Stella Tillyard: A Royal Affair. George III and his Scandalous Siblings. NY: Random House, 2005. 352 pp. Ill.
Stella Tillyard prefaces her book with the story of a quest through the archives, looking for documents that would reveal the personal, hidden lives of George III and his siblings. She reports meeting with more success in Hanover, their ancestral home, than in Windsor, where protective hands long ago consigned compromising papers to the flames. The resulting volume is a triumph of archival research over the conflagration carried out by the palace minions.
The author proves shrewd judge of character, both when it comes to the family and their advisors, such as Lord Bute: “His mentality, in a political world that was fast becoming professionalized, was that of an old-fashioned royal favorite…. His great talents were for demanding unconditional affection while offering his own heart only partially and at intervals, and for convincing himself and his royal confidants that he acted from the most disinterested sense of duty.” (pg. 29)
This is only one of many elegantly written character sketches. Tillyard is equally adept at explaining balance-of-power politics, for example the benefits Denmark reaped from its policy of neutrality during the French-British rivalry. Britain was determined to pursue a marriage strategy designed to pull the Danish court over to a closer alliance. Reading her account, one begins to understand why some royals turned out so twisted and despondent – in portraits they might look like potentates, but on the royal chessboard they were in fact often little more than pawns, sent away to foreign lands for reasons of state.
Caroline Matilda, for example, the king’s youngest sister, was married off to Christian VII, king of Denmark, who was subject to bouts of mental instability. While not openly hostile towards her, he wanted little more than to be left alone in his fantasy world.
Like Catherine the Great, who went from being a minor German princess to Czarina of Russia, Caroline Matilda went from being English to Danish, which on the whole would seem to have been a less jarring transformation. On the other hand, though Catherine did have her mother to accompany her abroad, at least for a time, Caroline Matilda was not allowed to have any countrymen with her after she arrived in Denmark. Even the British ambassador was kept at arms’ length.
(Caroline Matilde at the age of 15, before being sent off to Denmark)
Once in Copenhagen, she started to learn some valuable lessons: “that politics and subterfuge went together, that women in courts … could wield influence in subtle and disguised ways, and that one could say one thing, do another, and still consider oneself innocently above reproach.” (pg. 72)
Her unhappy fate suggests what might have happened to Catherine had she not had the foresight to remove her barely competent husband, Peter III, who rather oddly goes unmentioned here; after all, this Duke of Holstein-Gottorp did – as Russian Czar – go to war against Denmark to regain control of his native land, a rash decision which contributed to his overthrow and death in 1762.
Queen Caroline Matilda refrained from undertaking anything similar regarding her husband. Though he had lucid moments, there can be little doubt that he was unbalanced. “Often he spoke forcefully about killing somebody, usually himself. He was fed up with himself, he could not hang on any longer, he was going to throw himself out of the window or dash his brains out against the walls. One day, being rowed across Hirschholm’s ruffled lake, the king announced that he was going to hurl himself into the water. Over and over again he said sadly that he was confused, that his head was full of noise, and that he had lost his way.” (pg. 186)
(King Christian VII of Denmark, painted by Jens Juel in 1771)
After some initial coldness, the queen began a passionate affair with the king’s doctor, Johann Struensee. When reading about other European courts, I have often come across reference to his name, but this book provides the fullest account of him I have yet read. It was no accident that this radical reformer was trained in medicine. “Doctors … were to be central to the [Enlightenment] debate, both as thinkers and as fledgling men of science who took up and applied the idea of the efficacy of empirical experiment propounded by Isaac Newton and John Locke. … studying the body raised questions about the nature of the soul, and the very principles upon which life is generated and governed. Sitting behind the idea of the mind and the soul were, after all, the deity and the afterlife.” (pg. 103)
Once he had obtained a dominant position at court, Struensee proclaimed that no one should be deterred from pursuing the truth out of exaggerated respect for “persons, regulations or preconceived opinions.” As Tillyard explains, “Struensee’s words were carefully chosen. Behind the abstraction of the word ‘persons’ stood the nobility; behind ‘regulations,’ the judiciary; and behind ‘preconceived opinions,” the clergy.” (pg. 129) In his view: “It is better to let a guilty person go free than to punish someone who is not guilty, which is so repugnant to the liberties and rights of mankind.” (pg. 183)
When it came to raising young Prince Frederick, the future king, Struensee and the queen implemented Rousseau’s radical ideas on education. “Rousseau made gardening the centerpiece of the practical instruction he advocated for the early years of childhood. It offered an array of sensory lessons: the touch and smell of the rich loam, the buzz and chatter of insects and birds, the sight of nature itself vigorously growing. Digging taught the child the practical results of work, and the fruits of the land the notion of property itself. Emile, Rousseau declared, would make the land his own ‘by planting a bean,’ and this simple act of possession, earned by his own labor, was more ‘sacred’ and ‘worthy of respect’ than any grand conquest. Cultivate your own garden, Rousseau was saying, echoing Voltaire, anchor morality in your own social sphere, and virtue will follow as surely as Emile’s plants struggled upward from the ground.” (pg. 180f)
To implement all these revolutionary projects, Struensee and his supporters had to shove aside the old guard. Naively, the upstarts thought they could institute a radical regime of Enlightenment simply by issuing decrees and relying on the self-evident truth of their ideas. Yet the country was unprepared for such an upheaval. Freedom of the press came about in Denmark as a result of palace intrigue, not popular demand.
The old guard was able to carry out a successful coup, a key part of which involved obtaining the king’s signature on the legal documents they prepared. Once they had him in their grip, he signed everything the plotters put before him. Thus were they able to sideline his wife and arrest Struensee and his supporters in strict conformity to the legal niceties. From then on, the way was open for them to roll back all his reforms.
George III was kept abreast of these developments by Robert Murray Keith, who arrived as the British envoy in Copenhagen at the end of July 1771. “He was a veteran of the Seven Years’ War, a worldly-wise and well-connected soldier. His father had been ambassador to the courts of Vienna and St. Petersburg for many years before retiring to the austere splendor of Edinburgh’s New Town and the society of writers and philosophers…. Known as a war hero, but ambitious, too, for a softer sort of fame, Keith wrote music and poetry, eventually publishing three volumes of strictly rhyming verse in 1773… Keith saw himself as a man of action grown hardened in nearly twenty years as a serving and half-pay soldier and a romantic who hoped to settle down one day.” (pg. 190)
A rather different informant was Nathaniel William Wraxall, who was to prove perhaps even more influential in shaping British policy despite having no official post. “Wraxall was born in 1751 into a successful but unspectacular merchant family in Bristol. In a lifetime of writing and rewriting his own history and the history of his times, he smudged even this beginning, claiming that he came from an ancient family that had given its name to Wraxall, in Somerset. Many believed that he was a consistent fantasist or liar. … He would go north, encircle the Baltic littoral, and claim it for himself in a series of letters that would make him famous.” (pg. 254)
“After circling the Baltic, Wraxall’s written text, A Tour through some of the Northern Parts of Europe, ended in Hamburg in September 1774 with its author homeward bound. In fact, his real adventure was only just beginning. In the memoirs he wrote to be published after his death, based apparently on what he called his ‘Private Journal,’ his journey included detours and meetings that the version published in the spring of 1775 left out altogether.” (pg. 255) He became involved in a mad scheme to restore Caroline Matilda to the throne from her German exile, a plan which was frustrated first by lack of British support and then collapsed upon her untimely death. An adventurer or chancer, Wraxall was eventually named a Baronet by George III, who perhaps was rewarding him for his silence about some of the secrets he was privy to.
Room for Improvement
In my opinion, Royal Affair is far superior to Amanda Foreman’s Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, which – though it mainly covers a later period – does include some of the same characters. Still, there are one or two things that could have been improved.
After the death of Caroline Matilda, the last chapters return to London and the sorry entanglements of Princes William and Henry, which prove something of a letdown with their petty grievances, slights, and social ostracism instead of the conspiracies, confinement in lonely northern castles, and beheadings we had been treated to in Denmark. Most of these princes and their consorts, if they did not possess the glow that royalty automatically bestows, would be rather uninteresting individuals.
Perhaps an alternative narrative strategy would have been to keep the chronology intact by cutting back and forth between high drama on the continent and frivolity in England, but that is not the choice the author made. The result is that after we have already learned the fate of Caroline Matilda, the later chapters go back in time, and characters – whose death has already been described – rather jarringly reappear alive.
The concluding pages, however, need no changing. There, Tillyard shows how the king’s relations with his family members were similar to his relations with the American colonies. Once set in his opinion, George III would seldom alter it. It was the duty of both his siblings and the colonists to remain loyal, and if they failed in this, it then fell to him to chastise them, bring them to heel. If they obeyed, they could be forgiven. This was his way of treating everyone, for the most part without exception.
“A loving and tender father to young children and to his siblings as long as they remained dutiful and loyal, George had never been taught and never developed any means of negotiating and compromising with those in his family, from his brothers to his sons and daughters, who wanted to live in ways different from the ones he thought best for them. Toward his American subjects he behaved in exactly the same way. As his children, and like his children, they must be brought to acknowledge their duty to their father and their king. If honor would not bring them back to their motherland, then force must do so instead.” (pg. 292) “It was as if the loneliness and isolation that George had felt during the crisis over Caroline Mathilde and the quarrels with his brothers was being repeated with his colonists…” (pg. 296)
George believed his troubles came about because he was too lenient, whereas everyone else saw him as too strict. At one point he became so frustrated that he drew up a declaration of abdication, but never delivered it. The story ends with the memorable if awkward scene of him receiving John Adams as the first US ambassador. At least it can be said that when he had no choice, he was able to bow to the demands of statecraft and accept the inevitable with a modicum of good grace.
(John Adams presents his credentials to George III)
By the way, both George II and his wife Augusta play prominent roles in the early part of this book. The American state of Georgia was named for that particular George, and its capital city Augusta was named after his wife. While not strictly relevant, these details might have been worth mentioning, since after all Georgia was one of those colonies that would later join the rebellion against George III.
Bonus Points
The illustrations are well-chosen and commented on in the text, with attention paid to what the portraits say about the subjects’ personality. There could well have been more, since we get a number of descriptions of unseen paintings. The genealogical trees were clear, useful and of course necessary when talking about royal families of Europe. I also enjoyed the detailed description of the summer palace and gardens at Herrenhausen, the royal family’s estate in Hanover.
© Hamilton Beck
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