Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  ‘Why is he so tried?’ Sophia asked, after the eye surgeon Phipps had put leeches on the King’s blind inflamed eyes without result. ‘Dark and unknown indeed are the ways of providence.’ With the help of his secretary, General Taylor, the King dealt reliably enough with his official correspondence, although it was a laborious process. In his private affairs he became easily agitated. ‘He cannot find his things without assistance,’ Princess Sophia explained to her father’s master of music Sir William Parsons, and he trusted only one servant to arrange his property. Princess Sophia, that partisan of her father, in April 1809 thought it was anxiety preying upon her sister Amelia’s mind that caused her to appear so ill. ‘She looks wretched,’ she noted, ‘and just a skeleton.’ And she wondered that her mother and elder sisters Elizabeth and Augusta should ‘think so lightly of dear Amelia’s illness.’

  The Villierses persuaded Amelia to seek advice for the troublesome pain in her side from a Quaker doctor they favoured at Staines, Dr Robert Pope. A cough plagued her. ‘I go out in the garden,’ she wrote in May, ‘but I am tired of self and believe I never shall recover.’ She told her brother the Prince of Wales, ‘None but your dear self know what human feelings are, none of my family do but you, I like to think we resemble each other.’ Though twenty-one years apart, he and she equally felt ‘to their full extent the blessings of love and friendship,’ she wrote, referring to his relationship with Mrs Fitzherbert. He could therefore judge what she must feel, ‘deprived as I am of the enjoyment of either.’ For now in this illness Amelia’s relationship with Fitzroy had been nearly extinguished. She was not well enough to go to chapel, or downstairs, or out riding. Those meeting places on which she had so depended were one by one excluded. A favourite poem of Amelia’s had been:

  Unthinking, idle, wild and young,

  I laughed and danced and talked and sung;

  And, proud of health, of freedom vain,

  Dreamed not of sorrow, care or pain …

  The Princess of Wales had once supposedly detected one of Amelia’s ladies leaving a note in a hedge when out for a walk during a fête at Frogmore. On plucking it from the hedge, before General Fitzroy could come upon it, the Princess – and her companion the Duchess of York – found marked on it the Roman numeral XII. According to the tale, the Princess put the note back where she found it, then kept Amelia in conversation till past midnight that evening, so that she could not keep the meeting.

  The days of unthinking idleness and assignations were over. Sorrow, care and pain were from now on the Princess’s lot, as she submitted to different doctors’ prescriptions for what was then known as consumption, now as tuberculosis. But she managed her illness with courage. First she summoned Mrs Williams, who had years before been her wet-nurse, to be her companion at Windsor when the others went to town for the Birthday. Mrs Williams was her nurse when Dr Pope ordered a seton, or silk cord supposedly efficacious as a drainage device, to be drawn through a fold of skin on Amelia’s chest. Then, in midrjuly, again on the orders of Dr Pope – ‘No medicine having in any way removed the pain in her side’ – another seton was introduced into that troublesome area. Four days later Princess Elizabeth, though regretting her sister Amelia’s delicate health, was writing of her ‘perfect cure’ as being sure, albeit a considerable way off. But she was overly optimistic.

  Amelia was too weak – following the insertion of this seton into her side – to attend a housewarming at her sister Elizabeth’s cottage to celebrate the Prince’s birthday in August. But a few days later, still determinedly following Pope’s advice, she wrote to ask her father to allow her, with Princess Mary as her companion, to go to Weymouth for a ‘change of air’ –a formidable journey for someone in her state of health. She told the King that the royal doctor Sir Francis Millman concurred with Pope’s view that ‘there was great tenderness remaining’ in her lungs, which accordingly needed strengthening with warm baths and the mild air of Weymouth – and even with sailing.

  The King consented, and expressed himself as desperately sorry that he could not, on account of his eyes and public affairs, go with her. Amelia departed, not neglecting to write a spirited new will before she went, leaving all, as usual, to her Charles: ‘Nothing but the cruel situation I am placed in of being daughter to the King, and the laws made by the King respecting the marriages of the Royal Family, prevents my being married to him, which I consider I am in my heart and which vow and sole object has been my comfort and guide these last ten years and can end but with my life.’

  Of her sister’s fateful journey to Weymouth, Princess Mary wrote, ‘Her suffering was such that it was impossible for her hardly to speak.’ Nevertheless, Amelia did all she could to keep up the spirits of Princess Mary and their lady, Lady George Murray, ‘assuring us whenever she could, she felt better.’ Princess Augusta wrote of her sister on another occasion: ‘I never saw so good a disposition, so thoughtful and considerate to those about her, so afraid to fatigue them by their sitting up with her, I never saw anybody more careful to disguise her sufferings, for fear of vexing others; and truly it is most vexing to see her so long in such a sad state of health.’

  Amelia’s health was becoming more than vexing. She wrote to her wet-nurse Mrs Williams, some days before setting out for Weymouth, that she had given up calomel. (She called only for ‘salts or lavender water’ when the shooting pain in her side was at its worst, Mary told the King from the bathing resort.) And the silk setons, at Pope’s direction, were to be changed for india rubber the following day. ‘I feel very nervous as the hour [of departure] approaches and yet I must hide it.’

  Amelia felt secure in her confidences to Mrs Williams, as did Mary when she wrote to her own wet-nurse Mrs Adams, or Elizabeth to Miss Compton. The princesses’ correspondence with Lady Charlotte Finch dried up, as the royal governess was ill and old for some years before dying in 1813. But the favourite confidante of all the sisters – Lady Harcourt – remained a faithful correspondent, even after she left Nuneham on her husband’s death in 1809. Others to whom the princesses wrote, known for a shorter time, were to prove less trustworthy.

  Dr Pope was waiting for his patient at Weymouth, and, after applying leeches to Amelia’s side, declared himself ‘much better satisfied.’ He then returned to Staines, but the invalid he left behind showed no signs of progress, being afflicted by shooting pains and liable to moan in her sleep. She was carried out into a bathing machine opposite the house, fitted out with a couch, but the exertion was too much for her. After being winched up on board a yacht and placed on a couch on deck so as to benefit from the sea breezes, Amelia ended by fainting on leaving the ship. The motion of the sea had proved more than she could stand ‘on account of the pain in her side’. Princess Mary, Amelia’s companion, prayed that her sister ‘would find some benefit from all the tortures she has submitted to go through’. Her father wrote, offering advice from Windsor that to obtain the benefit of maritime air they should try placing her on a bed in a tent in a field with the flaps open. The answer came: recent heavy rain made that idea impractical.

  Amelia had been hope itself when she first arrived at Weymouth. She declared to her father, ‘Everything recalls former times, and I like your knowing everything about us, and that we are under your roof.’ The King’s footmen carried her very well upstairs, she added bravely, and her rooms were very comfortable. Dr Pope, after applying the leeches to her side, on his departure had left full instructions for her treatment with Mr Beavor, a local apothecary. An airing on the sands had not relieved the pain, she admitted, but she worked, read and wrote in the King’s room looking to the sea where she sat ‘entirely’, she told him on 14 September. But Mary reported to the King, however, that, although her sister was indeed ‘constantly employed’, she could not sit up as well as she had before leaving Windsor. ‘A degree of languor prevails at times that is painful to witness.’

  The King’s response was to lament to Amelia on 19 September ‘the absolute necessity of resorting to re
medies which in their momentary effect are so distressing.’ In early October Pope went down to the resort to make still larger ‘issues’ or openings in Amelia’s side. She survived them, although her flesh was now tender to the touch as well as being inwardly painful. He spoke of bleeding her, to see the state of the blood. As for the dressing of the ‘issues’, Mary had never seen her more in pain. (Mary Gaskoin, Amelia’s maid, had been trained by her mistress to apply ‘caustic’ to the skin that was now permanently inflamed around the setons.) But still Amelia went down to the bathhouse to immerse herself in the warm water there, until the cold wind began, and then made do at the house with a slipper bath. Her bravery was daundess.

  At last in November the hapless invalid was allowed to return home – ‘this obstinate pain in the side yields to nothing’, Princess Sophia heard the month before at Windsor. And the day before she set out on that journey home Amelia wrote wearily to her father, ‘this journey had not answered and yet everything has been tried that was recommended.’ But Amelia did not go back to the tower in the Casde which she shared with Mary and Sophia. Pope said the Castle ‘would not do’, from being ‘too elevated and my rooms to the eastward.’

  Instead the King made ready for his daughter’s return to Augusta Lodge, a house on St Alban’s Street close to where Lower Lodge still stood, which Princess Charlotte had earlier occupied. And Amelia from Weymouth was pliant, merely begging the Prince: ‘Don’t tell the Queen I can feel any pleasure in seeing her, for I can’t, and Eliza some day or other shall hear my mind.’ She begged her brother not to think her ill natured, but ‘neither affliction or pleasure ever led me near the Queen or Elizabeth, after all I have experienced in that quarter.’

  At Augusta Lodge, Amelia settled in early November in rooms on the ground floor giving onto a pretty garden ‘and very quiet’, with Princess Mary and Mrs Williams. The King visited her every day. ‘Alas, his blindness prevents his seeing how she is reduced as thin as death,’ wrote Mrs Kennedy, the Windsor Castle diarist, and he flattered himself with hopes of her recovery. The Queen also called every day but never asked after Amelia’s health, her invalid daughter declared. ‘I hear General F. R. is returned, and the Queen was particularly cross to him. She always tells me how very agreeable Sir Brent Spencer is and Col Desbrowe [Disbrowe], but regularly names no one else except Münster [the Hanoverian Minister] …’ complained Amelia. But others heard that Fitzroy himself had for some time – before her illness removed her from the world – been treating Amelia with ‘great harshness’ and cross words. It is possible to sympathize with his predicament, in having his bold seduction of one of the King’s daughters go so horribly wrong. Not only had he, from the beginning, acted as Amelia’s factotum and dealt as best he could with her money worries, but he had been her confidant for her agitations and suspicions about her family, and also for her worries about her gynaecological disorders. And now the lover who was obsessed with marrying him, who ordered accoutrements engraved with their entwined initials for the home she envisaged them sharing, was apparently dying.

  Painful examinations followed, with the Queen’s favourite Dr Millman and Amelia’s preferred medic Dr Pope ‘the best part of the day … in and out of her room’. When the former declared that ‘the calomel had been pushed too far at Weymouth’ by the latter, a liver specialist, Dr Saunders, was called in to examine Amelia with the King’s friend Dr Heberden. The principal cause of Princess Amelia’s disease was then declared to be ‘an inflammation which has taken place in the back part of the right side’, and that had caused ‘a considerable swelling’ there. ‘From its origin being in the neighbourhood of the liver’, Amelia told the Prince, the doctors thought it probable that that organ was ‘disordered in its functions’. (In modern terms, Amelia’s tuberculosis had spread from her lungs to her liver and other organs.) They believed that ‘a discharge of matter externally’ might occur naturally, which would not be ‘unfavourable.’ Amelia pathetically told the Prince that the King was pleased with Pope’s honesty when, responding to these criticisms, the doctor said he had not observed the swelling. ‘They say it will be a long case,’ she added.

  A month later further and greater opinions were sought, when Millman and Saunders suggested closing the seton in her side, as arduous a business as opening it. Sir Henry Halford and Dr Matthew Baillie came down from London to give their opinions of the case. Amelia was ecstatically grateful to her father, who willingly paid for the expensive consultation. ‘The desire to consult others, at a moment when additional torture is suggested, appears to me both natural and reasonable,’ he wrote. The doctors spoke against closing the seton and effectively joined with Pope to form her medical team, but the New Year of 1810 brought no relief. An outbreak of St Anthony’s fire or erysipelas around her face and eyes – a bright red and spreading skin infection – oppressed Amelia’s spirits further, and she had to suffer a blister applied to her head to drain it off, on Pope’s orders.

  No better, Amelia now found it difficult to digest meat, and after an effort to eat cold chicken, had a severe spasm. Her diet became one of laudanum, beef tea, brandy and a few strawberries and grapes. Leeches were placed around her head, which she bore bravely. Mrs Adams replaced Mrs Williams as head nurse in May, but Princess Mary and Mary Gaskoin, Amelia’s maid, stayed. The compass of Amelia’s love had grown very small, as her brother York later avowed.

  Though she kept up remarkably high spirits through months of ‘constant torture’, Sir Henry Halford spoke of her ‘constant retching and exhaustion.’ Visitors were rationed further, and one of them, her sister Augusta, said she ‘never saw such suffering’. Amelia read and wrote of Clarissa – she was on the fourth volume – that ‘there was much to like and much to abhor’ in its pages. Against hope she imagined a future with Charles, and commissioned from London firms more silver, with the initials CFR and AFR intertwined and surmounted with coronets, for the home she longed to have with him. And from I. and L. Tuck, her brothers’ jeweller, she ordered a hair bracelet initialled A and C, with hearts and hands locked.

  After her brother the Prince had delicately insisted she make a will, Amelia wrote to Charles on 28 July 1810: ‘Should my cruel situation continue to separate our persons, be assured my heart is and long has been joined and united with yours. I live but for you. I love you with the purest affection, the greatest gratitude.’ Nevertheless this document she wrote was for him to open when she was ‘no longer an inhabitant of this world’, and to tell him of the existence of her will, and of her choice of executors – the Prince, and her brother Adolphus, who had visited her at Weymouth.

  Even in extremis the Princess made one last effort to win her heart’s wish–from her doctor Sir Henry Halford in early September. She begged him to seek on her behalf permission from her father for her marriage to Fitzroy. He copied his answer to her – refusing her request – to her companion Princess Mary. In his opinion, he told Amelia, such a ‘communication’ would:

  entail great wretchedness upon yourself and misery upon all the Royal Family for ages to come … the end hoped to be obtained would not be secured thereby and … the attempt would be followed only by bitter reflection … this blow to the King’s peace of mind must be so heavy as to endanger the loss not only of his Majesty’s happiness but of his health. As a physician I cannot help putting this result in a most prominent point of view … what must be our reflections [those of the royal doctors] in knowing that we had consented to be the immediate instruments of such a calamity … A case has occurred undoubtedly in inferior life to almost every physician in which he has thought it his duty to interfere between the anger of parents and the certain death of his patient but no resemblance can be found between your RH’s unhappy case and one in inferior life. The circumstances here are peculiar and unparalleled.

  A weakened Princess Amelia read Halford’s letter with ‘astonishment and regret’, as she informed him. Already earlier that year she had described the doctor to her brother the Prince as ‘
so good a courtier that he does not venture to oppose anything the King and Queen like’. Now she reminded the egregious Halford that he had ‘solicited and obtained’ her confidence, ‘at an early period of our acquaintance by making the most friendly offer of assistance and consolation’. But now that he was convinced her disease was ‘more that of the mind than the body’ and that ‘affliction’ was shortening her days, he had nothing to offer but:

  an exhortation to filial duty and respect to my parents. I trust I know my duty on that subject, as well as what I owe to my dearest brother the Prince … and I am only sorry that a gentleman like yourself, whose skill and abilities no one can doubt, should think so meanly of me as to believe me deficient in either, or that my conduct is likely to be such as to become the object of impertinent remark at the corner of every street in every town in this island … I have asked nothing of you but secrecy. From that I do not release you, though I cannot but apprehend that the sentiments contained in your letter are the suggestion of some part of my family.

  She ended imperiously, ‘this subject is never again to be named between us on any account’.

  By the end of September Princess Amelia had been confined to her bed for a fortnight, having suffered a further outbreak of St Anthony’s fire – this one ‘literally from her head to her heels…’ wrote Augusta to Lady Harcourt on 26 September. ‘The torture she undergoes from the violence of the fever is so great that she can only be moved in a sheet. She says her bones feel as if they were breaking, and the soreness from the agony of the eruptions is indescribable.’ Nevertheless she was all piety and resignation, and, when alone with Augusta, thanked her for all the comforts that were daily thought of for her. ‘It would break your heart to see her,’ wrote Augusta, ‘but even now she looks so beautiful, so holy, so clean, so nice in her bed – You won’t mind my naming all these details because you love her as I do.’