Late that night, when the party was over, Charlotte sat down in her room at the Royal Pavilion and wrote to Mercer.
I find him quite charming, & I go to bed happier than I have ever done yet in my life… I am certainly a most fortunate creature & have to bless God. A Pss. never, I believe, set out in life (or married) with such prospects of happiness, real domestic ones like other people. I’m so very grateful at my lot I cannot express it sufficiently to you. All he said was so very charming & so right & so everything in short I could wish. I will report you further progress, but I don’t know if I shall have much time to write again till I get back to Cranburn.
After all that happiness and harmony, however, the letter ended on an inadvertently discordant note. ‘I must not forget to tell you’, wrote Charlotte, ‘that I am desired by him to scold you for your intimacy with Flahaud. He knows him personally & disapproves highly of him, & thinks his acquaintance is likely to do you no good, altho’ he readily admits his many agrements in society.’
Mercer’s letters have not survived, but there must have been resentment, reproach or even more in her answer to that, and it looks as though someone had told her that Charlotte was expressing her own disapproval as well.
On 2 March, Charlotte wrote from Cranbourne Lodge:
You know I must love you always just as much & just the same, independently of who you may live with and what your society may be. I never have presumed & never should think with anyone, however intimate, to interfere with their society, as I do not charge my friends or make them dependent upon that. Therefore for God sake do not fancy I was or ever am in the least angry with your intimacy with Flahaud. What you were told as my having said is a downright lie, as to no one did I ever express myself in that or any other way on the subject, still less ever thought so.
Charlotte was sure that ‘much of the mischief’ had been caused by her father’s latest mistress, Lady Hertford, who was ‘scandalised’ by the extent to which Flahault was being received in society, particularly by Whigs. But she also suspected that her father had helped to start the rumour that she had been criticising Mercer. The Regent had always been wary of Mercer, and he regarded her as a defiant influence. ‘You yourself, my dear love’, wrote Charlotte, ‘must know & have been long aware that the P.R. does and did not like you’.
Yet, despite her wish to disassociate herself from her fiancé’s warnings about Flahault, Charlotte said nothing to oppose or dismiss them. ‘What I wrote to you, my best M., was not from myself but from Coburg. He wished me to tell you fairly that such an intimacy did you harm in the eyes of the world, that he knew him personally both for a Jacobin & a man of bad conduct & principles in regard to women.’
The last bit was probably the true cause of ‘Coburg’s’ disapproval. There was a lot that Charlotte never knew.
In the first place, Flahault had been an aide-de-camp to Napoleon, a post for which Leopold had once applied. Secondly, and more importantly, Flahault had been established in his military career by the influence of his beautiful and powerful mistress, Queen Hortense, who, as the daughter of the Empress Josephine and the wife of Napoleon’s brother Louis, was the Emperor’s step-daughter as well as his sister-in-law. It was Hortense who had fascinated and seduced the young Leopold when he first went to Paris with his brother in October 1807, and it was Flahault who replaced Leopold in her affections and her bed after his departure in March 1808. When Leopold next visited Hortense in Paris, in 1814, there was a three-year-old boy running round the house, the future Duke de Morny, whose father was Flahault. Leopold’s animosity towards Flahault had more to do with envy and rivalry than disdain for his politics and morals.
No matter what anyone said, however, Mercer was much too intelligent and self-confident to be persuaded by prejudice, and Charlotte was obviously aware of her indignation. Her anxiety to retain Mercer’s trust and affection is evident in every letter that she wrote to her during the next two months.
As a mark of her own trust, Charlotte continued to take Mercer into her confidence. At the end of March she wrote:
The P.R. touched upon Hesse’s business with me & begged I would tell it to C., wh. I did after much difficulty one night. He took it uncommonly well & was very kind as he saw me so much distressed… He told me he should tell the P.R. I had told him the affair, wh. he was sorry for, as it was past & long gone by, & should not be thought or talked of any more…
In most of the letters Charlotte was also eager to blame her father for any discord and assure her friend that Leopold meant well by her. At the end of March, when Mercer was hoping to visit her in Windsor, she wrote:
I honestly confess to you I am afraid to ask you to come yet (for ever so short a time) as there is so much jealousy & suspicion as well as misrepresentation afloat. Things are not as comfortable as I could wish them to be or as they ought to be, but indeed I cannot blame Coburg, for I think I never saw a more amiable, affectionate, sensible, quiet, reasonable (or, in short) charming person than he is. But I see his situation will be a most awkward & distressing as well as difficult one, & he feels it himself, for the P.R. is certainly for restricting us considerably as to society & I know he has been poisoning his ears about you.
Leopold, she said, was torn between his indebtedness to Mercer and the need to be deferential to his future father-in-law. ‘C. has a great horror of appearing ungrateful & insensible to you & your kindness, but yet I see the P.R. has been putting him on his guard…’
Yet Charlotte was sure that all the disapproval and distrust would vanish as soon as she and Leopold were married. ‘When we are more together’, she wrote soon afterwards, ‘I really do think that he will be everything that we can wish, as he will see with his own eyes, hear with his own ears, & be convinced of the truth & falsehood of things, for he has a good head & a good heart, & is convinced you are attached to me…’
Charlotte was so desperate to reassure her friend that she even showed her some of Leopold’s letters, although she warned, ‘For God in Heaven’s sake never let it be known or suspected I ever showed you any…’ And the gamble seems to have succeeded. On 11 April she wrote, ‘I am delighted to read your opinion and hear all you say about Leo & his letters. He rises & they do still higher in my estimation & opinion from what your impression of them is.’
There is no knowing how many letters Mercer saw, but there were certainly plenty to choose from. The Prince Regent kept Charlotte and Leopold apart as much as possible. Leopold was in Brighton and Charlotte was in Windsor, and they only met occasionally when Charlotte drove down to the pavilion for dinner. Their courtship, such as it was, was conducted mostly through letters. As their wedding day approached, they were still as eager and optimistic as they had been when they first dined together in Brighton, but, as Leopold readily admitted, they hardly knew each other any better.
Nevertheless, in the planning and preparation for their life together, there was much to keep them busy. In Brighton Leopold spent several hours each day learning English, at which his vocabulary and grammar were soon much better than his pronunciation. But he was still unwell. Meeting up with Charlotte had not, as he hoped, cured everything, and nor had the hot baths which the Regent’s doctor had told him to take every other day. Within a fortnight of his arrival in Brighton he had written to Coburg to ask his personal physician, Dr Christian Stockmar, to join him.
Perceptive, practical and good-humoured, little Dr Stockmar was a highly qualified young physician who had taken over the military hospital in Coburg on the outbreak of hostilities with France. He had then served as a regimental surgeon with the Prussian army, and since the end of the war he had formed a close friendship with Leopold. Within days of his arrival in Brighton he had superseded Leopold’s equerry, Baron Hardenbroek, as his closest adviser. When Leopold and Charlotte assembled their own staff, Stockmar became the Prince’s Secretary, Comptroller of his Household and Keeper of his Privy Purse; he remained his confidant until, many years later, Leopold sent him back
from Brussels to London to become mentor to his niece Victoria.
CHAPTER TWENTY
‘Bless Me, What a Crowd’
AS SOON AS Leopold was naturalised as a British subject, the Prince Regent commissioned him a general in the British army and offered to raise him to the peerage as Duke of Kendal. Leopold refused the dukedom, but this was his only modest defiance. He acquiesced in everything when the marriage contract was drawn up, and he took no part in the financial discussions. That was left to the Regent and his government.
After much debate and indecision, Parliament agreed to provide the royal couple with two houses. Their London residence was to be Camelford House, a meagre brick building on the corner of Park Lane and Oxford Street, which had dark, little rooms, a narrow hall and only one staircase. The house had been the home of the second Lord Camelford, a cousin of William Pitt and a notorious duellist, who had died of a wound there twelve years earlier, after an encounter with Captain Best in Holland Park. Charlotte though it was much too small. ‘It will do for this season’, she told Mercer, ‘but really for the next we must look out for another’.
By contrast, their home was to be Claremont near Esher in Surrey, which Charlotte thought was ‘the most beautiful house and place possible’. She had visited it twice when she first went to stay with the Duke and Duchess of York at Oatlands, and by what looked like good luck, the most recent of its many unhappy owners, Charles Rose Ellis, had put it up for sale because his beautiful wife had just died there in childbirth.
For furniture, silver, linen, china and all the other household equipment, Parliament voted a generous single payment of £60,000, which was almost as much as it paid for Claremont. For living expenses and the cost of their household, Leopold was to be given £50,000 a year, and in addition Charlotte was to have £10,000 a year ‘pin money’ to cover the cost of her clothes and the payment of her ladies and her personal maids.
Charlotte was restrained in the composition of her new household. She settled for six footmen, not eight as her father suggested, and their state livery was to be simple green, not gaudy crimson and green like his. She was also loyal. She kept on many of the people who had been closest to her at Windsor and Warwick House. Among them, Mrs Campbell was to be lady-in-waiting, despite 279 applications for the job; Mercer’s uncle the Rev. Dr Short was to be chaplain; and Mrs Louis, of course, was to stay on as dresser.
Mrs Louis was kept busy as the wedding day approached. Charlotte’s dress, ordered by the Queen and made by Mrs Triand of Bolton Street, did not quite fit; a few subtle alterations were required. But the dress was ready in plenty of time. The ceremony was postponed more than once because of the Prince Regent’s gout.
At last the date was set. It was to be 2 May. On 22 April Leopold drove up from Brighton to Windsor and settled in at Upper Lodge. But he did not meet up with Charlotte until Princess Mary’s fortieth birthday party three days later at Frogmore.
On 29 April everyone set out for London. The Queen and her daughters drove up from Windsor Castle to Buckingham House in a huge, lumbering, old-fashioned family coach. Charlotte, with her ladies in attendance, drove from Cranbourne Lodge to Warwick House in an open carriage drawn by four bay thoroughbreds. Leopold and his gentlemen drove in two of the Prince Regent’s travelling carriages to Hounslow, where they lunched with the botanist Sir Joseph Banks, and then, in a dress carriage drawn by six bays and preceded by outriders in livery, they drove through cheering crowds to Clarence House, where Leopold was to stay until the wedding.
At dawn on the wedding day crowds began to assemble outside Clarence House and all along the Mall between Carlton House and Buckingham House, even though the ceremony was not due to take place until nine in the evening. As if it was any other day, Charlotte spent most of the morning sitting for the sculptor Turnerelli, while friends called in as usual to pass the time with her and inspect the progress of the work.
Early in the afternoon, Leopold drove down in a curricle to Warwick House. After a brief visit with Charlotte he went back to Clarence House, where the crowd was so thick that a footman was nearly crushed to death helping him out of the curricle and several women and children were pushed in behind him as he went through the door. From then until dinner time, the calls of the crowd were so incessant and insatiable that he had to come out onto the balcony every quarter of an hour to wave.
In the evening, while Leopold held a dinner for a few gentlemen at Clarence House, Charlotte went down to Buckingham House, dined with the Queen and then went upstairs to change into her wedding dress. Outside, the escort of Lifeguards assembled, and the band of the Coldstream Guards and a guard of honour from the Grenadier Guards marched down to the courtyard of Carlton House. Inside Carlton House, guests were assembling beneath huge, hot, low-hanging chandeliers in the heavily gilded Crimson Drawing Room, where the ceremony was to be conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Just before nine o’clock, Charlotte came out of Buckingham House, climbed into an open carriage and drove the short distance down the Mall with the Queen sitting beside her and her aunts Augusta and Elizabeth sitting opposite. ‘Bless me, what a crowd’, she said. She had seen the crowds that came to see the Tsar or the opening of Parliament, but she had never seen anything like the mass that had come to watch the wedding of their future Queen.
One of the guests waiting at Carlton House was Admiral Lord Keith, who was there in his official capacity as Deputy Earl Marshal. But he was not accompanied by his daughter. Before leaving Buckingham House, Charlotte sent one of her maids up to Harley Street to tell Mercer how she looked; and after the service she asked one of the guests, Princess Lieven, to do the same. But Mercer was not there to see for herself. It was said that she was not feeling well – and it may have been true. There were five bridesmaids, and the uneven number left a gap and spoiled the symmetry of the bridal procession. Perhaps there were meant to be six.
The reports that Mercer received from the maid and the Princess are not difficult to imagine. Charlotte’s dress cost over £10,000. It was a white and silver slip, covered with transparent silk net embroidered in silver lamé with shells and flowers. The sleeves were trimmed with Brussels lace, and the train, which was six feet long, was made of the same material as the slip and fastened like a cloak with a diamond clasp. She wore a wreath of diamond leaves and roses, a diamond necklace and diamond earrings, both of which had been given to her by her father, and a diamond bracelet that had been given to her by Leopold.
Leopold also wore diamonds. He was dressed for the first time in his scarlet British uniform and he carried a jewel-encrusted sword that had been given to him by the Queen. Not to be outdone, the Prince Regent was dressed in the uniform of a field marshal smothered in the badges of all the honours and orders that he had had the gall to give himself.
The ceremony was short and dignified – except for Charlotte’s slight giggle when Leopold promised to endow her with all his worldly goods. When it was over, Charlotte and Leopold stayed only long enough for the guests to drink their health. Then they left to change. Church bells pealed. Bonfires were lit. Field guns cracked their salute in St James’s Park, and far down river the cannons at the Tower of London boomed.
Charlotte did not rejoin the guests. Instead she went straight down the private staircase from the state apartments to the courtyard, where Leopold was waiting with a few members of her family and her household. Her dress was now a simple travelling dress, but her white satin bonnet was trimmed with lace and carried a plume of ostrich feathers, and over one shoulder, in the latest fashion, in the manner of a hussar, she wore a white pelisse with ermine collar and cuffs.
Leopold handed Charlotte into their new green carriage and then climbed in beside her. Then the Queen, forgetting for a moment that they were now married, barked at Mrs Campbell to get in and ride with them as chaperone. For the only time in her life, Mrs Campbell disobeyed a royal command. The royal couple drove off alone to Oatlands, which the Duke and Duchess of York had
lent them for their honeymoon.
The celebrations went on for several days, not just in London but in every town and village and every tavern throughout the kingdom. The poet laureate, Robert Southey, surpassed himself:
From every church the merry bells rung round
With gladdening harmony, heard far and wide
In many a mingled peal of swelling sound
The hurrying music came on every side.
Then he called on Heaven to bless the marriage ‘with all a wife’s and all a mother’s happiness’. But in the last two stanzas he changed his mood discordantly and described a dark, ghostly figure who came to remind Charlotte that she would one day be Queen of England and that in the end she would be answerable to God for how she ruled her subjects.
‘Hear me, O Princess,’ said the shadowy form,
‘As in administering this mighty land
Thou with thy best endeavours shalt perform
The will of Heaven, so shall my faithful hand
Thy great and endless recompense supply.
My name is DEATH, the last, best friend am I.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
‘The Perfection of a Lover’
ON THE SECOND day of her honeymoon at Oatlands, where the ‘unwholsome’ air of the house was ‘infected & impregnated with the smell & breath of dogs, birds & all sorts of animals’, Charlotte wrote to Mercer. Leopold, she said, was ‘the perfection of a lover’, although she went on, ‘I cannot say I feel much at my ease or comfortable yet in his society, but it will wear away I dare say, this sort of awkwardness.’
It would have been difficult not to feel awkward on a honeymoon that was anything but private. Although they did their best to keep out of the way, Leopold was accompanied by Baron Hardenbroek and Dr Stockmar, and if Charlotte had not resisted her father’s pressure, she would have been accompanied by Mrs Campbell as well.
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