Charlotte had understood from her earliest days what marriage meant for someone in her position: ‘In our high situation, we do not marry as others.’ Her eventual partnership would be a pragmatic alliance rather than a love match. But what her mind had long been schooled to accept, her heart often refused to acknowledge. ‘There is a tone of romance in her character, which will only serve to mislead her,’ predicted Charlotte Campbell gloomily.102 It was true that Charlotte was an avid consumer of novels and verse. Like so many other women of her generation, she was mesmerised by poetry, particularly that of the quintessential Romantic bad boy, Lord Byron. Charlotte read everything he wrote. ‘The Corsair was out yesterday, and I had the first that was issued, and devoured it twice in the course of the day.’103 She had fallen upon The Bride of Abydos with the same enthusiasm. When a new portrait of the brooding poet was made available as a print, she immediately bought a copy, and spent a lot of time gazing at it. ‘I admire it so very much, and think it so very beautiful. I try to trace the man and his mind in it, but cannot; it belies what he is, for it looks so loving and so loveable and something so very much above the common sort of beauty or what is regularly handsome.’104 Dark, dramatic heroes attracted her; and so too did romantic heroines governed by passion rather than propriety. ‘Sense and Sensibility I have just finished reading,’ she enthused to Mercer, ‘I think Marianne and me are very alike in disposition.’105 Neither her father nor grandmother would have been very gratified to hear Charlotte liken herself to a character led astray by her love for an unsuitable man, but the desire to follow her affections rather than the dictates of prudence ran very deep in her. It was to shape her life profoundly over the next few years as she attempted to balance two apparently contradictory visions of her future. On the one hand, she knew that marriage offered what she wanted most – emancipation from the petty tyrannies and destructive self-interest of her parents – but she found it hard to contemplate a partnership in which love and attraction played no part; and all but impossible to accept that she would have little or no role to play in selecting the man with whom she would spend the rest of her life.
Charlotte felt this all the more acutely as she already had some experience of how exciting a love affair could be. Her name had been linked with that of the handsome Captain George Fitzclarence, an illegitimate son of her uncle, William, Duke of Clarence, who was often seen riding alongside her carriage in the park. She was later attracted by the fabulously wealthy Whig peer the Duke of Devonshire, though when taxed on it by her father, denied vehemently that she had ever written him a letter addressed to ‘my dear, dear Duke’. She was first flattered and then irritated by the attentions of Augustus D’Este, the son of another of her uncles, Augustus, and the unfortunate Lady Augusta Murray. He stood pining beneath her windows, and hid behind pillars at church in an attempt to catch a glimpse of her. When D’Este wrote her ‘a formal declaration of the most violent passion possible sealed with a royal crest, that was too far’, and she complained to his father. Her most serious attachment was with yet another of her many illegitimate cousins. Captain Charles Hesse was the son of the Duke of York and a German lady. Charlotte met him when she was sixteen, and he was serving with the 8th Hussars. They took rides together; there were flirtations and, later, private assignations. More worryingly, there was also correspondence. Charlotte told Mercer that ‘on first setting out’ she and Hesse had agreed ‘to burn all letters, which I did most strictly, for certainly they were much too full of protestations and nonsense not to have got him into a most desperate scrape if ever seen’. But it was Charlotte who ran by far the greater risk – especially as she suspected Hesse had not kept his part of the bargain. ‘I suppose he has kept them,’ she wrote glumly. She asked Mercer to try to get the letters back, but Hesse was fighting abroad and did not reply to requests. Hesse was, as Charlotte fully understood, a very bad choice for an affair, and she referred to him guiltily – he was ‘this unfortunate folly of mine’, ‘my weakness … the most wrong thing possible’.106
Conscious of having made a mistake she might regret with one man, Charlotte was unresponsive when she was first approached with the suggestion that she marry another. It was in the summer of 1813 that the Hereditary Prince of Orange, the heir of the Dutch royal family, was suggested as a husband for her. The proposal, which would unite the interests of two Protestant dynasties, was favoured by the government and also by the regent, who was now convinced that if his daughter was not settled soon, she might find herself in serious trouble. He knew nothing as yet about Hesse; but he had heard the rumours about Fitzclarence, and returned continually to the subject of the Duke of Devonshire. Throughout the autumn, Charlotte was badgered and hectored by almost every member of the family to accept the Orange match. She continued to resist, explaining that she had ‘not the smallest inclination to marry at present as I have seen so little and I may add, nothing of the world as yet, and I have so much before me in prospects that for a year or two it would not come into my head’.107
Parcelled off as ever to Windsor when her will was to be worked on, she was resistant to all her aunts’ protestations of the hereditary prince’s many sterling qualities. ‘It is very unpleasant being exposed to the observations of a set of ill-natured spinsters who only regret not being young enough to seize upon him themselves.’108 When the regent arrived to add his arguments to those of his mother and sisters, Charlotte was still unmoved. He father was furious, complaining she was subject to ‘a constitutional perversity in temper and nature which nothing can now correct or eradicate’ – which was, he supposed, hardly surprising ‘when we reflect and recollect that part of the stock from whence this has sprouted forth’.109 Finally, the ubiquitous Sir Henry Halford was pressed into action, to offer Charlotte a medical perspective on her suitor. ‘That with regard to looks, he was not at all of the Dutch make; that if he was too thin, he would fill out, if he had bad teeth, that might be remedied; and that as to his being fair, that had nothing to do with manliness of character, for though he might look delicate, yet there was quite as much character as in a dark man. He then added language, which, I do assure you, I never heard from anyone, and certainly never expected to hear but in a book,’ an incredulous Charlotte told Mercer. ‘When he saw I looked severe, he turned it off with a laugh.’110
Then, quite suddenly, a week after her encounter with Halford, Charlotte changed her mind and agreed to see the prince. Perhaps she had been worn down by the arguments directed at her for the better part of a year. Perhaps she was encouraged by reports that the prince was ‘very manly, shy but not awkward or forward, but master of the subjects you talk to him upon’. She had also been told that ‘he is lively and likes fun and amusement’.111 They were to meet at a dinner held at Carlton House on 12 December 1813. Just before the event began, she was cornered by her father, who bullied her into making an extraordinary commitment. He ‘extracted a promise from me to give him my fair and undisguised opinion of him after dinner, for that my answer must be given that night one way or another with no hesitation’. Filled with trepidation at the prospect of having to make a decision on a potential husband in the course of a single dinner, Charlotte spent an anxious evening trying to assess the character of the man sitting next to her. She did all she could to be generous. He was undoubtedly very plain, but he ‘presented himself gracefully’ and was ‘so animated and lively that it quite went off’. At the end of the meal, the regent took Charlotte into an anteroom to find out what she thought. ‘I certainly hesitated for a moment, but he was so alarmed that he cried out, “Then it will not do!” But when I said he was mistaken, and that I approved what I had seen, he exclaimed in the greatest agitation, “You make me the happiest person in the world!”’ Inviting the Prince of Orange into the room, the regent took the hands of the nonplussed couple in his and ‘affianced them’ on the spot.112
Initially, Charlotte seemed content, if somewhat uncertainly so, with her decision. Further meetings with the prince had conf
irmed his essential decency and his regard for her. ‘Our tempers and minds will, I think, perfectly suit,’ she told Mercer on 16 December. She liked his frankness and affectionate nature, and was especially touched by his desire ‘to be on a good footing with all my family, to keep out of their quarrels and disputes among themselves’.113 She wrote again a few days later. ‘To say I am in love with him would be untrue and ridiculous,’ she acknowledged, ‘but I have a very great regard and opinion of him, which is perhaps better to begin with, and more likely to last than love.’114 On the 20th, she was more sombre, describing her forthcoming marriage as ‘at least a change for the better, as I shall no longer be confined, or obliged to submit to every caprice of the prince or his family’. It would also keep her ‘out of a thousand scrapes and désagréments’; beyond that, her expectations were moderate. She hoped that ‘we shall be very good friends always, but as to love that can never have any share at all’. It was, she told Mercer, ‘much wiser to crush at once all wishes or hopes and feelings which never could have ended in anything’. Was she thinking of Hesse, perhaps? Or the Duke of Devonshire, who had featured so frequently in her letters that year? ‘At least the one I wished to have married, the prince [i.e. her father] would never have consented to.’115
As the months passed, and the formal negotiations ground slowly on, Charlotte’s mood became more and more troubled. She was convinced her father ‘had used me ill and deceived me through the whole affair’.116 The Princess of Wales did nothing to assuage her daughter’s misgivings. She opposed the marriage, insisting that the Orange family were all violent intriguers of the worse kind. The hereditary prince himself had returned to Holland, and was no longer present to remind Charlotte of the qualities she had admired in him. And above all, she had been horrified to discover that she would be required to spend at least part of every year in her husband’s territories. Her fiancé had attempted to reconcile her to the idea with promises of travel, ‘to Berlin, or anywhere I might like in Germany’; but she grew increasingly determined that she would not leave Britain. As heir presumptive, she protested it could not be right for her to absent herself from the country she might one day rule. She asked to see a copy of the marriage contract, and demanded that a clause be inserted guaranteeing her right not to be forced to live in Holland. The Dutch government reluctantly agreed; but Charlotte was too far gone now to recover any of the initial enthusiasm she had felt either for Orange himself or the marriage. On 16 June 1814, she met the hapless prince and announced to him that she considered the engagement over. ‘I am of the opinion,’ she explained ‘that the duties and affection that naturally binds us to our respective countries render our marriage incompatible … I must consider that our engagement from this moment to be entirely and totally at an end.’117
Charlotte could not have chosen a more humiliating moment to announce that she had scuppered her father’s cherished marriage project. Representatives of every major European power had arrived in London to celebrate the signing of the Treaty of Fontainebleau that marked the victory of the Allied powers over Napoleon. The regent had looked forward to presiding confidently over a glittering parade of elaborate and status-enhancing dinners, balls and fêtes. Instead, he was defied by his eighteen-year-old daughter, and forced to endure the amused condescension of an army of crowned heads, most of whom were also his relations. His state of mind was not improved by learning that Charlotte had been receiving regular, and, if rumour was to be believed, unsupervised visits from one of the more attractive delegates, the sophisticated, worldly and untrustworthy Prince Augustus Frederick of Prussia.
The regent determined to take control of a situation he could no longer endure. On 12 July, he arrived in person at Charlotte’s Warwick House home. Announcing that ‘all was over’, he dismissed Cornelia Knight and all Charlotte’s servants. His told his daughter she was to stay the night at Carlton House, after which she would be sent to Windsor, to a small house where she would live under the direct supervision of the queen; new and more responsible ladies would be appointed to attend her. ‘God almighty, grant me patience!’ expostulated Charlotte. Whilst her father was turning away her household, Charlotte, acting on the spur of the moment, seized the opportunity to slip away. She ran outside, found a hackney carriage and drove immediately to Connaught Place, where her mother was staying. ‘I have just run off!’ she told the incredulous inhabitants.118
Once she arrived, no one knew quite what to do with her. The Princess of Wales summoned Henry Brougham, her legal adviser; Augustus, the Duke of Sussex – whose early experiences had given him some understanding for those whose emotional lives came into hard collision with the royal will – was also asked to come and help. But whilst they listened to her complaints and sympathised with her predicament, both Brougham and Sussex offered the same advice: Charlotte must return to Carlton House. She could not, they assured her, be forced into marriage; but it was impossible for her to defy the authority of her father, who had the right to tell her where she must live. Whatever argument Charlotte advanced, their answer was the same. In the end, tired and tearful, there was nothing for Charlotte to do but submit. At five in the morning, the Duke of York arrived and took her back to Carlton House. From there, circumventing measures designed to stop her communicating with outsiders, she managed to write a note to Mercer. ‘No ink or paper in my room. I stole these few sheets.’ Yesterday had been ‘such a dreadful day as no one can conceive’. She told her friend she was to be sent down to Cranbourne House, in a remote part of Windsor Great Park, the next day. She was allowed no books and the ladies put about her were ‘stupider and duller than anything’. She did not know what would happen next. She was adamant that she would not, under any circumstances, be persuaded to change her mind about the marriage. She prepared herself for a campaign of emotional attrition of a kind she had experienced many times before. But this time, things at Windsor were not to turn out quite as she expected.119
At first, she was anxious and fidgety, convinced ‘they will force down my throat that nasty, ugly, spider-legged little Dutchman when I will not have him’. She was shocked beyond measure to be told by the regent shortly after her arrival, with evident satisfaction, that her mother had decided to leave the country and live abroad. The Princess of Wales declared she had endured enough of her husband’s persecution, and was resolved to live a freer and, as it turned out, even more eccentric life abroad. She did not seem to have given much consideration to her daughter’s plight. Charlotte, who had always tried valiantly to see the best in her mother, was bitterly disappointed. The princess had not even taken the trouble to arrange to see her before she left. ‘She decidedly deserts me,’ concluded Charlotte. ‘I must say, what goes most to my heart (for after all, she is my mother, and she does share it) is the indifferent manner of her taking leave of me.’120
Charlotte was very miserable. Her marriage prospects had evaporated, her mother had abandoned her, her father regarded her with ill-disguised hostility, and she was again confined amongst people she thought disliked her. Then, against all expectations, her female relations began to treat her quite differently. Mary called upon her, and listened quite calmly to Charlotte’s version of the ending of her blighted engagement. She told her niece that she regretted things ‘having gone so far as they did, but if I could not be happy and we did not suit, it was much better that it should be over, for she did not see why I was to be unhappy, or more so than any other person, because I was a princess’.121 Even her grandmother, usually so unbending, was ‘remarkably good-humoured and gracious to her’. Charlotte suspected the Princess of Wales’s departure had something to do with it. The queen ‘begins to have her eyes opened … and to see that the regent only used her as a catspaw. Her oracle Princess Elizabeth says the same thing, so I hope she will continue as she has begun.’122
It was certainly true that her grandmother’s attitude changed considerably when her aggravating daughter-in-law was removed from the scene. The queen seemed able to see
Charlotte more clearly, to appreciate her as a personality distinct from her overbearing and often alarming mother. In these new circumstances, Charlotte’s virtues became more and more apparent. ‘You do not see Charlotte at all to advantage,’ the queen told the regent in September. ‘She is quite different with us, I assure you.’ Her son disagreed: ‘she appears to be half in the sulks’. The princess’s standing with the sisterhood was also transformed. She was, she told Mercer, now ‘a great favourite’.123 The queen’s main objective was to see her son and granddaughter on better terms; harmony was not to be obtained, however, at the price of resuscitating the Orange engagement, for which the ‘female council’ at Windsor had lost all enthusiasm. It had always been the prince’s project; he had not consulted his mother about it before pushing it forward and, now that it had failed, the queen wanted to hear no more about it, telling her son that ‘she would take no more orders, or directions, or have anything to do with his arrangements’.124 Soon, she declined to discuss it all, and reassured Charlotte that she would do nothing to promote it. ‘There are things that one cannot talk of, and the more one does, the worse they are … Now, let us be done with that foolish subject.’125
Despite the conciliatory atmosphere that prevailed at Windsor, Charlotte still did not feel able to confess the source of her unhappiness to the queen and her aunts. As only Mercer knew, it arose, in part at least, from unrequited love: she was still passionately attached to the feckless Prussian, Augustus Frederick. ‘I think and think and think about how it will all turn out till my head gets quite bewildered.’126 When he returned to Germany, they corresponded, with Mercer acting as courier. His letters kept hope alive in Charlotte’s heart: ‘A man must mean something by writing as he does.’ She wondered if she should propose to him, although she acknowledged it would be very difficult, ‘shy as I am, to confess my partiality or my sentiments to him’. She thought of him continuously, but disclosed nothing of her feelings to any of her family: ‘I begin now to have my feelings under perfect control. Adversity has taught me that necessary lesson. I can go down now and appear as calm as possible, with a smile even on my face when often I have been low and crying or sighing above.’127 In fact, when she did decide to make a grand confession, it was not about Augustus Frederick at all – it was about Captain Hesse.
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