by Flora Fraser
‘General Taylor was asked out; our hearts misgave us. He sent out for Lady Ilchester, which gave us a moment for to be sure that something dreadful had happened.’ The moment General Taylor came back into the dining room, Queen Charlotte said, ‘I am sure it is over.’ The express did indeed bring the news for which the Queen seemed to have been preparing herself. Princess Charlotte, not yet twenty-two years old, a beaming bride a year before, a proud wife and mother-to-be days earlier, had died in the night from complications following the stillbirth of her premature son.
‘Horror, sorrow and misery’, wrote Elizabeth to Lady Harcourt, ‘struck the heart, and no word could fall after such a dreadful shock.’ And dolefully she wrote to one of her brother’s confidential attendants, ‘In our lives have we never been so completely shocked.’ At the Bath Guildhall, where the King’s messenger had stopped to give the news to the dead Princess’s uncle, the Duke of Clarence, the banquet was abandoned. In Bath, as throughout the country, as the news spread, the reaction was shock – and universal and genuine mourning. The lawyer Henry Brougham wrote, ‘It really was as if every household throughout Great Britain had lost a favourite child.’ The Prince Regent was prostrate with grief and ‘deep affliction’.
At Windsor Princess Augusta, who had so recently written happily to Lady Harcourt, now told her, ‘I even dared to expect the poor child could have lived, after all the sufferings, to the third day – You may suppose that I am exactly in that situation of the man who stands till he falls. It is so sad a calamity that I am still quite stunned.’ After Sir Brent Spencer had broken the news to her, it had been her ‘very cruel’ task to ‘tell the fatal conclusion’ to Sophy, and she dreaded the effect it would have on her. ‘I sent for Battiscombe [the apothecary] to be with us and, thank God, the last accounts had been so bad that she expected a sad close as much as I did.’ As she wrote, they were waiting for the Queen and Elizabeth, and then ‘All our meetings and seeing Baillie will be over.’ But, thinking of the funeral ahead, she added, ‘till the necessary distressing scenes are past, we shall be constantly tracing open the wound afresh.’
The Queen, who returned with Elizabeth to Windsor on 7 November, continued to be the chief object of concern for Princess Augusta. She had dinner ready half an hour after the Queen arrived, having travelled ninety miles from Bath overnight. She had Dr Baillie tell ‘the grievous tale’ to her mother ‘at least two hours before she went to bed’, and tried in every way to ‘lessen all the horror she had to meet with.’ And she hoped that the Queen would adhere to Sir Henry’s advice, to return to Bath to complete the cure – ‘what little of the waters she had taken had acted like a charm upon her stomach’ – after the funeral. But still, she admitted, not being able to go about their usual avocations, they all brooded too much upon their ‘severe affliction’.
The details of the ‘grievous tale’ were enough to keep anyone awake, whether told at midday or late at night. Hours after the commotion surrounding the stillbirth, when the house was quiet, Charlotte had begun to moan and cry aloud in her room at Claremont. She called for Leopold, but he had ingested an opiate to help him sleep, and they did not at first wish to wake him. It took a while to shake him into consciousness, and by the time he arrived it was too late. His loving wife, despite her promise of more children only hours earlier, was a corpse, and guarding it were Mrs Louis, Charlotte’s old nurse, and Croft, the wretched accoucheur, who had watched aghast as Princess Charlotte, before their eyes, suffered a fatal haemorrhage and died.
Augusta wrote again on the day of Charlotte’s funeral, ‘This most melancholy sad day … it is true that we see nothing of the last sad ceremony, but I shall be glad when it is all over.’ They spoke to Prince Leopold, who talked to them of Charlotte’s character as it had unfolded to him in the last happy year of her life: ‘Her disposition expanding from prejudice into justice, and a self examination of the nervousness of her former ideas.’ He said she had told him how ‘long before she married … her mind had been impressed with a very unjust character of the Queen and her aunts. That she had been repeatedly told that she was brought to Windsor to be meddled and interfered with, and dictated to by them; that she found out, at last, it was false.’ This comforted Augusta.
And the Queen, who had so short a time before chosen her granddaughter’s bridal dress and trousseau and had now returned to Windsor to bury her, wrote of Charlotte, ‘Claremont was indeed her earthly Paradise.’ When the Queen returned from Bath, where she went in obedience to her doctors to complete her cure after Charlotte’s funeral was over, she still looked ‘ill in the face’, and was nervous and easily overcome. The force of her grief for Charlotte shocked the Queen’s dressers the Beckedorffs, mother and daughter.
Prince Leopold, whom the Queen and her daughters visited towards the end of November at Claremont, was also desolate, though calm. He had not yet returned to live in his former married quarters, he said, although he ‘made it a rule to walk into these rooms every day’. The bonnet and cloak that ‘she’ had taken off before she was confined still lay where ‘she’ had placed them. He could not bear to move them yet, he said, and he meant to keep all – he gestured to the house and grounds where he and Charlotte had walked and planned their life to come – as ‘she’ had liked it.
Prince Leopold, as the widower rather than as the husband of the heir presumptive to the throne of England, all of a sudden faced a very different future, and his new income of £50,000 a year – the sum allotted him in the event of Charlotte’s death – was as yet little consolation. Not so slowly, other reverberations of the heir presumptive’s death were felt among Charlotte’s uncles and aunts. The Prince Regent pursued with new vengeance his old project to divorce Charlotte’s mother, now that ‘much delicacy’ had been set aside by his daughter’s death. Caroline wrote from Italy, ‘England, that grand country, has lost everything in losing my ever beloved daughter,’ and doubted she would return there. Rumours redoubled that the Duchess of Cumberland was expecting a baby. And Charlotte’s uncles Clarence and Kent began to look about them for wives, while the Duke of Cambridge, who had fallen in love with a young HesseCassel princess at Hanover, pressed for his brother’s consent to his marriage, and a Parliamentary grant to reflect that status.
Princess Sophia, who had loved Charlotte’s spirit, was overcome with grief, and a ‘melancholy meeting’ with her sister Mary, who came to the Castle on her return from Brighton, only increased it. The Duchess of Gloucester herself, whose feelings were shallow by comparison with those of most of her family, was shocked to see the Duchess of York, who came on a visit from Oatlands and who had loved Charlotte, ‘so altered’. Even so, the Duchess of Gloucester twined strands of Amelia’s and Charlotte’s hair together in ‘two eternities’ as a gift for her brother, the Regent, and told him that ‘The two hearts open with a little hasp.’ But in the midst of this mourning, when the Duke of Gloucester went to Norfolk in the New Year of 1818 to shoot, Mary found Princess Elizabeth in unaccountably high spirits, declaring that the waters at Bath had set her up: ‘I am twenty years younger and walk and do as I usually do.’
Their mother was the reverse of well. The Queen’s breathing had grown short and laboured, and the doctors were so nervous about her condition that Sir Henry warned the princesses that ‘any sudden surprise, be it pain or pleasure, might cause sudden death’. A sudden surprise, and pain unmixed with pleasure, came barely a week later when Princess Elizabeth read a letter to her mother. Frederick, the Hereditary Prince of HesseHomburg – who had once offered for Augusta, and who had hung about Charlotte a year or so earlier – had offered for Elizabeth’s hand in marriage. Elizabeth said it was a surprise to her. It was certainly a surprise, not only to the Queen but to all Elizabeth’s sisters, Princess Mary wrote to the Prince Regent. And she enclosed, at Elizabeth’s urging, the letter that had confounded their mother – but had, by good fortune, not caused her sudden death. She was too angry with her daughter for that.
The Duchess
of Gloucester was calm itself. There was no reason for any consternation, she wrote. ‘Eliza having never concealed her wish and desire to marry,’ she argued, ‘she is only acting up to what she has always said.’ Naturally Elizabeth wanted the Prince Regent’s approbation, Mary continued, but she was old enough, in her younger sister’s opinion, to judge for herself. She would be a dreadful loss to the Queen, Mary feared. And yet, if the match did not take place, she warned her brother, ‘she will make the Queen more unhappy in the long run than the act of leaving her.’
The Hereditary Prince of Hesse-Homburg’s reasons for seeking Princess Elizabeth as his bride at this point were obscure. At the age of forty-eight, his bride could hardly be considered a strong candidate in the royal race to provide an heir to the British throne, or even for Homburg itself. Indeed the Prince had seven brothers to do battle for the latter cause. Still, members of both their families – Royal, the Duke of Kent, the Duchess of York and her brother Prince William of Prussia, who had married the Hereditary Prince’s sister Marianne – had acted in concert to advance the scheme, of which the bridegroom had written as early as February 1817. And it had advantages for both parties. Elizabeth would gain a property to administer, a husband, freedom from her mother. And her dowry would have a huge effect in the tiny domain of Hesse-Homburg. The state debts were growing, as the Hereditary Prince’s father grew old, and the buildings and lands had been neglected for years. In short, a capable wife with means seemed the answer to the Prince – a professional soldier who ‘shone’ at fortifications – as he contemplated the duty that would soon be his to superintend his Hessian homeland.
And as for his choice of Elizabeth? A report from Frankfurt in 1818 names her as the only princess of England available as a wife for those wishing to ally themselves with that prosperous country. Two princesses – Royal and Mary – were married, ran the note; one – Sophia – was a permanent invalid, and one was privately married. The rumours, if not the truth, about Augusta and Sir Brent had spread wide.
To Sophia the Queen talked fully and, her daughter thought, very reasonably one evening on ‘Eliza’s subject’. She admitted that her daughter, at nearly fifty, was of an age to decide for herself. However, the Queen was ‘vexed and flurried at the quickness with which she had taken her resolution’. Sophia attempted to soothe her mother and palliate her distress – although the Queen still cried bitterly at times – by reminding her repeatedly that ‘she knew this was always Eliza’s object’.
While the Regent declared that he entered deeply into the feelings of all parties – which he would endeavour to conciliate – the Hereditary Prince came to London, where, despite his preference for Elizabeth, he had to have his bride pointed out to him from among her sisters. He was ‘much hurt at the Queen’s manner.’ The Queen tried to prevent him on various pretexts from seeing Elizabeth as she had earlier tried to prevent Mary and William of Gloucester having interviews before marriage. But the Hereditary Prince could arrange nothing until he saw his bride, he told the Duchess of Gloucester. He hated writing, and would far rather talk over his proposals in person with Princess Elizabeth. The sooner Elizabeth and the Queen were parted, the better for both their sakes, wrote Princess Mary on 3 February. All comfort was at an end between them, and Mary blamed Elizabeth’s ‘injudicious friends’. Her departure would be a sad blow to the Queen, she predicted – ‘heaven grant she may not sink under it.’ With Sophia a tactical invalid and Mary busy with duties at Bagshot, it was surely Augusta who would now ‘sink under’ the attendance on her mother.
Two days later Sir Henry Halford was called in to assess the Queen’s health. He found that her ‘suppressed anger made it difficult for him to judge correctly of her pulse or of her breathing’, and he came out astonished at the ‘perturbation and distress of feelings which she manifested.’ Even the Regent was powerless to assuage her mood. Elizabeth, meanwhile, was ‘broken-hearted’ after the series of ‘severe speeches’ that her mother made her. The Queen refused to believe that her daughter had as yet made her ‘final irrevocable decision’ and stuck to her refusal to bless the match, given that the King had never answered the earlier proposal from HesseHomburg for one of his daughters. It was not a match he would have liked, she said. By degrees, however, the Queen was brought round, and within a couple of weeks was counselling the Regent that Elizabeth’s wedding should take place ‘as soon as you can manage it should’. And the sooner the bridal couple left England after that, she instructed Sophia to tell her brother, the better it would be.
Elizabeth now began to receive notes of blessing and congratulations on her forthcoming marriage to ‘Bluff’ – her name for Frederick. (Like his brother-in-law the King of Württemberg, however, the Hereditary Prince was usually called Fritz.) To Miss Gomm, the former nursery governess, she wrote, ‘I have great reason to bless God.’ No man ‘ever stood higher in the world’, she wrote of her Fritz, and his manner and conduct towards her were perfect. Others thought that he stank to high heaven of stale tobacco from the meerschaum pipes he smoked addictively. On one occasion he made a bow at Court and the seat of his breeches ripped loudly. His ruddy face obscured by coarse whiskers and moustachioes gained few admirers. Princess Elizabeth did not know of a letter written by Leopold’s mother to his sister Victoria, Princess of Leiningen, in which the match was called ‘stupid.’ And Napoleon, far away on St Helena, was contemptuous. ‘The English royal family’, he said in February 1818, ‘va incanagliarsi [mean to lower themselves] with little petty princes, to whom I would not have given a brevet of sous lieutenant.’ But she would have condemned Leopold – the likely source of his mother’s comment – and Napoleon too, had she heard of their remarks. For Elizabeth and her reeking warrior prince were, quite by chance, to have a very happy marriage.
The Regent and Council approving the match, Elizabeth in virginal white married the Hereditary Prince in the drawing room of the Queen’s House on 7 April. The maids of honour who had been at Royal’s wedding were summoned, and all the Queen’s ‘family’ was present, as were the great officers of state. With the promise that he would bring her back to England within a year, Fritz gathered up his bride and the many belongings she insisted on taking, and made for the Channel, after a honeymoon during which he would be so considerate as to smoke fewer pipes than usual. Among other possessions Elizabeth took with her to Bad Homburg were exercise books in which she had written down advice from Sir Joseph Banks on rose-growing and comments by Lord Harcourt on feeding orange trees. She took commonplace books and sketchbooks and artists’ paraphernalia – and her dear old china. At the last, Elizabeth’s resolve quivered. She and her sisters were aware that their mother was far from well. But she set her face for the Continent and looked forward to what lay across the Channel after the honeymoon she and the Prince were taking along the Sussex coast.
Bluff, for his part, sent an urgent letter to Bad Homburg to his chamberlain, ordering all the poultry to be removed from beneath the windows of his bride’s proposed apartments and the stables near by to be cleaned. The family, used to their own company and able to put on a show for meals or entertain at Frankfurt when distinguished or royal visitors passed through, were not over-scrupulous in their living habits or in overseeing those of their servants.
In the following few weeks in London the Regent, astonishingly, gave his consent for three of his brothers – Clarence, Kent, and Cambridge – to marry. During the battle to secure royal married allowances for all these bridegrooms, Mr Thomas Creevey, the waggish Whig MP, commented that the royal dukes were ‘the damndest millstone about the necks of any Government that can be imagined.’ One of them had to get rid of what others might have considered a millstone round his own neck. The Duke of Kent, who had been living for over fifteen years first in North America and now at Brussels with Mme de St Laurent, simply handed her the newspaper to reveal to her his engagement to Victoria, Princess Leiningen, Prince Leopold’s widowed sister.
While Elizabeth was still at Brigh
ton on honeymoon, Queen Charlotte’s health worsened. On a journey in June 1818 from the Queen’s House to Windsor, she had to stop at Kew when she developed breathing problems. Sir Henry Halford was summoned, and advised that it would be dangerous to move his royal patient.
‘What my feelings must be at this time being away from my mother that I have always adored since I had sense of reason,’ Elizabeth wrote, distraught, from Brighton. ‘My trial has been severe and only proves how little happiness there is in this world for had I not had these tremendous blows, I might have been much too happy, as I assure you every hour increases my affection, esteem and admiration of my husband, who expresses himself so lucky that I only wish that I really was all he thinks me.’ She and Bluff had had a very quiet time, were going to Worthing for a few days, and then embarked at Dover.
My spirits at times are not what they used to be, but I try to hide it from him, for though my family must be dearer than life to me, the kinder he is the more I ought to bear up. My dear sisters are angels, and I think Augusta particularly deserves every reward that this world can give by her uncommon firm steady friendship and affection for me, and exerting herself as she does for my mother dearest. They say her conduct is angelic – I have sacrificed my comfort in going away when I did, but that is of little consequence if I have done right, which I firmly believe I have, and that must make me content, but feeling that I might have shared with them the attendance on my mother, often occasions me a pang.