by Flora Fraser
At Weymouth meanwhile Royal’s sisters endured long weeks of ennui, going to the playhouse nearly every night, and sailing on the days the King bathed, so as not to fatigue him, although they would rather have walked or ridden. But, as Sophia wrote on 25 July to Lady Harcourt, they did not complain. ‘How trifling are our amusements when compared with the blessing of his returning health; all that should be put aside; no self in the case, and his health be our only object … there never existed so good a man, a husband and a father.’ By the end of the summer the King had recovered, but he looked an old man, stooped and less firm on his legs when, on 1 October 1801, he signed the preliminary articles of peace between England and France.
Princess Augusta in London wrote to Lady Harcourt with relief and regret mixed:
On Sunday I read a letter from my sister [Royal] in good spirits, and all happiness at the Peace – I, who am prudence itself, answered her yesterday that I was glad she was so happy, and that the telegraph had brought her such good news – but did not tell her what I will tell you, that she feels like an inhabitant of the Continent and I, like a proud Islander. Talk of the Continent now! It’s all chatter and as good as mouldy cheese.
I heard a long account the other day about the wonderful work the French would set about as soon as their lads returned from their different armies, and amongst other things that they would build a formidable navy. ‘So much the better,’ said I, ‘let them build, and we will take their ships’… It’s no disgrace that we cannot build ships like them and we ought to own that we cannot. Why, Eliza don’t grind her colours, grind her scissors, and yet nobody draws and cuts out like her. It’s all stuff to suppose that one can do everything …
Now what a prose I have been led onto, but you are so good you will excuse your spoiled child. And you must recollect for my excuse that I have been so very long thinking only on one subject [the King’s health] that now thank God as I have no uneasiness on that head, I may let my head run upon various subjects – that, it is always ready to do. It is like a wild colt, running and galloping de cà, de là, partout.
On New Year’s Day 1802 that ‘inhabitant of the Continent’ the Duchess of Württemberg reported to her father the King from Stuttgart that it had snowed above eighteen inches in town and three feet in the country. ‘A man was froze to death last night who had lost his road.’ She was hoping that ‘the road will be sufficiently beat’ in a week’s time to go in a sledge, ‘a favourite amusement of mine and particularly so of all the young people here as these parties end in a ball.’ The Duchess’s amusements were innocent enough, although conscientiously in May she hoped her father could do something for the Duke with the First Consul in Paris. She did not know that in March her husband Frederick had signed a private treaty with Napoleon, surrendering his possessions on the left bank of the Rhine in return for nine towns formerly Austrian. He was preparing the way to be created elector.
The Duchess kept her father informed of her employment: ‘I have bespoke a room to be painted and furnished in humble imitation of the seat at Frogmore but… I believe it will only turn out a bungling piece of work.’ Later in the year English visitors including her brother Adolphus, on his way back to Hanover, described her father’s building plans – to restore Windsor Castle to ‘its ancient Gothic beauty’ and to complete a new castellated palace on the river at Kew, ‘Lulworth Castle improved’. ‘I hope that your Majesty will allow me to draw you some chairs with a pen on velvet to be placed in this new palace, and that you will be so gracious as to decide whether they shall be flowers or landscapes,’ she wrote.
Despite all, the Queen was perturbed by what she heard from Ludwigsburg. Royal had written to her of her cousin the Princess of Thurn and Taxis – ‘spirited and agreeable society, very pretty and with a charming figure’. Sadly, wrote the Queen on 11 October 1802, ‘I don’t think the Princess can say the same of my daughter. I hear from all the English she is enormous. In other respects she does as much good as she can, and studies to make herself respectable by her conduct. That’s the essential, but still I don’t think one should neglect the exterior wholly.’
Brother Adolphus was searching the Continent for a bride, and he concentrated entirely on the exterior of his sister’s stepdaughter Catherine when he rejected her as a bride. For a year now Adolphus and Augustus had, like their brothers, been royal dukes. The King had created Augustus Duke of Sussex and Inverness, while Dolly became Duke of Cambridge, in November 1801. And this Royal Duke was fastidious. Princess Catherine was, following her father’s and now her stepmother’s example, as fat as could be – as fat, indeed, as his sister Elizabeth and not as tall, nor as pretty, he noted. Besides, he added, ‘knowing the violence of her father and mother, I own I am afraid.’ He continued his pilgrimage.
At Weymouth this year Amelia at nineteen delighted in the doings of her six-year-old niece Princess Charlotte. ‘I have dressed our dear little love from tip to toes for tomorrow [the Prince of Wales’s birthday] and dear Mary has dressed me for the day,’ she wrote. Fashion-plate Princess Mary had given her younger sister a dress that the elder described as ‘in my own style – to make her look less like an old woman than usual.’ But Amelia’s odd style of dressing did not prevent her from conducting a very open romance with one of the King’s favourite equerries, General the Hon. Charles Fitzroy. He had apparently stayed behind as part of her escort the previous summer when she remained with Miss Gomm, her English teacher, at Weymouth for her health a few days after the rest of the party left for London. Amelia’s refusal to hide her relationship with Fitzroy, Lord Southampton’s second son, her hanging back and riding with him, her insistence at playing at his table at cards, brought down on her the twittering disapproval of Miss Jane Gomm. But Amelia was impervious to such criticisms, as her elder sisters might not have been.
Princess Elizabeth for her part wrote to Lady Harcourt, ‘Now, if you wish to hear of Weymouth, shut your door and your window, and I will … say in a whisper it is detestable, and I continue my prayer, “Oh, how I long to be married, be married, before that my beauty decays etc”.’ (She had no particular candidate in mind, but a review at which the French princes, including Louis XVI’s cousin Louis Philippe, paraded before her father would soon concentrate her thoughts.) The days were odious, and the evenings, after ‘an hour’s German’, dressing and dinner, were as follows:
Read to the Queen the whole evening till cards, when I play at whist till my eyes know not hearts from diamonds and spades from clubs. And when that is over, turn over cards to amuse the King, till I literally get the rheumatism in every joint of my hand … News there is none, but who bathes and who can’t, and who won’t and who will, whether warm bathing is better than cold, who likes wind and who don’t, and all these very silly questions and answers which bore one to death and provoke one’s understanding.
There was festivity at the New Year at Frogmore with a children’s ball given in honour of the princesses’ niece, Charlotte. She ‘never was not in any one of the figures and danced with great dignity and looked, if I may say so, what she really is born to be’, wrote her aunt Mary, ‘but perfectly the life and spirit a child ought to have with it which makes it the more surprising …’. The children supped upstairs afterwards, ‘in those two rooms’ at Frogmore ‘that open into each other with large folding doors, the plateau was filled with children’s toys and you cannot think what a new and pretty effect it had’.
As Charlotte grew, and the divide between her parents widened, her aunts in England and in Württemberg thought not only of her wellbeing as a child, but of the character she would bring to the role of sovereign one day. The presence of a docker’s child at her mother the Princess of Wales’s house at Blackheath alarmed them. Not only was this hardly proper company for the future Queen of England, but the Princess said ‘everybody must love something in this world’, and lavished attention on this infant, Willy Austin, to the detriment of her relationship with her visiting daughter. These children’s ba
lls at Windsor were an opportunity for her to make ‘proper’ friends. And the Prince her father put in an appearance: ‘all good humour, and as you know he can be when he likes and intends to please and be pleased, his manner to the King was just what it always ought to be and the pleasure he expressed concerning his child and his admiration of her was really quite charming’.
By the autumn of 1803 Napoleon was concentrating his considerable forces on the project of an invasion of England, and 100,000 men stood ready at Boulogne to cross. ‘We are expecting the French but many say that they will not come, but it is as well they should be expected,’ Elizabeth declared stoutly.
The Queen meanwhile told her brother that she and her daughters were amusing themselves at Frogmore ‘with a good read, working there on a long table under the shade of fine trees.’ But while Augusta listened to the Queen read The Lay of the Last Minstrel, far away in a white medieval tower near Frankfurt the Landgrave of Hesse-Homburg wrote on 12 January 1804 to King George III. ‘My eldest son [the Hereditary Prince of Hesse-Homburg] has had only one wish for some time,’ ran his letter, ‘on which his happiness depends; to obtain the hand in marriage of your second daughter, Princess Augusta, and he presses me so strongly to place his wishes at your Majesty’s feet that I cannot refuse his prayer. He has no titles to speak in his favour, except his moral character, and the campaigns which he has made with honour in the Imperial service.’ But Augusta never got to hear of this proposal. As was his custom, the King refused the honour. But he could not refuse a letter from his son-in-law of Wurttemberg, who had a new tide, if no moral character, to inform the King of. The Diet reconstructing western Germany on a Napoleonic model had decreed that he was to be one of the electors of the Holy Roman Empire.3
This came as a bitter blow, especially as the King of England’s own Electorate of Hanover had been lost to the French almost immediately the war began again in May 1803. ‘We have had little contact with the continent since the French entered Hanover,’ the Queen informed her brother two months later. ‘The affair of Hanover is a coup de foudre for the King, but he is well.’ And Elizabeth wrote to Lady Harcourt, ‘The accounts of Hanover almost killed me, as in every sense it was a most melancholy event for the family and all the little hopes we had been building since the treaty of Amiens – like the treaty of Amiens – vanished into air.’ However, she continued with gusto, ‘as long as England shall be England, I still do hope we shall do. I think everybody may be of use, women as well as men, and we should be getting all our old linen together, making lint bandages and everything useful in that way…’
In September Augusta had apologized for the penmanship of a letter she sent to Lady Harcourt, but she was writing in Amelia’s room: ‘Dear Amelia is famously untidy with her inkstand and her pens are six inches deep in black mire.’ That autumn, untidy Amelia composed one of several last testaments that she would execute when illness overcame her. All were dedicated to her lover General Charles Fitzroy, ‘who nothing but my unfortunate situation parts me from, as I feel assuredly I am the chosen of your heart as you are of mine – I leave you everything I have …’.
Illness was to turn Amelia’s mind hard and suspicious, but now her family still hoped for her perfect recovery from her different ailments. ‘Through God’s assistance we may see her what she was,’ wrote Princess Elizabeth in December 1803. And Amelia herself told Lady Harcourt: ‘God knows my heart is gratefully devoted to my family, I possess the greatest of blessings, kind parents and sisters… Our dear King who is our sheet anchor, and whom we look up to next to Heaven is well. If he is preserved to us I think we must do well.’ She loved the Prince almost as much, and complained to him, ‘It is ages since eleven of us have been together.’
But the royal family was soon to need their ministering energies for another invalid. As Napoleon was crowned emperor of the French in January 1804, across the Channel the King caught a cold, and a ‘rheumatic attack’ with malaise and ‘hurry’ followed. Princess Mary, whose cardinal virtue was calm, wrote in distress: ‘The King never left us till half past seven o’clock. Such a day I never went through.’ And the Marquess of Buckingham told his brother of ‘the certainty of the King’s insanity having returned, which is now universally known, and makes a strong sensation.’ Once again the King was for a few days in danger of his life, then he recovered.
This time the King agreed that he was ill. He gave the keys to the private drawers of his desks to the Queen, dismissed his pages for the meantime and awaited medical help – and restraint. A new character, Dr Simmons from St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, was called in, the presence of the Willises being judged likely to bring on dangerous convulsions in their former patient. Although this new doctor – and his keepers – used the same methods the Willises had employed, Prime Minister Addington reported, ‘He submits cheerfully to the restraints which he believes to be necessary,’ and the King was in a straitjacket night and day. As he was on the road to recovery by 26 February, Simmons was able to declare his methods effective. Princess Elizabeth wrote, after it was over, ‘I have never quitted my mother’s room morning noon or night… I am told I am very much altered, look 20 years older. So adieu to looks of any kind, mes beaux jours sont passés.’
By the end of April the Queen could tell her brother that the King was getting better. ‘But one does not recover so easily at 66 as at 50.’ And indeed for the rest of a harrowing year the King was to veer from cool and collected to wild and sometimes lascivious behaviour, and back again. One event at least pleased him, the reappearance of Pitt as prime minister, He was ‘better than I have seen him yet, delighted with Mr Pitt whose presence and conduct have worked a miracle’, wrote Elizabeth in May.
‘The King (with Dr Simmons at his side) used to ride out at the same time with a great cortege of Princesses and their ladies, equerries, attendants, and frequently some of the Royal Dukes,’ an equerry’s wife, Mrs George Villiers, later recorded. Her husband, a favourite of the King’s, was called to Kew in June 1804 to ‘be always at hand to attend upon the King’ while the monarch was recovering, and the Duke of Cumberland’s house on the Green was offered to his wife and children, so that ‘he might have no reason for going away’. Mrs Villiers tells us that she dined every day with the Queen and princesses at the Dutch House: ‘I never saw any daughters… show such assiduous and affectionate devotion to their father … perhaps none so much as Princess Sophia and Amelia.’ In the sad, enclosed world of Kew that summer, these two princesses became intimate with Theresa Villiers, whom they called ‘Tant Mieux’, and her husband George, whom they dubbed ‘Savage’.
Mrs Villiers’s friendship with Sophia was to fade but with Amelia it increased daily. However, she wrote, the Princess never spoke of ‘the attachment that existed between her and General Charles Fitzroy, second son of Lord Southampton … From 1804 … till the year 1808 she never once alluded to it …’ (Amelia was equally discreet with her sister Mary, with whom she was to be on the closest of terms, but to whom she never once spoke of her ‘attachment’.) Mrs Villiers added how strange it was that the King, ‘though perfectly unconscious of the attachment’, never missed an opportunity – when he recovered – of ‘placing Princess Amelia under the care of General Fitzroy, whether in dancing, riding or on any other occasion’.
Although the King rode out and gave other appearances of functioning normally, the Prince of Wales felt justified in accusing ministers of conspiring to hide his father’s real condition from Parliament and the country. He begged the Lord Chancellor to regulate the matter – preferably by the Regency Bill of 1789. In July he bewailed the ‘extraordinary’ circumstance of any king exercising his royal powers while being kept under personal restraint, and begged the Queen to join him in declaring the King incapable.
Princess Augusta wrote to Lady Harcourt on 3 July of ‘the constant state of anxiety we live in … it makes me very low, but that I am so used to now, that I can bear it better than I did six months ago … I think it a gr
eat mercy we have so little company,’ she concluded, ‘as a made up face with a heavy heart is a sad martyrdom.’ Kangaroos proving a leitmotif in times of affliction for the royal family, she recounted how there was a tame one in the menagerie at Kew that fed from her hand. To her relief, if not that of the Prince, on the 20th of that month the King was declared restored to health. He left Kew for Windsor, and a few days later prorogued Parliament.
The Prince, abandoning plans for a regency, was now exercised by the very odd ideas the King had about Princess Charlotte, but, as Amelia told him, ‘All I can make out about you is that until the doctor leaves us he will take no steps to see you or the Princess.’ Simmons, having lingered a further month to observe the King, finally departed towards the end of August. The King wrote immediately to Princess Caroline and to his granddaughter’s governess Lady Elgin, requesting that they meet him at Kew, the late scene of his confinement. There he told the Princess of Wales that he meant to take her daughter under his care and that of tutors at Windsor, where Caroline might visit her freely. Indeed, he would provide a house there for her convenience.
Three days later, a furious Prince failed to appear at a meeting to which the King had called him at Kew, where he meant to impart this information. Princess Amelia, sending a snuffbox to her brother a few days earlier, had stressed that all their comfort depended on that meeting: ‘I am more wretched than I can express … could an extinguisher fall on the whole family as things are it would be a mercy.’ Nevertheless, the Prince did not appear at Kew. Instead a note from him was handed by Edward to the King, waiting with his other sons – including Augustus, who had just returned to England – and the Queen and princesses. ‘The Prince is ill,’ the King announced, and set out forthwith for Weymouth.
