by Flora Fraser
The Landgravine, no longer lachrymose, wrote from Frankfurt to Augusta Hicks, Lady Charlotte Finch’s granddaughter, in the winter of 1838: ‘Princes, Princesses &c [have] been worrying me with questions I cannot answer – none more than the question who will the Queen of England marry. How in the world can I tell? Who most probably will be the last to know …’ Elizabeth protested, as ever, that she had no wish to ‘meddle’. But in fact, whether her aunt in Homburg knew it or not, in England Queen Victoria was weighing up the merits as a bridegroom of a certain Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, her first cousin.
The death of Landgrave Louis early in 1839 did much to undo Elizabeth’s fragile happiness and sour her mood. While she and he had together turned Homburg into a watering place of distinction, it was now for Philip and his Frau to inherit their work – and undo it, Elizabeth feared. She remarked that already the castle had begun to resemble more the unkempt building it had been on her arrival in Germany, rather than the smart home with modern comforts within medieval walls that she had made it.
Elizabeth had once before spoken of her sister Mary being much in the world. This June she thanked Sir Samuel Higgins, the Duchess’s steward, for letting her know that Mary had been ill and was recovered. But she added rancorously, Mary was ‘so taken up with the world and its amusements’ that she did not keep in touch anyway. The Dowager Landgravine shared with Sir Samuel, in lieu of her gadabout sister, some unusually hostile thoughts about her once beloved Homburg: ‘You would be half crazy was you to see any stables but mine, so dirty so hot – so unwholesome and the carriages never brushed or cleaned. I make a great fuss to keep mine in order, but the neatness of England you never will find here – privately, there is a natural love of dirt amongst the Germans that makes me wild.’ Her peevish remarks and disenchantment with German manners were born of her continuing dissatisfaction with the upstart Princess Philip’s jurisdiction in the castle on which she, Elizabeth, had lavished time and money for twenty years. With every day, she told Sir Samuel in June 1839, she regretted the death of ‘my excellent Louis’ more.
The arrival of Queen Victoria’s portrait in Homburg caused the Dowager Landgravine’s stock to rise a few points in the castle. ‘I sent it up to my sister[-in-law] Louise to look at,’ Elizabeth wrote to her niece in thanks on 26 June, ‘as she could not come down to me … I never trouble you with letters,’ she added, ‘feeling you must be rejoiced not to be plagued with them from places you know nothing about.’ In a letter she sent to Augusta on New Year’s Eve, Elizabeth was more outspoken. It ended, ‘now I am useless.’
Word came to England on 15 January 1840 that the Queen’s aunt, Princess Elizabeth, the Dowager Landgravine, had died on the 10th of that month ‘without any suffering’ at the age of sixty-nine, in what she had recently termed her ‘miserable pied-à-terre’ at Frankfurt. Only her lady, Stein, and Brawn, her maid, had been with her. True to character, the members of the Hesse-Homburg family whose very residences Elizabeth had embellished and part-financed for years came to visit, but, on reflecting that there was little they could do, went away again.
Drawn by black-plumed horses, an immense catafalque covered in black velvet and bearing on its top the coronet to which she was entitled as a princess of England carried Elizabeth’s coffin from Frankfurt through a countryside lined with mourners. To the castle of Bad Homburg to which she had come with such high expectations twenty-two years before, the procession ascended, and in the chapel there, Philip and Gustav were the chief mourners. The Anglican burial service was read at the deceased’s request, before her body was committed to the Hesse-Homburg family vault.
Landgravine Elizabeth had at the last left the capital of her estate, previously willed to Louis, back to England, with numerous keepsakes to her family there. The Duchess of Gloucester in England regretted that the Landgravine had not done more for Baroness de Stein, the German lady who had been with her for more than two decades, than leave her 500 florins and some coral jewellery, ‘instead of shawls.’ But she put no faith in Elizabeth’s in-laws to make amends. Landgrave Philip was in a ‘deplorable’ state, Mary told her brother Ernest, and Gustav and Louise, in her opinion, were ‘interested selfish dirty minded people and have shown very little feeling either.’ But to Elizabeth, her relations with her husband’s family had been a sacred duty, and her jewels she duly bequeathed to her ‘sister’ Louise – whatever her faults – in Homburg.
19 Augusta – A Princess for All Seasons
In England, princess Augusta was ‘a good deal affected’ by the news of the death in Germany of her younger sister Elizabeth in January 1840. Augusta wrote to a friend, Mrs Dering, that she had known that a pain in her side had been troubling Elizabeth all the previous year. Indeed, the Landgravine had written to Augusta that she was ‘like the late Earl of Huntingdon, whose knees were so bent outward that he appeared as if he was making a minuet curtsy.’ But no one, Augusta wrote sorrowfully, had thought it ‘a disease likely to terminate her precious life.’
Mary and Sophia could not feel as their elder sister did. From childhood and right up until Elizabeth’s marriage, Augusta and this third Princess had been intimate. Royal, although an indispensable part of the elder trio of princesses, had always set herself apart a little, with her lofty temperament and her position as eldest daughter of the King. Moreover, when not together in Homburg or in England, Augusta and Elizabeth had written to each other twice a week, ever since Elizabeth first married Bluff and left for Germany in 1818.
For all her grief, Augusta was her usual rational self and, when Queen Victoria spoke of attending the State Opening of Parliament in February 1840 despite the Landgravine’s death, approved her plan. ‘Of course you must go, my dear,’ she said, ‘it is right you should do so and your duty to do so.’ She added that, if Queen Victoria liked, she might say that she, Augusta, had told her she should go. Augusta was further benign in her dictum that the Queen might wear mourning for only two months, and then black gloves for six weeks. The Landgravine’s brothers and sisters would, however, wear full mourning for three months. The approaching wedding of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert would of course be an exception.
Mary, with her sister Augusta, had once been eager to see their niece Charlotte ‘settled’. Now they were eager to see Victoria in what they regarded as that happy state. ‘In her situation it is a great object that she should be married,’ Aunt Mary had written on 17 September 1839 to Queen Louise. Fortunately Queen Louise’s husband (and Charlotte’s former husband) Uncle Leopold had the business well in hand. And his choice had never strayed from his nephew and Victoria’s cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
Victoria had pleaded three years earlier, on meeting this paragon, that she and Albert were too young to marry. Not for Victoria’s eyes, but for those of her own brother Ernest, Augusta had written on 21 February 1839, regretting the influence of Prince Leopold. Victoria, she expostulated, was ‘totally inexperienced and without a friend’. The match that Leopold promoted – for his nephew and niece Albert and Victoria – was born of political ambition and, she prophesied, would never succeed. But when Uncle Leopold convinced Victoria otherwise in the late summer of 1839, and when Albert came over to England that October, Augusta welcomed the Coburg Prince. It was common knowledge, even before Albert and his brother arrived, that a match had been made. And Princess Mary had written in September that she was pleased that her niece had already had ‘the great advantage of having had an opportunity of seeing more of him than, in general, falls to the lot of Princesses, and still less of Queens.’
Queen Victoria summoned Albert to the Blue Closet at Windsor on 15 October and proposed to him. It was an infinitely ‘nervous thing’ to do, she told the Duchess of Gloucester. But, as the bride was Queen of England, the formal proposal had to come from her. Moreover, the Queen told Aunt Gloucester, Albert would never have presumed to take the liberty.
The Duchess of Gloucester apparently made a favourable impression on Albert, a
nd she was much consulted by Victoria – while Albert travelled to Coburg and Gotha in turn – in the approach to the royal wedding that was to take place in February 1840. No favours had been given at her parents’ wedding, she reliably informed her niece – eighty years after an event at which she had not been present. Lord Melbourne was inclined to think she was right, for the daughters of George III brought an august, if sometimes spurious, authority to their pronouncements.
Queen Victoria was not slow to invent her own rules of etiquette. Accepting an invitation for herself and Albert – who returned to England in January – and a retinue of six to dine at Aunt Gloucester’s days before their wedding, Queen Victoria declared that she was ‘happy to meet anybody you choose at your table’. But the Duchess had mentioned to Albert that she intended inviting all the royal family. ‘Allow me to say that, if that is to be the case,’ Victoria wrote, ‘I must beg that, if Albert does not lead me into dinner (which he always does here but which I conclude you would do as you did last year) he should take in the next person in rank immediately after me.’ Victoria added that she felt anxious upon this point, ‘and I feel certain that my uncles and aunts will make no difficulty. …’ If they did, she warned, it would be almost impossible for her to meet her uncles except in her house and at her Court.
That old warhorse Ernest, King of Hanover was immediately up in arms at the idea of being cut out by Albert from his place as senior male member of the royal family. ‘All letters speak of the marked incivility … as to the conduct of Her Majesty and her Court to the members of the old Royal Family,’ he wrote from Hanover. ‘Mark my prophecy of three years ago,’ he continued, the Coburgs would insult them.
The Duchess of Gloucester had her own troubles in the months following Albert’s arrival – and following her sister the Landgravine’s death in Homburg. She was unwell and unable to attend Victoria’s wedding on 10 February, and Princess Augusta alone of the daughters of George III was present. When Queen Victoria and Prince Albert visited Aunt Mary in April at Gloucester House, Sir Henry Halford received them at the top of the stairs and whisked them into another room to give them a report on her health. The Duchess was ‘very low and excessively nervous’, he said, ‘having all sorts of fancies preying upon her mind, like at the beginning of her illness at Brighton.’
As a result, Albert stayed in the carriage outside while Victoria went in to see her aunt. She ‘kept holding my hand and looking up into my face very sadly,’ wrote Victoria. ‘In her other hand she held a paper,’ which she began telling Victoria about. It was all about some conversation, wrote a puzzled Victoria, between George IV and his daughter, Princess Charlotte, ‘which she maintains she had been forced to write’. The Duchess of Gloucester was thinking back to those short December days in 1814 when she had extracted her niece Charlotte’s troubled confidences about her mother and Captain Hesse. Victoria, knowing nothing of Princess Mary’s qualms of conscience in that affair, lost interest when Halford, who knew better, reassured her that ‘it was all imagination.’
Princess Mary recovered, and was fit to receive her brother the Duke of Cambridge when he visited her as usual on her birthday later that month. But Augusta stated of her sister dispassionately this year, when she herself was not well, ‘She is unfortunately nervous about her health, in which she is totally unlike the rest of her family.’
Augusta was by now finally reconciled to the changes that the new reign had brought, and she was fond of Victoria in a straightforward way. When she had told her niece the previous year that her health prevented her from appearing at the Birthday Court, she said she would gladly come to the dressing room where the Queen retired after the drawing room – ‘that I may make you my loyal courtesy as your subject, and maybe you will let me kiss your dear face en passant.’ And she gave her niece words of encouragement, complimenting Victoria on going to Adelaide, the Queen Dowager, directly the widow returned from a voyage abroad. She was indignant when her niece was attacked in the newspapers, and wrote with delight from Frogmore on 15 July 1839 that John Bull, the journal, had reformed its ways: ‘My poor child [Queen Victoria] has been cruelly calumniated, but yesterday she was spoken of as she ought to be.’
As she grew older, Augusta, like her brother Ernest, found change more and more repugnant. ‘The railroads are doing incalculable mischief to the great roads,’ she wrote, ‘the innkeepers are in great distress and are obliged to sell their horses and part with their boys which is melancholy – so many turned out of employment.’ Instances she had in plenty, and she named a blacksmith in Egham, ‘so very expert a man that he was in constant employ; and by calculation he will now lose the shoeing of 160 horses, which will be the ruin of the poor man’. Furthermore the two ‘capital’ inns at Bagshot were to be given up.
‘It is all detestable, I think,’ Augusta had written to Ernest on 3 October 1838. Now confined to her chair, she had once been a fervent rider who knew those roads and those inns from her long courses with her father and his equerries. Turning away from what could never please her, she sent a ‘very pretty book called “Chit Chat” with agreeable stories’ and a magic album to little Mary Adelaide at Cambridge Cottage for her birthday. Augusta had found the bright and boisterous children of her brother Adolphus a great entertainment since the family had returned from Hanover in 1837 and, with Prince George of Cambridge, settled at Cambridge Cottage in Kew. Augusta especially liked seven-year-old Princess Mary Adelaide, whom she entranced with story-telling skills developed long ago as a child at Kew. (Princess Mary Adelaide called Augusta a ‘capital Aunt’ when she resumed a story that she had stopped when her niece was naughty.) The print at the top of her letter, Aunt Augusta mentioned, showed the Amphitheatre at Brighton decorated for Queen Victoria’s visit to the Pavilion there. ‘You may cut it off and paste it into a book,’ she directed her niece.
Augusta gave her older niece Queen Victoria for her birthday in this year of her marriage ‘a turquoise heart with a bit of my old grey locks,’ and a blessing incorporating some words of advice for her future:
My hand shakes so I can hardly write – but as long as I can hold it, it will trace the truth from my heart of my affection for you, my beloved Victoria – May you as you increase in years, increase in domestic happiness, and comfort. Your solid and real happiness must be your home. Thank God you have a happy home. The life of a sovereign cannot be one of peace, it must be more or less chequered. But my dear father always said, ‘I could not have met with such locals and disagreeables, if I had not felt that when my public duty was done – and that, I always thank God, I thought first of, what was my duty to my country and for its good, before I thought of my own feelings – I say, I then thanked God that I had a peaceable happy quiet… home to return to.’ As years roll on, dearest dear Victoria, you must expect to meet with trials – for kings cannot do what they will, but what they can. And when, my dearest child, these troubles come upon you, you will have the blessing of the affection, confidence and devotion of dear Albert, which will be like balm to your soul. May God bless you, my dearest children, both together for many and many years, love your affectionate friend and aunt, Augusta.
Augusta became unwell herself at Clarence House in the summer of 1840, following Victoria’s wedding. A year earlier Brighton had been thought of as a cure for her deteriorating health, and she had written from there to her niece Victoria in February 1839 that she went out – never later than a quarter to three, and always in the best chaise – ‘with cloaks and an ermine tippet and a vile muff besides Welsh whittles [or blankets] round my feet and legs which is reckoned warmer than anything in the world’. But even so Augusta was eleven days in bed with influenza, and she detailed her bizarre appearance, with ‘leeches all round my throat – a brown necklace with a tailed fringe – very disgusting’. She had concluded then, ‘My beautiful writing will betray me, so I may as well tell you that I am still in bed.’
Wright, Princess Augusta’s dresser of long service, was with her mis
tress now at Clarence House. Sir Henry Halford told Lord Melbourne in June that the Princess’s condition was not hopeless, but the Duchess of Gloucester was so distressed after seeing her invalid sister that she could not attend a concert. And the members of Princess Augusta’s household at Frogmore received a lithograph of their mistress that she sent to them from London, but waited for her in vain, as her condition worsened in town. On 2 July 1840 the Windsor paper carried a report of ‘the serious and alarming illness of the Princess Augusta’. It concluded, ‘the inhabitants of this town (amongst whom Her Royal Highness has so long resided, and where her charity has been as unostentatious as her benevolence has been unbounded) … fear the worst.’
At Windsor and in its neighbourhood, Princess Augusta had been a familiar figure for years, exercising her ‘unostentatious’ charity and her ‘unbounded’ benevolence even while living at the Castle with her parents. But when she had taken possession of the Frogmore estate, following the deaths of both parents, this Princess whose personality was always less ‘marked’ than that of her sisters had flourished. She relished changes that she made to the garden and the walks there. Her mother’s estate, although extremely pretty with the ample white house facing the lake, with groves of trees bisected by Uvedale Price’s walks, had had, as her daughter saw it, its flaws. Augusta had greatly disliked looking in winter from her favourite room in the house, past a lime tree, at ‘a plain piece of grass, too large to be left unplanted and too small to be called a lawn’, in her flower garden, ‘just the other side of the lime tree opposite my own window’. In place of the turf, she wrote early on in her occupation of the estate, she had now made ‘a beautiful new basket’ so that ‘when the leaves drop from the tree, I shall have a small handsome clump to look at.’