Royal family life was frequently inharmonious. Elizabeth I was imprisoned in the Tower of London by her own half-sister Mary in 1554 when the Catholic queen was living in fear of Protestant insurrection. Some of the guards are supposed to have taken off their caps, knelt down and called out ‘God save your grace!’ as Elizabeth passed under the Bloody Tower. Even the Lord Treasurer and the Earl of Sussex were deeply troubled and wept as they locked the doors upon her.
The memoirs of the 18th-century Lord Hervey are a wonderful source of scandal and gossip about family life at court. He captured George II being unpleasant to his family at Kensington Palace, describing how he ‘stayed about five minutes in the gallery; snubbed the Queen, who was drinking chocolate, for being always stuffing, the Princess Emily for not hearing him, the Princess Caroline for being grown fat, the Duke for standing awkwardly, Lord Hervey for not knowing what relation the Prince of Sultzbach was to the Elector Palatine, and then carried the Queen to walk, and be resnubbed, in the garden’.
No love was lost between Queen Caroline and son and daughter-in-law Frederick and Augusta. Jealousy was part of the problem. ‘Popularity makes me sick’, Caroline claimed, ‘but Fritz’s popularity makes me vomit’. On 31st July, 1737, Frederick’s wife Augusta went into labour at Hampton Court Palace. Determined that his parents could not claim the privilege of witnessing the birth, Frederick bundled Augusta into a coach that drove to the seclusion of Kensington Palace. Here no arrangements had been made, so the baby (‘about the bigness of a good large toothpick case’, as Lord Hervey put it) was wrapped in a tablecloth.
