Yet again, the wishes of the daughters had been weighed against the king’s peace of mind, with no doubt as to who would be required to make the necessary sacrifice. Charlotte had tactfully stressed only the unhappiness that would result from George’s discovery of Amelia’s defiance, but others were more explicit in the pressure they exerted on the recalcitrant princess. When Amelia told her friend Mrs Villiers that she was ‘making up her mind to leave the castle with General Fitzroy and take her chance of forgiveness’, Mrs Villiers did not hesitate to invoke the spectre of the king’s precarious health as a means of bringing Amelia to her senses. ‘What would be her feelings of remorse if, as more than probable, such a shock as this would be to the king brought on a return of insanity? She was the most devoted of daughters to him, and this touched her.’182 Even her doctor resorted to similar methods of emotional blackmail. When, weighed down by depression, Amelia’s health began to fail, she asked her physician Sir Francis Milman to explain to the king that her sickness was aggravated by the misery of her situation. He refused to do so, ‘saying that for the king’s sake, she must sacrifice herself and patiently bear all the hardships that were imposed upon her’.183
Suffering with new symptoms from the tuberculosis which had first appeared in her knee, prostrated by anxiety, and lectured and criticised by so many of those around her, still Amelia refused to give up her dream of marriage to Fitzroy. In April 1808, when she thought she was dying, she wrote a long letter to be given to her lover after her death. ‘I feel our wishes are known and sanctioned in heaven,’ she wrote, ‘and there we shall meet to part no more. I solemnly declare the truth that you are the only person who ever suited me, for whom I could ever find the same confidence and affection.’ He was, she declared, ‘my husband! Though from situation, the rights I have not enjoyed.’184
She had no doubt now whom she blamed for her intolerable situation. Her mother had let her down when she most needed her support; and close examination of the Royal Marriages Act had proved to her the degree to which her father was the architect of the laws from which her unhappiness flowed. From 1808 onwards, a new harshness towards her parents was evident in all Amelia’s letters. ‘You know how little reason I have to love my family,’ she wrote to Fitzroy, ‘or esteem them in any way, and though I never hurt any of them, they God knows, have me – in many ways, various and cruel.’185
Amelia turned twenty-five in August 1808, and as she knew from her study of the Act, she could now apply to the Privy Council for the right to marry without the king’s permission. She drew up a formal letter to the Prince of Wales announcing her intention to do so; but throughout it, she referred to the king as ‘my late father’, suggesting that she could not bring herself to begin the process during his lifetime. The resentment towards her family so evident in her letter to Fitzroy was now focussed upon the king, as she bleakly recapitulated ‘the trials I have gone through, on account of not offending my late father, which cause has so long made me submit to them … You must know,’ she admonished her brother, ‘how cruel our situation has long been, and I may say, how unjust.’186 A year later she repeated her complaint, with an even greater sense of anger directed towards ‘the laws made by the king respecting the marriage of the royal family’ which had prevented her from becoming Fitzroy’s wife, ‘which I consider I am in my heart’.187 Alone of the sisters, Amelia was prepared to declare that it was the actions of her father – both past and present – which had so effectively denied her the only form of happiness she sought for herself.
This sobering realisation did nothing to improve Amelia’s state of mind or body. By the spring of 1809, she was again seriously ill. Mrs Villiers found her ‘bled and blistered’ and extremely unhappy in April, concentrating much of her anger on her parents. ‘She says herself, poor thing, that she must die for the ill-treatment she receives,’ wrote Mrs Villiers, adept at stoking up Amelia’s resentment. ‘It really makes me boil with rage! And then one hears of the king and queen being patterns of conjugal fidelity and parental affection! I am sure the queen never had one grain of the latter quality in her composition – the former I daresay she may boast of, for I don’t believe there is one person in the kingdom who would ever have had bad taste enough to propose to her to be otherwise.’188 It was remarks of that kind which resulted in the effective dismissal of Mrs Villiers from Amelia’s company. As she grew weaker, Amelia’s world shrank in on itself. ‘As to myself, I have nothing new to say, but I am sadly plagued with a cough,’ she wrote to the Prince of Wales in July. ‘I go out in the garden but am tired of myself, and believe I shall never recover. None but your dear self know what human feelings are; none of my family do.’189 Only her sister Mary was exempt from the bitterness that now consumed her. Mary’s calm presence soothed her mind, whilst her practical helpfulness sought to relieve her physical sufferings.
There was little however anyone could do to improve Amelia’s worsening condition. She had a persistent pain in her side which no medicine helped. Eventually it was decided to insert a seaton, a skein of silk placed inside a surgically created wound, intended to act as a form of primitive drainage tube. She already had one in her chest, and now submitted ‘to this very severe remedy’ again. But the seatons made no lasting difference to her state, and her doctors, with nothing else to suggest, recommended she retreat to Weymouth. She was quite willing to go. ‘My only wish is to get well, and God knows I long to feel I am no longer a burden to my family.’ Her only request was ‘that Miny [Mary] might go with me’.190
The journey from Windsor was a hard one; ‘obliged to rest at every place we stopped to change horses … in one constant fainting from the fatigue and violence of the pain in the side’. The sisters spent the night at General Garth’s Dorset house, where he treated them with his customary generosity, despite being lame with gout. He had arranged their apartments at Weymouth, and had ‘secured good milk and butter for our breakfast and fruit of all sorts, particularly grapes for Amelia; indeed he has forgot nothing, and thought of everything’. At the resort, Amelia made little progress. Taken into a bathing machine ‘to breathe the sea airs, she lay a quarter of an hour on a couch we contrived to place in the machine’; but, reported Mary, she remained ‘faint and low’.191 Soon she was too weak to walk down the seven steps of the pier to get into a boat. ‘She now finds great comfort in sitting quiet all day and not speaking,’ reported Mary sadly.192
At the end of September, she was worse, ‘thoroughly good for nothing … sickish all day and the pain in my side continues very much the same … For the last three days I have looked very yellow, they tell me. I feel it all swimming about me.’193 A letter from the Prince of Wales cheered her up, and she particularly enjoyed the fun it poked at their mother. ‘Your account of your interview with the queen amused me very much, and did not astonish me, for I see her snuffing and her so-ing you with all her might.’194 Throughout the autumn, the misdeeds of the queen and Amelia’s sister Elizabeth – or Fatima, as she called her, with cruel reference to her weight – occupied her mind. Elizabeth was regarded as the queen’s ally, and, as such, became the object of much of Amelia’s frustration and anger. ‘I shan’t mind the queen’s ill and cross looks now, or Fatima’s; her letters are such that they surpass one another in hypocrisy.’ It was impossible, she told her brother, ‘for me to say what I wish or what I ought; silence sometimes says most, and does so in this case’. She was convinced her mother had no appreciation of the true state of her health. ‘I must tell you that in one of her last letters to Miny, she don’t name me, but in a post script says “I am glad Amelia is better, and hope very soon to hear she is perfectly well.” This has provoked Miny … though she has always tried to make me think the queen’s letters are not unkind.’195
Amelia’s belief that her mother lacked ‘feeling or pity’ and was indifferent to her suffering was painful, as she knew her health was failing fast. ‘I can’t boast much of myself,’ she told her brother. Mary heard her moaning in her slee
p and noted that ‘she complains of constantly dreaming that she is in pain’.196 The seatons, which were badly inflamed, had to be treated with caustic, which was ‘a sad trial’, wrote Mary. ‘I never remember her in all this long illness suffering more pain.’197 By the beginning of November, it was clear that the stay in Weymouth had done nothing to improve her health and that she would have to go home to Windsor for the winter.
Amelia was prepared to return, but only if she was not required to spend time in close company with her mother. Mary agreed that it would be disastrous for her sister to live with the queen again. Charlotte had objected strongly to Mary’s accompanying her sister on the extended stay in Weymouth. She had disliked her prolonged absence from home, ‘which is not thought right, and is considered selfish of Amelia’. Mary dreaded any of this being said to Amelia; as she told her father, ‘you must understand, it will half kill her, who really, poor soul, never thinks of herself, and only wishes to give as little trouble as possible’.198 The king was touched by his daughter’s plight and agreed that a place must be found for Amelia where she could enjoy some respite from her mother’s bad temper, and avoid ‘unpleasant situations’. Now that he was ‘aware of the real object in view, nothing shall be wanting on my part to facilitate it’. An old house belonging to one of the king’s physicians, Dr Heberden, which was comfortable and at a safe distance from the castle, was fitted up for her. Amelia and Mary began the slow, painful journey home.
The cause of the queen’s lack of sympathy for her suffering daughter is not easy to understand, but it may have been an aspect of her descent into an increasingly depressed state of mind which was remarked upon by everyone around her. The pressures of her position had often driven Charlotte into melancholy sadness, as her letters to her brother during the early years of her marriage attested; but since the king’s first illness, her low spirits were often accompanied by anger and frustration, usually directed at those closest to her. After George’s 1804 bout of sickness, her moods grew even worse. ‘The queen’s temper is become intolerable,’ Glenbervie observed, ‘and the princesses are rendered miserable by it.’199 It is also possible that Charlotte considered her youngest daughter had brought some of her miseries upon herself.Amelia had refused to give up a relationship which had no future and could only end in pain for all concerned. She had paid no attention to her mother’s warnings, nor had she obeyed her direct instruction to ‘subdue every passion’, as Charlotte herself had sought to do throughout her life. Instead, she had abandoned herself to irrational emotions which could never be gratified in the way she sought. It was hardly surprising that her health had suffered as a result. If these were her thoughts, Charlotte would not have been alone in holding them. Mary, who was closer to Amelia than anyone, and ministered to her with a truly selfless devotion, was equally convinced that her sister’s misplaced love for Fitzroy was the cause of her illness. She talked of it later as ‘that most unfortunate attachment, which destroyed her health by degrees … As far as I am concerned upon the subject that I look upon as having killed her, I have nothing to reproach myself with, as I never encouraged what could not be for her happiness.’200
Once she was back at Windsor, Amelia’s attitude to her father grew warmer, as she saw for herself how worried he was about her; but for her mother, she continued to feel nothing but cold fury. ‘As for the queen,’ she wrote to the Prince of Wales in December 1809, ‘to describe her feelings, her manner and her visit to me yesterday, all I can say till we meet is that it was the STRONGEST CONTRAST to the dear king POSSIBLE, but I am too used to it to feel hurt, but I pity her.’201 Her mother visited her every day, but ‘never names my health’.202
Amelia had not seen Fitzroy since she had been sent to Weymouth some four months earlier. She was now too weak to venture out alone, and their secret meetings, so avidly awaited and planned for, had come to an end. Her illness had achieved what nothing else in over a decade had done, and made the secret prosecution of their affair impossible. Amelia no longer had the strength to enjoy anyone’s company beyond the narrow circle of her sister Mary, her maid Mary Anne Gaskoin and her doctors. By May 1810, she could no longer hold a pen and the tirelessly loyal Mary Anne was obliged to act as secretary for her. Sir Henry Halford, a new doctor brought in to consult on her case, was pessimistic about her prospects: ‘I cannot persuade myself that HRH is better,’ he informed the king. ‘I think her weaker, and I do not find that any one of the symptoms … has disappeared. They are all to be found distressing in their turn, and HRH has less power to bear up against them.’203 A spasm in her bowels added ‘a violent sickness’ to her long litany of medical problems; by June she could keep down only beef tea, hock and laudanum. But in all her pain, she had not lost sight of the aim that had been her most cherished ambition for so long: in the last months of her life, when she could hardly move or eat solid food, she made a final effort to bring about her much-desired marriage to Charles Fitzroy.
In July, she wrote to the Prince of Wales, appointing him her executor and sending him a copy of her will. In the same letter, she urged him to speak to Halford, who ‘is now become so good a courtier that he does not venture to oppose anything the king and queen like, though it may be very contrary to my wishes’. She begged her brother to ‘impress upon him how greatly you know the unhappiness of my mind increases my bodily sufferings’.204 The prince was, in effect, to prepare the ground for an approach Amelia intended to make herself upon Halford, whom she believed was uniquely positioned to persuade the king to change his mind on the subject of her marriage. Through him, she would exert the same emotional blackmail on her father that had been used on her all her adult life, and planned a last-ditch attempt to convince the king that by removing the principal cause of her unhappiness, he could improve her chances of recovery. The king had assured her that ‘there is no object dearer to my heart, no blessing for which I pray more fervently than that you may be restored to me’.205 Amelia wanted to test the truth of those assurances.
She wrote to Halford, asking him to explain to her father that her condition was greatly impaired by her reduced emotional state, and that marriage was the only solution to her misery. Halford – whose slippery disingenuousness later earned him the nickname of ‘the eel-backed baronet’ – refused point-blank to entertain the idea. He did not believe her father would agree to her request, and it was his opinion that merely raising the subject might fatally endanger the king’s fragile state of health. His message to Amelia was both uncompromising and sadly familiar: in the scale of both public and private importance, her wellbeing would always be secondary to that of her father.
Matthew Baillie, a colleague to whom Halford had shown the letter he wrote to Amelia, commented that it would be ‘perhaps not much to her taste’. Amelia was appalled by it and drew on all her feeble resources of energy to deliver the response she thought it deserved. Mary watched her working on it, spending ‘all day writing and erasing’. The result was a chilly dismissal of Halford’s egregiousness, coupled with an unsparingly accurate depiction of the reasoning that lay behind it. Although Halford had himself told her that he was ‘thoroughly convinced that my disease is more of the mind than the body and that affliction is shortening my days, you have nothing to offer but an exhortation to filial duty and respect to my parents’.206 She was sorry that he should ‘think so meanly of me as to believe me deficient in either, or that my conduct is likely to be such as to become the object of impertinent remark at every street in every town in this island’. Amelia was convinced she knew where to place the blame for his refusal to help: ‘I cannot but apprehend that the sentiments contained in your letter are the suggestion of some part of my family.’207 Baillie doubted that would be end of it: ‘Probably in the course of two or three months, she will make an application through some other channel.’208 But that was not to happen.
Everyone, including Amelia herself, knew there was little hope now. A skin infection that ‘erupted in her face and is now nearly all o
ver her body’ caused her pain ‘far beyond anything I can describe’, wrote the devoted Mary in September. Knowing that her sister had not long to live, Princess Augusta broke through the cordon of propriety that surrounded Amelia and arranged a final secret meeting between her and Fitzroy. After he had gone, Mary Anne Gaskoin wrote on Amelia’s behalf her last letter to the man she had loved with passionate intensity since she was seventeen years old. ‘The princess had desired me to tell General Fitzroy how very happy his visit of this evening has made her, so much that all words must fail in description. HRH wished me to say how much she had to say, but that it was impossible for her, being so short a time with you.’209 As a leave-taking, it was as poignant in its simplicity as anything else she wrote to her lover, a sparely forceful comment on the ‘cruel situation’ which had blighted her youth and ruined her chances of happiness.
On 25 October, the Prince of Wales wrote to the Duke of York, asking him ‘to come directly here, as well as William and Edward, as Amelia is anxious to see all you three … Pray bring them (if you can find them) with you as quick as possible.’210 Certain that she was dying, Amelia prepared to say goodbye to her family. When she saw the king, beside himself with grief and ‘weeping … all day long’, she gave him a ring which contained a small lock of her hair set under a crystal tablet, engraved ‘Remember me’. She asked him to ‘wear this for my sake and I hope you will not forget me’. The king replied, ‘that I can never do, you are engraven on my heart’, and then burst into tears.211 He was said to be ‘much distressed that she gave nothing to the queen’. Finally, in extremis, Amelia relented and, putting aside the bitterness that had dominated her relations with her mother in her last years, ‘she did at last give the queen a locket’.212
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