Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  There were many advantages to the scheme. Three years her junior, Louis Philippe was a handsome man. At thirty-eight, Elizabeth could hope at least for a child, and they would, for want of a home in France, remain in England, where she would become not a cottager but a householder, and independent. But there was of course an impediment.

  The Queen, when she received her own letter from Louis Philippe, said firmly, ‘It can never be.’ Elizabeth told the Prince, ‘She will never hear of it again.’ The Prince of Wales wrote back in support, encouraging her to hold fast – ‘be prudent and silent and I trust happiness may yet be your lot’. Brother and sister of course both referred to what might take place after their father’s death, or during a regency. ‘All I wished’, wrote Elizabeth of her interview with her mother,

  is that she had named it, that I might have acted by her with the degree of honesty … I thought she would have deserved, which was, ‘Let me accept it, but never mention it while that life is preserved to us.’ Do you think, my dear brother, I would have wished it brought forward after all I have seen? Good God no, and I think by the whole manner of the conduct they would have agreed to what may be unfortunate to us, but which will make everything couleur de rose afterwards, by considering my father before ourselves – I said that day on which my mother spoke with me, ‘You shall never see a wry face.’

  And Elizabeth swore she never would. ‘Without being a perfect good daughter,’ she wrote, ‘I never can make a good wife.’

  Nevertheless, during her discussion with her mother when she was ‘almost wild’, Elizabeth determined to ‘Never Give It Up’. The reason was, she said, that ‘it was hinted many, many things had been brought forward and rejected without a word from us, and therefore we felt the sun of our days was set’. One proposal at least in recent years had not been made known to the Princess in question. Prince William of Hesse Philippsthal Barchfeld – ‘a good looking young man yet poor in every way’ – proposed for lovely Mary, to no effect. Without her mother’s knowledge, Elizabeth was sorrowfully determined to proceed with the Orleans match under the protection of her brother the Prince, as a future project. And Augusta, she said, ‘has really stood forward nobly for me’.

  Elizabeth reported to her brother in November 1808 that the Duke of Orleans was anxious that the Prince should ‘insure the legitimacy of children, should there be any … if the least doubt should arise as to their legal situation she should feel he was scandalizing the world’, as well as ruining Elizabeth, ‘and entailing misery on his children’. Elizabeth begged the Prince to send for Orleans, who was about to depart for Spain, so that her suitor could ‘hear what you have said to me from your own mouth’. She had herself been ‘examining the business more closely’, since she and the Prince had spoken: ‘I find no marriage whatever can be looked upon as valid without the Sovereign’s consent which alone makes the law.’

  Princess Elizabeth was looking ahead to a time when her brother would be ‘sovereign’, and was anxious to assure the Duke of Orleans that the Prince would without fail consent to – and so legalize – their marriage and children. But she was wrong in her facts, and would appear to have misunderstood the Royal Marriages Act, if she had secured a copy of it. After the age of twenty-five the King’s children could, on giving twelve months’ notice to the Privy Council, marry a suitor to whom their father – or those who succeeded him as sovereign – had previously objected, or even one to whom they continued to object. There was, however, one proviso of which Elizabeth may or may not have been aware – that the Houses of Parliament should not, during the term of notice, declare their ‘disapprobation’ of the match. And in the case of a penniless French Catholic and émigré prince, that ‘disapprobation’ might possibly be forthcoming.

  In the event the project foundered. Louis Philippe decided that the opposition was too strong, and the wait too open-ended. Princess Sophia added a sad note on 5 October: ‘Eliza’s conduct towards my mother is perfect, and I lament her total want of confidence in her children.’

  These were difficult years for the Queen. She had slid into a depression, in which her nerves were irritable and her temper short. ‘The Queen’s temper is become intolerable, and… the Princesses are rendered quite miserable by it,’ Lord Glenbervie had commented four years earlier. The pleasure she had taken in her reading, her flower garden, her clothes and her children was vanished. Her little jokes with her ladies and fanciful letters to her brother dried up. She never spoke on the subject but she dreaded the extreme symptoms of this nameless illness to which her husband periodically succumbed. Her sons ranged from unfilial, like the Duke of Cumberland, to wastrel, like Clarence and Kent. Her beloved Prince of Wales alone, on whom she saw she might soon become dependent, she pursued with blandishments. The last thing she wanted to do was lose any of her daughters – or to inflame her husband’s symptoms by proposing that one of them marry a Frenchman, a Catholic and the son of Philippe Egalité, who had early favoured revolution in France!

  The discussion of putative children and their legitimacy acted to inflame Princess Elizabeth’s maternal instincts. Writing at the end of November of a Mrs Fulford’s pregnancy she confessed that she herself was ‘always wishing (don’t tell) to be in that way myself (I mean properly’). Her correspondent was Augusta Compton, who could be trusted not to divulge these longings. Miss Compton heard, less controversially, of the painful blisters Mary had had applied to her feet for her gout. ‘The caustics tortured her and inflamed the foot sadly.’ The result was that she was back lying on her couch in her room. Elizabeth was enjoying mornings at the cottage en fermière. She was altering the garden and planting it for spring.

  Over the winter Elizabeth’s hopes of matrimony, high in November, were whittled away. But a sentence in a letter to her brother – ‘If you have anything more to say you can write me a line, for I should like privately to know how the message is taken’ – ends the affair. By September 1809 Louis Philippe was writing gracefully to the Prince of Wales to announce his engagement to King Ferdinand IV of Naples and Sicily’s daughter, Princess Maria Amalia, and to say how sorry he was not to be joining the Prince’s own family. (He was made commander-in-chief of his father-in-law Ferdinand’s Sicilian forces.)

  During March 1809 there appear to have been a succession of messages and even a ‘principal adviser.’ Elizabeth walked with her sister Mary, who was not in on her secret, and fobbed her off when she said she knew the identity of the ‘person supposed to be the principal adviser’. But these may have referred to a scandal that now engulfed the royal family. On 27 January 1809, the Radical MP Gwyllym Wardle, formerly a lieutenant-colonel in the army, moved to appoint a committee to investigate the Duke of York’s conduct as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Frederick was accused of having abused his position to profit from the sale of army commissions that his mistress Mary Anne Clarke had arranged. Elizabeth wrote, ‘It is most cruel to see people wretched enough to try and ruin all the Royal Family which I am persuaded is their great wish.’

  Although the Duke appeared, by the end of a long and publicly aired hearing, to have taken part in none of the commerce himself, as Mrs Clarke’s lodger in town he had undoubtedly shared in the proceeds at her ever more luxuriously appointed house. And culpable of leniency, laziness and negligence – as well as of adultery – he was removed from his position as commander-in-chief.

  In December Elizabeth, her thoughts of matrimony extinguished, turned back to old friendships and to dependable friends. She asked Lady Banks to tell her husband Sir Joseph that they had feasted on the mushrooms she had sent over. ‘Now I have two ridiculous questions to add to your collection of conundrums,’ she added. ‘When is the Queen like a farmer? Answer, when she cuts her corn, and Why is the soul like a thing of no consequence? Because it’s immaterial.’

  The Princess confided in that repository of private royal thoughts, Lady Harcourt. She hoped to see her old confidant Lord St Helens – ‘my dear and invaluable Saint’ –
at Christmas. Seventeen years older than Elizabeth, the retired diplomat and lord of the bedchamber was a great connoisseur of the arts.

  It is always holiday with me when he is here, for I love him to my heart and may say it. There can be no harm as I do not see why one may not speak the truth. There is no man of m y acquaintance I love so well, and his kindness to me is never varied, and that is a thing I never forget. His advice is my rudder, his approbation my delight, and I have that respect and regard in that quarter that even a disagreeable truth I could bear from him which from others I could not take, and I am quite sure he would not say it if I did not deserve it, and I should be monstrously hurt if I did not flatter myself he liked me.

  You see I am honest, maybe too much so, but that is the nature of the beast. You know, young men I never could bear, and though there may be exceptions to every rule … any young man I like, I must think older than his years. But that you seldom find, and then I am sure I never was from my earliest days a person to please men in general, and though not at all shy, I always dreaded showing off. And if ever I was such a fool and tried to be agreeable, I have often gone to my bed thoroughly dissatisfied and displeased with myself.

  And now, I am neither young enough nor fool enough to run into that error. I take things as they come and people as they are and leave the matter to chance, whether I turn out pleasant or not. Half the world I associate with, I don’t care if I ever see again. So they become indifferent and also stop gaps, I mean men. Women, better to see them nothing other than very agreeable in society, but not for one’s room or intimates. Others such as my Saint at all times, minutes, days, nights … but God knows, they are not found often, they are diamonds without flaws.

  The Princess was right, these ‘diamonds without flaws’ were not easy to find. But the unfortunate outcome of her nuptial negotiations with the French Prince was not to deter her from seeking other means of escape.

  12 Passion

  Princess Amelia’s passion for General Fitzroy continued to rage, her open assertions of it causing difficulties in a household where feelings might run deep but were customarily confided sub rosa, or carried unspoken to the grave. And she thought and dreamt and acted always with her eventual marriage to Charles in mind. Some time before her twenty-fifth birthday, she wrote to him:

  How dearly and gratefully I do love you, my own CFR. I am miserable without you. Yes, judge of my feels [feelings] by your own. I do want you much more than you have an idea of. I am sure we must be hours together before we knew each other. The joy would be so great, I mean to keep you in bed for a week at least when we marry. We must somehow settle to meet. I think at Ernest’s we might, if you would come in plain clothes and if I could get Hely the man out of the way.

  When Amelia turned twenty-five in August 1808, her obsession with Fitzroy twisted in her side still more. For, as we have seen, under the terms of the Royal Marriages Act, she had reached the age when she no longer needed her father’s consent to marry. But in the event she never gave the required notice to the Privy Council on her twenty-fifth birthday or thereafter, for fear of inflaming her father’s condition. She did, however, write numerous letters to her beloved Charles and even, as we have seen, a number of wills in his favour, in which she, like her sisters Elizabeth and Augusta, looked ahead to a day when their brother, as sovereign, would allow her to marry. Younger, more impetuous than her sisters, Amelia also now dreamt of a clandestine marriage.

  ‘Dear Lord E, how I love him,’ Amelia wrote of Lord Euston, Charles Fitzroy’s uncle, who had been let into their secret plans:

  Do you think he could settle how to be called in church, or get a licence, and when I am next in town, I could manage it. With a licence I might, for I might go to Dumergue [the royal dentist] with Mrs Tant Mieux [Mrs Villiers] and then meet you and go to Chapel St, where, with a clergyman and licence we might be married. That would be the best of any plan, I think – and if witnesses were necessary, and Tant Mieux did not like to be one, Lord E, I am sure, would, or any of your mother’s old servants.

  Although Fitzroy seems from Amelia’s side of the correspondence to have played a supine part in the relationship, he dared much in openly accepting the affections of one of the King’s daughters. And he sometimes showed himself as rash as his lover. When one of Princess Amelia’s ladies, Lady Georgiana Buckley, tried to alert the King to his daughter’s romance, which was clear to all with eyes to see it, Fitzroy said he would resign if ‘those devils’, the Buckleys stayed. But the Queen did not dismiss the offender for many months, until Lady Georgiana’s ‘flippant’ talk about the royal family provided an excuse. The misfortune, Princess Sophia said, was that, when ‘all does not swim for them’, Princess Amelia and Fitzroy lost their heads and acted on the impulse of the moment. But they never did put into effect their scheme of marriage by special licence or otherwise.

  In part, the matter of witnesses was a difficulty. Unless Amelia gave notice of her intention to marry to the Privy Council, any witnesses to any marriage she contracted, the clergyman who officiated and possibly Fitzroy as well would be subject to the strange penalties of ‘praemunire’ with which the Royal Marriages Act threatened those participating in an unlawful marriage. Supposedly they would be stripped of all their possessions. In practice, as had happened in relation to the marriage of Amelia’s brother Augustus to Lady Augusta Murray fifteen years before, all involved would be disgraced, and the marriage declared null and void.

  The Princess nevertheless wrote eagerly of her future as Fitzroy’s wife. Where she could, Amelia made purchases towards the married life she envisaged, commissioning silver to be engraved with their initials intertwined, buying furniture inappropriate to her present circumstances but to be installed one day at Sholebrook Lodge, Fitzroy’s house in Northamptonshire. ‘Promise our bedrooom and your dressing room may be quite close for I shall be in and out all the time we are dressing.’

  Passionate and single-minded, Amelia created in her mind and in her letters a world of ‘ifs’ and ‘one days’. Attempting intimacy everywhere while true intimacy was denied them, she sought by her letters to create a union of ‘hearts’ where marriage there was none. ‘For years have I considered myself his lawful wife,’ she wrote of Fitzroy, ‘without ever enjoying my rights.’ And she declared: ‘No two ever loved or were so tried as we, and instead of separating us … it has bound us tighter and more sacredly together… I can never help praying and hoping a time yet may come when the Almighty may bless and join us in persons, as we are in hearts, ever inseparable.’

  In other uninhibited letters to Fitzroy Amelia went into Chaucerian detail, recalling the pleasure of the hours of intimacy they snatched together. And she revelled in their every encounter: ‘Oh God I am almost mad for you, my blessed and most beloved Charles. You are more dear to me and mine than ever today … Oh God, that dear soft face, that blessed sweet breath …’ More often, prevented from enjoying such ‘ecstasy’, she wrote of what she longed for: ‘I should like to cuddle to you … and then talk over everything unpleasant

  And again, and poignantly, she wrote without shame and in detail about her womb and other sexual organs which she feared were diseased, and would leave her unable to bear Charles’s children: ‘Don’t be angry or shocked, but do you think my spot being out is likely to prevent my having children if I was married to you? And what is its being out owing to? I ask you anything. I say anything to you, so don’t be angry. But if you are, pray tell me. I should hate to disgust you, you dear, dear soul… Don’t be angry, but from all I have suffered in those parts, I have often thought and dreaded having a cancer in my womb.’ She asked, ‘Could you not, my darling, consult any good surgeon and say it was a relation in the country who had been ill?’ He could tell the surgeon this fictitious relation’s husband was ‘uneasy’, or suspicious, so that Fitzroy could not ‘betray the name.’

  All the time she was busy, thinking up how they could next meet. ‘You cannot be more anxious, my blessed darling,
’ she insisted, writing of their mutual wish to meet, ‘than I am for it. I own I think it will be safer when you leave the dear [the King]. However, you had perhaps go home first… then I shall be sure of Mama’s being in her room with the dear …’ She had another idea later in the letter. Could Fitzroy somehow get ‘the key [hanging] by St George’s Hall’, she asked. ‘Is it practicable?’ Then he could explore ‘those little rooms one day, when we are perhaps at breakfast. Try the back staircase and where it leads to.’ They rode next to each other when they could in the royal cavalcade, and they touched feet or knees or reached for each other’s hands under the card table in the royal drawing room. The rest of the time, Fitzroy was more often than not out riding with the King, or playing backgammon with him in his northern apartments in the Castle. Amelia wrote in one hurried note, ‘… I am just returned from walking on the Terrace … I walked three times under the window where you were playing at backgammon, and I think you may guess what I felt and longed for.’

  Alone in her room, with her pen ever ready to confide her thoughts, Amelia reflected deeply on her relationship with Charles. She reasoned that it would have been that of husband and wife, but for their father’s ban, and so in the eyes of God it was such. ‘I wish you had known no other woman but me and yet so far being preferred to all by you after, that, I think, insures its lasting more than anything.’ She declared on another occasion, ‘I hate your speaking to a soul but me. It robs me of my right, my only right. How could you say I had not wore your watch lately? How little you must observe me, as you must know I never go without it, and so particular am I that, unless forced to be gewgawed, I never wear but what you give me.’

  Between her bouts of letter writing Amelia was being treated for an acute pain in her side which caused her to suffer this spring of 1809. ‘By God, if ever I lost an atom of your kindness, affection and good opinion,’ she said, hoping to bind Fitzroy to her, ‘may some charitable being destroy me, for what a wretch I should be.’ But, under the weight of her suffering, her charitable feelings towards some of her family declined – noticeably towards her mother and her sister Elizabeth, whom she called ‘Fatima’, no doubt in allusion to her size. For her father, however, Amelia retained an affection and sympathy which nothing eroded, although he was the cause of her unhappiness over not marrying Fitzroy. And this double vexation, that his life stood in the way of her marriage, for which she longed, that his death which she dreaded would allow her wish, preyed on her mind.