Princesses
Page 27
But Glenbervie inserted an astonishing caveat into his story about Tommy Garth’s parentage. After his remarks about the General openly maintaining the child, he added, ‘But the Princess of Wales told Lady Sheffield the other day, that there is great reason to suspect the father to be the Duke of Cumberland. How strange and how disgusting. But it is a very strange family, at least the children – sons and daughters.’
This claim by the Princess of Wales, which probably issued from one of Cumberland’s brothers or even from the Duke himself, who was ‘underhand the great friend of the Princess of Wales’ this year – that he was the real father of his sister’s child – was to dog Sophia for a long time. As the child grew up, sly references to the story multiplied, and the matter ended by exploding into the public arena when Tommy Garth was nearly thirty years old. Old letters from Sophia to General Garth complaining of Ernest making ‘attempts on her person’ were supposedly among other documents bandied about at that time to prove that her brother was responsible for her pregnancy.
That Ernest made ‘attempts’ on Sophia or, in plain language, tried to rape his sister is certainly possible or even likely. The Prince – that boisterous, rude darling of his nurse Mrs Cheveley – knew no boundaries where appetite or decency were concerned, and all his life not only used the grossest language about women, but made the grossest of physical assaults on them – all women, married, unmarried, young, old, innocent and knowing. As a young soldier on the Continent he had to be restrained from trying his luck at a nunnery. In later life one of his victims’ husbands committed suicide.
However, let us not forget to whom Sophia wrote these letters complaining of her brother’s ‘attempts’ – to her lover, General Garth. And while Ernest had the opportunity to be the father of Tommy Garth – he was at Windsor during the late autumn of 1799 – Sophia’s letter to ‘My very dear, dear General’ makes it perfectly plain that her relationship with the equerry was long-standing, consensual and intimate. In other words, if an ‘attempt’ by the Duke of Cumberland was responsible for the child to which his sister Princess Sophia gave birth at Weymouth, rather than the more regular attentions of her lover Garth, she was particularly unlucky. That Garth was the father of Princess Sophia’s child is the commonsense and probable, if unromantic and not so scandalous, answer.
Before we leave Tommy Garth in 1801 still at the Sharlands’, not due to take up residence for another three years at the home his ‘adoptive’ father General Garth provided for him at Ilsington Manor at Puddletown near by, it will be as well to quote the undated letter from Sophia already mentioned: ‘Though I never can be really angry with you, my very dear, dear General, yet at this moment I almost am so, for you have indeed been excessively naughty. How can you, my dearest General, go on so long, when you do not feel well, without seeing Dr Turton?’ This physician to the royal household, who died in 1806, was no doubt required to alleviate General Garth’s chronic gout from which he unromantically suffered agonies. Sophia continued:
Your dear ring has given me some tremendous pinches, but I have bore them like a heroine. If you looked at your little finger when you were so naughty, I believe a certain little ring would have been impertinent enough to have given you a pinch. I think you deserve it – And now, my dearest General, do not forget that, when you are neglecting your own health, you are the cause of giving many unhappy moments to those who love you. And that was the case yesterday, for, as we were going to dinner, I heard you were not well and till the evening, when I saw Miss Gomm, did not know you was better. Therefore, you may easily imagine, dinner went down but so so, but, upon looking at the ring, I was frightened to death and ate like an Alderman.
The letter concludes:
I assure you I do all in my power (which God knows is but little) to please my sisters, but alas! I fear I do not succeed – I can say no more at present. My heart is too full, but, though I own I am not happy, yet I shall never forget you, my dear General, to whom I owe so much. Your kind remembrance of me is a cordial. Your calling me your S makes me as proud as Lucifer … I love you more and more every day. God bless you, my dearest dear General. Think of me tomorrow at 2 o clock. I shall then be happy for two minutes as I shall be speaking to dear Gooly once more.
The King was ill. How ill was unclear, but in mid-February 1801, he told General Garth out riding that he was ‘very bilious and unwell’ and had not slept. It seemed that he had stayed too long in church on the Friday, which had been a fast day. ‘The weather was so snowy and cold that His Majesty became excessively chilled.’ Shortly thereafter the symptoms of thirteen years before that had so alarmed the royal family and disrupted public business came flooding back – colic, sweating and hoarseness – and led to acute delirium and coma.
Thomas Willis had visited the King on Monday, 16 February at the Queen’s House, and was satisfied, after spending an hour with him, that the patient had a severe cold and was hoarse but nothing more. Yet within days, although the King attended a Council – convened, out of respect for his ailment, at the Queen’s House – he was ‘hurried’ and dwelt on his illness of 1788. He told Henry Addington, the incoming Prime Minister – Pitt had resigned over the question of Catholic Emancipation on the 5th – that in 1788 his father Dr Anthony Addington had counselled quiet.
Quiet was what the King needed now, and a week after he had first felt symptoms he confided in Thomas Willis, ‘I do feel myself very ill.’ Sunday, 22 February 1801 saw the arrival of the Reverend’s ‘medical’ brother Dr John Willis and of four burly ‘keepers’ from Dr Thomas Warburton’s asylum, both sanctioned by the Duke of York and Addington. Following the pattern of years before, the Opposition began their ‘speculating, anticipating and arranging’ of Cabinet posts in the new regency government they felt would soon ensue. For on 27 February Dr Willis, according to the Prince of Wales, ‘not only thought that the King could not understand what he read, were he disposed to read but that he could not, to the best of his judgement, know a single letter’. How then could he sign his royal assent to public acts? Pitt’s resignation and Addington’s substitution as prime minister still needed the King’s confirmation. Russia was establishing an Armed Neutrality league in the Baltic to menace British shipping as she attempted to violate French commerce there. And at a time when Austria and France had made peace, and the Continent was at last quiet – albeit in the stranglehold of France – there was a growing appetite in England for peace. If the King were incapacitated, who would commission the preliminary discussions with France on that delicate subject?
The King’s very existence rather than just his sanity seemed in doubt on 2 March. The princesses gathered with the rest of the family at the Queen’s House, expecting his fever to end in death. But a stray suggestion from Addington, of putting a pillow of warm hops under the invalid’s head, had a miraculous effect. The King slept, he grew stronger. He ‘cries at almost anything’, the doctors wrote, and he still ‘became so puzzled’ – when reading state papers – ‘that he grew hurried and angry’. But they wrote their final bulletin, predicting complete recovery, on 11 March, and the King accepted Pitt’s resignation on the 14th. He even accepted, through the unorthodox medium of the Reverend Thomas, the need for proposals of peace, and signed them. Princess Augusta wrote with relief to Lady Harcourt on 16 March: ‘We are as well as can be expected, considering what we have gone through – and though all the great distress and horror is now over, we now feel much oppressed from fatigue of mind and hurry of spirits.’ Her mother hoped to see Lady Harcourt the following day, she went on. ‘But of course it depends upon the hours we spend with the King or when we are in expectation of being sent for.’
The Queen held a drawing room on 26 March at the Prime Minister’s insistence and much to the King’s displeasure, when he found that Dr Willis had so blistered his legs that morning that he could not appear. Princess Augusta later recalled her own anguish at this time: ‘When I was very miserable and unhappy at St James’s last winter I told Lor
d Harcourt that I never would be happy again. And he was so very good as to say, “O fie, le bon temps viendra.” And I was so obliged to him and so incredulous and so low that I could only say, “God knows!” To which he again replied, “He does know best and does best for us all.” I always tried to think so, but my mind was too oppressed then to say more.’
In the meantime, while the King’s mind was wandering, King Frederick William III of Prussia had issued a proclamation declaring that he was compelled to take ‘efficacious measures’ against Hanover, and Prussian troops duly occupied the King of England’s beloved, if obscure German Electorate. Adolphus, leaving his house on the Leinestrasse in Hanover, was back in England by mid-April 1801, where he found his father recovering – but once more in confinement and in rooms that had originally been prepared at Kew House for his own arrival. The King was there alone with the Willises and their keepers. The Queen and the princesses, in deep distress, lived across the way at the Dutch House, or Prince of Wales’s House.
The King had seen his eldest son on 15 April for the first time in a month, and received him with ‘every mark of love and fondness’, speaking of his happiness in embracing him on the day he dismissed Dr Willis’s keepers. He knew of Nelson’s victory in the struggle for domination of the Baltic, when that Admiral destroyed the Danish fleet in their own harbour of Copenhagen. But ‘of the condition of Hanover none had ventured to talk to him’, and he repeatedly declared he was a dying man, and determined to go abroad to Hanover and make over the government to the Prince. The Queen and Prime Minister between them became so agitated by his behaviour that, only days after he had embraced his son and celebrated his freedom, the Willises cornered him on 20 April at Kew, where he had gone to convalesce at the Prince of Wales’s House. While the church bells rang on the Green summoning the inhabitants to hear the prayers of thanks for the King’s recovery, the eager doctors imposed on the object of those prayers their will and the straitjacket. ‘I will never forgive you as long as I live,’ said the King. From April to late May he recovered slowly at Kew House, seeing nobody but the Willises – not even his son Adolphus, who inhabited the same house. The Willises were his constant companions as he walked round the gardens or signed official documents. Even after he was better, they stayed until the end of June on Kew Green to supervise him.
During this time the King took the interests of the Princess of Wales and her rights over her daughter almost painfully to heart. Elizabeth wrote to Dr Willis after a visit to her father in June 1801, when the princesses and the Queen, who camped at the Prince of Wales’s House, were at last allowed to see their father, now he was recovered: ‘The subject of the Princess is still in the King’s mind to a degree that is distressing from the unfortunate situation of the family.’ He meant to build the Princess another wing to her house at Blackheath, and take care of Princess Charlotte himself. But the Princess of Wales had spoken to Elizabeth in some alarm about all the schemes the King had for her. He was ‘heated and fatigued’, Elizabeth said ominously. Dr Robert Willis, a third Willis brother called in, said that there was an increase in ‘hurry’, and his brother Thomas concurred in this opinion: ‘His body, mind and tongue are all upon the stretch every minute …’ But the King was set in his mind, not only to spend a period of convalescence at the Lodge at Weymouth which he had finally bought from his brother the Duke of Gloucester now that his confinement was ended, but to lend his support to his niece the Princess of Wales in her battles with her husband the Prince. Days after he had reconciled with his son on his first recovery, Glenbervie reported, the King rode down to Storey’s Gate and over Westminster Bridge to visit the Princess at Blackheath with only the Duke of Cumberland and two equerries in attendance. ‘She had just breakfasted and was still in bed, and was very much surprised when they brought her word the King was at the door …’ She arose immediately and went down to hear from the King ‘his entire approbation of her conduct and his affection for her’.
One cannot exclude the possibility that the King’s hostess left a bedfellow when she went to greet her father-in-law. Princess Sophia wrote to Miss Garth from Weymouth in the summer of 1801, expressing a new caution about her sister-in-law, whose independent ways at Blackheath were leading to rumours of love affairs. ‘I think it a blessing you are not mixed in her [the Princess of Wales’s] confidence, as you can never be blamed; once and once only, and that was at Kew, Elizabeth said she thought the Pss confided in you; I ventured at random to say I thought not… as to the Pss I never name her to my sisters …’
Meanwhile the King’s virtuous eldest daughter, the Duchess of Württemberg, had returned to her husband’s Duchy after a year in exile, and she recorded, ‘I shall never forget the way in which they received me; the whole road from Lourch [Lorch] to Ludwigsburg was crowded with people. The Duke and his sons came three miles to meet me. Words can but feebly express the gratitude we feel to the Almighty for having restored us to our home.’ The kangaroos came safely home, too, and very shortly, none the worse for their journey, provided two young joeys for the admiration of the citizens of Ludwigsburg.
Royal thought fondly of her niece in England and wrote, ‘Pray tell little Charlotte that I send her a fan and when I go to Stuttgart shall not fail to bespeak some silver toys if she continues a good girl.’ But on hearing from General Melius, her husband’s envoy to England, of her niece’s ‘musical genius, speaking and repeating French well, and of her pretty manner’, she was a little hurt that ‘she displayed all these accomplishments without showing any timidity.’ In Württemberg the Duchess continued to supervise the education of ‘the children’, as she called her teenage stepchildren – Catherine, ‘who certainly puts me much in mind of dear Elizabeth and has a very amiable good heart’, and Paul, who was ‘a very comical boy and, in my partial eyes, his manners are like Adolphus’s’.
The Duchess’s delight now was in the gardens and grounds of Ludwigsburg: ‘After having been so many months deprived of flowers I feel double pleasure in attending to them and to a very pretty aviary the Duke has been so good as to build for me and to fill with common birds, as I object much to fine foreign ones which would not give me more pleasure and would cost much more trouble.’ But all the delights to be savoured on her return from exile paled beside the arrival of a letter her father wrote her from Weymouth, three days after the Willises and keepers had been dismissed for good. ‘It diffused on my whole countenance such a look of happiness that the first question my children asked me was what had given me so much pleasure, that they might share in it.’
Information that the King had ‘taken to botany’ led the Duchess to rejoice: ‘You will find it a constant source of amusement.’ She had herself bought a garden at Ludwigsburg of seven acres, with a house – ‘though in good repair, like old Frogmore and I have made it very comfortable by papering some of the rooms’. And she now tried to ‘acquire some fresh knowledge every day’, having a good gardener who understood both kitchen and flower garden, and a greenhouse and hothouse, ‘for flowers all winter long’.
Furthermore, the Duke increasing her land with the gift of an adjacent three-acre field, the Duchess was able to make hay three times that year, and feed the two Swiss cows she established there – and a calf born that September. But she worried, as a good Duchess should, about the field mice which threatened the potato harvest. Some farmers let their hogs into the fields to devour the mice, but then they ran the risk of swine fever. In graceful compliment to her father, she observed, ‘Your Majesty having taken so much to farming is very much admired abroad and looked on as one of the great causes of the improvements in England.’
At Stuttgart in the late autumn, the Duchess occupied herself with copying some dogs from Ridinger engravings, after a spell of damp weather had prevented her drawing or working – ‘it gives me violent headaches.’ She showed her work to the Stuttgart engraver Müller, and ‘he appears satisfied with those I have finished of late, which encourages me very much to apply [myself]’. A
t her new house, the Matildenhof, Royal began also to paint the celebrated Ludwigsburg porcelain with images derived from the engravings of Ridinger and others. The palaces of Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg filled with her painted and gilded products – cups, vases, plates and even plaques set into furniture.
The Duke had given her two very fine flower paintings, which, she believed, were by Breughel. ‘I intend to attempt to copy them but whether it will be in colours or in black and white I am not yet determined.’ She was delighted with a visit that she had had in November from Lord Minto, the British Minister at Vienna. ‘Indeed,’ she declared then, ‘it is impossible for those who have not been parted from their family to imagine the joy one feels at meeting with anybody who can give some account of all those one loves. I am like an infant on those occasions …’ She pressed the diplomat to take home to her father an account of her house at Ludwigsburg, her ‘favourite spot’. If possible, she contrived to spend one day there every week ‘and watch a little my workmen, who grow very idle if they are not followed.’
But she had other business in December 1801 which she hoped another British diplomat – Lord Cornwallis, envoy to the Peace of Amiens deliberations – could bring forward: ‘Though I understand Great Britain does not intend to interfere publicly in the interest of the Continent … one word from your Majesty would have great effect and be highly flattering to the Duke, who is much attached to you and has been one of the greatest sufferers by the war.’ The Duke was still waiting for the restitution of territory and financial recompense he had been promised at the Lunéville peace earlier that year.