William Collins The Strangest Family, Literature, Culture & Art, Paperback, Janice Hadlow

Author: Ralph Blumenau

Rating: 5

Review: A superb, beautifully written and psychologically insightful account of the family of King George III. It is a long book, because all the members of the family are brought most vividly to life in countless details. I knew nothing apart from their existence about eleven of George III's fifteen children, let alone about how they had been brought up, or the view which George III had that his family life should be a model for the country and certainly very different from the dysfunctional families of George I and George II, whose monstrously tyrannical and hate-obsessed nature towards their sons is described vividly and at length in the introductory chapters. George I had imprisoned his wife. I knew what influence over George II his wife Caroline had, but not how difficult a marriage it was for her because she never dared to cross him if she was to retain that influence over him; and she was as vitriolic in her hatred for their son Frederick as her husband was. Frederick, however, had an easy, affectionate and unproblematical relationship with his wife Augusta, and he was also a loving father to his nine children. But "poor Fred" died in 1751 when George, his eldest son was only twelve. He would now be in the care of his austere mother Augusta, who kept him secluded from any contact with public life, so that he dreaded becoming king one day. He had several ineffectual tutors before Augusta found the Earl of Bute to teach him. Janice Hadlow shows that the bad reputation that Augusta and Bute have acquired is largely due to public rumours spread by Bute's rivals, especially by Horace Walpole; she says it is extremely unlikely that they were lovers. Young George, lacking in confidence and ill at ease with everyone else, certainly came to love Bute and became utterly dependent on him. The author also acquits Bute of the charge that he was training George to be a more authoritarian king than his predecessors had been. Instead, he held before him the ideal of king whose high moral standards in public and in private would influence the nation and win him the love of his people. The very foundation of this, he taught the young prince, was a virtuous private life: for a king "the personal was always political". So when George married Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz soon after his accession to the throne in 1760 at the age of 22, he was determined that this should be a faithful, companionable and considerate marriage, in contrast to those of some senior aristocrats whose rackety and unloving lives the author describes at some length. Charlotte for her part shared his strong sense of duty and did everything to please him. He was nearly as controlling as George II had been and she forced herself to be as submissive as Caroline had been. Like Caroline, that sometimes made her unhappy. George III had never been sociable, and he did not let her be so either, so he was for many years almost the only person to whom she was close, and only in letters to her brother Charles in Mecklenburg could she ever say what she really felt. Only from the 1780s onwards would the whole family have real friends in the shape of Lord and Lady Harcourt and a Mrs Delaney. Mrs Delaney in turn would introduce Fanny Burney to them, who for five years (1786 to 1791) would be a member of the Queen's household and to whom we owe so much insight into the lives of the King and Queen in those years. By then all the children had been born (and two had died). Hadlow has many pages in which she describes childbirth and the changing attitudes, inspired by Rousseau and largely embraced by George and especially by Charlotte, to childhood, parenting and education in the second half the 18th century. But once the children reached the age of about ten, the control over the education of the boys passed from Charlotte to George. He had been a jolly and doting father when his children were small, but now he favoured a stricter, more formal and more censorious regime, concentrating on forming their moral character. By those standards his eldest son George especially fell far short: he amassed vast debts and was a womanizer; and by 1780, when the Prince was 18, his father's fault-finding soured their relationship. The curse of Hanoverian bad father-son relationships reappeared, including the son becoming allied to politicians who were outspoken opponents of the King and supporters of the rebellious American colonists. When his next six sons became teenagers, he showed no warmth for them either. One was sent to sea and the other five were sent abroad (and kept short of money) for their education and to get them away from the bad influence of their eldest brother: they would not see England again for many years. Two of the King's brothers, William and Henry, married English women and kept this secret from the King, who would have wanted them to make diplomatic marriages abroad. When he found out, he got Parliament to pass the Royal Marriages Act (1772), by which the King had to agree to the marriages in his immediate family, and the children of any marriage contracted without his permission would be declared illegitimate. When another brother, Augustus, in defiance of the Act, married an English aristocrat in 1793, the King had the marriage annulled and the couple's son declared illegitimate. The Prince of Wales had also secretly married a Mrs Fitzherbert in 1785, in defiance not only of the Act but of the law forbidding members of the royal family marrying a Roman Catholic. However, he denied the existence of this marriage even to his political friends, and in any case in 1794 he told Mrs Fitzherbert that their marriage and relationship was over. He then impulsively decided that he wanted to marry his cousin, Princess Caroline of Brunswick whom he had never met and about whose character he had never made any enquiries! King George was pleased; Queen Charlotte, whose German contacts had told her of Caroline's coarse and undisciplined character, was appalled, but, never willing to confront her husband, made no effort to oppose the King or the Prince of Wales. (For the same reason, she would actively oppose her unmarried daughters in their longings to marry.) The Prince took against Caroline as soon as they met, and after only a few weeks he and his wife ceased to appear together in public. He found her so revolting that after 1797 they separated and lived apart from each other. Before their separation, she had borne him a daughter, Charlotte. She would be brought up partly in her father's household at Carlton House and partly in that of the Queen in Windsor (in each case without love). She would grow up a strong-willed young woman, would turn down a marriage her father had arranged to the future King of the Netherlands and would instead get her way and marry Leopold of Saxe-Coburg in 1816. (Noone could know that he would be chosen to become the first King of the Belgians in 1831.) She would be very happy with him, but she and her child would die in childbirth in 1817. What about George III's daughters? Queen Charlotte was "ferociously well read" in the literature of three languages and interested in the natural sciences, and in the late 1770s established a discreet salon - discreet because overtly intellectual women were generally looked down on as unnatural in society. She saw to it that her three elder daughters - Charlotte, Augusta and Elizabeth - were well educated. The King insisted that his daughters, like his wife, should keep themselves apart from society; and while all but the eldest of his sons were sent away, the daughters were kept strictly within the confines of the family. Two of the King's sisters, Augusta and Caroline, had been unhappily married abroad, and "to protect" his daughters from a similar fate, he not only long resisted any of them marrying, but even prevented them from setting up their own establishments. At last, in 1797, when the Princvess Royal was 31, George III reluctantly accepted the insistent request of Frederick, heir-presumptive of Württemberg, for her hand, and she became a loving wife to him. The daughters Mary and Elizabeth would eventually marry in 1816 and 1818 respectively (after George III's second and lasting attack of madness): Mary, at the age of 40, would marry her cousin William, the Duke of Gloucester; and Elizabeth, at the age of 48, found real happiness with the Duke of Hesse-Homburg. But the three other daughters - Augusta, Sophia and Amelia - never did marry. In 1797 the King refused an offer for Augusta from a son of the King of Sweden; Sophia would in 1800 produce an illegitimate son whom she could never acknowledge and who was brought up by General Garth, a royal equerry, who was almost certainly the father - although there was a rumour that the father was Sophia's brother Edward, the Duke of Cumberland; and Amelia died in 1810, desperately unhappy because she had been passionately in love for nine years with another royal equerry, General Fitzroy. In 1788 George had suffered the first attack of madness, whose course is described in great detail and in all its horror for him (especially during his intervals of lucidity) and for his family, the Queen particularly. A Regency was needed, but if the Prince of Wales became Regent with full powers, he would dismiss the current government and put in his friends in the Opposition. But George recovered before the Regency Bill could be passed by the House of Lords. A second bout, lasting in its acute form just three weeks this time, occurred in 1801 just after Pitt had resigned because the King would not let him proceed to give Roman Catholics the vote. This time the political consequence was that, on the King's recovery, Pitt, believing that his resignation had played a part in triggering the illness, promised not to raise the question of Catholic Emancipation again. In fact, though George was not this time under restraint, his behaviour continued to be very alarming

Author: elizabeth anne hepburn

Rating: 4

Review: This clear, well-written account of Georges I, II and particularly, of George III, held my interest right through. This was a period, particularly in the case of the first two Georges, I had never investigated in great depth; I was intrigued to learn more about them. In the case of George III and his family I felt that I had really got to know something of the real people living behind the 'mask' of royalty; that their foibles and failings were the same as the majority of humanity. Their joys, frustrations and griefs lived on the page. I felt particularly sorry for George, the 'man', secluded in his rooms at Windsor, who had tried all his life to neutralise the toxic legacy of a dysfunctional family life, but successful only in part. How much happier I believe he might have been if he had not had the misfortune to have been born the eldest son and could have spent his life as a gentleman farmer. Still, one can see in his attempt the beginnings of the child-centric Victorian era to come. It was also fascinating to discover that Queen Charlotte was not a characterless child-bearing machine, as some views of her show, but a consort with strong beliefs of her own - this, I admit, came as a surprise. Ms Hadlow's writing is well researched but wears its scholarship lightly; it flows smoothly and is an easy, interesting read. I very much recommend it if you you are interested in this era but don't want your reading to be too densely academic.