Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  Like her father, the Princess Royal was incapable of writing without casting a damper on things, and her letter had begun, ‘My dear William, I am very happy to hear from the Queen that you pass your time pleasantly at Hanover. Perhaps you may wonder that, knowing this, I should be selfish enough to wish you to be here, where you would certainly not enjoy as many amusements. But, however, there are some pleasures which I do not doubt would afford you much satisfaction.’ And she wrote of Mary and Sophia attending the opera for the first time the night before, ‘they were very much entertained with the dancing.’

  While the schoolroom – with its lessons in history, geography and needlework – was still the usual province of the younger princesses Mary and Sophia, the three eldest were much with their parents. Their ‘instructions’ came more and more often from art masters and music masters, and from those among them who had some speciality or ‘fancy work’ to offer – painting on velvet, etching, sculpting in wax or in clay, and even ‘blotting’, the art of creating landscapes out of ink blots. And of course the princesses continued to draw – daily, nightly. Mrs Delany attests to them sitting with their mother round a large table after dinner with ‘books, work, pencils and paper’ spread out. The Queen, always on the alert for dispelling ‘oisiveté’ or leisure time with ‘reasonable occupation’ for her daughters, made sure that they pursued these studies as seriously as though their lives depended on it.

  The Princess Royal etched her image of Prince Octavius in 1785, copying a copy by her drawing master, John Gresse, of the Gainsborough original. In addition, she made five etchings of languorous ladies, entided The Five Senses, which she copied from drawings by Benjamin West, apparently made for her specific use. (West was everywhere at Windsor – even called in, when the Queen and her daughters were with their hairdresser at the Lodge, to give his opinion of the arrangement of jewels in their hair.) In the King’s libraries in London, Kew and Windsor were remarkable sets of drawings by artists ranging from Leonardo da Vinci to Piazzetta, and even prints by John Hamilton Mortimer, who specialized in theatrical portrait heads. With this splendid resource to hand, and with the guidance of John Gresse, the princesses copied the heads of philosophers, of peasant children and of turbaned Saracens. Princess Elizabeth even produced much later a portrait of Lady Charlotte Finch, copying the image from an earlier miniature.

  Just as at Kew, like their mother and the other ladies of the household, the princesses did not ‘dress’ till dinner at Windsor, but wore morning gowns. Thus on a visit to Bulstrode in 1783 all five princesses, and the other ladies of the party, wore ‘white muslin polonaises, white chip hats, with white feathers.’ The Queen alone was distinguished by a black hat and cloak. Cloaks and greatcoats were useful when the need came to broach the great outdoors, or even just the wind in the passages at Windsor. Even after the princesses had ‘dressed’, they did not always appear in splendour. On an evening visit in 1779 to Bulstrode they wore, like their mother and her ladies, ‘blue tabby, with white satin puckered petticoats, with a blue border, and their heads quite low.’ Mrs Delany noted on a visit to the Queen’s Lodge in the autumn of 1783: ‘All the royal family were dressed in a uniform for the demi-saison, of a violet blue armozine, with gauze aprons, etc’ The Queen was distinguished by ‘the addition of a great many fine pearls.’

  For high days and holidays, and for appearances in public – at Court, at the theatre, at the Ancient Music concerts of which the King and Queen were so fond – the princesses were dressed distinctively, either exactly alike or in the same dress in different colours. As early as the Princess Royal’s thirteenth birthday, for instance, she was in ‘deep orange or scarlet’ – by candlelight, Mrs Delany could not distinguish which – with Princess Augusta in pink and Elizabeth in blue. In addition their dress generally referred to or replicated that of their mother’s grander production.

  Augusta wrote of attending five oratorios in Lent 1784 with her mother ‘and once to see Mrs Abington the famous comic actress.’ Dresses were needed for all such public occasions, as well as for Court appearances, and the Queen and her milliners in consultation at the Queen’s House generally chose the cloth for the princesses. The princesses had their own part to play, choosing trimmings, painting fans and buying, with their pin money, cheap ornamental jewellery. But the Queen experienced financial woes, which she described to her brother Charles: ‘My expenses with five daughters, of whom the oldest appear at Court and are always with us in public, require all the economy imaginable. A sum immense. Their masters, servants and wardrobes above all consume a considerable sum’ – the last item, she estimated, between £1,500 and £2,000 pounds a quarter.

  Although the King was to add £8,000 annually to the Queen’s income of £50,000 beginning in August 1786, the following month she presented her Lord Chamberlain with a paper her Treasurer, Lord Guilford, had given her at the end of July, showing a shortfall of £11,000 to be paid. When the King enquired about these debts, the Lord Chamberlain ‘told him it was likely to be worse rather than better as the Princesses grew up.’ On Princess Mary and Sophia at that date the Queen reckoned to spend a thousand pounds each a year, and even on Princess Amelia, who was then just three, £500. Later Princess Mary was to confirm that she and Sophia had a thousand a year, but she added that her three elder sisters received double that sum. Where possible, the Queen kept the younger children in clothes made by country dressmakers, and their food was plain. But otherwise she appears to have made no economies. Her instinct was to give her children – and especially her elder daughters – the very best, particularly where their education was concerned.

  The Queen found educational opportunities even where others saw only pleasure. At the theatre in 1783 the royal family thrilled – like the rest of the theatre-going public – to Mrs Sarah Siddons’s displays of disdain and indignation in her great role as The Mourning Bride. ‘It was worth the trouble of a day’s journey to see her but walk down the stage,’ wrote one admirer. But then the Queen summoned the tragedienne, as she had once summoned David Garrick, to give readings at the Queen’s House. Mrs Siddons was too stately to feel much awe as she waited to perform in her sacque, hoop, double ruffles and lappets. She reasoned that she was in her natural element, as she had frequently ‘personated’ queens on the stage. But the appearance of the King on one occasion, pushing Amelia in her cane baby chair, and the child, released, showing an interest in the flowers at her bosom did help the situation. ‘What a beautiful child. How I long to kiss her,’ Mrs Siddons said aloud. But young Amelia had her own ideas, and ‘instantly held her little hand out to be kissed, so early had she learnt the lessons of Royalty.’

  Garrick too had been disconcerted by the royal family’s lack of expression – and lack of applause – when he read to them, but Mrs Siddons was more confident. With queenly grace she wrote later, ‘Their Majesties were the most gratifying of audiences, because the most marvellously attentive.’ Her reward was to be appointed ‘reading preceptress’ to the princesses – she was, according to Mrs Papendiek, the diarist wife of a royal page, appointed to ‘teach the two youngest princesses to read and enunciate’ – although the post was ‘without emolument.’ At any rate, she read plays to the royal family on a regular basis at the Queen’s House, and performances from Mrs Siddons at Windsor became an established treat for the princesses on their birthdays. The King and Queen generally commissioned the great actress, with scant regard for her art, to enact ‘sentimental comedy.’

  The three eldest princesses were becoming a familiar sight in public, in attendance on their parents – all ‘uncommonly handsome, each in their different way’, according to one observer: ‘The Princess Royal for figure, the Princess Augusta for countenance, and the Princess Elizabeth for face.’ The Prince of Wales had the royal favourite, Gainsborough, paint them as a group this summer – for the salon at his new palace, Carlton House. When exhibited by the painter, the princesses’ polite faces – masks of impersonal beauty – fascinated the pu
blic. Only their different accessories hinted at different personalities and tastes. The public could choose to see the images again when Gainsborough showed the painting two years later. The Carlton House salon, for which the painting was destined, was not yet ready to receive either real-life or painted princesses.

  The Prince of Wales was proving, like his brother William, a less than tractable son. At the general election in March 1784, when the Duchess of Devonshire famously kissed a butcher to secure his vote for the Whig candidate Charles James Fox, the young Prince gave a party to celebrate the victory that followed. An introduction to a Catholic widow, Maria Fitzherbert – an intimate of the Duchess of Devonshire – sealed the callow Prince’s fate. He became obsessed, the plaything of his emotions – in which frustration predominated, when Mrs Fitzherbert refused to become his mistress. He had taken no notice of expense in rebuilding Carlton House. In pursuing a Catholic with extravagant offers of marriage, as he now did, he took no notice of two distinct acts of Parliament which forbade any such activity.

  Mrs Fitzherbert, with great good sense, paid little attention to the Prince’s offers of marriage, until startled into consent after the frustrated Prince stabbed himself. The play-actor Prince so frightened his lady-love with groans and cosmetic pallor that she agreed to have a ring placed on her finger – the Duchess of Devonshire provided it. Next day Mrs Fitzherbert fled – and did not stop till she reached the comparative safety of Aix-la-Chapelle.

  Mrs Fitzherbert was wise to depart. The ring-giving, though scarcely a contract of marriage, had come too close to an act – namely, the heir apparent’s marriage to a Catholic and without his father’s permission – which would have been illegal on two counts. Had the couple married, by the Act of Succession of 1689, which forbade the Prince’s marriage to a Catholic, and by the 1772 Royal Marriages Act, which invalidated his marriage without his father’s permission, the Prince would have forfeited his place in the succession. As matters stood, no harm had come to the throne from the Prince’s theatricals. But when, as he had to, he revealed his growing debts to his father, the King, who had heard all about his bedroom theatricals and was already furious with him, was disinclined to help. As a result of all this, the princesses saw little of their eldest brother at this time.

  The King was barely more pleased with William, writing in August 1784 that, with thirteen children, he could not afford to pay any of the Prince’s further debts. He despatched Prince Edward, a son of whom he had higher hopes, to join that paragon Prince Frederick in Hanover. With great economy the ship that took Edward across the North Sea to Hamburg in May 1785 found both Frederick – newly created Duke of York and Albany – and William waiting there. The Duke of York was to lead Edward into good ways at Hanover, reprobate William was to board the ship and set sail for the West Indies.

  In their letters to their brothers abroad, the princesses did not mention a very cautious offer of marriage that was aired in the summer of 1785. Some at the Court of Denmark were eager to secure ‘a Princess of England’ as a bride for their cousin the Prince Royal of that important state, but they had heard at St Petersburg ‘that the King of England would not consent to send any of the English princesses to Denmark’. Hugh Elliot, the British Minister at Copenhagen, joined in the intrigue with zest and journeyed to London in June expressly to discover the truth of this.

  The Prince Royal was willing to break off ‘other engagements’ that were being considered in favour of an English bride, he announced. But the King was dismissive of the proposal: ‘After the treatment my late sister received, no one in my house can be desirous of the alliance.’ (The Crown Prince was, of course, the product of that unhappy marriage between King George Ill’s sister Caroline and King Christian VII which had seen that Queen exiled and living out the last few years of a short life under her brother’s protection in Germany.) The King firmly discouraged ‘all negotiation … till time may show to both Courts that it would be right to think of it’, which would not be before the Prince Royal succeeded his father. But the proposal, and especially the Danish Court’s apparent preference for Princess Augusta over her elder sister, caused a stir in the family circle. Even a year later, M. Guiffardiere, who took liberties others did not dare to, made Princess Augusta blush with some teasing references to her imaginary fondness for the plays of a particular country, which, it emerged, was Denmark. ‘How can you be such a fool!’ was her response.

  Princess Augusta was still happy at home with her sisters – and ‘doted on’ the company of her younger brothers Ernest, Augustus and Adolphus. Adolphus, benevolent if not blessed with brains, was a general favourite. Augustus, intelligent and bookish, had romantic aspirations to join the navy, although he suffered attacks of asthma. And handsome, boisterous Ernest was quite as entertaining and unmanageable as he had been as a child. The King arranged, rather than promoted, the education of these younger princes, just as the Queen did not lavish on the education and upbringing of the younger princesses the thought and care that she had given, and that she continued to give, despite their advancing ages, to that of their elders.

  Prince Ernest was to claim of their life at Kew, ‘we used to sup alone and be as lonely as monks.’ But their preceptors were on the whole young and cheerful, and he exaggerated. Everyone in the royal household enjoyed the company of the younger princes, certain in the knowledge that they would soon be following their elder brothers abroad. Princess Augusta gives a flavour of the princesses’ relationships with these younger brothers in an account she wrote of a visit in 1785 to Nuneham Courtenay, a magnificent country villa near Oxford and home of the Harcourts, one of the few ‘fashionable’ couples to hold key positions at Court.

  The royal party, including the King and Queen, the three eldest princesses and Princes Ernest, Augustus and Adolphus with a tutor, set out in three chaises and a coach from Windsor at seven in the morning so as to be at Nuneham for breakfast. ‘A very good one indeed!’ commented Augusta, ‘and I think I was one of them who relished it the most, though I had eaten a sandwich before with the greatest appetite …’ That misdemeanour was ‘my sisters’ fault’, Augusta wrote in exculpation, ‘for they ordered that some might be put in the carriage’.

  Only a day’s visit was planned, but in the interval before dinner in the octagon room Lord Harcourt mentioned to the King that ‘he had a private key of Christ Church Walk, and that he could see Oxford without the least trouble … and that if his Majesty would like to make Nuneham his inn, it would make the owners of it very happy.’ Princess Augusta reported her father’s reply, ‘Why, Lord Harcourt, it’s very tempting,’ and went on:

  Mamma, my brother, sister, and myself (not by far the least delighted of the family) kept our wishful eyes upon the King, who fixed his upon Mamma; and upon her saying, ‘I will do as you please,’ he said, ‘Well, with all my heart let us stay’. During all this conversation, I think our countenances were so curiously ridiculous, and I don’t doubt that our soliloquies were as much so, that anybody must have laughed if they had looked on us, without knowing why we looked ‘so strange, so wondrous strange’. For my part, I know I could not refrain from saying, ‘And O ye Ministers of Heaven protect me! For I shall be in despair if we do not stay.’ However I was so completely happy when I found we did not go back till the next day, that my spirits rose mountains high in half a second. ‘Thank you, my dear Lady Harcourt,’ ‘God bless you, Lord Harcourt, heaven preserve you both’, ‘You are the very best people in the Kingdom after Papa and Mamma’. These were the sayings for the rest of the day.

  Princess Augusta’s account of the royal children’s conversation on the subject of the bedrooms in the fashionable mansion they were to inhabit is compelling.

  ‘Dear Augustus’ (said Ernest), ‘think how amazing good of Lord Harcourt; he has promised me that I shall sleep alone. I have seen my room, it has a yellow damask bed. I have got a toilette too, with fine japan boxes on it. Beautiful Lady Jersey has that room when she is here. I suppose it is
a great favour to let me have it; I fancy strangers in general are not allowed to sleep in it …’

  ‘Say what you please’ (says Augustus), ‘Lord Harcourt has given me a much better room. I have got a fine view out of the window; and what signifies a damask bed when one has not a fine view. Besides, I am next room to Co Co [Lady Caroline Waldegrave]; and I shall knock against the wall and keep her awake all night.’

  (Adolphus), ‘I suppose you none of you have seen my room, I have got a tent bed in it; I should have you dare speak against a tent bed. It puts me in mind already that when I am an officer, and that I am encamped against an enemy, I shall have one then.’

  ‘Well,’ cries Princess Royal, ‘mine is a charming room; the dear Duchess of Ancaster sleeps in it when she is here; I shall tell her of it when I see her. I am to take care of Augusta tonight, she sleeps in my dressing room.’

  ‘Your dressing room, madam! Your nonsense,’ said I, ‘I think it the best room; for I can see into dear Lady Harcourt’s passage, and maybe I shall see her in it tomorrow morning. Lord, how happy I am to get a little look of her whenever I can.’

  ‘So we went on all day long,’ concluded Princess Augusta, ‘and I am sure we shall never hear the last of it, it was the most perfect thing that was ever known.’

  The younger princesses had remained at Windsor during this foray under the eye of Mlle Charlotte Salomé de Montmollin, their new French governess, who had previously been briefly with the princesses’ cousins, the Württemberg children. She was, according to a contemporary, ‘one of the best and finest work-women to be met with’, and taught Princess Mary and Princess Sophia, and in due course their sister Amelia, ‘a thousand ingenious uses of the needle’. Among the accomplishments they accrued were fancy needlework, beadwork and the netting of silk purses. Miss Jane Gomm, a governess last employed in Prussia, who had been educated in St Petersburg, joined them in 1786 as English teacher, and supervised the rest of their education.