Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  Mary of Gloucester spent the morning of Dolly’s funeral at home in London with her niece Queen Victoria, who had volunteered to keep her company, while the Cambridge ladies attended the Duke’s funeral at the church on Kew Green. The Duke of Wellington disapproved of their being at the funeral – it was against all royal etiquette – and thought they would have been better off at Gloucester House.

  There, the Duchess of Gloucester, her niece the Queen and all the servants huddled into the dining room where Mr Nepean, the chaplain, ‘read prayers and parts of the burial service’, and gave an address. Afterwards Mary and Queen Victoria sat upstairs, and the Duchess gave her niece a beautiful diamond bracelet that Queen Adelaide had only the year before left her in her will. In sombre mood the Duchess said she would prefer to give, ‘rather than bequeath’, it to Victoria.

  Now that her brothers and sisters – all but Ernest – were dead, the Duchess of Gloucester confided to Victoria stories of the Courts of George III and of George IV which she said she had never till now revealed to anyone. ‘She talked much of former times,’ Queen Victoria recorded later that year, ‘and the very painful quarrel between the Duke of Gloucester and George IV about the late Queen Caroline, whom the Duke defended. My aunt could in consequence not go to Court for a long time, as she naturally did not wish to go alone, and could not do so with her husband, exposed to see him insulted.’

  The Duchess of Gloucester was encouraged to reminisce further over the next years. And she happily criticized with her niece Victoria the ‘strange, rather over-lively and undistinguished manners’ of Augusta d’Este, the daughter of her brother Sussex by Lady Augusta Murray who was now Lady Truro, wife of the Lord Chancellor, and very handsome. With Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, now in her twenties, the Duchess shared a memory from sixty years before of her first bathe in the sea at Weymouth. Her bathing dress was a ‘regular one’ made for the occasion, she recalled, which ‘no floating about deranged’. The Duchess wrote, ‘If the world had been looking on, they would have seen me as well dressed as at a drawing room.’

  Energetic – and lonely – in her old age, the Duchess of Gloucester thanked Mary Adelaide for her share, on a visit she made to the Cambridge ladies at Plas Newydd, on the Isle of Anglesey, the summer after the Duke died, ‘in making me laugh of an evening. I am sure for years I had not laughed as I did the evening you brought up the Address from Bangor …’ She said she was ‘almost ashamed’ – at her age – ‘to have been so amused with … such wonderful nonsense.’ Back at home she drove about the grounds of Frogmore – now the Duchess of Kent’s retreat – in a garden chair belonging to her hostess, only to regret it next day. She wrote to Princess Mary Adelaide that it had shaken her ‘nearly into a jelly, and I am aching all over’.

  Mary looked forward greatly to the opening, set for May Day 1851, of the Great Exhibition in Paxton’s ‘Glass Palace’ in Hyde Park. And she was firmly of the opinion that Prince George, the new Duke of Cambridge, should return from military duties in Dublin for the event. She told his mother, the Duchess, in April: ‘My own feeling is that as there are so few of us left of the royal family to attend her [Victoria] … he ought to come.’ Aunt Mary did not count among the royal family the actress Louisa Fairbrother, who had been going under the name of Mrs Fitzgeorge since she and George – ignoring the Royal Marriages Act – had married, and with whom, when in London, together with three small sons, the Duke lived contentedly in a house in Queen Street. George’s marriage was a matter that was rarely discussed within the royal family, his aunt Mary limiting herself to counselling him, after his father’s death, to honour Adolphus’s wishes and ‘disembarrass himself of what would trouble him more every year’. George did not take her advice.

  Ten days after the opening of the Exhibition, Mary wrote of her ‘admiration’ for it to her niece Victoria – ‘it far surpassed anything I ever saw before and requires days and days to see everything. Then I was nearly blinded with looking and seeing such magnificent and such a fine collection of things from all parts of the world – and my chair went about very comfortably.’ She went a further three times that month. ‘Every day I find more to admire,’ she exclaimed, singling out the Russian exhibits for special commendation in a letter to her niece Mary Adelaide, who was on a visit to her mother’s Hesse relations at Rumpenheim in Germany. ‘I wish I had wings to fly to make you a visit,’ the Duchess of Gloucester told her, ‘and wake you up of a morning by pecking at the window to be let in and oblige you to get out of bed.’

  It is ‘well worth your making the exertion to go there’, the Duchess told her sister-in-law, the Duchess of Cambridge, a year or two later when she visited the Crystal Palace, which had housed the Great Exhibition, in its new home in Sydenham in south London. ‘There are plenty of chairs to be drawn about in, and plenty of room for everybody to walk about and sit down … and more than you can possibly eat and drink for 2 shillings a head and all well conducted, no noise and the building – as clean and sweet as possible … come and meet me there some day … no soul will disturb you as the conductors are all attention and do all they can to oblige everybody.’

  The Duchess was as much fascinated by the visitors to the Exhibition in Hyde Park as by the construction itself. She went there in September 1851, she wrote to Mary Adelaide, on ‘one of the shilling days… to see the lower classes milling about in the greatest order looking so happy and pleased amused me … the seeing them sitting down in groups to eat their dinner and displaying the contents of their baskets [was] almost as curious a sight as the Exhibition.’ Enthralled by the Exhibition and its exotic wares, she wrote after a State Ball at Buckingham Palace that one of the guests, the Duchess of Norfolk, had been so hung about with jewels that she looked ‘as if she had put on all the Indian things … in the Exhibition.’

  News arrived of the death at Herrenhausen of Ernest, King of Hanover in November 1851. And the Duke of Wellington, who had been Ernest’s political opponent, was not unmoved when he commented, ‘He had the disorder in his lungs which they all have!’ Queen Victoria wrote in November 1851, ‘Poor Aunt G feels it very much, though there never could have been great love for him on her part, but she has always been kind to all her brothers and sisters, and it is a sad feeling to be the last left of so large a family.’ As for the Queen herself, Ernest had been ‘an uncle whom I could not love … I never saw anyone like him, who liked to hurt in everything he said. He was of an extraordinary unflinching courage, for which one must admire him, but there were many dark stories connected with his name which I will not touch upon, but which make me shudder.’

  ‘My nephews and nieces … are now my chief object of care and interest,’ the Duchess of Gloucester wrote solemnly to Victoria after learning of her brother’s death. And, with every intention of keeping up ties of affection with her blind nephew George, the new King of Hanover, she prayed that Victoria might be guided in friendship with him. ‘I consider Hanover an old family estate that it is impossible not to wish to keep in the family,’ she explained. ‘Compared with the great country’ – the United Kingdom – she conceded that Hanover was ‘a drop in the sea’, but she counselled her niece that, ‘well managed and a good understanding kept up’, the former Electorate was a useful channel for obtaining information of affairs on the Continent. Regrettably, King George began almost immediately, as Queen Victoria informed her aunt, on ‘a track of reaction, so unfortunately the course pursued by almost all the German princes’. The ‘good understanding’ for which Mary had hoped perished before it was born. Indeed, the new King of Hanover and his wife soon incurred the old Duchess’s wrath by not acknowledging her ‘four letters… Christmas presents and New Year letter’. Her only solace, she told the Duchess of Cambridge, was King George’s resolve to ‘keep up all his father’s charities at Kew in regard to the school and church … He says he never can forget his happy childish days there.’

  Marking the anniversary of the Cambridges’ wedding in May 1852, Mary surrend
ered to gloom. ‘Without you,’ she told the widowed Duchess of Cambridge, ‘I should be all alone in the world … sometimes I think I must be a dead weight upon you. I feel I grow so stupid, so dull and so old … all and everything’, she concluded drearily, ‘is changed as to our family and the world in general.’ But she kept up her rituals, and as usual marked the Fourth of June, her father’s Birthday, with a party. Gout did not cramp her style. ‘I managed by going to one chair and then another (like a child beginning to walk),’ she reported. But it was the first time that there were no brothers or sisters with whom to mark the day.

  ‘Here I am all alone by myself today to drink the health’, she wrote to Mary Adelaide, ‘of the only one of my once large family left of us brothers and sisters – It made me low when I first awoke this morning.’ She comforted herself with the reflection that ‘such dear ones as yourself, George and Gussy are left to us to love and care about’. And she seized the moment to keep up other old ties: ‘Now I am going to drive down to Brompton Square to see the King of Hanover’s foster sister, old Miss Cheveley.’ (Miss Cheveley’s mother Louisa had been Ernest’s wet-nurse.)

  Occasionally lachrymose, the Duchess of Gloucester generally enjoyed a sociable old age. She offered on one occasion ‘a quiet evening with a stupid dull old lady’ at Gloucester House to an old friend, Sarah, Lady Abinger. But the tall house on the corner of Park Lane and Piccadilly often hosted greater numbers. And candidates for the crowded children’s balls she gave in the upper room there – she brought in ‘little wonders’, musical prodigies six years old, and ventriloquists to amuse her junior guests – were not hard to find. An elderly Duke of Argyll much later recalled attending children’s balls there with his cousins annually. ‘The Duchess of Gloucester, with grey curls on each side of her head and a small cap above her good natured face, was most kind and attentive to us all.’

  All beauty fled, all bosom and benevolence, with a comfortable shawl pulled around her and with a large lace cap drawn over her smooth and braided hair and tied under her fleshy chin, the Duchess was now the picture of a complacent Victorian lady – which, indeed, is what she was. She travelled between White Lodge and Windsor, Gloucester House and Brighton – and even Osborne. And she bore with resignation the deaths of public and private characters which the years brought, while rejoicing in the burgeoning royal family at Windsor. The Queen gave birth to an eighth child – Prince Leopold – on 7 April 1853 and used ‘that blessed chloroform’ for the first time.

  But hanging over all else was the threat of war with Turkey and Russia. And when hostilities broke out in 1854, in the thick of it was the Duchess of Gloucester’s nephew George, Duke of Cambridge, who had been promoted lieutenant-general and sent out to the Crimea that February in command of a division of Guards and Highlanders. At the battle of Alma in September his men came forward, when the Light Division had fallen back before the Russian counter-attack, and won the engagement. ‘When all was over,’ he recorded, ‘I could not help crying like a child.’ Disaster then followed success, when he had his horse shot from under him at the battle of Inkerman, and lost half his brigade of Guards.

  Shocks and losses, and the suffering of others, to say nothing of the primitive conditions out in Turkey – fever, salt pork, and no vegetables, tobacco or soap – preyed on George’s nerves, and he described himself as ‘dreadfully knocked up and quite worn out’. Encamped on the heights within view but just out of sight of Sebastopol, he wrote gloomily to his mother and aunt Mary in early October 1854 that cholera had broken out again very badly among the troops. And he felt there was no likelihood that Sebastopol would fall.

  News was sparse in England. Word of battles and of the killed or wounded came slowly, and Aunt Gloucester’s sleep was disturbed by the anxiety she felt on her nephew’s behalf. A month later, following news from George of Russian counter-attacks, she told the Duchess of Cambridge, ‘I am still in a shake with thinking what danger he was in.’ But, responding to the news that her nephew meditated coming home, Mary added: ‘I feel sure, without it is necessary, George never could think of doing so at such a moment.’ But George, exhausted, left the scene of war following the battle of Inkerman on 5 November and rested in a hospital ship, the Retribution, off Balaclava. Even there he was not left undisturbed, and had to retreat, after a thunderbolt hit the ship, to Constantinople to convalesce.

  ‘I should be miserable if his health obliged him to come home,’ Queen Victoria told her aunt Mary, as the latter informed George’s mother the Duchess of Cambridge in December. The Queen expressed the hope that her cousin had gone back to his post, and, as if to deny the possibility of his return to England, reported to Aunt Gloucester that she was at work making the Duke a comforter, to send out to him. But the Duke was homeward bound, regardless of his female relations’views. ‘You can not be more annoyed or more miserable [than I] at George having asked to come home on sick leave,’ lamented Aunt Mary to Queen Victoria as the new year of 1855 dawned. Thinking of ‘all the disagreeable things that … will be said’, she wrote, ‘it is a sad pity his nerves have been so shaken’.

  Before George returned to England in late January, his examination by a medical board at Constantinople had confirmed – to the invalid’s relief – his opinion that he should not rejoin the army for the moment. Still, his martial aunt did not give up hope, and she wrote to the Duke’s mother on 23 March, ‘I consider George’s return [to the Crimea] … only put off for the time and, as a proof of this, all his horses are left there.’ Meanwhile Mary took up her paintbrush to produce sixteen paintings for the Patriotic Fund exhibition in aid of Crimean War victims.

  When not fretting over her nephew’s nerves, the Duchess of Gloucester had passed the festive season arranging her glass cabinets and bringing out the treasures she had accumulated and inherited over many years. Among them was a satin pochette containing a prayer she had written when she was twelve and frightened during her father’s strange illness at Kew. And she had, should she wish to sigh over it, wrapped up in tissue paper the hair of many of her sisters – a great auburn coil from Amelia’s head – and even some iron-grey wisps identified as her mother’s during her last years. There were as well items of her sisters’ ‘work’ to turn over – including the maroon and lemon chequered workbags in which her sister Sophia had hung her correspondence on her chair arms.

  But there were more cheerful mementoes of the past – her family’s ‘pictures’, ranging from miniatures of her parents and Reynolds’s painting of her sister-in-law Sophia Matilda as a child to recent photographs of the Cambridges and of Victoria’s family. There was even one prized photograph taken by the fashionable photographer Claudet. It showed not only Queen Victoria, her son Bertie, Prince of Wales and his younger sister Alice, but also their great-aunt Mary, tiny and hunched but smiling, in a highly decorated dress. Her equerry the Hon. Augustus Liddell took another photograph of the Duchess of Gloucester – alone this time, but again in a very striking outfit adorned with a shawl. Other treasures at Gloucester House included books, Bibles and almanacs that had once belonged to her brothers and sisters. And the Duchess owned besides a magpie collection of jewellery and less substantial trinkets now all hers as sole survivor of a large family who had religiously exchanged gifts all their lives on high days and holidays.

  While staying in Brighton in the autumn of 1855, the Duchess of Gloucester was gratified to hear – in confidence – from Queen Victoria of another royal marriage to come. Vicky, Princess Royal, was engaged to Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, future King of Prussia, and the couple met the Duchess’s criteria for happiness – ‘the young people have been allowed (fortunately) opportunities of becoming well acquainted with each other’. Mary welcomed ‘an alliance that is so desirable in every way and one I always considered as the most natural to be thought of. But she then turned tearful. ‘It is not likely I should live to see this event take place.’

  ‘It appears like a dream to me’, she told Victoria, ‘that you should
have a daughter old enough to begin to think of settling down for life – when I remember your birth as if it happened only yesterday.’ In fact, Vicky would not marry her Prince of Prussia for another two years, and, in visiting this long engagement on their daughter, Victoria and Albert were breaking the Duchess’s tenet that long love affairs were ‘very disagreeable’. But they were at least providing for their daughter the dynastic match that Mary’s own father, King George III, had so singularly failed to produce for her.

  The guns that sounded the end of war in the Crimea in March 1856 led the Duchess to speak of ‘the blessings of peace’. She had lived through three terrible carnages – the American War of Independence, the Napoleonic Wars and now this. ‘Pray God it may be a lasting one,’ she wrote to Queen Victoria on 30 March. Honour was restored in July when, as one of the blessings of peace, George, Duke of Cambridge became commander-in-chief. But Bertie, the Prince of Wales, rather than his cousin George, was now the old Duchess’s pride and joy. As the future sovereign, he naturally attracted her attention, and she was delighted when, with his tutor Mr Gibbs, he paid her a visit at White Lodge in Richmond Park when she was recovering from a serious illness. ‘She had become so thin,’ her dresser Mrs Gold later recalled, that ‘her bones had nearly come through the skin.’ But Mary received visitors, sitting up in bed supported by cushions, and looked ‘very cheerful and … so nice and venerable’ – according to Queen Victoria – ‘in her white night-cap and everything so neatly and prettily arranged.’