Early in April 1736, Queen Caroline dispatched her courtier and friend Lady Irwin to The Hague to act as a chaperone for her son’s bride-to-be. Lady Irwin carried advice from the queen, telling Augusta that she would be happier if she indulged her new husband’s extramarital affairs: ‘[the queen] desired me in the strongest terms to recommend to the princess to avoid jealousy’, Irwin recalled, ‘and to be easy in regard to amours, which she said had been her conduct and had consequently procured her happy state she had enjoyed for many years.’5
On 25 April, Augusta arrived in her adopted country; the only companion she had from Saxe-Gotha was a jointed doll, the favourite plaything of her childhood.6 She would be presented to her future husband the next day. Frederick, or ‘Fretz’ as he was known by his family, was 29 years old and a charming prince if not the archetypal prince charming. He had ‘yellowish’ hair, a ‘face fair’, and his eyes were ‘grey like a cat’.7 His legs, however, were weak and spindly as a result of suffering from rickets. Moreover, the unusual circumstances of his childhood had made an indelible mark on his character. On the coronation of George I in 1714, Frederick’s mother and father had moved to England from Hanover, leaving the seven-year-old prince, alone and vulnerable, as the representative of the family in the government of Hanover. The queen, though initially reluctant to leave her eldest son, was eventually convinced to sacrifice maternal responsibility for royal duty. Believing he had been forsaken by his parents, Frederick came, unsurprisingly, to resent George and Caroline.
In the 14 years before he saw his parents again, Frederick developed a fondness for drinking, gambling, whoring and music. The flamboyant prince who moved to England on his father’s orders in 1728 was in some people’s eyes a charismatic bon vivant and in others’, a self-indulgent, insincere spendthrift. His parents certainly fell into the latter camp. After coming to England, Caroline had given birth to a second son, William, the future Duke of Cumberland, whose arrival filled the emotional void created by her separation from Frederick. If her feelings towards her firstborn became indifferent during his time in Hanover, they turned to active dislike when Frederick reached England. Caroline was horrified by her son’s transformation from an innocent seven-year-old into an ‘avaricious and sordid’ man.8 Although some of Frederick’s traits may have been disappointing to his mother, Caroline’s vitriolic pronouncements on her son’s worthlessness seem excessive. She declared him ‘the greatest ass and the greatest beast in the whole world’.9 One day, catching sight of the prince from her dressing-room window, she exclaimed to Lord Hervey, Vice-Chamberlain of the Household, ‘Look, there he goes – that wretch! That villain! I wish the ground would open this moment and sink the monster to the lowest hole in hell.’10
Frederick’s style had shades of some of the more colourful Restoration rakes and one can imagine him striking up a friendship with Charles II or the Duke of Buckingham. He was no stranger to London whorehouses; he played the cello well; he liked to think of himself as a poet; he fostered an interest in experimental science. Frederick thought Caroline and George mean-spirited, while his parents thought him profligate. Both sides probably had some legitimate grievances. At £50,000 a year, his allowance was half of what his father had received as Prince of Wales. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Frederick was careless with money. Horace Walpole’s Memoirs of George II offer an anecdote to illustrate how lightly the burden of repaying debts weighed on the prince: ‘One day at Kensington that he had just borrowed five thousand pounds from Dodington … seeing him pass under his window, he said to Hedges, his secretary, “That man is reckoned one of the most sensible men in England, yet with all his parts, I have just nicked him out of five thousand pounds”.’11
Among the things Frederick resented most about his parents was the role they had assumed for themselves as patrons of the arts and arbiters of musical taste. By the early 1730s, the London musical scene had been dragged into the intergenerational conflict. The king was a prominent supporter of George Frederick Handel, so despite appreciating Handel’s operas himself, Frederick set up a rival opera at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1733 under the management of Handel’s rival, Bononcini. Once it became known that Frederick was chief patron of the new opera, the young and fashionable nobility deserted the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket in favour of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The exodus from the Haymarket did not further endear Frederick to his parents. Royal visits to the opera were a spectacle scrutinised by the public, and poor attendance on a night when royalty were in their box was an embarrassment. As the crowds at the Haymarket dwindled, Caroline raged that her son’s popularity ‘makes me vomit’.12
Queen Caroline was correct when she warned Augusta of Frederick’s penchant for women; the prince’s little black book was brimming with names – on top of numerous courtesans in Hanover, there were, in England, Lady Archibald Hamilton, Anne Vane, Anne Vane’s chambermaid, and many prostitutes besides.13 Among the prince’s paramours, Lady Hamilton, the wife of the Earl of Orkney’s younger brother, Lord Archibald Hamilton, stood out for her maturity and intelligence. Though Jane had given birth to ten children and was not by any means an acknowledged beauty, she captivated Frederick. The pair were introduced by the Orkneys, but while it is tempting to imagine that they first met at Archibald’s beloved Cliveden, it is more likely that Frederick and Jane’s first encounter took place at the Hamiltons’ house in the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, in the fashionable West End of London. Soon after being introduced they were often seen walking together in St James’s Park and in deep conversation at court drawing-room functions. The relationship was primarily, though not exclusively, cerebral, and contemporary accounts are divided over whether Archibald knew and approved of the affair, or whether the pair duped him into thinking they were just good friends.
Despite his romantic and sexual entanglements – and marriage would not bring an end to these affairs – Frederick was extremely eager to find a wife and start a family. A consort and legitimate children were essential for the prince to look like a convincing heir apparent and would, he thought, help him to acquire a larger and more secure income: as a bachelor, his £50,000 allowance was given at the grace of his father, but the finances of married heirs were generally established by parliamentary authority. In fact, parliamentary wrangling over the prince’s allowance would continue until 1742, and would be one of the main issues around which Frederick’s supporters in the Country Party could rally.
Augusta’s situation echoed in reverse that of Queen Mary, who had left England 60 years earlier, similarly naive and unprepared, for a life in the alien Dutch Republic. Yet while Mary’s husband William was aloof and disengaged, Frederick empathised with Augusta’s plight and showed his 17-year-old bride affection and understanding. He was moved that she had been willing to give up her quiet existence in Germany for the very public, highly ceremonial life of a royal consort. According to Lady Irwin, on Frederick and Augusta’s first meeting, ‘he embraced her ten times when I was in the room’.14 Frederick’s protective stance towards Augusta enabled her to deal with the enormous public attention that their nuptials were to attract.
In the early 18th century a growing number of newspapers offered the reading public an unprecedented number of news stories, in greater detail than ever before. The first daily paper, the Daily Courant, appeared in 1702, and the first evening paper, the Evening Post, in 1706. By 1719, the St. James’s Weekly Journal was reporting that ‘both city, town and country, are over-flowed every day with an inundation of news-papers’, and over the course of the century newspaper production would increase from 1 million to 14 million a year.15 The ready availability of newspapers in coffee houses, which often identified themselves as either Whig or Tory in affiliation, and in taverns gave rise to a new urban cliché in the character of the quidnunc (literally a ‘what-now’), a ‘coffee-house politician’ who devoted so much time to keeping up with current affairs that he neglected his own business.16
&
nbsp; The rise in newspaper circulation was in no small part due to the birth of an opposition press. The most famous opposition journal, The Craftsman, was established in 1726 by Viscount Bolingbroke (whose Patriot King had so influenced Frederick), with the specific purpose of unseating the Whig prime minister Robert Walpole. Opposition papers published material that was critical of Walpole’s government, carried editorials that employed slogans of the Country Party, and devoted many column inches to trumpeting their own influence.
In retaliation, ministerial papers ridiculed the opposition output and Walpole’s government made sporadic attempts to prosecute for libel and sedition. Opposition publications also had critics outside the ministry. In 1738 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote that ‘reams of publick papers have been filled with dissertations on the word Liberty, which has been wrested for a great variety of purposes, without one definition of the true significance.’17 But despite such criticism, these papers continued to sell: many of them, especially those run by the renowned opposition editor Nathaniel Mist, were very profitable enterprises.
Most of the newspapers developed under the patronage of parliamentary groups and, in this sense, were closer in form to 17th- and 18th-century pamphlets than to the modern press. While opposition newspapers probably exaggerated the extent to which establishment papers were funded by the government, it is true that many journalists for the ministerial press received annual payments from the secret service. Ministerial newspapers – such as the Daily Gazetteer, the Whitehall Post and the St James’s Evening Post – were distributed from the offices of the secretaries of state, and fanned out through a network of local officials, who could generally be relied on to help with distribution. Opposition publications had their own sources of support and sponsorship, Frederick among them. They even seem to have competed with the government over certain writers: James Ralph, for instance, spent the 1740s writing against the Walpole and Pelham ministries in opposition organs like Common Sense, The Champion, and Old England, before switching sides when he began receiving £300 per annum payments from the secret service in 1753.18
Historians have long associated the rise of the press in the 18th century with the emergence of a ‘public sphere’, a literate and influential community of civic, financial and commercial interests distinct from the court. However, a closer look at the British newspapers of the period reveals an ongoing preoccupation with the court, both as the source and the subject of news.19 Events such as drawing-room functions were crucial opportunities for journalists to gather intelligence, and even international news was commonly prefaced with phrases such as ‘it is whispered around the west end’: clearly it was proximity to the court, rather than to the site of a newsworthy event, that made a report credible.20 Scenes of aristocratic spectacle, such as levees and balls, were also the subject of lengthy articles, which gave exhaustive accounts of what people were wearing and who was there; the guest list of any given event revealed shifting political alliances, providing excellent fodder for discussion among quidnuncs. Before their marriage even took place, Frederick and Augusta benefited from this expanding coverage of royal events. Both ministerial and opposition papers carried excited reports of Augusta’s arrival and the couple’s first public appearances. The media-savvy Frederick realised that if he and Augusta presented themselves in the right way, they truly could become the object of a national obsession.
On Monday 26 April, Frederick set out ‘between one and two in the afternoon’ from St James’s Palace, crossed the river at Whitehall, and then travelled to Greenwich on horseback.21 There he dined with Augusta in one of the park-facing rooms of the palace, ‘the windows being thrown open to oblige the curiosity of the people’.22 After dinner, the couple appeared on the balcony whereupon they were cheered by ‘not less than 10,000 persons’.23 Augusta was an instant sensation. ‘Her Highness had the Goodness to show herself for upwards of half an Hour from the gallery of the Palace, which drew the loudest acclamations,’ the London Evening Post reported.24 The prince had planned to throw £400-worth of shillings and sixpences into the crowd, but changed his mind when someone pointed out that ‘ill consequences might attend such a distribution’.25
The Thames at Westminster with Barges by Samuel Scott (c.1702–72). For Frederick and Augusta, the Thames was not just a functional thoroughfare. In 1732 he commissioned William Kent to make him a rococo barge, which he and Augusta would use in numerous river pageants.
Following the balcony appearance there was more showmanship in the form of an extravagant river pageant. Accompanied by boatmen in gold-filigree costumes, Frederick and Augusta were rowed towards the city in the prince’s rococo barge, which had been custom-made for him in 1732 to designs by William Kent. An entire floating string ensemble accompanied them upriver. The Thames was brimming with boats, all of which saluted the royal couple as they passed, hanging their streamers and flags in celebration. After the pageant, Frederick and Augusta returned to Greenwich, where the main gates of the park were left open late, so that the crowds could once again watch the couple dine together.26
This sort of spectacle struck a chord with many British subjects, who had been disappointed by the relative modesty of the first two Hanoverian kings and craved more theatricality from their monarchs. That Frederick and Augusta dined in public not once, but twice, on the day before their wedding was a powerful statement that they intended to go further than Frederick’s father in embracing spectacle and ceremony. The royal couple was evidently comfortable with grand, theatrical monarchy and capable of satisfying the public hunger for pomp and pageantry. When Frederick admitted to the Earl of Egmont that his barge was probably ‘too fine’, Egmont replied that ‘fine sights please the people and that it was good natured to entertain them that way.’27
Chapter 3
‘A PROFUSION OF FINERY’
THE ROYAL WEDDING took place on 27 April 1736. That morning Augusta was conveyed from Greenwich to the Chapel Royal in St James’s Palace. She travelled to Lambeth in a coach drawn by six cream-coloured horses, was met ‘with the loudest acclamations by several thousands of people’, crossed to Whitehall in the king’s barge, and then was carried to St James’s in the king’s chair. On her arrival, Frederick ‘received her at the garden door, and upon her sinking on her knee to kiss his hand, he affectionately raised her up and twice saluted her’.1
When brought into the royal presence of George II, Augusta ‘prostrated herself’.2 The gesture was conventional, but nevertheless flattered the king who, according to Lord Hervey, ‘set store by such marks of his status’ and had been attracted to Augusta as a match for his son partly because of her obvious deference.3 Whether or not her deference was genuine is debatable. Augusta’s ostensive humility was something she would maintain throughout her marriage, while all the time working behind the scenes with Frederick’s opposition group.
At half past eight in the evening, Augusta, enrobed in her ‘nuptial habit of silver tissue, richly embroidered with the same and adorned with tassels and a fringe’, processed from the Guard-Chamber to the Chapel Royal, accompanied by trumpeters and drummers. On her head rested a tiara glittering with diamonds; her robe was ‘crimson velvet, turned back with several rows of ermine’. The princess’s train was carried by four bridesmaids dressed in complimentary silver gowns, and adorned with ‘diamonds not less in value than from 20 to 30,0001 [pounds] each’. The ceremony was conducted by the Bishop of London and Augusta was given away by the king. The chapel was finely adorned with tapestry, velvet and gold lace, and pews had been taken down to make way for raked seating, which could accommodate a greater number of spectators. A gallery was built over the altar, in front of the organ, for the musicians. The setting was magnificent, but the day did not go flawlessly – Augusta’s poor English meant that Queen Caroline was obliged to translate the ceremony for her, and the anthem Handel had composed for the occasion, ‘Sing unto God, ye kingdoms of the earth’, was, in the Earl of Egmont’s opinion, ‘wretchedly sung’.4
After the ceremony, the bride and groom received George and Caroline in the drawing room at St James’s, and at half past ten they had supper. The first course consisted of 15 cold and 15 hot dishes, the second of 30 hot dishes.5 Reports abounded about the magnificence of the wedding feast. The London Evening Post reported:
[The dessert] form’d a fine Garden rising to a Terras, the Ascent to which was adorn’d with the Resemblance of Fountains, Grottos, Groves, Flowers &c. In the Middle was the Temple of Hymen, the Dome of which was supported on transparent Columns three Foot High. As the Meats were the most exquisite and rare that could be procur’d, so the Desert contained a Profusion of the finest Fruits, among which were Cherries in great Perfection, Apricots, PineApples &c.6
The final event was the bedding-in ceremony. The bride was undressed and helped into her gown by the princesses and escorted to the marital bed, where Frederick joined her in a ‘night gown of silver stuff and a cap of the finest lace’.7 The bride and groom were admired ‘sitting up in bed, surrounded by all the Royal family.’ The queen’s favourite, Lord Hervey, a maven of gossip and assiduous chronicler of the Georgian court, tartly remarked that the prince’s absurd nightcap was taller than any grenadier’s hat, and that Augusta looked very refreshed the next morning, so must have slept soundly.8
Hervey and Frederick had been friends when the prince arrived in England but had irrevocably fallen out when Frederick started his relationship with Anne Vane, and Hervey’s account of the Georgian court, as well as being consistently sympathetic towards Caroline, never misses an opportunity to mock the prince. The queen was Hervey’s ideal partner-in-crime – apparently she too was ‘amused’ by Frederick’s attire at the bedding-in ceremony. In a rare moment of sentimentality, she did, however, confess to Egmont that ‘her son was exceedingly pleased with the Princess, and had told her that if he had been himself to look all Europe over, he should have pitched his choice on her.’9 While Augusta and Frederick’s affection for each other was undoubtedly genuine, their mutual contentment was an important building block of their public image, which offered Frederick as a welcome contrast to his father and grandfather. George I was already divorced when he came to the throne and arrived in England with his mistress, Ehrengard Melusine von der Schulenberg, and George II was notorious for his frequent trips back to Hanover to visit various women; the sex lives of both men were perceived as ‘strange’ by the British public. Frederick’s marriage would be central to restyling the Hanoverian dynasty as domestically stable.
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