by Flora Fraser
Princess Augusta was the brothers’ most faithful correspondent, giving them news of each other now that they were separated. She wrote to Prince Augustus at Gottingen in April 1787: ‘I thank you for your pretty letter and in return send you a shade of your humble servant, which I fancy you will find like from the forehead to the upper lip. I kiss that, and then the chin is like, for I must say that I don’t think that pouting lip like mine, though mine is nearly as thick as Edward’s.’ She added, having good information from Hanover, ‘By the by I understand that Edward is grown quite a giant. If so, I hope he will never be a grenadier or else he will be quite a frightful sight. Pray send me your shade and I shall love it as much as your sketch, which I would not part with for the whole world. I hope you are still determined to go to sea. It is the finest profession in the world and you are made for it.’ But for all her encouragement, Prince Augustus’s severe asthma was to put an end to those dreams.
‘I had a letter from dear William last week,’ the newsletter went on.
He is at the island of Nevis in the West Indies. He says he is happy as the day is long and that the Pegasus is his whole and sole delight and pleasure. He has a little band of music that serves to make his ship’s company dance, and he says, ‘I doat to see my men happy.’ Everybody speaks well of him and I believe him, as I always did, a very hearty good honest English tar, liking better a hammock than a bed and plain salt beef than all the fine dishes and luxury that townspeople fare upon. He always wears his uniform and curls, and yet looks as well dressed, and more of a man, than any of the fashionable powder monkeys, and talks of affectation in a man as the one thing in the world that takes the same effect upon him as an emetic. God bless you my dear boy, believe me your affectionate sister and friend, Augusta Sophia. I have got so bad a headache, I can hardly see, so can write no more.
Augusta continued a fluent correspondent, sending off descriptions of scenes at home that would appeal to or interest her brothers, including an account of a royal doctor’s lingering death after he attended her and her sisters for measles:
Poor Sir Richard Jebb lived just long enough to see us all in a recovering state, but was so ill when he attended us and so very weak, that he was very near dying at Windsor and was in that state when he left us, that he was obliged to lay on mattresses in his coach and to go through the park, as he could not bear the shaking of the stones. We did not see him for some days before he went away, he was so thoroughly adying. But as we were on the same floor, we heard constantly how he was. And nothing gave him any pleasure but when us sick ones either sent to enquire after him – or that the last people he attended were the King’s children. For he loved nothing so much as Papa. He quitted Windsor on the Thursday and died the Tuesday after, much regretted by everybody who knew him.
The princesses’ return to health coincided with the excitement of their brother Frederick’s arrival at Windsor on 2 August 1787, after six years away in Germany. ‘Joy to great Caesar!’ wrote Princess Augusta. ‘Our dear dear Frederick just arrived this afternoon when we were at dinner. I am overjoyed to see him! Quite quite drunk with joy and spirits but not spiritual liquors.’ While the reprobate Prince of Wales’s birthday on 12 August went unmarked for the first time by cannon fire at Windsor, four days later the King and Queen gave a great ball there for his younger brother, the Duke of York. Princess Elizabeth for one enjoyed it so much that she wished to stay on, but ‘as everyone went away I could not possibly stay to dance capers alone so I also returned to bed’. But all the King’s pleasure in his second son’s arrival in England and in his military successes abroad was to be swiftly spoilt by the alacrity with which he joined the Prince of Wales’s parties of pleasure at Newmarket and elsewhere.
Augusta had another source of satisfaction. Her father this year permitted her to have a door broken through from her bedroom at Windsor to the little dressing room on the stair, so that she had two rooms. ‘I have two nice bookcases on each side of the chimney and my harpsichord so that altogether I am more comfortably lodged than I can express.’ She was learning the harpsichord, like her sister Elizabeth, with Charles Horn, a new music master. She enjoyed it so much that she had begun composing, and a minuet and a march were already to her credit. ‘You see what an enemy to mankind luxury is. I have been seven years at Windsor with only one room, and now that I have two, I find the total impossibility of ever submitting to live in one again …’ she wrote. There was a very ‘neat’ wallpaper in her new apartments and her friends had done many pretty drawings. But as she told her brother Augustus in August, the shade or silhouette he had just sent her had pride of place. It was ‘hung up just over against where I now sit’, she informed him, and she thought it ‘very like … I look at it as often as I come in and go out of my room and constantly when I am in it.’
News later that month that Prince Augustus was suffering from ‘another attack’ of his ‘terrible complaint’ – asthma – led his sister to write again: by way of cheering the invalid, she described a recent family outing to Hampton Court. ‘We did not go into the old straight walks that are seen from the windows for they are like the oldest part of Kensington Garden, but we went to the maze or labyrinth … It is certainly the most tantalizing thing I ever saw for I thought myself near out of it often. And then the shortest turn brought us far from the end of it. Old Toothacker the foreman is still there. I assure you he makes a very venerable appearance in the old gardens for now he has left off his wig and wears his own hair which is quite grey. It improves his looks very much.’
Royal joined in the chorus of pleasure at the Duke of York’s return, but wrote less happily to Augustus of her lot, which included going to the Ancient Music concerts which specialized in Handel’s music: ‘I think that my dislike for music rather increases.’ However, she continued to draw a great deal and looked on it as one of the most entertaining ways of employing herself. ‘This summer my drawing has not gone on as well as usual, on account of my having been forbid during three months after the measles to apply my eyes to anything.’ But she had now begun again and hoped to make up for lost time. ‘Mama has been so good to me,’ she wrote, ‘that she has now taken Miss Meen, a flower painter, to instruct me till we leave the country in colouring flowers. I continue every Monday heads with Gresse. Indeed if I do not come on I must be wanting in capacity, for I have every advantage and therefore no excuse but my own stupidity if I do not improve.’
At least reports of the younger princes were better. ‘The other young fry at Gottingen are the happiest of beings: they constantly write to me of the different entertainments they have both at Gottingen and Rotenburg,’ Augusta told William. Prince Edward had been despatched, after two years in Germany, to university in Geneva with his governor, General Wangenheim. She heard that ‘as he is exceedingly attached to his profession, he preferred Hanover’, a centre of military excellence. ‘But he soon made up his mind to quit it as it was by the King’s desire.’
The princesses’ daily round continued. Errands for their mother brought the elder princesses into the backstairs sphere, to be commented on by the author Fanny Burney, who for five years had a position as second keeper of the robes to their mother. The Princess Royal brought Miss Burney the Queen’s snuffbox to be filled and ‘took her leave with as elegant civility of manner as if parting with another Queen’s daughter’. If the Princess Royal’s regal manner disconcerted Miss Burney, she praised Princess Augusta, as did others, for the easy friendship she showed all the attendants in the house. When Miss Burney gave a workbox to Augusta’s wardrobe woman to put on the Princess’s table on her birthday, the courtier received her reward. She was led by none other than the Queen into Augusta’s room, where the Princess was seated at her desk writing letters and was thanked for ‘the little cadeau’ in ‘a manner the most pleasing’. Princess Elizabeth came asking Fanny’s superior, Mrs Schwellenberg, to send a basin of tea into the music room for Mrs Delany, and all the attendants in the tearoom ‘rose and retreated a
few paces backward with looks of high respect’. But Miss Burney rather noticed Princess Elizabeth’s bluntness – which she prided herself on: ‘Miss Burney, I hope you hate snuff? I hope you do, for I hate it of all things in the world.’
Nor were the younger princesses exempt from Miss Burney’s scrutiny. Princess Sophia, ‘curtseying and colouring’, came looking for her mother’s dog Badine, which the Queen was accustomed to leave in Miss Burney’s care while she was at early prayers. The author begged permission to carry the basket to the Queen’s room, but Princess Sophia insisted on taking it herself, ‘with a mingled modesty and good breeding extremely striking in one so young’. Princess Mary Miss Burney encountered earlier the same morning in the Queen’s Lodge when the Princess was ‘capering upstairs to her elder sisters’. She ‘instantly stopped and then, coming up … enquired how her mother’s attendant did, with all the elegant composure of a woman of maturest age’. Miss Burney had already seen how three-year-old Princess Amelia could be ‘decorous and dignified when called upon to act en princesse to any strangers, as if conscious of her high rank, and the importance of condescendingly sustaining it’. Now she reflected: ‘Amazingly well are all these children brought up. The readiness and the grace of their civilities, even in the midst of their happiest wildnesses and freedom, are at once a surprise and a charm to all who see them.’ But the princesses were also trained to be civil when in the midst of their wildest misery.
Miss Burney saw how the Princess Royal performed many secretarial tasks for her mother, including, on one occasion, efficiently labelling a ‘new collection of German books, just sent over’, while keeping up a conversation. In the spring of 1788, the Queen wrote to her botanical mentor, Lord Bute, offering him ‘a sight of the beginning of an herbal from impressions on black paper’. The Princess Royal and she together, she explained, meant to attempt this work of pressing plants – ‘not only the leaves, but the flowers and stalks, which I believe had not been done before with any success’. With the summer before them, the Queen declared blithely, and with the assistance of Mr Aiton, the royal gardener, she hoped to take her specimens ‘quite in the botanical way’.
With the encouragement of Sir Joseph Banks, director of the royal gardens at Kew, and of the head gardener there, the Princess Royal had already begun to copy, with growing skill, nature in the form of botanical specimens. She began with a wavering painting of a lily. Soon she was drawing parts of the flower as well, and writing Latin inscriptions beneath flower paintings, copied from the engravings illustrating John Miller’s An Illustration of the Sexual System of Linnaeus. ‘There is not a plant in the Gardens of Kew … but has either been drawn by her gracious Majesty, or some of the Princesses, with a grace and skill which reflect on these personages the highest honour,’ wrote the author of The New Illustration of the Sexual System of Linnaeus a decade later. Mrs Delany’s astonishing flower mosaics cut from paper were a shining example. And no doubt Lady Charlotte Finch, who took up botany, and Miss Hamilton, who was an enthusiast, encouraged their work. Confirming royal interest in this new branch of the natural sciences, the Queen, in 1784, had accepted the dedication of Lord Bute’s Botanical Tables: ‘I am much flattered to be thought capable of so rational, beautiful and enticing amusement, and shall make it my endeavour not to forfeit his good opinion by pursuing this study steadily, as I am persuaded this botanical book will more than encourage me in doing it.’
She appointed the Princess Royal her assistant in the spring of 1788, as the Princess’s ‘natural steadiness never makes her shun labour or difficulty’. She added, ‘I do not mean any reflection upon my other daughters, for all are equally amiable in their different ways.’ But she and Royal had left the initial execution to M. Deluc: ‘The specimens of plants being rather large, it requires more strength than my arms will afford, but in the smaller kind I constantly assist.’
How long would the Princess Royal be content to act as her mother’s secretary and ‘scholar’? She was never at her best in her mother’s company. Furthermore one observer described her as ‘born to preside’, which she could certainly never do at her mother’s Court. ‘Timidity, with a want of affectionate confidence in the Queen’s commands and wishes, always brought her Royal Highness forward as ill at ease,’ wrote another courtier, ‘while out of the Queen’s presence she was a different being.’ Mrs William Harcourt, Lady Harcourt’s sister-in-law, added: ‘Princess Royal has excessive sensibility, a great sense of injury, a great sense of her own situation, much timidity: without wanting resolution, she wants presence of mind, from the extreme quickness of her feelings, which show themselves in her perpetual blushes. She has excellent judgment, wonderful memory, and great application … She is unjustly considered proud, and a peculiarity in her temper is mistaken for less sweetness.’
The King and Queen had both been against the matches proposed so far, but they could not hope to fend off for much longer the matter of the Princess Royal’s marriage – not now that she was rising twenty-two. Her letters to her brothers make it clear that marriage was on her mind. Did her ‘timidity’ make it impossible for her to speak of it? Or was it an unmentionable subject?
All agree that, whatever the Princess Royal’s relationship with her mother, she dearly loved her father, ‘whom she resembled in many points of character, and she was his comfort and [his] darling.’ On 3 July 1788 she therefore wrote from Windsor to her brother Augustus in a less collected state than usual to give a hurried family bulletin: they had stayed unusually long – a fortnight – at Kew, owing to an unexpected bilious attack that had seized the King.
My dear Augustus by this time knows how ill our dear papa has been. His complaint was very disagreeable and indeed alarming for the time that it lasted – the spasm beginning at three in the morning, and continuing till eight o’clock in the evening. He is, thank God, perfectly recovered, but is advised by Sir George Baker to drink the Cheltenham waters, which are particularly good for all bilious complaints. We are to go to Cheltenham on the twelfth. Lord Fauconberg has lent papa his house. Lady Weymouth, Mr Digby and Colonel Gwynne are to be of the party, also Miss Planta and Miss Burney. Mary, Sophia and Amelia are to remain at Kew during our absence with all those that belong to them.
The Queen wrote a supplementary letter to Prince Augustus the next day, ascribing her husband’s ‘violent attacks’ to ‘the dryness and heat of the season … everybody has been troubled by this complaint…’. More on her mind was the farmers’ and country gentlemen’s anxieties about the harvest in these arid conditions – and for once with reason, as she suggested. ‘Providentially’ an abundance of rain had come in good time, and ‘everything bears a prosperous and plentiful aspect.’
She could not have been more wrong. The kingdom was about to be plunged into chaos and confusion. But in an excellent frame of mind the small royal party, as described by the Princess Royal, set off for Cheltenham and in good hope that the King would soon be fully recovered. The patient himself, unperturbed by his ailment, had no doubt, he wrote to Prince Augustus, ‘that the efficacy of the waters which are not unlike those of Pyrmont, the salubrity of the air, the change of scene, privation of long conversations at St James’s and, above all, the exercise of riding and good mutton will do what may be at present wanting’. And the King too was to be proved wrong.
6 Fear
‘Never did schoolboys enjoy tneir holidays equal to what we have done,’ wrote the Queen after the July 1788 visit to Cheltenham. ‘The King went there without any guards,’ which pleased the local people. ‘At various times have they thrown out that he was better guarded without troops walking among his subjects whose hearts were ready to defend him …’
Lord Fauconberg’s house, with a charming view of the Malvern Hills, had so few rooms that, even with only a skeleton staff accompanying the King and Queen and their elder daughters, Miss Planta had to take her tea with Miss Burney on a landing. All arrangements were rustic. When Miss Burney, plagued by illness, consulted an ap
othecary brought in to dose the Princess Royal for influenza, he thought mightily before suggesting a saline draught. On a visit days later to Worcester the Princess Royal divided the orgeat she had been given for her own influenza, and put half by Miss Burney’s bed.
The royal family strolled ‘on the walks’, and bought fairings and novelties which they distributed among their ladies and sent home to the younger princesses. At first, such was the curiosity of the local inhabitants about their royal visitors, the crowd around Lord Fauconberg’s house was ‘one head’, as, on the way, every town had ‘seemed all face’. But the extravagances of the initial welcome died down, and there was little to do in the little spa once the invalids of the party had walked at six in the morning across a couple of fields and an orchard to the wells to take their daily dose.
The King informed Sir George Baker in London that his bilious complaint was lessening, and enquired what that daily dose should be. Baker wrote, ‘no one except the drinker can possibly determine it. It is in general experienced to be a weak purgative.’ Baker conceived that a pint drunk every morning would act on the bowels sufficiently, but if the King wished to drink more, he would not object unless sleepiness or headache followed. He did beg, however, that the King should not take strong exercise. Fatigue, when taking the waters, was counter-productive, as it heated the constitution.
The King heeded Sir George to the extent of not riding his usual thirty miles a day. Instead, he embarked with his wife and daughters on a series of exhausting days out. Having written ahead to the Prince of Wales’s former tutor Dr Hurd, now Bishop of Worcester, with warning of his intention to attend the Three Choirs Festival and visit the china manufactory there, the King with his womenfolk meanwhile surveyed the model jail and hospital at Gloucester, where an enormous crowd surrounded them. They travelled to Stroud, where they inspected every stage of the process for making jackets at a clothing manufactory. And they visited, in addition, various seats of the nobility. At Lord Coventry’s house, Croome Court, the princesses sat stiff on stools with no backs, provided for them at the specific request of Lord Harcourt. But the formality of the visit abated when some young farmers, having found their way into Lord Coventry’s cellar, clambered into the King’s coach and sat there, despite remonstrances from coachman and postilions. The King, it was known, had a great fondness for the ‘harmless sportings’ of country people, and no disciplinary action ensued.