by Flora Fraser
In June 1814, the Prince of Orange reappeared to play a part in the fetes in London that marked the Allied victories culminating in the imprisonment of Napoleon on Elba, and the successful restoration of the Bourbons to France. All the French princes paraded, and the King of Prussia came with his general, Blücher, who was loudly cheered. The Russian Emperor, Alexander, and his sister, Grand Duchess Catherine (widow of Prince Peter of Oldenburg, son of the Prince of the same name who had once wooed the Princess Royal), came, and put up at Pulteney’s Hotel. The Prince Regent did not dare visit them there for fear of being hissed, of which the Grand Duchess declared herself very glad. She had come to London with a thought of marrying the Regent, but took a strong dislike to him. The Hereditary Prince of Württemberg, though a married man with children, attracted her instead.
The Prince of Orange, whose father had been restored to the throne of Holland the previous winter, and the Hereditary Prince of Württemberg – and his brother Paul – were among countless young princes who made their way to London this June, to begin the jockeying for position in the new Europe that would be continued at the Peace Congress to be held in Vienna shortly thereafter. A handsome prince in the Russian service, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, made Princess Charlotte’s acquaintance when she visited the Grand Duchess, and asked if he might wait on her. His brother was much in favour with the King of Prussia, and his sister was married to the Prince of Leiningen, but his – successful – effrontery was noticed, given that Charlotte was engaged to the Hereditary Prince of Orange. No one knew that, among the mêlée of princes, and while engaged to William, Charlotte had also met and given her heart to Augustus Frederick, a nefarious cousin of the Prussian King.
Meanwhile, Charlotte’s aunts were not without visitors during these days of fêtes and celebrations. And their sister Royal had written to Lady Harcourt from Ludwigsburg that she hoped ‘the various visits which will take place in England will… have some influence on my sisters’ future situation. This is a subject I have much at heart, and trust the Almighty will bless them and reward them already in this world for all they have gone through …’ She herself had had to decline her brother’s invitation to join the imperial and royal visitors in London, as she was ‘so very apt to be sick in a shut carriage and off and on constantly spit blood with a violent spasmodic cough.’ Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt, the Regent’s envoy, believed that the cough was a pretext and that Royal’s husband was furious not to have been addressed on the matter himself. But Royal begged him not to pursue the matter – she said she would be the loser for it. And still she prayed daily that her sisters might yet have a chance to marry.
In 1788, as we have seen, only days before the King of England became ill for the first time, he had said he would take his daughters to Hanover, there hold a court, and invite all the German princes to attend. His daughters might choose whom they wished, within moderation. Now the German and other princes had come instead to England – and, with Princess Charlotte affianced, they looked afresh at her older aunts. The King of Prussia was seeking a bride to act as mother to the seven children his adored wife Louise had left him. The Russian royalties were scouting for brides for their brothers, the grand dukes. Dynastic alliance with England, above all, rather than heirs and maidenly charms was what was desired at this time of acute anxiety on the part of all the imperial and royal houses of Europe.
Princess Elizabeth had remained at Windsor while her brother led a great party of emperors and kings and generals to the Ascot races: ‘I went into my room to sit in my great chair with my books, my papers and writing things, intending to employ myself all day.’ About three o’clock she was startled to receive a note from Mary, written at the race ground. The Emperor Alexander of Russia and his sister, the Grand Duchess of Oldenburg, were on their way to visit her.
Elizabeth dressed and summoned her wits to entertain her distinguished visitors, no doubt making something of the connection between them – her brother-in-law the King of Württemberg being their maternal uncle. ‘When they were gone I sat down to recover myself,’ the invalid wrote. The next moment, the door opened and from without ‘they said, the King of Prussia’. This time there was a double connection to explore. Louise, the adored wife of Frederick William III, had been Queen Charlotte’s niece, and he himself was half-brother to the dear Duchess of York. ‘I almost dropt,’ she wrote the following day, ‘for I did not expect him. He is very shy, very modest, looks manly, good and melancholy … you will allow it was awkward for me, as we had never met and there was no soul to introduce either him to me or me to him.’ It gave her the ‘headache ferociously.’
Although Elizabeth did not know it, her sister’s stepson, Prince Paul of Württemberg – first cousin of the Emperor and Grand Duchess, and the Princess of Wales’s nephew for good measure – had behaved shockingly that day at Ascot. He got the Hereditary Prince of Orange blind drunk, for the second time. The first time, at Carlton House, Princess Charlotte had been present to observe it. The Prince’s stepmother, Royal, disclaimed all responsibility from Ludwigsburg, telling the Regent that she had warned him in April that they could not be answerable for Prince Paul’s conduct. ‘For thirteen years he has done nothing but offend his father by the improprieties of his conduct.’ But Princess Charlotte seized on the displays to refuse outright to marry the Hereditary Prince of Orange. She was as summary with him in this great matter of state as she had been with young d’Este. She wrote to her aunt Mary of ‘an explanation which took place between me and the Prince of Orange and which terminated in a manner which will, I fear, give you pain; but in my situation it was unavoidable. Our engagement is at an end …’
The real truth was that Charlotte feared she would be forced to live in The Hague, and she felt very strongly that her presence in England was her mother’s protection against further designs – divorce, persecution – that she was aware her father meditated once she was gone. If she also felt that her father’s remarriage and the birth of a son – an heir apparent – might follow divorce, it was hardly surprising.
There were so many advisers pressing in with information and hypotheses on this unfortunate young Princess – ranging from her father and his government to her uncles Sussex and Kent, to Lord Grey and Mercer Elphinstone for the Whigs, to her mother’s lawyer Henry Brougham. And then there were the visiting dignitaries who put a finger in the pie, such as the Duchess of Oldenburg, the Tsar’s sister, who saw Holland as a useful Russian satellite and wanted the Prince of Orange as a bridegroom for her own sister. In the midst of it all was Charlotte, with her jutting bosom and hips and her fresh face and chestnut ringlets – outfacing her father’s wrath, and, as it happened, utterly in love with Augustus Frederick of Prussia, whom Miss Knight had allowed into Warwick House after Princess Charlotte had asked him to come and visit her.
The hothouse atmosphere of royal London exploded when the Regent appeared at Warwick House, demanding to see his daughter. Miss Knight said, on the Princess’s instructions, that she was too ill with a swollen knee to descend, but then offended the Prince by saying she must contradict a report that Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, an officer in the Russian service, had been secretly visiting Warwick House. The Regent said grimly that he knew that rumour to be false, and that equally he knew of a certain Prussian prince who had been the visitor in question. A distressed Charlotte then learnt she was to be incarcerated with elderly ladies of the Queen’s in a lodge in Windsor Great Park for her criminality in receiving Augustus and rejecting William of Orange. Seeking sanctuary she fled by hackney carriage, bad knee or no bad knee, to her mother, the Princess of Wales at her house in Bayswater, Connaught House.
It was a chastened Charlotte who left London, as her father had originally directed, a few days later for Cranbourne Lodge in Windsor Great Park. At Connaught House her mother had rejected her daughter’s impassioned plea to save her from the prison her father meant to condemn her to. (The failure of her many relations among the visiting dignitaries to cal
l on her, for fear of losing the Regent’s favour, had left Caroline wretched and humiliated and she was now set on going abroad.) Likewise Charlotte’s uncle Sussex had, with the other advisers who crowded the house in Connaught Street, counselled obeying her father.
Indeed, the lawyer Henry Brougham had led the quivering Princess to a window that overlooked Hyde Park and had spoken of the potential scene should he show her to the populace that would gather there next morning with the advent of a Parliamentary election. Blood there would be, and marches and riots in her defence, but the English public would never forget that she was the cause of that bloodshed. Just as surely as Charlotte’s aunts had had to obey their father thirty years before, so this wilder, more head-strong Princess – seeking emancipation as they had before her – agreed to be driven to Carlton House and to do her father’s bidding.
At Cranbourne Lodge, to compound her hurt, Charlotte learnt from her father that her mother was preparing, in the wake of Napoleon’s expulsion from France and the restoration of his satellite kingdoms to their former sovereigns, to travel to her brother William’s restored Duchy of Brunswick. It was a trip that the Princess of Wales had often meditated during her years of distress in England before her father’s death and the incorporation of her homeland into Napoleon’s Empire. The Regent had ‘no objection’, and had no wish to ‘interfere’ in his estranged wife’s plan. Her daughter wrote, ‘I really am so hurt about it that I am very low …’ But Princess Mary told the Regent, ‘I congratulate you on the prospect of a good riddance. Should a storm blow up and the ship go to the bottom I will send you a small fashionable pocket handkerchief to dry your tears – it will be the only black gown I shall ever put on with pleasure.’
Charlotte slowly recovered from a year and more of exceptional agitation and distress at Cranbourne Lodge which, after all, turned out to be a ‘very cheerful and very good’ house, ‘the view lovely.’ She visited Weymouth in company with her chaperone, Lady Ilchester, and General Garth, her grandfather’s former equerry, and bathed in hope of a cure for her knee, which swelled unaccountably. And she forgave her aunts and grandmother for their previous behaviour. Indeed, she found her aunt Sophia a strong ally when she expressed fears that the Regent had not entirely lost sight of reviving the Orange match. ‘The thing was impossible,’ said Sophia firmly. Charlotte came away, more relieved than she had felt for some time, ‘though I still see mountains and hills before me are to be passed over, if not quite inaccessible.’
All the princesses were utterly convinced that Charlotte, despite her youth, should marry. ‘The country and your family wish you to marry, and I am sure all who really love you must too,’ said Sophia, ‘for you never can be happy or enjoy anything like liberty or comfort going on as you do now, so subject and subjected.’ Royal wrote to Lady Harcourt: ‘Il n’y a nulle rose sans espine [there is no rose without a thorn], but I believe that it is ever better for Princesses in particular to be settled.’
The Princess of Wales’s failings were a subject on which the Queen and the princesses had ‘naturally agreed’ with the Regent – all bar Sophia. But Caroline had departed now for the Continent. And the Queen began, as Charlotte observed, ‘to have her eyes opened and see now … that the Regent only used her as a cat’s paw.’ The Queen meanwhile told the Regent, ‘You do not see Charlotte at all to advantage. She is quite different with us, I assure you.’ But he answered, ‘You always say so, I know. It is very unfortunate, but she appears to me half in the sulks.’ And Charlotte never lost her fear in her father’s company.
The only princess whom Charlotte was wary of was Mary. She suspected her of still being likely to take the Regent’s part if he tried to revive the Orange match. And she regarded her also as something of a rival. Mary, after all, though she was thirty-eight next birthday, was the beauty of the family, and Princess Charlotte, heir presumptive though she might be – and sought by many – had little confidence in herself. When Charlotte mentioned Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, she said she believed Princess Mary ‘coloured not a little’ and then was made ‘quite satisfied and cheerful again’ when Charlotte said he did not suit her taste.
Charlotte concluded darkly, nevertheless, ‘I suspect there was something or other.’ But when she questioned her aunt Sophia about Mary’s feelings, Sophia said irritatingly she knew nothing of it. ‘If there is any tendresse, it is all her side certainly,’ concluded Charlotte. However, when she departed for Weymouth that winter, she gave Mary credit for ‘feeling it exceedingly, as she had the example of poor Amelia before her eyes too fresh, easily to forget and not to feel uneasy about my knee’. Indeed, Mary also expressed her astonishment that the Regent was not more unquiet. ‘If the country takes an interest in me and about me,’ wrote Charlotte gloomily, ‘that shall stand to me in lieu of family and everything else.’
At Weymouth Charlotte was discomposed by her attendant, General Garth, pressing his ‘adoptive son’ Tommy Garth on her – ‘a more lovely boy I never beheld’, she admitted. But she ‘was taken aback’ when the General paraded the boy on the esplanade, and when Charlotte stopped overnight at his house at Ilsington the General said, ‘Pray see and speak to him, as he would be dreadfully mortified if you took no notice of him, but don’t let him be seen or let your ladies see you take any notice of him.’ Furthermore, the old General said roughly that Princess Charlotte should not believe any of the abominable stories she had heard of his birth. Charlotte nearly fainted.
‘It looks like this,’ she explained, ‘that not being able to torment her [Sophia] now any longer with the sight, he will continue it upon the relative she loves best besides the Duke of York, a sort of diabolical revenge that one cannot understand.’ However, her ladies, Lady Ilchester and Mrs Campbell, she wrote, believed that ‘it cannot be and is not Garth’s child, that he has the care of it, and is proud and vain that it should be thought his, and knowing he has it in his power probably to disclose whose it is, if offended, makes him so very bold and impudent about the whole thing.’ The feeling in the county, on the other hand, she said, was ‘that there is something to come out yet and that if it ever does, it will turn out to be some secret marriage or something of that kind.’
Charlotte was no stranger to stray children with question marks over their parentage, following her childhood with a mother who adopted first a French orphan, Edwardine Kent, and then a docker’s son, Willy Austin. She was also happy to guess at those children’s parentage, believing them both to be her mother’s, and the elder child – whom her mother had just married off to an aide-de-camp of her brother’s in Brunswick – the daughter of a military hero, Sir Sidney Smith. Edwardine had the same black hair as his, Charlotte said. As for Willy Austin, removed from Dr Burney’s school at Greenwich and tagging after the Princess of Wales as she toured the Continent, the Delicate Investigation and childhood memories had convinced her he was the child of the naval officer Captain Manby. ‘As for my mother taking a flight to Turkey,’ Charlotte opined, reporting rumours that became fact some months later, ‘I should not wonder at it, as it is quite possible for her to do anything strange and out of the way.’
Charlotte herself had decided to do something very reasonable by the time she left Weymouth – and marry Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, the young man who had asked to visit her that June. ‘That I should be as wholly occupied and devoted as I am to one [Prince Augustus of Prussia], and yet think and talk and even provide for another would appear unnatural in the highest degree were it written in a novel, yet it is true. It is not overstrained.’ On Charlotte’s return to Windsor, Mary’s became the room at the Castle where she most often found herself, and in January 1815 she seized an opportunity to confide to Mary her marriage plans, when her aunt asked if there were any one prince she had seen in England that she did not dislike the appearance of. She said that she was ‘not in the least in love’ with Prince Leopold, but that she ‘had a very good opinion of him’ and would rather marry him, for that reason, than any other prince.<
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Then her hopes were dashed. ‘Only think of Elizabeth and Augusta saying to me just before we parted for the night’, Charlotte wrote on 26 February, ‘how much they hoped I should be tormented and worried no more on the P[rince of] O [range] business, how they longed for an answer from me which might set my mind at rest.’ And Princess Royal had written from Stuttgart, ‘saying the reports were that Lord Castlereagh was going to Brussels’ – the new Orange capital – ‘on his way to England. That, if it was true, she only hoped to God it was not to renew any more torment or worries for me.’ Charlotte went on, ‘the letter came to wash down again all my air-built hopes of quiet’.
Princess Mary told the Prince that she and her sisters were trying to encourage the Orange match, as they knew his feelings on the matter. Charlotte had a more committed supporter in Princess Sophia. ‘As for the O[range] business,’ she wrote to her niece, ‘I have my doubts whether all hopes are yet given up at headquarters [Carlton House]. They still flatter themselves that the event may take place. At least, so I hear. But I live so very much to myself, and so very retired, that I do not learn much. My health … does not allow me to trudge about sufficiently to get much information.’ And she was ‘in complete quarantine’ with her family, as their ideas did not agree.
The Queen, however, was strong in support of her granddaughter. She was ‘deeply overcome, and she wept which is very uncommon for her’, wrote Charlotte. ‘She was very affectionate to me, implored me on her knees not to marry ever a man I did not like, that it would be endless misery…’ She did not wish to encourage Charlotte to disobey her father’s wishes, the Queen told her granddaughter. But, Charlotte recorded, she insisted that, ‘in what so wholly concerned my earthly happiness and well-doing, I had a right to have my own opinion, and by it to be firm.’