Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  Some years later, Victoria spoke of her aunt Sophia being ‘quite in the power and à la merci of Sir J.C. Sir John Conroy’s power over Sophia probably stemmed from his ability to turn away the bullying demands of Tommy Garth, as we have seen. But Sophia also found in Sir John a confidant of the kind she had always favoured, like Miss Garth and Sir Henry Halford, with whom she could weave conspiratorial melodrama without resolution. Victoria later recalled that ‘Princess Sophia used to court him [Sir John] more than anyone.’ The affairs of the different households at Kensington Palace and of royalty elsewhere were grist to Sophia’s mill, and Conroy was an appreciative correspondent. ‘Tell her how well she writes and always to write with the blackest stuff,’ he instructed his son Edward. Sophia, appreciative in her turn, paid a large part of the purchase price of a Welsh estate for Sir John, and bought for him besides a family house in Vicarage Gate, off Church Lane in Kensington.

  Sophia might court Sir John with the purchase of residences, but she was getting old and accident-prone, now that she saw with only one eye. Victoria wrote solemnly in her diary on 26 February 1836, ‘Poor Aunt Sophia could not come to dinner as she met with a sad accident in the morning; she set her cap, handkerchief and dress on fire and came to her servants all in a blaze; most fortunately they instantly put it out and she is not much burnt; only a little on her neck and behind her ear.’ But the Princess recovered and that summer, ever intellectually curious, took up Italian lessons and read Le Favole with a Signor Guazzi. Later she acquired a new dog, and wrote to Victoria for Dash’s diet. It was very simple, her niece replied: ‘A compound of potatoes broken up and with gravy mixed up, a very few little slices of meat being put at the top of all.’

  Elizabeth had cheered up over the course of her long stay in England, especially when her brother-in-law, Landgrave Louis, joined her towards its end in June 1836 and was warmly welcomed by William and Adelaide. He was the King and Queen’s companion in their coach, driving through ‘the beautiful park of Windsor’ and ‘to Busche [Bushey], a country estate of the King, where he lived before, when he was Duke of Clarence’, as the Landgrave’s chamberlain Christian Jacobi informed his wife in Homburg. Elizabeth meanwhile had been staying with Augusta during a series of unseasonable ‘cold and rainy’ days, ‘covered with mist and fog.’ She admired her sister Augusta’s management of Frogmore, where she herself had played such a part before her marriage. ‘All the plants which I saw planted, and planted so many with my own hands, we are now walking under their shade,’ she had written the previous summer. ‘I must say that Augusta keeps it in admirable order, she has taken the farm into her own hands and it is quite lovely, and the drive round her fields is very pretty and interesting to me. She is the best of mistresses, and is adored by all around her, and with reason, for being so benevolent, so kind, so good as she is I cannot tell you – she ought to have a mine. That she certainly wants, for she impoverishes herself from all going on in good deeds.’

  With regret, in July 1836 Elizabeth left her elder sister – and Sophia as well – to travel back to Homburg with Louis. But as compensation her widowed sister Mary went out to Homburg on her very first visit to the Continent. From there she wrote to the Duchess of Kent ‘in high spirits.’ Being out of England, Victoria’s two aunts missed the occasion later that summer when King William turned on his sister-in-law the Duchess of Kent in front of a hundred guests. The normally affable King, aged seventy-one, spoke wildly against his younger brother’s widow, who was sitting at his right hand. Princess Victoria burst into tears, and the Duchess abruptly ordered her carriage.

  The source of the King’s irritation was ostensibly that the Duchess had commandeered a suite of rooms at Kensington contrary to his express orders. But he was perhaps maddened into this unbecoming show of wrath against his sister-in-law by a very recent miscarriage that his queen, Adelaide, had suffered, defeating his hopes that a child of his own could supplant Victoria as his heir. ‘The regularity of drives and of walks on alternate days, very excellent spirits and looking particularly well’ – all these signs had led Augusta, correctly, to conclude that Adelaide was pregnant again in 1835. But this Clarence child did not transpire. With Victoria’s approach to adulthood, it was at last allowed among those of the royal family – Augusta among them – who frowned on the pretensions of the Duchess of Kent and her brother Leopold that, like it or not, Victoria would almost certainly succeed her uncle William.

  ‘My aunt Gloucester was taken very ill last week with a violent nervous fever,’ Princess Victoria wrote in her diary on 10 January 1837, following Mary’s return to England and journey to Brighton at the New Year, ‘and continues still very ill. She is quite delirious.’ William and Adelaide remained at Brighton with the Duchess of Gloucester, and her sanity was feared for. However, she recovered enough to order chicken broth for nourishment in the last week of January, and indeed organize payment of her servants’ wages. Shortly before her niece Victoria’s eighteenth birthday, in May 1837, the Duchess was enough recovered to host a large dinner party at Gloucester House. She was ‘very well dressed’, her niece noted, ‘and looked remarkably well, better than last year … Two men called Ganz played, one on the violin and the other on the violoncello, very well but not very amusingly’ The Princess’s majority, when she turned eighteen a month later, was warmly celebrated by her relations, and Aunt Augusta ‘made the honneurs’ at the ball that night, as the King was unwell. Whenever Victoria succeeded her uncle William, there would now be no call for her mother, the Duchess of Kent – whom King William detested – to play the part of regent, with her brother Leopold hovering.

  Victoria’s accession came unexpectedly soon. In early June 1837, William IV became seriously ill and for many days the devoted Adelaide did not stir from his bedside even so long as to change her clothes. But her nursing and the efforts of Sir Henry Halford and the King’s other doctors were in vain. William Henry, Duke of Clarence, King William IV, died on 20 June. Victoria was famously called down from the bedroom she shared with her mother to hear that she was queen, and her aunt Sophia wrote to her: ‘My dear Victoria, The awful day is arrived which calls you to fill the most exalted and important station in this country.’

  Despite the loss of William, all the princesses – even the Landgravine in Homburg – regarded Victoria as a sacred charge, the child of their brother Edward, and their sovereign. She in turn invited all her aunts to sup and to dine with her at Buckingham Palace, which became her new home, but Sophia had to turn down the invitations. ‘I really find my sight so rapidly diminishing that I am sensible of being a trouble.’ Looking ahead to an operation, to remove cataracts, she wrote on 16 August, ‘I therefore must look forward a few months hence to be enabled, if still wished for, to appear before you more like others.’ The natural gaiety with which Sophia had written to her Kensington neighbour was much curtailed now that she was queen.

  Victoria took trouble with all her aunts, although she was absorbed by public business with her accession, and thanked the Landgravine for an album she sent to her. Elizabeth was realistic – ‘we are all so much older, that we cannot expect the sort of attachment we have been spoilt with’, she wrote, referring to the attentions of King George and King William to their sisters. But the departure of her brother Adolphus and his family from Hanover for England in the wake of their brother Ernest’s accession as king of Hanover was a cruel blow to Elizabeth. Following Salic law no woman could reign in Hanover – once an electorate, since 1813 a kingdom – and the kingdoms of Great Britain and of Hanover now had to divide. While Queen Victoria moved into Buckingham Palace, King Ernest entered with pomp into the city of Hanover, and took up residence in the palace of Herrenhausen.

  After Ernest had left for Hanover, Augusta visited Royal Lodge, the home he had left at Kew, and, she reported to him, ‘your pretty little bitch terrier puppy rushed up to me in the most cordial manner’. Her remarks about the new Queen of England, however, were for a time not especially cordial.
This was to be expected, perhaps, as Augusta spent a good deal of the winter following her brother William’s death with his widow Adelaide. Mary too mourned William – ‘his most hospitable home was open at all times to us’. The changes were hard to bear, she wrote to Lady Currey in July 1837, and mentioned ‘the anxiety that so youthful a Queen must occasion to all those of her relations’. Victoria had no knowledge of the world, ‘poor child’ – and she was unavoidably, ‘poor soul, completely in the hands of the Ministers.’ But soon the youthful Queen’s diary records the eagerness with which the Duchess of Gloucester forged ties with her. At Windsor, the Queen made much of her aunt Gloucester, and sat on a sofa between her and her uncle the Duke of Cambridge for an entire evening. ‘It is impossible to be with her (I must say),’ wrote the aunt to Queen Louise – whose husband Prince Leopold had become king of the Belgians – ‘though she is my niece, and not feel a particular interest about her – and she gains much on acquaintance.’

  The arrival of the Cambridge family back from Hanover to live in Cambridge Cottage at Kew in the autumn of 1837 irked Victoria as much as it delighted her aunts. ‘It is a great pity Augusta is so high-shouldered,’ she noted of her fifteen-year-old cousin. The Duchess, meanwhile, told Queen Louise that Gussy – Princess Augusta of Cambridge – was ‘an affectionate creature’, and that ‘the little one’ – Princess Mary Adelaide – was ‘quite a darling and a great pet with all of us’. Victoria agreed about ‘the little one’, declaring that same month after a family afternoon at Buckingham Palace that ‘Minny [Mary Adelaide] was beyond everything merry and funny’

  Just as the Duchess had feted her niece Victoria’s eighteenth birthday in May, now she gave ‘a sort of juvenile fête’ at Gloucester House to mark her niece Mary Adelaide’s fourth in November, with ‘dancing dolls, jugglers, etc’ to amuse the children. ‘I went down and saw the children and supper, and then came away,’ wrote a very adult Victoria. As her aunt Gloucester had earlier said to Queen Louise, ‘Poor dear, she is very young to be brought forth into so responsible a situation.’

  On 22 December Augusta poured out all her grievances, which amounted to grief, in a passionate letter to Sir William Fremantle, who had been treasurer of the royal household since 1826. ‘I indeed lament the changes in the Great Park’s beauty,’ she told him, ‘usefulness and what is more melancholy, many individuals will greatly suffer from them. But what could be expected from a poor, young creature who is completely a puppet in the hands of others, kind and amiable as I believe her really to be. She is totally ignorant, even of her own position, and she can but trust to those who are about her. She has no taste for the country – and only likes it now because she is fond of riding – consequently an additional ride made under her own eye will very naturally have charm for her.’

  Augusta became more reasonable, and considered her niece’s decision to spend six weeks a year at the Pavilion in Brighton, although Victoria did not like it, very proper. Her niece’s attentions to Queen Adelaide had been great, she conceded, and her eagerness to have members of her family about her – whom she had seen little of before she came to the throne – evidently proceeded from a good heart. But Victoria was, in turn, not always complimentary about her aunts. Three months before her Coronation, she spoke to Lord Melbourne of ‘the fuss the Princesses were in about their robes’, and told him in some amusement that the Duchess of Gloucester had offered to hold the tip of her train when she was crowned, as the Duchess of Brunswick had done for Queen Charlotte.

  In time for the Queen’s Coronation on 28 June 1838 the ‘old royal family’ played out a game of ‘budge’. At St James’s, the Dowager Queen Adelaide left Clarence House, and Princess Augusta moved into it. Meanwhile at Kensington, Sophia had to find a new home, as the dilapidated part of the Palace where she and the Kents had resided was to be pulled down. It was shortly after she moved into her new residence, York House in Vicarage Place, close to the Conroys, that Sophia found that the sight in her good – left – eye was diminishing.

  To the grief of her sisters Augusta and Mary, Sophia’s sight failed completely in December 1837. The operation of which she had written with such hope to the new Queen had done no good. And by the following year she could see no light at all, except when she was out of doors. Victoria visited Sophia in February 1838 with Lady Durham. ‘She tells me that day and night’, the Queen wrote in her diary, ‘she sees nothing but snow, and that only when she is brought very close to the light, she can distinguish shades. She bears it very patiently, but seems at times very much disheartened.’ In her helpless state, Sophia found, not surprisingly, a visit to her sister at Bagshot Park later that year perilous. ‘It is wonderful to me that she can be so cheerful,’ wrote the Duchess of Gloucester on 30 August. ‘She walks out a great deal and drives out with me. …’

  Queen Victoria did not much like aunt Augusta’s answers to her private secretary Sir Benjamin Stephenson in April and July 1838 on the subject of Queen Charlotte’s jewels, which uncle Ernest now claimed for the crown of Hanover. On the eve of their wedding in 1761, Queen Charlotte had often told Augusta, George III had handed his bride ‘into the room where her bridal attire was placed, and he showed her the jewels in question’. They were hers, and hers to dispose of, he told her then. And Augusta had often seen her mother look at the jewels and say they were to go to Hanover, ‘in failure of a King in this country’. Princess Augusta herself wanted to know the size of Victoria’s wrist, as she was ordering a bracelet for her – a gold band or gold chains just as she liked – on which was to be mounted the Duke of Kent’s picture. This pleased her niece, but Victoria was startled when her composed aunt nearly caught fire – as her sister Sophie had before her – by standing too near to a candle when she was giving the Queen and the Prime Minister dinner.

  The tireless Duchess of Gloucester gave a ball for Victoria on 5 July 1838 which the young Queen enjoyed – with reservations. ‘The rooms are of course extremely small in comparison to those here. All the windows were taken out which made it very cool, too cool almost at last,’ Victoria noted. But she did not depart till half-past three in the morning, and danced eight times, five before supper and three after. A while later the Queen recorded her displeasure with the Cambridge family, who gave her another fête: ‘The house is ill adapted for a ball, and the whole was not half as well arranged or half so gay as at Gloucester House. The heat was awful, and what was dreadful, all the candles melted and covered everybody, as well as the floor, with wax. They should at least have taken the windows out.’ The next day Victoria was still musing on her wrongs: the Duchess of Cambridge had not received her at the door, and was ‘only coming down the staircase’ when she arrived. Her aunt Gloucester, on the other hand, had very properly received her at the door, and shown her ‘every possible civility.’

  The Duchess of Gloucester travelled on serenely. ‘I really pity the Queen,’ she wrote on 13 July to Ernest, ‘for she has no soul about her to tell her what she ought to do, as I really think that she is disposed to do what is right if put in the right way.’ Princess Mary was sure she knew the cause of the problem: ‘Unfortunately never having been brought up to live with any of us (though always kind when we meet) yet there is no intimacy … I hope by and by when her mind is more quiet and got more used to her situation and she finds we do not push ourselves, that she may find out how sincerely and truly we are her friends.’

  Elizabeth gave up wintering at Hanover now that her brother Dolly had left the city where he had been vice-regent so long, and had taken a ‘pied-à-terre’, as she named it, in a house on the main street in Frankfurt. She had ‘neither heart, power or strength to go to Hanover’, she admitted, ‘my legs have been so very painful and weak, so care I must take of them’. This pied-à-terre would enable her to have her whist party ‘most evenings’. And, should she want more company, the castle at Bad Homburg was often as ‘full as an egg’ with a great crew of relations, including Prince Wilhelm and Princess Marianne of Prussia, ‘ne
phews and ladies.’ But the company there was no longer all to her taste, as earlier it had been.

  Elizabeth’s relations with Gustav and Louise were no easier. ‘I hope this week to accomplish seeing some of the natives,’ she wrote, but she saw little of them and their children. ‘One must in this world make up one’s mind to contretemps,’ she added staunchly. When their elder daughter Caroline married Prince Reuss, however, she roused herself to decorate the corridors and state apartments with ‘Gothick screens’ and evergreen branches.

  The wish of her imbecile brother-in-law Prince Philip of Hesse-Homburg, who lived at Greiz in Thuringia, to marry a lowborn Frau had vexed Elizabeth, but the marriage won Landgrave Louis’s acquiescence, providing it was a morganatic affair. Then Philip and his Frau came to live at the castle. It was impossible for Elizabeth to be comfortable there under such circumstances, but she promised, ‘I will do all in my power to make [the new Princess] happy, for Philip’s sake … I have made all visit her – and I went the other evening to please the natives, upon the Salle being opened for the first time near the well, which is a great event, and I made her sit next to me to let them see how very well I was with her.’

  The ‘well’ to which she referred was a project of Louis’s, a spa at Bad Homburg, which Elizabeth had encouraged and helped to finance. ‘All that is doing at the Source – beautiful, all done with good taste,’ she wrote, ‘so is all the Landgrave does.’ She had prevailed on Louis not only to develop the spring or Source at Bad Homburg, but also to lay out gardens and esplanades around it, and now a Salle for refreshments. The success of the Source Elizabeth was a great pleasure to its namesake. Her portrait was hung above the entrance to the spa, and was held by everyone, she said, to be ‘like, but not flattered, tant mieuxpour moi.’

  The disagreeable atmosphere in the castle receded as Elizabeth spent more and more of her time down on the promenades at the Source. ‘All those that are here appear pleased with the place and the waters,’ she reported with satisfaction. Elizabeth became with an effort resigned to much that might have annoyed her in her domestic circumstances. ‘I say to you with truth’, she insisted, ‘that no one enjoys their old age more than me, and am convinced that I have been a much happier being since the spring and summer of my life are over.’