Читать книгу The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians - Janice Hadlow - Страница 14

DEATH HAD COME SUDDENLY UPON George II, with very little regard for his dignity. Horace Walpole heard that the last day of the king’s life had been conducted with the same punctiliousness which had marked all his actions. At six in the morning he had been served his breakfast chocolate. ‘At seven, for everything with him was exact and periodic, he went to his closet to dismiss it.’ When he did not emerge from his private lavatory, his valet, Schroeder, grew alarmed. Drawing closer to the door, he ‘heard something like a groan. He ran in, and found the king on the floor.’ He had cut the right side of his face as he collapsed. Schroeder may have been the author of the laconic coded note hurriedly sent to the young Prince of Wales informing him what had happened to his grandfather. The stricken king did not respond to his valet, nor to the anxious ministrations of his servants, who carried him back to the more decorous surroundings of his bedroom. By the time they had summoned his spinster daughter Amelia, he was beyond help. Amelia’s sight was very poor, and when she saw her father laid on his bed she did not realise he was already dead. Walpole was told that ‘they had not closed his eyes’. Amelia bent down, ‘close to his face and concluded he spoke to her, though she could not hear him – guess what a shock when she found out the truth’.1

George II was the first reigning monarch to have died in England for nearly fifty years. His funeral was intended to be an event both sombre and imposing, reflecting the dignity of the office of kingship and the mourning of a bereaved nation. It was held at night, and began with suitable solemnity, accompanied by muffled drum rolls and bells tolling in the darkness. Walpole, who could never resist the lure of a ceremony, was present throughout the proceedings. He thought the early stages were very impressive, and was moved, despite himself, by the severe choreography that marked the coffin’s journey to Westminster Abbey. But once inside the chapel, he was sorry to see that discipline and decorum fell apart: ‘No order was observed; people sat or stood where they could or would; the yeoman of the guard were crying out for help, oppressed by the immense weight of the coffin; the bishop read sadly, and blundered in the prayers.’ The dead king, with his obsessive devotion to the niceties of correct behaviour, would have been appalled. Walpole noticed that only the Duke of Cumberland – the chief mourner and the son George II had loved above all his other children – behaved as his father would have wished. ‘His leg extremely bad, yet forced to stand upon it nearly two hours; his face bloated and distorted by his late paralytic stroke … Yet he bore it all with firm and unaffected countenance.’

The same could not be said for the Duke of Newcastle, who had served as the late king’s first minister, and whose grief was flamboyantly unconstrained. ‘He fell back into a fit of crying the moment he came into the chapel, and flung himself back in his stall, the Archbishop hovering over him with a smelling-bottle.’ The sardonic Walpole noticed that Newcastle’s distress did not prevent him from surreptitiously making himself as comfortable as he could in cold and clammy circumstances. When Cumberland tried to shift his position, ‘feeling himself weighed down, and turning round, he found it was the Duke of Newcastle standing on his train to avoid the chill of the marble’.2

For all the incipient disorder that so often overwhelmed even the most sober eighteenth-century spectacles, the final act of the funeral was a moment of genuine pathos. The king had always intended that he would be buried alongside his long-dead wife. Now, as his remains were placed in the grave next to hers, it was apparent that their two coffins had been constructed without sides, so that their bones would eventually mingle. Twenty-three years after her death, George and Caroline were united once more.

Mourning for George II was subdued. His death had been expected for so long – he was seventy-six when he died, the oldest king to sit on the throne since Edward the Confessor – that the public response to it was inevitably muted. The Duke of Newcastle, whose tears were perhaps more heartfelt than Walpole allowed, was one of the few who seemed genuinely moved, declaring that he ‘had lost the best king, the best master, the best friend that ever a subject had’.3 Most other verdicts were distinctly cooler; in many of his obituaries, it was George’s least attractive characteristics – his parsimony, his boorishness and his proudly declared lack of intellectual refinement – which featured most prominently. Walpole thought his disdain for the literary world had a very direct and adverse impact on his posthumous reputation, musing that if he had pensioned more writers, he might have enjoyed a better press at the time of his death. As it was, George had never laid himself out to court approval, and his character was not one that attracted easy plaudits or unmixed admiration. In death, as in life, he remained a difficult man to love.

However, there were some among his contemporaries who looked beyond his very visible failings and eccentricities and recognised qualities of greater worth. Lord Waldegrave, once the reluctant governor to the unhappy Prince of Wales, was convinced that with time, ‘those specks and blemishes that sully the brightest characters’ would be forgotten and George would be remembered as a king ‘under whose government the people have enjoyed the greatest happiness’.4 Elizabeth Montagu, an intellectual with no inherent admiration for kings, was another who praised the late king’s somewhat undervalued virtues: ‘With him, our laws and liberties were safe; he possessed to a great degree the confidence of his people and the respect of foreign governments; and a certain steadiness of character made him of great consequence in these unsettled times.’ He had not, she admitted, been a particularly heroic figure – ‘his character would not afford subject for epic poetry’ – but she thought him none the worse for that. Indeed, she wondered if his lack of interest in the lofty and the ideal was not his best quality, praising his conviction that ‘common sense [was] the best panegyric’.5

The old king was certainly not much regretted by the man who succeeded him. Relations between George II and his heir had not been good in the years leading up to his death. The unstoppable ascendancy of Bute had alarmed the king, who distrusted him, and the fervency of the prince’s devotion left no room in his emotional life for any other male authority figure. In private, the young George was intimidated and repelled by the king’s loud, blustering invective; in his public role, he longed, as had his father before him, to be released from the frustrations which curtailed his political actions as Prince of Wales. Only his grandfather’s death could deliver him from this limbo, and he and Bute awaited the inevitable with ill-disguised eagerness. In 1758, when George II fell seriously ill, one observer commented on the excitement with which the prince’s household greeted the news, ‘how sure’ they were ‘that it was all over, and in what spirits they were in’.6

As his opinion of the king sank ever lower, the prince was determined that there was one area of his life over which his grandfather should have no influence. ‘I can never agree to marry whilst this Old Man lives,’ he told Bute. ‘I will rather undergo anything ever so disagreeable than put my trust in him for a matter of such delicacy.’ It was probably for this reason that, even after Bute had decisively scuppered his hopes of marrying Sarah Lennox, he made no public move to find a more acceptable spouse. In private, however, he was more pragmatic, preparing for the inescapable eventuality of an arranged marriage even as he carried on his doomed flirtation with the unattainable Sarah. Safely secluded from any potential interference from his grandfather, the prince had begun to explore more realistic matrimonial prospects. Closeted with his mother, he was spending his evenings ‘looking in the New Berlin Almanack for princesses, where three new ones have been found, as yet unthought of’.7

When the much-anticipated moment of his grandfather’s death finally arrived, one of George’s first acts was to promote the issue of his marriage to the top of his personal agenda. He had maintained an extraordinary discipline over his desires, but did not intend to wait any longer than was absolutely necessary to become a virtuous and properly satisfied husband. Even before the old king’s funeral had taken place, George summoned Baron Munchausen, the Hanoverian minister in London, and instructed him to begin investigating potential candidates for the vacant position of Queen of England.

George had a very clear idea of the kind of woman he was looking for: he hoped to find a helpmeet and a companion who would share his vision of a morally regenerated monarchy, and who would be happy to play her allotted role in his great domestic project. Physical attraction did not rank particularly high on his list of requirements; and he was not interested in women of fashion, influenced perhaps by his great-grandfather’s unhappy experience with a high-maintenance beauty. He told Munchausen he hoped his future wife would have a good general understanding, but stipulated she should have no taste for politics. He had no desire to be managed in public life by an intellectual superior, which he suspected had been his grandfather’s fate. Not over-confident in the strength of his own character, the attributes he sought in a woman were mild, calm, unassuming ones; but equally he hoped for something more than mere colourless docility. He was keen to find a spouse who would actively appreciate his seriousness of mind, and welcome the continence and discipline which he intended should be the defining qualities of his adult life. A strong religious sense, a deep-rooted understanding of the importance of duty, and a willingness unhesitatingly to identify her interests with his own were also of prime importance. Years before, his mother had rejected a princess proposed by the old king as a possible wife for his grandson: Augusta was concerned the girl would take after her mother, intriguing, meddling and ‘the most sarcastical person in the world’. She knew ‘such a character would not do for George’. A loud, uncooperative, pleasure-seeking woman ‘would not only hurt him in his public life but make him uneasy in his private situation’.8 George knew his mother was right. If he was to have any chance of reforming kingship from within, a great deal depended on his finding the right wife.

The pool of possibilities was not large: a British king had to marry a Protestant, ruling out an alliance with the great nation states of France and Spain. George II’s daughters had taken husbands from Holland and Denmark, and a princess of Denmark was briefly considered, until she was discovered to be already promised, and dropped out of the running. Otherwise, George concentrated his search entirely within German principalities and dukedoms. Germany was the spiritual home of his dynasty; it had provided wives for his father, grandfather and great-grandfather; he was personally related to many of the ducal and princely rulers, and through them could expect to access useful knowledge about the characters and dispositions of potential brides. Germany was not only known territory for George; it was also one in which he was unequivocally the dominant suitor. He was an incomparably attractive catch, ruling a country that was richer and more powerful than most of the small princely states put together. There was little doubt that anyone he approached would consent to his invitation; the only difficulty lay in deciding whom to ask.

When the king first approached him, Munchausen had been able to think of only two princesses who might match his requirements. One, Elizabeth of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, was the younger sister of the girl who had been proposed to George as a potential wife by his grandfather several years before, and briskly rejected. Elizabeth was only fourteen, but her youth was only part of the reason George was reluctant to consider her. Her prospects were irrevocably tainted in his eyes by the old king’s attempts to bring about the earlier alliance, and he was obstinately prejudiced against the whole family as a result. Munchausen’s only other immediate candidate was Frederica Louise of Saxe-Gotha. She was nineteen – a suitable age – and Munchausen had heard many good things about her; however, he felt constrained to add that, like her mother, she was reputed to be very interested in philosophy. George replied with some vehemence that this description made the princess repugnant to him from every point of view.9 He added that he was not at all discouraged by the shortcomings of these first contenders, assuring Munchausen that, perhaps as a result of his study of the New Berlin Almanack, he knew there were many other princesses to consider.

Bute later presented Munchausen with a list, drawn up in George’s handwriting, of the marriageable princesses who had caught his eye. Armed with these names, Munchausen was directed to begin the search in earnest. He was told to ask his brother, chief minister in Hanover, to make discreet enquiries about the character and disposition of all the women on the list. Bute emphasised that speed was of the essence. The king wanted the matter resolved as soon as possible, and so, for his own reasons, did Bute. He had seen how severely Sarah Lennox had tried George’s determination not to involve himself with women, and understood that marriage could be delayed no longer. Both he and Augusta had done all they could to instil in the young man a deep-seated conviction that it was one of his most important duties to avoid entanglements with designing females, and, responsive as he always was to the pull of obligation, George had so far complied; but both anticipated with apprehension the possible advent of a mistress, with her own agenda to pursue and her own relatives to advance. A lover was thus far more to be feared than a wife, and it was not surprising that Bute confided to Munchausen that he could not be happy until he saw the young king happily married. He dreaded the danger of his being led astray, he told the minister, out of the good way in which he had been at such pains to keep him.10

Munchausen’s brother, himself an experienced politician, responded immediately to the sense of urgency communicated by both George and Bute and sent back a report containing his initial findings on the front-runners. Frederica of Saxe-Gotha, whose philosophical interests had so dismayed the king, was firmly dismissed: Munchausen had heard she was scarred by smallpox; he confided privately to his brother that she was rumoured to be deformed. More promising was Philippa of Schwedt, sixteen years old and a niece of Frederick the Great. Caroline of Darmstadt was considered to be worth further investigation. Munchausen was keen to keep Elizabeth of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel as a possibility, despite discouraging signals from the king. She was reputed to be very beautiful. It was true she was young, but Munchausen insisted she was very well developed for her age, although he admitted it might require a proper medical opinion to determine her potential childbearing capacity.11

Almost as an afterthought, Munchausen added an idea of his own: Sophia Charlotte, of the tiny duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, looked promising. He had heard she was quiet, unassuming, of unimpeachable respectability, and was said to have been very properly educated by her mother, ‘une princesse d’un esprit solide’. He undertook to find out more about all the princesses, preferably from those who had actually met them, and, if possible, from an Englishman, who might be expected to have a better understanding of the king’s taste. His own preference was for the Princesses of Brunswick and Schwedt; he doubted whether any of the others had been brought up in circumstances of sufficient grandeur to prepare them for the role of Queen of England.12 George and Bute did not entirely agree. Having read Munchausen’s report, they instructed him to concentrate on the Princesses of Schwedt, Darmstadt and Mecklenburg-Strelitz, and to consider the Brunswick princess only if all other options failed. Bute told Munchausen her youth counted against her, but Munchausen believed it was the continued association of her family with George II’s wishes that had set the king’s mind against her. George, it seemed, and as he declared, was determined not to be ‘be-Wolfenbüttled’.

It took Munchausen some weeks to complete the next stage of his enquiries, and it was not until January 1761 that a detailed report arrived in London. It put an end to the chances of Philippa of Schwedt. Although she was said to be handsome, it also described her as ‘d’une humeur opiniatre et peu prévenante’: ‘stubborn’ and ‘inconsiderate’ were not words George wanted to hear used about a prospective wife, and her name disappeared from his thinking. ‘I am under the greatest obligation to your brother,’ he told Munchausen. ‘What would I have risked if I had not hit upon so honest a man. I now abandon the idea.’ That left only the Princesses of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and Darmstadt. Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was said to have a very good character, but Munchausen was still anxious that, having been raised in a very small, undistinguished court, she was too provincial to be seriously considered. The king’s own preference, at this point, was for Caroline of Darmstadt; if further reports on her were favourable, he confided to Bute that she would be his choice. Meanwhile, he continued to urge haste on everyone concerned. ‘The king’s longing and impatience increase daily,’ Munchausen told his brother, ‘and he has today calculated how long it will take for this letter to reach mon cher frère and for him to send an answer.’13

When the much-awaited dispatch arrived, it was a great disappointment. It had little positive to say about Caroline’s character, asserting that her own mother had described her ‘as stubborn and ill-tempered to the greatest degree’. The same report was, however, far more encouraging about the other candidate, ‘giving a very amiable character of the Princess of Strelitz’. George was encouraged, insisting that he did not share Munchausen’s anxieties about the limitations of her upbringing. It was her character that mattered to him, not her background. He told Bute that if she was as sensible as was reported, ‘a little of England’s air will soon give her the deportment necessary for a British queen’.14

The relaxed jocularity of George’s tone defined the attitude with which he set about the prosecution of what he called ‘my business’. Indeed, as the search for a spouse progressed, there is a definite sense in his correspondence that he was rather enjoying it. For such a timid and inexperienced man, the prospect of making an unhindered choice from a parade of marriageable young women, none of whom was likely to reject him, was clearly an attractive one. In the role of prospective husband, he found a new confidence, secure in his worth and in the power of his position. He had no difficulty in outlining the qualities necessary to satisfy him, nor in rejecting candidates who failed to live up to his very exacting requirements. As a spouse, he intended to be an altogether more assertive character than he had been as a son. In finding the partner he thought he deserved, he showed himself capable of making decisions with none of the anxiety or lethargy that had paralysed his actions in earlier life. This was an enterprise in which George did not intend to fail.

In the spring, the king’s search began to move towards a conclusion. In May, Caroline of Darmstadt was finally and decisively eliminated from his thinking, as disturbing new facts emerged about her family. The apparent piety of her father and his court had at first seemed attractive to George, who hoped his wife would share his own strong Christian convictions. But fresh information put a far darker complexion on the family’s spiritual pursuits. The king was horrified to learn that the Prince of Darmstadt had been drawn into the orbit of a group of religious visionaries who had driven him to the edge of reason. George had been told that these ‘visionnaires’ had ‘got about the princess’s father, have persuaded him to quit his family in great measure, lest the hereditary princess should prevent their strange schemes; they have brought the prince very near the borders of madness, and draw his money to that degree from him, that his children are often in want of necessaries such as stockings, etc.’. He had also discovered that ‘this princess was talked of last year’ for another prince, who had ‘refused her on account of her strange father and grandfather’.15 Was George prepared to take a risk another man had already declined?

He brooded for a fortnight, then on 20 May he wrote to Bute with his final decision: ‘The family of the Princess of Darmstadt has given me such melancholy thoughts of what may perhaps be in the blood.’ The possibility of madness was not an inheritance any ruler wanted to import into his bloodline, and put an end to the candidacy of Caroline of Darmstadt. As a result, the seventeen-year-old Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who had begun as a complete outsider – little more than a chance addition to Munchausen’s list – ended up bearing away the crown. ‘I trouble my Dearest Friend with the enclosed account of the Princess of Strelitz,’ wrote George. ‘I own it is not in every particular as I could wish, but yet I am resolved to fix here.’16

*

In the eighteenth century, Mecklenburg-Strelitz was considered very much a rural backwater. The duchy was then about the size of Sussex, and in the hierarchy of German princely states was in the second or perhaps even third division. Such was its reputation for mud and provinciality that it was sometimes referred to by heavy-handed contemporary jokers as ‘Mecklenburg-Strawlitter’. In 1736, when he was still Crown Prince of Prussia, Frederick the Great paid a surprise call on the Mecklenburg dukes, arriving unannounced at the family castle of Mirow. There was little evidence of the Prussian military discipline that reigned in Berlin. He wrote to his father that, ‘Coming on to the drawbridge, I perceived an old stocking-knitter disguised as a grenadier, with his cap, cartridge and musket laid aside so that they might not hinder his knitting.’ Gaining access to the castle proved a task in itself. ‘After knocking almost half an hour to no purpose, there peered out at last an exceedingly old woman. She was so terrified that she slammed the door in our faces.’ When Frederick finally met someone with enough self-possession to take him to the ducal family, he was promptly invited to dinner.

At the duke’s table, Frederick was surprised to see some of the ladies darning stockings during the meal.17 He was even more shocked to discover that sewing was not an activity confined to the female members of the family. The duke himself was a passionate devotee of needlework, said to embroider his own dressing gowns in his spare time, having achieved considerable skill in the art through years of practice. This was an eccentric pursuit for an aristocratic man (Frederick clearly thought it evidence of mild derangement) but neither the duke nor his relatives seemed embarrassed by it. On the contrary, over supper, madness formed the principal subject of discussion. ‘At table, there was talk of nothing but of all the German princes who are not right in their wits – as Mirow himself is reputed to be. There was Weimar, Gotha, Waldeck, Hoym and the whole lot brought on the carpet; and after our good host had got considerably drunk, he lovingly promised me that he and his whole family will come to visit me.’18 It was fortunate for George III’s future wife that none of these rumours reached the ears of the king, finely attuned as they were to any hint of inherited mental instability.

This was the world into which Princess Sophia Charlotte was born in 1744. The embroidering duke was her grandfather. Life was quiet for the Mecklenburg family in their compact palace, so small that Frederick had mistaken it for the parsonage. Charlotte had four brothers and an elder sister, Christiane (who at twenty-five was considered too old to be a wife for the twenty-two-year-old George III). Her father’s death, in 1752, when she was only eight, must have disturbed the placid passing of the days, but little else seems to have impacted on an early life distinguished by its lack of event. ‘The princess lived in the greatest retirement,’ one contemporary observer noted. ‘She dressed only in a robe de chambre, except on Sundays, on which day she put on her best gown and after service, which was very long, took an airing in a coach and six, attended by guards. She was not yet allowed to dine in public.’19 Charlotte’s mornings were devoted to the reigning family passion, sewing, in one of its many ornamental forms; she was inducted into the discipline of the needle very early, and never lost her taste for it when she was both older and grander. ‘Queen Charlotte, as we know, always had her piece of work in hand,’ recalled one of her more unctuous biographers. What had been in her grandfather adduced as possible evidence of insanity was regarded in Charlotte as an admirable demonstration of female industry. Her sewing skills, however, did not displace more academically minded pursuits. Charlotte’s mother took the education of her daughters seriously, and by the time Charlotte was seven she was already in the schoolroom. The sisters were instructed by Mme de Grabow, a poet whose local fame had earned her the title of ‘the German Sappho’.20 Besides teaching poetic composition and the rudiments of French – then considered an essential part of a polite education – Mme de Grabow also gave lessons in Latin. This was an unusual subject for girls: classical learning was generally considered the exclusive preserve of masculine study. Charlotte and Christiane were also taught theology by a Dr Gentzner, but the study of religion seems to have been secondary to his real passion, which was natural history. He was an accomplished botanist who awakened a similar enthusiasm in Charlotte. From her youth, she was a keen collector of plant specimens, preserving those she found most interesting in voluminous sketch books.

By the time she was in her early teens, Charlotte had already developed the bookish tastes that would stay with her for the rest of her life. She was a voracious reader, devouring serious works of literature, theology and philosophy; whatever she could beg, buy or borrow she would consume with an intensity that belied her otherwise docile demeanour. But her intellectual journeys were undertaken alone. The remoteness of Mecklenburg ensured she had no access to sophisticated thinking of the kind that had so stimulated Queen Caroline. Her parents were committed Lutherans who viewed with deep suspicion any form of study which sought to question the foundations of sacred truths. There was no Leibniz at the small, rural court to stretch her mind, and no protective cadre of like-minded, clever women to encourage her curiosity. Perhaps as a result of her intellectual isolation, Charlotte drew very different conclusions from her reading. Without the debate and provocation that had encouraged Caroline to explore unorthodox opinion, Charlotte’s values were unchallenged by what she read. Unlike Caroline, who was always suspected of harbouring suspiciously radical ideas about the truth of revealed religion, Charlotte’s intellectual explorations never undermined the traditional beliefs in which she had been so scrupulously raised. Her studies made her a bluestocking,21 but she was never a philosophe. While she immersed herself in the products of the Enlightenment, she did not endorse its implied social and political progressivism. She once returned a copy of one of Voltaire’s book to a correspondent, announcing primly: ‘I do not want anything more of his.’22

Her moral world remained that of her parents and grandparents, in which obligation was more important than personal happiness, and religion was the only meaningful expression of faith. She was a conservative, politically, morally and spiritually, most at ease in the confines of the established order, and unsettled by any attempts to undermine its power. These were qualities which would have appealed very strongly to George, who prized them in himself. Nor would he have been necessarily dismayed by her literary interests. It was not so much intellectual capacity itself which he distrusted in women, as the desire to give it a public, and above all a political, meaning. Charlotte never sought to build a reputation for herself as a clever woman; hers were private passions, pursued with decorous and entirely characteristic self-effacement. Indeed, when Colonel David Graeme, sent by the king to Mecklenburg to begin the formal negotiations for her hand, first met her he was underwhelmed by her accomplishments. He thought she spoke French ‘but middling well’, and was surprised that she had no knowledge at all of English. He saw too, as Munchausen had warned, she possessed little of the social polish that more urbane girls of her age and status could usually command. That Charlotte had talents, Graeme was sure; he just did not believe they had been fostered as they deserved. Only one of her skills truly impressed him: he was intrigued to discover that she had taught herself to play the glockenspiel, an instrument of which Graeme had never heard. It produced, he explained, ‘a bright and agreeable sound’.23

Two weeks after George had made his decision to ‘fix here’, he had instructed Graeme, a friend of Bute’s, to set out for the duchy, taking with him the formal offer of marriage. It was a slow journey, the roads ‘either overflowing with water or deep sand’, and it took Graeme more than a fortnight to get there. When he arrived, he was horrified to find that the widowed Duchess of Mecklenburg, to whom he had been told to explain his mission, was seriously ill. A series of ‘violent cramps’ had, he wrote to Bute, confined her to bed and ‘deprived her of speech’.24 Graeme carried with him a letter from the Dowager Princess Augusta, proposing her son as a husband for Charlotte. Unable to carry the document directly to the duchess, he entrusted it to Charlotte’s sister Christiane, who read it to her sick mother. When Graeme met the rest of the family at dinner later that night, it was plain that everyone now knew about the offer of marriage except the person most concerned by it. They had decided to tell Charlotte nothing, so that ‘by having no disturbance in her mind, she would converse more freely’, and Graeme could observe her natural behaviour. Unconscious of his scrutiny, Charlotte clearly acquitted herself well and some time after dinner was informed of the possible future that awaited her.

How she responded to this extraordinary announcement is not known. The story that she sat stoically silent, unmoved, without looking up from her sewing, is probably apocryphal. Her family were certainly far less restrained. They recognised what an unlooked-for opportunity had fallen into their laps, and were desperate to grasp it with both hands. Only Christiane must have found it hard to join in the general rejoicing. The terms of the marriage treaty forbade any other member of Charlotte’s family from marrying an English subject; having been thwarted in his own desire to marry ‘a countrywoman’, the king wanted no ambitious British in-laws intriguing from the sidelines. This put an abrupt end to Christiane’s romance with the Duke of Roxburghe, who had met her whilst travelling in Germany, and ‘had formed an attachment to her which was returned’.25 Unable to marry each other, neither Christiane nor the duke ever married anyone else. He dedicated his life to the collection of rare books; she became a cloistered royal spinster, an unacknowledged casualty of her younger sister’s marital good fortune.

Christiane’s fate registered not at all on the rest of the Mecklenburg family, who hastened to reply to a list of questions posed in Augusta’s letter. Alongside the formal declarations of the princess’s age, religion and availability – her brother eagerly confirmed that she was engaged to no one else – Graeme sent back to London a more intimate report of his own. Intended for the king’s eyes, this was in effect a candid, first-hand portrait of Charlotte. Inevitably, it began with an assessment of her looks. No one ever thought Charlotte a beauty, and throughout her life her supposed plainness was remorselessly and woundingly satirised. In middle age, she was depicted in cruel caricatures as a crow-like hag, or a bony, miserly witch, an emaciated spider, all arms, legs and chin. Even as a young woman, she was often described as plain and charmless. Recalling her first arrival in England, the diarist Sylvester Douglas, Lord Glenbervie, thought Charlotte presented a very unappealing figure: ‘She was very ill-dressed, and wore neither rouge nor powder … her hair used to be combed tight over a roller, which showed the skin through the roots, than which nothing can be more frightful.’26

Graeme’s pen portrait of her was more kind. She was very slender, he wrote, and of medium height; her complexion was ‘delicate and fine, with an abundance of red, not to be called a high bloom but as much as, in my opinion, there should be at her age, and sufficient to relieve the lustre of a very fine white’. Her hair, one of her best features, was a pale brown. Her nose was acceptable in shape and size, but her mouth, later to attract the delighted attention of the caricaturists, was, he admitted, ‘rather large’. She had a little growing still to do. She was just seventeen, and ‘the appearance of her person is not quite that of a woman fully formed, nor may it be expected at her age, though the bosom is full enough for her age and person’. She was, he had been told, healthy, and carried herself well, ‘the whole figure straight, genteel and easy, all her actions and carriage natural and unaffected’. In conclusion, he declared, as so many others were to later do, that ‘she is not a beauty’, but ‘what is little inferior, she is amiable, and her face rather agreeable than otherwise’.27

If Graeme was cautious in his careful evaluation of Charlotte’s looks, he was far more effusive in his description of her character. The more time he spent with her, the more he grew to like her. He warmed to her artlessness, and was delighted when she sent him a bowl of cherries as a present. When her sick mother died only days after the marriage offer had been received, Graeme was moved by Charlotte’s ‘flowing tears’; she confided in him that the duchess’s last words had been a wish for her happiness, and declared herself ready ‘to render herself worthy of that station … before tears again stopped her utterance’. Throughout her grief, he noted with approval, she showed ‘not the least spark of hauteur’. Her unworldly rectitude amused him. He was amazed to discover with what detail she had researched the services of the Anglican Church before solemnly assuring him that she would have no difficulty in conforming to them. He could not imagine that she could be so seriously attached to ‘some inessential points’ that they would prevent her ‘paving the way to a throne’.28

If she was sometimes guilty of taking herself too seriously, this was not the dominant note in her character; as a young woman, Charlotte was lively and even playful in company. Lord Harcourt admitted that ‘our queen that is to be’ had seen very little of the world, but thought she demonstrated qualities more important than those of sophistication and experience. ‘Her good sense, vivacity and cheerfulness, I daresay will recommend her to the king and to the whole British nation.’29 Charlotte certainly demonstrated a fervent desire to win the approval of both her future husband and her prospective subjects. When the British navy won a victory in the West Indies in July 1761, she wrote enthusiastically to Graeme, describing how she and her sister had danced till midnight to celebrate. Her feelings, she wrote, were exactly those that the wife of the King of Great Britain should be, sharing in the happiness of not just the king himself, ‘but of all his worthy nation … there are times when the heart speaks, and this is how my heart feels this morning’. Graeme forwarded her letter to Bute as proof of her ‘frank open heart’, adding his hope that ‘her good humour and good spirits’ should never ‘suffer any interruption or change’.30

For others, it was her calm good temper that attracted most plaudits. Munchausen, to whom more than anyone she owed her good fortune, was struck by the sweetness of her disposition, if not the polish and sparkle of her conversation. ‘It cannot be pretended she should entertain people in a brilliant manner,’ he observed, ‘but she is gracious and kind to everyone.’ He noticed that her servants and entourage adored her and that ‘never since her tenderest childhood did she arouse in anyone the slightest ill humour’.31 Charlotte’s marriage prospects had plucked her from obscurity and made her an object of political interest to other European states. Baron Wrangel, a Swedish diplomat reporting on her to his government, painted a similar picture of placid good temper and innocence. ‘She has a good and generous heart … but no idea of the value of money.’ She spent a lot of her time with servants, and was unguarded in her conversations with them, a fact that might, he thought, be used to gather intelligence about her; but she was not herself either a strategist or schemer. ‘She has no knowledge of politics, and no idea of intrigues, or of the interests of princes.’ That, he believed, was one of the reasons she had been chosen, since ‘she will never involve Britain in the affairs of the Continent’.32 To some extent, Wrangel was correct in his analysis. The relative insignificance of Mecklenburg meant that in marrying one of its princesses, George was unlikely to become embroiled in the complicated pattern of alliance and dispute that dominated relationships between the larger and more powerful German princely states.

But it was Charlotte’s character as much as her dynastic neutrality that consolidated her appeal for the king. It was her simplicity, upon which all who met her commented with such approval, her lack of sophistication, of contention or wilfulness, that commended her most strongly to Graeme and, through his reports, to her future husband. Young, inexperienced, untutored in the ways of courts or politics, her naivety emerged not as the disadvantage Munchausen had feared, but as her most powerfully attractive quality, an enticingly blank page for a man to write upon. She was ‘mild’, ‘soft and pliable’, Graeme enthused, ‘capable of taking any impression, of being moulded into any form’.33 Little similar flexibility was to be expected from her husband, who saw himself as the secure stake around which his wife would twine. George would supply the worldly judgement and direction their relationship would require; he did not hope or wish to find such qualities in his wife. Charlotte’s lack of looks, money, sophistication and influence counted for nothing; on the contrary, they amplified the key promise of her pliability – and it was that which ultimately secured her the crown.

‘The more I resolve in my mind the affair, the more I wish to have it immediately concluded,’ wrote George to Bute at the end of June. Now he had made his choice, he was impatient to be married; but he was also keen to spare his bride the prospect of having to face both coronation and wedding services in intimidating succession. The coronation was planned for September. He hoped Charlotte could arrive in London a month beforehand, allowing time for the wedding and a short honeymoon. With no time to lose, the machinery of government and protocol was put in motion, and the Privy Council was summoned to meet on 8 July. When they assembled, they were informed of the king’s intention ‘to demand in marriage the Princess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, a princess distinguished by every eminent virtue and amiable endowment’. This was the meeting that so shocked Henry Fox and put an abrupt end to Sarah Lennox’s royal romance. It caught even the unflappable Walpole by surprise, and as a result he had only the baldest news about the impending nuptials to pass on to his extensive network of correspondents. ‘All I can tell you of truth is that Lord Harcourt goes to fetch the princess and comes back as her Master of the Horse. She is to be here in August, and the coronation on the 22nd September.’34

The choice of Lord Harcourt as the official charged with negotiating the marriage treaty, and bringing Charlotte to her new home in England, was surprising – Harcourt himself confessed that ‘this office I expected about as much as I did the Bishopric of London, then vacant’. His last contact with the king had been as his louche and ineffectual governor, when George was Prince of Wales. It was Harcourt who had so successfully and infuriatingly given the dowager princess the repeated brush-off, despite all her persistent attempts to pin him down and find out exactly what he was doing with her son. It was a mystery to everyone why George had chosen him, but somehow fitting that the appointment seems to have arisen from what Harcourt had not done rather than as the result of some more positive action. The king was said to have told Harcourt that as he was the only man not to have solicited him for a place when he inherited the throne, he had always had it in mind to do something for him. It was definitely a plum of a job; Harcourt was given the title Master of the Horse to the new queen’s household, and was granted the huge sum of £4,000 to pay for his trip.

He arrived in Strelitz on 14 July. The next day, final details were agreed and the marriage treaty was ‘despatched away to England’. Harcourt was pleased to see how hard the ducal family had exerted themselves to mark the occasion and was particularly impressed by a grand banquet, held the night the treaty was signed. The palace and gardens were lit with 40,000 lamps; even the small town of Neustrelitz illuminated its lanes and backstreets to celebrate. To conclude the event, Charlotte made a speech of thanks which ended with a formal leave-taking of her family. It ‘so forcibly impressed many of the bystanders that their wet cheeks could only tell what they felt’. Colonel Graeme – who was among the damp-eyed spectators – was moved to uncharacteristic emotion, writing to Bute that he was convinced ‘no marriage can afford a greater prospect of happiness’.35 When the day came to leave, Charlotte departed in great style. Lord Harcourt’s carriage led the way, followed by Charlotte’s; in the third carriage came ‘the ladies’, including two ‘femmes des chambres’, Juliana Schwellenberg and Johanna Hagerdorn. George had been reluctant to allow Charlotte to bring any of her old servants with her to England. ‘I own I hope they will be quiet people,’ he told Bute gloomily, ‘for by my own experience I have seen these women meddle much more than they ought to do.’36

Back in London, the king’s enthusiasm mounted daily. He had acquired a portrait of Charlotte and was said to be ‘mighty fond of it, but won’t let any mortal look at it’.37 Although George had little interest in fashion, he concerned himself in the provision of a suitable wardrobe for his bride. ‘Graeme ought to get a very exact measure of her,’ he told Bute, ‘accompanied with a very explicit account of every particular, that her clothes may be made here.’38 He knew that the styles of a remote German court would not survive the critical scrutiny of the London beau monde. The usual method of ordering clothes by proxy was to send one’s stays to the dressmaker, who would use them as a form of measurement, but such was the austerity of Charlotte’s upbringing that she had only a single pair, which clearly could not be spared. Graeme sent her measurements instead, passing them on to Lady Bute, who was to ensure that new gowns – and presumably a few extra pairs of stays – would be waiting for Charlotte when she arrived in England.

The atmosphere of apprehension and excitement in London had reached fever pitch well before Charlotte had even set out from Mecklenburg. The announcement of the royal wedding had been followed by news of a great victory in India, where the British and French were contesting for supremacy in the subcontinent. The capture of Pondicherry, the principal French base in the south, marked a decisive upturn in British fortunes, and had inflamed the national mood of manic self-congratulation even further. Even the usually detached Walpole was caught up in the celebratory atmosphere. ‘I don’t know where I am,’ he confessed. ‘It is all royal marriages, coronations and victories; they come tumbling so over one another from distant parts of the globe that it looks just like the handiwork of a lady romance writer to whom it costs nothing but a little false geography to make the Great Mogul fall in love with a Princess of Mecklenburg and defeat two marshals of France as he rides post on an elephant to his nuptials.’39

The man at the centre of the mounting excitement sought to sublimate his eager impatience into practical organisation. George began to assemble the Hanoverian family jewels so they could be worn by his new wife, paying his uncle the Duke of Cumberland £50,000 to buy out Cumberland’s share of his inheritance. The result was a collection of extraordinary richness. At the end of July, the Duchess of Northumberland was granted a discreet opportunity to examine it by Lady Bute, who had temporary custody of it, presumably in her role as the overseer of Charlotte’s trousseau. The duchess, a wealthy woman well supplied with jewels of her own, was astonished by what she saw. ‘There are an amazing number of pearls of a most beautiful colour and prodigious size. There are diamonds for the facings and robings of her gown, set in sprigs of flowers; her earrings are three drops, the diamonds of an immense size and fine water. The necklace consists of large brilliants set around … The middle drop of the earring costs £12,000.’40

George also appointed a household for his wife-to-be, a substantial establishment that included six Ladies of the Bedchamber, six Maids of Honour and six lower-ranking waiting women. The future queen was also provided with chamberlains, pages, gentleman ushers, surgeons, apothecaries, ‘an operator for teeth’ and two ‘necessary women’. As well as a Master of the Horse, other staff included a treasurer, law officers and her own band of German musicians. At the top of this structure, he placed two intimidating women: the Duchess of Ancaster was to be Mistress of the Robes, the Duchess of Hamilton, Lady of the Bedchamber. Both were experienced beauties, veterans of court life, worldly sophisticates who might not have been the obvious choices to reassure and support a callow seventeen-year-old on her first arrival in a strange country; they were, in effect, Charlotte’s introduction to the female world in which she would now be expected to make a life for herself, for the king had charged them with the task of crossing the Channel and accompanying the future queen home. Neither duchess was very happy about the idea, and neither proved the easiest of passengers. The Duchess of Hamilton insisted that her tame ass should accompany her on the journey, so that she should not be deprived of the medicinal benefits of its milk. ‘The Duchess of Ancaster,’ Walpole noted, ‘only takes a surgeon and a midwife, as she is breeding and subject to hysteric fits.’41

The fleet assembled to carry the reluctant duchesses across to Germany sailed from Harwich and arrived at the mouth of the Elbe on 14 August 1761. On the 22nd, Charlotte was ready to embark. She had no experience of the sea – indeed, she had probably never seen it before – and therefore little idea what to expect on her journey. Her first voyage turned out to be anything but a smooth one. The weather was bad from the beginning, with gales, rain and thunder making the small fleet’s progress slow and haphazard. As the days went on with no sign of the English coast, the discomfort of the journey took its toll, and the duchesses were soon observed ‘to be very much out of order’; however, a very different story was told of Charlotte’s response to the ordeal.42 ‘The queen was not at all affected with the storm, but bore the sea like a truly British queen,’ gushed one contemporary press account; Walpole heard that she had been ‘sick but half an hour; sung and played on the harpsichord all the voyage, and been cheerful the whole time’.43

In reality, Charlotte seems to have found the voyage just as prostrating as all the other passengers. When Lord Anson, who captained the Royal Charlotte, finally arrived in Harwich on 7 September, he wrote immediately to the Admiralty explaining that ‘the princess being much fatigued made it absolutely necessary to land her royal highness here’, and plans for a triumphal procession up the Thames to London were quietly abandoned. From Harwich she travelled to Colchester, where she was presented with a gift of candied eringo root – a kind of sea holly – which must have given her a rather strange idea of what was considered a delicacy in her new homeland. She spent the night at the home of Lord Abercorn in Witham, where she ate her first formal English dinner, with Lord Harcourt standing on one side of her chair and Lord Anson on the other, and the door ‘wide open, that everybody might have the pleasure and satisfaction of seeing her’.44

After that, it was onwards to London, to St James’s Palace and her destiny. The marriage ceremony was to take place that very evening. No wonder that, as her destination approached, she had little to say. ‘When she caught the first glimpse of the palace, she grew frightened and turned pale; the Duchess of Hamilton smiled – the princess said, “My dear Duchess, you may laugh, you have been married twice but it is no joke to me.”’45

There was little time for reflection. As soon as her arrival in town had been confirmed, all the city’s pent-up desire for celebration exploded into a cacophony of sound. ‘Madame Charlotte is this instant arrived!’ scribbled Walpole as a delighted postscript to one of his omnipresent letters. ‘The noise of coaches, chaises, horsemen, mob that have been to see her pass through the parks is so prodigious that I cannot distinguish the guns. I am going to be dressed, and before seven shall launch into the crowd. Pray for me!’46 Walpole was not the only well-connected spectator determined to satisfy his curiosity. Everyone wanted to see the first meeting of the king and the princess. The Countess of Harrington watched it from over her garden wall, and passed on what she had seen to the Countess of Kildare, who in turn described it to her husband. Introduced to the king, Charlotte ‘threw herself at his feet, he raised her up, embraced her and led her through the garden up the steps into the palace’.47

Some later reminiscences asserted that at the moment of their meeting, the king had been shocked by Charlotte’s appearance. ‘At the first sight of the German princess,’ wrote one particularly hostile commentator, ‘the king actually shrank from her gaze, for her countenance was of that cast that too plainly told of the nature of the spirit working within.’48 Yet there is no suggestion in any contemporary account that George was disappointed in what he saw. Walpole, never disposed to be charitable, described Charlotte on first seeing her as ‘sensible, cheerful and … remarkably genteel’.49

After the formal greetings, George led Charlotte into St James’s to present her to his family. In pride of place was his mother Augusta; also present were his three sisters and three brothers, and his uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, welcomed back into the family now that his nephew sat securely on his throne. Charlotte was conducted to a lavish dinner which included partridges stuffed with truffles, venison in pastry, and sweetbreads. While the royals ate, the court began to assemble in preparation for the wedding ceremony. Most, including Walpole and the Duchess of Northumberland, arrived at around seven o’clock. They had a long wait, on an exceptionally hot evening.

‘The night was sultry,’ wrote Walpole, dashing off his impressions of the event. ‘About ten, the procession began to move towards the chapel and at eleven they all came into the Drawing Room.’50 Then Charlotte appeared for the first time in a public role in England, dressed in an elaborate wedding gown which was subjected to a scrutiny almost as intense as that directed upon her looks. The dress was made of silver tissue, trimmed with silver and covered with diamonds, set off with a little cap of purple velvet. But for all its magnificence, Charlotte’s outfit was a very poor fit; clearly, the measurements sent across from Mecklenburg had proved no substitute for the more accurate sizing that stays would have provided. The dress, burdened with heavy jewels, was far too large for Charlotte’s slender frame. It was of course Walpole who recorded that her ‘violet velvet mantle … which was attempted to be fastened on her shoulders by a bunch of pearls dragged itself and almost the rest of her clothes halfway down her waist’.51 The unhappy result was that ‘the spectators knew as much of her upper half as the king himself’.52

Struggling with her clothes, the princess was led by the Duke of York through the assembled crowd of courtiers towards the chapel where the wedding was to take place. As she made her way, her nerve began to fail her and her hands shook. ‘Courage, Princess, courage,’ urged the duke.53 An even more intimidating experience followed, as she was plunged into a heaving rout of intensely curious strangers. She had enough self-possession to kiss the peeresses, as etiquette demanded, but Lady Augusta, the king’s sister, was ‘forced to take her hand and give it to those who were to kiss it’.54

In a reversal of tradition, protocol demanded that the princess arrive first at the altar and wait for the king. When he entered, the service began. It was conducted in English, as George had required. The Archbishop of Canterbury later remembered: ‘I called on him and the queen only by their Christian names. When I asked them the proper question, the king answered solemnly, laying his hand on his breast, and suggested to her to answer, “Ich will,” which she did: but spoke audibly in no other part of the service.’55 The marriage began as it was to continue, with George instructing his wife while she remained silent.

‘The instant the king put on the ring,’ reported the Duchess of Northumberland, ‘a rocket was let fly from the top of the chapel as a signal for the discharge of the Park and Tower guns, which were immediately fired.’ The princess had rallied somewhat. ‘She talks a great deal,’ observed Walpole, ‘is easy, civil, and not disconcerted.’ Her French, he thought, was only ‘tolerable’ but ‘she exchanged much of that, and also of German, with the king and the Duke of York’.56 She was also able to display her other accomplishments. ‘The royal supper not being ready, the queen (at the king’s request) played very prettily on the harpsichord,’ and sang to the assembled family, who did not, the duchess had been told, ‘get to bed till three in the morning’.57

To Charlotte, brought up in the staid uneventfulness of Mecklenburg, the day must have seemed as if it would never end. At its close, however, she was spared the ordeal endured by Augusta, her new mother-in-law, and other princesses before her. When she and the king entered their bedroom, they did so alone, and closed the door behind them. Their marriage was undeniably a public event, but what happened afterwards was private, with none of the public ribaldry that had accompanied George’s parents on their wedding night. Walpole heard that the abandonment of the old rituals had been at Charlotte’s insistence. ‘The queen was very averse to going to bed, and at last articled that no one should retire with her but the Princess of Wales, and her two German women, and that no one should be admitted afterwards but the king.’ When the dowager princess returned from the couple’s bedchamber, she asked the Duke of Cumberland to sit with her for a while. The duke was tired and tetchy, and refused with bad grace. ‘What should I stay for?’ he demanded. ‘If she cries out, I cannot help her.’58

Later, George and Charlotte were to find it much harder to navigate their way through the imprecise distinctions between the two dimensions of royal life – that which they inhabited as man and wife, and that which they occupied as king and queen – but the privacy of their first night together was a declaration of the optimism with which the pair entered the marriage state. Their union would not be like those of their predecessors: it would start in the way it was meant to go on – as a genuine partnership, forged in private intimacy.

*

The day after the wedding, Charlotte was presented at an official Drawing Room, designed to introduce her to the great and the good of the court. Walpole thought that George seemed in great spirits and delighted with his wife, talking to her ‘continually, with the greatest good humour. It does not promise,’ he noted with rare generosity, ‘as if they two would be the most unhappy persons in England, from this event.’59 A celebration ball was held that night where, according to the Duchess of Northumberland, ‘everything was vastly well conducted; nor was it too hot, notwithstanding there were a vast many people, all very magnificently dressed’. In the midst of the minuets and country dances, the duchess was touched to see the king doing all he could to please his new wife. ‘His Majesty this evening showed the most engaging attention towards the queen, even the taking of snuff (of which Her Majesty is very fond) which he detests and it made him sneeze prodigiously.’60 At a second Drawing Room the following day, the duchess heard from George himself how very pleased he was. ‘The king this day did me the honour to tell me that he thought himself too happy.’61

Gradually, Charlotte began to relax a little. Even the news that the aged, half-blind, Jacobite Earl of Westmorland had mistaken Sarah Lennox for the queen and tried to kiss her hand in error did not cast a pall over the proceedings. Sarah had pulled back her hand in horror, declaring, ‘I am not the queen, sir!’ ‘No,’ declared one wit, ‘she is only the Pretender.’

None of this seems to have disturbed Charlotte’s increasing assurance. She was even confident enough to turn a small social embarrassment into a mild joke. As the Duchess of Northumberland and other ladies ‘attended Her Majesty back to her dressing room, her train caught the fender and drew it into the middle of the room. I disengaged her. She laughed very heartily and told me a droll story of the Princess of Prussia having drawn a lighted billet out of the chimney and carrying it through the apartment, firing the mat all the way.’62

‘You don’t presume to suppose, I hope,’ wrote Walpole to a distant correspondent a few days after the wedding, ‘that we are thinking of you, and wars and misfortunes and distresses in these festival times. Mr Pitt himself would be mobbed if he talked of anything but clothes and diamonds and bridesmaids.’63 With the first round of ceremonies over, the royal couple spent a few days taking trips to Richmond and Kew. They clearly enjoyed themselves, since they were to return in later life, spending many summers at Kew, and establishing their growing family there, in what was regarded as a healthy rural outpost of London.

While they admired the views of the Thames, and the gardens William Kent had designed for George’s grandmother Queen Caroline, elsewhere the preparations for the coronation continued apace. Walpole, whose appetite for royal ceremony was all but sated, complained of ‘the gabble one heard about it for six weeks before’, and referred to the whole event as ‘a puppet show’, but could not entirely divorce himself from the rising tide of excitement. ‘If I was to entitle ages, I would call this the century of crowds,’ he mused as people from across the country began to flood into London.64

*

Coronation Day began early. The Duchess of Northumberland ‘rose at half past four, went to the queen’s apartment at Westminster’. There she found Charlotte, once more weighed down with jewels, dressed with stiff formality complete with mother-of-pearl fan, but with her hair worn girlishly loose, discreetly supplemented with ‘coronation locks’, a false hair piece that had cost six guineas.65

The event opened with a procession from Westminster Hall to the abbey. When George and Charlotte arrived at the abbey door it was immediately clear that the ceremony promised to be just as chaotic as the late king’s funeral. From the outset, nothing ran to plan, or to time. Many key props were missing: ‘In the morning, they had forgot the sword of state, the chairs for the king and queen and their canopies.’ When the king complained about the poor management, the Earl Marshal, who was responsible for organising the day, promised him solemnly that ‘the next coronation would be regulated in the most exact manner imaginable’.66 Gradually, however, things began to fall into place. At the abbey, the king’s entry was greeted by the choir of Westminster School, who sang ‘Vivat Regina Charlotte!’ and ‘Vivat Georgius Rex!’ ‘There was all sorts of music,’ enthused one spectator, who had travelled down from Yorkshire for the day. ‘It was a grand sound.’67

Alongside the nobility and courtiers, the abbey was packed with more ordinary visitors who had squeezed themselves into its precincts with the settled intention of enjoying every moment of what promised to be a long and satisfying day. One of those was the young William Hickey, whose father, a prosperous City lawyer, ‘had engaged one of the nunneries, as they are called, in Westminster Abbey, for which he paid fifty guineas’.68 The Hickey family was stationed in a panelled bolt-hole right up in the roof, from which they commanded ‘an admirable view of the whole interior of the building’. They had anticipated the affair would be a long one, and had therefore arrived properly prepared. ‘Provisions, consisting of cold fowls, ham, tongues, different meat pies, wines and liquors of various sorts were sent into the apartment the day before, and two servants were allowed to attend.’ The twelve-strong party had found it an ordeal just getting to the abbey at all. ‘Opposite the Horse Guards, we were stopped exactly an hour without moving a single inch. As we approached the abbey, the difficulties increased.’ Crushed together by the crowds, coaches were constantly ‘running against each other, whereby glasses and panels were demolished without number, the noise of which, accompanied by the screeches of the terrified ladies, was at times truly terrific’. The Hickey family took six hours to get to their niche, where they were glad to find ‘a hot and comfortable breakfast waiting for us all’.

Some five hours later, at one o’clock, the king and queen at last arrived. Hickey had ‘a capital view’ of the actual crowning, but like almost everyone else in the abbey, he could not hear a word of what the archbishop was saying, and so decided that this was the perfect opportunity to enjoy lunch. ‘As many thousands were out of the possibility of hearing a single syllable, they took that opportunity to eat their meal, when the general clattering of knives, forks, plates and glasses that ensued, produced a most ridiculous effect, and a universal bout of laughter followed.’69

Whatever else had been overlooked, some provision had been made for the more basic needs of the ceremony’s principal players. For Walpole, ‘of all the incidents of the day, perhaps the most diverting was what happened to the queen. She had a retiring chamber, with all the conveniences, prepared behind the altar. She went thither – in the most convenient, what found she but – the Duke of Newcastle!’70 After about five hours, the coronation was finally over. The procession assembled again and, at about six o’clock, marched back to Westminster Hall for the banquet. The Duchess of Northumberland found the walk back through the dark and cold extremely trying. She was impatient for a meal, which she felt was now long overdue. ‘No dinner to eat … instead of profusion of geese etc., not wherewithal to fill one’s belly.’71 The coronation’s organisers had planned the long delays as a prelude to a gesture intended to amaze the guests as they re-entered Westminster Hall. More than 3,000 candles had been suspended from the ceiling of the hall; they were designed to be illuminated instantly by a complicated system of flax tapers, but the whole enterprise almost ended in disaster. The poet Thomas Gray, who was sitting in the hall, described how ‘the instant the queen’s canopy entered, fire was given to all the lustres at once by trains of prepared flax, that reached from one to another’; then, ‘it rained fire upon the heads of nearly all the spectators (the flax falling in large flakes) and the ladies (queen and all) were in no small terrors’.72

As the guests brushed the charred remnants of flax out of their clothes and hair, there was plenty to distract them. The banquet finally arrived – three services of over a hundred dishes – and the royal party devoted themselves to their food. Gray noticed that the king and queen ‘both eat like farmers’, as they tucked into the venison served to them on gold plates. As nothing had been provided for the many spectators to eat, baskets and knotted handkerchiefs were lowered from the crowded balconies, and heaved back up weighted down with cold chickens or bottles of wine. For the second time during the Coronation Day, the event had turned into an informal shared feast.

When the banquet was over, the king and queen returned to St James’s Palace to share a prosaic supper of bread and milk with a little gruel. There seems little doubt they did so with quiet, unaffected relief. In the previous few weeks, Charlotte had acquitted herself as well as anyone could expect. She had travelled across Europe to marry a stranger, and found him to be neither cold prig nor louche debauchee, but instead a serious, steady young man who had so far treated her with nothing but respectful affection. He, for his part, had found for himself a woman who, if she was neither a great beauty nor overburdened with fashionable accomplishments, had so far displayed a gratifying willingness to admire, esteem and obey him. No wonder the king was pleased.

In early September, when Charlotte, as yet unseen by him, was still crossing the turbulent North Sea, George had written hopefully to Bute, ‘I now think my domestic happiness [is] in my own power.’73 Now that the idea of a wife had turned into the reality of Charlotte, he was even more confident that married life, so long anticipated, would deliver everything he expected from it.