Behind the Palace Doors (24 page)

Like his father, George I, whom he succeeded in 1727, George II was born in Hanover, and was thus Britain’s last foreign-born monarch. His reign was marked by the Seven Years’ War—from which Britain emerged as Europe’s dominant colonial power—and even more savage domestic battles with his son and heir, Prince Frederick
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George I introduced to Britain not only a new royal dynasty but a virulent tradition among the Hanoverian monarchs of hatred toward their heirs. The first George so loathed his son, the future George II, that after one particularly nasty spat he had the prince arrested, snatched away his children, then booted him out of St. James’s Palace. But that behavior was positively tender compared with the way George II treated his own son Frederick, of whom he once lovingly said, “Our firstborn is the greatest ass, the greatest liar, the greatest canaille and the greatest beast in the whole world and we heartily wish he was out of it.”
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It is not exactly clear what Frederick might have done to earn his father’s unceasing animosity, other than exist. Sure, he was a little on the lecherous side, but so was George II, and George I before him. As a matter of fact, all three generations availed themselves at various times of the same mistress, Madame d’Elitz, who was rather ancient by the time she deflowered Frederick when he was sixteen. (When someone once observed that there was nothing new under the sun when it came to Madame d’Elitz’s promiscuity, the English politician and wit George Selwyn is said to have retorted, “Or under the grandson.”)

Frederick was abandoned in Hanover as a little boy of seven when his parents and siblings left the German duchy to join George I as he claimed the British crown in 1714. There the child languished, essentially orphaned, for the next fourteen years. His parents hoped it would be longer. They actively schemed to keep Frederick out of England, not even inviting him to his father’s coronation after the death of George I in 1727. “Poor Fred,” as he came to be called, had no idea that his mom and dad were conspiring against him. “My only consolation in this sad affliction [grief over the death of his grandfather King George] is the knowledge of my dear parents’ goodness,” he wrote to his sister. “I flatter myself that I shall always conduct myself in a manner deserving of their esteem and friendship for me.”

It was only when Frederick tried to marry his cousin Princess Wilhelmina of Prussia—in essence, conducting his own foreign policy
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—that he was allowed to come to England, where he might be more carefully controlled. The welcome was not exactly warm. Frederick barely knew his mother and father and would soon find out how horrible they really were.

George II was a boorish, oversexed bully who, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote, “looks on all men and women he sees as creatures he might kiss or kick for his diversion.” Queen Caroline of Ansbach, who shared her husband’s hatred for their eldest son, was a brilliant politician but grasping and manipulative. “Her predominant passion was pride,” Lord Hervey wrote, “and the darling pleasure of her soul was power.” Caroline indulged the king’s lusty forays outside the marriage, even discussing with him in vivid detail the relative merits of his unattractive mistresses,
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all the while pursuing her own political agenda with Prime Minister Robert Walpole. A popular verse of the time satirized the royal power structure:

George and Caroline had once been outcasts from the court of George I, establishing their own alternative court at their London residence, Leicester House, where they made fun of the oafish king and nurtured opposition to his government. But the glitter and excitement that surrounded them as Prince and Princess of Wales all but disappeared once George II came to the throne. The king established a stultifying routine in which nearly every activity was militaristically timed—down to when he would sleep with his mistress. “No mill horse ever went on a more constant track or a more unchanging circle,” Lord Hervey wrote.

Prince Frederick, by contrast, brought a refreshing lack of pretense with him from Hanover, as well as spontaneity, generosity, and charm. “I am extremely pleased that I can tell you without flattery or partiality that our young prince has all the
accomplishments that ’tis possible to have at his age,” Lady Montagu wrote to a friend, “with an air of sprightliness and understanding, and something so very engaging and easy in his behaviour, that he needs not the advantage of his rank to appear charming.” All of London seemed enamored with the affable, sometimes outrageous prince, which distressed his parents no end. “My God!” Queen Caroline exclaimed. “Popularity always makes me sick, but Fretz’s popularity makes me vomit.”

The hostility of the king and queen toward their son was reflected in his allowance, which was about half of what George II enjoyed when he was Prince of Wales. Frederick was also kept far away from any matters of state, which left him plenty of time for mischief. His debts were enormous and his dalliances indiscriminate. Indeed at one point he managed to impregnate not only his mistress, Anne Vane, but her chambermaid as well. Furthermore, like his own father in the previous reign, the prince was beginning to attract opponents of the king’s policies. A mighty rift was growing, one that nearly destroyed the great composer George Frideric Handel when he was dragged into it.

When it came to culture, George II was a Philistine.
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Nevertheless he loved Handel, who composed the music for his coronation. The king and queen, along with their daughter Princess Anne, faithfully attended his operas at the King’s Theatre, where the socially ambitious gathered to bask in the royal presence. Handel came to represent the very essence of refinement. Recognizing this, Frederick set out to wound his father by ruining his favorite composer. The prince and his supporters established a rival opera company at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, run first by the Italian composer Giovanni Battista
Bononcini, then by another Italian, Nicola Porpora. Talent was lured away from Handel’s theater, as well as patronage by the younger nobility, among whom Frederick was far more popular than his father. On many nights the King’s Theatre was nearly empty, forcing Handel to spend more and more money in an effort to keep competitive and stay afloat. His nerves, to say nothing of his wallet, took a severe beating. And though the opera wars eventually ended peacefully, the clash between King George and Prince Frederick only grew in ferocity.

Frederick married sixteen-year-old Augusta of Saxe-Gotha in 1736 and wanted an income for his new wife. He also wanted an increase in his own paltry allowance, which could be reduced at the whim of his father. So, he appealed to Parliament. The king and queen trembled with rage when they learned that their son had maneuvered around them; it would be a tremendous blow to their prestige if he prevailed. Lord Hervey recorded Queen Caroline’s reaction as she watched Frederick walking across a palace courtyard:

“Look there he goes—that wretch! That villain! I wish the ground would open up and sink the monster to the lowest hole in hell. You stare at me, but I can assure you if my wishes and prayers had any effect, and that the maledictions of a mother signified anything, his days would not be very happy or very many.”

Anxious as the king and queen were about the political consequences if Frederick succeeded in Parliament, they couldn’t bring themselves to simply pay the prince what the king himself received when he was in the same position. Thus, the matter did go before both the Commons and the House of Lords, and thanks in part to some well-placed bribes by the king, Frederick lost. His parents were thrilled. They wanted to toss him out of St. James’s Palace as punishment for his insolence but were dissuaded only by Walpole’s suggestion that the popular prince on the loose—made a martyr by his mother and father—might become too potent a political force. Still,
they were determined to make their son’s life as miserable as possible.

When Frederick announced that his young wife was pregnant, the couple was ordered to Hampton Court so that the king and queen could keep a closer eye on them and also avoid any popular acclamation of the birth in London. Of course the atmosphere was toxic, and as Augusta prepared to deliver, Frederick was determined to whisk her away from his noxious parents. The couple escaped under cover of darkness and made their way back to St. James’s Palace by coach. By the time they arrived, Princess Augusta was in labor.

Meanwhile, back at Hampton Court, the king and queen were awakened with the news that Frederick and Augusta had escaped. Queen Caroline had suggested that her son was impotent and was therefore determined to be present at the birth to assure that a changeling wasn’t proffered as legitimate royal issue. “At her labour I positively will be,” she declared, “let her lie-in be where she will.” Caroline, her daughters, and the rest of the royal retinue raced off to London, where they were amiably greeted by Frederick and told that the child, a baby girl, had already been delivered. After seeing the little princess, Queen Caroline pronounced herself satisfied that the baby was indeed Frederick’s.

“I owe … I had my doubts upon the road that there would be some juggle,” she said afterward. “And if, instead of this poor, little, ugly she-mouse, there had been a brave, large, fat, jolly boy, I should not have been cured of my suspicions. Nay, I believe that they would have been so much increased, or rather, that I should have been confirmed in my opinion, that I should have gone about this house like a mad woman, played the devil, and insisted on knowing what chairman’s brat he [Frederick] had bought.”

Running away with one’s wife in labor was not as bad as, say, abandoning one’s seven-year-old son in another country. But for King George and Queen Caroline it was an act of unforgivable
defiance. “I hope in God that I shall never see the monster’s face again,” ranted the queen, while the king gleefully plotted his revenge—even as he appointed himself godfather to the new baby. “This extravagant and undutiful behaviour in so essential a point as the birth of an heir to my crown is such an evidence of your premeditated defiance of me,” the king wrote, “and such a contempt of my authority and of the natural right belonging to your parents, as cannot be excused by the pretended innocence of your intentions, nor palliated or disguised by specious words only.”

The prince and his little family were banished from all the royal palaces. Notice was then given to all foreign diplomats and members of the nobility that anyone who paid their respects to the Prince and Princess of Wales would no longer be welcome in the king’s presence. “Thank God tomorrow night the puppy will be sent out of my house,” King George rejoiced on the eve of his son’s removal.

It was a precipitous decision, reminiscent of the king’s own banishment by George I, and it rebounded badly. The opposition rallied around Frederick, just as it had around George II when he was Prince of Wales. Furthermore, it was utterly ineffective in its intent to harm the prince. On the contrary, Frederick reveled in the freedom he found far away from his father and his suffocating court. Worst of all, his popularity soared.

Queen Caroline expressed her desire never to see her son again. And in the end she got her wish. Two months after Frederick’s banishment, she lay dying. The prince asked that he might visit his mother and comfort her in her illness, but King George wouldn’t hear of it. “He wants to come and insult his poor dying mother,” the indignant monarch roared. “But she shall not see him. I could never let that villain come near her. And whilst she has her senses she would never desire it. No. No! He shall not come and act any of his silly plays here, false, lying, cowardly, nauseous puppy.”

Caroline’s deathbed scene was touching as she bade farewell to the children she liked and urged her husband to remarry. (“No,” the king sobbed. “I shall have mistresses.”) As for Frederick, the queen was unmoved, stating that “at least I shall have one comfort in having my eyes eternally closed: I shall never see that monster again.”

After siring eight more children,
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including the future King George III, Prince Frederick died in 1751 at the relatively young age of forty-four. “This has been a fatal year to my family,” George II wrote several months later. “I lost my eldest son, but was glad of it.”