Sex Lives of the Kings & Queens of England by Nigel Cawthorne

Author:Nigel Cawthorne [Cawthorne, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780131122
Publisher: Prion Books Ltd
Published: 2012-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

On her deathbed, Queen Caroline begged her husband not to take another wife. As he wiped the tears from his eyes, he replied: ‘No, I shall have mistresses.’

Lady Deloraine believed this was her opportunity. She had been coy before, but now she started bragging about her royal conquest, even to her wards, the King’s young daughters. Walpole was resigned to the idea of the King having a ‘plaything’ but he wished ‘His Majesty had taken someone less mischievous than that lying bitch’.

The death of the Queen created something of a political crisis. How were George’s advisers to maintain their influence over the King? The Duke of Newcastle suggested that they should use his daughter, Princess Emily, as their intermediary.

‘Does the Princess design to commit incest?’ asked Walpole. ‘Will she go to bed with the father? Does he desire that she should? If not, do not tell me the King intends to take a vow of chastity or that those that lie with him won’t have the best interest in him.’

Walpole’s solution was to send for Madame von Walmoden – on the grounds that he had been ‘for the wife against the mistress’ and now should be ‘for the mistress against the daughter . . . unless you think the daughter intends to behave so as to supply the place of both wife and mistress which . . . I know not how she can do but by going to bed with him.’

In the meantime, George made do with Lady Deloraine. Even though he complained that she smelled of cheap Spanish wine, he slept with her ‘without the least alteration in his manner of talking to her or his manner of paying her, and in short sent for this old acquaintance to his apartment for just the same motives that people send casually for a new one to a tavern’.

Lady Deloraine was discarded as soon as Madame von Walmoden arrived. The newcomer was created Lady Yarmouth and was installed as the King’s official mistress. She was to prove a very effective power-broker. Lord Chesterfield remarked of the King: ‘Even the wisest man, like a chameleon, takes without knowing it more or less the hue of what he is often upon.’

Lady Yarmouth also made money by selling honours, a trick that she had learned from the King. Shortly after her arrival in England, she had asked the King for £30,000. He refused but allowed her to choose two candidates for elevation to the peerage. She did so and, pocketing the bribes, she received the £30,000 without costing the King a single penny.

This was still a pittance when compared with the fortune accumulated by Madame de Pompadour, who was presiding at Versailles as Louis XV’s mistress. A French count visiting London made a disparaging comparison between the pair. ‘While Madame de Pompadour shares the absolute power of Louis XV,’ he wrote, ‘Lady Yarmouth shares the absolute impotence of George II.’

Like all Hanoverian kings, George II detested his son, describing Frederick, Prince of Wales as ‘a monster and the greatest villain that was ever born’.

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