by Flora Fraser
Meanwhile, the negotiations for the Princess Royal to marry the Hereditary Prince of Württemberg began – and proceeded at a snail’s pace. The Württemberg commissioner who had been despatched to London that month was Count Zeppelin, the intimate friend of the Hereditary Prince since they had been brothers-in-arms in the Russian military service. Indeed, he was said to be such an intimate friend that the previous Hereditary Princess had objected, and the King’s reference to the Hereditary Prince’s ‘brutal ways’ may have been occasioned by such rumours. At any rate, on 4 May Count Zeppelin had ‘a long conversation with M. le Comte de Woronzow’ – the Russian Ambassador to London – ‘who informed him of the zealous interest taken by the Empress [of Russia, the Hereditary Prince’s sister] in respect to the object of M. de Zeppelin – and he [Woronzow] had the most positive orders of Her Imperial Majesty to use any means in his power to her name to facilitate its accomplishment.’ Two days later, Zeppelin made the formal proposal in his master’s name for the Princess Royal’s hand in marriage, and on 4 June the Hereditary Prince wrote to an English baronet, Sir John Coxe Hippisley, who had interested himself in the affair, of his joy at the successful outcome of ‘my dear Zeppelin’s negotiations’.
The King’s response was cautious, and he wrote of his daughter to the Hereditary Prince from Kew on the 15th, ‘In an affair so essential to her happiness it would have been contrary to my duty not to leave her perfectly free in taking time to fully reflect’ before declaring her sentiments. He gave his consent to the match, but he could not think of sending his daughter to Germany until it was in a more tranquil state. Likewise, he stated: ‘You must defer coming to this country until circumstances are such that it [the marriage] can take place.’
The Prince in Stuttgart was impervious to snubs, and the Princess Royal wrote on 7 September to the Prince of Wales to say that she had received ‘a very handsome letter’ from him. Everything that had been anathema to her was enchanting now. ‘We were out to see the line,’ she reported, describing the spectacle of part of the British fleet sailing in formation past Weymouth Bay. Generally the Princess hated her family’s daily pursuits – music, cards and the sea – but on this occasion, she added, ‘I own I was much amused.’ Baron de Rieger, the Württemberg Envoy Extraordinary, left Stuttgart for London with the marriage contract in his luggage on 3 October, charged by the Hereditary Prince to tell the King ‘of the happy change in our affairs … the tranquillity of this country’. And the King, resigning himself, told Lord Grenville on 6 November: ‘Baron Rieger is to arrive in the course of this month to conclude the treaty of marriage.’ Promptly next day the Baron duly arrived, and presented his credentials from the Duke and Hereditary Prince to the Duke of Portland.
Unfortunately, towards the end of that month the Princess Royal caught jaundice, and was ‘as yellow as a guinea’. But, her sister Augusta wrote, she bore ‘the inconvenience of the complaint with uncommon patience and Sir Lucas Pepys foretells the greatest good from it.’ Early in the New Year she wrote again to Lady Harcourt: ‘All the spare time I have is devoted to poor Pss R who, after a week’s amendment, is worse than ever … It is a detestable complaint and I fear, will not leave her as soon as she thinks. She is as yellow as gold and as weighty as lead – suffers more than she ever ought to do and is as patient as a lamb.’
Jaundice, wicked weather, reverses on the Continent in the war against France, and many other obstacles notwithstanding, the determined bride was dressed and ready when the Prince, having disembarked on her native coast from the Prince of Orange packet on 10 April 1797, appeared at the Queen’s House on the evening of the 15th for their first interview. Princess Elizabeth wrote to Lady Charlotte Finch immediately afterwards, ‘We are just come upstairs and I can say with great truth and pleasure that nothing could go off better than the interview of this evening with the Prince of Wurttemberg. My sister is very well pleased with him, and I really think that he appears delighted with her. He has a very handsome countenance, is certainly very large – but very light with it and a most excellent manner. In short, we are all pleased with him.’
‘Very large’ indeed: Frederick, Hereditary Prince of Württemberg had a huge stomach, so large and round that Napoleon said of him: ‘God put him on earth to see how tight you could stretch, without bursting.’ ‘Sensible and well informed’ he might be, ‘… though not exactly the picture of a young lover’, as Lord Grenville wrote. But his appearance was a gift to the London cartoonists, who seized on this German prey and dubbed him the great ‘Bellygerent’.
The Princess Royal did not flinch from her purpose, although a private letter of 13 May from Windsor told Fanny Burney she was ‘almost dead with terror and agitation and affright at the first meeting – she could not utter a word – the Queen was obliged to speak her answers.’ The Prince said courteously that he hoped this would be the last disturbance he would cause her, and paid court successfully to her sisters until she was recovered.
A note written by the Princess Royal exists from the days that followed: ‘My dearest Lady Harcourt, I have received the Queen’s commands to acquaint you that if you wish to see my trousseau, she desires that you will be so good as to be at the Queen’s House tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock. Pray mention this to nobody, as the Queen does not wish it to be spoken of.’ And among the gowns and dresses laid out at the Queen’s House were two complete sets of baby clothes, one for a girl, one for a boy, till the age of three. Most of the dresses, however, were unmade. Queen Charlotte, who had taken on the task of equipping her daughter, had merely selected material to be made up in Germany according to fashions there.
As for the wedding ceremony itself, the Queen declared that she and no other would dress Royal for the occasion, as Augusta told Miss Burney when the latter said she had heard ‘the bride had never looked so lovely’. Proclaimed the younger sister, “Twas the Queen dressed her! – You know what a figure she used to make of herself, with her odd manner of dressing herself; but Mama said, “Now really, Princess Royal, this one time is the last; and I cannot suffer you to make such a quiz of yourself; so I will really have you dressed properly.” And indeed’, added Augusta, ‘the Queen was quite in the right, for everybody said she had never looked so well in her life.’
Augusta’s light-hearted recital does not disguise the tension that existed between Royal and the mother she was about to leave. But the Queen spoke admiringly of Royal insisting on embroidering her ‘wedding garment, and entirely … well knowing that three stitches done by any other would make it immediately said it was none of it by herself. With her mother’s sanction, the silks she used were white and silver, her right as eldest daughter of the King, although, marrying a widower, she should, according to etiquette, have been in white and gold. James Bland Burges, as knight marshal of the King’s household, walked ahead of the tremulous Princess and her husband ‘immediately after the drums and trumpets, and in front of the pursuivants and heralds.’ And in the accomplished cartoon by James Gillray entitled The Bridal Night that depicts this scene, not only does the coronet, ‘set with brilliants’, that the bride wore, shine, but a bag marked £80,000 floats above the procession.
The new Hereditary Princess of Württemberg brought to the marriage a dowry of £80,000, which would become her widow’s jointure if she survived her husband. The King, citing the uncertainties of Continental war and hence the uncertainties of currency valuation, insisted on keeping the sum lodged in Britain. The Hereditary Prince did not argue, but he protested on another point, ‘extended a finger and said, “not a ring to show”’. In Germany it was the custom for the bride to give the groom a present of value. Even the Princess’s hair in a ring surrounded by brilliants would answer for his marriage. The Harcourts returned a dusty answer: ‘I hope … that upon reflection the Pce will consider that every country has its own customs, and that it is as reasonable that he should at present be satisfied with those established here, as it will soon be for the Princess to adopt those of the
place she is going to. It would be very painful for her to find that there was dissatisfaction, after all the pains that have been taken to show every attention.’
The Princess Royal was up early on 2 June 1797 to make her departure with her bridegroom on this great adventure, having said her goodbyes to her sisters and parents the evening before. ‘The parting was very severe,’ noted her niece Charlotte’s sub-governess, Miss Anne Hayman. ‘There was to be no leave taking by mutual agreement, and the sisters dropped away one by one the evening before. But when the King went to wish the Princess of Württemberg good night, she fainted in his arms, and he was obliged to leave her in that state, not daring to encounter the scene that might follow.’
Her brother the Prince of Wales walked about Carlton House till midnight, meaning every instant to go and bid his sister farewell, but, feeling too much, he put it off till morning. When morning came, he was too affected to depart the house, and then it was too late. The new Princess of Württemberg, however, the night before forgotten, ‘sailed in good spirits’. Her family was less sure than she was of a successful outcome to this step into matrimony, less sure of her husband and of his character. Five years later, on 11 October 1802, Queen Charlotte wrote of the Hereditary Prince to her brother, ‘I agree with you, he is agreeable in society.’ Among the Hereditary Prince’s friends in England were Sir Joseph Banks, with whom he stayed, and who advised him on an agricultural and manufacturing tour he made of the country while he waited for his bride to complete her arrangements for departure. ‘But he has a vanity which made him detested in England,’ continued the Queen. ‘He did not know how to govern his bad humour in the presence of the women of my daughter’s suite, and for a man who prides himself in knowing the world, that was to forget himself entirely. In a few words, he displeased us totally and his departure was not regretted.’
But the new Hereditary Princess was at last in a situation, as Miss Burney wrote, to make her happy. ‘She is born to preside,’ wrote the novelist, ‘and that with equal softness and dignity; but she was here in utter subjection, for which she had neither spirits nor inclination … her style of life was not adapted to the royalty of her nature, any more than of her birth; and though she only wished for power to do good, and to confer favours, she thought herself out of her place in not possessing it.’ If that power came at a price, the Princess Royal was never to regret her marriage. Exhilarating was the moment after a night at Harwich when the Hereditary Princess stepped aboard the San Fiorenzo, and that when she stepped ashore at Cuxhaven, to be greeted by her brother Adolphus. ‘He is grown much larger since he left England and having let his hair grow as long as Ernest’s was, it has altered his appearance very much,’ she wrote to the Prince of Wales.
The couple proceeded to Hanover, in her father’s Electorate, for balls and drawing rooms, all etiquette and formality at Herrenhausen, and then on through the countryside, where ‘the peasants enquired which was the King’s daughter’, and asked the King to come and visit them. The Princess had her first encounter with Mme de Spiegel, who was to be her lady-in-waiting at Stuttgart. Onward she drove to Brunswick, to Nordheim, to Münden, and to the gates of Cassel, while her mother in England wrote to her brother Charles, ‘I have just separated from my daughter Royal. It cost us much, God hopes she will be happy. The Pce has esprit, worldliness, and knows how to get what he wants. They are both at an age when they must know how to discern what true contentment consists of, and, first youth being past, they must endeavour to make themselves mutually happy.’
The Prince, who had gone ahead, greeted the new Hereditary Princess – with full honours and with his two sons – at Heilbron, frontier to the Duchy of Württemberg, on 23 June. Prince Wilhelm and Prince Paul were, their new stepmother wrote, ‘so like my brothers that I was both pleased and overcome.’ And the next day, arriving at Stuttgart, she met both her parents-in-law. That evening, at Ludwigsburg, the massive castle in the country where the Württemberg family liked to live as much as possible, she met her nine-year-old stepdaughter Catherine. All three of her stepchildren were to be encouraged by their father to call his new wife ‘Maman’. And for the first time ever this new bride and stepmother, who had been known as ‘Royal’ by her intimates, was known by her husband as ‘Charlotte’.
Timid the Princess Royal might appear in company, nervous and sometimes reduced, for fear of stammering, to speaking little, but she had achieved her heart’s desire – to marry. On her arrival at Ludwigsburg she found her husband Fritz had sent ahead a copy of Gainsborough’s portrait of her dear father to hang in her closet. Whatever his faults as a husband to her cousin Augusta, this Prince of the Holy Roman Empire seemed determined to please her.
Book Three: Scandal 1798–1810
9 In Spirits
The King had found parting with his eldest daughter very painful, and was hardly better disposed towards his new son-in-law than was the Queen. He resented the Hereditary Prince’s attempts to secure his interest for the Duchy with letters and even via petitions from the Princess. The Hereditary Princess had to reassure her father that, on her instructions, the Prince would write no more, as the King disliked answering letters. Accordingly, when they heard at Windsor that the Prince had had an accident out shooting in Germany, no great sympathy was felt for him.
But at Scharnhausen, the Hereditary Prince’s country retreat near Stuttgart, it was a major drama. The Hereditary Princess told her father she had been ‘seized with … an unaccountable uneasiness’ after she had seen her husband mount and ride off. She could not go on with her book, but went up ‘to sit with Madame de Spiegel in her room.’ Fifteen minutes later that lady was called out to go to Prince Wilhelm, the Prince’s son, and when she returned she begged Royal to join her in the garden. ‘The moment that I had reached the bench I burst into tears,’ wrote that Princess, ‘entreating that she would acquaint me with what had happened to my husband. She then by degrees told me that he had fallen from his horse.’
After a short time her stepson Wilhelm came out to bring Royal into the house. She found the Prince in bed, ‘and he then told me himself that his arm was broke. It is a great mercy that he was not killed, as in the first fall he broke the right arm in the joint… and afterwards, as it was on the side of a mountain, rolled four times. His eyes was much bruised but providentially not hurt essentially.’ With great presence of mind, as the Hereditary Princess lovingly wrote, ‘before they could lift him off the ground, [he] ordered his son to go to Madame de Spiegel, to desire that she would break it to me in the gentlest manner and gave directions that I should be taken into the garden, that I might be spared the pain of seeing him lifted out of the coach.’ Royal was entranced by this proof of her husband’s consideration for her. Their being in so remote a part of the country, the surgeon could not arrive for hours to set the arm, but when Royal went to her husband, ‘he kept laughing and talking with me for above three hours, when he insisted on my going to supper, and the moment I left him he fainted away.’
The princesses in London were, as Miss Hayman, in attendance on their niece Charlotte, observed at the Queen’s House a few days after Royal’s departure, ‘very pleasing and affable, but still lamenting, I believe, the loss of their sister.’ But by early August Princess Elizabeth had become callous, telling Lord Cathcart that her brother-in-law in Württemberg was none the worse for his mishap. ‘No more has happened than a broken arm … notwithstanding he never quits his room.’
Princess Elizabeth, however, had grown in confidence since she had published a book in 1795 entitled The Birth and Triumph of Cupid, containing some twenty-four designs she had made on that theme, engraved by the Queen’s ‘Historical Engraver’ Mr Peltro Tomkins. The following year, the plates were republished as The Birth and Triumph of Love, accompanied by a set of 109 Spenserian verses on the same amatory theme by that enterprising young man of letters – and subsequently member of the King’s household – James Bland Burges. A connection of Martha, Lady Elgin, when she was o
ne of the Queen’s ladies, and a sometime Foreign Office employee, Burges enjoyed versifying in assorted magazines of the day. He had his reward when he learnt in November 1794 that all the princesses copied and kept his verses, considering him ‘an astonishing genius’, and that Princess Elizabeth was in addition the author of some anonymous poetry he had received. At a drawing room shortly thereafter, his ‘Muse’ – Princess Elizabeth – asked him the names of some French émigré officers awaiting presentation, and their introduction was effected.
‘I will satisfy your curiosity about my epic poem’, wrote Burges to a friend when busy at work the following year on his Spenserian verses, ‘on condition that you will confine what I say to yourself for the present … I have already finished the first book of it in the metre of Spenser’s Fairy Queen, but not in his antiquated language. How the idea may have been executed is not for me to say; but the idea in itself is so entirely original, that I am confident nothing like it is to be found in any language. I caught it from some drawings of Pss Elizabeth, and I am writing this poem for HRH.’
On Twelfth Night 1796 the poem was complete, and Lady Elgin wrote from the Queen’s Lodge to Burges that she had given it to the Princess, whom she saw briefly. ‘I was … most completely gratified by her manner of reading,’ wrote Burges’s champion, ‘and the delighted expressions that burst out, I may say, as she went through the lovely poem.’ The Princess, not wishing to have her Cupid ‘mortified’ by being set aside, did not show it to the Queen, as the Oranges were on the point of arriving to dine. But while she was showing it to Mr Smelt, the Queen came in and, as Princess Elizabeth herself wrote, ‘I had the pleasure of putting into Mama’s hands Sir James B B’s most beautiful and elegant poem … my poor little foolish silent Cupid owes all its worth to the poetry, for I never saw him before in the favourable light you all did, till he was privileged with verse.’
