Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  For the Queen, the King’s enthusiasm for Windsor engendered many logistical problems. Four days after the excitement of the Prince’s birthday at Windsor, Prince Frederick’s fourteenth birthday was spent in the comparative calm of Kew, but later that month of August 1777 it was decided that all his brothers and sisters should be present to celebrate Prince William’s twelfth birthday at Windsor. Under Miss Gouldsworthy’s and Miss Hamilton’s supervision, coaches shipped the three elder princesses, their three younger brothers and Princess Mary, in her wet-nurse Mrs Adams’s care, from Kew to Windsor and back again, with an escort of Light Horse to protect them en route. Mrs Adams was a useful member of the nursery for such expeditions, but when her charge was eighteen months old in October 1777 an event that was not unfamiliar in this royal family occurred. The approaching birth of a new baby dislodged the old wet-nurse from rooms that would be needed for the new one.

  From the Queen’s House, Princess Augusta wrote to Miss Hamilton’s mother, shortly before the new baby was due, introducing herself and saying she hoped to encounter Miss Hamilton, who was at Kew, ‘when she comes to see the cradle of the new child Mama is to have …’ And she wrote again to her new correspondent, saying, ‘I hope you are as well as I expect. My dear friend your daughter, tell her when you see her that she is very good to me.’ Princess Augusta, aged just nine in the winter of 1777, was from an early age consumed with the problem of ‘being good’ and troubled by her lapses from that holy state.

  Princess Sophia was born at the Queen’s House on 3 November 1777. ‘I was taken ill and delivered in the space of fifteen minutes,’ the Queen informed her brother Charles the following month. On this occasion, the King was very likely not hovering, as he had done so anxiously for the births of his elder daughters. While Queen Charlotte and the midwife, Mrs Johnson, were taken unawares by the speed at which the child shot into the world, the King was working against the clock, as the French moved closer to declaring war on Britain in sympathy with the Americans and in indignation against the English embargo of French ports.

  Princess Sophia’s sisters, too, were preoccupied, as their beloved dresser Miss Dacres had suddenly abandoned her employment to become wife to their brothers’ page, Mr Henry Compton. Their letters to Miss Dacres on her departure and on her October marriage show how dependent they had been on this companion of their early childhood.

  Princess Augusta’s response to the terrible loss of Miss Dacres was markedly mature, although her handwriting was huge and unformed. ‘I am very sorry that you do go away from me,’ she wrote on 20 October, ‘though at the same time I am glad that you will be happy. I hope sometimes you will come and see me and I hope that you will lead a happy life. I hope your sister [Mrs Adams, who had just quitted her post as wet-nurse to Princess Mary] is well. Dear heart, you can’t conceive what I felt when Mama told me you was to be married to Mr Compton. It caused me many tears when I heard it.’ The Princess rationalized her feelings in a letter to Gouly the same day: ‘Dear Miss Dacres is a great loss to me, for I love her with all my heart. I would [not] have lost her for all the world, but you know one can’t have always what one wants. She is the first loss I have had, for Mlle Krohme was a loss to me but not such a great one as Miss Dacres.’ When Mlle Krohme had died in April 1777, it was the Princess Royal who had been greatly affected.

  The birth of Princess Sophia did not long distract Princess Augusta from writing affectionate letters. ‘My sisters and me have got in the lottery [a prize of] twenty pounds and what I have got is for you,’ she told ‘Cuppy’ – this was the name Prince Adolphus had manufactured for Mr Compton’s new bride – on 4 November. ‘I desire that you will always remember your poor child,’ she entreated her former dresser in another – undated – letter. ‘I assure you that she was very sorry when the Queen told her that you was to go away from her.’

  ‘I shall always remember how my dear Mrs Compton loved me,’ wrote Princess Augusta again, manfully to the new Mrs Compton. ‘And now I begin to repent that I did not behave well to you … I promise you that you shall always hear that I have been good.’ Pursuing this theme, she was to write to her mother from the Queen’s House on Boxing Day 1777,

  Dear Mama, I am very glad to tell you that I am very good; this morning I behaved pretty well and this afternoon quite well. All my brothers and sisters send their duty to you and Augustus in particular for he told it to me about six times, give my love and duty to Mama, little dear Sophia is quite well and little Mary is pretty good. Dear Mama I am your most affectionate dauter December 26 1777 Augusta Sophia Queens House London.

  The Princess Royal’s response to Miss Dacres’s happy change of circumstances was distinctly less affectionate than that of her younger sister. ‘How could you be so sly as not let anybody know of when you was to be married?’ the Princess Royal upbraided her former attendant the day after Princess Sophia’s birth, and wished her joy of a marriage ‘done, done, never to be undone.’ She tried blackmail: ‘I beg you will not go till after the christening.’ She was only sorry it was so soon. ‘I do not think you love me though I do you …’ wrote the unhappy Princess. Her angry refrain did not quickly diminish. ‘I am very much hurt at your loss,’ she wrote three days later, ‘… too soon of a week, of a year, at least I think so.’ For a month or more the Princess Royal bombarded her with requests and directions. ‘Princess Royal presents her compliments to Mrs Compton and begs she will do her the favour to come to breakfast next Sunday at nine o clock,’ ran one note. ‘Pray do tell me where your house is that I may kiss my hand to you every day, when I walk by your window,’ ran another. But it was swiftly followed by a rebuke. ‘Mr Compton told me it was his fault that I did not see you at the window … It was a baulk … I hope to see you there tomorrow.’

  The Princess Royal’s amour-propre and sense of grievance were assuaged when Mrs Compton visited and showed contrition. And in addition the Queen and Lady Charlotte were taking steps to introduce the Princess Royal to an adult world. Earlier in the year she had been present at a private performance at the Queen’s House when the actor David Garrick had read from his tragedy Lethe. ‘Today,’ Royal wrote grandly to Mrs Compton on 5 December 1777, ‘I went on an airing with mama.’ But the Princess Royal was not out of the nursery yet. Thanking Mrs Compton two days later for another visit, she announced, ‘I now write by the light of the fire; laying on the ground.’ And on the day after Boxing Day she wrote to her mother, ‘Tomorrow I give a breakfast to my brothers and sisters and some other people. Last night we saw a magic lantern of Mrs Cheveley’s which made me laugh very much.’ She ended politely that she hoped the Queen had been able to go to Windsor.

  Seven-year-old Princess Elizabeth was direct in her affection to her former dresser. She drew an accomplished picture of Cuppy’s new home on Kew Green and sent it, inscribed ‘this is your house’, to her with the message, ‘My dear Mrs Mary I love you with all my heart… I and my sisters wish that you will come to see us… Mary says your name very often.’

  Mrs Henry Compton was not to enjoy the princesses’ regard long, for she died the following autumn at Kew, after giving birth in September 1778 to a daughter named Augusta. The princesses, however, had already transferred their affection to Mary Hamilton, the well-born young woman whom the Queen had appointed in April 1777 to join Lady Charlotte and Miss Gouldsworthy as ‘a third lady to be at the head of the establishment’. Although Miss Hamilton later wrote that she ‘never in [her] life had the least desire to belong to a Court’, this clever, lively – and young – companion was to play a major part in the princesses’ lives for five and a half years. The papers Miss Hamilton preserved after she had left royal employ include such examples of indentured schoolroom labour as the following improving text, copied out by Princess Augusta, aged nine, in her best – but not very good – handwriting on 17 July 1778: ‘Recreation, moderately used, is profitable to the body for health, and to the mind for refreshment: but it is a note of a vain mind, to be running after e
very garish pomp or show.’

  Rather more revealing is the following scrawl by the same author written from Kew House:

  My dear Miss Hamilton, I am very sorry for the blow I gave to you the night before last. I am very sorry indeed, and promise you I won’t do so any more. I have written to Gouly and she has forgiven me, because I have been very good with every body and her too, and I learnt very well with Monsieur Guiffardière. I read very well, and I said my verses well also. I beg you will forgive me, for indeed I will be very good to you, and I will mind every thing you bid me. I am very sorry that I hurt Miss Gouldsworthy. I promise you I won’t do so any more. But I hope I have not hurt you, and I was very sorry to find you put brown paper and arquebade upon your breast. I hope it will be of no consequence to you for I assure you that if it is, it will make me very unhappy. I am your ever affectionate Augusta Sophia.

  And early in their acquaintance, discovering a taste for writing and for finding new correspondents, Princess Augusta wrote, while sitting with Miss Hamilton, a letter to her companion’s mother in Derbyshire: ‘My dear Madam, I hope that you are well Miss Ham sends her love to you but pray don’t forget to write to Miss Ham. Madam I am your most obedient servant AS.’ But then, apparently dissatisfied with these formal pleasantries, she added on the front: ‘28 November 1777, London, at night. Madam, Miss Ham. has a very bad headache, but for all that, she sat down and has writ you a very long letter and I shall be very angry with you if you don’t thank her.’ And finally, on the back fold, she added:

  Dialogue between Clare and Eloise at Lambeth in Cornwall.

  E: My dear friend, I had the pleasure to see your little brother last night.

  Pray, has not he got a wig, for he had something like one?

  C: He had, my dear, for he did tear his hair off his head. He is very sorry now that he has tore his hair off his head.

  E: He was very handsome before he had that trick.

  C: So he was.

  And there the dialogue ends, with a note from the dramatist, ‘And good night, I am very sleepy.’

  The Princess Royal’s letters to Miss Hamilton, on the other hand, like those she wrote to Mrs Compton, are full of threats and scolds and teases. ‘Princess Royal presents her compliments to Miss Hamilton,’ she wrote shortly before Christmas 1777, ‘and begs to know why she would not kiss her last night.’ And in the early part of the next year the Princess Royal, aged eleven, was in commanding form:

  Madam, I am very sorry that you did not sleep well last night. I beg you will lay down and then not think of any thing but of a flock of sheep, and if you do not do that I shall not love you in the least, and I know that you will be very sorry for that, and if you do what I desire I will love you very much. Madam, your friend, Charlotte Augusta Matilda.

  Miss Hamilton was quite up to such tricks, and called the eleven-year-old autocrat’s bluff next morning. The Princess Royal had to concede: ‘Madam, Though you did not think last night of a flock of sheep, yet as you did sleep more than the night before, I will love you a little bit. Pray give my love to your mama.’

  Brought to heel, the Princess Royal wrote three days later on 17 January, ‘My dear, I thank you for your note, and I hope you think I minded what you told me, and that it will encourage you to continue your correspondence with me.’ And then she put a note in Miss Hamilton’s workbag: ‘Day and night I always think of you, for I love and esteem you.’ And she wrote again: ‘My dearest Hammy, I that love and adore you, think it very hard, that you will not kiss me today. I will tell you why I love you,’ she added, attempting to subdue her feelings. ‘This is the reason, for it is that I think you have a good character.’

  The awkward, hungry notes continued, sometimes twice a day. The Princess wrote late in January: ‘Ma chère, Je vous assure que je vous aime de tout mon Coeur et je vous prie d’avoir la bonté de m’accorder votre amitié et si vous avez cette bonté vous me rendrez fort heureuse.’ But she had not finished there. On returning to the Queen’s House that night from drinking tea at Gouly’s apartment in St James’s, the Princess Royal’s first thought was of Miss Hamilton, who had had the evening off. And she sat down to write: ‘When we came home, only think, we went all three in Lady Charlotte’s [sedan] chair, and she walked on the side. I hope you was much pleased with the play and the farce. I assure you of my love and promise you always to continue it.’

  Romantically, the lovesick Princess signed another note a couple of days later, ‘your most affectionate unknown friend’. She sent her love to Miss Hamilton’s mother in Derbyshire: ‘tell her that though I have not the happiness of knowing her, yet I love her because she belongs to you’. And she added, ‘Pray give me your love, for I wish for your love so much that I think you must give it to me, My dearest love, your little affectionate friend, Charlotte Augusta Matilda’. She returned to the theme two days later, afraid that she had made Miss Hamilton ill on some account. ‘Pray love me for I love you so much, and so it is fair. The publicans and sinners even loved those that loved them,’ she wrote with muddled logic but clear-eyed determination.

  Despite the Princess’s declarations of affection, she made her attendant’s life difficult in time-honoured fashion, as the following letter of 6 February shows: ‘My dearest Hammy, I am very sorry to have tormented and hurt you, in not learning my lesson for Monsieur de Guiffardière, but I promise you to do my utmost for to know it perfecdy tomorrow.’ M. de Guiffardiere, a French émigré doctor of letters, had been chosen as the princesses’ principal master this year, and he was to suffer much at their inky hands. Later this year Princess Augusta begged Miss Hamilton to ask M. de Guiffardière ‘to not tell that foolish thing I did this morning, for I promise that I won’t do so any more’. (It had been a bad morning. Augusta was also seeking forgiveness from Gouly for ‘being so foolish this morning about my rhubarb.’ ) There would be more good intentions and inattention to follow from the princesses’ younger sisters over the next decade. Inclined to lose his temper with poorly prepared pupils, in this opening year M. de Guiffardière was full of hope. Eventually beloved, he was to dedicate to his royal pupils his Cours élémentaire d’histoire ancienne, à l’usage des LL. AA. Royales, Mesdames les Princesses de l’Angleterre, published at Windsor in 1798.

  The princesses had lost another long-standing teacher this year. Although a Miss Planta continued to be the elder princesses’ English teacher, and to teach them other subjects including their own royal history, this was not Frederica Planta but her sister Margaret or Peggy. So discreet, so efficient and so self-effacing was the Planta family that when on 2 February 1778 Miss Frederica Planta died suddenly, she was immediately replaced by her younger sister. And her brother Joseph was only sorry to disturb the royal household with arrangements for removing his sister Frederica’s body from the room it occupied at St James’s Palace. As a Miss Planta continued to be the princesses’ companion, sit, walk and sup with them, and draw the same salary, many people never noticed the substitution. Besides, there were so many attendants now for the royal children that it was difficult for anyone to keep up with them – except for the children themselves.

  Miss Hamilton appears to have directed the energies of her emotional pupil the Princess Royal effectively back into her studies. Besides M. de Guiffardière and the new Miss Planta and Mlle Suzanne Moula, the French teacher who replaced Miss Krohme, the princesses had other tutors for specific subjects ranging from their writing master Mr Peter Roberts to their geography master Mr George Bolton, and to dancing and music masters. In addition, the Princess Royal and Princess Augusta continued to learn German with Mr Schrader. By the time the royal family took up residence at Kew for the summer months, the Princess Royal was writing on a more respectful note: ‘My dearest, I beg you will forgive me intruding upon your morning leisure, but must beg that tomorrow you will breakfast with me. I am very sorry to find that you have so bad a headache, and beg that if tomorrow you have such another you will not think of coming to my breakfast.’ />
  Her mother the Queen believed the Princess Royal to be a steady, conscientious pupil, and indeed she was when interested. When she was twelve, in 1778, for the first time an artist, John Alexander Gresse – known in London as Jack Grease – was employed as drawing master to the princesses, and the Princess Royal found something of a métier. With Gresse and other art masters Royal began ‘drawing heads’ every week, or copying Old Master profile drawings by Leonardo da Vinci and other heads by Italian and English eighteenth-century artists in her father’s library. The results were creditable, and marked the beginning of a passion for drawing and painting copies of superior originals in the pursuit of artistic excellence – as Sir Joshua Reynolds in his fashionable Discourses on Art advised.

  In March 1778, the French broke off diplomatic relations with England and the King was at work from six in the morning until midnight without respite. ‘I speak, read and think of nothing but the war,’ wrote Queen Charlotte with energy, having recovered quickly from the birth of Princess Sophia. ‘Je deviendrai politique malgré moi.’ But busy King George III marked the birth of his fifth daughter – a round-headed, fair-haired baby with blue eyes – and sought Parliamentary provision in the spring of 1778 for the princesses and for his younger sons, which he had neglected to do until this point, and even for those of his brother Gloucester as princes and princesses of the blood. Although other woes would accrue to her lot, as she lay in her cradle round-faced Princess Sophia was assured of £6,000 a year for life, to be paid to her on marriage or on her father’s death. Her brothers were to receive £8,000 on the same terms, and her cousins Prince William of Gloucester and Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester won respectively £6,000 and £4,000 on their own father’s death.