Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  When she was still well enough to write, Amelia had sent a note to Lady Harcourt: ‘Don’t mention having heard from me, for people are very kind, but I feel unequal to writing to many and therefore if it is known, I may offend some even of my own family … though I see no one now but my own family every day, yet during your stay here, I do hope I may just get sight of you if possible for a minute.’

  Princess Augusta secured at least one meeting between Amelia and her General, recorded in a letter to him from Mary Gaskoin, who had opened the gates of the house to let him in. The Princess wished Fitzroy, while out riding with Princess Augusta, to ‘express in the strongest terms’ how much they both felt ‘the very great kindness’ she had shown concerning this visit.

  But the Princess was dying. Princess Elizabeth wrote on 19 October: ‘There is no hope of our dear Amelia who is gradually sinking to an early grave by illnesses which have never been able to be got the better of.’ Her sister had taken the Sacrament, she said, and ever since had ‘appeared to have said adieu to the world’. She was now ‘waiting her awful summons … with a degree of firmness … which is truly heroic if not angelic and heartily prays to be released.’ Miss Ellis Cornelia Knight, the author and one of the Queen’s readers at this time, records seeing her in late October. ‘Taking off her glove, she showed me her hand, it was perfectly transparent.’ The Princess, who had loved music, could not bear the sound of a pianoforte, even in another room. Princess Augusta gave her instead a bird, ‘which sang very sweetly, and with a very soft note, and she took pleasure in listening to it.’

  Augusta wrote to Lady Harcourt on 26 October: ‘Our beloved Amelia is absolutely going out like a candle … Her physicians assure us she cannot recover, but the poor dear King flatters himself [that she might], however, because they cannot say they see the signs of approaching dissolution in her face … I dread when the fatal close takes place, it will be a very great blow to him … her state is deplorable, that is, the pains of the body, for she is the greatest possible example of the immortality of the soul … affections as tender and delicate as they were ever at any period of her life.’

  On Sunday, 28 October, Sir Henry Halford wrote to the Prince of Wales: ‘I am grieved to inform you that the King has passed a night entirely without sleep.’ Over the previous two days, as his patient’s situation had deteriorated, Halford had called in Dr Matthew Baillie and then Dr William Heberden junior and David Dundas, Serjeant-Surgeon since 1792, as the King began to exhibit the symptoms that his family dreaded. He was nervous, prone to tears, his nights became disturbed, and his pulse quickened. His appearance at the fiftieth anniversary of his accession on Thursday, 25 October had frightened everyone. ‘As he went round the circle as usual,’ wrote Miss Knight, ‘it was easy to perceive the dreadful excitement in his countenance.’

  Meanwhile Amelia had softened towards her mother. She ‘cut off a lock of her hair’ after one frightful seizure, ‘gave it to Her Majesty, thanked her for all her kindness, hoped her own sufferings and her anxiety would now soon be over, but hoped also she would remember her and sometimes think of her.’ Mrs Kennedy heard from another of the Windsor ladies that the Queen was ‘the picture of grief, cannot shed a tear and endeavours to keep up to support the King, who weeps all day long, but rides out every day as usual, and the Queen goes to Frogmore for an hour most mornings.’

  The King usually visited his daughter at three in the afternoon. One day he was standing weeping by the fire when Princess Mary said, ‘Sir, Amelia desires you will come to the bedside.’ Amelia said, ‘My dearest father, this ring shall tell you my wishes,’ and handed him a ring she had had made specially. She had had some of her hair put under a crystal tablet set round with diamonds, and in the crystal was engraved the motto, ‘Remember me.’ Reading the motto, the King embraced his daughter and said he ‘should think of her, and lament her every day he lived, for she was in his heart’s core. That it should be on his finger as long as he lived, and go into his coffin with him.’ Princess Mary had gone on her knees to prevent her sister from giving him the ring. But Amelia was resolved on it, and resolved in all she did, even asking that the bird that Augusta had lent should be restored to her two days after her death, so as not to awaken too many cruel reflections.

  In her ‘last hours’ the twenty-seven-year-old Princess Amelia spoke to her attendants at Augusta Lodge:

  ‘I am dying, send for the chaplain, to pray with me.’ All thought her so weak that she would not be able to join with him, but she did do it and in all the fervour of devotion repeated the prayers after him, and, upon his stopping, ‘Sir,’ said she, ‘you have left out one prayer – the absolution, which I desire you to repeat.’ ‘Your Royal Highness must then allow me to ask you some previous questions.’ She acceded and after that thanked him, and said, ‘Now I must ask you a question – do you think that my great sufferings have been laid upon me because I am a sinner above all others?’ ‘By no means,’ he replied. ‘Do you think’, she said, ‘that when my soul departs, I shall go into the bosom of my saviour through his merits and mediation?’ He answered in the affirmative. ‘Now then,’ said she, ‘I have nothing to ask.’

  On Thursday, 1 November Augusta went to her sister, and Amelia’s words, ‘Dear Augusta I love you, I always did love you,’ were within days to be ‘like heavenly sounds’ in her sister’s ears. For early the following morning Amelia was seized with convulsions, then ‘fell into a stupor between 11 and 12’. At noon Princess Mary, sitting by her bedside, put aside the curtain to look at her, then said, ‘Sir Henry, I do not hear her breath, pray come and look.’ The doctor felt Amelia’s pulse, then lit a candle and, having examined the Princess, closed the curtain. ‘Your Royal Highness must suffer me to lead you to the Queen, who is in the house,’ he said. Mary remonstrated, saying, ‘Oh, she is dying and I will not leave her.’ ‘Madam, she is dead,’ came the grim response, ‘and you must leave the room, for I must go and acquaint the Queen.’ While Sir Henry wrote to inform the King of his daughter’s death, Princess Mary wrote to Charles Fitzroy, before quitting Augusta Lodge: ‘My dear Fitzroy, Our beloved Amelia is no more but her last words to me were, “Tell Charles I die blessing him.” Before I leave the house I obey her last wishes.’

  Princess Augusta described her own reaction to her sister’s death in a letter to Lady Harcourt on 6 November:

  God knows I had never looked forward to dear Amelia’s life being spared – and her sufferings were so great and her frame of mind so angelic, that except for my own deprivation of a sister I doted upon, I could not wish the tortures prolonged. At the same time the suddenness of her death has been a severe shock to us all, especially to myself – for seeing the Queen’s coach when I returned from my ride I said, ‘I am glad it is here for it shall carry me directly to my beloved Amelia.’ And little did I think that angel now gone to another and a better world, and that poor Mary had just got out of the coach at the castle. I saw Mary as soon as I could collect my ideas at all, and then I went to the Queen, both of which were duties I wished to fulfil as soon as possible, and since that time I have scarcely shed a tear.

  The King was too ill for several days before and after Amelia’s death to understand anything, let alone that she was dead. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Wellesley, had heard the King sobbing before he went in to see him on 29 October – ‘most dreadful – a sort of wailing, most horrible and heartrending to hear’. Still Halford had hoped ‘the [King’s] malady would last a short time’; Baillie thought of months. But now his mind was gone. ‘His excess of feeling has been too much to bear,’ Elizabeth wrote to Augusta Compton, ‘and the long suspense between hope and fear has been the fatal cause of his illness.’

  ‘The violence of the [King’s] disorder was at a horrible height,’ wrote Mr Speaker Abbott of 2 and 3 November. While Amelia lay dying at Augusta Lodge, it had already been resolved by the physicians supervising her father’s treatment that they would ‘control and govern’ his case, but would do well to ‘
have some of the mad people under them.’ At their request Dr Simmons came down to Windsor, but on finding he was to be ‘under’ the physicians, went away again. On the day Amelia died, a madhouse keeper from Kensington with two assistants was introduced into the King’s apartments at Windsor, with instructions that they were ‘not to be afraid of employing the necessary means of restraint, but were at the same time never to lose sight of the King’s rank.’ Dr Henry Revell Reynolds, who had attended in all the previous illnesses, was called in as additional physician the following day, the 3rd.

  When he first suspected he was becoming ill the King charted his own descent into alienation. He remarked that at its inception he had dreamt the same dream which heralded each of his other illnesses, and he named the causes of his former illnesses, ending ‘and now it is poor Amelia’. He told Sir Henry Halford that, if his case required medical supervision, he and any other physicians attending him should admit to their consultations no ‘medical man specially engaged in the department of insanity.’ But, three days after Amelia’s death, the King’s ministers were resolute that – despite Simmons’s refusal to act – the attendance was required of a medical man ‘whose practice and experience have powerfully been directed to that species of disorder with which it has pleased God again to afflict his Majesty …’. The Prime Minister Spencer Perceval wrote to the Prince of Wales on 5 November: ‘Doctor Robert Willis is proceeding down to Windsor this morning for that purpose.’

  The King still could not take in the fact of Amelia’s death, though Sir Henry Halford attempted to impress it on him. The King had written to Amelia on his seventy-second birthday that June, as they applied the cupping glasses to her head once again at Windsor: ‘There is no object nearer my heart, no blessing for which I pray more fervently than that you may be restored to me.’ Now, when told that his prayers had failed, he resorted to believing that Amelia had died but had risen from the dead. Lord Auckland commented on 5 November that it was ‘not easy to conceive a more terrible visitation of mental misery than that of feverish insanity added to total blindness’, and very hard to imagine a king ruling in such circumstances.

  Amelia’s sisters were torn between bracing themselves for their sister’s funeral and fearing for their father’s sanity. Augusta said of Amelia in her letter to Lady Harcourt of 6 November: ‘You who loved her dearly will understand the delight it is to me to talk of her and how happy I am she is to be buried where I live. The same good and merciful God who gave her to me, had a right to take her to himself whenever he thought fit. I am thankful for the time I had the blessing of possessing her.’ She received back the bird that she had lent Amelia, and she asked Amelia’s nurse, Mrs Adams, to secure for her from her sister Mary ‘any one little box belonging to poor dear Amelia – either the writing box or the red leather box and any one book which she has read in much during her illness. I cannot help asking this for I had rather have a book than anything. Don’t name it till you think it quite right.’ The ‘circumstances of horror’ in which they had been for some days concerning the King had ‘added greatly to our afflictions’, Augusta confessed, ‘and we may indeed say we are borne down with grief.’

  Elizabeth wrote to Lady Harcourt on the 9th, four days before Amelia’s funeral was due to take place in St George’s Chapel: ‘I now shudder when I think of what the angel King will feel when he knows the worst for as yet, though it has been named, he cannot believe it. Three days later, however, ‘restraint was taken off’, after the King at last comprehended his daughter’s death.

  Amelia’s funeral took place the next day, 13 November, at eight o’clock in the evening. ‘There was no parade, only the hearse drawn by eight of His Majesty’s fine black horses, escorted by a troop of the Royal Household Blues and Royals with drawn swords.’ The Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cambridge, Amelia’s executors, followed in a coach and six, while the Castle bell tolled the short distance that the coffin travelled from Augusta Lodge to St George’s Chapel. Amelia’s other brothers, cloaked and booted, met the body at the west door of the church, which was itself illuminated by two rows of guardsmen bearing flambeaux. Lady George Murray and three others of Princess Amelia’s ladies – wearing long white crepe veils and long white gloves – supported the pall, while eight of the King’s Beefeaters carried the coffin into the chapel. All Amelia’s brothers were ‘in floods of tears the whole ceremony, particularly the Prince’. But her sisters and mother, according to etiquette, were not present for the service, nor for the moment when the Beefeaters lowered Amelia’s coffin into the royal vault below the chapel. Remaining in their apartments in Upper Ward, they had heard only the tolling of the bell, to announce the passage of the hearse into the Castle.

  The King in his northern apartments knew now that his darling Amelia was dead. With his mind gone, it seemed that a period of regency must ensue. Princess Elizabeth wrote some weeks later, ‘Distress and misery has so long been my lot that I have no longer the power of tears.’

  Book Four: Maturity 1810–1822

  13 Breaking Up

  There was, besides the sadness of Amelia’s death and of her father’s reaction to it, the matter of her will. Amelia’s maid Mary Gaskoin, herself to die of tuberculosis within months, received, according to her mistress’s directions, all the clothing that had been found in the Princess’s apartment at the Queen’s House: ‘a variety of court dresses, fans and other ornaments of dress.’ Everything else Amelia had left to Charles Fitzroy, but the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cambridge, as executors, moved swiftly to overturn the will. A bereaved Fitzroy received the brothers – at their most charming. He agreed that it would only do Amelia’s reputation harm if it were known she had left nearly all her possessions to him. The brothers assured him they would pass on much of what she had left to him – a ‘large number of packing cases… removed from HRH’s different apartments’ and now lodged at Mrs Villiers’s house. There were books and furniture, plate – Amelia had had half of it engraved AFR and CFR – and china. Fitzroy was later to contest this arrangement, but for the moment the princes’ graciousness won the day.

  Knowing nothing of the urgent bargaining taking place between the Prince of Wales and General Fitzroy to reassign the dispositions of Amelia’s will, in the days following her funeral on 13 November 1810 the King took his own measures, assuming his daughter to have died intestate. According to Mrs Kennedy, he ‘called for his strong box, took out some gold and bank notes, parcelled them and had them put up in different papers, sealed, and then called for pen and ink and directed them himself to the Queen, saying, “I must perform my promise to my dear departed child.” They were little legacies to her attendants and to the poor.’

  But that night the King was feverish and sleepless, and they ‘restrained’ him at three in the morning. For a good month the delirium and sleeplessness persisted, with acute pain at times from a bowel complaint. Towards the end of November the Privy Council examined the physicians – Halford, Heberden and Dundas one day, and Baillie the next – and Dr Robert Willis, all of whom spoke ‘with confidence’ of the King’s ultimate recovery. The politician George Canning had indeed believed, before Amelia died, that ‘the one shock’ of her death would probably accelerate the King’s recovery. But it was not to prove so, and by mid-December, when they were examined by Select Committees in the Commons and Lords, the physicians’ answers about the King’s recovery were less firm.

  Princess Elizabeth wrote with feeling of the proceedings at Westminster, calling them ‘the vile examinations what kills us, yet I am determined not to despair.’ Princess Mary, meanwhile, having nursed her sister for over eighteen months without pause, was recovering from a collapse brought on by ‘worry and anxiety of mind’, her elder sister wrote. The King, Mary told Mrs Adams, was not worse, but ‘at a standstill, says nothing quite wrong but nothing quite right and talks a great deal more than he might or than the physicians like’. Courteous Sir Henry Halford had to divide his time at Windsor between ‘upstairs�
� – the south apartments, where Princess Mary lay heavy headed – and ‘downstairs’ – the north apartments, where the King walked and talked and forgot to sleep. Sir Henry steadied the nervousness in Mary’s usually placid head by a blister ‘on the back part of the head where the great trembling of the nerves is.’

  The atmosphere in the chambers of Westminster in December was muted and without any of the frenzy that had characterized the Machiavellian extravaganzas of 1788-9. The machinery for a regency had been in place since 1789 when the King’s recovery had stopped the third reading of Pitt’s bill, and the doctors’ reports now convinced the Parliamentary Committees that a regency, or ‘substitution for the deficiency in the executive power’, was now called for. On 20 December Perceval introduced in the House of Commmons a Regency Bill with restrictions.

  The Whigs, who expected to be called on to form a government, worried that the Prince as regent, with the restricted powers that were proposed, as they had been in 1788, would be unable to carry on public business at all. Others, the Tory Prime Minister Perceval among them, expected to be turned out if the Prince was appointed regent. They worried more about what would occur, should the frail seventy-two-year-old King be declared well once more and no regency ensue.