Dora explained to George that his father had ‘found it necessary to make some retrenchments in the family’ and thought it prudent not to mark the day. Instead, the Queen graciously gave a fête at Windsor for him, and the Princesses presented him with some plate. What did Dora think of this? She is careful not to say; but she does tell her son that she is quite alone. The August sunshine is especially lovely over the park, she wrote, but Frederick has gone back to school, Henry is at sea; Tuss has been invited to his first party and Sophy has a message for her brother, but they are evidently absent, as are all the others. She does not say where they are; perhaps the Duke has taken them to see their aunts at Windsor. ‘Even Mely has taken her flight, & the house is so still, that it does not appear like Bushy.’19 It made an eerie end to the summer.
There were reasons, if not excuses, for the Duke’s behaviour. The royal family was in a sad state. Princess Amelia was dying, slowly and agonizingly, from tuberculosis. The other Princesses were all miserable in varying degrees: Princess Sophia described them as ‘poor old wretches… old lumber to the country, like old clothes, I wonder you do not vote for putting us in a sack & drowning us in the Thames.’20 The King, now over seventy, was blind and sinking into madness again, reopening the question of a regency. The Queen had every reason to be unhappy; and indeed Dora expressed her sympathy to the Duke for his mother’s afflictions on several occasions, and shed some tears over them too.
The Duke was drawn closer to his mother and sisters by their unhappiness. He was with them more, and they welcomed him and, however cautiously, his children. While she still lived, Princess Amelia sent messages to George and Henry, and Sophy and Frederick were at Windsor when she died. Sophy was very kindly received by her aunts, the Princesses, and invited to attend the funeral. She did so, rather to her absent mother’s consternation, because Dora thought it would upset her; Dora had, however, prepared mourning for all the children before going away again. Sophy was not distressed by the funeral, but her life became confusing. She and her father were now invited together to functions from which her mother was debarred. They went to stay with the Devonshires and Bessboroughs at Chiswick House, for instance, where there was waltzing every night, and the Duke made everyone laugh with his imitations of the Queen’s outrage on hearing that Napoleon had married the Emperor’s daughter: ‘My Got! My Got! what will this come to? – the oldest House in Europe married to an Emperor of yesterday. My Got! My Got! married to nothing – he has no blood in his veins.’ The Duke might mock his mother for insisting on the importance of blood, but Sophy saw that it was not entirely a laughing matter; her own blood put her in a very uncertain position.
Her mother had no blood in her veins at all, but she was generous. Dora realized that, if the Duke’s children were to take their place in his world, she must let them go into it without her. So she sang Sophy’s praises to him as ‘charming in mind and person’, said she would make a clever and accomplished woman, and encouraged the Duke to let her entertain for him. ‘She is now old enough, to receive your friends – do Love, oblige me in this it is what I have long wished,’ she wrote about this time, adding ‘company may amuse you too… I assure you it would give me great pleasure, during my absences.’21 As a practical mother, she also urged him to give her daughter a proper dress allowance. Dora was right about Sophy; she was found to be just as charming as Dora said, and was welcomed into society.
The elder girls’ problems were of a different kind. Lucy, the reasonable and sweet-natured, who had said she would never marry, suddenly announced she had accepted a proposal from the Duke’s friend Colonel Hawker. He was a man of good family and well-to-do; he was also approaching fifty. Perhaps that was his charm to a fatherless twenty-one-year-old. Considering her mother’s history, and Fanny’s unsatisfactory marriage, and the Marches, Lucy may have reasoned that it was safer to be sensible than passionate; and considering the world in general, it also seemed better for a woman to be married than not. Like her fictional contemporary, Jane Austen’s Marianne, she settled for flannel waistcoats and emotional calm.*
Lucy was married at Hampton Church in April, in the presence of her mother, Henry and Sophy. Dora wrote, using her public voice, ‘he is a most excellent man, and has a very good private property: she will make the best of wives – a better girl never yet lived: it makes me quite happy’.22 What she felt privately is another matter; a few months later, after Hawker had carried Lucy off to Portugal as he rejoined his regiment, she wrote, ‘I miss poor Lucy who has in her heart a Soldier and ought to have been a Colonel.’ Dora wanted all her daughters to marry; she had never considered any other path in life for them, but this remark suggests that, when she thought about it, she saw that Lucy’s capacities were greater than her opportunities.23
Fanny took over as her travelling companion, but where Lucy had been a support Fanny was more of a worry and a drain on her emotions. Alsop had become increasingly quarrelsome; he was ambitious and dissatisfied, and made Fanny suffer for it. She thought of trying to become a concert singer, or even following her mother on to the stage; Dora discouraged her as strongly as she could. Fanny was eager to help by looking after Dora’s costumes, but there were disquieting aspects to her character. One night, without telling her mother, she poured ‘white poppy syrup’ into her bedtime wine and water; it was intended to give her a good night’s sleep, she explained later. Dora said it had done her no harm, but Fanny’s easy dispensing of poppy syrup – laudanum – was disturbing.
As Christmas approached again, nothing was quite right. Dora expected FitzErnest to stay with them, but he was not allowed to. Sophy’s pious governess-companion, Miss Turner, fussed about whether she should stay over the holiday, driving Dora to a rare outburst of temper:
Miss Turner writes to Fanny today that you have asked her to stay over Christmas, but will not decide what she is to do, till she hears that it is agreeable to me, what nonsense… I hate those unnecessary over refinements, if she will not squeeze my hand, or sit on my lap, she is heartily welcome to remain as long as it pleases you, or dear Sophy finds pleasure in her society.24
Fanny in turn was uneasy about whether the Duke really wanted her at Bushy for Christmas. Even Dora’s servants were giving trouble, accusing each other of sexual misdemeanours and trying to embroil her in their feuds: the respectable Miss Sketchley, who sometimes looked after the children and sometimes travelled with Dora, accused Thomas of having women in his room. Since he was married, and the gossip got back to his wife, he was furious; he retorted by telling Dora he had found Miss Sketchley waiting for him in his bed at lunchtime one day. This is the world of Tom Jones rather than Jane Austen, but Dora was past seeing the funny side. Her letters this winter are full of anxiety and uncertainty, as though she sensed the approach of something bad, and as though those around her sensed it too.
And when it came, the Christmas of 1810 was ‘far from what it used to be – thoughts of those absent spoiled all’.25 George, Henry and Lucy were away. The Duke and Sophy were often out, sometimes until five in the morning if they had been to a ball, and then slept all day. The weather was cruel. The news of the King was bad, and the Prince of Wales was preparing to become Regent at last. Dora was home for a month, then set out for Bath, this time with no daughter for company. Arrived in Bath, she had a painful fall during a farce. She ate her meals alone: ‘the servants are attentive and kind to me, but servants are not friends or children’.26 Still her children were her consolation: Mary was a good little correspondent, Eliza too, Lolly was ever faithful, and always wanted to hear about her work in the theatre, her costumes, the other actors and the characters in the plays; to amuse him she kept up a joke about naughty Lord Foppington who got locked in the coal cellar. You can see from her letters to the little boy what a good and attentive mother she was, even in her absence.
She was given a moment of unexpected and overwhelming happiness during this Bath season, when George suddenly walked into her dressing room out of the blue
. He had been given leave from Portugal, and decided to visit his mother before doing anything else. His good looks put all the young actresses in a whirl; he went out to buy ‘a whole cargo of Toys’ for his brothers and sisters. Then, with his mother watching and laughing, he went for a swim in the medicinal waters, with a straw bonnet on his head. She never forgot the joy of that moment in which her two lives fitted together for a brief two days.
He could not stay long, and she had to go on to Worcester and Coventry. On her way back to Bushy, she hoped to meet the Duke in the old way at Maidenhead; she was disappointed – he had a previous arrangement – but another of her sons made up for it. She spent the night with ‘dear Frederick’ instead: ‘he desires to sleep in my room, and I do not feel inclined to refuse so gallant an offer’.27
She was a loving mother, but not a foolishly doting one. She lectured George on the dangers of smoking and drinking, and roundly told him bear-baiting was cruel ‘and nothing can justify cruelty’. A few weeks after her happy meeting with him in Bath, she sent him two angry letters on the subject of his inattention to his father and, more important, the bills he was running up. She warned him solemnly, for his father’s sake and for his own good name, never to live beyond his means or to subject himself to ‘the insults of tradespeople’. She went on, ‘I feel the smart of this every day, tho’ not on my own account. Alsop has ruined himself and consequently poor Fanny by his unpardonable extravagance.’28
The list of her worries now was almost as long as the list of her children. Lucy was in Portugal, pregnant, and due to have the baby before she could return to England. Henry’s detestation of the navy had become so strong that, despite his father’s surprise and discomfiture, and after many eloquent pleas by his mother as well as himself, he was at last allowed to leave; now, at fourteen, he was going to Marlow to prepare for the army instead. Nine-year-old Lolly, willing or unwilling, was due to take his place in the navy and went off to school with Frederick: ‘poor Lolly, but I think and hope it will do him much good, my Tus, is now my only boy, for from the moment they go to school, they begin to forget their mothers’, she wrote, quite wrongly as it turned out.29 The Marches had a baby daughter and another on the way; they were again sharing a house with the Alsops. Sophy and Mary were doing the social rounds with their father; the Prince Regent gave Sophy a dress to wear to Carlton House, where he was planning a fête more splendid than any yet given.
Now, when Dora was at Bushy, the Duke avoided being there except on Sundays. When she left, she wrote, ‘I believe when I am out of the gate at Bushy Park I am very soon forgot. Well, I cannot help it – it is only a continuation of my strange fate.’30 When she was due to return, she found things no better. She wrote from Yorkshire at the end of August 1811, ‘If you are all to be out the 3rd Sept I will put off my return till the 4th, for I dont like to come to an empty house after so long an absence.’31 The tranquil pleasures of domestic happiness had taken their flight from Bushy.
17
‘My dear Mother… a Most Injured Woman’: 1811
‘My dear Mama,’ wrote George from the army headquarters in Portugal to his mother as she toured Yorkshire in the summer of 1811,
Lucy sailed on the 14th for England and cried at parting with me… I am soon to have my troop [i.e., become a captain]… Father suggests the poor old King will soon be dead… I hope to God I shall see you soon… Sophia I suppose is so proud tell her when I come home I will not Chapron her… tell her I understand walzes are going on in London and if she does so I shall be under the necessity of shooting all her Partners – It’s not proper for a woman… I wish I was with you and Lucy to talk over our Campains – Give my love to all the children but [by] the by you are away at present – I hope the King will leave Papa a good round sum – Let me know all about it – Henry writes me word Papa expects something prodigious I trust in God he will leave him a good deal.1
Dora must have laughed at her soldier son’s letter, naïve, affectionate, short on spelling and punctuation; sighed at his anxiety about money; and smiled too, with pleasure and pride. She had sent him the family news, about the Prince Regent inviting Sophy to his fête at Carlton House and giving her an elegant dress to wear for the occasion; about Frederick riding in Windsor Great Park with his friendly cousin Princess Charlotte of Wales and their aunts, Princesses Augusta and Sophia, a bishop in attendance – his father had roared with laughter on hearing this; about the cricket in the park at Bushy; about Henry enjoying his army training at Marlow, Lolly about to go away to school, her own eagerness to see Lucy with her baby. What else? His father’s asthma attack had been less severe this year, but she had kept all his royal uncles informed, and they had responded kindly. She herself had played at Covent Garden for ten evenings in June, warmly greeted by the London audience, which had not seen her for two years: evidently the Duke had relented on this point.
George’s understanding that the ‘poor old King’ was dying was mistaken, though the mistake was general; in truth he had only retreated into a private world of madness and had another nine years yet to live. But the Regent now ruled, and the fête at Carlton House to which Sophy was invited was given to mark his assumption of power. This was the party that enraged the young Shelley by its blatant extravagance – it cost £120,000 – when so many of the Prince’s subjects were without work, and suffering and starving. Dora was not on the guest list of two thousand. She probably did not expect to be; Mrs Fitzherbert did not attend either. Sophy went on her father’s arm, and was introduced to a pretty young woman who was attracting much attention. Her name was Catherine Tylney Long, and she had just come into a spectacularly large fortune. The Duke was immediately struck by her, and by the possibilities she suggested.
Soon after this Dora set off for Yorkshire, where George’s letter reached her. The contrast with fashionable London could hardly have been greater. Tate Wilkinson’s son John was doing his best to keep the old theatre circuit alive, but audiences were poor this year, both because of fears for the King’s life and because so many were out of work. Pit- and gallery-goers could not afford tickets, and the gentry felt it disrespectful to visit the theatre at such a time. She and Wilkinson did their best, but it was hard going. She played in Leeds, taking lodgings out of town, beside the peaceful ruins of Kirkstall Abbey, opposite a farmhouse where she could go in and out without being seen, ‘one of the solitary pleasures I enjoy’. In York she also enjoyed visiting an old actress who had been kind to her when she was a girl in the 1780s; she was now ‘past 80, but cheerful and very pleasant. I let her have the newspaper every day and she walks out with me in the fields.’2 She also visited the asylum, meant to be a model of its kind, with distressing results. One of the inmates had an obsession with the royal family, and when he found out who she was he ‘grew outrageous’ wanting to speak to her, and ‘the poor devil was locked up’.3 Later Dora was told he had tried to kill himself, and she blamed herself as ‘the wretched, the innocent cause’: this was the black side of fame and royal connections.4
Although audiences improved gradually at Harrogate and Wakefield, Wilkinson was in such difficulties he told her he could not pay what he had promised her. Reluctantly she decided she must agree to go to Cheltenham later in the month. Yet her letters had touches of light-heartedness. In one she described Thomas proclaiming, as he took her letters to the post, ‘Here go letters to the best man and finest fellow that ever blood warmed.’ She added, ‘the next time he came into the room I could have given him a squeeze – but it would have been a very innocent one’.5
At Bushy the finest fellow that ever blood warmed was not at all himself. He was brooding over Miss Long and his future. For nearly twenty years he and Dora had been a married couple in all respects but the legal and religious. They were held together by profound mutual affection, by absorption in their children, by all the joint activities of their home. Here they shared a bed; here they joined in family prayers; here she had given birth to his sons and daughters, the elde
st now seventeen, the youngest four; here too she had helped to carry out all his plans for the house, the garden and the farm. He respected her for her character and her judgement; she relied on his good temper and his fidelity, and never quite lost her sense of wonder at being chosen by a prince, and giving grandchildren to the King.
Common interests and pleasures held them together, and were reinforced by their social isolation; because their position was anomalous, they depended on each other more than couples who could mix freely with their peers. He might visit his family without her, enjoy bachelor dinners and sometimes yearn for the navy; and she might go on tour, and entertain her theatrical colleagues in London; but to both of them the family at Bushy was always the centre and heart of life.
Now the Duke’s ideas were changing. He was in his mid-forties, an age at which even the staunchest of men sometimes feel they must seize a second chance of happiness before it is too late. He had the example of his friend Colonel Hawker before his eyes, carrying off young Lucy, with a dowry into the bargain. Dora had passed child-bearing age and may sometimes have seemed more like a mother than a mistress; in the last two years she had been away a great deal, leaving him to mope alone. Brooding on these things, he could summon up the knowledge that his mother had always disapproved of the relationship on moral and religious grounds; from time to time, bishops had been dispatched to talk to him about his way of life, not unnoticed by Dora.
Then, when his brother became Regent and took stock of the situation of the whole family, he almost certainly encouraged the Duke to think about changing his situation. There were financial incentives: Parliament would grant more money to a married prince. There were also dynastic ones: the royal family could do with some more legitimate children, there being still only the one – Princess Charlotte – in the younger generation. Unlike his mother, the Prince Regent cared not a straw for morality. He quite liked Dora and greatly approved of her children; on the other hand his liking gave none of them any reason to expect favourable treatment. He himself had seen no harm in ditching mistresses and making an advantageous marriage, so why should his brother not do the same? As far as that went, there was nothing to stop William keeping a mistress and taking a wife too.
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