by Flora Fraser
The Regent huffed and puffed, his mother cried at Miss Knight’s perfidy when she accepted the position, and her daughter Mary wrote, ‘It really is very selfish of the Queen not to consider the consequence it is to find proper people for Charlotte.’ It was true, nevertheless, that Charlotte went under the aegis of her grandmother and aunts to a series of London events including the Queen’s birthday drawing room – and to a ball at the beginning of February which the Regent gave in his daughter’s honour.
Princess Mary was cheerful about these outings, unaware of the bilious tone of her niece’s letters. A few days after the Carlton House ball, which went on till past six in the morning, Princess Charlotte wrote, ‘I really enjoyed it and though very far from well, exerted [myself] to the utmost, and danced down every dance. Princess M[ary] opened the Ball, though it was given for me, and was always the couple above me, as jealous and ill natured the whole night as she could be. I did not care, as I am not quite so mean as to care about trifles.’ In Charlotte’s opinion: ‘There is a cabal and a wheel within wheel about everything,’ and she held Princess Elizabeth and Princess Mary, in particular, to have great influence over her father: ‘It is infamous to make such a use of a brother … as Princess Mary does of the Prince Regent towards her … Their low jealousy was let out yesterday at dinner, and in the evening at the fête it was obliged to be concealed. They could not endure [me] being heard and seen, the Prince Regent being pleased with me, and his having gone for the partners for me, and having left me to make choice of them.’ She wrote of her father with delight, ‘He was just opposite to what he had been before.’
William, Duke of Gloucester, though absent from London on military duties, heard tell of ‘grand doings’ at ‘the Court of Carlton House’. He moved, with his sister Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester, uneasily between his cousin the Regent’s new Court and his aunt Brunswick’s and cousin Caroline’s houses. Princess Mary reported to her brother, who was always morbidly interested in the doings of his estranged wife, that the party had been only family at Kensington Palace when Charlotte visited her mother on her birthday: just Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester and her lady, and Charlotte’s maternal uncle, the Duke of Brunswick – a widower – and his two young boys.
Despite a rapprochement that had existed for many years now between William, Duke of Gloucester and his sister Sophia Matilda and their cousins the King’s offspring, he and Sophia Matilda had never been given the tides ‘royal highness’. And the omission rankled. It was suggested – perhaps to account for the romantic vacuum of Princess Mary’s existence – that the Duke had proposed not once but many times to his beautiful cousin, who had been born Her Royal Highness at the Queen’s House months after plain Prince William’s own birth in Rome; and that her refusals rankled too. But there were other rumours, that the Duke of Gloucester was ‘always in love with somebody … very amorous.’ It was also said that he was ‘a good man, but amazingly stupid, tiresome and foolish’ – which would explain why anyone might reject him.
Princess Mary was cast down when Mr George Villiers – husband of Mrs Villiers and once the King’s favourite equerry until his dismissal for peculation – turned blackmailer. In his possession, he wrote to Sir Henry Halford, were letters from Princess Amelia and from Princess Mary to his wife regarding ‘the subject which’, he declared, he knew to be the cause of the younger Princess’s death. ‘In the number of years Mrs Villiers was intimate in our house, I cannot pretend to say’, Mary wrote, ‘that I may not have written many things I should be very sorry appeared before the public.’ And that Amelia died of a broken heart, she believed, she had quite possibly asserted, although she did not recall that she had explicitly mentioned General Fitzroy’s name. But she was defiant. ‘I don’t care what he says or does to the living, however disagreeable, but to disturb her poor ashes is more than I can stand.’
The matter was resolved, quietly, discreetly. General Taylor and Sir Henry Halford with Sir Benjamin Bloomfield, the Prince’s secretary, employed what was to become over the years, in defence of several of the princesses’ reputations, an effective mixture of emolument and emollience – with belligerence as a last resort. The princesses’ sister-in-law the Princess of Wales, however, had no such supporters in positions of power when the Regent refused to read a letter she wrote, protesting that she had lately had no access to her daughter. But she had as supporters the Whigs, she had the public, and she had her brothers-in-law, the Dukes of Kent and Sussex, and her cousin the Duke of Gloucester, who for their own reasons wished to spar with the Regent.
Caroline’s letter, published in The Times as the ‘Regent’s Valentine’ on 14 February 1813, rehearsed old arguments. But her mother, the old Duchess of Brunswick, died in the midst of a new Parliamentary committee being appointed to examine the conduct of her daughter, and the evidence collected in the Delicate Investigation being revisited. New waves of sympathy and applause met Caroline’s every appearance in public, even as she was being driven by debt – and a wish for greater privacy in which to indulge a new friendship with a handsome Italian music master – to move out of Kensington and into a rented house in Bayswater. But, while the Princess of Wales gained public sympathy, she lost much of the confidence her daughter had till now placed in her. The Regent forced Charlotte to read the Parliamentary Report, which was mostly a commentary on the charges brought against her mother seven years before and going back to a time when Charlotte was a small child.
Many bitter recollections came back to the young woman who read the evidence for the first time. Charlotte wrote six months later, ‘after the publication of things I was wholly ignorant of before, it really came upon me with such a blow and it staggered me so terribly, that I never have and shall not ever recover [from] it, because it sinks her so very low in my opinion …’. She continued: ‘it has taken away any feeling of respect or duty … I will add that I think she had her aggravations, that she was ill-used, and is still now more than before, after this double clamour …’ But, she said, ‘the horror of the knowledge of the whole can never make those feelings ever return again that might have allowed influence’.
The burial of the Duchess of Brunswick disturbed her nieces the princesses at Windsor, recalling, with its night-time ceremony, the laying to rest with similar honours of their sister Amelia. They heard the bell toll. As before, soldiers of the Blues and Royals, holding flambeaux, surrounded St George’s Chapel, while the Duke of Brunswick, cloaked and booted as his cousins had been before him, honoured his mother as they had their sister.
Royal, the Duchess’s eldest niece, had recently renewed correspondence with her family in England, after her husband realigned himself with the Austrian and Russian emperors following years as a Napoleonic satellite. She explained to Lady Harcourt, ‘Having been so many years deprived of letters from my friends and of all English newspapers, I am a little like a person who has been in India, and returns home quite ignorant of most transactions which have taken place in England.’ Many of her first letters were, in fact, concerned with the depreciation of her income since 1805, thanks to a fluctuating foreign exchange. And she wrote now, begging on her stepsons’ behalf for a share – as Augusta of Brunswick’s children – of their grandmother the Duchess’s estate. With unusual tact, she did not ask for any sum for the Duchess’s granddaughter Trinette, now Jérôme Bonaparte’s wife and Queen of Westphalia, perhaps judging a Brunswick inheritance unlikely to be forthcoming for Napoleon’s sister-in-law.
Another disruption occurred in the stillness of the Castle to alarm especially the Queen. Princess Augusta wrote to Sir Henry Halford from Windsor on 2 May 1813: ‘The chambermaid Davenport (who has been very strange for a long time past) went raving mad in the night and at five this morning she flew down to the Queen’s door.’ Davenport knocked and called out to Mrs Beckedorff who went out to her. Davenport declared she would see the Queen, and Princess Augusta too. Upon Mrs Beckedorff telling her ‘in her mild way’ that she would not wak
e the Queen but that she should see her in the morning, the chambermaid ‘threw herself on the floor and swore and screamed in the most violent manner’.
The matter passed out of the royal ladies’ hands when Dr Willis’s men, hastily summoned from across the quadrangle, placed the girl under restraint. ‘In that state’, wrote Augusta with horror, she was now – ‘thank God’ – gone to London. And, Dr Millman, for whom her mother had an ‘adoration’, not being available, Dr Baillie came to quiet the Queen. The Queen would be seventy the following year, and not only were her nerves fraying, but she suffered increasingly from headaches and from bowel complaints – a debilitating duo. Sir Francis Millman, her doctor of many years, who her dresser believed ‘understands the Queen better than all the world put together’, spoke of a cure or rest at Bath or at another watering-hole, but the Queen refused to leave the King. Her temper and her nerves were now accepted by her daughters and those who inhabited their reduced circle.
At Frogmore, where Queen Charlotte continued to botanize and garden, they had, she said, ‘a very small society’. ‘With walks, reading, work and a collection of engravings,’ she wrote flatly, ‘our time passes, if not joyously, at least reasonably, and that is all qu’il nous faut.’ Entertainments now were always subject to the Queen’s calculation – were they seemly, given the King’s condition? When one of the princesses wished to sit for her portrait to Henry Edridge, the Queen said ‘she would allow no painters to come to the Castle as she did not think it proper, ill as the King was’. Princess Mary circumvented this neatly six months later by saying she would sit to Mr Thomas Lawrence the next time she went to town. When Hanover was restored that year to England, and Adolphus went out to head the new civil government, his mother’s first thought was of the King, who knew nothing of the matter. She lamented that her husband was denied the pleasure of hearing of the return of this possession whose loss had caused him such suffering.
In some ways the Queen was still energetic. She joined with her daughters in advising Augusta Compton to accept in marriage Captain Thomas Baynes, a retired naval captain with a post at the Royal Naval Asylum at Greenwich, whom she had refused earlier in the year. The Queen hoped Augusta Compton’s ‘natural shyness’ would not get the better of her good sense, and Princess Mary, too, was swift to urge haste. ‘Pray don’t let her go on with a long courtship,’ she wrote to Augusta’s aunt, Mrs Adams, ‘it is such nonsense – in particular, with so old a man as her intended.’
It was ‘downright folly’, wrote Princess Elizabeth, to resist, and she did not stint on her wedding presents to her protégée, giving ‘some dimity for petticoats, two silk gowns, a small lace veil of Brussels, one of patent, not too long, and a skirt of Honiton [lace], a wedding work box’. She continued, ‘I shall send more things by and by’ When the wedding day neared, Elizabeth was beside herself. She rejoiced that Augusta had ‘determined to quit that vile class, you know what I mean [spinsters]. Don’t let anyone know my sentiments, for else I shall bring a hornet’s nest about me but my language is that of truth seldom spoke anywhere, particularly near the dwelling of HRHs.’ Augusta had set her a good example, she added, and she would follow it whenever she could.
In August, when Mrs Baynes was on honeymoon at Hastings, Elizabeth wrote again: ‘A married woman is a much more respectable and estimable one than a tabby, the thing of all others I hate, though alas! it is my own case. But maybe your wedding may bring me luck …’ She had eaten Augusta’s wedding cake ‘by the pound’, and trusted it would have a proper effect. (According to the old wives’ tale, a good helping of wedding cake made spinsters radiate eligibility.) If not, she said, ‘men must be blind, and Phipps [the royal oculist] must couch them [remove their cataracts], that’s all.’
But it was not Elizabeth who had eaten that wedding cake to effect. Princess Charlotte, nearly thirty years her aunt’s junior – barely come out, at seventeen – was suddenly mooted as a bride. For in August 1813 the Hereditary Prince of Orange brought despatches to the Regent from his patron, Arthur Wellington, that announced a great victory over Marshal Soult’s forces in the Pyrenees. And the Regent seized his appearance in London to impress upon his daughter the dynastic opportunities of marriage to this unprepossessing boy, Prince William of Orange. Lord Yarmouth was sent as his emissary, to tell Charlotte that all must wish her to be ‘well together’ with her father. The Regent’s sisters Elizabeth and Mary – whom Yarmouth called ‘intriguantes in every way except being women of gallantry which might be the case too, but there he did not meddle’ – governed her father now, he said. How much more easily might she do so, Yarmouth wheedled, with so superior an understanding? But until Charlotte was married, with her own establishment, how could it be, he sighed?
At first Princess Charlotte resisted. She might say she was free of her mother’s influence, but Caroline had stigmatized the Oranges, when they lived in exile at Hampton Court before proceeding to Berlin, as ‘intriguing and violent’. Furthermore, a friend in London who met the Prince said Charlotte would think him ‘frightful… as thin as a needle. His hair excessively fair, to match a complexion that is burnt brown by the sun; eyes that have no expression at all, but fine teeth that stick excessively out in front.’ And so Charlotte declared herself at Frogmore one August afternoon, to another of the Regent’s emissaries, ‘very much in favour and in preference for everyone to the Duke of Gloucester’. She wrote to her confidante Miss Mercer Elphinstone, ‘I added that I had considered it long and in no hurry, and was convinced of the propriety.’ ‘Good God, I can hardly believe you are serious,’ came the reply of her father’s deputy. The Duke of Gloucester’s attachment to her aunt Mary was common rumour. And Charlotte, well pleased with her effect, ‘laughed heartily after they were gone’. Even the reminder that she could not marry the Duke of Gloucester if the Prince forbade it did not disconcert her. ‘I assured them nothing was so easy as to make a public declaration that I would never marry anyone else.’
Two months later, the Regent held forth to his daughter so strongly and in such indecent language against the Duke of Gloucester, her supposed object of affection, that she hardly knew which way to look – ‘especially as he repeated it twice over’. He accused her of being in love with the Duke of Devonshire – whom, as it happened, the Duke of Clarence favoured that winter as a groom for his illegitimate daughter, Sophia Fitzclarence. But eventually, on the advice of Lord Grey, the Whig leader, who counselled that opposition to her father must not commence her public life – ‘which God grant may be long and glorious’ – Charlotte accepted her fate. Her aunt Mary advised her to marry – although she did not promote ‘Slice’, as Gloucester was known, but rather ‘the Orange’. And Charlotte had an interview in December with William, whom she described as ‘shy, very plain, but he was so lively and animated that it quite went off’. When it was done, the Regent took her into the other room, and, on his asking what she said to it, she hesitated. He was ‘so alarmed that he cried out: “Then it will not do”.’ When Charlotte indicated, rather, that she approved what she had seen, he exclaimed in still greater agitation, ‘You make me the happiest person in the world.’ And without a second’s pause he called in the young Prince, ‘took us both into another room and fianced us, to my surprise’. He took their hands and joined them and gave them his blessing. ‘And when it was over, and I was walking with him [William of Orange], we were both so excessively astonished that we could hardly believe it was true,’ Charlotte ended her tale.
‘Whether it was summer or in spring’, his daughter was ‘equally to be married’, the Regent told his mother days later on Christmas Eve at Windsor after she had expressed her surprise at the heady course of events. And when the Queen attempted to give her granddaughter some ‘good advice’, the Prince was no less impatient. The royal family was gathered to attend Charlotte’s confirmation, which had been planned rather more carefully than her engagement. Not surprisingly, at the end of her confirmation, ‘so awful a ceremony that I felt dur
ing it and afterwards exceedingly agitated’, Princess Charlotte saw ‘traces of agitation visible upon all their faces’ when her family greeted her.
But the match, so suddenly come forward, so urgently forwarded, was not destined to stick. Charlotte worried about a black box containing her letters to her admirer Captain Hesse which Mercer seemed unable to extract from him. She worried about her mother, ‘a very unhappy and a very unfortunate woman who has had great errors but is really oppressed and cruelly used.’ She worried about her aunt Sophia, especially when Dr Baillie, her mother’s doctor, said that ‘he saw … no end to her illness … that hers and Amelia’s sickness were precisely the same, though not originating from the same causes… having no digestion at all it is greatly to be feared she will sink under it, having so little strength.’ It seemed that no medicines would remain in Sophia’s stomach.
Charlotte also worried that Mr Augustus d’Este, her uncle the Duke of Sussex’s son by Lady Augusta Murray, was quite her ‘shade’. All the previous summer he had pursued her on her daily drives in the Park in her tilbury; now he was again in evidence, for instance, at the Chapel Royal – ‘opposite to me the whole time of service, never taking his eyes off me and imitating every motion of mine.’ When she went to Kensington Palace to see her mother, where the Duke of Sussex also had apartments, d’Este was ‘planted behind one of the pillars of the colonnade watching me’. An extravagant letter from the boy – Charlotte took exception to her bastard cousin’s use of his father’s royal crest – finished the matter, for she sent it to her uncle Sussex with a request to be no further disturbed.
