Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  Later that year Princess Sophia was at Kensington Palace reading a letter from her sister Royal that had just arrived, when a message was brought to her that her correspondent had died on 6 October. The Dowager Queen’s sufferings had been dreadful, Augusta told Ernest, but short. She had spent her Saturday as usual, was indisposed on the Sunday and on the following day: ‘The water rose so much to her chest and occasioned such palpitations at the heart’ that, ‘had her existence been prolonged, it would have been but for her to suffer torture and misery.’

  In Ludwigsburg, so Elizabeth heard, the Dowager Queen’s death had aroused strong emotion. Her ‘son’ King Wilhelm had earlier irritated Elizabeth by selling off the china that Royal had painted for his father, but now he redeemed himself by his constant watch, with his family, at his stepmother’s deathbed. And his niece Pauline could not be detached from the side of the Dowager Queen’s dead body for some hours.

  Royal herself had written of her hopes to be reunited after death with the daughter whose stillbirth she had never forgotten. Now those two sets of baby clothes that she had brought with her from England, and which had so long lingered among her effects, were sold off with a dress of cloth of gold and other costly possessions dating from more recent times. In England Augusta was consoled by the thought that Royal had been so happy in England the previous year. Sophia agreed, and admitted to Lady Louisa Murray, ‘Her visit last year revived feelings which I do not conceal from you were dormant after an absence of thirty years …’

  Augusta was vexed by the behaviour of her brother-in-law the Duke of Gloucester. He had ‘taken it as a heinous offence’ when Robinson, a page of many years’ service, expressed a desire to become a messenger, and had sacked him. Augusta asked Sir William Fremantle, who appointed her brother the King’s household, if Robinson might try out as a King’s page. Mary, she said, had begged her to help.

  The Duchess of Gloucester was often very unhappy with her husband’s behaviour, but she had found a spiritual refuge at Bagshot in the flower garden and arboretum she had made with the help of her husband’s agent Mr Edmund Currey and of Mr Toward, her gardener. She would always love Mr Currey, she wrote later, ‘for all the amusement and pleasure he afforded me in first giving me taste and pleasure in my garden and for the country’. The agent had had only one object when he originally undertook the management of Bagshot Park – ‘to make the Duke like it and give him a taste for that place, and prevent him leaving it, as he used to do for shooting before he had game enough at Bagshot Park’. But with Mary’s enthusiastic support the flower garden and arboretum flourished too.

  At Frogmore Augusta was apparently fully engaged in charitable works, gardening, farming and playing duets with Lady Mary Taylor. Whether General Spencer still formed part of her life is not known, just as it is not known whether they ever succeeded in marrying. When he died in December 1828 at his estate at Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire, his obituarist wrote: ‘Since the peace [of 1815] Sir Brent Spencer has passed his time in perfect retirement, enjoying the pleasures of a rural life, and the society of a few chosen friends …’ Augusta herself, whether one of Spencer’s ‘few chosen friends’ or not, made no reference to his death.

  Meanwhile, others were very concerned about the behaviour of Tommy Garth, now a captain on half-pay aged twenty-eight. Following a year in Paris after Harrow, learning French – and visiting the gaming tables – he had made little of the career in the army offered to him. Despite every kind of assistance, his progress had foundered on his own lack of enthusiasm. By the early 1820s, on the other hand, he was a familiar sight on the Leicestershire hunting fields, and had become a member of the ‘wild Meltonians’ set who hunted round Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire. His first crime was to fall in love with a fellow Meltonian’s wife, Lady Astley. The second was to elope with her in 1826, carrying her off from the London house where she left behind her not only Sir Jacob Astley, her husband, but two tiny children.

  Tommy Garth’s elopement with Georgiana Astley, earlier a Miss Dashwood of West Wycombe, was the talk of the town, and his relationship with Princess Sophia was hinted at in caricatures of the night-time escape. Sir Jacob, betrayed, sued his fellow Meltonian for ‘crim con’ damages. (‘Criminal conversation’ was the term then used for adultery in legal proceedings.) But Asdey was allotted a shilling after Garth brought counterclaims that Asdey was no stranger to prostitutes and girls of the town in London and Leicestershire. Astley’s petition for divorce failed, too, as the supplicant needed ‘clean hands’, and the evidence brought by Garth’s lawyers in the civil suit proved they were filthy. So Garth and Georgiana, with great effrontery, lived a sort of twilight existence together in a series of inns and lodgings. Georgiana’s husband asked her to return to him, but she refused. Tommy and she were apparently oddly happy.

  So was Princess Sophia in the late summer of 1828 when she wrote tranquilly to her niece Victoria: ‘Has Polly learnt any new words?’ Princess Victoria’s parrot had gone with her to Tunbridge Wells and Ramsgate. Sophia apologized for not writing earlier, and thanked her nine-year-old niece for her well-written letter. ‘I have walked very often all around the gravel walks under your windows,’ wrote Aunt Sophia on 29 September at the palace in Kensington Gardens. ‘In looking up at your windows how I missed that little voice which always makes me cheerful, as it gives me the delight of feeling that my dear Vicky is near me.’

  Then Tommy’s past, or rather his birth, caught up with him, indeed with everyone concerned. General Garth, thinking himself in 1828 on the point of death, summoned his ‘protégé’ and showed him an iron box containing letters and documents relating to his birth, which Tommy took away with him to study. The General recovered, but his son did not give the documents back. On the point of going to prison for debt the following spring, he was ‘compelled to address the illustrious lady’, he recorded later, by whom he meant Princess Sophia, for assistance. Sir Herbert Taylor, private secretary to King George IV as he had been to George III, and the Duke of York before him, was then entrusted with the delicate business of engaging young Garth to deposit at a bank the box of documents he had received from the General. In return he would receive an annuity of £3,000, and the payment of his debts. But all parties played unfair, and Sir Herbert took the box from the bank, while young Garth publicized his wrongs in an affidavit declaring robbery.

  Meanwhile, the Duke of Cumberland came over to England as a guest of his brother the King this spring – and one determined to oppose the Duke of Wellington’s cowardly volte-face, as he saw it, in sponsoring a bill for Catholic Emancipation shortly after becoming Prime Minister. Among allegations levelled against the Duke by those who favoured the bill were the old – false but potent – claims of his incestuous relationship with his sister Princess Sophia. These intensified with newspaper hints at Captain Garth’s doubly royal parentage. It all made for a harrowing year for Sophia. And when General Garth – Captain Garth’s real father – died in November 1829, and left the bulk of his estate to his nephew Captain Thomas Garth RN, in the belief that Tommy Garth was provided for, it was the harbinger of a further trail of misfortunes. But for the moment Tommy Garth played the part of chief mourner for his protector – and continued to stave off attacks from Sir Jacob Astley, who still, despite all, wanted his Georgiana back.

  While Sir Herbert Taylor defended Princess Sophia’s tarnished name against all comers, Sophia herself made no public or known private response to the allegations and rumours about the birth of Tommy Garth, but continued her correspondence with her niece in the next-door apartments at Kensington Palace. Ten-year-old Victoria announced that August from her uncle Leopold’s Surrey home, ‘Claremont is in high beauty now. I have been this morning sitting in the flower-garden.’ Later in the summer she wrote from Broadstairs, enquiring after her aunt’s dog. ‘How is poor little Cosmo? I hope that he does not whine any more.’ The younger Princess spoke proudly of her own dog: ‘Fanny comes every morning to the breakfast table to
get some biscuits; and Shrewsbury [the Duchess of Kent’s new horse] comes close to the door in the morning to be fed with carrots.’

  Victoria thanked her aunt for offering to make a dress for her – ‘I shall like the pattern very much,’ she told her – and announced that Sir John Conroy’s daughter Victoire was tormented by a boil. Aunt Sophia responded with thanks for Victoria’s letters: ‘I know my dear little friend is not very fond of letter writing, therefore I am doubly pleased with your so kindly devoting so much time to me.’ And she asked for news of Victoria’s drawing and singing with Mama. ‘Cosmo I must speak for,’ she reported in October 1829; ‘he is very well now’ – he had fallen from a window ledge – ‘and fancies himself fond of me, but I think him a little of a rogue … he makes up to his mistress, as within the last few days we have had fires, and he enjoys lying on the rug before the fire, and follows me for that purpose.’

  Earlier in the year George IV, lying in bed and increasingly gout-ridden at Royal Lodge, his mansion in Windsor Great Park, had been incensed that his sister Sophia should have such trouble brought upon her by these public airings of her past. At one point, he wanted to sack both Garths – the elderly General and his half-pay Captain son – from the army. Most of the time, however, he plotted peaceably with Jeffry Wyatville to ‘Gothicize’ still further the medieval fastness of Windsor Castle. But this brother, who meant more than anyone to the princesses, and whose appearance in their lives had always represented light and hope, was dying. George IV was so puffed up with dropsy, wrote the Duchess of Gloucester in dismay, that he resembled a feather counterpane. He rallied, but he was mortally ill. Days before he died, the King was ‘as clear, as communicative, as agreeable, nay as facetious as he ever had been’, his physician and man of business Sir William Knighton wrote. Wellington visited the King, and was ‘astonished at his strength, both of body and mind’. On 26 June 1830 George IV summoned Knighton at three in the morning, after calling out, ‘Sir Henry, Sir Henry! Fetch him – this is death!’ After Halford – and Knighton – duly appeared, the King’s ‘lips grew livid, and he dropped his head on the page’s shoulder’. At 3.15 a.m., confirming his prophecy, came death.

  The Times asserted on 16 July, ‘There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased King.’ But the newspaper forgot the sisters of George IV. One and all they were stricken by the death of a brother who had ever been kind to them, and especially kind when they were in deep distress. He had raised their spirits with letters and presents and jewellery, with his effulgent regard, with his confident promises. Now the glow of George IV’s personality was extinguished, and with his death the princesses had virtually lost a third parent. Bluff, friendly William was a very different sort of brother, and would be a very different kind of king.

  18 Elizabeth – The Largesse of a Landgravine

  George IV’s death in June 1830 was hard for Princess Elizabeth in Homburg. She had been much affected by her sister Royal’s death twenty months before, especially because, after their initial reunion at Ludwigsburg at Christmas in 1820, the two had visited each other several times. Then Elizabeth’s husband, the Landgrave, died in April 1829 after complications, following a bout of influenza, when an old leg wound broke out. ‘No woman was ever more happy than I was for eleven years,’ she wrote, ‘and they will often be lived over again in the memory of the heart.’ But the train of Elizabeth’s life as a widow did not alter greatly, given that Bluff’s younger bachelor brother Louis, the new Landgrave, was so congenial, so eager to enter into all her ideas for embellishing Homburg – with her income.

  Now the death of George IV had removed a brother who had, in the widowed Landgravine’s eyes, been ‘all heart, and had he been left to his own judgement, would ever have been kind and just. But people got hold of him, and flattery did more harm in that quarter than anything’. Comparing her brother and father, she observed, ‘My brother was always in a dazzle. My father was always seeing things composedly, sensibly, and seeing much further into the danger of what such and such things would produce.’

  Elizabeth had been at Hanover and, around the time of her sixtieth birthday, on the point of setting out for England with the Cambridges in May 1830 to spend a year there, ‘making the dear King my first object’, as she told Sir William Knighton, when she heard that George IV was ill. She had written cheerfully to him a month earlier, ‘Only promise when I am with you, that you look upon me as a quiet old dog to whom you can say, “Now leave me, go for a month to Mary” – and so on, without an idea of offending. In the way I shall not be, for once in my own room and not with you, I have employment enough never to annoy anyone.’ Now, surmising correctly that she would not see the King again, she begged Knighton from Hanover, ‘Put by a glass or a cup, or any trifle, ever so small, that he has used, even a pocket handkerchief which he has used, for me.’

  Elizabeth proceeded, despite her brother’s death, to England with the Cambridge family, who were going to leave eleven-year-old Prince George to be educated there. It would never, she told Knighton, in a letter she wrote from Brighton later that year, have been an easy journey, as she had ‘nearly lost the use of her legs’ since the ‘shock of the Landgrave’s death’. Now it was a journey made in sorrow. Not only was King George IV dead, but every corner of London and Windsor recalled him to his sister’s mind. Windsor Castle, in particular, called forth painful thoughts. It was ‘a very severe trial’ to Elizabeth to find herself in ‘that magnificent castle, and the being I most valued and loved gone; everything which I saw showing his taste, and every spot calculated to please and delight – his own formation.’ She told Knighton, ‘I give you my word, I went about half dead … you may believe the wound is far from healed, though I am able to show myself and appear cheerful in society’

  To reflect the changes that had occurred in Homburg since Fritz’s death, Elizabeth had recently remade her will, leaving to the new Landgrave Louis all her ‘funded property’ – £36,000 – in England, and her ‘library, prints, drawings’, many of which she had brought on marriage from England. The rest of her bequests were mementoes, snuffboxes, bracelets, which she parcelled out in her will between her family in England and her in-laws in Homburg. Now in London she herself received mementoes. George IV had left her two snuffboxes filled with his own mixture. Elizabeth, who had once said she hated the stuff her mother and eldest brother took with such enjoyment, was overjoyed, and declared, ‘The snuff will never be taken out, so dear is it to me.’

  But barely a month after she had arrived in England, Elizabeth spoke of leaving, her nerves frayed by the double exertion of mourning her brother and of adapting to the new reign. Her brother King William’s behaviour was lamented by many. First, he created his eldest son George Fitzclarence, Earl of Munster, and gave all his illegitimate children the titles of the younger sons and daughters of a marquess. Then he went into mourning upon the death of the husband of his illegitimate daughter Augusta Fitzclarence, the Hon. John Kennedy-Erskine, which scandalized many. After a military review, the new King put on plain clothes and went rambling up Pall Mall. To cap it all, his wife Adelaide’s complexion was muddy.

  There was nothing of majesty here, and people began to remember George IV with kindness. However, Elizabeth took a liking to the comfortable company of William and Adelaide, and busily ‘sided’ with her brother when he condemned the Duchess of Kent’s upbringing of their niece Victoria, his heir. In September, after spraining her knee and becoming completely ‘fixed’ to her chair, she tried the ‘warm bath’ at Brighton, and did not return to Homburg till the following summer.

  King William IV had much to undergo in the first years of his reign. Not only was he beset by members of his family, and by members of the current and previous administrations, with exhortations and advice about Parliamentary reform. But his eldest son, George Fitzclarence, now Earl of Munster, chose this moment to denounce his father to the Duchess of Gloucester – for failing to provide him with th
e funds and estate necessary to the dignity of a peer. He cited a previous letter of his father in which William had refused him money: ‘Dear George, I cannot admit primogeniture, and must give 10,000 to each of your brothers and sisters before I can think of any other money for you.’ Munster pointed out to his aunt Mary ‘the utter contradiction … the virtual acknowledgement of primogeniture in raising me to the hereditary peerage.’ When Duke of Clarence, and in comparative financial difficulty, his father had made ‘every use’ of him. Now he was king, he was trying to get rid of him ‘at the cheapest rate possible.’ Munster gained nothing by his appeal to his aunt Gloucester but kind words. However, he and the ‘Fitzclarence set’ that he headed continued to hang about their father and about Queen Adelaide, who accepted their existence with pious resignation.

  Meanwhile, the Duke of Gloucester left the Whigs over the issue of reform, and remonstrated with the King on the danger it presented, warning that the measures proposed would deprive him of the crown. ‘Very well, very well,’ said William equably. ‘But sir,’ the Duke pressed, inspired for a moment by wit, ‘your Majesty’s head may be in it.’ Nevertheless the second Reform Bill was approved in the summer of 1832, following a letter from William to Tory peers warning them not to vote against it again, or else he would be constrained to create enough new Whig peers to pass it. So just as Mary’s husband, when a Whig, had fallen out with her brother George IV over one Parliamentary bill in 1820 – the Pains and Penalties against Queen Caroline – so, now that he was a Tory, he fell out with her brother the new King. And once again she was in a quandary – whether to visit her brother in Brighton, where her husband would not go, or remain on uneasy terms with her husband at Bagshot.