When the writer Fanny Burney was offered a place at the court of King George III she was, Janice Hadlow writes, “horrified”. As the celebrated author of Evelina told Queen Charlotte, her “acquaintance hitherto . . . was not only very numerous but very mixed,” including David Garrick, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Edmund Burke. Now, as “Second Keeper of the Queen’s Robes” she would be reduced to a kind of dresser. “What a life for me!”
Burney was persuaded to submit for the sake of her father’s career, and “the doors of the court closed behind her”. Posterity was the gainer. Her record of court life is fascinating. But for Burney herself the five years she spent there were stultifying; “the attendance incessant — the confinement to court continual — I was not to receive anybody without permission”. (Permission would never be granted should her proposed visitor be male).
At least, though, she could eventually leave. For the royal children escape was not so easy. Hadlow describes a peaceful domestic evening in the 1770s when the King and Queen and their dozen children sat round a table of an evening, drawing, sewing, chatting about trifles. An appealingly intimate picture. But turn the clock forward 20 years. Five of the sons have been sent away — to sea or to study in Germany — and forbidden to return, in some cases for many years. Meanwhile the daughters are still yawning through interminable evenings en famille, having, like Burney, resigned themselves to subordinating their wishes to those of their parents. For them the sweetness of domesticity has curdled into sour disappointment and suppressed fury.
Hadlow’s long and engrossing book is all about the family life of England’s Hanoverian kings. The Jacobite rebellions, the American War of Independence, the French Revolution — these events are acknowledged only cursorily. William Pitt gets a few brief mentions. Napoleon is remembered only for a spiteful joke he made about the Princess Royal’s enormously fat fiancé, and for the fact that the wars he occasioned took so many of the King’s favourite equerries away on campaign. When Hadlow talks about the “battles of 1812” she is not referring to the French invasion of Russia but to the middle-aged princesses’ (self-described as “the old cats”) insistence of receiving their own allowances, and their demand to be permitted to go — infrequently, and never all at once — to dine out in London at their brothers’ houses.
Hadlow’s focus on the familial exactly reflects the central argument of her book. When the soon-to-be George III found himself, as the result of his father’s early death, heir to the throne, he seemed sorrily miscast in the role. He was so timid that when his uncle, the notorious “Butcher” Cumberland, showed him a weapon the shy teenager “turned pale, and trembled”. George thought the Duke was going to murder him. He had no taste for militarism, no gift for exploiting factions. Instead, guided by his mentor Lord Bute (famous for the “symmetry” of his long legs) he conceived of a new role for the monarchy, transcending politics and personifying an ideal of private “goodness”. From his time onward kings and queens would play, not at political snakes-and-ladders or war games, but at Happy Families.
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It was a counterintuitive choice. The Hanoverian dynasty was spectacularly ill-qualified to embody the tranquil virtues of domesticity. Hadlow’s family saga begins with the disappearance (presumed murdered) of George I’s wife’s lover, and the subsequent lifelong imprisonment of the erring Sophia Dorothea in a gloomy castle. In each of four successive generations a royal couple took a pathologically exaggerated dislike to their heir. In 1717, after a squabble at a christening, George I , king from 1714 to 1727, banished the Prince and Princes of Wales from all the royal palaces, separating them from their children. Nearly 20 years later the instructions drawn up to manage their ejection were consulted when George II and Queen Caroline, in their turn, threw out their eldest son Frederick, whom the Queen described as “the lowest, stinking coward in the world” and a “monster”. The pattern, sadly, was not to be broken. For all George III’s good intentions, he made many of his dozen children miserable and his heir, the future Prince Regent and George IV, told a friend “my father hates me; he always did, from seven years old”.
The Hanoverian court provides rich material for historians. The relationships are complex, the anecdotes lurid and — most importantly — the sources are detailed, copious and witty. Hadlow’s chief witness at the court of George II is Lord Hervey, the bisexual courtier, scurrilous gossip and astute social analyst described by Alexander Pope as “a painted child of dirt that stinks and stings”. In the next reign Horace Walpole takes over — his memoirs and letters are as knowing as they are funny. William Hickey, the great-grand-daddy of all gossip columnists, provides a wonderfully vivid account of George III’s coronation in 1761. The assembled bigwigs watched the procession up the aisle with adequate decorum but then, since the ceremony was inaudible to all but the best-placed, settled down to lunch — filling Westminster Abbey with the sounds of popping champagne corks and the fragrance of scores of roast fowl.
The royals themselves documented their own lives minutely, the princesses struggling to fill their futile lives with letter-writing, Queen Charlotte confiding to her brother in Germany the frustrations and anxieties she was obliged to hide from English eyes. Fanny Burney was witness to the ghastly ordeal (for himself and all his family) of George III’s recurring madness. So was the beady-eyed Lady Mary Coke — whose penchant for prying into others’ private business is a boon to scholars. All of these provide jigsaw pieces. Hadlow, an accomplished storyteller and a thoughtful historian, assembles them into a picture full of emotional colour and drama, which still resonates today. She argues persuasively that the British monarchy owes its surprising longevity and success to an inspired conceptual shift whereby the royal family became identified, not as a power-wielding dynasty, but as a model of domestic virtue, a shift originating — this is the funny bit — within the shockingly dysfunctional family of the first four Hanoverian kings.
The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians by Janice Hadlow, William Collins, 684pp, £25; ebook £16.79. To buy this book for £20, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134