by Flora Fraser
The following year, the new King, anxious to secure both a companionable consort and the succession – of his four brothers and two sisters then living, none as yet was married – seized on Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz to be his queen. She was a seventeen-year-old princess of’very mediocre education’, according to the reports, from an unimportant north German Duchy, and spoke no English. Hence, ran his thinking, unlike grander brides, ‘being isolated, she could never involve England in affairs of the Continent’. The Queen was only too happy to adhere strictly to the line that the King had instructed her to follow in politics on her arrival in London – not to meddle. ‘Having been brought up without pomp and in the simplicity of a small court,’ as a diplomat informed the French Foreign Minister, Choiseul, ‘she has no knowledge of politics, and no idea of intrigues, or of the interests of Princes.’
The English found her ‘plain’, criticized her complexion as sallow, and noticed her spreading nostrils and mouth, but the marriage was an immediate success; an astute courtier observed that they had an immediate air of pleasure in each other. To his delight the King and his new, submissive Queen appeared to agree on all things, especially the need to live a good Christian life.
Within a year of his marriage, in 1761, the King had an heir, George, Prince of Wales. Within two years he had shown himself a patron of the arts, embellishing the new Queen’s House with libraries and with collections of paintings from Italy. And when, by September 1766, Queen Charlotte, speaking accented but fluent English, was a mother of three sons at the age of twenty-one and heavily pregnant with her next child, they could not fault her fecundity.
But the weekly drawing rooms and levees over which the King and Queen presided at the ancient palace of St James’s, emphasizing England’s power, where all was splendour and formality, were exhausting. And party politics were a further minefield for the inexperienced new sovereign and his consort to circumnavigate while they built their marriage – of vested landed interests and patronage centring around the powerful Whig and Tory families. In the six years since his accession, the King had had five different administrations – led, in turn, by the Duke of Newcastle, the Earl of Bute, George Grenville, the Marquess of Rockingham and, since July, William Pitt, newly Earl of Chatham. These changes brought, in turn, five Oppositions to contend with. And the King could hardly be blamed for wishing for a little domestic comfort in such trying circumstances.
The Queen was a great favourite with her ladies, and, even if she might have wished for more gaiety, she still sparkled in the small domestic setting her husband imposed on her. ‘She is timid at first,’ according to a report on her character, ‘but she talks a lot, when she is among people she knows … She is capable of friendship and attachment to those who attach themselves to her.’ The beneficiaries of the Queen’s entertaining commentary on Court life or of her remarks on the books she consumed were her ladies at Court who had travelled abroad and imbibed Enlightenment ideas, like Lady Charlotte Finch, or who were foreign themselves, like Lady Holderness, the Dutch wife of the eldest princes’ new governor. With these intimates the Queen carried on a rattling, vivacious correspondence which might well have surprised her husband or even her children accustomed to their dependable but somewhat austere mother. ‘The Queen did not see this,’ she wrote in a postscript to a particularly lively letter to one of her ladies in which she had commented on some absurdity of Court life.
In the year 1767, the Duchess of Northumberland wrote with admiration of the royal nursery arrangements: ‘The Queen sees everything, but says nothing.’ This was by marked contrast with the King, who was prone to go up and check on his sleeping children at six in the morning, to the discomfiture of their half-dressed attendants. No detail of their life was too small to interest him. But just as he knew every facing of every military uniform and did not know why the American colonies were rumbling with dissatisfaction, so he had no particularly good grasp of his children’s different personalities.
A remarkable portrait that the artist Francis Cotes created in early 1767 of the Princess Royal asleep in her mother’s lap shows how the child must have appeared in her first year of life. ‘The Queen, fine,’ wrote Horace Walpole in the margin of his catalogue on viewing the painting exhibited at the Society of Artists show later that year, ‘the child, incomparable … The sleeping child is equal to Guido.’ In November 1767 a new son, Prince Edward, displaced Royal as the baby of the family when she was just thirteen months old.
Unfortunately for the Princess Royal, even before Prince Edward’s arrival the Queen’s careful childcare arrangements were a distinct failure in the first year of her eldest daughter’s life. For Lady Charlotte, that incomparable governess who apart from anything else spoke ‘the purest Tuscan’ following youthful years in Florence, was suddenly consumed by her own concerns and those of her children. Not only was she dealing in her few hours of private life with the trauma of her husband’s death, and with the management of her four children, but the health of her beloved eldest daughter Charlotte was failing, and her case increasingly resembled that of Frances, the daughter who had died two years earlier from tuberculosis.
When the Princess Royal was weaned from Mrs Muttlebury’s ample bosom in April 1767 on to a diet of pap, she found no Lady Charlotte Finch in command of a highly organized nursery. The royal governess had embarked on a desperate and ultimately unsuccessful tour of watering holes with her eldest daughter. Mrs Cotesworth, the sub-governess, was left in charge of a bevy of nurses who dealt as well as they could with the demands of the royal children. The Prince of Wales told Lady Mary Coke that the Princess Royal ‘lived at the Lodge [in Richmond] with the Queen and … was extremely pretty.’ But until Lady Charlotte returned in November, having buried Miss Finch, the royal nursery – with three children under three, and the Prince of Wales and Prince Frederick five and four respectively – was in a degree of confusion.
Order, restored with the grieving Lady Charlotte’s return and further improved when a French mademoiselle was taken on to assist with the Princess Royal, came under threat again soon enough. For six days after Prince Edward’s first birthday – he was born on 2 November 1767 and named after his lately deceased paternal uncle Edward, Duke of York – the Queen gave birth to a second daughter. As a sense of injury was to be one of Edward’s most developed characteristics, it is perhaps appropriate that he had an opportunity to experience it so early.
Princess Augusta Sophia, second of the daughters of George III and named after her paternal grandmother and after her mother who was christened Sophie Charlotte, was born on 8 November 1768. Anatomist Dr Hunter again hovered in the adjoining room, while Queen Charlotte went through her travail at the Queen’s House with a female midwife. It was an extremely swift labour, lasting an hour and a half. But then Princess Augusta was the King and Queen’s sixth child – and besides, in a long life, she never gave anyone any trouble if she could help it. The labour was not without another kind of incident. The waiting father was extraordinarily eager that the child about to enter the world should be a girl – so much so that Dr Hunter, anxious that, if it occurred, the repugnant alternative should not be regarded as his fault, protested. ‘I think, sir, whoever sees those lovely Princes above stairs’, the doctor ventured, ‘must be glad to have another.’ ‘Doctor Hunter,’ the King replied, ‘I did not think I could have been angry with you, but I am; and I say, whoever sees that lovely child the Princess Royal above stairs must wish to have the fellow to her.’ The agitated King then interrupted his wife’s labour to repeat the dialogue to her. The Queen was no doubt relieved to give birth to a small and pretty girl, a foil to the Princess Royal, who was destined to be among the most loved and loving of the royal children, and to win the grudging respect of one with no liking for the House of Hanover as ‘certainly the best of the whole family’.
Princess Augusta was in later life to display an eye for the absurd that marked her out. An incident that occurred during a public re
ception at St James’s Palace shortly after her birth is worth recalling in that context. Traditionally, a few days after members of Society had paid their respects, members of the public came to enquire after the health of the royal mother and child, and were rewarded with ‘cake and caudle’. The latter was a mixture of thin gruel and wine served to women in childbirth and to their visitors. Traditionally also, the throngs – mayors and corporations included – who passed through the chambers of the Palace were ludicrously greedy. At the ‘enquiries’ for Princess Augusta, two young ladies, having drunk deep of the caudle, made a bid to carry off ‘a large quantity of cake, and some of the cups in which the caudle had been served up’. Detected, the inebriated misses were allowed to go free after a severe reprimand, and after begging a pardon on their wavering knees.
Princess Augusta was swiftly absorbed into the ebb and flow of royal family life, and was so accommodating as to spend her first Christmas – with her wet-nurse and brother Edward – at Lady Charlotte Finch’s apartments in St James’s Palace, while the Princess Royal and Prince William were inoculated against smallpox, a disease that was often fatal if caught, at the Queen’s House. Lady Charlotte, never having had smallpox, customarily remained with those royal children who had not yet been inoculated. Lady Mary Coke visited the Queen’s House on Boxing Day 1768 and found Prince William ‘excessively full’ of spots, while the Princess Royal had ‘not twenty all over her’. She told her correspondent that she was surprised to find the Princess Royal a healthy child, ‘for instead of colour in her cheeks there is a yellow mark, which I should never think denoted health.’
In defiance of Lady Mary’s pronouncement, Princess Royal was back at her lessons with her French teacher, Mile Anne Dorothée Krohme, without delay. Her education, destined to be a great source of pleasure and interest to her, had begun when she was a mere eighteen months, in the spring of 1768. The King and Queen, however, had shown a bewildering lack of manners in ‘poaching’ Mile Krohme from their intimate friends the Holdernesses, who lived across the river from Richmond at Sion Hill where she was their daughter Lady Amelia d’Arcy’s beloved governess.
’The whole was transacted’, wrote Lady Mary Coke, ‘before any notice was taken to Lord and Lady Holderness; that is to say, the proposals were first made to Mile Krohme, which seems, I think, a little strange, and does not, I think, please them.’ It was indisputably in the English royal family’s interest that the Princess Royal should speak and write French fluendy. Later she herself was to ask repeatedly of a niece’s governess: ‘Do not you soon intend getting in somebody in playing to accustom her to hear French spoke? If she does not learn early, she will never acquire the accent ...’ For the Princess Royal was destined for marriage on the Continent, and to a great Protestant prince, where French would be the language of the Court, regardless of whether German or another tongue was the language of the country. Presumably anxiety on this point led the royal parents to treat their friends the Holdernesses with such unusual discourtesy.
Within a few months, as it turned out, the hijacked Frenchwoman returned to her own country. ’She says herself for only a short time,’ reported the vigilant Lady Mary Coke, ‘but others think that a melancholy in her temper, which has been observed by their Majesties, made them think her improper to educate the Princess Royal, and that she is not likely to return.’ A substitute was found in the form of Mlle Krohme’s cousin Julie, who proved thoroughly popular, as she acted as the Queen’s unofficial secretary as well as her daughters’ French teacher.
The Princess Royal’s memory – and in due course that of Princess Augusta – was trained before reading and writing were even thought of. Thirty years later she had not forgotten the pleasure she took in her early lessons, and endorsed the method employed with her to a niece’s governess, when that Princess was just two: ‘Pray begin to employ her, as early as possible, with some reasonable little things, for everything in which memory alone is required can be learnt early. Let her have little prints of the history of the Bible – tell her the stories and they will already get in her head and she will never forget them …’ The Princess Royal was an apt pupil. She and her siblings were to have, after this early training, an uncanny recall of names, faces and incidents, even from childhood, as well as a remarkable grasp of historical facts.
Remembering other less pleasant scenes from childhood, Princess Royal spoke of the importance of ‘breaking’ children of any ‘sad passions’ to which they might be subject, although she advocated ‘gentleness’ to subdue ‘temper’. But above all else, and here she followed her mother, she believed, in the education of princesses, that ‘making her a good Christian’ rather than concentrating on making a ‘wonderful’ child full of accomplishments was, with the duty of guarding her from ‘folly’, the chief labour for a princess’s superintendents.
A little folly, however, was sometimes permissible in the royal nursery. In late September 1769 Princess Augusta, at nearly eleven months, and Royal – a couple of days before her third birthday – were dressed up with their brothers for ‘an entertainment given at Kew in the house assigned to the young Princes by Lady Charlotte Finch …’. Princess Royal represented Columbine in a dress of crimson and black, ornamented with gold. (‘Her royal highness appeared rather too plump for the character,’ was one onlooker’s comment.) She and Princess Augusta sat in a shared pavilion in Lady Charlotte’s apartment, ‘a sort of illuminated temple, very picturesque’. Princess Augusta wore a ‘well-fancied dress of silver gauze, with painted gauze wings at her shoulders, and a chaplet of flowers on her head’.
The eldest princes, meanwhile, in Hussar dresses of white satin trimmed with fur, awaited their parents in a military tent. They were joined there by a charity boy, Master Blomberg, whom, on a misguided impulse, the Queen had taken in some years before to be a companion to her eldest sons, and who now wore a ‘Mercury’ dress. The Prince of Wales by no means liked this addition to the nursery, Lady Charlotte Finch’s daughter Henrietta sighed, adding that he took no pleasure in sharing his possessions with Master Blomberg or anyone else. He was happy, nevertheless, to make all around him cry while he took theirs. Later the Princess Royal was to write with feeling that taking a ‘humble companion’ for children in an ‘exalted situation’ was a ‘sad thing’.
When the King and Queen arrived, the two eldest princes emerged from their pavilion to perform a ‘warlike dance, to martial music’. Then Prince William, in harlequin dress, stepped out of another pavilion that he shared with Edward, a Bacchus with trailing ivy leaves, and made two or three trips around the room ‘with the true harlequin step (which he had learned very perfectly)’. And finally Princess Royal, his Columbine, came out and accompanied him in the dance as well as a child of not quite three could, while Princess Augusta was carried round the room ‘fluttering her little silken pinions, like a real sylph.’
The Princess Royal was later implicitly to criticize these tableaux, and declare that she did not like ‘wonderful children’. Displays of their accomplishments stoked vanity, she asserted, perhaps remembering not being a ‘wonderful child’ herself. She found music ‘horrid’ later, while some of her brothers and sisters were both very musical and fairly ‘wonderful’ as children. Moreover, when Princess Augusta was a month old, Lady Mary Coke found her ‘the most beautiful infant I ever saw’. But she was not so kind about the child’s elder sister. ‘I forgot to ask you’, she wrote to a correspondent, ‘if you did not think the Princess Royal very plain.’ Lady Mary’s criticism was to be, if not accurate, prophetic. The Princess, though never ‘very plain’, was never to be beautiful, as her sister Augusta would be, or elegant, as her mother was. And although her figure and height would be in her favour, her reputation was established early.
The royal parents at any rate heartily applauded this exhibition of their children’s prowess, although the atmosphere was tinged with sadness. This performance was a farewell gift from Lady Charlotte, whose Etonian son Lord Winchilsea was now i
ll. No longer trusting the spas of England after her experiences at Bristol and Scarborough with her poor daughters, she took her son abroad to Nice.
The princesses’ parents continued to cultivate their rural idyll at Richmond and Kew. Prince Frederick had told Lady Mary Coke in the month before Princess Augusta’s birth that the King had been ‘working in the garden, cutting down trees, and that he had carried away the boughs.’ Before she left for Nice, Lady Charlotte Finch told Lady Mary that the Queen at Richmond, not pregnant for once, ‘wears an English nightgown and white apron … ‘tis a dress his Majesty likes; formerly nobody could appear before the Royal family with a white apron …’ And Lady Charlotte added that the King had ordered her to wear this homely dress too. Lady Mary Coke’s outrage knew no bounds when she heard, in July 1769, that the King and Queen with the Queen’s brother Prince Ernest – on a visit from Mecklenburg – and Lady Effingham had walked through the town of Richmond without a single servant. ‘I am not satisfied in my own mind’, she wrote stiffly, ‘about the propriety of a Queen walking in a town unattended.’ There was really no limit to the King’s liking for living ‘in a retired manner, but easy of access’.
But in fact outside the rural bliss constructed at the royal residences on the Thames – at Richmond Lodge with its shabby Indian paper on the walls and its rolled lawns and orange trees outside, and at Kew in Lady Charlotte’s house with views of passing traffic on the Thames – there were strained relations between Crown and country in this year following Princess Augusta’s birth. At home, and to the King’s fury, the radical Mr John Wilkes had been returned as Member of Parliament for Brentford, just across the Thames from Richmond. News from the recalcitrant British colony of Boston in America was hardly more encouraging. Horace Walpole wrote, days before Princess Augusta’s birth, of the new Parliament: ‘A busy session it must be. The turbulent temper of Boston, of which you will see the full accounts in all the papers, is a disagreeable prospect.’
