The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  She brought a great deal of energy and goodwill to her task, and did all she could to win the affections of her charges. A few months after her arrival, she organised a summer tea for the three eldest princesses in her rooms. Mary did not stand on her dignity, and seems to have had a more boisterous sense of fun than their other attendants. ‘We went first into the garden, where we amused ourselves playing about. I say we, for I enjoyed it as much as them.’ Later they played the card game Dumb Crambo, where ‘there were a number of forfeits which gave rise to much amusement in framing punishments’. A good time was had by all, and ‘their royal highnesses were quite rakes, as Lady Charlotte allowed them to stay till ten o’clock’.84

  The queen was as delighted as her daughters with her new recruit. Mary Hamilton was exactly what had been missing from her cultivated domesticity, a witty, articulate addition to her entourage. Only two days after her arrival, Mary ‘had the honour of sitting two hours with Her Majesty tête-à-tête. I read a manuscript of Glover’s Leonidas. She praised my style of reading poetry, and was pleased to say she would take lessons from me.’85 Soon, she was a favoured member of Charlotte’s inner circle. The combination of Mary Hamilton’s intellect and good-heartedness was a very attractive one, and completely overwhelmed Charlotte’s usually impenetrable emotional armoury. The affection she felt for her was unprecedented, as was the freedom with which she came to express it. A few years after their first meeting, she was writing to Mary with a warmth and appreciation she extended to no one else. Theirs was, for Charlotte, a true and most welcome meeting of like minds. ‘What can I have to say?’ she enquired of Mary in 1780, ‘Not much indeed! But to wish you a good morning in the pretty blue and white room where I had the pleasure to sit and read with you The Hermit, a poem which is such a favourite with me that I have read it twice this summer. Oh,’ she enthused, ‘what a blessing to keep good company. Very likely I would never have become acquainted with either poet or poem was it not for you.’ With Mary, Charlotte revealed a sprightly playfulness that was usually kept well hidden. She even allowed herself to express some of the satiric attitude with which she privately regarded some of the more tedious requirements of her role. ‘A droll idea started up in my head’, she wrote teasingly to Mary, which she knew was ‘dangerous to indulge’. It was ‘comparing the Terrace – the Royal Terrace – with? … Patience … with a market! Oh fie upon the queen!’ It is hard to imagine anyone else with whom Charlotte would have been so cheerful and so unguarded in declaring ‘this wicked thought of mine. Promise to keep it to yourself.’86

  The whole family shared something of the queen’s strength of feeling for Miss Hamilton. When he was sixteen, the highly susceptible Prince of Wales noticed her, and immediately fell in love with her. She was ten years his senior, but that had no impact on his ardour. ‘I not only esteem you, but love you more than words or ideas can express,’ he wrote. Mary was flattered, but replied that, ‘without injuring my honour’, she could accept only his friendship. For all her restraint, it was a relationship of genuinely warm feeling, and the pair exchanged seventy-five letters between April and December 1779. In reply to his flowery declarations, Mary urged the prince to improve his behaviour, to give up swearing and drinking, and pay less attention to the purchase of expensive clothes; in reply, he insisted that he was encouraged to behave better merely by being in her company. Once, after she had left Windsor, he had searched her rooms hoping to find some memento of her; all he could discover was the remains of a bouquet he had given her. ‘I seized it and kissed it with fervour,’ he declared, ‘and then, as you had worn it within your bosom … I placed it in mine, hoping it would confer some particular virtue in me.’87

  But the most intense of all the relationships Mary Hamilton inspired within the royal family was with the small girls for whom she cared. From the moment of her arrival in the household, the princesses sought desperately to win her affection, by any means necessary. For both the elder girls, there seemed to be only one way by which they thought this could be achieved – by reminding her constantly of their impeccable behaviour. They had clearly imbibed the moral teachings of their mother very thoroughly, and were much preoccupied with goodness. Their earliest letters show them to be obsessively concerned with their ability to reach that pre-eminently desirable state, and often resemble a kind of moral barometer, alert to all the small shifts in the weather of their conduct. Writing to Mary Hamilton, Augusta was repeatedly determined to prove her worthiness in this most important respect: ‘Upon my word, I will be very good to you, and everybody else that is around me in this house’; ‘I will always be good, Madam’; ‘I will be good all day.’ The young Elizabeth was just as eager to fulfil the prime directive. ‘I will be very good,’ she assured Mary Hamilton, ‘to please Mama, and make everybody happy and do my lessons well.’ When Mary fell ill, for Elizabeth, there was only one way to make her better. ‘I will be very good to please you, and make you well again.’88

  Inevitably, the princesses sometimes fell short of the standards set for them. Although the sisters could not compete with the uncontrollable high spirits of their brothers, their behaviour was sometimes a challenge to those around them. Augusta seems to have been the main offender; Mary Hamilton kept a little cache of apologetic notes from her, a doleful catalogue of her transgressions. ‘I am sorry that I behaved so ill to you this afternoon,’ runs one sad little note, that reads as though punctuated by tears; ‘I promise I won’t do so any more, and assure you that I am ashamed of it, that I won’t so any more. I beg you will believe me, for it is very true.’ Sometimes her sins were the minor ones of ‘impertinence’ or ‘meddling’. Others were more serious. ‘I am very sorry for the blow I gave you last night, I am very sorry indeed … I have wrote to Gooly and she has forgiven me … I hope I have not hurt you, and was very sorry to find you with brown paper … upon your breast.’ A few months later, the sins were again small ones. ‘I beg you will ask Miss Goldsworthy to forgive me for being so foolish this morning about my rhubarb.’89

  Augusta did everything she could to persuade Mary Hamilton of the depth and intensity of her affection. Sometimes she was commanding: ‘I desire that you will love me’, she once imperiously insisted. On other occasions she was more of a supplicant: ‘Miss Hamilton is obliged to love Princess Augusta,’ she begged plaintively, ‘she is obliged to say so very often.’90 In a way familiar to generations of teenage girls, she also sought to show the depth of her emotions by inflicting pain upon herself. When she was fourteen, and Mary Hamilton was no longer living at court, she sent her old governess a tiny card. On the back of it, Mary noted that she ‘had pricked herself with a pin and wrote this in her blood to give to Miss H’.91

  Augusta’s devotion was more than matched by that of her elder sister. The awkward Princess Royal, anxious, tense and painfully self-aware, was desperate to come first in the affections of the glamorous, amusing, clever Miss Hamilton. Her campaign to attract and hold her attention was unrelenting. Shortly after her arrival, Mary found a note from Royal ‘put into my work’: ‘Day and night I always think of you,’ the eleven-year-old princess declared, ‘for I love and esteem you.’ Once their relationship was established, Royal was a demanding companion. ‘The Princess Royal presents her compliments to Miss Hamilton, and begs to know why she would not kiss her last night.’ There was no aspect of Mary Hamilton’s daily life which Royal could not turn into a way of expressing her devotion. ‘I am very sorry that you did not sleep well last night. I beg you will lay down and not think of anything but a flock of sheep … if you do what I desire, I shall love you very much.’92 Her feelings grew stronger as she came to appreciate Mary’s virtues. ‘You do not know how much I love you, for you are so good natured and good to me, that I cannot help it.’93 For Royal, as for her sister, only the really good deserved to be loved. But she hoped that genuine strength of feeling might be understood as a virtue in itself; surely she was entitled to affection, having given it so freely herself? ‘Pray gi
ve me your love,’ she urged, ‘for I wish for your love so much that I think you must give it to me.’ ‘Pray love me,’ she insisted, ‘for I love you and it is but fair.’94

  Royal’s intense desire to extract from Mary Hamilton an unequivocal declaration of loving commitment perhaps reflected a deep emotional insecurity. Like Augusta, she had seen those close to her leave, in ways that were entirely beyond her control. When her French teacher Mlle Krohme died in 1777, she had been inconsolable. ‘My daughter is incomparably upset,’ the queen told her brother. ‘She cries all the time.’95 In the same year, her much-loved attendant Mary Dacres found a husband and left her service. Royal felt utterly betrayed. ‘How could you be so sly as not to let anyone know you was to be married?’ she demanded, drawing the sad conclusion: ‘I do not think you love me as I love you.’96

  If some of the hunger for affection displayed by the princesses can be attributed to their fear of abandonment, some responsibility for their neediness must also attach to the queen. The ‘gravity of manner’ and ‘self-command’ that she took such trouble to maintain did not encourage the warmest relations between mother and daughters. She shared the king’s concern that her children might fall victim to the corrupting wiles of the court, as potent a fear for her girls as for the boys, despite all she had done to minimise the threat. ‘Between you and me,’ she confided to her brother, ‘I think there is too much flattery mixed in with their education, and I need a lot of patience, faith and uprightness to prevent the bad effects that can result from this.’97 But what looked like ‘uprightness’ to Charlotte could easily read as severity and detachment to her daughters. This was amplified by her inability to express the more openly affectionate emotions that they so desperately sought from others. Lady Harcourt, the queen’s closest friend, did not think that Charlotte lacked deep sentiments, but agreed that she found them impossible to display. She was, she thought, ‘very sensitive, but loved to restrain her feelings, from principle’.98 The princesses were never less than respectful to their mother, and were always dutiful in delivering themselves of the conventional pieties. It is hard not to conclude, however, that in their childhood and youth, it was not from their mother that they expected to receive unqualified, demonstrative affection.

  A decade later, in the eventful year of 1789, the Harcourt ladies were discussing with the queen the unfortunate fate of Marie Antoinette. Mrs Harcourt was struck by a remark of Charlotte’s, criticising the chilly demeanour of the French queen’s mother, Maria Theresa of Austria: ‘The empress never made companions of her daughters,’ she asserted, ‘but kept them at the greatest distance.’ Mrs Harcourt found this observation poignant in its lack of self-awareness. ‘I could not but think, that in this account, the queen, without perceiving it, in part condemned her own conduct towards her daughters, for with the kindest intentions towards them, it certainly seems as though she kept them at too great a distance – preventing that confidence that would be of such advantage to them, and obliging them to find more pleasure in the society of friends than in their mother.’99

  In fact, as the Harcourts well knew, the young princesses had few real friends except each other. Their lives were packed with occupation, but in the midst of their busyness, they were isolated, with only each other and their attendants for company. This was the darker side of Rousseauian retreat – a life populated by familiar faces and enlivened only rarely by anything exceptional or unexpected. For the women of the family, time could and often did hang heavy on their hands, with boredom an enervating backdrop to their days. Even the queen, so determined an advocate of time well spent, openly alluded to the creeping ennui that sometimes threatened to envelop the women of the household. ‘Our amusements at Windsor are much the same as they were last year,’ she told Mary Hamilton in 1780. The only difference she could see was that her drives were not quite as long as they had been then. ‘For you know,’ she wrote mournfully, ‘we deal not much in variety.’ This was not, she boldly declared, how she would prefer things to be. ‘I am for some little change, why should it not be so in our society? We both agree and say yes! But when it must not be, what is to be done then? Why, to submit!’100

  Until the king wanted a different style of life, everything would stay as it was. Three years later, as Charlotte had predicted, all was exactly as it always had been. ‘There is never any news here,’ one of her daughters’ attendants wrote to Mary Hamilton, ‘we are in faubourg of sameness.’101 The unchanging routine weighed heavily on the whole female household. Their hours were long, with little time off, and their commitment was expected to be total. Even the indefatigable Lady Cha was eventually worn down by it. In 1774, after twelve years’ service, during which the sickness and death of two of her own daughters had barely interrupted her duties in the royal nursery, she wrote to the queen and requested two days off each week in which she could see her friends. Charlotte reluctantly agreed, but asked her to increase the hours of her duties on her remaining days, in order to encourage the other attendants ‘and make them look upon it less as a confinement’. Lady Charlotte was outraged, replying that she had ‘ever made her own concerns … give way to the duties of my place, as everything belonging to me has experienced’. She was now forced to consider whether she must resign, as the queen ‘must know what an uncommon stock of spirits and cheerfulness is required to go through the attendance of so many and such very young people in their amusements, as well as behaviour and instruction’.102 Horrified at the prospect of losing her, the queen immediately capitulated.

  Lady Charlotte was hardly alone in her expressions of unhappiness. The sub-governesses ranked beneath her shared all the grievances she described. They kept up a sad correspondence which reveals the depths of their common misery. Bored and exhausted by their long hours of service, they had, as they often assured one another, no real independent existence. Through the prism of their discontent, the daily round of the queen’s household looked grim indeed. ‘Our life here is not to be envied,’ wrote Miss Goldsworthy to Mary Hamilton, as she arrived back from the Queen’s House to Windsor. ‘I return back to the dungeon, heated to death, and wishing, as I never have before in my life, for the hour of going to bed.’103 Even activities that were supposed to entertain felt more like punishments. ‘Yesterday we went a-hunting, I accompanied the princesses to see the stag hounds out of the park, we were two hours and a half going to see that.’104 Much as she cared for them, the children tired her out, and she had no time to herself. ‘The dear little angels are now asleep, their spirits beyond what you can imagine, I have not had a moment to myself during twelve hours that they are awake to do anything. I have tried various, but now I give it up.’105

  After two years of such endurance, Mary Hamilton herself had had enough. Her days began at seven in the morning and did not end until she put the princesses to bed at midnight. Her hours of ‘waiting’ were too often exactly that – formless and pointless, without variation or purpose. Above all, she missed the company of her friends, for visitors were not encouraged and she was allowed only occasional leave. ‘I continue in a situation for which I have neither inclination, strength of constitution or sufficient stock of spirits to support,’ she wrote in 1779. For a while, she did her best to bear it. She endeavoured to do her duty; and ‘had the satisfaction of being approved of’. She knew she was specially favoured by the queen, and tried to draw pleasure from her preferment, but it was all to no avail. ‘I had not time to possess my own mind, my health and spirits suffered much from leading a life of constant restraint.’ Nothing she experienced at court could compensate for what she had lost. ‘I love independence and liberty,’ she declared, ‘and have no taste for a mere parade of life.’106

  It was not until 1781 that she could summon up the courage to ask the queen for permission to resign. When she did so, she was refused. ‘The contents of your letter I am inclined to treat as the effects of low spirits,’ Charlotte replied, ‘and therefore won’t indulge you in an entire belief of what you have sai
d.’107 But Mary was determined. ‘I wish a hundred times a day that I had never entered into this situation,’ she confided to her diary. ‘I am very unhappy.’ It took her another year to persuade the queen to let her go.

  She was very much missed. The faithful Augusta continued to write to her for some years; the Princess Royal, with whom relations had cooled as the princess grew older, passed on her rather more temperately expressed good wishes. The Prince of Wales, who had found far more complaisant mistresses since the days of their innocently playful correspondence, never entirely lost his feelings for her. In later years, one of his gentleman declared that Miss Hamilton was ‘the only woman he ever heard the prince speak of with proper respect, except the queen’.108

  Of all the family, though, it was probably the queen who missed her most. For Charlotte, Mary Hamilton’s resignation was far more than simply the loss of a valued governess. Her inability to keep Mary as a happy member of her household undermined the entire vision of domesticated intellectual purpose that had meant so much to her. She had admired Mary’s intellect and enjoyed her company, and clearly hoped she would stay as a companion for herself and an inspiration for her daughters. But women like Mary were precisely those who, like Charlotte, found the boredom and isolation of life at court impossible to bear. For all her efforts, Mary Hamilton’s ineradicable unhappiness was a forceful reminder that Windsor was not – and never could be – the vision of fulfilled intellectual contentment the queen had glimpsed at Bulstrode.