Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  Princess Mary herself was dejected, writing in January 1812, ‘No one that really loves the King ought to pray for his life being prolonged a moment in so deplorable a state.’ And a few days later on 4 February her father was declared, in a question-and-answer session between Council and doctors, unlikely to recover. ‘Is it insanity?’ the Council questioned. ‘Yes,’ the doctors replied firmly, and a full regency was inaugurated that month.

  With the passing of the unrestricted Regency Bill, an uncontroversial and necessary measure, if a lamented one, the Prince Regent acquired all the powers that his father had held. The Prince’s decision to retain Perceval and his father’s Tory ministers, however, on the same plea as before, that he could never forgive himself if the King one day cast off his delirium and suffered a relapse on finding the enemy Whig party in power, was spectacular.

  At Windsor the Queen and the princesses, while regretting the need for a full regency, were happy, as stout defenders of the King, that his ministers should remain in power, although the King himself, under the care from now on of both Willises and their keepers in his northern apartments at Windsor, knew nothing of the matter. But the Dukes of Portland and Devonshire, Lord Grey and the other leaders of the Opposition were from now on the Prince’s implacable enemies; Princess Charlotte, a fervent Whig, rushed from her father’s table when he proposed a toast to Mr Perceval. And, as in a game of cards, the Whigs picked up Charlotte’s mother, Caroline, Princess of Wales, when the Tories dropped her as a Court card of lesser value now that they had the Prince in their deck.

  The previous autumn the Prince had outlined to his sisters at Oatlands the measures he intended to include, for their happiness, in the Regency Bill, then being drafted. Sophia, giving her address as ‘The Nunnery, No. 3 Castle Court’, wrote to him afterwards: ‘My heart overflows with gratitude for all your noble and generous intentions towards us …’ And she hoped that ‘your kindness to four old cats’ would not cause the Regent any trouble with his ministers. ‘How good you are to us… Poor old wretches as we are, a dead weight upon you, old lumber to the country, like old clothes, I wonder you do not vote for putting us in a sack and drowning us in the Thames. Two of us [Augusta and Elizabeth] would be fine food for the fishes, and as to Minny and me, we will take our chance together.’

  If the ministerial arrangements pleased the Queen, the financial arrangements that the Prince was making for his sisters occasioned in her some bitterness, or ‘jealousy of your kindness’, as Princess Mary told her brother. The Queen said that no one appeared to feel for her, and that she thought it best not to discuss anything with her daughters. Nevertheless, Princess Augusta was worried to death by their mother’s complaints, her sister Mary believed. ‘Poor soul … she has, I believe, spoke more to her than to any of us.’

  In Parliament there were eyebrows raised at the additional sums of £9,000 that the Prince wished settled on each of his four sisters in England. But they had their supporters, notably in the person of William Fremantle MP, who spoke movingly of the princesses and of ‘the filial affection and amiable and captivating submission with which they have borne the calamities which have lately fallen upon them. Throughout the Empire,’ he declaimed, ‘there can be but one sentiment on their conduct and sufferings. Every father of a family may truly say to his children, imitate but the virtues and the example of your Princesses the King’s daughters, and my wishes will be gratified.’ The Regent’s and Mr Fremantle’s wishes were granted, and Sophia thanked her brother for ‘the energy you have shown’ and ‘the steadiness with which you have persevered on our account’.

  With the additional £9,000 a year came a new carriage for each of the princesses, plus a page and a footman. The livery was to be the same as that of their brothers – crimson, lined and trimmed with green, very handsome. Furthermore, the princesses could now appoint a new lady each on half-duty at £300 a year. But when General Taylor brought the princesses letters to sign regarding their proposed allowances, the Queen became enraged that Mr Perceval had not written to her. Augusta replied boldly that in this delicate matter it had been right for the Regent instead to speak to her. The Queen looked ‘very steadfastly at me’, wrote Augusta to her brother, ‘and said with a kind of suppressed anger, “That may be, but still I think I ought to have been addressed straight to myself”.’ It was all very wearing.

  Princess Elizabeth was no less affected. ‘The changes are great here, which has nearly broke my heart,’ she reported to Miss Compton on 29 February. In January, before the passage of the Act, she had written of the disagreeable duty of parting with old friends among the household: ‘I wish to do everything handsomely, properly and soberly.’ Miss Planta had resigned, and Elizabeth told Lady Harcourt, ‘The Queen has behaved like an angel, she gave her a present of £100 a year. Augusta and me intend to make it [up to] three, for she then will be comfortable. She thinks of going to Bath … You may suppose she was violently affected and how much pleased at our mother’s kind and gracious conduct.’

  When the day came in February to make the final farewells, Elizabeth recorded:

  It was Miss Planta’s last day and she was the picture of misery and breaks her heart. Which of course affected us much, and leaving after so many years and having done her duty thoroughly, made me … recollect nothing but the good. Then came a servant, he was a porter on the King’s side [of the quadrangle] who had belonged to us, to tell us he was going. There was another scene. And so it went on all day – grief and vexation of spirit. Every hour something springs up to rend our hearts – letters from other servants, occasioned by the present melancholy change. It will be soon over, but these days are misery to us. This morning my sisters have persuaded our dear old Cox … the old servant in the Queen’s ladies’ room, to retire … she has behaved extremely well and really like a sensible woman, thoroughly a gentlewoman. She came into my room and I said, ‘I hope you will be happy.’ ‘I cannot be otherwise,’ she responded. ‘You have all done everything to make me so.’

  Elizabeth noted sorrowfully, ‘I appear like a brute to everybody … I can scarcely bring myself to see them. It so totally unhinges me, and this a.m. it has seized my bowels and made me bilious.’

  Other servants and certain members of the royal households left, too, who felt their dignity forbade them remaining under the new arrangements, where only five tables instead of twenty were to be ‘kept’, so that equerries would dine with doctors, and ladies of the bedchamber with keepers of the robes. ‘I look forward with a degree of dread to all we have to bear still,’ Elizabeth wrote. Displaying a certain guilt, she added, ‘If anyone thinks we are much pleased with the idea of an establishment, they must think we are born without hearts and feelings. God knows it is a most bitter pill to swallow, for the cause’ – the King’s illness – ‘is death to us.’

  The King’s merino sheep in the Home Park at Windsor, procured for him from Spain and Portugal by Sir Joseph Banks, were sold off. The Staffordshire Regiment and the Blues and Royals were no longer to guard the Castle. The Queen’s German band was dismissed. Castle Street in Windsor no longer echoed to the hooves of the King’s glossy saddle horses, and Highflyer, Perfection and Othello were sold off, and Spanker, Frolic, Traveller and Boldfeather too. But there was for Princess Sophia, when she felt well enough to resume her riding – she had been plagued by ‘cramps’ for some months – room for comfort. She and Augusta, the only equestrians among the princesses now that Amelia was dead, took ownership of Skyscraper and of five further mounts.

  They might have splendid new establishments, a carriage and a lady each, but, Elizabeth wrote, ‘You may depend that we do not intend doing anything extravagant or silly, we only wish to have that degree of liberty which is right… The trials of these years have made me more sedate and more willing to yield on many points than I ever was. In short, a home sans ma mère I hate the thought of.’ But of course with an income of £13,000 any of the princesses could now set up their own households, were they not s
ubject to their mother’s wishes.

  Princess Augusta no longer felt subject to those wishes, and wrote a letter to her brother on 5 March on a very confidential matter. She reminded him that, when her heart was ‘full of care’ one evening after dinner four years before, she had told him, as she had earlier told the Duke of York, the secret of her heart – her love for General Sir Brent Spencer. The Prince of Wales had responded then that he had often marked ‘a gloom’ upon her countenance which, he was certain, ‘proceeded from some secret cause of anxiety’. No action was possible then, but now, writing her letter, Augusta looked to the Prince’s sanction for a ‘private marriage’ with the object of her affection. Though Sir Brent was not her match in birth or station, it had been twelve years since they were first acquainted, and nine since their attachment had been ‘mutually acknowledged’. She was now forty-three.

  ‘Long and great has been my trial, and correct has been my conduct,’ Augusta proclaimed with feeling. In the circumstances, she begged the Prince to stand witness at the secret marriage she craved. If he thought it not proper to attend himself, she asked him to send Frederick in his place to give royal sanction to the match. Almost as ardently, she desired her mother’s blessing, but she wished the Regent to broach the matter to the Queen. Though her mother’s consent was not necessary, Augusta wanted Queen Charlotte to acknowledge that her daughter had never shrunk from any of her duties, ‘though suffering martyrdom from anxiety of mind and deprivation of happiness’. In the event, Princess Augusta did not send her letter to her brother until June, while her mother continued to be cold and difficult with her daughters.

  Anxiety about an approaching drawing room – the first in eighteen months, and one marking the return of the Queen and princesses to public life – brought forth a tirade from the Queen on 2 April directed at her daughters. The occasion was another letter written to her by Augusta. It began by thanking the Queen for ‘the many years she had so liberally provided everything for us’, and mentioned the resolve the princesses had taken to go about in Society despite their father’s condition. When Augusta came in from her ride after breakfast, she had her answer. ‘I was fully aware’, the Queen wrote, ‘that the happiness of an independent establishment must carry the idea of liberty with it, and … this may perhaps be the last time that any one of you may be inclined to take a mother’s advice.’ But, she warned them, ‘your situation is very different to that of your brothers’. They were duty bound to appear in public. ‘Your sex and … the present melancholy situation of your father’ must be counted in. And, the Queen declared, ‘the going to public amusements excepting where duty calls you would be the highest mark of indecency possible.’

  Finally she addressed the visits the princesses had begun to make to their brothers in their new coaches and carriages. ‘You never can be in the house with those that are unmarried without a lady – even that pleasure, innocent as it is, should be considered before it is done.’ Bidding Augusta keep in mind that ‘no age whatever is exempted from being criticized’, the Queen closed her letter by saying that she had seen that Augusta had fixed her course, so she would not say more.

  Her mother’s reply was ‘written in anger’, Augusta told her brother the Prince, ‘and I put a person in a passion and a person that is drunk upon the same footing.’ Hence she would not copy it to him, and, when she saw the Queen in the evening with her sisters – their mother had dined alone and cried a great deal – the Queen smiled and said nothing. Augusta said nothing in her turn.

  The quarrels between the Queen and Mary and Augusta did not occlude the joy brought by the Regent’s visit to Windsor on his father’s Birthday in June 1812. Elizabeth was suffering from a bout of St Anthony’s fire on her face, and Sophia was still invalid. But Mary and Augusta and the Queen were a harmonious trio for the occasion. The Prince Regent crossed to the northern apartments his father occupied, and stood silent spectator of the King’s activity for some time. ‘He was struck’, Mary reported, ‘with the King’s good looks.’ The Regent, however, thought their father had ‘grown very fat and large’.

  When, on the 12th of this month, Princess Augusta sent her March letter to the Regent and begged him to show it to her mother, saying of it, ‘there is not one syllable not strictly true’, she enclosed a covering note: ‘I feel that the longer I delay the making my sentiments known to you, the more completely miserable I grow, particularly as I do not nor cannot name the subject on which I have written to any one but yourself…’

  Augusta’s March letter would have moved a stone: she had originally been led to speak to the Prince when the General was abroad, and her ‘anxiety for his safety and welfare’ had been ‘put to the trial for a second time’. She told the Prince that the General had offered to give up his ‘situation about the King’, to spare her unhappiness, which she forbade. ‘A third time he was ordered abroad, and painful as the thoughts were of our being separated again, it was a mutual consolation to us both’, she wrote, ‘that you and dear Frederick … were apprised of our attachment.’ Had the General fallen, she knew they would have shared her sorrow. Now that the General was returned, ‘I am sensible’, she said, ‘that should you agree to our union, it can only proceed from your affection for me, and your desire of promoting my happiness, and that of a worthy man … of course it will be necessary to keep it a secret and … it must be quite a private marriage … Nothing is more repugnant to my principles… than the not acting with candour to every individual, and more particularly towards my own family, but … there is no duplicity in silence.’ As for the Queen, ‘if she merely thinks of my birth and station’, she could not approve, ‘but that is the only reason she can object to it and I shall never blame her for it’. Augusta ended, ‘I am proud of possessing the affection and good opinion of an honest man and of a highly distinguished character.’

  She continued, it seems, to possess that ‘affection and good opinion’, even though no answer from her brother, not even a letter from her mother exists, and it seems unlikely that any marriage took place. The only material evidence of Augusta’s relationship with her General is a locket bearing her miniature and taken from his neck after death, with an accompanying card claiming that they had married. It is a claim impossible to substantiate.

  Before she had sent her letter, Princess Augusta with Princess Mary had been the Regent’s sisters with the appetite for town. Shortly after the King’s Birthday of 1812 they dined one day at York House, the next at Carlton House. But, Princess Mary told Mrs Adams, ‘all this has been done with great difficulty and given us much pain and sorrow’. She could not enter into particulars in a letter, but, she wrote, with obvious reference to the Queen’s opposition, ‘if you knew everything you would think we are quite right’. Mrs Kennedy wrote compassionately at Windsor of the Queen and princesses, ‘They have been shut up so long, that they have lived a most melancholy life.’

  Sophia’s health yielded under the strain twice within eighteen months. Only weeks after she had nursed Amelia for the last time, Mary found herself looking after her other younger sister, Sophia, when she was ‘much subdued’ and had a ‘bilious fever’ for five weeks. Halford and Baillie both feared that her case resembled Amelia’s. ‘And in many things she puts me so dreadfully in mind of poor Amelia, it makes me quite sick,’ wrote Mary, who had known her dead sister’s case better than any doctor. These morbid feelings did not, in fact, herald any deterioration in Sophia. She grew thinner, her niece Charlotte noticed, over the year, and was quickly fatigued, but she continued to ride out, getting into a post-chaise that followed behind when her energy dimmed.

  But on the King’s Birthday in 1812 Sophia remained with Elizabeth at Windsor, the younger sister very ill once more with spasms and other symptoms that so reminded her sisters of Amelia’s case. Halford and Baillie rather now feared she was ‘nervous’. It was a nebulous condition, but it was one that was now to persist for years, not months. It effectively immured Sophia in her rooms at Windsor, and –
by association with the invalid King in the northern apartments of the Castle – this incarceration easily gave rise to rumours about her health to join those others that circled about her. Six years later Dr Baillie’s sisters answered enquiries from a guest, the novelist Maria Edgeworth. Princess Sophia was ‘not insane’, they told her, ‘only nervous and weak’. Miss Edgeworth recorded, ‘this is the truth, and nervous is not here used as a soft equivocal word’. The Misses Baillie also quelled the rumour that Amelia had died ‘a martyr to the King’s evil and all scars and sores – absolutely false’. Their brother had seen the Princess ‘after death’, and ‘her neck and every part of her was free from all scar or sore or swelling or any symptom of that disease’. But one of the Misses Baillie started new hares – ‘all about her children true’, noted Miss Edgeworth, ‘Fitzroy her husband I think she said but am not sure – was not always kind to her’. And she added: ‘The princess [Sophia] is married, it is believed, to General Garth. Miss Baillie says you would be surprised if you saw him.’

  Leaving aside the accuracy of the information Miss Edgeworth acquired about the two princesses, Sophia’s letters to Sir Henry Halford show her very ‘nervous’ indeed. Usually clear-headed and lively in her correspondence, she now betrayed extreme anxiety and morbid sensitivity in matters of no moment to a person in normal health. Halford was her lifeline, her dependence was all on him. He heard from her daily in letters that listed in equally minute detail the dishes she had tried to eat and the range of emotions through which she passed while she lay in her bed at Windsor.

  For Princess Mary, the purchase of ‘finery’ to set off her good looks had always been a pleasure. Now, with a new lady, Lady Isabella Thynne, as chaperone, and with her more capacious purse, she made frequent visits to West End haberdashers and mantua makers. Sophia, too, had looked forward to emancipation. She and Mary had made a pact to share the costs of a coach, a chaise and two footmen out of their handsome new incomes. Mary, visiting her brothers and her friends in London in defiance of her mother, had sole use of the stable, as Sophia lay in her room, guarding her ‘cramps’.