Princesses

by Flora Fraser

  When the fourteen-year-old Prince of Wales visited his great-aunt during her convalescence, he brought her five game birds he had shot himself. ‘I hear’, wrote the Duchess to the boy’s mother, ‘the keeper says he will be an admirable shot as he sets about it so steadily.’ A few years before she had encouraged Bertie’s earliest sporting attempts: ‘I can well believe how delighted you must have been at being allowed to go out shooting for the first time, and the being so fortunate as to have killed two rabbits gives every hope that you will be a good sportsman by and by.’

  After receiving her great-nephew in bed, the Duchess roused herself to entertain him downstairs. ‘He made himself very agreeable, full of wishing to have the particulars of every picture that hangs up in the room and the history of every picture in the house, making very sensible remarks… in short, I was delighted with him,’ she told Queen Victoria, ‘and I hear he gained all hearts below stairs.’ Already a ladies’ man, the future King Edward VII said, before he left to catch his train, that ‘he was so glad he had seen Aunt Gloucester up and dressed, as she looked so much prettier up than in bed’.

  The only one of the family who now worried Aunt Gloucester was Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge. At twenty-three she had spurned one suitor, the Prince of Sardinia – which she now regretted – and she was growing disquietingly large. But the Duchess of Gloucester endorsed the tour of Germany on which the Duchess of Cambridge led her younger daughter, and, while wishing marriage for Princess Mary Adelaide, did not for a moment neglect her other junior relations. The ninth birthday of Princess Louise in March 1857 produced a packet of books and a letter from her great-aunt Gloucester, and in addition, twenty pounds despatched separately to her mother ‘for any trinket you may fancy for her’. Mary, who had had little money herself when young, liked to give generous sums to children, once sending a ‘little bit of paper’ for three sisters to divide, with the message, ‘As there are balls, it may assist in making you all a little smart.’

  Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were not neglectful of Aunt Gloucester in their turn. When he heard that Mary had been taken ill in April 1857, Prince Albert sent over to Gloucester House ‘a very handsome useful piece of furniture’ – a sofa that could be raised ‘an inch at a time’ and was a ‘perfect convenience.’ The Duchess had had it brought upstairs and would probably try it in the course of the day, her equerry Liddell wrote in thanks. The Duchess was ‘very weak and much oppressed’ that day, as her niece Mary Adelaide noted, but she nevertheless wrote to Albert herself: ‘It is impossible to express, my dear Albert, how deeply I feel your kindness in sending me so beautiful and useful a chair, and one that I feel sure will be such a comfort for me when once I get used to use it, and how much I am impressed with your kindness. Thank God that dear Victoria is going on well, my affte love to her, Yours, Mary, April the 15th, GH.’ This was to be the last letter she ever wrote.

  Next morning an account came to Cambridge Cottage of the Duchess of Gloucester having had ‘an attack of spasms at the heart in the night’. That afternoon George – who was out of London – and Gussy – in Mecklenburg-Strelitz – were telegraphed for, and the rest of the family, forbidden for the moment to see the Duchess, waited downstairs in the small front drawing room at Gloucester House. It was ‘wretched work’, wrote Princess Mary Adelaide after some hours of sitting there, talking and reading with her mother. And the next two days were much the same. But on the 18th, after the Duchess of Cambridge and Mary Adelaide returned from seeing the Queen’s new baby, Princess Beatrice, at Buckingham Palace, back at Gloucester House the ailing Duchess awoke from a doze and kissed her hand to her niece Mary Adelaide, when she visited her. But this small sign of life meant little, and Hawkins the Duchess’s surgeon6 said ominously on 18 April that ‘he felt much alarmed as a torpor was stealing over the brain.’

  Visitors continued to come to Gloucester House – Prince Albert, the Prince of Wales and Vicky, the Princess Royal, the Duchess of Inverness, Aunt Kent, even Princess Feodora and her husband, Prince Ernest of Hohenlohe-Langenburg. Queen Victoria visited with her daughter Alice. George, Duke of Cambridge arrived, and then on the 21st Gussy, from Mecklenburg-Strelitz with her son Dolphy. Mary Adelaide peeped at her aunt from behind a screen as the Duchess was given beef tea, and wondered at her marvellous tenacity. But the days hung heavy for those assembled at the house.

  The Prince of Wales sneaked up the back way to look in on his aunt. On the 25th, her eighty-first birthday, Mary gave signs of life, and pressed Mary Adelaide’s hand twice when her niece kissed hers. Two days later she was confused, and did not know her visitors. She asked if the Duchess of Cambridge was coming. They replied that she was in the house. Would Aunt Mary like her to come? ‘By all means, let her come,’ was their great-aunt’s reply. But when the Duchess of Cambridge came, the patient did not speak.

  The Duchess stopped eating the next day, on 28 April, and there was a ‘marked change’ in the night that followed. After seeing her aunt on the 29th, Mary Adelaide of Cambridge cried in the room of Mary’s dresser Mrs Gold, and after dinner Hawkins directed the family that they should remain for the night. At three-thirty the following morning the family knelt around the Duchess’s bed. Mr Nepean, the chaplain, read the prayers for the dying. ‘The pulse was beating feebler and feebler and death had set its stamp upon her much loved features,’ recorded Mary Adelaide. The old Princess’s heavy breathing was loud in the room, and she hovered ‘between life and eternity’. At five-fifteen in the morning of 30 April 1857, ‘with another stretch and a momentary convulsive contraction of the face’, Princess Mary, Duchess of Gloucester died.

  ‘With her is gone the last link, which connected us with a bygone generation,’ Victoria wrote, on receiving the news of her aunt’s death in a note from George, written at half-past five that morning. ‘She was an authority on everything, a bright example of loyalty, devotion and duty, the kindest and best of mistresses, and friends. She had become like a grandmother to us all, from her age, and from her being the last of the family.’ Meanwhile the mourners at Gloucester House wandered sadly from room to room, watching the servants unbar the shutters and draw the blinds as day dawned. Then they drove away, leaving Mrs Gold to wash and dress and lay out the corpse of the mistress whom she had served so long. The story of the six daughters of George III, which had begun with the Princess Royal’s birth in the Queen’s House ninety-one years before on Michaelmas Day 1766, was concluded.

  The Princesses’ Family

  Select Bibliography

  DOCUMENTARY

  Additional and Egerton Mss, British Library, London

  Anson Mss, private collection

  Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, New York

  Clement Collection, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, Farmington, Connecticut

  Ephemera Collection, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

  Finch Mss, DG7, Leicestershire Record Office, Wigston Magna

  Georgian and Additional Georgian, Victorian and Additional Victorian, and George V Papers, Royal Archives, Windsor Castle

  Halford Mss, DG24, Leicestershire Record Office, Wigston Magna

  Harcourt Mss, private collection

  Hesse-Homburg Papers, Gothic House, Bad Homburg

  Hoare Pitt Papers, Public Record Office, Kew

  Miss Lucy (known as Mrs) Kennedy’s Diary, Royal Library, Windsor Castle

  Lord Chamberlain’s Papers, Public Record Office, Kew

  Lower Saxony State Archives, Hanover

  Mountstuart Mss, Isle of Bute, Scotland

  James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven

  Rulers of England Papers, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York

  Stuttgart State Archives, Stuttgart

  PRINTED

  Place of publication is London unless otherwise stated.

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