Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  As the country flamed in riots over the Corn Bill, and it was written on the wall, ‘Prince Regent, dissolve this Parliament directly or your head shall pay for it,’ the Queen was firm herself with her son, saying sternly: ‘Prince of Wales, you must, if you persist, talk to your daughter yourself. For both myself and mine choose to keep quite out of it, as we will never press what will, we know, make Charlotte miserable.’ Charlotte’s own unhappy conclusion was ‘The Prince must be gone mad if he goes on persecuting me with his abominable Dutch man.’

  On the Continent, Royal was at last diverted from her niece Charlotte’s peccadilloes by news of Napoleon’s escape from Elba. ‘His landing in France at the head of so small a body of men would have appeared romantic’, she warned the Regent on 16 March 1815, ‘to all who were not acquainted with the talents and good fortune he displayed till last year.’ The Queen of England, suffering from erysipelas and a swollen face, was as anxious as her daughter in Württemberg – and was to become more so, when another marriage scheme divided the royal family, making the Regent’s and Charlotte’s tussles over her choice of bridegroom look feeble by comparison.

  The final conflict of the Napoleonic Wars was played out on the fields and farmland around Brussels in June 1815, and Royal’s supporter Napoleon, vanquished for ever, was despatched to the remote Atlantic island of St Helena. Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, with many others, headed for a Continent no longer, as the older royal houses of Europe saw it, in chains to an upstart. And while others prepared to gather once more at Vienna to fight for territory, Ernest – saturnine and scarred – found, at his mother’s old home of Strelitz, a bride. Unfortunately, the woman he wished to take as his wife was his cousin Frederica. A woman of fascinating and natural manners, she had also, when a widow with two children by Prince Louis of Prussia, jilted Ernest’s brother Adolphus for the Prince of Solms. Solms then divorced her, citing her ‘loose behaviour’.

  The Prince Regent gave his assent to the marriage in Strelitz – and opened Carlton House to the couple when they wished to say their vows again in England in 1815. But the Queen, who loved her brother Charles more than anyone in the world, could not bring herself to receive her niece, his daughter and now her daughter-in-law. She feared that ‘her [Frederica’s] character is so well known in this country that it may cause you many difficulties’, Mary wrote of her mother to the Regent, ‘which don’t strike you at this moment… Should the Princess of Wales ever come to England again (and find the Pss of Solms well received) it may place us all under great difficulties.’

  The Queen’s nephew the Hereditary Prince of Mecklenburg-Strelitz came begging her to reconsider, and still she could not. When he retaliated by sending a ‘very improper letter’, his aunt declared to all her children ‘that she never will see her nephew again’, and she commanded them ‘to have no further communication with him’. Given the Queen’s ‘adoration for her own family’, Mary wrote to the Regent, ‘the feeling herself under the necessity of acting against them is one of the greatest trials she could have in the world,’ and the Queen’s health deteriorated from this summer of 1815. Elizabeth asserted to her brother Sussex, ‘as she acts from principle and a thorough knowledge of the King’s opinion, she cannot err’. The princesses meanwhile were persuaded by their mother to write an uncomfortable letter to the Regent, the day before their brother Ernest married in England, avowing their intention to follow the Queen’s ‘line … in the propriety of which we entirely concur.’ The next day the miscreant couple were married at the Regent’s home. And Charlotte believed that her uncle Ernest must have had her father in his power in some way to cause him to upset his mother and sisters so.

  The Prince Regent ignored his mother’s advice not to recognize his immoral sister-in-law. But he was eager to know details of his daughter’s past passages with that immoral woman his estranged wife. And Princess Mary had acted as confessor to Charlotte, when, on Christmas Day 1814, she told a rambling tale of her visits to her mother over the past years. Charlotte was at the time distraught on account of lawyer Henry Brougham’s reports about Caroline’s behaviour on the Continent. ‘There is no hazard or risk to serve my poor mother that I would not run if it would be of any avail,’ she told Miss Elphinstone. But she could not conceive that breaking her promise to her father not to write to her mother would do anything but mischief. ‘When he talks of her being completely in a man’s power I do not exactly know to what extent of evil I am to prepare myself,’ she wrote fearfully of Brougham’s reports.

  Charlotte’s recital to Mary included an account of how the Princess of Wales had taken her and Captain Hesse by the hand and shut them in a bedchamber with the words, ‘I leave you to enjoy yourselves.’ Much else followed, to the grim satisfaction of the Prince Regent, to whom Princess Mary wrote immediately a full account of her conversation with her niece. ‘I never knew whether Captain Hesse was her lover or mine,’ said Charlotte forlornly.

  After she made her confession, Charlotte passed the night ‘in the horrors … I fear so terribly that I may have tended … to incriminate her … She is still my mother and as her child I have no right to cavil in her conduct.’ Charlotte begged Mary – ‘you are perhaps a more impartial judge than the Prince’ – to tell her if she had acted justly. ‘Except it be absolutely necessary,’ she wrote, ‘I hope all that passed in your room yesterday will be kept sacred within your bosom.’ But of course Mary had passed it all on.

  Once the rupture of Charlotte’s engagement had become known, other princes did not hesitate to visit the Regent’s Court, some latecomers being two Austrian archdukes in the autumn of 1815. ‘I have such a dread of foreign princes, the sight as well as the name of them alarm me from the idea of some intrigue or other going on for my marrying some one of them, that I am on the qui vive,’ Charlotte confessed, longing for Leopold to appear and declare himself. Of another prince who appeared, the Hereditary Prince of Hesse-Homburg, she wrote: ‘a husband in petto for me too, I suppose … the best thing I can do to make all easy and equally pleased is to marry them all at once in the lump. He is not a man at all calculated for me or that could make me happy’

  Indeed, beside smooth young Leopold, the mature and soldierly charms of the Prince from Homburg stood no chance. They were not always on show, anyway, as he was often obscured by pungent plumes of smoke rising from his beloved meerschaum pipe. There was too the reek of tobacco that clung about his hairy person – he boasted, besides a full head of hair, bushy sideburns and luxuriant whiskers – to discourage Charlotte.

  Meanwhile, the Prince whom the Princess had once declared herself willing to marry, the Duke of Gloucester, had at the ripe age of forty, proposed to a wealthy widow, Lady Monson – and been rejected. Under this blow, wrote Charlotte, ‘my cousin seems strangely to have kept his dignity and love of pride etc. She has done more than anybody else ever effected, I believe’ – she meant, jokingly, in getting the Duke to propose. But Charlotte was soon cast down by new reports about her mother who, it was said, had taken as her lover an Italian who acted as her travelling courier. ‘I am in despair at what you tell me about a courier. I had not the slightest or smallest suspicion of the kind … Surely, surely, my dear Marguerite,’ she wrote to Mercer Elphinstone, ‘there can be nothing there, a low common servant, a servant too. And yet you seem to insinuate it from the influence he has in disgracing the boy Austin.’

  Charlotte was distracted from these meditations when she won her object, and the Prince Regent finally agreed to Prince Leopold as a suitable choice of husband for her. On a cold damp morning in February 1816, she came flying over to the Castle from Cranbourne Lodge with a ‘face of delight’ to show her aunts her father’s ‘perfect’ letter on the subject. Later that month her suitor arrived from the Continent and was interviewed by his prospective father-in-law at the Pavilion at Brighton, where the Regent was increasingly spending his time. (His latest inamorata, Lady Hertford, could not abide London, all her comfort was ‘destroyed’ there, and so
anyone, government ministers included, wishing to hold the Regent’s wavering attention had to go down to the Sussex coast.) Princess Augusta, who had visited her brother in January, was delighted with her brother’s taste: ‘The house is quite beautiful, the ground floor entirely Chinoise of the very best taste – and magnificent, the bedchamber storey all plain handsome, good, substantial furniture.’ Prince Leopold found the corps diplomatique who assembled there less entertaining than the Princess. ‘Who would have thought that I could have put a morsel in my mouth sitting with an ambassador?’ she wrote. ‘But I did or I must have starved.’ He complained of the oppressive heat of the rooms, which was doing immense damage to his chest, and Charlotte was all solicitude.

  The marriage went forward, despite the Regent’s ill humour. As host at Brighton to the young fiancés and suffering from the gout, he wheeled himself about in a ‘merlin chair’, not being able to put his feet to the ground, ‘and in that sits the whole evening with his legs down’, wrote Charlotte. The Queen, who told her son that this was a match she most highly approved of, gratified her granddaughter by consulting with her about ‘fine lace’ and other items for her trousseau before ordering it. Charlotte had delightful evenings with Leopold, ‘full of long conversation on different subjects interesting to our future plans of life … A Princess never, I believe, set out in life (or married) with such prospects of happiness, real domestic ones like other people.’

  Although the wedding was being planned according to ‘some old documents’ Lord Liverpool had found relating to her aunt the Princess Royal’s marriage, Charlotte considered herself luckier than that Princess. When they were in town, she and Leopold met daily, ‘and she did not’, she wrote of her aunt, ‘after the first day till they were married’. But then the Princess Royal did not have so many sexual escapades or such bizarre parents to discuss. Leopold hoped very much that the Prince Regent would not pursue his prospective mother-in-law for a divorce. He dreaded the ‘éclat’. ‘We did not say much about my mother,’ wrote Charlotte, ‘as he told me honestly her conduct was so notorious and so much talked of abroad that he was as well informed as everyone else about her.’

  By mid-March 1816 Parliament had voted a generous sum to the bridal pair, and had agreed to the purchase of Lord Clive’s house, Claremont in Surrey, as their residence. The nation was caught up in the love affair that blossomed between Charlotte and her fiance, and their marriage, which took place on 2 May before an imported altar in the drawing room at Carlton House, was widely celebrated. ‘Everyone complimented me upon the composure and dignity of my manner, and the audible manner in which I answered the responses,’ Princess Charlotte wrote from Oatlands, which the Duchess of York had lent the bridal couple for their honeymoon. ‘It all seems to me like a dream, and I ask if it is not so sometimes to myself, and I forget it all for a time, and then it comes back in full force. I cannot say I feel much at my ease or quite comfortable in his society, but it will wear away, I dare say, this sort of awkwardness.’ Also Charlotte and Leopold both found the ‘air of the house’ at Oatlands ‘quite unwholesome, it is so infected and impregnated with the smell and breath of dogs, birds, and all sorts of animals’ – the Duchess of York’s close companions for many years since she and the Duke had amicably parted.

  Charlotte declared that the foundation of her own marriage was ‘very reasonable and therefore there is less chance of its ever being otherwise than with most others; indeed, on the contrary, I am more inclined to think that it will improve. I do not see how it can fail to go on well, tho sometimes I believe it is best not to analyse one’s feelings too much or probe them too deeply or nearly.’ She had not completely forgotten Prince Augustus Frederick of Prussia.

  While Charlotte became a wife and the mistress of her own house at Claremont, with firm hopes of becoming a mother as well, lightning struck out of a clear blue sky. Princess Mary, aged forty, followed her niece to the altar and married her first cousin William, Duke of Gloucester on 22 July 1816. Lady Albinia Cumberland described the scene to her daughter:

  Well, the wedding is over! Dear Princess Mary looked most lovely and angelic – really. Her dress a rich silver tissue of dead silver … no trimming upon it – lace round the neck only. Diamond necklace. The hair dressed rather high. The diamonds put round the head, something in the form of a diadem. When everybody was assembled in the saloon, the Dukes of Cambridge and Clarence handed her in. She looked very modest and overcome. The Prince Regent stood at the other end to the Duke of Gloucester. She stood alone to the former, quite leaning against him. Indeed she needed support. I pitied the Duke of Gloucester for he stood a long time at the altar waiting till she came into the room, giving cakes, carrying wine etc … She then went to the Queen and her sisters, and was quite overcome, was obliged to sit down, and nearly fainted …

  Lord Eldon, the Lord Chancellor, said afterwards of the new Duchess of Gloucester that ‘her behaviour was so interesting and affecting at the ceremony. Even the tears trickled down my cheeks.’ Impossible for the Princess not to miss the presence of her father at this sacred ceremony. But the King inhabited a world of his own at Windsor, full of its own ceremonies. On one occasion, alone in the room with Willis, he ‘took leave of all his company before he went to bed as if the room had been full of people’. When Dr Willis attempted to hurry him, the sovereign bowed acceptance: ‘But I beg Lord Hardwick may first tell his story to Mr Smelt.’

  Princess Mary wrote when the Duke’s offer had just become public, in late June, to a friend who was a recent bride herself, ‘it is difficult to describe what my mind is suffering at the prospect of leaving my first and most beloved of homes’. She declared, however, that, as the Duke’s seat, Bagshot Park, was so close to Windsor, she would hardly spend a week without seeing her mother and sisters. And she wrote warmly, ‘The Duke of Gloucester made so good a son himself– his warring parents were both now dead – ‘that he enters into all my feelings in regard to my family and my wish to take my share of duty in the attendance at Windsor in illness or in any distress.’

  What had precipitated this marriage? The Duke of Gloucester had lately, as we have seen, proposed to another lady, and so was presumably in the mood to marry. Perhaps his thoughts had turned to marriage when his cousin Charlotte ‘declared’ for him. With marriage he won the coveted HRH, and even became a field marshal, as Leopold had done weeks earlier. But if it was true that he had earlier proposed to his cousin Mary twenty or thirty times and she had rejected him, why did she now accept him? Not much had changed in his circumstances to make him more or less attractive than at any time since he had become duke in 1805. Married life would centre on a town house, Gloucester House, which faced Hyde Park to the west, and, in the country, Bagshot Park, where the Duke was accustomed annually to shoot his way through the autumn and winter months. Nevertheless Princess Augusta believed Mary had ‘every prospect of happiness’.

  Mary herself guarded that prospect of happiness, and refused to allow her brother Ernest to visit her at the Queen’s House before her marriage. ‘I am quite certain’, she wrote, ‘the Queen would be greatly offended if he came into her house, and secondly, was he to say anything against the Duke of Gloucester, it would place me in a most awkward situation.’ Mary was marrying a cousin from a ‘weaker branch of the family’, whom most if not all of her brothers had long regarded as a tiresome fool, and she, quite reasonably, did not wish to hear it said.

  One of the chief reasons, it emerges, that Mary accepted Gloucester, or even possibly promoted the match herself, was that she hoped, as a married woman, to see more of her adored Prince Regent. ‘I hope’, she told him, ‘I may be permitted to find my way into your room occasionally of a morning when in town. I shall be very careful never to get out of the carriage until I know you can receive me.’ In return she directed him, ‘Come when and as often as you please to my house, it will be the joy of my life to see you.’ She had told the Duke ‘how completely and entirely my happiness depends on my remaini
ng on this blessed footing with you and all my family.’ She ended this document that spoke only of her ties to her own family and of none to the Duke, ‘I trust and hope my intended marriage will rather add and increase … my devotion to my family, and that as a married woman I can come forward and be of more use to you all than I can now.’

  Charlotte wrote a few weeks after Mary’s marriage: ‘I have seen the Gloucesters twice. They seem very comfortable and happy. He is much in love, and tells me he is the happiest creature on earth. I won’t say she does as much, but being her own mistress, having her own house, and being able to walk in the streets all delights her in their several ways. He is not at all in favour with the regent, who quizzes him and shrugs up his shoulders at him upon all occasions…’ Charlotte herself found the Duke of Gloucester ‘tiresome’, but, after he and the Duchess had stayed at Claremont in August, wrote, ‘though they are not the most agreeable people in the world, still they are exceedingly good humoured, good natured, kind and easily pleased … the Duke seems very fond of Mary and to be very happy; he is certainly all attention to her, but I cannot say she looks the picture of happiness or as if she was much delighted with him.’

  15 Daughters in Distress

  Princess Charlotte had not been entirely enthusiastic about her aunt’s marriage. The new Duchess of Gloucester gave tit for tat. ‘Our visit to Claremont went off very well,’ Mary wrote on 29 September 1816, ‘considering that we went to see two people completely engrossed with each other … I doubt that the sort of life they are now leading can last, but I wish it may with all my heart.’ Mary had very little conversation with Charlotte, who had once confided in her. ‘She really appears … to have no eyes or thoughts but for the Prince of Coburg and he is much in the same state.’ Charlotte herself admitted with delight, a month after marriage, that her ‘reasonable marriage’ had flowered into a love match.