Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  ‘The Queen was much frightened,’ wrote Augustus of the awful day at Kew, ‘as were all my sisters.’ A month later, when Princess Amelia fell from her horse out riding with her father, the King insisted, with unwonted severity and when she was plainly suffering, that she remount and continue. With the Prince’s failure to attend the meeting still in his mind, he said that he had one child already who lacked courage. He would not have more.

  When the King reached Weymouth, at six in the morning, he was ‘less hurried than could have been expected’, wrote his daughter Sophia. ‘He went to bed for an hour, and since that has not been off his legs, but I trust in God after a few days he will be more quiet as we must make allowances for his joy at this moment finding himself quite at liberty.’ But, she added, ‘I am sorry to say, he means to wear the uniforms of the different corps… which is vexatious.’ All that summer, according to unkind witnesses, the King dressed in heavy Hanoverian boots and wore great gauntlet gloves, an odd choice of dress for a bathing resort. Buckingham wrote to Grenville, ‘My accounts from Weymouth are the same. Mens non sana in corpore sano.’

  But there was worse. Lord Grenville had heard from his brother Buckingham in May that, when the King drove out, his sons accompanied him. The Queen and princesses, meanwhile, followed in another conveyance, as he had shown himself to be ‘lost to all propriety of conduct in their coach.’ The Queen did not now allow the King into her bedchamber, placing two German ladies there and then retaining two or three of the princesses who stayed until he had left the apartment. The fear or disgust the Queen had felt for the King was strong enough to resist the entreaties of ministers, doctors, nature and ‘duty’, according to a memorandum from Weymouth the Prince of Wales received in September. Lord Auckland wrote to Lord Henley that month, ‘With in the family there are strange schisms and cabals and divisions among the sons and daughters. One of the two youngest of the latter dines alternately with the Patron [the King] and nobody else.’ Lord Hobart wrote to Lord Auckland the same month, ‘It is a melancholy circumstance to see a family that had lived so well together for such a number of years completely broken up.’ Dr John Willis had told him confidentially, he added, that ‘things would never be quite right’.

  The royal parents, dissatisfied and irritable with each other, effectively separated on their return from Weymouth, when they both took up residence in Windsor Castle, in accordance with the King’s new project of inhabiting the Castle itself and pulling down the Queen’s Lodge. But they lived in separate apartments in different parts of the Casde. The Queen bemoaned the loss of her comfortable warm rooms at the Queen’s Lodge, occupying now with her daughters the south and east towers that looked over the Long Walk and the Home Park. The King moved into the northern wing once lived in by Queen Elizabeth, and there his conversation which had been at times ‘very childish’ at Weymouth became sober and composed.

  Other family rifts healed. In November 1804 the King and Prince met at last, ‘a day that has created feelings in me never to be forgotten’, wrote Princess Amelia. ‘The dear king I think wonderfully well. To me he appears more placid and calm than I ever saw him since his illness.’ But the King wrote next day to his niece at Blackheath, saying that he now ‘wished to communicate a plan for the child’s happiness’. And so began a series of conferences at the Princess of Wales’s house which alarmed the royal family. Two weeks later Sophia wrote to Mrs Villiers:

  Well my dear, I am completely miserable. The dear angel [the King] gone to Blackheath and probably will not be home till dark. How late it was last night, he could not have been home till one. All this worries us to death. I thought him most hurried when he came in to our dinner, very good humoured, but in a sad fidget, after dinner he talked of nothing but this sad story, but not one word of anger escaped him … the old Lady [the Queen] is in high glee, I suppose at the dear man’s absence – How unnatural, how odious!

  Sophia did not relish her growing role as her father’s confidante, and, a few days later, remarked that she wished she had a new dictionary ‘to do justice to all my heart feels’. The Princess of Wales at Blackheath told of having to leap over sofas to escape the King’s passionate lunges, and a housemaid was apparently caught by the King and locked in a stable with him. ‘He is all affection and kindness to me,’ wrote Princess Sophia, ‘but sometimes an over kindness, if you can understand that, which greatly alarms me.’ She hoped the Princess was prudent: ‘I believe he tells her everything.’ Her father’s ‘flow of spirits’ disturbed her.

  At Weymouth that summer two physicians speculated that Sophia herself suffered already in some part, and was likely to suffer more, from what people persisted in calling the ‘family malady’ – that scrofulous tendency which, in her father’s case, was held to have ‘fallen upon’ his brain. As someone who lived on her nerves, Sophia felt keenly her father’s changes of mood – and sexual attentions. As she said sorrowfully to Mrs Villiers, ‘I wish I did not feel as I do, for these feelings have ever been my misfortune. I wish sometimes I had all the bonhomie of a princess, it would be better for me, but though born a RH, I must feel like the rest of you, and this your kind heart will forgive.’ Sophia had been prone to ‘spasms’ for nearly ten years now, but these ‘feelings’ and the ‘nervous’ condition from which she had suffered this summer were apparently new. They were to recur.

  Yet Sophia was no supporter of her eldest brother: ‘Does he really fancy, because he is the rising sun, anything he says, it is to be swallowed whole?’ she asked. But her venom was reserved now for her troubled mother, whom she saw as the chief agent of her father’s unhappiness. She recorded that the Queen ‘was not pleased at the dear angel’s desiring her to go over the castle with him. She said she was “not an enthusiast”. How true that is. God knows, her enthusiasm consists in nothing but eating black puddings and German dishes at Frogmore.’

  Sophia’s spirits were so broke, she declared, that she hoped, ‘when my duty to the best of fathers is at an end’, that she could then ‘retire from this worldly scene and end my days in quiet’. Buckingham, always in the know, declared shortly before Christmas that ‘appearances at Windsor are most unfavourable.’ Even in her relations with Princess Elizabeth – who, with Princess Augusta, was sympathetic to the Queen – there was no peace for Sophia. The elder sister told the younger, who was writing to Mrs Villiers, to say the Queen was in a delightful humour. ‘At this I hesitated,’ reported Sophia. ‘Eliza then left in a huff saying, “Well, say what you like, nobody wants you to say what you do not feel, but it is very unfortunate that people see with such different eyes”.’ For her part, Elizabeth wrote on Boxing Day that she had been ‘more unhappy this year than any one year of my life.’

  The King kept to his cold northern apartments at Windsor, where General Sir Herbert Taylor, his new private secretary, now joined him every day. Remarkably George III had managed till now his vast correspondence himself. But an unexpected blow, the loss of sight in his left eye the previous summer, had left him persevering with the aid of a green eye-shade. Now the oculist Phipps declared that there was no way to save the right one, short of couching the cataracts, and Taylor proved an able amanuensis. It was said that Princess Mary developed romantic feelings for him, and that they were reciprocated. But gossips were always eager to ascribe to the blameless, beautiful Mary some romantic attachment.

  The father the princesses had known when they grew up was now hardly recognizable. The energetic and authoritarian King of their childhood was now a stooped and blind old man on whose behalf Sir Herbert conducted public business, and to whom he related the progress of the war. The King’s love of farming and of the countryside and hunting could no longer be realized with much vigour, in his poor state of health. He went out for stilted walks with his equerries and pages, and in the evenings music was his one solace. And yet he remained stubborn on the same points which had tried him years before. He would still not yield on the question of allowing Catholics into Parliament – and he wou
ld still not yield on the question of his daughters getting married.

  ‘The kinder the angel King is to me, the more desirous I am of keeping in my own humble sphere … not asking to court popularity and make my little self of consequence,’ Sophia wrote in January 1805. She told Mrs Villiers of an unpleasant ride with her father when he had alarmed her with his hurried expostulations, ‘What! What!’, and said ‘much against the Queen’. He said to Sophia, ‘I look upon you as my friend and I will tell you that I cannot go on as I do, she has turned me out of her room, and a friend I must and will have … I shall find somebody else.’ When the King said he saw she did not approve of this, Sophia simply said, ‘I lament it.’

  With her elder sisters, who were more forgiving towards their mother, Princess Sophia reported, she was highly out of favour, and Sir James Bland Burges heard that the princesses now spent hours in their own rooms and were rarely together. Sophia wrote of their situation: ‘to have the whole talked over and canvassed now makes me wretched. It is not that I am invisible to his [the King’s] faults, but I know what he was. And can I love him less, when I reflect that this sad change arises from the will of God? And indeed this house is made so truly uncomfortable that I cannot wonder at his flying from it.’ A day later she avowed, ‘The Queen’s manner to the Angel is, in a word, shameful. Indeed I believe she has lost her head and her heart for I am sure it is as hard as a stone.’

  In the meantime a new governess, Lady de Clifford, was chosen for Princess Charlotte, ‘the quantum of access… to be allowed to the mother’ was decided, and in February Charlotte was established at Windsor. The King wrote on the occasion of Caroline’s first visit to her: ‘It is quite charming to see the princess and her child together, of which I have been since yesterday a witness.’ Now that Charlotte had the ‘advantage of excellent air and a retired garden’ at Windsor, which would be the young Princess’s residence for the greater part of the year, he believed his granddaughter would make satisfactory progress in her studies, ‘which have certainly been little attended to.’ And, his mind at peace, the King was well at last. ‘All the hurry of his manners is gone – he never said “hey!” once or “what” twice together,’ wrote the Princess of Wales’s Privy Purse Miss Hayman, ‘and indeed was as quiet and collected as possible.’

  The Queen brought up with her more pliant husband in April 1805 the subject of a proposal from her brother Charles in Mecklenburg. He wished his son, the Hereditary Prince, to marry one of their younger daughters. She had not ‘named the subject to any of the Princesses’, the Queen told the King, ‘for I have made it a rule to avoid a subject in which I know their opinions differ with your Majesty’s. For every one of them have at different times assured me that, happy as they are, they should like to settle if they could, and I feel I cannot blame them.’ The King was remarkably gracious in return – ‘My dearest Queen, After having had the good fortune to possess such a treasure come from Strelitz, it is impossible for me to hesitate a moment, if my daughters wish to marry, to declare I would like to see them allied with this house above all others in Germany’ Four days later the Queen wrote to her brother in encouraging terms. The King had agreed that the Hereditary Prince of Mecklenburg-Strelitz should come – in July – but had stressed that he should be aware that the princesses’ dowries were fixed in England. The King had written, ‘I cannot deny that I have never wished to see any of them marry: I am happy in their company, and do not in the least want a separation.’ Still, he would not oppose what they felt would add to their happiness.

  The Queen advised her nephew, in fact, to visit only after the royal family had made their summer visit to Dorset. ‘The stay at Weymouth is sad. We have very mediocre lodgings and the place really only exists as lodgings for invalids.’ She also suggested coming after the summer because, in any event, nothing in the way of settlements could be arranged till Parliament met in the autumn.

  By chance, Mrs Delany’s niece, now a Welsh matron Mrs Waddington, saw all the bridal candidates for the Mecklenburg Prince, as well as their elder sisters, in Lady Charlotte Finch’s apartments at St James’s this summer. About to join their mother and embark on a drawing room, the princesses with their hoops took up almost all the space in the very small room. Elizabeth was conspicuous by her size in a blue gown, not to mention ‘eleven immense yellow ostrich feathers on her head’, which Mrs Waddington said ‘had not a very good effect’. But Princess Mary shone for her ‘beauty’ and taste combined. Her headdress was ‘a large plume of white ostrich feathers, and a very small plume of black feathers placed before the white ones: her hair was drawn up quite smooth to the top of her head, with one large curl hanging from thence almost down to her throat. Her petticoat was white and silver, and the drapery and body … were of purple silk, covered with spangles, and a border and fringe of silver.’ Then the call came for the princesses to attend the Queen, and Mrs Waddington observed, ‘if they had been anyone else, I must have laughed at seeing them sidle out of the room, holding their hoops with both hands.’

  Was Princess Mary – the calm, bland beauty, the fashion plate, the nurse – the bride for the Mecklenburg Prince? Or would he choose troubled, attractive Sophia, or passionate Amelia? Mary was undoubtedly the one without complicated ties to England. Romantically she had only ever been known to favour distantly her cousin Prince William of Gloucester and, before that, more faintly, a man whose proposals of marriage, it was said, she had refused – still another cousin, Prince Frederick of Orange, who had died – and, of course, General Taylor.

  The trip to Weymouth this summer was remarkable only for the suffering of both King and Queen. The Queen endured crippling headaches ‘in the back part of my head’, an inheritance, she declared, from her mother. Only drops from her Kew apothecary, Augustus Brande, relieved the ‘tormenting evil.’ The King’s eyes were so bad meanwhile that he could not recognize people coming into the room – not even, some said, his own children. He had taken an aversion to his green eyeshade and would not even wear it under his hat.

  Under these circumstances the princesses, so subject to their parents’ moods, were out of sorts. ‘Nothing can be more dull than this place, not a creature we know,’ Sophia wrote. ‘General Fitzroy I have only seen for a moment; thank God somebody else is not here,’ she added, thinking presumably of General Garth, who had made her dread going out the previous year when he walked about the town with young Tommy Garth.

  Princess Sophia was herself not well, being dosed regularly with laudanum. She was mortified to be taken ill on board the yacht, in the middle of dinner with the King in his cabin, and ‘carried upon deck more dead than alive.’ In that state, ‘spasmed all over’, she remained till they came to anchor. She continued, well or ill, in her passionate hatred of their mother – ‘She makes my blood boil in some things’ – and in her compassion for their father’s sufferings. There was nothing absolutely wrong or incoherent about him, she said, ‘but a triviality about him that greatly alarms me, for it is so unlike himself’.

  The Queen’s misdeeds consumed her, especially her refusal to share her bed with the King, extending now to fitting locks on the bedchamber door. ‘Will you believe it possible that she keeps us there [in her bedchamber] and at last says, “Now, sir, you must go, for it is time to go to bed” – My God … how can she refuse him anything?’ Sophia wished she were the King’s little dog: ‘what a little Fidel I would be and lay all day at his feet’. And, expressing her wish to escape these scenes, Sophia claimed that, ‘could astronomical observation be made’, their Windsor neighbour the astronomer William Herschel would see that ‘there was a just mistake in my birth, for surely I never was intended for an R HÙ. Of ‘those dull [assembly] rooms’, the Princess exclaimed, ‘Oh ye Gods, how deadly dull it is, and only think of our going to the Master of Ceremonies’ ball and sitting in a circle there – I wished myself a kangaroo.’

  Back in London the royal family received in early November news of the victory at Trafalgar that put an
end to fears of invasion and of enemy sea power for the duration of the war. The King and Queen were overcome. ‘But you know of old,’ wrote Princess Elizabeth to Lady Charlotte Finch, her former governess who was now in retirement, ‘they place the victory with gratitude at the foot of the throne of grace and though they feel happy, far from exalted.’

  Trafalgar put an end to French hopes of naval supremacy, but meanwhile the Napoleonic armies had beaten the Austrian forces into submission when they rose up against their conquerors that summer. As the wife of a Napoleonic elector, the Princess Royal was obliged to abandon her horticultural schemes at Ludwigsburg, and the ouvrages, the ormolu and the porcelain with which she was embellishing all the palaces of the Duchy. In October she fled the advances of the Austrians, once her husband’s overlords, for the safety of Heidelberg. There she received the welcome news – from her point of view – that the French had defeated the Austrians at Ulm on the 19th. ‘Most providentially the [river] Neckar rose in the night which stopped their [the Austrians’] march,’ she informed Lady Charlotte.

  With the French defeat of the Russians, the Austrians’ allies, at Austerlitz in December 1805, the Continent was truly under French dominion – to the Queen of England’s fury. Writing earlier in the year to suggest that her nephew the Prince of Mecklenburg-Strelitz come from Strelitz, she had been so confident that a match would occur that she was led to ‘picture one of her daughters in the home where she had been so happy’. But when she had hoped the Prince would visit, in the autumn, the King had called for delay, given the uncertain state of the Continent. At the end of the year, the Queen told her brother that the King had said to tell him that nothing had changed. ‘As soon as I see the moment this alliance can take place, I will tell him,’ the King told her. ‘If only’, the Queen wrote crossly, ‘on the Continent they had encouraged the soldiers with Nelson’s order, “England expects every man to do his duty”, and that was all the orders given that day. If Mack and Prince Aursberg [Auersperg] had thought like that, Vienna would not be in the hands of the tyrant.’