Having successfully warned off her brother, Charlotte must have been appalled to have the unsuitable Caroline now produced as a potential wife for her son. In desperation she seems to have made at least one attempt to persuade the king to veto the idea, even to the extraordinary extent of disagreeing with him. ‘Something is in agitation, God knows what,’ wrote Prince Ernest at the end of August to his eldest brother, ‘but the honoured authors of our days have had yesterday a very long conversation tête-à-tête which seemed to be very boisterous, for though the wind made a horrible noise, one could perfectly well hear them talking.’ Ernest was not sure what was at the heart of their argument, ‘but I suppose you was. The king was in remarkable spirits, but his counterpart the very reverse.’87
However forceful their discussions, nothing the queen said made any difference, and the preparations for the wedding went on. Unable to halt the inevitable, Charlotte retreated back to her customary position of mute, self-consuming anger. ‘She said that she had resolved never to talk, no never to open her lips about your marriage,’ reported Ernest to the prince, ‘so that no one should say she had a hand in anything.’ She promised she would treat the princess well; more than that she would not say. ‘Her opinions she could not give, as she never intended to speak about it. She hoped you would be happy, and all this she said with tears in her eyes. God knows what is the matter with her, but she is sullen.’88 When the Prince of Wales wrote to his mother to try to discover why she was so upset, she refused to engage with him on the subject at all. She no longer hoped to prevent the marriage, but was determined to absolve herself from any responsibility for it. ‘When a person keeps silent upon every subject as I do and have done,’ she replied, ‘I cannot plead guilty.’89
In November 1794, the prince’s envoy arrived in Brunswick to escort the princess to London. James Harris, later created Earl of Malmesbury, was an experienced and sophisticated diplomat who knew the prince and his tastes well. His first impressions of Caroline’s physical appearance were not, on the whole, very favourable. ‘Pretty face – not expressive of softness – her figure not graceful – fine eyes – good hand – tolerable teeth, but going – fair hair and light eyebrows, good bust – short, with what the French call des épaules impertinantes.’90 Although he bravely listed the princess’s best features, Malmesbury was clearly uneasy. He knew that the prince was accustomed to select his mistresses from among the most elegant and sophisticated women of the fashionable world. It was true that his preference was often for women who were both larger and older than convention dictated, but he considered himself an appreciative connoisseur of female beauty and his standards were high. Malmesbury suspected he would not respond well to Caroline’s unexceptionable and slightly overblown looks; nor was he reassured by what he had begun to discover about her character.
His first conversation with Caroline’s father did nothing to calm his mounting sense of disquiet. The Duke of Brunswick confessed that he was very worried about how his daughter might behave once she arrived in England. ‘He was extremely anxious about her doing right … He wished to make her feel that the high situation in which she was going to be placed was not simply one of amusement and enjoyment; that it had its duties and those perhaps difficult and hard to fulfil.’ Confirming what Queen Charlotte had heard, the duke admitted that anxiety about Caroline’s flightiness had indeed led to her having been raised ‘very severely’. He hinted that the ‘free and easy unreserved manners’ of his wife, George III’s sister Augusta, had not provided his daughter with a very satisfactory model for correct regal behaviour. The duchess, who had already regaled Malmesbury with her dislike of Queen Charlotte and told him an indiscreet story about her eldest brother’s bedwetting habits as a child, was, as Malmesbury diplomatically concluded, ‘at times … certainly apt to forget her audience’. The duke was even more worried when he considered what he knew about the behaviour of his future son-in-law, who, he correctly deduced, was unlikely to act as a stabilising influence on his daughter’s uncertain grasp of correct behaviour. He told Malmesbury that ‘he dreaded the prince’s habits’. He had already urged Caroline never to appear jealous, and ‘not to notice’ any of his affairs. In conclusion, he begged a clearly shaken Malmesbury ‘to be her adviser, not to neglect her when in England’.91
Malmesbury soon saw for himself why her father was so apprehensive. Sitting beside the princess for the first time at dinner, whilst he noted approvingly that Caroline was ‘cheerful and loves laughing’,92 he was less satisfied with other aspects of her personality. She was loud, impulsive and unrestrained, with little of the dignity he knew she would be required to demonstrate in her new life. The more he got to know her, the more his concern grew. She was gushing and indiscreet, lavishing endearments upon relative strangers, ‘making miss-ish friendships that last twenty-four hours’. She would talk to anyone who amused her, and say anything to anyone. ‘I find her inclined,’ he confided to his diary, ‘to give way too much to the temper of the entertainment, and to get over cheerful and too mixing.’93 She prided herself on her ability to discover the secrets of those around her, and eagerly passed them on. She was, Malmesbury concluded, an even more inveterate gossip than her mother. At twenty-six, she still behaved as if she were a naive and impressionable teenager. He was dismayed to hear her make ‘improper remarks’ about the supposed affairs of her friends, and was even more unhappy to hear rumours of her own flirtations, of over-familiarity with dancing partners, of tokens allegedly given to handsome young officers and of romantic feelings harboured – indeed openly admitted – for unsuitable men.
But for all her obvious shortcomings, Malmesbury gradually warmed to Caroline. Although it was only too clear to him that she had ‘no fixed character, a light and flighty mind’,94 he thought she meant well, and came to believe that beneath her obvious failings was concealed an essentially good heart. Declaring encouragingly that ‘she improves very much on closer acquaintance’,95 he decided it was worthwhile doing all he could to improve her prospects for success in her life to come. Casting himself as her unofficial mentor, he sought to tone down those aspects of her personality he knew would not serve her well, whilst attempting to instil in her a more realistic sense of what her new role would require. Above all, Malmesbury tried to persuade her of the importance of adopting a dignified bearing, encouraging her to become less dependent on the noisily solicited approval of those around her.
To this end, the earl prescribed a plan of action strikingly similar to the guidance George III had given the young Charlotte a generation before. He was horrified by Caroline’s repeated insistence ‘that she wished to be popular’ in her new home,96 and urged her instead to place herself above all considerations of liking and disliking. ‘I recommend perfect silence on all subjects for six months after her arrival,’97 he advised. After that, he instructed her ‘to avoid familiarity, to have no confidantes, to avoid giving any opinions; to approve, but not to admire excessively; to be perfectly silent on politics and party’.98 When she complained that he ‘recommended too much reserve’,99 he merely repeated his advice with even greater force. Again and again he begged her ‘to think always before she speaks’.100 He was unsure how much, if any, of his advice she heeded. She listened to his lectures with good-humoured patience, but, as Malmesbury noted with a sinking heart, they did little to depress her ebulliently high spirits. She was still ‘vastly happy with her future expectations’, undaunted by his attempts to make her reflect more soberly on her future. Even her future husband’s reputation as a womaniser did not dismay her. She was naively confident that she could manage him, telling Malmesbury that she ‘was determined never to be jealous … and was prepared on this point’.101 Malmesbury, suspecting that her avowed resolution would be pretty quickly tested, urged her to do all she could to stay true to it, maintaining that ‘reproaches and sourness never gained anybody … and that the surest way of reviving a tottering affection was softness, enduring and caresses’.102
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p; After two months in Brunswick, Malmesbury and the princess set out in freezing weather on the long journey through war-torn Germany to reach the North Sea coast, from where they would embark for England. The journey was slow, and during it Malmesbury had plenty of time to reflect on his feelings for his complex and often contradictory charge. He remained impressed by her resilient good nature. Few things made her angry; she had submitted to his many admonitions with good, if not always very attentive, grace. She was, he thought, no fool; Malmesbury believed she had ‘quick parts’, though ‘without a sound or distinguishing understanding’. It was her lack of mental discipline which Malmesbury believed undermined all her more positive qualities. She was ‘caught by first impressions, led away by the first impulse; turned away by appearances or enjoyment’. Nor did she seem to possess any real ideas of right or wrong. She had, Malmesbury concluded, ‘some natural, but no acquired morality, and no strong innate notions of its value and necessity’. With a better upbringing, he thought she might have been a very different person. ‘If her education had been what it ought, she might have turned out excellent, but it was that very nonsensical one that most women receive – one of privation, injunction and menace, to believe no man and never to express what they feel or say what they think.’103
If Malmesbury was concerned about the shortcomings of Caroline’s inner life, he was even more anxious about the image she presented to the world. For all his efforts, her manners remained crude and unpolished. He explained to her repeatedly that she must learn to be less blunt in her language as the ‘English were more nice than foreigners. Never to talk about being sick, etc.’104 He was horrified when she sent a bloody tooth she had just had extracted down from her room for him to inspect. And he was genuinely shocked by her lack of personal delicacy. Despite his embarrassment, he felt it necessary to have a very explicit conversation with her on the subject of hygiene and general cleanliness. ‘On these points, I endeavoured, as far as was possible for a man, to inculcate the necessity of great and nice attention, as well as to what was hid as to what was seen.’ She was, Malmesbury maintained, often ‘offensive’ from lack of attention in this regard. He knew she wore coarse petticoats and shifts ‘and these [were] never well washed nor changed enough’. Nor was she very particular about her toilette, preferring to wash quickly rather than properly. For this, as for so many of her other failings, Malmesbury blamed the Duchess of Brunswick. ‘It is remarkable how on this point her education has been neglected, and how much her mother, though an Englishwoman, was inattentive to it.’105 Cheerfully impervious to shame, Caroline obediently followed Malmesbury’s advice and, for a while at least, appeared each morning properly scrubbed and tidied; but none of this promised well for her eventual reception in London by a prince of famously fastidious temperament.
Whilst Malmesbury strenuously applied himself to preparing the princess for her uncertain future, back at Windsor, Charlotte and her daughters diligently assembled her trousseau. There too Caroline’s mother was found wanting. ‘I received yesterday the pattern of the princess’s nightdress,’ wrote the queen, but ‘what to do about shoes I do not know, and feel very sorry for it, particularly as I thought to have expressed myself circumstantially enough on every subject for the duchess.’106 Nothing could prevent Charlotte making peevish remarks about her Brunswick sister-in-law, but her daughters were heroically optimistic about the approaching wedding. Who could not be delighted at the prospect of marriage with their brother? ‘Were I the princess,’ wrote Elizabeth to the prince, ‘I should certainly sing when I came to St James’s. Oh! Had I the wings of a dove, I’d fly away and be at rest, and by what one has heard, she must thank God to have let her take flight and that to you. I trust in God that neither of you will ever know what it is to have an uneasy moment.’107
Little of this anxious optimism survived the first meeting of the prince and princess in April 1795. Already disconcerted to discover that Lady Jersey – whose exact relationship with her husband-to-be had been communicated to Caroline by an anonymous letter sent to her whilst still in Germany – was to be her lady-in-waiting, the princess arrived in London flustered and ill at ease. She tried to behave well, kneeling to the prince as Malmesbury had instructed, but he was unmoved. ‘He raised her (gracefully enough) and embraced her, said barely one word, turned round, retired to a distant part of the apartment and calling me to him, said, “Harris [i.e. Malmesbury], I am not well; pray get me a glass of brandy.”’108 The princess, shocked by his behaviour, commented with typical bluntness that she thought him very fat and nowhere near as handsome as his portrait.
From a bad start, things only got worse. A formal dinner held later that night was a disaster. Caroline forgot everything she had been told about the value of regal discretion; her behaviour, ‘flippant, rattling, affecting raillery and wit, and throwing out coarse vulgar hints’ about Lady Jersey, embarrassed everyone present, and in Malmesbury’s opinion fixed for ever the prince’s dislike of her.109 The marriage ceremony, which took place a few days later, was a painful harbinger of the couple’s future relationship. The prince arrived drunk, did not look at his bride, but gazed instead at Lady Jersey. When the archbishop asked whether there were any lawful impediments to the marriage, ‘he laid down the book and looked earnestly at the king, as well as at the bridegroom, giving unequivocal proof of his apprehension that some previous marriage had taken place’. With equally heavy-handed significance, the archbishop twice repeated the passage requiring the husband to be faithful to his wife. ‘The prince was much affected, and shed tears.’110
The couple’s brief honeymoon was spent in the unpromising company of some of her new husband’s more disreputable friends at Kempshott in Hampshire, who were, Caroline later asserted, ‘constantly drunk and filthy, sleeping and snoring in boots on the sofas’. Their wedding night was an ordeal for both of them; in their very different accounts of what went wrong, each blamed its failure on the other, in a pattern that was to recur throughout their partnership. The prince told Malmesbury that Caroline had gasped, ‘Ah, mon Dieu, qu’il est gros’, when they finally got to bed and she saw how he was endowed, but far from finding this encouraging, it had convinced him that ‘her manners were not those of a novice’.111 He maintained he slept with her only three times, disgusted ‘by such marks of filth both in the fore and hind part of her … that she turned my stomach, and from that moment I made a vow never to touch her again’.112
Caroline told a rather different story of what had happened on those fateful Kempshott nights. ‘If I can spell out her hums and haws,’ wrote Lord Minto, to whom she confided the tale years later, ‘I take it that the ground of his antipathy was his own incapacity, and the distaste which a man feels for a woman who knows his defeats and humiliations.’113
After only a few weeks of marriage, George ceased to appear in public at all with his wife. The king was obliged to give Caroline his arm as the family walked on the terrace without the Prince of Wales. It was obvious to all that something was seriously wrong, but his sisters nevertheless bravely attempted to seek out reasons to be cheerful about this increasingly ill-starred union. Writing to her brother, Elizabeth praised the ‘open character’ of ‘my sister’ the Princess of Wales. ‘I flatter myself you will have her turn out to be a very comfortable little wife,’ she insisted optimistically. The news that the princess was pregnant briefly inspired the family to invest new hope in the tottering relationship, and when, in July, the couple retreated to the country for a brief stay, every letter received was scrutinised for phrases that might suggest a better understanding between them. ‘Mama is … happier than words can express at your ending your letter with the words “we are all very happy and comfortable here”,’ wrote Elizabeth. ‘It has not only made Mama happy, but all of us who love you in every sense of the word, and could the wishes of your poor sisters have been of any use, you certainly had them from the first to last … I am commissioned with loves, loves, loves on all sides to you as well as the princ
ess to whom I beg to be very kindly remembered.’114
But, as time went by and the prince showed no real signs of softening in his harsh and unrelenting attitude, the queen gave in to despair. She told Lady Harcourt in August that she was ‘so low and dejected that I had every difficulty in the world to muster up some degree of cheerfulness for the evening. The situation is truly deplorable, for what to say I do not know.’ She grew increasingly disenchanted with her daughter-in-law, whom, for all Charlotte’s protestations that she would treat her fairly, she had never learnt to like. ‘The utmost we can do’, she concluded wearily, ‘is to keep out of the scrap ourselves.’115
The princess’s baby was born on 6 January 1796, after what the prince described as ‘a terrible hard labour for above twelve hours’. She had given birth to ‘an immense girl’ whom her father greeted ‘with all affection possible … notwithstanding we might have wished for a boy’. The king declared himself delighted – ‘indeed I always wished it should be of that sex’. (‘You know Papa loves little girls,’ commented Princess Mary.) The king hoped parenthood would bring them closer together, as it had done for himself and Charlotte. ‘I trust they will have many more children, and this newcomer will be a bond of additional union.’116
The Strangest Family Page 60