by Flora Fraser
Her nerves frayed, Sophia was ‘quite overcome’ when news of a terrible incident in Parliament reached her in May 1812. An assassin, John Bellingham, shot dead Prime Minister Spencer Perceval. ‘To think that we live in a country that could produce so great a monster,’ exclaimed Princess Mary. Princess Elizabeth, like Sophia, was ‘truly overpowered’ and ‘completely overset.’ The whole House of Commons felt horrified, she recounted, and ‘all party animosity’ was put to one side when ‘poor Mrs Perceval and her twelve children’ were recommended for a pension.
Perceval, apart from his earlier championing of the Princess of Wales, had been a politician greatly to the princesses’ liking. He had protected the interests of the King. In addition, he had been largely instrumental in the successful passage of the Regency Bill and of the provision for the princesses. They were right to mourn his passing and regret the advent of his successor, the tremulous Lord Liverpool.
Princess Elizabeth, declaring herself a ‘bad courtier’, went less and less to London in her search for independence. She wrote of her rooms in the Castle that they were ‘altered, old friends with a new face’, with the help of her new income. Her old bedchamber too was changed into ‘an elegant sitting room and all as pretty as possible, my old china perfect and altogether it is quite the thing. It has been an amusement, and the only one I have had.’ Ever industrious, Elizabeth claimed to have ‘of late been idle to an excess’, but she shared with Miss Augusta Compton her latest artistic achievements. She had done ‘some few drawings in a slight state … on blue paper’. Had she had more to copy she would have been happy, but her supplier had gone into Wales. She wished she had Augusta’s ‘hand and pen’ to make all her studies and books perfect, and, searching perhaps for a companion in her artistic projects, she offered to her friend another cottage close to her own at Windsor.
Augusta Compton’s father, the Queen’s page Henry Compton, had died recently. ‘Do you think to live in town or in the country?’ Elizabeth opened, moving on swiftly to enquire, ‘how was you to like being near here?’ She could, she explained, ‘manage’ – that wonderful new income – a ‘very pretty little cottage which I think I can get’, where Augusta could live rent free, and with a friend if she liked. ‘Be honest and tell me’, Elizabeth concluded, ‘if you do or do not like the idea.’ Elizabeth continued eagerly with her plan for Augusta Compton to be her companion in the country. ‘The room below is lovely,’ she wrote on 13 June of the cottage she had acquired; ‘you may make as pretty a room above if you will sleep in one of the back bedrooms.’ Within the week, Miss Compton was at Windsor, which offered Princess Mary the opportunity for some sharp words about her letting down her maternal relations by spending time with Elizabeth’s maids. Mary concluded, ‘without she keeps herself up properly … I cannot ask Miss Townshend and many of the respectable people at Windsor to visit her.’
Elizabeth did not see this, Mary added – and there perhaps lay the real burden of complaint. It was, after all, Elizabeth who did not ‘keep herself up properly’ but dined in her ‘cottage’ with pages’ wives and maids and – in Augusta Compton’s case – the daughter of a nurse and page. Elizabeth was, in short, becoming eccentric, and prizing low rank and humble origins in her companions above other qualities. And as she inhabited her old countrywoman’s role at Old Windsor, her figure grew still larger, and her cheeks rounder.
Elizabeth had new criticisms to make enprincesse of her niece Charlotte, who in June 1812 had been sent, for the sake of her ‘studies’, to live at Lower Lodge in Windsor. The sixteen-year-old, going up to town every two weeks to visit her mother, dined at the Castle every other evening, after the hours spent with music teachers and art masters and riding out with her aunts were over. The Princess of Wales made attempts to see her daughter more than once a fortnight, and was met with rejection when she drove down unexpectedly to Windsor. The Queen – and Lady de Clifford – inflexibly applied the Prince’s orders, that the Princess should never see her daughter in any of his houses, and as such Lower Lodge was now counted. Pausing to order in pigeon pie from the Castle Inn as she awaited a kinder response that did not come, the Princess of Wales drove back to London to bruit about the story of her husband’s cruelty and left her daughter at Windsor to a ‘more than usual sleepless night’ after what Charlotte described as a day of ‘events, doubts and uncertainties.’
Such was the tension between her parents, that Charlotte’s mind, when not occupied by ‘study’, ruminated ‘upon everything that is uncomfortable, and happiness fled’, and in these painful circumstances she even came, from disliking it, to value ‘study’ – learning from the Griesbachs (musicians in the King’s band) and drawing ‘landscapes and figures’ on alternate days. Her thoughts had earlier more naturally flown to waltzing and billiards and ‘gymnastic games.’ Twenty years or more after those aunts whose company she scorned had sought independence, as they were finding a measure of it, she now sought it too, declaring, ‘This cannot go on very long … Emancipation cannot be far away, I trust …’ She longed for a time when it would be ‘in my own power, my own act and deed, independent of everybody’, to take her own course of action. Meanwhile her mother’s actions ‘put us all into a great fury’, Mary told Mrs Adams on 12 July. And, she concluded mournfully, Charlotte had been ‘neglected to a degree that is quite dreadful and I own I begin to fear she has very little heart’.
Charlotte had turned against her aunt Mary, who, she wrote, was ‘the carrier of everything back again to the Prince, whose great favourite she is, as well as Princess Elizabeth. There is but one difference, that the former [Mary] being a fool, cannot contrive things so well as the other [Elizabeth] who has cleverness and deepness, both; had she the scope to exercise them, she would be a second Duke of Cumberland, having all his dark propensities of dark deceit, and also Princess Mary is a very good handle, that is all, for she is too great a repeater.’ Princess Sophia was now Charlotte’s favourite: ‘When I see her with the rest of her family, I can hardly believe she belongs to them – so wholly different is she in thoughts, opinions, manners… Her nobleness and rectitude of mind renders her no favourite here. The constant scenes of intrigue, of tracasseries she can but ill support.’ And the King’s situation made Sophia further miserable in her niece’s opinion: ‘Her health is impaired by her acute feelings, not for herself but those she loves.’ As Sophia had once fought Caroline’s battles, Charlotte noted, her aunt now fought hers at the Castle.
Princess Mary recited the ‘heartbreaking’ facts about the King’s condition. ‘I fear now not the smallest prospect of his mind ever coming round,’ she wrote. In addition to his old delusions he had a new idea – ‘that he is surrounded by most of his old friends that have been dead at least fifty years’. He was almost wholly occupied by this phantom assembly, and was quite happy, except when asked to turn his attention to something else. ‘He puts himself into violent rages,’ Mary told Mrs Adams on 24 August, ‘which, entre nous, require restraint.’ Most sobering of all, he did not appear to mind the restraint. ‘He is grown very thin, looks many many years older,’ she concluded, but he was still very strong.
The King remained all this time in his own world, speaking tenderly of Princess Amelia, his hold on reality sometimes loose, sometimes only a fraction less than perfect. His sons Augustus, Edward and Adolphus took him out walking on the terrace, and he talked of making alterations at the Weymouth house he was never to visit again. Faced with this blind, unknowing husband, the Queen – whose duty it was, under the Regency Act, to visit him once a week and stand silently observing him – was a broken vessel. ‘Poor woman, her dreadful alarm and fears get so the better of her, she appears so dreadfully cold,’ wrote her daughter Mary. Only Charlotte, ‘open hearted and artless’, who ‘cuts all her jokes with the Queen’ as she did with her aunts, beguiled the old lady into good humour. The Queen was ‘surprised but certainly full as much amused’ as her daughters by Charlotte, ‘and very good-natured to her, and inclined to
join in the fun’. That fun, Princess Mary commented tartly, was ‘without end’. Still, she believed now, ‘a great deal of good may be done with her’. Charlotte’s outspokenness, careless manners and ungainly deportment would yield, in her opinion, to ‘care and constant attention and good example and talking to her as a friend (not as a governess) … we have still very good ground to work upon’. Mary sounded only one note of alarm. When she went into Charlotte’s room at Lower Lodge – the room that used to be Amelia’s – her niece was standing at her dressing table, just as that earlier occupant had had the habit of doing. It could have been Amelia standing there, wrote Mary in sudden distress.
Nothing disturbed the King in the sad calm of Windsor. Elizabeth, establishing a new tradition, organized at Frogmore, on the Prince’s suggestion, the fetes to mark her brothers’ birthdays and other high days and holidays, that had once been held in the Castle. Princess Charlotte dreamt of Parliament granting her an establishment of her own, while her preceptor, and previously her uncle Edward’s tutor John Fisher, now Bishop of Salisbury, read to her from Mrs Hannah More’s Hints for Forming the Character of a Princess. (‘This I believe is what makes me find the hours so long. I am not quite good enough for that yet,’ she complained.) Augusta, Sophia and Mary made an expedition to Lord Liverpool’s country home with their mother and ladies, and came away with a higher opinion of the new Prime Minister.
And then Princess Charlotte wrote in mid-November from Windsor to her clandestine correspondent Miss Mercer Elphinstone – a Whig! – that the Regent had come down to Windsor with a most welcome message. Charlotte was to be three days in the week at Warwick House, her London home, in the winter, ‘to have such masters as I had not here, and such amusements as the time will allow, the opera, play, dinners at company at Carlton House and those of his brothers who can give them … Two princesses are to go up to the Queen’s House, to break the ice for them of new liberty.’ She added dramatically, ‘Here is the hitch. The Queen is outrageous, and will not hear or allow either of them to go without her. There has been a terrible fracas about it all, nor is it over yet, for nothing more can be done or said till the Regent returns.’ The princesses thought that he would be very angry ‘at her opposing his orders’. Charlotte herself was not particularly thrilled at the idea of being ‘seen out under the charge of a parcel of old maids’. The society she would see would be ‘ministerial’, or Tory, while she was still a committed Whig. Nevertheless, she admitted, it would be ‘at least something to get away for a day or two from this odious place’. Therefore, she sent her thanks to the Regent.
The Regent, by way of avoiding further disputes, wrote on 29 November to say that he wanted Charlotte to be present at the State Opening of Parliament, when he went down in person to the House of Lords. Furthermore, he wanted his sisters to attend her, else she could not go. ‘It made it quite impossible we could refuse going,’ wrote Mary to Mrs Adams, ‘as we never ought to stop any amusement for Charlotte. It therefore is decided.’ Mary and Elizabeth were to go. Mary lamented the ‘great deal of disagreeables’ it caused them, and it placed them in a ‘sad and most awkward situation’. The ‘disagreeables’ of course came from the Queen. ‘We can only do for the best,’ Mary finished. But it came to a head in a ‘dreadful scene’ on a December Sunday, Augusta informed the Regent.
The Queen wrote her own account of the scene. ‘Elizabeth, by defending her own conduct, struck in a most violent manner upon a Holy Book, saying that she would have an oath that she had done all in her power to please.’ The Queen believed that her daughter wished to hit her. Augusta wrote that her mother used ‘hard expressions’. It was particularly painful, she observed, for Elizabeth, who was the most attached of all the princesses to her mother. ‘Sad and cruel is the return she has met with.’
Elizabeth and Mary resolutely took their places in the House of Lords with Charlotte beside them at the State Opening of the new Parliament. But their return to Windsor brought a further outburst from their mother. ‘She told them that she would never forgive them,’ Augusta reported to the Regent on 2 December. ‘Eliza said, “May God forgive you for saying so”.’ The Queen saw their public endorsement of the Regency Parliament as a betrayal of the King. ‘She won’t allow that any of us feel for the King’s unhappy state of mind.’ Mary wrote: ‘Today the Queen still appears to very great disadvantage and when we are with her cuts at us very deep, but we do all we can not to mind it.’
The Queen ended by commanding her daughters to name the subject no more, but Augusta, for one, felt ‘most deeply’ the injustice with which she treated them. The Regent attempted to assuage matters with conciliatory letters, but the Queen remained ‘silent and very distant with us and out of humour’, Mary told him. The princesses were careful to do nothing to offend, and were anxious that the Queen should master herself before her granddaughter, and that Charlotte should not notice how ‘uncomfortable’ the Queen’s manner was with her. With the once protective King, though yards away, insensible of his daughters’ predicament, the Queen, swollen with dropsy, hounded her daughters with rages and angry predictions of disaster.
The princesses could not keep the Queen’s unhappiness from her granddaughter. ‘The Queen exposed herself … before Charlotte’, wrote Mary on 9 December, ‘at breakfast this morning in her manner towards us.’ Mary found it difficult to know what to say to her niece, who had plainly taken in her grandmother’s bad humour. ‘You have been long enough at Windsor now’, Mary offered, ‘to know the Queen has not a good temper, and the kindest thing you can do by us is never to provoke the Queen.’ The Queen’s black mood lasted all day. She dismissed them all hurriedly from breakfast, as if she ‘could not contain herself at all’. When they saw her again at dinner, she dispensed the coffee in summary fashion and sat in her own room without speaking a word, while Elizabeth read to her.
The atmosphere of tension and hostility persisted. But in the middle of December the princesses launched a protest. The Regent – the Queen’s favourite child and the supreme power in the land – would have to try to make her see reason, they declared to him: ‘We have neither health or spirits to support for any length of time the life which we have led for the last two years.’ Unless the Regent could ‘secure’ them from this ‘treatment’ from their mother arising from ‘compliance’ with his wishes that they attend his daughter to town or fulfil other entirely reasonable engagements in London, they believed the intention must be ‘to force us to quit the paternal roof.
Their mother having forbidden them to mention this subject to her, they begged their brother to ask her to explain to him ‘her present and future intentions with respect to the line which she means to adopt towards us’. If they were forced to quit their mother – and father – at Windsor, they wrote determinedly, they would ask his protection in establishing new residences. They were very serious about this, especially Augusta and Mary.
When George, Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall and Prince Regent exerted himself, there was no being more charming, sympathetic or adept at oiling troubled waters. And there was no being in the world more susceptible to his gracious manners than his mother. After a visit to Carlton House and an interview with the Regent, the Queen, charmed and soothed by her eldest son, relinquished her belief that the princesses’ duty was to remain at Windsor without relief. The princesses accepted, in their turn, their mother’s assertion that she had misunderstood them. Within days mother and daughters were back in daily domestic contact. Mary, recently so enraged with the Queen, asked Mrs Adams in Dorset to send some ‘baked apples’ for her, ‘which she is told Devon is famous for.’ And she wrote that she was as ‘busy as a bee making things for the poor to give on Christmas day’, and had just finished an immense drawing for the Queen, which was to be put up at Frogmore.
Princess Charlotte, soon to be seventeen years old and still ensconced at Lower Lodge with masters and governesses and nursemaids, might show her legs indecorously when she sat down, alternately mistrus
t and adore her warring mother and father, gossip with her old nurses and conduct clandestine correspondence with Whig misses. But she, and her desire for amusement, also represented her aunts’ lifeline to an independent and adult life in London. Even Sophia, ‘very nervous, very low’, hoped to dine at Carlton House and attend the next drawing room. The passage of the war and the politics of the Houses of Commons and Lords became quite suddenly the province of these mature princesses. Casting off the remnants of the wretched cocoon in which they had slumbered for so long at Windsor, Augusta, Mary, Elizabeth – and Sophia when well enough – prepared to take London by storm.
14 Emancipation
In the midst of the princesses’ new independence, with their mother resigned to their new life in London, and with her strong feelings that this showed disrespect to the King softened by the Regent’s blandishments, there was extra need for them to attend town. Their niece Charlotte had lost her governess and chaperone. ‘We have lived in the high road to town for the last fortnight,’ wrote Princess Mary cheerfully to Mrs Adams in January 1813, ‘in consequence, entre nous, of Lady de Clifford having resigned, and the difficulties were great in trying to make the new arrangements.’
She was being economical with the truth, even when she added, ‘The Prince has therefore begged the Queen to assist him, and that has caused much anxiety and as yet nothing is settled.’ Lady de Clifford had been asked to ‘quit directly’ after it was discovered she had condoned her charge’s flirtations the previous year. Not one by-blow of an uncle – George Fitzclarence, the Duke of Clarence’s son – but two, the other being Captain Charles Hesse, an illegitimate son of the Duke of York, had ridden alongside Charlotte’s carriage in the Great Park at Windsor without protest from her governess. But Charlotte, indifferent to Lady de Clifford’s removal, wanted her fidgety replacement, the Duchess of Leeds, to be named her lady-in-waiting. She also wanted to purloin her grandmother’s reader, Miss Knight, and have her named ‘lady companion’. Other girls of seventeen, she said, were not subject to governesses.
