Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  Prince Frederick in Hanover had been adventuring: ‘I was about one week ago in the mines of the Hartz where we were obliged to go down ladders for above thirteen hundred feet and up again, as for me I did not feel it in the least, but Grenville complained that his wrists ached the next day so terribly he could hardly stir.’ But nothing could compare with the glamour of Prince William joining the English forces deployed against the American rebels in New York. His sister Royal wrote to him in March 1782: ‘I hope that you do not really think that there is even a possibility of your being forgot at home, for indeed if you have the smallest suspicion of it, you do us all very great injustice, for you are generally spoken of several times in the course of the day.’ She wished that she could have seen him skate: ‘I am sure that before the end of the winter you will be able to do it very well.’ (As William was not yet adept, the other officers would skate along pulling him on a sledge over the frozen Hudson river, shouting, ‘Hooray for the Prince, hooray for the Prince.’) ‘All my brothers and sisters send their love to you. Octavius is very much improved since you have seen him by his change of dress,’ she ended.

  At home Princesss Augusta’s behaviour was still erratic, and she was often repentant. ‘I assure you my dear Hamy’, she wrote in the summer of 1782, ‘that it is my most earnest desire to please the King and Queen and you, and that I will be obedient to everything you say and that I will put off childish things from this day forward and for ever more, and that I will always take it for granted that I should never be told anything if it was not for my good.’

  But when the Queen broke the news in 1782 to this younger daughter that she was to appear at the King’s Birthday that year, the thirteen-year-old ‘was perfectly silent for some time’ from surprise. So the Queen told Lady Charlotte Finch, who was at the seaside at Deal this year – with Prince Alfred, who had recently been inoculated, and Mrs Cheveley. She added that, from not wishing her daughter to dwell upon her coming debut, she had told her of it only two days before it was to occur.

  The Queen recorded that, even so, her daughter – who had not by any means grown out of her childhood shyness – ‘grew more timorous’ as the moment of her appearance approached. Public life of any kind and crowds in particular held terrors for this Princess. ‘We are … for our sins… forced of Sunday evenings to walk on the terrace,’ she had written two summers before at Windsor. But she ‘went through it very properly’, the Queen reported to the royal governess with relief after the Birthday that June; and ‘her behaviour was approved of. The newspapers, she went on, had been very kind to the juvenile debutante, saying that ‘the world admired the elegance of Princess Royal, and not less the modesty of the Royal Augusta’. Princess Augusta may have been formally ‘out’, but she was still a child. ‘I am very much obliged to you my dear Hamy,’ she wrote in September, ‘for having let me have a fire and assure you that you shall not be mortified by my proving that you did wrong, but I will not only be obedient to you and not meddle with it and not only be obedient about that but about all things which can give you any pleasure.’

  Into this picture of domestic tranquillity – barring the Prince of Wales’s dissipations in the equerries’ room after dinner with his parents, and some debauchery in town – came, unannounced, death. Shortly after Princess Augusta made her debut in London in June 1782, Prince Alfred endeared himself at Deal to – among others – an old bluestocking lady by waving at her when asked to do so. He was at the seaside resort to recover his strength after being inoculated against smallpox. But he did not profit from his bathing. His face and especially his eyelids were still troublesome, with eruptions from his inoculation, and his chest continued weak. Nor did a session of horse riding – what his mother termed the ‘four-footed doctor’ – answer, an activity which Mr Pennell Hawkins the Queen’s Surgeon had recommended, disapproving of the child being carried around in Mrs Cheveley’s arms. Prince Alfred’s chest continued to be a problem on his return from Deal, and the doctors convened at Windsor in August to discuss his case. But it came as a complete shock to the family when they concurred in the opinion that the child could not survive more than a few weeks.

  None of the fourteen royal children had ever been in more than passing poor health, or less than an advertisement for the skills of the Hawkins brothers, Mr Pennell and Sir Caesar (a baronet since 1778), who inoculated them and attended them in illness, and of Augustus Brande, the Mecklenburg apothecary who had set up shop at Kew. At one point when the Queen sent to her brother Charles a medical book that contained, she wrote, ‘the manner in which they care for children here from the moment of their birth’, she boasted, ‘Follow our method a little, and you will find that your children will become strong as anything.’

  After prolonged bouts of fever, Prince Alfred – not yet two – died at Lower Lodge, Windsor in late August, despite the dedicated nursing of Lady Charlotte and Mrs Cheveley. They, first among others, received mourning lockets of pearl and amethyst containing curls of the dead boy’s light gold hair. The household did not, however, go into mourning, as it was not prescribed in the case of deaths of children under the age of seven. Alfred’s small body was buried with full honours at Westminster Abbey beside those of larger men of greater note, and his death affected the whole household. The Queen ‘cried vastly at first’, Lady Charlotte reported, ‘and … though very reasonable’ – she dwelt on her good fortune in having thirteen healthy children – was ‘very much hurt by her loss and the King also.’ The King, who was a blunt man, found his own comfort. He said that if it had been three-year-old Octavius who had died, he would have died too.

  Princess Augusta had another cross to bear later this year. In November she wrote on a piece of paper for Miss Hamilton:

  ‘Question: Do you think I have behaved well this summer? Ans: (Pretty well upon the whole.)’ By your saying pretty well, I perceive you mean not quite yet what you could wish for. Therefore I hope that at the end of next winter when I ask you the same question, you will be able to answer ‘Yes,’ that I may have the pleasure of seeing that I have made you happy and improved myself, which I always mean to do.

  But there was to be no such appraisal the following November, for six days after Augusta penned her memorandum Miss Hamilton departed, to live with her friends in London. Leave had at last been granted by the Queen for her resignation, and Miss Hamilton, like Miss Dacres before her, passed quietly out of the secluded circle within which the princesses existed.

  Six months later, however, deeply agitated, Miss Hamilton made her way to the Queen’s House, seeking confirmation of a hideous rumour. Miss Planta wrote from Kew on 5 May 1783 to confirm the truth of what she had heard. ‘My heart bleeds for the King and Queen for indeed you see in them the resigned Christian in the afflicted parent,’ wrote the English teacher. ‘I need not say more to you, who were witness to the melancholy event which happened not many months ago [Prince Alfred’s death]. I believe we shall remain here till the last duty is paid to the dear departed angel.’

  Out of the blue at Windsor a few days earlier, from being his usual ebullient self, Prince Octavius had sickened over a period of less than forty-eight hours, and, despite the frantic attentions of all the royal doctors, had died at Kew at 8.40 in the evening of 3 May. Although he had been inoculated with Sophia weeks earlier, smallpox had had nothing to do with his death. Mrs Cheveley, who had nursed him as she had nursed Alfred, was unfortunately firm on the point. So rumours that he was a victim of his Gotha blood, and that both he and Alfred had succumbed to the ‘family disease’ – sometimes named as scrofula, and sometimes as ‘a weakness in the lungs’, or tuberculosis – circulated. Whatever the cause of the child’s death, the King was quite undone by it. As Princess Augusta was later to recall, the next day her father passed through a room at Windsor, where the artist Gainsborough was putting the finishing touches to portraits of the royal family. The King sent a message to beg the artist to desist, but, on hearing that the work on which he was engaged wa
s the portrait of Prince Octavius, allowed him to continue.

  At the Royal Academy summer exhibition a week after Octavius’s shocking death, the royal family inspected Gainsborough’s ‘numerical’ work – oval heads of the King and Queen, and of all their children, excluding the absent Prince Frederick. There in the bottom right-hand corner were Octavius, bright eyed and golden haired–just as he had been in life – and diminutive Alfred, still in baby clothes, ‘painted by remembrance.’ The princesses, trained not to show emotion in public, were overcome and cried, regardless of their company. These portraits of their dead brothers, when hung in the Queen’s House and when later engraved, became life-long talismans for the princesses of what had been.

  Over the Birthday in June 1783 hung the cloud not only of the coming peace negotiations with a victorious America, but of Octavius’s death. The King was at least as cast down by his four-year-old son’s death in May as he was by the negotiations that in Paris that September would accord the American rebels full independence and establish an American republic.

  But, for the Queen and for her daughters, there were immediate concerns to divert them from their grief. In July, Princess Royal and Princess Augusta acquired their first ever lady-in-waiting – Lady Elizabeth Waldegrave. It was a practical acknowledgement that, at rising seventeen, Princess Royal now took drawing, painting and even the dread music lessons to avoid idleness rather than because her education was incomplete. The Queen warned her old friend Lady Holderness, who had recommended Lady Elizabeth, to put the new recruit on guard: ‘See her and tell her my way of things, particularly how I hate intrigues and that I must insist that in case she ever sees anything improper in the princesses’ behaviour I must be told of it, and that I am the person she must talk to.’

  At the age of thirty-nine, the Queen herself was expecting a fifteenth child, conceived after Prince Alfred’s death and due early this August. A cradle with satin curtains and a matching coverlet was made ready. Mrs Johnson, who had been first employed as royal midwife seventeen years before at the Princess Royal’s birth, was in attendance. And on 7 August 1783 Queen Charlotte gave birth to a sixth princess, named Amelia in compliment to her wealthy great-aunt in London.

  The birth of Princess Amelia at Windsor – the only child of the King and Queen to be born there – acted as a tonic on her father’s spirits. While grieving for Octavius, he was as proud and possessive a parent as though Princess Amelia had been his first child. Amelia was to be the most turbulent and tempestuous of all the princesses. She would show a strength of will that would surprise and divide her doting relations, but as yet, beneath the ivory satin curtains of her cradle and under the coverlet embroidered with garden flowers, she was merely the latest royal baby in a long line.

  The birth of Amelia did not obliterate for her sisters the memory of their brothers Alfred and Octavius, but they did not dwell on the death of the latter, as their father did. Three months after Amelia was born, the King wrote to Lord Dartmouth that every day ‘increases the chasm I do feel for that beloved object [Octavius]’. The artist Benjamin West probably best soothed the King’s ‘woe’, if he astonished others, with a huge painting entitled The Apotheosis of Prince Octavius exhibited at the Royal Academy the year after that Prince’s death, and featuring Prince Alfred perched on a cloud and stretching out baby arms in welcome to his elder brother. Way below, an earthly landscape features Windsor Castle, from which Prince Octavius has presumably been launched.

  The King’s feelings of political frustration about the humiliating final stages of the American war had led him to consider abdicating the throne of England and retiring to Hanover. Amelia’s birth, following so swiftly on Octavius’s death and followed itself a month later by the firing of the Tower guns signalling peace between England and the new United States of America, was felt, and was always to be remembered within the family, as a time of hope and redemption.

  For many years Amelia was to repay this investment in her by being quite as beautiful and winning a child as her brother Octavius had ever been. With hindsight, it is possible to say that she was a child of whom too much was expected. ‘Our little sister is without exception one of the prettiest children that I have ever seen,’ the Princess Royal, in September,

  wrote with satisfaction to her brother William, who had been despatched the previous month to Hanover. (His parents had been horrified at his rough sailor’s manners and hoped that a course in his father’s Electorate would prepare him better to be an officer.) She regretted that, being absent, he would miss Amelia’s christening, and, with the material rather than spiritual comforts the day would bring in mind, wrote, ‘I wish that I could send you some of the plum cake in my letter … but that being impossible you must be satisfied with my wishes.’

  So great was the gap in age between the Princess Royal and Princess Augusta and their baby sister, that the elder sisters, at nearly seventeen and nearly fifteen, stood godparents – with their brother the Prince of Wales – when the Archbishop of Canterbury baptized the child on 17 September 1783 at the Chapel Royal, St James’s. Princess Elizabeth, whose debut had not yet been decided upon, looked on with her younger brothers and sisters. Princess Amelia was the fifteenth child of King George III and Queen Charlotte to be christened there – and, although no one knew it, she was to be the last. Before the chapel would again host a royal baptism, one or other of the children gathered around Amelia’s font must first take a bride or groom.

  Book Two: Experience 1783–1797

  5 Brothers and Sisters

  One thing was certain. Over the Queen of England’s dead body would her sister-in-law the Duchess of Brunswick succeed in the campaign she had recently resumed to secure the Princess Royal as a bride for her ill-favoured son, the Hereditary Prince of that duchy. ‘I would much rather keep all my daughters with me for ever than see them marry there,’ the Queen wrote to her brother Duke Charles in July 1783. The King’s sister Augusta – Duchess of Brunswick since 1780 – had recently married off her own eldest daughter Augusta, at the age of fifteen, to the Hereditary Prince of Württemberg. The King rejected his sister’s advances in November 1782, saying that he intended none of his daughters to leave home before they were seventeen. He later ignored the Duchess’s riposte, ‘Your princesses must be very different from all other girls, if they did not feel themselves unfortunate not to be established.’ The Princess Royal turned seventeen in September 1783, but her father made no plans to interrupt her round of education ‘reasonable occupation’ and entertainment with her sisters in England.

  Details of that round follow from the correspondence that Princess Augusta struck up with her brother William in Hanover: ‘We walk for two hours of a morning and our instructions last from eleven till two. Then I have an hour’s English reading from three to four and sometimes go out with Mama,’ wrote Princess Augusta on 6 November 1783. One imagines her sucking her pen and thinking what next to say. Inspiration came: ‘We went the other day to Baron Alvensleben [the Hanoverian Minister at the Court of St James’s] at Ham Common who gave us a very handsome breakfast. From thence we went to Hampton Court Palace, which I think very fine. Last Thursday we went to Kew, and we drove around Richmond Garden, where there are great alterations for the better. We always go to town with Papa and Mama, and then go to the drawing room and the play. Sometimes we play at cards in the evening, sometimes work, and draw.’ But Princess Augusta’s letter was not finished. William had sent her a ‘pin’ or brooch bearing a ‘shade’ or silhouette of his profile, Augusta had sent him some of her hair. ‘I cannot help once more thanking you for your dear little shade which I love being your gift and being yourself. You cannot have more love for my hair as you are so good to say you have than me for this pin.’

  Given time and practice, Princess Augusta would become an excellent and reliable source of family news. But the Queen did not now encourage her daughters to write to their brother. ‘Their mornings are so taken up with their different masters,’ she wrote
to William in February 1784, ‘that unless they make use of every moment, they hardly can find time for writing letters.’ And the Queen wrote to William of a promised gift: ‘I shall be glad to have your picture, but give me leave to advise you that your income is not that of your elder brothers.’

  William, for all his sisters’ good wishes, was failing to reap the advantage of the courses in Hanover which his father had hoped would teach him to become a useful officer. His governor, General Bude, commented on the Prince’s ‘great hauteur … extremely good opinion of himself’ and ‘lightness of character. All he hears in praise of his brother [Frederick] excites his jealousy, not his emulation.’ And a passion William developed for the daughter of his uncle Charles of Mecklenburg, ‘Lolo’ or Charlotte, ended with that Princess, on Queen Charlotte’s advice, being despatched to her maternal grandmother in Darmstadt to evade the importunate Prince.

  The elder princesses at home revelled in William’s attention, the Princess Royal writing on 30 March 1784: ‘I wish that the air balloon earrings that you sent-me could transport me through the air, that I might see you and Frederick, and that after having spent a few hours with you, I might return in the same way.’ Princess Augusta hoped, too, and for the same reason, that ‘the air balloons were brought to perfection’. ‘But she added, not knowing how famous one Vincenzo Lunardi would become within a few months, ‘I don’t think that will be very soon.’