by Flora Fraser
Augusta told of her ‘poor stricken heart’ and of the ‘very very great sorrow’ they had gone through in ten days. ‘The blow is struck but now the first recovery opens our eyes to our affliction. I have cried a great deal today, and feel relieved by it,’ she wrote on 4 February. Mary and Augusta and Sophia sat and worked in the evenings as they waited for the interment, first of their brother Edward and then of their father.
When the Duchess of Gloucester visited Windsor four days later she found that Princess Augusta and Princess Sophia were ‘making great exertions to get their things all packed up to leave the Castle’. Mary herself thanked the new King for the gift of the furniture ‘in the room I used to live in in the Castle’, which would embellish Bagshot, and also for the gift of one of her father’s carriages. Mary was always a materialist, and these acquisitions helped dull the pain of the two January deaths and the loss of Windsor.
Princess Augusta and Princess Sophia departed the Castle the day after their father’s funeral, an event at which their brother Frederick was chief mourner in place of the King. While his father lay dying, George IV had fallen suddenly and gravely ill and, still weak, feared the night air. His feelings were as ever overset by death, this time to the point of contracting a pleurisy that had made some of his doctors think a third royal funeral might be in the offing. But it was not to be.
‘The seeing this dear old place at this moment’, Mary wrote from Windsor, ‘is very melancholy.’ She believed that Sophia’s ‘strength of mind’ would help her to survive the move. It was a ‘great object to get her to town’ and into the care of Sir Henry Halford. She was to occupy apartments first in her brother Adolphus’s home, Cambridge House in Mayfair, and then at Kensington Palace.
Augusta, on the other hand, was bound for Frogmore, where she meant to live most of the time, keeping apartments at the Queen’s House for forays to town. She had sent for Lady Harcourt, who had been with them after the Queen’s death, to join her there. And although she ‘began to flag sadly’ while making her final arrangements in early February at Windsor, within the month she was beginning to have things as she wanted, even promising her brother, General (newly Sir) Herbert Taylor, Sir Benjamin Bloomfield and others of the new King’s inner circle a ‘famous good dinner’ at her new home.
From now on the princesses and, indeed, their brothers would be welcome only as the King’s guests at Windsor. And although he was too preoccupied with putting together further damning evidence against his wife to feel any urge as yet to take possession of the Castle, Augusta and Sophia had a home, as well as a parent, to mourn.
With George Ill’s death came an outpouring of reverent prose in the public press and a flood of images for sale extolling his virtues in life – balm to his daughters’ eyes and ears when they had so minded his treatment the year before. The sentiments they expressed in the days after George Ill’s death – ‘clouded as his precious life has been for many years, it has pleased the Almighty to spare him many a pang which would have severely tried him’ – were to be repeated and printed in newspapers and sermons and broadsheets. This image of a pious, benevolent father of the people might have come as a surprise to earlier subjects of George III, whose caricaturists and pamphleteers had not been so kind. But now, with the prospect of George IV as monarch, there was no stopping the pious flow.
‘May you when your hour comes be as much loved, respected and regretted as he must be,’ Elizabeth intoned, writing to her brother, the new King, on 6 February after hearing the news. That seemed unlikely, however, although Mary had recently told her brother that she could ‘only lament you are not known all over the world as you are in your own house and at Brighton, for you are not done justice to by anybody’. For some, like his sister, George IV’s charm was undimmed from when he was a boy, and he enlivened and brightened every occasion at which he was present, for all his auburn wig and florid, womanish face, his great girth and gouty legs. But this was not the case with most. In particular, his estranged wife Caroline endorsed Leigh Hunt’s 1812 judgement that her husband was ‘a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties.’ When she heard that he had, almost as the first act of his reign, ordered that her name be omitted from the prayers for the royal family in church, the new Queen of England made plans immediately to return to England.
The oddities of the situation that the regency of ten years had created at Windsor were identified by Sophia when she wrote of her father’s death to the new King: ‘While I am mourning the loss of one who must and ever will live in my recollection, I am addressing one who has acted as such [that is, as fatherly protector and ruler] for some years.’
Princess Elizabeth had a hard time adjusting to the idea that her father was dead and that her brother was king in his stead. She even found it difficult to address her brother by his new title: ‘I am a strange mortal and cannot help being easy with what I love. Therefore he must forgive me if I am not proper enough.’ Then she heard in Homburg of the new King’s dreadful pleurisy. According to Princess Mary, when a second express arrived, announcing his recovery, Elizabeth ‘completely lost her head and for some time would not attend to reason’. So her English maid, Sarah Brawn, wrote home to the housekeeper at Kew, and she said she never saw her poor mistress ‘in such a state of nerves in her life’. Perhaps Elizabeth had not forgotten that dark day in Bath when they learnt of Princess Charlotte’s stillbirth – and then came that fateful second express, bearing the news of the young mother’s own death.
Elizabeth refused – ‘at great personal sacrifice to her own private feeling’ – her brother’s invitation to come over in the spring of 1820 for his Coronation, an invitation which her brothers Ernest in Berlin and Adolphus in Hanover had already accepted. Bluff, her husband, had only just become sovereign in his father’s place, she explained, and not only did they have to look after his widowed mother, but they had found everything ‘at 6’s and 7’s’, with terrible debts to pay. Elizabeth would not wish to appear, should she make the journey, ‘otherwise than as your sister ought to appear’, but she could not think of making the necessary outlay at this time of hardship in Homburg. ‘I make my excuse with running-over eyes,’ she concluded, ‘but my duty and affection for Bluff make me feel I am acting right.’
Royal, far away in Ludwigsburg, also refused her brother’s invitation to attend the Coronation he was planning in London. Gratified as she was, she wrote, the health to which she was a martyr, and her ‘grandchildren’ – Prince Paul’s daughters, whose care was her delight, as well as King Wilhelm’s children on whom she doted – were twin duties forbidding her to take her place in Westminster Abbey. She only regretted that the peeresses were to walk at the Coronation – ‘much as I shall ever rejoice at everything that can encourage trade’. She feared this would bring forward ‘fresh fuel for those who are resolved to begin many unpleasant discussions concerning an illustrious lady [Queen Caroline], who I understand will force herself on the public, and is determined to run any risk for the sake of mischief.’
But it seemed that, while Royal and Elizabeth would not see their brother crowned, his sister Sophia might be well enough to be present. Her move to London had given her a new lease of life, and she wrote to her brother, ‘I am very well satisfied with my abode …’ She added, ‘the hopes of being able to see so much more of you and to be near at hand’ to Carlton House had been a prime reason, an ‘essential inducement’, for fixing upon Cambridge House as a permanent home.
Emerging at last from long years immured in twilit sickrooms, Sophia wrote of ‘trying to look at all around one in a favourable light’. She was, she reckoned – and in this she mistook the matter sorely – ‘not very difficult to please’. And she said she wished only for a ‘quiet snug home’ – which was what she now had. With an energy that was new to her, she walked in the gardens of the empty Queen’s House, drove out to Hyde Park and Regent’s Park with her sister Mary, and had one or two ladie
s in for the evening. She sat in a red dress to the painter Thomas Lawrence. She even mimicked her mother talking to one of Amelia’s doctors: ‘Really, had I shut my eyes,’ Mary said of their dead mother, ‘I should have thought she was in the room.’ And finally one morning in April Sophia excelled herself. ‘Judge of my joy,’ wrote Mary, ‘when the door opened, and who should walk into the room but dear Sophy. The first visit she had made – and she actually came up to the top of the house, and really did not appear the worse for it, went all over it, and sat with me nearly an hour.’ Mary told their brother, ‘All nervous people must be a little humoured in regard to their health.’ She did not, therefore, like to let Sophia know how well she thought her. But, she concluded, ‘being her own mistress… has been of great use to her general health’. She showed insight into Sophia’s turbulent mind that dictated her varying poses from invalid to intrepid horse-woman when she concluded that it was ‘by doing it her own way’ that her sister would flourish.
And then reports came of an impediment to a peaceful Coronation. Queen Caroline, the wife whom the King refused adamantly to have crowned or to allow to be present at his own ceremony – was about to set out for England. Mary was quick in her outrage at the prospect of what she called ‘the Illustrious Traveller’ coming to England. She had heard that, before the Liturgy was changed, someone had said it ought to read ‘Praise our gracious Queen Caroline.’ ‘Good Lord defend us …’ she exclaimed.
The rest of the year was dedicated to ‘the Queen’s affair’. It had been a rare year since 1795, when George and Caroline’s misconceived marriage took place, that the Treasury and ministers – not to mention the royal family – were not dealing with fresh and unreasonable demands from one or the other. Not for nothing did one of the myriad cartoons published in this momentous year feature Queen Caroline as a kettle calling George IV – a coalscuttle – black. It had been a relationship which had caused untold damage to their daughter Charlotte before her marriage. But in this year of 1820 the couple’s private and public disagreements lit the fuse of seething political discontent in the country. Now the rancorous arguments of King and Queen fed the nation, as the Radicals took up the Queen’s cause. All the Parliamentary time that might have been devoted to debating reform of rotten boroughs was given to searching out the details of this rotten marriage. In the process, ‘Silly Billy’, as the Duke of Gloucester was aptly named, did untold damage to his own marriage when he rose in Parliament to support his cousin Caroline and denounce his brother-in-law the King.
Before the breach the Duchess of Gloucester had heard with pleasure Lord Hutchinson, one of the many who had been drawn into the ‘Queen’s affair’, speak ‘affectionately’ of the King ‘to please my feelings’. ‘Both your ears ought to have burnt,’ she told him. But Hutchinson failed in his brief – to offer Caroline in France the enormous sum of £50,000 a year to stay away and renounce the tide of queen. An ambitious alderman, Matthew Wood, got to Caroline first, and persuaded her to continue her journey to England.
A former lord mayor, Wood, with other City Radicals – merchants and bankers among them, who wished to end the monopoly of aristocratic political power – took up Caroline’s cause with gusto from February when the Republican newspaper proclaimed her virtues as an ‘injured princess’. Princess Augusta, horrified with all her family by Caroline’s dependence on a ‘Cit’, heard later that Wood had laid a massive bet that the Queen would come to England. And he had made his trip to France, she declared, simply to ensure that she did cross the Channel so that he could obtain his winnings.
Mary told the King on 12 June, ‘I am not surprised at the arrival as I never doubted she would come.’ And in a gesture of support for their brother – who stayed at Windsor – Augusta came up from Frogmore and Mary from Bagshot, to be present in London on 19 August. On this day, the Bill of Pains and Penalties, a punitive measure to deprive Caroline of her rights as queen and to condemn her for adultery with her Italian ‘low man’, began its second reading in the House of Lords. Notwithstanding the Duchess of York’s grave illness – she died later that day – her husband, the Duke of York, was there in the House, with his brothers Clarence and Sussex, to support the honour of their brother.
A small dumpy figure in a black wig and with heavily arched eyebrows and rouged cheeks, Caroline was unrecognizable even in private life to those who had known her earlier in England. But none of the princesses met their strange sister-in-law during her residence now in London. In a letter later in the year to her brother Ernest, Augusta made her views clear, writing of ‘the wicked who have made this horrid woman their tool. Bad as she is I am sure’ – and here she differed from Mary – ‘she never would have come to England’, Augusta believed, ‘if it had not been for Wood’.
The evidence brought against the Queen in the House of Lords and given by a couple of naval captains and by nearly ninety Italian witnesses – boatmen, ostlers, grooms and maidservants of varying degrees of respectability – failed, overall, in its effect. And when Henry Brougham, Caroline’s lawyer, browbeat the Lords in November into abandoning the bill – he prophesied revolution should they continue with it – George IV’s ‘language and manner were those of a Bedlamite’, Charles Arbuthnot recorded. Fulminating against those who had brought the catastrophe about, the King blamed particularly his cousin Gloucester for supporting a woman whom he knew to be a virtual criminal.
Mary suffered greatly from the double strain of her husband’s support for Caroline – a woman she had long detested – and her brother’s anger against her husband. It was impossible for her to see the King or even correspond normally with him, as it would be rank disloyalty to her husband. But how she longed to! The Queen’s affair drove a wedge not so much between King and Duke as between Duke and Duchess. For Mary concluded that the Duke’s support for Caroline was born of his jealousy of the King, though it was probably just muddle-headed chivalry. When the trial was over, the Duke took up his gun and resumed his annual slaughter of game, but the damage was done between him and Mary. The King moreover did not forgive him or show him one mark of favour till 1827, when he made him governor of Portsmouth.
The other princesses raised the King’s spirits with reports that the Queen’s popularity was waning in the New Year. ‘Loyal addresses are coming in every day,’ Augusta wrote to Ernest, now a supporter of the King, in Hanover. Their brother Frederick, staunch Tory and also loyal to the King, had been given the Freedom of the City of Norwich and had been very well received there, though it was ‘all but a Radical town’. She concluded, ‘Things getting better by degrees are more sure to hold.’ In Ludwigsburg, where Elizabeth was at last visiting her sister Royal – they met after more than twenty years – welcome news arrived that a thanks-giving service for Queen Caroline in St Paul’s, following the abandonment of the bill, had been a paltry affair and ill attended. The Queen’s conduct had disgusted everyone, Elizabeth wrote to Bluff in Homburg, and her pious hope was that, at the end, even the most blind would have their eyes opened.
At home in England, the King felt popular enough to warrant holding a drawing room at the Queen’s House, with a ball to follow in the evening at Carlton House. Augusta, her brother’s hostess, informed Ernest in Hanover that the attendance had been splendid. ‘Every person of proper feelings made it a point to come up to London on purpose to be present at it.’ By midnight the Princess was ‘pretty well fagged’, having already received Society for four and a half hours before dinner at six. Having optimistically ordered her carriage for three in the morning, she was delighted to accept the offer of her brother’s a good hour and a half earlier. The drawing room and ball had been especially splendid, in the King’s view, as his wife had failed to appear at either. Caroline was not yet a spent force, but her power had waned dramatically with the grab at £50,000 a year she had made when it was offered her for a second time (after her earlier refusal) as an inducement to leave the country. This behaviour contradicted all that she had supposedly stoo
d for, and made her supporters look fools. The game was not yet over, however.
At the Coronation of George IV on 12 July – or rather, hours before – Caroline of Brunswick, Queen Consort of England, made her last attempt to breach her husband’s defences and demanded entrance at first one door and then another of Westminster Abbey. Denied at each of them, to a chorus of cheers that turned to jeers from the crowd waiting for the ceremony, she at last turned away – with a cry as if mortally afraid. Hours later, the King – effulgent in gold brocade and velvet bloomers, feathers nodding from his cap – stepped along the royal blue carpet that led from Westminster Hall to the welcoming Abbey doors. When the crown was placed upon his head and the peers and peeresses rustled obeisance, his expression was one of deep satisfaction. It had been a long time coming.
When George had first dreamt of kingship – in 1788, when his father had seemed mortally ill – the Irish Parliament had offered him the unrestricted regency of Ireland. Now king of that country, he determined to pay his subjects there, who had been so generous in the past, a visit. As he departed, Queen Caroline, uncrowned and ill, lay at Brandenburg House, her home at Hammersmith. Before the King’s yacht had reached Holyhead, news came: she was dead, of an obstruction on the liver. The King had been on board shockingly drunk, or, as the Tory scribe John Croker put it, ‘gayer than it might be proper to tell’. But after he heard of the Queen’s death the royal widower did not appear on deck and Croker heard that he was, if not ‘afflicted’, at least ‘affected at the first accounts of this event’.
Caroline’s hour was not yet over. Honouring her wish to be buried at Brunswick, her executors negotiated with the government for her coffin to be carried to Harwich to be embarked for Stade. But tempers ran high, and, when the authorities tried to turn the procession aside from a route leading to the City, where the Queen’s support had been greatest, two protesters were killed in the fray that developed in Hyde Park. Princess Mary condemned from Bagshot ‘all the disgraceful and disgusting scenes that have taken place within this last week, first at Brandenburg House and then as the Procession went on’. She regretted, particularly, the part of Caroline’s executors, her lawyers Stephen Lushington and Thomas Denman. ‘How thankful I feel’, she told her brother, ‘that you was not in town, for whatever blame may be attached to any of those who made the arrangements you … have had little or nothing to do with it.’ Citing ‘infamous, designing invidious people’ and those in Brandenburg House and Radicals besides who had ‘espoused her cause from the beginning’, Mary ended, ‘hand and head ought to join hand and heart to spurn them out of society’.