For a moment or two the Regent and Mr Adam, who was Mercer’s uncle, reeled round the room together. Then the Prince struck his shoe against the leg of a sofa, fell over and tore a tendon in his foot. Being the man he was, he made a fuss, retired to bed and remained at Oatlands for over a fortnight.
Inevitably, when the story got out, the Prince’s many enemies said that he had obviously been drunk. But, if he had been, Charlotte would have admitted it to Mercer. According to her letters the only guest who got ‘beastly drunk’ was Richard Brinsley Sheridan, remembered now as a playwright but equally well known then as a leading member of the Whig opposition.
Having introduced the Princess to the waltz, clearly the Duchess of York’s next duty was to take her to the opera. The visit was arranged to take place on 22 February the following year, when Charlotte would have passed her sixteenth birthday. Meanwhile the Duke attempted to improve her mind, and perhaps her English, by lending her an anonymous novel, which both he and she believed had been written by Lady Anne Paget.
Charlotte loved it and wrote to Mercer. ‘“Sence and Sencibility” I have just finished reading; it certainly is interesting, & you feel quite one of the company. I think Maryanne & me are very like in disposition, that certainly I am not so good, the same imprudence, &c, however remain very like.’
CHAPTER FIVE
The Radical Princess
AS THE DAY for the visit to the opera approached, Charlotte also agreed to dine with her father on that evening. There was no conflict in this. It was customary in those days to dine before going to the opera or the theatre; the Prince Regent, like most people, dined in the late afternoon.
There were sixteen at the dinner, among them the Duke of York, but not the Duchess, and politicians from both parties, including Sheridan and Adam. As it was bound to do, the conversation turned to politics. When too much wine had been consumed, the Prince launched into a vehement attack on the Whigs. He censured the leader of the Whig opposition, Earl Grey, for not having joined a coalition in the previous year, when he was offered the opportunity, and he censured the Duke of York for corresponding with him about a possible future government.
Until he was sworn in as Regent, the Prince had been an ostentatious Whig himself. At one of his daughter’s birthday parties he had told the guests proudly that he was having her educated to espouse the ideals of Charles James Fox. Once he became Regent, therefore, the Whigs fully expected that, after a year, when he would have the power to do so, he would dismiss the government and call a general election.
By now, however, it was clear to everyone that he was never going to do any such thing. After all, it was the Tory government, now led by Spencer Perceval, that had made him Regent, and it was the Tory government that was winning the war in Spain. It was neither in his interest nor the nation’s to risk a general election at such a moment.
To Charlotte her father’s conduct was nothing short of a betrayal. She was the Whig he once wanted her to be, despite the influence of Tory tutors. She could never be as fickle as he was. As a Whig she was sincere, committed and above all radical. Her letters to Mercer are full of recommendations of Whig pamphlets and journals. Shortly before the dinner she had written to her about what her father and his government were doing to suppress the Roman Catholic majority in Ireland. In a letter so passionate that her respect for grammar and syntax was even less evident than usual, she wrote:
I do indeed feel very very unhappy & uneasy about this business in Ireland; it but too too clearly shows the side he has taken. Good God, what will become of us! Of Ireland! We shall without doubt lose that, & as English people all faith & confidence in their Prince. Don’t call me a croker after all this, nor a republican for saying that the Irish will be justified in anything they do, if their long promised freedom is not granted.
As the conversation at the dinner table became more and more heated, Charlotte became more and more agitated. The Duke of York defended himself. Lord Lauderdale defended Lord Grey, who was no longer welcome at Carlton House. Eventually Charlotte burst into tears, stood up and turned to leave. Sheridan, not yet too drunk not to be chivalrous, left his seat and escorted her to the door.
Back at Warwick House Charlotte composed herself enough to make the short journey to Covent Garden. As she and the Duchess of York entered their box at the opera house, she waved over-excitedly to everyone she knew in the stalls. A few judged her behaviour a little undignified, but to most people it was charming. Then she noticed that the box opposite was occupied by Earl Grey. Here was a chance to tell the world where her political loyalties lay. Having already attracted his attention, she leaned out and, for all to see, blew kisses at the leader of the opposition.
A few days later, after the Whig gossips had spread the story of the dinner party throughout London, ‘dear Lord Byron’, whom Charlotte had been ‘seeing a great deal lately’, wrote a short poem in praise of the Princess who did not yet know how popular she was. It was entitled ‘To a Lady Weeping’.
Weep, daughter of a noble line,
A sire’s disgrace, a realm’s decay —
Ah! happy if each tear of thine
Could wash a father’s fault away!
Weep, for thy tears are virtue’s tears,
Auspicious to these suffering isles —
And be each drop, in future years,
Repaid thee of thy people’s smiles.
Over the next few months the Prince Regent stiffened his loyalty to the Tories. When Spencer Perceval was assassinated by a lunatic on 11 May, he did not call a general election. Instead he invited Lord Liverpool to form another Tory government. But at the same time he grew more and more paranoid about the influence the Whigs were having on his family. He knew that his wife was now being advised by Whigs, and he knew that Mercer Elphinstone was as radical as any of them. So he gave orders that Charlotte and her mother were to see each other as seldom as possible, that all Charlotte’s letters were to be opened and read by his agents at the Post Office, and he told his daughter that she must no longer meet with Mercer or even write to her.
Charlotte managed to obey the last order for all of six months. But it was not an order she could obey for ever – and it was not one that she found difficult to disobey. She was already experienced and accomplished in the art of sending secret letters. The world was full of bribable grooms and sympathetic ladies-in-waiting. On 24 August she wrote to Mercer again, describing herself as ‘surrounded by spies’ and the house in Windsor as ‘a perfect prison’, and recounting the political manoeuvring in which she was being played as a pawn.
As for her mother, the association with the Whigs was no more than expediency. When the Tories were in opposition, the Tories had been her advisers. Now that the Whigs were in opposition, her advisers were the Whigs.
The two closest of these were the brilliant but unscrupulous Scottish lawyer Henry Brougham and a rich, vulgar brewer’s son, Samuel Whitbread. Like the Tories they leaked little stories to the press, representing the Princess of Wales in the best light they could, and her husband, which was easier, in the worst; and they waited patiently for the opportunity to manipulate the relationship to their best possible advantage. It was not a long wait.
Early in October Charlotte went up from Windsor for one of her now rare visits to her mother at Kensington Palace. Since Lady de Clifford was suffering from an eye infection, she was escorted by one of the Queen’s lady companions.
Before they left the Queen gave her companion, Miss Cornelia Knight, strict instructions. ‘Do not let Princess Charlotte go out of your sight for one moment.’
She was equally firm with her granddaughter, telling her ‘not to retire at all’, to which Charlotte answered understandably that she would have to retire to change for dinner and that there was nothing she had to say to her mother that she was not prepared to say in front of anybody else.
But by then the Queen’s caution was no longer necessary. A few weeks earlier Lieutenant Hesse had sailed with his
regiment for Spain.
In the following week the Princess of Wales wrote to the Queen demanding that her daughter should be allowed to visit her more often and threatening to come down to Windsor unannounced if she was not. On the advice of Brougham and Whitbread, who probably wrote the letter for her, she sent a copy to Charlotte.
Innocently, Charlotte told her grandmother. The Queen, who had decided to ignore the letter, was concerned to learn that there was a copy of it. She sent for the Prince Regent. The Prince Regent sent for the Prime Minister. When Charlotte was summoned she told them that she had burned the letter. Somehow, the Prime Minister managed to persuade the Prince and his mother that they were worrying about nothing, and that there was nothing they could do about it anyway.
A week later, however, when Charlotte went on her scheduled fortnightly visit to Kensington Palace, her mother persuaded her to tell her everything that had been said at the meeting. When Charlotte seemed apprehensive, her mother reassured her. ‘She did nothing without good advice.’ And then, after another week, to Charlotte’s bitter amazement, her ‘accurate’ account of the family row appeared in several newspapers.
Using Charlotte and her mother, the Whigs had succeeded in reducing the Regent still further in the eyes of the people. They had forgotten the earlier rumours about the Princess of Wales. To them she was now a thwarted mother as well as an abandoned wife, and the Prince Regent was more than ever a decadent bully.
After that, when Charlotte drove out in her carriage, she was greeted with shouts of ‘Don’t desert your mother, dear!’
In December, when the Prince Regent was due to open Parliament, he agreed reluctantly that it would look bad if he did not invite his daughter to attend. After the ceremony and the speech from the throne, he came out and drove back to Carlton House, through crowds that were at best silent but more often jeered or shouted, ‘Down with the Regent!’ Behind him his daughter drove waving through a wall of cheers and chants of ‘Charlotte! Charlotte! Charlotte!’
By the time the Princess reached Warwick House, she can have been in no doubt. She was now the most popular member of the royal family.
Soon afterwards Lady de Clifford resigned as governess. The continuing eye infection was a good excuse, but she must have known that her lack of vigilance had lost her the confidence of her employer, and that it was probably better to jump before she was pushed. On top of that she felt betrayed by the Prince Regent. When, in accordance with what she saw as her duty, she had passed on information ‘respecting the conduct of a person known to His Royal Highness’, he had promised not to repeat it. But it was now quite clear that he had broken his promise.
When the Regent asked her why she was resigning so suddenly, Lady de Clifford replied, ‘Because your Royal Highness has taught me the distinction between the word of honour of a Prince and a gentleman.’
It was a mistake to insult a man who was known to be a great bearer of grudges. Some months later, to her surprise, the Prince invited Lady de Clifford to a ball. Foolishly she accepted. When the evening came the Prince walked up the group of guests among whom she was standing, greeted everyone else and then turned his back on the crestfallen Lady de Clifford.
As usual Charlotte was only told that Lady de Clifford had resigned on grounds of ill health. Around Christmas she wrote to her innocently at length, telling her how much she missed her, reporting that the Duke of Brunswick had shaved off his moustache and that her father had given her a white Italian greyhound, and ending ‘God bless you, my dearest Lady.’
In January 1813, just after she had celebrated her seventeenth birthday, Charlotte was told that her new governess was to be the Duchess of Leeds and that, since Mrs Udney had also decided to retire, her new sub-governess was to be Miss Cornelia Knight.
Charlotte was furious. No girl of seventeen had a governess. And anyway she was a princess. She ought to have her own establishment by now. She ought to have ladies-in-waiting. And one of them ought to be Mercer Elphinstone.
But this was never an argument that was going to have any effect on her father. In the last of several heated meetings, in the presence of the Queen and the Lord Chancellor, who had been brought along to add legal weight to the Prince’s prejudices, he informed his daughter that the best he was prepared to do would be to describe Miss Knight as a ‘lady companion’ and not a ‘sub-governess’.
‘Besides’ he said, with all the self-deluding confidence of someone who barely knows the half of it, ‘I know all that passed in Windsor Park; and if it were not for my clemency, I would shut you up for life. Depend upon it, as long as I live you shall never have an establishment, unless you marry.’
The Prince Regent was still determined to treat his daughter as a child. But there was not another man in the kingdom who felt inclined to do the same.
Five months later, over eight hundred miles away, Wellington defeated the French at Vittoria and prepared to drive them back over the mountains into France. According to Captain Gronow of the 1st Foot Guards, one of the officers wounded in that battle was Lieutenant Charles Hesse of the 18th, who received his first slash on his sword arm. While he was recovering, Hesse was honoured by a visit from Wellington himself. The General gave him a package that had been sent out from London, apparently by ‘a royal lady’. It contained a beautiful gold watch, a hunter, and there was a portrait of the lady inside the cover.
CHAPTER SIX
‘Protracted Childhood’
‘DEPEND UPON IT, as long as I live you shall never have an establishment, unless you marry.’
The Prince Regent did not always mean what he said, but Princess Charlotte knew all too well that he had been serious when he said that. For her, marriage was the price of freedom. If that was not enough of an incentive to marry the first man who asked her, the regime of the Duchess of Leeds was another.
It was not that the Duchess was in any way strict. On the contrary, she was easy-going and avoided every kind of conflict. She concurred with ‘the Great UP’ at every opportunity. When Charlotte was in London, she only came to Warwick House between 2 and 5 p.m., which gave the Princess the evenings to herself. But she was a boring, graceless, self-important hypochondriac. She was forever telling ‘stories of an hour’s length’ and taking cold showers to wash away her latest ailment. Worst of all, in Charlotte’s eyes, she was ‘a violent Tory’.
The daughter of the Accountant-General to the Court of Chancery, the Duchess had won her Duke’s heart on the basis of her beauty alone, and her exalted new rank had gone to her head. To Charlotte’s embarrassment, she often ‘overacted’ her part and was patronising with people whom she regarded as inferiors.
Even so, the Duchess’s ‘disagreeable’ company might have been worth suffering if her easy-going nature had allowed Charlotte to meet and correspond with anyone she pleased. But protecting the Princess from undesirable influences was the one duty that she tried to take seriously. She was always, as Charlotte put it, ‘keeping close’ to her in public, and, with an air of innocence, the Duchess introduced her fifteen-year-old daughter, Lady Catherine Osborne, into Charlotte’s household.
To everyone outside that household, it seemed ideal that the Princess should have a companion closer to her own age. It does not seem to have occurred to any of them that a fifteen-year-old girl who danced well had nothing in common with a sophisticated seventeen-year-old Princess who looked and behaved as though she were at least twenty. But the people who were actually members of that household were very soon suspicious of Lady Catherine. She asked too many questions, and she was all too often found alone in Charlotte’s room without a good reason for being there. As Charlotte wrote to Mercer, ‘That odious Lady Catherine is a convenient spie upon everybody in the house, with her long nose of bad omen, & her flippant way of walking so lightly that one never hears her.’
Things were not as bad as they could have been, however. The tedious Duchess and her prying daughter were effectively thwarted by the conspiratorial loyalty of Miss Co
rnelia Knight.
‘The Chevalier’, as Charlotte called her, was, like Mercer, the daughter of an admiral. As a child she had met many of England’s leading authors and artists, including Dr Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith and Sir Joshua Reynolds. After her father’s death she and her mother had lived for many years in Italy, where she wrote several books, including a guide to the Roman countryside, Latium, and a historical novel, Marcus Flaminius. When her mother died the almost penniless Miss Knight was offered a home at the British Embassy in Naples by Sir William and Lady Hamilton, and on her return to England she was appointed a lady companion to the Queen on the recommendation of the novelist Fanny Burney, who was also one of Her Majesty’s ladies.
At the end of her entertaining life Cornelia Knight published a long, revealing memoir. But until the day she sat down to write it she was resolutely discreet. She had lived in Naples at a time when Lady Hamilton was conducting her notorious affair with Lord Nelson, and yet she insisted that ‘the attention paid to Lord Nelson appeared perfectly natural’. It was she who checked regularly and caught Lady Catherine so often in Charlotte’s room. Like Mercer, she was a true friend and confidante to the Princess. She was the most reliable of the couriers who carried letters between them, and when the need for security called for it, she even wrote some of the letters herself.
From the moment she set foot in Warwick House, which was, she wrote, ‘falling to ruins’, Cornelia Knight was overwhelmed with sentimental sympathy for Charlotte. When she first went with her to dine with her father at Carlton House, she was initially flattered by the warmth of his greeting and then disillusioned by the way in which he patronised and ignored his daughter. A few days later, at a small gathering in the Duke of York’s apartments, her disillusion turned to indignation when she discovered that she was expected to be as much of a spy and a guardian as the Duchess.
Charlotte & Leopold Page 5