by Flora Fraser
Augusta had been spared the ‘disgraceful and disgusting scenes’ of her sister-in-law’s funeral procession, having set out at the end of July for Germany to visit both her sisters. The newly crowned George IV, too, felt the need to travel abroad, and, leaving the United Kingdom for the first time in his life, he spent a happy month in the restored Electorate, newly a kingdom, of Hanover, where he was feted whenever his gout allowed him to appear.
It was all that he could have wished, as there was no Caroline to disturb his Coronation, no Radicals to taunt him, not even the threat of Napoleon – dead this year on St Helena – to alarm him. He wept when presented with an address from the University of Göttingen where his younger brothers long before had harassed their tutors. Perhaps what meant most to the King, however, was his visit to the battlefield of Waterloo en route to Hanover. None other than the Duke of Wellington was his guide as he visited the different battle positions adopted on that fateful day. It poured with rain but George persevered – to inspect the spot where his friend Lord Anglesey’s leg lay buried. Given time, he was to declare that he had been present at Waterloo not just on this visit, but on the day of the battle itself, six years earlier in June 1815. And with the dawning of another era, when memories dimmed of what had occurred and what had not in a previous age, he came to believe his own story.
Book Five: Piano Piano 1822–1857
17 Royal – Queenly Dowager
Following the débâcle of the ‘Queen Caroline affair’ in 1820, there was a welcome diversion for the Dowager Queen of Württemberg in Ludwigsburg. Elizabeth at last came from Homburg to stay with her sister for several weeks over Christmas 1820 and New Year 1821, while Fritz – newly Landgrave Friedrich VI of Hesse-Homburg – attended the Austrian Emperor to Munich. The sisters had not seen each other since the elder left England in 1797, when Royal the bride had been aged thirty and Elizabeth twenty-seven. Now fifty years old, the new Landgravine was shocked by her sister’s size, which made her appear older than her age, and by her immobility. The Dowager Queen did not walk, but was carried in an armchair everywhere in the palace by attendants.
Once she had recovered from her surprise at her sister’s condition, Elizabeth wrote daily to her husband of the state and opulence by which she was surrounded. ‘Even you, dear angel, who is the grand mogul in your presents,’ Elizabeth told Bluff on Christmas Eve 1820, after partaking in her sister’s Christmas Eve rituals, ‘would have been enchanted to see the magnificence.’ The Dowager Queen had arranged ‘thirteen tables filled with all sorts of things, silverware, jewellery, clothes, toys, bonbons …’ Charlotte and Pauline, her stepson Prince Paul’s daughters, for whom the majority of the gifts were destined, were overcome.
The Dowager Queen had been delighted earlier this year when her good-for-nothing stepson in Paris had given her custody of these princesses, his daughters. She had been determined to make this, their first Christmas together, special. But Baroness Veronica de Stein, Elizabeth’s lady, was also ‘aux anges’ when she received from the Queen Dowager, among other treasures, an amethyst cross and a silk dress. Elizabeth herself was given her sister’s portrait and was pleased to see that Royal got a handsome porcelain vase – doubtless from the Ludwigsburg factory – from her ‘son’ the King.
The contrast between the sisters’ living standards could not have been more marked. On his father’s death in January that year, Fritz had found the small state or landgraviate of Hesse-Homburg still deeper in debt to the bankers of Frankfurt and further afield than he had suspected. And he and Elizabeth had only her English income with which to service the debts that his father had incurred over many years. Stoically the new Landgravine declared herself very glad to be going home, and in general very glad not to be a rich widowed queen with a doting family and a busy life. She was stifled by the heat of the apartments at Ludwigsburg, she said, and exhausted by the number of steps leading from one apartment to another.
While the Dowager Queen still had her sister Elizabeth at Ludwigsburg, good news came from England. Following several miscarriages, Adelaide, William, Duke of Clarence’s ugly but agreeable wife, had given birth to a daughter in early December. ‘She was born nearly without assistance,’ Elizabeth heard, and sent further details to her husband on 28 December 1820 of this interesting royal baby. The accoucheur had been in the country, and the wet-nurse had not yet been brought to bed, the baby being two months premature. ‘Good old Halford ran for Sir William Knighton. A lady en couche [in labour] gave up her accoucheur, and they found a wet-nurse in three hours.’ The reason for the early delivery, Elizabeth believed, was that six days before she gave birth, Adelaide ‘went to church with Eliza Fitzclarence when she was marrying [the Earl of Erroll], and after that she was never well.’
Princess Sophia, in England, paid a visit of three hours to St James’s Palace to see her new niece, and told her sisters in Germany that she had come away enchanted. ‘She will be a worthy Queen if she does not have a brother,’ wrote Elizabeth to her husband from Ludwigsburg. Born at seven months, the child, although small, thrived ‘beyond anything that was ever known’, and was given the name of Elizabeth, to the pleasure of her Homburg aunt. It was ‘a name very dear to the English and in these cruel times I think they have done very well to choose what will please,’ the Landgravine told her husband.
The princesses took malicious pleasure in the knowledge that the Clarences had produced an heir who would now knock eighteen-month-old Princess Victoria of Kent – who had been, from birth, heir presumptive – on to a lower rung in the succession to the throne. The princesses mistrusted their Coburg sister-in-law, the Duchess of Kent, and her brother Prince Leopold – still living on his £50,000 a year at Claremont. They wondered, however, that the Clarences, ‘as they both are so fond of the country’, did not spend more time at Bushey Park, the Duke’s house on the Thames, now made ‘very neat all fresh papered and yet furnished into thorough comfortable plain gentleman’s rooms’, as Augusta wrote to her brother Ernest on 8 May 1821. The couple’s apartments at St James’s were ‘so dreadfully small that none but such contented creatures as they are could endure it’. But Bushey was where William had earlier raised his Fitzclarence family with Mrs Jordan. Perhaps, even for an insensitive man like William, the ghost of his children’s mother whom he had cast off – and who had died two years before in France – was still strong.
Sophia, meanwhile, had moved from her brother Adolphus’s house in Mayfair into a new house in Connaught Place north of the Park, near Kensington Palace. And the Duchess of Kent and her household comptroller Sir John Conroy – the Duke’s former attaché – visited her there regularly. The house was ‘quite clean, he [the landlord] furnished it only three years ago’, Augusta recorded on 17 December 1820, and Sophia would have only two rooms to paper or paint, ‘on account of his having had some large pictures against the wall’. The situation was very good, she added. ‘It faces the south and looks over all the best part of Hyde Park and is particularly dry and clear of smoke.’ Augusta told her correspondent, their brother Ernest, a few months later in May 1821 that it was quite like being in the country, with all the advantages of London – the Park ‘making a constant gay scene, particularly a string of carriages daily which full still continues notwithstanding the heat and dust.’
There were no more mentions of spasms in connection with Sophia. She paid visits to Kensington Palace in her carriage where her bibliophile brother Sussex occupied rooms stacked with 50,000 volumes. She rode with the Duchess of Kent and Princess Feodora of Leiningen, the Duchess’s daughter by her earlier marriage, in Mr Fozard’s riding establishment behind the Queen’s House. The Duchess of Kent had papered and furnished her apartments, formerly Queen Caroline’s, at Kensington in rich, warm tones according to German taste. Princess Victoria’s cradle was preserved as an object of sentimental regard, her cot was in the room next to her mother’s, her father’s portrait was prominent.
Nothing could have been more intimate – nor,
some objected, more stifling. But Sophia was a regular visitor to Kensington, and at least part of the attraction there was the charismatic Sir John Conroy. The Duchess hung on the comptroller’s every word, and included Lady Conroy and their several children – one of them a girl named Victoire of her daughter’s age – in her affection. Sir John was assiduous, and Sophia soon matched her sister-in-law in her attachment to him and his family. Conroy’s son Edward later wrote, ‘We were one family.’
Sophia’s sisters had another reason to dislike the Duchess of Kent. She was linked too closely for their liking not only to the Conroys, but also to her brother Prince Leopold, who had become distinctly unpopular with the princesses following Charlotte’s death. A remark by Royal in Württemberg on 26 November 1824 shows the animus she felt towards him: ‘Will you believe it that Prince Leopold is gone to Paris without having sent me the prints of my two elder brothers which Augusta had given him to have forwarded to me?’ The Duchess of Kent often took her daughters down to Claremont to see Leopold, which hardly helped – and then made difficulties about the royal family visiting Victoria. But Sophia, the Duchess’s Kensington neighbour, was allowed into the charmed circle.
Augusta was more objective about their brother Edward’s child than was her sister Sophia. She wrote to their brother Ernest, who had settled with his family for reasons of economy in Berlin, on 8 May 1821, ‘Our little Victoria is a handful and a very engaging child. She is tall and speaks very plain and is a capital mimic … but her Mama is trying to break her of it … she is too young to understand it is wrong.’ But Augusta of all the princesses was the least involved with her nieces and nephew – except for the Fitzclarences, for whom she had a protective kindness. Her affections she reserved for her siblings, and they reciprocated.
When Augusta voyaged to the Continent to visit her sisters in July 1821 Elizabeth could not do enough for her at Homburg. She introduced her to her brother- and sister-in-law, Gustav and Louise, who had married the same year as she and Fritz, and who lived in the castle with a baby daughter. She drove her around the ‘dear little town’ of Homburg that surrounded the castle and that Elizabeth described in a letter to Mme d’Arblay as ‘not larger than a village’. And they drove around the fertile plain below Homburg, and beyond to what Elizabeth called ‘the finest mountains you can conceive, some covered with wood, others barren and chiefly rock, which makes the scenery picturesque.’ Despite the state’s debts, Elizabeth and Fritz were everywhere contemplating ‘improvements’.
At Ludwigsburg, however, to which Augusta proceeded after two harmonious weeks with the Landgravine at Homburg, she had a great shock. Affection for her sister led the Dowager Queen of Württemberg to drive to a frontier post to greet Augusta. But the younger sister found that the elder had changed dramatically. ‘She says’, Mary wrote to Mrs Adams on 6 October 1821, ‘she never should have known Royal again barring her eyes.’ In her white cap and apron and with her huge girth, her jaw line and neck a solid slab, Royal was enormous, to the point that she found it more comfortable to do without any corsetry. Moreover, she was swollen in every part of her limbs and even in her face from dropsy, and lopsided from where her left breast had grown unaccountably large one year.
Royal, on the other hand, Mary told Mrs Adams, thought Augusta ‘fatter and older, but she should have known her in any part of the world.’ The sisters’ days together were sour-sweet – Augusta still the determined British patriot, Royal after years of exposure to Continental warfare more fluid in her opinions. But they were united in lamenting the death of little Princess Elizabeth of Clarence at only four months. Until William and Adelaide produced another child, Princess Victoria of Kent would once more succeed her uncles George, York and Clarence on the throne. Should she and any issue fail, the throne would go to the Duke of Cumberland, a result many in England were loath to see occur.
Augusta returned to her apartments in the Queen’s House in London, and to Frogmore, via the kingdom of Hanover where Adolphus, vice-regent since 1813, and his Augusta and their son George were living in domestic contentment. After this journey to the Continent, Augusta had sated to some degree the desire to travel abroad that she had long felt, and first expressed when – nearly twenty years before – she had envied her brother Augustus his sightseeing in Italy.
But Augusta was not to be allowed to rest yet. Her brother the King had made up his mind to pull down Carlton House and make the Queen’s House – where Augusta had apartments – a showpiece for the monarchy. When it was proposed that it would be cheaper to build afresh, he said that youthful memories made the choice of his parents’ home sacred to him. And swiftly installing a throne room, larger state rooms and modern fittings, as well as rooms for all the functions for which George III and Queen Charlotte had looked to St James’s, this pious son rendered his parents’ old home unrecognizable, and rechristened it Buckingham Palace.
The King also toyed with the idea of demolishing St James’s Palace, but ended by leaving it. And here Augusta was shown by her brother’s clerk of works a very desirable small house, Stable House, as a substitute for her apartments in the Queen’s House. The King, in a very good mood, after a thunderous welcome in Edinburgh, promised that the house, an annexe to St James’s Palace, across the courtyard from William and Adelaide’s apaartments, could be made comfortable with a door leading from the garden into Green Park, so that his sister need not walk in the streets to visit her family. Augusta did not take the same pleasure in walking the streets that Mary and Sophia did.
But just when she was preparing to take the house, she was persuaded to set off again for Germany. The house at St James’s would not be ready for some months. The King warmly seconded the proposal made by their brother Adolphus, who was in England, that Augusta join him and his family at Hanover for the winter. Meanwhile, in the waltz of siblings that grew a little more ponderous every year, Adolphus and Mary were off to Brighton for a few days, from where Mary would then proceed to stay with the Clarences at Bushey.
When Augusta returned to England early the following year, her brother Adolphus sent her from Hanover a clock as a housewarming present for her new home in Stable House, and she placed it, she told him happily, in her drawing room. Whether it was a wrench to leave the Queen’s House, a home she had known for fifty years, she did not disclose. At times she and her sisters had been more miserable there with their mother than anywhere else. Her views on her brother’s proposed changes for Windsor Castle she also kept to herself, describing on 26 March 1824 a dinner there as ‘very cheerful and pleasant.’ She invited Lady Harcourt to a housewarming in her new abode in London on 29 March, begging her not to dress up, and thanking her for so ably managing a committee for the foundation of an orphanage, to which Augusta planned to donate a library of good works. And several times she invited Mme d’Arblay to join her and Mary, who was with her a great deal, being ill and ‘under the care of Sir Henry Halford and … other medical attendants’ for much of the year.
Royal, from Ludwigsburg, praised Augusta for inviting Mary to stay with her. She herself had been two months at Teinach with her own Court, bathing and attempting to cure pains in her hands that tortured her. At this Black Forest spa, set among velvety woods and precipitous ravines where she had first gone for a ‘cure’ after the stillbirth of her daughter nearly thirty years before, Royal was always happy. Now Miss Cornelia Knight, Charlotte’s former lady, who had been visiting Elizabeth, was staying with her in Ludwigsburg. ‘All my young people much amused,’ Royal noted with satisfaction on 26 November 1824 after a little ball she gave for a Württemberg nephew who had settled in the town to study for the military. The affair lasted from six to eleven-thirty – ‘s’entend, both ball and supper, which is just a good length of time without allowing any dawdling between the dances’, wrote the hostess.
The young consumed Royal’s attention as she prepared to enter her sixties. Prince George of Cambridge’s fifth birthday in Hanover – the age at which he came, accordin
g to German tradition, under the care of male governors – had occasioned a generous present from her of a topaz seal (to bear in due course his crest, orders and arms), and a silver fork, knife and spoon. Following German tradition again in making these presents, Royal promised to add pieces each year till he had two dozen of each, and then match that set with another two dozen. ‘I wish I could do more,’ she had concluded her letter to Adolphus on 24 March 1824. ‘I can only go on piano piano.’
Princess Sophia in England had an opportunity of enjoying daily the company of her brother Edward’s child, Victoria, when she left Connaught Place for apartments in Kensington Palace abutting those of the Duchess of Kent. Not only did she see Victoria by day, but she spent nearly every evening with the Duchess, with her daughter by her first marriage, Princess Feodora of Leiningen, and with the Conroys. When the Kent and Conroy group left town for a spell at the seaside, Victoria, aged five, wrote – with the aid either of her mother or of her newly appointed governess, Miss Louise (later Baroness) Lehzen – to her ‘dear Aunt’. Sophia wrote back, on 3 September 1824, ‘You will be sorry to hear that Aunt is quite deaf and cannot hear a word with her left ear. It is very distressing and very uncomfortable. I hope it will be well before I see you again, as you will find it a little troublesome to make me understand you.’