Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  The recall proved disastrous for the Duke of York’s marriage. The Duchess, still caught up in Prussian affairs, showed little respect for the husband who had so publicly been proved an inadequate commander, and he turned in his discomfiture to his brother the Prince of Wales for the comfort of revelry. The Duchess stayed at Oatlands, pursuing musical and charitable projects and amassing a menagerie of animals in place of a husband. No child was ever born of this union which had begun so well, and which had been intended to secure the Hanoverian line, given the Prince of Wales’s disinclination to make a dynastic marriage. And so, although it was an amicable separation, and the Duke visited Oatlands at regular intervals, the succession to the throne was endangered once again.

  Meanwhile, on 10 May 1794, Ernest, who was nothing if not brave, had been leading a charge at Tournai, when he was badly wounded in the eye, and had to return to England to recover. He did not lose the eye, but a film settled over it, and, as he had been shortsighted before, his chagrin was considerable. The great sword-cut in his cheek he regarded with some satisfaction, following his education in Germany, where duelling scars were a source of pride. But this tall, handsome and energetic Prince’s career as a cavalry officer seemed in doubt, as he rested in England and reviewed the family he had not seen for eight years.

  For a time there was only Adolphus, of all George Ill’s sons, serving on the Continent, and he was mostly confined to barracks in a defensive position near the Prussian border. (Edward was stationed with a garrison in Canada, from where word of his excessive love of discipline only slowly reached critics in England.) In March, however, Prince William of Gloucester, aged eighteen, was sent to join his cousin Adolphus in Flanders, and the Duke of York returned there later in the year.

  Fortunately, Lord Howe, father of the princesses’ friends, scored a tremendous naval victory, known afterwards as the Glorious First of June, to divert the nation’s attention from the calamitous campaign that Britain had waged in Flanders. The Queen and princesses, accompanied by Prince Ernest, drove down to Portsmouth to congratulate the victor when he arrived on his flagship, the Queen Charlotte, and Princess Elizabeth afterwards wrote to Lady Charlotte Finch: ‘Of all days of my life, this is the one that I may indeed call the proudest.’ Augusta told Fanny Burney two years later that ‘when she was at Portsmouth at church, she saw so many officers’ wives and sisters and mothers helping their maimed husbands, or brothers, or sons, that she could not forbear whispering to the Queen “Mama – how lucky it is Ernest is just come so seasonably with that wound in his face! – I should have been quite shocked else, not to have had one little bit of glory!”’

  But all was not well. And on 25 July Elizabeth wrote to Lady Harcourt that they were bound the following month for Weymouth, in search of rest for the King. ‘I think it absolutely necessary,’ she said bleakly, citing ‘much hurry of mind, owing to unpleasant business, sleepless nights but much better this last week’. The King was ill again, although not so ill that it had been publicly announced. The Queen was about to call in Dr Willis’s son Thomas for an opinion. ‘That is the true reason why I did not write, but never write to me on the subject, nor own to the family that I have mentioned it but the truth will out to you …’ She wrote, ‘We never talk on the subject and continue doing the same things as we have always done, going to chapel, breakfast, reading, work and drawing. Sometimes squabbling takes us till dinner, after that we sit together unsociably till card time when we have a little conversation.’

  From Weymouth Sophia reported to Lady Harcourt on 24 August, ‘Going to sea is as usual our greatest amusement – that is to say the greatest to those that love it but for my part I prefer land.’ And of her father, she wrote, ‘I cannot say some people are bright by any means – however, better than when we left Windsor.’ She confessed, ‘I find that at present very much my spirits are very weak. I am easily overset. However I struggle as much as possible.’

  Down to the anxious household at Gloucester Lodge at Weymouth the Prince of Wales drove at the end of August, and announced to his parents his earnest desire to marry – and marry soon – his aunt the Duchess of Brunswick’s daughter, Caroline. Very typically, he had ended his relationship with Mrs Fitzherbert in cowardly fashion by having his brother Ernest call on her with the information that the Prince would be visiting her no more. But he could not end their secret marriage of 1785 without openly acknowledging it. Now the Prince disregarded the danger his bride Caroline would encounter crossing Europe to reach him, and he disregarded the fact that he had never met her. He owed so much money that to get his debts paid by Parliament he would have to indicate his wish to settle down, so that he could demand the income of a married man. And he had fixed on his unknown cousin as the bride most likely to win his father’s approval most swiftly, as being his sister’s child.

  The King, still far from well, approved the scheme, but the Queen, who knew much more Continental gossip than her husband, and who was decidedly less fond of the Brunswick family than he, was dismayed. Not only had the chastity of Caroline’s deceased sister, the Hereditary Princess of Württemberg, been in doubt, but the Queen had counselled her widower brother Charles only months before against considering Princess Caroline as a second wife. She had heard that the Princess was so flirtatious that a governess was deputed to follow her round the ballroom to prevent impropriety.

  Neither husband nor son listened, and by December the matter was set in stone. The Princess in Brunswick had eagerly accepted the flattering offer, the King had announced the Prince’s intended marriage to Parliament, and the Queen and princesses in England were busily preparing for the bride’s arrival. As the New Year came in, Lady Charlotte Bruce remarked that the Queen and princesses and some of the ladies had been ‘as closely employed for three weeks in embroidering dresses for the birthday and the forthcoming marriage of the Prince of Wales, “as if they had been working for their daily bread”’.

  When Mrs Harcourt had joined her husband General William Harcourt – the new commander-in-chief – at the British lines in Flanders in December 1794, she had found the army ‘weak and sick’. Every foggy night they expected another attack. But this did not stop her speculating about one of the Allied officers she found there – Prince Frederick of Orange – as a husband for one of the princesses. His father the Stadholder was rich, and the wife of his elder brother the Hereditary Prince – the Duchess of York’s sister Wilhelmina – was too amiable to let any younger brother’s spouse feel inferior.

  Mrs Harcourt was easily seduced. Prince Frederick of Hesse, another officer present, spoke of a nephew’s hope for an alliance with one of the princesses, and after spending an agreeable day in December with the scion of the Hesse house in question, Mrs Harcourt felt no hesitation in declaring for Hesse over Orange: ‘He is the only man worthy of our Princesses; he even deserves Princess Augusta, angel as she is.’

  When the French took Holland in January 1795, putting an end to British military operations on the Continent until 1807, and the Orange family fled their Court at The Hague for exile in England at Hampton Court, Prince Frederick of Orange, at least, ceased to be mentioned as an eligible groom for the princesses. And matchmaker Mrs Harcourt had to abandon other speculation when she was deputed to leave her husband and escort the Princess of Brunswick to her destined husband in England.

  In London the princesses cheered on their brother as his marriage approached, and with it the Parliamentary debates on the size of his income. Augusta wrote to him in February 1795, thanking God that ‘all things wear a good face’. Elizabeth told him in the same month, ‘If you are ever in want of a friend … remember the corner room at the Queen’s House.’ The groom himself was in a state of steaming disappointment, however, by the time his bride arrived in London in April. The money paid by Parliament had covered his debts, but had left him – in his view – with a tiny income, on which he could barely afford to maintain Carlton House and his Marine Villa at Brighton. His bride, he argued, far fr
om being the golden goose he had hoped for, would instead merely bring him nothing but expenses.

  The meeting of the Prince and of his cousin Princess Caroline was perhaps doomed, given the groom’s resentful feelings towards their coming union. At that ceremony – in the Chapel Royal, St James’s – the Prince was drunk. On their wedding night he was drunker. But the person who should have been most concerned at the Prince’s deficiencies, Princess Caroline, did not show any outward perturbation. Fair-haired, sharp-nosed and sloe-eyed, she smiled and nodded at all those who were presented to her in this new strange land whose language she had only just begun to learn.

  But it was not all bad at the beginning. On 13 May, the Princess Royal wrote to Lord Harcourt of the preparations at Frogmore for a proposed nuptial fête she and her sisters and mother were giving for the Prince and his bride. ‘I am a little like Mary in The Fête Champêtre,’ she exclaimed, ‘running every way and doing little to the purpose.’ And she instructed him to tell Lady Harcourt of the dress for the occasion: ‘all the fair that are assembled at the cottage are to endorse the uniform of shepherdesses, and strut across the lawn in muslin gowns and elegant fancy hats. However we do not complete the fair vision by bearing a crook, as we fear mischief might move among so many belles, were they trusted with offensive weapons.’

  The Princess Royal could be, as her mother’s former Assistant Keeper of the Robes wrote, ‘very gay, and very charming; full of lively discourse, and amiable condescension.’ Like all the other princesses – and the Duchess of York – she subscribed to Heideloff’s Gallery of Fashion, an expensive magazine showing the latest modes. Like Princess Augusta, the Princess Royal apparently managed well on £2,000 a year, loved jewels, and bought from Duval. When her art master, John Gresse, died in 1794, she did not repine, but tried out new teachers.

  Despite this evidence of loving the material world, it is noticeable in her mother’s diary of the previous year that Royal often now did not form part of the crocodile of princesses that the Queen led – to Frogmore, to St George’s Chapel, to the Ancient Music concerts at Tottenham Court Road, to Kew. Even when she accompanied her family, she was not always a willing companion. On 24 August 1794, the Princess Royal left the church at Weymouth ‘on account of the heat’, according to Queen Charlotte’s diary. Her continuing resentment towards her mother, her wish for escape from the state of subjection in which she considered she was kept, and her belief that such escape was impossible, had resulted, in short, in withdrawal from the world.

  Suddenly there was a bridegroom in view, and in August 1795, walking on the sands at Weymouth, Princess Augusta teased her elder sister, calling her ‘Duchess of Oldenburg’, while Princess Elizabeth wrote of her sister’s ‘maiden-blush cheek’ being ‘turned into a damask rose’ whenever that Duke’s name was mentioned. For in a match fostered apparently by Mrs Harcourt and by the Prince of Wales, the Princess Royal was now seriously considering as a husband Prince Peter of Oldenburg, a widower with children, and cousin and heir of the reigning Duke of that name. She wrote to her brother: ‘I am perfectly convinced that the Duke of Oldenburg’s character is such that could this be brought about, it would be the properest situation, and knowing your kindness, shall leave it totally to you.’

  News came while the princesses were at Weymouth that their sister-in-law the Princess of Wales was pregnant, and the Queen diligently sent pigs to Brighton to provide bacon and ham for the Princess. But the Prince was never there. Indeed, his sisters were grateful for his presence in London in November 1795 when a mob surrounded their father’s carriage and abused him and his government. Afterwards a hole was found in one of the windows, indicating that someone had fired at him. And Elizabeth, who had been drawn to the window of the Queen’s House by the hubbub far off, recorded, ‘When the coach turned round the corner of the end of the Mall near this house the hooting, screams, and horrid sayings which reached my ear, being at the open window, it scared me in a manner which no words can ever express.’ Princess Augusta told Lady Harcourt that at the play next night ‘my poor agitated mind was more fit for a fireside than for pomp and noise.’ When they came out, they faced a mob once more, and the Prince of Wales and Duke of York – the chief objects of hatred that evening – dispersed it, to her relief, by riding off in separate directions and so leaving them a clear passage home.

  At the end of the year, while his own marriage was complicated by a passion he had discovered for Lady Jersey, a grandmother, the Prince of Wales encouraged his maternal uncle Ernest of Mecklenburg-Strelitz to endorse the Oldenburg alliance. But meanwhile, whether by coincidence or stimulated by rumours of the approaching Oldenburg match, the Princess Royal had received a proposal of marriage from quite another quarter – and it was not one that, at first, pleased her father.

  On 13 November 1795, de Wimpfen, the Württemberger Minister in London, sought an audience with Lord Grenville, the British Foreign Secretary, and suggested the Hereditary Prince of his country as a bridegroom for the Princess Royal. The Hereditary Prince was the elder brother of Prince Ferdinand of Württemberg, who had proposed four years earlier for Princess Augusta. But he was also a widower with three children. And his deceased wife was the King’s niece, Princess Augusta of Brunswick – and the Princess of Wales’s sister. The Hereditary Prince had, at the least, abandoned his wife in Russia, when he took their three children back home to Stuttgart. The King replied to Grenville: ‘In the course of the summer I was astonished at the Duchess of Brunswick mentioning in a letter to me a desire of such an alliance, but knowing the brutal and other unpleasant qualities of this Prince, I could not give any encouragement to such a proposal.’ He therefore ordered Grenville to refuse the request, and he continued, ‘if he will not take a gentle hint, I have no objection to his adding that, after the very unhappy life my unfortunate niece led with him I cannot as a father bequeath any daughter of mine to him’.

  But the Hereditary Prince was not daunted. A month later, he himself wrote to the King: ‘The eminent qualities of Mme Princesse Royale, no less her virtues universally acknowledged, have given birth in me to the most lively desire to see my fate united with hers.’ And the King of England, under pressure from the Imperial Court of Russia – the Hereditary Prince’s sister had married Catherine the Great’s son, the Emperor Paul – began to shift from his earlier position.

  Slowly another story began to emerge in which the Empress Catherine, with whom Augusta of Brunswick had been a favourite, had persuaded the Princess to stay in Russia when her husband left with their children, against his wishes. Catherine had tired of her protégeé, in this story, and banished her to the castle of Lohde, where Augusta duly died. It was a shocking story, to be sure, but one in which the Hereditary Prince seemed to show no worse than anyone else involved. This story emanated from the Russian Court, where the Hereditary Prince’s sister, wife of Catherine’s son Paul, was now empress, and keen to promote her brother’s cause.

  The Prince of Wales’s own marital situation did not improve, not even when his wife gave birth to a healthy girl on 7 January 1796, who was named Charlotte Augusta – good Hanoverian names. Princess Mary wrote from Windsor on the 9th, ‘I am almost distracted with joy at the birth of my little niece. I am sorry for my brother and sister [-in-law]’s sake that it was not a boy as I believe they both wished it, but I am sure in a very short time my brother will be as much pleased that it is a girl.’ She went on: ‘Papa is so delighted it is a daughter. As you know, he loves little girls best. He was, I am sure, more kind than I can ever express to us in a speech he made to Lord Jersey, which was: “If the Prince of Wales is blessed with such a daughter as mine are to me, he will be a happy man indeed.” … I may say in return that, if my brother is as good a father to my niece as the King has always been to us, she will be a very happy little girl.’

  But the Prince was truly het up. He wrote a will the night that Charlotte Augusta was born, condemning her mother on every count and leaving the few groats he believe
d he possessed to ‘my Maria [Fitzherbert], my wife, the wife of my heart and soul.’ This testamentary bequest occupied twenty-six pages.

  The Queen, so practised in the business of childbirth, had sent cradles to Carlton House and had appointed rockers and nurses, dry and wet. Lady Elgin became governess to the baby destined for a majestic calling. From the first, it was pretty much established that Princess Charlotte of Wales was to be the one and only child of the Prince’s marriage to Princess Caroline – and hence heir to the throne following her father.

  The Prince had no justice on his side. He had taken a dislike to his cousin which largely hung on his continued love for Mrs Fitzherbert, although, a fastidious man, he found Caroline’s slatternly approach to dressing and even washing off-putting. The Queen took his side, at least partly from a dislike of the Princess’s mother. The princesses, for too long accustomed to defend the Prince against all comers, were beguiled by their brother’s stories of his wife’s insubordination. They sympathized with him and made few attempts to see their cousin and sister-in-law. And so the Princess of Wales found no support in the unknown country of England – except, indeed, from her uncle the King. But, powerful though he was, the King could not command his son to reconcile with his niece. Besides, he believed that wives should obey their husbands. And the princesses, when they tried to be even handed, failed too. Princess Elizabeth wrote to her brother on 6 June 1796 of the King ‘constantly saying that you should never yield to the Princess, and she must submit which every woman ought’. She added, ‘He has said and re-said that you must be supported by the whole family, for, if you was to fall, the rest of the family would soon follow.’ The reference was unmistakably to the Duke and Duchess of York, whose amicable separation had already caused England’s ally the King of Prussia some grief.