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By the beginning of 1805, much of the work on the new apartments at Windsor was done, and the new living arrangements were in place. Charlotte was not impressed. When the king asked her to inspect the alterations with him, she declined, declaring herself ‘not an enthusiast’. Only one tantalising prospect raised her spirits. At the end of 1804, her brother Charles had written from Mecklenburg suggesting that one of her daughters might marry George, his eldest son. The queen was delighted; there was nothing she wanted more than to cement her lifelong affection for her brother with an alliance of this kind.
She did not feel it right to approach the king with the idea until the spring, when he seemed at last to have recovered from the worst effects of his illness. The letter she wrote to him advocating the match was unusually bold in its tone, reflecting both her love for her brother and a determination to forward his proposal. For the first time in any of her correspondence, she suggested to the king that he might put the wishes of his daughters above his own and agree to what Charlotte knew they wanted. In the past, she said, ‘I have made it a rule to avoid a subject in which I know their opinions differ with those of Your Majesty’s. For every one of them have at different times assured me that, happy as they are, they should like to settle if they could, and I feel I cannot blame them.’135 The king replied with polite good nature that ‘after having had the happiness of possessing such a treasure from Strelitz’, he would not hesitate to say ‘that if my daughters are disposed to marry, I should prefer an alliance with this family than any other in Germany’. He went on to add perhaps the clearest explanation he ever gave for his failure to find suitable husbands for the princesses: ‘I cannot deny that I have never wished to see any of them marry: I am happy in their company and do not in the least want a separation.’
He was quite unembarrassed by a confession of such frank self-interest, and does not seem to have thought it made him appear either selfish or heartless. For George, this simple assertion of the primacy of his feelings merely reflected the natural order of things. His needs ranked higher than those of his daughters, and it was he who would determine whether or not they should be fulfilled. He was not an intentionally cruel man, but he found it very difficult to distinguish between his own interests and those of the princesses. He was entirely satisfied with things as they were and could not understand why his daughters were not. If he was content, how could they be unhappy? He never appreciated their desire for a life that did not have him at its centre. However, perhaps age and illness had mellowed him, for on this occasion he decided not to stand in the way, telling Charlotte that if she considered this ‘a serious offer’, he would put his own feelings aside: ‘I should certainly not want to oppose what they feel will add to their happiness.’136
The queen told her brother that she was ‘full of joy and impatience’ at this unexpectedly positive response, although she advised the hereditary prince not to come to England immediately, but to wait until after the summer trip to Weymouth. She was still exuberantly happy in May, telling her brother that she could not express all she felt, ‘especially when I picture one of my daughters in the home where I was so happy’.137 But the months went past, the family returned from Weymouth, and still the hereditary prince did not come, Finally, in 1806, Charlotte received a letter from Charles announcing that his son had decided not to marry yet.
It was a bitter blow. There seemed little now to engage the queen’s hopes for the future. Wherever she looked amongst her close family, she saw nothing but unhappiness. Relations between her eldest son and his wife had deteriorated to new levels of acrimony. The prince, who told his sisters that the princess was ‘a perfect streetwalker’, had accumulated extensive written evidence of her numerous alleged adulteries. He had presented the incriminating documents to the Cabinet and demanded they take action against her. Reluctantly, the ministers had agreed to appoint a commission to investigate. It was hard to see what good could possibly result from such a public display of private misery, and the queen despaired.
The king’s physical health was another source of anxiety. For many years, he had been troubled by cataracts in one eye; now the other was attacked, leaving him virtually sightless. Even though their relations were cooler now, Charlotte was still deeply affected by this disabling blow to her once robust husband, and although George showed ‘an exemplary fortitude … under this heavy calamity’, she admitted to Lady Harcourt that she found his dependency hard to bear. ‘The necessity of keeping up before him is such a strain on both body and mind that all idea of amusement, excepting what is necessary to enliven him, vanishes.’138 Her life at Windsor became even more restricted; one day followed another with little to distinguish them. Even the steady flow of correspondence to her loyal confidante began to dry up. ‘I thought it just as well not to increase the number of letters from a place like this,’ she told Lady Harcourt mournfully at the end of 1808. ‘Where nothing occurs to entertain, [they] must soon become very stupid.’139 After enduring two years of an existence she found exhausting and enervating in equal measure, Charlotte sent Lord Harcourt a verse couplet which she believed summed up ‘our style of living’:
They Eat, they Drank, they Slept – what then?
They Slept, they Eat, they Drank – again.
She added ruefully that she and her daughters could no longer be described as ‘la bande joyeux’. Those days seemed long past. The best they could aspire to now was to be considered ‘la bande contente’.140 That would be enough to satisfy her diminished expectations. Charlotte must have known that even this was an optimistic assessment of the princesses’ shared state of mind. Sophia was angry, resentful and increasingly withdrawn; Mary and Augusta concealed depths of frustration beneath superficially calm exteriors; Amelia was fragile in health and emotionally volatile.
Even Elizabeth, her mother’s most active supporter and the most determinedly upbeat of the sisters, had been ground down by the challenges of the past few years. She had turned thirty in 1800, and knew that every year that passed made the likelihood of her becoming a wife and mother more remote. In the absence of any credible marriage prospect, she did everything she could to offset the boredom of her life. She engraved, she painted, she embroidered – and still the empty hours yawned before her. That was especially true at Weymouth, where time dragged even more slowly. ‘I amuse myself with an hour’s German, then write, and draw and dress for dinner, read to the queen the while till cards, when I play at whist till my eyes know not hearts from diamonds and spades from clubs.’ The conversation was as dull as the amusements. ‘News there is none, but who bathes and who can’t,’ she wrote in 1802, ‘and who won’t and who will, and whether warm bathing is better than cold, who likes wind and who don’t, and all these silly questions and answers.’141 Six years later, nothing had changed: ‘We go on as we have for the last twenty years of our lives’; life continues ‘much as usual, as you know, vegetating’.142
No one worked harder than Elizabeth at the business of being cheerful. She said she always preferred being happy to being sad, and could not understand why others did not feel the same. Life did not have to be so dull or so depressing, but those around her, she felt, had fallen into the habit of misery: ‘It is astonishing to me that they can have happiness within their grasp, but not trouble to put out their hand.’143 In spite of all reverses, she did her utmost to see the best in her situation. ‘Trials we must have, and they would not be trials if they were not felt. I therefore rejoice in the good, try to go on mildly with the bad, and bear all good-humouredly.’144 She worked hard to keep up ‘that great flow of spirits’ which alone enabled her to get through the long days, and gamely sought to bury her own discontents. However, there were some frustrations which overwhelmed even her relentless cheerfulness.
As she grew older, she became increasingly impatient with her royal status. On the one hand, she was proud of her high social standing; on the other, she was painfully aware of the limitations that accompanied
it. She referred more than once to her royal identity as ‘the canister at my tail’ and felt its weight upon her keenly, declaring that she was not at all suited to the world into which she had been born. The world of the court was hateful to her, ‘a hotbed of insincerity, jealousy and a thousand other stings of uncomfortable littleness belonging to human nature’. She liked to think of herself as a plain dealer, unimpressed by pretension, and impatient of hollow ceremony. ‘Though born at court,’ she declared to Lady Harcourt, ‘I have no court cant, and love my friends as truly as any plebeian in this or any other country.’145 She longed to escape from the false, artificial and purposeless life she felt closing in on her: ‘I wish I could cut through that fence, maybe a rabbit hole would let me through, though my size comes in my way. Modern dress might let me squeeze out, we live in strange times, I will not give up.’146 What she needed was a way out, an escape route to a different existence. Like her mother with her Frogmore retreat, Elizabeth found it in the shape of a private place she could truly call home.
With a loan from the Prince of Wales, she leased a small cottage, ‘The Garden House’, in Old Windsor. Here she planted a garden and ran a model farm, of which she was very proud. She had inherited, as none of his sons had done, the king’s passion for agriculture. ‘You are perfectly right in thinking that I feel and think all most perfect at the Cottage for eggs, butter, cream and milk,’ she wrote in 1808. ‘I am unworthy of pigs, though I watch them with a hawk’s eye and my broods of chickens and ducks are beyond everything my delight.’147 A cottage of her own offered Elizabeth the sliver of privacy and independence that enabled her to survive the grim years of the early 1800s. Yet, for all the pleasure she took in her rural retreat, something was missing. ‘Between friends,’ she confessed to her eldest brother, ‘a mate not being there (though I hope will make an appearance, though time flies)’, she was still lonely and unfulfilled.148
None of her sisters was as frank or as unashamed in declaring the urgency of their desire to marry as Elizabeth. ‘I continue my prayer,’ she had told Lady Harcourt in 1802, ‘of, Oh how I long to be married, be married, before that my beauty decays.’149 News of a wedding always made her think of her own stark marital prospects. When her friend Augusta Compton announced her engagement, Elizabeth was heartfelt in her congratulations, although the disdain she felt for her own single state tinged her goodwill with bitterness. ‘Thank God again and again that you have determined to quit that vile class, you know what I mean … You have set me a good example, and I will follow it whenever I can.’ The desire to put behind her the shame and humiliation, as she saw it, of spinsterhood was one important aspect of Elizabeth’s desperate desire to find a husband. But she was also aware that she was missing out on other pleasures. Her vision of the married state was never fey or over-romanticised. She anticipated the physical side of wedlock with the same gusto with which she applied herself to the large meals she so enjoyed. She offered Augusta Compton her cottage as ‘the place where you will pass your HONEYMOON’, and signed off her letter, in words an inch high, ‘Amen and A-Man’.150
As the years passed and there was still no prospect of a husband in view, it grew harder to keep her hopes alive. ‘Time is a vile old gentleman, for though I court him as much as anybody, he, like all other gentlemen, gives me the slip.’151 Neither she nor her sisters had known of the Mecklenburg proposal in 1805, as the queen had not told them of it; and in any event, it was extremely unlikely that Elizabeth would have been selected as the suitable candidate for the hereditary prince, as she was nine years older than him. But then in 1808, when she was thirty-eight and after so many years of fruitless anticipation, she at last received a proposal of marriage, from a completely unexpected quarter.
When his name was first linked with hers, Louis Philippe, the exiled Duke of Orléans (and cousin of the executed Louis XVI), was living a modest life at Twickenham. Since the Terror, during which his father was guillotined despite actively supporting the Revolution, his family had scattered across continents, and he had pursued a variety of careers. For a while he had been a schoolmaster in America; and it was probably during his travels in Canada in the late 1790s that he met Edward, Duke of Kent, after which he came to settle in England. The two men became firm friends and remained close – Edward had lent the needy Orléans money, and kept a bedroom available for him to use at Kensington Palace – and it may have been at Kent’s prompting that Orléans came to consider Elizabeth as a potential wife. It is not known whether Louis Philippe and Elizabeth ever met, although it seems probable that they carried on some form of private correspondence. Certainly they seem quickly to have developed favourable opinions of each other. Orléans was confident enough of his position to write to the Prince of Wales in 1808, declaring that he wished to marry Elizabeth, and suggesting that she was likely to accept him. Elizabeth confirmed this, telling her brother that ‘I own that this has been the wish of my heart for so long … and that my esteem has been gaining ground for so long that it has truly been my prayer.’152
In late September, the queen discovered the existence of the Orléans letter, and confronted her daughter, demanding to know if she had been aware of it. Elizabeth was deeply hurt at the implication she had sought to conceal the proposal from Charlotte. ‘I had flattered myself that from my constant attendance upon my mother, with my natural openness of character, I had hoped she would have gained confidence in me at my time of life.’ She was grieved to find that this was not the case, but was not prepared to be cowed into submission. ‘I let her know that I was not ignorant of what had passed, with my sentiments and feelings on it.’ She begged the Prince of Wales to help bring the match about, pleading ‘that you will not dash the cup of happiness from my lips’.153
Perhaps emboldened by the princess’s enthusiasm, Louis Philippe now made an open declaration of his intentions, writing directly to the queen to ask her to speak to the king. Charlotte replied with an uncompromising negative, as she informed her unhappy daughter. ‘My mother … though kind to me, has assured me it can never be, and that she never will hear of it again.’154 Orléans was an impoverished refugee, living on the charity of others, with no prospects before him. He was also a Catholic. This did not concern Elizabeth – ‘being firm to my own faith, I shall not plague them on theirs’ – but as the queen knew, the king would never allow his daughter to marry a man who was not a Protestant. Still Elizabeth refused to give up, and she was encouraged by the Prince of Wales, who urged her not to despair. Her resolve had been further stiffened by the support of her sisters, and by secrets that had come to light in the upheavals following the proposal. ‘Many things I will tell you which determined me at once to say I would NEVER GIVE IT UP, for, it was hinted, many things had been brought forward and rejected without a word from us, and therefore we all felt the sun of our days was set.’155 Elizabeth and her sisters now learnt, probably for the first time, of offers and refusals made for their hands going back over many years. It was unlikely to have made any of them more resigned to their fates.
It may have been these revelations which spurred Elizabeth to explore every possibility rather than see this offer too pass away from her. After the queen delivered her refusal, Elizabeth claimed that what she hoped for was not an immediate union – she seems to have accepted that her father would never agree to it – but some form of engagement, which would allow her to marry the duke after the king’s death. She was confident Louis Philippe would agree to these terms, which ‘may be very unfortunate to us, but which will make everything couleur de rose afterwards by considering my father before myself’. These, she declared, were the only terms on which she would consider proceeding, ‘for without being a perfect good daughter, I can never make a good wife’.156
However, despite her protestations that she would never abandon that ‘degree of submission’ that she believed was the particular burden of ‘an HRH’, there are indications that Elizabeth may have considered defying her parents and making a private marri
age with the duke. Her correspondence suggests she and Orléans had discussed the terms on which this might be brought about. In November, she wrote to the Prince of Wales seemingly on the duke’s behalf, asking her brother to confirm that when he became king, he would regularise the position of any children they might have. ‘He wishes, in justice to himself, as well as out of delicacy to me, that you would merely ensure the legitimacy of children, should there be any, for that subject once clearly decided upon, his mind will be at ease.’ An undertaking of this kind would only have been necessary if the couple planned to marry before the death of the king. ‘I must now only make one request to you,’ asked Elizabeth of her brother, ‘from myself, which is that you would send for him before he goes, and not feel shy in talking the subject over with him, for it must be an ease to his mind as well as to mine to hear what you have said to me from your own mouth, and that he would swear never to reveal what passes.’157
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