Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  When the silk weavers of Spitalfields in London, who supplied their costly fabric for Court levees and drawing rooms and royal birthdays, protested – and rioted – against foreign imports of silk in 1769, the King and Queen naively attempted to turn public opinion in their favour and seduce the Spitalfields weavers with an additional opportunity for them to display their wares at a ‘junior drawing room’ at St James’s presided over by the seven-year-old Prince of Wales in a crimson silk suit and his three-year-old sister, the Princess Royal, reposing on a sofa in a Roman toga, also of silk.

  The Queen was excessively proud of the silken tableau that her children created at St James’s, and declared it fit to be painted. But the vain effort to woo public opinion broke up when the London mob, yelling defiance, drove a hearse into the Palace courtyard. The Prince of Wales said afterwards that he ‘thanked God it was over’, and told Lady Mary Coke two days later, when she hoped it had not fatigued him, ‘Indeed, Madam, but it did, and the Princess Royal was terribly tired.’ There was no attempt to repeat this public display of the royal children.

  Tempers could fray in the royal nursery itself, as when, exasperated by Prince William, his nurse Mrs Abbott ‘had not only the presumption to strike him, but knocked his head against the wall’. The affair attracted some publicity – Lady Mary Coke heard of it in Vienna – and Mrs Abbott was dismissed. This was an offence, lèse-majesté, that could not be overlooked by the Queen and Lady Charlotte. The offender’s pension, however, was paid to her for the remainder of her life – an indication, perhaps, that it was felt that she had had much to try her.

  Lady Mary Coke recorded on one occasion that the Princess Royal’s ‘temper was a good deal tried by her brothers, who pulled her about most unreasonably.’ She now regarded the Princess as ‘much improved’, and, perhaps necessarily, ‘the best humoured child that ever was’. The Queen was to write to Lady Charlotte in 1771 with some relief after the royal governess returned from a journey, ‘They never can be in better hands than yours.’ Three years later, with her family still growing, she wrote that she was ‘thankful to providence for having worthy people’ about her children.

  Inevitably, when Lady Charlotte had returned unexpectedly to London in the spring of 1770, leaving her son in Nice, there was speculation that the Queen was ‘a-breeding’ again. Lady Charlotte could not comment, as there was – despite the frequency of the occurrence – a coyness at Court observed about the Queen’s very visibly increasing person. The tattlers were proved right. A wet-nurse, Mrs Spinluffe, was in place at the Queen’s House by mid-May, and Princess Elizabeth – named after her maternal grandmother, with a nod to the great Tudor Queen – was born there on 22 May 1770.

  With the birth of a third daughter and seventh child, Princess Elizabeth, King George III and Queen Charlotte, had they been otherwise, might have seen fit to draw their childbearing to a close. But it would never have entered the King’s head. On hearing that a lady of his acquaintance, already blessed with nineteen children, was lying in with her twentieth, he wished sincerely that she might have twins. And it would not have entered Queen Charlotte’s head at this point to have ideas of her own on the subject.

  The elements of a formula for the education and management of princes and princesses continued to evolve. The Princesses Royal and Augusta acquired an attendant they doted on, Miss Mary Dacres, in the year of Princess Elizabeth’s birth. The sister of a rear admiral and a Cumberland connection of an intimate of the Queen’s, Lady Effingham, Miss Dacres appears in the nursery accounts as the princesses’ ‘dresser’. On Miss Dacres the Princess Royal and Princess Augusta showered affection, and while Lady Charlotte and Mrs Cotesworth taught them to read, Miss Dacres managed their ‘passions’ and was patient with Royal’s stammer – ‘hesitation in speech’, that princess later recorded, was ‘unfortunately very common on all sides of the Brunswick family’ – and Princess Augusta’s shyness.

  These princesses were unusual and fortunate among European princesses – and, still more so, among girls in England – in having such high-minded and bookish parents who treated their education seriously and took great care over their attendants. They were also unusual and fortunate as young royal children in having parents who preferred their children’s company and that of a small domestic circle to the glamour and turbulence and power-broking that characterized most other great Courts in full flow. But they were to be unfortunate in having parents who could not – given their public duties, given the number of children they continued to produce, and given the domestic and foreign calamities that were soon to strike the royal family – adequately oversee the implementation of the Utopian child-rearing policies they earnestly advocated.

  2 Growing Up

  Lady Mary coke went to breakfast with Lady Charlotte Finch at Kew on 19 August 1771, specifically ‘to see the young Princesses, who are with her early in the morning: the Princess Royal I think the most sensible agreeable child I ever saw, but in my opinion far from pretty: the Princess Augusta rather pretty, but not so well as she was last year’. She did not see Princess Elizabeth, now nearly fifteen months, but conceded that Prince Ernest, who had been born ten weeks earlier, on 5 June at the Queen’s House in London, was a ‘pretty infant.’

  Lady Charlotte had become director of the princesses’ education, and the princesses had begun their daily drive over to her house at Kew from Richmond Lodge, earlier this year, when the Prince of Wales and Prince Frederick acquired their own establishment at Kew, complete with governor, sub-governor and tutors. A merchant’s house opposite the Dowager Princess of Wales’s residence, Kew House, and known as the Dutch House, with a garden gate on to the riverbank, was duly redecorated for the princes, and became known as the Prince of Wales’s House. The previous August, Queen Charlotte had signalled the coming move in a birthday letter to the Prince of Wales that she requested his governess to read to him: ‘Time draws near when you will be put into the hands of governors, under whose care you will study more manly learning than what you have done hitherto.’ At the age of seven, in England, boys’ education became the province of their fathers and they went ‘into men’s hands’. The Prince of Wales and his brother had remained beyond the usual age in the care of Lady Charlotte. The courses of the tight-knit junior royal family were dividing, and the princesses would now receive most of their education at Lady Charlotte’s own new house on the river at Kew and see little of their elder brothers.

  Lady Charlotte in her turn would see little of her former charges. Her son George, who had recently succeeded his uncle as Earl of Winchilsea, wrote from Christ Church, Oxford, where he was now an undergraduate, hoping his mother liked her new abode and its ‘charming situation’. ‘It must be quite new to you to have a garden gate to yourself,’ he added encouragingly. Lady Charlotte’s sister, Lady Juliana Penn, however, was sympathetic about her inevitable demotion, and wrote after seeing the Prince of Wales and Prince Frederick installed as Knights of the Garter this summer of 1771: ‘I felt a great part of the beauty of the sight was your work, and what must give you pleasure, in seeing your two sweet little princes brought up by yourself to be fit for anything that can be expected from them. The world indeed does you justice and they were admired by every creature that looked on them.’

  From now on, the princes’ governor, Lord Holderness, and his deputies would receive compliments on their prowess. And the following spring, in 1772, a house facing St Anne’s Church on Kew Green was assigned to Prince William and Prince Edward, and a ‘tall and showy’ Hanoverian army officer in his thirties, General Budé, was appointed their instructor. As a royal nursery attendant later related, Prince William ‘exulted beyond measure going into men’s hands. His very housemaids, he said, should be men.’ The appointment of an officer rather than a university man as his instructor was no doubt an additional pleasure, as Prince William was of ‘a strongly marked military turn’. Third and fourth in line to the throne, the younger princes – and Prince Ernest and any other prince
s who should be born – were destined for the army and navy, not for government, and their education need not include the subtler points of constitutional law.

  The admirable Lady Charlotte’s path lay now with the females of the species, and for a while she and the sub-governess, Mrs Cotesworth, undertook the whole of the princesses’ education at Kew, bar the rudiments of the French language, which Mlle Julie Krohme supplied. ‘Till we were seven or eight children,’ the Princess Royal later wrote, ‘we had no English teacher, Lady Charlotte Finch and Mrs Cotesworth having taught us all to read. But the Sub Governess’s [Mrs Cotesworth’s] ill health preventing her giving us the proper attention, Lady Charlotte could not teach us all and begged Mama to take some clergyman’s daughter to assist her. Notwithstanding which Lady Charlotte continued to read with Augusta and me everyday sometimes two but always one hour.’

  In 1774, Lady Mary Coke wrote a more forthright account of Mrs Cotesworth’s health problems: ‘It has been said a long time that she had taken to drinking, which must make her very improper for that employment.’ Perhaps also Lady Charlotte Finch had a little less relish for her task as royal governess, now that the excitement of moulding the heir to the throne was no longer hers. Be that as it may, in July 1771 she undoubtedly did governess and clergyman’s daughter Miss Frederica Planta honour in calling her to be ‘about the little Royal family’. She was ‘to teach them to read first English, and the other languages after that’, wrote Miss Planta’s sister Elizabeth. A governess herself, Miss Elizabeth Planta followed the affair with interest, although she disparaged the terms and conditions of the employment, including the salary of £100 a year: ‘Her appointments are quite mediocre.’ Still, her sister was at Kew as she wrote, ready to attend the princesses when they came from Richmond Lodge, and her accommodation was paid for, as were her chairmen – porters who carried her sedan chair – when the royal family was in town. ‘The future promises des avancements,’ Elizabeth concluded dispassionately.

  Unfortunately, Frederica was still bound to an employer, Lady Hoskyns, who liked having her children’s governess filched by the royal family no better than had the Holdernesses. And she was a good deal more vocal about the inconvenience. She accused Miss Planta of ‘having made underhand applications’ to the royal household, and wrote in terms, Miss Elizabeth considered, that ‘showed very vividly that she regarded her own interests much more than those of my sister.’

  At last Lady Hoskyns was made to cede the invaluable Miss Frederica Planta, but not before the Queen herself had expressed her displeasure at Lady Hoskyns’s obstructiveness. The appointment was one much to the Queen’s taste. Key to her interest in attendants employed about her daughters was that they should be not only Christian but the right kind of Christian. Following Lady Charlotte Finch – mentor in much – she subdued her temperament and exorcised the frustrations of her position by a passionate meditation on sermons and exegeses on the Bible, but she was utterly intolerant of agnostic brands of Christianity.

  The Misses Planta followed, in their Christian faith, their father Andreas, a respected pastor in London and founding librarian at the fledgling British Museum. One of those Deist Christians who found themselves able to reconcile recent geological findings with the Story of Creation, he had emigrated from his native Switzerland, when that ‘republic of letters’ became dominated by philosophers who decried his brand of faith. In London he and his wife settled happily, their son Joseph succeeding him as librarian at the British Museum and four of their five daughters becoming governesses. (The fifth married and fled the world of education for Philadelphia in America.)

  And so the princesses had their English teacher, and Miss Planta, ‘mistress of seven languages’ – including Latin and Greek – ‘and a most pious Christian’, settled into the community of royal preceptors and tutors and governesses at Kew. The Queen had written to Lady Charlotte: ‘I am sorry that I myself have not more time to spend with them [the royal children] and therefore am thankful to Providence for having worthy people about them.’ She and the King were certainly prepared to fight fair and foul to secure those ‘worthy people’.

  State portraits by Allan Ramsay of the King – auburn haired and pink cheeked – and of the Queen – dark, slight and grey-eyed – were copied in these years and sent abroad to confirm the young couple’s status. They were sovereigns of a mighty kingdom following the triumphant end of the Seven Years War in 1763, and of a growing commercial empire, and the Queen’s diamonds in her portrait were commensurately dazzling. Chief among them were those that sparkled on a stomacher the King had commissioned on their marriage for £60,000. ‘The fond [or background] is a network as fine as catgut of small diamonds,’ the Duchess of Northumberland had recorded in 1761, ‘and the rest is a large pattern of natural flowers, composed of very large diamonds, one of which is 18, another 16, and a third 10 thousands pounds price.’ Lord Clive, better known today as Clive of India, added, among other riches, to the Queen’s store of jewels presents from the deposed Great Mogul of India, Shah Alam: ‘two diamond drops worth twelve thousand pounds’.

  But in the midst of their public life the royal couple continued to attempt a domestic life, whether in town at the Queen’s House or at the Lodge in Richmond parkland, once the property of the King’s grandfather George II. The princesses were still brought down to visit their parents after breakfast and, now of an age to do so, visited after their parents’ four o’clock dinner. The King continued as devoted and eager a parent as ever, carrying Prince Ernest as a baby around in his arms and sitting on the floor to play with him, just as he had when the older children were infants.

  But now, while the King and Queen attended to public business, after breakfast the princesses were driven off to Kew and to the schoolroom at Lady Charlotte’s or, when in town, climbed to their brothers’ old schoolroom at the Queen’s House. All the princes and the princesses, at their father’s behest, pursued a programme of mens sana in corpore sano, which excluded meat from their diet except on certain days, and included daily airings in the garden of the Queen’s House in town or walks in Kew Gardens come rain, come sun. It featured as well a discussion of improving subjects selected from a ponderous commonplace book that the King had kept since boyhood.

  The princesses’ schooling in London in the winter months with Lady Charlotte and her subalterns was instructive, and their hours with their parents at Richmond Lodge or at the Queen’s House were precious, but their days at Kew, given the environs where they took their airings, were inspiring. They were old enough to have their imaginations fired on their walks by the strange fancies that the architect Sir William Chambers had placed in the gardens to entertain their grandmother. There was a Chinese pagoda modelled on one he had seen on his travels to Shanghai, a model Alhambra and even a Gothic cathedral, besides innumerable temples. And in the years since their grandmother had established a botanical garden and a menagerie at Kew in 1760, there had come exotic visitors bringing booty from foreign lands to enchant the children.

  This very October, following his voyage with Captain Cook to the South Seas, the young naturalist Sir Joseph Banks presented the King and Queen at Richmond Lodge with an Australasian crown and feathers. He also brought to the botanical gardens that occupied part of the Kew property an extraordinary plant with orange and blue shoots from the Cape of Good Hope, and named it the Strelitzia, in graceful compliment to the Queen’s native land of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. In the menagerie in a different part of the gardens, another first fruit of Captain Cook’s voyage to the South Seas – a kangaroo from Botany Bay – was proudly placed, a mate brought over, and a successful breeding programme instituted. Not surprisingly, Kew was to have a powerful hold on all these princesses’ memories and imaginations in later life.

  The princesses now saw little of their elder brothers and of tag-along Prince Edward, except when their paths crossed while out on airings. The boys, so recently part of a boisterous family group and meeting their parents twice daily, we
re now forbidden to stray from the sphere of their houses at Kew – except for those improving walks in the grounds of Kew and, in the case of the eldest two, Sunday dinner, which they took with their governor Lord Holderness and his wife at Sion Hill on the other side of the Thames. Otherwise, spartan conditions reigned in the boys’ establishments. Meat was rationed, and even when fruit tart was on the menu it was ‘without crust.’

  The Prince of Wales and his brother were, to begin with, obliging pupils and anxious to please all their instructors, although Prince Frederick later condemned one attendant as having been ‘used to have a silver pencil-case in his hand while we were at our lessons … and he has frequently given us such knocks with it on our foreheads that the blood followed them.’ But the King instructed the princes’ governors and preceptors to administer beatings when appropriate. One of the princesses later claimed to have seen her eldest brothers ‘held by their tutors to be flogged like dogs with a long whip.’ The boys, trusting or fearing their father, did not complain. Other boys of their age endured worse at schools, and their regime, with a certain want of imagination, was the same as their father’s had once been.

  These indignities the princesses were spared, and the Princess Royal, condemning harshness as counter-productive, later declared, ‘I love a steady, quiet way with children.’ She also wrote, echoing her mother, ‘On the whole I believe that example does more than precept … I think the more they [children] are led to everything, and fancy it is by their own instigation, the better.’ But the princesses probably suffered other ordeals by way of punishment for poor behaviour. Royal thought severe measures – tying girls’ hands was a practice of the time – should be the response to ‘a lie, or the proof of a bad heart … alone.’ But for ‘ill humour’ she endorsed ‘great firmness and coldness’, and her prescription ‘for bad lessons’ was interesting: ‘the making learning a favour and the not allowing her to learn the next day if she is idle.’