by Flora Fraser
Worse followed. The Gloucesters père et fille had to wait three-quarters of an hour in the ballroom, while the royal family ate dinner before the ball, a meal to which they had expected to be invited. When the ball opened, Sophia Matilda ‘danced very well but nobody paid her the least respect, and after the King and Queen were gone she was treated quite as a common person and pushed about’. At last the Prince of Wales took pity on his cousin, and advised her to go home. Little though they knew it, the King and Queen’s callous treatment of the Gloucester children was to rebound much later on one of their own.
Princess Augusta complained to her brother Augustus of the race days on Ascot Heath rather than of any ball: ‘we were there for 5 hours which – added to another, half of which was spent in going and the other in coming home – we were cooped up six hours in a coach in hot and dusty weather … you may suppose I was very agreeable company when I came home – for I was almost asleep, and amazingly cross that those horses lost, for whom I wished, so that I found it was charity not to wish for any one in particular’.
Prince Augustus, now aged seventeen, was pursuing his campaign, begun long before, of persuading his father to send him to sea as a midshipman: ‘The fine and noble description of the British fleet, which are preparing [for war with Spain] have roused in me a double desire, which haunts me day and night… The blood of a British subject boils within me and I wish to be witness to what is going forward.’ But it was not to be, as the Queen told the disappointed romantic. His health made it impractical.
Prince William, on the other hand, had rejoined the navy on promise of war against the Spanish, and was at anchor at Torbay, full of ‘zeal for the sea service’, as Princess Augusta told their brother Ernest. And she wrote to Augustus: ‘Dear little Amelia has got through her inoculation remarkably well and quick – She has had no spots in her face and not altogether thirty about her body. I think her grown and looking better than she has done of a great while.’ Her elder sister agreed: ‘She [Amelia] is the most charming little girl that I ever saw, her understanding and quickness are astonishing for her age. If she grows up as she is at present, I shall be very much disappointed if both her and Sophia are not superior to most women.’ The superior Sophia, who was reading Campe’s Kinder Bibliotheque, had an artistic project in mind, fostered by the gift from her sister Mary of her ‘picture’. ‘My intention is to have a locket made of all my brothers and sisters’ hair,’ she wrote. And she was writing to all her five brothers abroad, to the Prince and Duke of York and to her sisters, for that purpose.
The previous summer Princess Royal had fretted at having got ‘behind’, during the visit to Weymouth, with her drawing: ‘The time that I have lost which is dreadful this year … I did little or nothing.’ Now she explained to her brother Augustus: ‘I should have answered sooner, had I not been totally prevented doing anything by the Queen’s furnishing two rooms at the house she has bought at Frogmore, and my painting with stencils the chairs for one of the rooms, and cutting out in paper several ornaments, which things could not be completed without time. On Amelia’s birthday we breakfasted there.’
Queen Charlotte’s purchase from a Mr Floyer of his rambling farmhouse with eleven rooms to a floor at Frogmore in the Home Park at Windsor was something of a surprise to all. But Lady Harcourt wrote an account of their first festivity there to her husband:
We were all dressed beyond our usual morning dress before eight. We then went over to the chapel, returned to fetch the little princesses, and then proceeded to Frogmore. Pss Elizabeth (who had been there from 7 o clock) met the Queen in the hall and presented her with a basket of flowers. Three of the rooms are made very pretty. The Princesses have painted the borders, not only for the papers, but for the curtains and chairs, upon white glazed linen. The servants’ bell ropes, flower tubs, flower pots, and flower baskets are also of this manufactory, and filled with a profusion of oranges, limes, various plants, and ornamented with large swags of ribbons – vastly well.
Among all the babble of family news, there was one item in December 1790 of especial interest to King George III and Queen Charlotte’s second daughter. ‘We have just now a Prince of Württemberg here,’ wrote Augusta’s mother, ‘who has served every campaign against the Turks. He seems a very amiable young man, religious, modest and agreeable. He is but 27 years old.’ The Duchy of Württemberg was, like Hanover, part of the Holy Roman Empire, which had existed in Europe since the tenth century – since the fourteenth as a limited elective monarchy – and which featured circles of electors, princes, dukes and counts.
This catalogue of virtues commended him to the Queen, but she did not mention something that must tell against him. Prince Ferdinand was the younger brother of another soldier, the Hereditary Prince of Württemberg, whom the King’s niece Princess Augusta of Brunswick had married and accompanied to St Petersburg ten years earlier when she was fifteen. When the Hereditary Prince and their three children – two sons and a baby daughter – left Russia, Augusta did not leave with them. And shortly after she was imprisoned by the Empress, Catherine the Great, in the castle of Lohde for unspecified immorality. Despite loud protests from the Brunswick family – and remonstrances from King George III – to St Petersburg, Augusta was still there in 1788 when she died.
The tale was murky, and the Hereditary Prince of Württemberg cast as its villain by his mother-in-law, the Duchess of Brunswick, and by others. There were widespread rumours that he had an ungovernable temper, and, again, that his wife had only turned ‘coquette’ after he had himself indulged in open amours at the Russian Court. But it would appear that the English Princess Augusta did not dislike his younger brother. Returning from church on Christmas Day, she wrote to Augustus: ‘I hope you don’t think it vulgar to wish you a happy Christmas, but I was used to do it when we were children and that time I never think of but with an undisturbed pleasure. A time when we were sensible to no greater care than a tumble or a scratch which a kiss and a beg pardon would make up for in a moment.’ And she repeated her mother’s news: ‘I forgot in my last letter to tell you that we have made acquaintance with Prince Ferdinand of Württemberg, a Lieutenant General in the Austrian service. He has served against the Turks, and is now come to England for a few months.’
On 3 January 1791 Prince Ferdinand wrote to Lady Harcourt, one of those among the Queen’s ladies who keenly wished to see the princesses married: ‘The Prince Ferdinand Duke de Württemberg has the honour to present his most respectful homage to Lady H, and will have the honour of paying his court tomorrow at midday. He thinks himself very happy to promise himself the advantage, so long desired of…’And meanwhile cheerful, stout Elizabeth was going up to town from Windsor to get her birthday clothes, and the King and Queen had promised them a ball – ‘it will be but a little ball which (entre nous)’, she wrote, ‘I like much better than a great one, we shall have but 14 or 15 couples which is just the pleasant number.’
A week later, the Princess Royal described at length this Twelfth Night Ball at which Prince Ferdinand was present, and which took place in the Salle d’Armes at Windsor Castle. The princesses dined at the King’s table with the Prince, two other tables were some way off. They danced from 8 p.m. till 4.30 a.m. in the King’s Salon, and in other rooms some of the chaperones played cards. Augusta says little, except that she danced with her brother William, her cousin William and the Duke of Dorset, and with Ferdinand. But the Württemberg Prince was her acknowledged suitor and members of the household, hearing of his beauty and elegant manner, rejoiced at the idea of her – ‘certainly the most beautiful creature one could wish to behold’ – securing such a bridegroom. Augusta could look forward to a travelling life as the wife of a distinguished Continental soldier, and, for a settled home, an elegant palace in Stuttgart with opportunities for walking and riding and gardening.
Alas, by the time the next Court ball came round – the Queen’s birthday ball on 18 January – Mrs Papendick records that ‘the King had refused his
suit, and he sat in the background and would not come forward’. The King himself was magnificent on this occasion in a dark brown coat ‘embroidered with gold and stones’, and the Prince of Wales wore a ‘dark purple spangled all over and quite superb’. But Augusta condemned the dresses she and her sisters had worn for the occasion – ‘very handsome gowns but very heavy – at least mine was so’. It had been a ‘horrid dull ball’, with ‘a good deal of fussing and dressing’ and ‘a good deal of fatigue from morning to night’. It would seem that she as well as the Prince was suffering from her father’s refusal to let them marry. The only mystery is that the Prince appears not to have asked for the Princess’s hand in marriage until the day after this ball.
‘Your kindness to me inspires in me gratitude and confidence’, he told Lady Harcourt on the 19th. ‘As proof of this, Madame, I ask you to permit me to ask you the favour of remitting the enclosed to their Majesties.’ (‘The letters I was desired to give to the King and Queen contained a proposal of marriage for the Princess Augusta,’ noted Lady Harcourt.) The following day Prince Ferdinand wrote to her again: ‘I have just yielded to the Prince of Wales who has invited me for the third time to go to his terre [estate] in Hampshire, tomorrow morning. As it could be that their majesties might have orders for me during the few days I will be absent, I beg you to make clear my earnest wish to return as soon as possible to London, if that was the pleasure of their majesties.’ But no message came for the Prince to interrupt his Hampshire stay, and on Saturday the 22nd he was out hunting there with the Prince.
The King presumably found reason to object to this unexceptional match on the ground of the suitor’s consanguinity with the Hereditary Prince. Or, and this was the explanation the household endorsed, because Prince Ferdinand was ‘two removes from the dukedom, besides which the King would not let the younger Princesses marry before the elder’. It was, at any rate, a very public refusal, when all had been expecting a favourable answer to the dashing officer’s suit.
On the 29th Augusta reminded herself, in a letter to her brother Augustus, of her unhappiness during the darkest days of her father’s illness when all seemed bleak: ‘If such a great light could come forth from such utter darkness though I always had hopes – I mean our dearest father’s recovery – after his shocking illness – I am sure we ought never to despair and submit patiently to everything.’ And she found consolation in the religion that had supported her during that time. Of taking communion, she wrote three months later: ‘When I reflect on what an occasion the ceremony was instituted and by whom … I try as much as lays in my power to make myself worthy of receiving it, and … go to the table with all the calmness I am mistress of, and always return with an inward satisfaction and a fervent desire to remain in the good resolutions I have taken.’
Putting away thoughts of love and marriage, Augusta incarcerated herself in literature. M. de Guiffardière, who had teased her about an earlier suitor, the Crown Prince of Denmark, recommended the Abbé d’Olivet’s French translation of The Thoughts of Cicero, knowing her taste for ‘serious reading’, and she kept a copy in London and at Windsor. She went through a course of reading with ‘Grif: Thomson’s Seasons, Les Saisons by the Chevalier de St Lambert, Les Jardins by M. de Lille and this same de Lille’s translations of Virgil’s Georgics: ‘Having the advantage of Grif’s remarks and explanation of what I did not quite understand,’ Augusta wrote, ‘I never passed any time more pleasantly in my life.’ She thanked God that she could be by herself without ever feeling alone, thanks to books and music, dancing and a little work. Indeed, she was somebody who needed hours to herself. ‘I don’t think I have spent the day to my liking’, she wrote on a later occasion, ‘if I have not been an hour alone – I require that little quiet and then I am equal to do anything. But unless I have my reading and thinking quietly and by myself I am totally done up for.’
The King had now rebutted proposals from the royal houses of Denmark and of Württemberg. Later this year, the widower King of Sardinia asked for the hand in marriage of a princess of England, the condition being that she become a Catholic. George III turned down the heretical proposal instantly, the easier because the bridegroom was older than he was. As her husband turned down suitor after suitor for her daughters, the Queen became despondent. When her younger daughters’ French teacher, Mlle Charlotte Salomé de Montmollin, married this summer, one of her colleagues remarked that the Queen took as much trouble with the trousseau as though it had been her own daughter marrying. And how she wished that were the case! Meanwhile Charlotte Salomé’s cousin Julie took her place.
The Princess Royal, meanwhile, grew discontented and solitary, and railed against her mother for inviting to Windsor the daughters of government families who, she said, ‘could not amuse the King, but only ran idly about the house, interrupting everybody’. Rudely, she instructed her lady-in-waiting to ‘tell all these visitors that she never received anyone in the morning’. Princess Elizabeth meanwhile dedicated herself to a bevy of artistic projects; Princess Augusta took refuge in friendships, and her family. The arrival of letters from brothers continued to be for all the princesses red-letter days. ‘My great joy at finding it on my dressing table’, Elizabeth wrote to Augustus of one letter of his, ‘caused a general laugh for I quite screamed.’
Unfortunately this year Augusta lost Lady Elizabeth Waldegrave, whom she called her best and dearest friend, to the altar. Admittedly, she would still see her former lady-in-waiting, as she had married Lord Cardigan, Governor of Windsor Castle. But Augusta wanted acknowledgement of her generosity in blessing the match. ‘Don’t you think I behave very handsomely upon this affair?’ she asked Augustus, before adding, ‘you must allow me to feel a great deal upon this occasion, as in our situation a true friend is the most valuable of possessions’.
The careful catalogue of her friends which the Princess now made for her brother was not large. First came her family, then there were those that ‘have been with me from my childhood’ – Lady Howe, Lady Harcourt and Lady Cremorne; these were her ‘particular friends’. Of the ‘younger people’ she favoured Lady Caroline Waldegrave, Lady Frances Howard and Lady Mary Howe. She said firmly, ‘And I feel that quite sufficient. I have of course many pleasant acquaintances, but there is a wide difference between such and friends.’ As for Lady Char and Gouly, she declared, ‘I never can mention them with any body else … owing everything to them.’ This was a princess who loved to confide, but felt the difficulty of forming new friendships, she noted, ‘too suddenly as they may prove fatal to us’. She wrote without emotion, ‘The highest disadvantage in our elevation is the being subject to flatterers and false friends – both of which are shocking calamities to which we are liable.’ To her delight, in April the King and Queen appointed two of her ‘particular friends’, Lady Elizabeth’s sister Lady Caroline Waldegrave and Lady Mary Howe, ‘to be our ladies’.
The elder princesses’ unmarried state was acutely on show this June when their younger sister Mary made her debut, aged fifteen, at the Birthday ball. The Duke of York had written to Augustus on 29 March 1791, ‘You would hardly know your younger sisters, they are so much grown and so much improved, particularly Mary.’ Her dark hair and pale skin had always made her stand out among her sisters. Now came the moment when she would for the first time dance at Court and furthermore lead off the first minuet. For her sisters standing beneath her in the set, it was also a moment that would nudge them – six, eight and nine years older than her – into the shadows of spinsterhood.
Princess Mary like her mother was ardently interested in clothes, and savoured her dress for the Queen’s Birthday: ‘the colour of the gown is green with gold spots and stripes, the trimming is to be crepe, with a little running pattern of gold spangles. I think it will be very pretty.’ Her younger sister Sophia – a foot shorter and looking much younger than she was – declined to describe the dresses for the birthday – ‘They are always the same sort of thing.’ In ‘a great shew of royalty’, l
ater that year Prince William of Gloucester – only a few months older than Princess Mary – and his elder sister were made welcome at the King’s Birthday. But Mary’s appointed partner was her brother Prince William.
Unfortunately, at twenty-five the veteran of more than nine years’ active service at sea, Prince William relied on strong drink to cheer all social occasions, and his sister’s debut in society was no exception. He arrived incapable from alcohol, and Mary had to sit disconsolate in her gown and spangles while another couple led off the dance. Prince William did not mend his ways. Later that year he plied drink on his mother’s learned reader, M. Deluc, at a dinner given by Mrs Schwellenberg, and the poor man became tipsy just before he was to go to the Queen. But Princess Mary’s beauty had at least struck many beholders – her cousin Prince William of Gloucester for one, and her two eldest brothers for others, who thought they saw a way of turning it to their advantage.
While the French King and Queen’s plight disturbed other crowned heads of Europe – news of their flight from Paris in June 1791 was swiftly followed by that of their capture at Varennes, and of the abolition of the monarchy on 16 July – the Prince of Wales in London and the Duke of York in Berlin were writing of the twenty-one-year-old Crown Prince of Prussia as a suitor for one of their sisters.