by Flora Fraser
Her own husband, averred the Duchess, was ‘all affection and kindness and has no object but my happiness’. She wrote of ‘a marriage which promises every comfort’ and of the Duke’s ‘honourable character and excellent heart.’ And they both thoroughly enjoyed the marriage feast that her sister Princess Elizabeth contrived in their honour at her cottage at Old Windsor – a splendid fête, with rustic emblems and trophies of plenty and fruitfulness jostling ‘pan pipes twisted with tassels’, trumpets, fifes and drums, painted on a blue background. The guests danced in a tent, and were offered a ‘sandwich supper’, and Elizabeth told Mrs Baynes that, if she had let her imagination have fair play, there would have been turtle-doves in pairs and cupids in every corner.
The new Duchess endorsed the work of the Duke’s steward, Mr Edmund Currey, who had done much recently to make the estate into a first-class shoot. For this Princess Mary was grateful, as she learnt that the Duke had only rarely been at Bagshot before Currey’s landscaping of the property, which included ‘wood walks, fine large trees’ and a ‘variety of ground that is striking for so small a park.’ She could see opportunities for thinning here and planting there, she wrote. Gardening, an activity in which Mary had taken little interest till now, was to become her passion, under the tutelage of the personable Mr Currey and with an excellent gardener, Mr Toward. She intended to make a flower garden, once the Duke and her brother the Prince had settled on which side of the house additions should be made, she told Miss Henrietta Finch in October.
The Prince Regent had sent Mr John Nash, the celebrated architect, to survey Bagshot Park and grounds with the plan of making additions. ‘He passed two hours with us yesterday, and will put his ideas on paper for you to approve or disapprove,’ Mary wrote to her brother. She had told Mr Nash again and again that he should add only what was necessary ‘from comfort’, having no wish to ‘drive any unnecessary expenses upon any of the [government] Offices.’ Nevertheless, Mary had found on arrival at Bagshot that what the Duke thought necessary for a lady’s comfort was very far from her own. ‘You know how many things are required in a lady’s apartment,’ she wrote to Miss Finch on 4 October 1816, ‘and that never can come into the head of any man, still less one who never was used to live with ladies before he married me.’
Even before he married, the Duke had been badly off at Bagshot for lodging rooms for his staff and even for servants’ rooms. All was now to be rationalized and adapted by Mr Nash for the new couple’s convenience. According to Princess Mary, the house had only two good rooms, her own and the Duke’s. The apartment – and dressing room – that her sister-in-law Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester had occupied when she stayed had recently been greatly ‘injured’ by rain, and, as for the Duke’s gentlemen, they had to sleep in a garret. Only their long attachment to the Duke made them put up with being lodged among the servants. The basics for the ‘common convenience of a family’ were not to be found in the house, and she continued to beg the Regent to urge Lord Liverpool to give his consent for their supply.
The Duke, when not out in his newly stocked woods with his gun, or travelling England in pursuit of game elsewhere, had found his comfort till now not at home, but in his sister Princess Sophia Matilda’s house in London, or in male society at the numerous London clubs that he belonged to. With a marked liking for institutional life, he felt most strongly about the African Institution, of all the many bodies whose dinners he attended and whose meetings he chaired. Promoting the rights of African slaves, he thus found himself in company with Mr William Roscoe of Liverpool, lawyer Mr Henry Brougham and other Radical MPs. Gloucester was here, as in other charitable enterprises, always a generous donor. But it was whispered that he did not always fully follow the arguments that raged around him at Cambridge, at the African Institution or in other committee rooms.
The new Duchess, taking a hand at philanthropy herself, was building a small schoolroom for Bagshot parish which was ‘much wanted’. In case these activities palled, the new Duchess was going to have ‘a master for landscapes, which’, she said, ‘I think will amuse me very much.’
She and the Duke received morning visits from her mother and sisters, the Regent called from Royal Lodge at Windsor, and Charlotte and Leopold came to stay. But their most frequent guests were Princess Sophia Matilda, with her companion, formerly her governess, Miss Dee, and the guests who came on shooting parties during the autumn. When the Duke was away shooting – often for ten days or more at a time – his bride generally visited her mother and sisters at Windsor. Thus she made good her promise that she would continue to play as full a part as possible in Castle life.
Poor health dominated the lives of the Queen and of Mary’s sisters at Windsor, where every ailment became a hideous encumbrance. Sophia was now never long free from spasms, although there were days when she could sit up and play at cards. And, mysteriously, there were days when the invalid went out for a hearty ride with her sister Augusta. Mary, visiting from Bagshot, was drawn into this world of indisposition and was laid up for several days in November with a very bad chilblain on her foot, reminding her, she wrote to her brother, of another chilblain ‘in the very spot that caused me so much suffering two years ago.’
The Queen’s poor health – her bilious complaints and her sinking spirits – was apparent to all her daughters. On certain anniversaries, like the day on which the King fell ill, 25 October, grief overcame her. When she received the news of the death of her brother Grand Duke Charles, Elizabeth wrote, ‘She was struck so cold … that I was privately anxious.’ Years earlier Royal had written of her mother’s difficulty in giving vent to the strong emotions that disturbed her, and the years had not altered that failing. ‘After all that has passed, one cannot wonder at its being a most painful thing to her to feel that, in acting the part of a truly great and excellent Queen, she was obliged to take a step which for the sake of the country was so extremely painful to herself … if she had not done what she did, the morals of the country were gone.’ But the Queen gained some pleasure from visiting her granddaughter Charlotte and Prince Leopold at Claremont. Their plans to attend the Lord Mayor’s Banquet and to take part in public life met with the Queen’s firm approval, and though she tried to dissuade her own daughters from attending Charlotte and Leopold, frailty made her less obdurate in general. Only in one matter was she unbending. She would not quit Windsor, though the King did not register her presence when she made her impassive visits to his northern apartments, for the ‘cure’ her doctors implored her to take.
For Princess Mary, marriage was a brave new world. Among other difficulties to contend with, she had to reconcile her loyalty to her brother the Regent with her new duty to her husband. Her dreams, expressed before marriage, of acting as hostess – which she could never do in her spinster state – to her brother at Brighton were with difficulty realized. Although the Gloucesters spent the New Year of 1817 there with the Regent, who was, according to Charlotte, ‘as well with them as can be’, the Duke’s feelings for his cousin remained those of anger and envy. And the Regent did not forget that, throughout his battles with their mutual cousin his wife, the Gloucester family had played an ambiguous part and had never ceased to visit the Princess of Wales till she left England.
When an assassin made an attempt on the life of the Prince Regent early in 1817, the Duchess of Gloucester seized the opportunity to rush to the Castle, where her brother was recovering. Royal wrote from Württemberg warmly, if not knowledgeably, of ‘the spirit of anarchy’ abroad in Britain, and praised her brother for cancelling the drawing room – for fear of riots – at which their mother had been due to preside. ‘It would be terrible to have her exposed to any hurry’, she wrote of the Queen, ‘at this time of life.’ She said of her mother further that ‘at her time of life, she ought to give up having long drawing rooms… Augusta and Eliza might with great propriety do the honours of them at Carlton House or … like our late aunt Princess Amelia they might once a month have their own dr
awing room, which would help to keep up trade.’ Royal was referring to the silk merchants, dressmakers and milliners who benefited from orders for the new outfits that were de rigueur for drawing rooms.
Royal herself had no wish to return to England and host any such drawing room, although she was now free to do so. Momentous news had come from Stuttgart in November. Royal’s husband, Frederick, King of Württemberg – that great survivor who had twisted and turned his way through the Napoleonic Wars – had died on 30 October 1816. And the Duke of Kent, who had by chance been with his sister when the King expired, would do justice to their mutuál attachment to the last, wrote Royal. Her sisters and brothers were less convinced about that attachment, and considered that the Queen was too proud to admit that she was the victim of domestic violence. Over the years, reports of the King’s mishandling his wife had filtered back to England, but, given Württemberg’s status as a French vassal state, it had seemed impolitic to raise the issue. Now the matter must be allowed to rest, with the King in his grave.
Royal’s stepson Wilhelm and his new wife Catherine had also stayed with her to the last – although Catherine was ‘taken in labour as she was sitting in the next room to the late King when he was dying.’ (Bewitched by the Grand Duchess of Oldenburg in London, the Hereditary Prince had divorced his wife and married the Russian Princess, who was now expecting their first child.) With great firmness of mind, hours after the King’s death and twelve hours after the delivery of her own child, this new Queen of Württemberg wrote to Queen Charlotte ‘to ease her mind’ about Royal, Elizabeth told Lady Harcourt.
As Dowager Queen of Württemberg, Royal wrote six months later to Lady Harcourt that, although supported wonderfully by the Almighty throughout ‘the severe trial it has pleased him to afflict me with’, her heart was ‘too deeply wounded’ not to mourn constantly her ‘dearest friend’ – the dead King. She thought of her husband constantly, led the same sort of life he had been partial to, and employed herself in those things that had given him satisfaction. And this, she found, was ‘in a degree prolonging his existence beyond the grave’. In Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg she had a respected position and could live, on her generous English jointure, an extremely grand and luxurious life. Each year she kept up a sort of summer court at Teinach, the watering place in the Black Forest where she had first gone years before, after the stillbirth of her daughter. This year she wrote of the waters, ‘But although I submit to their prescription, I have little faith in it as nothing can ease a broken heart.’ Why would Royal wish to exchange this respectable life of mourning for the daughter’s lot in England that would be hers, queen and widow though she was?
The day after her husband died, Royal wrote to Sir John Coxe Hippisley, one of the trustees who had been appointed on her marriage to invest her dowry: ‘I believe that from the day of the King’s death, I am entided to the whole interest of my fortune’ – £80,000 in 1797. For dowager residences she chose apartments in the new Palace at Stuttgart, a set of rooms in the great complex at Ludwigsburg, and the pretty villa, Mon Repos, outside the latter town. It was from Ludwigsburg in August 1817 that she wrote to wish her brother the Regent a happy birthday: ‘I look forward with delight to the moment which will make you a happy grandfather.’
Princess Charlotte was expecting a baby in November 1817. Even before she was pregnant she had surprised visitors who remembered her rakish teenage habits by the taste she exhibited for domestic life at Claremont. She and Leopold sang, sharing a piano stool. As the pregnancy advanced, they went hand in hand for slow walks in the grounds. Charlotte sat to Mr Thomas Lawrence the fashionable painter, and in the portrait, her happiness outshines even the lavish gold embroidery on her Russian blue dress. People began to say that she would make – in due course – an excellent queen. Charlotte’s old foibles – her impulsiveness, her arbitrary favouritisms and dislikes – were forgotten. And she moved happily about her new home, entertaining family and friends with pleasure. ‘It is not à façon de parler to say that this is Liberty Hall, and that we are only too happy to dispense with form and ceremony,’ she said contentedly one evening. But that was going too far for one visitor who found the circle they sat in impossibly formal and German, and the conversation deadly.
The weather cleared in September, and the Duchess of Gloucester – and her sister Augusta, who visited – quite lived out of doors at Bagshot and Windsor. On receiving a letter from Lady Harcourt, Augusta wrote that it was a real pleasure to reply to her – ‘but so many people would expect me to correspond with them because my sisters are fond of writing that I give out I cannot bear writing which really is not the case, but the fact is, I love my few friends so very much that I cannot make a hospital of my heart – a phrase I have often made use of to dear Miss Gouldsworthy, who entered perfectly on my feelings upon the subject…’
They heard that the Princess of Wales – having learnt that she was to be a grandmother in November – was coming to England, and that Miss Frances Garth, her former lady, was to meet her at Dover. But Mary placed hope in a forged bond that the Princess had given her brother the Duke of Brunswick before his death, and which she hoped would help to expose and bring down her sister-in-law.
Mary forgot about the Princess of Wales on a bridal visit with her husband to Weymouth, originally a Gloucester ‘fiefdom’, where they were besieged by a host of friendly inhabitants. When they visited the Ilchesters at Nutting, a house ‘full of fine old chinoise and japan and some good pictures’, the Duchess noticed, among a sea of Frampton and Seymour relations, ‘a most agreeable old lady with a wonderful memory’ who told her stories of fifty years back ‘with a degree of cheerfulness that is delightful.’ Was Mary thinking of her mother, now aged seventy-three, who was neither cheerful nor delightful, but ill and old and cross? Weymouth seems to have awakened in Mary no painful recollections of her last visit there with Amelia, and triumphantly she proceeded to Brighton, to batten on her brother from the comfort of one of his houses – ostensibly to see if a course of sea bathing would keep off’the Saint’, or erysipelas, that coming winter.
Princess Elizabeth, meanwhile, was spending her time painting glass for a window in her new ‘castle in the air’ – the dairy she dreamt of building at her Old Windsor cottage. ‘I have no such thing,’ she told Augusta Baynes, who had traced her a design for her project, ‘but I love living on hope. She is at times a sad girl, but still one cannot live without her.’ Elizabeth now planned to japan a large screen with ‘bold patterns of birds, plants and figures’, and asked Augusta to trace her some. She would ask Mr Festrage, the great japanner, to send her some tracing paper of quality that did not stick.
After her hopes of marriage with the Duke of Orleans had been dashed eight years earlier, Elizabeth had increasingly inhabited the role of eccentric in her cottage at Old Windsor. Adhering to her rustic character, she wrote of putting the pieces of wedding cake her friends sent her under her pillow and lying in wait for bridegrooms. But of course this was daft nonsense; bridegrooms could not ‘come along’ for Princess Elizabeth as they might for a Miss Compton or even a Miss Perceval. If she were to come by a husband, it would be by treaty with a foreign state. Meanwhile, outside were the cattle and Chinese pigs that she bred. Inside, the house was chock-a-block with the ‘old china’ and teapots that she collected, her library of books, and her portfolios of prints and drawings. There were also to be found the raw materials of myriad artistic endeavours – scissors and black paper for the silhouette scenes of mothers and babies which she cut out with such dexterity, screens and inks and paints for her japanning projects, the large albums which she illuminated with texts and then grangerized, or filled with appropriate prints and engravings in the margins, and even a decorative garland or two from the countless fêtes and parties that she delighted in arranging for her friends and family.
Her artistic plans were put on hold in November 1817 when she was appointed companion to her mother on a journey to Bath. The Queen had at last conse
nted to try the waters there. The physicians’ dire warnings about the consequences of her remaining without remedy had at last overcome her aversion to leaving the King at Windsor. With the experienced and faintly ominous remark, after a visit to Claremont, that Charlotte was very large indeed, although some way off full term, and with anxious imprecations to Princess Augusta, left in charge at Windsor, about the care of the King, the Queen departed.
At Bath, Princess Elizabeth and Queen Charlotte settled into a routine of going to the Pump Room in the morning and dining early with their ladies at the capacious house in New Sydney Place which they had rented. But only days after they had arrived, on the morning of 6 November, before they left for the Pump Room, they received the unhappy news that Charlotte had gone into labour a month early the previous evening, and that her baby – a large and handsome boy – had been stillborn. The Princess’s labour had been unexpected. She had come in from a walk and was laying aside her bonnet and cloak when the pains began. It was agonizing and protracted, they heard, and Sir Richard Croft, her accoucheur, and the midwives had done their best, but to no avail. When she was told the news, they learnt, Princess Charlotte had been stoic and, before settling to rest, had comforted her afflicted husband by speaking of many children to come.
Queen Charlotte in Bath, who had ‘long been uneasy about Charlotte’, did not at all like the account of her granddaughter’s condition after the delivery, and all day worried and waited for a further express to bring more news. The Duke of Clarence, who had taken a house at the other end of the terrace, supported his mother before leaving to dress for a banquet that the City and Corporation of Bath were giving him at the Guildhall. The Queen and Elizabeth meanwhile – after some hesitation, and in all their diamonds – received the Lord Mayor and Deputation in advance of the dinner, as had been arranged. Worse news, the worst of news then arrived, and Princess Elizabeth wrote that night of the ‘tremendous blow’ they were dealt, when that second fateful express arrived while they were at dinner in New Sydney Place.