by Flora Fraser
Before his death George IV had discreetly arranged that his sister Elizabeth should no longer make repayment of Homburg state debts to Mayer Amschel Rothschild, the banker in Frankfurt, without her English trustees’ approval. Early on in her marriage she had impulsively sent her jewels to the banker without her husband’s knowledge, naively wishing to secure a sum to ease Fritz’s worries about the debt he had inherited with his principality when his father died. Rothschild then informed an aghast Fritz that he could not produce the sum Elizabeth had requested for over three months, but that ‘he would buy the jewels for his wife, who would like to have them’. As Elizabeth remarked to her brother the King in England, ‘if you had seen Fritz’s face of horror. …’ Fritz said he would sell his woods rather than do as the banker suggested.
As a widow, Elizabeth continued to pay £6,000 of her ‘appanage’ from England to settle other state debts in Homburg. And with the £5,000 she kept for herself, she carried on supporting the variety of projects she had already begun while Bluff was alive. She built a new coach house and stables at the castle, and she planted an English garden, and erected buildings and follies in the Little Wood immediately below the castle. Just as Elizabeth had arranged her collection of china in her cottage at Windsor, now she installed her ‘china closet’ in a house she had built for it in the Little Wood, and ‘peu à peu’ she hoped to make the house pretty, which was now ready to receive furniture. In the Great Forest that lay beyond, she worked with a pliant Louis on a great Gothic house roofed with copper to serve as a location for woodland picnics.
In the town, she supported, among other charities, a sewing and knitting school for poor children, and arranged for the distribution of layettes for expectant mothers in need. The quality of life for inhabitants of castle and town had improved dramatically, thanks to the energy of this busy Princess. Things had, in fact, been transformed since Bluff had written home urgently from St James’s in 1818, bidding his steward to cleanse the Augean stables of the castle, and paint afresh the hallmark white tower. She was optimistic that she and her brother-in-law Louis could continue the work she had laboured at with Fritz, simultaneously to enhance the country and clear it of debt.
Elizabeth still occupied the married quarters in the castle at Bad Homburg which she and Fritz had restored with the Hesse Darmstadt architect Georg Moller, and which had become known as the ‘English wing’. When the writer Fanny Trollope visited Homburg, Elizabeth walked her, as she recorded, through ‘a suite of rooms … from the windows of which a beautiful view was enjoyed. The library contained a large and excellent collection of books. The Princess said, “I brought these volumes with me from England”, adding, with a smile, “I am very proud of my library.” Speaking of the beauty of the scenery, she said, “I can never forget Windsor and Richmond, but Germany is a glorious country.”’ Mrs Trollope stopped before a portrait of George III. ‘You know that portrait,’ said the Princess. ‘It is my father. It is quite perfect.’
But life as a dowager was not quite as agreeable as the Landgravine had hoped it would be. Optimism, Elizabeth’s chief characteristic, waxed and waned now. The children of her brother- and sister-in-law Gustav and Louise, thirteen-year-old Caroline, nine-year-old Elizabeth and their two-year-old brother Friedrich, had the scarlet fever in December. And although the children recovered, the whole family was in quarantine over Christmas. Young Elizabeth sent word to Aunt Elizabeth to say that her dolls all had the scarlet fever and she had put their clothes in the fire. ‘The poor dear children are peeling and they have forbid Gustav and Louise to come near me,’ wrote Elizabeth, ‘for the infection is much stronger at that time.’ So the Christmas tables heaped with presents that she had bought in Frankfurt for the children were not wanted this year.
Elizabeth’s letters were always full of coded allusions to the shortcomings and oddities of her in-laws at Homburg. Gustav and Louise’s habit of keeping themselves to themselves meant she saw little of their children, which upset her. But she tried to avoid ‘clashing with those whom I love … How strange it is! But one must smile often upon what would at times make me cry, for I always wish to be kind.’ She wrote again, ‘I never ask questions or meddle with anybody else’s concerns. If they tell me, I hear, if not, I do not take it ill. It is the only way to go on when one has such various people in one house …’
The numerous charities Elizabeth had established or to which she contributed at Homburg occupied much of her time. ‘I am wanted for rich and poor, halt, maimed, etc., and it is one’s duty to do what one can, and I don’t like to appear to run away, as if I would not assist,’ she told a new English acquaintance, Miss Louisa Swinburne, who had settled with her family at nearby Wiesbaden. Nevertheless, she left her cares at Homburg behind her in the first half of 1833 on a visit to her brother Adolphus in Hanover, where she lived in a whirl at his vice-regal Court. Appointed godmother to her brother’s latest child, Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, she was amused at the christening by the enormous weight of the infant’s dress and the cushions which formed part of the ensemble she had to lift to the font. Elizabeth’s sister Mary in England, another godmother, wrote to her elder Cambridge niece, eight-year-old Augusta, as the ceremony approached: ‘You have no idea how a kind and good elder sister assists a younger one.’ Augusta could save Mary Adelaide from getting into many scrapes, Mary suggested, and help her in her education. ‘I speak from experience,’ the Duchess of Gloucester wrote, ‘as I once had three elder sisters, and your Aunt Eliza who was always most particularly good natured to me when a child, always came forward to give me good advice.’
Elizabeth obliged her brother by holding a drawing room in Hanover, and an assembly afterwards. But as a widow, she explained, she never took off her black, except for a birthday. ‘Then I wear white as my grand dress, and grey for the smaller days when colours are expected.’ Abhorring idleness, she hosted a party of thirty to hear a Swede, whom her sister-in-law the Duchess of Cambridge supported, lecture on French literature. Back at Homburg she no longer sighed for London. ‘All that is going on so affects my feelings that I might unintentionally sport sentiments which would be very highly improper,’ she wrote, referring to the meetings of the first reformed Parliament. ‘I am no politician, I hate the whole trade.’ She preferred, she declared, to ‘watch my poor, my gardens, my cows’.
With widowhood and with the passing of years, Elizabeth made friends with the Cumberlands – her brother Ernest and his wife Frederica – who now lived in a house newly christened Royal Lodge across the way from Cambridge Cottage on Kew Green, but who still made visits to the Continent. Even so, she kept her distance, and when the Cumberlands paid her a visit in Homburg in the autumn of 1833, she hung back. ‘I wish to be friendly and kind, but not to push, so I don’t worry them of a morning which is better for all parties.’ No such injunction governed meetings with her nephew Prince George of Cumberland, who had been born nearly blind in one eye, and had recently lost all the sight of his good eye in a most unfortunate accident. Playing with a curtain cord at a window at Royal Lodge, he had swung it and the brass weight hit him square in the eye. The thirteen-year-old was at first thought able to see ‘much as usual’, as Prince George’s preceptor Dr Jelf told Dr Thomas Hughes, once tutor to the boy’s father. But this proved to be far from the case. ‘To see that lovely creature led about is not to be told – his good humour, his sweet way of expressing himself…’ grieved Elizabeth. And she feared that the operation planned to restore his sight would not answer. ‘The only thing is to make him forget himself,’ she declared, and consoled herself with the apparent pleasure the blind young Prince took in talking and laughing with her.
Shortly after her brother George IV’s death Sophia’s eyes too had begun to cause her trouble. She had worn spectacles for years – and had long lost the self-consciousness that years before had made her hesitate to wear them to the theatre. But now no spectacles seemed to help, and her sisters Mary and Augusta grew concerned. Nevertheless,
despite her anxiety, Sophia maintained her cheerful letters to her niece. ‘Today all looks very la la,’ she wrote to Victoria early in the New Year of 1832. ‘Damp and dull, and does not tempt me much to go out, but I shall try, for if once in this season one is shut up, there is no end to it.’ She was glad Victoria was coming home to Kensington. ‘All is gay when the house is full, and I hear the sound of carriages.’ When the Kents were in town, she still went, according to her niece’s diary, almost every evening after dinner to their apartments, and sometimes played the piano with the Duchess.
And then the blow fell. Resigned as Sophy was to an existence impaired by nerves and spasms, and lately by deafness, the misfortune that befell her now required reserves of iron. ‘The affliction with which the Almighty has thought fit to try me with … is the total loss of my right eye,’ she informed her brother Adolphus in January 1832. She woke up blind in that eye on a Monday morning, and sent for Mr Alexander, the eye surgeon, after she had continued some time in the same way. ‘Pray treat me like a rational being,’ she said firmly when he arrived, ‘and tell me the real truth, for I assure you I am prepared for the worst.’ Alexander duly informed her that it was a decided cataract come in abruptly, but he did not advise the operation of couching, or removing it, while her left eye still functioned,
Sophia was remarkably spirited in the face of this setback, and continued to ride and to play music as though nothing had happened. She even decided to learn German, recalling, for her niece Victoria’s benefit, that the measles had stopped her education in that language years before. She was playing the piano a great deal, and trying some new waltzes and quadrilles – but she had to admit that what she called her ‘poor blind eyes’ were a ‘sad drawback.’
Dolls, dogs, Mr Fozard’s riding school – where Princess Sophia, the Duchess of Kent, Victoria and her governess, Baroness Lehzen, were all keen pupils – and summer holidays continued the subjects of the easy correspondence with Victoria which Sophia kept up, as the Duchess of Kent led her daughter off to ever fresh resorts and watering places. From the Isle of Wight Victoria wrote in September 1833 of her dog: ‘Dash has distinguished himself several times by swimming.’ And she was pleased to hear her aunt had ridden some other horses at Mr Fozard’s. Avril was ‘a nice quiet creature’, she agreed. ‘Still, you must have been very tired of riding her always.’ And a further letter contained the information: ‘I don’t think you will know Dash when you see him, his ears are grown so long and curly’
Princess Elizabeth in Homburg was sad not to know her niece Victoria better, or to see more of Gustav and Louise’s children, but she sought out others. A young niece of Miss Swinburne, Elizabeth’s Wiesbaden friend, was invited to visit her aunt when she was staying with the Dowager Landgravine. ‘Someone knocked at the door,’ she recalled later, ‘which, being opened, the Landgravine, a very fat old lady dressed in black, appeared with her apron full of toys and presents for us.’ Later in the day the party drove ‘all through the grounds, crossing a good many little streams with rustic bridges’. They all met at a summerhouse on an island where the Princess gave them tea. ‘She poured her own tea into the saucer to drink it, and, as we children laughed at this, she laughed too and said she was like an old English washerwoman.’
Elizabeth had been all this time hatching a charitable scheme, to benefit the poor of Hanover, where she now spent her winters. A young lady of the town, Miss Minna Witte, had written some German sonnets to accompany Elizabeth’s 1806 series of prints, The Power and Progress of Genius. These plates had now been ‘improved’ by the Hanoverian artist Ramberg, and Princess Elizabeth herself had supplied prefatory remarks in English to each of them.
In June 1833 Elizabeth wrote in great anxiety about this production to Edward Harding, once her mother’s librarian at Frogmore, who was to produce the book. There was so much to do, and she asked him to settle with Ackermann the printseller in London how many he would take. Elizabeth had an immense list of people she must send copies to, diminishing the profits – ‘out of my two hundred I give fifty to the young woman who made the poetry … she [Minna Witte] has behaved with such modesty, that I cannot say too much of her.’
‘It has turned out very well,’ the Landgravine was able to tell Miss Swinburne at last in the spring of 1834. And her dedication to Adolphus in the finished book read, ‘It will give me the greatest pleasure if this work should turn out of use to a town I so much love, and where you and all have shown me such proofs of kindness, and, without compliment, your own manner of acting has served me as an example to throw in my widow’s mite into the general Poor Box.’ The publication was a success, and the school or crèche that Elizabeth envisaged was soon founded from the proceeds. Within months there were sixteen, then thirty-two pupils. It would not be renowned for its ‘learning’, she admitted, but would be ‘of much use, for the infant children of poor women who go out to work all day; it prevents their being killed.’ She referred to incidents of these unsupervised children playing in the streets and being run down by passing carriage-horses.
Mary became, quite unexpectedly, a widow in the winter of 1834. Her husband the Duke of Gloucester had been as usual keen for the shooting season to begin, and had set off the month before to meet ‘a large shooting party at Sir George Stanley’s in Buckinghamshire’, Augusta told Ernest, while the Duchess tended her autumn garden. But he was taken ill with a fever, returned home, and – fifteen days later – died on 30 November at the age of fifty-eight. The ‘family complaint’ was, as usual, blamed for this latest royal death, the politician John Wilson Croker claiming that ‘the immediate cause of death was the internal bursting of a scrofulous swelling in the head’. At the end, the Duke had been quiet and grave. On the morning he died, being told that Princess Victoria and her mother had asked after him, he said, as the Princess wrote in her diary on 2 December, ‘Tell them that I say, God bless them, and that I love them.’ According to her sister Elizabeth, the Duchess wrote that ‘So fine a death was rarely witnessed … she should feel the better for it as long as she lived.’
But it had been all so sudden, a strange end to a curious life and a difficult marriage. The Duchess of Gloucester’s maid Mrs Gold said much later, ‘Their marriage had not been a happy one, and she was not attached to the Duke, but she had been a most humble and obedient wife, though he plagued her much and could not bear her being of higher rank than him.’ Indeed, reported her sister Elizabeth, Mary spoke of her feelings being fully alive to ‘his [the Duke’s] poor broken hearted sister who, she is aware, has lost her all in him.’ The implication was that, while Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester was a broken reed, she herself was not.
Mary had her own ideas from the beginning about how to live as a widow – in London, and without the stricken Princess Sophia Matilda’s companionship. Shortly after the Duke’s body had been placed, where his father and mother already lay, in St George’s Chapel at Windsor, she moved into his late apartments on the ground floor of Gloucester House. This was, Aunt Sophia told Princess Victoria on Christmas Day 1834, ‘a good plan for herself and her friends as the high staircase is so steep [to her former top-storey apartments], but I sometimes think she may regret the gaiety of the scene from the windows above.’ The Duchess showed no signs of regretting the view she had been obliged to enjoy after her husband had banished her to the top of the house – on the ground that she kept the downstairs drawing room untidy. Now, within a month of his death, she took over his quarters.
Princess Victoria paid an afternoon visit to her aunt Mary a few weeks later, on 1 February 1835, and wrote in her journal, ‘She looks uncommonly well. She is in the deepest mourning and shows no hair at all from under her widow’s cap.’ And Sophia wrote to Victoria that summer from Bagshot, ‘She does everything like her neighbours, and except keeping to her earlier dinner hour, I see no difference in health… and strength.’ Anxiety about her recovery from the Duke’s death was no longer necessary, Sophia wrote drily. Comptroller Currey – newl
y Sir Edmund – and his wife Louise were besides on hand to comfort her.
But Elizabeth, who came to England again to cheer her widowed sister in January 1835, was gloomy. ‘We are like a pack of cards,’ she wrote, ‘and run so near together that we all are sensible we are going down hill.’ Princess Augusta had always enjoyed taking exercise, boasting once ten years before that she was ‘in fine walking order’ and managed three miles every day for a fortnight at Bushey – except on two days, when it rained hard. But then she was laid up for months with a stiff knee. Although she wrote to her brother Ernest robustly when she was some way to recovery, ‘I have walked several times about my two rooms with my crutch and the assistance of [her dresser] Wright’s arm,’ from now on Augusta’s exercise was limited to airings in a carriage, and, if she wanted to promenade about the Frogmore estate, she had to resort to a garden chair. The Duke of Sussex was now blind too – at least, until he got his cataracts couched, and he would not undergo the operation until after the annual meeting of the Royal Society, of which he was president. Ernest had had a throat operation in Hanover. And Sophia’s health did not bear thinking about; as she approached sixty, her eyesight was now failing at great speed, although she continued, undeterred, her correspondence with her niece Victoria.
Princess Victoria’s responses to Sophia from Ramsgate in the autumn of 1835 gave no hint of Sir John Conroy’s attempts there, while she was ill with a fever, to make her promise that he should be her private secretary when she ascended the throne. But the incident turned Victoria, now aged sixteen, not only against Conroy but against her mother and against her aunt Sophia, his supporters.