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