Augusta told the regent that her relationship with Spencer had been ‘mutually acknowledged’ some time in 1803. Spencer was then stationed in England, spending much of his time at court, where the couple could occasionally contrive meetings together. In 1807 he was posted to Denmark, in command of a brigade given the task of preventing the Danish fleet from falling under French control. Augusta, anxious for his safety, was delighted to hear that the operation had been a success. ‘Judge what my happiness must have been when we were stopped going up Henley Hill with the intelligence that Copenhagen had really surrendered.’ But, as she confessed to Lady Harcourt, who knew all about the affair, ‘my heart was very ill at ease until I came home and found that all my friends were safe’.60 Spencer was then sent almost immediately to Spain. It is not known whether he and Augusta corresponded during his absence, but the princess devotedly followed his progress in the Peninsular War. The Duke of York, who seems to have been aware of the couple’s affection for each other, was a reliable source of military information, supplying accounts of Spencer’s exploits to his eager sister. ‘We have good reports from Spain,’ she told Lady Harcourt in September, happily recounting accounts of General Spencer’s bravery. He was, she assured her, ‘one of my elite friends in the bunch with you’.61
Augusta knew that the king, whilst he certainly admired Spencer as a soldier, would never have considered him suitable as a son-in-law. Conscious that their mutual attraction could not culminate in marriage, for years the couple had attempted to suppress their feelings for each other. Augusta told the regent that Spencer had offered to ‘give up his situation around the king, or at least to plead his being on the Staff, that he might not come too often where we must meet in circumstances he was aware were most painful to both of us’. Augusta had thought this too extreme; she did not want him to damage his career, and felt that total withdrawal would undermine his ‘private worth’. Instead, she suggested he should come to court ‘as seldom as he could do consistent with that gratitude which he must feel for the king’s marked favour towards him … and he had never deviated from this plan of conduct’. It had been a very severe sacrifice for her not to be in the company of the man she loved; but, as she explained, ‘it was my duty to exert every effort not to express my feelings, both for his own sake and my own’.62
Thus the thwarted couple had gone on, separated sometimes by war and distance, sometimes by propriety, but never apparently varying in their silent, secret devotion. Finally, in the events of 1812, over a decade since their first meeting, Augusta thought she saw an opportunity to transform their circumstances. With her brother regent, she hoped he would agree to an arrangement her father would never have countenanced. That was the purpose of her long, confessional letter. ‘To you we look up, for our comfort and peace of mind. Your sanction is what we aspire to.’ As she was well over twenty-five, in principle, under the terms of the Royal Marriages Act, Augusta could have applied to Parliament to approve her union with Spencer, but like Amelia before her, she seems to have been incapable of defying the known wishes of her father. Instead, she begged the regent, acting in the king’s place, to give his permission for what Augusta called ‘quite a private marriage’. She wished this to be done with the greatest discretion, and may have hoped that the partnership could be properly acknowledged after the king’s death. If the regent was prepared to gratify the couple’s desire, she implored him to inform the queen. Augusta did not seek her mother’s consent, as she knew it was ‘not necessary’; but she did want her blessing. She hoped against hope that it would be given. If Charlotte could be persuaded to look beyond considerations of rank, ‘when she considers the character of the man, the faithfulness and length of our attachment, and the struggles I have been compelled to make, never retracting from any of my duties, though suffering martyrdom from anxiety of mind, and deprivation of happiness, I am sure she will say, long and great has been my trial, and correct has been my conduct’.63
Augusta’s affair had none of the emotional flamboyance of her sister Amelia’s relationship with Charles Fitzroy. Where Amelia had been angrily defiant, Augusta was silently resigned; where Amelia railed against her fate, Augusta did all she could to conceal her frustration. But the single letter in which she sought to explain and justify her love for Spencer is one of the most touching documents in all the sisters’ correspondence. ‘I confess I am proud of possessing the affection and good opinion of an honest man, and highly distinguished character,’ she told her brother simply, ‘and I am sure that what you can do to make us happy, you will not leave undone.’64
It is not known whether the regent agreed to grant Augusta her ‘heart’s wish’. There is no further reference in her correspondence or in that of any of her siblings to the proposed marriage. Gossip circulating in the German courts a few years later maintained that one of the princesses had been recently married, but no evidence survives to confirm or disprove the rumour. After his retirement from the army, Spencer bought an estate at Great Missenden, not far away from Windsor, and became a regular visitor there, in contrast to his tactful absences of earlier times. He was made a Knight of the Bath by the regent in July 1812 – quite a distinction for the son of a country gentleman – and was present at his coronation as George IV. He was certainly regarded with sufficient favour to have accompanied Augusta, Elizabeth and the queen to Bath in 1817, where they had gone to take the waters for Charlotte’s health. It was said that when he died in 1828, he was wearing round his neck a locket with Augusta’s picture in it. But whilst these details suggest a continuance of the devotion he and Augusta had shared for so many years, and perhaps even an informal acknowledgement of it by her family, they do not necessarily imply that a marriage had taken place. If it had, it would have been a partnership of a very unusual kind, for Augusta did not move out of Windsor Castle until after her father’s death in 1820. Whilst she was able to enjoy more of Spencer’s company in the years after 1812, it seems unlikely that Augusta achieved the principal objective of the dignified and moving letter she wrote to her brother in that year – that of becoming Sir Brent’s wife.
Whilst Augusta brooded over the difficulties of her love for Spencer, in another Windsor apartment, her sister Sophia was, if possible, even more unhappy. The illness of her father, to whom she was devoted, had pushed her fragile spirits into the deepest of depressions. Her niece, Princess Charlotte, who knew herself what it felt like to be alone and unloved, was horrified by Sophia’s misery. ‘It is melancholy and very distressing to see how she suffers, and the very visible decline of her health.’ The life she led at Windsor was, Charlotte thought, a major cause of Sophia’s distress. She did not sleep, and was subject to more or less continuous physically disabling ‘spasms’. Her relations with her sisters, in whose company she was obliged to spend her time, were not easy. ‘She is not a favourite with the elder ones,’ noted Charlotte. ‘There is nothing they have not said against her.’65 Sophia herself admitted that she was not, ‘at any time, inclined to be very intimate with females, as they are not always true to each other, and this house abounding with them, all I can do is to steer clear of any intimacy’.66
By 1813, her niece thought Sophia so reduced and unhappy that she wondered if she would survive. ‘I have gradually prepared my mind for her not being long lived, both from her tender and dwindling state, besides which, her sensitive mind and exquisite feeling must have had too many death blows to her spirits or her health ever to recover.’67 Twelve months later she seemed even weaker, and Charlotte was horrified to be told by Dr Baillie that he saw frightening similarities between Sophia’s complaint and the illness which had killed Amelia just four years before. She retreated into a narrow world of her own making, bounded by the privacy of her rooms, from which she rarely ventured. ‘Real misfortune, I am afraid, has given me a degree of suspicion and dread of people in general,’ she confessed, ‘which I am ready to admit I may carry too far.’68 Between 1812 and 1814, she lived a life of total seclusion at Windso
r so severe that it mirrored that of her father.
There were, however, some advantages to Sophia’s retired life. Chief among them was that it excused her from spending time in the unwelcome company of her mother. Although the queen sometimes expressed pity for her daughter’s pathetic condition, her attitude to Sophia’s mysterious illness was generally one of impatience. ‘My odious low spirits is always a bone of contention,’ Sophia observed ruefully, ‘though God knows I cannot help it.’69 Her mother’s attitude was noticed by others in the family, who were saddened by it but not surprised. ‘I perfectly understand all you say about the difficulty of making a certain quarter understand the real state of things,’ wrote the Duke of Kent to Henry Halford, who was treating Sophia, ‘but where there is a natural want of warmth, it is difficult in the extreme to make a proper impression.’70
Isolating herself at Windsor also removed Sophia from scenes even more distressing than the familiar manifestations of her mother’s disapproval. In the world beyond her rooms, the presence of her son, born in 1800 as a result of the affair with General Garth, was becoming harder and harder to ignore. Young Tom’s father had always done all he could to make the boy visible to both the royal family and the curious, fashionable world. When Sophia’s niece, Charlotte, visited Weymouth in the summer of 1814 – where the Garths were also staying – she noted that the general’s son crossed her path ‘fifty times a day’. She saw Tom Garth all the time, riding up and down the sands, passing her carriage, patting the horses in the old general’s stable while the servants and officers ‘look at him and then talk to themselves’. Increasingly embarrassed by the father’s insouciance and the boy’s proximity, Charlotte began to wonder if there was not some plan behind Garth’s behaviour. Brooding over what it all meant, she concluded that General Garth’s shameless promotion of their son was driven by spite and recrimination – his chief purpose to make Sophia unhappy. ‘That not being able to torment her now any longer with the sight, he will continue it upon the relative she loves best in the world – which is me – a sort of diabolical revenge that one cannot understand.’71
It seems unlikely that Garth’s intentions were as complex as Charlotte imagined. He may have hoped the princess would find young Tom as winning and attractive as he did; he was certainly never ashamed of showing the world how much he cherished him. By placing the boy so insistently and conspicuously in the company of one of his royal relations, he may also have hoped for an informal, tacit acknowledgement of his true identity. But whatever his motives, Charlotte was right in thinking that, for Sophia, even the knowledge of such encounters would be unbearably painful. Hidden away in Windsor, Sophia increasingly concentrated her feelings on the few people who penetrated the solitude of her apartment: her brothers, her sister Mary, her niece Charlotte – and her doctor, Henry Halford.
Over the years, Sir Henry had become of far greater importance to the royal family than his title of physician-extraordinary to the king would suggest. During Amelia’s long illness, he had often been asked to manage difficult conversations and broker delicate arrangements, involving himself in matters that went far beyond the usual duties of a medical practitioner. He became a kind of informal family fixer, called upon whenever sensitive subjects required careful handling. When added to the authority he displayed as a trusted doctor, these qualities made him extremely attractive to a woman like Sophia, who was always drawn to older, masterful men. His famously emollient manner – charming, sympathetic and endlessly patient – could not have formed a greater contrast with that of Sophia’s unsatisfactory mother; and, of course, he was one of the very few men entitled to visit her on a regular basis. In the depths of her unhappiest years, Halford became for Sophia something much more than just her doctor. He was her adviser, her confidant, an endless source of consolation and support – and also a man on whom she could lavish a great deal of otherwise undirected affection. In her own eyes at least, Halford was the closest thing Sophia possessed to a lover.
By 1811, their relationship had already gone far beyond that of doctor and patient. In that year she wrote Halford a letter in which all her strongest feelings for him were laid bare. Significantly, she began it just before her mother was due to arrive in her rooms for one of her regular visits. ‘Now it is just past five. I am trying to recover myself before a Great Personage makes her appearance, and to find comfort, I shall write to you, my dear good soul.’ Sophia spent the rest of the evening working on her letter, pouring out her heart in her crabbed, tiny handwriting. When finished it ran to over 1,500 words, a stream of consciousness that captured her thoughts in no order other than the moment at which they occurred to her. It began with the banal – ‘I had my dinner at three. Tried to eat the chicken but it went down very so’ – but soon moved on to her governing preoccupation: the condition of her inner emotional life. Its fragmented observations illuminate some of the strongest traits of her character, from her tendency to self-pity (‘no one ever makes allowances for my feelings’) to her deep sense of isolation (‘I told you how friendless I am … and now I solemnly declare that except for my dear brother, you are the only creature to whom I could open my heart’). She assured Halford it was he who had rescued her from the despair into which she had sunk. ‘How much the difference since I have known you, all my dormant feelings have been roused and I have gained your affection and kindness.’ There is also a hint of the physical desire she felt for this authoritative, attentive man. ‘Your feelings do so consist with my own, and your attentions are so kind and gentle that they half kill me.’ If Sophia sometimes enjoyed seeing herself as a victim, it was often as one overwhelmed by passion. ‘Remember,’ she told him, ‘I can love and not by halves, so pity and forgive me.’
It is hard to know to what extent Sophia’s feelings were reciprocated. She maintained that her affection had grown in response to Halford’s fondness. ‘You gain upon me every hour,’ she told him, ‘and how can it be otherwise, for such kindness I never before experienced. It is so different to everything I have been accustomed to.’ But as with every one of her relationships, she knew nothing could come of it. Halford had a wife and children living in London, and he was far too politic to risk serious entanglement with a vulnerable princess whose reputation was already tainted by sexual misadventure. And yet Sophia’s heart refused to submit to rational objections. ‘I have thought of you a great, great deal. I think till I make myself miserable, and then I know you will scold me. No, I hope not, for I am sure you cannot blame my trying to struggle against impossibilities.’ Perhaps, for all his worldliness, Halford shared some of Sophia’s conviction that they were ‘necessary to each other’s happiness’. He kept her letter till the day he died, when it was found carefully preserved among his papers.72
*
As the sisters passed into middle age, still only partially resigned to their uninspiring futures, it cannot have been easy for them to contemplate the arrival into the public world of the sole legitimate representative of the family’s next generation. Princess Charlotte, the daughter of the warring Prince and Princess of Wales, had just turned fifteen when her father became regent, and it was not long before the question of her future marital prospects very speedily eclipsed those of her aunts. Her youthful eligibility was a visible enough reminder of their humiliating unmarried state; and Charlotte rarely passed up an opportunity to refer to it herself. The sisters were ‘the old girls’, ‘a parcel of old maids’, ‘a brace of very ugly daughters’. Charlotte’s slightingly dismissive references to her aunts’ enforced spinsterhood perhaps reflected her confidence that she was unlikely to follow in their footsteps.
Her expectations were, as she was already aware, very different. As heir presumptive to the throne, the question was not whether she would marry, but only when and to whom. As she was to discover, however, it was more of a struggle than she imagined for a princess to take control of her destiny. Despite her great expectations, she too was to face many of the same struggles for freedom and self-det
ermination that had blighted the lives of her aunts. But Charlotte fought her battles with a very different spirit. As she pitted her will against her father in a way they never would have attempted with theirs, the princesses watched from the sidelines with a mixture of horror, sympathy and perhaps envy; Charlotte was capable of asserting her wishes in a way that, with the possible exception of Amelia, they had never done in the past and could not imagine doing in the future.
Charlotte had been a lively, intelligent child who escaped having the wilfulness educated out of her by the peculiar situation of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Her eldest aunt, the Princess Royal, ascribed much of her later behaviour to ‘the many disadvantages of her education, and from not being constantly under the eye of a parent’. This fateful conjunction meant that ‘she has from infancy, been a little too accustomed to act for herself’.73 After her parents separated, Charlotte lived at first in apartments in Carlton House, under the supervision of her governess, Lady Elgin; but the findings of a ‘Delicate Investigation’ of 1806 changed everything.
The Strangest Family Page 74