Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  Among the comings and goings of officers and battalions and regiments at Windsor, one arrival was of significance for Princess Augusta herself – that of General Sir Brent Spencer, an Irishman who commanded the 40th Somersetshire Regiment. Since becoming an ensign at the age of eighteen, he had been almost constantly in the West Indies. But now, aged thirty-nine and a bachelor, he returned from an ill-fated expedition with the 40th to the Helder under the command of the Duke of York. When he brought despatches from the Helder to the King at Windsor, Sir Brent made such a favourable impression on the monarch that he was appointed one of his aides-de-camp, and took up residence at Court.

  Spencer did not long remain with the King – perhaps fortunately, since he was ‘anxious and fidgety when there was nothing to do’, as a contemporary put it, ‘but once under fire like a philosopher solving a problem.’ Soon he was away again, off to command the 40th in the Mediterranean – Menorca, Malta and then to Egypt with Abercromby’s expedition to force the French out of Alexandria and Cairo. But he had made an impression on Princess Augusta, whose siblings had always teased her about her ‘rage militaire’, and she had equally affected him. She had written in 1793, ‘I intend for the rest of my life to be very despotic until I have a Lord and Master, and then (unless I break the great oaths and promises I shall make when I marry) I shall give myself up to his whims.’

  Now Princess Augusta dreamt of having Sir Brent Spencer not only for a lover but for a husband, as she later recounted. But she did not yet reveal her feelings, strong though they were, to Spencer himself. He, for his part, caused much ill feeling when he unaccountably broke his engagement to his cousin Miss Canning this year, but whether this was on account of unspoken feelings he had himself for Princess Augusta cannot be known. It was dangerous for any private gentleman to have feelings for these princesses, when the King their patron would not allow even princes to come near them – unless the princess herself gave encouragement. In due course Princess Augusta would give that encouragement, in pursuit of private happiness within the confines of the Royal Marriages Act, an ambition that she had long pondered. The intensity with which she pursued that goal would startle those she entangled in her scheme – Sir Brent, perhaps, as much as anyone.

  The Prince of Wales meanwhile had returned to Mrs Fitzherbert, and Princess Augusta wrote to him on 25 August 1799, without apparent irony, ‘how very much it stands to your mutual credit, that old friends sincerely and unalterably attached, should come together again’. A year earlier she had written that all the sisterhood felt concern at ‘the dejected appearance you made. I am not such a child as for you or anyone else in the world to suppose me ignorant of the cause … After such real affection, not to say adoration on your side, and I am confident from all I have heard pretty near the same on hers, I am certain it is nothing less serious than a reconciliation, which would surely make both of you happy.’

  Other unorthodox arrangements proved too fragile to withstand the displeasure of the author of the Act. In Berlin out of the blue Prince Augustus’s wife Lady Augusta Murray had appeared at his side, alarmed to hear he was ill. After an interval of six years apart the Prince and his lady lived contentedly for a time, and even provided for their son Augustus a sister, Augusta. But the Prince was recalled to England by his father, and not long after his arrival there in May 1800, his Berlin sojourn with his wife and son and their daughter’s birth appeared like a dream – as did his promises to Lady Augusta of eternal fidelity. Shrugging off all encumbrances, Augustus took up his father’s offer of apartments at Kensington Palace and became an avid bibliophile. He welcomed visits from his brothers and sisters at Kensington, but bad health, he claimed, kept him away from Windsor.

  Meanwhile in the spring of 1799 in Württemberg Augusta’s elder sister Royal had believed herself in real, not romantic, danger as the French drew near. But she had resisted her husband’s attempts to send her to safety. Her sister-in-law Princess Ferdinand, a target as the wife of an Austrian general, had left for Hanover on hearing the report that the French intended marching through the Duchy. As the daughter of the King of England, the Duke argued, Royal would have also a special value to the enemy. But with the stepchildren, and her ladies, she remained in Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg – keeping up lessons in engraving with Friedrich Müller. She preferred not to be parted from her husband, she told her father: ‘some days ago I was low with the thoughts of what might happen but now that the decisive moment approaches I am perfectly calm.’

  Notwithstanding her calm, Royal lamented to her father the ruin of the country. The French armies under the command of General Moreau were in and out of the city, eating all they could find, stealing cattle as they pleased, and the Austrian generals imposed equal demands. The Duke dissolved the Stande or Parliament when it advocated making peace with the French, and offered stout promises that he would never leave his people – only to renege on that when the Helder disaster appeared to render flight essential. The Duchess reluctantly agreed to go to Wengen in September 1799, but after a few days she was celebrating her release from captivity. The menace had passed for the time being.

  The next spring, however, there was no way out. To Erlangen in the Prussian King’s Franconian lands the Württemberg women and children retreated in 1800. Here in a flat landscape of conifers and sand, far from the fruitfulness of Württemberg and in a small house, Charlotte, Trinette and Paul sat down to endure the war. By a touch of fate, the pair of kangaroos she had requested from England were their companions – an intelligent chamberlain at Stuttgart having divined they would be of interest to the royals in their exile. This was not what Charlotte had expected when she adopted that diamond headdress and had her hair pulled into ringlets for her wedding day. She had hoped above all to be a mother, but she had certainly also looked forward to exercising the power of her position as the matriarch of a major Continental power.

  Stoic by nature, self-abnegatory by upbringing, Princess Charlotte Augusta Matilda, Duchess of Württemberg looked out over the desert sand and identical pines in the shifting light and fretted that the French would destroy the improvements she and Fritz had so recently made at Ludwigsburg. Meanwhile, her husband the Duke of Württemberg, with his son Wilhelm, was energetically attempting at Vienna to redress his altered fortunes, and those of his Duchy. He expressed himself as bitter against Britain, which had done so little to aid his country considering their new family connection. And the Mintos heard that he was among those eager to separate themselves from the fading Holy Roman Empire and seek their fortune with Napoleonic France. Colleagues remonstrated with Minto for listening to the Duke, but the diplomat stood firm:

  Besides the natural claim he seemed to have as an ally and relation of our own Court to support from an English minister in his relations with this Government, it seemed impossible to refuse a … kind and friendly ear to the lamentations and claims of a prince whose ruin seems so much a consequence of this relation and engagements to us … It is not his merits, but his misfortunes, or rather ruin in a common cause that my indulgence is directed [to]. I admit also that he is no apostle of our cause, and I can easily believe all you say of the mischief done by his indiscreet and perhaps ill affected language. Yet I have not nerves to resist altogether, or rather feel some indulgence for the cries and clamour of a real agonie. For he is at present struggling in the very convulsions of political death.

  In England Charlotte’s sisters had recently recovered in May 1800 from convulsions of a different nature. Huddled outside the royal box at Drury Lane Theatre behind their mother, who was waiting to join her husband once he had taken his bow, they heard a shot. At first they thought it was a ‘squib’ backstage. Then the King waved the Queen back, saying, ‘Don’t go forward, a man in the parterre has fired a pistol.’ The Queen, worried that her younger daughters would faint, said nothing, for fear of uttering a ‘bêtise.’ For two minutes the theatre was silent. ‘You could have heard a pin drop,’ the Queen told her brother. Then, with the
marksman apprehended, the King advanced, showing himself safe and unharmed, and a hubbub, with ‘cries of joy’, erupted. But the actors were too frightened to start the comedy, and the audience wanted to know what had happened. ‘Finally,’ reported the Queen, ‘an actress was pushed onto the stage.’ The actress announced, ‘I have the pleasure to tell you the man is in custody,’ and the comedy, very badly performed, began. There was no political intention, at least, in the attempt on the King’s life, as Sheridan, the theatre manager, discovered on questioning the marksman. James Hadfield, a hospital orderly who had tried to murder his child two days before, joined Margaret Nicolson, the King’s earlier assailant, in Dr Monro’s asylum, Bedlam.

  Sophia wrote to Miss Garth on 25 May of ‘the miraculous escape of my most perfect and angelic Papa’, at the same time complaining of having been very far from well ‘with a complaint in my stomach’. The year before she had been afflicted by this complaint, as in earlier summers, including that first occasion in 1793 when she had stayed for so long at Tunbridge Wells and again in the summer of 1798. She had been forbidden ‘any kind of fatigue or hot rooms’ this time, and therefore would not be at the Birthday, although she told Miss Garth that she would accompany her parents in the following month – July – to Weymouth.

  In the event, Sophia and Amelia set off a day before the rest of the royal party, and stopped for the night en route at General Gouldsworthy’s house outside Salisbury. It was said that Princess Sophia was still so weak she had to be carried up the stairs there. The rest of the royal party pursued their usual headlong course by coach from Windsor to Weymouth, there joining on 31 July the younger princesses and Prince Ernest, newly Duke of Cumberland, who was taking a course of sea bathing. (The King had provided royal dukedoms for both Ernest and – at last – for Prince Edward in Canada, who became Duke of Kent, in April 1799.)

  After taking an airing on the sands in a ‘sociable’ (an open carriage) with her sisters Augusta and Elizabeth on the 2nd, Sophia was ill off and on at Weymouth in the early days of August until the 8th, when the Prince her brother – with whom she was still on cool terms, due to her support for his hated wife – heard from Amelia: ‘at last we have the prospect of seeing our dear Sophia restored to health very shortly’.

  Dr Francis Millman attended the Princess, and by 15 August she was judged well enough to take another airing on the sands. Progress continued slowly, and she benefited from the ‘warm bath’, or bathing in heated seawater, while the rest of the royal family made ‘aquatic excursions.’ The King rode about Dorset with his son Ernest and with General Garth for companions, while the Queen and the other princesses ‘worked’ or took airings on the sands. Finally, in early October Sophia was declared fully recovered, and the extended royal visit came to a stop. And shortly before she left with the royal party for Windsor on the 8th, Dr Millman received the King’s congratulations and a baronetcy, although it was later said that the monarch put his daughter’s recovery down to eating good roast beef.

  At any rate, the party returned to Windsor, after the extended stay at Weymouth, in high good humour to prepare for celebrations to mark the new century. These were to commence on New Year’s Day 1801, but there were to be other celebrations soon – for, after seven years of war, peace was at hand.

  In December 1800 the Duchess of Württemberg and her children – as she called Paul and Trinette – were threatened directly in the ‘paper house’ in which they lived at Erlangen. Moreau, having defeated Archduke John, was headed for Vienna, but other French forces had taken Nuremberg and their troops were now constantly marching through Erlangen itself. They were ‘quartered in all of the villages around about, which makes me an absolute prisoner’, wrote the Duchess. Only the day before she tried to walk round the town, then saw a patrol which stopped them in their tracks. Later that month, during exchanges between the Austrian and French positions, ‘one could hear every shot as distinctly as if we were at a Review’, but there was no decisive outcome. ‘The whole day there is nothing but firing to be heard. God grant the Austrians success,’ she wrote with remarkable calm.

  The Austrian outlook was hopeless and the Emperor sued for peace on Christmas Day. The Treaty of Lunéville, signed on 9 February 1801 and confirming Campo Formio, put an end to the Holy Roman Empire, concluded the War of the Second Coalition, and closed the eighteenth century with complete victory for France on the Continent – though not as yet in the newly United Kingdom of the British Isles. Over the New Year, congratulating her father on the union of Great Britain and Ireland and wishing him well for the new century, the Princess Royal wrote in disgust that the Austrian troops had simply thrown down their arms on hearing of the armistice.

  A few days later she had more delicate information to offer from her husband, who was still in Vienna. The Duke had had to send a representative to Paris. His instructions were to keep in the background and ‘come forward’ – only when there was no thought of continuing the war, of course – to make a separate treaty with France. The Duke could not, Royal pleaded, maintain war against the might of France with only 7,000 men if Austria had made peace. The English, who had been suspicious of Royal’s husband at Vienna, were confirmed in their opinion of him, as he took the first steps towards alliance with Napoleon, and pulled with him Napoleon’s foe, the King of England’s eldest daughter.

  10 Agitation

  Even as the Peace of Amiens was being celebrated, Princess Elizabeth mentioned to Dr Thomas Willis in March 1801 ‘a very delicate subject – the cruelty of a fabricated and most scandalous and base report concerning P.S. [Princess Sophia]’. The rumour was that she had given birth to a child at Weymouth the previous summer. ‘Such a report’, wrote Willis indignantly, ‘must in its nature be false as those who are acquainted with the interior of the King’s houses must testify.’ But the rumour or ‘report’ was almost certainly true.

  Princess Sophia was in no doubt about the origin and fount of the rumours – her brother, the Prince of Wales, who so disliked her championing of his estranged wife. ‘He has trifled with my character, and a young woman’s character once gone is not so easily regained,’ she averred. For even before Lord Glenbervie and Princess Elizabeth gossiped and protested, Princess Sophia had confided in her oblique way – to Lady Harcourt on 30 December 1800 – her distress at the stories that were circulating about her. Referring to a ‘private conversation’ they had had, and to her happiness that she had ‘had courage to begin it’, she wrote:

  the excessive kindness of your manner has, I assure you, greatly soothed my distressed and unhappy days and hours …

  I have no doubt that I was originally to blame, therefore I must bear patiently the reports, however unjust they are, as I have partially myself to thank for them; but, dearest Ly H, when I reflect of the difference of your behaviour and that of others, it shows me how insincere the generality of this world are, and how one ought to value and revere a true friend, which is most justly styled the most precious jewel in life. It is grievous to think what a little trifle will slur a young woman’s character for ever. I do not complain, I submit patiently, and promise to strive to regain mine, which, however imprudent I have been, has, I assure you, been injured unjustly.

  For all her fighting words, Sophia almost certainly gave birth at Weymouth – in circumstances which remain mysterious – to a baby who was baptized in the parish church there on 11 August 1800. The infant was described in the parish register as ‘Thomas Ward, stranger’ or foundling, ‘adopted by Samuel and Charlotte Sharland’, and as having been born on the 5th of that month. Samuel Sharland, a colonel of the Weymouth Volunteers, had a prosperous tailoring business on the Weymouth esplanade, and the birth of his own child was noted earlier in the month in the same register.

  There is no doubt about Thomas Ward’s existence or about his presence during the first few years of his life at the Sharlands’ house on the esplanade at Weymouth. But great doubt surrounds the whole business of his birth, including his birthplac
e and his birthdate – notwithstanding the date given in his baptismal entry. The child may have been born when Sophia stopped en route at General Gouldsworthy’s on 30 July, or somehow, somewhere when she reached Weymouth – not necessarily at Gloucester Lodge, the royal residence on the esplanade, where there was little privacy. Sophia later said that it was her ‘old nurse’ who was with her at that dreadful time, and stopped the story from coming out then, but gives no further details. Apparently she did not realize for a very long time into her pregnancy that she was having a child.

  Still more doubt obscures the identity of the child’s father. General Thomas Garth is, of course, the natural candidate, given Sophia’s ‘passion’ for him. A teasing letter without a date and addressed to ‘My very dear, dear General’ – almost certainly General Garth – refers to their exchange of rings and in other ways convinces the reader that their relationship was intimate. And less than four years after Sophia had given birth, Glenbervie was writing, ‘The foundling which was left at the tailor’s [Samuel Sharland] at Weymouth about two years ago, is now in a manner admitted by the people about the Court to be the Princess Sophia’s and, as the story generally goes, by General Garth … It is now said the Queen knows the child to be the Princess Sophia’s, but that the King does not, but that the Queen thinks Garth the father.’

  As if to confirm part of the opinion that Glenbervie ascribes to the Queen – that General Garth was Thomas Ward’s real father – the equerry went on to adopt and educate the child at Harrow, renaming him Tommy or Thomas Garth in the process, making him his heir, and fostering his career in his old regiment. The letter Sophia wrote in 1805 referring to her ‘old nurse’ shows plainly that she was the child’s mother. Nothing would appear to be clearer than that, by some lapse in morals or contraception, Sophia and the General had together conceived Tommy Garth in the autumn of 1799. For evermore the Princess was to bear the shame of this ill chance, forfeiting all hope of marriage or domestic happiness. And the General behaved honourably by the boy in giving him his name, if his adoption of young Tommy unhappily confirmed the rumours that he was the illegitimate offspring of the equerry and the Princess.