Frederick, who saw Cumberland’s success as a direct threat to him, did all he could to fuel hostility to his brother. He financed a pamphlet laying out in detail all the excesses committed by Cumberland’s troops, and his adviser Egmont wrote another, arguing that the emboldened duke’s next step would indeed be to mount a coup d’état. This was a complete fiction, but a very powerful one, that struck alarm into the hearts of otherwise rational politicians for nearly twenty years. In eighteen months, Cumberland was transformed in the public perception from conquering hero to ‘the Butcher’, a cruel German militarist with tyrannical ambitions and, unless his access to power was closely controlled, both the desire and the means to make them real.
So overwhelming was this scenario, even at the time of Frederick’s death five years after Culloden, that it made Cumberland unemployable in England. The king railed impotently against what he regarded as the traducing of his favourite, declaring that ‘it was the lies they told, and in particular this Egmont, about my son, for the service he did this country, which raised the clamour against him’; but he knew nothing could be done about it.37 He understood the political realities well enough to understand that Cumberland could never now be made regent. The disgraced duke bore his exclusion stoically in public – ‘I shall submit because the king commands it’ – but in private confessed himself deeply humiliated, wishing ‘that the name William could be blotted out of the English annals’.38
If he could not name Cumberland regent, the king had little choice but to appoint an otherwise most unlikely candidate, Augusta, who now held the title of princess dowager. And if she was thought competent to act in that capacity, he could hardly justify removing his heir from her control. Thus, against all expectation, the young Prince George was allowed to stay in the company of his mother. This decision was to have an extraordinary effect on the shaping of his character; as much as the premature death of his father, it was to determine the kind of man he became. Had he been exposed, while still a boy, to the worldly challenges of life at George II’s court, very different aspects of his personality might have emerged. Instead, he was allowed to retreat with Augusta into an increasingly remote and cloistered existence.
His mother’s intention was to protect him, and George – anxious and easily intimidated – was keen to be protected. He had responded to news of his father’s death with a sense of shock so profound that it was physical in its intensity. ‘I feel it here,’ he declared, laying his hand on his chest, ‘just as I did when I saw the two workmen fall from the scaffold at Kew.’39 He did not like his grandfather, whom he rightly suspected was irritated by his shyness and lack of confidence. (On one occasion, the king’s frustration may have taken more violent form; a generation later, walking round Hampton Court, George III’s son, the Duke of Sussex, mused: ‘I wonder in which one of these rooms it was that George II struck my father? The blow so disgusted him that he could never afterwards think of it as a residence.’40) But when George II arrived at Leicester House in the days after Frederick’s death, ‘with an abundance of speeches and a kind behaviour to the princess and the children’, his sympathy seemed so genuine that even the cautious prince was partially won over. He declared that ‘he should not be frightened any more with his grandpa’.41
Despite this, it is hard to believe that George II could ever have changed the habits of a lifetime and transformed himself into the steady, supportive father figure of which his heir stood in such deep need over the next few years. Certainly the prince did not think so. For all the king’s new-found concern, his timid grandson had no wish to test the depth of his solicitude by joining him at St James’s. He made it clear he preferred to live with his mother. Yet, although the prospect of staying with Augusta no doubt offered security to a young boy badly in need of solace, it was far from an ideal solution. The life Augusta made for her son, isolated from the world he would one day be expected to dominate, did nothing to prepare him for the role that his father’s death had made so terrifyingly imminent. The complicated politics that had ensured George remained in his mother’s care may not, in the long run, have done him much of a favour.
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Until Frederick’s sudden death, the defining quality of Augusta, Princess of Wales, was her apparent passivity. She seemed to have no real personality of her own, but was entirely under the control of her husband. Hervey, who once memorably described her as ‘this gilded piece of royal conjugality’, claimed that she played no active role in his political life. Frederick, he reported, had once observed that ‘a prince should never talk to a woman of politics’ and that ‘he would never make himself the ridiculous figure his father had done in letting his wife govern him or meddle with business, which no woman was fit for’.42 George II, on the other hand, who always suspected there was more to his daughter-in-law than met the eye, used to declare: ‘You none of you know this woman, and none of you will know her until after I am dead!’43
The king was not wrong in alleging that Augusta was not quite the demure innocent she seemed. For all Frederick’s protestations, she was no stranger to his political ambitions during the late 1740s. She hosted the dinners at which he and his supporters thrashed out their strategies and engineered their alliances; she was discreet, trustworthy and, above all, unquestioningly loyal, identifying herself completely with her husband’s strategising. Significantly, it was to Augusta, and not to one of his trusted advisers, that Frederick entrusted his ‘Instructions’, encapsulating the programme he expected his eldest son to implement in due course, and it was she who was charged with explaining them to his heir and keeping them fresh in his mind. And after Frederick’s shocking demise, it was she who took brisk and immediate measures to destroy any incriminating material that might compromise his followers and his family.
As the historian John Bullion has shown, in the hours immediately following his death, she showed herself to be more of a politician than any of his dazed friends. While Frederick lay dead in the next room, she summoned Lord Egmont and outlined a decisive plan of action to be followed in the next few vital hours. ‘She did not know, but the king might seize the prince’s papers – they were at Carlton House – and that we might be ruined by these papers.’ She probably had in mind a document Frederick had drawn up in 1750 that was a blueprint for action in the event of the king’s death and described in some detail appointments that were to be made and policies followed. She gave Egmont the key to three trunks, told him to retrieve the papers and bring them back to her; she even gave him a pillowcase in which to carry them. When Egmont returned, she burnt the papers in front of him. Only then did she begin to consider what to do about her husband’s body, or inform the king of his death.44
Having dealt with the most pressing threat to her family’s security, she proceeded to manage her father-in-law too. When he arrived at Leicester House, ‘she received him alone, sitting with her eyes fixed: thanked the king much, and said she would write as soon as she was able; and in the meantime, recommended her miserable self and children to him’.45 Always pleased to be treated with the respect he thought he deserved, the king warmed to her submission, as she must have known he would. ‘The king and she both took their parts at once; she, of flinging herself entirely in his hands, and studying nothing but his pleasure; but minding what interest she got with him to the advantage of her own and the prince’s friends.’46 When she heard that the king had decided to allow George to stay with her, she did not forget to write and tell him how thankful she was.
Although