George’s renunciation was made easier by the fact that he did not see the object of his passion for some months. The next time he did so, he was no longer Prince of Wales but king. George II died in October 1760; Sarah Lennox went to court in 1761, when all the talk was of the impending coronation. As soon as he saw her again, all George’s hard-won resolution ebbed away, as ‘the boiling youth’ in him made him forget all the promises he had made to Bute. Despite his undertaking to give her up, he took the unprecedented step of declaring to her best friend the unchanged nature of his feelings for Sarah. One night at court, he cornered Lady Susan Fox-Strangways, another member of the extensive Fox clan. The conversation that followed was so extraordinary that Lady Susan repeated it to Henry Fox, who transcribed it. The king asked Lady Susan if she would not like to see a coronation. She replied that she would.
K: Won’t it be a finer sight when there is a queen?
LS: To be sure, sir.
K: I have had a great many applications from abroad, but I don’t like them. I have had none at home. I should like that better.
LS: (Nothing, frightened)
K: What do you think of your friend? You know who I mean; don’t you think her fittest?
LS: Think, sir?
K: I think none so fit.
Fox then said that George ‘went across the room to Lady Sarah, and bid her ask her friend what he had been saying and make her tell her all’.126
The fifteen-year-old Sarah, never very impressed by George’s attentions, had been conducting a freelance flirtation of her own, which had just come to an end, and she was in no mood to be polite to other suitors, even royal ones. When George approached her at court soon after, she rebuffed all his attempts to discuss the conversation he had had with Lady Susan. When he asked whether she had spoken to her friend, she replied monosyllabically that she had. Did she approve of what she had heard? Fox reported that ‘She made no answer, but looked as cross as she could. HM affronted, left her, seemed confused, and left the Drawing Room.’127
Fox worked away, trying to discover the true state of George’s feelings for Lady Sarah. Despite the unfortunate snub, they seemed to Fox as strong as ever. He was less certain, however, of where they might lead. Fox told his wife that he was not sure whether George really intended to marry her, adding that ‘whether Lady Sarah shall be told of what I am sure of, I leave to the reader’s discretion’.128 If a crown was out of the question, it might be worth Sarah settling for the role of royal mistress. At the Birthday Ball a few months later, Fox’s hopes of the ultimate prize revived once more. ‘He had no eyes but for her, and hardly talked to anyone else … all eyes were fixed on them, and the next morning all tongues observing on the particularity of his behaviour.’129 But after over a year of encouraging signals, there was still no sign of any meaningful declaration from the king. Determined to bring matters to a head, Lady Sarah was sent back to court with very precise instructions to do all she could to extract from her vague suitor some concrete sense of his intentions. As she explained to Lady Susan, Fox had coached her to perfection: ‘I must pluck up my spirits, and if I am asked if I have thought of … or if I approve of … I am to look him in the face and with an earnest but good-humoured countenance, say “that I don’t know what I ought to think”. If the meaning is explained, I must say “that I can hardly believe it” and so forth.’ It was all very demanding. ‘In short, I must show I wish it to be explained, without seeming to suggest any other meaning; what a task it is. God send that I may be enabled to go through with it. I am allowed to mutter a little, provided that the words astonished, surprised, understand and meaning are heard.’130
Yet for all Lady Sarah’s careful preparation, she could not get near the king, and nothing came of it. Then, at the end of June 1761, the king made yet another of his cryptically encouraging remarks, this time to Sarah’s sister Emily, telling her: ‘For God’s sake, remember what I said to Lady Susan … and believe that I have the strongest attachment.’ A few days later, Fox was dumbstruck to be told that the meeting of the Privy Council summoned for 8 July was ‘to declare His Majesty’s intention to marry a Princess of Mecklenburg!’131
No one could believe it, least of all Sarah. On the day after the meeting – and its purpose – had been announced, ‘the hypocrite had the face to come up and speak to me with all the good humour in the world, and seemed to want to speak to me but was afraid. There is something so astonishing in all this that I can hardly believe …’132 For months, Lady Sarah and Fox puzzled and obsessed over what the strange and confusing episode had meant. Lady Sarah could not help but feel humiliated, but was determined not to let others see it. ‘Luckily for me, I did not love him, and only liked him, nor did the title weigh anything with me; or so little at least, that my disappointment did not affect my spirits above one hour or two, I believe.’133 If that was an exaggeration born of bravado, it was nonetheless true that she had recovered her spirits sufficiently to accept without a qualm the invitation to act as one of the bridesmaids at George’s wedding a few months later. ‘Well, Sal,’ sighed Fox, making his own final comment on the whole affair, ‘you are the first virgin’ – or as he jokingly pronounced it, ‘the first vargin’ – ‘in England, and you shall take your place in spite of them all, and the king shall behold your pretty face and weep.’134
Had either Fox or Lady Sarah asked George to explain his behaviour, it is hard to know what he might have said. No one could deny that his conduct had not been strictly honourable. Although he had not made a direct proposal of marriage, he had come pretty close to it, and he had certainly encouraged Sarah to think of him as some kind of suitor when he was not, as he knew only too well, in a position to offer any respectable outcome to their developing relationship. By January 1761, preliminary enquiries had begun in Germany to find him a woman he could marry, but, despite all his assurances to Bute and to himself, he was still irresistibly drawn to Sarah Lennox, dropping suggestions and making promises that he knew he could not keep. When, in the spring, he made his fateful declaration to Lady Susan Fox-Strangways, he was privately reading reports evaluating the looks and characters of every German Protestant princess of marriageable age. His formal proposal to the Princess of Mecklenburg was accepted on 17 June, only days before he made yet another of his insistent speeches to Sarah’s sister Emily, beseeching her to ‘believe that I have the strongest attachment’.
George’s motives, in the end, remain opaque; but perhaps he explained his actions to himself by considering them as the contradictory product of the two conflicting aspects of his identity. The king in him submitted, as he knew he must, to an arranged marriage with a woman he had never seen; but the ‘boiling youth of 21 years’ found it harder to accept that he ‘must often act contrary to my passions’, and that to ‘the interest of my country … my own inclinations shall ever submit’. In 1760–61, for the first and only time in his life, George allowed his heart to rule his head and followed the call of instinct, not obligation. He knew from the beginning which way it would end, recognising that he was formed for duty not rebellion. However, before the world of you shall closed inevitably and finally over the prospect of you could, he enjoyed a brief flirtation with the alternative. While he kept his sanity, he would never stray again.