If the Prince of Wales was regarded by his father as easily the most disappointing of his sons, none of the others, with the exception of the favoured Frederick, was treated with much greater consideration. Distance and denial were the hallmarks of his relationships with them. Having established the younger boys in Germany, the king kept them perennially short of cash – his sixth son, Augustus, was given just a guinea a week pocket money – with the result that all of them ran into debt, incurring his deep displeasure. Edward, who had been sent from Germany to study in Geneva, was especially unhappy. Geneva was, he wrote, ‘a villainous dull place’, and his minder, Colonel Wagenheim, gave him so little to live on that he could not afford ‘to enjoy those indulgences, which not only princes, but private gentlemen expect at a certain age’. His father had surrounded him with men ‘upon the footing of low-lived spies and pettifogging attorneys’, whose only function was to ensure he stayed out of trouble. He was, he believed, ‘losing the very best and most valuable part of my life and existence’. The king did not answer his letters, and, convinced he could stand it no longer (‘I would rather join the fusiliers at Glasgow, for there at least the ground is British and one can manage to exist’), he fled back home. There his misery met with no sympathy. The king sent him off in disgrace to join the military garrison at Gibraltar. From there he was posted to Canada, without being allowed to visit England first. He was still in Quebec in 1791, after eight years’ continual absence, wondering whether ‘a further state of probation’ would be required of him, or whether he soon might be allowed home.72
Even William, ‘the naval prince’ lauded in popular ballad as ‘England’s young but future pride’, who had behaved very creditably under fire, rarely lived up to his father’s expectations. He tried hard to tell his parents what he thought they wanted to hear, assuring them not long after he first went to sea that ‘my moral conduct is not infected by the great deal of vice that I have seen, nor my manners made more impolite by the roughness particular to most seamen’.73 When he arrived home after his first tour of duty, his father did not agree with his son’s optimistic assessment of himself, finding him instead loud, boorish and crude. ‘You know very well,’ he told him, ‘that after the first week, your behaviour on returning from America did not meet with my approbation.’ He had forgotten completely what was required of him in terms of conduct. ‘The station of a prince requires a behaviour very unlike that of a forecastle. You have’, he concluded, in words by then exhaustingly familiar to his eldest brother, ‘in Frederick an excellent example; follow it and you cannot fail of winning my good opinion and that of the public.’74 Frederick himself admitted to the Prince of Wales that William was indeed sometimes ‘so excessively rough and rude that there is no bearing it’. The king was not pleased to hear that on board ship, William’s lack of decorum had extended to arguing with his fellow officers and that he had often manifested ‘an unhappy disposition to resist control’. The prince was not alone in his tendency to talk back when given an order; the quarterdeck of an eighteenth-century warship could sometimes be a surprisingly disputatious place; but George felt that his son was diminished by such actions, and was determined to put a stop to them. When the American War was over, the king took action. William was temporarily removed from the navy and sent to Hanover to learn German, improve his manners and ‘enable him to pursue his profession as an officer, not a mere sailor’.75
William was horrified: he loved service life, and hated Hanover, which he thought ‘a dull place and much given to scandal’. He disliked the nobility, whom he found ‘haughty and proud’, and suspected they were equally unimpressed with him, especially ‘my free tongue with English oaths’. For all his bravado, he seems to have been lonely there. He made no friends among ‘the phlegmatic Germans’ and was in trouble at home for flirting with one of his teenage Mecklenburg cousins. He asked the Prince of Wales to pity him, begging him to consider ‘how disagreeably situated I am in this damned country … Pretty qualifications for any young man like me, smoking, playing twopenny whist and wearing great thick boots. Oh! I wish I was returned. England, England forever, and the pretty girls of Westminster.’76 Taken away from the profession he loved, and exiled to a country he disliked, William was not even allowed the consolation of a grand title. His attempts to persuade his father to make him a duke, like his brothers, fell on deaf ears. It was only when William threatened to stand for election to the House of Commons in order to bring his case before the public that the king relented, and granted him the dukedom of Clarence. William’s long campaign for recognition – and the parliamentary grant that went with it – cannot have made him better disposed towards his father, or have improved his miserable mood. His attempts to gain a sympathetic hearing from his mother hardly fared better. ‘I am sorry to find by another letter of yours that you continue talking of your disposition to melancholy,’ she wrote. ‘It is a thing so little known in your family that I cannot think it serious.’ Charlotte blamed his unhappiness on his obstinate and wilful nature: ‘You appear rather inclined to dislike everything that has been thought of as necessary towards your improvement. If such is your disposition, you deserve pity indeed.’ If he continued to oppose ‘every means the king has taken for your improvement, you will always be wretched yourself, and embitter the lives of those who have the misfortune to surround you’.77
Eight months later, in August 1785, when William was clearly no happier, the queen wrote in even stronger terms: ‘Your reasons for liking and disliking are in general so trifling and frivolous that the best judgement one could form upon them would be youthful volubility.’ Now that he was nearly twenty, that was no excuse and ‘severer judgements must arise, which can be no less than want of a good heart, want of understanding, ambition, vanity, and wilfulness, and an uncommon share of caprice’. Unless he could master his failings, he would become ‘a trifling character, which is the most despicable of all things in the world, and the higher the rank, the more it is observed’. His future was in his own hands. ‘Cease, I beseech you, to be a great little man which is in reality, nothing at all.’78
William was pleased when he was at last allowed back into the navy that autumn, albeit not with the Mediterranean posting he had so coveted. Unlike the king and queen, he was a diligent correspondent, insisting that he ‘wrote everything that is in my heart’ to his parents, but by the following February he had still not had anything in reply. ‘It appears to me strange that though I have written to them letters that require answers, I have not yet heard from either of them.’ He was particularly troubled by the king’s silence. Although not naturally a reflective man, his father’s behaviour was so inexplicable that William devoted a great deal of effort to try to understand it, sharing his bemusement in his letters to his eldest brother. Why did the king seek to control every aspect of his sons’ lives and yet show so little apparent interest in their wellbeing? ‘What can be the use of his keeping us so close? Does he imagine he will make his sons his friends by this mode of conduct? If he does, he is sadly mistaken.’ William did not deny his father thought he was acting in his sons’ interests, and it could even be the case that beneath his apparent coolness, the king might actually love him; but it was, he concluded, impossible to tell. ‘I cannot but regard him, and would do everything to please him, but he is so difficult to satisfy.’79
A year later, in 1786, having again received no answers to his many letters, William’s attitude hardened. He was about to go home on leave, but viewed the prospect gloomily, ‘with a certainty that my Christmas box will be a family lecture for immorality, vice, dissipation and expense’. He no longer felt in the least warmly disposed towards his critical and undemonstrative father. ‘The conduct of late years that I have met with from a certain quarter has been so different from what I observe in other families that those tender sensations have been quite worn out.’ His conclusion was a combination of puzzlement and resignation: ‘I have never been able to find out the motives that have actuated h
im.’80
It was surely disappointment that explained much of the king’s behaviour. During the greatest political crisis of his reign, he was convinced that, with the exception of Frederick, none of his sons had risen to the challenge of offering him genuine and heartfelt support. Not one had reformed his usual behaviour in an attempt to turn himself into the helpmeet he longed for: dutiful, obedient, attentive to his rules and a natural inheritor of his vision of kingship. He had not, of course, always made it particularly easy for them to live up to his ideal. Perpetually associated with admonition rather than encouragement, seemingly indifferent to their desires and feelings, capricious in his orders and unforgiving in his resentments, he was not an easy man to love. He was certainly much provoked by his sons, especially the Prince of Wales; but he was not generous in his dealings with any of the brothers, either financially or emotionally. In return, they closed their eyes to the rigours of his public role, ignoring the pressures under which he laboured, and the toll it took on his health and his temper.
The tragedies that stalked his private world made the difficulties of his public office even harder to bear. The death of Octavius inflicted a wound from which the king never recovered, whilst the memory of the little boy’s innocent virtues threw the failings of his surviving sons into ever-darkening relief. By July 1783, two months after Prince Octavius died, entangled in the morass of party politics and faced with negotiating the humiliating peace with America, the king’s spirits sank to a new low. ‘Every morning,’ he declared, ‘he wished himself eighty, or ninety or dead.’81 It was only the refuge provided by his home, his wife and his daughters that enabled him to carry on at all.
CHAPTER 10
Great Expectations
IN LATE 1783, THE ATMOSPHERE of lowering depression that had surrounded George and Charlotte for so many years began to lift a little. For good or ill, the military mission in America was over, and whilst the outcome was hardly to the king’s liking, at least he was no longer required to endure regular news of humiliating and morale-sapping defeats. In the year that followed, he had recovered his energy sufficiently to pull off an astonishing act of political bravado, ridding himself of a minister he loathed, and replacing him with what was to prove one of the most stable administrations of his reign. Whilst the tempo of his life as a public man could hardly be called happy, it had at least become calm; and some of the stress that had been the dominating experience of the previous ten years began, slowly but surely, to ebb away.
The queen too had crossed a Rubicon, but of a far more personal kind. Her daughter Amelia, born in August 1783, was the queen’s fifteenth child – and much to her relief, also her last. When she had found herself pregnant again in 1780, with the ill-fated Alfred, even Charlotte’s formidable sense of resignation failed her and she had written bitterly to her brother that she had hoped to have no more children. Now, as must have soon become apparent to her, her formidable fertility had run its course. Charlotte was thirty-nine, and had been pregnant for two decades. With the arrival of this daughter, twenty-one years younger than her eldest brother, her long campaign of maternity was finally over.
For both the king and queen, there was a sense of a line being drawn under a demoralising period of protracted unhappiness; in the years that followed, they seem to have made an effort to lighten their spirits and find more entertainment in their lives. The couple allowed themselves greater opportunity to engage in the kind of sedate and dignified pleasures they both enjoyed, taking drives out to explore the countryside and, like other aristocratic eighteenth-century tourists, visiting grand houses, scrutinising the art, furniture and other collections of the owners. Perhaps more surprisingly, they even made some friends. Since the earliest days of their marriage they had been a profoundly self-contained pair; now, for the first time, they allowed people from outside the immediate family into the closed circle of their lives.
The Harcourt family had been courtiers for over fifty years. Simon, 1st Earl Harcourt, had fought with George II at Dettingen in 1743; the old king had later appointed him as governor to his grandson, in which post the earl’s remote, elusive presence had quickly driven Augusta, the prince’s mother, into agonies of angry frustration. His son George Simon (who inherited the earldom) was a far more thoughtful character than his remote, elusive father. Surprisingly for a man of his background, when young he had been a supporter of the radical John Wilkes. He lost his Wilkite sympathies as he grew older, but his devotion to the ideas of another radical energiser never wavered. Like so many of his generation, the earl was a passionate devotee of the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The entrance to the gardens of his country house at Nuneham Courtenay in Oxfordshire was adorned with quotations from the works of the great philosopher; his bust occupied a place of honour among the lawns and flowers. The ideas Harcourt had imbibed from his reading of his hero changed for ever his attitude to his own wealth and the obligations that arose from it. The poor villagers who lived and worked on the Harcourt estates were, as the earl reflected, the chief beneficiaries. ‘They have reason to bless Jean-Jacques,’ he explained, ‘for to him alone, not to me, have they any obligation, as, but for his writings, I might have left them in the misery and sickness they have for so many years been a prey to.’ He established a model of philanthropic good practice at Nuneham, awarding prizes for industry and virtue, announcing the names of the winners in church, and emblazoning their cottages with an ‘M’ for merit. None of this, however, entirely assuaged the guilt he felt at the difference between their lives and his own: ‘Whenever I return from their cottages, I feel ashamed and hurt at silver dishes and gilt ceilings.’1
Sentiments like these kept the thoughtful and reflective Harcourt away from the arena of conventional politics, towards which his background would otherwise have directed him. He was also subject to bouts of melancholy and depression, which led him to conclude, probably correctly, that he was temperamentally unsuited for the rough and tumble of Westminster life. Instead, he settled at Nuneham, married his cousin Elizabeth Vernon, and set out to live as philosophically and do as much good as his extensive means and rather tentative personality allowed. Although never as ferociously intellectual as the Duchess of Portland, the home Harcourt created for his family had something about it of the flavour of Bulstrode.
The dignified, uncontentious way of life adopted by the Harcourts was extremely attractive to George and Charlotte, who yearned to follow a similar plan for themselves. The Harcourts’ determination to take no part in politics only added to their appeal. Lady Harcourt was intelligent and cultivated, just the kind of woman whose company Charlotte liked, whilst her husband’s oft-declared lack of ambition helped the king feel at ease with him. Soon they were widely regarded as royal favourites. Inevitably, not everyone was quite as impressed with the Harcourts as the king and queen. Fanny Burney, who met the earl at court, wondered if he was quite as unworldly as he liked to appear, musing that no one who referred quite so often to the absence of any benefit he had received as a result of royal favour could be completely indifferent to it. The diarist Lord Glenbervie thought the earl’s wife was similarly conscious of her privileged position, describing her as ‘the lofty Lady Harcourt’, noting that ‘she sits and walks as if she had her coronet on her head, and were afraid of its falling off’.2 If the Harcourts occasionally preened themselves on their royal relationship and the virtues that had promoted it, this had no effect on George and Charlotte. They felt free from either constraint or obligation in their company, and had no qualms in thinking of them as their friends.
The relationship became strong enough to include almost all the royal family. George and Charlotte’s children all kept up a lively correspondence of their own with the Harcourts. The boys sent letters from Germany to pass on news about their progress, and the princesses, with less to occupy their time, wrote letters even more prolifically. Elizabeth, the third sister, surprised even Lady Harcourt, herself no slouch with a pen, by the sheer volume of what she wr
ote. ‘Once, when I was ill and confined to my house for six weeks,’ Lady Harcourt recalled, ‘I received from her at that time 143 letters; for she often wrote twice and sometimes thrice in a day if the opportunity of sending a letter occurred.’3
For Elizabeth and her contemporaries, letter-writing came almost as easily as conversation. For those who could afford the time, paper and postage, keeping up one’s correspondence was a crucial part of the daily round. This was especially true for women, who frequently took on the role of keeping their family’s social network of friends and relations fully informed about domestic events. There was no state-sponsored postal service, but, nevertheless, letters circulated briskly from place to place with surprising speed and efficiency. In London, they were dropped off at named collection points, and carried by foot to the appropriate addresses, sometimes arriving only hours after they were sent. Even cross-country mail was delivered regularly, with only the very remotest destinations waiting for week after uncertain week for letters to turn up. The likelihood that their correspondence would arrive safely encouraged letter-writers to ever greater levels of epistolary output. It also changed the content of what they wrote. The ability to write a graceful, formal letter was considered the mark of an educated person, and collections of sample templates could be purchased for those uncertain of their compositional skills. But most letter-writing was far less practised and artificial than these coolly elegant pieces. Everyday letters were often written almost as a form of extended conversation, a link in a great chain of correspondence that went on for years. Others were dashed off in haste, in response to an event, a meeting, the inspiration of a casual thought. Eighteenth-century correspondents wrote with a freshness and immediacy that still leaps off the page, consigning their hopes, fears and joys to paper with a candour that buttonholes the reader after so many years. In a world with fewer diversions, the arrival of a letter was an event to be shared and celebrated or enjoyed as a private pleasure. In most households, there simply could not be too many of them.
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