Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (6 page)

In the drawing room on this particular evening, he faced a challenge that demanded rather more subtlety than a cavalry charge, though it was equally daunting for him to face.

He was about to have to be polite to the father he loathed.

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After a long and painful period of gossiping, jostling and waiting, a whisper ran like wildfire around the room. A door from an inner chamber opened, and the king appeared.

The buzzing swarm of courtiers immediately clustered round him in a tight circle, and animated chatter in French and German, as well as English, broke out. This was not an ancient, staid and orderly court; it was mercurial as well as international. Many of the people here were German immigrants who had travelled from Hanover with George I in 1714.

Meanwhile, Prince George Augustus, Princess Caroline and their household remained huddled together at the lower end of the room, almost braced against the approach of the king. There
were no warm greetings; the king merely gave his son a wintry nod.

A palace drawing room could be full of deception beneath its bonhomie: ‘lying smiles, forced compliments, careful brows, and made laughs’, a place in which ‘people talk of nothing but foreign peace, and think of nothing but domestic war’.
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The antagonism flickering between the two courts now made ‘the whole thing look like two armies drawn up in battle array’.
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The two royal households, the king’s and the prince’s, had not shared the same room for more than two years. This evening’s party was supposed to mark their official reconciliation after a terrible quarrel, but nothing could mask the genuine hostility that still burned between them.

The bad feeling had reached fever pitch, and it had been a long time in the building. To understand the roots of the resentment between father and son, we need to go back decades into the past.

Some people pointed to 1705 as the date of the first disagreement between the king and the prince, and indeed Prince George Augustus had complained vociferously about his father’s stingy wedding present upon his marriage to Caroline that year.
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But it was after their move to London in 1714 that relations between father and son became positively and publicly bitter.

In 1715, it was said that ‘the Prince is on very bad terms with his father, and that they won’t speak to one another’.
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They seemed more interested in provoking one another than in defeating the major rebellion led by the rejected Catholic claimants to the throne which threatened their new kingdom that year.

The following year saw George I planning to return to his native Hanover for a much-needed summer holiday. He refused to make his son regent of Britain in his place as precedent suggested. Now the sniping within the royal family began to be a grave threat to the nation’s well-being. ‘The Princess is all in a flame, the Prince in an agony,’ wrote Princess Caroline’s servant Mary Cowper. ‘They are all mad, and for their own private ends will destroy all.’
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Juicy reports about the latest twists and turns of the royal family’s persistently poor relationships constantly circulated around London. ‘Have you not observed’, asks Lord Chesterfield, ‘how quickly a piece of news spreads itself all over the town?’
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Londoners’ appetite for gossip had helped to fan the flames of antagonism that burned between the king and his son: ‘the more ridiculous the scandal is, the more greedily they will swallow it’.
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Yet there were also good political reasons behind the rift in the royal family. With his father out of the way in Hanover in 1716,
Prince George Augustus suddenly became very keen on politics, ‘very intent upon holding the Parliament, very inquisitive about the revenue’. He asked ‘daily for papers’ and seemed ‘to be preparing to keep an interest of his own in Parliament independent of the King’s’.
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This was an early instance of what would become known as ‘the reversionary problem’. A ‘reversion’ was the promise of an office or job in the event of a future vacancy. (‘Everyone comes to Court to get,’ remarks John Hervey, ‘and if there is nothing to be got in present, it is natural to look for reversions.’
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) A prince possessed the greatest reversion of all, and could expect the greatest achievement of his life – becoming king – only when his father died. His friends and supporters would also grow impatient for power. So the pattern of eighteenth-century British politics, where a king and his heir would lead rival factions in Parliament, began to form.

The reversionary problem was created in 1688, when the Stuart princesses (and future queens) Mary and Anne won a battle but lost a war. They’d accepted the support of the Whig aristocracy in removing their father James II from the throne, but in doing so they also accepted that a monarch
could
in fact be sacked. They therefore sacrificed a great deal of the mystical authority that had sustained their predecessors.

The loose coalition of aristocrats known as the Whigs, meanwhile, had acquired an addictive taste for power. Not yet a formal political party, the Whigs were keener on the innovative culture of credit recently created by the Bank of England than their landowning opponents, the Tories. Slightly warmer towards religious Dissenters than the Tories, the Whigs were also hotly opposed to tyrannical and absolutist rule. That said, like all politicians in the period, they belonged to society’s upper echelons and were keen to defend the social hierarchy.

When Anne died childless, royal power was eroded even further. The Whig-dominated Parliament that invited George I to become king took the opportunity to place various restrictions
upon his scope for action. Some were more onerous than others. On the one hand, he still had the power to appoint the ministers of his government, so he had the ultimate say, that of ‘men rather than measures’. As first minister Sir Robert Walpole put it in 1716, ‘nobody can carry on the King’s business if he is not supported at Court’.
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On the other hand, the Act of Settlement of 1701 had ring-fenced royal power. George I could not award peerages to his fellow Germans; he could not declare war or leave the country without Parliament’s consent; he could not change his religion.

However, despite Parliament becoming more and more important as the arbiter of affairs, the Georgian kings would fight a skilful and determined rearguard action throughout the eighteenth century. But they would all experience problems with their heirs. ‘Great divisions arose in the court,’ it was said, ‘some devoting themselves to the wearer of the crown, and others to the expectant.’
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In Parliament, ambitious members continually used the heir as a focus for stirring up trouble. His ministers moaned ‘to the King that the Prince’s friends were like a battalion that broke through all their measures’.
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There were clearly sound political reasons for father and son to be at war.

In addition to all this, their personalities were poles apart.

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Prince George Augustus’s father could not speak fluent English, but then he was not born to be a British king.

Hanover, their joint birthplace, was a conservative and sleepy little city on the River Leine between the north German plain and the mountains of Lower Saxony. George I inherited his claim to Britain through his mother Sophia, a granddaughter of James I of England who had married Hanover’s Elector. The state’s rulers were called ‘Electors’ because they belonged to a consortium of nine minor princes who ‘elected’ their overlord, the Holy Roman Emperor. Their territory included much of modern Germany and its neighbouring countries.

George I inherited Hanover when his father died in 1698. Meanwhile, back in Britain, Queen Anne was reluctant to face the
implications of her inevitable death and her childlessness, and neglected to invite her Hanoverian heirs to visit Britain during her lifetime. The mere suggestion that they should come over to familiarise themselves with their future inheritance was taken as ‘a great piece of rudeness’ and ‘no better than presenting the Sovereign with a death’s head’.
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George I: an ‘honest dull German gentleman’?

 

During the Hanoverians’ enforced absence, the supporters of their main rival were very vocal. These were the Jacobites, followers of the ‘Pretender’, the exiled Catholic son of James II (his more optimistic friends called him ‘King James III’). Many Tory politicians held dangerous, treasonous Jacobite opinions. If a gentleman heard even his cook-maids and footmen shouting, wrote Daniel Defoe, he’d be wrong to assume that they were arguing about the pudding or the washing-up. Servants’ feuds were just as likely to be about the ‘mighty affairs of the government, and who is for the Protestant Succession, and who for the Pretender’.
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It was quite remarkable, in the event, that George I became king without bloodshed in 1714, and in 1715 he easily defeated a Jacobite rebellion.

Five years later, by 1720, he was very nearly sixty. One eyewitness described how ‘his cheeks are pendent, and his eyes are too big … he is fond of pleasures’.
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Lord Chesterfield claimed that George I favoured fat women, and that those who aspired to become his mistresses had to ‘strain and swell’ themselves to put on weight (‘Some succeeded, and others burst’).
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In his drawing room the king was noticeably eager to kiss visiting ladies ‘on the lips’, and was observed to take the ‘most pleasure in kissing the prettiest’.
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The king himself was short, ‘very corpulent’ and sadly lacking in kingly charisma: ‘his countenance was benign, but without much expression’.
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Most unfortunately, given his job, he was ‘not fond of attracting notice’. He hated crowds and ‘the splendour of majesty’.
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A certain snide, sophisticated, cynical category of British courtier would give George I an enduring reputation as an uninterested, uneducated boor: an ‘honest dull German gentleman’, as the snooty Chesterfield put it, ‘as unfit as unwilling to act the part of a King’.
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In actual fact, the passionate love he had for his homeland of Hanover was misread as this supposed distaste for his adopted country of Britain. His reputation as a perverted sexual athlete was also completely undeserved. In reality, he liked to spend his evenings quietly with his skinny and aging mistress and the three dreary daughters she had given him.

So the crowded palace drawing room was rather like George I’s idea of hell. His glacial behaviour there meant many of his courtiers believed him to be utterly heartless. On one occasion Lady Nithsdale, whose husband was in the Tower awaiting execution, tried to hand the reluctant king a petition for mercy. She caught hold of his coat in a desperate plea for attention, keeping ‘such strong hold that he dragged’ her to the very door. The petition for her husband’s life ‘fell down in the scuffle’ and Lady Nithsdale ‘almost fainted through grief and disappointment’.
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But certainly the king was not, as many courtiers thought,
entirely ‘so cold that he freezes everything into ice’.
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With a small group of close friends he could throw off his protective carapace and act naturally, timidly allowing the people he loved to see his human side. If George I had friends in the sense of intimates who knew his every mood, they certainly included his servants. Above all, his two confidential Turkish valets, Georg Ludwig Maximilian Mohammed von Königstreu and Ernst August Mustapha, were among the few with whom he could relax.

The more acid members of George I’s court thought him nothing but ‘an honest blockhead’, and that becoming king ‘added nothing to his happiness, only prejudiced his honesty and shortened his days’.
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Kinder friends feared that he would ‘find more worry and trouble than pleasure in his regal condition’, and guessed that he would ‘often say to himself, “If only I were still Elector, and in Hanover.”’
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He probably did indeed repeat the words to himself every drawing-room night.

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The ‘reconciliation’ that was supposed to take place in the St 
James’s Palace drawing room on 25 April 1720 was intended to draw a line beneath an argument that had really begun to heat up late in 1717. The whole sorry affair would become known as ‘the christening quarrel’.

A bird’s-eye view of St James’s Palace. The Tudor gatehouse lies to the left, while the Great Drawing Room overlooks the formal gardens to the right

 

On 3 November 1717, a courtier had written to a friend about the ‘difference running as high between the two courts as ever’. He was altogether unaware that the tension between king and prince was about to turn a twist tighter.

Prince George Augustus and Princess Caroline already had a boy and three girls, and Caroline had spent most of 1717 pregnant once again. The same letter reported that she’d finally given birth, ‘last night at six o’clock’, to a young prince.
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This baby boy became the innocent cause of an almighty but slightly ridiculous row.