George certainly saw little of himself in his eldest son. From the prince’s earliest days, everyone who met him was struck by his graceful self-possession, easy assurance and confident bearing. He had none of the gauche self-consciousness that had been such a painful and disabling feature of his father’s childhood and youth. ‘He had an elegant person, engaging and distinguished manners,’ recalled Mrs Papendiek, ‘added to an affectionate disposition and the cheerfulness of youth.’39 He was as much at ease beguiling the women of his mother’s household as he was shepherding foreign ambassadors through the cultural minefields of patriotic artworks at Windsor. It is hard to imagine the king, so awkward and defensive when young, undertaking either task with the polished bravura demonstrated by his son.
From the first, the Prince of Wales engaged with the world in a way that had been impossible for his father. He anticipated life beyond the schoolroom, not with shrinking trepidation, but with a desperate desire to join it. He was pleased with himself, happy with his physical and intellectual attributes, which he surveyed with a relaxed contentment never enjoyed by the king. In a playful letter, written to one of his sisters’ governesses when he was just seventeen, he described his looks and personality in terms that suggest few of the usual adolescent anxieties. Enumerating his qualities in the third person, he began with ‘the features of his countenance’, which he found ‘strong and manly’. His mouth and teeth were good, his eyes, though grey, were ‘passable’. He was especially pleased with his hair, of which ‘he has more than usually falls to everyone’s share’, but less so with his figure, which, as he accurately foresaw, already showed ‘too great a penchant to grow fat’. He regretted that the shape of his face was far too round to be judged really handsome, but on the whole, he was more than satisfied: ‘Such are gifts nature has bestowed upon him, and which the world says she has bestowed upon him with a generous hand.’ Deftly avoiding an air of too much smugness, he added a self-deprecating postscript: ‘I forgot to add my ugly ears.’
He was equally at ease with ‘his qualities of mind and of his heart’. He thought himself ‘open and generous, above doing anything that is mean’, although he suspected he was ‘too susceptible, even to believing people his friends and placing too much confidence in them, from not having yet obtained a proper knowledge of the world and its practices’. ‘His heart, he declared, ‘is good and tender, if it is allowed to show its emotions.’ He was not blind to his vices or, as he preferred to describe them, ‘weaknesses’. It was true that he was too subject ‘to passions of every kind’, but maintained that he ‘never bears malice or rancour in his heart’. He confessed that he swore too much, and was ‘rather too fond of Wine and Women’. Summing up the balance sheet of his personality, his opinion of himself was extremely favourable: ‘His character is open, free, generous, susceptible of good impressions.’40
For the young prince, with his quick mind, cheerful disposition and lively imagination, everything came easily. He was never accused of the lumpen, dull stupidity with which this father had been so often charged. His problem was laziness; not the terrified, almost catatonic inertia and inattentiveness that had paralysed the king when young, but the flighty indiscipline of a mind that found too little in the world around it to engage or direct it. Where the king had been oppressed by the scale of what lay before him, riven with self-doubt and suspicion that he was simply not up to the job, his son seemed untroubled by such concerns. The prince’s good qualities were ones that his father had never himself enjoyed, whilst he was singularly lacking in those the king had developed with such effort, and had achieved only at the cost of the almost complete re-engineering of his character. It is hard not to see much of the frustration George felt for his heir as the unacknowledged resentment felt by a man for whom every step of his journey had been difficult, marked by sacrifice, submission and perseverance for a child whose experience was so very different – whose intelligence was considerable, whose charm was effortless, and whose lively personality had, from his earliest days, delighted those who knew him best.
The king complained, with some justification, that all these virtues meant nothing if they were squandered; but in a pattern that was to become depressingly familiar, drew no lessons from the experience of his own youth. Perhaps his most significant derogation in the management of the prince was his conspicuous failure to provide him with his own version of Lord Bute. Once emancipated from his influence, the king could never be brought to admit how the years spent under Bute’s tutelage had transformed him; and he was not eager to see established in his own household an alternative power base of the kind Bute had provided for him when he had been heir. Perhaps he assumed that as he was the living embodiment of Bute’s prescriptions, he could himself fulfil the task Bute had once performed so powerfully; but this was not so. Although everyone – including George himself – insisted that the Prince of Wales regarded his father as his principal role model, the king was not well equipped for the task.
George had none of Bute’s charismatic intensity. He was never able to inspire his heir, as Bute had once inspired him, with a sense of the particular mission of royalty, with the scale, not just of the obligation, but also of the excitement and possibility of power. For all his faults, Bute had been a galvaniser, an enthuser who had beguiled, fascinated and stimulated his pupil as much as he cajoled and even bullied him. There was no one in the prince’s world of comparable energy and vision. His father offered him no shining outcome, no prize uniquely of his own making to be won at the end of his endeavours. He had nothing to recommend except hard work, duty and the selfless satisfaction of having fulfilled the purpose for which God had intended him. There was no model for kingship except that defined by the king’s interpretation of it; and no forceful, inventive thinker to tailor this blueprint to the very different character of his son.
In place of the inspiration that was in such short supply, the prince was well provided with a steady diet of admonition. He was urged to regard his father as the perfect model for a moral life and regulate his actions accordingly. ‘Try and imitate his virtues,’ declared the queen, ‘and look upon everything that is in opposition to that duty as destructive to yourself.’41 There was no area of life, the prince was regularly assured, in which he could not learn something useful from the example of his father. Warning his young charge against ‘the slow poison’ of overeating, Lord Holdernesse loftily informed the prince that ‘I cannot name one virtue which does not bring your royal father to mind. Abstinence is only one of the many that adorn His Majesty; equally master of his passion and appetites, he enjoys the greatest of blessings, mens sana in corpore sano. In this point, I wish the prince may rival the king.’42
The king himself saw it as one of his key responsibilities as a parent to ensure that all his sons – not just his heir – were aware of his displeasure and disappointment when he considered they had failed to live up to the high standards demanded of them. In his letters, his tone to them was often brusque, and sometimes one of ill-concealed annoyance. Even when he sought to show genuine affection, it was couched in terms which seldom failed to remind the boys that his love for them was conditional on their satisfactory conduct. On a rare trip away from home in 1778, worn down with anxiety about the progress of the war with America, he wrote to George and Frederick with uncharacteristic emotion. ‘I know well I have a difficult time to steer the helm,’ he declared, ‘but the confidence I place in Divine Providence, the attachment I have for this my native country, and the love I bear my children are incentives enough to make me strain every nerve to do my duty to the best of my abilities.’ He called the princes ‘my dear sons’ and signed himself ‘your affectionate father’, but he could not resist reminding them that the strength of his feelings was, even in this relatively tender moment, dependent on their future behaviour. ‘Act uprightly, and show the anxious care I have had of you has not been misspent, and you will ever find me not only an affectionate father but a sincere friend.’43 In the
ir replies, both princes demonstrated how well they understood what was required of them. The young George hoped that he would be found ‘hereafter worthy of your affection’ whilst Frederick declared it his ‘greatest ambition to deserve Your Majesty’s and the queen’s affections’.44 Both boys knew that their father’s love was something to be won rather than given freely.
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The qualified nature of his attachment to his sons perhaps made it easier for George to implement the final stage of their education – sending them away from home. First to go was the third son, William. He was an affectionate, literal, no-nonsense boy, bluff and unpretentious, and much loved by his sisters. The king had always considered that his loud, blunt, unsophisticated nature made him specially suited to a career in the navy, and in 1779, at the age of fourteen, he joined HMS Prince George as midshipman. He was to be allowed no special privileges and treated exactly as the other young men on board: George commanded Admiral Samuel Hood that ‘no marks of distinction are to be shown unto him: they would destroy my whole plan’. Charlotte was pleased to see that he went off very happily, ‘and undertakes his profession with a great deal of zeal’.45
William’s departure from the brotherhood made little impact on the Prince of Wales, who had always treated him as very much an outsider, not to be admitted to the closed senior partnership of himself and Frederick, the Duke of York. However, the king’s decision the following year to send Frederick to live in Hanover was a devastating one for the prince. The queen explained to her brother Charles that Frederick’s departure had been organised with great secrecy, ‘so that all the difficulties that can be made here cannot harm this enterprise and nothing put back this affair that is so desirable for the good of the young man’. The plan, as publicly announced, was for Frederick to follow his military studies in Germany, but as Charlotte confessed to her brother, it was also a preventative measure, intended ‘to make him see what a prince loses by cultivating bad company and bad ways’; for although her second son had ‘a good heart, doesn’t want spirit, has lots of liveliness and much sincerity’, Charlotte admitted that ‘prudence doesn’t always guide him’. Despite all the care that had been taken with his moral education, the result had not been what she would have wished. ‘As to religion, he has had the best instruction on this subject that could be had, better even than others in the Royal family have ever had, but with all the pains that have been taken with him, religion isn’t treated in England as it is with you.’46 In Hanover, it was hoped, the examples would be better. Moreover, he would be removed from what the king increasingly considered the most insidiously corrupting influence at work on the prince – that of his elder brother, who, George believed, had taught the younger to share in the pleasures of women and drink, which were becoming habitual for him.
It was a considerable sacrifice for the king to see his best-loved son leave home. The Annual Register reported that both he and the queen ‘wept severely’ on the day of his departure. But if his parents were upset, the Prince of Wales was heartbroken. He and Frederick had hardly been apart since they had shared their specially adapted cradle together as babies. The prince was ‘so much affected with the misfortune of being deprived for so long a period of the sole companion of his youth’, reported the Register, ‘that he stood in a state of entire insensibility, totally unable to speak or to express the concern he felt so strongly’.47 They would not meet again for over six years.
Where Frederick and William led the way, their remaining brothers soon followed. The king’s dealings with his younger sons were never as intense as those with the elder two, and he seems to have parcelled them off abroad with few qualms. Certainly, they left home at ever-younger ages. In 1785, eighteen-year-old Edward was bound for Hanover. The following year, Ernest was sent to the University of Göttingen, aged fifteen, followed there by the thirteen-year-old Augustus and the twelve-year-old Adolphus. George viewed their loss with equanimity. He was a poor correspondent, ignoring his sons’ regular pleas for more generous allowances and taking a dim view of requests for leave to visit their family. Like Frederick, most of the brothers were not to see home again for many years. Edward, who was later given the title of Duke of Kent, did not live in England again for thirteen years, returning only once, without permission, in 1790, when the king saw him for only ten minutes before ordering him away again. Ernest was absent for eight years; Adolphus for seven. Of all the adult brothers, only the Prince of Wales was kept at home, kicking his heels in frustration, and with nothing to do but drink, gamble and involve himself in political and sexual intrigue.
For all the modernity of George and Charlotte’s early intentions, especially those of the queen, as the princes grew older, it was clear that they had been only partially successful in establishing a new kind of relationship with their sons. It had proved far harder than they had hoped to escape both the pull of the past and the limitations of their own personalities. The king, as had so many of his predecessors, failed to find a blueprint for the education of the Prince of Wales that captured his imagination and provided him with an apprenticeship appropriate to his future role. Suspicious and resentful of his heir’s talents and his shortcomings, he had little to recommend to him but patience, restraint and good behaviour. Perennially unimpressed by the efforts of his other sons, who frequently complained that he was impossible to please, by the time they came to maturity, George had built around himself an image of fatherhood very different from the cheerful good nature that had marked his dealings with his children when they were small. Whilst all the boys paid lip service to the idea of their father as a model of rectitude, in practice their experience of him was very often one of dourness, irritation and sometimes even fear. When angry, George could be extremely intimidating – Lord Melbourne later told Queen Victoria that the Prince of Wales was ‘monstrously afraid of him’. When disappointed, as he so often was, he was detached to the point of complete rejection, finding it easy to withdraw his affections, and consigned recalcitrant or simply uninspiring sons to an exile that was as emotionally chilly as it was physically distant. As the brothers grew older, their father seemed to grow colder, crosser and ever more remote. The queen rarely intervened. By the mid-1780s, the male part of the family was fragmented, dispersed across Europe, writing disgruntled, miserable letters home to an often unresponsive father. This was not the united, happy brotherhood of uncorrupted, contented probity that their education had been designed to produce. Perhaps, with their daughters, the king and queen might do better.
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The question of how best to educate girls was one which perplexed many Enlightenment thinkers. Their learning could have no direct practical application: all academic institutions and other professions were closed to them, as were the informal centres of debate, discussion and enquiry that grew up around specialist clubs, societies and coffee-houses; these were male preserves, their sexual exclusivity protected as effectively by custom as the older bodies were by law. But did that mean women were to be denied all access to the transforming benefits of knowledge, excluded from participation in any life of the mind? Few progressive thinkers felt entirely comfortable with this position; yet even those who saw the perpetuation of female ignorance as a philosophical wrong, a denial of the potential they believed was there to be realised in all human beings, often felt uneasy when confronted with the consequences of their beliefs. Rousseau was not the only intellectual instinctually opposed to the idea of educated women playing a public role in society. For him, the learned female was useful only in her role as maternal educator; he envisaged no purpose for her beyond the confines of the nursery or schoolroom.
Even those more sympathetic to the principle of women’s education rarely saw learning as a force designed to project women into the public sphere, transforming the existing relationships between the sexes. The scholarly woman was essentially an anomaly in the natural order of things, and she was strongly advised to wear her learning with tact and discretion. Too overt a demonstration
of what she knew would only make her unhappy, undermining her in her traditional role whilst offering nothing meaningful in return.
The fate of a young female bluestocking could be a sad and lonely one, if not well managed by those around her. When the aristocratic Mary Hamilton confided to her usually indulgent uncle that she had begun to study Latin, that touchstone of masculine scholarship, he was horrified. He very much wished she had not started it, but now that she had, she should ‘keep it a dead secret from your most intimate friends, as well as the rest of the world, as a lady’s being learned is generally looked on as a great fault’.48
This was certainly the experience of Louisa Stuart, daughter of the king’s mentor, Lord Bute. Even in the household of a man with such wide-ranging intellectual pursuits, her academic interests were seen as a deliberate provocation to her family, who ‘daily snubbed and checked me … for reading books I had no business with, instead of minding my work as I should do. Whatever I wanted to learn, everybody was up in arms to oppose it, and represent that if indulged, I should become such a pedant nobody would be able to bear me.’ She attributed the crippling shyness with which she was afflicted for the rest of her life to the campaign of attrition which she endured in her own home. ‘Some of its effects have stuck faithfully by me … from the habit of dreading the ridicule which usually followed whenever I opened my lips and a constant apprehension, of being despised by men from having it dinned into me that if they suspected my pursuits and inclinations, they would spit in my face.’49 Perhaps the most famously awkward bluestocking in all literature, subjected on her every appearance to dismissive ridicule of a kind Louisa Stuart would surely have recognised, was herself the creation of a brilliantly clever woman. Poor Mary Bennett, whose embarrassing attempts at intellectual assertion are ignored and whose accomplishments belittled by her indifferent family, is left at the end of Pride and Prejudice with only her books and piano for company. Her elder sister Elizabeth understands, as Mary does not, that wit is a more piquant attraction for even a clever man than insistent displays of acquired knowledge; as a result, she lands the eligible husband that eluded both the fictional Mary and the real-life Louisa Stuart.
The Strangest Family Page 33