by Lucy Worsley
The courtiers observed the king closely, hoping for further deplorable evidence of his hard-hearted hatred for his son. And they thought they had found it in the events of that evening, when the news arrived at St James’s Palace:
His Majesty had just sat down to play, and was engaged at cards, when a page, dispatched from Leicester House, arrived, bringing information that the Prince was no more. He received the intelligence without testifying either emotion or surprise. Then rising, he crossed the room to Lady Yarmouth’s table, who was likewise occupied at play; and leaning over her chair, said to her in a low tone of voice, in German, ‘Fritz is dode’. (Freddy is dead).70
But it wasn’t a lack of emotion that made the king maintain such tight control. It was just his rigid, royal training: ‘the guarded conduct of kings must not always be tried by the rules of common life’.71
This muted reaction disguised much warmer feelings. A few days later George II went to see Prince Frederick’s bereaved wife Princess Augusta, ‘sat by her on the couch, embraced, and wept with her’. Crying and hugging, he told his grandsons that ‘they must be brave boys, obedient to their mother, and deserve the fortune to which they were born’.72
The widowed Princess Augusta enraged Prince Frederick’s ever-troublesome political supporters by gratefully ‘falling at old George’s feet’. They thought she’d ‘betrayed the whole party’ with this belated family reconciliation.73 Frederick’s death devastated the ranks of his erstwhile political friends, the members of the ‘reversionary interest’. Now ‘all who had flattered themselves with rising in his reign’ were extremely disappointed: ‘some peerages were still-born, more first-ministerships, and sundry regiments’.74 Prince Frederick’s funeral was marred by disorganisation, a lack of catering and heavy rain, and was read by his former friends as a final insult from father to son.75
And now, of course, the ‘reversionary interest’ transferred itself instead to Prince Frederick’s eldest son, shy little Prince George, the future King George III.
Each year his birthday would be celebrated at Leicester House, that traditional hotbed of opposition, with the customary huge party. Cramped and crowded, Leicester House proved far too small ‘for the worship of the rising Sun, of whose future influence every single idolater expects a particular portion’.76
The old king may have had something of a rapprochement with his daughter-in-law, Princess Augusta, but he remained a frightening and forbidding figure to his grandson. Little George claimed that ‘whilst this Old Man lives; I will rather undergo anything ever so disagreeable than put my trust in him’. George III rejected everything his grandfather stood for. His own reign as king would be a lifelong reaction against the splendour, warped morals and German focus of the early Georgian court and its lavish summer sprees at Kensington Palace.
It is clear that this family had paid an enormous emotional price in return for the role of royalty and had been placed under terrible pressure by the reversionary problem.
In the very last months of his life, though, George II seems to have made an effort to reach out to his grandson. ‘The reception at St James was very different from what I expected,’ little George wrote after one visit, ‘the old man was in as good humour as ever I saw him.’77 And, while he condemned his grandfather for giving himself up into the hands of his mistresses, little George was not slow to use Amalie as an intermediary to pass on requests to the king.
George II failed to make similar efforts to re-establish good relations with his only surviving son, William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland. Once his parents’ favourite, William Augustus was last seen by us dancing at the ball for his fourteenth birthday. Since then he’d tasted life at sea, but the most exciting action that he experienced on board HMS Victory was the occasion upon which his ship was accidentally rammed by another. Abandoning his naval aspirations, William Augustus turned instead to the army and became a rather successful soldier. In 1743, he was shot in the leg on the battlefield of Dettingen while helping his father and ‘riding about animating the men with great bravery and resolution’.78
He was treated by none other than his mother’s and Sir Robert Walpole’s old surgeon, John Ranby, but he would never be able to walk easily again, and grew immensely fat as a result.79
When Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, arrived in Scotland in 1745, the British Establishment was taken by surprise at his success in rousing an army of Jacobites and heading south. So William Augustus was hurriedly brought back from the continent to face the threat, and the British troops ‘leaped and skipped about like wild things that the Duke was to command them’.80 They were certainly correct to show confidence in his ability to lead them in battle, although the renowned victory at Culloden in April 1746 was achieved by overwhelming technological superiority (bayonets trumping broadswords), a suspicion of dirty tactics and a remorseless determination to kill rather than give quarter to the defeated. Cumberland was appropriately rewarded with the epithet ‘Butcher’, and a powerful legacy of pity was born for the slain Jacobites and the ending of the Highland way of life.
After Prince Frederick’s death in 1751, George II wanted William Augustus to be designated as regent in the event that his grandson should come to the throne before coming of age. But ‘Butcher Cumberland’s’ reputation for bloody violence was just too deep for this to wash. Prince Frederick’s death was greeted on the streets with cries of ‘Oh! that it was but his brother!’81 As he’d maintained only poor relations with Princess Augusta, the future king’s mother, William Augustus found himself gradually eased out of influence.
He also resigned all his military commissions in a fit of pique when his father brutally failed to support his decision to make peace with the French in 1757 during the opening stages of the Seven Years’ War. George II’s temper had not quite left him in his old age, and William Augustus felt the wrath of an inconsiderate father just as his elder brother had done so frequently. His son had ‘ruined me and disgraced himself’, the king decreed.82
Through long habit, Amalie Yarmouth had become a kind of stepmother to the royal family. So, when William Augustus decided to leave the army, he asked Amalie to break the news. She stood up for her pseudo-stepson, attempting to the calm the king, saying that ‘it was to no purpose to be always blaming what was passed’.
Typically, George II ‘grew angry with her’ and ‘told her he knew better … how to act towards his own children’. So William Augustus remained estranged.83
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In 1739, Amalie had moved into the damp apartment previously occupied at Kensington Palace by Henrietta, and she remained in these central but uncongenial quarters for the next twenty-one years. She kept fires burning continually to aid her ‘ague’ and to disperse the ‘damps’ that invaded the rooms.84 (Once the flames got out of hand and damaged the apartment.) Amalie still remained a slightly disappointing mistress to those who expected more glamour: she was a ‘quiet, orderly, well-behaved, honest German, well past her youth’. She ‘did no mischief, made no enemies’, and lived with the king just like a ‘stiff old gentleman and his respectable housekeeper’.85
Some people thought that a little more ‘destructive luxury, or a spirit of dissipation’ would have been in order from a royal mistress.86 But the closest Amalie came to scandal was the occasion upon which another lady at court wrote a ‘very fond’ letter to her husband in France. It was also ‘mightly improper as to politicks’. She’d had the sense not to sign it in case it was opened – which of course it was – but unfortunately she’d directed that an answer should be sent to Amalie’s lodgings. This led people to think that Amalie had been the author, and she had to explain away a ‘very disagreeable mistake’.87 She nevertheless managed to recover her reputation. Like Caroline, Amalie had discovered that sympathy, rather than sex, was the secret of success as George II’s consort.
The king had always been quick to deny that Amalie had any political influence. Whenever he detected that his ministers were trying t
o manipulate him through his mistress, he would explode. ‘Why do you plague her?’ he’d bark. ‘What has she to do with these things? The only comfortable two hours I have in the whole day, are those I pass [with Amalie]; and you are always teazing her.’88
In consequence, a visiting Frenchman wrote home to France with the view that ‘whereas Madame de Pompadour shares the absolute power of Louis XV, Lady Yarmouth shares the absolute impotence of George II’.89
But this was not entirely true. We’ve already seen that George II was not completely powerless, and neither was Amalie. When Mr Pitt came to the palace during a political crisis, for example, ‘the pages of the backstairs were seen hurrying about, and crying, “Mr Pitt wants my Lady Yarmouth.”’90 And Amalie’s measure of influence with the ministers was not entirely of her own making, because the king was only too glad to burden her with the duties of a secretary.91
She’d also become known as the person to visit, cash in hand, if you wanted a peerage, ‘including among her customers, the grandson of a footman and the son of a Barbados pedlar’.92 She certainly wasn’t cheap: it was said that she had ‘touched twelve thousand’ for one particular coronet, and ‘sixteen thousand pounds’ for a viscountcy.93 Horace Walpole thought that she was obsessed with ‘selling peerages whenever she had an opportunity’, although, having had to put up with so much bad temper over so many years, she did deserve some financial compensation.94
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Meanwhile, George II and Caroline’s daughters the princesses had undergone many vicissitudes. The pock-marked and harpsichord-loving Princess Anne had been so desperate to get married that she’d accepted the horrifically ugly Prince William of Orange. But her new life in the Netherlands was miserable and she took every opportunity to come running back to her parents.
Her father gave her only a cold welcome. George II thought that having made her marital bed she must lie in it. Anne also struggled to have babies: it was nearly ten years before she produced the requisite son and heir for Prince William. She outlived her husband but failed to reverse the steady decline of his state. On 12 January 1759, her death (from dropsy) took place in The Hague. She’d been fifty years old, far from the land of her birth and missed by few.95
Anne’s younger sister Princess Louisa had been packed off to marry the king of Denmark. She’d died in the same year as her brother Frederick, after a bungled operation just like her mother’s. Louisa’s first pregnancy had given her ‘a slight rupture which she concealed’, and ‘her death … was terrible’.96
In 1737, when Queen Caroline had died, her modest, mild and favourite daughter Princess Caroline had suffered a nervous breakdown. The younger Caroline had confidently expected to follow her mother to the grave, but somehow she managed to limp on through life, in poor health, for another twenty years. She lived as a recluse, shut up ‘in two chambers in the inner part of St James’s’, all other possibilities ‘now dead to her’.97 Here she received no visitors except close family and John Hervey, for whom she had cherished a long-lived but hopeless passion.98 She finally died in 1757.
At seventeen Princess Mary had been married off to the hereditary Prince of Hesse-Cassel, but found her husband ‘a brutal German, obstinate, of no genius’.99 He treated her with ‘the greatest inhumanity’ until they parted in 1755. His conversion to Catholicism gave Mary the excuse she needed to leave. Her sister Princess Amelia remarked with relief that it was for Mary the final ‘fifth Act of the Tragedy, which will make it soon over’.100 After a recuperative spell in England, Mary returned to Hesse-Cassel to look after the interests of her sons.101
Princess Amelia was by 1760 the only child to remain with her father. No prince had ever emerged as a possible husband for her, and marriage to a commoner was unthinkable. She had lost her old squire, ‘Booby’ Grafton, the former Lord Chamberlain, to a fatal hunting fall in 1757.102 Still outspoken, still well-informed, it was unfortunate that Amelia clashed with her father’s favourite, the meeker, more malleable Amalie Yarmouth. Her talents were wasted in her role as an aging spinster princess, though she constantly shocked her prudent sister-in-law, Princess Augusta, with ‘highly improper’ but successful spells at the gaming table during trips to Bath.103
Princess Amelia’s friends thought that she ‘knew more of the world than princes usually do; partly from native sagacity, partly from keeping better company and having a mind above that jealous fear of the superior in understanding’.104
While the sparks still sometimes flew at Kensington, George II had recently begun to give Princess Amelia more of the appreciation that she deserved. He could not help noticing that she was now the only one left of his and Caroline’s eight merry children: Mary was gone back abroad; her brother William Augustus was hostile; the rest were dead.
While the king had always had mistresses, and while politics had complicated his relationships with his children, he had always really wished to place his family first.
Yet, by 1760, a succession of desperately unfortunate quarrels and accidents had seen his family fizzle away. As a child, George II had lost his own mother when she was imprisoned for adultery. Then he lost contact with his eldest son through the move to Britain in 1714. Next he effectively lost his own father through the quarrel that also saw his three eldest daughters taken from him. His second son was snatched and died in George I’s care, cementing the enmity between them. After a few short years of peaceful life with what was left of his family, George II lost his richly, truly, deeply beloved Caroline. His grandchildren were turned against him, and he lost his eldest son to a premature death. Death took three more daughters, Louisa, Anne and Caroline, while an ill-considered, snarling slight saw his only remaining son sink into silent enmity.
Bearing in mind all these losses, it was no wonder that the king was bitter, disappointed, enraged. The British Empire was no consolation, and ‘his eyes were now constantly full of tears’.105
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Meanwhile, outside the court, Henrietta Berkeley’s beloved George had died, after a painfully brief eleven years of happy married life, on 29 October 1746.
She could not have failed to mourn him, and their surviving letters reveal how greatly they had loved each other. He’d used to beg her: ‘for my sake take more than usual care of yourself’, while she herself was accustomed to sign off with ‘God bless you … I do with all my heart and soul nor do I yet repent that I am H. Berkeley.’106
Bereft of George, Henrietta continued to live quietly at their country house at Marble Hill and their town house at 15 Savile Row. She amused herself by taking a kindly interest in young relatives. But her health was poor, and she must have regretted the years of her youth given to her first husband and to the king. Regret must have almost overwhelmed her when she thought about her only son, Henry, turned against her by his father and altogether lost to her, although he led a successful life and became a Member of Parliament.107
Down at Marble Hill, Henrietta passed the time entertaining her friend and neighbour Horace Walpole with stories of the court of old. Sir Robert Walpole’s son was described as ‘long and slender to excess; his complexion, and particularly his hands, of a most unhealthy paleness’. He had a very characteristic walk, in a ‘style of affected delicacy’, which made it look like he was ‘afraid of a wet floor’.108 An indefatigable collector of snippets of history from court dowagers, his letters and memoirs are an entertaining if inaccurate guide to the Georgian court of his youth. His favourite activity of an evening was to sit gossiping about old times with aged royal mistresses, namely Henrietta Berkeley or Amalie Yarmouth.
He found life in his house at Strawberry Hill, as Henrietta’s near neighbour, most satisfactory to his macabre taste: ‘dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and Pope’s ghost is just now skimming under my window by a most poetical moonlight’.109
Henrietta brushed with the court one last time just before George II’s death, the occasion a final, chance encounter with her former lover. Her friend Horace reports
how ‘oddly’ it happened. Two days before the king died, she went to make a visit to Kensington Palace. She didn’t know that one of the regular reviews of the troops was taking place in Hyde Park and ‘found herself hemmed in by coaches’ in the resultant road chaos. Here, stuck in the jammed traffic, Henrietta’s vehicle came close to the coach of the king, ‘whom she had not seen for so many years, and to my Lady Yarmouth’. She recognised them immediately.
But, despite their proximity, ‘they did not know her. It struck her.’110
George II may have erased her from his memory. Just as she’d promised, though, when she’d left court so long ago, Henrietta had never forgotten him.
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In the old days Henrietta had often heard George II saying that Kensington Palace’s reputation for dampness was undeserved. Certainly it didn’t affect him personally, because ‘incessant fires’ were kept blazing in his rooms to ensure that there was ‘no possibility of His Majesty’s catching cold’.111 He’d frequently boasted that he ‘would never die’ at Kensington.112 On 25 October 1760, he was to be proved wrong.
The events of George II’s last morning unfolded in the first-floor private apartments at Kensington Palace that overlooked the gardens to the south-east. The king’s simple bedroom contained his ‘small bed’ with its hair mattress, his single candle and a wicker basket standing on the table to hold his nightcap during the day.113
That Saturday morning, George II rose at six as usual. Schröder, his valet, later remarked that the king had ‘never looked better than when he gave him his chocolate at seven’.114 After drinking, the king ‘threw up his window and said it was a fine morning, he would go into the garden’.115
Horace Walpole’s diary contains the most entertaining account of what happened over the next few minutes, before the king had the chance to leave.