The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  In less exposed situations, her muted virtues became far more visible. As a child, she had been the favourite of nearly all her teachers, who responded with pleasure to her quiet concentration, ‘her attentive sensible countenance’. Clever and perceptive, she was adored by her governess Mlle Moula, who maintained that ‘she had more sensibility, more energy and more imagination than all the others put together’.32 She shared a gift for mimicry with the Prince of Wales, and in private she occasionally revealed a sharp tongue. But her wide eyes, set in a small, pale face, gave her a vulnerable, fragile look that reflected her shrinking, anxious character. Mlle Moula had, when she was very young, identified Sophia’s tendency to ‘nervous irritation’, and thought her cruelly ‘subject to low spirits’. She was to suffer from these complaints all her life, coupled with an imperfectly described and undiagnosed physical debility that saw her endlessly confined to her room or to her bed. She was not without admirers in the family – her brother Edward, Duke of Kent, referred to her as ‘that clever little thing and my first favourite, Sophy’ – but her cleverness and sensibility were generally less apparent to those around her than the many physical difficulties she endured. Eventually, these problems came to define her, and she was almost always referred to in terms that accentuated her weakness and fragility. She was ‘poor Sophy’ or ‘little Sophy’ or ‘Madam Little’.

  Sophia’s health problems seem to have started in her teenage years. In 1793, when she was sixteen, she began to experience problems in her throat with what she called her ‘swallow’; she also suffered from fainting fits that attacked her many times a day. Later that year, having made no improvement, she was sent to take the waters at Tunbridge Wells, but with little tangible benefit. It was hardly surprising that she was so often depressed. ‘Things are so-so here,’ she wrote to her eldest brother from Tunbridge, coining a phrase she was to use throughout her life, and which perfectly sums up her assessment of her low-key unhappiness. Some of her misery resulted from her lack of sympathy for those around her. Far less gregarious than her sisters, she often found herself out of step with their moods and puzzled by their shifting alliances. She did not always find their company congenial. When her eldest sister was still at home, Sophia thought her dominating and managing. ‘Many unpleasant things have passed since we have last met,’ she told the Prince of Wales in 1793. ‘Princess Royal and Lady Cathcart I strongly suspect are at the bottom of everything. I should not say this unless I was quite sure. My reasons I will give you when we meet.’33 A year later, she was still oppressed by ‘the ups and downs of life’, telling Lady Harcourt that ‘my spirits are weak. I am easily overset, however I struggle as much as possible’.34

  Her poor health contributed greatly to her weakness of spirit. Her recoveries were only ever temporary, mere gaps in a catalogue of cramps, fits and spasms that went on for year after year. In 1797, she collapsed at a review at Weymouth. ‘She was so ill that she could not be taken home for some time,’ and had to be undressed by her ladies, ‘for the violence of the pain swelled her so much that she could not bear her clothes on, and she was purple in the face’.35 It is not at all clear what caused Sophia’s attacks, which are too imprecisely described to suggest any real diagnosis, but it has been suggested in recent years that they may have been a result of porphyria, which she may have inherited from her father.

  The sad regularity of Sophia’s bouts of sickness meant that, at first, little attention was paid to the news that she been again taken ill in the summer of 1800. She had apparently recovered by August, when the queen wrote to Lady Harcourt, noting that ‘my dear Sophia, on whose account we prolong our stay’, was by now ‘so much amended in her health that the physician thinks she may, without any risk, give up the warm sea-bathing’.36 But by the following spring, gossip had begun to circulate that the princess’s indisposition had not been quite what it seemed. The diarist Lord Glenbervie was one of the first to hear the stories. ‘I heard yesterday a recapitulation of Princess Sophia’s extraordinary illness last autumn at Weymouth, from the most authentic information.’ With uncharacteristic circumspection, he chose at that point not to transcribe the rumours: ‘They are of too delicate a nature for me to choose to commit them (at least according to my present feelings) even to this safe repository. But they are such as to scarce leave a doubt in my mind.’37 In the same year Thomas Willis, who had assisted his father in treating the king in 1788/89, was in correspondence with Princess Elizabeth over the state of her father’s health. He was shocked to hear from Elizabeth herself news of ‘the cruelty of a most scandalous and base report concerning P.S.’. He was deeply indignant on behalf of the whole family: ‘Such a report must be in its nature false, as those who are acquainted with the interior of the royal houses must testify.’38 But Glenbervie was right and Willis wrong. The rumour – that Sophia had given birth to a child in or around Weymouth in late July or early August 1800 – was, it seems, the truth.

  It was widely believed in Weymouth that something scandalous had taken place there during the summer. Elizabeth Ham – the teenage girl whose farmer uncle was so often visited by the king to discuss agricultural matters when the royals were in residence – was dimly aware of the stories circulating around the resort’s tea tables:

  It was about a fortnight after the royal family had come for the season, and so, according to custom, there were aunts and other visitors staying at our house. I was listening to all these discussions going on, and of course, saying nothing. When the conversation ceased for a minute, I looked up from my work and said, ‘I wonder what is the reason that the Princess Sophia has never been seen out since the family came?’ Upon this, the whole party burst into a laugh, for it was very evident that everybody had been thinking the same thing, but had deemed it high treason to give it utterance.39

  Elizabeth Ham soon knew all the details of the gossip that had so entertained the female members of her family. The ‘delightful story’ centred on a wealthy tailor by the name of Sharland, whose wife had just given birth. During Mrs Sharland’s confinement, the doctor attending her found an excuse to send the midwife away; when she returned, ‘she found two babies where there had been only one’. Under pressure from the inquisitive midwife, Mrs Sharland revealed that ‘a few minutes after she was sent away, a carriage stopped at the door. The doctor had brought a newborn infant and placed it by her side, with a purse of money, and told her that she must say that it was her own.’ This she clearly did not do, for it was soon known to all the town that the child was not hers. Mrs Sharland admitted as much to Elizabeth, who went to investigate a few weeks later. ‘Seeing an infant in its cradle, and stopping to kiss it, I asked if this were her own child or the little foundling and she told me it was the latter. I gazed upon it with great interest, for I was sure it would turn out a hero.’40 The baby, a boy, was given the name Thomas Ward and baptised on 11 August.

  A few years later, Glenbervie reported that ‘the foundling, which was left at the tailor’s at Weymouth … is now in a manner admitted by the people about the court to be Princess Sophia’s’. How the birth had been managed, or where it had taken place, he did not know; but he was confident he knew the identity of the father, naming him as ‘General Garth, one of the king’s equerries, and a very plain man with an ugly claret mark on his face.’41

  Major General Thomas Garth was a career soldier, like all the royal equerries, and had served in Germany, the West Indies and Flanders. He was thirty years older than Sophia, closer to her father’s age than to her own. There clung about him something not quite of the modern world, one observer describing him as ‘a fine gentleman of the old school, in powder and pigtails’. He was hardly a conventionally handsome man, his appearance dominated by the birthmark that was the first thing anyone noticed about him. Captain Landmann, another soldier, who met him in Weymouth, described him as ‘a little man with good features, but whose face was much disfigured by a considerable purple mark on the skin, extending over part of his forehead and one e
ye’.42 Elizabeth Ham, still young enough to have rather naive ideas about the unpredictable wellsprings of mutual attraction, thought it impossible that ‘a fair young princess’ could possibly have chosen for a lover ‘a little old man with a clarety countenance’.43

  But there was more to Garth than his unprepossessing looks. Fanny Burney had known him at Windsor and he more than satisfied her very exacting standards for what constituted good company and gentlemanly behaviour. When he left court, she declared she had been ‘very sorry to lose … a man of real worth, religious principles and unaffected honour, with a strong share of wit and a great deal of literature’.44 He had a cultivated appreciation of art, and could lay claim to having recognised the raw talent of one of the greatest artistic talents of the day: he discovered the young Thomas Lawrence drawing the customers at his father’s tavern at Devizes, and kick-started his career as a portraitist by introducing him to wealthy aristocratic patrons. He was a generous and considerate host, known for his excellent dinners. When the sickly Princess Amelia was making her slow and painful journey to Weymouth in 1809, he opened his comfortable, if old-fashioned house to her, diligently scouring the countryside for the asses’ milk he was told might help her condition.

  Perhaps his best qualities were displayed in the unswerving love and pride he showed for the child left at Weymouth. Garth took the boy – named Thomas, like himself – into his own home, bought him horses and sent him to expensive schools, first at Datchet, then to Harrow. He introduced him to all his visitors, even the grandest. ‘He tells me he dotes on him beyond anything,’ reported an incredulous Princess Charlotte, daughter of the Prince of Wales, who visited General Garth in 1814, and was shocked to find herself in the presence of a child whom she clearly believed to be her illegitimate cousin. Garth proudly confessed to Charlotte the strength of his feelings for the child. ‘He is afraid that he spoils him … He thinks of nothing else, morning, noon and night.’45 It was not unknown for eighteenth-century fathers to recognise their responsibilities to their illegitimate children. In acknowledging the boy and making him his heir, Garth had behaved well, if not exceptionally, by the standards of the time; but the lifetime of affection lavished by the general on young Tom Garth, whom he always treated as a much-loved son, blithely indifferent to the disapproval of others, illuminated his most attractive qualities, and perhaps explains what drew Sophia to him in the first place. Proud as he was of his paternity, Garth remained silent on the subject of the boy’s maternal origins. ‘He now acknowledges himself to be the father,’ noted Glenbervie, ‘but does not say who is or was the mother. His niece, Miss Garth … has often thrown out hints to him … but he has always given the subject the go-bye, by saying, I perceive what you mean, but you are mistaken.’46

  For all Garth’s delicacy, there seems little doubt that Princess Sophia was the mother of young Thomas Garth, and that she and the general had conceived him in the autumn of 1799, when Sophia was twenty-two. Glenbervie attributed their unlikely pairing to the whim of a moment, ‘in which opportunity had, with HRH, proved too strong for reason, principle and good taste’.47 The diarist Charles Greville also thought that the couple’s relationship could only be explained as the momentary product of an overwhelming and irrational desire. Unlike other scandalmongers, Greville did not think that Garth’s unimpressive looks made the liaison unlikely, ‘for women fall in love with anything, and opportunity and the accidents of passion are of more importance than any positive merit, either of mind or body’.48 Sophia’s susceptibility to ‘accidents of passion’ had been intensified, Greville believed, by the seclusion in which she and her sisters had been brought up, ‘mixing with few people, their passions boiling over and ready to fall into the hands of the first man whom circumstances enabled to get at them’.49

  It never occurred to either man that Sophia might have chosen for herself the man who became her lover, nor that their relationship was anything more than a momentary impulse of gratification. A single line in a letter written by Princess Mary as early as 1798 suggests that Garth’s name already had some romantic significance among the sisters. ‘As for General Garth, the purple light of love, toujours la même’.50 The general was obviously a figure of sufficient familiarity to be worthy of a somewhat patronising dismissal by the sharp-tongued Mary. The existence of a more established understanding between the couple has recently been further confirmed by the biographer Flora Fraser. An undated letter, written by Sophia to ‘my very dear, dear general’, suggests, in tone and content, that the princess and the soldier were more than just good friends. Certainly, they were close enough to have exchanged tokens of affection. ‘Your ring has given me tremendous pinches,’ wrote Sophia, in an uncharacteristically playful and flirtatious style, ‘but I have bore them like a heroine. If you looked at your little finger when you were naughty, I believe a certain little ring would have been impertinent enough to give you a pinch. I think you deserve it. And now my dearest general, do not forget that when you are neglecting your own health, you are the cause of giving many unhappy moments to those who love you.’ The letter closes with a declaration that leaves little doubt of the strength of her feelings: ‘I shall never forget you, my dear general, to whom I owe so much. Your kind remembrance of me is a cordial. Your calling me your S makes me proud as Lucifer … I love you more and more every day.’51

  Charles Greville, whose source of information was Lady Caroline Thynne, daughter of Queen Charlotte’s Mistress of the Robes, believed the affair had been consummated at Windsor: ‘The princesses lived at the Lower Lodge. Princess Sophia, however, was unwell, and was removed to the Upper Lodge, and a few days after, the king and queen went to town, leaving the princess there. Garth … remained also, and his bedroom at the lodge was just over hers. Nine months from that time she was brought to bed.’52 It is impossible to say why the couple were prepared to take such a risk. Caroline, Princess of Wales, thought Sophia was too naive and inexperienced to have understood what she had done, arguing that she ‘was so ignorant and innocent as really not to know until the last moment that she was with child’. Yet, as Glenbervie commented dryly, ‘everybody says the Princess S is very clever’. He asked the Princess of Wales if she really thought Sophia ‘did not perceive something particular had passed, and if she could think it a matter as indifferent as blowing her nose’.53

  Despite his scepticism, Glenbervie transcribed into his diary a lengthy account given to his wife by ‘a person of unquestionable veracity’, which confirmed the idea of Sophia’s naivety. Lady Glenbervie’s source was sitting ‘tête-à-tête with the princess [when] the latter mentioned to her the continued motions, and as she called them, convulsions in her inside, and bid her put her hand on her belly that she might feel them. The lady did so, and having had many children, was so certain of the nature of the motion that she was quite panic stricken. But neither on that, or any other occasion, ever spoke or looked as if she thought or suspected that others might think she was pregnant.’54

  If Sophia did not know what was happening to her, it is hard to imagine that her mother, a woman with twenty years’ experience of childbearing behind her, would not have recognised the signs of pregnancy in her daughter. Perhaps Charlotte knew more than she ever disclosed. An undated letter from the queen to Lady Harcourt, perhaps written in the summer of 1800, appears to refer, albeit obliquely, to the events of that time. Charlotte is pleased to report ‘a most unexpected though long wished-for change in dear Sophia’s health. Not without much suffering and pain, but as I am sensible that our wishes could not properly be obtained without it, I was prepared for it, and thank God that I can say she goes on as well as circumstances allow.’55 There is nothing else in Charlotte’s surviving correspondence that hints she was aware that her daughter gave birth to a son during these months, nor is there any report of any comment made by her on the stories that began to circulate so soon after the event. Yet again, it seems she trusted in ‘that little word, silence’ which had so often seen her through
difficult times.

  For all her refusal to confirm or deny the facts, however, Charlotte was believed to be in full possession of them a few years later. ‘It is now said,’ wrote Glenbervie in 1804, ‘that the queen knows the child to be Princess Sophia’s, but the king does not.’56 Greville too thought that George’s ignorance had been successfully maintained by being kept away from his daughter during the crucial months: ‘The old king never knew it, for the court was at Weymouth when she was big with child. She was said to be dropsical, and then suddenly recovered. They told the old king she had been cured by eating roast beef, and this he swallowed, and used to tell it to people, all of whom knew the truth, as a very extraordinary thing.’57

  In the immediate aftermath of the birth, Sophia herself made no comment on her situation. In December 1800, she wrote an ambiguous letter to Lady Harcourt, assuring her that ‘our private conversation has often occurred to my mind’ and ‘how happy I was that I had the courage to begin it’, as the outcome ‘has greatly soothed my distressed days and unhappy hours’. Without declaring the subject of her thoughts, she concludes that ‘no doubt that I was originally to blame, therefore I must bear patiently the reports, however unjust they are, as I have partially myself to thank for them’. Sophia’s extreme discretion makes it impossible to know whether she is, in the most guarded manner, referring to her pregnancy. Her next sentence is no easier to interpret: ‘It is grievous to think what a little trifle will slur a young woman’s character for ever. I do not complain. I submit patiently, and promise to strive to regain mine, which, however imprudent I have been, has, I assure you, been injured unjustly.’58 It is hard to think of any woman at any time describing the birth of a child as ‘a little trifle’; perhaps Sophia was attempting to deny the reality of what had happened to her; perhaps, only a few months after the event, she still hoped it might somehow be concealed or forgotten, and that she could start life again.