute to
the remarkable fidelity of the king. Other European royals may have fathered as many children as he did, but unlike those of so many of his contemporaries, George’s numerous progeny were all the legitimate offspring of his wife. Indeed, the teeming robustness of the king and queen’s ever-increasing brood was seen by some commentators as a reward for their unswerving pursuit of the strictest moral conduct. At the same time, the exuberant vitality of the children themselves softened the image of what a well-conducted family life looked like, making good behaviour seem a little less static and severe, a little more lively, and perhaps even sometimes fun.
In practice, the sheer number of siblings the king and queen produced meant that the family very rarely operated as a single unit. From their earliest days, the children tended to divide into small groups. The two eldest sons, George and Frederick, only a year between them, were by far the closest, rarely spending a night apart from each other throughout their childhood. When they were little more than babies, the queen’s cabinetmaker constructed for them a pair of twin beds ‘under one tester’ and surrounded by enveloping red velvet curtains in which the small princes slept together. As ‘heir and spare’ they clearly occupied a more elevated place in the family hierarchy than the other brothers; William, the next son, seems to have hovered rather yearningly outside the gilded partnership of the elder boys, constantly hoping – usually without success – to be admitted to their world. Edward and Ernest were often placed together, in classrooms and apartments, as were their younger brothers Adolphus and Augustus. The very youngest boys, Octavius and Alfred, were still in the nursery when the older princes were almost adults. The daughters’ lives followed a similar pattern. Royal, Augusta and Elizabeth were treated very much as the senior princesses; they were educated together and lived separately from their younger sisters. Mary and Sophia, the middle daughters, formed a tightly knit pair, whilst Amelia, the baby of the family, occupied an especially privileged position, somewhere between pet and mascot, fussed over and admired by all.
These arrangements would have been familiar to other eighteenth-century children, many of whom grew up in similarly large families. The queen was one of ten children; the king one of nine. Lady Kildare, a sister of George’s first love Sarah Lennox, produced twenty-two children during her two marriages. Mrs Tunstall, one of the royal housekeepers, had sixteen. Long after her own childbearing days were over, Charlotte wrote to a friend that she had just met Sir John and Lady Wigram, ‘father and mother of twenty children, all alive, their ages from thirty years to five months, and hopes to have four more to complete the two dozen’.23 The king was a great advocate of big families. When the Countess of Aylesford, already the mother of nineteen children, was about to give birth yet again, George commented that he hoped ‘two will be produced … the more the better’.24
Where George and Charlotte were exceptional was in the number of their children who survived the perils of infancy and childhood. Death stalked the eighteenth-century nursery, with appalling consequences. The loss of ‘beloved objects’ was a miserable inevitability for many parents. To have lost only two of their fifteen made the king and queen extremely fortunate, as they knew from their own youthful experience. Four of the ten children born to Charlotte’s parents were dead before they were two. Three of George’s siblings died as teenagers. Twelve of Lady Kildare’s twenty-two succumbed to childhood sickness, including her adored eldest son, Lord Ophaly, the heir to the earldom. Of Mrs Tunstall’s sixteen babies, only a single daughter emerged alive from the schoolroom.
Evidence of the horrifying and seemingly unstoppable cull of the young and vulnerable is to be found in every aspect of eighteenth-century life; every family has its own story to tell of a ‘fine child’ taken with gut-wrenching suddenness, or of the hand-wringing powerlessness of parents witnessing a long and terminal decline. Particularly poignant in their testimony to the callous universality of loss are the pictures eighteenth-century parents had made of their children. Cheerful, thriving boys and girls gaze happily out of their portraits, but a distressingly large number of the subjects of these tender portraits did not long survive their completion. In Hogarth’s famous depiction of the Graham children, baby Thomas, who reaches so eagerly for the cherries his sister holds, was dead before the painting was finished. A touchingly idealised vision on the canvas too often concealed the sad reality of childhood vulnerability.
Whilst it may not have been apparent to the mourning parents of the dead, a quiet demographic revolution had begun to make itself felt in the middle of the eighteenth century, shifting the chances of survival slowly but surely in favour of the child. This was particularly evident amongst the children of upper- and middle-class families, where it is estimated that infant death rates fell by around 30 per cent between 1750 and 1775.25 In the comfortable homes of the better-off, improved nutrition and higher standards of cleanliness played an important part in accelerating this decline. And whilst many illnesses – particularly tuberculosis – remained resistant to the limited treatments offered by contemporary medicine, other diseases lost some of their ancient destructive force. The gradual withdrawal of plague from Europe and the introduction of early forms of inoculation against smallpox tempered the impact of two powerful epidemic killers of children. This did not mean that childhood became a risk-free experience; as late as the twentieth century, and perhaps until the widespread availability of penicillin, infancy remained a minefield of life-threatening dangers. Yet, for all the tragic instances of individual deaths, more and more wealthy eighteenth-century parents could expect to see larger numbers of their children survive into adulthood.
This extraordinary demographic shift triggered a great debate amongst social historians in the mid-twentieth century, who sought to understand its causes and explain its significance. Some, most notably Philip Aries and Lawrence Stone, argued that improved infant survival rates had an impact on contemporary behaviour that was nothing short of revolutionary, ushering in completely new ideas about the nature of childhood itself. They maintained that in medieval and pre-modern Europe, high levels of child mortality discouraged parents from forming close emotional bonds with their children. When chances of death were so high, it made little sense to invest either time or affection in the very young. Parents kept their distance; their dealings with their children were formal and hierarchical. The wealthy in particular had little personal contact with their young, contracting out the practical business of child-rearing to servants. It was only when death rates decreased in the mid-eighteenth century that this bleak picture began to change. Then, it is argued, parents were able to relax the barriers they had erected over the ages to protect themselves against the likelihood of loss. This in turn encouraged even greater survival rates, since fewer young children died when their wellbeing became the direct responsibility of their parents. In scarcely more than a generation, this process was said to have transformed thinking about children and their place in the world. From the 1750s onwards, the welfare of children, their interests, and even their pleasures, became the paramount aim of all concerned parents.
Since this theory was first articulated, other historians have criticised it as oversimplifying changes in family life. They have argued in favour of a more complex picture, stressing the variety and range of experiences across the ages. Recent scholarship has decisively, and often poignantly, demonstrated that parental affection was very far from being the unique product of any one era. The personal testimony of many pre-eighteenth-century mothers and fathers bears heartbreaking witness to the strength of their love for their vulnerable children, as well as to the depth of their despair when they lost them. No one reading Ben Jonson’s raw poem, written in 1603 and mourning the loss of his seven-year-old son to plague, could doubt the sincerity of his love for his lost child:
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy …
Rest in soft peace, and asked, say, here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry …
Few scholars now accept the principle of a general ‘warming-up’ of the emotional temperature of family relationships in this period. But it seems hard to deny that something important was happening to ideas about the relationship between parents and children during the eighteenth century. If parental affection and its impact on family relationships were not the exclusive creation of that period, they were certainly given new force and meaning during its latter decades. During these years, thinking about the duties and pleasures of parenthood had become one of the most keenly debated topics of the day, exercising philosophers, clerics, politicians, moralists and, above all, parents themselves. And what many of them concluded was that that there was little of more importance to society and individuals alike than the achievement of a happy family life.
Emerging from the accumulated observations and arguments of half a century’s philosophical and polemical literature, a powerful image gradually took shape of the new model family most likely to deliver this optimistic outcome. At its heart was a complete reappraisal of the nature and meaning of childhood. Traditional religious teaching held that the young were born sinful; it was the duty of parents to civilise them and bring them to a knowledge of God, by chastisement if necessary. Enlightened thinkers took a very different view. For them, children were the embodiment of mankind’s original innocence, pure and uncorrupted. They were much influenced by the philosopher John Locke, whose work Some Thoughts Concerning Education, published in 1693, did much to popularise the idea of the infant mind as a tabula rasa, a clean slate, which it was the task of its mentors carefully to shape and form. Enlightened parents hoped to prepare their children for entry into society without destroying any of the natural virtues with which they had been born. This, they were sure, was far better achieved by affection than any harshness. In the ideal, enlightened family, mothers and fathers exercised their authority gently; they were firm but fair, governing by tenderness not fear, prizing warmth over distance and friendly intimacy over cold authority. They understood that childhood was a unique and special state, with its own particular needs and requirements. The energy and uninhibitedness of children were to be celebrated, not denied. Lively play was to be encouraged, with specially designed toys and games provided to increase their pleasure.
The Strangest Family Page 26