The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  Whilst he could veto their choice of a wife, there was little the king could do to prevent his sons taking lovers, as he was repeatedly forced to acknowledge throughout the 1780s: as soon as they emerged from the schoolroom, the princes found themselves mistresses. Amongst aristocratic sophisticates, there was some sympathy for their plight. ‘Consider what a sad dog a prince of the blood is,’ exclaimed Lord Temple to the diarist Joseph Farrington, ‘who cannot by law amuse himself with any women except some damned German princess with a nose as long as my arm, and as ugly as the devil. In my opinion, a prince of the blood is the most miserable being on Earth.’98

  The lives of the princesses were far more susceptible to parental control. The sisters saw few people beyond the royal household, and their strongest bonds of friendship were often with women much older than themselves: Mrs Delany, Lady Cha and Lady Harcourt were all either middle-aged or elderly. Elizabeth and Royal had a small circle of female friends nearer their own age, with whom they enjoyed occasional gossipy encounters, but there were few opportunities for unsupervised, unregulated intimacy. The exacting restrictions placed by the queen on Fanny Burney’s freedom to entertain male guests suggested how carefully access to the royal palaces was monitored. There were certainly few opportunities for the princesses to meet men, other than those appointed by the king and queen to carry out court business. Three of the sisters were later to form relationships with their father’s equerries. When a serious illness removed Princess Elizabeth from public view for much of 1785–86, it was rumoured that she had given birth in secret to two illegitimate babies. The supposed father was the page William Ramus, who had once been mentioned as a possible husband for Miss Goldsworthy, the princesses’ sub-governess. There was no truth in the story, but it demonstrated the narrowness of the circles in which the sisters moved. Even gossip could not imagine for Elizabeth a partner other than one employed by her parents. The salacious tale did demonstrate, however, that even the youngest of the three elder princesses was now considered mature enough to have an affair. It would surely not be long before the king began to make plans for more honourable arrangements. Could marriage, for each of his eldest daughters, be very far away?

  Yet the years went by, and no treaties were drawn up, no dowries negotiated and no announcements made. There had been some interest in the princesses when they first made their debuts into public life; as early as 1781, the Emperor of Austria was said to have enquired about Royal as a possible consort, although his advanced age was thought to have ruled him out as a husband for the fifteen-year-old girl. A more persistent enthusiast for a marital alliance was the king’s eldest sister, Augusta, Duchess of Brunswick, now established in Germany with a clutch of children for whom she was eager to find suitable matches. The Duke of Gloucester told Mrs Harcourt that ‘the duchess had long and ardently desired to see her son married to the Princess Royal, but the king always disliked the idea’. George had never entirely trusted Augusta, whom he thought tactless, indiscreet and prone to trouble-making. ‘He had a strong prejudice against the alliance,’ continued Gloucester, ‘and against his sister. He even said one of her last letters was the best he had ever received from her, because there was no scheme in it.’99

  The queen entirely shared her husband’s lukewarm response to the Brunswick proposal. She and the duchess had disliked each other from the moment of Charlotte’s arrival; indeed, the duchess blamed the queen for alienating her brother’s affections, describing her bitterly as ‘an envious and intriguing spirit’.100 Unsurprisingly, Charlotte was determined to put an end to the whole idea. ‘I would rather keep all my daughters at home forever,’ she declared to her brother, ‘than let them marry there.’101 When the king wrote to his sister rejecting her offer, her reply was tart and to the point: ‘Your daughters must be very different from all other girls, if they did not feel themselves unfortunate not to be established.’102 Ten years later, when the bleak truth of her observation was apparent, even to their father, George was in more conciliatory mood. In 1794, the duchess said that the king had ‘offered her a princess for her son, if he would come over and be seen’, but it was too late, and she would not reconsider. ‘Charles was certainly a very good-humoured, harmless boy, and would certainly make a good husband, but she would not send him over, as she was quite sure if he was to show himself, none of the princesses would have him.’103

  Other marital prospects also came to nothing. Gloucester told Mrs Harcourt that on a visit to England the Duke of Saxe-Gotha, ‘a very good man’, had ‘fallen in love with the Princess Royal, his own wife being then supposed dying. In which case, he could have married her’; but his wife recovered, and, as Gloucester bluntly observed, ‘though afflicted with fits, there was no prospect of a vacancy’.104 Gloucester later discussed the matter with the sickly duchess herself, who confirmed the story. In a poignant illustration of the sad reality of loveless royal marriages, she told him ‘she believed her being alive was a disappointment to her husband, for he had expected her illness to end fatally, and she knew he had set his heart on marrying the Princess Royal’.105 Gloucester heard that, frustrated in his plan to marry her himself, Saxe-Gotha ‘would now try and get her for his son’, but that plan also went nowhere.

  Writing in 1789, Gloucester thought Royal’s remaining options were limited. ‘He doubted the Prince of Prussia being disposed to any such alliance. He thought the Prince of Denmark a very desirable match, but doubted his disposition to marry.’106 As the brevity of Gloucester’s list suggested, the number of princes with qualifications that entitled them to be considered as potential husband material was not long; Royal’s contemporaries, however, seemed to enjoy more success than she did in finding candidates who were available, Protestant and willing to marry. Her Mecklenburg cousins, daughters of Charlotte’s favourite brother Charles, were quickly and advantageously settled, as was one of the Duchess of Brunswick’s daughters, who was snapped up although aged only fifteen. Royal was now well into her twenties, and, humiliatingly, no nearer marriage at the end of the decade than she had been at its beginning.

  This was not how anyone, least of all Royal and her sisters, could reasonably have expected things to turn out. George III was one of the most powerful monarchs in Europe, ruling the continent’s wealthiest nation, a vibrant, expansionist power with which many smaller Protestant principalities might have hoped to secure a profitable alliance sealed by marriage. None of the princesses suffered from disabling deformities of mind or body; none had reputations for difficult tempers of the kind that had led their father to reject several potential spouses nearly thirty years before. Yet the flood of proposals that the sisters must surely have anticipated never materialised. There was little serious interest in securing their hands, and the small trickle of offers that had drifted in uncertainly when they first graduated from the schoolroom slowly but steadily dried up. Perhaps this was because from the earliest days of their entry into the marriage market, the sisters had been dogged by a sense that, for all their apparent readiness for matrimony, they were not properly available; princes in serious pursuit of a wife looked elsewhere, convinced by experience that the king would never agree to any proposal that took his daughters away from him.

  By any standards of eighteenth-century behaviour, George’s failure to promote and secure the marriages of his daughters was a significant dereliction of paternal duty. Finding and vetting a possible husband, and negotiating the settlement that sealed the match, was the crowning act of a father’s career, perhaps the greatest service he owed to his daughters. This was a responsibility incumbent on all fathers, not only royal ones; in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mr Bennett’s lazy indifference to the marital prospects of his daughters, his inability to rouse himself to manage their interests, almost brings ruin on the whole family. Unlike Mr Bennett, the king was no indolent ironist; no one was more committed to the meticulous fulfilment of all moral and familial duties. Why, then, did he fail his daughters so profoundly in the execution
of an obligation so crucial to their future happiness?

  The Duke of Gloucester, who had clearly reflected a great deal on his brother’s complex attitude to marriage, thought that the princesses would never have been allowed to choose British husbands. His own experience, and that of the Duke of Cumberland, had demonstrated the king’s bitter and unwavering opposition to any such idea. Thus, their only option was to marry away from home. This, too, the duke thought, their father would never contemplate. The king had often stated his belief to Gloucester ‘that he had not looked out for Continental alliances for them from a notion that they would be unwilling to leave England’.107 There was, in fact, nothing to suggest that this was indeed how the princesses felt; whilst the prospect of permanent separation from their family may have filled them with sadness, they understood this was the price to be paid for moving into the next stage of life. In Royal’s view, it was a painful sacrifice, but a necessary one: despite all the grief that accompanied it, leaving home was a choice any sensible girl would make in order to secure for herself a degree of independence. Writing in 1823, when she was approaching the age of sixty, she made her feelings very clear, insisting that any woman ‘will lead a pleasanter life in a proper establishment of her own, than if she was to continue for years unmarried. No one can speak more feelingly than myself on this subject, as certainly, my home life was far from being comfortable.’108

  For the king, however, the prospect of his daughters’ departure was unbearable. It was alleged that ‘he positively howled’ whenever the subject of their marrying was raised.109 This sounds out of character for a man who exerted such strenuous control over his emotions, but, if true, the intensity of his reaction was not entirely the result of his selfishness. In many ways his concerns for his daughters’ welfare were legitimate; he feared that once removed from his supervision, they would fall prey to a host of malign possibilities from which he would be powerless to protect them. He knew only too well from the experience of so many of his own female relations that arranged royal marriages only rarely had truly happy endings.

  George’s youngest sister Caroline Matilda – a posthumous child, born after the death of her father Frederick – was only fifteen years old when she was married in 1766 to Christian VII of Denmark. She was a very reluctant bride. Prior to the ceremony, the Duchess of Northumberland watched her brought into the royal Drawing Room in tears: she ‘cried so much … she was nearly falling into fits’.110 Once married, she set out for Denmark, separated from everyone she had ever known. Her British ladies left her at the Danish border; ‘not a chambermaid belonging to this country is to go with her into Denmark’, observed Lady Mary Coke.111 When she arrived at Copenhagen, she discovered that her new husband was a deeply unhappy and disturbed man. Years of systematic bullying as a child by a brutal governor had left him scarred, physically and mentally; his grasp on reality was fragile, and he was dominated by his powerful and manipulative mother. In the midst of this dark, Gothic drama, the seductive personality of the court doctor, Johann van Struensee – clever, charming and charismatic – was very attractive to the isolated young queen. Soon the couple were lovers; together, they took effective control of the kingdom, ruling in Christian’s name, until toppled in 1772 by a coup d’état organised by Christian’s mother. In the chaos that followed, Struensee was executed, being messily beheaded. Caroline was forcibly divorced from her unresisting husband, and, in response to pressure from Britain, allowed to leave Denmark and retreat to the remote castle of Celle in her brother’s Hanoverian possessions. Like her unfortunate great-grandmother before her, she was not allowed to take her two children with her. On hearing her crying, an attendant once came into her room and found her talking to the miniature of her son that hung by her bed.112 She was never resigned to her exile, and hoped one day to return to Denmark. However, in 1775, she died of scarlet fever, at the age of only twenty-three. With tragic, if probably unintended, symbolism, she was buried next to Sophia Dorothea, the repudiated wife of George I, another unhappy woman who died in exile.

  The king had no doubt that it was his sister’s unfortunate marriage that was the cause of all her misery; it had thrown her, unprotected, into a world of intrigue and horror where her hitherto ‘amiable character’ had been ‘perverted by a wicked and contemptible court’.113 It was a deeply depressing story, and one which weighed heavily on George’s mind for many years. He had been concerned from the outset that Caroline was neither experienced nor robust enough to cope with such a sudden exposure to the realities of the world, brooding gloomily on the eve of her departure on ‘the precipices into which she may probably fall’; but once she was gone, there was little he could do to help her. When, years after these shattering events, an offer was received from the Danish court proposing Caroline’s son Frederick as a possible husband for Augusta, the king was determined not to see history repeat itself. ‘After the treatment my late sister received there,’ he wrote with chilly finality in reply, ‘no one in my house can be desirous of the alliance.’114

  The marital experiences of George’s eldest sister Augusta were less dramatic than Caroline’s, but no one could doubt the humiliation and unhappiness of her position. Augusta had been married in 1764 to Charles William, the Hereditary Prince of Brunswick. He was handsome and cultured, a military hero who had fought bravely as an ally of Britain in the Seven Years War. At first, the couple seemed well matched, and she told her family that she ‘never knew anybody with more real good heart. In short, he is monstrously fond of me, and I am a happy woman.’ But Augusta’s protestations did not convince her brother. When she arrived in London to comfort their mother as she lay dying, George wrote to Gloucester that ‘she seems by her manner to be much graver than before, and I should think that it goes on but coldly between her and the Hereditary Prince, though she has not dropped the most distant hint of it’. To her younger sister Caroline Matilda, Augusta was more frank. ‘She says’, Caroline told her brother, ‘that the prince’s humour grows worse every day … She finds a great alteration in him.’115 He had always had affairs, but had recently moved his new mistress into the palace and allowed her to usurp Augusta’s position there. Rejected by her husband, she found little consolation in her children. Their wellbeing was a continual anxiety to her: one was blind, and another had developmental disabilities. She wished for nothing now except to retreat into seclusion where she could find some peace. Even her old enemy, Queen Charlotte, was aware of the depth of her misery. ‘She is not happy, so Lady Gower tells me. To the king, she has written just once, and in this letter, she said, Home is Home. Yet when she was there, she was just as unhappy.’116

  Escape from one form of unsatisfactory life did not, as Augusta sadly discovered, guarantee the discovery of a happier one elsewhere. The arranged marriages that were the destiny of most royal women rarely promised the possibility of much genuine fulfilment. Perhaps the bleakest commentary on their limitations was delivered, with cruelly unrelenting precision, by Augusta’s unwilling partner, the Duke of Brunswick. His words are a reminder that husbands, as well as wives, suffered when trapped within them. ‘Only private people can live happily married,’ he wrote, ‘for they can choose their mates. Royalty must make marriages of convenience, which seldom result in happiness. Love does not prompt these alliances, and these marriages not only embitter the lives of the parties to them, but all too frequently have a disastrous effect upon the children who are often unhealthy in mind and body.’117 It was a sad comment on his and Augusta’s wasted years together.

  ‘What unhappy wretches are princesses!’ Mrs Delany had written, years before she lived among them. ‘How they are sacrificed! It is to be hoped that they all have not the tender affections of their happier subjects.’118 The king knew better than anyone that his daughters were fully supplied with the ‘tender affections’, and he had no desire to see these trampled underfoot by alliances that offered little protection for the women obliged to endure their unpredictable outcomes. George was not p
repared to make sacrifices of his daughters, and his instinct to protect them from the possible consequences of arranged marriages was sincerely felt. But these honourable motives do not entirely explain his antipathy to their leaving home. There was also a strong element of unacknowledged self-interest in his refusal to allow them their independence. They were, he told Gloucester, ‘the comfort of his life’; their presence was a solace so powerful and affirming that he did not intend to give it up. The princesses were everything their unsatisfactory brothers were not: uncomplicated in their affections, untainted by ambitions that did not match his own. They were neither unruly nor unpredictable. They did not contradict, embarrass or disappoint; they were deferential and attentive, and willingly subjugated their needs to his. As his sons became adults, with inconvenient personalities and desires, George’s feelings for them cooled; by keeping their sisters unmarried, they would remain forever suspended between childhood and maturity, frozen in a condition of permanent emotional dependency. In neglecting to find them husbands, the king ensured that they would remain as dutiful, loving daughters for the rest of their lives.

  George did not think of himself as a domestic tyrant; he would have been extremely uncomfortable with the idea that he had deliberately thwarted his daughters’ happiness. Instead, he simply persuaded himself that he and they thought as one on the subject. He made no attempt to discover their real feelings, and they did not seem willing to enlighten him. Gloucester, who was aware of the true state of the princesses’ minds, ‘thought that His Majesty should be apprised of their real sentiments’, but made no attempt to do so himself. Nor, more significantly, did their mother. Charlotte knew that her daughters longed to enjoy the benefits of homes and families of their own, but she did nothing to persuade her husband to acknowledge the unfairness of their situation. Mrs Harcourt attributed her inaction to ‘a timidity’, which her daughters shared. ‘Lest they offend him, they keep their wishes too generally unknown to him, though it seems as if, when laid before him, he has no greater pleasure than in obliging them.’119 The queen understood her husband better than that. She recognised that this was an issue on which he would not be moved, and retreated to her habitual position of saying nothing that would challenge his authority. ‘I have so many things I could say,’ she once told Lady Harcourt, ‘but prudence imposes silence; and that dear little word has so often stood my friend in necessity that I make it my constant companion.’120 The interests of her daughters were sacrificed to her iron determination never to contradict the expressed desires of her husband. In the face of the king’s resolve to keep them at home, the three eldest princesses seemed doomed to mark time, with little to fill their days but the increasingly desperate pursuit of personal accomplishments.