by Flora Fraser
The Princess Royal had further details of the French campaign that had so destroyed the chances of one of her sisters joining her on the Continent. And they could not fail to disturb and fascinate her family in England. Just before the Ulm campaign began, the Emperor Napoleon himself visited her and her husband at Ludwigsburg on 2 October. The previous day his marshal, Ney, had taken up residence in the palace of Stuttgart, after the Elector had made a spirited defence of his state against the ‘violent Austrians’.
‘You will easily believe, my dear brother,’ she wrote to the Prince,
that this was not a pleasant moment for me, but I should despise myself, could I, out of weakness, at such a moment have left my husband …
Certainly, the Emperor Napoleon’s enemies have done him great injustice. I can say with truth that he went out of his way to be attentive to all the Electoral family, but most particularly so to me. Soon after his arrival he made me a visit and sought to say something polite to all present. I am convinced that he wishes to have peace with Great Britain, for he not only spoke with regard of the King, but of you, dear brother, on different occasions with esteem …
The Electress’s belief that her conduct would do the Electorate no harm had been confirmed days later, before she wrote to her brother. As she wrote to Lady Charlotte Finch, ‘by an article of the treaty [of Pressburg, signed on Boxing Day 1805] the Elector has been acknowledged by these two sovereigns [the Austrian and French emperors] as King of Württemberg’. The new King ordered a general thanksgiving upon hearing the news, ‘and I was obliged to dress in the greatest hurry’, wrote the new Queen, ‘to attend him to church … the whole day was filled up by drawing rooms dinners plays and redoutes’. Royal had determined that Lady Charlotte should be ‘the first of my friends acquainted with this alteration in my situation’. Writing to her brother the Prince now, she asked for ‘that same place in your affection as Queen that I have enjoyed under so many different names.’ (The new Queen did not succeed in this wish with her mother. ‘Ma très chère Mère et Soeur’, she tried writing to Queen Charlotte. ‘You may guess how it was received,’ wrote Lady Bessborough. The new King of Württemberg meanwhile put an enormous gold crown on top of his palace in Stuttgart to announce his new dignities to all the birds of the air.)
Royal mentioned to her brother, besides Napoleon’s visit to Stuttgart on his way to victory at Ulm, that of his Empress, Josephine, ‘on her road to Munich’. Both visitors had been charming, the Empress ‘a very well-bred pleasant woman [who] does a great deal of good’. Josephine’s son, Royal wrote meditatively, was about to marry Princess Augusta of the ancient house of Bavaria – ‘the settlements are very great’.
Years later Napoleon himself recalled his meeting with Royal: ‘She soon lost whatever prejudices she might have originally entertained against me. I had the pleasure of interfering to her advantage, when her husband, who was a brute, though a man of talent, had ill-treated her, for which she was afterwards very grateful.’ Two years later Royal ‘contributed very materially towards effecting the marriage’ of Napoleon’s brother Jérôme, King of Westphalia, with her stepdaughter Princess Catherine of Wurttemberg.
11 Outcry
On hearing the news of the death of Prime Minister William Pitt in January 1806, Princess Amelia wrote with some acumen, ‘I do not fear the present moment so much as the future, for you know with him [her father], distress blazes out long after the blow.’ A blow was coming which would distress the King as much, in its way, as the death of his long-serving Prime Minister. For a few months later the Prince of Wales’s lawyers placed before the new Prime Minister, Lord Grenville, papers containing such allegations against the Princess of Wales that the King felt he had no option but to appoint – on 29 May – a Secret Commission of four Cabinet ministers to look into the charges.
The papers not only alleged outrageous behaviour with various men on the part of the Princess of Wales, but also claimed that she had given birth to a son whom she was raising in her own house in the guise of an adopted child. It was further alleged that the Princess had announced her intention at a future date of declaring the boy, called Willy Austin, hers – and naming the Prince as his father. The King’s instructions to the committee were that they should ‘enquire into the truth of the written declarations touching the conduct of her RH the Princess of Wales’. To her daughter-in-law the Queen sent a message by Princess Elizabeth on 31 May that Caroline would not be expected at the Queen’s House on the King’s Birthday the following week – ‘nor in the evening, nor in the morning.’ And three days after the Birthday, on 7 June, the Duke of Kent appeared at Blackheath to warn his sister-in-law that within hours many of her servants would be sent for to Downing Street, to be questioned on the evidence they had given – earlier in the year and without her knowledge – to the Prince of Wales’s lawyers.
The Princess of Wales spoke of returning home to Brunswick. But on the first day at Downing Street the child whom the Princess had indeed looked after in her house since shortly after his birth four years before was proved beyond any doubt to be William Austin, son of an unemployed docker and his wife. Nevertheless there were other parts of her conduct that the Commissioners viewed with grave concern, and so they reported to the King in July 1806. The King passed the document without comment to his son, beyond saying, as the Prince told his sister Amelia, that the Commissioners’ conclusion was ‘they could not, as a result, recommend to the King not to receive the Princess, nor to receive her’.
The Prince, furious, still vowing divorce and vengeance on his estranged wife, sought his sisters’ company. Princess Amelia wrote to Charles Fitzroy: ‘Do you know the Prince’s visit made me very nervous, for I love him and yet how all my brothers concern me in their characters.’ The Prince told Amelia that ‘The King was very kind to him and he thought him remarkably well … he was sorry the King wd talk so little to him on the subject [of the Princess], that he had tried to bring the subject forward but could not.’ Amelia continued,’ The Prince does not mean to let the thing rest here and he swears, if she is received, he will not put his foot into this house or at Court. But he persists that he is sure whatever the K does is not meant unkind to him, and that he is forced into it, and not does it unkindly.’
The Prince, she declared, said the Princess was ‘a perfect streetwalker’. And he said to her in front of their sister Mary, ‘I tell you what, my dear Amelia, the Princess says, if things don’t quite end to her satisfaction, she will bring forward many things she has seen and heard here of your sisters, and will say the K allows things here which he finds fault with in her. Don’t be uneasy, it cannot injure your plans and perhaps it might prove a blessing and make you all much happier.’ Amelia went on:
I felt myself colour. Minny laughed. And had she not been present, I really think I could have ventured to speak.
He then asked about the ride, ‘Who rode?’ I said, ‘General Spencer and Taylor.’ ‘And who did Augusta ride with?’ I said, ‘With us.’ ‘No no,’ says he. ‘I know all.’ ‘She did not,’ I said. ‘Ranger [Spencer’s mount] was near her, but she rode amongst us.’ He then said, ‘I know you all. If things turn out well, I shall often come here and ride with you, and we shall, I hope, have many a comfortable pleasant chat and ride, and I will tell you all I see and think.’ He appeared good humoured.
There was much that the Princess of Wales could have ‘brought forward’ about the behaviour of her sisters-in-law had she wished. And she continued to tell Lord Glenbervie privately ever more scandalous snippets about the birth of Tommy Garth, now five years old and living for the last three years at General Garth’s house near Weymouth. But Sophia’s affair with General Garth was over, its demise hastened by his habit of parading the boy about Weymouth when the royal family was in residence. In January 1805 the Princess wrote to Mrs Villiers: ‘I agree with you that it is very, very desirable that some check should be put to the odd conduct of a certain person [General Thomas Garth] … At the same
time I will candidly avow to you that that person is very difficult to manage, and thus I have more than once endeavoured to point out to him how ill-judged it was allowing … the younger object [Tommy Garth] to be with him.
‘All my entreaties proved very useless’, she continued, ‘and I merely received a cold answer, that it was selfish and that I could not pretend affection as I never had expressed a desire of even seeing what God knows was out of my power [her illegitimate child]. This wounded me beyond measure, for my conduct had shown but too plainly that I am not selfish, and I own to you that what hurt me the more was the indelicacy this year of knowing it so near me and that I never could go through the town [Weymouth] without the dread of meeting what would have half killed me, had I met it [the child].’
After further remarks on Garth’s conduct, Sophia vowed ‘to try in my poor way to serve what I ever must feel an instinct and affection for [Tommy Garth]’. At the same time she recognized that she could never go ‘abroad’, that is marry a foreign prince. She declared, ‘… I never could answer it to myself to marry without candidly avowing all that has passed …’ Sophia continued,
… there is one love to whom I am not indifferent, I will not name him till we meet, and it is this, my beloved friend, that I think of with fear and trembling; could it some time or other be allowed, I think it would make me happy, but though I know the difficulties and above all, I feel that, did he know the full content of this story, he might think me very unworthy of him. And how could I blame him? For I know but too well how I have lost myself in the world by my conduct, and alas, have felt it humbly, for many, many have changed towards me … The person in question bears the most honourable character and was very kind about me at the time of this sad story …
Would settling with this unknown man with a respectable name in England be wrong, given her shameful situation? This was the quandary Sophia now expressed to her confidante. As the years passed, so did these references and allusions by the princesses to a future – after their father’s death, or possibly after his symptoms made a regency necessary – multiply, when much would be possible that was not now.
Shortly after she wrote this letter, Sophia declared that she had been in pain since the Queen’s birthday drawing room: ‘From my head to my heels I know not a spot free from pain; the weight of the clothes [at the birthday] almost destroyed my poor stomach, and just now I feel a perfect rag.’ But within days she was elated by a speech from the object of her affection: ‘That evening he did find me out and came up of himself, said he was delighted to see me and lamented his misfortune in coming to Windsor on the very day I was taken ill, to which I answered I was very much obliged to him; we then spoke upon indifferent subjects and [he] at last said, “Pray take care of yourself and do not be ill again for you are of too much consequence to give this fright to your friends too often”.’
This speech was enough for Sophia to savour, to build upon, to treasure and repeat – although she was never to ‘settle’ with this unknown man of ‘honourable’ character, or any other. ‘I have lost myself in the world by my conduct,’ Sophia wrote in 1805, and it was unfortunately true. There was little she could do to change that, especially when General Garth thrust her illegitimate child in the way of Society.
In July the following year the General wrote to his niece, Miss Garth, that he had ‘some idea of remaining in town a month, and this I cannot do without my family, in short, I cannot live longer without the child’. He added, referring to the Princess of Wales, of whose household his niece was still a member, ‘I am not sure I expressed myself to HRH sufficiently respectful or grateful for the superb present made the child, nor indeed did I know how to act, yet I hoped I have not been wanting in respect – if I have, make me so, I beg. The present was too great for the child – Mine on my life and honour, if there is truth in woman, and no ways under the influence of the abominable and idle stories set about the world.’ So it would appear that, although they had now quarrelled, Sophia had earlier assured the General that Tommy Garth was his and not her brother’s child.
‘It is so delicate a thing to attack the honour of a woman,’ wrote the Duchess of Brunswick the following month – in August 1806 – to her brother the King, when he delayed responding to the Commissioners’ Report, beyond asking the Cabinet to discuss it, and requesting that a copy of it be sent to his daughter-in-law, which was done on 11 August. She and the Duke of Brunswick begged him to publish the particulars of the Delicate Investigation and to receive their daughter. Indeed, she asked for her daughter’s innocence to be proclaimed, else the King’s and Queen’s characters would suffer ‘in the eyes of all Europe’. She ended: ‘I close this letter with tears.’ But the eyes of Europe were elsewhere. That August pusillanimous King Frederick William III of Prussia at last went to war against Napoleon and his Grande Armée – and was soundly beaten for his pains at the battles of Jena and Auerstädt in November.
The commander he employed to head the disastrous force was the Princess of Wales’s father, whose attachment to Prussia was so great that he came out of retirement at the age of seventy. Badly wounded at Auerstädt in October, and carried to safety on a litter, near blind in one eye, he begged Napoleon, moving northward, to show clemency to his Duchy of Brunswick. The Emperor agreed, on condition that the Duke abandon the service of the Prussian enemy. But the old Duke replied that as long as he could use his limbs and vital air was in him, he would defend his King and country. He died from his wounds on 10 November at Altona, his wife and the rest of the Brunswick family having scattered in advance. Princess Elizabeth from Windsor wrote in December of Napoleon’s victories and his establishment of the Confederation of the Rhine, which included Brunswick and other conquered territory: ‘whole countries ruined, burnt, pillaged… in short, the Duke of Brunswick’s death is a most happy release.’ But the Princess of Wales in England, on hearing the news of her father’s death, fell ill, believing, according to the politician Mr Spencer Perceval, ‘… it is intended that she shall never be permitted to see the King again, at least not to see him alone.’ In October she had sent a spirited defence of her conduct to the King, drawn up by her lawyers, but she had heard nothing in response.
The King wrote at last in January 1807 to say that he would indeed receive her, and that no further steps were to be taken against her. But he noted that there had ‘appeared circumstances of conduct on the part of the Princess which his Majesty never could but regard with serious concern’. The evidence of flirting and the allegations of lovers had startled the King, who had fortunately no memory of his own unrestrained and inappropriate behaviour with his daughter-in-law in earlier years. The Princess, furthermore, stood accused of abusing members of the royal family – calling her cousin William, now Duke of Gloucester since his father’s death in 1805, the ‘grandson of a washerwoman’, and Prince Ernest ‘a foolish boy’. The rest of her brothers-in-law she thought ‘very ill made and [they] had plum pudding faces, which she could not bear’. Adolphus, besides, looked like a sergeant, ‘so vulgar with his ears full of powder.’ ‘Honourably acquitted; but a reprimand’ was Caroline’s summary of the letter from her father-in-law.
But then the Prince decided that, before his wife should once more be received, his lawyers should respond to the report – ‘that I may not have to charge myself with any possible hazard affecting the interests of my daughter and of the succession.’ And so, uncomfortably, while the King awaited the arrival of his widowed, stateless sister, the Duchess of Brunswick, who had begged a home, he waited too for his son’s lawyers to permit him to receive his sister’s child once more.
A change of ministry brought an end to the affair, and in April the King at last received the Princess. But, as Princess Elizabeth noted, the public had taken very badly the royal family’s treatment of the Princess of Wales, both over the Delicate Investigation, as the enquiries at Downing Street became known, and over her father’s death. It was believed, the princesses lamented, that none of the
royal family had paid her any visit even of condolence during her bereavement. And although it was not true, it soured the public mood against the Queen as well as against her son, the chief offender. At the Birthday in June 1807, which both Prince and Princess of Wales attended, husband and wife did not speak but came out ‘close together, both looked contrary ways, like the print of the spread Eagle.’
The matter of the Princess Royal’s happiness with her husband had for some time concerned her parents. One matter on which they were united at least was the infamy of the turncoat Napoleonic King, her husband. Despite all the difficulties of gaining private access to the Queen of Württemberg – a title the royal family in England did not accord her – an English lady secured from Royal the following: ‘when peace was settled, she would put her favourite plan into execution, that of seeing her family. But as long as certain matters were not settled [the acknowledgement of the Kingdom of Württemberg’s existence by her father’s government] she could not go.’
Royal’s concluding words were:
I should be afraid of contributing to the ruin of the House of Württemberg, for Bonaparte has eyes and ears everywhere, and you know best what we have to fear from the great preponderance of power. Tell this, Madam, to your obliging correspondent [a Mr Home] and thank him for the interest he takes in my behalf. Request him to inform my dearest father not that I am happy, for this would be telling an untruth, but that his Majesty’s love and the care he is graciously pleased to take on my behalf amply compensates for all my sufferings.