Janice Hadlow - The Strangest Family - The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians

The prince’s marriage marked a new phase in the deterioration of relationships within the royal family, and brought out into the open the covert warfare that had been waged between parents and son for so many years. Now Frederick felt himself strong enough to go on the offensive, and did so through the medium of his naive young wife. Whenever the couple attended chapel, the prince ensured that they always arrived after the king and queen. To reach her seat, Augusta had to push past Caroline and oblige her to get up. It took a direct order from the king to put a stop to this petty campaign of attrition. Caroline did not blame her new daughter-in-law, saying that she knew she ‘did nothing without the prince’s order’. There was no harm in Augusta, Caroline assured Hervey: ‘she never meant to offend, was very modest and very respectful’, but it was ‘her want of understanding’ that made her such exhausting company. She was perhaps not surprised to hear from one of her daughters that Augusta spent a large part of each day ‘playing with a great jointed baby’, dressing and undressing it in full view of an incredulous crowd of servants, who, like the queen, thought a married woman should be beyond playing with dolls.

When the prince announced that his wife was pregnant, Caroline simply refused to believe it. She had for some time harboured doubts about her son’s capacity to sire a child; now her curiosity developed into a strange, fixed obsession. She insisted to Hervey that she did not believe the marriage had ever been consummated, and questioned him remorselessly to discover what he knew about Frederick’s sexual prowess. It was a subject she had already discussed directly with her son, who, she told Hervey, ‘sometimes spoke of himself in these matters as if he were Hercules, and at other times as if he were four-score’. Frederick had recently confided in her details ‘of an operation that he had had performed upon him by his surgeon’, and added that he had ‘got nasty distempers by women’; but she suspected both were lies intended to distract attention from the reality of his impotence. She was sure little Fitzfrederick, the prince’s alleged child by Anne Vane, was really Hervey’s. Hervey replied that Fitzfrederick was not his child and that from what Anne Vane had told him, he assured Caroline there was no reason why he should not be Frederick’s. ‘She used to describe the prince in these matters as ignorant to a degree inconceivable, but not impotent.’ 61

Unconvinced, Caroline asked for a second opinion: could Hervey ‘get some intelligence’ from Lady Dudley, who ‘has slept with half the town’ and might know if Frederick ‘was like other men or not’? When Hervey refused to do so, the queen tried another approach. Had Frederick ever asked him to father a child on his behalf? Hervey told her he had not. If he had been asked, Caroline persisted, would such a thing be possible? Hervey thought it might be, but only if the marriage had actually been consummated, ‘for though I believe I may put one man upon her for another’, he doubted whether he could fool a woman who had never had a lover. Would it be possible to deceive her if both men were agreed to carry out the plan? It would take about a month, mused Hervey, during which ‘I would advise the prince to go to bed several hours after his wife, and to pretend to get up with a flux several times in the night, to perfume himself always with the same predominant smell, and by the help of these tricks, it would be very easy.’ It would be easier if the man was the same size as the husband and did not speak during the process. Caroline was so shocked by the ease with which Hervey thought the deception might be managed that she delivered a rare rebuke to him: ‘I love you mightily, my dear Lord Hervey, but if I thought you would get a little Hervey on the Princess of Saxe-Gotha … I could not bear it, nor do I know what I should be capable of doing.’ 62

Caroline seems to have convinced herself that her son was preparing some deception in relation to his wife’s pregnancy, whether at the point of conception or delivery. As the months went by, she questioned Augusta about her condition, but could get no sensible answers from her. To everything she asked – how long she had been pregnant, when she expected to give birth – the princess replied simply that she did not know. The prince had clearly instructed her to tell his mother nothing. But Caroline was determined the couple would not evade her scrutiny. She knew Frederick wanted the birth to take place at St James’s, rather than at Hampton Court where the family were currently in residence. Wherever it happened, Caroline was certain she would be there: ‘At her labour I positively will be … I will be sure it is her child.’ 63

She had reckoned without her son’s lunatic determination to outwit her. On 31 July 1736, the prince and princess dined formally with the king and queen at Hampton Court. Later that night, the princess’s labour began. Frederick immediately ordered a carriage to take his wife, himself, three of the princess’s ladies and Vreid, the man-midwife, to London, away from the prying eyes of his mother. Augusta’s waters broke as the prince carried her down the corridor. Ignoring the princess’s desperate pleas to be left where she was, Frederick bundled his labouring wife into the coach, all the time murmuring, ‘Courage, courage’ in her ear. It was quite the worst thing Frederick ever did in his life, and he was lucky that Augusta did not die as a result of his actions. ‘At about ten this cargo arrived in town,’ wrote Hervey. ‘Notwithstanding all the handkerchiefs that had been thrust up Her Royal Highness’s petticoats in the coach, her clothes were in such a state with the filthy inundations which attend these circumstances … that the prince ordered all the lights put out that people might not see … the nasty oracular evidence of his folly.’ There were no sheets in the unprepared house, so Augusta was finally delivered between two tablecloths. At nearly eleven o’clock, she gave birth to ‘a little rat of a girl, about the bigness of a large toothpick case’. 64

After the birth the prince informed his parents, back at Hampton Court, what had happened. The queen could not believe it; the king was furious, shouting, ‘You see now, with all your wisdom how they have outwitted you! This is all your fault! A false child will be put upon you and how will you answer to your children!’ 65Pausing only to dress and to pick up Lord Hervey, Caroline went immediately to London, where she spoke politely to the exhausted princess and kissed the tiny baby. She said nothing to Frederick, other than to observe that ‘it was a miracle the princess and the child had not been killed’. 66Then she turned around and returned to Hampton Court. She had no doubts, she told Hervey, that the ‘poor ugly little she-mouse’ she had seen at St James’s was indeed the princess’s child. Had it been ‘a brave, jolly boy I should not have been cured of my suspicions’. But her relief that there had been ‘no chairman’s brat’ wished on them did nothing to make the birth an event that brought the family together.

Frederick named his new daughter Augusta, pointedly failing to pay his mother the compliment of naming the first-born girl in her honour. But even without the ill feeling surrounding her arrival, there would have been no reconciliation between the generations. Some time before her birth, Frederick had decided to raise again the long-disputed issue of his allowance in Parliament, and against all expectations, he had been successful in making the subject a Commons motion. His father’s response to the prospect of having his financial affairs publicly (and no doubt critically) discussed was predictably apoplectic. Caroline’s reaction was more surprising. It had been plain for some time that her attitude to Frederick had hardened considerably. When Hervey asked her if her views on her son had indeed changed over the last year, Caroline agreed most vehemently that they had, telling him that she now believed ‘my dear firstborn is the greatest ass and the greatest liar and the greatest canaille and the greatest beast in the world, and I most heartily wish he was out of it’. 67