Читать книгу The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians - Janice Hadlow - Страница 15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shelburne was one of those sober men who had looked forward to wedlock, and had been determined to make his marriage work. Like George III, he had had a difficult childhood, and was determined to create a happier world for his wife and children. In his public life, he was an ambitious politician, who was to serve the king briefly as first minister between 1782 and 1783, but in private, he was a thoughtful intellectual with a taste for the classics. In these scholarly pursuits, he found a willing partner in his wife. Sophia had been raised amongst educated women, and liked nothing more than to spend the evenings reading with her husband. Closeted in their apartments, away from the severe grandeur of the principal rooms, the couple jointly made their way through Thucydides or the works of David Hume. In this quiet intimacy, they enjoyed their happiest moments. ‘Spent the whole evening tête-à-tête in my dressing room,’ wrote Sophia in her diary. ‘Nothing can be more comfortable than we have hitherto been.’10