Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  They moved, too, into central apartments in Ludwigsburg, a palace where ‘everything had been allowed to go to ruin’ and no doors shut, and lived with workmen all around them while Royal neared her time. They were planning to make Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg comfortable and ‘to attempt nothing more’, she said, citing that reprobate Duke Charles’s ‘folly of constantly launching into the expense of building new palaces and neglecting the old ones’. She would send her father a plan of the alterations at Ludwigsburg when all was complete, but wondered, as they were to have a menagerie there, ‘will your Majesty forgive my entreating you to send us a pair of congaroos [kangaroos] which would be a great pleasure to us?’

  The death of her mother-in-law in March 1798 gave Royal yet another ‘undertaking’: ‘I am now very much taken up with Trinette’ – Catherine her stepdaughter – ‘who, unless she has lessons, never leaves me for a moment. One thing gives me great pleasure … that from the beginning she took to me very much, and her age being the same as my dearest Amelia’s makes her doubly interesting to me.’ She was grateful to her father for the advice he gave her ‘to try by my example to imprint those principles [of religion] on the mind of Trinette … I trust I shall succeed in my endeavours to make her, as far as I can, go through the same course of religion that Mama made us read with Schrader [the German Reform Church pastor in London].’

  The move to Stuttgart came at last, and from there Royal wrote to England, a week before the baby was due, that she had taken the Sacrament with her husband: ‘I own I felt a great deal of joy at being enabled to go to the altar, as I think that when one has fulfilled that duty, one’s mind is better enabled to go through any undertaking in life.’ And then the baby did not come. For three weeks the Duchess lay in a state of suspended animation, while the Duke fussed about her. And Princess Amelia, in England, wrote lightly that there was no word of the sprouting branch of the Württemberg family. The ‘heat and the confinement’ of Stuttgart made both Duke and Duchess long for the country and Ludwigsburg where they would go after her confinement. Admittedly it was the ‘fashion’ in Germany not to stir for six weeks after childbirth. ‘However, I plead mama’s example and then they must submit,’ she wrote on 13 April, set on leaving within the month. Looking still further ahead, she pressed Mr Charles Arbuthnot, the British envoy who had come to congratulate the Prince on his accession, to stay on till the christening, there to act as the King’s representative. Her conception of all that was to come was at last realized. All was in place, when the pains began. The Princess prepared herself and the accoucheuse and ladies gathered.

  But then all Royal’s hopes and dreams foundered. Her labour produced a stillborn daughter. The Duchess ‘having been delivered of a dead child and having suffered very greatly in her lying-in’, Mr Arbuthnot began a difficult letter to the Prince of Wales, ‘so much fever ensued that for a short time the physicians were apprehensive for her safety.’ The Duke of Württemberg’s Chamberlain, Baron de Wimpfen, wrote more openly on 30 April 1798 to Sir John Coxe Hippisley: ‘Her Royal Highness continues to manage as well as is possible in her situation, but she does not yet know of the death of her child, for which they are preparing her …’ But then, when the body of Fritz’s father had lain in the palace of Stuttgart, Fritz had had a newspaper printed and given to his widowed mother, falsely declaring the body, which she had wished to see, to be instead at Ludwigsburg. Medieval indeed.

  When the Duchess was told the evil news of her baby daughter’s death, her husband told her also of their subjects’ concern for her health. Even the country people came into town to get news of her, and the bourgeoisie were planning a fête for her recovery, an event unheard of in the annals of the Duchy. ‘We consider the death of the child as a true sadness,’ wrote Wimpfen. ‘It was a beautiful big girl who, in becoming a new bond of union and tenderness for father and mother would have contributed strongly to her Highness’s happiness. We must hope for the future, today all the wishes are united for her recovery.’

  The Duchess wrote to her father from Stuttgart on 4 May: ‘Do not think me ungrateful to Providence for the many blessings with which I am surrounded when I say that the loss of my dear child has deeply afflicted me. I trust that I feel this as a Christian and submit with resignation to the will of the Almighty, but nature must ever make me regret the loss of the little thing I had built such happiness on: when I do this I frequently blame myself as God has made her happier than my warmest wishes could have done.’ She thanked God for her husband’s affection and attention in her distress – ‘I am doubly sensible of this happiness as it falls to the lot of so few people in our situation of life …’ And she even thanked Mr Arbuthnot for his courtesy in giving up the ball he had planned to give to the Duke in honour of the birth of her child. The preparations having been made, he had proposed to give it instead in honour of her recovery. He ‘had the goodness to give it up when he heard how deeply I was afflicted at the knowledge of the death of my child.’

  Four days later the Duchess was stronger. ‘Though I shall long silently mourn my child … were it in my power to recall her to life I would not do it. These times are not those to make one pity children it pleases God to save from the miseries of this life.’ The doctors had advised the Duke to take his invalid wife to Teinach, a ‘famous water drinking place … where I am also to take the baths of Liebenzell which they assure will perfectly cure me.’ In the meantime they moved to Ludwigsburg and she was carried into the garden there, hoping soon to be able to walk to the large English garden the Duke was laying out at a distance from the house. Her husband, still tender, made a flower garden outside her dressing room for her more immediate enjoyment, and a year later she was to take pleasure in ‘drawing the flowers that blow there.’

  In the months following the stillbirth, Royal was ‘very busy’ with her drawing, and by August could tell her father that she walked a great deal – ‘generally two hours a day and near five or six English miles in the woods and often in the fields. I am afraid that my pace is sometimes a little irksome to the other ladies but having now obtained that they divide themselves, and that some walk in the morning and the others in the evening, I go on in my old way, as I find it agrees very much with me, as notwithstanding all this exercise I continue very fat, without it I should be a perfect sight.’

  A portrait commissioned by her husband of Duchess Charlotte about this time shows her golden haired and smiling, but grown sensibly more matronly, in a muslin dress. Schweppe, the artist, may have been exercising some restraint with his paintbrush. The Princess Royal had, of all the three eldest princesses, always been noted for her good figure, but following her pregnancy and the stillbirth of her child, she grew larger with every year until it was eventually reported that she had no shape – like snow. A year after the stillbirth, she was to write uneasily to her father that she was now nearly as large as her husband. The mind boggles. The Duke had had, by 1802, a piece cut out of the whist table at home to accommodate his stomach, although when he was in London an accurate observer, Sir Gilbert Elliot, told his wife that the bridegroom’s belly was not as large as had been advertised. But, although the Duchess ceased to mind about her size, she did not forget the hopes she had had of her dead daughter.

  No more children came, although she hoped for them and kept till her death the baby clothes she had brought from England. ‘If ever the Almighty blesses me with girls, it shall ever be my object to have them constantly with me, and to try gently to correct little faults,’ she wrote, in one of many long letters of advice she composed for Lady Elgin, governess in England to her two-year-old niece Charlotte. They contained the wisdom that she would have wished to have lavished on her own child’s education. But, as she wrote to Lady Elgin a few days after the anniversary of her daughter’s stillbirth, she did not think she would wholeheartedly enjoy seeing her niece: ‘The sight of all children is a pleasure mixed with pain.’

  Princess Charlotte enchanted others, including her grandfather the
King. He played with her on the carpet at the Queen’s House as he had done thirty years earlier with his own children. She sang ‘Hearts of Oak’ for him, and in return he bought her a large rocking horse. ‘She is the merriest little thing I ever saw,’ wrote her sub-governess when she was one and a half. ‘Pepper hot too, if contradicted she kicks her little feet about in great rage but the cry ends in a laugh before you well know which it is.’ Her aunt Royal hoped that she would one day be a bond of union – even a magnet – between her parents, but she was to be more a bone of contention.

  Princess Mary reported that Weymouth this September 1798 was ‘very dull and indeed stupid’ after the fun of Windsor, for within two weeks Princess Sophia was ill with ‘cramp in her stomach’, and it was ‘a perfect standstill of everything’. She wrote to the Prince about his ‘amiable left hand’, Mrs Fitzherbert, to whom he thought of returning – and to whom the following year he did return. The Prince’s estranged wife and their daughter were now both settled out of London, the former at Montagu House on Blackheath and her daughter and attendants in the village of Charlton near by.

  Princess Sophia was continuing her correspondence with Miss Garth, and was pleased that she had looked ‘fitter than for some time past’ when she walked on the terrace. At Weymouth, when she had recovered from her illness, she rode out with her father every morning, which ‘does not make me a little vain’, and in the evenings they went to the theatre where Kemble and Mrs Mattocks were in residence. Sophia finished by giving Miss Garth an account of her uncle, General Thomas Garth: ‘he is very well but not over and above pleased with Weymouth; notwithstanding he is all good humour and as cheery as ever; you know he is no small favourite of the dear Kings.’

  The General’s principal period of attendance each year on the King was during the three winter months, but as Major-General of the district he had a house near Weymouth, and so was a constant visitor there.

  Meanwhile, Princess Amelia, youngest of the six princesses, was having an adventure of her own at the staid sea-bathing resort of Worthing. At her sister Royal’s wedding the year before, Amelia, an excited fourteen-year-old debutante, was the tallest of all the sisters with big bones, a fine bosom and mid-brown hair. Further, according to Miss Burney, she had ‘ruby lips’ and ‘an expression of such ingenuous sweetness and innocence as was truly captivating’. The King adored her, while Amelia herself worshipped her eldest brother the Prince, and of all her sisters loved the motherly Mary most. Her life, unlike those of her elder sisters and as befits that of the youngest child of such an enormous family, had been till now free of care. When the King recovered from his 1788-9 illness, the doctors said that the Queen should from now on address herself entirely to his needs. ‘Then I pity my three younger daughters, whose education I can no longer attend to,’ she said. Amelia was then five. The King later inscribed a book that he gave to his eldest daughter, ‘For the Princess Royal, governess to her five sisters’ – and there was some truth in his words. According to Mrs Papendiek, the Princess Royal took a great interest in her youngest sister’s education at least, and gave her lessons. But there seemed nothing to pity Amelia for in having such a serious scholar and affectionate sister for a tutor.

  And then her health became alarming. On 8 October 1798 Amelia should have been celebrating, with the rest of her family, Nelson’s annihilation of the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile, of which word had just reached England. But in the summer of this year, as Nelson was chasing the French fleet, she had developed terrible inflammation and pain in the joint of her knee. With Gouly, and Gouly’s brother General Gouldsworthy and other attendants, she was sent in August to Worthing, where, it was thought, she would be more quiet than at Weymouth, and where Dr Thomas Keate, an excellent surgeon, especially in the matter of wounds and injuries of the arteries, and Sir Lucas Pepys attended her. Amelia confirmed in a letter to her father at Weymouth that she could never have reached that resort. Even the short journey to the Sussex coast from London had been agony.

  Every morning in August, in pursuit of a ‘perfect cure’, she sat out in ‘a little garden near the sea’, and all afternoon she sat out on the sands. A sofa that the Prince of Wales sent her was pulled up on board a barge attached to a sloop named the Fly, for her to lie on and better enjoy the sea air, but the motion disturbed her. ‘I find my leg at present much the same,’ she wrote to her father on 9 August, ‘but certainly the vapour and warm sea bath are of use and therefore I hope that I shall soon be able to assure you I am better.’ Her brother the Prince was assiduous, and in early August visited her from Brighton further along the coast with more presents. ‘The hats are very pretty and fit me exactly,’ she wrote in thanks. Later in the month she was out on the barge again, this time in ‘a cot which is a very clever invention as it will prevent my feeling a great deal of the motion’. But there was still no ‘material amendment’ in her knee.

  Princess Amelia, aged fifteen, was determined not to complain to her parents. ‘Oh dear, that I cannot help saying, but complain I will not,’ she wrote to her English teacher, Miss Gomm, adding, ‘I have given over dining with the ladies, as having no appetite, the smell of meat was very disagreeable to me.’ But she underwent treatments that appalled her. ‘Only think of my being electrified,’ she exclaimed, ‘you well know my horror and fright for it, but I put that aside as well as I could the moment Mr Keate told me he wished me to try it. I must ever think it horrid. It hurts very much when it is upon the knee, although it is done in the slightest manner possible.’ On her arm it was nothing in comparison, ‘though it was done stronger’. To her ‘feels [feelings]’ the knee seemed the same but Dr Keate said it was better, and she had an appetite. ‘Laudanum to a great degree is left off,’ she told the Prince on 28 October. ‘I have attempted to stand up – It gave me very severe pain though I did only do it for half a minute.’ The Prince visited her again, and the Duke and Duchess of York called on her.

  When Miss Burney saw Amelia one morning this summer at Sir Lucas Pepys’s house, the Princess, ‘seated on a sofa, in a French grey riding dress with pink lapels’, seemed as lively as ever. But her condition became clear when, on leaving the room, she had to be ‘painfully lifted from her seat between Sir Lucas and Mr Keate’. Grateful for all, Amelia did wish, in her pain and discomfort, that she could have just one sight of her sister Mary’s shining face. ‘Oh dear, never can there be such another angel in this world.’ Amelia’s only fear was that the angel was too perfect to be long for the world. She swore she should die if Mary did. On her parents’ Coronation Day, the Fly sloop, commander Captain William Cumberland, fired a ‘feu de joie’ out at sea, and as she wrote the band was playing a last song out of Blue Beard. Mary and she had sung that ‘almost the minute before my lameness seized me’, she recalled sadly.

  When the doctors Sir Lucas Pepys and Mr Keate attended on 13 November and solemnly ordered her to keep her leg down, Princess Amelia obeyed and no longer laid it on the sofa. Sir Lucas, physician in ordinary to the King since 1792, was inclined to be dictatorial and very firm in his manner. ‘It is four months since I have let it hang, and therefore of course it hurts,’ she wrote bravely. She complied also with their directive that she ride, and General Gouldsworthy lent her one of his horses, Frolic, for an attempt out on the downs where no one could see her. Eventually came success. Sir Lucas’s prescription and the electrifying answered – or the knee healed naturally. By Christmas Amelia was back in London. ‘I go on riding every day, and now canter,’ she wrote, and was on her way to join the family for Christmas at Windsor.

  A curious story exists about this sojourn at Worthing relating to Amelia and Robert Keate, nephew of surgeon Thomas Keate, who assisted his uncle with the royal patient there. In her August letters she told the King that he seemed to be ‘a very modest, civil young man and anxious to do what is right.’ But she also told the King ‘how attentive and anxious to do right’ was Captain Cumberland. He took her out, lying on a sofa imported for the purpos
e, to recruit her health on his barge. Nevertheless in early September, when the older Keate had to leave Worthing periodically to attend another patient, young Keate became responsible for her case – ‘his nephew, who is very gentle, attends me, you know’, Amelia told her father. Given the curious circumstances of her isolation, with only Gouly and Mrs Cheveley and General Gouldsworthy for companions – even Lady Charlotte Belasyse, Amelia’s lady, was called away to Yorkshire – it seems perfectly possible that the young nephew and Princess enjoyed during this summer at the least a tender relationship. But there the matter did not end. Lord Glenbervie learnt from the Princess of Wales twelve years later details that she had heard from the Duke of York about this Worthing sojourn – that ‘being engaged one day’ there, Keate had sent his nephew to Amelia, ‘who communicated an infection to her from whence all her subsequent illness originated.’ We shall see that this gossip chimes with fears about her fertility – and with detailed descriptions of symptoms that tally with those of venereal infection – that Amelia herself expressed later in extremely confidential letters.

  For the moment, Amelia was restored to health and the following summer could join the rest of the family at Weymouth – where the princesses had their niece Charlotte to dote on. Amelia gloated over the baby one afternoon when, all by herself, she collected her from her nap and gave her her tea. Amelia, when not in pain, continued to be lively and enthusiastic. She was also religious. On 24 December 1799 she was confirmed by the Archbishop of Canterbury in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. She believed that ‘the consequence these two days have been to me’ would long endure, for her happiness depended on it.

  Others in the family were not so blessed. After a period of some months in which she had not answered his letters, Prince Adolphus had heard in Hanover on 27 March 1799 that his beloved fiancée Frederica, widow of Prince Louis of Prussia, had married the Prince of Solms the day before. Admittedly there had been obstacles in the way to their own match, as the King was still waiting for peace to ask Parliament for a grant for the marriage. But poor Adolphus was beside himself with grief and mortification in the house on the Leinestrasse in Hanover that he had so lovingly prepared for his bride.