Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  Burges had considered that, if the publication he envisaged of the manuscript he was working on were a success, ‘it will place me not very low among the English poets.’ Princess Elizabeth was more modest, and sent a copy of her original Cupid engravings to Lord Harcourt, with the note: ‘As you was so very good as to wish to have a copy of The History of Cupid, I do beg your acceptance of it. It is in so terrible an undress, that I am really afraid to send it.’ Nevertheless, she wrote, ‘I send it the moment I received it, in hope that it might give you a moment’s amusement, which if it does, will gratify me very much.’ All the princesses in different ways relied on Lord and Lady Harcourt as sounding boards for the great world, from which they were aware they lived secluded. Ever since her ‘great illness’ at Kew, Princess Elizabeth had felt sustained in her artistic endeavours by Mr Smelt. In this new adventure of publication, Lord Harcourt, who was not only a distinguished amateur artist himself but also a noted patron of poets and artists, supported her.

  Once encouraged by publication, there was no stopping the Princess. (She may, in 1794, have been author of the illustrations Tomkins provided for an edition of the royal ladies’ favourite volume of poetry, Thomson’s The Seasons.) And Tomkins executed soon after a further set of engravings from her drawings, entitled The Birthday Gift or The New Doll. In March 1796, Princess Elizabeth wrote to Lady Harcourt:

  As I make it a rule never to push, I was not so lucky as to get near you [at Court]; which you will now have occasion to be sorry for, being troubled with one of my very stupid notes; which will be made double so, by being forced to name the insignificant present of the ‘Delights of a new Doll,’ which I shall be very much flattered if you will accept. I send you two copies, one for yourself, one for Mrs Darner, if you don’t think it impertinent. I forget whether I ever sent you the engraving of the dancing dog.

  Lady Harcourt, whose work Horace Walpole had wished to publish, provided in return by way of compliment Philip, A Tale, dedicated to Princess Elizabeth.

  When Miss Burney visited the royal family in July at Windsor to present to the Queen her new novel Camilla, Princess Elizabeth was still full of her own publishing venture. She related ‘the whole of her own transaction, its rise and cause and progress, in the Birth of Love’, wrote Miss Burney in her journal. But Miss Burney failed to record these details, judging that she must abridge her account of her visit to Windsor there, else she would never finish. She had energy enough however to note, of her own book, that Princess Elizabeth had exclaimed, ‘I’ve got leave – and Mama says she won’t wait to read it first.’ With permission so graciously given, ‘I wrote immediately to order six sets, bound in white and gold,’ recounted a delighted Miss Burney, one for each of the Queen’s daughters.

  While her sister Royal was glorying in the sumptuous palaces of Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg, set in a land of plenty famed for its Rhenish wine and romantic forests, Princess Elizabeth had a very different view of how best to live in a changing world. She wrote from Kew to Lord Harcourt, thanking him for arranging a trip to inspect Strawberry Hill, where Horace Walpole worshipped the Gothic and classical past: ‘My life has certainly been spent at Court, but my actions and affections have ever been guided by sincerity and truth, and have no tint whatever of a courtier. At this place my great hoop is dropped, and my plumes lowered so that the Pss is left in town and the humble miss steps forward.’

  Princess Elizabeth did not, for all that, abjure luxury. The Queen gave Miss Burney in July 1796 an account of her new house at Frogmore, of ‘its fitting up, and the share of each Princess in its redecoration.’ Miss Burney had already heard from a Windsor correspondent of Princess Elizabeth’s work there painting ceilings and designing buildings in the gardens. And when she visited the princesses’ different apartments at Windsor this summer, she spoke of Elizabeth’s as the ‘most elegandy and fancifully ornamented of any in the lodge, as she has most delight and taste in producing good effects.’ In consequence, the artistic Princess knew what it was to be in debt and, James Bland Burges claimed, she had said she would soon go to jail.

  But Elizabeth had a liking for comfort of a more substantial kind too, which her friends the Harcourts enjoyed supplying. She thanked them in December 1796 for ‘the best Bath buns that ever were eat which saved me from a lethargy of cold which I suffer with more than ever. Now picture me sitting in the fire with all my different comforts round me in my own room, in the act of copying, when a knock at the door made me turn and your kind present entered the room. I will own to you the moment the box was open I looked with an anxious eye to see whether you had sent me a few lines.’

  The Princess Royal withdrew, and then departed for another life. Princess Elizabeth resorted to Bath buns for comfort. Their younger sister Sophia found a confidante, as the troubles worsened between the Prince and Princess of Wales, in the shape of Miss Frances Garth, who had been appointed sub-governess to the couple’s daughter, Princess Charlotte, on her birth in January 1796. Miss Garth, niece of the King’s equerry Colonel Thomas Garth, had been companion to Lady Harewood, and was a plain, modest young woman with a talent for embroidery and fancywork. Princess Elizabeth on one occasion wrote to thank her for a cloak she had made for the Queen: ‘so perfect a piece of work, which Mama says is done more like a fairy than anything else’. The Queen added that it was the only cloak that had ever fitted in her life. Sophia, alone of the princesses, felt that the Princess of Wales was unfairly treated, and Miss Garth struck her fancy. But Miss Garth may also have acted as an emissary, with the Princess of Wales’s encouragement, for a romantic correspondence – or something more – between Princess Sophia and Miss Garth’s uncle the Colonel.

  Fanny Burney visited the Queen’s House on Sophia’s twentieth birthday in early November 1797, and was interested both by her appearance and by her self-consciousness:

  She had a pair of spectacles on, which, with her uncommonly young face – its shape being as round as a baby’s, and its colour as rosy – had a most comic and grotesque appearance … She is so near-sighted, that she is almost blind; and the Queen now permits her always to wear spectacles. ‘And I want her’, said Princess Augusta, ‘to wear them at the play, where we are going tonight; but she is afraid, she says, of some paragraph in the newspapers; but what, I ask her, can they say? That the Princess Sophia wears spectacles! Well, and what harm can that do her? Would it not be better they should say it, than she should lose all sight of the performers?’

  Augusta herself, although shy, was not vain. She ‘let the hairdresser proceed upon her head, without comment’, wrote Miss Burney, ‘and without examination, just as if it was solely his affair, and she only supported a block to be dressed for his service … And when he begged she would say whether she would have any ribbons, or other things, mixed with the feathers and jewels, she said, “You understand all that best, Mr Robinson, I’m sure – there are the things – so take what you please.’ ”

  Sophia supported her sister-in-law the Princess of Wales with difficulty, her mother and sisters being partisans of the Prince. On one occasion the Princess said, ‘I perceived you withdrew from me, but I saw your motive, and approved greatly.’ In June 1796, when Carlton House was ablaze with emotion after the Princess of Wales had forced the resignation of her husband’s lover, Lady Jersey, as her lady-in-waiting, Sophia wrote in flattering terms again to Miss Garth, hoping she would wear the hair she sent around her neck: ‘Your uncle also told me you had desired him to give me your duty. Indeed, be assured you will, in time if not already done, turn my head.’

  The uncle of whom she spoke was Colonel Thomas Garth – major-general from January 1798 – with whom Frances Garth lived after her father’s death. He was one of the King’s favourite equerries, and was much with the royal family.

  On another occasion Sophia, thanking Miss Garth for helping her with a troublesome piece of needlework she had sent her, wrote, ‘O! Were I my own mistress how often I would fly to you.’ She was glad the accounts were g
ood of the Colonel. ‘May I beg you to thank him for his remembrance of me, and to mention how sensible I am of his not having forgot me, and that I am very sorry I have not seen him for so long.’

  Thomas Garth was a small man, ‘a hideous old devil’ according to one account, and marked by a claret-coloured birthmark that extended down over one eye. In compensation, contemporaries speak highly of his wit and, indeed, of his stories of his own soldiering adventures in the West Indies. At any rate, Sophia had entangled herself romantically with him by the autumn of 1798. Her sister Mary wrote in September to the Prince of Wales: ‘As for General Garth, the purple light of love toujours le même.’ While this may or may not have been a cruel allusion to the General’s birthmark, or just a quotation from the poet Cowper, a daughter of one of the Queen’s ladies later recalled, ‘the princess was so violently in love with him that everyone saw it. She could not contain herself in his presence …’

  A year earlier, in the summer of 1797, with Miss Garth now a woman of the bedchamber to the Princess of Wales and part of that estranged Princess’s establishment at Blackheath, Princess Sophia wrote that she had found an emissary to be trusted with correspondence for Miss Garth when she accompanied the Princess of Wales to Carlton House to see Princess Charlotte: ‘His name is Robinson, he has lived with us many years and may be depended upon – He will therefore walk to Carlton House with his son, who will I trust be allowed to give you my letter without further enquiries…’

  Far away from the intrigue that sometimes characterized royal family life in England, the Hereditary Princess of Württemberg was absorbing the new country over which she would preside with her husband when the Duke his father died. ‘She has won the hearts of all who have seen her from her great affability and desire to please,’ wrote an English resident there, Sir John Stuart. Sir John considered the Princess ‘particularly fortunate’ in her choice of Grande Maitresse, or Mistress of the Robes – Mme de Spiegel. She was ‘a woman of great merit, nearly her own age, of much information, of irreproachable moral character, and who has conducted herself with great propriety in her own family through difficult circumstances’. Charlotte also had acquired Mme de Spiegel’s young niece and daughter-in-law as ancillary ladies – ‘Her RH treats them as if she was educating them herself with all the good humour possible.’ Stuart considered the Prince and Princess had made a wise choice in appointing ladies from outside the Stuttgart ‘Circle’. ‘Another generation must pass before the ravages made by the Duke Charles’ – Fritz’s uncle and a former reigning Duke – ‘in the morals of every rank can be repaired,’ wrote Stuart ominously.

  It was of another generation that the Princess wrote to her father on 30 August 1797 in some excitement: ‘The Prince has desired me to present his humble duty to your Majesty and to express his great regret at not being able to write. But not having it in his power to do more than sign his name with his left hand he does not think it respectful to acquaint your Majesty in that manner he has reason to hope that I am with child.’

  They were off to the Prince’s house at Ludwigsburg to escape the heat of Stuttgart as she wrote. Court functions, balls, assemblies and levees took place in that city at the Neupalais or new palace – a huge Baroque edifice accommodating within its gilded marble corridors, as well as state rooms, a multitude of doors and staircases leading to apartments for all the branches of the ducal family. In the small town of Ludwigsburg, halfway up the hill, a former duke had built an enormous palace rivalling Versailles in size, featuring wall-to-wall classical paintings and Pompeian rooms, and commensurate acres of garden. But, just as at Windsor the royal family lived in the shadow of the Castle in the Queen’s Lodge, so at Ludwigsburg the Hereditary Prince and the rest of the family inhabited more informal residences abutting the Palace.

  That October, congratulating her father on the British naval victory of Camperdown, Charlotte resumed a plea for his aid, as Elector of Hanover, for her new home, Württemberg, at the forthcoming Congress following the conclusion of peace between Austria and France. The Ducal House of Württemberg had lost so much – in both territory and revenue – by this ‘cruel war’, she wrote. Looking with confidence to the future, she added that, in supporting the Prince, her father would be ‘taking in hand the interest of a son sincerely attached to your family, of your daughter and of your grandchildren.’ While the Duke had sent Count Zeppelin to Vienna and then on to St Petersburg to seek the backing of those imperial Courts, the Princess believed her father’s support would be most effective. The friendship between her husband and Count Zeppelin may have been more than platonic, but it does not seem to have disturbed Royal: Zeppelin was welcome at Court, with his wife and daughter. (His friendship with one Count Karl Dillen was anyway judged now to be closer than that with the Hereditary Prince.)

  From Scharnhausen, four months pregnant, Royal wrote in late November 1797 to England – now standing alone though firm against France – of the ‘dreadful’ times, of the new King of Prussia’s difficult inheritance, and of Austrian regiments marching daily through Stuttgart. To her husband, who was away shooting, she wrote on the 22nd an account of how she passed the hours. It had snowed all morning the day before, and when darkness fell, she and Mme de Spiegel had worked and drawn for five hours till nine. Falling back on patterns familiar from Frogmore days, she was embroidering a chair cover with eagles and, she wrote to Fritz on the 23rd, she hoped to finish it that day.

  This peaceful way of life came to an end at midnight on 22 December 1797 when Fritz’s father dropped down dead. And as his mother’s health weakened, Royal increasingly had the care of her stepdaughter, Princess Catherine, who had been living with her grandmother. Also, with the theatre of war now moved to an area north of Switzerland, the Duchy, positioned between France’s eastern frontier and Austrian territories, had become a favourite route for both French and Austrians on their way to attack each other’s territories. The damage the troops did as they passed through, to say nothing of the foraging and plundering that went with such mass movements, was fast impoverishing the normally wealthy Duchy. Earlier in December Royal had written to her father in England that the Austrian artillery were now marching through the country – and in heavy rain – for the fourth time that year, and that Austrian troops passed frequently through Stuttgart on their way to their new Turkish territories.

  Frederick wanted Royal to rest, to abjure long drives. Royal, following the example which she had seen her mother set so often, intended to continue a normal life until the last month of her pregnancy. Her husband did not wish her to attend a card party of English émigrés from Switzerland that she had arranged. Royal dismissed his worries: the Court doctor, M. de Weimar, was on hand, and her health seemed good.

  Another of George Ill’s children was hoping this winter to marry and provide further grandchildren. Prince Adolphus had been invited in August by the Prussian King to join a family party at Pyrmont with the Crown Prince and Princess – a Mecklenburg cousin, Louise – and with another, widowed cousin, Princess Louis of Prussia and her two children. (Prince Louis had been killed in action the previous year.) Years before, Prince William had been smitten in Hanover by their cousin Charlotte or Lolo of Mecklenburg. Now his brother Dolly fell passionately in love with her younger sister Frederica, the widowed Princess Louis, and in December won her agreement to their engagement. The King in England sanctioned the match, made his son a colonel and even bought Dolly a house on the Leinestrasse in Hanover for a married home. But the marriage contract would have to wait, he warned, until Parliament – sore from war expenses – was in a mood to grant his son the income of a married man.

  The very public if unofficial separation that had taken place between the Prince and Princess of Wales did not commend to Parliament the idea of financing another royal marriage. The King ordered a great Thanksgiving at St Paul’s for the naval victories of that year – Camperdown in October against the Dutch, and Cape St Vincent in February against the Spanish -and, for good measur
e, Lord Howe’s victory on the Glorious First of June in 1794. But neither the Prince nor the Princess was present. After a good deal of wrangling over carriages and appeals from both to the King, he decreed that their finances allowed neither of them to appear. Unfortunately, the couple’s wrangles, as much as the prospect of the Thanksgiving, gave the Queen a wracking headache which prevented her appearance at the drawing room – ‘crowded with heroes’ – on 12 November preceding it. By December that year the Prince was petitioning the King for a full separation from his wife, but George III refused it.

  Meanwhile in Württemberg the new Duchess, although six months pregnant, had to throw off her previous ‘retirement’ when her husband inherited. Sir John Stuart had written, ‘I imagine she will not think her situation so agreeable, when Duchess. If she indulges herself in retirement then, she must become unpopular at a German Court.’ But although the new Duchess informed her father that, from economy, she was to take no more ladies to reflect her new station, and her husband meant to keep his father’s establishment, she happily moved into the new palace at Stuttgart. ‘This evening I am to have an English card party,’ she wrote to her father. ‘We are in hopes that many who have left Switzerland will settle here, at least till they see what turn affairs are likely to take.’ The previous year the French had made of Switzerland a Cisalpine Republic. ‘Every moment the people come in to move some of the furniture. My new apartment is both fine and convenient, as on one side I have my private rooms and on the other those to receive company.’ The portrait of her father, she wrote, was to be hung in her ‘favourite closet.’