For some years, Mme Beaumont ran a private school for girls in Covent Garden, where she sought to demonstrate what could be achieved when a curriculum that went beyond polite accomplishments was implemented by properly educated teachers; but this was not enough to keep her occupied, and she was soon involved in a wide range of educational enterprises. All of them reflected her central conviction that children learnt most effectively when the educational process was entertaining as well as informative. Pleasure was a far greater incentive to progress than the traditional combination of rote learning and physical punishment. To that end, she wrote a variety of books and magazines intended to entertain and inform young readers. Her Magasin des enfants featured a beguiling combination of fairy tales, fables and other stories which sat alongside nuggets of fact, designed to communicate more conventional knowledge. She had none of Rousseau’s distrust for fiction, and actively aimed to excite the imagination of children.
Mme Beaumont’s desire to stimulate children’s minds through play also led to her involvement in the design and production of educational toys. It is not clear whether she actually invented ‘dissected maps’, an early form of jigsaw specially adapted for small hands, in which wooden pieces representing the component parts of nations could be joined together to form whole countries or continents; but they were always associated with her, and were known as ‘Beaumont maps’ for many years. Caroline Fox, who was exactly the kind of conscientious mother Mme Beaumont wanted to attract, as both convert and customer, used what she called ‘the Beaumont wooden maps’ to teach all her sons.
Most of Mme Beaumont’s educational aids were intended for use not in schools but in private homes. Like Rousseau, she was convinced no teacher could instruct a child with the loving intensity of a mother, and believed that persuading women not to delegate this vital task but instead to glory in it as the crowning maternal virtue was the first step on the long road to educational reform. She also understood that to disseminate her principles, she would need to win the hearts and minds of key female opinion formers, and from the moment of her arrival in Britain, astutely targeted those she judged most susceptible to her message. ‘I was looking out for mothers who were governesses to their children,’ she wrote in 1764, ‘that their examples might add weight to my efforts for engaging parents to take on themselves that duty.’ She focused on rich, powerful and aristocratic women, heaping fulsome praise on those already aware of their responsibility to what she called ‘that little rising generation’, celebrating the commitment of those mothers who ‘amidst all the avocations arising from your rank’ devoted themselves to the education of their offspring: ‘You are truly mothers to the children you have brought into the world.’1
She was soon invited to put her ideas into practice in a number of aristocratic families, including those of Lords North and Egremont. However, it was her role as governess to Sophia Carteret which brought her to the attention of the woman who would eventually translate her practices into the very grandest of schoolrooms. Sophia was the niece of Lady Charlotte Finch, and Lady Charlotte was sufficiently impressed by Mme Beaumont’s work to ask her to assist in the instruction of her own eldest daughter. Lady Charlotte was clearly satisfied, and she became one of Mme Beaumont’s most influential disciples. When she took up her role as governess to the royal children, it was the practical principles of Mme Beaumont, with their emphasis on pleasurable, creative enjoyment, which formed the basis of her plan for their education.
In this, she had the full support of the queen. Charlotte was a strong believer in the primacy of the maternal role in education, and was once reported to have delivered a stinging public rebuke to ‘a celebrated duchess’ who was unwise enough to admit that her children were not taught by her, but placed in the care ‘of a most excellent governess and faithful servants’. Charlotte was said to have been outraged, declaring, ‘it is impossible that servants, however true they may be, or however affectionate, can have the feelings of a parent … There can be no apology for the neglect of the first duties.’2
The queen’s words echoed the language of both Rousseau and Mme Beaumont, though her affronted response was disingenuous, coming from a woman whose public role compelled her to be more of a supervisor and less of a mother than she might have wished. Charlotte was well aware that she was herself entirely dependent on the services of others to educate her children; indeed, her inability to observe a principle in which she believed so profoundly may well explain her strident outburst.
Her endorsement of the other key foundation of Mme Beaumont’s educational plan involved less of a gap between her principles and her practice, and perhaps, for that reason, allowed the queen to be uncharacteristically determined in its implementation. Charlotte was an early convert to the idea that education – at least, for the very young – was best delivered through play. Many years later, she assured her brother that ‘the greatest merit’ of a governess was in ‘contriving that her pupils gain instruction without realising it, thinking themselves amused when they are in fact gainfully employed’.3 Although Charlotte acknowledged this was a skill ‘met with but rarely in education’, it was one she valued very highly.
The queen’s tenacious support of the pleasure principle in learning ensured that, during their earliest years, her children were the beneficiaries of one of the most benign and progressive educational theories of the time. Frederika Planta, one of Lady Charlotte Finch’s teaching assistants, used it in the royal nursery to guide the young princesses gently through their first lessons. ‘I believe they all love me,’ Frederika wrote to a friend, ‘and I have gained their affection by making their learning as much play as possible.’ To teach them history, she owned a set of cards illustrating important events of the past, which the girls were required to place in the right order. This, she explained, ‘reduced the chronology of England to a game, by means of which the princesses are better chronologists than I was 3 years ago’.4
Alongside Miss Planta’s historical flash cards, the royal children also made extensive use of Mme Beaumont’s dissected maps. Sixteen of them were purchased, and kept in specially constructed cabinets.5 For the older siblings, the schoolroom was supplied with imaginatively designed atlases, showing the countries of the world with their names written in letters which represented their physical shapes. Geography featured prominently in Lady Charlotte’s curriculum. In the eighteenth century, it was a dynamic, exciting discipline, and one in which the king was especially interested. Although George showed little curiosity about his own kingdom, and never travelled further north than Worcester, he enjoyed poring over charts and maps of remote places. The king and queen were both well informed about the new discoveries, especially in the southern hemisphere, which were transforming ideas about the shape of the world and also the variety of human life within it. They wanted their children to share their enthusiasm, supplying them with globes and prints of foreign landscapes and even commissioning desks designed to display large-scale atlases.
To help her charges learn languages, Lady Charlotte used a series of ‘Boards’ on which Latin and French verb tables were laid out. She also owned some ‘fishes and counters in a counter box, of Birmingham manufacture’, which presumably aided first steps in arithmetic.6 Twenty years later, having long outlived its originator, the Beaumont scheme was still in use in the royal nursery. The three youngest children were given a specially produced ‘Set of Toys’, three boxes that contained a variety of pictures and stories, for teaching spelling, grammar and ‘figures’.7
Under this system, the young royals blossomed. Lady Mary Coke, on one of her regular patrols of the royal nursery, reported approvingly on their progress. ‘Did I tell you that the Prince of Wales and Prince Frederick write amazingly well?’ she asked her sister in 1768, when the princes were six and five respectively.8 Both the eldest boys were ‘the most charming children’ and were ‘much improved’. All the brothers had, in her opinion, something to recommend them. Prince Frederick was ‘the most h
andsome’, and Prince William, the third son, though ‘not pretty’, was nonetheless ‘very good-humoured’. Prince Edward, dark and clever, learnt to speak at an amazingly early age: Lady Mary was astonished to hear him talking, ‘although I believe he is but a year and half old’.9
For all their virtues, however, none could compare with Lady Mary’s favourite, the Prince of Wales, the uncontested star of the schoolroom, who excelled in everything from his height (‘I think I never saw a taller boy of his age’), to his charm (‘he was extremely good company’), to his wit (‘I can assure you he is the most comical child I ever saw’).10 Lady Mary was utterly smitten. She had no doubt that his early education had served him well, enabling a naturally agile mind to absorb knowledge far beyond what was usual for a child of his age. ‘I forget to mention an anecdote of the Prince of Wales, much in his favour,’ she told her sister in July 1771. The prince, not yet nine years old, had accompanied the king as he showed a deputation of French dignitaries around the treasures of Windsor Castle, ‘the prince explaining to the ambassadors the paintings, etc. When they came into St George’s Hall, he stopped short and said to the king, “I believe I had better not relate the history of this painting, as the French ambassador is present.” You remember,’ Lady Mary reminded her sister, ‘’tis the Black Prince leading captive the kings of France and Scotland.’ Miss Planta’s entertaining history lessons had clearly lodged in the mind of the Prince of Wales, enabling him to avoid – with characteristic elegance – a diplomatic faux pas. For someone of his age, ‘so much thought, and so much delicacy of thought is very extraordinary’, concluded Lady Mary, pleased as ever with the performance of her favourite.11
While the princesses would remain in the gentle, female atmosphere of the schoolroom for the whole of their childhood, their brothers were soon required to graduate into an altogether more rigorous environment. Even the most forward-looking Enlightenment thinkers agreed that the educational paths followed by boys and girls must eventually diverge. Male and female education was ultimately directed towards very different ends. Mme Beaumont too acknowledged this. She told her aristocratic female clients that their sons ‘will tread in the steps of their fathers and fill, with applause, the principal offices of state’. Their daughters, in contrast, could expect only to oversee the development of the next generation, happily taking upon themselves ‘the glorious appellation of governesses to their own children’.12 Boys acquired knowledge to equip them to take their place in the world; girls learnt in order to make them suitable wives and mothers for the enlightened man. Female education stayed within the purview of women for its duration; boys quickly moved out of the control of women, and into the sphere of men.
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In 1771, the nine-year-old Prince of Wales and his eight-year-old brother Frederick left behind the easy rule of Lady Charlotte, with its emphasis on the pleasure of instruction, and passed into a far more demanding regime of intellectual and physical exertion. It represented a huge change, not just for them, but also for the queen, who surrendered much of her personal control over their upbringing. From now on, their education would be overseen not by their mother, but by the king. He would appoint their instructors, approve their curriculum and lay down the rules that dictated the daily rhythm of their lives. The shift in their status was emphasised by their removal from the familiar life they had always known, and they left the crowded nursery to live in a separate establishment, with their own household around them. They had entered not only the world of ‘manly learning’, but an entirely masculine domain. Charlotte would never again exert the degree of influence over the young princes she had once enjoyed. Now they answered directly to their father.
The changes were immediate and radical, as the king implemented a far more orthodox approach to learning. A team of tutors was put in place, all men, under the nominal control of their governor, Robert, Earl of Holdernesse. Horace Walpole thought him ‘a formal piece of dullness’, but the king, who knew him well, perhaps hoped his stolid lack of flamboyance would act as a calming influence on his boisterous sons.13 Holdernesse presided over a much more strenuous curriculum than that of Lady Cha: the princes worked for eight hours a day, studying French, German and Italian, as well as the inevitable Latin and Greek. Constitutional history featured prominently, as did geography, mathematics and music. The easy encouragements of the Beaumont plan were replaced by the harsher disciplines of an older tradition, which put more emphasis on punishment than pleasure. Princess Augusta later recalled seeing her brothers ‘held by their tutors to be flogged like dogs with a whip’.14 As a grown man, Prince Frederick remembered the petty cruelty of one of his teachers, who ‘used to have a silver pencil case in his hand while we were at our lessons, and he has frequently given us such knocks with it on our foreheads that the blood followed them’.15
None of the educational writers studied by the queen endorsed such measures; indeed, both Mme Beaumont and Rousseau specifically outlawed physical punishment. Nor did they approve of such an intense programme of formal learning for young children, who were, they considered, not yet ready to absorb so much factual knowledge. But Charlotte seems to have made no protest at the abandonment of the benign system which had governed the early lives of her sons. Her habitual deference to the will of the king would have made any active opposition to his decisions unthinkable, and her ability to distance herself emotionally from aspects of her life which she could not change made it impossible for her to contemplate any active disagreement. Perhaps she was able to quell any troublesome misgivings by concentrating on those aspects of educational purpose about which she and the king thought indivisibly as one.
George and Charlotte were united in their conviction that the ultimate aim of education was the instillation in a young mind of moral values that would guide and sustain a child throughout its life. Although both were bookish autodidacts with an ineradicable respect for learning, neither ever doubted that cleverness was of far less lasting value than goodness. For them, the point of all intellectual effort was to understand more clearly what God and the rank he had allotted you in the world required of you. Without that sense of responsibility, all learning was hollow, and all knowledge useless. ‘Unless you are a good man,’ the king later insisted to Prince William, ‘you cannot be of utility to your country, nor of credit to your family. This may seem old-fashioned language, but experience will show you that it is most true.’16
Neither the king nor the queen ever questioned the way in which that goodness was best expressed. Some of the greatest thinkers of the eighteenth century grappled with the idea of what virtue looked like when defined by precepts other than those of religion. George and Charlotte were unmoved by their conclusions. For them, it was only through the prism of Christianity that true ideas of right and wrong could be understood. ‘Moral philosophy,’ George told his son Augustus, ‘till a proper foundation has been made in the principles of religion, cannot be with utility pursued.’17 The king was a devout Anglican with a faith that neither his father, grandfather nor great-grandfather had shared. He liked to attend religious services daily, and made his presence in church loudly felt, giving the responses in a forceful and enthusiastic voice. He believed profoundly in the idea of a personal God, who was concerned directly in the outcome of human affairs. George’s letters frequently refer to the operations of ‘Divine Providence’, whose sometimes mystifying outcomes he struggled all his life to comprehend. He had no doubt his kingly role brought with it a special responsibility to preserve and foster religious faith. He firmly believed this was best expressed by the terms of his coronation oath, which bound him to uphold and defend the Anglican settlement. This led him to reject attempts to relax the restrictions under which Catholics and Protestant Dissenters lived, which effectively excluded them from participation in public life. On a personal level, however, George was more tolerant, visiting Catholics and Quakers in their homes and ignoring the criticism this provoked. He had little natural empathy with the Methodist
movement, which made such an impact on many of his poorer subjects during his reign, distrusting its fervency and worrying about its potential to foment disorder. He had more sympathy with the aims of higher-class evangelical reformers such as Hannah More and William Wilberforce. The Proclamation Against Vice which George issued in 1787, to the immense amusement of the sophisticated world, urged better behaviour upon the nation in a way that strongly reflected evangelical concerns. However, George’s heart would always be firmly rooted in the tradition of Anglican worship.
Charlotte, although brought up as a Lutheran, soon became as committed an Anglican as her husband. Their shared religious belief was one of the strongest bonds between them: it informed everything they thought and did, in their public and private roles. Both found religion a source of great personal solace and comfort. ‘I am certain that without religion, none can be happy,’ wrote Charlotte in reflective middle age, ‘for it is the true and only support in every situation of life in prosperity, and it keeps us within bounds as it tells us that the hand who gives can also take from us, and in our adversity, it supports us in our distress.’18
Like her husband, she fervently hoped that their children would one day derive the sense of comfort and purpose that faith had delivered into her own life. It was never, in Charlotte’s mind, too early to encourage that longed-for outcome. On the Prince of Wales’s eighth birthday, she sent him a long, sober, distinctly uncelebratory letter, urging the little boy ‘above all things, to fear God, a duty which must lead to all the rest with ease; as his assistance, properly implored, will be your guide through every action of life’. This would not only make him a better person; it would enable him to act as a model for the proper behaviour of others. ‘Abhor all vice, in private as well as in public; look upon yourself as obliged to set a good example.’19
The Strangest Family Page 31