Augusta’s parents had been ‘lately undeceived’ by learning details such as these, which Frederick claimed he had been too delicate to reveal to them at the time.137 The Empress of Russia too had stood forward to declare the hereditary prince’s innocence. ‘Can it be supposed,’ exclaimed Hippesley, ‘that the Duke and Duchess of Brunswick, the Emperor and Empress Queen of Russia would all enter in a conspiracy to impose upon His Majesty, and sacrifice the Princess Royal to a prince so undeserving of Her Royal Highness?’138 The king, outflanked by the negotiators, and aware of his eldest daughter’s overpowering desire to see herself ‘settled’, capitulated, and on 15 June 1796, he wrote to Frederick giving his formal consent to the match.
There is no written account of how Royal responded when she at last achieved the object she had wished for all her adult life, but soon she was seen wearing a medallion with a portrait of the prince hanging from it, tangible proof that against all her expectations, she had been claimed at last, and would not now live out her days in her mother’s increasingly dismal shadow. Fanny Burney, who knew her so well, did not doubt that the translation from dutiful daughter to independent duchess would do more than provide Royal with the happy prospect of a husband and family; it would also satisfy a deeply rooted desire in her to exercise authority, rather than be perpetually subject to it. ‘She is born to preside,’ mused Fanny, ‘and that with an equal softness and dignity; but she was here in utter subjection, for which she had neither spirits nor inclination. She adored the king, honoured the queen and loved her sisters and had much kindness for her brothers; but her style of life was not adapted to the royalty of her nature, any more than of her birth; and though she only wished for power to do good and confer favours, she thought herself out of place in not possessing it.’139
Royal had bought her freedom at what some considered a fairly high price. When Frederick arrived in London, the newspapers were explicit about his physical failings. ‘His Serene Highness is in truth a most excessively corpulent man,’ commented The Times, ‘so much so that his servants, in assisting him to put on his pelisse [cloak], are obliged to walk quite around him to put it on from one shoulder over the other.’140 Napoleon, who thought him ‘a man of talent’, commented that nature had created the prince to see how far human skin could be stretched without bursting. His size was an undoubted gift to the caricaturists, who drew him waddling into St James’s like a great moustachioed whale. When presented at court, the sisterhood loyally looked past the prince’s shortcomings, tactfully commending his manly looks and strength of character. When finally brought face to face with her husband-to-be, however, the Princess Royal’s nerve failed her; she was ‘almost dead with terror and agitation and affright … She could not utter a word. The queen was obliged to speak all her answers. The prince said he hoped this would be the last disturbance his presence would ever occasion her.’141
A few weeks later, on 18 May 1797, the couple were married. Royal wore a dress of white and silver, every inch of which she had painstakingly embroidered, knowing, as her sister Augusta told Fanny Burney, ‘that three stitches done by any other would make it instantly said it was none of it by herself’. The result had been far more elegant than anything the princess usually wore. ‘’Twas the queen herself that dressed her! You know what a figure she used to make of herself with her odd manner of dressing herself; but Mama said, “Now really, Princess Royal, this one time is the last, and I cannot suffer you to make such a quiz of yourself; so I really will have you dressed properly.” And indeed the queen was right, for everybody said she never looked so well in her life.’ (‘The word quiz, you may depend on it,’ observed Fanny, ‘was never the queen’s.’142)
On 2 June, the new Duchess of Württemberg set off with her husband for Germany. Everyone in the family knew it was unlikely they would see her again. Princess Amelia, the youngest of the sisters, reflected the complicated mix of emotions that marked her departure: pleasure at seeing Royal achieve the matrimonial status for which she had so long and desperately pined, tinged with sadness at her loss. ‘My heart is so full with parting with my dear sister, I can hardly write … I am rejoiced to see how much she feels the going, but to be sure it makes me much more a fool.’143 The queen’s response was more circumspect. She wished the princess well, but regarded her future with a distinctly sombre eye. ‘I have just separated from my daughter Royal,’ she wrote to her brother. ‘It has cost us much, God hopes she will be happy. The prince has esprit, worldliness, and knows how to get what he wants. They are both of an age when they must know how to discern what true contentment consists of, and first youth being past, they must endeavour to make themselves mutually happy.’144
The duke and his duchess seemed determined to do the best they could to achieve that mutual happiness as they travelled towards their new home in Germany. After a crossing of the North Sea that made her Weymouth excursions seem very tame – ‘I have been most miserably sick, not being able to leave my bed the whole time’ – the couple arrived eventually in Hanover, where they were met by the princess’s young brother Adolphus. He had not seen his sister for some years, and ‘must own I find her charming and I am convinced that with her excellent understanding and goodness of heart she will be very happy with the prince; he is extremely fond of her’. The duke had described his wife ‘as a blessing from heaven’, and, Adolphus told the king, ‘I really do believe he thinks so. It would be very unnatural if he did not, for it is impossible to behave in a better manner towards a husband than she does to him.’145
The contrast with the first weeks of her elder brother’s marriage could not have been more striking. In July, now established at her new home at Ludwigsburg in the heart of the duchy, Royal assured the family that ‘my dear prince is unwearied in his attentions and love, doing everything that he can imagine which will give me pleasure; in which he so totally succeeds that I am never so happy as when we are at home, and am always anxious for the moment when I can return’.146 Over the next months, she often described him as ‘the best of husbands’, and although in later life the couple’s relationship was to be tested to the extreme by the experience of war, occupation and personal grief, she never departed from that conviction.
Not everyone shared Royal’s determinedly positive assessment of her marriage and her husband. There was, as had been earlier suspected, a less genial side to Frederick’s character. Queen Charlotte declared in 1802 that she had never liked him, that ‘he had a vanity that made him detested in England’, that he had not known ‘how to govern his bad humour in the presence of the women of my daughter’s suite’, and that ‘he displeased us totally and his departure was not regretted’.147 It is possible that Charlotte’s openly critical attitude towards her son-in-law – which she had not expressed in 1795 – was in part explained by his devious political manoeuvring. Desperate to hold on to his duchy when so many of his German counterparts had lost theirs to the French, he was as persistent a supplicant as he had been a suitor, nagging the king for expressions of support, both financial and diplomatic. In a letter his wife wrote to her father on the very day of her departure from England, she added a postscript, clearly written at the behest of her husband, hoping that the king ‘will be so gracious as to join your influence to that of the two Imperial courts in support of the interest of his family’.148 It was the first of a lifetime of such requests. Frederick was an astute opportunist: by 1805, he had thrown in his lot with Napoleon, to the extent that the emperor’s brother married Frederick’s daughter (news that was not well received at Windsor). Frederick had no illusions that his marriage was not based on political necessity, but he never treated his wife with the callous and insulting hostility that Royal’s brother had meted out to Caroline, and for this she was sincerely and lastingly grateful. In later life, his temper worsened, and he was sometimes seen to bully and harangue his increasingly long-suffering duchess, but she never uttered a word of criticism of him, and reacted severely to those who did.
In
1817, she scolded the Prince of Wales for listening to ‘idle reports of those whose only object must have been to do mischief’ in suggesting all was not always well between herself ‘and my adored husband … Believe me, dearest brother, never could I have been as happy with him as I was had not our minds been congenial.’149 In 1823, when the duke had been dead for seven years, Royal delivered to Lady Harcourt her verdict on their life together which, in its calm admission of the importance of compromise in marriage, might be allowed to stand as the final word on its success. ‘I believe that in my married life, I enjoyed as much reasonable happiness as falls to the lot of most mortals. Perfect happiness is not to be sought for on this earth; but affection enables us to counter even disagreeables with courage; and the great mainspring of leading a comfortable married life is confidence in each other, and the making it the rule to bear and forbear.’ If, in later life, most of the forbearing had been done by Royal, who, it was said, was ‘always puffing up the conjugal fidelity of her husband’, she would never have swapped the risks and challenges of marriage for the dreary certainties of spinsterhood. ‘Many people laugh at me for being such a great advocate of matrimony,’ she admitted, ‘but I am every day convinced that few single women are happy.’150
Although, from the moment of her arrival in her new husband’s home, Royal was determined to find everything about it good, she missed her family, especially her father, whom, as she must have known, she was never to see again. As she wrote sadly to the king, her arrival at her new home had been a forceful reminder of what she had left behind. At a dinner given to welcome her to Ludwigsburg, ‘the duke had “God Save the King” performed by both vocal and instrumental music, and Your Majesty’s health drunk with a royal salute. I own that I required all the strength in my power not to burst into tears. However, I fought with my feelings and behaved pretty well.’151 She had new relations to meet, especially her husband’s children by his first marriage, among whom was a teenage daughter, Catherine. Frederick had written rather brusquely to his daughter, as he and his second wife travelled through Germany, instructing her to behave well ‘to her new Mama’; but Royal was very far from being the harsh stepmother of fairy tale. At their first meeting, Royal had been delighted by Trinette, as she was known. ‘She is really very handsome, being the image of her father,’ she commented approvingly, and had soon won the girl’s affections. She was pleased that her stepdaughter seemed to like her: ‘from the beginning she took to me very much, and her age being the same as my dearest Amelia’s makes her doubly interesting to me’.152
Her happiness was crowned with the discovery, in August 1797, that she was pregnant. Throughout the summer, she wrote constantly to the Prince of Wales, hungry for news of the young Princess Charlotte – ‘all the letters I receive from home are full of her praises’ – and anticipating the imminence of her own motherhood. ‘I look forwards with great anxiety to the moment when I shall be equally blest.’153 She was still waiting by the middle of April 1798, and did not go into labour until the 27th; then, after a long and difficult delivery, she gave birth to a stillborn daughter, ‘a big and beautiful child’. The English minister at Stuttgart reported to the Prince of Wales that the duchess ‘suffered very greatly in her lying-in, and so much fever ensued, that for a short time, the physicians were very apprehensive of her safety’.154 She was not told for some days that her longed-for child was dead. Her first letter was to her father, to whom she wrote in an uncertain hand on 4 May: ‘Do not think me ungrateful to Providence for the many blessings with which I am surrounded when I say that the loss of the dear child has deeply affected me.’ She was, she assured the king, doing all she could to ‘submit to the will of the Almighty; but nature must ever make me regret the loss of the little thing I had built such happiness on’.155
A few days later, she was ‘much better and stronger’, but still sunk in grief. ‘I can with truth assure you that at the moment, I feel the most deeply the loss of my little angel.’ She sought to find some comfort in religion. ‘Though I shall long and silently mourn my child, I am so convinced of the wisdom of the Almighty, and of her happiness, that were it in my power to recall her to life, I would not do it. These times are not those to make one pity children it pleases God to save from the miseries of this life.’156 On the same day she wrote to the Prince of Wales, confessing that, although ‘I gain strength every day, I am very low,’ adding despondently, ‘you who have the blessing of so charming a little girl as Charlotte will feel for my loss’.157 There would be no other children. The ‘two sets of children’s clothes, supposed to last the first three years, one for a boy and one for a girl’, which Royal had brought with her as part of her trousseau, ‘were never needed and were sold at her death.’158
For the rest of her life, Royal would take a compassionate interest in the welfare of young girls, devotedly fulfilling her thwarted maternal affection through her loving care of other people’s daughters. If she felt any sense of injustice when she compared her situation to that of her prolifically fertile mother, she kept such thoughts to herself. Though she never forgot her lost baby, Royal was long schooled in dutiful submission to events beyond her control. Replying to a letter from her father which had given her ‘great comfort’, full as it was with ‘motives for resignation’, she bravely summoned up those aspects of her life that kept her from despair: ‘Parents that I so justly love and respect, to whom I owe the principles which at all times are the only source of happiness, and can in times of affliction be the only true comfort … a husband whose affectionate tenderness has attached me to him in the strongest manner, sisters I dearly love, and friends that are kind to me. Ought I then to repine or murmur when it pleases God to afflict me?’ Despite the rawness of a grief she rightly expected would never completely fade, Royal refused to rail against her fate. ‘The Almighty has granted me blessings which he has refused to most women, and still more to the greatest number of princesses.’159
Of the three weddings which took place in the royal family during the 1790s, that of the Princess Royal was by far the most successful. It was not always characterised by ‘the inexpressible bliss’ that the queen had felt radiating from the letters she sent home in its earliest days; but for Royal, it delivered a degree of satisfaction enjoyed neither by Augustus, unwillingly separated from his wife and son and living in crushed and lonely exile abroad, nor by the Prince of Wales, consumed by an all-pervasive hatred for a partner from whom he knew he could never be free. Of all the family, only Royal ended the decade in a happier situation than she began it; only she, contrary to all her own expectations, salvaged something positive from a period in which all other attempts by her siblings to create more settled lives for themselves ended in disaster.
Her brothers must bear some of the blame for what went wrong for them: Augustus was reckless, and the Prince of Wales gave no thought at all either to the character of the woman he chose or the demands married life would make upon him. Yet the miserable situation of their two sons was also partly of George and Charlotte’s making. The king rigidly enforced his legal right to control the formal relationships of his children, but, during ten years, made not a single effort to help any of them find a partner of whom he could approve. At the same time the queen withdrew from further involvement in the emotional difficulties of her children, hiding her bitterness behind an air of resentful disapproval.
The resulting unhappiness affected everyone in the family. ‘The world never appeared to me so bad as this year,’ wrote Elizabeth in September 1796, in a heartfelt response to the plight of her idolised eldest brother. But whilst she sympathised with his sufferings – ‘I cannot conceive how anybody can treat you ill in any way whatever’ – they had done nothing to dampen her own desire to be married. On the contrary, she was now more eager than ever. ‘I trust that the Princess Royal’s lot being determined upon, it may open the way for others,’ she declared, ‘for times are much changed, and every young woman who has been brought up as we have, by the goo
dness of Mama, must look forward to settlement.’160 Royal’s example proved to Elizabeth that a husband and establishment, and perhaps even love, were still within the sisters’ grasp. Not all the experience of marital misery she had witnessed at such close hand would deter her from seeking a similar opportunity for herself.
CHAPTER 13
The Wrong Lovers
GEORGE AND CHARLOTTE’S THREE YOUNGEST daughters grew up in an atmosphere very different from that which had shaped the characters of their elder sisters. As with so many other aspects of family life, it was the king’s illness which changed everything. When, in 1788, both doctors and politicians insisted that the queen must in future devote all her energies to her husband, Charlotte’s first thought had been to lament the effect it would have on the upbringing of the junior princesses: ‘I pity my three younger daughters,’ she observed, ‘whose education I can no longer attend to.’1 The king’s eventual recovery did nothing to alter this seismic shift in her responsibilities and, as a result, Mary, Sophia and Amelia rarely found themselves exposed to the sustained, demanding programme of academic and moral instruction that had been the daily experience of the senior princesses. Charlotte’s expectations were reluctantly tailored to accommodate her new burdens, and the education of the youngest girls was competent rather than outstanding. They were mainly instructed by governesses, with whom they lived in sometimes uneasy proximity at the Lower Lodge at Windsor. They were physically and emotionally more detached from their mother than the older princesses, less dependent on the ebb and flow of her restrained but powerful personality.
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