John Van der Kiste - King George II and Queen Caroline

KING GEORGE II

QUEEN CAROLINE

ALSO BY JOHN VAN DER KISTE

Published by Sutton Publishing unless stated otherwise

Frederick III, German Emperor 1888 (1981)

Queen Victorias family: a select bibliography (Clover, 1982)

Dearest Affie: Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Victorias second son, 18441900 [with Bee Jordaan] (1984, n.e. 1995)

Queen Victorias children (1986; large print edition, ISIS, 1987)

Windsor and Habsburg: the British and Austrian reigning houses 18481922 (1987)

Edward VIIs children (1989)

Princess Victoria Melita, Grand Duchess Cyril of Russia, 18761936 (1991, n.e. 1994)

George Vs children (1991)

George IIIs children (1992)

Crowns in a changing world: the British and European monarchies 190136 (1993)

Kings of the Hellenes: the Greek Kings 18631974 (1994)

Childhood at court 18191914 (1995)

Northern Crowns: the Kings of modern Scandinavia (1996)

KING GEORGE II

QUEEN CAROLINE

JOHN VAN DER KISTE

First published in 1997 by Sutton Publishing Limited

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

John Van der Kiste, 1997, 2013

The right of John Van der Kiste to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 5448 8

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Illustrations

King George II

Caroline, Princess of Wales

Hampton Court Palace

Queen Caroline and William, Duke of Cumberland, c. 1730

Royal family silver medallion

King George II, pottery mug

Sir Robert Walpole

Princess Mary of Hesse-Cassel

Queen Louisa of Denmark

Augusta, Princess of Wales

King George II, statue

Preface

If the number of existing biographies is taken as a convenient yardstick, then King George II must be reckoned as the least-known of our monarchs since the Middle Ages. He reigned for thirty-three years and lived to the age of seventy-six, an age unsurpassed by any reigning British monarch until his successor and grandson, King George III, and his grandsons granddaughter, Queen Victoria, both reached their eighties. Yet apart from George II and his Ministers, by Reginald Lucas (1910), which as its title suggests is predominantly political in tenor, A King in Toils, by J.D. Griffith Davies (1938), which the author calls not a biography, but rather a record of relationships in the life of George II, and a life by Charles Chevenix Trench (1973), literature has been extremely sparing in its celebration of the second Hanoverian King of Great Britain. He is the only crowned monarch since the Tudor age to be omitted from the Weidenfeld & Nicolson Life and Times series on British Kings and Queens, published in the 1970s and 1980s. For the most part the King, the strutting Turkey-cock of Herrenhausen in Thackerays elegant phrase, remains an ill-defined caricature known for hating boets and bainters, loathing his eldest son and heir even more, and for being the last King of Britain to lead his army on the battlefield but little more.

Queen Caroline has scarcely fared better. Yet at least she has been vividly portrayed in print by W.H. Wilkins (1901), R.L. Arkell and Peter Quennell (both 1939), all of whom have recognized that she was a remarkable woman and eclipsed the consorts of the other Hanoverian Georges in talent and intellect rather than notoriety. To take a comparatively recent verdict, that of J.H. Plumb and Huw Wheldon in Royal Heritage (1977), she was by far the ablest of our Queens between the reigns of Elizabeth I and Victoria, and she has been greatly undervalued.

Contemporaries have left their accounts of the King and Queen to posterity, but the most extensive memoirs, those of Lord Hervey, are the least reliable. Hervey greatly admired the Queen and their third daughter Princess Caroline, but neither liked nor respected the King, or indeed most other people with whom he came into contact. The other great contemporary diarist of the period, Horace Walpole, was a considerably more gifted writer and his court reminiscences have never lost their appeal, but while he was more even-handed and less reluctant to give praise where it was due, he was not always the most objective of witnesses either. Their thoroughly readable but frequently waspish writings have inevitably formed history in the absence of any other alternative. It is surely no more than mild exaggeration to suggest that Hervey and Walpole were to the Kings reign what tabloid journalism has been to the closing decades of the twentieth century. The more kindly if less well-known memoirs of Lords Egmont, Chesterfield and Waldegrave have done something to redress the balance; but with personalities who died over two centuries ago, inevitably, fact and fiction are difficult to separate.

All too often, biographies of one character are written at the expense of another. Wilkinss life of Queen Caroline, for instance, belittles King George II as a small-minded, stupid nonentity with few redeeming qualities, grossly inferior to his father; while most accounts of their eldest son Frederick, Prince of Wales, readily take the side of poor Fred against his allegedly cruel and unsympathetic parents. Where does reality finish and colourful legend or, to borrow that hideously overworked clich of modern times and the television age, soap opera take over? To choose but one example: it is noted by Arkell, much the most fair of those writers mentioned above, that Queen Caroline sent a message of forgiveness to her eldest son while she lay dying, while the vitriolic pen of Hervey would rather have us believe that her last words on Prince Frederick were: At least I shall have one comfort in having my eyes eternally closed. I shall never see that monster again. Under the circumstances, readers might appreciate that from time to time in this book, presented with such a divergence of source material, I have chosen to err on the side of charity.

Continuing on a similar theme, reference must be made to Ragnhild Hattons biography of King George I (1978). Although it only deals with the early lives of his son and daughter-in-law and not beyond, its exhaustive modern research has gone some way towards correcting the traditional, often inaccurate portrayal of the first two Georges, particularly with regard to their mutual antipathy. I have not sought to hide the fact that such ill-feeling existed, or indeed deny that it played a major part in the history of the dynasty; but I have echoed Hattons well-supported contention that it has been exaggerated in the interests of making a good story.