Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  That very summer she had the pleasure mixed with pain of seeing her stepdaughter Trinette depart for Paris, where, in the presence of an avuncular Emperor Napoleon and of her own father, the Württemberg Princess married none other than the Emperor’s young brother Jerome, King of Westphalia. A year later Royal wrote to her brother the Prince. Napoleon and Tsar Alexander had meanwhile met at Erfurt in September 1808 to concert plans for partitioning Turkey and to renew their alliance formed in mid-river at Tilsit the previous year. She told him, ‘I am indebted to the French for the pleasure of conversing with you, dear brother … little did I hope to have it in my power to recall myself to my friends when the King my husband set out for Erfurt to visit Emperor Napoleon, who at his first interview with him enquired most particularly after me and hearing how much I was affected with not being able to correspond with my family, was so good as to desire the King to acquaint me that he would undertake to have my letters sent to England.’

  That July of 1807, Royal’s aunt, the Duchess of Brunswick, who knew what it was to suffer from ‘the great preponderance of power’ vested in Napoleon’s small person, arrived in London. She was ‘very deaf and looking much older than she ought at her time of life. Her memory fails her very much, and her whole system is very much shook.’ But she took a house at Blackheath next door to her daughter the Princess, and invited her brother the King to dine on ‘all the German dishes that you like – send me your bill of fare that it’s to your taste.’ Her daughter Caroline invited ‘particularly old fogrums and old cats’ when the Duchess came to dine. Princess Charlotte was allowed by her father to dine on Sundays at her grandmother’s. ‘It is settled that my mother don’t go to the royal family without me,’ wrote Caroline that July. ‘By that means it will come all again upon the footing as it was two years ago.’ In this she was very much deceived.

  Eleven-year-old Princess Charlotte was now much with her aunts the princesses at Windsor, according to the King’s desire that she be educated there. But her mother was no longer granted the easy access that the King had envisaged and accorded her before the Delicate Investigation, and the offer of a house at Windsor was not made good. When in London, Charlotte, her governess Lady de Clifford and a gossiping female household filled Warwick House, a tall, narrow seventeenth-century building at the end of a dark alley behind Carlton House, where the Prince forbade his wife to go.

  In the absence of mother and father, the princesses cooed over Charlotte and dressed her up in clothes like a doll or the daughters they did not have and lavished inexpensive jewellery on her. Her resemblance to her father – and her looks were very boyish – delighted them. But her wilfulness – and she could be imperious with the ladies of her household – and her tantrums, which had now become rages, dismayed them, as did her dislike for books in particular and education in general. The elder princesses and Queen Charlotte were especially distressed by Charlotte’s disdain for literature, and not even the enthusiasm of her tutor Bishop Fisher, who had as a young man taught Charlotte’s uncles and given her aunt Princess Elizabeth art lessons, succeeded. Her passion for horses and riding, however, Augusta and Sophia and Amelia could all sympathize with, even if the Queen complained that her granddaughter whistled like an osder and walked like a groom.

  Among other entertainments for Charlotte at Windsor was the cottage with a thatched roof and rustic porch that her aunt Elizabeth took on a lease from a farmer at Old Windsor and rebuilt. Inside, Elizabeth kept her collection of teapots in all kinds of shapes and designs and other ceramics which she had been acquiring for nearly ten years. Several times a year she invited the rest of the family to join her, usually in celebration of a family birthday, and then the cottage was en fête with garlands of artificial roses. It was a perfect answer to Elizabeth’s earlier wish to be a plain farmer’s wife. She should be a farmer herself instead, with fields of corn whose harvest she could compare with those of her father’s Flemish and Norfolk farms. The public, who had previously admired Elizabeth’s artistic productions, learnt of her new avocation from an article in the Lady magazine which featured her cottage, with a field of bristling corn in front.

  Princess Augusta, meanwhile, wrote from Windsor to thank Lady Harcourt for a ‘very happy day’ at Nuneham in the autumn of 1807. She confessed that she had ‘not for a long time been so free from care, though at times (even in that delightful spot) I could not help thinking of my soldiers and sailors, my anxiety on their account having oppressed my mind beyond measure. Judge then what my happiness must have been when we were stopped in going up Henley hill with the intelligence that Copenhagen had really surrendered and that we had met with very little loss.’ 4 General Spencer had been appointed in July to the command of a brigade in the British expedition against the Danish capital, and when the British navy captured the Danish fleet in September, the General distinguished himself in the successful attack on the Danish land forces.

  ‘Still my heart was very ill at ease,’ Augusta wrote,

  until I came home and heard that all my friends were safe – Since the troops sailed which is seven weeks today, I have never had an instant’s comfort passing what might be the consequence. But thank God all is well – all is as it should be. We have acted like truly brave men – sensible men, steady and not vengeful. I only wish you could have seen my face, it was perfectly broad with delight, for my pride is as much gratified as my heart. Today the Gazette has not lessened these delightful sensations, but it has added to my gratitude to heaven to think what dangers they escaped.

  The Gazette paid due tribute to General Spencer’s part in the hostilities, and to Augusta’s relief he returned home in October. She could confide in few – Lady Harcourt was a chief comforter – about her anxiety for the General’s safety. She too thought ahead to a day when her father’s objections to members of the royal family marrying commoners might no longer stand in her way.

  The following spring Spencer left for Gibraltar with 5,000 men to cooperate with Sir John Moore against the Russian fleet at the mouth of the Tagus river. When he joined Arthur Wellesley at Cadiz, and supported him in the battles of the Peninsular War that followed at Rolica and Vimeiro,5 Spencer’s exploits gained him the Order of the Bath, and his grateful superior, Wellesley, wrote: ‘There never was a braver officer or one who deserved it better. ‘But the experience of waiting at home in England without news tried Augusta’s nerves. She wrote in June to Lady Harcourt of reading the Thirty-fourth Psalm, and ‘my sweet comfort the 94th …’. Both had often, ‘in the multitude of sorrows which have encompassed my heart … refreshed my soul. We have had good reports from Spain by the Alcmene frigate,’ she added. T trust they are true, and I trust your fellow servant General Spencer may again show us what bravery and discretion can do, for he joins all these great qualities in one. I am very anxious for him, for he is one of my Elite friends in the bunch with you. It is very small but choice.’

  Two months later she wrote in relief: ‘The Gazette will have informed you of the dangers and valour of the army, and that of Sir Arthur Wellesley and General Spencer … every army officer and man did their duty to the utmost.’ One of her brother Frederick’s aides-de-camp had stood by Spencer under fire, she reported. ‘He says he never in his life saw anything like his coolness, good temper, intrepidity and steadiness – that he was, if possible, greater on the 21st [at Vimeiro] than on the 17th [at Rolica] and that his conduct on the first day was enough to establish his military character, if it had not been often seen before, and each time with credit to his head and heart.’ Her father’s happiness at the news of these ‘great Peninsular victories’, she declared with joy, was ‘not elated and noisy, but only calm, smiling, and content and gratitude to heaven for having helped his endeavour.’

  Princess Elizabeth was taking steps to secure her happiness. In February 1808 she passed some happy hours with their old nurse Miss Dacres’s daughter Augusta Compton, in whom the princesses had long taken an interest. Elizabeth sent her ‘a little box for y
our work which I have long prized, I mean the top for it was your mother’s work for me when I was five years old. The netting I did myself.’ Elizabeth stayed at her cottage in March when Amelia was infectious with the measles and thought of going to live there permanently. She even sounded out Miss Compton as an agreeable companion, who shared her skills in drawing and was otherwise accomplished. She wrote to the Prince, ‘The cottage scheme was a delightful one and like yourself – he would have financed it – ‘but between friends a mate not being there (who I hope makes its appearance one day though time flies) it would have been lonely’

  Bidding the Prince happy birthday in August – the sisterhood sent him some china – Elizabeth told him that she had opened the doors of her dear little cottage to her neighbours to celebrate. ‘I am new from top to toe.’ The King was relatively well this summer, but the family seems on this occasion and others to have shielded him from anything unfamiliar on the ground that it might strain his nerves – even an event as innocuous as a visit to his daughter’s cottage. ‘We had all the natives [inhabitants of Windsor and environs] on Thursday,’ Elizabeth wrote to the Prince of their parents’ wedding anniversary, 8 September 1808, usually a red-letter day in the Court calendar, ‘but my mother very wisely proposed nothing gay as it is cruel by my father …’ The doctors had prescribed absolute regularity – to the point of monotony for all around him – in his diet, his exercise and, in so far as was possible, his duties.

  Spencer Perceval, Prime Minister since 1807, could not however shelter George III from the worries that Wellesley’s and Sir John Moore’s expeditions to Portugal and Spain brought, following the French invasion of the latter country and Joseph Bonaparte’s installation there as king. The King received full details of Wellesley’s triumphs at Vimeiro and Rolica in 1808. As Princess Mary wrote in July, he was cheered by ‘the spirited conduct of the Spaniards which appears to continue through that country’.

  Meanwhile Miss Gomm had handed in her resignation in March 1808. ‘Gouly will miss her sadly,’ wrote Princess Mary, but later that month Miss Gouldsworthy, ‘in consequence of declining health and increasing deafness’, thought it advisable to retire from her situation. So Princess Mary informed her old nurse, Mrs Adams. Miss Gomm and Miss Gouldsworthy set up home together in a small house in Hill Street in London, but Princess Mary said gloomily of Gouly, ‘Thirty-four years constant habits and never having been used to the trouble of housekeeping etc will go deeper and deeper with her.’ A boiling tale underlay her calm news of two governesses hanging up their slates and anticipating a retirement together. It was a story that would have a tragic resolution within only a very few years, and that had reached one of many crisis points when Princess Amelia caught the measles in March and was blooded and blistered for it.

  Miss Gomm, suffering from an attack of guilt that she had allowed Princess Amelia so long to prosecute her affair with General Fitzroy, tried simultaneously to confess all and to ‘save’ Amelia from ‘being ruined’. Seeking an interview with Princess Elizabeth, the governess had no more joy than when she had brought up the matter with the Queen four years earlier. The Queen, on hearing that Miss Gomm in her distress described her as contributing to Amelia’s ruin by sanctioning the romance and indeed planning to sanction the Princess’s marriage to her lover once the King was dead, was ‘outrageous’, or outraged. Elizabeth tried, not altogether with success, to prevent Miss Gomm from uttering further on the subject. But matters had gone too far, and while Amelia and Fitzroy continued to meet, to ride and to play always together at cards – headlong to ruin, as Miss Gomm saw it – resignation for the governess herself was the only route forward.

  ‘We have had great and sad changes this year,’ wrote Mary, and she did not find they were any the better for them. But by her twenty-fifth birthday on 7 August 1808 Princess Amelia was calm. Lady Charlotte Finch, to celebrate the day, sent her a snuffbox, having counselled her never to use one before that day. Other presents she received ranged from a lace vest and sleeves to a necklace of gold chains and monkey heads from her brother the Prince, and a gold turban from Princess Elizabeth. But she was no longer extravagant, Amelia wrote. Though there were ‘squibs’ in the papers about her ‘economy in dress’ when it became known that she had set her maid Mary Gaskoin to make her ‘birthday petticoat’, the Princess declared that she was proud to scrimp, ‘which I shall continue to do till I am clear [of debts] and therefore think it much more honourable than buying things I cannot pay for.’

  Her debts were not small. To David Bolton, a tutor – and father of the earlier royal tutor Sir George – who had acted as investor and more often lender to the princesses and their brothers for some years now, Princess Amelia owed £9,000 – but it was a tangled web which the royal siblings could not divulge to their parents, who were still their financial masters. When Princess Sophia asked for the return of the £5,000 that she had invested with Mr Bolton, she was told he had lent it to her brother Frederick. Among other services Charles Fitzroy performed for Amelia was the writing of letters to that ‘rogue’ Bolton to attempt to set her financial affairs in order.

  Princess Elizabeth of all the sisterhood was the most agitated this year. The acquisition of her cottage at Old Windsor had delighted her the year before, and she had written to Lady Harcourt of a visit to Nuneham: ‘The blues of the flower garden I shall never forget, but I must be troublesome and beg you to ask Flora how she manages your beautiful hydrangeas for in my life I never saw anything to equal them – I have spent my whole morning at the cottage walking about and determining what shall be done – for I must plan a great deal, and the flower garden shall be as pretty as I can make it. You cannot think how well it all looked today and having setled my plans I am quite enchanted.’ She would have loved to remain at Nuneham, and longed to ask: ‘Will you receive me without my canister at my tail and feel as if you had any of your friends with you?’ Princess Elizabeth dubbed ‘the HRH’ a garrison round her and her sisters. ‘I wish I could cut through that fence, maybe a rabbit hole would let me through though my size comes in my way. Modern dress might let me squeeze out, we live in strange times, I will not give up,’ she wrote.

  But this year all seemed only to fuel her discontent. ‘We go on vegetating as we have done for the last twenty years of our lives,’ she wrote on 11 September 1808. ‘I am just going to walk so cannot write as much as I intended, besides which the wind is so high that it stupefies me.’ For the first time, at thirty-eight she was at odds – severely – with her mother. She and her sisters vegetated alongside the Queen, she wrote. ‘My madre goes out very little, though she thinks she does, and takes so little exercise that I believe it unwholesome.’ The Queen was, as a result, growing very large.

  Elizabeth had begun a regimen of walks at eight in the morning, ‘for the sake of not losing the use of my legs’. Nothing was going to shift the weight which she had carried all her life, and which she did not have the height to carry off. Her pretty face and full bosom nevertheless show to advantage in engravings of the Beechey portrait, originally commissioned for the Prince, and now often ornamented with an easel and paints to mark her fame as an amateur artist. As she said, ‘All my amusements keep me at my desk.’ At Windsor Castle she wrote cosy scribbles to her brother the Prince. She cut out silhouettes, painted borders to books and decorated china. She japanned panels and boxes. And in 1804 she had published a book of plates entitled Cupid Turned Volunteer, dedicated to her sister Augusta. Two years later came The Power and Progress of Genius. If sedentary, she was nothing if not energetic.

  She told the Prince that she kept equanimous even in the rain of the last four or five days by drinking sugar and water at night. As he knew, ‘It requires not only a great flow of spirits to follow up a day’s duty,’ she wrote, ‘but a degree of submission which seldom falls to the lot of any but a RH which to make you smile I tell you en secret is the canister to my tail.’ She added, ‘When scribbling to you I blow all my stiffness away and write comme u
ne bourgeoise, or why may I not say the cottager, whose comforts have been so much owing to your unparalleled kindness.’

  Days later Elizabeth wrote again in a panic, ‘having heard a letter of confidence has been written to you on my subject by a person who shall be nameless.’ She referred to a letter that Louis Philippe, the impoverished Duke of Orleans who was living in Twickenham with a number of other French princes in reduced circumstances, had written to her brother. In it he referred to his wish to marry Princess Elizabeth – and possibly to her acquiescence in the scheme, which had been promoted by Edward, Duke of Kent. Edward had spent some years in North America with Louis Philippe, when the French Prince was in exile there, and had continued the friendship in England.

  Unfortunately the Queen heard of this letter and asked Elizabeth what she knew about it. ‘I thought it more honourable,’ wrote Elizabeth, ‘by her and just towards myself, to let her know I was not ignorant of what had passed with my sentiments and feelings upon it.’ To her brother she wrote: ‘If there is no possibility of the thing now, I only entreat you … that you will not dash the cup of happiness from my lips, yet. Believe me, whatever I may feel at present – and flattered at having been thought of… if I did not hope and flatter myself I might make them [Louis Philippe] happy, I would not think of it…’ Louis Philippe, son of Philippe Egalité and grandson of Louis XIV, was Roman Catholic, but she was unruffled. There being no soul ‘near them that might worry or plague on the score of religion I do not fear it for you know I hate meddling, having no turn for gossiping, and being firm to my own faith I shall not plague them upon theirs’.