The Third George: (Georgian Series) (40 page)

There was little to tell. The Queen had fallen sick of an affliction in her throat and in a few days she had died.

‘But she was strong … she was healthy … and so young.’

Oh, yes, she was young to die. How could it have happened? He heard the story of the page who had died, possibly through eating ‘something’.

Had Caroline Matilda died for the same reason?

No one could say. No one could be sure. Poor ill-fated Caroline Matilda who had lived so quietly in the heart of her
family and then for a few violent years as Queen of Denmark.

‘It is all trouble,’ said George. ‘Sometimes I feel as though I am going mad.’

*

Everyone at Court was talking about the trial of Elizabeth Chudleigh. George was horrified at what had been unfolded. This was the woman whom he had regarded as his friend; and here she was exposed in the courts as the most scheming of adventuresses.

What a devious course she had travelled! Her life was one long tangle of lies. When she had been living at Court as spinster Elizabeth Chudleigh she had in fact been married to the Honourable Augustus John Hervey. There had even been a child of the union, who, perhaps fortunately, had died. Elizabeth had been unsure whether she would acknowledge her marriage to Hervey until his uncle, the Earl of Bristol, whose heir he was, had been on the point of dying. Then she had considered it would not be such a bad thing to become Countess of Bristol; but before the Earl had died she had become the mistress of the Duke of Kingston and had decided that she would rather be the Duchess of Kingston than the Countess of Bristol. Because she did not wish to suffer the scandal of a divorce she had pretended her marriage to Hervey had not taken place and when there was an opportunity of marrying the Duke of Kingston she had done so, forcing Hervey to silence on their marriage.

During her spell as Duchess of Kingston Elizabeth had flaunted her position; one of her many extravagances had been to build a mansion in Knightsbridge which was known as Kingston House.

The Duke, who was many years older than Elizabeth, did not long survive the marriage; and he left his fortune to Elizabeth on condition that she remained a widow since he feared that her vast fortune might attract adventurers.

This caused some amusement among those who knew Elizabeth for the biggest adventuress of them all. Elizabeth, however, was not satisfied with the arrangement and the story of her remarkable adventures would never have been known had not her late husband’s nephew, on information he had received from an ex-maid of Elizabeth’s, brought a charge of bigamy
against Elizabeth which, if proved, would mean that she had never been the Duke’s true wife.

Elizabeth who had been travelling in Italy enjoying her wealth was forced to come home to face the charges. She was a woman who was in the thick of adventure even in Rome where she had difficulty in obtaining the money she needed from the English banker until she produced a pistol and forced him to supply it. Nothing it seemed was too outrageous for Elizabeth to do.

And now the trial was entertaining the whole of London. There was Elizabeth – the young adventuress, whose portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds had delighted London before her arrival, which fact had decided her to leave Devonshire and seek her fortune in the capital city. To London she had come, found a place in the household of the Princess Dowager, attracted the interest of the King – George II – secretly married Hervey, decided she had made a mistake, destroyed the church register; and then when there had been a possibility of Hervey’s becoming Earl of Bristol, forged a new sheet in the register to replace the old one she had destroyed. Then deciding that Kingston had more to offer her she ignored her marriage with Hervey and married the Duke.

This was Elizabeth Chudleigh, the sparkling vivacious maid-of-honour who had befriended George when Prince of Wales, who had learned the secret of Hannah Lightfoot, who had used it to blackmail the Princess Dowager and Lord Bute and now faced a charge of bigamy.

No wonder everyone was talking about Elizabeth Chudleigh; it was far more interesting, than all the dreary controversy about the American Colonies.

*

But the King could not escape from the American problem; he could not sleep for thinking of it. He grew more and more stubborn; he would not give way to these rebels; he was not going to be browbeaten. The fact that so many in his own kingdom believed his policy and that of North to be wrong made him stand more firmly behind his chief Minister.

‘I am ever ready,’ he said, ‘to receive addresses and petitions, but
I
am the judge where.’

That was the crux of the matter. He was going to be the judge. He was King George and he was going to rule. For years his mother had said to him: George, be a king. Well, now he was the King; and he was going to show it.

He no longer had the blind faith in Chatham that he once had had. There had been a time when he had believed that if Pitt would form a government all would be well; the people had believed it too; but Pitt had become Chatham and Chatham was a poor invalid, a man who suffered cruelly from the gout and who, it was said, had once lost his reason through his illness.

Lost his reason! The King shivered at the thought; and tried not to remember that period of his own life when his brain had become a little crowded. That was past. It should never happen again; but it haunted him like a grey ghost, always ready to leap out at him and torment him at unguarded moments.

Now when he spoke of Chatham he called him that ‘perfidious man’, ‘that trumpet of sedition’, for there were times when Chatham in the House of Lords thundered his disapproval of the Government with all the fire which had belonged to the Great Commoner.

Chatham was now urging the King at all costs to put an end to the strife in America, to stop this barbarous war against ‘our brethren’. He wanted every oppressive Act passed since 1763 to be repealed.

Lord North, who like the King had become deeply affected by the struggle, wanted to retire, but George would not allow this. In this conflict with America, George declared, he had the majority of Englishmen behind him; he was stubborn; he had made up his mind that weakness was disaster. He shut his eyes to military losses; he had set himself on a course of action and he believed it would be folly to give it up. It would be construed as weakness and they could not afford to be weak.

He kept hearing his mother’s voice ringing in his ears: ‘George, be a king.’

It was alarming to learn that Americans were visiting the Court of France and the French were offering help in all forms, short of declaring war, and that there were many Frenchmen who were urging Louis XVI to go as far as that.

North was in a panic. He longed to escape from the storm which he had helped to raise. England needed a strong man
now and there was one whom the French feared above all other Englishmen. William Pitt had brought humiliation and disaster to their country; he had snatched Canada, America and India from them! he had made England a force to be reckoned with. And Pitt was still in the field of action even though he masqueraded under the name of Chatham.

North sought to introduce two Bills which he believed would win the approval of both England and America. In the first the right of the English Parliament to tax Americans would be relinquished; in the second a commission would be set up to adjust all differences.

Charles Fox supported this Bill, but some members of the Opposition were against it. North had shown himself to be the enemy of America, they said, and the Americans would be too proud to accept such offers from him.

George himself clung to his desire to remain strong, but he did not oppose North’s proposals; yet North again attempted to give up the seals and step into the background. He wrote to the King informing him of this desire. ‘Lord North feels that both his mind and body grow every day more infirm and unable to struggle with the hardships of these arduous times.’

But George would not let him go. His great desire was to keep North as head of his Government, for he would never approach Chatham again.

Chatham, watching the way events were shaping was now seeing himself once more as the one man who could bring his country out of the morass of disaster into which she had fallen. It was Chatham who had brought America to England; how right that it should be Chatham who should heal the breach between the two countries.

He could not agree that America should be allowed to declare her Independence. He could not bear to let America go. He deplored the faulty statesmanship which had brought about this disastrous situation. But he was certain that it was not too late.

He hobbled into the House of Lords, his legs encased in flannel, supported by his son and his son-in-law.

‘I rejoice,’ he cried, with a return of his old fire, ‘that the grave has not closed over me so that I can raise my voice against the dismemberment of this ancient and most noble monarchy.
Pressed down as I am, I am little able to help my country at this perilous juncture, but while I have sense and memory I will never consent to deprive the royal offspring of the House of Brunswick, the heirs of the Princess Sophia, of their fairest inheritance …’

His voice faltered a little and then the old power rang out.

‘I am not, I confess, well informed of the resources of this kingdom, but I trust it has still sufficient to maintain its just rights, though I know them not. But any state is better than despair. Let us make one effort and if we must fall, let us fall like men.’

He sat down in his seat helped by the members of his family.

The Duke of Richmond replied that it was not practical to keep the American Colonies. They could not hold them and to continue to attempt to would weaken the country still further and make an attack by France possible. The country was not prepared for war.

Chatham rose and protested once more against the dismemberment of this ancient and most noble monarchy. The threat of French invasion made him laugh. He turned violently to the Duke of Richmond and then suddenly he swayed and would have fallen had his son not caught him in his arms.

The debate ended and Pitt was carried out to a nearby house in Downing Street.

There was no doubt that he was very ill.

A few days later he expressed a wish to go to his beloved house at Hayes and he was taken there.

In three weeks he was dead.

*

The body of the Great Commoner lay in state for two days and was buried in the north transept at Westminster Abbey.

‘That,’ said the people,’ is the end of Pitt, one of the greatest of English statesmen.’ But this was not quite the truth. The chief mourner was the dead man’s second son, his firstborn being abroad. His son was William Pitt, named after his father; he was nineteen and he was determined to be as great a politician as the father he mourned.

*

So the great struggle had come to an end with ignominious defeat for the King and his country.

George knew this humiliating memory would haunt him for the rest of his life; and he was right: it did.

Often he was heard to murmur: ‘I shall never lay my head on my last pillow in peace as long as I remember my American Colonies.’

In the meantime Charlotte had spent the greater part of her time being pregnant. Ernest had been born in June 1771; Augustus in January 1773; Adolphus in February 1774; Mary in April 1776; Sophia in November 1777; and Octavius in February 1779. So that by the year 1780 they had thirteen children.

And at the beginning of that year no one was very surprised to learn that Charlotte was pregnant again.

Fire over London

THE KING’S ELDEST
sons were giving him great cause for alarm, particularly the Prince of Wales. In the past he had looked to his family for comfort and found it. That was when they were children. Alas, children grow up; and it seemed to be a tradition in the family that the Prince of Wales should be at enmity with the King.

‘Why should he, of the whole family, have turned out so? eh?’ he demanded of the Queen.

But she could not tell him. Poor Charlotte had had no opportunity to learn anything. In the nineteen years that she had been in England she had been kept as a prisoner – a queen bee in her cell, never allowed to know the secrets of politics, never asked an opinion. They had made of her a Queen Mother, nothing else; and they had kept her very busy at that.

She adored her eldest son; he had been the King of the nursery and well he had known it. With his rich colouring, his blue eyes and golden hair, he was beautiful; and if he was a little wild it was what everyone expected of such a little charmer.

Lady Charlotte Finch had declared him to be a handful, and worse still he carried his brother Frederick, who was a year younger than he was, along with him. But the young George had
been full of curiosity; he had shown an aptitude for learning which delighted his father, who had never himself been good with his books. Young George, in the seclusion of the Bower Lodge at Kew, had shown good promise. There was nothing else to do but learn, so he learned. He had a good knowledge of the classics, spoke several languages, could draw and paint with a certain amount of talent and seemed avid for learning. High spirited, yes. Mischievous, certainly. Leading his brothers into trouble, it had to be admitted.

‘He is such a boy,’ said his mother fondly and indeed wondered how such a plain creature as herself could have produced such a wonder.

Life at the Bower Lodge had been carefully laid out by the King. The children’s domain was not to be contaminated by the Court. So influenced had George been by his mother that he had made the household of his children almost a replica of that which he had known as a boy. He did not pause to consider the conduct of his brothers which had brought such anxiety into his life; nor Caroline Matilda’s unhappy experiences in Denmark. Even he himself had broken out over the Lightfoot affair and he could so easily have gone against his elders and married Sarah Lennox. He did not connect the wildness of his brothers with their sequestered childhood. And now here was young George threatening to be as difficult to control as George’s brothers had been – if not more so.