The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  But amongst all Charlotte’s trials, it was the behaviour of her children that caused her most distress. This was the decade in which the first serious challenges appeared from within the family to the emotional authority established by the king decades earlier. As the struggles grew more prolonged and unpleasant. Charlotte’s attempts to carve out a quiet space for herself, where she could retreat into a somewhat chilly and isolated calm, became ever less successful.

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  Relations between the queen and her eldest daughter had not been good for some time. Alongside Augusta and Elizabeth, the Princess Royal had endured her father’s illness as a member of the suffering sisterhood who rarely left their mother’s side. But as the king recovered, it became clear that Royal did not entirely approve of her mother’s conduct during those difficult months. Like her eldest brother, her political sympathies lay with the opposition Whigs, and she was said to object strongly to the queen’s passionate identification with the king’s ministers. Soon her disapproval was reported to have tipped over into something much stronger. ‘Her Royal Highness now averred that she had never liked the queen, from her excessive severity, that she doubted her judgement on many points, and went so far as to say that she was a silly woman.’53 It seems unlikely that the painstaking and punctilious Royal would ever have described her mother in terms of such dismissive disrespect, certainly not in any place where she might be overheard; but there is little doubt that as the new decade opened, the twenty-four-year-old princess was plumbing new depths of unhappiness. Her principal complaint was boredom. Whether at Weymouth, Windsor or Frogmore, there was little to break the monotony of royal routine. Sometimes even the resilient Elizabeth’s spirits wilted when she was forced to contemplate the emptiness of their lives, in which nothing marked one day out from another except the playing of a little cards followed by the prospect of some cursory squabbling.

  For the princesses, the lowering effects of this life were made harder to bear by their mother’s increasingly bad temper. The misery that Charlotte fought so hard to conceal under a veneer of disciplined resignation too often exploded into angry words, ‘sour looks’ and bitter recrimination. Her daughters, who spent nearly all their time in her company, bore the brunt of it. ‘I am sorry to hear the behaviour of a certain person continues so bad,’ wrote the queen’s youngest son Adolphus to his eldest brother. He could not understand why their mother chose to be ‘so odd, and why make her life so wretched when she could be just the reverse’.54 James Bland Burges – junior minister, poet and friend of the princesses’ lady-in-waiting, Lady Elgin – had heard similar stories of Charlotte’s irascibility: ‘I understand that the smiles and graces worn at court are generally laid aside with the full-dressed gown and jewels.’55 Burges thought the Princess Royal was particularly susceptible to the peevish moodiness of the queen, ‘before whom she is under the utmost constraint, and who maintains a very strict discipline and the most formal etiquette even in her moments of relaxation’.56 By 1791, this combination of isolation, aimlessness and squabbling had exhausted even Royal’s much-practised powers of endurance. Driven to desperation, she approached the one member of her family who she hoped would not only take her plight seriously, but might also help her change it: the Prince of Wales.

  In the eyes of his sisters, their eldest brother could do no – or very little – wrong. To them, he was not only the very model of aristocratic elegance and refined modern taste, he was also generous, charming and indulgently kind. Even his more disreputable behaviour, of which they were not unaware, did little to affect their rosy view of him. He brought excitement and a touch of glamour into their otherwise monochrome days. They enjoyed his immersion in the life of high society, seeing him as an emissary from a raffish and exotic world which they knew they could never themselves enter. In return, the prince made a genuine attempt to live up to the standards set by the unconditional admiration of his sisters. More than anyone else, they penetrated the armour of his monumental self-regard; he made time to write to them, visit them and send them presents. He remained a part of their lives when it would have been only too easy for him to have drifted away into the louche world that was his accustomed habitat.

  There was, of course, another dimension to both the princesses’ desire to confide in the prince and his willingness to listen to their problems. All knew that a time would come when he might have the power to change their situations. The prospect of his succeeding their father was never openly discussed, but it was the unspoken undercurrent to all the conversations the prince was to have with his sisters for over two decades. The extraordinary exchanges he had with the Princess Royal in 1791, when, for the first time, she openly declared the depth of her unhappiness and called upon her brother to help her find a way out of it, was the first of many appeals to come.

  In May, the Prince of Wales had gone to the Queen’s House to sit with his mother on the occasion of her birthday. As he wrote in a letter to Frederick, Duke of York, their eldest sister was there too, ‘with whom I joked much in a good-humoured way about herself in the presence of my mother’. This was quite clearly family business as usual for the prince, and he had not at all expected what happened next. ‘Soon afterwards I took my leave and went upstairs to sit with my other sisters, when the eldest followed me and begged to speak two minutes in private with me, to which I immediately assented. She then told me how much obliged she would be if I would never joke with her respecting the smallest trifle in the presence of her mother, as I did not know how she suffered from it afterwards, how she was treated, etc., etc.’ Clearly somewhat bemused, the prince promised that he ‘would do as she asked, and had I known it sooner, she never should have suffered a single moment’s uneasiness by my means, as it ever was the principal object of my life to do everything in my power to render every individual of my family as happy as possible’. Royal seems to have taken her brother’s polite apology as an invitation to further confidences. She asked to see him again, and when the prince agreed to do so, described with passion how miserable she felt:

  She said that the evident partiality which was shown on every occasion and in every trifle by her parents to all her other sisters in preference to her, the manner in which she was treated on all occasions, particularly by her mother, the constant restraint she was kept under, just like an infant, the perpetual and tiresome and confined life she was obliged to lead, no attempt being made at settling her abroad, or giving her a species of establishment at home, but what was worse than all, the violence and caprice of her mother’s temper, which hourly grows worse, to which she is not only obliged to submit, but to be absolutely a slave – in short, these circumstances combined were such as had led her to speak her mind.57

  Having stated her grievances so powerfully, Royal expected something more from her brother than just sympathy. As the prince described it to the Duke of York, she had made it clear that ‘Nothing should make her undergo another year of what she had for some years past … anything was preferable to the misery she was slave to at present.’ All the prince’s attempts to calm her down were brushed aside; she was not to be fobbed off.

  Both Royal and her brother knew there was only one way to extricate her from the sad life she had described with such loathing, and that was marriage. She begged her brothers to ‘endeavour to form some sort of alliance for her abroad, or in case that did not succeed, to press for some sort of establishment being formed for her here … If we would not, both of us, enter into these views cordially and engage to do the most we could for her, she gave me to understand she was determined to pursue her own plans and schemes.’ This was fighting talk indeed for the dutiful daughter of a dutiful queen, educated to believe that submission to the requirements of the family must always take precedence over her own happiness. Made reckless perhaps by the exhilaration of her defiance, Royal went even further, making it pathetically clear to her brother with whom she hoped her happiness might be found. ‘She then entered into an argument with me about what t
he propriety would be, supposing no attachment could take place abroad for her, were an alliance to be thought of with our friend the Duke of Bedford, and to tell you the truth, my dearest Frederick, I think she seems more anxious about this than for any foreign match in the world. She says she is come to a time of life that will not admit of any scheme of this sort being any longer postponed.’ The prince found this such an extraordinary idea ‘that to tell you the truth I could hardly forbear laughing’.

  He knew such a marriage would never take place. Bedford was one of the greatest of the great Whig grandees, and therefore effectively an hereditary member of the opposition. The king’s hostility to seeing his daughters marry British peers would only have been intensified by the knowledge that it was Bedford whom Royal had chosen. The prince told his sister bluntly that such a match was impossible. ‘I told her I thought if I knew my father, which I thought I did pretty well, that he would never think of giving his consent to anything of this kind.’ He considered a foreign alliance was a far more realistic prospect, and promised her that both he and the Duke of York would consult ‘mutually what was best for her interests, and to endeavour … to alleviate those distresses which seem to press so much upon her mind’. In the meantime, ‘she must take a little patience’.58

  However, when he responded to his brother’s long letter, the Duke of York was pessimistic whether much could be done. ‘Nobody pities her more than I do,’ he wrote, ‘or wishes to see her married sooner, knowing what a dreadful life she must lead,’ but he thought there were no opportunities in Prussia, where he was then living. ‘I cannot think that she can expect to marry the Prince Royal here because she is now five and twenty and he is only one and twenty. Besides, though I know that it is his great plan to marry one of our sisters, yet I believe he looks forward to Mary, who is certainly in every respect more suited to him in age. Tell Princess Royal however from me that I will give her my opinion very full how to proceed.’59

  In the end, nothing came of Royal’s attempt to force the issue of her unhappy situation. No more was said about the Duke of Bedford, who died young and unmarried. The only union that came out of Germany in 1791 was that of the Duke of York himself, who married the woman he called his ‘old flame’, his cousin, the King of Prussia’s eldest daughter, Frederica. ‘I do not say that she is the handsomest girl ever formed,’ wrote Frederick contentedly to his elder brother, ‘but she is full enough so for me, and in disposition she is an angel.’60 When she arrived in England, the stylish and sweet-natured Duchess of York soon became one of the Princess Royal’s closest friends and confidantes; but she was no substitute for the husband and independence that she had so desperately desired. As time passed and her hopes ebbed away, Royal’s only resource was the patience her brothers so insistently urged upon her, to sustain a life she found unendurable.

  It is possible that Royal’s parents were not even aware of her abortive bid for freedom. Her failed attempt was followed, however, by a far more direct challenge from within the family, both to the legal authority the king had established for himself in the Royal Marriages Act of 1772 and the desire for emotional control that lay behind it. No one saw it coming, perhaps because it was mounted by one of the least flamboyant of the princes.

  Augustus was the second youngest of George and Charlotte’s surviving sons, a bookish and thoughtful boy. He was originally destined for the navy, but suffered from asthmatic attacks so severe that he was often unable to lie down to sleep at night, and was forced to try to rest sitting up in a chair. The king therefore decided that, after he had finished his studies at Göttingen, a career in the Church would suit him better than the sea. In the meantime, he sent him off to Rome, where it was hoped the climate might improve his health. Augustus was at first a reluctant traveller, disliking the attendants his father had chosen for him, and soon exhausting the pleasures of the tourist sights. Things looked up outside the church of San Giacomo when he met Lady Dunmore and her daughter Lady Augusta Murray. Noticing that Lady Augusta’s shoelace was untied, he knelt down and tied it for her. Soon they were reading The Tempest together; next they exchanged love letters, full of passionate references to ‘Goosey’ and ‘Gussy’; and not long after that, on 4 April 1793, in defiance of the Royal Marriages Act, they were married by an English clergyman at Lady Dunmore’s hotel. Augustus was only twenty; his new wife was some years older, and as a result was generally regarded as a cradle-snatcher. Augusta was clearly more experienced in the ways of the world than the rather innocent Augustus. Lady Harcourt thought she ‘had the address to conceal or gloss over some of the earlier transactions of her life’.61 The diarist Joseph Farrington, no stranger to worldliness himself, thought Lady Augusta ‘coarse and confident-looking’, concluding that the prince ‘is generally considered as having been drawn into it’.62

  Rumours about the affair must have reached the king by the spring of 1793, as he ordered Augustus to return home. The prince took his time and did not arrive in London until the autumn. As soon as she met him, his mother suspected, ‘by the agitation Augustus is in’, that the gossip was right, but she surely cannot have suspected just how far matters had gone. Lady Augusta was now pregnant, and, at Augustus’s urging, the couple underwent a second marriage ceremony. On 5 December at St George’s, Hanover Square, in the very early morning, a man calling himself Mr Augustus Frederick, in a greatcoat pulled up to hide his face, married Miss Augusta Murray, who was eight months pregnant, the bride maintaining ‘she had married Mr Frederick in Italy when he was under age and so she decided to be re-married’.63

  If Augustus hoped this second wedding in Britain would give some extra degree of security to his wife, he was wrong; neither ceremony had any validity in English law, as both contravened the terms of the Royal Marriages Act. He later described his marriage as ‘a misunderstanding’, but it is hard to imagine he was not aware of the provisions of an Act that loomed so large in the lives of all his siblings. In January 1794, a few days before his son was born, Augustus wrote to his eldest brother in frantic anxiety. ‘My situation I believe to be one of the most unpleasant in the world, from various reasons I cannot mention … Many times has my mind been so overcome with despair that I have been almost distracted.’64 He must have known by then that the king had ordered him back to Italy. He left a few days later, having said nothing to his father about his wife and child, leaving them in London to face the consequences alone.

  The king was officially informed of his son’s illegal actions at the end of January, and coolly instructed the Lord Chancellor to ‘proceed in this unpleasant business as the law directs’.65 It took just over six months for the inevitable verdict to be reached. On 14 July 1794, the Arches Court of Canterbury pronounced the marriage between Prince Augustus and Lady Augusta Murray null and void. The King’s first grandson – another Augustus – was by this action declared illegitimate. Lady Augusta was established quietly in the country with her son, on a small pension, but warned not to try to join her erstwhile husband abroad.

  Meanwhile, the prince brooded on his situation in Rome. Cut off from all contact with the princesses – he was convinced there was ‘an order existing which forbids any correspondence betwixt my sisters and me’ – he relied on his brothers to keep any link with home alive. As many of his exiled forebears had done before him, he began to assemble a picture gallery of his closest relatives. He wrote to Ernest in October asking him to ‘sit for a miniature for me and send it by the first opportunity’. He had already managed to gather together images of almost everyone else. ‘The Prince [of Wales]’s and Adolphus’s are the only ones missing as the Princess Royal has promised me hers, and the queen that of Amelia. Pray put the Prince of Wales in mind of it. In my solitary and unhappy moments, the sight of these pictures affords me great comfort.’66

  Despite his miserable state, he insisted to the Prince of Wales that he would not capitulate; but the king was implacable, and as the months passed, Augustus’s loneliness gnawed away at his resolve an
d a more conciliatory tone crept into his letters. He begged the king to understand the difficulty of his situation: ‘Can a man of feeling who, through involuntary error, has become a father, forsake his child because the law is ignorant of his birth? Who is to protect the unfortunate companion of my misfortunes and my helpless infant if I do not stand forward?’67 Throughout 1795, Augustus tried to persuade his father to accept that he could not repudiate his wife and child, ‘those who have suffered on my account and whom I love’. He repeatedly begged him ‘to find some efficacious remedy’ for his impossible position, but to no avail. In the end the king refused to respond at all to his pleas, and gradually it became clear to Augustus that there was nothing to be done.

  Kept away from both his families, new and old, this inoffensive and affectionate man began to sink into a deep depression. ‘I want nothing but to be left alone. My whole disposition is altered, that I hate society, and only feel less uncomfortable when alone.’68 For the next four years, Augustus cut a sad and solitary figure among the classical ruins of Rome. It was not only George and Charlotte’s daughters whose lives were blighted by the king’s cold determination to command emotional obedience from his children. As Augustus’s story suggests, a sensitive son could suffer as profoundly as any of his sisters.