Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  And with that, Elizabeth crossed to the German coast and made her way down the Rhine to her new life.

  At Kew the Queen fretted that she was away from the King, but her doctor was adamant that she should remain where she was. And at least Princess Sophia, still not well, remained at Windsor. Princess Augusta, however, and the Duchess of Gloucester joined their mother at Kew, while the Duke, as Augusta told Lord Arran, tactfully went abroad. ‘If he stayed at home,’ Augusta explained, ‘and Mary was at Kew the illustrious world would certainly say they had had a quarrel.’

  Royal wrote from Ludwigsburg to Lady Harcourt:

  Entre nous, when I first heard of the Duke of Gloucester’s intending to make a tour without Mary, I was quite vexed, as all the English appeared to think there was some secret cause of his taking this step. Indeed, reports that reached me made me tremble for my dear Mary’s happiness, and this worked me so much, that nothing but my thinking it wrong to offer advice unasked prevented my entreating Mary to reflect seriously on the consequences of so long a separation; as too frequently when married people have been parted for months, they take up tricks which are calculated to destroy their domestic happiness, and often that confidence which must reign between husband and wife is destroyed by their having accustomed themselves to confide in others.

  Although the Duke had longed to marry his cousin Mary, as her husband he grew to delight in inflicting domestic privation on her. And his adoring sister, Princess Sophia Matilda, became for Mary a ‘meddling, fussy’ sister-in-law, who made the Duke’s domestic tyranny still harder to bear. In one turbulent incident Mary was summoned by Sophia Matilda from a family crisis at Windsor to tend the Duke who was ill. The Duke then said he did not want her there, made his sister write to Windsor to say his wife was returning, and refused to send for Mary’s dresser when she stayed. Mary wrote: ‘to have one’s feelings so little considered is to add an unnecessary distress; and want of concern since, nearly drove me wild last night’. Now Royal was quite happy to hear the Duke had been so kind as to let Mary attend the Queen, ‘and assist poor dear Augusta, who I should fear would have been too wretched, had she been quite alone at Kew’. She herself was of course not able to come. ‘My complaints are of a nature not to allow of my being two hours in a carriage,’ she wrote ominously.

  While the Queen was confined to her bedroom at Kew, her nurses Augusta and Mary were passing judgement on their new sisters-in-law, Kent, Cambridge and Clarence. Victoria, Duchess of Kent was the ‘livelier’, they considered, although not handsome. The Duchess of Cambridge – Princess Augusta of Hesse-Cassel – was ‘proud’. And the young Duchess of Clarence – Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen – was, although pious, sadly without looks or fortune. But the Queen’s daughters had little enough time to spare for their brothers and their new wives. For they lived in a permanent state of alarm about their mother’s health.

  Elizabeth wrote from Homburg in August 1818 to Lady Harcourt:

  Alas, all my letters are daggers to my heart when I read of the state of my mother. That really kills me, for to know her so very suffering and not to be near her is almost death, though you will do me the justice to say that, of such an illness, I never dreamt. My agonies have been dreadful, but I can say with truth to you who will not show my letter, that my dread of losing her was always such that I did wish to settle, and my feelings regarding the sentiments I have ever held forth, and the opinion I have given regarding improper society, when once she was out of the way, has been fully justified by those asked to the last party at Carlton House where I hear many were offended at the Dss of A appearing there.

  The princesses, in September, thinking their mother’s end near, begged Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister, to send the Archbishop of Canterbury to Kew. They hoped that that prelate might prevail on their mother to receive the Last Rites, which she was reluctant to have administered. Liverpool, in his turn, wrote of the Queen, ‘For a person whose conduct through life has been so free from reproach she has a strange unaccountable fear of death.’ The Queen was reluctant even to make a will and took a dislike to General Taylor when he raised the subject. She prayed ceaselessly, with her eyes and hands lifted up – alarming her assistant dresser, Miss Mary Rice. And she tried various remedies for her condition, including an invalid’s chair to pull her upright. Her swollen legs were not the least of her problems. But the Queen herself feared mostly for her heart, which she was convinced must stop soon, so difficult was it for her to breathe.

  From Württemberg and from Bad Homburg came the sighs of daughters not present. The Dowager Queen of Württemberg was conscious of the Regent’s goodness to their mother. Elizabeth agreed with her sisters at Kew that ‘it is almost unkind to wish that precious life prolonged.’ Vanished was any hint of the tensions that had existed between and among the sisters and their mother. Augusta and Mary waited at Kew for the end, walked daily in the gardens of Kew and Richmond, and indeed made some ‘improvements’ there, planting coverts for their brothers’ shooting. But their daily work lay inside the Dutch House that stood between the gardens at Kew and the River Thames. Here their brothers, the Prince and the Duke of York, and their father before them, had been educated, here their father had stayed during his illness in 1804, and here now their mother lay dying. Her sufferings on her chest made it uncomfortable for her to lie in bed, and so she sat day and night in a chair propped up with pillows and with a pillow on a table in front of her on which she often rested her head.

  General Taylor informed the Regent in August that the Queen had still not made a will. And Princess Augusta, he added, believed that Frogmore would be hers under the terms of the Crown grant for that property, she being the senior unmarried daughter. Was this indeed explicit, Taylor asked, in the document that she had cited to him? Nearly a month later he returned to the subject, but the Queen herself at last solved the problem of her intestacy when she roused herself at the end of October to confront death. With her old directness she requested an assessment of her condition from the doctors, and Princess Augusta read out their latest bulletin. The Queen heard her daughter out in silence, ‘but under visible emotion’. She asked if the opinion implied there was ‘danger’, and Augusta replied that the doctors had not applied that word to ‘any other state than that of spasm, which certainly occasioned considerable uneasiness to them’. Hump-backed now and crooked with pain, the Queen spoke of her sufferings to Augusta, and of their distressing effect on her mind. She ‘lamented most feelingly their effect upon her temper’ to her daughter, and ‘expressed her anxiety to control that effect’. She said ‘her time was chiefly spent in prayer, and often so when she was thought to be asleep’.

  The Queen then interrogated Millman and Halford about her illness. Halford said afterwards that she had ‘not mistaken the opinion [they] conveyed’. And though she still spoke of’soon going to Frogmore’, the Queen secretly employed her dressers, the Beckedorffs, to send for General Taylor to settle her will. ‘The Queen received me in her bedroom,’ Taylor wrote in a later memorandum, ‘and I observed a packet of papers lying upon the table which at once explained to me the object of her Majesty’s summons.’ She told him to look through the draft of her will, and see if anything else needed doing ‘to provide more especially for her unmarried daughters’ and to consider more generally the others. He asked if he might break the seal. ‘She answered, “Oh yes, Sir, do so”, and she laid her head forward on the pillow seemingly much oppressed by her feelings, in which position her Majesty remained a considerable time.’ He suggested assigning Lower Lodge to Sophia. ‘Yes, sir, I think that would be very right. You will put it in so.’

  On 11 November Taylor returned and read the Queen her will, and she approved it: ‘Quite right.’ But she ordered him to leave it for her to read over before she signed it. Five days later Mrs Beckedorff found her mistress ‘in a state which alarmed her, seemingly struggling for breath, under violent perspiration and hardly capable of answering a question, apparently quite e
xhausted’. Halford and Millman went in and, coming back, told Taylor her life was in danger, there was no time to lose, if the act of signing the will was of importance. Taylor said he ‘considered the completion as of the utmost importance to the Queen’s character and to the credit of her name’. The physicians went up ahead to tell the Queen ‘she was in immediate danger’. Taylor followed and ‘found her sitting at the table, her head reclined, and Sir Henry Halford on his knees by the left side, holding her hand and feeling her pulse with a most anxious expression of countenance’. The Queen, looking up and seeing Taylor, ‘gave me her hand with a most affectionate look and a painful smile’. Pressing his hand, she continued to hold it in hers, but soon ‘reclined her head. The perspiration was running down her face, her eyes were moist. She breathed quick and appeared under great suffering.’ He asked whether she would sign the will. She ‘did not hear me (being very deaf on the right side),’ he wrote, ‘and asked Sir Henry Halford, what I said.’ While Sir Francis Millman held her right hand to feel the pulse, Taylor ‘got the will which was in a sealed packet which Mrs Beckedorff took out of a press’. While the Queen was signing it, and the doctors witnessing it, Halford – in Latin – urged Taylor to send for the Prince Regent. ‘I then apprised the Princesses,’ wrote Taylor, ‘who had remained ignorant of the Queen’s state, and Sir Henry Halford wrote to the Princess Sophia at Windsor.’

  Princess Augusta could not afterwards forget ‘the seeing her sinking so fast… never complaining more to Mary and myself than that she was very ill – and in great pain – but she exerted herself so much when we were with her that it was often too much for her’. Sometimes she weakened. ‘I wish to God I could see your brothers,’ she told Augusta at one point, crying terribly, ‘tell them I love them … I wish I was near the dear King.’ On Friday the 13th – ‘the last day we were with her to speak to her … she sent for us rather late,’ wrote Augusta. ‘And after speaking most kindly to us both, but evidently under great oppression and pain, she said, “I am so miserably oppressed, so utterly, I don’t know what to do”.’ Augusta ‘moved her pillow for her on the table, and said, “Shall I call anybody?” [The Queen] said, “No, the doctors will come soon. “Mary said, “Had we better not leave you to be quite quiet?” She looked up and smiled, and with tears in her eyes… gave her hand to each of us, nodded her head, but could not speak. And I said to Mary, when we quitted the, room, “Believe me, she will not be equal to see us again!” And I was but too correct in my judgement.’

  On the morning of Wednesday, 18 November 1818, Queen Charlotte died, sitting up in her chair and holding her son the Regent’s hand. ‘We were, thank God, in the room when she expired,’ wrote Princess Augusta of herself and Mary. With them also was the Duke of York. ‘The countenance was so placid and her poor features which, for many months, we had never seen free from expression of pain, were quite become natural, and she looked so very free from all care, that the last impression was one I would not forget for worlds.’

  Elizabeth, from Homburg, agreed with what Lord Sidmouth had said of the Queen, ‘That the whole nation would for ever mourn the loss of a person who had… performed every duty by it, as well as by her own family – and that morals, conduct and decency would be at an end.’ Speaking of which, she added indignantly, she herself had recently had to see her cousin the Duchess of Cumberland, whom her mother had refused to receive. It was ‘the bitterest pill I had ever swallowed’, she wrote. It had been her duty, as she saw it, to submit to her husband, who had requested it, but she had told Bluff, ‘Civil I would be, intimate never, and … if her husband [the Duchess’s husband, Elizabeth’s brother Ernest] ever names my mother dis-respectfully … whether in my own room or one of the public dinners, I should say nothing but walk out of the room.’

  16 Princesses at Large

  Princess Augusta and her sister Mary moved out of the Dutch House and into their brother Adolphus’s house at Kew, Cambridge Cottage, so as not to be present for the laying out of their mother’s corpse and its removal to Windsor. And they walked a last time in late November 1818 round the grounds of Kew that they had tramped daily since the summer – ‘to take leave of everything we love here, at least forever in the style we have hitherto lived here’. They remembered, Augusta better than her younger sister, the gay young mother Queen Charlotte had been at Kew, superintending the education of her children, taking tea in her thatched cottage, enjoying the music of Bach and Cramer and Fischer in her drawing room at Kew House. Frogmore had darker associations, for it had been for the Queen a retreat from the world – a world of anxiety and dread – that she inhabited following the King’s first illness.

  ‘Very little oversets Augusta,’ Mary wrote, but they were ‘fumbling’ into their old ways. With awe they observed the preparations being made to inter in the royal vault the woman whose will and authority had so dominated and crushed theirs. The blind, deluded King, once Queen Charlotte’s loving husband, knew nothing of his wife’s death or funeral when she was laid beside the coffins of her granddaughter Princess Charlotte and of that Princess’s stillborn son, whose deaths a year earlier had instigated the race for the succession.

  Sophia inherited Lower Lodge, where she had spent so much time as a child, under the terms of her mother’s will so painfully made only days before her death. But it seemed clear that, in her invalid state, Sophia should remain instead in the Castle at Windsor, where she was well cared for by the doctors and, above all, by Sir Henry – who attended her father. She was very conscious of his presence in the apartments that lay across the quadrangle and through Engine Court.

  While her mother was at Kew, Sophia had received a daily report on her father’s health from the physicians, ‘to be transmitted to the Queen in her absence from Windsor – This was by her own special order – Now alas! The mouth that gave the order is shut for ever!’ Sophia wrote that it would give her great pain to be ‘without the daily comfort’ of an authentic report of her father’s state. The trembling invalid’s request was duly granted, and a copy of the report continued to be furnished to her every day.

  In the following months, the effect of Queen Charlotte’s death on Augusta and Sophia at the Castle went deep. At Windsor was everything to remind them of the Queen, and when on 4 January 1819 they bid goodbye to Lady Harcourt, who had sustained them these six months at Kew, Augusta was again overcome. ‘My heart was so full,’ she wrote, ‘when I saw you there this morning, not only with the thoughts of parting with your kind self but with the thoughts of going to the Cathedral, that I hardly knew what I was about. The only chance I had of behaving tolerably was not speaking at all, and I fear that my silence might appear lacking in gratitude or want of affection, both of which I deeply feel for you and more particularly so since the sorrows have been so equally shared between us which we have gone through the last seven months…’ Augusta and Mary had made a pact to go that morning to St George’s Chapel, in whose vault the remains of their sister Amelia and their mother now lay. She wrote, ‘Our visit to the cathedral was very affecting indeed, particularly as… it is eight years and two months since I put my foot into it.’ She and Mary passed to the right of ‘the two great chairs where my excellent parents always sat, and which will never be filled by either of them. I am glad I have been there … now we will go there every Sunday. It is right and what I am sure the dear King would approve and that is all I wish.’ And so Augusta condemned herself to more suffering, in the cause her mother had taught her, of doing ‘what the dear King would approve’.

  She wrote in February: ‘With all the letters I have to write abroad I have not a minute to myself. I have all Eliza’s business to do besides my own – and to write, or at least try to write, very clearly to her upon various subjects. Beckedorff is here, and every day she has something to say or to show to consult me about. And I must account to the trustees for everything that is done for Eliza … My time does not hang heavy on my hands, for they are always full from morning to night, but the subject
is always painful. I get my walks daily, and go some days to Frogmore.’ But she did not go often into her mother’s room there ‘whilst all her effects are still laying about… It is so very melancholy that I avoid seeing them as much as possible. I fear it will take full another week before it is all cleared away, and then I trust I can go with pleasure.’

  The Queen had left her house but not its contents to Augusta. Almost all her possessions, including her library, were to be sold, with the proceeds going to her daughters. Before her books went on sale, however, at Mr Christie’s auction rooms in London, the princesses chose to keep some of those in which their mother had written or which she had annotated. Some others the Regent retained for the royal library, with the portfolios of drawings and etchings that Royal and Augusta and Elizabeth had done under the eye of their drawing masters fifty years earlier. Kept back also were the great illustrated albums the Queen and princesses had filled in their hours at Frogmore – the ‘Extracts of the History of England’ that Princess Mary had copied from Hume and that her mother had illustrated, the badges of the ‘Dukes of York’ with their armorial bearings which Princess Elizabeth had painted so beautifully.

  Bacon’s bust of the King the princesses donated to the royal library, after having casts made for themselves. They gave to the Prince Regent the red and white tents that Tippoo Sultan had once owned and that the Queen had used for garden fetes. The Beckedorffs, mother and daughter, cleared from the Queen’s presses and bureaux her dresses, ‘made and unmade’, and all her lace and trinkets, their reward for long service. As for the Queen’s magnificent jewels, those that had been hers were for her four younger daughters to keep or sell. Difficulties arose when the Regent declared that the Queen’s jewels were really Crown jewels, and not hers to dispose of. But her daughters were adamant that they were not, that they had been bought by George III for his wife at their marriage, on the births of their children and after his periods of illness.