The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  The impact on their development was marked. Removed from the glaring intensity of the queen’s ambition, not one of the girls grew up to share the breadth of their mother’s intellectual tastes, nor the rigour with which she pursued them. But if they lacked the hard-won accomplishments of their more studious sisters, they were also far less consumed with their anxious desire to excel. They displayed none of the punishing obsession with self-improvement that characterised the Princess Royal, desperate to prove her worth by the quality of her painting and the range of her reading; they were untouched by the collecting mania which drove Elizabeth to accumulate china and porcelain she could not afford, and to cultivate ferociously an ever-expanding list of new skills, from japanning to woodcuts to etching. On the surface at least, the younger princesses seemed calmer, blander personalities than their intense and striving elder sisters.

  Yet, beneath their polite demeanours, each of the younger princesses nurtured, as the older princesses had not, a small but resilient core of rebellion, which would have major consequences for the family as they grew into adulthood. Two of these younger daughters would challenge more powerfully than any of their elder sisters the moral framework of the world their parents had created for them. Their attempts to follow the promptings of their emotions led them into extreme and unexpected situations, and both, in their different ways, would eventually be overwhelmed by the consequences of the choices they made. Without the accident of their father’s illness and the resulting degree of separation from their mother’s dominating presence, it is hard to imagine any of Charlotte’s daughters seizing the opportunity to follow their own inclinations in defiance of the principles of sacrifice and submission their parents valued so highly. The queen may have suspected that turning her attention away from her younger daughters would have untoward results, but even she could not have predicted quite how far-reaching and disruptive to the family those results would be.

  Of all the sisters, it was Princess Mary, the fourth daughter, born in 1776, who presented the least troubled face to the world. The most classically beautiful of the princesses, her slim figure, fair hair and blue eyes gave her an almost doll-like prettiness. Mrs Papendiek remembered her as ‘exquisite, both in figure and grace’.2 The diarist Sylvester Glenbervie sat next to her once at dinner when she was in her mid-twenties, and found her ‘perfect, a very pretty small face, full of sense and sweetness’.3 The Earl of Malmesbury – who, as a much-travelled diplomat, had had plenty of opportunities to survey the physical attractions of female royalty across Europe – was equally captivated, declaring her ‘all good humour and pleasantness, her manners perfect … [I] never saw anyone so exactly what she should be’.4 Mary enhanced her natural advantages by dressing with particular care and attention. She was seriously interested in clothes and spent a great deal of time honing and developing her taste. The result was a pared-down, minimal elegance that made her immediately identifiable among her sisters. Mary would never have allowed herself to be painted, as was her youngest sister Amelia, in a curious and fussy confection of ruff and cap that muffled up her youth in a frumpish and unflattering form of fancy dress. In 1802, Mary took matters directly in hand, remodelling Amelia’s eccentric fashion choices to reflect her own more worldly tastes. ‘I flatter myself Amelia will look in great beauty,’ she told her eldest brother, ‘as I have given her a dress in my own style to make her look less like an old woman than usual.’5 Everyone commented on her warmth and the frequency of her smile. The miniaturist Andrew Robertson, who painted her in 1807, found her beguiling: ‘Beautiful creature – most difficult to paint, fidgets about, nor sits steady one moment – affable and laughs.’6

  Although she shared with almost all her family a well-developed musical talent, Mary was not an intellectual. References to books and other literature are rare in her correspondence, in stark contrast to the stream of comments, reviews and recommendations that pepper the letters of her mother, elder sisters and, much later, her niece. Once she had finished her formal education, she seems to have given up books for ever. She had few pretensions to cleverness, but nurtured an acute observer’s eye for the foibles of the world around her. She was a lively and entertaining writer, whose letters are characterised by an Austen-like directness that often leaves behind it a surprisingly tart sting. No one described the boredom of the lives she and her sisters led with more economy or more bite than Mary. And no one was safe from her brusque and unforgiving judgements, not even her much-admired older brothers. ‘Frederick left us on Monday,’ she wrote to the Prince of Wales from Weymouth in 1798; ‘he is grown very fat, but looks well in the face. He does not like to hear that he is fatter, but it is so very visible that I could not help making the remark.’7 Even her father, regarded by her sisters as beyond even the lightest criticism, was not immune. ‘We go two or three times a week to the play,’ she reported to the prince during the same trip. ‘It was pleasant enough, but one may have too much of a good thing, and that is my case in going so often to see a set of very bad actors; however, it amuses the king, and we have nothing to do but submit and admire his being so easily pleased.’8

  For a woman whose beauty was so celebrated, Mary attracted surprisingly little attention from male admirers. She was never the subject of any scandal, and her name was seriously linked with no one except her cousin, the Duke of Gloucester, who was said to have yearned fruitlessly after her since his teens. Others suitors – both legitimate and unsuitable – kept their distance. For all her easy charm, there was a quality in Mary that did not encourage approaches. Her sister Elizabeth once described the natural condition of king’s daughters as ‘noli me tangere’ (‘touch me not’), and it was a prescription Mary seems to have internalised very early in life. Her closest relationships were conducted safely within the confines of the family circle. Like all her sisters, she preserved a special place in her heart for her eldest brother. He was her ‘eau de miel’, whose letters gave her intense and lasting pleasure. ‘Anything from you can create that sensation in my heart, as no one loves you more than she who is now addressing you.’9 He fully reciprocated her admiration. Mary was often regarded as the prince’s favourite sister. He appreciated her beauty and equally admired her sensible, grounded character. ‘Oh, what an angel she is,’ he wrote in 1799, ‘how gifted she is in body and mind by Providence, and what a blessing she is to us all.’10

  As the younger princesses had grown up it was clear that Mary’s deepest bond was with her youngest sister Amelia. Seven years Amelia’s elder, there had always been a hint of the maternal in Mary’s protective affection for the last, and most indulged, of George and Charlotte’s children. Mary’s family nickname – Miny – was a result of Amelia’s toddler attempts to say her sister’s name, and by the time they were adults the pair formed one of the sisterhood’s most resilient and mutually supportive partnerships. Once, when the two women quarrelled, both were bereft. ‘After the number of years we have loved each other, you could not be so blinded or so led away,’ reproached Mary. ‘The more I think of it, the more it hurts me … No one will feel the more mortified to hurt you than I should.’11 The row had arisen from Amelia’s suspicion that Mary had been too accommodating to the queen, too ready to reveal confidences; that she was, in short, ‘Mama’s tool’. Others shared her misgivings in this regard. Princess Elizabeth was reluctant to confess a secret with her sister, ‘for fear of it coming out elsewhere’;12 and Mary’s niece, Princess Charlotte, later described her as ‘too great a repeater’ and ‘the carrier of everything back to the Prince [of Wales] whose great favourite she is’.13 But these criticisms also perhaps reflect Mary’s powerful desire to act as an emollient negotiator between the increasingly bitter factions that divided her family. Not suffering great peaks and troughs of emotion herself, she felt ideally placed to smooth away, as best she could, the disturbing results of intense feelings in others. She once told her eldest brother that it was the object of all the sisters ‘to keep the peace, and when they can do no good
, they will do no harm’.14 It was as good a description as any of her own sense of her role within the complicated and shifting family dynamic.

  If the defining tone of Mary’s outward character was one of calm self-possession, her youngest sister was a far more volatile and forceful personality. As a teenager, the passionate intensity that was to distinguish all Amelia’s actions in later life was largely hidden, shrouded beneath a lazy-eyed, sweet-natured voluptuousness that beguiled those susceptible to her rather ripe appeal. ‘Lovely creature, fine features, melting eyes,’ noted the painter Andrew Robertson, ‘charming figure, dignified, finest hair imaginable.’15 She had none of her sister’s discreet elegance; Amelia was majestic rather than slender, and, thought Mary, ‘promised … to be very large indeed in time’. Fanny Burney, who remembered the toddler Amelia as her father’s indulged favourite, met her again when she visited Windsor in 1798. ‘She is now as tall as Princess Royal,’ she wrote, ‘and as much formed; she looks seventeen, though only fourteen, but has an air of innocence, a Hebe blush, an air of modest candour and a gentleness so caressingly inviting, of voice and eye, that I have seldom seen a more captivating young creature.’16 Neither had Fanny’s four-year-old son Alexander, who had been brought along on the visit and had so far proved embarrassingly resistant to the appeals of the older princesses to play with them. When Amelia entered, it was quite a different story. ‘The child was instantly delighted with her! … She stooped down to take his unresisting hands, and exclaiming “Dear little thing!” took him in her arms, to his own as obvious content as hers. “He likes her!” cried Princess Augusta, “the little rogue! See how he likes her!”’17

  When Fanny met Amelia again, later that year, it was in far less happy circumstances. Amelia had been ‘extremely ill … of some complaint upon the knee, which caused spasms and was most dreadfully painful’. She had been sent to Worthing to try the effects of sea-bathing as a potential cure, and was now on her way home. Fanny, who lived near to where Amelia had broken her journey back to Windsor, visited her. ‘The princess was seated on a sofa in a grey French riding dress, with pink lapels, her beautiful and richly flowing and shining fair locks unornamented.’ She received Fanny ‘with her brightest smile’, but Fanny, who had not forgotten the manners she had learnt at court, at first refused the invitation ‘to come and sit by her’ and ‘drew a chair at a distance’. Only when the princess insisted did Fanny finally agree to come closer, and spent a happy hour exchanging family news. At the end of their meeting, it was very clear that the Worthing cure had not worked. Amelia was unable either to get up or walk, and had to be ‘painfully lifted from her seat’ and carried out. Though she did so ‘with a dignity and self-command extremely striking’, it was plain to the shocked Fanny that she was far from well.18

  Amelia had been a boisterous and healthy child. It was not until 1798, when she was fifteen, that she had the first hints of serious illness. Although it started with an acute pain in her knee, other worrying symptoms soon emerged. She was always tired, and lost her appetite. She was, she wrote to the Prince of Wales from Worthing in August, ‘suffering a great deal’. The strengthening diet that had been prescribed made her ‘very sick, and I confess it was I think owing to eating and drinking the porter, for I could hardly lose the taste of it’.19 In September, the prince was sufficiently worried to travel along the coast from Brighton to visit her. He was not reassured by what he saw there. ‘Her appetite’, he told the queen, ‘is shocking and if she goes to force it at all, her stomach throws up in a short time what she has swallowed.’ As well as the troublesome knee, ‘the smallest touch’ of which gave her ‘the most dreadful agonies’, he was concerned to see that she now had ‘a most dreadful cough’.20

  When she grew no better, more rigorous solutions, aimed at addressing her manifestly deteriorating physical condition, were tried. ‘Since I last had the pleasure of seeing you,’ wrote Amelia to her eldest brother, ‘I have taken two emetics, but I cannot say as yet I find my appetite improved. I have been electrified, which I hope I shall find shall do me a great deal of good, but as yet there is no judging, it is so short a time since I first began it.’21 Dr Thomas Keate, who attended Amelia during her stay at Worthing, hoped that passing an electrical current through her inflamed knee might diminish the pain. When Mary went to visit her sister in October, she saw no improvement. Amelia herself knew she was no better. ‘As to my own sufferings, I find them the same; every little exertion adds a great deal to my pain.’22 In fact, none of the treatments prescribed by Keate could have made the slightest difference to Amelia’s condition. She was suffering from the early stages of tuberculosis, and the pain in her knee resulted from an inflammation of the joint caused by the disease.

  She remained weak and ill throughout 1799, and in the summer was again taken to the sea for the benefit of her health, this time accompanying the rest of the family to Weymouth. There, in August, she at last seemed to improve. This was not, as was later to become so painfully apparent, the complete cure for which everyone had so fervently hoped; the progress of her tuberculosis had been held in check, but the disease had not been eradicated. It would later reappear, with symptoms so sadly familiar to Georgian doctors that there was little doubt about the probable outcome. Yet, for some years, Amelia seemed to recover some of her health, and a good deal of her cheerfulness. She felt well enough to trade gossip again with her eldest brother, the acerbic wit she shared with her sister Mary reappearing along with her health. Her own sufferings had not given her much compassion for her eldest sister, the Princess Royal, whose situation in far-off Württemberg she mercilessly lampooned: ‘Don’t tell, but I hear she is so prodigiously large she can scarcely walk up or downstairs. This is out of compliment, I suppose, to her duke; very romantic, but if I was her, I would not, if I could help it, show my affection in this manner.’23 To the Prince of Wales, she showed a far sweeter, more affectionate face. When, after repeated promptings, he sent her a new dress, which she had insisted ‘I am in great want of’, she was touchingly grateful: ‘The beautiful gown … arrived this morning; it made me particularly happy, since it showed you sometimes thought of me, even when I was not with you.’24

  Throughout her illness, Amelia’s affection for her generous and entertaining eldest brother grew more and more heartfelt. During her long stay at Worthing, she had little direct contact with her parents; it was the Prince of Wales who visited her, and kept her cheerful with ‘perfect and kind’ letters that raised her spirits and made her laugh. Gradually, the prince came to dominate the landscape of Amelia’s emotions, edging out other, more distant familial figures. He was twenty-one years older than Amelia, and increasingly seemed more like a father to her than her real, much-respected but increasingly remote parent. She made her own reading of their relationship very clear, signing one of her letters to the prince as ‘your own child (meaning myself)’.25 A year later she again assured the prince, ‘you know, I have always been so vain as to consider myself as your child’.26 For the rest of her life, this was the signature with which she concluded all her correspondence with George. He was the only one of her male relations she really trusted, and to him alone she poured out all the feelings for which she found no expression elsewhere.

  Sometimes, the strength of her affection for her eldest brother was expressed in terms that mirrored in their intensity the language of romantic love. ‘No words can express half how dearly I love you,’ she assured him in 1801, ‘or how vain I am of the place I have in your heart. If you ever changed towards me, it would break my heart.’27 Her love for her parents, whilst always dutifully observed, was described in far cooler terms. ‘I think dearest Mama pretty well,’ she wrote on Christmas Day, 1799. ‘How great has been her affection and kindness for me, and indeed, how grateful I ought to be, and indeed, am, in having always such a model before my eyes.’28 Her mother and father were examples to be admired; but for unconditional affection and liveliness she had learnt to look elsewhere. Amelia’s little w
orld had long since ceased to revolve around her parents.

  The queen was not unaware of this. She recognised that with her younger daughters she had never quite achieved the emotional ascendancy she still preserved with the senior princesses. She also suspected that, of all her girls, it was Amelia who had travelled furthest from her influence. She was later to attribute this to ‘the indulgence you have met with through a long series of ill health, which both affection and humanity led myself and those about you to yield to at that time, and which none of your sisters were ever allowed to enjoy’.29 Charlotte saw correctly that there was a steeliness in Amelia, fostered in those years when she was freer than any of her other daughters to shape the world around her to suit her own tastes. But it was not from Amelia that the first challenge to the precarious status quo of royal respectability was to come; it was from her older sister, Sophia.

  *

  With the possible exception of Augusta, who as a grown woman seems deliberately to have turned as blank a face as possible to the world, Sophia was the most elusive of the sisterhood. As she grew older she had become increasingly withdrawn. The fifth daughter, she sat almost invisibly between the classically perfect Mary and the statuesque Amelia. At first glance, she lacked in every way the immediacy of their impact. She was small, delicate and extremely short-sighted, ‘as to be almost blind’.30 The queen had given Sophia permission to wear spectacles in public, but the princess, as self-conscious and embarrassed about her sight as Elizabeth was about her weight, refused to do so. She would not even put them on to go to the theatre ‘for fear of some paragraph in the paper’. Her sister Augusta was airily dismissive. ‘Well, I ask her, what can they say? That the Princess Sophia wears spectacles. Well, and what harm can that do her? Would it not be better they should say it than she should lose all sight of the performers?’31 Sophia was never one to relish bravura displays of defiance; shy and uncomfortable in the glare of public attention, she much preferred the privacy of her own rooms.