CHAPTER 5

A Modern Marriage

THE CARE WITH WHICH GEORGE had chosen his wife was a measure of the optimism with which he viewed the prospects for his marriage. He had always intended that it should be more than a purely dynastic union. Unlike so many of his royal predecessors, he was determined to find within it a personal happiness which would enrich and transform his private life. But he also hoped that his relationship with his new queen would have a public meaning too. It was central to his mission as king to set an example of virtuous behaviour that could inspire his subjects to replicate it in their own lives. The conduct of his marriage would be the strongest possible declaration of the principles in which he believed, a beacon of right-thinking and good practice which would illustrate in the most personal way what could be achieved when consideration, kindness and respect were established at the heart of the conjugal experience. In pursuing this ideal, George was not alone. Many other young couples of his generation sought to find in their marriages the qualities of affection and loyalty the king set out to achieve in his own partnership. In his attitude to this most important relationship, George was perhaps less royally unique and more reflective of the aspirations of many of his subjects than in almost any other dimension of his life.

This was not, however, always apparent in the marital practices of those closest to the king in social status. Among the upper reaches of the aristocracy, instances abounded of married couples displaying spectacular and well-publicised indifference to any of the established standards of moral probity. Plutocratic levels of wealth and a blithe sense of entitlement fostered a serene disregard for the marital conventions that regulated the actions of poorer, smaller people. The great aristocrats made their own rules. Lady Harley, the Countess of Oxford, had so many children by so many different lovers that her brood was dubbed the Harleian Miscellany, after the famous collection of antiquarian books. Her husband was unperturbed by her affairs, declaring that he found her ‘frank candour’ to be ‘so amiable’ that he entirely forgave her.1 In the Pembroke marriage, it was the earl who was the unfaithful partner, eloping with his mistress but sending the baby boy produced by the liaison back to the family home, where he was affectionately cared for by Pembroke’s much-tried countess.

A higher-profile example of marital conventions turned upside down was the talk of the country for most of its thirty-year duration. The relationship between the 5th Duke of Devonshire and his duchess, Georgiana, was a crowded one by any standards, including not only the ducal husband and wife but also Elizabeth Foster, who joined the Devonshire household as the duchess’s best friend – some said lover – and eventually came to preside over it as the duke’s acknowledged mistress, the mother of two of his children and, after Georgiana’s death, his second wife. Unlike the long-suffering Lady Pembroke, who Horace Walpole thought had all the purity of a Madonna, Georgiana pursued her own relationships, most notably with the politician Charles Grey, by whom she had a daughter. The baby was raised by Grey’s parents, but Georgiana’s legitimate children were brought up at Chatsworth alongside those of her husband and his mistress.

For all its very public indifference to accepted standards, the Devonshire marriage came to an end in the traditional way, with the death of one of the partners. This was not the case with a relationship whose noisy dissolution scandalised a mesmerised public, and seemed to some outraged observers to have rewarded bad behaviour on all sides. The union of the Duke and Duchess of Grafton was a typical elite match. Augustus Fitzroy was heir to the Grafton dukedom; Anne Liddell was a rich man’s daughter who brought a huge dowry of £40,000 to her new husband. It looked as though money had been the prime consideration in arranging the marriage, but the duchess claimed that she and the duke had been very much in love when first married in 1756. Whatever had brought them together, the Graftons were not happy for long. The duchess was soon complaining of the duke’s gambling, drinking and adultery, and, perhaps hoping to shock him into better behaviour, she left him and retreated to her father’s house. It proved a huge miscalculation on her part. Grafton immediately took up with Nancy Parsons, described by Horace Walpole as ‘a girl distinguished by a most uncommon degree of prostitution’, who was said to have earned a hundred guineas in a single week ‘from different lovers, at a guinea a head’.2 The duchess asked for, and received, a formal separation, whereupon the duke installed Nancy Parsons in her rooms and allowed her to wear the duchess’s jewels and preside over her dinner table.

As a separated woman, only the most unimpeachable conduct would have shored up the duchess’s tottering reputation; but she was only twenty-eight in 1765, and perhaps felt it was a little early to retire from the world, especially given the humiliating way in which she had been replaced by Nancy Parsons. Soon her ‘flirtations’ were the subject of disapproving gossip. She dallied with the Duke of Portland, who married someone else without telling her first. Then, in 1767, she met the Earl of Ossory at Brighton. They began an affair, and she found herself pregnant with his child. Despite his own well-publicised adultery, Grafton was outraged; perhaps his recent appointment as first minister had hardened his usually fluid moral resolve. He prosecuted the duchess for adultery and won. She was persuaded not to counter-sue in return for a generous allowance, and her agreement to hand over into Grafton’s care the children from their marriage, who were taken from her as she lay in bed about to give birth to Ossory’s baby. The Graftons were divorced by an Act of Parliament in 1769; three days later, the duchess married Ossory.

It was this last chapter in the duchess’s chequered story that provoked most disapproval from guardians of conventional values. Princess Amelia, George II’s plain-speaking spinster daughter, observed grimly that ‘the frequency of these things amongst people of the highest rank had become a reproach to the nation’. She particularly objected to the duchess’s remarriage, as it suggested that an adulterous affair could be transformed, via the agency of divorce, into a state of respectable matrimony. Princess Amelia was not the only member of the royal family who disapproved, especially when the reputation to be washed clean was that of the woman involved. The courtier and diarist Lady Mary Coke overheard the king ask the Lord Chancellor, the country’s most senior legal officer, whether ‘something might be thought of that would prevent the very bad conduct of the ladies, of which there had been very many instances lately’. Later she heard a rumour that ‘His Majesty proposed a bill should be brought in, to prevent ladies divorced from their husbands from marrying again’.3

In the event, nothing more was heard of the king’s desire to enforce female fidelity through parliamentary legislation, but George did all he could, by every other means at his disposal, to signal his distaste for the brittle, serial immorality practised so flamboyantly by so many of his loose-living aristocratic peers. The image of the worldly, sophisticated womaniser who took his pleasure with insouciant disregard for his marriage vows had been extremely attractive to George’s father and grandfather, both of whom believed that their masculinity was enhanced by the tang of a little adultery; but George was immune to its appeal. He conformed to a very different eighteenth-century type, and, as a result, looked towards a very different vision of the married state. As the historian Amanda Vickery has shown, not all eighteenth-century men were amoral pleasure-seekers, drawing their gratification from the bottle, the hunt or the gaming table, believing, as Horace Walpole wrote of the Duke of Grafton, that ‘the world should be postponed for a whore and a horse-race’.4

For many sober, conscientious, diligent young men, it was not through such expensive and ephemeral amusements that they hoped to establish their identity and position in the world; it was marriage with some respectable young woman which would allow them truly to come into their own and make their way in life. Marriage was not a burden to be endured, a restraint to be kicked against, but a prize towards which they endlessly planned and schemed. ‘My imagination was excited with pleasurable ideas of what was coming,’ wrote one eager groom for whom the longed-for day was at last in sight; ‘There was not one thing on earth which gave me the slightest anxiety or doubt! Nothing but a delightful anticipation of happiness and independence!’5 The yearning to find the right wife, with whom they could establish a home and raise a family, was, for men like these, an all-consuming desire, its achievement a source of lasting satisfaction.

Their outlook was one with which George III instinctively identified. He was socially conservative, sexually restrained, dutiful, exacting and often painfully self-aware. He was also loyal, decent and hungry for emotional warmth, if supplied on his own terms, and by a woman who would not intimidate or overwhelm him. The template towards which he was drawn, both by his character and his sense of his public mission, placed wedlock at the very pinnacle of human emotional experience. ‘This state,’ wrote the clergyman Wetenhall Wilkes in a bestselling pamphlet first published in 1741, and still in print when George and Charlotte were married twenty years later, ‘is the completest image of heaven we can ever receive in this life, productive of the greatest pleasures we can enjoy on this earth.’6

This was a vision of matrimony in which, whilst considerations of property and money were not ignored, it was the harmony of the couple at its centre that mattered most. It was a union into which both partners entered willingly, with an equal commitment to making it work, a marital joint-enterprise in which husband and wife were both prepared to sacrifice individual needs and desires in order to secure the success of the wider family project. Both were prepared to involve themselves in the interests of the other, since shared tastes and mutually satisfying pursuits were considered to be the strongest bedrock upon which a happy marriage rested. Inside the partnership, the most propitious emotional climate was considered to be one of steady affection rather than volcanic eruptions of feeling. A firm endeavour to please was thought more significant than physical attraction, and generosity of spirit and mildness of temper most important of all.

The degree to which this model of matrimony – once dubbed by academics ‘the companionate marriage’ – was a new phenomenon which emerged in the mid-eighteenth century has been one of the most hotly contested debates in social history in recent years. Little credence is now given to the once widely accepted assertion that, before this date, most marriages were cold, commercial contracts, dominated by financial considerations, arranged by parents, and with little room within their bounds for affection. Nor is it now generally accepted that after about 1750 there was a universal warming up of the married state, with love becoming the principal basis for entering into wedlock. But whilst, in practice, marriage continued to contain within itself examples of success and failure, the concern to get things right, to try to identify the best possible preconditions for a stable and lasting relationship, was an obsessive preoccupation of many eighteenth-century writers, thinkers and moralists.

In the latter years of the eighteenth century, the poets and novelists of the Romantic movement celebrated the wilder transports of feeling as the means by which lovers underwent the most transcendent of human experiences, but an earlier generation took a more sceptical view. Most were concerned to balance the appeal of romantic love with a more pragmatic assessment of what made marriage work. Every mid-century writer offering advice to young people insisted that, despite what novels told them, unbridled passion was not a suitable foundation on which to build a stable relationship. Love, of the more turbulent kind at least, was a transient affair, not to be confused with the more solid virtues of lasting affection. They distrusted what they regarded as disorderly and disruptive emotions. The kind of desire later so powerfully celebrated by the Brontë sisters, which hurtled through ordinary life like a disruptive hurricane, was not at all to the taste of earlier moralists, who disapproved of its intemperate volatility and thought it a most unsuitable basis for the long-haul demands of married life. ‘When you are of an age to think of settling,’ wrote one mother to her daughter in an entirely typical example of maternal advice, ‘let your attentions be placed in a sober, steady, religious man who will be tender and careful of you at all times.’7

A sensible parent would always have preferred the unexciting virtues of a George III – kindly, decent, disciplined – to the febrile glamour of a Grafton. In a society where only the richest and most powerful were able to contemplate divorce, choosing a suitable spouse was a matter of enormous significance. The perils involved in finding the right man is the subject of every one of Jane Austen’s books, whose plots usually turn on the difficulties of distinguishing the genuinely worthy candidate from competitors of greater superficial attraction but less true value. To amplify the pitfalls, her novels usually feature a bitter portrait of an ill-matched couple, with Pride and Prejudice’s Mr and Mrs Bennett perhaps the most poignant example of the destructive effects of the fateful attraction of opposites. As Austen understood, there were no second chances in Georgian marital experience, except those supplied by the capricious agency of death.

If it was a good idea to choose a partner by the application of sense rather than sensibility, it was just as important to have a realistic expectation of what even the best marriage could deliver. A life of uninterrupted bliss was not to be looked for. Those most likely to enjoy the fruits of a successful marriage were those who set a limit on their aspirations for it. Writing to a close friend who had just announced her plans to marry, the bluestocking Elizabeth Carter was certain she was too intelligent to fall into such a trap, observing primly that ‘you have too much sense to form any extravagant and romantic expectations of such a life of rapture as is inconsistent with human nature’. Carter was confident that her friend would enjoy far greater – if perhaps rather chillier – benefits as a result: ‘The sober and steady mutual esteem and affection, from a plan of life regulated upon principles of duty will be yours.’8 Wetenhall Wilkes warned his readers that ‘The utmost happiness we can expect in this world is contentment, and if we aim at anything higher, we shall meet with nothing but grief and disappointment.’9

Most of those to whom Wilkes and his many counterparts directed their arguments were, on the whole, people like themselves: thoughtful, literate, leisured, with some property and income to dispose, with the time and means to make considered decisions about matrimony. They were not poor – for those without assets, marital choices were fewer and starker – but neither were they the great monied magnates who so often considered themselves beyond the reach of regulation and advice. In most cases, it was ‘the middling sort’ who were most engaged, both as practitioners and commentators, in debates about what constituted a good marriage; but even amongst the aristocracy, some partnerships were built upon foundations of which Wilkes and his many supporters would have entirely approved.

William Petty married Sophia Carteret in 1765. He was the Earl of Shelburne, she was an earl’s daughter. They were not quite as rich as the Devonshires, but by any other standards, their income was huge. They owned property in London, Bath and Ireland, and their principal residence was Bowood in Wiltshire, a magnificent country house remodelled by Robert Adam. Within these majestic settings, they carved out for themselves a genuinely loving union, marked by shared interests, kindness and consideration, and, above all, a mutual commitment to the grand marital project.

Shelburne was one of those sober men who had looked forward to wedlock, and had been determined to make his marriage work. Like George III, he had had a difficult childhood, and was determined to create a happier world for his wife and children. In his public life, he was an ambitious politician, who was to serve the king briefly as first minister between 1782 and 1783, but in private, he was a thoughtful intellectual with a taste for the classics. In these scholarly pursuits, he found a willing partner in his wife. Sophia had been raised amongst educated women, and liked nothing more than to spend the evenings reading with her husband. Closeted in their apartments, away from the severe grandeur of the principal rooms, the couple jointly made their way through Thucydides or the works of David Hume. In this quiet intimacy, they enjoyed their happiest moments. ‘Spent the whole evening tête-à-tête in my dressing room,’ wrote Sophia in her diary. ‘Nothing can be more comfortable than we have hitherto been.’10 The Shelburnes had two children, but in giving birth to a third, Sophia died, at the age of only twenty-five. The earl never really recovered from her loss. He had carved on her tomb ‘her price was above rubies’. It is impossible not to believe the words came from the heart.

The Shelburne marriage showed that affectionate, mutually supportive marriages were achievable not only by the middle classes. Aristocrats too could aspire to a model of matrimony that placed a loving alliance of husband and wife firmly at its heart. Perhaps the most surprising example of this is to be found in the later life of the Duke of Grafton. After his divorce, he cast off Nancy Parsons and married again. This time, Grafton proved a model husband, fathering twelve children. In 1789, the scandals of two decades before forgotten, he published a pamphlet urging a total reformation in the moral behaviour of the upper classes.

George’s reserved and punctilious character would never have allowed him to follow the examples of the Devonshires or the Graftons, but he knew he would have no difficulty in conforming to the requirements of an alternative vision of conjugal life. The wedded happiness enjoyed by the Shelburnes – bookish, reserved, intimately self-absorbed – was exactly to his taste. This was the pattern he intended to follow in his own marriage, and he had done all he could to ensure that he would achieve it. Although he had no opportunity to get to know his wife before he married her, he sought out a woman whose character seemed likely to suit his own. Like other discerning suitors, he had rejected partners possessed of greater beauty or better connections in favour of a mild, obliging temper. He did this because he hoped his would be no aridly formal arrangement, but, as far as he could ensure it, a genuine union of like minds. He entered the married state eagerly, never doubting for a moment that it was within its bounds that he would achieve lasting happiness. From the outset, he was dedicated to the longest of long terms. Before he had even seen Charlotte, George declared to Bute that he hoped he would be united with her for the rest of their lives.

*

Once safely and irrevocably joined to his new wife, the king set about creating the foundations for their future. They were to start their married life in St James’s Palace, then the principal royal residence in central London. Originally built in the sixteenth century by Henry VIII, it had been subjected to numerous alterations over the years, and by the 1760s was a rambling warren of jumbled styles and tastes. Foreign visitors used to grander royal residences found it unprepossessing on the outside; within, it was neglected and shabby. George himself once referred to it as ‘that dust trap’.11 When Walpole was shown around it in 1758, he was astonished to find Queen Caroline’s bedroom had been left as it had been at the time of her death twenty years before, ‘down to the wood that had been laid for the fire on the day she died’.12

George fitted out a suite of rooms which included a bedchamber for which the royal furniture-makers built ‘a very large mahogany four-post bedstead’ with Corinthian columns. It took seven hundred yards of blue damask to cover the posts and make new valances and curtains. Five new mattresses were also ordered, stuffed with fine wool and the ‘best curled hair’.13 There was no dedicated bathroom, but there was a specially built tub, and in their dressing room the king had placed a selection of soaps, tooth sponges and lavender water. A flannel mat protected the carpets of Charlotte’s closet when the hairdresser puffed powder on to her hair. Carved and gilded stands were bought for ‘large glass basins of gold-fish’ to stand upon; a card table was installed for the queen’s German attendant, Mrs Schwellenberg, who was a keen player, and a small cushion was made for Charlotte’s little dog, Presto, who followed her wherever she went.

From their smartened-up base at St James’s, the young couple sallied out to show themselves to the world. In the early days of their marriage, they went everywhere together. It was a matter of surprise to Continental observers how frequently aristocratic English spouses were to be found in each other’s company. ‘Husband and wife are always together and share the same society,’ noted the French traveller François de La Rochefoucauld somewhat incredulously. ‘The very richest people do not keep more than four or six carriage horses, since they pay their visits together. It would be as ridiculous to do otherwise in England as it would be to go everywhere with your wife in Paris.’14 George and Charlotte went together to a variety of public events. They were regular attendees at the theatre, particularly when the comedies the king preferred were performed. He was said to be ‘in roars of laughter’ when they watched David Garrick star in The Rehearsal. Charlotte loved the opera, and in the week after her marriage, declared her intention of attending productions once a week. When she proved true to her word, the opera’s managers were forced to shift their timetables to accommodate her. Years later, Charlotte was to confide to her brother that she thought the standard of opera in London extremely poor, and that most of the singers sounded like parrots. She wisely kept these thoughts to herself, however, and in public showed nothing but enthusiasm for the musical productions of her newly adopted home.

Walpole thought it was Charlotte’s taste for entertainment that drove much of the couple’s sociability in the first days of their marriage. ‘The queen is so gay that we shall not want sights,’ he wrote, noting that ‘two nights ago she carried the king to Ranelagh’, the more decorous of London’s two pleasure gardens.15 The king’s father had been a frequent visitor, but without the persuasion of his new wife it was unlikely his staider son would have chosen to go. George’s presence there, against his natural inclination to avoid public revelry, was a real declaration of his willingness to please.

Their regular domestic entertainments were more low key, and focussed strongly on family. Once a week, George took his new wife with him on his visits to his mother. On Wednesdays, the queen held a regular concert, in a room that had been specially equipped for musical performance. ‘The queen and Lady Augusta play on the harpsichord and sing, the Duke of York plays on the violincello and Prince William on the flute.’ George did not perform in company, but only in private with Charlotte. ‘The king never plays in concert,’ noted the Duchess of Northumberland, ‘but when they are alone, he sometimes accompanies her on the German flute.’16

George and Charlotte’s shared interests made their moments of privacy all the more valuable to them. Their love of music was one of the strongest bonds between them in these early years. The queen played ‘very prettily’ on the harpsichord and took singing lessons twice a week from Johann Christian Bach, son of the great composer. When the eight-year-old Mozart visited London in 1764, he and Charlotte played a duet together; he later dedicated some of his early sonatas to her. The king and queen were great readers and, like the Shelburnes at Bowood, spent many agreeable hours in George’s growing library. Both were drawn to works of history and theology, and read easily in French and German. As Charlotte’s English improved, she began to add the literature of her new homeland to the European titles she had hitherto enjoyed. The couple even had similar tastes in food. Terrified of succumbing to the family obesity, George was always extremely cautious about the amount he ate; but, like his wife, his natural preference was for simple, hearty meals prepared with the minimum of fuss. In 1762, the Duchess of Northumberland set down in her diary a typical royal menu: ‘Their Majesties’ constant table at this time was as follows, a soup removed with a large joint of meat and two other dishes such as pie or a broiled fowl and the like.’ Accompaniments included ‘pastry, spinach and sweetbreads, macaroons, scalloped oysters and the like’.17

These private pleasures perhaps seemed all the more precious because they were so rare. From the beginning of their marriage, quiet intimacy was something George and Charlotte had to fight to achieve. Most of their time was spent in full exposure to an intense and unblinking popular curiosity. In the performance of the formal duties that absorbed so much of their time, they were permanently on display; most of their private life was conducted in a semi-public world, where their behaviour was endlessly recorded, dissected and interpreted. The court was full of observers; many of the people closest to the royal couple hurried away from every encounter to place their impressions on paper, to be passed around friends and acquaintances, and discussed yet again at a distance.

St James’s was a perfect embodiment of the contradictions and difficulties that surrounded George and Charlotte’s attempts to carve out a domestic life for themselves. For all George’s attempts to turn it into a home, it remained, first and foremost, a place of public business. All major royal events were held there; but most significantly, it was the venue for the twice-weekly Drawing Rooms that played such a crucial role in the rhythm of elite social and political life. Men and women both attended, in their best clothes, to compete for the notice and approbation of the king and queen. Politicians, military men and even the occasional author went there to further their interests, to demonstrate possession of favour or to attempt to recover it; women to confirm their position in polite society, or to be introduced into it via formal presentation to the queen. In theory, it was an exclusive gathering; in practice, it was very loosely policed, and anyone with the proper court dress and an appropriate air of command could talk their way in. ‘I have got admittance a hundred times in my life,’ boasted the MP George Selwyn, ‘by ordering a door-keeper in a peremptory way to admit two gentlemen who have happened to stand near me in a crowd, and have been astonished at their access and my impudence.’18

The king was very frustrated by his inability to limit admission to the palace to those he thought had a right to be there. Then, in the summer of 1762, an incident occurred that demonstrated the impossibility of securing even the most private places in his life from unauthorised public access. ‘I can’t help troubling my dear friend with a very disagreeable subject,’ he wrote to Lord Bute in July. ‘On Saturday morning, a mean fellow came to [the bedchamber woman-in-waiting] Mrs Brudenell’s room, and took nothing out of her drawers but the key to the queen’s rooms, and made off into the passage.’ Fortunately, he was seized by servants, but they ‘very foolishly released him on restoring it’.19 That night he was found again, lingering outside the queen’s bedchamber. This time he was taken to the guards’ room, where he was questioned. The Duchess of Northumberland reported that ‘he said he came to see the king and queen and not to steal. Dropped some hints about how easy it would be to do the king a mischief. No arms, but an uncommonly long penknife upon him. Asked if he should not have been sorry to have alarmed the queen, he said why should she be alarmed? He meant her no ill … Asked if he should not be sorry to offend the king, said no, he was but a man like himself, and had but one life to lose, no more than he had.’20 George, who would always be phlegmatic when faced with attempts on his own life, was horrified by the implied threat to the queen. ‘If my dear friend sees what may be done,’ he implored Bute, ‘I wish he would order some steps to be taken.’21

In fact, George had concluded some time before that he must move out of St James’s, and had been searching for a home more suitable to the married life he wanted for himself and Charlotte. Walpole had been anxious he might settle at Hampton Court, bringing all the bustle of court life far too close to his own quiet Thames-side house; but the king hated the old Tudor palace, perhaps because it was there that George II was said to have struck him. When it caught fire in 1770, he declared ‘he should not be sorry had it been burnt down’.22 Walpole breathed a sigh of relief: ‘Strawberry Hill will remain in possession of its own tranquillity, and not become a cheesecake house to the palace; all I ask of princes is not to live within five miles of me.’23

Rather than relocating to an existing royal palace, George planned to buy something new and soon fixed upon a house built in 1702, standing in a fine position at the end of The Mall. Built of warm red brick, adorned with lead statues of classical worthies on its roof, and emblazoned on all four walls with mottoes in gold text, Buckingham House was a striking building. Surrounded by fields, it was, as one of its golden texts declared, rus in urbe. It was owned by Sir Charles Sheffield, a descendant of the Duke of Buckingham, who drove a hard bargain. The king paid £28,000 for the lease, a sum considered exorbitant by Lord Talbot, the Lord Steward, who, George observed to Bute, ‘attacked the price given for the new house and everything that regards it’. That George, usually so careful with money, was prepared to lay out so much to secure the property was a measure of its importance to him. ‘Bucks House,’ he explained to Bute, ‘is not meant for a palace, but as a retreat.’24

In many ways, this was George and Charlotte’s first true home, and George began its refurbishment in 1762 with enormous energy and enthusiasm. ‘I am so glad Sir Charles can remove so soon,’ he wrote eagerly to Bute. ‘The gardeners cannot begin too soon; all I want for the present is to have the outward walls planted, and a gravel walk round. I should imagine trees could be brought from Kensington that would nearly do.’25 The gold mottoes, too exuberant for the king’s plain taste, were to be painted over. He was horrified to discover that Sir Charles’s servants had been bribed by the curious to let them see inside before the king and queen moved in and that it was now ‘quite dirty’. Nothing escaped the king’s attention, or diminished his desire to get the job done quickly. Inevitably, he turned to Bute – who in his day job was now George’s first minister – to expedite matters. ‘I send my Dear Friend a list of what is immediately wanted, I beg these things may be immediately put in hand, there is one article I had forgot, that is grates in all rooms that are furnished … I have not touched upon what is necessary for enabling meat to be warmed up in the kitchen as that is an article I am totally unacquainted with.’ It was unlikely the lofty and ascetic Bute would have been able to enlighten him. ‘I cannot lay down my pen,’ the king concluded breathlessly, ‘without afresh recommending dispatch in preparing these things.’26

The result of all these efforts was a house furnished in a style of richly restrained elegance. It sought to blend grandeur with modern comforts, but it could never be described as simple or homely. Like the Shelburnes, George and Charlotte did not consider the pursuit of domestic happiness incompatible with interiors that reflected their elevated status. Walpole heard that the king and queen were ‘stripping the other palaces to furnish’ their new home, and Buckingham House was soon crammed with art treasures. Charlotte’s apartments were laid out on the first floor, the most desirable space in any eighteenth-century house. Her drawing room was decorated in green and gold, the walls lined in a darker green damask specially chosen as a suitable background on which to display the Raphael cartoons, brought from Hampton Court. Elsewhere, the ceiling was decorated with a work by Gentileschi, representing the Muses paying court to Apollo. On the ground floor, the king had built for himself a grand new library and a ‘mathematical room’ which displayed his growing collection of clocks, coins and maps.

More personal touches were provided by the furniture made specially for the new house. The king ordered for Charlotte a music desk ‘with a loose mahogany board to lie on the top, for the queen to draw off’; there were stands for bird cages, two ‘mahogany houses for a turkey monkey’ and a ‘square deal tub’ in which to wash the queen’s dog. There was also ‘a very handsome mahogany bookcase’ that cleverly concealed its true purpose. On one side was a door that, when opened, led discreetly into a hidden water closet.27 Outside, with a view of the fields where the king kept cows and sheep, was a scented carnation garden where the queen sat in warm weather. From the very beginning, the new palace was always strongly associated with Charlotte and her taste, and it was soon known as the Queen’s House, a name it was to keep for the next fifty years.

In 1767, Caroline Girle, who had been among the crowds at the coronation and had since become a royal sightseer of remarkable persistence, ‘went to see what is rather difficult to see at all, the queen’s palace’. In the five years since George and Charlotte had moved in, the new house had become a sophisticated, opulent and comfortable home. Caroline noted the ‘the capital pictures, the finest Dresden and other china, cabinets of more minute curiosities’. Managing to inspect even the queen’s bedroom, she counted twenty-five watches, ‘all highly adorned with jewels’ in a case next to her bed. But what really impressed her was the fact that even though it was March, ‘every room was full of roses, carnations, hyacinths, etc., dispersed in the prettiest manner imaginable in jars and different flower pots and stands’. She was also ‘amazed to find so large a house so warm, but fires, it seems, are kept the whole day, even in closets’.28 Buckingham House might not have presented the most flamboyant face to the world – the exacting La Rochefoucauld thought it was ‘without ornamentation or architectural distinction’ – but inside it was a model of discreet luxury that only the very largest amounts of money could achieve.

Within this setting of restrained richness, George and Charlotte soon established a private routine of extreme simplicity. Whenever they could, they abandoned their elaborate formal court dress for plainer, more comfortable clothes. Charlotte left her hair unpowdered and even persuaded George to abandon his wig. ‘The king and queen’s manner of life was very methodical and regular,’ observed the Duchess of Northumberland. They spent as much time as they could alone together, a state they could best achieve by retreating to their bedroom. ‘Whenever it was in their power, they went to bed by 11 o’clock,’ wrote the duchess, who kept far later hours herself. ‘The necessary woman first warming the bed, they had every night coals, chips etc., set by the chimney and they burnt a lamp in their room and had set by it a small wax taper.’ The couple clearly slept in the same bed together, and seem to have done so for many years. George got up at dawn, as he was to do for the rest of his life. ‘The king’s alarum waked him before five o’clock, when he rose and lighted the fire, and went to bed again until the clock struck five, and by that time, the fire being a little burnt up, he rose and dressed himself, and went into the queen’s dressing room, where he wrote till eight. What he wrote, no one knew.’ When the queen got up and joined her husband, ‘they breakfasted together, and that over, the king went downstairs. Their table was neither sumptuous nor elegant, and they always dined tête-à-tête.’ The king, the duchess noted with amazement, ‘at breakfast drank only one cup of tea and never ate anything’.29

Once the working day began, the king’s time was not his own, and George’s diligent attention to business meant that the hours left unoccupied to spend with Charlotte were limited. But when free to choose, he demonstrated unequivocally that what he really wanted was to be left alone with his wife. His fine home, renovated at huge expense, was designed to offer as much opportunity as possible for the pursuit of contented domestic retirement. There seems little doubt that the king’s feelings for the woman at the centre of this meticulously created world were deep and genuine. When George fell ill in 1762, it was suggested that he leave London to improve his health. He told Bute bluntly this was impossible unless Charlotte accompanied him: ‘Nothing in this world could make me go without her.’ His love for his wife was as strong a feeling as any he had ever experienced. ‘I know,’ he confided in Bute, ‘that the loss of her I have now would break my heart.’30

George’s growing emotional involvement with his wife did not, in the first years of his marriage, do anything to lessen his dependency on Bute. The earl continued to play a central part in the king’s life, not just as his political mentor, but also as a source of advice and support on his new-found responsibilities as a family man. George took few steps, even on the most trivial matters, without seeking the approval of his old friend. Did Bute think ‘there was is any impropriety in my seeing Henry V at Covent Garden, in which the coronation is introduced?’ He urged the earl to give the matter his speediest attention: ‘I wish he would send me a line by ten o’clock tonight.’31 If the queen’s brother were to visit London, where was he to be lodged? ‘I ask my Dear Friend, whether, being a younger brother, he may not with propriety live in a private house, what leads me to think this is that even my younger brothers do so.’32 Issues of ‘propriety’ loomed large in George’s mind; the difficulty of making the right decision made him anxious and he yearned for Bute’s endorsement. Even small gestures of intimacy were, for the cautious and punctilious king, pregnant with unseen consequences, and routinely submitted to Bute’s consideration. In May 1762, George wrote: ‘The queen wishes very much that I would give her my picture in enamel to wear at her side in place of a watch. I see no impropriety in it, but wish he would, if he sees any, send me a word.’33 What Charlotte thought of her husband’s relationship with Bute is not known. The Duchess of Northumberland noted without further comment that after his marriage, the king still kept the earl’s picture, ‘in full-length, in his private closet’.34

*

The collapse of this relationship would be, without doubt, the single most significant event of George’s early manhood, and a trauma which marked the king’s character for the rest of his life. The abrupt, self-willed departure of Bute, and George’s inability to prevent it, inflicted a deep wound on the king’s sense of self and his relationship with others. The end of their partnership was as painful as a divorce, and neither man would ever be quite the same again.

This sad dissolution was all the more painful because, by 1761, everything promised so well. As soon after his accession as George could manage it, Bute had been appointed first minister: the earl now held the reins of government in his hands, and was at last in a position to turn the ideas he and George had discussed for so many years into practical politics. Both knew their first step would be to put an end to the Seven Years War, a conflict that had raged around the globe, encompassing conflict in Europe, naval battles in the West Indies and General Wolfe’s victory in Quebec. As a proxy struggle for mastery between Britain and France, it had delivered a succession of strategic victories which made it popular amongst noisy patriots, but it was regarded by Bute and George as both bloody and expensive, draining national resources and undermining the crown by increasing debt. A king in thrall to City financiers, and the politicians who represented their views, could hardly pursue the public good with the disinterested energy Bute and George intended; but securing a peace treaty proved harder than either of them imagined, and the bruising apprenticeship it offered in the grubby realities of eighteenth-century politics, international and domestic, was to destroy the relationship between them that had been cemented with such deep affection over so many years.

The peace project was unpopular, and Bute’s attempts to argue its virtues in Parliament failed. He was a poor speaker, and had no network of supporters on whom he could depend. Gradually, he concluded that if the Commons could not be persuaded to vote for peace, they must be convinced by other, cruder means. To the king’s horror, Bute recommended bringing into government Henry Fox, whose shady reputation had been a significant factor in rejecting his close relation Sarah Lennox. Fox was the undisputed master of corrupt parliamentary practice, and Bute was sure he could deliver the peace that no one else could. The king reluctantly agreed. ‘We must call in bad men to govern bad men,’ he commented gloomily.

Fox’s methods were as successful as Bute had suspected and the king had feared they would be. He offered pensions and salaried posts in government to win over supporters; to the less delicate, he offered straightforward cash payments, operating from the House of Commons pay office, and spending over £250,000 in bribes. At the same time, Fox engineered the dismissal of the Whig supporters of the war from almost every public office they held. The Duke of Devonshire, known as ‘the prince of Whigs’, was sacked from his job as Lord Chamberlain in the king’s household. Whig dukes lost the lord lieutenancies of counties; Whig admirals fell from the Admiralty Board; even doormen and messengers who had gained their places through Whig patronage lost them overnight. In the space of a few days, Fox had ‘turned out everyone whom Whig influence had brought into power except the king’.35

With the removal of all opposition so efficiently arranged, the peace was approved by the House of Commons by a majority of 319 votes to 65. It was a victory, but one in which neither the king nor Bute took much pleasure. This was not how they had imagined achieving ‘the goal’ in quieter days at Leicester House. The easy success of Fox’s unashamed venality depressed Bute; but he was even more horrified by the venom with which he was now attacked as the chief architect of such an unpopular policy. ‘The press is, with more vehemence than I ever knew, set to work against Lord Bute,’ observed Sarah Lennox. ‘The fire is fed with great industry and blown by a national prejudice which is inveterate and universal. He is most scurrilously abused as being a Scotsman and a favourite.’36 In caricature after caricature, Bute was insultingly portrayed with all the attributes thought by the English to distinguish the Scots. He was shown as an impoverished wearer of a threadbare kilt, which managed to be both ludicrous and suggestive; he was depicted as an unprincipled, unashamed seeker of power and money, who would stop at nothing to achieve his ends. In one print, he is seen creeping into the dowager princess’s bedroom at night; in another he pours poison into the sleeping king’s ear. He would connive at adultery and even regicide, the caricaturists maintained, if either served his purposes.

Yet the violence of the press was as nothing compared to the physical intimidation to which Bute was exposed on the streets of London. Eighteenth-century politics was a feral business, and unpopular politicians were roughly handled by crowds as well as by newspapers and in prints. In 1761, on his way to the lord mayor’s annual banquet, Bute’s coach was recognised by his enemies who surrounded it with ‘groans, hisses, yells, shouts of “No Scotch rogues!”, “No Butes!”’ The coach was pelted with mud and stones, and Bute feared he was about to be hauled out himself when the constables finally arrived. From then on, he surrounded himself with a posse of hired hard men, ‘a gang of ruffians and bruisers’, to protect him. Despite his precautions, he was attacked again in 1762 as he passed through the streets towards Westminster for the state opening of Parliament. This time, Walpole thought Bute had been lucky to have escaped with his life. The earl had had enough: in April 1763, he resigned.

His decision came as a shock to everyone except the king. George had known for some time that Bute had come to hate the political world he had once hoped to dominate. He begged him to reconsider, but Bute was determined to go. In a long letter he wrote to a friend a few months before his final departure, the earl laid out his reasons for leaving. The peace treaty was signed, ‘the king has his sceptre in his hand … and the helm, that demanded a bold, venturous hand may, at this peace, be managed by a child’. His health, he declared, was failing under ‘the eternal, unpleasant labour of the mind and the impossibility of finding hours for exercise, the little time I get to sleep’. It was a shattering sense of disillusionment with the practical reality of politics that had made it impossible for him to carry on. He could no longer bear to be tainted by his involvement with men and measures that repelled him. ‘In my opinion,’ he wrote bitterly, ‘the Angel Gabriel could not at present govern this country, but by means too long practised and such as my soul abhors.’ As he could tolerate it no longer, ‘therefore, in the bosom of victory’, he went.37

George was devastated. Bute’s resignation was ‘the most cruel political blow that could have happened to me’.38 He knew it marked the end of the great joint project of moral renewal which they had discussed, planned and longed for over the past decade. ‘I own I had flattered myself that when the peace was once established, my D Friend would have assisted me in purging out corruption … and that when we were both dead, our memories would have been esteemed to the end of time.’ Now none of this would happen, for George could not do it alone. ‘Instead of reformation, the ministers being vicious, the country will grow, if possible, worse, let me attack the irreligious, the covetous, etc. etc. as much as I please, that will have no effect.’39 Contemplating the departure of the man who had dominated his life for so long, the king was said to have sat for hours ‘with his head reclining in his arm, without speaking a word’.40 He never used the term ‘betrayal’, but it hovered in the air nonetheless. When called upon to give up the pursuit of private happiness for the greater good, George had done so uncomplainingly, in obedience to Bute’s dictum that the sacrifice of Sarah Lennox was a necessary one. Now it appeared that Bute was unable – or unwilling – to do the same for him.

For a while after his departure, Bute and the king continued to correspond, with George still seeking the earl’s advice as if nothing had changed. Their relationship staggered on, more polite form than substance, until, in 1766, George dealt it the final blow. He declined to meet Bute, who was still politically toxic, in order to avoid offending his current ministers. The earl could not believe it. He wrote to the king, begging him not to throw away the true affection that bound them together, even if he had no further role to play in public life. ‘I say, sir, suffer me in this humiliated position to possess your friendship, independent of your power. I have never merited being deprived of that, which consists in the operation of the heart and soul … Alas, my dear Sovereign, what other view or selfish purpose can I have? I have forever done with this bad public, my heart is half broke, and my health ruined … The warmest wish I have remaining is to see you happy, respected and adored.’41 George did not reply, and Bute did not write again.

The Dowager Princess Augusta once had a haunting dream: ‘The window was open, and the moon, which was level to it, shook with a tremulous motion before her eyes, to her great disquiet. She bade Lord Bute to try and fix it. Extending his arms to stop its motion, it burst in his hands into a thousand fiery splinters, upon which, turning to the princess, he said reproachfully, “See, Madam, what you have brought me to.”’42 In the years he spent with Augusta and her son, Bute had done all he could ‘to try and fix it’. He had offered George a credible vision of the kind of king he could be, and in doing so had transformed George’s idea of himself and his destiny. But by leaving as he did, he confirmed many of George’s deepest fears about the mutability of personal relationships. If leaving was an option, it was one that would be exercised eventually, with whatever professions of regret. ‘I shall never meet with a friend in business again,’ the king wrote mournfully upon his mentor’s resignation.43 In fact, Bute was probably the only friend George would ever have, in business or outside it. After the earl’s departure, he did not look for one again. In future, all his significant emotional investments would be made amongst those who shared the lifelong obligation to the royal project. It was not by finding new friends that George hoped to fill the void left by Bute, but by turning to his family and, above all, to his wife.

For many years after Bute’s ignominious departure, George’s administrations were unstable and the source of much unhappiness to the young king, who considered himself bullied and oppressed by ministers forced upon him by political necessity. As George floundered, seemingly unable to find a way to work with anyone other than Bute, the popular mood grew increasingly hostile towards him. The corrupt means by which the peace had been achieved still rankled with both politicians and the press; accusations now circulated, asserting that the king’s behaviour was unconstitutional and threatened the sovereignty of Parliament. The ill-advised decision to prosecute one of his most imaginatively abrasive critics, the formidable antagonist John Wilkes, made a difficult situation worse. It gave previously inchoate resentment a focus for its anger, and provoked rioting and disorder so violent and so widespread that it seemed to threaten the survival of the established system of government itself.

George was neither immune nor protected from the hurricane-like impact of popular political disapproval. The highly personalised invective that accompanied it was directed towards him with as much venom as it had once been towards Bute. Any appearance in public was an opportunity to insult or provoke him. On his way to visit his mother, ‘the mob asked him if he was going to take suck’.44 George and Charlotte were once at the theatre when the alarm for fire was raised. In the stalls, the result was mayhem, and some of the audience were injured; but far above in the royal box, Charlotte was unperturbed, assuming the chaos was no more than business as usual; ‘she had not heard the expression of fire, and imagined they were saying impertinences to the king’.45 Silence was just as potent a method of indicating disapproval. On his way to a City dinner, the king rode through wordless crowds who, once he had passed, cheered loudly and pointedly for their favourite, the successful wartime first minister, William Pitt. ‘When he goes to the theatre, or goes out, or goes to the House, there is not a single applause,’ noted Walpole.46 The alternating experience of sinister silence or vociferous complaint was a seemingly inevitable aspect of royal experience, one that was simply to be ignored or endured.

In such circumstances, it is not surprising that George regarded the calm pleasures of his married life with such relief. It was also perhaps inevitable that he should come to associate his conjugal happiness with ideas of retreat and retirement. The private world he built with Charlotte was to be utterly distinct from the difficulties of his public existence. Her role was not to act as partner in resolving his problems, but to provide escape from them. George had no desire to see his wife drawn into the political factions and allegiances that permeated every crack and crevice of elite life. Nor had he any wish to see her follow in the footsteps of his grandmother, the busy, clever and managing Queen Caroline. Even his own mother, whose supposed political objectives were the subject of endless speculation, and whose alleged relationship with Lord Bute exposed her to public abuse of the crudest kind, was not considered a suitable role model for his wife. Indeed, if the Duke of Gloucester, the king’s younger brother, is to be believed, George specifically warned Charlotte against having any dealings with the dowager princess. ‘The very day the queen arrived,’ the duke told Walpole, ‘three hours afterwards when she was gone to be dressed for the wedding, I was left alone with the king, and he told me he had already given her a caution not to be alone with my mother, for she was an artful woman, and would try to govern her.’47

Whether as a result of the king’s instructions or of the princess dowager’s own self-contained and inward-looking nature, Charlotte was never on familiar terms with her mother-in-law. Nor did she build a relationship with George’s eldest sister. Princess Augusta saw herself as a stout defender of the hegemony of the royal family, and had waged a doughty campaign against what she saw as Sarah Lennox’s pretensions, laughing in her face in an attempt to warn her away from her infatuated brother. Walpole thought she was loud, indiscreet and ‘much inclined to meddle in the private politics of the court’.48 These qualities may have persuaded the king to extend to his sister the same chilly detachment he insisted Charlotte observe in regard to his mother. It was certainly the case that Charlotte and Augusta were never friends; thirty years later, Augusta was still complaining about her sister-in-law, describing her as ‘an envious and intriguing spirit’, who had disliked her mother and herself, ‘was extremely jealous of them’ and had alienated the king’s affections from her.49

George’s proscriptions extended far beyond his immediate family. In his anxiety to place his wife beyond politics, he erected around her a powerful social exclusion zone which left her in splendid isolation at the centre of the court over which she was expected to preside. In the early years of her marriage, Charlotte had no real friends at all, and was equally alone among the ladies of the court. The Ladies of the Bedchamber, whom she saw most regularly, were far older than the young queen, and having intrigued and campaigned for their positions around her, were often thoroughly bored with the role once they had secured it. One of them, Lady Egremont, described the dullness of the mornings they spent sitting in a formal circle around the queen with nothing to do but examine what each of them was wearing. ‘She represented it as a very triste affair,’ sniffed Lady Mary Coke primly.50 With little else to think about, the ladies occupied themselves with the elegant prosecution of turf wars over excruciating issues of precedence. ‘I went to court,’ recorded the Duchess of Northumberland, a seasoned combatant in such battles, ‘and the queen called before Lady Bolingbroke, who was lady-in-waiting, came in. The Duchess of Ancaster going in, I stepped before her and said I was the lady-in-waiting, which nettled her so much she would not speak to me after. The queen,’ she noted with satisfaction, ‘was very gracious.’51

The duchess’s diaries are peppered with references to Charlotte’s ‘graciousness’. She admired her ladies’ dresses; she politely showed them her jewels; she played and sang, smilingly acknowledging their praise. As Charlotte later explained to Lady Harcourt, her studied politeness was as much a result of the king’s direction as her carefully imposed aloofness, for ‘he allowed and encouraged me to be civil to all’.52 Her goodwill was of necessity spread very evenly amongst those around her; anything expressive of an emotion warmer than bland disinterest on the queen’s part led to nothing but strife. The mildest indication of genuine preference was sufficient to provoke gossip and recrimination for weeks. When Lady Bolingbroke appeared to have attracted Charlotte’s favour, news of it became the subject of endless speculation and it was immediately reported that ‘the other ladies, particularly Lady Egremont’, were extremely jealous.53

Many years later, Charlotte considered George had been absolutely correct to insist that she held herself apart from those around her and made no close connections: ‘I am not only sensible that he was right, but I feel thankful for it from the bottom of my heart.’54 But as a young bride in a strange country, surrounded by the scrutiny of the ambitious, and forbidden to build friendships with those she found more sympathetic, it must have been a demanding proscription to obey. Isolated behind her enforced graciousness, Charlotte was a lonely figure in those early days. It was perhaps not surprising that, in the absence of other connections, her relationship with one of her servants became one of the most important in her life.

Juliana Schwellenberg was one of the two ‘German women’ Charlotte had brought over to England with her. Mrs Schwellenberg was in theory one of the queen’s assistant dressers, but she rarely did any actual dressing herself; instead, she was in charge of Charlotte’s Wardrobe – a significant department of the household – overseeing ‘the persons therein employed and the regulation of the expenditure’. She insisted on being addressed as ‘Madame’, and liked to think of herself as ‘Female Mentor to the queen’.55 From the moment of her arrival, she was a controversial figure. In an early memoir of Charlotte, published shortly after her death in 1818, Mrs Schwellenberg was described as ‘a well-educated woman, extremely courteous in her manner … devotedly attached to the illustrious family with whom she lived’. Others found her less amenable. The novelist Fanny Burney, who suffered at her hands when she was at court in the 1780s, and disliked her as a result, created a picture of Mrs Schwellenberg in her journals as a true comic monster, an appallingly compelling mix of petty cruelties and absurd self-aggrandisement. She was unpopular with Charlotte’s other servants, and involved in a wearying succession of rows and feuds. The king had always resented her presence and, after yet another explosion in the queen’s household, he was reported to have ‘desired she should be dismissed, and return to Germany with an allowance suitable to her position in that country’.56 With surprising defiance, Charlotte begged him to reconsider. George relented, but made it a condition of her reprieve that Mrs Schwellenberg ‘should not resist his commands, nor influence the queen’s mind upon any subject’.57

‘The Schwellenberg’, as she was universally known, successfully weathered not just the king’s disapproval, but that of almost everyone else at court. Impervious to decades of criticism and complaint, secure in the unwavering protection of the queen, she remained in her service until the day she died in 1797. Though she could never be described as Charlotte’s friend, she was a loyal and devoted companion, and in her early days in England, the queen had few enough of those. She was a link with Charlotte’s old home, almost the only person at court who had known Mecklenburg, and who missed its low-key charms. Above all, she was, with a single-minded intensity, dedicated entirely to the queen. She had no interest in cultivating wider alliances, impressing or conciliating other people, as her widespread unpopularity demonstrated. All that mattered was the preservation of her primacy with Charlotte. For all her eccentricities and shortcomings, Mrs Schwellenberg offered the queen a relationship in which Charlotte always came first, in which there could be no question of other, hidden allegiances. It was hardly surprising that Charlotte could not bear the prospect of losing her.

Charlotte’s isolation grew more pronounced as the years went by. By the mid-1760s, it was apparent that her husband’s passionate desire for a life of domestic retirement was not a passing phase but the guiding principle by which he intended to govern their time together. The rhythm of their year was soon well established. They spent the winter, whilst Parliament sat, in the luxurious privacy of Buckingham House. In the summer, they retreated to the even greater seclusion of Richmond Lodge in the countryside south-west of London, where they were reputed to spend their days very modestly. ‘The court,’ wrote Walpole in 1764, ‘makes a strange figure. The recluse life led at Richmond, which is carried on to such an excess of privacy and economy, that the queen’s friseur waits on them at supper, and four pounds only of beef are allowed for their soup, disgusts all sorts of people.’58

Walpole voiced a common contemporary response to the king and queen’s increasing lack of visibility – a sense of disappointment that they had failed to deliver on their early promise to act as a lively focus for aristocratic life, using their place at the pinnacle of the pyramid of polite society to nurture a resurgence of cultural energy and excitement. Put simply, they had not turned out to be as much fun as everyone had hoped. Manipulating the facts to serve his own purpose, Walpole argued that the royal couple’s seclusion had been forced upon them by Bute and his ally the princess dowager, the better to prosecute their intentions to subvert the constitution. Augusta, he asserted, had imposed ‘strict laws of retirement’ on her son. ‘He was accessible to none of his court, but at the stated hours of business and ceremony; nor was any man but the favourite … allowed to converse with the king.’59 This argument was nonsense, as Walpole himself well knew; but like so many of his pronouncements, the hollowness of his conclusions were disguised by the strength of the evidence he submitted to support them. As the Duchess of Northumberland’s diary suggests, Walpole was not the only observer to find something both puzzling and troubling in the extremity of the king and queen’s insular existence. ‘His Majesty,’ she wrote, ‘was certainly naturally of a most cheerful, even sociable disposition, and a clear understanding, yet he lived in the utmost retirement.’60 She, like Walpole, blamed Bute. Others attributed the king’s taste for seclusion to the way he had been brought up, and linked it directly to the habits he had acquired under his mother’s tutelage. But as one well-placed observer maintained, these explanations were only part of a more complicated story.

Years later, the Duke of Gloucester, the king’s brother, declared that, contrary to what was popularly supposed, ‘the retired life the king and queen led for the many first years of their marriage’ was ‘entirely the king’s doing’.61 The duke conceded that his mother, Augusta, had instilled in her eldest son an early distaste for loud, unregulated sociability – ‘he had been locked up till he married, and taught to have a bad opinion of the world’ – but maintained that George’s preference for solitude arose from something more than habit. He sought out retirement, Gloucester thought, not just because it was what he was used to, but because it provided the best possible circumstances in which he could shape and mould the affections of his malleable young wife: ‘That he was delighted in having under his own training a young innocent girl of 17, for such was the queen when she arrived, and that he determined she should be wholly devoted to him and that she have no other friend or society.’ The king’s prohibition of all other relationships was designed, in Gloucester’s opinion, to make himself the uncontested focus of all her affections, to ensure she would ‘depend on him and him alone’. It was to ensure the exclusivity of her love that Charlotte’s early married years were spent largely alone, ‘except for the Ladies of the Bedchamber, in a funeral circle’. For most of the time, ‘she never had a soul to speak to except the king’.62

It is impossible not to feel that George’s love for his wife in these early years was a strong and genuine emotion. For a man not given to extravagant declarations, he was uncharacteristically voluble in expressing the pleasure he took in her company. ‘Every hour convinces me more and more of the treasure I have got,’ he once wrote delightedly to Bute, describing his marriage ‘as the source of my happiness as a private man’. However, as George’s brother recognised, contained in the unfeigned reality of his sentiments was a whiff of emotional despotism.63 His love for Charlotte was real, but it required from her an almost total resignation of self, a willingness to subsume all her interests in his, to submit utterly to his powerful instinct to own and control. As she quickly came to understand, George’s affection was ruthlessly proprietorial. It is perhaps significant that the only recorded declaration of her own feelings in these early years was couched in language she must have known would please him most. Writing to Bute in May 1762, George had noted with satisfaction that Charlotte, ‘with her usual affection, expressed herself as this effect … that my conduct to her made her esteem herself as belonging to me and me only’.64

If there was a darker side to the ideal of affectionate marriage, it lay perhaps in the potential for extreme self-absorption and isolation on the part of the couple at its heart. A quiet domestic life, shared by two like-minded and reasonable people, could, if their privacy was too strictly and narrowly enforced, start to feel more like confinement than contentment. Gloucester was not the only observer to wonder whether that had not been Charlotte’s experience. Mrs Mary Harcourt, who came from a family of courtiers and saw much of Charlotte in later life, agreed with his reading of events: ‘Coming over, with natural good spirits, eagerly expecting to be queen of a gay court, finding herself confined in a convent, and hardly allowed to think without the leave of her husband, checked her spirits, made her fearful and cautious to an extreme, and when the time came that amusements were allowed, her mind was formed to a different manner of life.’65 If there was a price to be paid for the success of George and Charlotte’s marriage, it was clear from the outset that it would be Charlotte’s duty to pay it.

In her younger days at least, Charlotte may have felt that too much attention from a husband was to be preferred to none at all, or to the routine humiliations of ill-concealed infidelities. Neither she nor George could have been happy in the loosely amoral partnerships that were the experience of so many of their aristocratic contemporaries. They were, as they thankfully recognised, fortunate in sharing a much more positive view of marriage as the foundation of all social and personal happiness, and luckier still in that both were prepared to try to live up to the ideals they so eagerly embraced in theory. In the earliest years of their partnership, they were rewarded for their efforts and experienced some of the fullest pleasures that the eighteenth-century married state could offer. It was true that when scrutinised closely, their relationship already contained within it seeds of the difficulties that would later reshape it in altogether less glowing colours; but, by any standards – and especially those of other royal partnerships – they had embarked on their union with all the willingness to make it work that defined the most successful modern marriages. Confident in having found the right wife, secure in the happy state of his home, George was ready to begin the next stage of his great family project. ‘I have now but one wish as a public man,’ he confessed, ‘and that is that God will make her fruitful.’66