Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  The Duke of York had left England that month for the Court of Berlin, hoping to enlist as a volunteer in the Prussian army in a war against the Austrians that did not in the event transpire. But he remained there, rekindling romantic feelings that he had harboured ten years earlier in Berlin for the King of Prussia’s daughter by his first marriage, Princess Frederica. And there he received a letter from his brother the Prince of Wales, written from Brighton and outlining his remarkable suggestion that their sister Royal should marry Frederica’s half-brother, the Crown Prince of Prussia.

  Not only was this youth of twenty-one unknown to Royal; he was also four years younger than her. And it was at this point that the Duke of York remarked in a letter to his brother that the Prussian heir would make a better bridegroom for Mary, and indeed he believed the Crown Prince already had her in mind. The Prince of Wales’s plan was, to the Duke of York’s mind, unfeasible and, anyway, he was far too preoccupied negotiating his own match with Princess Frederica at the Prussian Court and in correspondence with their father to be an envoy in this matter.

  But the Prince’s account of his conversations and his correspondence in May with their sister the Princess Royal shows just how desperate and nervous she was, shortly before Mary’s debut. ‘I had occasion to go to the Queen’s House,’ the Prince began, ‘and sit with my mother, where our eldest sister also was, with whom I joked much in a good-humoured way about herself …’ Afterwards the Princess begged him never to tease her again in that way before her mother. He did not know ‘how she suffered for it afterwards’. A few days later the Princess Royal poured out her heart in a private interview with her brother. All her sisters were favoured over her. In addition, she spoke of’the violence and the caprice of her mother’s temper which hourly grows worse’. And her parents made no attempt to supply any sort of establishment for her – at home or abroad. She was kept under ‘constant restraint … just like an infant.’

  Failing marriage abroad, she would be happy, she said, astonishing her brother, to marry the Duke of Bedford, his friend. Indeed, he said, she seemed eager for it. ‘She says she is grown to a time of life that will not admit of any scheme of this sort being long postponed.’

  The Princess Royal’s plans, radical though they were, were most interesting to her brother, in that they might be of assistance in his attempts to secure loans on the Continent. He was at present negotiating through an agent, Zastrow, a large loan from the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, and Zastrow had said he had heard the King of Prussia would be ‘ready to assist’ with more money, if his son the Crown Prince married a princess of England. When the Prince rashly mentioned this to his sister, she seized upon it, only to have her dreams shattered by the Duke of York’s response.

  The Duke of York thought no more highly of her other scheme, to marry his friend the Duke of Bedford. It was perhaps with the Duke in mind – a leading Whig and agriculturalist – that she had fulminated against those idle daughters of government. But in her rage against the world the Princess Royal now said, according to Mrs Papendiek, that ‘she had never liked the Queen, from her excessive severity.’ She added ‘that she had doubted her judgement on many points, and went so far as to say that she was a silly woman’.

  The Bedford plan was, like the Prussian plan, dismissed by her brothers as one their father would never agree to. The project of an establishment and independence, which the Princess Royal had introduced with such fire, crumbled into cinders. And Royal, baulked of her attempt to escape, retreated from the family circle, while her younger sister Elizabeth whiled away the wet hot summer with long drawing lessons from Mr Gresse. At the Lodge at Frogmore, where she and Augusta and the Queen went almost every day, Elizabeth sat in a room with her sister and read, wrote and ‘botanized’, while their mother sat in another room – very small and green – across the passage where she did likewise. On Saturdays, the younger princesses, having no lessons, came too. But Royal was rarely there.

  In February this year, the Queen had written to her son Augustus – about to embark, for his health, for the south – a letter describing the mild winter in England: ‘No frost nor snow, and everything in blossom. The hazels, lilacs, primroses, wallflowers, polyanthus, are all out this present time, in Kew, Richmond and Windsor gardens.’ Four days earlier she had begun to plant, with the help of a Yorkshire clergyman, ‘who undertakes to render this unpretty thing pretty’, the neglected garden at Frogmore. From that day accordingly she dated ‘the beginning of my little paradise’ where Mr William Aiton, the gardener at Kew, had finished making her a greenhouse. She was also taking up the botanical studies that the King’s illness had interrupted, again with a vengeance. ‘Curtis’s books of botany, Lees, Sowerby, and Miller’s English garden calendar and dictionary are to be my chief studies when there, and the drying of plants – both foreign and natives – an endless resource. Of the former I make a collection and have hitherto gone on with great success.’

  The Queen’s immersion from that time on in her houses and gardens at Frogmore was to please some of her daughters more than others. Elizabeth was an enthusiast from the beginning, and wrote this year: ‘Our few days in the country every week suit me extremely and Mama’s little cottage at Frogmore fills my thoughts at present very much.’ She had just been there with Augusta and ‘It looked in beauty, at least we wish to think it did …’ Elizabeth described to Augustus the ‘shades’ or silhouettes that she was now making from black paper with amazing dexterity – not only portraits but whole scenes of figures, often mothers with children and, very, very often, babies. ‘I shall enclose two or three of my cuttings out, and if you like them, I will send you more. But you must remember that I do not draw figures, and cut out these without drawing them first.’ She declared herself content with her secluded life: ‘It is a very lucky thing for me that I do not live more in the world, for I am sure it would not do for me.’ But Elizabeth often declared an airy lack of interest in the world while being a keen participant in it. Of a regiment stationed at Windsor and said to be ‘the finest regiment … quite perfection,’ she wrote, ‘I do not understand anything about it!’

  The younger princesses were despatched to Nuneham and the Harcourts in the late summer of 1791, for their elders were once again off to Weymouth, where the King, who had been looking ‘full and bloated’, could bathe. ‘I shall take Don Quixote as my companion, which is very rude of me when I add that I go in the carriage with Pss Royal and our 2 ladies,’ wrote Elizabeth a week before they set out in early September, ‘but I cannot keep up conversation for a whole day.’

  The King bathed with energy at Weymouth, and rode desperately hard also – thirty-two miles to Lulworth in the heat one day, and perspiring violently. But he was judged to be well. His wife was not. ‘The Queen looks, I think, very ill,’ wrote Mrs Harcourt, ‘and, by all accounts, has been so low and languid, that nothing but real illness can account for it.’ She had, in addition, been troubled by a bad foot for six months. But above all, Mrs Harcourt was interested in news about the Duke of York and his bride. They married in Berlin – on his sister Princess Royal’s twenty-fifth birthday, 29 September 1791 – in a double ceremony in which the bride’s sister Wilhelmina married the Prince of Orange.

  ‘We have nothing to do with any former attachments she may have had,’ Mrs Harcourt wrote, and did not elaborate. All the reports were that the couple were deeply in love and talked of nothing but retiring to England, ‘and living with and for each other’. Upon hearing that Princess Frederica’s brother the Crown Prince of Prussia was to accompany his sister to England, Mrs Harcourt wrote with excitement, not knowing of the Princess Royal’s disappointed hopes: ‘We shall see which of our three goddesses will have the apple.’

  But the Crown Prince did not come. And to Queen Charlotte’s discomfiture her brother Charles’s motherless daughters, on whose education she had advised, scooped the pool. His daughter Louise became the bride of the Crown Prince of Prussia on Christmas Eve 1793 and in due course
queen of that country. Her younger sister Frederica married two days later the Crown Prince’s younger brother, Prince Louis of Prussia.

  Augusta bathed for the first time this year at Weymouth. ‘I like it very well, and think it will do me good, I feel very hungry, all very good signs, first hunger, and then faith’, was her tepid response to the sensation. She preferred joining a party that sat in one of the bathing machines, working, while Lady Mary Howe read aloud. And she walked along the strand almost in the sea – ‘the spray is charming and the sands so soft to walk upon that I am quite delighted. It is quite an indulgence to me who am tortured with the bad gravel on Windsor Terrace.’ At Weymouth, the princesses and even the Queen walked about with only a lady, and went into the few shops as they pleased. But there was little enough to do. When they went to the play twice a week, ladies of their circle secured the boxes to either side ‘to keep off improper company’. Alas, they could not improve the quality of some of the actors’performances. For entertainment, Princess Augusta was reduced to making an attendant’s young son – with ‘little legs like two sticks … feet like little bits of sealing wax’ – dance round the room while she played her harpsichord.

  The arrival of the clever, sophisticated Duchess of York in November altered the Princess Royal’s mood for the better – although the Prussian Duchess had a love of music which the English Princess could not share. The Duchess brought a £30,000 dowry, and the English cartoonists, for the first time, featured Princess Amelia. She was held up by the Queen to greet the Duchess of York – indicating greed on the royal family’s part to get the Princess’s large dowry. In fact, the Duke of York, a man in love, spent £20,000 on jewels for his bride. The Princess Royal described her new sister-in-law as a ‘charming’ little woman, and praised her as very industrious. With the Duke Frederica settled down at Oatlands, the luxurious house complete with games room and pool and grotto that he had furnished three years earlier.

  But Royal was distressed that her brother Augustus complained of her silence. She could not, she said, ‘write such long letters as Eliza … our life is so much the same … the history of one day, that of every day …’. She couldn’t think what her sister filled her pages with. ‘Besides,’ she continued, ‘ever since we parted, our society is so much altered, and the people we live with so unknown to you.’ She asked him, rather, to tell her about the pictures he had seen, and the snowy Alps. (All the princesses thrilled to the idea of travel. Princess Elizabeth was reading Pennant’s Tours of Wales, and meant to try next his Tours through Scotland.) How, she wrote, she envied Augustus his sight of Rome; were she there, she would not leave a single spot unseen of that great city. With M. de Guiffardière’s ancient history lessons to the fore, she added, ‘The statues are amazingly fine by all accounts, but I am afraid very few of them are not a little broke.’ Meanwhile, the Queen asked Augustus for some Italian fan leather ‘quite white for to paint on, and if besides you will send us some Naples fan mounts I shall be much obliged to you.’ Fan painting was a favourite hobby of hers and of the Princess Royal and Elizabeth, she explained. The princes might travel or marry and settle. The princesses had their ‘work’ to do.

  8 Despond

  Princess Augusta wrote on 3 February 1792: ‘Elizabeth and me (who were always each other’s best friend) are sitting opposite each other at the same table and talking between whiles.’ They had been quiet that New Year, while they discovered what entertainments their new sister-in-law the Duchess of York, who was visiting, might like. But the Duchess was not unnaturally distracted. Following their joint declaration at Pilnitz, in September 1791, her father the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria signed a defensive alliance against France this month, based on the repugnance they felt for illegitimate republican regimes.

  ‘What joy it must be to Papa and Mama and all of us to see how fond they are of each other,’ wrote Sophia, nevertheless, of her brother Frederick, on whom she doted, and of his Duchess. Sophia was now included with her sister Mary in more of the family doings, and found the farce, The Town Hunchback, ‘very laughable’, though Mary did not. ‘The little idol Amelia’ still ate in the nursery, as Miss Burney on a visit in January noted, and the six-year difference in age between Sophia and her younger sister was also apparent in the elder sister’s note: ‘Amelia played about the room with Lady Douglas’s two daughters and with Lady Harrington’s little girl, Lady Anna Maria Stanhope. Mary and me played at cards.’

  While the Duchess of York’s father and brothers prepared to go to war over France’s demand in March 1792 that Prussia’s ally Austria withdraw from territories in Flanders, her new family in England felt no such call to arms. They were living in more or less domestic contentment, or at least idleness. The Prince of Wales was at Brighton with Mrs Fitzherbert, who was incidentally angry that the Duchess of York would not treat her as belle-soeur or sister-in-law. Prince William, Duke of Clarence had set up house with the celebrated comic actress Mrs Jordan at Bushey, and even Edward had found happiness, at Quebec, with a Mme de St Laurent. Only the princesses’ younger brothers were without known romantic attachments – Ernest and Adolphus in the Hanoverian cavalry and infantry, and, at Portici near Naples, Augustus. From there this last Prince, disappointed in his hopes of a naval career, was considering academe as an alternative. He wrote to his former tutor Dr Hughes on 10 January 1792: ‘very probably next October in a year I shall be going or gone to Cambridge or Oxford; but… this is a great secret.’

  The princesses continued to spend much of their time at Frogmore Farm, Mr Floyer’s house which the Queen had rechristened Amelia Lodge. When Miss Burney visited the royal ladies at the Queen’s House in May 1792, the Queen opened her ‘work repository … a very curious table and work bag in one’, and showed her a sample of the chair covers she was making for ‘her cottage at Frogmore’. It was Princess Elizabeth’s twenty-second birthday that month, but, no suitor beckoning, she wrote instead for Lady Harcourt’s amusement an answer to a hypothetical advertisement: ‘Rug Lane 1792, To the person intended for getting all proper people for the Queen’s small establishment at the Cottage Royal at Frogmore.’ She sought ‘the place of housekeeper’, and went on, ‘Now my love, I am a pretty good hand at conserves, pickling, and so forth … When I lived with the late Lord Orford [Horace Walpole] I gave great satisfaction to him and Miss Polly. I was a great favourite of the latter’s, I used to read to her. In case of that’s being wanted, I could read to her Majesty, as I am told she is fond of that amusement.’

  The Queen was indeed ‘fond’ of reading, but had a way of dealing with books given or even dedicated to her that were not to her taste. She deftly put Dinarbas, for instance – a turgid sequel to Dr Johnson’s Rasselas by a lady author – into Fanny Burney’s hands, for ‘some account’, as the Queen put it, ‘of its merits’ before she read it. Miss Burney praised it, and even recommended it to the princesses’ attention: ‘I am sure their Royal Highnesses could read nothing more chastely fitted for them.’ For reward, she received later in the year the author Miss Ellis Cornelia Knight’s new publication Marcus Flaminius. Like many others, Miss Burney believed the princesses isolated from the world, allowed to read neither novels nor newspapers without their mother’s permission. And the princesses traded on this supposed isolation to appear blank-faced and innocent, while a constant diet of letters and newspapers and Court gossip – as well as the books that circulated among the household – kept them immensely well informed of what was ‘moving’ in the world.

  For Elizabeth and for the Queen, the purchase of first Frogmore Farm, or Amelia Lodge, and then the neighbouring Great Frogmore estate in 1792 featuring Frogmore House offered distinct possibilities. The Queen was to avoid both the cares of her position and her husband. Elizabeth seized on the opportunity the acres of neglected garden at Frogmore House afforded for designing architectural ‘surprises’ in the Gothic or Olde English style as well as small buildings on the more established classical model, both being then fas
hionable. Moss huts, Gothic ruins and octagonal temples appeared in the grounds under her direction. And while the French Queen’s creation, Le Petit Trianon, lay neglected at Versailles, the Queen of England and her daughters established what she called a ‘terrestrial paradise’ in the Home Park at Windsor.

  Fanny Burney, hovering around the passages and corridors of the Queen’s House on the King’s Birthday, was invited by Princess Elizabeth to join them in the state dressing room where the Queen was sitting with her head attired superbly for the drawing room, her Court dress awaiting her at St James’s. All the princesses (bar Princess Amelia) and the Duchess of York were with her. In the background stood M. de Luc, Schwelly, Mme de la Fite and Miss Gouldsworthy. For this day was to be fourteen-year-old Princess Sophia’s debut at Court.

  With five princesses now ‘out’, established routines of thirty years were ending. This summer, Lady Charlotte conducted Princess Amelia daily to her mother in the White Closet at the Queen’s House, as she had escorted so many royal children since she was first appointed as governess to the infant Prince of Wales in 1762. But Lady Charlotte was now old, deaf and unwell, Princess Sophia writing this autumn, ‘I am grieved to death about her, she is if possible more kind to us than ever. Indeed, both Gouly and her are so good to us that we should not be deserving of having such treasures about us, if we did not feel their kindness in the highest degree.’

  Lady Charlotte resigned from her post in November 1792, and with the New Year the Queen must look for other governesses and companions for her younger daughters. Even the Queen’s dresser, Mrs Schwellenberg, who had ruled backstairs longer than Lady Charlotte had the schoolroom, was now a very sick dragon. Too ill to preside in the eating room where she had persecuted Miss Burney and others, Schwelly rose from her sickbed only to attend the Queen at her dressing and at her going to bed. The Old Guard was passing.