The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  Charlotte’s attitude to the Windsor project gradually warmed as their new base became less ‘antique’ and more in the modern taste.34 ‘Our house gets bigger every day,’ she told her brother in 1779. ‘Without being magnificent, it is elegant with a charming atmosphere of gaiety and cleanliness, next to the great castle which gives it great grandeur.’ She was pleased to find that ‘the inhabitants of this part of the world are extremely polite. They keep their distance without incommoding us, or continually meeting us.’35 A few weeks later, she was even more positive: ‘We have begun our little trip to Windsor, where we are always pleased to be if the Season and our affairs permit it.’ There were friends to see in the neighbourhood, and interesting places to visit. ‘And it is true that the air is so good and so clear that we are all cheered up, above all when the young ones are with us, which is what I like best.’36

  Any sustained pleasure in her new surroundings was compromised from the very beginning, however, by the impossibility of enjoying it for very long. It was true that the situation of Windsor was unique, but ‘the only thing that is not good is that we are not established there, consequently we are everywhere and nowhere’.37 The family now had three homes in three locations, and the peripatetic life enforced on Charlotte by the constant commute between them soon began to exhaust and depress her. The route from London to Kew to Windsor became the pattern by which she mapped out her life; it was undertaken with great regularity and with striking speed. The haste with which the royal carriage chased up and down the roads of southern England was the subject of much comment. A newspaper article of 1779 reported: ‘It is remarked of Their Majesties that when they travel, they go with the greatest speed imaginable.’ A man who tried to keep pace with their coach on horseback ‘says that the horses in the chaise galloped every step of the way, and that they could not have gone at a rate less than 14 miles an hour’. This was not necessarily considered a good thing. ‘Several persons at different times have been thrown down and hurt through not being able to get out of the way soon enough.’38 The wheels of a carriage in which the young princesses were travelling once caught fire, so fast were they turning. On one occasion the elderly Mrs Delany was travelling in a coach that was nearly forced off the road by the relentless, unstoppable passage of the king’s carriage; a fellow passenger thought it evidence of incipient absolutism, arguing constitutional monarchs did not behave with such disregard for the welfare of other road users.

  Although English roads were judged to be some of the best in Europe, the combination of speed, unmade surfaces and eighteenth-century suspension cannot have made such travelling a pleasant experience; and it was one which Charlotte sometimes endured many times a day. In 1776, only a few weeks after their first stay at Windsor, Charlotte described to her brother the frantic pace at which her life was now played out: ‘Sunday, at six o’clock in the evening, we depart for Windsor, just the king and me, we leave in a carriage to go to the castle, see the beau monde on the terrace for an hour, then we sup. On Monday and Tuesday we stay there, leaving at nine to return at two, dining at three, leaving again at five, and returning at nine at night. On Wednesday, we return to Kew, only to change horses, then we go to London, and I dress, and in the evening we return to Kew. I stay there on Friday and Saturday to see my children. This is to show you,’ she concluded ruefully, ‘how little time I have to myself.’39

  Charlotte’s letters to her brother explode with frustration at the empty rush and purposeless bustle of her life: ‘We are always on the move’, ‘We are often in three places in a week.’ In such circumstances, it was impossible to have any kind of rational, regular life. Charlotte did not even know where her favourite books were, a major source of annoyance for such a tireless reader. ‘Indeed, sometimes I think I have no books at all, for they are at Kew, or they are in town, or they are here; and I don’t know which is which.’40 The feeling of being ‘everywhere and nowhere’ became her dominant experience, leaving her with a profound sense of endless dislocation. Twenty years after the moves to Kew and Windsor, she was still railing against the restless existence the travel between them had imposed upon her: ‘Our life, if you can call it life, is nothing but hurry.’41

  It was not just the incessant travel between the family bases that weighed upon her spirits; even on arrival, she was not happy. This was not readily apparent to others. Charlotte was an expert and practised concealer of her feelings, and none of the eager diarists who watched her so carefully seems to have been aware of her true state of mind. To them as to everyone else – perhaps including even the king – she presented a façade of benign complaisance, willing to please and be pleased by everything that pleased others. The gloomier sentiments that lurked beneath that rigorously maintained exterior she confided to no one – with the single exception of her much-loved and much-missed younger brother Charles. She wrote to him in Mecklenburg with as much regularity as the posts and the many calls on her free time would allow.

  While much of the correspondence concerns the shifting relationships between German princely families, with Charlotte offering advice and passing on news and gossip (in a way that rather undermines her own frequent claim to understand nothing of politics), the letters also reveal a voice that is heard nowhere else in any of her writings: devoid of all artifice, with no attempt to entertain or amuse; and one that is utterly candid in its descriptions of life as she lives it, and the effect it has on her state of mind. Across the years, she has some positive things to say: the pleasure she takes in the healthy development of her children is a constant, recurring joy, as is an unfailing interest in the wellbeing of her Mecklenburg relations, particularly that of Charles’s hard-won brood. There are descriptions of enjoyable days, of occasional pleasurable outings and airings. But it is the bitter unhappiness of so many of her letters which shocks and surprises, a sense of resigned dissatisfaction with the entire tenor of her existence, confessed only to her brother.

  In the letters, the ‘private retreats’ of Kew and Windsor are seen in a very different light. As early as 1773, just a year after the move to Kew, Charlotte told her brother that she was sad to leave London, and that a solitary and retired life was not for her.42 The boredom of her existence was a theme she returned to again and again. ‘Your letters replace entertainment for me,’ she wrote yearningly to Charles in January 1776; ‘in fact, they are everything to me, because all other forms of entertainment are forbidden me.’ She had begun to believe that, for her, ‘real joy’ was unattainable: ‘I have not felt such a thing since I was fourteen or fifteen.’ She knew she was wrong to indulge in such pessimistic thoughts, but her circumstances made it hard not to surrender to them. ‘You will see that my continual confinement, or rather, my solitary life weighs heavy on my soul.’43 As time passed, her feelings were unchanged. ‘I can confirm that my solitary life is still increasing,’ she reported in December 1776. ‘We have very few resources when it comes to amusements,’ she noted in April 1777. ‘I hope your weather is better than ours,’ she added two months later, ‘and your amusements more varied than here.’44

  Charlotte’s life was hardly devoid of activity, but the obligations that crowded her days were not of her choosing and prevented her from doing what she really wanted. ‘I would gladly ready myself for a trip to Germany,’ she declared, ‘a too happy thought for me.’ She knew it would never happen. ‘I cannot think of it without shedding tears.’45 Her days were given up instead to activities she disliked. She resented the hours and hours she spent at court, describing it scathingly as ‘that parade’. Even outings designed to entertain did not please her. ‘I am getting ready to go to the theatre,’ she told Charles in 1776, ‘a trip I would gladly deprive myself of, since it bores and inconveniences me.’46 Most of her official appearances gave her little pleasure, and even when they did – she was genuinely impressed at the sight of the fleet at anchor off Portsmouth at the height of the American War of Independence – none of this compensated for the miasma of tedium which envelope
d her at most royal functions. At one military review, she complained, ‘as to my own stay, I found it so stupid, as etiquette makes all the company men and the king was nearly always out all the time’. Charlotte found herself ‘left with the company’ of an unnamed lady ‘who was as bored with my person as I was with hers’. Compelled to sit on the margins, Charlotte could only boil in silent frustration. ‘It is in my opinion, infinitely preferable to stay in one’s own lodging where one knows one can do nothing, than to be of a party where you have the temptation of good company without daring to profit by it.’47

  If one cause of Charlotte’s unhappiness was the boredom of her life, and her powerlessness to change it, there was another dimension of her experience over which she had no control, and which contributed overwhelmingly to her miserable spirits. Her long years of perpetual childbearing exhausted and depressed her. She made no public complaint, although in 1775, a rare year in which she was not pregnant, she noted with surprise that life could, perhaps, still hold some interest for a woman.48 Usually, she sought to adopt the attitude of resignation regarded as an appropriate response to the perils of fertility. ‘I tell myself, before being brought to bed, of the truth of the proverb, “Man proposes, but God disposes”.’49 But by 1780, after eighteen years of childbearing, and despite her best efforts to cultivate the required attitude of submission, she had simply had enough. ‘I don’t think a prisoner could wish more ardently for his liberty than I wish to be rid of my burden and see the end of my campaign. I would be happy if I knew this was the last time, at least I think so, because it is getting the better of me,’ she told Charles.50 In fact, she had two more pregnancies to endure before her ‘campaign’ was truly over.

  Charlotte’s fertility was in many ways a visible sign of the success of her marriage, proof that she had fulfilled her primary function as both wife and queen. In her public role, she had achieved all that could be required of her; but the private Charlotte perhaps suspected that her own happiness had been compromised by her long marathon of childbearing. If she had been pregnant less often, she might have had more time to pursue interests that genuinely engaged her intellect and provided a fulfilling alternative to the emptiness of her official duties. Above all, she could have devoted herself more thoroughly to the upbringing of her children; released from the tyranny of continual lyings-in, she could have had far more personal involvement with a smaller, more manageable family. But in this, as in so many other aspects of her life, the choice had not been hers. The seemingly unending cycle of pregnancy was yet another task imposed upon her, and one she found it increasingly difficult to bear. ‘I have need of all my religion to support myself in this situation,’ she confided to her brother. ‘This has a strange effect on me, and prevents me from enjoying even the small amount of pleasure I have. For God knows, there is a small amount at present, and it gets less day by day.’51 When unhappiness threatened to engulf her, Charlotte did all she could to pull herself out of her misery. Her most favoured technique was one of denial. Any form of sadness or frustration was best dealt with by simply refusing to acknowledge its existence. ‘Although I am bored,’ she wrote to Charles in 1780, ‘I am following the old proverb which goes, “You must put on a good face in a bad game”.’52

  In an attempt to subdue and control her unquelled feelings, she called constantly upon the strict sense of duty which was such a defining aspect of her character. Happiness, she insistently told herself, was not and never could be the first objective of a responsible person. Duty must always come first; only when its claims were satisfied could any thought of personal contentment be considered. ‘To a well-thinking mind, it is always pleasing to fulfil its duty,’ she wrote. She admitted that, ‘though I have frequently found that duty is very often connected with difficulties, it is frequently attended with a secret, inward satisfaction which none but those who act right can enjoy and of which no earthly power can deprive us’. True pleasure was to be found in the knowledge of an obligation discharged, real happiness in a duty fulfilled. ‘Can we want any better approbation than our own conscience? I think not!’53

  In practice, she often had to work hard to maintain her conviction that sacrifice was the key to all happiness, and that a refusal to recognise private desires was the key to overcoming them. ‘God knows,’ she admitted to Charles, ‘I sometimes have regrets I think are justified, which I feel and know I must suppress.’ Characteristically, she tried to deny these feelings. ‘I reproach myself for these ideas, tell myself that God knows better than me. But alas, I admit I don’t always think like that.’54

  In one letter alone does Charlotte allow herself to analyse what she believes to be the source of her misery. It was not only the particular, daily circumstances of her life which drove her to despair; it was the dominating central fact of her existence, her role as queen, that was the real cause of her unhappiness. ‘I confess I find myself day by day less suited to my position,’ she wrote resignedly in 1778. ‘“Every rose has its thorn” says the proverb, ah, my dear brother, how many thorns a great rank has! There are many bitter pills to swallow; the very fact of being surrounded by people to whom one cannot become attached, even if one wanted to, is enough to repel a soul as sensitive as mine.’ To be royal was to be isolated, as Charlotte had learnt through painful experience. The rigid emotional barriers which the king had insisted his young wife erect from the moment of her arrival, the studious maintenance of a proper distance, the knowledge that every aspect of her behaviour was watched and evaluated by an army of observers, had led to her ‘forming a bad opinion of everybody. Perhaps this is taking things too far, but admit brother, that to always live, or rather, to weigh up every word, action or step that one makes is not really to live. At the very least, it is not the way to enjoy to the full the short life which providence has allotted us.’55

  Nearly twenty years after becoming queen, Charlotte was not, she told her brother sadly, the woman he had once known. She had lost the cheerfulness she used to have, and which she regarded as ‘a thing absolutely necessary to enable one to live in the world’.56 It had been eroded by many difficulties, but had finally foundered on the realisation that those qualities increasingly thought vital to happiness – a measure of self-determination, the comfort of sustained family affection, some uncontested privacy – were, for the most part, incompatible with the requirements of royal life. For all the efforts she and the king had made to minimise and overcome them, the formal and the artificial were, it seemed, ineradicable qualities of royal life. Understanding this did not make Charlotte an advocate of change – like her husband, she had no desire to undermine the hierarchies of the traditional order – but nor did it make her happy. As her children grew up, she began to consider how their expectations could be shaped and tailored to equip them for the reality of the world they were to inhabit. Perhaps the right kind of education could prepare them for the rigours of the life that was to come?

  CHAPTER 8

  A Sentimental Education

  WHEN QUEEN CHARLOTTE’S LIBRARY WAS broken up and sold after her death, it was found to contain over a hundred works on education. Her collection included established classics of the genre, such as John Locke’s seminal essay, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, which appears significantly close to Charlotte’s maternal hand in Allan Ramsey’s 1764 portrait of her and her toddler sons. Rousseau’s Emile was there, as were a host of other books in German and French. Over the years, Charlotte also took a deep interest in the pamphlets produced by campaigning British female writers, who saw education as a vital first step in the moral regeneration of society. The writings of Sarah Trimmer, who founded some of the first Sunday schools for poor children, earned a place on the queen’s shelves, as did those of Hannah More, the hugely influential and prolific propagandist whose work included Hints Towards the Education of a Young Princess and The Influence on Society of the Manners of the Great.

  Ideas about education fascinated Charlotte to the very end of her life. Long after her c
hildren had grown up, she continued to buy a wide range of books on the subject, whether they offered practical advice, theoretical speculation or programmes for social change. On one level, Charlotte’s eager consumption of these works was yet another manifestation of her robust intellectual curiosity; but they also informed the decisions she made about the education of her own children, ensuring that, when directly under her care, they experienced some of the newest and most exciting ideas about how best to equip the young for the adult world.

  Although the queen was an instinctual conservative in almost every other aspect of life, in education, she was something of a progressive, keen to embrace the new thinking she had absorbed from her extensive reading. The appointment of Lady Charlotte Finch as governess was in itself a declaration of the modernity of her approach. Lady Charlotte was not just an accomplished intellectual in her own right; she was also connected, by ties of family and friendship, to a group of women who, through a potent combination of advocacy, influence and practical example, were both extremely active and remarkably effective in spreading the gospel of the latest educational theories.

  Chief amongst them was an émigré Frenchwoman, Mme Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont, who, as ideologue, teacher and entrepreneur, did more than almost any other of her female contemporaries to transform the landscape of upper-class education in mid-eighteenth-century Britain. Mme Beaumont arrived in London in 1748, and for the next fifteen years devoted her lively intelligence, formidable energy and shrewd eye for a commercial opportunity towards improving standards of teaching in Britain. She was horrified by the poor quality of educational provision she encountered everywhere, and was especially critical of the governesses who delivered it. Their ‘crass ignorance’ was, she declared, stunting the development of children in even the wealthiest homes.