by Flora Fraser
Unfortunately, the princesses’ remaining attendants did not pull well together as Mary and Sophia completed their teenage years, and as Amelia approached them. Miss Gouldsworthy, though unremittingly kind to all her charges, even to those who abused her, was often ill. And Miss Burney’s opinion of the two ‘English teachers’, Miss Planta and Miss Gomm, was that they ‘humiliate, dislike and distrust each other …’.
Princess Mary of all the sisters adored children, and she enjoyed hearing from Fanny Burney about a nephew’s fantasy island called Protocol. ‘Had we been alone’, wrote Fanny, she was sure Mary ‘would have insisted upon hearing every particular.’ Mary, intensely interested in the world around her, was no great student, but Sophia and Amelia were naturally quick and avid readers. It was a pity that the Queen had no educational aspirations for them, as she had had for their elder sisters. Instead, with Mlle Julie de Montmollin their instructor, they became beautiful needlewomen, adept at lacemaking, crochet work and all kinds of fine embroidery. But their handwriting, in contrast to their elder sisters’, was shocking, the very texts of their letters less assured, their knowledge of history, geography and botany skimpy, and their artistic and musical education sketchy.
This year, for the first time, the younger princesses were allowed to join their sisters at Weymouth, where the royal party proceeded in mid-August, and Mary vividly remembered her first sea bathe there half a century later. Her bathing dress was a ‘regular one’ made for the occasion, which ‘no floating about deranged. If all the world’, she recalled, ‘had been looking on, they would of [sic] seen me as well-dressed as if in a drawing room.’ She remembered the fatigue of bathing. ‘I began with jumping into the sea from the first step of the machine, but I would not go on so doing, and then the two bathing women dipped me into the sea which saved much fatigue and I liked it much better.’ However, the experience did not agree with her. At last ‘I was obliged to lay down and could not walk at all, so that it was given up.’
They were at Weymouth for the Princess Royal’s twenty-sixth birthday, but she did not raise the subject of her future. No one wanted to dispute with the King now, for fear his old and shocking illness might re-emerge. On being informed this year that the great Dr Burney’s remedy for depression was to compose canons to solemn words, the King told the musicologist’s daughter that he, too, found that grave or difficult employment composed him when ill or disturbed.
The prospects of the princesses marrying abroad had anyway diminished as the prospect of full-scale European war loomed. Shocking news arrived from Paris – of the mob entering the Tuileries Palace on 10 August, of their killing the Swiss Guards, and other Swiss in the English Minister’s house – and of the French royal family taking refuge with the National Assembly.
Still worse news came. The Prussians, who with Austria had declared war on France in July, assembled an allied army at Coblenz. Hoping to take advantage of the social and military chaos in France, the army marched on Paris under the command of the famed but elderly Duke of Brunswick – and was routed by French cannonade at Valmy on 21 September. Next day, the French republic was declared, and – further news came – the French had defeated an Austrian army at Jemappes and taken Flanders.
Weymouth, by contrast, remained the most peaceful town imaginable, where the King and Queen of England went weekly to the public assembly rooms, and took tea in friendly fashion with people ‘with a claim to their notice’ in an inner room. On her return to Windsor, Princess Elizabeth wrote to Lady Harcourt on 3 October 1792: ‘Of all parties to Weymouth this has been infinitely the most agreeable to me …’ Only breakfast at an inn on the way back had been a disappointment: ‘anything so disgusting I thank God I never saw before and never wish to see again, bad butter… plum cake as stowage for the stomach’. She hoped Lady Harcourt would pardon ‘the badness of my handwriting, but I have so horrid a pen that it is scarcely possible to write, and another thing is that I am scrawling, while my hair is dressing’.
Sophia wrote on 14 November of having been to see ‘Mama’s new house [at Great Frogmore], in time it will be charming. Pray tell Lord Harcourt (for I assume it will amuse him) that we went all over the house not excepting the kitchens and cellars which are very good.’ In January the Queen had written of her plans for a Gothic cottage at Frogmore Farm which the architect James Wyatt was to design. (The King had also given her the long elm walk which used to lead to Shaw Farm and she had planted 4,000 trees there, on the advice of her new consultant Major William Price.) But, as we have seen, the Queen had persuaded the King to buy her the much larger neighbouring estate of Great Frogmore, and so all ideas of a cottage were at an end. Amelia Lodge was demolished and its grounds united with those of Frogmore House, the Queen’s new residence.
Meanwhile, the princesses’ brothers Ernest and Adolphus, to their delight, were under arms. Following the trial and execution of Louis XVI in early January 1793, an emboldened France declared war on Britain and the United Netherlands (which comprised the Austrian and Dutch territories in northern Europe). Austria, Prussia and Holland dispatched their finest generals to lead their armies in the coalition that responded to this aggressive move. Hanover was supplying nearly 4,000 men out of a force of 20,000 that the states of the Holy Roman Empire were drumming up against the French. And King George III yielded to his sons’ pleas to serve. Accordingly Adolphus was ordered in November to join the Hanoverian Foot Guards, and Ernest the Hanoverian Light Dragoons.
Adolphus, aged nineteen, was thrilled to be off to join the coalition: ‘I always have wished to make a campaign.’ And the King of England had insisted that his second son the Duke of York, aged twenty-nine, be appointed commander-in-chief of the British forces, who set off with the declared intention of knocking France out of Flanders and restoring order – and with the undeclared intention of thereby acquiring some part of the French West Indies. Lady Harcourt was moved to compose ‘A song written on the occasion of the Guards being sent to the Continent under the command of HRH the Duke of York, 16 Feb 1793’. But Mrs Lucy Kennedy, a lady diarist with apartments in Windsor Castle, tells us that Princess Sophia fell extremely ill at that leave-taking. ‘She went with the family to Greenwich to see her brother, the Duke of York with the British Guards, embark for Germany … It affected P.S. so much, that she fell into fits, which have increased, and continued ever since …’
In the early summer of 1793, following the Duke of York’s departure and a bad bout of chickenpox, Princess Sophia was three weeks in bed, the Queen told her brother, with a bad ‘swallow’. She remained alarmingly ill for many months, and Mrs Kennedy called her illness in October ‘a violent nervous disorder’. She elaborated: ‘She takes from 50 to 80 [fits] in the 24 hours, falls back in her chair, more or less convulsed, recovers soon, does not complain of pain, and goes on with her work, or book as if nothing had happened, until she sinks again. Sir Lucas Pepys attends her.’
To try and cure this puzzling complaint, Princess Sophia was first sent for six weeks to Kew, with her sister Mary and Lady Charlotte Bruce, Mrs Gouldsworthy and Mrs Cheveley for companions. (Che Che slept in Princess Sophia’s room as she had slept in those of other royal invalids whose lives were judged in danger.) But on 8 July her sister Elizabeth wrote to Lady Harcourt: ‘I make no scruple of telling you that Sophia is just the same – patience itself, but making us all very uneasy, though we are assured she is not in the least shadow of danger, which we must thank God for. You know well enough how many unhappy hours that makes me pass in every sense of the word. But at Court, one learns deceit…’ Elizabeth gave way to ‘low spirits’ only in her own room.
‘My swallow has improved within these last few days,’ wrote Sophia to the King from Kew House on 19 August, and spoke of her gratitude to her father during her ‘long and tedious illness’. But in the autumn and back at Lower Lodge she was nervous and paranoid: ‘Many more unpleasant things have passed since we met; Princess Royal and Lady Cathcart [their new lady-in-waiting] … I st
rongly suspect are at the bottom of everything … my reasons I will give you when we meet… I have very good ones and I heard many a story that Princess Royal has repeated to the Queen.’ She ended by begging: ‘You will not mention to any of my sisters what I said to you.’
At the beginning of October, Sophia was despatched by her alarmed parents to Tunbridge Wells with Lady Cathcart, Lady Charlotte Finch’s replacement, and Mrs Cheveley as attendants, to drink the waters there. Mrs Kennedy wrote:
she was not told of it, until the coach drove to the door, in hopes the flurry of spirits, and agitation would make her weep, which it did violently, which relief made her perform her journey better than they could have expected … The queen only told Lady Cathcart and Mrs Cheveley the day before, took no leave of her [Sophia], and took all the Royal family to Frogmore immediately after breakfast … when they returned at 12 o clock, she was gone. They all wept much, especially Princess Mary, who had never been separated [from her] one day in her life.
But the ‘cure’ answered, and Sophia could write of her mysterious illness on 15 October to the King, ‘My faintings are less, though not as much diminished as I could wish, as to my swallow with your leave I will not mention that.’
The royal family had anxieties this autumn other than Sophia’s health. In August, after the Hanoverian troops had successfully taken Valenciennes from the French, the Queen had written, ‘Thank God my sons behaved well.’ But on 6 September the French attacked Hanoverian forces – among them Adolphus – retreating after dark from Dunkirk. In the hand-to-hand fighting that ensued, Prince Adolphus was ‘wounded in the shoulder, and had a deep cut with a sabre so near the eye that it is a wonder it escaped’. So General William Harcourt wrote from the British lines to his wife, and off flew Mrs Harcourt to the Queen’s Lodge with her letter. The Queen was much affected by the news of her son’s wounds, ‘and the Princesses all cried very much.’
The King heard simultaneously from the Duke of York of a desperate and unsuccessful sortie the British forces had made to try and take Dunkirk from the French on the 6th. (When the Duchess of York received word at Oatlands of these events, she finished her game before opening the despatch, as befitted the granddaughter of Frederick the Great.) The Duke was safe, if humiliated, and the British forces had to lift their siege anyway soon enough and go to the support of the Hanoverian army, which had been forced to retreat still further. Here at least Adolphus could rest from his wounds, and here he received orders from his brother to make for England and a full recovery.
Adolphus’s sisters had last seen him seven years before, when he went off, a skinny twelve-year-old, to study at the University of Göttingen. Elizabeth wrote from Weymouth on 17 September 1793,’… I am at this moment the happiest creature with my brother [Adolphus] who is quite an angel…’ But Adolphus was puzzled by changes that he observed, and he wrote later, ‘I am very sorry to hear that the ill humour of a certain person (you know who I mean) [the Queen] continues so bad: particularly her behaviour towards dear Mary and Sophia is so very singular, as they certainly by no means deserve it. What can possess her to be so odd and why make her life so wretched when she could have it just the reverse?’ Mary, Adolphus said, was ‘a charming creature, and one of the sweetest tempered girls I ever saw.’ But the Queen could not shake off the misery and feelings of doom that the King’s illness and the fate of the French royal family had engendered in her. Steely of purpose, she worked on an ‘entertainment’ she and Princess Elizabeth had planned for Coronation Day – 25 October – and ordered ‘a certain quantity of green paper’ stained the colours of laurel and oak leaves. She wanted thin rose-coloured paper too, and some ‘for fashioning yellow and dark red roses.’ But the celebration had to be postponed after Queen Marie Antoinette was executed in Paris on 16 October.
‘Augustus is hourly expected. I do not understand why he is so long a coming,’ Elizabeth wrote in September. But, as the political situation in Europe declined, Augustus lingered abroad, although the King had called him north from Rome in May. The King and Queen had heard then that he was romantically inclined towards the Earl of Dunmore’s daughter, Lady Augusta Murray, who was travelling with her family on the Continent. But they had no inkling that he had married her – secretly and in defiance of the Royal Marriages Act – in the Hotel Sarmiento in Rome. And, before he answered his father’s call to head north, Lady Augusta became pregnant.
When Augustus did arrive, his mother showed herself well aware of the passion he had formed in Italy, saying to Elizabeth when Lady Augusta arrived in England in October: ‘I see it is not over, by the agitation Augustus is in.’ Elizabeth could say little. Fear of discovery did not prevent Augustus and Augusta, back in England, from going through another marriage ceremony at St George’s, Hanover Square, on 5 December 1793. They also had clandestine meetings before the birth of the coming baby – not only in London, but at an inn in Windsor. Prince Augustus crept away there between engagements at the Castle – including his confirmation at St George’s Chapel two days before Christmas.
The King and Queen continued to follow anxiously the progress of the British forces under the command of their second son in Flanders. ‘There is a subscription set on foot in most of the towns in England for procuring flannel waistcoats for the British troops, now serving under the Duke of York. The conductor of the newspaper called The Sun has offered to receive all the donations …’ Mrs Kennedy wrote. ‘Everybody is interested about this charity. Her Majesty has ordered 2000 flannel waistcoats to be made immediately.’ But the British campaign was going badly.
Adolphus, recovered, was sent back to the theatre of war early in the New Year, and Ernest, still out there, was moved, to his disgust, into the heavy dragoons. The Harcourts’ sister-in-law Mrs William Harcourt, who was at Tournai with her husband the General, became reacquainted with the boy she had known at Windsor over seven years before. ‘He is excessively liked here,’ she wrote, ‘but would not do in England; he talks too much, and I am sure he would not bear the life of Windsor three days. He is a true Hussar; but open, lively, and very good-natured.’ On further acquaintance with Ernest, Mrs Harcourt noted, ‘I have some difficulty in endeavouring to make him behave well.’ When they paid a visit to a convent where he had been quartered the previous summer, she added despairingly: ‘He would kiss the Abbess and talk nonsense to all the poor nuns. I know a thousand traits of the goodness of his heart, but I fear he is too wild for England.’
But the princesses now were occupied most of all by their brother Augustus’s coming departure for Leghorn, since Elizabeth and Sophia at least knew that he was about to become a father. Mrs Kennedy recorded, ‘On Monday the 13th [January 1794] the Royal Family all went to the play, the Princesses wept the whole time, and both K and Q looked grave. The two young Princes were to set out early next morning, Prince Augustus to Rome, and Adolphus to join the army and [the] Duke of York … The King thought it was better to go to the play, that it would keep them all more composed, but it was [a] pity as they could not compose themselves …’
That very day at Lower Berkeley Street, Lady Augusta gave birth to a son, whom she imaginatively named Augustus. But the Prince had barely time to see his son before he was off on L’Aquilon and ordered back to Italy. Princess Elizabeth, fearing their father’s wrath, had prevented her brother from handing the King a confession that he had written on 9 January. She even produced the exact terms of the Marriage Act to warn him against revealing his secret to their father. But she may not have guessed just how implacable the King was to be when the news leaked out.
‘Today the King told me’, runs Queen Charlotte’s diary for 25 January, ‘that the Lord Chancellor had acquainted him yesterday after the levee with the disagreeable news of Augustus’s marriage with Lady Augusta Murray … That the register was found. And that he had given orders to the Chancellor, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the other Ministers to proceed in this unpleasant business as the law directs, Augustus having married under
age being against the Marriage Act.’ She added: ‘Also orders were given to stop Lady Dunmore and her daughter joining him or leaving England.’ After this account of the measures the King had taken, she wrote further on the 29th: ‘we went into my room to read, then acquainted the Princesses of their brother’s imprudent match with Ly Augusta Murray. Then read and wrote till one…’
The King spared Lady Augusta and her family no humiliation, hauling them before the Privy Council to make affidavits, until, on 14 July 1794, the Arches Court of Canterbury declared both Prince Augustus’s marriages to have been a ‘show or effigy of a marriage’ and therefore null and void. Hence the Prince, the Court declared, ‘was and is free from all bond of marriage with the said Right Honourable Lady Augusta Murray’. And the Prince’s son, the King’s firstborn grandson, was declared illegitimate.
The King had made his position clear when his brother Cumberland married Lady Anne twenty years before: ‘I must … on the first occasion show my resentment, I have children who must know what they have to expect if they could follow so infamous an example.’
Prince Augustus, weeping with frustration, remained on the Continent. Lady Augusta, barred from joining him, lived – on a pension from the King admittedly – in retirement at Teignmouth with their baby son, who, owing to the shenanigans surrounding his birth, was not even baptized until he was two years old – and then as ‘Augustus Frederick, son of Augustus Frederick and Augusta Augustus Frederick’.
Barely two weeks after Prince Augustus’s marriage was discovered, the King suffered another humiliation at the hands of his sons. The Prime Minister came to him and made it clear that the Duke of York had to be withdrawn from his command. His inexperience was having disastrous effects; he should never have been placed in command. The King tried to save face and appoint the Duke of Brunswick, his brother-in-law, in his son’s place, but Brunswick, still smarting from defeat at Valmy, refused. And on 14 February 1794, diverting attention from his recall, the Duke of York brought with much pomp to England the standard once carried by Louis XVI which the British forces had seized from the French.