Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (8 page)

Prince George Augustus, meanwhile, had no time for his wife’s interests and often used to brag about ‘the contempt he had for books and letters’ and ‘to say how much he hated all that stuff from his infancy’.
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While their drawing room at Leicester House remained comfortably full, the prince and princess nevertheless found themselves paying a terribly high price for their principled stand. It was
difficult and sometimes impossible for them to see their daughters and baby son left behind at St James’s.

Once, when the princesses’ governess refused to allow George Augustus access to his little girls, he ‘flew into such a rage that he would literally have kicked her out of the room if the Princess had not thrown herself between them’.
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Sadly the children’s own interests were sacrificed in this quarrel between their elders. ‘We’ve such a good father and such a good mother,’ one of them said, ‘and yet we are orphans.’ Asked if her grandfather the king often visited them, she replied, ‘Oh no, he doesn’t love us enough.’
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Gossip about these events could not be contained and began to spill out across all the courts of Europe. ‘The King of England is really cruel to the Princess of Wales,’ wrote the Duchess of Orléans. ‘Although she has done nothing, he has taken her children away from her.’
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In emotional terms, Prince George Augustus and Princess Caroline paid dearly for taking their stubborn stand against the king. They were robbed of their daughters’ childhoods, and they would feel the pain of this for the rest of their lives.

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Worse was soon to come. Early in 1718, George I planned his court’s summer move to Kensington Palace. Set in fields and gardens beyond the edge of London, the palace was rather tumble-down, ‘superior to St James’s, but prodigiously beneath any idea we might form of a royal palace’.
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Nevertheless, it was a more relaxed, attractive and healthy place than the main urban royal residence.

The king sent ahead the little baby boy George William, whose christening had ignited the argument. Once he was at Kensington Palace, though, the baby developed a cough and ‘straitness of breathing’. After a short illness, he ‘fell into convulsions’ and died.
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Orders were placed for a pitiful amount of black velvet, just ‘sufficient to cover the coffin’ of a baby.
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His funeral cortège left Kensington Palace at 10 p.m. on 12 February 1718.
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Given the circumstances, the cause of the child’s death and his post-mortem were of enormous importance. A large team of doctors was drafted in to observe it, including Princess Caroline’s own physician, Sir David Hamilton.
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A draft of the team’s report, written at Kensington Palace, reveals their discussions. It records that upon opening the baby prince’s body, they found ‘a large quantity of water’ inside the head, inflamed viscera and a little heart containing a great ‘polype’, or cyst.

In the original document at the British Library, the nuanced, considered medical discourse is concluded by another, more politically aware hand. Protecting the king and his medical staff from any accusation of malpractice, it finishes firmly: ‘it appears above all that it was impossible that this young prince could live’.
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Princess Caroline was nevertheless utterly distraught. Perhaps if she had swallowed her pride and ended the quarrel, her infant son would still be alive, or would at least have died in her care.

‘My God!’ wrote Prince George Augustus’s great-aunt in Paris:

Parting a mother from her tiny baby appears to be outrageously callous, a ridiculously exaggerated retribution for the king to exact for a petty breach of etiquette. But in fact the ‘christening quarrel’ took place against a much more profound psychological background. Deep in the murky forest of possible motives for the hatred between king and prince there lies the mysterious matter of the missing queen.

During the drawing-room parties of the 1710s and 1720s, there was a conspicuous gap by George I’s side. His wife, Prince George Augustus’s mother, was completely absent from the court scene at
St James’s. She was still alive, and perfectly well, but had long been imprisoned in a remote German castle. Her sad story was bound to have affected the emotions of both her husband and son.

During George Augustus’s early years in Hanover, his mother Sophia had embarked upon a prolonged, flagrant and ultimately doomed affair with Philip von Königsmarck, a Swedish count then serving in the Hanoverian army. Some of his passionate letters to Sophia survive. On 19 July 1693, he described his memory of ‘dying’ (or having an orgasm, ‘
la petite mort
’) in her eyes, and of her calling out to him, ‘My dear König, let’s do it together!’
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By one dubious means or another, these letters would in due course come to be revealed to the drawing rooms of Europe.

Their grand passion came to a dark and horrible end. One night in 1694, Königsmarck was making his way towards Sophia’s room through the shadowy corridors of the riverside Leine Palace at the heart of the old city of Hanover. Suddenly he was ambushed, set upon and strangled. An Italian assassin, assisted by three members of the court, did the dirty deed.
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They disposed of his body by throwing it into the river.

The whole of the Hanoverian court was grimly united in its silence on the matter, especially when increasingly far-fetched and lurid rumours began to circulate, such as the story that the remains of a skeleton wearing Königsmarck’s ring had been discovered during building work at the palace.
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Because she had been indiscreet with her lover, Sophia’s affair was a matter of state interest, and her trial swiftly followed. While she was relieved to be divorced from her hated husband, she was less happy when he had her placed under house arrest at the distant castle of Ahlden. She was also denied access to her son, Prince George Augustus. He had only been eleven when his mother disappeared, but we know that her fate still darkened his thoughts.

The ancient scandal was constantly raked up around the courts of Europe. In 1716, Princess Caroline received a petition

‘How unspeakably insolent, if this really was said to the Princess!’ commented the Duchess of Orléans as she gleefully passed on the gossip. ‘England is a mad country,’ she concluded.
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At the point when Sophia had fallen in love with Count Königsmarck, she had long endured rampant infidelity from her husband. When he appeared in the drawing room at St James’s Palace in London, George I was usually accompanied by two women assumed by everyone to be his long-term German mistresses.

First there was Ehrengard Melusina von der Schulenberg, usually known as Melusine, a tall thin lady known by the disapproving English as ‘the May Pole’. Next to her stood Sophia Charlotte von Kielmansegg, a short fat female disparagingly called ‘The Elephant’.

When George I had arrived in London in 1714, his companions Melusine and Sophia Charlotte came in for endless criticism. The low life of London were ‘highly diverted’ by the new king’s seraglio.
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The two ladies were just ‘ugly old whores’, the newspapers claimed, and would have found few clients even in the brothels of Drury Lane.
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The skeletal Melusine was said to be ‘duller than the King and consequently did not find that he was so’, while the obese Sophia Charlotte had ‘fierce black eyes, large and rolling … two acres of cheeks spread with crimson, an ocean of neck that overflowed’.
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Lord Chesterfield, one of the king’s cruellest critics, claimed that no woman came amiss to George I ‘if she was but very willing, very fat, and had great breasts’.
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Indeed, a confectioner in the royal household had to be dismissed for using ‘indecent expressions concerning the King & Madam Kielmansegg’.
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But Sophia Charlotte and Melusine were thoroughly and
deliberately misunderstood and misrepresented by the British, who did not – or would not – attempt to like foreigners. Truth at the Georgian court was even stranger than fiction, for Sophia Charlotte von Kielmansegg, ‘The Elephant’, was actually the king’s half-sister. The princes of Europe usually maintained both wives and mistresses, creating a tangled jungle of official and unofficial children. George I’s father had enjoyed an affair with his chief minister’s wife; Sophia Charlotte was its result.

Despite all the talk, there is no evidence that George I and Sophia Charlotte had an incestuous relationship, and indeed an ambitious courtier in search of power thought himself on ‘a fine road to it by furnishing Madame Kielmansegg both with money and a lover’ of her own.
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George I remained silent upon the subject of his estranged wife, her lover and the murder. The shy king had a will of iron and an iron-clad ability to hold a grievance for years.

So there were unhealed wounds deep down in his relationship with his son. They allowed the ridiculous quarrel over the choice of a godfather to become the visible expression of an antagonism much more entrenched and damaging.

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By 1720, everyone was sick of the inconvenience and unhappiness caused by the ‘christening quarrel’. They all hoped that the St James’s Palace drawing room would be the setting for a happy resolution.

As early as February 1718, Princess Caroline had been using the rules of polite social engagement to force the king to acknowledge her presence and to speak to her. A journalist congratulated his country upon ‘the near prospect there is of a reconciliation between his Majesty and his Royal Highness. The Princess of Wales’s appearance at court can forebode no less.’
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This, however, was only a lull in a two-year war of attrition. The submission or apology that the king required of his son remained unforthcoming. In May of the next year, when George I went to Hanover for the summer, he set up a Council of Regency from 
which Prince George Augustus was again pointedly excluded. He forbade his son and daughter-in-law from using St James’s Palace in his absence, and announced that court gatherings would be hosted by his three grandchildren, the little princesses.

It was a turning of the political tide that eventually pressured the royal family into making more serious attempts at appeasement. Forces more potent than themselves were in motion. The turnaround was forced by the involvement of Sir Robert Walpole, the man who hoped to become all-powerful among the politicians.

Walpole, whom ‘nothing terrifies, nothing astonishes’, was something like the country’s first ‘Prime Minister’.
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He certainly acted as if he were, though the title was not yet formalised. At this stage in his career he was still working closely with his brother-in-law, Charles Townshend (who’d later become known as ‘Turnip Townshend’ for his agricultural innovations).

These two were both Whigs, to be sure, but they were locked in close combat with other Whig factions, such as the one led by their nemeses, the Earls of Stanhope and Sunderland. Walpole once had to be restrained from throwing a candlestick at Stanhope during a Cabinet meeting.
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The enfeebled Tories, meanwhile, remained in disarray, and Walpole and the Whigs ran rings around them.

As his struggle against his fellow Whigs Stanhope and Sunderland intensified, Walpole began to need new allies. He sought an alliance with the king’s Hanoverian ministers, and he also began to think that a united royal family could provide him with much-needed support. To secure a royal reunion would signal Walpole as the most powerful politician on the scene.

Though fat and often coarse, Sir Robert had a magnificently magnetic personality. A good speech by him in the House of Commons had ‘as much of natural eloquence and of genius in it as had been heard by any of the audience within those walls’, and ‘whatever he proposes seldom fails of being pass’d’.
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His eloquence persuaded George I that reconciliation with his son was worth what was promised in return:
£
600,000, to be paid against the debt on the Civil List.