by Flora Fraser
The King, still frail, did not attend these festivities, and he found that his head for business was somewhat impaired. He wrote in May that ‘lassitude and dejection’ made it difficult for him to take quick or satisfactory decisions, and complained of fatigue: ‘I am not yet able to copy my own papers.’ Telling Pitt that he would attempt for the meanwhile only to ‘supervise’ his ministers’ work, and relying on time to complete his cure, he continued to take bark, with tartar mixed in, as directed by Dr Willis, now back at his Gresford asylum. And he continued to make plans for Hanover.
The King missed a piquant encounter at the ball following his Birthday drawing room on 4 June between his daughter Princess Augusta and the Duke of Richmond’s heir, Captain Charles Lennox, whom the Queen had pointedly invited – to her son the Prince of Wales’s fury. A week earlier, Lennox had fought a duel with the Duke of York, his commanding officer in the Coldstreams, after publicly insulting his brother the Prince. ‘The Duke of York had one of his curls shot off, and when the King and Queen heard it, the first showed very little and the second no emotion at all, and both said coldly that they believed it was more Fred’s fault than Lennox’s,’ wrote an indignant Whig. The royal parents had not yet forgiven their eldest sons their behaviour during the King’s illness.
When the dancing began, Lennox joined with his partner in the royal family’s set. The Prince of Wales left that set with the Princess Royal, before the Captain could ‘turn’ her. But the Duke of York with Princess Augusta remained. And so Augusta danced with the dashing Captain, creating in the circumstances a sensation. Indeed, the manuscript of The Claustral Palace, a projected book detailing the romances of the princesses and for that reason suppressed, features handsome Captain Lennox as Augusta’s earliest lover.
A rash of lovers and suitors and even a bridegroom might have followed for Augusta in Germany had the King stuck to his plan of setting up shop at Hanover. Unfortunately, Dr Willis counselled against the proposed trip as too strenuous, and advised the King to take ‘a few dips in the sea’ instead as a final guarantee of his health. This suggestion took root with the King, and led him – anxious that he might not ‘entirely recover the vigour of mind and the inclination of taking the same active part’ that he had done ‘for above 28 years’ without ‘thorough relaxation’ – to plump for Weymouth. This was a rather staid sea-bathing resort in Dorset, thirteen hours by coach from Windsor, where his brother Gloucester had a house.
And so early in the morning of 25 June 1789 the three elder princesses departed Windsor for Weymouth, part of a caravan of eight coaches loaded with luggage and supplies – Lyndhurst in the New Forest their first stop. The Queen, the princesses and all the ladies, noted Miss Burney, wore ‘riding coats of the Windsor uniform, which is a new dress taken up this year’, for their journey. The younger princesses – Mary, Sophia and Amelia – stayed behind at Lower Lodge at Windsor with Gouly and Lady Charlotte Finch.
En route to Weymouth the party stopped for a few days in the ancient New Forest in Hampshire. It was the King’s first visit to this royal hunting ground, and at its entrance a local baronet, Sir Charles Mills, waited to present him with a brace of white greyhounds with silver collars. Hereditary Keepers of the Forest then escorted the royal party to the ‘King’s house’ at Lyndhurst, where the Duke of Gloucester received them. Princess Augusta, at least, was greatly taken with the New Forest, and some years later fantasized to an admirer of living in a cottage there.
Miss Burney, another of the party, remembered instead the experience of passing through Salisbury further down the route to Weymouth: ‘a city which with their Majesties, I could not see for people! It seemed to have neither houses nor walls, but to be composed solely of faces.’ The roads, according to one observer, were ‘lined with every human creature of every rank and every age, in chariots, coaches, carts, on horseback, upon asses … all come to see, and holler, and scream their true loyalty and joy … every field and every hedge was robbed of every flower to wreathe garlands and crowns.’
The princesses had their first sight of Weymouth Bay on 30 June, and of the harbour and the rolling hills of Portland Isle beyond, as they descended the steep hill leading to the town that curved round the bay. The Duke of Gloucester’s house, Gloucester Lodge, lay at the end of that great sweep, the southernmost part of an elegant terrace of houses. Next door was the Royal Hotel, and immediately in front of the Lodge door was the public esplanade, leading to the shops, circulating library, theatre, assembly rooms and other appurtenances of a popular seaside resort. Across the esplanade lay the sands, the public bathing machines and the sea itself. Their lodgings, in short, commanded no privacy whatsoever.
For the princesses it was an entirely new sensation (except for Elizabeth, who as a ten-year-old had stayed at Eastbourne) to see and hear the sea, to walk on sand and, of course, to bathe – and all in public. Their father’s first attempt at sea-bathing on 7 July was not without incident. The ‘dipper’ or bathing attendant who rolled the bathing machine containing the sovereign forward into the waves made the most of her moment. The windows of the machine were inscribed in gold ‘God Save the King’. The dipper wore a plain flannel dress tucked up, and no shoes, but her girdle and a bandeau in her hair were both inscribed again ‘God Save the King’. And there were others waiting to proclaim their loyalty. When the King descended from the back end of the machine to duck under the waves, a band of musicians, concealed in a machine alongside, appeared and struck up ‘God save great George our King’.
The Queen wrote diplomatically a few days later, ‘Elizabeth and Princess Royal go in the sea every other [day],’ and her husband had been in twice – but had been stopped by a pain in his ear. The royal party also sailed, and the princesses were ‘frequently’ rowed about in ‘ten oar cutters’ manned by the oarsmen – ‘very smart fine dressed men’, wrote his mother the Queen – of their brother Prince William (who in May had been created Duke of Clarence and St Andrews). But the sailor Duke’s ungrateful sister Princess Royal told her brother Augustus that she no more liked sailing than she liked music. On one occasion it took six hours to get back to Weymouth from Lulworth Castle, the winds were so strong.
The royal family did not slump on reaching home. Mrs Siddons, summering in Weymouth with her small son, was playing Mrs Towneley that night for their benefit. And so they went, ‘such figures to the play as were never seen before’, wrote Princess Royal, ‘for we only stopped by Lady Pembroke’s to put a little powder in our hair and went in our cloth greatcoats!’ Mrs Siddons, for her part, rejoiced to see the King so well, she had never seen him so handsome in her life, ‘and the Queen is absolutely fat’, she wrote to Lady Harcourt at Nuneham Courtenay.
Royal’s patriotic younger sister Augusta enjoyed the opportunities which sailing on the frigate Southampton afforded to learn about her father’s navy. ‘I went all over the ship …’ she wrote. ‘The first ship I ever saw both inside and outside, the most enviable of things, and the most elegant and clean.’ ‘I am a famous sailor,’ she boasted in late July. She had barely sat down, ‘and stood while they hove the anchor, and while she tossed about in a capital manner. Lady Elizabeth Waldegrave was the only one of the ladies who was sick.’ Entertained by everything to do with her new-found passion for the sea and the navy, Augusta told with gusto of the method by which she had ascended the side of the ship. It was a ‘very mild and safe ceremony which bears a very false and ridiculous name … whipping. It consists of being drawn up her [the ship’s] body in a chair by two cables. It seems tremendous to the ear, but as I would trust my life in the hands of a British sailor, I thought myself as safe and secure as in my own room.’
Others across the Channel were less safe. In late July, the Queen at Weymouth heard that, following the storming of the Bastille on the 14th of that month, the French Minister of Finance, M. de Foulon, had escaped, but was then discovered. ‘They intended to hang him, but the cord breaking, they beheaded him.’ She also heard that the Queen of
France was to be forced to go with her son the Dauphin to give thanks for the Revolution at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. ‘The poor unfortunate Princess, what a bitter potion is hers,’ wrote Queen Charlotte with feeling. ‘I pity both the King and her, and wish anxiously that they may meet with some well disposed people to extricate them hourly out of their great horrible distress.’ The Queen was waiting for the morning post to know how the French Queen had gone through ‘this mortifying scene.’
The Magnificent, a seventy-four-gun ship of the line, sailed round the coast to stand off Weymouth Harbour, and Mr Pitt drove down from London to discuss developments. But events in France did not deter the royal family from their programme of sailing and sightseeing, and in mid-August they embarked on an ambitious journey to Exeter, Saltram and Plymouth. Their appearance so far west caused many demonstrations of loyalty – not least from a housekeeper who gave a child a morsel of the King’s dinner when he had done, and said ‘she might talk on it when she was an old woman.’ At Plymouth, the royal party was saluted by ‘every ship, every fort, and every battery’, and next day the King went to Saltram Victualling Office and inspected supplies. More to the royal ladies’ taste was a visit to Mount Edgcumbe, where the Queen cut a sprig of myrtle from a bush and said, ‘I will carry this home, and plant it myself in a pot; I will send it home, and always have it, and always keep it.’ When they departed downriver, their hostess, Lady Mount Edgcumbe, said the 200 boats on the river looked ‘like a wood’ with their oars lifted in acclamation of the monarch restored to health. And she was quite sure her husband George would not be satisfied till he had raised a triumphal arch to commemorate the visit.
The King was well, they could rejoice, but the Queen was much changed. Her hair till the previous year had been a light brown. During the King’s illness it turned white. She was also so bowed and stooped with suffering that, according to several diaries, she had shrunk in height. And shortly after New Year 1789 was rung in so dolefully at frozen Kew, Fanny Burney recorded that the Queen had lost so much weight that her stays went twice round her. Mrs Siddons’s testimony at Weymouth eight months later makes it appear that that phase of intense grief was over.
These were the physical effects. But the Queen’s personality had undergone a sea change. The horror of those four months had struck deep. She had been drawn, for the first time ever, into politics. There she floundered, attempting desperately to follow the King’s firm orders never to meddle with party. And she was attacked by the Whigs – her beloved Prince’s party – whatever she did. Now she dreaded drawing rooms and balls and even her favourite concerts for fear of obloquy. On her return to Windsor and London from Weymouth in mid-September, she was most happy at home, when one of her daughters, or her readers, M. Deluc or Mme de la Fite, or even Miss Burney or M. de Guiffardière, read aloud to her, distracting her from the daily round.
Unfortunately, the King’s lewd remarks during his illness about his preference for Lady Pembroke, his repeated expressions of dislike for the Queen and his assertions that she frightened all her children had also had their effect. The Queen was never again to be that gay centre of her intimate circle, that nimble correspondent of her brother and sons, the firm administrator of the several households. The humiliations and insults heaped upon her by the King, the hatred he had conceived for her, had confounded her. Even after he was declared officially well, for some time he harked after Lady Pembroke. The Queen developed a terrible temper that did indeed frighten her children, and she became capricious in her treatment of them and of her attendants.
Years before, Gainsborough had painted the Queen as he might a lively actress moving across the stage. Benjamin West had painted her again, the composed mother of thirteen children. When the young painter Thomas Lawrence painted her, on her return from Weymouth, she was inattentive and edgy. One of the princesses sat reading to her but did not pacify her mood. The artist proposed she wear jewels, perhaps to inject some much needed sparkle into the picture, and she refused. In the end she allowed her pearl bracelets with the King’s portrait to be introduced into the sombre painting, but she would not model them herself, and her hairdresser’s daughter was given that employment.
Princess Amelia, Lawrence’s other sitter at Windsor in September 1789, was a good deal easier – until the painter gave two drawings to her elder sister and only one to her, ‘The child ran to her father telling him in grief that she was sure that Mr Lawrence did not like her as much as her sisters … The child’s sorrow prevented the progress of the portrait for that day, and until the presents were equalized.’
Typical of the Queen’s sombre mood were her continued reflections in July on the French Revolution, occasioned, she believed, by ‘the want of principle and the neglect of all duty to God and man’. Again she wrote: ‘I often think that this cannot be the 18th C in which we live at present, for ancient history can hardly produce anything more barbarous and cruel than our neighbours in France.’ The Queen’s reflections on the revolution in France were leaden, but at least it made her more cheerful about the future of England. It was a country with ‘much to bless itself for’, she declared, ‘a king is returned to us, the illness has made him even more dear to his people …’. And, telling her son Augustus that the King had resumed his levees, she ended: ‘I have hopes that we shall soon come to go on in our old way’
Princess Augusta’s opinion of events across the Channel was more robust, if not more sophisticated, than her mother’s. ‘Poor France,’ she wrote to Augustus, ‘she’s penny wise and pound foolish, I pity the King – I hate the nation – Indeed they aren’t worth hating – I only hold them cheap.’ She settled down, having greatly enjoyed her summer, to lessons on the harpsichord with her music master, Charles Horn, who had come to England as a valet seven years before. Now, as music master to the royal ladies he occupied a place last held by John Christian Bach, who had died in 1782.
The Princess Royal had been anxious to get back to her drawing lessons with Richard Livesay, Benjamin West’s apprentice, when they were at Weymouth. Princess Elizabeth was drawn both to music and to art. The princesses were all busy when the New Year bells of 1790 tolled, as their new lady-in-waiting and friend Lady Mary Howe attests: ‘You heard before of my having painted the Queen’s parrot,’ she wrote to her married sister Louisa in Ireland, ‘it’s beautifully framed and to be hung up in town. I have also given my handsomest nonpareil [or pink parakeet] to Princess Elizabeth. She is so very fond of birds that I was happy to give it up to her. She is painting Miss Moser’s great flower piece most astonishingly well, and Princess Royal finishing a beautiful fan for the Queen, with feathers, flowers, insects, shells … figures and landscapes, I think it one of the prettiest I ever saw.’
Miss Mary Moser, whose work Princess Elizabeth was copying, was the leading flower painter in England, and one of only two female artists who had been elected founder members of the Royal Academy. The Queen, busy both purchasing art and creating it, wrote to her brother Charles on 2 February asking for colours to paint botanical specimens in gouache – some prepared, some in powder form. ‘I wish much for those from Nuremberg,’ she wrote, ‘as the place best known for this sort of painting.’
Princess Augusta wrote from Windsor to her brother Augustus at the end of February, ‘Trifles and enormities both serve the world with a great deal of talk for a little time … Emperors’ deaths and a fashionable new carriage, a new dance at the Opera, the birth of an heir apparent to a Crown, the forwardness of the season and new gowns or caps or such like nonsense give topics of conversation, all in their turns, and one talks of each of them with the same avidity as were they all of the same consequence.’ But she, like her other sisters, envied Augustus the travels he now undertook in search of better health.
Rome was ‘of all places abroad the one I wish most to see’, she told him when he reached the Holy City. When he was in Florence, Princess Augusta wrote that she longed to visit the Uffizi Gallery, and Princess Elizabeth chimed in: ‘
Of all places in the world Italy and Switzerland are the countries out of England I most wish to see.’ By contrast, their own amusements recently had consisted in music at home and once a week music in Tottenham Court Road. And the Princess Royal wrote, ‘I suppose that you now both read and speak Italian with ease, having had such a favourable opportunity of learning it and that language not being very difficult… If you recollect the picture that Zoffany painted of the Tribune, I beg that you will let me know whether you think it like.’ She knew that he had introduced paintings and objects from other rooms, but she wanted to know ‘if in other particulars he has followed the original close.’
The King’s recovery continued, and on I March Princess Augusta observed: ‘He continues his old pursuits just as he formerly used to do, only that he has left off coursing. Therefore he has parted with his greyhounds to hunt hares with a very pretty pack of harriers he has just got.’ But the King’s thoughts of taking his daughters to his Electorate had faded with his return to the routine of government and recreation. Two months later the princesses’ brother Edward didn’t think their father at all likely to go to Hanover.
The King attended his Birthday this year, and his third daughter, Princess Elizabeth, yawned. ‘A great many minuets were danced – indeed (entre nous) so many that when the country dances began, I was more inclined to sleep than to begin dancing again.’ Another princess there, on the other hand, was alive with mortification. Unfortunately neither illness nor recuperation at their father’s house had made the King – or Queen – soften towards the Gloucester children, as became clear when Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester made her debut on this occasion. The Princess was an odd sight to begin with. She was ‘not dressed well in a very old fashioned style – her gown was very magnificent but the hair was dressed quite out of the fashion … after her own direction’, wrote an uncharitable relation. ‘She herself has not the least idea of dress and she will not be guided by anyone else.’ But then ‘she was placed in a corner with Miss Dee [her governess] and Their Majesties just spoke to her as they would to any common person’.
