Back at Warwick House, where Mercer was waiting with Charlotte, Miss Knight reported all that had been said. Charlotte and Mercer were disappointed. They had hoped that Prince Leopold was romantic enough to keep his courting a secret, and Miss Knight was dismayed to have discovered that Prince August’s courting was even less of a secret.
Next day, after Mercer had returned from spending the night at her own house, Charlotte sent a note asking her father to come to her. Eventually he came, at six in the evening, accompanied by the ‘Bish-UP’ of Salisbury.
While the Bishop waited downstairs, the Regent went up and saw Charlotte alone behind closed doors in the drawing room. Miss Knight waited in the anteroom where she and the Regent had once waited with the door open. After three quarters of an hour, he came out and summoned the Bishop.
A quarter of an hour after that Charlotte came out, almost hysterical. Her father had now summoned Miss Knight. They had only ‘one instant’ to talk.
Miss Knight followed the Princess into her dressing room. Her father, she said, had decided to dismiss everyone. All the servants were to go, and Miss Knight would be required to leave immediately. New ladies were waiting to take over from her. As soon as possible, within a few days, Charlotte was to be sent to Windsor, not to Lower Lodge, but to Cranbourne Lodge, in the middle of the forest, where she was to be kept in isolation. No one would be allowed to visit her but the Queen, and even she would only come once a week.
The Princess fell on her knees. ‘God Almighty grant me patience!’
Cornelia Knight began to comfort her, but Charlotte insisted that she must go to the Regent before he became angrier.
The admiral’s daughter went into the drawing room and stood defiantly in front of the Regent and his pompous Bishop. He told her what Charlotte had told her already. He asked her to leave at once since he needed her room for the new ladies. When she asked what she had done to offend, he refused to give a reason and said simply that he had ‘a right to make any changes he pleased’.
When she came out of the drawing room Miss Knight was met by Mercer and Mrs Louis, who was weeping. The Princess had run away. Mrs Louis thought she might have gone to Carlton House, but Mercer had heard her say she was going to her mother.
Mercer and Miss Knight went in to tell the Regent together. To their surprise, he seemed rather pleased. He said, Miss Knight wrote later, that ‘he was glad that everybody would now see what she was, and that it would be known on the Continent, and no one would marry her’.
Meanwhile, in Pall Mall, Mr Collins, an architect, was looking out of the window above his uncle’s print shop when he saw a frantic young lady who was obviously in great distress. He went down and asked if he could help her. She asked him to call her a hackney-coach. He found one, handed her into it and watched as it drove away westward and then turned north-west.
Inside the coach the passenger instructed the driver, Mr Higgins, to take her to Oxford Street. When they reached it she directed him to Connaught House, where she told the servant who opened the door to give her driver an extravagant three guineas. It was only then, when he saw the house and the low bow of the servant, that Mr Higgins realised who his passenger had been.
The Princess of Wales had gone to dine in Blackheath. Charlotte sent a groom to gallop after her and bring her home as fast as possible. She ordered dinner, and then she gave quickly-scribbled notes to two of her mother’s coachmen and sent them off to find and bring back Brougham and her Whig uncle, the Duke of Sussex. Each note began with the same words: ‘I have run off.’
The groom caught up with Charlotte’s mother on the road. By 9 a.m. she was back in her own house and sitting down to dinner with Henry Brougham and her daughter. Brougham was not hungry, he had already dined, and he was exhausted. He had been up all the previous night working on a case. When Charlotte suggested that he could at least carve, he told her that the only dish he felt fit to carve was the soup.
Charlotte recounted all that had happened and said that she had run away because she could take no more of her father’s bullying. Her plan now was to stand by her mother and live with her if she could. But it was a plan that her mother met with somewhat less enthusiasm than might have been expected. Unknown to Charlotte her father had offered to increase her mother’s allowance to £50,000 a year, and now that Europe was at peace again, her mother was contemplating exactly what her father had hoped – a little bit of foreign travel.
The party was upstairs in the drawing room when Mercer arrived accompanied by ‘the Great UP’. After Charlotte’s flight, when the Prince Regent went off to join a card party at the Duke of York’s apartments, Mercer and the Bishop had agreed to go up to Con-naught House and try to persuade Charlotte to come home, and Cornelia Knight had refused to come with them because she could no longer bring herself to set foot in a house that belonged to the Princess of Wales.
Mercer was invited up to the drawing room, while the Bishop was shown into the dining room. It was a pattern of precedence that was to be maintained throughout the night. Partisans of the Princess were brought straight upstairs: representatives of the Regent were at best shown into the dining room and in most cases not even admitted to the house.
The Bishop did not have to wait too long, however. He was soon sent back to find the Regent with a note from Charlotte, in which she promised to return to Warwick House provided she was allowed to see Mercer as often as she wished, and provided Miss Knight and Mrs Louis were allowed to remain members of her household.
He had not been long gone when a series of coaches and carriages arrived carrying the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Chief Justice and the other law officers, advisers and privy councillors who had been summoned and sent out by the Regent. To Brougham’s much amused embarrassment, Charlotte merrily instructed the servants to tell them all to wait in their carriages.
Then Cornelia Knight arrived. As soon as Mercer and the Bishop had left Warwick House she had become so anxious about Charlotte that she changed her mind. She would have come after them then and there if she could. She had sent a note to Lady Salisbury explaining the emergency and asking if she could borrow her carriage. But the carriage had not been available until after it had dropped Lady Salisbury at the opera house.
In her memoir, Cornelia Knight wrote that once she was in the drawing room she gave Charlotte her royal seal, a key and a letter that had arrived after her departure. But she did not say who it was from.
The next to come was the Duke of Sussex. He had been dining with friends when Charlotte’s cry for help arrived. It was so illegible that he had stuffed it in his pocket. It had taken a second note from Brougham to bring him.
Outside in the street, accepting that they were never going to be admitted, the law officers, advisers and privy councillors turned their carriages and drove away. Upstairs in the drawing room the Duke of Sussex asked Brougham whether it would be lawful to resist if the Regent tried to take Charlotte away by force.
Brougham shook his head. ‘It would not’, he said.
The Duke turned to Charlotte. ‘Then my dear, you hear what the law is. I can only advise you to return with as much speed and as little noise as possible.’
But Charlotte was not yet ready to take that sort of advice, even though Mercer and her mother agreed with it. She was still waiting for the Bishop to come back with her father’s answer to her note – and Miss Knight was already tired of waiting. She would go down to Carlton House and see what was happening, and if possible she would confront the Regent. Since Lady Salisbury’s carriage had been sent back to the opera house, she went in one of the carriages from Connaught House.
When the impetuous ‘Chevalier’ reached Carlton House she found that all the eminent lawyers who had been waiting for Charlotte outside Connaught House were now waiting for the Regent in his drawing room. He was still playing cards, they said. But they knew that the Bishop had reached him, and that the Bishop was now on his way back to Connaught House.
Suspecting tha
t Charlotte might want to spend the night with her mother, Miss Knight went over to Warwick House and asked Mrs Louis to pack a bag with Charlotte’s nightdress and anything else she might need. When it was done, they set off together in the carriage.
By the time they reached Connaught House the Bishop had delivered the Regent’s answer. Charlotte could go on seeing Mercer, but that was all. It was not enough. The friendly pleading and the obstinacy continued.
Some time between two and three in the morning the Duke of York arrived. He had always been a good friend to Charlotte, and as a Royal Duke he deserved to be received with respect, but on this occasion he was the Regent’s representative. He was shown into the dining room.
If the party upstairs had known that he was carrying a warrant empowering him to take the Princess home by force if necessary, they might have been a bit more cautious. Nevertheless the Princess of Wales did go down to talk to him. When she came back she reported that the Duke had been sent from his own card party to bring Charlotte back to Carlton House. He had not mentioned the warrant.
The night went on. Everybody pleaded. Charlotte, her eyes red with tears, still insisted that she would not go.
At last, shortly after dawn, Brougham led Charlotte to the window and showed her Hyde Park in the early sunlight. There was to be a by-election that morning. ‘In a few hours’, he said, ‘all the streets and the park, now empty, will be crowded with tens of thousands. I have only to take you to that window and tell them your grievances, and they will all rise in your behalf.’
‘And why should they not?’ said Charlotte.
Brougham replied:
The commotion will be excessive; Carlton House will be attacked – perhaps pulled down; the soldiers will be ordered out; blood will be shed; and if your Royal Highness were to live a hundred years, it never would be forgotten that your running away from your father’s house was the cause of the mischief: and you may depend upon it, such is the English people’s horror of bloodshed, you never would get over it.
Brougham had won again. The tearful Princess submitted. She would go back with the Duke of York to Carlton House. But she was a princess, and as such she insisted that she must be taken back in a royal coach. And while she waited for that coach to come she asked Brougham to write a short statement to the effect that she was determined never to marry the Prince of Orange, and that ‘if ever there should be an announcement of such a match, it must be understood to be without her consent and against her will’. When it was written, she asked for six copies to be made, signed all of them and gave one to each person present.
Brougham was deeply impressed. ‘I had no idea of her having so much good in her’, he said.
The carriage came. While everyone else went downstairs to see the Princess off, Cornelia Knight stayed in the drawing room. By her own admission she was too miserable to go.
Charlotte took the Duke of York’s hand and climbed into the carriage. The Duke stepped in and sat beside her. Her mother came forward. The Princess, she said, must be accompanied by her maid. The Duke refused. Charlotte insisted. Mrs Louis climbed in and sat shyly opposite the Duke and the Princess.
They drove down Park Lane, along Birdcage Walk and up the Mall to Carlton House. It had been a long night. But the Prince Regent’s cruelty knew no bounds. The Princess and her maid were kept waiting in the courtyard for half an hour before they were admitted into the house.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
State Prisoner
ON 15 JULY 1814 the Duke of Sussex wrote to the Prime Minister asking why Princess Charlotte of Wales was being held as a ‘state prisoner’ and demanding to be allowed to visit her.
He knew about Charlotte’s condition because he had received a letter from her. It had been written on stolen paper with a pencil dipped in milk, and it had been delivered by a secret postal service that began with the French master, Mr Sterkey, and then ran on through Cornelia Knight and Mercer Elphinstone.
For all that she was living in the comfort of Carlton House, Charlotte was indeed a prisoner. The warders were the Dowager Countess of Ilchester, the Dowager Countess of Rosslyn, her two nieces, the Misses Coates, and one of Charlotte’s former sub-governesses, Mrs Campbell, who, being a Tory, was now restored to favour with the Regent. There was always at least one of them watching her. Even at night one of them slept in her room, or else in the room beside it with the door open.
The only consolation was that loyal Mrs Louis had been allowed to stay on. But even she was as much of a prisoner as her Princess. At night she was required to sleep on a sofa in Charlotte’s room. By day, whatever she was doing, she was always accompanied by two of the Regent’s own servants, one watching her and one guarding the door. When she went across to Warwick House to collect some of Charlotte’s clothes, Lady Ilchester herself went with her and told her ‘there must be no talking or messages’.
The only contact with the outside world lay through Mr Sterkey, Miss Knight and Mercer. Mercer did all that she dared to represent Charlotte’s interests. She was in close touch with Brougham, Earl Grey and the Duke of Sussex – and she was in touch with Prince Leopold.
Leopold wrote to Mercer on 17 July, and next day they met. He was anxious about Charlotte and he was eager to see her. But Mercer held out no hope for him. As she told him in her reply to his note, Charlotte had been so offended by his letter to her father that it had ‘put an end to all possibility of a happier future’.
If Charlotte really was offended that much, it can only have been because her father showed her the letter, or else because the naive old Bishop, who certainly did see it, described the contents to her in detail.
The letter was much more than the simple self-justification that the Regent described to Miss Knight. It was a blunt declaration of intent, combined with fawning flattery and not-too-subtle personal propaganda.
Leopold began by saying that he had only visited the Princess because she had invited him to do so. But he felt now that he might have offended her father by not asking his permission first, and that this was probably the reason for the coldness with which His Royal Highness had received him at a subsequent audience. Nevertheless he still had the confidence to assure the Regent that his intentions were serious, and to insist that, at a more appropriate time, they would be worthy of consideration.
‘Your Royal Highness’, he wrote, ‘who knows human nature so thoroughly, and judges it so wisely, will be too kind to blame me for the desire, but I beg you to be sure that, with a character so cool and steady as mine, I would not dream of making definite suggestions at the present moment.’
It looked as though Leopold was courting her father not Charlotte, and his letter was enough to make August the favourite. Dashing, worldly, carefree August was the one who had been brave enough to write directly, and secretly, to Charlotte; and his letters were apparently so affectionate and romantic that it was too dangerous to do anything but burn them as soon as they had been read.
But for the time being there was little that Leopold could have done anyway. On the day after his meeting with Mercer, Charlotte, her ladies and Mrs Louis were moved down to Windsor, to Cranbourne Lodge, and soon afterwards he received news that Prince Emich Charles of Leningen had died. By the end of the month he was in Bavaria comforting his widowed sister Victoria.
On her arrival at Cranbourne Lodge, Charlotte was alarmed to discover that Lady Ilchester was no longer her ‘chief warder’. She and the other ladies were now under the direction of a male ‘governor’, a seventy-year-old retired general called Thomas Garth. But, to her relief, Charlotte soon formed a good impression of both the General and her new home. The General, she told Mercer, was ‘very good hearted’, even though he was ‘very vulgar in his conversation and language’; the lodge, despite its isolation, was ‘very cheerful’ and ‘far superior to the Lower Lodge’.
Next day the Duke of Sussex, who had received no answer to his letter to the Prime Minister, stood up in the House of Lords and asked him five very w
ell informed questions: was the Princess Charlotte still allowed to receive visits from friends; was she still allowed what he described as ‘the free exercise of her pen’; was she, as he put it, ‘in the same state of liberty as a person not in confinement would be in’; had her doctors recommended a holiday by the sea, and if so would she be allowed to take one; and finally, now that she had reached the age at which she was constitutionally entitled to ascend the throne and rule without a regent, were there any plans to provide her with her own appropriate establishment?
Lord Liverpool declined to answer, on the grounds that to do so would be to accept the ‘disagreeable’ and ‘unnecessary’ implication of the questions.
The Duke was not satisfied. In response, he told their Lordships that he planned to call for a full debate and bring in a motion of censure against the government. But during the next few days he learned from the newspapers that Charlotte had been seen out riding with the General at Windsor, and Earl Grey persuaded him that public arguments were never the best way of resolving private royal quarrels.
The Duke withdrew his motion. The only outcome was that the Regent summoned him to Carlton House, rebuked him loudly, in language that would have shocked even General Garth, and then dismissed him like a servant and never spoke to him again.
In her isolation at Cranbourne Lodge Charlotte was at least allowed to see newspapers. She read that the motion had been withdrawn. The week went by. The sense of being watched was oppressive. The loneliness without the company of Miss Knight or any hope of being allowed to see Mercer was dispiriting.
Then her father appeared, accompanied by the ‘Bish-UP’, and told her with undisguised pleasure that her mother was planning to leave for an extended tour of the Continent. Charlotte would, of course, be allowed to go up to London to say goodbye.
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