Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  And there were other things to be fearful of. In America, the colonies were in ferment. Despite conciliatory proposals from the House of Commons, as Prince Adolphus supped his apple purée at Kew in April 1775, the first shots had rung out in a skirmish between British troops and American patriots in Lexington, near Boston. As the situation darkened, the English government was forced to despatch more troops to General Howe, commander-in-chief across the Atlantic – and hire still more from German warlords as General Washington proved Howe’s superior.

  In the meantime, what with America and the princes in need of subjection, exhortations for the daughters of King George III to ‘be good’ came more than ever thick and fast. Their mother’s love had always been conditional. In the spring of 1775 she had written from Kew to Lady Charlotte Finch: ‘If everybody is well behaved at the Queen’s House of the female party I should be glad to see my daughters on Wednesday morning between 10 and 11 o clock.’

  The princesses learnt that, as the King’s rule was benevolent, so any infringement of it – their uncle Gloucester’s defiance, the American colonies’ violent assertion of independence, let alone their own brothers’ dissidence – was to be abhorred and punished. Thus the royal children grew up to detest alike highwaymen, Opposition politicians and General Washington. And in later – if not more mature – years, they were to deplore the measures of Catholic emancipation and Parliamentary reform, which ran contrary to their deceased father’s will. Nourished on the legend of the blood of Englishmen shed on American battlefields and on the sin of lèsemajesté, few of the princesses would venture to stray over the lip of conservatism – except those who determined to launch their own rebellion against their father. For the others, and most of all for Princess Augusta, whose brothers and sisters teased her when they were older about her ‘rage militaire’, their politics were to be an expression of loyalty to their father.

  Just before their mother was due to give birth to her eleventh child in late April 1776, the elder princesses went with her to observe a thousand guardsmen march off to take ship for America. Queen Charlotte wrote to her brother in Hanover, ‘the affair is so interesting that it possesses me entirely.’ In particular, the reluctance of the Quakers of Pennsylvania to take up arms appealed to her. Her husband’s reaction was more violent, for he could never understand why the colonies should wish to revolt against a benevolent Crown. But the Queen did not voice her sentiments openly, and the princesses at Kew learnt a specific form of patriotism during a childhood in which remote conflict in America anguished their father and returning generals brought not eagles to lay before him, but increasingly sombre budgets.

  The Declaration of Independence which Washington and other principals signed on 4 July 1776 was to enlarge the American patriots’ ambitions and further to incense the King. The conflict was not to end until 1783, after France, Spain and Holland had joined arms and nearly all Europe had formed an armed neutrality in 1780 to resist the British seizing American goods from their ships. These seven fruitless years of war were to change the reputation and character of England as firmly as the end of the Seven Years War had assured her a new prestige and power. The eventual loss of the colonies was – unlike the outcome of the royal Dukes’ rebellions and that of their nephew the Prince of Wales – not to be punishment and removal of privileges but liberation and a scot-free, not to say tax-free, existence.

  Princess Augusta, however, when recalling her childhood, spoke not of the generals who came to report on the progress of the war, but of games of cricket and football and hockey: ‘When she was a little girl, she played at all these games with her brothers, and played cricket particularly well.’ Her elder sister Royal, by contrast, advocated learning through play with dolls. The play at Kew could certainly get quite rough. On one occasion, Princess Augusta recalled, the Queen’s brother Prince Ernest of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was visiting and nearly had his eye knocked out when his nephews swarmed all about him and one got on his back and clawed at his face. For all the segregation of princes and princesses, in Princess Augusta’s memory, at least, they were much together. And her younger brother Ernest later fondly remembered days at Kew: ‘How gay did the Green appear … from the middle of May till the beginning of November, and how cheerful did the Green look on a fine Sunday evening when all the servants in their red liveries were strolling about and sitting under the old trees by the church, and every house was inhabited.’

  3 The Younger Ones

  A new character was now added to the group of princesses, a sister born nearly ten full years after Princess Royal, a child born in wartime as her elder sisters had not been, a child with three elder sisters and seven elder brothers whose needs would come before hers, and a child who would have, of all the royal siblings, by far the most commonplace mind. Nevertheless of all the princesses, Princess Mary – as the girl born on 25 April 1776 was to be christened – would have the most self-confidence and exhibit the most tenacity in achieving her desires, for she was to be the beauty of the family. Princess Mary reigned serene, and for eighteen months enjoyed the attentions – at £200 a year, with a pension of a hundred for life to follow – of wet-nurse Mrs Anna Maria Adams, sister to the elder princesses’ beloved dresser or nurse, Miss Mary Dacres.

  The even keel of the royal children’s life at Kew over which Lady Charlotte Finch and the princes’ governors presided was rocked violently in the spring of 1776. But Princess Mary’s birth was not responsible, nor was that of her cousin Prince William of Gloucester on 15 January 1776, at the Palazzo Teodoli in Rome, although his mother, the Duchess of Gloucester, exclaimed on 5 October of that year in a letter to her friend Elizabeth, Lady Nuneham that her son was ‘the surprise of all Rome’. Although only nine months old, his prodigious intelligence, she wrote fondly, caused a furore among her friends, as did his unswaddled limbs. ‘Several ladies have followed his fashion in dress,’ the Duchess informed her friend, ‘and some new born babies are now stretching and enjoying their limbs at liberty, who but for him would be bound up like mummies.’ Unfortunately, evidencing their royal uncle’s disapproval of their existence, this Italianate prodigy and his elder sister, Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester, were undignified by the title of royal highness and were unprovided for by Parliament.

  The convulsion occurred at Kew in April 1776 and took the form of a ‘junior rebellion’ when Princess Mary was a few days old and the Declaration of Independence in America two months off. Lord Holderness, the Prince of Wales’s and Prince Frederick’s absentee governor, returned from the Continent to find the boys laughing in his face, and the Dutch House, or Prince of Wales’s House, at Kew alive with disobedience. With many apologies for the need to distract the King even for a moment from affairs of importance across the Atlantic, Lord Holderness and the sub-governor, Mr Leonard Smelt, resigned. The whole household was swept away, and new and grimmer preceptors installed. But the Shockwaves that the princes’ rebellion had caused in the community of Kew were not to be so easily brushed aside.

  The Prince of Wales might still learn to box and fence and construe in Greek, and the new governor, the Duke of Montagu, might put on paper details of a Spartan regime, but the Prince had felt his power, and the struggle between royal father and son, which was to strain the princesses’ loyalty to both, had begun. ‘He is rather too fond of wine and women,’ the seventeen-year-old Prince was to write of himself in the autumn of 1779. If this was fantasy – he was still in the hands of governors, to whom his father had earlier deplored the Prince’s ‘bad habit … of not telling the truth’, as well as now his poor German – the wish would soon be father to the act. Suddenly with war in America, and the princes out of control, life at Kew was not so safe. ‘You shall always hear that I have been good,’ Princess Augusta wrote to her dresser. The princesses must be good for everyone.

  ‘Unhappily for me we have begun to hunt deer at Windsor,’ the Queen wrote to her brother Charles, ‘and since that moment all rational occupation cannot take plac
e.’ A few months after the junior rebellion at Kew, as the rebel American colonists congregated in Philadelphia, fancy led the King of England to take up the sport of hunting at the ancient seat of Windsor, following the example of numerous monarchs from William the Conqueror, who built the castle, to the last of the Stuarts, dropsical Queen Anne, who pursued her quarry in a curricle. For a lodging King George III chose a house facing the south terrace of Windsor Castle that he had until recently rented out to Lord Talbot, and here he and the Queen stayed for the first time in early July 1776. It would be charming once the brown woodwork had taken on ‘une autre face’, the loyal wife told Charles.

  But the Queen’s decorative schemes had to be put on hold, and her enthusiasm for Windsor flagged, after the King, with his architect Sir William Chambers, decreed that the house as it stood was far too small and that a new one, the Queen’s Lodge – a veritable barracks, with seventy rooms – should rise in its place. ‘The King is building it,’ the Queen wrote, informing Charles that the house was to be a gift to her, ‘but I am buying the furniture and I settle my accounts the moment they are delivered. Besides, I am in treaty for a garden and house next door to it, for which I am paying £4000.’ In the meantime, the King and Queen occupied apartments in Windsor Castle itself. As they had found six years earlier when they stayed there for the installation of their eldest sons as Knights of the Garter, it was cold, uncomfortable and inconvenient.

  From this point on, when not occupied with public business, the King indulged himself to an unusual degree, in hunting and supervising the building of the Queen’s Lodge – with battlements on top to match those of King William the Conqueror on the Norman castle opposite. The royal couple spent a commensurate period of time, sometimes two days a week, at Windsor. ‘Ma vie sera tout à fait campagnarde,’ the Queen prophesied on 18 June 1776. With the demands of Court levèes and drawing rooms occupying another three days, she increasingly fretted that she was with her children only on Fridays and Saturdays. After a few years she wrote to her brother with exasperated good humour, ‘It is true we are pilgrims on earth, for we are very often at three different places in a week.’

  The Queen valued the months at Kew from May to October as prime time for inculcating in her daughters the principles of orthography, religion, royal genealogy (Hanoverian and other), history ancient and modern, geography and languages. At Kew neither she nor her daughters nor any of the ladies who supervised or taught her daughters ‘dressed’ until shortly before dinner – and when they did, they employed their wardrobe women rather than hairdressers to attend to their coiffure. In 1777 the royal mother could not necessarily count on more than five years in which to conclude her plan of education for her eldest daughters at Kew and elsewhere before they took up the burdens associated with marriage which had deflected her from her own studies. Even now, when in London the two eldest princesses began to attend their parents in public – to breakfasts, to the play, to the opera. Their curled and powdered heads, their polonaises and ‘gewgawed’ or bejewelled necks and arms entranced the public when they issued forth, and were described in flattering detail in the newspapers. But their mother, equally bedecked and bedizened, regretted the hours lost to what she called ‘rational occupation’, while accepting the need to encounter Society.

  The princesses had a first exposure to Windsor – a place that would be as much a part of their lives as Kew – in the summer of 1777, when they were of an age to appreciate the grandeur and history of the place, as well as the hugeness of both Castle and park. A new attendant, Miss Mary Hamilton, formed, with the princesses, part of an enormous royal caravan that travelled to Windsor in the earlier part of August, and stayed in apartments in the Castle. They were there to inspect the rising Queen’s Lodge, and to celebrate the beginnings of a late-come but earnest Hanoverian royal residence at William the Conqueror’s stronghold. The principal celebrations were fixed not for 1 August, the sixty-third anniversary of the accession in 1714 of the first Hanoverian King of England, George I – but for 12 August, his great-great-grandson George, Prince of Wales’s fifteenth birthday.

  The princesses and their brothers and immediate ‘family’ were housed temporarily in towers and eyrie apartments on the east and south fronts of the Upper Ward, or in the state apartments occupying the entire north front with a view of Eton College chapel across the Thames. As for other members of the household, some had to climb the many steps to apartments at the top of the historic and moated Round Tower in Middle Ward which divided Upper Ward from Lower Ward. Others needed to be of a religious or humble cast of mind, as they were appointed apartments in the Deanery adjoining St George’s Chapel that Edward IV had built long before in the centre of the Castle buildings, or were lodged in the almshouses reserved generally for the quaintly named Poor Knights of Windsor. To make way for this royal assault, indignant tenants had been ejected from grace-and-favour lodgings everywhere within the Castle which time and monarchs had so long forgotten.

  Some of the alterations to the Lodge that the Queen had made were finished, seven or eight rooms or so, and on the eve of the Prince of Wales’s birthday she and the King took the princesses over to view them. A day or so earlier, Miss Hamilton had seen them and wrote that the rooms were ‘furnished in a style of elegant simplicity … beautiful paper hangings, light carved gilt frames for looking glasses, worked chairs and painted frames, every room different. Curtains of fine white dimity with white cotton fringe – one set of chairs are knotted floss silk of different shades, sewn on to imitate natural flowers …’

  What made more of an impression on eleven-year-old Princess Royal and her sisters than some rooms furnished with the Queen’s familiar elegance, or even the state rooms inside the castle – which had a tendency to admit rain – furnished by their Stuart kinsman King Charles II, were the festivities arranged for their brother’s birthday. And what no doubt made most impression of all was that their lessons on that day were deferred in honour of the event.

  Cannons fired and bells rang to mark the day, and the royal family activities included a carriage procession through the Home Park and a tour of a newly built country house in the locality, before they dressed in their best in the evening to walk on the terrace beneath the south wall of the Castle that was the place of popular promenade. Even sixteen-month-old Princess Mary, who Miss Hamilton described as ‘a lovely elegant made child’, wore a lace frock over a blue silk coat, and was carried out of the Castle gate to take part in the procession. Both she and her elder sisters – ‘with their hair dressed upon high cushions, with stiff large curls powdered and pomatumed, small dress cap and diamond ornaments set in a formal manner such as stars etc.’ – were admired greatly. Their satisfied attendant, Miss Hamilton, thought that they looked uncommonly well and that the sophisticated costumes ‘suited them despite their tender years.’

  The King was delighted by the enthusiasm and respect the townspeople of Windsor showed for the royal crocodile on the terrace, flattening themselves against the curtain wall of the Castle so as not to touch their exalted visitors and periodically shouting their regard. Miss Hamilton, who was shepherding the princesses’ younger brothers behind them, recorded the scene: ‘There was a great crowd, each saying aloud what they thought, without restraint… a host of nobility, fashionable persons, pretty women, smart girls, coxcombs, and abundance of clergy.’

  Slowly the royal family processed to the end of the terrace, the King constantly halting to accost someone in the crowd, and bringing the rest of the family behind him up sharp in a flurry of silks and polonaises, powdered curls, dress-swords and governesses. At last he decreed the ‘terracing’ at an end, and the royal family finished the evening, listening from their apartments within the Castle to Sir George Lennox’s regimental band play in the quadrangle before their windows.

  The princesses returned to Kew and to their studies the following day, but their brother’s birthday celebrations were the beginning for them of a long and not always happy associa
tion with Windsor, bringing with it dissipation of the children’s paradise that was Kew. The King their father would fire several of his daughters with the new enthusiasm he felt for all things rural, equestrian and agricultural. Long walks in the mud and riding and hunting in the rain would make of them true English countrywomen, as their Hanoverian aunts and great-aunts had not been. But the softer and more civilizing influence of their mother, who regarded long walks as barbaric and pined and suffered from crippling headaches within the thick walls of the Castle while the rest of the family braved the elements, would diminish – and her temper would fray.

  There was dissipation of a happier kind, however, at Kew this summer when pretty young Miss Hamilton, who enjoyed giving the children treats, provided for the elder princesses and for Lady Charlotte’s granddaughter, Miss Augusta Feilding, in her apartment there a ‘little entertainment of fruit, flowers, cakes, tea etc.’. First the children played in the garden. Then Lady Charlotte, Gouly and Mrs Feilding joined them, and they played at Dumb Crambo, with forfeits ‘which gave rise to much amusement in framing punishments’. The princesses were ‘quite rakes’, recorded the successful hostess, ‘as Lady Charlotte allowed them to stay up till 10 o’clock’. When the party was at last at an end, wrote Miss Hamilton, ‘the flowers were tied up in nosegays and Princess Royal had the distribution of them, the cakes, etc.’.

  The younger princes, Ernest, Augustus and Adolphus, also enjoyed Miss Hamilton’s ministrations. She lodged – and held her party – in the house that had recently been appropriated to their use on Kew Green, and that was now known as Prince Ernest’s House. On one occasion, when she formed part of the princes’ escort back to Kew from Windsor, they would not leave her, although they now had, with their new establishment, their own attendants. They even came into her room at Prince Ernest’s, she wrote: ‘the dear children had so completely found out my weak side.’