The Third George: (Georgian Series)

by Jean Plaidy

  ‘And you think your brother would help us?’

  She was thoughtful. Would George help? George was just a little mean, but was that over the small household matters? As for Charlotte, she had the reputation of being a miser, but Charlotte was not involved in this. She, poor insignificant creature, had no say in anything.

  She did not really believe anything would come of the affair; it was something to dream about as one sat in the spring sunshine in the French garden.

  Mr Wraxall said he would go to London to see if he could arrange an interview with the King, which he was sure he would be able to do when the King knew he had come from his sister. Then he would ask George for his help and when they had it, they would go triumphantly ahead with their plan.

  ‘Pray do that,’ said Caroline Matilda. ‘And I will await your return with the good news.’

  So Mr Wraxall left for London and Caroline Matilda waited, without any great enthusiasm, for her brother’s response.

  *

  The King’s equerry stood before him.

  ‘A gentleman, Your Majesty, who asks an audience. He says his name is Wraxall and that he comes from the Queen of Denmark.’

  George’s emotions were in revolt. There had been so much trouble already, that he had come to expect nothing else from his relations.

  Caroline Matilda with some request. He could guess what that request would be. She was tired of her exile; she wanted to return to Denmark or to come to England. She was tired of living in the shadows. But only there was she safe.

  She was his little sister though, and he remembered her as a chubby baby and afterwards as the little girl with the bright eyes and eager smile who was always clamouring for a part in the family plays. He smiled fondly. But she was not the same. She had become the woman who had indulged in an adulterous intrigue and who had nearly involved her country in war. The scandal of her behaviour had swept through Europe.

  ‘No, no,’ said George. ‘If people will not learn restraint, they must take the consequences.’

  He had had to restrain his impulses; he had had to give up Hannah, give up Sarah and marry Charlotte. Others had to make sacrifices.

  His mouth was primly set.

  ‘I do not know Mr Wraxall,’ he said, ‘and I cannot see him.’

  But as usual his conscience would not let him rest. Caroline Matilda’s face was constantly before him. He kept thinking of the day she had been born when he had first seen her and his mother had said: ‘You must take care of your little sister always, George, for remember she has no father.’

  And he had vowed he would take care of her.

  He asked one of his gentlemen-in-waiting to see Mr Wraxall and find out what he wanted.

  He listened to the plan. His help and money was needed to bring Caroline back to Denmark.

  What a child she was! Did she not understand that she might be asking him to involve his country in war?

  Had he not enough troubles? His two brothers had made unsatisfactory marriages; they were not received at Court because of this; and the eternal American question was in his mind day and night.

  ‘Mr Wraxall should be told that there is nothing England can do until the Queen of Denmark is securely back on the throne of Denmark. If she were, we would support her. You think you can make him understand, eh? What?’

  And Mr Wraxall, being the most optimistic of gentlemen, stayed on in London hoping that the King would change his mind.

  *

  Caroline Matilda waited listlessly in Celle for the return of Wraxall. She guessed that George would do nothing. George did not approve of the scheme; he knew it was doomed to failure right from the start.

  One morning in May she arose early and sat at her window looking out over the gardens. The trees were in bud and some were already showing a glimpse of tiny leaves.

  Oh, she thought, it is very beautiful here in Celle.

  One of her women came to her with an expression half shocked, half excited.

  ‘Madam,’ she said, ‘one of the pages is dead.’

  ‘Dead! Where is he?’

  ‘He is in the pages’ room.’

  Caroline Matilda went straight there and looked at the young boy who was lying on a couch. She shivered and turned away.

  ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘We do not know, Your Majesty,’ was the answer. ‘We can only believe it must have been something he ate.’

  ‘Have the doctors been called?’

  ‘Yes, Your Majesty. They say it may well be something he has eaten.’

  ‘Poor child,’ she said, and lightly touched his forehead.

  She could not get him out of her mind. Something he ate? Something tainted, by accident or by design?

  How could one be sure? Poor child. What harm had he done anyone?

  *

  She lay in her bed; her women had come to help her dress.

  ‘No news from England then?’ she asked.

  ‘None, Your Majesty.’

  ‘I doubt not we shall soon have Mr Wraxall with us,’ she said.

  They dressed her hair; they put on her gown; and she went walking in the French garden. One must take a little exercise. George had always said that the family had a tendency to fatness, and how right he was. She was beginning to feel the inconvenience of too much weight; it made one so breathless.

  When she came in from the garden she felt a little unwell; so she retired to her apartments and lay down. Her throat felt hot and dry.

  Her women came in and were alarmed at the sight of her; the rich colour which was characteristic of her family had left her cheeks; she looked oddly different.

  ‘I am a little unwell,’ she said.

  ‘Madame, should we call the doctors?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘It is like a red hot vice grasping my throat.’

  They did not say that the little page who had died recently had complained of the same symptoms.

  When she allowed the doctors to come to her they saw at once that she was very ill.

  *

  George was a worried king. Events were not going as he and North had believed they should in North America. He regarded the Opposition’s attitude as little short of treason. It was their continual haranguing of the Government and disagreement with its American policy which gave heart to the Colonists.

  Chatham was making a nuisance of himself in the Lords.

  ‘We shall be forced,’ he declared, ‘ultimately to retract. Let us retract while we can, not when we must.’

  Withdraw the troops from America? ‘Impossible!’ said North. ‘Impossible!’ echoed the King.

  Chatham, Charles Fox and Edmund Burke were against the King and the Government. John Wilkes, who had become Lord Mayor of London, drew up a petition with the Livery of the City suggesting that the King dismiss his government because they were responsible for the existing bad relations between the Country and America. George, who had always hated Wilkes, retorted that when he wanted advice he would go to his government for it.

  Meanwhile the conflict was going from bad to worse. Gage, as Commander in Chief, had attempted to seize the colonists’ arms at Concord and was defeated at Lexington, and shortly after there followed the disaster of Bunkers Hill.

  And it was while George was tormented and distressed by this alarming event that news was brought to him from Celle.

  When he read the letter he stared at it and tears filled his eyes.

  His sister Caroline Matilda … dead!

  It could not be. She was only twenty-four years old. It was true she had lived through a great deal but she was little more than a child.

  He questioned the messenger.

  ‘How, eh? Tell me. How did it happen … what?’

  There was little to tell. The Queen had fallen sick of an affliction in her throat and in a few days she had died.

  ‘But she was strong … she was healthy … and so young.’

  Oh, yes, she was young to die. How could it have
happened? He heard the story of the page who had died, possibly through eating ‘something’.

  Had Caroline Matilda died for the same reason?

  No one could say. No one could be sure. Poor ill-fated Caroline Matilda who had lived so quietly in the heart of her family and then for a few violent years as Queen of Denmark.

  ‘It is all trouble,’ said George. ‘Sometimes I feel as though I am going mad.’

  *

  Everyone at Court was talking about the trial of Elizabeth Chudleigh. George was horrified at what had been unfolded. This was the woman whom he had regarded as his friend; and here she was exposed in the courts as the most scheming of adventuresses.

  What a devious course she had travelled! Her life was one long tangle of lies. When she had been living at Court as spinster Elizabeth Chudleigh she had in fact been married to the Honourable Augustus John Hervey. There had even been a child of the union, who, perhaps fortunately, had died. Elizabeth had been unsure whether she would acknowledge her marriage to Hervey until his uncle, the Earl of Bristol, whose heir he was, had been on the point of dying. Then she had considered it would not be such a bad thing to become Countess of Bristol; but before the Earl had died she had become the mistress of the Duke of Kingston and had decided that she would rather be the Duchess of Kingston than the Countess of Bristol. Because she did not wish to suffer the scandal of a divorce she had pretended her marriage to Hervey had not taken place and when there was an opportunity of marrying the Duke of Kingston she had done so, forcing Hervey to silence on their marriage.

  During her spell as Duchess of Kingston Elizabeth had flaunted her position; one of her many extravagances had been to build a mansion in Knightsbridge which was known as Kingston House.

  The Duke, who was many years older than Elizabeth, did not long survive the marriage; and he left his fortune to Elizabeth on condition that she remained a widow since he feared that her vast fortune might attract adventurers.

  This caused some amusement among those who knew Elizabeth for the biggest adventuress of them all. Elizabeth, however, was not satisfied with the arrangement and the story of her remarkable adventures would never have been known had not her late husband’s nephew, on information he had received from an ex-maid of Elizabeth’s, brought a charge of bigamy against Elizabeth which, if proved, would mean that she had never been the Duke’s true wife.

  Elizabeth who had been travelling in Italy enjoying her wealth was forced to come home to face the charges. She was a woman who was in the thick of adventure even in Rome where she had difficulty in obtaining the money she needed from the English banker until she produced a pistol and forced him to supply it. Nothing it seemed was too outrageous for Elizabeth to do.

  And now the trial was entertaining the whole of London. There was Elizabeth – the young adventuress, whose portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds had delighted London before her arrival, which fact had decided her to leave Devonshire and seek her fortune in the capital city. To London she had come, found a place in the household of the Princess Dowager, attracted the interest of the King – George II – secretly married Hervey, decided she had made a mistake, destroyed the church register; and then when there had been a possibility of Hervey’s becoming Earl of Bristol, forged a new sheet in the register to replace the old one she had destroyed. Then deciding that Kingston had more to offer her she ignored her marriage with Hervey and married the Duke.

  This was Elizabeth Chudleigh, the sparkling vivacious maid-of-honour who had befriended George when Prince of Wales, who had learned the secret of Hannah Lightfoot, who had used it to blackmail the Princess Dowager and Lord Bute and now faced a charge of bigamy.

  No wonder everyone was talking about Elizabeth Chudleigh; it was far more interesting, than all the dreary controversy about the American Colonies.

  *

  But the King could not escape from the American problem; he could not sleep for thinking of it. He grew more and more stubborn; he would not give way to these rebels; he was not going to be browbeaten. The fact that so many in his own kingdom believed his policy and that of North to be wrong made him stand more firmly behind his chief Minister.

  ‘I am ever ready,’ he said, ‘to receive addresses and petitions, but I am the judge where.’

  That was the crux of the matter. He was going to be the judge. He was King George and he was going to rule. For years his mother had said to him: George, be a king. Well, now he was the King; and he was going to show it.

  He no longer had the blind faith in Chatham that he once had had. There had been a time when he had believed that if Pitt would form a government all would be well; the people had believed it too; but Pitt had become Chatham and Chatham was a poor invalid, a man who suffered cruelly from the gout and who, it was said, had once lost his reason through his illness.

  Lost his reason! The King shivered at the thought; and tried not to remember that period of his own life when his brain had become a little crowded. That was past. It should never happen again; but it haunted him like a grey ghost, always ready to leap out at him and torment him at unguarded moments.

  Now when he spoke of Chatham he called him that ‘perfidious man’, ‘that trumpet of sedition’, for there were times when Chatham in the House of Lords thundered his disapproval of the Government with all the fire which had belonged to the Great Commoner.

  Chatham was now urging the King at all costs to put an end to the strife in America, to stop this barbarous war against ‘our brethren’. He wanted every oppressive Act passed since 1763 to be repealed.

  Lord North, who like the King had become deeply affected by the struggle, wanted to retire, but George would not allow this. In this conflict with America, George declared, he had the majority of Englishmen behind him; he was stubborn; he had made up his mind that weakness was disaster. He shut his eyes to military losses; he had set himself on a course of action and he believed it would be folly to give it up. It would be construed as weakness and they could not afford to be weak.

  He kept hearing his mother’s voice ringing in his ears: ‘George, be a king.’

  It was alarming to learn that Americans were visiting the Court of France and the French were offering help in all forms, short of declaring war, and that there were many Frenchmen who were urging Louis XVI to go as far as that.

  North was in a panic. He longed to escape from the storm which he had helped to raise. England needed a strong man now and there was one whom the French feared above all other Englishmen. William Pitt had brought humiliation and disaster to their country; he had snatched Canada, America and India from them! he had made England a force to be reckoned with. And Pitt was still in the field of action even though he masqueraded under the name of Chatham.

  North sought to introduce two Bills which he believed would win the approval of both England and America. In the first the right of the English Parliament to tax Americans would be relinquished; in the second a commission would be set up to adjust all differences.

  Charles Fox supported this Bill, but some members of the Opposition were against it. North had shown himself to be the enemy of America, they said, and the Americans would be too proud to accept such offers from him.

  George himself clung to his desire to remain strong, but he did not oppose North’s proposals; yet North again attempted to give up the seals and step into the background. He wrote to the King informing him of this desire. ‘Lord North feels that both his mind and body grow every day more infirm and unable to struggle with the hardships of these arduous times.’

  But George would not let him go. His great desire was to keep North as head of his Government, for he would never approach Chatham again.

  Chatham, watching the way events were shaping was now seeing himself once more as the one man who could bring his country out of the morass of disaster into which she had fallen. It was Chatham who had brought America to England; how right that it should be Chatham who should heal the breach between the two countries.

  H
e could not agree that America should be allowed to declare her Independence. He could not bear to let America go. He deplored the faulty statesmanship which had brought about this disastrous situation. But he was certain that it was not too late.

  He hobbled into the House of Lords, his legs encased in flannel, supported by his son and his son-in-law.

  ‘I rejoice,’ he cried, with a return of his old fire, ‘that the grave has not closed over me so that I can raise my voice against the dismemberment of this ancient and most noble monarchy. Pressed down as I am, I am little able to help my country at this perilous juncture, but while I have sense and memory I will never consent to deprive the royal offspring of the House of Brunswick, the heirs of the Princess Sophia, of their fairest inheritance …’

  His voice faltered a little and then the old power rang out.

  ‘I am not, I confess, well informed of the resources of this kingdom, but I trust it has still sufficient to maintain its just rights, though I know them not. But any state is better than despair. Let us make one effort and if we must fall, let us fall like men.’

  He sat down in his seat helped by the members of his family.

  The Duke of Richmond replied that it was not practical to keep the American Colonies. They could not hold them and to continue to attempt to would weaken the country still further and make an attack by France possible. The country was not prepared for war.

  Chatham rose and protested once more against the dismemberment of this ancient and most noble monarchy. The threat of French invasion made him laugh. He turned violently to the Duke of Richmond and then suddenly he swayed and would have fallen had his son not caught him in his arms.

  The debate ended and Pitt was carried out to a nearby house in Downing Street.

  There was no doubt that he was very ill.

  A few days later he expressed a wish to go to his beloved house at Hayes and he was taken there.

  In three weeks he was dead.

  *

  The body of the Great Commoner lay in state for two days and was buried in the north transept at Westminster Abbey.

  ‘That,’ said the people,’ is the end of Pitt, one of the greatest of English statesmen.’ But this was not quite the truth. The chief mourner was the dead man’s second son, his firstborn being abroad. His son was William Pitt, named after his father; he was nineteen and he was determined to be as great a politician as the father he mourned.