The grace and cheerfulness that George displayed in these days of excitement and promise were more than the temporary product of a moment; he was an essentially good-hearted man, who tried to observe the decencies of gentlemanly behaviour even in the darkest and most trying times of his reign. However, the polite, easy candour celebrated by so many observers in those early days was only part of who he really was. There was a sombre, more thoughtful cast to his character, which Liotard’s portrait caught as acutely as it did the new-minted freshness of his features. The young George stares watchfully out from the canvas, with an air of wary self-containment. This is a serious man, with a serious purpose in mind – there is no hint of frivolity or light-heartedness in his measured expression. For all its tenderness, it is also an image of quiet, sustained – even steely – determination; and it was a better indicator of what lay in George’s mind as he contemplated the future than all the benign gestures with which he navigated the immediate aftermath of his grandfather’s death. For George III came to the throne determined to do more than merely replace George II. He aspired to be not just the next king, but a new kind of king.
As heir to the crown, George had spent much of his youth transfixed by the inevitability of his destiny, trying to comprehend what was expected of him. What was the true purpose of kingship in the modern world? Why had he been called upon to undertake this extraordinary and unasked-for burden? How could he discharge it as providence intended, fulfilling his duty to God, to himself and to his subjects? The answers to these questions, he eventually concluded, encompassed far more than the narrowly political concerns that had absorbed the energies of his predecessors. Their obsession with the day-to-day management of political business, the ups and downs and ins and outs of ministerial fortunes, had obscured the unique and singular meaning of sovereignty. The job of a king, George had decided, was no less than to graft moral purpose on to the nation’s polity. It was his role to act as the conscience of the country, and the guardian of its true interests. He was, George believed, the active agent of principle in public life, a figure intimately connected with the daily workings of politics and yet with a significance far beyond them. It was his duty to remind politicians what the point of politics was and, through his interventions and understanding, to direct them beyond their personal and party interests towards a larger and more lasting common good.
This interpretation of his task did more than influence George’s public life; it also profoundly shaped his sense of his duties as a private man. How could a king act as a moral compass to others if he did not live a moral life himself? George’s idea of kingship thus reached far beyond a purely public dimension; it contained within itself a powerful personal imperative too. There was a direct connection between his actions in the political world and his conduct at home. He could not act as a force for good in the national interest if he was unable to live by right principles in his private life.
George’s desire to see these ideas reflected in his actions as king was to put a great deal of pressure on the established order of politics in the years immediately after his accession; but it was their impact on the intimate world of the royal family that would prove far more revolutionary and of much greater lasting significance. He knew that to deliver the moral authority he needed to justify his vision, he would need to create a new kind of family life for himself. This meant redefining the personal relationships at its heart, reshaping what it meant to be a royal husband, wife, son or daughter. This would involve a greater emphasis on meeting high moral standards, a greater stress on duty, obligation and conscience. But he would also attempt to introduce into these roles something of the human warmth and emotional authenticity he believed non-royals found in them, hoping to provide for his wife and his children the solace and affection that seemed so singularly lacking in the lives of his immediate predecessors.
Because in becoming a new kind of king, George recognised that he would also have to become a new kind of Hanoverian. He understood that his idea of kingship required him to turn his back on his family’s past, rejecting a malign inheritance of emotional dysfunction that had been handed down from generation to generation. Both his great-grandfather, George I, and grandfather, George II, had hated their sons with a passion bordering on madness. None of his male relations had been faithful to his wife. Every Hanoverian prince kept a succession of mistresses with scant concern for the feelings of his spouse, who responded with either mute resignation or loud and furious cries of dismay. The children of these unhappy unions were, unsurprisingly, rarely happy themselves. Drawn into feuds between their parents, they were angry, jealous and disaffected. They schemed and quarrelled between themselves and seemed destined to repeat the behaviour that had destroyed any chance of contentment for their parents. As George saw it, this legacy of amoral, cynical behaviour had warped and corrupted the Hanoverians, crippling their effectiveness as rulers and making their private lives miserable. It had made them bad kings and bad people. It had set husband against wife, father against son, sister against brother. It had thwarted their ambitions and corrupted their affections, leaving in its wake nothing but bitterness.
George planned to put an end to the whole painful cycle. On the very day he became king, he sent for his uncle, William, Duke of Cumberland, the victor of Culloden, with whom he had had many differences in the past, and announced his intention to outlaw the old habits of spite and bad faith. Walpole heard that George had been most explicit in signalling the magnitude of the change, telling the duke that ‘it had not been common in their family to live well together, but that he was determined to live well with all his family’.26 It was such a public declaration that everyone appreciated its significance.
George’s intention to reform the way his family related to one another underpinned all the decisions he made about his private life in the years that followed. It dictated his choice of a wife, and shaped the ambitions he had for their relationship within marriage. It influenced his attitude to fatherhood, and was the foundation upon which he based the upbringing of his small children. It governed the way the young princes and princesses were educated and laid down a pattern of behaviour they were expected to follow as adults. Alongside his profound Christian faith – another distinction that marked him out from his forebears – it informed almost every action he took in relation to his intimate, personal world.
At one level, his devotion to the project grew out of something deeper than conscious strategy; it was a manifestation of the most enduring aspects of his personality, a reflection of the qualities of exacting, dutiful conscientiousness that were indivisible from his character. George acted as he did because he was who he was. But his desire for change owed as much to his sense of history as to the promptings of his nature. He was profoundly aware of his family’s failings and believed passionately that it was his duty to reject the pattern of behaviour they had bequeathed to him. For that reason, the lives of George’s predecessors are worth exploring, in all their dissolute, chaotic extraordinariness. They were the mirror image of everything George thought valuable and true in human relationships – a dark vision of just how wrong things could go when all sense of discipline, restraint and honest affection was lost. To appreciate what motivated the most upright of the Hanoverians, it is necessary to understand something of the people against whom he so firmly defined himself.
CHAPTER 1
GEORGE III’S FIRST SPEECH FROM the throne was a resounding declaration of his particular fitness to take up the task before him. ‘Born and educated in this country,’ he pronounced, ‘I glory in the name of Britain.’1 It was not a statement any of his immediate predecessors could have made, which was of course precisely why he said it. From the very earliest days of his reign, he sought to mark himself out from his Hanoverian forebears. Neither George I nor George II had been born