Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (52 page)

A rather moving painting of George II depicts him as he was in 1759. He stands at the top of William Kent’s Grand Staircase at Kensington Palace; Yeomen of the Guard are glimpsed in the background. The king was by now deaf and blind in one eye. He found that time now dragged heavily: his affairs insufficient ‘to fill up the day; his amusements are without variety, & have lost their relish; he becomes fretful and uneasy merely for want of employment’.
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Yet this portrait, based on a lightning sketch taken of the king unawares, makes him look tranquil, relaxed, half-smiling at a courtier just out of view. He looks kindly, capable of compassion, very human.

When someone close to him lost a child, the king had always been deeply and movingly sympathetic. One of those who witnessed this tenderness thought it was ‘his real disposition and way of thinking’, while his famed temper tantrums were temporary: ‘a fit, or a storm’.
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His own children, on the other hand, had often found him horribly hard of heart. He had never been slow to have them whipped.
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One of his grandsons developed a lifelong loathing of Hampton Court Palace, for example, associating it with harsh beatings administered by the king himself. George II had forever acted the king with his children, treating them with ‘all the reserve and majesty of his rank’.

In Horace Walpole’s opinion this was a fatal flaw: he could have had a happy life if only ‘he had never hated his father, or had ever loved his son’.
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But the king’s own parents had taught him that royal fathers and mothers could not afford to grow fond of their offspring and that political considerations took precedence.
This was a lesson in enduring loss that it took many years for him to unlearn. Only in his dotage did George II’s feelings of paternal pride start slowly to sprout once more. One by one, his children began to predecease him, and he began to realise what he had lost.

‘I know I did not love my children when they were young,’ he freely admitted. ‘I hated to have them running into my room.’ But now, as he said, he loved them ‘as well as most fathers’.
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As it was with his wife, so it proved with his children: love grew strongest in the hour of parting. ‘He is in very low spirits,’ murmured the courtiers.
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Unlike the king, Prince Frederick had managed to overcome the difficulties of his own upbringing in order to become a wonderful father to his own family. ‘My dear children,’ he would write to them, ‘you have giv’n me too much joy to-day.’
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(These children included a much-loved, physically disabled daughter, described as a ‘dwarf’ and named Elizabeth.
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) At Leicester House there was ‘all the freedom of private life, all the festivity of wit’, in contrast to Kensington Palace, where there was ‘little but the gloomy pomp of state and court etiquette’.
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Frederick’s relationship with his father never really recovered from the intense quarrels of the 1730s. In 1747, George II announced that ‘his son, for whom he did not care a louse, was to succeed him, and would live long enough to ruin us all’.
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Surprisingly, though, the expected reign of a kind King Frederick would never arrive. On 20 March 1751, the prince died. Some people said that an accidental blow to the head from a cricket ball had finished him off, but an account of his final moments shows that the immediate cause of death was a pulmonary embolism, or a clot of blood in the lungs, which stopped him from breathing. Prince Frederick had been complaining of pleurisy pains in his chest since catching a cold in Kew Gardens three weeks previously.
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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:

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’.
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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’.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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’.
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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.’
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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’.
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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.
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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’.
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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!’
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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.
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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.
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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.
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(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’.
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Some people thought that a little more ‘destructive luxury, or a spirit of dissipation’ would have been in order from a royal mistress.
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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’
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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 to 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.’
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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’.
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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.”’
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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.
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