by Flora Fraser
The Queen wrote to the King in April 1778, ‘Dear little Minny [Mary] remains quite uneasy about not finding you anywhere in the house, every coach she sees is Papa coming and nothing satisfies her hardly but sitting at the window to look for you.’ For the King spent much of the summer months of that year reviewing troops at camps in locations varying from the West Country to Warley Common in Essex and Cox Heath in Kent, visiting the fleet at Portsmouth and elsewhere, and making preparations. These covered the vexed subject of arrangements for the care of the royal family against a French invasion that became a real threat the following year.
But the family still found time for a fleeting visit to Windsor to inspect the Queen’s Lodge. ‘It is astonishing to see the progress… since last year,’ Miss Hamilton wrote; ‘it is a spacious elegant structure, though standing on a confined space of ground.’ And the celebrated botanist Mrs Delany was lost in admiration at the effect of the Queen’s interior decor: ‘The entrance into the first room [in the Queen’s Lodge] was éblouissante after coming out of the sombre apartment in Windsor, all furnished with beautiful Indian paper, chairs covered with different embroideries of the liveliest colours, glasses, tables, sconces, in the best taste, the whole calculated to give the greatest cheerfulness to the place …’ The Queen and the princesses – Mary and the baby Sophia included – all lodged with the King and necessary attendants at the unfinished house for the few days they were at Windsor this summer. The Queen was later to refer to a neighbour’s unfinished country house as ‘unfurnished, unfinished, dirty and uncomfortable to the greatest degree’, and to complain of it as not appearing ‘the least cheerful’. She expanded on her theme: ‘A thing the most essential in a country place, is its being cheerful; for else it is not worth living at it.’
But the King was content, and surveyed energetically all the ‘improvements’ in a smart new ‘Windsor uniform’ – a blue coat with red collar and gold buttons – which he had devised, and which, it was decreed, not only he but all his sons and the equerries and male members of the ‘family’ were always to wear while resident at that place. When a royal cavalcade of ‘fifty-six personages’, counting the thirty-three servants in attendance, descended on the elderly Duchess of Portland and her companion Mrs Delany at Bulstrode, the King and all his ‘attendants’ besides wore this smart new uniform ‘of blue and gold’. Bidden to Windsor the following day with the Duchess to meet the remaining royal children – seven only having accompanied their parents to Bulstrode – Mrs Delany does not record whether the King, appearing at the head of all his seven sons, again sported the ‘Windsor uniform’. But she described young Princess Mary as ‘a delightful little creature, curtseying and prattling to everybody.’ And the child engaged Mrs Delany herself in conversation while they looked down from a bow window in the Castle at the crowds on the terrace below.
Mrs Cheveley – or Che Che, as she was known to the younger princes and princesses, who adored her – was the younger girls’ nurse, and had been their elder brother Ernest’s wet-nurse. Once described unforgettably as ‘rather handsome and of a showy appearance and a woman of exceeding good sense’, she was very much the younger children’s champion and took enormous pride in all their doings. She wrote after one visit to Windsor: ‘sweet Pss Mary has conquered and captivated every human being that has seen her. There never was a child so consummate in the art of pleasing, nor that could display herself to such advantage.’ Prince Ernest was her other favourite; she called him ‘my boy’, and described him approvingly as ‘rude’, ‘big’ and ‘noisy’. ‘I do not know that I have a right to hold the scales when Prince Ernest is to be weighed …’ she wrote, admitting her partiality.
Mrs Delany shared Mrs Cheveley’s admiration for her charge when the royal children partnered each other, over at the Queen’s Lodge, in minuets and country dances. The little ‘ball’ ended with the ‘delightful little Princess Mary’, a spectator all this time, dancing with her brother Adolphus ‘a dance of their own composing’. Lady Charlotte Finch had not lost her touch in twenty years of organizing displays of the children’s skills for their parents and guests to admire. Mrs Delany was less taken by the performance of the Princess Royal, observing with some surprise, when the girl danced with her eldest brother – a beautiful dancer – that she had ‘a very graceful, agreeable air, but not a good ear’.
One of the Duchess of Gloucester’s nieces who had apartments in the Deanery had written early on, echoing Lady Mary Coke’s earlier remarks on the lack of formality at Kew: ‘The King and Queen live at Windsor rather in too easy a style.’ And the Duchess’s niece Miss Laura Keppel – no friend to a family who did not recognize her aunt – further remarked of the King and Queen: ‘They make themselves, I think, too cheap. They walk about the park as other people do … They know all the tittle-tattle of the place and the Queen sits in the room Lord Talbot’s servants used to sit in to see everything that passes. I wish they had not thought of coming to Windsor …’ she concluded.
But the royal family had come to stay, and in the summer of 1779 they were finally installed for good in the Queen’s Lodge – ‘our new habitation, just the thing for us’, Queen Charlotte wrote approvingly. ‘The new building of offices advances very well and the Duke of St Albans’s house’ – to be known as Lower Lodge – ‘will be finished by the beginning of autumn.’ Usefully the garden of Lower Lodge connected with the southern stretches of the Queen’s Lodge garden. And so the children housed in either place – including a new Prince, Octavius, born that February – might come and go with ease. At Kew, at the top of the Green, Prince Ernest’s house had meanwhile, as we have seen, been acquired to accommodate that Prince, his two younger brothers, Augustus and Adolphus, and a swarm of attendants.
Prince William had left home – and a vexed relationship with his younger brother Edward – at the age of fourteen in June 1779, to board the Prince George, Rear Admiral Robert Digby’s flagship, at Portsmouth, and enter the Royal Navy as an able seaman. The impetuous Prince was cock-a-hoop. Less so was one of his tutors from Kew, Dr Majendie, whose unpleasant task it was to share the boy’s stateroom, monitor his behaviour on deck and on shore, and attempt to din some Latin and Greek into the royal recruit’s head. General Bude and the other tutors remained at Kew with dark, clever Prince Edward, who continued, in his solitary splendour, to be unpleasant to his elder brothers and haughty to his attendants. The princesses wrote to William in letters that spoke in every sentence of their affection for him, but Miss Hamilton noted that the Princess Royal was the only one of the royal children who seemed at all affected when their brother departed.
Mrs Delany, visiting Windsor this summer, found the sight of the King carrying around in his arms by turns Princess Sophia, not yet two, and the latest arrival, Octavius, delightful. Princess Mary – in a ‘cherry-coloured tabby’ or frock and ‘with silver leading strings’ – could not quite put a name to her interlocutor of a year earlier, but made her a ‘very low curtsey’ and greeted her: ‘How do you do, Duchess of Pordand’s friend?’ Less benign members of the small Court sighed at their seclusion, and reserved a special dislike for the now established practice of terracing, or walking on the terrace – whatever the weather. ‘Bring heavy shoes,’ ran one dismal note from Miss Gouldsworthy during an especially rainy spell at Windsor to Miss Hamilton at Kew, ‘the gravel on the terrace is so wet, thick shoes will not suffice.’
The royal females themselves were not above joining in the complaints. This summer, on 26 September, nine-year-old Princess Elizabeth wrote to Miss Hamilton at Kew from Windsor: ‘I ought to have told you that Lady Holderness and Lady Weymouth [two of the Queen’s ladies] are here. You know how I do dislike her, and like Lady Holderness, but I do promise you that I will take a great deal of care not to sit by her at dinner.’ The Queen herself wrote to Miss Hamilton the following year on 20 August: ‘Mrs Vesey … is in this neighbourhood and come twice to Lady Courtown in order to see the Royal Family upon the terrace. I made her two c
urtseys from the window and was told my politeness had almost thrown her down. I was sorry to find that I had been doing mischief. The princes’ and princesses’ liking for the company of their social inferiors – the nurses and pages and housekeepers and grooms at Kew and Windsor – and their tendency to make confidants of their attendants was of their parents’ making, and born of the seclusion in which they were kept.
The Queen was worried above all about the effect of this seclusion on her beloved eldest son. His liking for ‘low company’ and his influence on his younger brothers were not lost on her, and in private she and the King began to think of sending their second son Frederick to Germany to embark on a course of military studies there – away from the elder brother who was fast becoming, in their gloomy view, unfit to be useful to the world.
Meanwhile, Miss Hamilton was in the unhappy situation of having excited the Prince of Wales’s first amorous attentions. It being Princess Mary’s turn to be inoculated against smallpox by Surgeon Pennell Hawkins with her brother Adolphus in the spring of 1779, Miss Gouldsworthy had remained with them some weeks at Kew, while they lay in darkened rooms. During a previous inoculation the Queen trusted that ‘some Providence which has hitherto given me uncommon success in all my undertakings will not withhold it from me this time, as I can say it is not without praying for his assistance as the greatest and best of medicines I can put my confidence in.’ Providence was kind again, and Mary and Adolphus, or ‘Dolly’, came through their ordeal, although not without the three-year-old Princess, who was full of spots, being very fretful, especially when stopped from itching those on her scalp.
Miss Hamilton was obliged to take Gouly’s ‘post at the marble table’, against a wall of the drawing room in the Queen’s House, where the sub-governess was accustomed to spend her evenings standing while the elder princesses, seated within a family circle, ‘worked’ and read and played cards. Their companion, the sixteen-year-old Prince of Wales, was inspired to expostulations of excitement by his nightly viewing of sentinel Miss Hamilton, and he poured out his admiration for his sisters’ attendant in a series of impulsive letters that he smuggled to her over the course of the summer and autumn. Between – rejected – requests that he and his correspondent exchange lockets with romantic mottoes, the Prince revealed that he hoped he and his brother Frederick were to move to his grandmother’s former home, Carlton House on Pall Mall, within the year, abandoning governors: ‘towards midsummer we are both of us to dash in to the wide world.’ In preparation for this worldlier role, the Prince stole into Miss Hamilton’s apartment at Kew and seized a bouquet she had worn in her bosom to place it in his.
Like many who would come after her, and like his mother before her, Miss Hamilton appealed to the intelligence, feeling and sense she believed the Prince to possess: ‘I want to raise your virtues, for you have virtues. You have a heart too good ever totally to eradicate the love and admiration of what is virtuous.’ But she shuddered at the Prince’s impetuosity, and her side of the correspondence consisted more and more of remonstrances – about his liking for the company of his servants and grooms, about his habit of cursing like them. She had had her last reprimand delivered on New Year’s Eve 1779, after the Prince informed her – to her horror – that he had shifted his affection to a new object of admiration, an actress, Mrs Mary Robinson, whom he had contrived to meet. ‘A female in that line’, Miss Hamilton prophesied earlier in the month, ‘has too much trick and art not to be a very dangerous object.’
And now this boy so long secluded from the world did indeed plunge into vice, climbing out of his bedroom at Kew to keep midnight appointments with the actress – and, consequently, entering into an opposition to his father that would sorely try his sisters’ loyalties. Within months, Mrs Robinson was suing for breach of the many, many promises that her besotted young lover had made her, and the King had to pay her £5,000 in settlement of her claim.
To add insult to injury, the Prince took up with his reprobate uncle the Duke of Cumberland, who favoured the Whig cause. Long forbidden to appear at Court, the Duke was welcomed back into the fold with his brother Gloucester by the King after they supported him in restoring order in June 1780, when London was convulsed by serious riots. Under a banner of ‘No Popery’, with a willing London mob at their heels, Lord George Gordon and others, who objected to Parliamentary proposals to free Catholics from restrictions passed a century before, captured the streets, let loose prisoners and burned the Lord Chancellor Lord Mansfield’s house and library at Kenwood.
The King decreed that his brothers – but not their wives – should meet his children. So one week the Duke of Gloucester came. The next the Princesses Royal and Augusta, with their elder brothers, and the three little princes duly received the reprobate Duke of Cumberland, according to the Queen’s commands, in the Gallery at Kew House. The Duke stayed half an hour during which ‘the elder Princes, a l’ordinaire, made the little ones as noisy as possible’, wrote Gouly. But the main point had been established, in the King’s view – the princesses had not enquired after the health of their uncles’ duchesses. He failed to foresee that his brother would seem an object of glamour to his sons, and that, when the princes took their uncle back to their own house, where he remained till ten o’clock, it would be the beginning of an unwelcome friendship, and of a penchant for the Whig party.
4 Adolescence
The queen had written wistfully once of Bath, the watering place, which she said was ‘as full as an egg’ with fashionable summer visitors – English and foreign nobility among them – dancing and sniffing out scandal. Now she wrote, ‘I fear for my daughters one day or another, because one has to know the world to judge it, and to know how to behave there.’ Being alone, she went on, the tendency was to create a wicked world which had no basis; and on entering that world, it vanished into the air. The Queen also expressed doubts to her brother Charles about the wisdom of a policy which she intimated to be now not hers but the King’s – of keeping their elder children, and particularly their daughters, in the country and out of the way of a world which she did not believe to be any more wicked than it had ever been. ‘As we all do the same as each other, our conversation cannot be animated, and our life is too uniform and retired for us to gain knowledge of the world.’ It was not stimulating, she declared.
Horace Walpole, who had rejoiced in the Queen’s appetite for gaiety on her arrival in England and regretted her subsequent seclusion, would have agreed with her. Indeed had the Princess Royal been allowed to go about in the world a little, or permitted some friends of her own age, a fracas that developed in the summer of 1780 and came to a head shortly before her brother Prince Alfred was born in September might never have occurred.
The Princess Royal and Princess Augusta were left under the care of Miss Gouldsworthy this June, while Lady Charlotte and Miss Hamilton led a party of invalids in search of sea breezes and bathing machines at Eastbourne on the Sussex coast. Princess Elizabeth had been suffering from disfiguring boils that spring, and Prince Edward was sickly; Princess Sophia and Prince Octavius would profit from the change of air. Princess Mary remained with Gouly and her two elder sisters at Kew, while nurse Mrs Cheveley accompanied the younger children to Eastbourne.
Prince Edward with his retinue was lodged separately, but the two parties met each morning in the relaxed atmosphere of Compton House, a delightful villa in the neighbourhood with a library and garden pavilion. Here Prince Edward worked with his tutor, the Reverend John Fisher; here Princess Elizabeth read the Psalms and the chapter of the day with Lady Charlotte Finch and attended to ‘Various lessons from Lady Charlotte and myself in the absence of her teachers’, as Miss Hamilton recorded.
Among the early writings of the royal children that Miss Hamilton preserved is a ruled sheet on which Princess Elizabeth wrote out six times in some previous year, with varying degrees of success, ‘Forgetting of a wrong is a mild revenge.’ Three times she failed to fit the last word on the line. But she was
by now an accomplished penwoman, having at the age of nine and a half on New Year’s Eve 1779 copied out: ‘Superiority in virtue is the most unpardonable provocation that can be given to a base mind, innocence is too amiable to be beheld without hatred and it is a secret acknowledgement of merit which the wicked are betrayed into when they pursue good men with violence.’
‘Sometimes Mr Fisher stays and obligingly instructs the pss in drawing, or she is again employed by lessons,’ Miss Hamilton told her colleagues at Kew. Princess Elizabeth was fortunate in her instructor. Her brother Edward’s preceptor or tutor, the Reverend John Fisher, was a gifted amateur artist, and the trouble he took with her at Compton House suggests that he recognized the flair that she was to bring to a remarkable career as a decorative artist.
‘Princess Elizabeth and my sweet engaging child Pss Sophia are playing about like butterflies in the sun and culling wild flowers on the grass,’ wrote Miss Hamilton, turning to less weighty matters, ‘whilst I am watching them and scribbling to you.’ The Queen at Windsor wished she was with them, and was to write, in the last month of her pregnancy, to her brother Charles in Germany, ‘I don’t believe a prisoner wishes more ardently for his liberty than I wish to be rid of my burden … If I knew it was for the last time I would be happy.’
Now she wrote to Lady Charlotte: ‘How happy should I be to make dear Sophia a visit in her bathing machine and how surprised would you be to find me in it, hélas! I must only think of it; in thoughts I am very very often with them all.’ The Queen admired from afar Elizabeth’s ‘steadiness’ in undergoing what the mother termed ‘that dreadful operation of bathing’. ‘You will allow her I am sure great merit’, she had told Lady Charlotte, ‘in feeling so much, saying nothing and yet doing what was right.’ Lady Charlotte herself stayed well clear of the bathing machine.
