Bringing Them Up Royal: How the Royals Raised their Children from 1066 to the Present Day

by David Cohen

  When the King broke down again, it was generally assumed that he suffered a recurrence of his earlier madness, but he was now seventy-two years old and seems more likely to have been suffering from senile dementia. He still had moments of lucidity, though: he believed that he became depressed when his youngest and favourite daughter, Princess Amelia, fell ill with consumption. Amelia was, in fact, far from being an obedient daughter as she passionately pursued the Earl of Euston and wrote astonishingly intimate letters to him (in one, she hoped he would not be disappointed by her sexual parts). But the King almost certainly did not know of these erotic letters. When she was dying, he visited his daughter every day and gave her ‘every consolation that could be drawn from religion though his own heart suffered dreadfully in witnessing the pains he could not alleviate’. After she died, he insisted on keeping a lock of her hair. Amelia’s nurse noted: ‘The scenes of distress and crying every day were melancholy beyond description.’

  The Prince of Wales finally got the power he wanted and became Regent in 1811. By now, he was using remarkable amounts of laudanum. After spraining his ankle, he took 250 drops at one sitting and then continued on a steady dose of 100 drops every three hours. Sir Henry Halford, the Prince’s physician, feared his patient’s use of the drug would drive him mad and it certainly affected the way he treated his daughter. England was now a place with a senile King and an addict for Regent. It is ironic that, while both these men were still ‘ruling’, the country managed to defeat Napoleon. The Battle of Waterloo may have been won on the playing fields of Eton, but the victory owed nothing to the royals.

  Once he was Regent, the Prince of Wales was determined to triumph over the wife his parents had forced on him. Caroline was accused of having had a child by another man. She had managed to conceal her pregnancy, she claimed, because she was so fat that no one could tell whether or not she was with child. Gleefully, George set up what became known as ‘the Delicate Investigation’, whose aim was simple: he wanted evidence that would allow him to divorce the wife he hated. Their daughter Charlotte was now ten years old and became the victim of their battle. Her father told her that she could not see her mother while the Delicate Investigation was proceeding.

  The most graphic evidence was appropriately indelicate. A footman, Joseph Roberts, observed that Caroline ‘was very fond of fucking’, but could one really believe the word of a servant against that of a Princess, especially when she remained very popular with the public? There was no clear proof of Caroline’s guilt, so George reluctantly allowed Charlotte to see her mother again. He imposed one condition: his daughter could not play with William Austin, whom, the Prince believed, was Caroline’s illegitimate son that she had managed to bring into the world without anyone knowing.

  George was inconsistent in his attitude towards his daughter Charlotte, sometimes sentimental, sometimes unpleasant, sometimes mean. He gave her a stingy allowance for clothes and imposed one bizarre rule: she liked the opera, but her father ordered that she had to sit in the rear of the box and leave before the end of any performance.

  By 1811, George’s brother, Prince William, was so deeply in debt himself that he had to give up Mrs Jordan. The jilted actress commented: ‘Money, money, my good friend, has, I am convinced, made HIM at this moment the most wretched of men,’ before adding: ‘With all his excellent qualities, his domestic virtues, his love for his lovely children, what must he not at this moment suffer?’ She was given a generous allowance of £4,400 per year and custody of their daughters, as long as she went away and never set foot on the stage again. When she did take up her acting career again, to repay the debts her son-in-law had incurred – William took custody of their daughters. Soon afterwards, Mrs Jordan fled to France to escape her creditors and died, impoverished, near Paris in 1816. William was now a single man, with eleven children to look after but he took his responsibilities more seriously than one might expect.

  Charlotte’s Quadrille – the Princess, the Orange, the Prussian and Leopold

  When Charlotte was seventeen, she and her father started to fight over whom she should marry. As she was likely to become Queen in her own right, Charlotte could have her pick of European Princes. Her father favoured William of Orange but he disgraced himself by getting drunk the first time he met her. Charlotte, who had not shown any political instincts until that moment, informed her father that a future Queen of England should not marry a foreigner like ‘the detested Dutchman’, as she called William. The Prince of Wales suspected she was as devious as he had been with Mrs Fitzherbert and that Charlotte really wanted to marry another William, the Duke of Gloucester. He confronted the pair and thundered he would never allow the match.

  ‘He spoke as if he had the most improper ideas of my inclinations,’ Charlotte wrote, ‘I see that he is compleatly poisoned against me, and that he will never come round.’ The newsletters had much fun with stories about whether Charlotte would marry ‘the Orange or the Cheese’ – Gloucester was ‘the Cheese’ as the county’s cheese was tasty.

  In June 1814, Charlotte gave in to her father and signed a marriage contract with the Orange, but she had her mother’s roving eye and fell in love with a Prussian cavalry officer. The Prussian galloped away, however, having seen that preparations for the wedding were in full swing. Then Charlotte met what she had been looking for perhaps all the time: a young man with a triple-barrelled German name, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. She invited him to call on her and they spent nearly an hour alone without a chaperone. As soon as he left Charlotte, Leopold wrote to her father apologising for any indiscretion. The real trouble with him, however, was that he was too poor and the Prince of Wales, as usual, needed money.

  If George was all for the marriage to the Orange, Caroline was bound to be against it. She and her daughter now found an original way of annoying the Prince: if Charlotte married the Orange, she would have to live in the Netherlands, a sacrifice she could only contemplate if her mother lived with her. Fat and fond of sex, Caroline would shock the bourgeois burghers of Amsterdam, so the Orange would not agree and Charlotte broke off their engagement. Her father responded by doing what a number of Hanoverians had done before – putting his child under house arrest. He told Charlotte that he was going to send her to Windsor the next day, where her grandmother, the Queen, would talk some sense into her. Charlotte, a perfect teenager, ran screaming out into the street – her laudanum-addled father had not taken the precaution of having the house surrounded by guards. She had no idea how to hail a cab, however, but a gallant passer-by found her a hackney. As she clambered inside, Charlotte instructed the cabbie to take her to her mother’s house in Blackheath.

  Within hours, members of the royal family arrived in Blackheath, including Frederick, Duke of York, George III’s second son. He did not come as a sympathetic uncle, eager to help in a crisis, but with some sort of legal document which forced Charlotte to return to her own home. After much bickering, she was allowed to spend the night at her mother’s on the strict understanding that she went straight to her father’s house the next day.

  The runaway Princess became the talk of the town. Father and daughter had a tearful reconciliation, but George still sent Charlotte to Windsor, where again she was under house arrest. The servants were instructed never to let her out of their sight. Her grandmother now had to juggle a senile husband, a clutch of troublesome sons and a furious, headstrong teenager. Giving birth was simple by comparison.

  Charlotte managed to smuggle a note out to her favourite uncle – Augustus, the Duke of Sussex – who seized the chance to annoy the Prince of Wales. A few days later in the House of Lords, the Duke asked the Prime Minister (Robert Jenkinson, Earl of Liverpool) whether Charlotte was free to come and go. George was furious and blamed Sussex for making a bad situation worse – and public. The two brothers never spoke again.

  Following this incident, Charlotte was abandoned once more: at the end of July 1814, George told her that her mother was about to leave E
ngland for a very long time. Charlotte was upset, but her relationship with her mother was by now so damaged that she did not feel anything she might say would make a difference. Even worse, her mother was casual about leaving. Charlotte simply said: ‘For God knows how long, or what events may occur before we meet again.’ In fact, Charlotte would never see her mother again.

  Throughout these dramas, Charlotte still hoped that her Prussian cavalry officer would whisk her off, but, in mid-December, she ‘had a very sudden and great shock’ when she learned that he had married someone else. She wrote that she would ‘take the next best thing, which was a good tempered man with good sence’ (her spelling left much to be desired), before adding: ‘that man is the P of S-C’, by which she meant Leopold, the Prince of Saxe-Coburg. Her father, however, refused to give up hope of the lucrative marriage to the Orange, even though Charlotte was adamant. ‘No arguments, no threats, shall ever bend me to marry this detested Dutchman,’ she wrote.

  The ‘next best thing’ to the ‘detested Dutchman’ was flattered by Charlotte’s attentions, but Leopold was fighting against Napoleon and could not come to visit her. That did not stop Charlotte formally requesting her father’s permission to marry him. The chaotic political situation on the Continent, George said, made it impossible for him to even consider such a folly; he did not add there was an even greater problem, Leopold’s poverty. But his daughter persisted and, in January 1816, she wrote to her father: ‘I no longer hesitate in declaring my partiality in favour of the Prince of Coburg – assuring you that no one will be more steady or consistent in this their present & last engagement than myself.’ Whether he was genuinely touched by Charlotte’s pleas or too tired to keep on fighting is not clear, but George finally summoned Leopold. The father, who had bungled his own love life, interviewed his daughter’s suitor to see if the young man was suitable. Their talk went well and Charlotte then had dinner with Leopold and her father. She wrote of Leopold:

  I find him charming, and go to bed happier than I have ever done yet in my life ... I am certainly a very fortunate creature, & have to bless God. A Princess never, I believe, set out in life (or married) with such prospects of happiness, real domestic ones like other people.

  George now told Charlotte that Leopold ‘had every qualification to make a woman happy’ but, almost at once, the Prince behaved eccentrically. He did not allow her to spend much time with her suitor because he had managed to convince himself that, if she saw too much of him, she would become bored. George was projecting what Phillips had described as his ‘lack of steadiness’ onto his daughter.

  Charlotte’s mother did not bother to return for the wedding. She was in Italy, where she was enjoying herself with an Italian maître d’. The honeymoon was spoilt by the fact that the couple spent it at Oarlands Palace, which stank and was overrun by dogs. Bride and groom were also not feeling altogether well, but Charlotte wrote that Leopold was ‘the perfection of a lover’. Marriage made her more relaxed, perhaps for the simple reason that Leopold loved her as her parents had never really done with any consistency. Christian Stockmar, Leopold’s adviser, noticed that Charlotte was much calmer and more in control of herself than before. Leopold wrote: ‘Except when I went out to shoot, we were together always, and we could be together, we did not tire.’ When Charlotte became too excited, Leopold would say only, ‘Doucement, chérie’ (‘Gently, my love’). Charlotte seems to have liked that, and began calling her husband ‘Doucement’.

  At the end of April 1817, Leopold told his father-in-law that Charlotte was pregnant. The public placed bets on whether it would be a boy or a girl. Speculation thrived. Economists calculated the birth of a Princess would raise the stock market by 2.5 per cent, but the birth of a Prince would increase it by 6 per cent.

  Though Stockmar had a degree in medicine, Charlotte was entrusted to Sir Richard Croft, who was not a doctor but an accoucheur (male midwife). Croft suspected his patient had been stuffing herself while pregnant and insisted that she eat very little. Insufficient calories probably slowed down the progress of her pregnancy.

  A few weeks before she was due, Charlotte wrote a somewhat disturbed letter to her mother, who was still disgracing herself abroad. ‘Oh my mother,’ she said, ‘when I look to the dark probabilities, even shadows shake my courage and I feel myself the victim of terrors which reason would almost demonstrate absurd.’ She felt surrounded by strangers, ‘with a single exception’ – Leopold. If she survived, she would do her best to restore her mother to her proper place, but ‘a pang of terror shoots across my bewildered brain’. It sounds like a plea from an anxious daughter to a mother who showed no enthusiasm to return to be by her side.

  Charlotte was due to deliver on 19 October, but nothing had happened by the end of the month. On the evening of 3 November, her contractions began, but she was weak because of Croft’s starvation regime. In the morning, he summoned a doctor and an obstetrician; they all began to fear Charlotte might be unable to deliver the baby.

  A traumatic labour

  Again, 5 November proved to be a fateful date in royal history. At 9 p.m., the baby was delivered, but the child was stillborn. George and the rest of the royal family were assured that the mother, at least, was doing well. Utterly exhausted, Charlotte reacted calmly. It was the will of God, she told her midwife, that the baby should have been born dead. She was finally allowed to eat a little. Leopold, who had remained with his wife throughout the labour, obviously thought she was in no danger. He took some opium and collapsed into bed.

  Three hours after she had given birth, Charlotte began vomiting violently and complained of pains in her stomach. Croft was alarmed to find his patient was very cold, could not breathe easily and was bleeding. He put hot compresses on her, then the accepted treatment for postpartum bleeding, but it did not help. Croft called in Stockmar and urged him to wake the Prince to come and see his wife. Stockmar ran to Leopold’s bedroom but could not rouse him from his opium-induced slumbers and so he ran back to the Princess.

  Charlotte seized his hand and said: ‘They have made me tipsy.’ Stockmar was so shocked by her condition that he decided to try to wake Leopold again. He was leaving the room when he was startled to hear Charlotte say, ‘Stocky! Stocky!’ He turned round, walked over to the bed and realised those were her last words: she was dead. The post-mortem examination concluded that she had died as a result of a haemorrhage, although there was perhaps less blood than might be expected.

  Charlotte’s father was sick with grief, but, as he so often did, could not behave decently. He was too distraught to attend her funeral. When she heard that Charlotte had died, her absent mother fainted in shock and, as soon as she had revived, waxed tragically: ‘England, that great country, has lost everything in losing my ever-beloved daughter.’ She too did not attend her ‘ever-beloved daughter’s’ funeral.

  Leopold did attend the funeral and took the death of his wife very badly. He wrote to Sir Thomas Lawrence:

  Two generations gone. Gone in a moment! I have felt for myself, but I have also felt for the Prince Regent. My Charlotte is gone from the country – it has lost her. She was a good, she was an admirable woman. None could know my Charlotte as I did know her! It was my study, my duty, to know her character, but it was my delight!

  Stockmar later wrote that Leopold ‘has never recovered the feeling of happiness which had blessed his short married life’. But Charlotte’s tragic death was far from the end of Leopold’s involvement with the British royal family, their marriages and their children.

  William – the new heir

  The tragedy meant that one day Prince William was very likely to become King. William was not merely the heir, but might well produce heirs. He was only in his early fifties, but he had a good breeding record as he had fathered ten children with Mrs Jordan and at least one with another mistress. Since the country would now have to pay them, William’s debts became less of an issue, unlike his children. He insisted any wife had to be prepared to act as a mot
her to his team of eleven illegitimate children. The prospect did not appeal to a number of eligible European Princesses but, finally, the inevitably German, Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen , agreed to have him and his brood. She was twenty-five years old and quite strong willed. Adelaide soon took her husband, his children and his finances in hand: she insisted he take proper exercise, cut down on his over-eating and made him drink less wine and more barley water. Invigorated by a young wife and barley water, William had no difficulty in fulfilling his conjugal duties. Adelaide became pregnant at least five times, but she had three miscarriages and her two surviving daughters died young.

  Remarkably tolerant, Adelaide even made no fuss when her husband commissioned a statue of his dead mistress, Mrs Jordan, and two of their children. William wanted the memorial placed in Westminster Abbey but the Dean refused to allow this memento of immorality to be set on sacred ground. The delinquent triptych was shipped down the Thames to Mapledurham, where a more tolerant clergyman housed it in his church (the vicar happened to be one of William’s many illegitimate sons). There, the statue remained until a distant descendant of William’s, the fifth Earl of Munster, presented it as a gift to Elizabeth II. It now stands in Buckingham Palace. Given the recent marital history of the royals, one cannot think of a better place for it.

  In 1820, George III died. His son was again too indisposed to attend a family funeral – George IV’s doctors put it down to anxiety, laudanum and too much whisky. Any psychoanalyst would also suggest other reasons; George would have to behave well when what he really wanted was to dance with joy now that his father had finally expired. For Freud, the death of his father was his making, freeing him to develop psychoanalysis; for George, it was his final unmaking.