The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  In fact, the birth of his child drove the prince into an even greater frenzy of hatred for his wife. A few days later, in a state of nervous collapse, he convinced himself he was dying and rewrote his will. As ever when he was in desperate straits, his thoughts turned to Maria Fitzherbert, and it was to her, ‘the wife of my heart and soul’, that he bequeathed all his property. ‘To she who is called the Princess of Wales’ he left only a shilling. For all its empty posturing, it was a gesture that indicated the depth of his repulsion for Caroline, with whom he never lived again.

  In April, for the first time, he suggested a formal separation which, he informed his wife, he would not infringe ‘by proposing at any period a connection of a more particular nature’, even if their daughter – now baptised Charlotte after her grandmother – were to die. The queen sympathised with her son’s unhappiness, but thought there was little chance of his father agreeing to a separation of any kind; indeed, the king was not prepared to countenance any open acknowledgement of the couple’s incompatibility. ‘You seem to look upon your disunion as merely of private nature,’ he wrote to his son. He had ‘totally put of sight’ the fact that as heir apparent, the prince’s marriage was a public act, and one which could not simply be set aside by everyone agreeing it had been a regrettable mistake: ‘a separation cannot be brought forward by the mere interference of relations’. The king advised him instead to think of his daughter, and do all he could ‘to make your home agreeable’.117

  Although his decision correctly reflected the political realities of their position, the king’s refusal to allow the ill-matched couple a separation effectively consigned them to years of mutually aggravated misery. Most blamed the prince for the unhappy situation. Everyone – with the possible exception of his sisters, for whom he could do no wrong – agreed that he had treated Caroline in an insulting and brutal manner from the very moment of her arrival. He paraded his mistress Lady Jersey before her, and appointed her as one of the ladies of her household, compelling his wife to spend most of her days with her preening rival. He gave Lady Jersey jewellery that had originally been presented to the princess, which his mistress wore as ostentatiously as possible. On the rare occasions the princess visited the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, she was sure to find Lady Jersey already in confident residence. So many and so public were the humiliations heaped upon his wife by the prince that his ill-treatment of her was common knowledge. ‘If a twentieth part of them have any foundation,’ commented Lord Glenbervie, ‘that is sufficient to fix the highest degree of blame on his conduct.’118

  It was true that Caroline’s behaviour was, as Malmesbury had observed in Germany, sometimes unpredictable. She did not always seem to understand the distinctions between what could and could not be said or done – as the prince saw, and trumpeted to anyone who would listen, there was something odd about her, and she was to grow progressively stranger as she grew older – but in the early days of her marriage she was never malicious, although she had a great deal to bear; and she was a conscientious and affectionate mother to her baby daughter. The extremity of the prince’s behaviour was a puzzle, even to those closest to him. ‘My brother has behaved very foolishly,’ Prince William was reported to have said in 1796. ‘To be sure, he has married a foolish, disagreeable woman, but he should not have treated her as he has done, but made the best of a bad bargain as my father has done.’119

  It was not until 1797 that the king was finally persuaded to concede that the warring prince and princess might live apart, although it was hoped the separation would be a temporary one. Caroline eventually settled at Montague House in Blackheath, a few miles south-east of London. She furnished it with none of her husband’s famous good taste; instead, it was a triumph of exuberance over style. Lady Charlotte Bury, who became Caroline’s lady-in-waiting, described it as ‘an incongruous piece of patchwork; it may dazzle for a moment when lifted up at night, but it is all glitter and trick and everything is tinsel and trumpery about it; it is altogether like a bad dream’.120 The princess was delighted by her new home. ‘I was free,’ she later declared to Charlotte Bury, who sought, somewhat laboriously, in all her reminiscences to capture Caroline’s strong German accent: ‘Oh, how happy I was! Everybody blamed me, but I never repented of dis step. Oh mine god, what I have suffered! Lucky I had a spirit, or I never would have outlived it!’121

  The Prince of Wales, in contrast, could summon up no comparable sense of cheerful detachment. His sense of revulsion for Caroline remained raw and visceral. ‘My abhorrence of her is such,’ he wrote, ‘and the rooted aversion and detestation that I feel towards her, that I shudder at the very thoughts of sitting at the same table with her, or even of being under the same roof with her.’ ‘Never, dearest and best of mothers,’ he begged the queen, ‘propose to me to humiliate myself before the vilest wretch this world was cursed with, who I cannot feel more disgust for from her personal nastiness than I do from her entire want of all principle.’122 His passionate rejection of his wife was, as he so often and so vituperatively declared, a reaction to who she was, to a personality he despised and a body that repulsed him; but it may also be possible that the fervency of his hatred owed at least some of its intensity to what Caroline represented – that his overwrought reaction to her was an unconscious revolt against the very idea of an arranged marriage, even one that he had arranged himself.

  The campaign of spite and persecution that the prince waged against Caroline makes it hard to feel much sympathy for his predicament – in the matter of his marriage, as in so many other aspects of his life, George was his own worst enemy; but perhaps behind his blustering venom was concealed a deep sense of shame and humiliation at the position in which he found himself. On his wedding day, a rare sympathetic witness, looking beyond the drunkenness and tears, caught a glimpse of a desperately unhappy man, ‘who looked like death and full of confusion, as if he wished to hide himself from the looks of the whole world’.123 Even George’s first biographer, writing in the year he died and in a tone deeply critical of his many moral and political failings, thought his marital position pitiable. ‘That the heir apparent to the throne of a free country should be compelled, against his inclinations, to unite his destiny with an individual he did not love is a circumstance which the statesman, the moralist, and the philanthropist must deplore.’124 Everything in his character and his chequered amatory history suggested that, despite all the earnest hopes of his sisters, George would never have found it easy to adapt himself to the demands of a calm, companionable marriage. Asked by a fellow diplomat before he left Germany how he thought Caroline would cope, Malmesbury had warily reflected that ‘with a steady man, she would do vastly well, but with one of a different description, there are great risks’.125 Much the same might have been said about the prince. He might never have been a particularly satisfactory husband, but the uninformed and unreflecting alliance he entered into with a complete stranger cauterised something deep in his soul, destroyed his always shaky moral compass, and introduced into his character a sense of bitterness that he carried with him until the day of his death. He was not a very attractive victim, it is true, but in his own self-regarding and theatrical way, the Prince of Wales suffered too from the unpredictable iron dictates of the royal marriage market.

  The prince was not, however, one to keep his sufferings to himself, seeking to draw all his family into the tense atmosphere of accusation and blame he created around himself. His mother was soon exhausted, both by her proximity to so much misery and her inability to do anything about it. ‘How many unpleasant things have passed since we last saw each other,’ she wrote sadly to Lady Harcourt in the spring of 1796. ‘To know them and not to have the power of soothing and assisting the sufferer is real martyrdom. I hear all sides and know so many things which must not be revealed that I am most truly worn down with it; and my dislike of the world in general gets the better of me.’ Everyone involved, ‘all say most cutting things’.126 Her daughters were equally in thrall to thei
r brother’s unhappiness. ‘We are all truly miserable about you, and the first question in the morning and the last at night is, have you heard anything from London?’127

  By the beginning of 1797, the queen had simply had enough. The prince had worried and harassed her throughout the autumn, demanding that she admit his mistress Lady Jersey to court. Bolstered perhaps by her deep-seated dislike of her daughter-in-law, and her desire to please her son, Charlotte did so, and found herself at the centre of a whirlwind of criticism as a result. It was the final straw. In January, she took the unusual step of writing to the king, putting down on paper the long list of her many grievances, and stating her intention effectively to withdraw from public life. ‘Your Majesty saying on Friday last at dinner that you supposed I would shut up shop until the town filled, induces me to beg leave of you to shut up shop entirely as far as relates to assemblies.’ This was not, she explained to her husband, solely the result of recent difficult events. ‘Before anything unpleasant happened last year, I found the fatigue almost too much for me.’ Fortified by a doctor’s prescription, she had managed to keep going, ‘though not without great exertion, and Your Majesty will I am sure be sensible that as from Monday to Saturday, we live in a constant bustle, either upon the road or in public, I may now begin to feel the consequences of that life.’ But it was the disintegration of her son’s marriage, and the pain attendant upon it, that had stiffened her resolve to remove herself from the spotlight. ‘Since the unpleasant affair of the Prince and Princess of Wales began, I will fairly own to Your Majesty that my dislike of everything public is greatly increased, and I have given full proof of that by appearing but three times on the Terrace last year, and not oftener at the Esplanade at Weymouth.’ The widespread criticism of her reception of Lady Jersey had increased her habitual suspicion of the press: ‘I found every word I spoke in the papers, and thereby was convinced that spies were sent to watch me.’ Her inability ‘to clear my character when things were at their worst in London’ had been the final straw. ‘I then determined never to appear but where my duty called me. I have been so thoroughly wounded at this time that nothing can ever make it up to me, and my dislike to mankind is so general that I distrust every soul and everybody that surrounds me.’ She concluded by asking the king to consider moving the time of dinner from four to five, as ‘this would certainly make the evening less long for the females of the family’, and reduce the opportunity for depressing gossip. ‘The encouragement for me,’ she observed in the closing lines of her long letter, ‘is not great in doing anything but what is merely my duty.’128

  If, at the beginning of the 1790s, the queen had hoped that she and her family might end the decade in better shape than they had begun it, she was miserably disappointed. The public world had grown infinitely more threatening, whilst the carefully nurtured calm of her private life had foundered on the disastrous attempts made by two of her sons to establish their independence through marriage. Her daughters, she knew, were restive and anxious; even her once-dependable husband had become a source of terrible anxiety, to be treated with trepidation, lest his terrifying and inexplicable illness return with the same speed and severity with which it had descended from nowhere in 1788. Charlotte’s response was, as ever, one of retreat, fleeing not just from the glare of her public role, but from any honest and open emotional engagement with her family and their seemingly insuperable problems. Ignored when she had attempted to offer advice, and recruited into recriminatory contests she was powerless to resolve, the queen effectively abdicated all responsibility for any further role in shaping the destinies of her children. Intent instead on preserving her own sense of self-righteousness – as she had declared when she failed to persuade either her husband or her son to listen to her misgivings about Caroline’s character, ‘no one should say she had any hand in anything’ – she left them to shape their own futures as best they could. For her daughters, dependent as they were on the advocacy of others to promote their interests, this was a dark development in lives already shadowed by disappointment. If their mother would not fight for them, who would?

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  Almost the only unalloyed pleasure the princesses enjoyed during the 1790s had been the birth of their baby niece Charlotte in January 1796. ‘God grant every blessing and happiness may attend my (already) dear little niece,’ wrote Elizabeth as soon as she had heard all was well, ‘and may she resemble in everything (what is most affectionately loved by me), her dear father.’129 The excitement with which the news was received contrasted starkly with the chilling disregard shown by the king for the welfare of his other grandchild, Augustus, born in such difficult circumstances two years earlier. For the baby Charlotte, things were very different. ‘The king could talk of nothing but his pretty little grandchild,’ Elizabeth assured the prince. ‘He said there was never so perfect a little creature, and everybody here was delighted to see him in such ecstasies of joy.’130 The happiness the princesses took from the safe arrival of their brother’s child was genuine, generous and strongly felt; but it also focussed their minds on their own unchanging state, still at home, still single and with no immediate prospect of motherhood looming for any of them. Telling the prince once again that ‘my sisters are quite enchanted’, Elizabeth added a telling postscript: ‘Old one rather anxious to follow your example.’131

  The Princess Royal lost no opportunity to tell anyone how desperately she still wanted to be married; but for all their concern over the depressed state into which they knew their eldest daughter had fallen, her parents made no attempt to help her out of it. It was left to others to do what they could to further her interests. The Harcourt women were particularly active on her behalf. Mrs Harcourt, living alongside her soldier husband, who was fighting in the Low Countries, was constantly looking out for suitable candidates for Royal’s hand. In 1795, she had been much impressed by the widowed thirty-nine-year-old Duke of Oldenburg, with whom she had spent a very agreeable evening. Mrs Harcourt worked on him as hard as she could, telling him that ‘he was much considered and esteemed by our royal family’, how much ‘his virtues must naturally be the object of their attention’, and that ‘I was sure they would be glad to see him.’ Surely, she exclaimed, this ‘must suggest to him that an alliance might take place?’132 In the midst of all his marital difficulties, even the Prince of Wales found time to advance his sister’s case, writing to the queen’s younger brother Ernest, and asking him to help in bringing about the Oldenburg marriage. Royal was effusively grateful and was, she maintained, ‘perfectly convinced that the Duke of Oldenburg’s character is such that could this be brought about, it would be the properest situation’.133 Princess Elizabeth was soon teasing her sister by calling her ‘the Duchess of Oldenburg’, noting ‘that her maiden-blush cheek is turned to a damask rose whenever the duke’s name is mentioned’.134 But, as with so many of Royal’s hopes for change, nothing happened. No more was heard about it, and the Duke of Oldenburg, who never remarried, drifted gently but permanently away from the royal family’s ambit.

  On this occasion, however, the Princess Royal was not left to nurse her disappointment for long. In December 1795, Frederick, Hereditary Prince of the Duchy of Württemberg, wrote to the king asking to marry his eldest daughter. As usual, George’s initial response was to refuse, but this time he did so on the basis of something other than his wish not to see a daughter go abroad. ‘Knowing the brutal and other unpleasant qualities of this prince,’ he told his Foreign Secretary, ‘I could not give an encouragement to this proposal.’135 Frederick of Württemberg had been the subject of dark speculation in Europe for some years. He had been married to Augusta of Brunswick – the sister of the new Princess of Wales – and had taken her to Russia whilst he served in the army there. The couple lived in Russia for six years, and had three children. In 1786, Frederick and the children returned home, but without his wife. No one seemed to know exactly what had precipitated their separation; there were rumours of an affair, but these were never subst
antiated. Others said Augusta had simply chosen to stay at the behest of her then great friend, the Empress Catherine the Great. At some point, Augusta fell out of favour with the empress, and was sent to live at the remote castle of Lhode. There she died, of unknown causes and in circumstances sufficiently inexplicable to ensure that gossip about her possible fate continued to circulate around the courts of Europe for years afterwards. It was never spelt out exactly how Frederick was considered accountable for his first wife’s death, but it was an unhappy story that did not make the king eager to consider a marital alliance with him. ‘I shall not consent to his request,’ he declared, ‘and if he will not take a gentle hint, I have no objection to adding that after the very unhappy life my niece led with him, I cannot as a father bequeath any daughter of mine on him.’136

  Frederick proved impervious to all attempts, gentle and otherwise, to reject him. Württemberg was poor and surrounded by bigger and hostile principalities; the prospect of an alliance with the wealthiest and most powerful state in Europe was not one to be easily surrendered. For months, Frederick’s envoy, Count Zeppelin, laboured in London, ‘going door to door’ to remove ‘the ridiculous prejudices’ harboured against his master. With the help of John Coxe Hippesley, a barrister who had worked for the East India Company and who had experience of investigating tricky questions of law, a body of evidence was assembled that appeared to exonerate Frederick from any complicity in his wife’s fate by placing the blame on her alone. A picture was gradually assembled in which Augusta was depicted as an irresponsible woman, swayed by strong emotions, without much self-discipline or restraint, a character, indeed, not unlike that of her younger sister, the hapless Princess of Wales. It was also implied that she had added infidelity to this catalogue of faults, which may, or may not, have resulted in the birth of an illegitimate child.