Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  Princesses Mary and Sophia wrote letters in beginner’s French to their father recounting their daily doings at Windsor, Sophia writing: ‘I hope my cold gets better soon, because I do not dare to read with Mlle Montmollin, and that grieves me, because we read such nice things together.’ Mary, too, reports on her sister Sophia’s ‘rhume’ while giving an account of an evening at Mrs Delany’s house in Windsor: ‘We played dominoes and we were very well amused.’

  Mrs Delany had been installed by the King and Queen this autumn in a house at Windsor cheek by jowl with the Queen’s Lodge, and lived in a permanent daze at the condescension of the royal family who made a habit of stopping in unannounced to see her. The King, in particular, treated Mrs Delany’s house as an extension of his own. But her house also served as a useful retreat in the evening for his youngest daughters. Mrs Delany records in her diary Princess Mary’s good voice, and Sophia’s softer tones, as they played and sang Handel’s ‘Hallelujah’ chorus for her on one of these evenings. ‘My dear papa,’ Princess Sophia wrote again to the King in French,

  … You will hear with pleasure that my dear Mary has had the best lesson she ever had in her life with Mademoiselle Montmollin and I am doing the same, because I do not want to fall behind. On the contrary I shall always try harder and harder, and what I like above all is the history of the Greeks. My dear Mary wants to write to Mama this evening for the first time. I wrote yesterday so today she has her turn. Believe me, my dear Papa, I shall always be your respectful daughter, Sophie.

  The appetite for books that Mlle de Montmollin fostered in her charge was not to diminish. All her life, Princess Sophia was to be a voracious and adventurous reader in French and in English. Appropriately then she was the dedicatee of the best-selling children’s book, The Story of the Robins, which Mrs Sarah Trimmer, a prime mover in the Sunday-school movement and daughter of George Ill’s clerk of the works at Kew, published in 1786. But the younger princesses were not always studious. ‘We had great pleasure yesterday in seeing our brothers,’ Princess Sophia informed her father in a letter, ‘we played at “poule” [a French card game] and greatly enjoyed ourselves.’

  The younger princesses’ letters to their parents show how much they lived apart from them, sometimes with the younger princes at Kew, often at the Lower Lodge at Windsor – usually with Princess Amelia and Che Che, or Mrs Cheveley, too. When the Queen arranged for Mrs Siddons to read at the Queen’s Lodge in April 1785, it was for the benefit of her elder daughters. After John Adams, the first American Ambassador to Britain, had delivered his compliments and a bow on presentation to the Queen, and she had returned a curtsey, the Princess Royal and Princess Augusta, as well as the King and Queen, all spoke to him ‘very obligingly.’ A meeting in July of that year between the Queen and Mme de Genlis, whose books had so crucially guided the education of the elder princesses, did not lead the Queen to make any new experiments with her younger daughters’ upbringing. There was much that was done on the model of their elder sisters’ plan of education, and still more that was makeshift about the younger princesses’ education.

  These princesses were less disciplined than their elder sisters, as the history painter John Singleton Copley discovered when he embarked on an ambitious group portrait of the three children, complete with family pets. Years before, Johann Zoffany had painted a successful, if stiff, group of King, Queen and the elder princesses and princes in Van Dyck costume. Copley’s experience was quite different. ‘During the operation the children, the dogs, and the parrots became equally wearied,’ wrote an observer. ‘The persons who were appointed to attend them while sitting complained to the queen; the queen complained to the king and the king complained to Mr West, who had obtained the commission for Copley.’ The artist contrived to finish the work and, charming and pouting in a baby carriage with a fringed parasol, Princess Amelia steals the show. But Copley had had enough. He returned to history painting, and never took on another portrait commission.

  During an outbreak of whooping cough at Windsor in December 1785 which laid low all six princesses, and had attendants, physicians and parents running from one house to the other, Princess Mary, who was later to be very careful of her health, reported to her father, ‘I cough much more than my sisters, but I hope things will go better.’ In general, the princesses were in good health. Certainly Princess Elizabeth appeared so when, in front of Mrs Delany, the Queen made her daughter try on a pair of stays and rejected them as too small. The teenage Princess, mortified, insisted that they did fit, but her mother overruled her and sent for a larger pair.

  Princess Elizabeth had seemed, if annoyed, in perfect health on this occasion. But a few days later Mrs Delany was concerned, as all at Windsor were. Elizabeth was suddenly extremely ill – she was diagnosed first ‘with an inflammation on her lungs’, and then with severe ‘spasms’. Mrs Papendiek, the page’s wife, wrote that it was a ‘scrofulous abscess on her left side.’ Her parents feared for her life, the images of Alfred and, in particular, of Octavius’s sudden sickening in their minds, as well as the Dowager Princess of Wales’s Gotha blood. The Princess was bled twice in forty-eight hours. At an early January conference, the London doctors did not know what else to suggest. The New Year’s drawing room was abruptly cancelled, and it was thought that Elizabeth had only days to live. And then she recovered, to the bewilderment of her doctors, if to their relief.

  Had the royal family but known it, there was calamitous news of a different kind in another quarter. The Prince had married Mrs Fitzherbert in December 1785, having prevailed on her to return from France and listen to his serious proposal that they marry secretly but legally, at least in the eyes of her Church. The deed was done in extreme secrecy at Mrs Fitzherbert’s house in Park Street, Mayfair, on the 15 th of that month, under cover of an evening party. Nevertheless, the news crept out, and within months a set of well-informed cartoons with titles such as All for Love and Wife or No Wife, informed an avid public of the ceremony.

  After this clandestine marriage, Mrs Fitzherbert played the part of hostess at Carlton House, a house where, in Horace Walpole’s opinion, every ornament was ‘at a proper distance, not one too large, but all delicate and new’ – and all in the French taste. ‘How sick one shall be, after this chaste palace, of Mr Adam’s gingerbread and sippets of embroidery,’ wrote Walpole. The task of renovating and decorating the Prince’s grandmother’s house had been agreed by Parliament in 1784 at a figure of £30,000. Unfortunately, work on this palace of ‘august simplicity’ had to stop shortly after Mrs Fitzherbert became its mistress with costs running £220,000 over budget. The Prince had no funds, and his father refused to contribute.

  Abandoning London life – and debt – for the moment, the Prince retired to the seaside at Brighton in 1786, where he lived quietly with Mrs Fitzherbert, and occupied himself making essential repairs to a small ‘marine villa’ – destined, many years and many, many thousands of pounds later, to become Brighton Pavilion, that fabulous tortured product of Eastern opulence and princely extravagance.

  Meanwhile, although the sharp anxiety about Princess Elizabeth’s health had decreased, she was so weak that she spent much of this same year – 1786 – at Kew. In January, Queen Charlotte wrote of her being struck by a ‘new series of attacks’. And then again in August the Princess was at Kew, with Gouly attending her, and with Sir George Baker ministering to her. Her ‘long illness’ was never specifically diagnosed, but, involving spasms and supposedly a scrofulous abscess, it was probably tubercular in origin. The rumours that had circulated in the old Dowager Princess of Wales’s life, that she had brought from her native Saxe-Gotha a ‘king’s evil’ prevalent in that family – tuberculosis of the lungs – had been given weight not only by the deaths of her own children and by a mysterious illness the King suffered in 1765, but by the deaths of Prince Alfred and Prince Octavius. The royal family was by now widely held to have an ‘hereditary weakness in the lungs’ and several of the children had besides a well-dev
eloped tendency to violent spasms.

  Elizabeth was not to be free from suffering entirely for another two years, and she was to write long afterwards in a Book of Common Prayer, ‘This prayer book was given me by General Gouldsworthy in 1786, during my great illness, and has ever proved my truest and most comforting friend in all my distresses.’ She also spoke feelingly of care administered by the General’s sister Miss Gouldsworthy: ‘She never was away from me any part of the day and she was so very good as to have a chaise longue brought into the room that she might sleep by me. I always loved her extremely, but my illnesses have made me love her and esteem her ten times more.’

  Rumours later spread that during this time – and in a later year – Elizabeth gave birth to not one but two children, and that the father was a royal page called George Ramus, whom she married. William or ‘Billy’ Ramus, the most likely candidate, was page in several households at Kew over a number of years, and there were others of his family in royal employment too, but no George. There seems no substance to the story which includes the King being present at the wedding. It probably arose after one of Billy’s family was dismissed, and can itself be dismissed.

  The year at Kew away from her family was in many ways formative for this third Princess, this seventh child. Not only was Elizabeth away from her elder sisters, but even her three noisy younger brothers, and the governors and tutors who tried to control them, were no longer there. In July 1786 the three younger princes were ordered abroad by their father to the University of Gottingen near Hanover, where they were to learn German and pursue a military education. As a result Kew was a haven of peace, an ideal place for steady study, and Princess Elizabeth always spoke with gratitude of the Smelts, with whom she spent a great deal of time there. Leonard Smelt, the elder princes’ former sub-governor, had settled at Kew, with his wife following his resignation, and remained a royal favourite. He and his wife encouraged Elizabeth in a ‘course of reading’ that occupied her for much of the year. Moreover, she had Mr Smelt, a noted amateur artist, to encourage her in her drawing. And the festoons of painted roses that decorate Queen Charlotte’s teahouse in the grounds of Kew Gardens, by repute the work of Princess Elizabeth, and the Hogarth prints varnished on its walls may have been produced in this year away from ordinary occupations.

  At the beginning of July 1786, with the departure of their brothers for Gottingen, the princesses had a new correspondence to begin. Princess Augusta wrote to Prince Augustus soon after he had set off, hoping that the seasickness he had suffered would not make him give up his thoughts of being a sailor. ‘I beg if you are so good as to answer this letter that you will let me have some account of Frederick and of Edward, for I shall be more inclined to believe what you and your brothers say about him than anybody else …’ She wanted to hear ‘if you are pleased and happy at Gottingen, in short every particular concerning you. You will think me certainly mad to be so inquisitive but every little thing that happens to you is most interesting to me. I forgot to tell you that Mrs Oaks has dressed us some excellent spinach and I could not help mentioning it as I know she is a great favourite of yours.’

  The Princess Royal gave advice on how her brother could prevent the tinnitus of which he complained:

  I wish that you could find some means to stop your ears for to prevent your hearing the variety of false sounds of which you complain. Perhaps custom may use you to them, but, if it has not that effect, I should advise your keeping a canary bird which will out-scream all the other noises. Pray in your next letter let me know how you like German. I hope that when you have studied this language long enough for to understand what you read you will read Gellert. His works will do you and every body that reads them good. He is a favourite author of mine.

  While their brothers began on an extensive curriculum, the Princess Royal turned to what really interested her this year, her expanding circle of female friends. She told Augustus: ‘the Miss Howes are gone into the country, therefore I cannot give them their message that you send them. A fortnight ago I spent a charming evening with them. They left London the next day and I am afraid that we shall not meet for two months.’ Besides Miss Mary and Miss Louisa, Lord Howe’s daughters, there were other new female friends named by the Princess Royal in these letters. ‘Lady Harriot Elliot [Lord Chatham’s daughter, recently married and now expecting a baby] in her present situation cannot venture to come to Kew which prevents my having the pleasure to see her, but I hope that we shall meet in November, for she will then come to London and, I hope, be able to come frequently to the Queen’s House.’

  In the meantime, on 5 August 1786 the King appeared in his wife’s dressing room at the Queen’s House with an announcement that dumb-founded her and their two eldest daughters who were with her: ‘Here I am safe and well as you see, but I have very narrowly escaped being stabbed.’ Lady Harcourt received an account of what had prompted this declaration from her sister-in-law, Mrs Harcourt, who had the tale ‘exactly and with a candour that does him honour’ from the King. The King had alighted earlier that day at St James’s, and made to take from a woman standing there a petition she held out to him. Upon which she drew a knife and tried to drive it through his side.

  He said that if he had not happened to have seen the woman preparing her petition, and from her eagerness kept his eyes fixed on her he could not have escaped, for she was close to him, and on her drawing the knife from the paper he stepped back. That she aimed a second blow, but was caught by the Guard, and a servant wrested the knife from her hand. It was a large servant’s eating-knife with a horn handle, made sharp on both sides … he is not sure whether it struck against him or not, but he thinks it did not. He said he called to them directly to take the knife from her but not to hurt the woman, for he was not hurt.

  The would-be assassin, Margaret Nicolson, ‘lived servant with Mrs Rice’, Mrs Harcourt heard, and had ‘left her … from being wrong in her mind. She is so certainly on this subject, and Monro [Dr John Monro, superintendent of the lunatic asylum known as Bedlam] declares her so.’

  The thanks given for the King’s escape included an address from the senate of Oxford University: ‘upon the miraculous escape that he had of being murdered by that wicked mad woman’, as the Princess Royal put it, ‘who, if she had succeeded in her horrid attempt would have made us the most wretched family in the world. But providence who watches over all things was pleased most mercifully to preserve the life of the best of kings and of fathers.’ Princess Augusta described to her brother Augustus the royal family’s stay at Nuneham this year, which preceded the solemn ceremony at Oxford: ‘I was particularly pleased with the sermon, which was preached by Lord Harcourt’s chaplain Mr Hagget … Good God! My dear Augustus how miserable how abject and how low should we have been thrown if… we had had such an unheard of misfortune.’

  Princess Elizabeth, upon recovery from her ‘great illness’, was filled with energy, and wrote in November 1786 to Augustus: ‘Having been some length of time separated from all the family, as well as masters, I now must make up for the time I have been without them.’ She had begun to learn the harpsichord, and wished to sing the praises of London now as well as Kew: ‘never has a winter begun more delightfully for me than this one has. I trust in God it will continue so. The constant kindness and affection I receive from Papa and Mamma adds very greatly to it and all the amusements they can think of for us, we are always sure of having.’ Still occupied with her studies, she wrote to Augustus, five months later, ‘It has not been in my power to write for some time as the day passes very quickly with all my different employments. So that trying to perfect myself in everything, I hope, will plead my excuse which, if I did set about to do, must be very long.’

  The Princess Royal was less contented. ‘My dearest Augustus,’ she wrote in the new year of 1787,

  I have been very much mortified by a provoking rash, which prevented my being at the birthday. I had the last month worked very hard for to complete four fans and two muffs
which were intended for that day. On the Monday I finished everything expecting with the rest of the family to go to London on the Tuesday but helas, when I was a going to get up, I was so red that it would have been dangerous to have moved me. I therefore remained at Windsor, which I shall leave next Monday if no fresh misfortune prevents my going to London.

  She took some comfort in the fact of ‘several other young ladies who have been prevented going to the birthday, Lady Charlotte Bertie by a fever, Lady Frances Bruce by a cold, Miss Howes by being at Bath. The eldest of them having a complaint in her stomach has been ordered to spend six weeks at those wells. I am very sorry for it, as it prevents my enjoying their company, particularly that of little Mary, who you know is a great friend of mine, and was that of poor Lady Harriot.’ (Lady Harriot Elliot had, to the horror of the Princess Royal and friends – and as a warning that there were perils as well as pleasures consequent on marriage – recently, and very soon after her marriage, died in childbirth.)

  She continued, in her old admonitory style: ‘Pray, do you understand German enough yet to read plays? For if you do, that is the most likely way to make you learn to speak it tant bien que mal but however you must walk before one runs … Pray give my love to my brothers and believe me your ever affectionate sister, Charlotte Augusta Matilda…’

  ‘Since I wrote last, I have had the pleasure to spend many evenings with dear Miss Mary Howe,’ the Princess Royal recorded soon after, ‘who I think more charming than ever.’ But Miss Howe was cast down. ‘She is very low at the thoughts of parting from her sister, Miss Louisa, who is going to be married to Lord Altamont, an Irish peer of great fortune.’ Princess Elizabeth, two months later, added to this picture of sisters parted by the demands of matrimony, not a future apparently in prospect for the princesses themselves: ‘Louisa Howe is not as yet concluded with Lord Altamont, but will be soon. She is prettier than ever. Her sisters are miserable at the thought of parting with her, particularly Mary, who has always lived with her ever since she was born and constantly slept in the same room. But they have the pleasure of thinking that she will be perfectly happy, as everybody gives him the best of characters.’