The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians

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George III, Queen Charlotte and six princesses (watercolour, attributed to William Rought)

AND FOR MY PARENTS, WHO DID NOT LIVE TO READ IT

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As Caroline had feared, her elder daughters were never restored to her while the old king lived. She went on to have other children: William in 1721, Mary in 1723 and finally Louisa in 1724. But it was not until George I died, in 1727, from a stroke suffered while travelling through the German countryside he loved, that Anne, Amelia and Caroline came back to live with their parents again. By then it was too late to establish the stable home life that Caroline had hoped to provide for them. Before they had been taken from her, she had been a careful mother to her girls. ‘No want of care, or failure or neglect in any part of their education can be imputed to the princess,’ her husband had written in one of his many fruitless appeals to his father.54 Caroline’s daughters would never waver in their devotion to her; but their long estrangement from their father – and the constant criticism of his behaviour which they heard from their grandfather for nearly a decade – meant that on their return his eldest daughters regarded him with distinctly sceptical eyes. When they saw for themselves how he treated their mother – the strange mixture of obsession and disdain, passion and resentment, respect and rudeness, the destructive combination of warring emotions that had come to characterise George’s attitude to his wife – any tenderness they once had for him soon evaporated. It was hardly an attractive vision of domestic happiness with which to begin a new reign.

After the birth the prince informed his parents, back at Hampton Court, what had happened. The queen could not believe it; the king was furious, shouting, ‘You see now, with all your wisdom how they have outwitted you! This is all your fault! A false child will be put upon you and how will you answer to your children!’65 Pausing only to dress and to pick up Lord Hervey, Caroline went immediately to London, where she spoke politely to the exhausted princess and kissed the tiny baby. She said nothing to Frederick, other than to observe that ‘it was a miracle the princess and the child had not been killed’.66 Then she turned around and returned to Hampton Court. She had no doubts, she told Hervey, that the ‘poor ugly little she-mouse’ she had seen at St James’s was indeed the princess’s child. Had it been ‘a brave, jolly boy I should not have been cured of my suspicions’. But her relief that there had been ‘no chairman’s brat’ wished on them did nothing to make the birth an event that brought the family together.

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