by Flora Fraser
‘My pen is not capable of tracing a quarter of what I feel at the moment of your departure,’ Queen Charlotte had written in July 1771 to her brother Prince Charles, who had just left England for his duties as military governor of Hanover after a long summer stay. Her newborn baby, Prince Ernest, was no consolation – nor was the offer her other brother in England, another Ernest, made to delay his return to Zell in the Hanoverian electorate where he was governor. ‘My pleasures are finished for the year by our separation,’ she wrote.
The Queen did not know how truly she wrote. Over the coming months she and the King were to be plagued by family and political crises in the world that lay outside the well-managed promenades of Kew. In the American colonies there was growing discontent with the King’s decision that they should be taxed and the revenue raised put to their defence. Thirty years before, the then Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole had been wary of such a measure when it was proposed to him in 1739. ‘I have old England set against me, and do you think I will have new England likewise?’ The King had lit a ‘long fuse’ when he insisted on Prime Minister Lord North exacting duty on newspapers and other printed material in the colonies with the Stamp Act. In March 1770 a mob, incensed by the continuing tax on tea, had attacked the Customs House in Boston. Five of the assailants had been shot, but the protests grew bolder. Within two years, another mob was to board a revenue cutter, the Gasparee, and burn it. Within six, the American colonies were to declare their independence from the Crown, and a bloody war would be launched.
The King was to be similarly obstinate in a situation at home which he regarded as a challenge to his authority, and which he could not control – the behaviour of his younger brother the Duke of Cumberland.
The King’s relations with his brothers and sisters had never been easy. His parents had always favoured lively Prince Edward, Duke of York, over him and had greeted his own more faltering essays into social intercourse, ‘Do hold your tongue, George: don’t talk like a fool.’ Given that the Duke of York liked nothing better than to roam expensively in Italy, the King was perhaps less sorry than he might have been when his brother died in 1767. (Lady Mary Coke, who, without much justification, had considered herself practically affianced to the Duke, was devastated.) But now it was the King’s brother Henry, Duke of Cumberland who posed a problem. He had shown his character at his brother the King’s wedding in 1761. When someone had questioned his early departure from the family group on the wedding night, he had replied, ‘What should I stay for?… if she cries out, I cannot help her.’
The Duke, having succeeded his uncle ‘Butcher’ William, Duke of Cumberland, as ranger of Windsor Great Park, caroused at the Ranger’s residence there, Cumberland Lodge, and on the Continent with his mistress Lady Anne Horton. Lady Anne was the daughter of an Irish peer who sat on the Whig benches, and her constant companion was her sister Lady Elizabeth Luttrell – known in all the capitals of Europe as a hardened gambler.
The King was furious and confounded when the Duke of Cumberland handed him a letter to read on 1 September 1771, while the brothers were out walking in the woods at Richmond. It informed him that the Duke had married Lady Anne, and was now looking for greater Parliamentary provision as a married man. The King described his reaction to this news to his brother the Duke of Gloucester: ‘After walking some minutes in silence to smother my feelings, I without passion spoke to him to the following effect. That I could not believe he had taken the step in the paper, to which he answered that he would never tell me an untruth.’
The scandal this mismatch brought on the royal family, and the harm it did to the King’s endeavours to create a more moral atmosphere at Court, made him and others think longingly of the system that obtained at many Continental Courts to deter this sort of thing. The Duke’s conduct, the King wrote to his mother, was ‘his inevitable ruin and … a disgrace to the whole family’, and he encouraged him to go abroad. ‘In any country,’ the King told his brother, ‘a prince marrying a subject is looked up [on] as dishonourable, nay in Germany the children of such a marriage’ – a morganatic match, as it was termed there – ‘cannot succeed to any territories but here where the Crown is but too little respected, it must be big with the greatest mischief. Civil wars would by such measures again be common in this country; those of the Yorks and Lancasters were greatly giving to intermarriages with the nobility.’ He went on, ‘I must therefore on the first occasion show my resentment, I have children who must know what they have to expect if they could follow so infamous an example.’
This letter made very uncomfortable reading for the Duke of Gloucester, who – although five years his junior – the King regarded as ‘the only friend to whom I can unbosom every thought’. Gloucester, weak and flaccid except in the pursuit of women, made a perfect recipient for the King’s laborious thought processes. On this occasion, the message of the letter was clear. Gloucester must settle the question that perplexed Society: had he married Lady Waldegrave or not? For the King to have one brother married to a commoner and with family among the Whig Opposition in the House of Commons – five of the new Duchess of Cumberland’s brothers and her father had seats there – was unfortunate. Were Gloucester married, too, and, should he wish to go into opposition, he could count on the political support of those strong Whigs the Walpoles and Waldegraves, as Maria belonged to the first family by birth and to the second by her first marriage.
The Duke of Gloucester answered approvingly, soothingly, condemned his brother Cumberland’s behaviour and added for good measure that he himself would never marry. Honour was apparently satisfied, and Gloucester, pointedly leaving Lady Waldegrave in England, went abroad to Tuscany where he almost immediately fell ill with a ‘bloody flux’. For companionable nurses, fortunately, he had the attentions of not one ‘Madame Grovestein’ from Holland but two. In January 1772, however, Lady Mary Coke in Vienna heard from Lady Charlotte Finch in England, ‘the Royal family does not flatter themselves with the Duke of Gloucester’s recovery … the accounts are so bad as to leave little room for hopes.’ He was then at Naples. And as late as March, having flitted to Rome, the devoted Grovesteins hot on his heels, the itinerant Duke was still ‘at death’s door’.
In England, meanwhile, the King’s ‘resentment’ was immediately manifested in the announcement that those who visited the Duke of Cumberland and his new Duchess would not be welcome at Court. But he went further, despite the pleas of his mother, the Dowager Princess of Wales. She, more concerned for the dying Duke of Gloucester in Italy, preached family harmony in the case of Cumberland. ‘All I beg of you is,’ she wrote to her son the King in November, after expressing her chagrin that Henry had behaved so badly, ‘do not have vengeance against him in your heart and if he has the good fortune to be quit of his wife, pardon him.’ She knew her eldest son’s capacity for resentment. Instead of listening to her, the King meditated a Royal Marriages Act, making it illegal for members of the royal family to marry without the previous consent of the sovereign. With his brother Gloucester’s assurance that he was a bachelor, this and other provisions in the bill that the King personally drafted should deter him from ever making an honest duchess of his bastard Walpole mistress. And looking ahead, the King would be sure of controlling his own children’s marriages.
The brooding lawmaker had other family matters to attend to. His mother, who had been suffering from agonizing throat pains, had been much affected by the initial reports of her son Gloucester’s imminent death abroad and by the family strife over her other son Cumberland’s marriage. By the end of November 1771, her situation had deteriorated – ‘her speech grows less intelligible, she hourly emaciates, and her dreadful faintings towards night must soon put an end to a situation that it is almost too cruel to wish to see’, the King reported. No one thought she would last a fortnight. Her malady was now described as ‘a cancer in her mouth and risings of the viscera.’
But the redoubtable Dowager Princess lived on and on beyond the prescribed f
ortnight. ‘Nothing ever equalled her resolution,’ wrote Horace Walpole. ‘She took the air till within four or five days of her death, and never indicated having the least idea of her danger, even to the Princess of Brunswick [her daughter], though she had sent for her.’ Ghastly with illness, the old Saxe-Gotha Princess dressed and received her son the King and the Queen in a travesty of their usual evening ritual on the last night of her life, Friday, 7 February 1772. She ‘kept them four hours in indifferent conversation, though almost inarticulate herself, said nothing on her situation, took no leave of them – and expired at six in the morning without a groan.’ The Princess was unpopular to the last: her coffin was hissed and booed on its way to its resting-place in the royal chapel of Henry VII in Westminster Abbey. Meanwhile, Prince William, who was tender hearted, asked Miss Planta to read him the funeral service, and ‘wept bitterly.’
There was more to come. On the day before the Dowager Princess died, Horace Walpole had written to his friend Horace Mann, ‘No more news yet from Denmark, which is extraordinary, but one should think therefore that nothing tragic has happened, or Mr Keith [the English Minister in Copenhagen] would have dispatched messengers faster. You may imagine the impatience of everyone to hear more of this strange revolution…’
Whether the Dowager Princess was apprised or unapprised of her daughter Caroline’s misadventures, the story that arrived in London at the end of January 1772 gripped Society and horrified the King. Queen Caroline of Denmark, the royal princesses’ aunt who had married the King of that country two days after the Princess Royal’s birth, had been lying in bed in the early morning on 17 January, after a masked ball that she and the King had given. Hearing a commotion below, she believed that it was the servants clearing up, and called for quiet.
It was, in fact, the King’s stepmother, the Dowager Queen Juliana, and her son Prince Frederick, confronting the King with evidence of the Queen’s adultery with Count Struensee, the Prime Minister. The King, whose mind was weak but affectionate, resisted for a time their demand that he sign a death warrant for his favourite Minister and an order for his wife’s imprisonment. But they persisted. Struensee had been seized earlier as he left the ball. And now into the Queen of Denmark’s bedchamber sprang armed guards, who bore her off to the fortress of Kronborg.
The English Minister at Copenhagen, Sir Robert Murray Keith, was the hero of the hour in England when it became known there that he had threatened that gunboats would be trained on the offending capital if the Queen was not released. But for the King – and in due course for his daughters – when Keith’s despatch reached him, this was a defining hour. For two months his sister the Hereditary Princess of Brunswick had poured into his ear complaints of her husband’s adultery and contemptuous treatment of her. Now his sister Caroline had been, as he saw it, ‘perverted by a cruel and contemptible court’. When she was released from Kronborg, he sent her to live in the city of Zell in his Electorate of Hanover, where his brother-in-law Ernest was governor, and where their sister Brunswick became a constant visitor. There he hoped that ‘by mildness’ Caroline would be ‘brought back to the amiable character’ she had previously possessed.
King George III never forgot his sisters’ fates in foreign Courts beyond his control, and it weighed heavily with him that he had promoted the matches. This would prey on his mind with fatal consequences when his own daughters came of an age to marry. His brother the Duke of Gloucester was to hold that the King believed his daughters did not wish to settle out of England. Meanwhile his sisters, who had never been close, forged an agreeable friendship on a foundation of religion and tears. And Lady Mary Coke summed it up – the Queen of Denmark had exposed herself, so too had the Duke of Cumberland with his disgraceful marriage, the Princess of Wales had an ‘incurable distemper’, and the Duke of Gloucester was, ‘with one foot in the grave, lavishing his poor remains of life in pursuit of his intrigues with Madame de Grovestein. This is a picture full of shades.’ It was an evil hour for the English royal family, and was felt to be so by no one more than the King.
The reputation of the monarchy, however, was even more severely tarnished when the King drove through his ill-considered Royal Marriages Act at the end of March 1772 with the reluctant assistance of his Prime Minister, Lord North. The temper in the House of Commons was inflamed. The MPs did not hesitate to speak ill of every member of the royal family, and the recently deceased Princess of Wales came in for a great deal of abuse.
Furthermore, on 16 September, just over a year after the Duke of Cumberland had broken the unwelcome news of his marriage to the King at Richmond, another storm broke. The Duke of Gloucester told the King that he too was married – had been married, in fact, since 1766, secretly but perfectly legally. The ceremony had taken place days before his niece the Princess Royal’s birth.
All through the brouhaha about their brother Cumberland’s marriage, it transpired, Gloucester had played a false part. Lady Charlotte Finch told Lady Mary Coke at Kew that she thought the Duke of Gloucester very ungrateful to the King. (Coke, with more important things on her mind, decided at the drawing room on 22 September 1772 that Princess Elizabeth was now ‘much the prettiest’, when the three princesses saw company in the old drawing room.) And the reason for divulging this information now? The Duchess of Gloucester, as Lady Waldegrave was revealed to be, was expecting their child in May of the following year.
The King turned on his once favourite brother and not only barred him from Court, declaring that, as with the Cumberlands, anyone who visited the Gloucesters would not be welcome at Court, but instigated a humiliating and vindictive investigation by the Privy Council into the validity of his brother’s marriage. His supposed object was that there should be no doubts about the child’s legitimacy. In the meantime, his own wife, Queen Charlotte, appeared in satin and ermine at the January drawing rooms in 1773 until a week before she gave birth on the 27th of that month to their sixth son and ninth child, Augustus. The Queen, naturally stoic, rarely had sympathy for the woes of pregnant women, but even she might have felt a pang for the Duchess of Gloucester concerning the ordeal that now awaited her.
The Privy Council hearing took place days before the Duchess was to give birth, and she was forced to appear to defend the marriage, despite her condition. A flurry of depositions later, the King conceded on 27 May that the marriage had been valid after the Privy Council registered it as such, and the child born two days later – Sophia Matilda of Gloucester – at the Duke’s house in Upper Grosvenor Street was duly given the title of princess. Any sympathy the Queen might have felt for her sister-in-law was no doubt extinguished when the Gloucesters summoned members of the Opposition to attend the birth.
The unchivalrous Privy Council enquiry had been most unfortunate, not least for its author. It earned the King the hatred of Horace Walpole, fond uncle of the Duchess of Gloucester, who had earlier been well disposed towards him. Walpole took revenge on the King in his later writings on the Court of King George III. As for Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester, her mother wrote that she seemed to smile at all the world to make up for being unwanted. But Horace Walpole was less enthusiastic about what he called the ‘royalty of my niece and nieceling.’ Asked by a lady at Court if he had seen the infant and was she not very pretty, he replied curtly ‘that he had no idea’. All he knew was that she was very red.
Following the example of the Cumberlands, the Gloucesters left England with their baby daughter and, as Lady Mary Coke observed in December 1773, ‘I wonder after having made such disgraceful marriages that they cannot stay at home, as they certainly do nothing but expose themselves when they come abroad.’ Both couples spent their time running from Continental Court to Court to establish whether, if their own King would not receive them, anyone else’s would. Meanwhile, the King and Queen and family were isolated not only from the London Society that he shunned, but from the other members of the royal family. As a result, and because the King and Queen did not encourage their daughters
to make friends with other children, dreading ‘party’, the princesses’ youth was spent almost exclusively with each other, their younger brothers and their attendants.
The Queen had written to her brother Charles in March 1772, ‘We have changed our home this summer. We exchange Richmond for Kew, our chez nous will be better and the solitude greater than ever.’ With the Princess Dowager’s death, her summer residence at Kew – the White House, or Kew House – became available to the King and Queen. While the building in Kew Gardens could accommodate only the royal parents, their daughters and a skeleton household, the princesses could at least wave to their elder brothers in the Prince of Wales’s House opposite, whose northern windows gave on to the Thames. Should they so choose, the princesses could walk from the gardens of Kew House into the back of Prince William’s House, which fronted Kew Green. Following Prince Ernest’s birth in 1771, Prince Augustus and then Prince Adolphus were born in 1773 and 1774. These ‘younger princes’, as they were known, acquired in due course their own house – known, imaginatively, as Prince Ernest’s House, at the top of the Green, close to Lady Charlotte Finch’s house.
In other houses on Kew Green, in Kew Village, by Kew Bridge and by the ferry over to Brentford the rest of the royal household was disposed. They might not be perfectly housed, but the royal family had left Richmond Lodge, which it had long outgrown, for good, and in due course it was demolished. Kew became a full-blown royal campus, which the royal children rarely left during the summer months, where servants intrigued against each other, and where tradesmen in the village that had grown up around the church on the Green vied for preferment.