In implementing a practical plan of education for her daughters, the queen had adhered very closely to the advice in the letter to her brother. In Lady Charlotte Finch she had found a governess of distinguished capacity, warm affections and unquestionable loyalty in whom she had absolute trust. Having discovered her, she did everything in her power to keep her, ensuring that the Finch family were well provided for with appointments in the royal household. As she had urged her brother to do, Charlotte maintained a powerful supervisory presence over all proceedings; her severely judgemental eye was keenly felt by both her daughters and their instructors. ‘I have seen Her Majesty,’ noted a chastened sub-governess in 1779; ‘she is pleased that their Royal Highnesses have continued their writing, but does not think Princess Augusta’s so well as what was done on Saturday, in either sense or handwriting, and she wishes M. Guiffidière [Guiffardière] would, when he corrects her false spellings, likewise correct, or rather, help her to style the phrases in a more correct manner or use her own words in better sense.’63
Charlotte had no compunction at all about the methods by which she acquired the best-qualified instructors. In 1768, Mlle Krohme was appointed as French teacher to the two-year-old Princess Royal. Lady Mary Coke heard that she had been seduced away from the Holdernesses, her previous employers, without the observation of the customary formalities. ‘I imagined Lady Holdernesse had been applied to, and that it had been transacted with their approbation,’ wrote Lady Mary, ‘but the whole was transacted before any notice was taken to Lady or Lord Holdernesse … which does not please them.’64 Unperturbed, the queen acquired another of her daughters’ teachers in exactly the same way. Frederika Planta was lured away from Lady Hoskyns, who complained loudly about Charlotte’s underhand methods, but to no avail. Miss Planta was delighted to be offered a place around the royal children, and stayed there until her early death in 1778. She came from a scholarly family: her father was a Swiss pastor of intellectual interests who produced a clutch of governess daughters; her brother was Keeper of Manuscripts and Medals at the British Museum. She undertook ‘the instructive part of the education of the princesses’, teaching them the rudiments of all the basic subjects, as well as reading and writing. Mrs Papendiek thought her ‘quiet, patient, plodding, persevering disposition’ was ideally suited to the job. After her death, her sister Margaret, always known as Peggy, inherited her post.
Alongside the Plantas, the queen appointed Martha Goldsworthy as sub-governess in 1774. She was, thought Lady Cowper, who knew her well, ‘in every respect qualified for such a trust, by her manners, morals and accomplishments’. She was connected to the court through her brother, who was one of the king’s favourite equerries. She was also known to Lady Charlotte Finch, who may have recommended her. Her family had once been rich: her mother, Lady Cowper noted, had had £10,000 but ‘her father spent it all’.65 As was the case for so many other unmarried women without resources, Martha Goldsworthy had no alternative but to hire herself out as a governess, albeit in the very grandest circumstances. Like Frederika Planta, her virtues seem to have been the dogged ones: she was loyal and honourable, hard-working and deeply committed to the wellbeing of her charges, but perhaps not the most inspiring presence. One of her colleagues recorded that she was ‘most praiseworthy and indefatigable in the duties of her station, but she wants softness of temper and manner. Nor do I think her qualified, either by education or birth, to be sub-governess to the daughters of a monarch.’66 There was always a hint of bitterness in ‘Gooly’, as the princesses called her. Mrs Papendiek heard that ‘William Ramus, a page at court, had formed an attachment for Miss Goldsworthy, and proposed to her’, but nothing came of it: ‘On the queen saying that, in the event of her marriage, she must quit her situation, the idea was given up.’67 She remained a spinster for the rest of her life, eventually retiring to live in the company of another unmarried royal instructress. Perhaps it was not surprising that her frustrations and disappointments sometimes overwhelmed her.
*
The pupils on whom so much care and thought devolved were bright little girls, with all the prodigious conscientiousness of their parents. The three eldest princesses, so close in age, spent all their time together. As a group, they sometimes seemed rather like a single organism, but in fact they had quite distinct characters.
The Princess Royal was eager to please, diligent and dignified. Frederika Planta thought her ‘a noble child, very much the daughter of a king’. Her somewhat stately demeanour seems to have provoked the unwelcome attentions of the wilder princes; her essential good humour was, thought Lady Mary Coke, ‘much tried by her brothers, who pulled her about most unreasonably’.68 Perhaps aware of her deficiencies in looks – Lady Mary could never set eyes on her without remarking on her plainness – she sought to win approval by painfully correct conduct. ‘She is remarkably sensible,’ wrote Miss Planta, ‘the propriety of her behaviour is very great.’ Behind the façade of decorum, she was an anxious child, afflicted with the stammer that ran in the family. Her niece, Princess Charlotte, was to suffer from it. George himself displayed a much-commented-upon verbal tic, an insistently repeated ‘What! what!’ that punctuated his speech. Etiquette required the naturally shy king to begin all conversations and it was perhaps in response to this pressure that he developed this distinctive habit. Royal was said to resemble her father very closely, and certainly shared much of the shyness and timidity that had characterised his youth. She was more confident in the classroom than the Drawing Room, where her ‘shining parts’ showed to better advantage than her tentative and uncertain dancing skills. ‘She speaks French very well,’ enthused Miss Planta, ‘is well versed in ancient histoire, and there is not an event of importance in English history with which she is not pretty well acquainted. She writes well, makes pertinent observations on what she reads, and has a competent knowledge of geography. Till next Michaelmas,’ she reported proudly, ‘she is not 8 years old.’69
Her younger sister Augusta had the inestimable advantage, in Lady Mary Coke’s critical opinion, of natural good looks. She declared that the newborn Augusta was ‘the most beautiful infant I ever saw’, and never revised that opinion. She was the ‘darkest of the family’ and ‘extremely pretty’, slender and lively.70 From her earliest days, Augusta was an engagingly responsive pupil with a particular taste for history. Miss Planta had encouraged her interest, tantalising her with ‘some striking facts … in words adapted to her capacity, and then told them as diverting stories. This method has taken, and she tells them again in words of her own, with as much pleasure as she would a fairy tale.’71
Augusta was the most imaginative of the elder sisters, a trait which did not meet with everyone’s approval. ‘She tells long stories,’ complained Lady Mary, ‘which is not a good habit.’72 In later life, Augusta was a writer of extremely entertaining letters, her correspondence marked by a laconic humour that implied a secret amusement with the world as she found it. Even as a very young girl, she seems to have written purely for her own pleasure. Two of her childhood ‘stories’ have survived, fragments transcribed in an immature, unformed hand. One concerns ‘a lady and gentleman who married’ and ‘wished that they had children’. The husband is visited by a friend who promises to let him ‘into a secret. Your wife told me she did not like children, and likewise, that she hated to be with a husband who plagued her all day.’ When the husband expresses his shock – ‘What lies are you saying!’ – the friend confesses that ‘I only said it to see what you would say.’ The young author concluded blithely that ‘they were friends ever after’. The mildly unsettling quality of these strange little pieces is even more evident in Augusta’s other surviving composition. It is a ‘Dialogue between Clare and Eloise’ and takes place ‘at Lambeth, Cornwall’, suggesting that not all of Augusta’s geography lessons had taken root. ‘E: My dear friend, I had the pleasure of seeing your little brother last night, pray has not he got a wig, or something like one? C: He has, my dear, for he did te
ar the hair off his head, he is very sorry now that tore the hair off his head. E: He was very handsome before he had that trick. C: So he was, very pleasing.’73 There was always something unknowable about the dark and elusive Augusta, a wryness and irony that did not quite suit the image of uncomplicated openness prescribed for princesses.
About Elizabeth at the age of four, Miss Planta had least to say: she thought she was sweet-natured, sensible, well behaved and, above all, rather large. From her earliest days, the unfortunate Elizabeth was always defined by her size. ‘She was born fat,’ declared Mrs Papendiek bluntly, ‘and through all her illnesses she never lost flesh.’74 As she grew older, the stolidly meticulous, purposeful toddler demonstrated that she too possessed ‘the same surprising memory which runs through the family’.75 She also acquired a robust and rather rollicking sense of humour, a taste for simple enjoyments, whether of the mind or the body, and a much-tried optimism that always sought to put the best possible complexion on events.
Alongside the grounding in academic basics provided by Miss Planta, the princesses studied a variety of more traditional feminine accomplishments. The queen was said to have ‘a decided genius for drawing’, which she felt had not been properly cultivated when she was young. She was determined her daughters would have the opportunity she had missed. The girls were taught all aspects of drawing and painting by a number of distinguished instructors, including, for a while, Thomas Gainsborough.
Like her husband, Charlotte was passionately fond of music, and sought to pass on to her daughters the shared pleasure they both took in it. The princesses were taught by Johann Christian Bach, who, by day, also gave lessons to the queen, and in the evenings accompanied the king on the pianoforte, whilst he played the flute. In a strongly musical family, only the Princess Royal derived no pleasure from it. She later confided to Fanny Burney that ‘she heard it with almost pain’. Her inability to master instruments with the easy facility demonstrated by her brothers and sisters was perhaps another source of worry for a child already much pre-occupied with striving for recognition and acceptance.
There were no classical languages on the princesses’ curriculum, but they did study other subjects often considered to be exclusively male preserves. The queen told her brother that ‘my eldest daughters also took a little course in electricity and air to acquire some little idea of physics’.76 Much of their early instruction in science came from M. de Luc, but, when older, they accompanied their mother to a series of lectures in botany given by the Reverend J. E. Smith, co-founder of the Linnean Society. The girls were also taken to see demonstrations of the most modern applications of science and technology. On one occasion, the king and queen went with the elder princesses to Wimbledon to witness a demonstration of fireproofing: Charlotte and her daughters watched a bedstead and its curtains set alight, whilst the floor, treated with chemicals, remained unscathed. They then proved their courage, ‘in going upstairs and abiding in a room directly over that in which fire raged like a furnace beneath’.77 Another visit took them to Samuel Whitbread’s great new brewery at Southwark, where beer was manufactured on an epic, industrial scale. Such visits delighted the king, whose interest in works of technological and mechanical ingenuity was boundless: ‘he explained the leading movements of the machinery in a way that clearly showed scientific knowledge’, whilst his wife and daughters explored the giant cistern where thousands of gallons of beer would one day be stored. ‘The queen and princesses would needs go into it,’ it was reported, with some surprise, ‘though with some difficulty, as the aperture was so small.’78 Clambering with her girls through Mr Whitbread’s massive machinery, Charlotte showed her commitment to education in its broadest form, as an aspect of life that went well beyond the confines of the schoolroom.
The princesses were also exposed to more conventionally practical skills. As their mother had done before them, they spent many hours at their sewing. Even though it was unlikely they would ever be required to make their own clothes, every woman was expected to have some mastery of this fundamental task, if only for the purposes of judging the work of others: ‘You will be better able to know if it is well done for you,’ as Mrs Delany explained.79 More decorative needlework was an art cultivated by even the most aristocratic of women. It was a way of demonstrating wifely devotion; the making of shirts, cravats and other items of masculine clothing was a traditional expression of female affection and duty, and Lady Charlotte Finch was still embroidering waistcoats for her estranged husband long after she had formally separated from him. It also allowed women to display their feelings for favoured female friends and relatives, by presenting them with objects – purses, reticules, sewing cases – that were entirely of their own making and often the product of considerable time and skill. The expertise involved in their manufacture went far beyond basic needlework, requiring mastery of complex procedures of knotting and beading. Once acquired, these skills could also be applied to the creation of a wide variety of soft furnishings, cushions, chair covers and wall hangings. The queen was considered an extremely adept practitioner of these arts, and her own rooms at Windsor were copiously adorned with evidence of her work. She saw no contradiction between her passion for her needle and her appetite for learning; both offered different forms of stimulation and resort for the right-thinking female mind. From their earliest days, her daughters were trained to follow in her footsteps.
Unlike their brothers, the princesses were not subject to physical punishments. ‘Your gentle, good-humoured dove must not be roughly opposed,’ observed Mrs Delany, ‘but led with a silk rein.’ For girls, the discipline that came from within would always prove more effective than the threat of a whipping. ‘The most essential ground is to teach them such a love of truth that on no account would they ever tell a lie.’80 The queen was at one with Mrs Delany on the importance of inculcating in her daughters the strongest possible notions of right and wrong. Charlotte regarded the provision of their moral education as the most significant obligation incumbent upon her as their mother. As young girls, they followed a course of religious study with her chaplain, Dr Schroeder, but the queen always considered the moral teaching of even the best professionals as secondary to her personal instruction, which she continued to practise with the princesses long after they had left the schoolroom. Fanny Burney once came upon them closeted with their mother, ‘reading some religious books’ together. She was glad of the opportunity to witness Charlotte’s ‘maternal piety’ in action, and much impressed by the way in which ‘she enforced, in voice and expression, every sentence that contained any lesson that might be useful to her royal daughters. She reads extremely well, with great force, clearness and meaning.’81 Charlotte’s efforts were not made in vain. In sharp contrast to their brothers, all her elder daughters grew up to share her piety; the Princess Royal mirrored the beliefs of her parents perfectly when she wrote, as a much older woman, that ‘the making of her a good Christian’ was the most important purpose of any girl’s education.
The queen had much reason to be satisfied with her daughters’ progress as they completed the first stages of their education. They were dutiful and conscientious, good learners who had benefited from the assiduous efforts of their carefully chosen teachers. But for Charlotte, this was not quite enough. Alongside their instruction, she also wanted to offer the princesses inspiration, placing them in the company of an intelligent, well-read young companion who would take their education to the next level by acting as both teaching assistant and role model. There is no doubt this had equal appeal for the queen herself, presenting the opportunity to bring a like-minded thinker into her small household circle, thus allowing her the kind of sociable intellectual stimulation she so craved.
In 1777, Charlotte considered that she had found exactly the right candidate for the job. Mary Hamilton was clever, young and well connected. She was twenty-five, the granddaughter of a duke, and the niece of William Hamilton, connoisseur, diplomat and, later, cuckolded husband to Lord Nelso
n’s Emma. She was intellectually inquisitive and brimming with cheerful self-confidence; she kept up a lively correspondence with a wide circle of intellectual women. Her learning had made her neither solemn nor sombre; she was an entertaining and candid writer, with a slightly flirtatious tone, and was clearly an engaging presence. Everyone who met her liked her. Inevitably, she was known to that magnet for bright women, the Duchess of Portland, who seems first to have recommended her to the attention of the queen. Charlotte was impressed by an endorsement from so revered a source, and moved very fast to bring her into her household. When told that she was ‘thought upon to fill a new place about the princesses’, Mary Hamilton was astonished, and a little apprehensive: ‘I had never in my life had the least desire to belong to a court, and to ask for such a thing would have been the last of my thoughts.’ But the wheels were now turning and there was no going back. A few days later, she was seen and approved by Lady Charlotte Finch. She was then ‘presented to Her Majesty, who received me in the most gracious manner’, and, almost without knowing quite what had happened, found herself established in Prince Ernest’s old apartments at Kew. ‘The transaction was so sudden that I can hardly comprehend how it came about.’82
At first, Mary Hamilton found a great deal to enjoy in her unlooked-for new job. She went with the princesses to Kew where they walked in the parks, paraded around the village and sat in the gardens. At Windsor, she joined the family’s regular, ceremonial procession across the public terraces, where anyone and everyone could watch them as they walked past. It was an exciting experience for a newcomer. ‘Went on to the Terrace,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘There was much company – Nobility – Persons of Fashion – Pretty Women – Smart Girls – Handsome Men – Coxcombs – Officers – Misses and an Abundance of Clergy.’ The king, clearly charmed by her, was kind and teasing, in his rather heavy-handed, bantering style. ‘In his most amiable and good-humoured way, he charged me not to lose my heart to any of the old prebendaries.’83
The Strangest Family Page 35
