Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  All the princesses, as we have seen, took a close interest in their nieces and nephews, and much appreciated news of them – be they legitimate or their brother William’s Fitzclarence family. And their brothers were no less interested in the coming generation. On 29 March 1825 the Duke of Cumberland from Berlin gave his old tutor a laconic description of his six-year-old nephew, Prince George of Cambridge, and of the boy’s sister Augusta. ‘The little boy is two months older than George [of Cumberland, his own son] but mine is fatter, the little girl is delightful and much more lively than the boy’ Consumed with pride in his own son, Ernest continued, ‘George [of Cumberland] is very like the picture of [Benjamin] West’s where I am with my two younger brothers and the big black Newfoundland dog.’ He did not mention that his son’s eyesight was a source of anxiety.

  The Cambridges, meanwhile, visited England from Hanover in the summer of 1825 and stayed in the very house on Kew Green where William and Edward had grown up. It was renamed Cambridge Cottage, and, once all were settled in, the Duchess of Cambridge begged her sister-in-law Victoria of Kent to bring her daughter to play for the day. But the Duchess was short in her responses. It would appear that she preferred Victoria to play with comptroller Conroy’s children rather than with her cousins.

  In February 1826 Lady Harcourt, that remarkable correspondent to whom all the princesses had written their most intimate confidences, that friend who had known all their secrets, died. But the princesses kept up other long-standing, if less intimate, relationships. When Princess Sophia invited Mme d’Arblay to spend one Good Friday evening with her, the reply was effusive:

  Madam, Oh yes! Sweet princess, yes! Good Friday evening I shall feel – 1 dare not say more good, but more devout I will venture to assert, for spending it with so unchanged, unchangeable and kindly invariable, though so august a personage as the dear and fair Princess, who, from her childhood upwards, has so graciously deigned to receive and to encourage the warm attachment of her Royal Highness’s most obliged, most faithful, most grateful and most respectfully devoted F d’Arblay.

  The cold winds of the spring in 1826 were succeeded by a ferocious summer heat. The Duchess of Gloucester longed to sit beneath the shade of her trees at Bagshot, but she was staying in London to see her brother Frederick, who was seriously ill with dropsy. The Duke, aged sixty-two, suffered from this dropsical tendency which some of Queen Charlotte’s children had inherited from her. In addition, he – like the King his brother – had the tendency to gout which George III had suffered, and made no pretence at diminishing his consumption of food or drink, or at increasing the exercise he took to counter his ill health.

  This time he had been lucky, and Mary set off for Bagshot on 23 July where she found that a planned ‘party on the water’ which the King had devised for Virginia Water had to be postponed because of the weather, now turned from heat to torrential rain. ‘From the vast quantity of wet that has fallen,’ the King wrote that same day from Royal Lodge, his house in the Great Park at Windsor, ‘the tents will be so wet, and what is sure, will continue damp in consequence for some days to come, that it would be downright madness to think of dining there tomorrow. This, my dearest Mary, is abominably provoking, but I hope by the end of the week we shall be able to make our party on the water good.’

  Augusta still liked new experiences, if they were pleasant, and was gratified to have been present – with the rest of the royal family – to observe Lord Liverpool, that good conservative, lay the first stone of a new bridge in Kingston-on-Thames. ‘It was a very pretty town, quite a new one to me,’ Augusta observed, and she was delighted with her invitation from the Corporation and with the ‘deservedly handsome reception’ they gave the Prime Minister. On another occasion she was to stand patron to an ‘Extraordinary Exhibition’ of ‘industrious fleas’ in Regent Street in London, but whether curiosity drew her to see her protégés perform is not known.

  She visited Petworth, Lord Egremont’s seat in Sussex, motivated by a reasonable curiosity to see her host’s famous ‘fine statues’ and even the grounds modelled by Capability Brown. The Boulle tables, she noted, ‘would be much the better for Bramble’s polishing’. But there was something of a family connection to explore as well. Her brother William’s eldest son by Mrs Jordan, Captain George Fitzclarence, had married Lord Egremont’s ‘natural’ daughter Mary Wyndham in 1819. With his wife and his father-in-law, George now received his aunt Augusta at Petworth. ‘I wished Lord Egremont to feel that I loved William’s son’s wife, which I really do,’ wrote Augusta to her friends the Arrans, and she kissed Mrs Fitzclarence. ‘I hope you think I was right.’

  King George IV was not stopping at making the Queen’s House into a palace or embellishing a lodge in Windsor Great Park as sumptuous Royal Lodge. At Windsor he had decided to ‘Gothicize’ the whole Castle with the aid of architect Jeffry Wyatt. Wyatt, enraptured with the grandeur of the scheme, asked permission to change his name to Wyatville. ‘Veal or mutton. Call yourself what you like,’ came the King’s grumpy answer. A visit to the altered Castle, which was now emerging from under Wyatville’s scaffolding, put the King’s sister Augusta in an equally grumpy mood. ‘The main garden and Bastion terrace is frightful to the greatest degree. Wyatville’, she said with scorn on 13 September 1826, ‘says it’s Classical. I never saw such an unmilitary appearance in my life.’

  To soothe such upsets, Augusta and her lady, Lady Mary Taylor, played on the piano and harp for two hours together most evenings at Frogmore – ‘and I have got some new songs which I hope you will command here or at St James’s Palace in the spring’, she told the Arrans later that month. She had had a harp made for Lady Mary by Egan in Dublin. It was ‘in the highest order’ and ‘a great addition to the piano. We play little trifles of our own arranging which, as we play so much together, go very well indeed.’

  Augusta’s skill in arranging ‘medleys’ for her instruments of choice – including the Irish songs of Tom Moore, to that poet’s pleasure – had been noted by Fanny Burney not long before. The Princess had begun this hobby of setting words to well-known tunes with the collaboration of Lady Harcourt at the outset of the French wars, when it was the fashion to stir up patriotic feeling by distributing song sheets with suitable sentiments around the theatres. And Tom Moore himself, whom Augusta greatly admired, had recently listened to her perform the ‘new airs’ that she had composed for two of his songs – ‘The Wreath You Wove’ and ‘The Legacy.’ Moore in return sang to her his rebel song, ‘Oh, Where’s the Slave!’ and wrote, ‘it was no small triumph to be chorused in it by the favourite sister of his Majesty George IV.

  Augusta also played for Tom Moore a march that she said she had composed for her brother Frederick’s regiment. But the news about Frederick was bad again in September. His limbs were badly swollen. And Sophy wrote a melancholy account from London. Frederick, who thought it was a secret he was dropsical, talked of going to Brighton for a week, but his nerves were irritable – he liked a change ‘even of rooms’. With the New Year it became clear that, racked by spasms and no longer able to swallow food, he had not long to live. Sophia was there when Frederick died on 5 January 1827 at the Duke of Rutland’s house in London. She wrote afterwards to her brother the King: ‘I am still a piece of marble, and can catch myself for ever inclined to call out, “So is it all true?” when the worst I know but too well.’

  Frederick had been, according to Adolphus, ‘the chief object’ of Sophia’s life, and her grief was ‘poignant’. She wrote proudly to Lady John Thynne on 18 January, ‘I occupied his last thoughts. Alas! All his property, you know too well what must become of it.’ (It was to be auctioned to pay his creditors.) But the Duke had written, ‘If there is anything over I name my beloved sister Sophia as residuary legatee.’ She continued, ‘Of course there is nothing to inherit, but the naming me in such a manner has made me feel I am Heir of his affection which is the most precious gift I could receive.’ Sophia could be quite nonsensical, but she busie
d herself distributing mementoes of their brother to the rest of the family. Mary, who helped her, received a print of the Duke. To the King Sophia sent the last opera glass that Frederick had used, for, in showing it to her, she told him, he had said the King much approved it ‘as suiting his eye’.

  Sophia tried to be optimistic and chose some new cloth for habits with a view to recommencing her riding. But a series of spasms weakened her, and it was not till April that she felt able to drive out with Augusta, as the latter told Ernest on the 20th of that month, to ‘one of the fine gardens on the King’s Road to see the spring plants in their greatest beauty, that is to say, in the greenhouses.’

  The death of Frederick, the father’s favourite who had ever been devoted to his brother’s service, went deep also with George IV. Harking back to former days, he commissioned Augusta to beg a visit from their sister Royal at Ludwigsburg.

  The Queen Dowager was thrown into an almighty palaver about this enterprise. She consulted her ‘son’ the King about the journey – and her physician about bringing forward, or omitting, her usual summer trip to Teinach to take the waters. It was ‘not a water drinking place one can go to in general in the spring’, she explained, ‘as the snow remains there often till June’. She wondered if there was a ‘metzo terminé’ (mezzo termine, or middle course) she could take, but she was so flattered by ‘our dear brother’s wishing to see me once more in this world’ that she resolved to make the journey. Requesting the use of Mary’s apartment at Frogmore, the Queen Dowager worried to her sister Augusta on 25 March 1827 that she would be able to do so little. ‘I am troublesome from not being able either to go in a shut carriage or walk. My breath being now so short that I must be carried downstairs as well as upstairs.’ Royal, cataloguing these frailties, finished, ‘Though the shell is altered, the heart ever remains most affectionate.’ And she was ‘quite wild’ with the idea of Augusta meeting her at Greenwich Stairs, as she had once driven herself to Bessig in Germany, ’to wait for your arrival and first catch the sight of your horses driving over the little bridge’. To her brother the King she wrote the same day, ‘I am only afraid that you will be rather hurt … at my appearance as I am very old of my age and infirm, owing to the gout in my hands and feet and a constant shortness of breath.’ She implored him, ‘Look on me as an old woman …’ She was sixty years old.

  When the Royal Sovereign, the King of England’s yacht, sailed up the Thames in early June to land the Queen Dowager at Greenwich Stairs, Augusta was duly waiting for her. Together the two sisters entered the City of London, a much larger place than when the elder had left it thirty years before. But it was at Windsor that Royal most marvelled at the changes. The Queen’s Lodge had been pulled down, and following her brother’s Gothic ‘improvements’, the Round Tower had gained a foot for each of the years she had been away. She went all over the Castle ‘without any fatigue – being carried about in her armchair and by her own servants’, Augusta told Ernest, and was ‘pleased and astonished’ with what she saw.

  In early July the Dowager Queen sat out in the Priory Woods at Frogmore and told Augusta she was ‘quite delighted to find that the outline of the walks had not been materially altered’. ‘Indeed, Mr Price laid them with so much discretion and taste’, the younger sister fought back gently, as she told their brother Ernest, ‘that they could scarcely be improved, but… taking down some trees and opening places in the shrubbery has given an appearance of depth to the garden which is hardly credible.’

  The Duchess of Gloucester made a third late in July at Frogmore, so ‘the house is literally what the common people call “chock full”’, Augusta wrote cheerfully to the Arrans on 25 July. ‘Our sitting room every morning after breakfast is the Colonnade, which is lovely. Mary and I have each our table opposite each other and a good large couch in the middle of which we sit, making a second and third table of each end of it, for all our superfluous articles of baskets, dictionaries, trays for the wafers and wax, etc.’ Every morning at midday the Dowager Queen, who breakfasted in her room, summoned her younger sisters, and they then arranged the rest of the day. ‘Royal’, Augusta told Ernest on 26 July, ‘has enchanted the Eton boys by begging a week’s holidays for them … She delights everybody by her learning and she knows as much and as correctly about all the families in England as if she had never been out of it.’

  Royal was happiest when with the King her brother, whom she had feared to disappoint with her appearance. Lady Louisa Stuart wrote kindly, after seeing her old friend, that she was ‘rather shapeless than fat, not having worn stays of any kind these twenty years. And her dress is nothing extraordinary, what anybody’s would be who went with their own few grey hairs instead of wearing a wig.’ But then the King who greeted his sister the Queen Dowager now resembled more a pantomime dame – with rouged cheeks and a slipping wig – than anything else. The Dowager Queen was entranced anyway – and in ecstasy to see her brother Edward’s child Victoria at last, who had been invited with her mama to stay with the King at Windsor and meet her great-aunt from Germany.

  Till now, Royal had had to content herself with sending presents – an amethyst cross and earrings on one occasion – and accompanying notes to Princess Victoria. The eight-year-old Princess was not at all shy. In fact, she was ‘quite at home with the King and Queen, very merry and jumping about and never was so happy in her life’. With an eye to the future, Mary wrote that if her brother saw their niece Victoria long enough for her to be at her ease with him, ‘he must be enchanted with her’.

  Royal complained to her sisters of ill health, but when the King begged her to ‘send him word at any moments when she felt herself equal to joining an early dinner party by the lake in the Great Park’, she recovered miraculously. ‘The very thoughts of it gave her new life,’ wrote Augusta. Under an August moon, Royal and Augusta joined their brother at the lakeside dinner party that he hosted at Virginia Water. And after dinner, ‘six strong pullers’ rowed the ladies over to an island where they took coffee with the gentlemen of the party in a Chinese pavilion, papered inside ‘with the grey ground and bamboo panels, the same as at the Pavilion at Brighton’. Augusta ended her account, ‘we took a delightful row on the lake till after nine o’clock by moonlight’.

  Royal’s time in England drew slowly to a close. She and Augusta went up to the Castle to inspect the ‘magnificent’ designs for wallpapers – and even floor papers – that Mr Robson, the King’s paperhanger, had produced. ‘He is a very clever man,’ wrote Augusta to Ernest at the end of September 1827. ‘He has produced a floor paper with gold, and by a process with oil the floor loses its roughness and looks like a velvet ground.’ Her brother the King spoke of inhabiting the Castle after Easter, she added, but she doubted it would be ready. ‘The gilding of the library has left such a very strong smell of oil paint, that it needs fire and air and sun to get it out of the rooms, before it can be pleasant to sleep in them.’

  Royal did not forget her family at home in Württemberg, and told Lady Louisa Stuart, showing her some ornaments she had bought from the jewellers Rundell and Bridge, that they were for her ‘granddaughter’ Pauline. But the Queen Dowager was ‘very low’ when she had to leave England. Her brother the King escaped the last farewells, telling Augusta to make his excuses and say ‘he had a little gout’. Augusta, on whom the burden of Royal’s slow and cumbersome tour of scenes past and present had rested, wrote crisply, ‘I rather think it was nonsense not to see her again.’

  Shortly before Royal departed, Sophia wrote to her niece Victoria excusing her lack of letters. ‘Since my sisters have been in town, my mornings have been so occupied and so many interruptions occurring.’ After her sister had left, Sophia conceded to a friend, ‘She certainly tried all she could to show how rejoiced she was to see us again, and naturally kindness begets a return.’ But if Sophia and Royal had not warmed to each other, the Queen Dowager returned to the Continent, glad to have rekindled with others relationships of which she had cherished the m
emory all these years.

  Augusta was ordered to Brighton for a ‘cure’ in the winter months following her sister’s departure, but before she went, William and Adelaide, now in a new-built house at St James’s, Clarence House, came to dine with her at Stable House. ‘We had some of my favourite Irish melodies,’Augusta told her friends the Arrans, ‘simple ballads which we like better than anything else, and then I played to amuse William every Paddy tune I could think of – O’Carrol – O’Rafferty – O’Casey, all his delights.’

  That December it grew dark in St James’s Palace by half-past three. ‘Dear William has just been with me,’ Augusta wrote again, ‘and pulled down my blinds and had the candles lighted, for he said it was too melancholy.’ At Brighton she lived comfortably in the White House, a house belonging to the King on the Steyne, and, having promised Sir Henry Halford that she would walk, she attempted a quarter of a mile along the sea front with a stick. Days later, she proclaimed triumphantly, ‘I am grown bold, and stomp away with my stick in a most happy independent manner.’ When indoors, she again abided by Sir Henry’s instructions, the physician having charged her ‘on no account to sit in hot rooms.’ Accordingly, she sat in the evening in the light of very few candles.

  Augusta remained nearly three months in the Brighton house, determined to persevere and walk sturdily once more. The spectre of Royal, who had effectively lost the use of her lower limbs, may have frightened her into this determined action. Occasionally, melancholy thoughts occurred to the Princess. She regretted Frederick’s death – she had visited him here at Brighton shortly before it – and the loss of another link in the family chain. But she bound up her knee, and in January 1828 she announced she could walk on flat ground as firmly and as fast as ever. ‘When in the streets or on the chain pier’, she added, however, ‘I take my stick for safety’