Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (37 page)

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The trigger was Princess Augusta’s waters breaking. She could have now expected midwives to be summoned, pans of water heated, clean linen put onto her bed and the necessary witnesses – the queen, members of the Privy Council – to be called.

But none of this took place. Prince Frederick, with a callous disregard for the health of his eighteen-year-old wife and unborn child, insisted instead on bundling Augusta through her bedchamber door and down the stairs. He wanted her out from under his parents’ roof before the baby was born.

To get the wailing princess to descend to the waiting coach, Frederick pushed from behind, while his dancing master and one of his equerries pulled at each of her arms. Meanwhile, Lady Archibald Hamilton, one of Princess Augusta’s ladies, begged ‘for God’s sake’ that ‘the Prince would let her stay in quiet where she was, for that her pains were so great she could not set one foot before the other, and was upon the rack when they moved her’.
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Considering the complicated nature of royal households, it comes as no surprise to learn that Lady Archibald Hamilton was another old flame of Prince Frederick’s. But her pleas on Princess Augusta’s behalf were in vain. The prince insisted that his wife be packed into the vehicle with Mrs Clavering and Mrs Paine, two of her dressers, while Vreid, his faithful valet and a trained surgeon, sat on the box. They now drove hazardously through the night to St James’s Palace.

Prince Frederick would later put it about that it was at Princess Augusta’s own ‘earnest request’ that they rushed away from Hampton Court. The journey was absolutely necessary, he claimed, because ‘there was neither midwife, nor linen, nor nurse at Hampton Court’, while all things were available in London.
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And it was certainly true that Frederick was an anxious and jumpy father-to-be: in the weeks before the birth, he had been ‘twice or thrice in town to get advice of his physicians, and Mrs Cannon, the midwife’.
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They’d assured him that the intermittent pains Princess Augusta was feeling were caused only by colic. He may have married her in order to increase his allowance, but the prince did have tender feelings towards his wife.

But nobody was fooled by this explanation that the journey resulted from the fears of a ‘wise and tender’ husband concerned for his wife’s safety: it was ‘far from truth’.
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Indeed, nothing could have been less likely than Princess Augusta herself choosing to endure her first labour in a coach, and ‘she cried and begged not to be carried away in her painful condition’.
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Her husband’s tetchy reply was, ‘Come, come, all will be soon over,’ and ‘
Courage! Courage! Ah, quelle sottise!
[Ah, what foolishness!]’
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Prince Frederick was absolutely determined that he would deny his detested parents their privilege of witnessing the birth of an heir.

The smuggling of the pregnant princess out of the palace took place while Caroline and George II’s evening was winding down, and the king and queen remained completely unaware of the commotion. As John Hervey described it, all was ‘just as usual’ until they separated ‘at ten of the clock; and, what is incredible to relate, went to bed all at eleven, without hearing one single syllable of the Princess’s being ill, or even of her not being in the house’.
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For once Prince Frederick had managed to seize the initiative in the battle with his parents. In his desperation to make an impression on his implacable father, he willingly risked two lives. ‘Had he no way of affronting his parents but by venturing to kill his wife and the heir of the crown?’ was one verdict on this adventure. ‘A baby that wounds itself to vex its nurse is not more void of reflection.’
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The journey in the coach must have been frightful. They covered the fifteen bumpy miles in only an hour and a quarter,
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and Prince Frederick and the three ladies had to hold down the screaming princess. (Frederick later complained that the force he’d been compelled to use had given him a terrible ache in his back.) They were ‘oblig’d to stop several times whilst she took her pains’, a treatment considered most ‘cruel’ by those who heard of it afterwards.
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While they were on the road, Frederick dispatched messengers to Chiswick and Lambeth to fetch Lord Wilmington and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the most convenient members of the Privy Council. He needed witnesses to the birth.
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Although they thrust many handkerchiefs up Princess Augusta’s petticoats, her skirts were slowly soaked with ‘the filthy inundations which attend these circumstances’. When the coach eventually reached St James’s Palace, Prince Frederick ordered all the lights to be put out so that the servants there could not see this gruesome evidence of ‘his folly and her distress’.
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Of course, nothing at St James’s was prepared, so they had to send out to the neighbours for napkins, warming pans and other ‘necessary implements’ for the operation of birth.
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One account of the evening presents the ludicrous spectacle of Prince Frederick and Lady Archibald Hamilton together airing the sheets for Princess Augusta’s bed, which turned out to be damp, forcing them to use tablecloths instead.
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Arriving all of a sudden, the little baby – ‘about the bigness of a good large toothpick case’ – had to be wrapped in a napkin.
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In a final touch of farce, the official witnesses arrived too late, the Archbishop fifteen minutes after the child was born.

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The baby princess, to be named Augusta like her mother, was born at about eleven or midnight (accounts vary), and a messenger bearing the news was immediately sent post-haste to Hampton Court.

There must have been much anxious discussion among the queen’s servants before, at half past one in the morning, Caroline was woken by her Bedchamber Woman Charlotte Amelia Titchborne. Caroline’s first thought was that the palace must be on fire. But no, Mrs Titchborne explained, it was just that Princess Augusta’s labour had begun.

The queen called for her nightgown, expecting to go to her daughter-in-law’s apartment a few metres away. ‘Your nightgown, Madam,’ replied Mrs Titchborne, ‘and your coaches too; the Princess is at St James’s.’ ‘Are you mad?’ Caroline interrupted, ‘or are you asleep, my good Titchborne?’

All was soon explained, and the eruption of George II’s wrath when he heard what had happened must have been one of the most spectacular ever.

Baulked from being present at the actual birth, Caroline was anxious to get there as soon as possible afterwards. Very grim and sober, she called for her coach and for John Hervey, and together they drove off to St James’s in a kind of tragicomic chase. Of course, no one at St James’s Palace was expecting them, so when
they arrived Caroline had to sit waiting in the dark ‘till a footman was found who had a candle and lighted her up to the Princess’s apartment’.
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Upstairs in Princess Augusta’s rooms Caroline found the baby girl wrapped in table linen. ‘God bless you, poor little creature!’ the old queen said to her granddaughter. ‘You have come into a disagreeable world.’
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This was a rare and brief moment for grandmother and baby to bond, a tiny lull in the war between the generations.

After drinking hot chocolate with John Hervey, Caroline departed from St James’s at about 4 o’clock in the morning. Back at Hampton Court she found her husband still ‘in an infinite passion’ at Prince Frederick’s sneaking away with ‘no notice to him or the Queen of his design’.
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The king’s terrible tantrum continued all the next day, and a courtier returning to the palace to begin a week on duty ‘found all the folks here in a comical sort of way, with their being call’d up in the night’. Information about what had actually happened was hard to come by: ‘everybody here being dealers in mysteries’, while ‘all the sycophants and agents of the Court spread millions of falsities’.
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But everybody agreed that this was indisputably an act of war.

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This action of Prince Frederick’s was more than a foolish risk taken with his child’s life; it was a deliberate piece of the most extreme provocation. Nothing could have been calculated to give more offence than tricking George II and Caroline into missing the birth of their grandchild by whisking their daughter-in-law away from the palace without a word. The king ‘swells, struts and storms’ with rage, wrote one courtier.
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Over the next few weeks, Caroline steadfastly visited her granddaughter at St James’s, but observers noticed that she never addressed her son, nor he her. When his mother was leaving the palace, though, Prince Frederick took advantage of the crowd of spectators in the courtyard to sink ostentatiously to his knees,
‘down in the dirt’, and to kiss her hand with a false but ‘most respectful show of duty’.
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He was not the only one acting a part in order to win the war for public approval. Despite her gruelling night-time journey and repeated visits to her daughter-in-law, Caroline too admitted privately that ‘one does not care a farthing for them, the giving oneself all this trouble is
une bonne grimace pour le publique
[putting on a good show for the public]’.

After several solicitous visits she could bear it no longer. George II was glad that she stopped going, telling her she was ‘well enough served for thrusting her nose where it had been shit upon already’.
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Part of the reason for Caroline and George II’s fury was their obsessive suspicion that they might have had a fraudulent heir thrust into their family, a fear that had been rife in royal circles since the birth of James II’s son, the Old Pretender, in 1688. George II and Caroline were worried that Prince Frederick, by arranging for Princess Augusta to give birth in private, might have likewise introduced an impostor. ‘A false child will be put upon you,’ the king thundered at the queen.

Having seen Augusta’s baby girl, though, Caroline did not suspect her son of having planted someone else’s child upon her. ‘I own to you, I had my doubts upon the road that there would be some juggle,’ she said to John Hervey later, and ‘if, instead of this poor, little ugly she-mouse, there had been a brave, large, fat, jolly boy, I should not have been cured of my suspicions’.
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Now it was openly acknowledged that ‘the two Courts of the King and the Prince, over which a cloud has hung for some time’, were ‘at last quite separated by a storm that has broken out upon the lying-in of the Princess’.
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A stand-off through the medium of letters commenced, just as it had in the ‘christening quarrel’ of 1717.

Prince Frederick fired off a volley of what he thought were submissive missives apologising for his behaviour, but it was inevitable that his parents failed to find them sufficiently remorseful.

On 5 August 1737, Hervey wearily reported to Ste Fox’s brother Henry (also an old friend) that ‘yesterday’s letter’ from Prince Frederick to George II ‘was to desire earnestly to be re-admitted into the King’s presence, protesting the uprightness of his intentions, and not owning himself in the wrong at any step’. It gave offence for including ‘not a word
of
or
to
the Queen’. The king’s answer was that ‘as the purport of the letter was the same as that which Lord Jersey brought the night before, it required no other answer than what had been given to that’.

Poor John Hervey understandably complained that he was ‘tired to death of hearing nothing but this sort of stuff over and over again; it
ennuies
me to a degree that is inconceivable’. ‘I shall see you tomorrow,’ he wrote to Henry Fox, ‘and I suppose you, not being so tired of the subject as I am, will make me talk it all over again.’
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In the earlier ‘christening quarrel’ George II had been kicked out of the royal palaces, and now he found himself expelling his son in exactly the same manner. On 12 September, the order went out to ‘all peers, peeresses, Privy Councillors and their ladies and persons in any station in the service of ye King and Queen that whoever goes to pay their court to their Royal Highnesses the prince or princess of Wales will not be admitted into their Majesty’s presence’.
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Meanwhile, just as before, ‘whoever was unwelcome at St James’s, was sure of countenance at the Prince’s apartments’.
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Again the courtiers had to choose their allegiance, and one of them found this ‘melancholy prospect’ made him ‘almost burst into tears’.
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The doomsayers inevitably predicted the end for the House of Hanover: with all these silly quarrels, the crown would ‘be lost long before this little Princess can possibly enjoy it’.
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