Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  The Queen teased Miss Hamilton:

  Pray can you tell me what punishment is to be made use of when the physician recommends bathing in the sea and it is not complied with? I am very impatient to have that point determined as I intend practising it upon a certain Miss M H who promised Dr Turton to wash herself quite clean, and who since her arrival at Eastbourne pretends to be a little fearful, for I dare not make use of the word which begins with a C for fear of shocking your delicacy …

  Queen Charlotte wrote to Lady Charlotte Finch in July 1780, ‘Tell Miss Hamilton I hope soon to answer her letter. She makes me guilty of breaking a commandment, for I envy her writing so well.’

  Princess Royal wrote to Miss Hamilton this summer from the Queen’s Lodge: ‘Dear Hammy, I have behaved well in every occasion except last Wednesday, that I danced ill. I am very sorry to be obliged to add that, but alas it is too true. However, I hope that you will not give me quite up, since I have done everything else well, and that [sic] I dance better last Friday.’ But the Princess Royal had greater sins to report, and wrote again at greater length: ‘My dearest Hammy, I return you ten thousand thanks for your letter, which is filled with the most undeniable truths. I have not now much time and therefore must defer for the present to give you an ingenuous account of myself, which I am afraid will not be very pleasant, but I hope with the next post to send you one which will please you better and give you more satisfaction.’ Turning to domestic news with relief, she added:

  We have been at Windsor, Miss Planta and M Guiffardiere accompany us there. I have one hour every morning with the latter. Mama has worn the trimming you saw me work her last summer. She has ordered me for the present to put by my waistcoat, not because it was too great a piece of work for me but because she was afraid as I have not much time to work, it would dirty. I have bought myself a little Spa toilet for two guineas, which contains everything that can possibly be wanted. Pray give my love to all those it is due. Pray tell Elizabeth that next week I shall write to her.

  This letter was very likely in reply to a remonstrance from Miss Hamilton. The Princess Royal had been behaving less than well to her attendant Miss Gouldsworthy, who wrote from Kew, worn out from having escorted the elder princesses three times in a week to the Queen’s House: ‘I return to this dungeon … heated to death and wishing… for the hour of going to bed.’ A month later she complained of ‘being dragged for two hot hours upon the terrace at Windsor’. Meanwhile, Miss Planta, the princesses’ English teacher, decried the damp at Kew, and ascribed her rheumatism of the last two years to the insalubrious surroundings.

  In July Miss Planta wrote that the Queen would be most unhappy when she heard of the Princess Royal’s conduct to Gouly: ‘Miss G is much dissatisfied with the Pss R’s conduct and I am sorry to say it is far from amiable.’ Miss Planta had warned her pupil of the consequences to come: ‘Unless she corrects herself in time, the Queen will grow indifferent to her.’ But Gouly, that much tried sub-governess – who had now been with the family for nearly five years – tendered her resignation, which the Princess Royal had plainly hoped would be the result of her behaviour. She said to all and sundry that she wished Miss Hamilton – for whom she still had a passion – would replace Miss Gouldsworthy. The angry young Princess – fourteen on 29 September, six days after Prince Alfred’s birth – did not get her wish. Miss Gouldsworthy remained at the Queen’s request, and the Princess Royal’s rage subsided once the Eastbourne party – and dear Hammy – returned in October.

  The Princess Royal’s sister Princess Augusta had a more equable temperament, and was much happier within the family circle, as a letter she wrote to Miss Hamilton the year before shows. It was the morning of her eleventh birthday:

  My dear Hamy, This morning I waked at four and I found all my presents. But I would not look at them for fear that I should disturb Gouly and Princess Royal. At half after six the maid came in to make the fire. Then I waked a second time and I looked at them and I assure you that I liked them very much and when I came to the beautiful little purse you was so good as to give me I was as happy as a Queen, for if your present had not been what it was I should have had no play purse for tonight. As soon as I come to Kew you shall see all my presents …

  Now she wrote from the Queen’s Lodge in July 1780: ‘Dear Hamy, I am now (as you see) performing my promise. You must promise to answer all my letters or else I will not write to you. We are now come to Windsor and for our sins are forced of Sunday evenings to walk on the terrace. I hope you mind and never show the scrawls that I write to you. We now always dine at the castle, for the King is fitting up a library here as well as at Kew.’ After adding the information that ‘We now do our hair in a new sort of fashion, we wear hats all day and no caps,’ she ended, ‘My dear Hamy, the letters having to go in half an hour, I can write now no more. My dear Madam, I am with the most profound respect your most humble and obedient servant as I know you like those titles.’

  Augusta was cheerful, but other tempers were riding high in Windsor, including the King’s in the course of a tempestuous general election this August. Irritated by the Whig party’s plan of economy for the Court, he went into one of the silk mercers’ in the town and said, as one anecdotalist had it, ‘in his usual quick manner, “The queen wants a gown – wants a gown – No Keppel – No Keppel”.’ The mercer was convinced that he should vote for the Tory candidate in lieu of Admiral Lord Keppel, the Whig MP who had recently seen off the French fleet, and ‘all the royal brewers and butchers and bakers’ in the town followed suit. Further, the princes’ page Billy Ramus and some of the Queen’s band who lived at Kew Green were ordered by the King to appear at the Castle on the eve of the election, and ‘were put to bed at Windsor so as to vote as inhabitants.’

  But Admiral Lord Keppel had his admirers within the royal family. Prince Augustus, aged seven, was locked up ‘in the nursery at Windsor for wearing Keppel colours.’ Presumably he had been dressed up by his elder brothers, for, in a first display of the sympathy with the Opposition that enraged their father, the Prince of Wales and Prince Frederick became ardent Keppelites during this bitter local contest. Indeed, the Prince of Wales would not speak to an equerry who cast his vote for the Tory candidate, Mr Peniston Portlock Powney – widely known as ‘The King’s Pony’ – who gained the seat.

  Princess Augusta, for her part, found the political hullabaloo at Windsor tiresome, and wrote to Miss Hamilton: ‘I wish that the election was at an end for the noise is inexpressible. I believe that if you had all the children of Sussex all together in one room could not if possible be greater [sic].’ She was herself busy with a new pastime, making a coin collection:

  Col Lumsden showed me some shillings, half crowns and one guinea of Q Eliz that one of the drummers dug up from under Herne’s Oak. They are to be sure very curious … My collection goes on very well, for General Freytag [the Hanoverian Minister] has given me some German coins of the late King [her great-grandfather King George II] and of the present King [her father].

  At Eastbourne a month later, Princess Elizabeth received a letter from her father with less controversial news. ‘I was made glad to hear that my dear mama was so well and that I had got another brother,’ she wrote in reply. ‘Sophia says she has got a little grandson; Octavius she calls her son. Last night Lord and Lady Dartrey drank tea with Edward and me.’ Alone of the princesses and princes, Princess Elizabeth was to preserve a fondness for her brother Edward in later years, which was perhaps promoted by these months they spent together.

  The cannons fired from the ships, and from the beach both yesterday and today. I was so overjoyed when I had your letter this morning, my dear Papa, that I could not settle myself to write. I beg my best duty to my dearest Mama. I have the pleasure of telling you that my brothers and sisters are well. I remain my dear papa your most dutiful and most affectionate daughter Elizabeth

  Four months after the birth of Prince Alfred, her fourteenth child and ninth son, the Queen rejoiced in
January 1781 to find that ‘the new year is begun without the want of a nurse’. And indeed as the next two years wore on without that need arising, there may have been agreement between husband and wife at this point that their family could be said to be complete. Nevertheless, the Queen and all the family were sincerely sorry to lose another of their number. While Prince William pursued his midshipman career in the Atlantic, the King despatched Prince Frederick in December 1780 to Hanover to pursue the military studies for which the boy had already showed some aptitude.

  Over the course of the new year, the royal schoolroom and nursery were in some confusion. Not only had Miss Hamilton leave of absence for some weeks to nurse her mother in Derbyshire but Lady Charlotte Finch sailed for Lisbon to nurse her son, Lord Winchilsea. Stalwart Miss Gouldsworthy’s health declined so badly that she had not the breath to stoop to a writing table, Miss Hamilton told Lady Charlotte in early September. And to cap it all, one of Mrs Cheveley’s own three children had a bad eye, requiring her to take the whole brood to Margate for a month.

  When she returned from Derbyshire, Miss Hamilton kept the absent Lady Charlotte informed about the progress of the princesses back home, writing on one occasion:

  I must tell you a little anecdote of Pss Mary’s. When Lady J P [Juliana Penn, Lady Charlotte’s sister] came last night Pss M said, I am glad Lady Joully is come. One of her sisters told her she ought to call her Lady Juliana. ‘Oh,’ says she, ‘I don’t care how I call her, God bless her – I love her – she is so like dear Ly Char.’ And Pss Sophia, who is my great great favourite, says ‘Ly Cha is very ill natured to stay so long.’ She is continually enquiring after you.

  Lady Charlotte Finch was still in Portugal, embroiled in family crises of her own, when the Princess Royal made her debut, not yet fifteen, at the King’s Birthday on 4 June 1781. Not only the Princess, but her mother, the masters and attendants who had coached her for the important event, and the whole household had to steel their nerves. But all went well. From Caldas on the coast north of Lisbon, Lady Charlotte wrote to Princess Elizabeth of the ‘satisfaction’ the King and Queen must have had ‘in seeing dear Princess Royal’s first appearance at the ball on the birthday’. She thought of it ‘continually’, she wrote, ‘tho, as my dear Princess Elizabeth will conceive, with almost as great regret, that I should have been absent at such a time; I can think of nothing that can make me amends for such a disappointment, till the time comes for my dear Princess Augusta and Princess Elizabeth to be called forth upon the like occasion, when I have no doubt they will do themselves as much honour as Princess Royal has done.’

  Princess Elizabeth wrote to Miss Hamilton, ‘Last Wednesday William returned home from Portsmouth.’ The princesses’ beloved brother, now nearly sixteen, had stories to tell of being present at two sieges of Gibraltar, but his naval superiors in general were tried by his liking for drinking and brawling. ‘I hope you are better and will continue so,’ Princess Elizabeth wrote. ‘Augusta and me have got a delightful house [at Windsor] which is called the Lower Lodge, the rooms are delightful and very pleasant. I hope to see you in them soon, my dear. I hope you have not had so much thunder as we have had here. Mama has read a very fine sermon and two very pretty Spectators.’

  The princesses took their cue in relationships with their attendants from their mother, who continued to endear herself to all her daughters’ attendants by the attention and great civility she showed them. ‘My dear Miss Hamilton,’ she wrote on one occasion, ‘What can I have to say? Not much indeed! But to wish you a good morning in the pretty blue and white room where I had the pleasure to sit and read with you The Hermit, a poem which is such a favourite with me that I have read it twice this summer. Oh what a blessing to keep good company. Very likely I should never have been acquainted with either poet or poem was it not for you.’ And again the Queen wrote to the same correspondent:

  My dear Miss Hamilton, I find it with regret, that notwithstanding all my envy I cannot obtain that agreeable style of writing both you and Lady Charlotte Finch are possessed of. I grieve and fret for days about it, but it avails me nothing else but making me dissatisfied with myself, which is the true way of preventing my poor head to make any real progress in such a desirable talent. I shall therefore renounce all claim to elegance of style and desire you to be contented with a very simple natural way of writing, well meant at all times but making no pretensions whatever. Having prepared you for this I may without the least fear of offending your feelings upon that subject say anything that occurs to me without being criticized. I mean by that, severely, for a little will do me good, as I love to improve. Pray do not think me too old for that. It would be mortifying indeed.

  But in June, when Miss Hamilton tried to resign in a letter stressing her delicate constitution, the Queen was as iron: ‘The contents of your letter I am inclined to take as the effect of low spirits and therefore won’t indulge you with an entire belief of what you have said …’ If her attendant persisted in her opinion, she must inform no one but the Queen, until the latter had gone through the ‘disagreeable’ business of finding a ‘proper person’ to replace her.

  At the Prince of Wales’s nineteenth-birthday ball at Windsor in August, which lasted till six in the morning, Miss Hamilton wrote, ‘the Queen, Pss R and her sisters wore different coloured clothes, trimmed with silver and were all very fine’, while their brothers and father and others danced in the full Windsor dress uniform. ‘I wish I could convey a proper idea of the very brilliant and magnificent appearance of St George’s Hall which was the supper room,’ she wrote earlier in the letter. ‘It put me in mind of descriptions in the Tales of the Genii.’ Without incident the Princess Royal opened the ball with her brother, over 2,000 candles illuminating their progress down St George’s Hall, and there were even rumours of an approaching marriage – to none less than the Emperor of Austria – to confirm her adult status after a bold-faced English duchess in Vienna suggested her as a bride to that elderly and widowed sovereign. On His Imperial Majesty’s replying with courtesy that he thought the Princess might prefer a younger husband the determined peeress replied, ‘That is nothing, I married to my first husband an old man, and it did very well.’

  At chapel on the birthday morning, Miss Hamilton wrote, the gentlemen wore ‘the undress uniform, the ladies, hats – smart polonaises – the hair well dressed, white cloaks, etc – each dressed agreeable to their own taste, except the princesses, who all wore rose colour trimmed with gauze’. Apropos of the Prince of Wales and churchgoing, Miss Hamilton noted demurely that he had taken up shooting and was very fond of it. ‘This morning he was going to set out [for a shooting party] as we went to chapel, he has quite left off attending divine service. On Sunday mornings,’ she added pointedly ‘their Majesties and the psses attend both the chapel and cathedral [the name by which St George’s Chapel was known].’ The Prince of Wales did not as yet enjoy independence in Carlton House in fashionable Pall Mall, but he had achieved a level of autonomy, having his own apartments in town at the Queen’s House as well as in the Castle at Windsor.

  Meanwhile, Princess Augusta sent to Lady Charlotte Finch at Caldas what her governess described as ‘not only the most gracious, but the most entertaining’ two letters she ever received. ‘I have read them over and over again with the greatest pleasure.’ She went on to mention ‘a dear little girl here, that is excessively like my sweet Princess Augusta who dances delightfully, she is the cleverest little creature here and I am quite fond of her, I believe you can guess why’. Lady Charlotte encouraged Princess Augusta’s new hobby. She was acquiring ‘the different coin of this country to add to your Royal Highness’s collection’, although she had found no medals. She spoke of the formal dress for little girls in Portugal, and appeared to think of Princess Augusta, whom the first Miss Planta had earlier thought ‘childish’ for her age. And indeed, although in duty bound to follow her sister into the world, now that the Princess Royal had made her debut, twelve-year-old Princess Augusta
was still fully occupied with her lessons.

  In February 1781 she had copied out: ‘No character is more glorious, none more attractive of universal admiration and respect than that of helping those who are in no condition of helping themselves.’ And a month later she had written to Miss Hamilton, who was ill, from a schoolroom at St James’s Palace, ‘My dear Hamy, I am very sorry that it was not in my power to write to you this morning but I was a-doing my French lesson and I could not leave it off for to write … I looked when we came into the court to see if I could see you at the window but I don’t believe there was so much as a fly to be seen. We were very anxious to hear how you was, but nobody could tell. I am sorry that as I am under the same roof as you … I cannot see you.’

  But she could also be upon occasion an unruly schoolgirl. ‘Madam,’ she wrote to Miss Hamilton, ‘I beg your pardon for what I did to you this morning. I promise you I won’t do so any more. I beg you will forgive me and indeed I won’t do so again. Indeed I shall be very sorry if you go away from us, for indeed I love you very much. Indeed I won’t behave ill to you again. I am very much ashamed of what I did and said this morning, upon my word, and won’t do so again.’ And she wrote again: ‘Madam, I beg that you will have the goodness to forgive me for all the impertinences I did you. I promise you that I won’t do so any more and promise you that I will do everything that you bid me.’ A small piece of paper bearing the faded inscription ‘Augusta Sophia, Queen’s Lodge, Windsor, August 14th 1781’ was docketed by Miss Hamilton with the words ‘As a mark of affection, Princess Augusta Sophia pricked herself with a pin and wrote this in her blood to give Miss Hamilton.’

  The King was increasingly caught up in business about the war in America, especially after the news in November 1781 that the British commander-in-chief, Lord Cornwallis, had had to surrender in humiliating circumstances at Yorktown on 19 October to the American forces. The princesses grew up in an atmosphere rarely free of increasingly gloomy discussion about the great struggle overseas. Princess Augusta was nevertheless, under the influence of her father, to become particularly patriotic and fervently attached to the idea of the British soldier as the apogee of all that was valorous.