The contrast with the easy musical assurance of her younger sisters must have been additionally painful. Mrs Delany’s niece, Marianne Port, was treated in 1786 to a private performance on the piano by the ten-year-old Princess Mary. She dashed off ‘a lesson by Handel’ and, ‘with all the sweetness in the world, played it twice’. When she had finished, ‘Princess Sophia said, “Now I will play to you if you like,” and immediately played the Hallelujah Chorus in the Messiah; and Princess Mary sung it.’83
Royal sought other ways to please. She threw herself into the pursuit of a variety of accomplishments and skills, devoting all her time and considerable powers of application to mastering them. She worked diligently at her academic studies, tackling challenging volumes of history and theology. Fanny Burney had observed that ‘she writes German with as much facility as I do English’; in that language, too, her preferred authors were of a distinctly serious tone. Like her mother, her grandmother and her great-grandmother before her, Royal was also fascinated by the study of botany. When the queen decided to embark on a botanical work of her own, classifying and illustrating different kinds of herbs, she chose Royal over her other daughters to assist her: ‘Her natural steadiness never makes her shun labour or difficulty,’ observed Charlotte, paying a rare tribute to her eldest daughter’s meticulous and painstaking nature.84
Royal displayed a similarly intense commitment to her pursuit of artistic activities. All the royal women were enthusiastic amateur artists, and the princesses explored a wide range of what would now be called mixed media, painting on velvet, decorating furniture, stencilling walls, and even illustrating their own fans. They also undertook the more traditional forms of drawing and painting. The copying of great works was thought a useful training for artistically minded girls, and Royal spent many hours making her own versions of old masters from the royal art collection. Influenced by her own studies of plants, and by the extraordinarily beautiful illustrations she had seen made at first hand by Mrs Delany, she was equally interested in the painting of flowers. Many of her drawings demonstrate considerable skill and accomplishment. But whatever pleasure she took in creative works seems to have been overpowered by the sense of relentless, punishing self-improvement with which she undertook them. She was terrified by any interruptions to the demanding schedule she imposed on herself, obsessed with the idea that she would fall behind and be found wanting. When the queen hired ‘Miss Mee, a flower painter’ to give her extra lessons in technique, it only added to her self-lacerating sense of inadequacy: ‘If I do not come on, I must be wanting in capacity; for I have every advantage, and therefore no excuse but my own stupidity if I do not improve.’85
Royal’s frantic desire to leave no moment unfilled in her pursuit of ‘improvement’ was encouraged by the attitude of her mother. Charlotte was obsessed with time and the proper use of it. At her first meeting with Fanny Burney, she had made her views very clear: ‘Oh, for me, I am always quarrelling with time! It is so short to do something, and so long to do nothing.’ There was little that made her so angry, she declared, ‘as to hear people know not what to do! For me, I never have half time enough for things.’ The perennial solution to any complaint of boredom was obvious to her: ‘Why, employ yourselves!’86 It was a brisk injunction that must have been very familiar to her daughters.
Royal did all she could to follow her mother’s directive, and make rational use of her time. She accompanied her parents on visits to gardens and houses; when they were in London, she went with them to their favourite concerts of ancient music – which tried her patience – and to the theatre, which she enjoyed only if the underlying message of the drama made the expedition worthwhile. (Unlike her father, she had no taste for simple, knockabout comedy.) Sometimes great actors were invited to give private readings to the family, but she found these stilted affairs. Fanny Burney was once asked to read a play in front of the queen and princesses, and found it a depressing experience. ‘It went off pretty flat – nobody is to comment – nobody is to interrupt – such is the settled etiquette.’ She thought ‘the annihilation of all nature and pleasantry’ all the more dispiriting as she knew how much the queen and her daughters loved lively conversation.87 When David Garrick was invited, he made the mistake of choosing to read a comedy. Nobody laughed. ‘It was as if they had thrown a wet blanket over me,’ he commented gloomily.88
Royal probably gained most pleasure from her role in educating her younger sisters. The queen had never devoted as much attention to the intellectual upbringing of the three younger princesses as she had done to the elder three, and Royal gratefully grasped the opportunity to fill the gap. She became both teacher and mentor to the girls, spending many hours in their company and proving an effective and imaginative teacher, especially with the young Princess Amelia, whom Charlotte Papendiek thought ‘had much improved under her tuition’. Royal was in her early twenties when she took on the role of ‘governess to her three younger sisters’. It must have occurred to her, as she watched them stumble over their German verbs, that at her age the queen had been mother to a growing tribe of children. In contrast, Royal was marking time, held in an ever-extended girlhood which could not satisfy her, however earnestly she sought to force purpose and activity into its empty hours.
Princess Elizabeth once declared that she and her sisters were certain of having all the amusements their parents could devise for them. Her elder sister would no doubt have agreed with such a dutiful pronouncement; but she might also silently have observed that they were not necessarily the amusements she would have chosen for herself. As a daughter, even when loved and indulged, she was not, as her life daily reminded her, a free agent. She existed in a world of good-natured dependency in which every aspect of her existence was subject to the wishes of others. Even her clothes, made in colours designed to complement those of the queen, were not of her own choosing.
There was, as Royal well understood, only one answer to her growing sense of impotence. She was ready to graduate from the life of a daughter into that of a wife. The time had come for her to marry.
*
George and Charlotte’s children had from their earliest days understood that royal marriages were not like others. They knew that they could expect relatively little freedom in the choice of a spouse, and that dynastic or political considerations were more significant than their own preferences. With far less opportunity than their brothers to investigate possible partners during their travels abroad, the princesses were resigned to marrying men they barely knew before leaving their home and family for ever, with little prospect of ever returning. This had been their mother’s experience, and it was a destiny they imagined they would one day share. Both sons and daughters were equally aware of the primacy of their father’s intentions in managing their marital prospects. Royal children were expected to do their duty, and marry – or not – as their sovereign directed. In the past, the monarch’s ability to proscribe and prevent had been enforced largely by tradition, through fear of reprisals and the sheer force of royal personality; but the actions of George III changed all that. When, as he saw it, his right to influence who married whom in the heart of his own family was ignored and defied, he took decisive action to ensure it would never happen again. The Royal Marriages Act enshrined in law the king’s ability to veto alliances he did not like. As a piece of legislation, it was to impact directly on the lives of three of his daughters and one of his sons; as a demonstration of his desire to exert emotional control over even those he loved, it was the basis from which so much of the future unhappiness of his children flowed.
The Act was a response to the behaviour of the king’s youngest brother. Henry, Duke of Cumberland, was a man of pleasure in the classic Hanoverian mode: a drinker, a gambler and a serial taker of mistresses. In 1770, much to the king’s shame, Cumberland had been named in a divorce suit brought against him by Lord Grosvenor, and, in a trial that attracted enormous public attention, his love letters to Lady Grosvenor were read out in c
ourt. Beneath their conventional declarations, these revealed a rather sad and lonely man hidden behind the brittle persona of the rake; but this had no effect on the outcome, which resulted in damages being awarded against the duke for the vast sum of £13,000. As he had no assets, this was paid by a reluctant and angry king. However, it was the shocking news that Cumberland had married without George’s permission which finally destroyed any lingering affection the king felt for his brother.
Cumberland had not informed George of his intention to take a wife because he knew he would never have agreed to his choice. The new Duchess of Cumberland was Anne Horton, a daughter of Simon Luttrell, who later became the Earl of Carhampton. For the king, she had many objectionable qualities, the first of which was that she was British. George had given up Sarah Lennox because he had been persuaded by Bute that any alliance between royalty and the local aristocracy was fraught with political risk. Anne Horton’s relations were, if possible, even less attractive to the king than the Foxes had been in 1760. The bride’s four brothers and her father all sat in the Commons, where their behaviour was as unpalatable to the king as their morals. Simon Luttrell’s dissolute activities led to his being dubbed ‘the King of Hell’. He and his sons were all hard-drinking, hard-living men of the kind George despised, and his new sister-in-law had an equally raffish air. She was extremely attractive, reported Horace Walpole, ‘with the most amorous eyes in the world, and eyelashes a yard long’. She had, he admitted, ‘more of the air of a woman of pleasure than woman of quality’, with a gift for dancing ‘and a great deal of wit, but of the satiric kind’.89
When Cumberland told the king what he had done, George was first horrified and then furious, though, characteristically, he sought to control his anger. ‘After walking some time to smother my feelings,’ he told the Duke of Gloucester, his other surviving brother, ‘I, without passion, spoke to him to the following effect – that I could not believe he had taken the step … to which he answered me he would never tell me an untruth.’ Once forced to accept the veracity of Cumberland’s confession, the king was implacable. ‘I told him, as the step was taken, I could give him no advice, for he had irretrievably ruined himself.’90
Almost immediately, George moved to introduce legislation to prevent an event of this kind happening again. The Royal Marriages Bill sought to prevent any of the king’s close family from marrying without his permission until they were twenty-five; even then, they would be obliged to inform Parliament and the Privy Council of any proposed alliance. Objections could be made for up to a year following such a declaration. Any marriage contracted in defiance of these provisions would be deemed null and void, and any children produced regarded as illegitimate. It was not a popular bill, due to the considerable unease felt at the idea that a universal human right – the freedom of a competent adult to marry whom they wished – could be compromised by royal decree. Lord North had a difficult time shepherding its passage through Parliament; but the king would not be deflected, instructing North to drive the bill on ‘with a becoming firmness’. George’s public declaration to Members sitting in the ministerial interest, that ‘I have a right to expect a hearty support from everyone in my service and I shall remember defaulters’, carried the day.91 ‘The king grew dictatorial and his creatures kissed the earth,’ commented Walpole. In 1772, the bill became an Act of Parliament on receiving royal assent.
The progress of the bill must have given the Duke of Gloucester much uncomfortable pause for thought. As early as 1766, it had been rumoured that he too was concealing a secret wife. Lady Mary Coke recorded that when he walked into the royal chapel at St James’s, the lady beside her ‘bent forward and said to me “Married”.’ Lady Mary replied that she did not believe it, ‘upon which she repeated, “Married, I assure you it is true”.’92 Later, Lady Mary also heard that every night at Windsor, on the stroke of twelve, a rocket was let off in the Great Walk, a signal to ‘a certain royal duke’ that the coast was clear for him to join his lover in her lodgings. Eventually, the rocket ‘became such a ridicule at Windsor that he was obliged to leave it off’, but his nightly visits continued, rocket or no rocket.
The woman with whom the duke spent his nights was Maria, Lady Waldegrave. As a young woman, she had married Lord Waldegrave, who had been George’s governor when he was Prince of Wales; she was also the niece of Horace Walpole, which meant that the diarist had unusually full access to the details of her story, at least as it appeared from her point of view. Walpole argued that the relationship between Lady Waldegrave and the duke was not ‘a dissolute connexion’: she and the duke were ‘remarkably religious’. He was sure they were married, and thought the king and queen suspected it too.Certainly, George and Charlotte extended to Lady Waldegrave – who was nowhere near as objectionable to them as Anne Horton – ‘a sort of equivocal acknowledgment of what she was’.93 Two events made it impossible for a situation of such carefully calibrated discretion to continue: the introduction of the Royal Marriages Act and the discovery that Lady Waldegrave was pregnant. The Duke of Gloucester now had no choice but to admit to the king that he, too, was married. If his coming child was not to be declared illegitimate, he would also have to prove that the wedding had taken place before the Act was passed.
In the autumn of 1772, the duke summoned up his courage, and confessed to the king that he had been married since September 1766. Whatever George may have privately suspected, the shock of Gloucester’s admission was devastating. He had expected such behaviour from the rackety Cumberland, but not from Gloucester. ‘Reserved, pious, of the most sober and decent disposition,’ Walpole believed that Gloucester ‘was of all the family, the king’s favourite.’94 The knowledge that he had said nothing, whilst the king confided in him all his misgivings about the Cumberland marriage, added to George’s distress. Walpole heard that ‘he cried, and protested he had not slept all night’ after the fateful meeting with Gloucester. ‘He talked of not seeing the duke again, though he said it should not be forever, that he should be miserable not to see again the brother whom he loved.’95 Smarting from a sense of betrayal, the king grew vindictive, subjecting his brother and his heavily pregnant wife to the ordeal of formal investigation into the legality of their marriage. Only when it was at last proved valid, if unsanctioned, was Lady Waldegrave acknowledged as Duchess of Gloucester, and her newborn child, Sophia Matilda, safely legitimate, given the title of princess.
The king, his resolve stiffened by the queen, who disliked both her sisters-in-law, remained fixed in his disapproval of his brothers’ marriages. Neither duchess was received at court. The Cumberlands, indifferent to their exclusion, filled up their house with gamblers and reprobates, and indulged in heavy-handed ridicule of George and Charlotte. ‘A mighty scope for satire was afforded by the queen’s wide mouth and occasionally imperfect English, as well as by the king’s trick of saying What! What!, his ill-made coats and general antipathy to fashion.’96 Nothing like this was permitted in Gloucester’s more decorous household: ‘the duke respected himself and his brother too much to permit it’. But in terms of lasting happiness, it was the partnership of the louche Cumberlands which proved most resilient. The duke never looked at another woman until he died in 1790, as devoted to his flamboyant duchess as he had been when they married nearly twenty years before. By 1781, in contrast, the marriage of the sober Gloucesters was falling apart. The duke blamed the duchess’s ‘very unfortunate turn of mind and temper’; when their daughter was only a year old, she had, he said, threatened to leave him. He confessed to the king, with whom he was partially reconciled, that he had made a terrible mistake and that his heart was ‘very full. I am indeed punished for my juvenile indiscretions by the very ungrateful return I receive at home.’97
Chastened and penitent, the Duke of Gloucester was gradually admitted back into the family circle, but never again to the uniquely privileged position he had once occupied in the king’s heart. Beneath his habitual good nature, George nurtured a steely resentme
nt for those he considered had flouted his authority; a dutiful man himself, he expected a similar display of respectful obligation from others. The Royal Marriages Act translated that conviction into a legal requirement. It had its origins in the uncontrolled behaviour of his brothers, but it reached far beyond and into the lives of the next generation, as George had intended that it should. ‘I have children who must know what they are to expect if they follow so infamous an example,’ he had written with cold determination in 1771. It would take a great deal of courage to suggest to the king that any judgement, any opinion, any feelings other than his own had a role to play in securing their future happiness.
The Strangest Family Page 45
