by Flora Fraser
One of the King’s preoccupations at Cheltenham was a promised visit from his second son Prince Frederick, Duke of York. The Duke was loath to leave Oadands, the house near Weybridge on which he had just taken a lease. But the King was determined, and at last the Duke relented. Elated, the King was next concerned to have his son near at hand, but there was literally not a room to spare in the Fauconberg house. The King solved that difficulty by buying a sturdy timber house that stood on the outskirts of the town, and having it dismantled and re-erected on Lord Fauconberg’s land. (He also caused a well to be dug in his host’s garden, averring the quality of the water there to be infinitely superior to that in the celebrated wells a few miles off.) Unfortunately, for all the King’s energy, the Duke stayed only one night, pressure of business forcing him to fly off again – in the direction of Newmarket races. For male companionship, the King instead took to raising his equerries from their beds at six in the morning with a holler.
The stay at Cheltenham was punctuated by the arrival of letters from Princess Mary and Princess Sophia at Kew, and even from Princess Amelia, who turned five there on 7 August. While the King and his daughters were taking the waters under Sir George Baker’s direction, the doctor had another patient at Kew. Princess Mary had developed a ‘tumour’ in her arm, and Mr Charles Hawkins – Caesar’s son and Pennell’s nephew, who had become the King’s Serjeant-Surgeon on his father’s death two years before – had to operate. Princess Sophia wrote to her father in French, to thank him for a ‘charmante’ present, and to add, ‘Amélie est enchantee de son joli cadeau … Le bras de ma chère Marie continue d’etre toujours le même et grâce à dieu elle ne souffre pas beaucoup.’
Princess Mary wrote, too, describing her sufferings from her arm, or rather from the ‘part swelled up to my shoulder’. ‘How happy I was when I awoke to receive your kind letter and the beautiful present you were so good to send me. Amelia was so delighted to hear there was something for her,’ she continued, ‘that she came upon my bed to receive it, and means to wear it today.’
Princess Amelia made a sprawling attempt at a signature to a letter to her father this same day, which an attendant – probably Miss Gouldsworthy – acting as scribe and coach for the flood of information she had to give, wrote for her. ‘My dear Papa,’ the letter ran, ‘I am very much obliged to you for the very pretty belt, and I am to wear it today when I dress. Pray give my duty to Mama, I hope you are quite well after the waters. Pray give my love to my sisters, and I hope when they come back that they will be very well. Minny [Princess Mary] feels pain when she puts on [the] poultice, I always do hold her hand … Pray tell Augusta and Elizabeth, I intend to write to them very soon, so I do to Princess Royal. Lady Ely and Mrs Bonfoy come today. My dear Papa I am your affectionate daughter Amelia.’
Sophia wrote again, in English this time. ‘My dear Papa, I am very much obliged to you for the charming letter you was so good as to write me, and for the charming descriptions it contains.’ (The royal party was now at Worcester staying with Bishop Hurd for the choral festival.) She was very happy to hear that one Lady Reid had made acquaintance with General Gouldsworthy – Gouly’s brother and the King’s equerry – and she expected ‘to hear in a short time that he is gone to make her a visit’. Gouly desired her to send her duty to him ‘and is very much flattered at your remembrance of her’. But the burden of Sophia’s letter was excitement. Princess Mary still being hors de combat following her operation, the younger sister had received permission to attend one of the children’s balls that were held in private houses, at which boys and girls practised their dance steps in for-giving company. ‘I am very much obliged to you, my dear Papa, for letting me go to the ball and my dear Mary is so good as to say that she is very glad I am. Mr Hawkins has given her leave to come down stairs which you may suppose makes me very happy.’
Unfortunately, this promising letter alone survives from the Princess’s progress into adolescence. Princess Sophia, favourite charge of many of her governesses and attendants, a girl who stirred an elderly Lord Melbourne to speak of her charms in youth – ‘he always thought Princess Sophia, when young, though very pretty, very like a gypsy’, he said – can only be glimpsed through the eyes of others until November 1790, when, at the age of thirteen, she writes a small and somewhat secretive hand.
Princess Mary wrote two days later from Kew to thank her father for another letter. ‘Indeed I do not see anything extraordinary in my behaviour in being glad that Sophia should go to the ball,’ the elder sister wrote priggishly, ‘for I think it is only what I ought to have done.’ It was Princess Amelia’s fifth birthday that day and, although she missed her parents, Mary told them, the little girl was ‘vastly pleased’ with the presents they sent, and ‘laughed exceedingly’ at the nutmeg grater in the shape of a wooden shoe the King sent – surely a souvenir of the Cheltenham ‘walks’.
The royal sisters and parents were reunited at Kew in mid-August, and the yearly round began again with a ball at Windsor on the 29th for the Duke of York, and a drawing room in London two days later, new clothes for the King and Queen’s wedding anniversary on 8 September, and new clothes again on the 22nd, for Coronation Day. Princess Augusta promised, in a letter she wrote to her brother Augustus, a long account of ‘that most blessed of spots, Cheltenham’ in her next. But this letter was dedicated to her regret on hearing he had been so ill, and her relief at knowing that he was recovered.
I hope, my dearest, that you will take proper care of yourself… And that you will not be displeased with me when I ask you if you take exercise enough. For you know how much you used to be out in the air when you was in dear old England. I thought that phrase of ‘old England’ would make you laugh and that is, added to air and exercise, what I shall next recommend by way of a restorative. A little mirth, even in an illness, makes one feel better, and I am very sure that, if I was with you two or three days talking over old stories and telling you several new ones that have passed since you are gone, that you would soon pick up your good looks and spirits.
Princess Royal’s letter to poor asthmatic Augustus was, if sincere, decidedly more sombre:
perhaps this very illness … is a great blessing, since it has confirmed all the good principles that have been instilled into you, and made you see the comfort that religion fills the soul with, when we have reason to believe that all other comfort will soon be withdrawn from us. Indeed, my dear brother, every day convinces me more and more of the truth and comforts of religion. For never does anything vex or really afflict me that, if I have recourse to prayer, I do not instantly feel relieved, being convinced that my father, which is in heaven, knows what is best for me and only afflicts me for wise purposes.
Recommending her dear Augustus, with his ‘serious turn of mind’, to read ‘a German book, that I am very fond of, which is Haller’s letters to his daughter’, the Princess turned to news of a concert, which was to be held at the Castle on her birthday. ‘We were to have had a great entertainment, as Mrs Siddons was to have read a comedy, but alas she has leave of absence from the managers, and is some hundred miles from London for a month. Therefore it would have been quite cruel to have sent for her.’ The Princess Royal would ‘at least try to keep awake during that evening, which will indeed be something new for me to do at harmony. I am afraid that you will not have a very great opinion of me from this confession, as in general a love of music to distraction runs through our family, of which I alone am deprived. Pray, my dear Augustus, do not love me less for my want of ear, and consider that music is almost the only thing that we differ about. In drawing we are both artists and I hope by the next messenger to send you a proof that I have not lost my time since my return from Cheltenham.’
Princess Elizabeth joined in the correspondence, rather rushed: ‘You have not heard as yet, I suppose, that Lord Carmarthen is going to be married to Miss Anguish – everybody gives her the best of characters. Mrs Fox [Lady Charlotte Finch’s niece and the princesses’ friend]
was brought to bed last Saturday of a daughter. Lady Louisa Clayton [Lady Charlotte’s sister] was with her at Plymouth. Now my dear, Adieu, believe me affectionately yrs Eliza. My best love to Ernest and Adolphus I will write soon to both of them.’
Although the Queen was in playful mood on her eldest daughter’s birthday, instructing Miss Burney to ‘bring down the two “Michaelmas geese”’ – Miss Gouldsworthy’s birthday falling on the 29th as well as the Princess Royal’s – the evening concert was a lugubrious affair, lasting from eight until midnight with an interval for tea. Fischer the oboist played once; the rest of the performance, according to Lord Ailesbury the Queen’s Chamberlain, was ‘very indifferent, particularly the Windsor singers’. But the King was cheerful, ‘and continued to talk with satisfaction of his Worcestershire tour, and to think that Cheltenham had been of use to him’.
The Princess Royal was happy with her birthday presents, which she described to her brother Augustus: ‘Mama gave me a beautiful watch and chain of green enamel set with pearls. Prince of Wales a diamond hoop ring, and Frederick a blue enamel ring with a large diamond in the middle and set round with smaller ones.’ But she was less satisfied on another topic. One by one, her friends, and even the ladies who had attended her and her sisters, were marrying and having children. Mary Hamilton had married Mr Dickenson. Lady Caroline Waldegrave was now affianced to Lord Cardigan, while she, the Princess Royal, had only dancing partners – and those chosen for her by Lord Ailesbury. When the ball was over she accompanied her parents back to the Upper Lodge, at the age of twenty-two nowhere nearer her objective of ‘settling’.
The next princess due to celebrate a birthday was Sophia, who would be eleven on 3 November. But between the Princess Royal’s birthday concert and that day, the dull regularity of the royal family’s routine was to be overturned. Sophia’s birthday – and still more her sister Augusta’s birthday on the 8th – would be days for anxiety and fear rather than celebration, and the close harmony which ruled the King and Queen’s lives together shattered. Nor would the princesses’ relationships with their parents ever be the same again.
It began in the week of 16 October 1788. The King, aged fifty, complained of a rash on his arm, and showed it to his daughter Elizabeth, who told Lady Harcourt that ‘it looked very red and in great weals, as if it had been scourged with cords.’ The Princess advised her father to take care, but he proceeded with his normal punishing routine. On the Wednesday, he took only a cup of coffee and dry biscuit for breakfast, as it was a levee day, and, after having no dinner, ate only pears at supper at the Hanoverian Minister’s. The following morning, Thursday, he walked around Kew and Richmond gardens in the morning dew, then failed to change his stockings, only pulling off his wet boots before driving into town with the Queen and princesses. He was afraid he would make them late, for dressing for the drawing room.
That night at Kew he became very ill. At 1 a.m. the Queen ran out of her apartments, ‘in great alarm, in her shift, or with very little clothes’. As the pages attempted to ‘retire’, she ordered them to go for Mr David Dundas, apothecary at Richmond. He came forty minutes later and revived the King, who in turn sent for Sir George Baker. His note, inscribed ‘7.25 a.m.’, informed Baker that he had had a-‘spasmodic bilious attack.’ The King was suffering acute pain in the pit of his stomach, which was shooting from side to side and into his back, making breathing difficult. He told his doctor that ‘of late he had been much tormented in the night by a cramp in the muscles of his legs, and that he had suffered much from the rheumatism, which … made him lame.’
The King did not get better quickly. In fact, his legs swelled after he took the senna that Sir George prescribed. The royal family’s return to Windsor was delayed, as he was still feverish. And indeed it was not till the morning of 21 October that the King, although he had had a bad night’s rest, wrote that he felt able to see Mr Pitt, his Prime Minister. With amazement, Pitt received a private note from Sir George Baker, saying that the King was in a state ‘nearly bordering on delirium.’ William Grenville, a member of Pitt’s Cabinet, wrote equally confidentially to his brother the Marquis of Buckingham on 23 October 1788: ‘a part of the K’s disorder is an agitation and flurry of spirits which hardly gives him any rest’. And at Kew itself Princess Augusta was employed by the Queen on the 23rd, in extreme secrecy, to beg Sir George not to permit the King to leave Kew and attend his normal round in London until he was fully recovered: ‘Mama desires you would express it not as hers but as a wish of your own.’
The King meanwhile wrote to his son Augustus on the 24th, informing him that the spasm in his stomach that he had suffered on the 16th, ‘with the consequences of removing it’, had left him too ill to write earlier, but he was going to St James’s that day, to show he was not as ill as some had believed – though he added that he would ‘certainly have for the rest of my life a flannel clothing next to my skin.’ He was more concerned about Augustus’s poor health at Gottingen than his own, and with preparations to send his son south to the milder climate of Nice for the winter.
At the levee that day at St James’s, which the King did indeed attend, his swollen legs, wrapped in flannel, appalled more people than his presence reassured. Prime Minister Pitt noted what the King himself named his ‘bodily stiffness.’ Two days later, William Grenville thought the King’s appearance at the levee ‘an effort beyond his strength, but made with a view to putting an end to the stories that were circulated with much industry. He has, however, considerably weakened himself by it …’ And Grenville hinted that ‘The present situation is sufficiently embarrassing; but if it turns out ill, all sense of personal inconvenience, mortification, or disappointment, will, I fear, be lost in considerations of infinitely greater moment.’ But a veil of silence had fallen over the King’s health. Following the levee he had travelled to Windsor where he spent the anniversary of his accession, 25 October, generally a joyful occasion, with his family. Unfortunately, the King was not at all well. When his coach drew up at the door of the Queen’s Lodge and the King saw his four younger daughters waiting there, he had a hysteric fit. Later, Miss Burney saw him by chance, and he spoke with ‘a rapidity, a hoarseness of voice, a volubility, an earnestness – a vehemence …’ She wrote: ‘it startled me inexpressibly.’
The King seemed to have lost all power over himself. At Sunday Matins in St George’s Chapel, he started up, as the sermon was to begin, ‘embraced the Queen and Princesses, and then burst into tears’. He said to Princess Elizabeth,’ “You know what it is to be nervous but was you ever so bad as this?” With great presence of mind, she answered, “Yes”,’ and he became calmer. The scene took place in the royal pew close to the altar, so no one else witnessed it. But the King was undoubtedly very ill, of which he was aware. Once back at Windsor he had said to his equerry General Gouldsworthy, ‘I return to you a poor old man, weak in body and in mind.’ And during these days, sitting in a chaise with the Queen, he listened to her stating her belief that God did not try his servants beyond their capacity. ‘Then you are prepared for the worst,’ he said, with a hand encircling her waist.
Sir George Baker reassured the Queen that the King was not as ill as he seemed. Bringing in the King’s favourite Windsor physician, Dr William Heberden, as his partner, Baker counselled putting a blister on the King’s head with his wig to be worn over it. But the princesses watched with horror as their father’s hold on his world crumbled. The meals at which he had been so punctual lay waiting for him now. The Queen was distracted. Yet no one dared to call a halt to the King’s activities. With mottled skin and swollen legs, rapid and hoarse in his speech, he became a frightening figure. He took his daughter Augusta and then the Princess Royal out in his carriage for airings, and told them quite unexpectedly of plans he was formulating for their more or less immediate marriages in Germany. He would take them to Hanover in the summer, he said, and make his Court there as gay as possible, attracting all the young princes of Germany. He regretted that he
had not made matches for them as yet: he had been held back only by the ‘pain the idea of parting from them’ had caused him. He would be happy with such choices as they themselves should make, if they did not make mesalliances. The extent of their husbands’ territories was as nothing besides his wish for their happiness. And there was much more …
It was what the Princess Royal had wished for, but stated under these circumstances – and told rapidly, hoarsely, excitedly – these plans could only upset her and her sister. ‘Though there was nothing improper in what he said,’ wrote Lady Harcourt, ‘yet he spoke with a degree of eagerness and rapidity that was distressing to the Princesses.’ The Princess Royal came in from the airing on which she had heard of these plans for her future and gave the Queen what Fanny Burney took to be a good account of the episode. But the Princess spoke in German, which she was well aware Miss Burney did not know.
Officially the King’s illness was a rheumatic complaint and, in the doctors’ words, ‘it appears now as if everything has thrown itself upon his nerves, which has given him a very violent degree of agitation which nothing but rest and quiet will remove.’ But neither the royal family nor the household at Kew was convinced, and London was full of strange reports. Miss Burney at Windsor wrote on 3 November: ‘we are all here in a most uneasy state. The King is better and worse so frequently, and changes so daily, backwards and forwards, that everything is to be apprehended if his nerves are not quieted.’ The Queen burst into tears when Miss Burney was with her, but more often closeted herself with Gouly, to ask how her brother found the King. ‘Sometimes she walks up and down the room without uttering a word, but shaking her head frequently and in evident distress and irresolution.
