Charlotte & Leopold

by James Chambers

  Throughout those months there were no letters. There is therefore no record of what they discussed. But there is no doubt that one of the most important topics was the rumour that Mercer mentioned in one of her last letters from Scotland.

  In her reply Charlotte wrote that she too had heard it. Perhaps, if the Princess were willing to pay it, the price of freedom would soon be available.

  It was being said that the Prince Regent and his ministers were planning to arrange a marriage between Princess Charlotte and the Hereditary Prince of Orange.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘Slender Billy’

  BACK IN 1795, while Charlotte’s mother and Lord Malmesbury were held up in Hanover by the fighting in Holland, the Dutch Stadholder and his family had escaped to England. But his eldest son, Prince William VI, who succeeded him as head of the House of Orange in 1806, did not like England or the English. He blamed his British allies for abandoning his army as soon as the French returned to the attack. After only a few months in London, he left for Prussia, where he spent the next twelve years attempting to ingratiate himself with Napoleon.

  Since Napoleon had made his brother Louis King of Holland, it was never likely that he was going to give it back to the House of Orange; in 1807 Prince William realised at last that it would be wiser to hedge his bets. He may not have liked it, but he had to accept that, if Napoleon were ever to be defeated, the people who were most likely to help him were the British. He approached Lord Malmesbury, who had once been British Ambassador at The Hague, and suggested that the natural alliance between Holland and England should be strengthened by a marriage between his son and heir, known as the Hereditary Prince of Orange, and the heir presumptive to the throne of England, Princess Charlotte.

  Malmesbury could see the benefits. Britain’s security would be greatly enhanced if the state that lay between England and Hanover were tied irrevocably to the British crown, and if the Dutch fleet were to be combined with the Royal Navy, Britannia’s rule of the waves would be unassailable. It was a good idea, and it was not, after all, a new idea. At the end of the seventeenth century the son of the Stadholder had married the daughter of the King of England, and they had ruled England jointly as William and Mary.

  Encouraged by Malmesbury, the Dutch Prince decided to prepare his son for this possible opportunity by sending him to Oxford to get an English education. In 1811, after Charlotte’s father had become Regent, the Prince of Orange flattered him by consulting him about his son’s future: it was agreed that the young man, now twenty years old, should be commissioned into the British army. So when he came down from Oxford, the Hereditary Prince of Orange went out to Spain, to serve as an aide-de-camp to Wellington.

  By the spring of 1813 the tide had turned against Napoleon. Everywhere his armies were falling back towards France. In the north, the Russians and Prussians were driving them southwards. In the south, Wellington and his allies were driving them northwards. The monarchs and statesmen of Europe were beginning to plan for the peace that was now within their grasp.

  From the British point of view, the best way to maintain that peace was to create a strong ‘buffer state’ separating France from Prussia, and the ideal state for that was Holland. But Holland would have to be strong enough to withstand any initial threat, and stable enough to remain reliable. To make it strong enough, why not increase its size by incorporating part of the Austrian Netherlands, in the area that is now Belgium? To make it stable, why not give it a constitutional monarchy, like England’s, and make the Prince of Orange a king instead of just a stadholder? And to extend the buffer even further, and make the new state susceptible to British influence, why not arrange a marriage between neighbours – between the ruling families of Holland and Hanover?

  So that was the plan. The Prince of Orange was delighted. He was going to be a king, and king of an enlarged kingdom as well. It was more than he could have dreamed possible.

  But so far no one had bothered to mention it to the future Queen of England or the Prince who might one day succeed his father as King William II of Holland.

  Nevertheless there were too many whispers. Charlotte was sure that the plan was true, and she was in two minds about it. On the one hand the Hereditary Prince of Orange came from a family that her mother ‘detested’, and Charlotte would never ‘be tempted to purchase temporary ease by gratifying the Windsor & Ministerial cabals’. On the other hand, if the Prince had enough ‘qualities of the head & heart’ to make him ‘likeable and desirable’, he offered a chance to change her life for the better, even if ‘love’ was ‘out of the question’.

  All that was certain for the time being was that Charlotte was prepared to give the plan a chance. But her first experience of the House of Orange did not leave her with a good impression.

  It was on 12 August, at the Prince Regent’s birthday party – the one to which Charlotte went without a present. The party was held at Sandhurst, the new home of the Military Academy. In the morning ‘the Great UP’, now Bishop of Salisbury, consecrated the chapel, and the Queen presented new colours to the cadets. In the evening, the entire company sat down to dinner. The royal family and the guests of honour, including the Prince of Orange, who was in England to negotiate his son’s future, sat at a table inside the house, and all the other guests sat in tents in the grounds.

  According to Charlotte, the only man in the royal party who was not ‘dead drunk’ was her favourite uncle, the Duke of Brunswick. In the course of the evening the Prince Regent slid silently under the table, where he was eventually joined by the Prince of Orange, the Commander in Chief and almost all his ministers. By the time they got there, the dishevelled Prince of Orange had managed to discard his coat and waistcoat, most of the ministers were incapable of speaking and the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, was in such a state that, by his own admission, he could not remember next day where he had been or who he had been with.

  The last to fall was the Commander in Chief, the Duke of York, who did so by rolling backwards out of his chair, banging his head against a wine cooler and pulling the table cloth and everything on it on top of him. He was revived by the Duke of Brunswick, who poured iced water over his head, and he was then sent back to London in a post-chaise, wrapped in a greatcoat.

  When the Queen left, she was kept waiting for ‘a full half hour’ while various nervous equerries searched for her host and helped him out to see her into her carriage.

  In Charlotte’s opinion, the double celebration of the opening of Sandhurst and the Prince Regent’s birthday ‘began badly and ended in tragedy’. Miss Knight agreed. ‘It was a sad business. We went home very quietly in an open carriage by the lovely moonlight.’

  Two days later Charlotte described the chaos in a letter to Mercer, who was now back in Scotland, and two days after that she wrote again, reporting that Wellington had defeated the French in the Pyrenees and was advancing into France, and that the news had been brought to London by the Hereditary Prince of Orange.

  Charlotte was sure that the Prince had been summoned to meet her, and in support of this she recounted a conversation that had taken place between her and ‘a Government person’ at Windsor. According to this unnamed minister, it was being said that Charlotte had ‘persistently refused’ to consider her planned marriage to the Hereditary Prince of Orange.

  Charlotte was incensed by his impertinence and infuriated to learn that she was already being blamed for her response to a plan that had not yet even been put to her. So she decided to tease the minister and add a red herring to his rumour. Without denying what he had said, she told him that she much preferred the Duke of Gloucester.

  ‘Good God’, said he. ‘I can hardly believe you are serious.’

  When he then reminded her that she could not marry without her father’s permission, Charlotte answered that ‘nothing was so easy as to make a publick declaration that I never would marry anyone else’.

  The trick worked. The ‘Government person’ was clearly ‘both sur
prised & frightened’.

  ‘I was rather amused I confess’, wrote Charlotte, and she ‘laughed heartily’ after he was gone.

  But in reality she felt threatened. Even the government was gossiping. She went on the defensive. She declined to attend every event at which she thought the Hereditary Prince of Orange might be present. But she was curious enough to ask about him, and she learned a bit from one of his dancing partners, Georgiana Fitzroy. The Hereditary Prince was apparently ‘very gentlemanlike, well informed & pleasant’ and he was ‘the best waltzer that ever was’. But he was also ‘excessively plain’ and ‘thin as a needle’. Georgiana thought that Charlotte would find him ‘frightful’.

  Had Charlotte but known it, the Hereditary Prince was as apprehensive as she was. It was a relief to both of them when he went back to Spain after less than a month without being introduced to her. But she still felt that the plan was brewing, and she knew that she was being watched more closely than ever. Lady Catherine Osborne was everywhere. For a while Charlotte and Miss Knight had avoided being understood by her by talking to each other in German. But Lady Catherine, who had her own governess, had learned enough German to make out what they were saying. So now they were talking to each other in Italian, and Lady Catherine was busy learning that from a music master.

  One night, when Charlotte found ‘her little Ladyship’ loitering yet again in a dark passage, she lost patience, pushed her into the water closet, locked the door and kept her there for a quarter of an hour. ‘It did for a good laugh to Miss K & me’, she told Mercer, ‘as the young ladies dismay was not small, & her assurances thro’ the door very amusing’.

  At last, on 14 October, while Charlotte was still isolated at Windsor, she had her first ‘sounding out’ about marriage. It came from Sir Henry Halford, who spent ‘a full hour and a half’ with her, asking her opinion and praising the Hereditary Prince of Orange.

  Charlotte could see that things were ‘coming to a crisis’, but she was a long way from being ready to commit herself. She tried a trick that she had tried before. She told the doctor that she was ‘resolved firmly’ not to accept the Hereditary Prince of Orange and that she much preferred the Duke of Gloucester, who was after all an Englishman.

  The trick worked again. Sir Henry believed her. When he took his leave, he told her solemnly that he would have to report all that she had said to her father.

  As she told Mercer, Charlotte would have much preferred this to have happened when she was back in London, where it would be easier to get good advice. But she shrewdly wrote to the leader of the opposition, Earl Grey, asking him to tell her what to do.

  Four days later the Prince Regent appeared at Lower Lodge. Since Charlotte had to change for dinner at Windsor Castle as soon as he left, Cornelia Knight wrote to Mercer that evening to tell her what had been said, and Charlotte followed with her own letter next day.

  They were both ‘shocked & disgusted’ by the language that the Prince used to describe the Duke of Gloucester, despite the persistent protesting of Miss Knight. ‘It was so excessively indecent’, wrote Charlotte, ‘that I hardly knew which way to look’. They were also indignant when he accused his daughter of being regularly drunk, and then added that she could not possibly have fallen for the Duke of Gloucester if she had not been. But they were amused when he suggested that her affection for the Duke Gloucester might just be a ruse to disguise her true and equally unacceptable fancy for the Duke of Devonshire. And they were both suspicious at the end when he became magnanimous. There were plenty of eligible princes to choose from, he said, and then assured them that he was not the sort of man who would force his daughter to marry anyone against her will.

  ‘The fluency with which he utter’d falsehoods’ left Charlotte ‘convinced that there does not live one who is a greater coward or a greater hypocrite’. But, as Mercer had advised, she held her tongue.

  Next day, a long letter arrived from Earl Grey. The leader of the opposition’s advice to Charlotte was to do what she was doing already – play for time.

  There was only so much time left to play for, however. Charlotte knew that she would have to make some sort of decision soon. The word was out. The Gloucester story was common knowledge. The marriage of the Princess Charlotte of Wales had replaced the relationship between her parents as the principal topic for gossip. Several newspapers were asking, ‘Will she choose the Orange or the Cheese – “Slender Billy” or “Silly Billy”?’

  Yet there were plenty among the people and the press who still favoured the Duke of Devonshire rumour. Several journalists and cartoonists had suggested that the Regent and the Tories were offering Charlotte to the young Duke in order to tempt him and his money away from the Whigs.

  The story that the Princess had fallen for the Duke of Devonshire was strengthened by Lady Charlotte Campbell, who said that there was a portrait that looked very like him hanging on a wall in Warwick House. Although Miss Knight told her that it was not the Duke, Lady Charlotte insisted to everyone that it was, and indeed it may have been, or at least it may have looked like him. In her memoir, Cornelia Knight mentioned that there was a print of one of the Dukes of Devonshire hanging among many others at Warwick House. But Lady Charlotte was not very good at guessing the subject of portraits. There was also a miniature of a young hussar in Warwick House, which the Princess said belonged to her father, but which Lady Charlotte reckoned was probably George FitzClarence, and in that she was almost certainly wrong. If the Princess owned a portrait of an unnamed hussar, he was more likely to be Charles Hesse.

  Princess Charlotte had not yet completely recovered from her ‘unfortunate folly’. On one occasion she wrote to Mercer,

  I feel rather uncomfortable I confess about an engagement I see by today’s papers that has taken place between the French and the 18th Hussars in wh. two Capts & a Major I know are killed and wounded, & it says that two subaltern officers are killed also. Were anything to happen to our friend I should feel it excessively, as it is impossible not to do for a person one has been so intimate with.

  But the folly was also a problem now. As Mercer pointed out, if Charlotte decided to marry her Prince, and if her mother continued to oppose the wedding, she was not above trying to stop it by revealing her daughter’s relationship with Charles Hesse. And if she needed evidence to prove her story, she could probably persuade the little hussar to part with some of Charlotte’s letters and presents.

  When Hesse set out for Spain, he and Charlotte had agreed to burn all their letters to each other, and Charlotte had done so with his, ‘for certainly they were much too full of professions & nonsense not to have got him into a desperate scrape if ever seen’. But she was pretty sure that he had not done the same thing with hers. So by the time Charlotte returned to London, at the beginning of November, Mercer had written to Lieutenant Hesse, asking him, as a man of honour, to send back everything that Charlotte had ever given or sent to him.

  By then it was clear that the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte was drawing to a close. He had been defeated at Leipzig by the armies of Russia, Prussia, Sweden and Austria. Wellington had invaded France. Charlotte’s favourite uncle and his Black Brunswickers had recovered their duchy. The Russian cavalry had reached Holland and the French army of occupation was withdrawing ahead of them. Napoleon’s brother was no longer its king.

  Not surprisingly, therefore, at the end of the month, Charlotte wrote to Mercer, ‘My torments & plagues are again beginning again spite of all promises made at Windsor. I have had a violent orange attack this morning.’

  ‘The little baroneted doctor’ was on the offensive again. The Hereditary Prince of Orange was returning from France to Holland. He would be passing through England. The Prince Regent was planning a dinner for him. It was now Charlotte’s duty to meet him and consider a marriage that could play such a vital part in the security of the realm. In pressing his case, the doctor reminded her that the marriage would bring her ‘power, riches and liberty’. He had an answer for e
very objection. If the Prince was too thin, he could fill out. If he had bad teeth, they could be fixed.

  The Prince Regent joined the campaign, but this time in a different way. He was more respectful and warm-hearted with his daughter than ever before. Twice in the course of the next week he invited her to dine at Carlton House with his most distinguished guests, among them Prince Lieven, the Russian Ambassador; Lord Castlereagh, his brilliant Foreign Secretary; and Madame de Staël, the greatest of France’s women writers, who he knew was one of Charlotte’s heroines.

  Others lent their support, reminding Charlotte that there were many, including, it was said, Wellington, who had a high opinion of the young Prince of Orange.

  Charlotte the young lady could be very stubborn. But Charlotte the princess had a sense of duty. On 8 December she wrote to Mercer: ‘I have agreed without any demur or hesitation to see the young P. when he comes & as much as they please, because I am for doing all that is fair by them & indeed giving the young man a chance too.’

  She accepted that a marriage would be greatly in the interest of both their countries, particularly since the Austrians were ‘being jealous respecting their share of Holland’. But she did have one reservation. If she married the Prince she would not be prepared to accompany him when he went to Holland.

  ‘As heiress presumptive to the Crown it is certain that I could not quit this country, as Queen of England still less. Therefore the P of O must visit his frogs solo.’

  The Hereditary Prince of Orange landed at Portsmouth on 10 December. Next day Charlotte received a letter from Mercer, who had gone down to have a look at him as he came ashore. He had made a favourable impression. It was a relief. Mercer’s opinion meant more than anyone’s. It has, wrote Charlotte in reply, ‘eased me of 100,000 worries’.