Family
Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, was the second son of King George III of Great Britain. His elder brother, later King George IV, lived a life of great debauchery and was often in seriously bad health and although he had one legitimate child, a daughter, she died tragically young. This alone made Frederick a person of great political importance in his day, courted by both the Whigs and the Tories as heir presumptive to the throne. He was his father’s favourite son and (most of the time) his elder brother’s best friend, so he had a lot of influence over the two men who reigned in his lifetime. In two separate campaigns he commanded British forces overseas and he was Commander-in-Chief of the Army for twenty-nine years. During this time he introduced vitally important reforms and presided over the defeat of Napoleonic France. He founded the military academy that became Sandhurst and in London he was connected with fine buildings such as Lancaster House, the Albany and the Duke of York’s former barracks in Chelsea. Alone among British royalty, his statue stands high on a pillar in central London that predates Nelson’s column and is only slightly shorter. In folklore he is commemorated by a world-famous jingle and in his lifetime he lost huge sums on the turf and through playing cards badly; he also found himself at the centre of a corruption scandal so great that the case was tried by the House of Commons.
Frederick never became king but British history has been radically affected on many occasions by the accession to the throne of a second son. In modern times (i.e. since 1485) Henry VIII would not have become king without the early death of his elder brother Arthur, while Charles I succeeded to the throne, to the dismay of most people who knew him, on the death of his very popular elder brother Henry, who caught a fatal chill after swimming in the Thames. Charles II, despite having innumerable illegitimate children, had none by his lawful wife and was succeeded by his younger brother as James II. Charles feared that what he termed ‘the stupidity of my brother’ might cost James his crown and he was right. Not content with being a Roman Catholic convert at a time when Catholics were deeply mistrusted in Britain, James insisted that his subjects should be Roman Catholics also and this triggered the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, after which Parliament declared that he had abdicated the throne. Acts of Parliament established that his Protestant daughter Mary should be queen and that her husband William, Prince of Orange, should be king jointly: should they have no children, the throne would pass to Mary’s younger sister Anne. This in fact occurred but Anne and her husband, Prince George of Denmark, suffered over the years the appalling tragedy that all seventeen of their children died young, so that when Anne herself died in 1714 her successor, according to the Act of Settlement of 1701, was George, generally known as the Elector of Hanover. His branch of the ancient Guelph family had ruled territories in North Germany since the early Middle Ages and his father Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, had supported the Holy Roman Emperor, the titular sovereign of most Germanic lands, in a war against the Turks. For this he had been rewarded in 1692 with the promise of promotion to the status of Kurfürst, or Electoral Prince of the Empire, although this was not officially confirmed by the Imperial Diet until 1708. His son George succeeded to his lands in 1698 and inherited more territory from his uncle in 1705. What came to be known as the Electorate of Hanover, after its chief city, was about the size of Wales, with a population of three-quarters of a million people. Although not a king, George was a sovereign ruler, and together with the eight other imperial electors was empowered to choose a new emperor whenever the imperial throne fell vacant.
On top of all this steady advancement, George was also the heir to the kingdoms of Great Britain (i.e. England and Scotland) and Ireland, because the Act of Settlement had barred the Roman Catholic heirs of James II from the succession. It declared that George’s mother Sophia, who was the granddaughter of King James I and the nearest Protestant heir to the throne, should succeed Queen Anne. Sophia died in June 1714, aged eighty-three, only a few weeks before Anne died, aged only forty-nine, on 1 August. Somewhat reluctantly, George said farewell to his beloved palace at Herrenhausen, near Hanover, and arrived in London. Within a few months this ‘Hanoverian Succession’ was tested in 1715 by a rebellion in favour of James Edward Stuart, the son of James II, but the Whig party defended the Act of Settlement and the ‘Jacobites’, whose support was largely in Scotland, were defeated. The party names ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’, both denoting thieves and villains, had emerged in the reign of Charles II as terms of abuse used by one political group against the other. Broadly speaking, the Whigs supported the Protestant, Anglican Church and the concept of a monarchy whose powers were limited by parliamentary statute. The Tories included many with Roman Catholic or ‘High Church’ sympathies and many of them took the view that kings ruled by ‘divine right’, not by the will of the people. The abdication of James II in 1688 and the Hanoverian Succession in 1714 were therefore both triumphs for the Whigs, whose aim was that the new king should govern with the advice of his Whig ministers. Although George could speak some English, he was by no means fluent and he was, in the main, prepared to allow the business of government to be undertaken by able ministers. Chief among these was Sir Robert Walpole, whose ascendancy was so great that he is often thought of as Britain’s first prime minister, although this title did not become official until the twentieth century.
George’s marriage to Sophia Dorothea of Celle had been made for dynastic and financial reasons and it was a very unhappy one, leading to violence between them. They both took lovers and he divorced her in 1694 and kept her a prisoner in the electorate. This may have been one of the underlying reasons for the unnatural detestation George felt for his only son George Augustus, who succeeded him as George II in 1727. The new king contemplated sacking his father’s minister, Walpole, until he came to realize that he was indispensable. His wife, Queen Caroline, was a shrewd politician who, until her death in 1737, helped her husband to work closely with the Whigs, ensuring a stability that was not seriously disrupted, even by a second ‘Jacobite’ rebellion in 1745.
Unfortunately, relations between George II and his heir Frederick, Prince of Wales, were as bad as those between himself and his own father. The king was in many ways an unattractive and unsympathetic character but his wife was a sensible woman, much respected by contemporaries. Yet she, too, had a violent dislike of the heir to the throne. A courtier, Lord Hervey, recorded in his memoirs that she had said of him that he was ‘the greatest ass and the greatest liar and the greatest canaille [trash] and the greatest beast in the whole world and I most heartily wish he was out of it’. Even on her (early) deathbed she apparently said that she was comforted by the thought that she ‘would never see that monster again’.1 This hatred was vigorously returned by the prince, who attempted to make life as difficult as possible for his father and mother. One of the ways he could do this was by using his considerable patronage as Duke of Cornwall to build up a political party dedicated to the thwarting of the king’s ministers in Parliament.
It may be that Lord Hervey, a supporter of the queen, was prejudiced against Prince Frederick but other commentators were also very critical. Horace Walpole found that Frederick could be generous but was insincere, dishonest and childish, while Lord Chesterfield described him as ‘more beloved for his affability and good nature than esteemed for his steadiness and conduct’. Unlike his father, whose main leisure pursuits were stag hunting and playing cards, Frederick had intellectual interests, notably music – he played the violoncello – and art, as well as landscape gardening.2
The quarrel between Frederick and his parents came to a head over his marriage. In 1736 he agreed to marry Augusta, a daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Gotha, a bride chosen for him by the king. He then demanded that his allowance of £50,000 a year should be doubled and pursued this aim with great determination, to the fury of his father. When Augusta soon became pregnant, the king and queen wished her child to be born at their country residence, Hampton Court, but even while she was in labour Frederick had her conveyed to St James’s Palace in London, where the child, a daughter named Augusta, was born. After this flagrant disobedience there was a complete break between the prince and his parents and Frederick was banished from the Court and the royal residences. In June 1738 Frederick’s eldest son George was born, two months premature, in a rented house in London and over the next few years he was provided with four younger brothers and three younger sisters.
Frederick never became king. He died in March 1751, suddenly and unexpectedly, from complications after catching a cold, leaving George, aged twelve, as heir to the throne. He was created Prince of Wales a month later and his mother was given charge of his education and upbringing. She never remarried but fell much under the influence of the Earl of Bute, who became her main adviser and tutor to Prince George and her other children. Gossip at the time assumed they were lovers but he was a happily married man with a large family and his constant advice to George, who liked and respected him, was that a king must live a morally upright life, free from all taint of scandal. Bute was a man of considerable learning with an unfashionable interest in science but he was not a man with great political experience. However, his influence on George was very considerable and between the two of them Bute and George’s mother brought the boy up to believe that his grandfather had fallen under the spell of Whig ministers who had usurped the rightful powers of the Crown.
As George became older, he became critical of the king’s methods of government, as Hanoverian heirs before him had done. The first major disagreement came in 1755, when George II was keen that his grandson should marry a young princess of the related House of Brunswick but, prompted by his mother, the prince showed no interest. When he came of age in 1756 George was given his own household and at the head of it stood Bute, his revered tutor and adviser, a first minister in waiting. When Britain went to war against France in 1757 the prince asked for a high military appointment, but was refused, to his great annoyance. Then, after living longer than any British monarch up to then, George II suddenly died on 25 October 1760, soon after waking in the morning and drinking a cup of hot chocolate.
The Young Prince, 1763–1780
George III was twenty-two years old when he succeeded to the throne. Tall, handsome and almost certainly a virgin, the previous year he had fallen in love with Lady Sarah Lennox, a fifteen-year-old whom he met at Court, but he knew that a marriage with her was highly unwise because of her family’s political affiliations and Bute warned him off any kind of illicit entanglements. Once king, it became a major priority for George to find a suitable wife whom he could marry before his coronation. He was forbidden by Act of Parliament to marry a Roman Catholic and this drastically reduced the field. No marriage with a French or Spanish or Italian person of royal rank could be contemplated, so Denmark, Sweden and the multiplicity of minor sovereign states in Germany were the most fruitful possibilities. Unknown to his ministers, George sent out emissaries to draw up a list of suitable and available Protestant princesses and the list eventually ran to eight names. All of these were eliminated for one reason or another except Charlotte, the seventeen-year-old daughter of the Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, a small state in the north of Germany.
Basing his choice entirely on reports, George proposed marriage and Charlotte, who brought little to the union by way of finance or prestige, excitedly accepted. She also agreed to forgo Lutheranism in favour of the Anglican Church. Then her mother died and George caught chickenpox, but she arrived at Harwich on 7 September 1761 and the next day met George for the first time in the garden of St James’s Palace at about 3.00 pm. She then dined with the king and his family and in a ceremony performed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, she was married to him in the Chapel Royal, just across the road, at 9.00 pm. Supper was served, the new queen played the harpsichord and sang, and the happy couple retired to bed at 2.00 am. For a girl of her age, speaking no English and marrying a man she had never met in a country she had never visited, this must all have been quite an ordeal.3
George III’s decision to marry Charlotte propelled her out of a relatively modest home environment. She and her sisters had been brought up in her family’s unpretentious palace at Milow, which was much smaller than many of the aristocratic mansions to be found in England. She was well educated and proved to be deeply appreciative of art and music and also of botany. She learnt English quickly and was already fluent in French and German, as was her husband. Although at first Charlotte was dominated by her mother-in-law, she gradually bonded with the king and they became devoted to one another. In the twenty-one years between 1762 and 1783 she bore him fifteen children, of whom nine were boys, two of them dying in infancy. The six girls caused little trouble because they were kept at home until a suitable marriage offer arrived; for three of them, it never did. Charlotte, the eldest daughter and Princess Royal, married the King of Württemburg, Elizabeth married the Landgraf of Hesse-Homburg and Mary married her first cousin, the Duke of Gloucester. Two of the sisters, Augusta and Sophia, lived to be old maids, while the youngest, Amelia, died unmarried, aged only twenty-seven. Even the married ones failed to produce children.
Several of the boys, as we shall see, tended as adults to be troublesome and to some extent rebellious, particularly in the conduct of their private lives. Frederick’s elder brother, the Prince of Wales, turned out to be charming and intellectually gifted, but, most people thought, morally bankrupt and professionally incompetent. Of his younger brothers, the dukes of Clarence, Kent, Cumberland, Sussex and Cambridge, most were involved in scandals of one sort or another, though two of them eventually became kings. They were all very fond of each other but were at times an embarrassment to their parents as well as to the British public. Why this was so is an interesting question. Certainly the king and queen were very dutiful parents and they strove to ensure that their sons were provided with suitable tutors and an educational programme that would keep them healthy and happy.
George, Prince of Wales, was born on 12 August 1762 and his younger brother Frederick followed hard on his heels on 16 August the following year. Frederick was born at Buckingham House, or ‘the Queen’s House’, which George III at first rented and later bought from the Duke of Buckingham. He used it as a family home in London, as opposed to his official residence, St James’s Palace, only a short distance away, where he held royal levées on most days of the week and where he conducted official business. The other favoured royal residences were Richmond Lodge and Kew, where the king’s mother lived until her death in 1772 and where there were a number of houses ranged around Kew Green, chief of which was ‘the Dutch House’, the present Kew Palace. Although Hampton Court Palace was in good order, it brought back unhappy memories to the king of his childhood, so he did not use it, while Windsor Castle was in much need of restoration at this stage and was mostly occupied by junior royals.
On 14 September the baby prince was officially baptised at Buckingham House by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who gave him the single name of Frederick, despite the fact that he is often mistakenly referred to as Frederick Augustus.4 Many members of the royal family and aristocracy attended this ceremony, which was followed by refreshments, including caudle and cake. For the king and queen to have provided ‘an heir and a spare’ so quickly was a welcome development, which seemed to ensure both the future and the stability of the monarchy and there was general satisfaction, although most members of the aristocracy were beginning to be taken aback by the unpretentious lifestyle adopted by George and Charlotte. Both of them disliked unnecessary show and the queen once told her confidante, Fanny Burney, that she only wore elaborate jewels for special occasions. They both ate and drank quite frugally, the king because he had a lifetime’s horror of growing fat, as a result of which he undertook an enormous amount of physical exercise. He worked hard, too, rising at 6.00 am and attending dutifully to his public business. He kept no secretary and wrote his letters in his own hand for most of his reign.
When Frederick was seven months old he was chosen to succeed to one of the Holy Roman Empire’s many anomalies, the Prince-Bishopric of Osnabrück, a small state, some forty-five miles long by twenty-five miles wide, on the borders of the Electorate of Hanover. The diocese, founded by Charlemagne in 772, became a semi-independent princely state within the Holy Roman Empire in the early thirteenth century and survived many subsequent upheavals. One of the bloodiest of these was the Thirty Years War, essentially a conflict between Roman Catholics and Protestants, which came to an end in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia. One of the treaty’s detailed provisions was the compromise that the ruler of this territory should in future be alternately a Catholic and a Protestant, and that he should be appointed by the Archbishop of Cologne, if Catholic, and by the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, if Protestant.
The first holder after 1648 was a Catholic and the second was George I’s father, then Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, who appointed himself as Prince-Bishop in 1662 and set about building a new, medium-sized baroque palace known as Osnabrück Castle. When he died in 1698 the prince-bishopric reverted to a Catholic, who died in 1715, whereupon George I, in his capacity as Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, appointed his younger brother Prince Ernest Augustus to the dignity (and indeed died suddenly at Osnabrück Castle while visiting his brother in 1727). Ernest died the following year and on the death of his Catholic successor in 1761 it fell to George III to fill the vacancy. After some delay he made the controversial decision to appoint his infant son Frederick.
The practice had been that when a Catholic held the post, he would be a priest who fulfilled the religious duties of a bishop but a Protestant was the secular ruler of the state and his duties were delegated to the cathedral chapter. Hence it was not so strange, though it seemed so to many people, that a baby of seven months could officially preside over a bishopric. Nevertheless, the appointment of an infant to the post antagonized Catholic opinion and gave rise to a major row. The chapter of Osnabrück cathedral claimed the right to administer the territory during the minority of the prince, while the Archbishop of Cologne appointed a Catholic vicar-general to run its affairs and instructed the citizens to obey him or face excommunication.
George III’s ministers in Hanover stoutly refused to accept either of these arrangements. Heated argument persisted for a considerable time until a compromise was brokered by King Frederick II of Prussia, Britain’s ally in the Seven Years War which had ended in 1763. One of the many details of the arrangement was a promise made by George III that Prince Frederick would spend a considerable time in Germany as part of his education, so that he could become familiar with his bishopric as well as with the laws and customs of the empire.5 Once the prince’s succession was fully recognized, he was routinely referred to in Britain as ‘the Bishop of Osnaburg’, which was not a completely accurate translation as brücke means bridge in German, whereas burg means castle or stronghold.
On 16 August 1764, Frederick’s first birthday, a celebration fete was held in his honour at Kew and four thousand special medals were struck in gold and silver to mark his election as prince-bishop. Designed by Thomas Pingo, the medals represented on one side the figure of Hope, resting on a shield, bearing the arms of the prince, with a pedestal supporting the mitre, crozier and sword of the bishopric.6 Seven days later the queen gave birth to her third son, William Henry, and soon after that George and Charlotte took the brave decision to have their two eldest sons inoculated against smallpox.
This was at the time a dreaded disease, which, if it did not kill its victims, could leave them seriously disfigured. Inoculation consisted of introducing infected material from a smallpox lesion into the skin of a patient, on both arms, using the point of a lancet. Then the child had to stay in bed, preferably in the dark, for ten days. The procedure had met with growing success in England during the eighteenth century and was approved by the Royal College of Physicians in 1754. However, there were many, especially among evangelical churchmen, who strongly opposed it, arguing that physicians were meddling in God’s work. The operation was performed by the king’s surgeon, Fennel Hawkins, and fortunately proved successful. Subsequently George and Charlotte had all their children inoculated until tragedy struck in May 1783 when their thirteenth child, Prince Octavius, died of smallpox shortly after being inoculated, aged four. An angelic child, he was by then the king’s favourite, and George was inconsolable: ‘There will be no heaven for me’, he lamented, ‘if Octavius is not there.’7
From the very first the king and queen did their best to ensure that their children received the best possible education. In the early years their governess was the kindly Lady Charlotte Finch (‘Lady Cha’), of whom all the royal children were very fond. According to a recent historian of the family, ‘Every aspect of their lives, both great and small, came under her all-encompassing control’, and she was ‘exactly the kind of concerned scholarly mother the queen would have chosen to be if her rank had allowed it’.8 From about 1771 George and Frederick were given their own households on Kew Green and they were taught together under the general direction of their official governor, the Earl of Holdernesse. Their chief academic tutor was Dr William Markham, who gave up his post as Headmaster of Westminster School at the king’s request to take up this duty – for which he was later rewarded with the Bishopric of Chester and then the Archbishopric of York.
The king laid down that the two boys should be kept occupied from early in the morning until 8.00 at night and be given careful instruction in the classics as well as in modern languages, so that by the age of ten Frederick was capable of writing letters in excellent French. The princes received instruction in military sketching and plan-drawing from a talented officer in the Royal Engineers, Leonard Smelt, a versatile man who was also accomplished in literature and art. On 15 June 1772 Frederick was formally installed as a Knight Companion of the Bath in Westminster Abbey and ten days later he was invested with the insignia of a Knight of the Garter at a grand ceremony held at Windsor Castle.9
In 1774 Holdernesse fell ill and had to leave his post for a time, during which, he alleged, his enemies poisoned the minds of the princes against him so that when he returned, they failed to treat him with proper respect. He resigned in 1776 and was replaced by the Duke of Montagu, with Richard Hurd, Bishop of Lichfield, taking over the academic duties from Markham and Colonel Hotham the more practical studies from Smelt. George and Frederick were now aged thirteen and twelve respectively and beginning to show signs of a rebellious nature. According to one of their sisters, this was curbed, on the king’s express instruction, by the vigorous use of corporal punishment.10
It was sensibly recognized that growing boys needed physical exercise and George and Frederick played a good deal of single-wicket cricket on Kew Green, becoming highly proficient, according to observers. The two brothers were already beginning to reveal the differences in their characters and tastes – George more intellectual and theoretical, Frederick more physical and practical. Their father was very interested in agriculture, so a small piece of ground was set aside for them at Kew so that they could grow wheat and reap and thresh it themselves, occasionally helped by the king. In every respect they were encouraged to live frugally and to think soberly but in the case of the Prince of Wales, at least, the result was in the end the opposite of what was intended and as the boys moved into their teenage years their tutors began to express doubts about their progress, not so much in academic terms, but in attitude of mind.
A long letter from Frederick, aged fifteen, has been preserved, which finds him discussing current affairs and the details of a marriage scandal and complaining that he has no time to write letters because ‘our time is so exactly parcelled out’. At the same age the king took him, with his elder brother, to Eton College, to hear recitations of famous speeches performed by the senior boys and they were all deeply affected by the young Richard Wellesley’s rendering of the Earl of Strafford’s eloquent defence of himself at his trial in 1641.11 When Frederick was sixteen he seems to have had a ‘youthful amour’ with a dairymaid at Kew and by the age of seventeen he was already about six feet tall and very attractive to women.12 At about this time he seems to have had an affair with Letitia Smith, described as ‘an adventuress who was also believed to have been the mistress of the highwayman John Rann’. After Frederick had left for Hanover, she told the Prince of Wales that she missed him so much that she had been ill, and could not live without him.13
There was no doubting Frederick’s interest in manly sports and also his enthusiasm for soldiering, which the king encouraged in him, although not in George. For military instruction Frederick was placed in the charge of General Smith, a distinguished engineer, as well as Colonel Lake, and he read important texts on the art of soldiering. Moreover, part of the gardens at Kew were used in order to map out some of the campaigns of the Seven Years War and to reconstruct the military triumphs of King Frederick II (‘the Great’) of Prussia, who became a hero to his young namesake. As Frederick grew to manhood his father saw in him much that was good, while increasingly he despaired of the heir to the throne.14
Home and International Politics, 1756–1780
While his eldest children had been growing up, George III had faced many crises in the government of the country. When he came to the throne he inherited the Seven Years War, which had begun in 1756. The main enemy was France, with her allies Austria and Russia, while the main British ally was Frederick of Prussia. Under the direction of the brilliant but eccentric minister William Pitt ‘the Elder’, Britain’s navy attacked the French empire with great success in Canada, India, the West Indies and West Africa, while money was poured into the Prussian coffers to keep the French armies busy on land. In the famous ‘Year of Victories’, 1759, General Wolfe captured Quebec, the French navy was defeated at Lagos and Quiberon Bay, and Hanover was saved by the defeat of the French at Minden.
When George became king in the following year he agreed with Bute that the colonial war had already been won and that peace should now be made, a strategy that infuriated Pitt, who resigned in 1761, followed by his political ally, the Duke of Newcastle, in 1762. This left the king and Bute free to conclude the Peace of Paris in 1763, by which Britain gained the whole of Canada, much of ‘Louisiana’ and the islands of Tobago, Dominica, St Vincent and the Grenadines, as well as Senegal in West Africa. In India the British East India Company was left the dominant force. Britain made peace without reference to her ally, Prussia, but Frederick arranged a separate peace with Austria by which he was able to hold on to gains already made, especially the rich province of Silesia. So Britain emerged from this war the owner of a worldwide trading empire, while Prussia was established as the dominant military power in Europe.
Bute came under strong criticism from politicians, partly because he was a royal favourite and partly because it was argued that he had given away too many gains. He resigned in 1763, to the king’s great regret, and for the next seven years George looked for a ‘prime minister’ whom he trusted and who could also command a majority in the House of Commons. George Grenville, Lord Rockingham, Pitt himself (as Lord Chatham) and the Duke of Grafton all came and went until in 1770 the king appointed Lord North, with whom he was able to work for the next twelve years. The British Constitution had developed by this time to a stage where the king still retained important executive powers, such as the appointment and dismissal of ministers as well as the formulation of foreign policy, but he could not force legislation through the House of Commons, which had almost complete control over the money supply. So he gradually built up his own party of ‘king’s friends’ in the Commons as well as in the Lords, and used these supporters in coalitions with other political factions. In general this approach to government was acceptable to the Tories, but not to the Whigs, who accused the king of meddling too much in matters that were properly the responsibility of Parliament.
The expulsion of the French from North America in 1763 relieved Britain’s thirteen American colonies of the threat of French invasion and encouraged them to agitate for more self-government, especially in the matter of raising taxes. Trouble began with the imposition of a Stamp Tax in 1765, which had to be withdrawn after strong protests of ‘No Taxation without Representation’. When Lord North actually reduced the tax on tea in 1773, in order to help the East India Company, which was in financial difficulties, the colonists saw this as a plot to bribe them to drink more tea (which they had largely boycotted) and in the famous Boston Tea Party incident in December that year large amounts of tea were thrown into the harbour by colonists. This resulted in legislation which punished the colonies and led to their Declaration of Independence in 1775, which began a long war with the mother country. Britain had a strong navy but only a small army, so the 10,000 British troops which went out to fight in America were buttressed by 18,000 German mercenaries, many of them from Hanover. In 1777 some 5,000 British troops were defeated and forced to surrender at Saratoga, and this encouraged France and her ally, Spain, to enter the war on the side of the colonists, hoping to win back some of their previous losses. Britain also had to declare war on the Dutch, who insisted on carrying supplies to the rebels.