In the event, neither proved possible, not least because the boy’s proud father insisted on displaying his son to the fascinated gaze of the public at every opportunity. The general’s country house was not far from Weymouth, and young Tom Garth was frequently to be seen playing on the sands there, even when the royal family were visiting the resort. This was very painful for Sophia, as she confessed in a letter of 1805. Writing to her friend Mrs Villiers, she lamented the general’s insensitivity in placing her son so visibly before her. It would, she said, be ‘very desirable’ if ‘some check could be put to the odd conduct of a certain person’, but admitted that ‘that person is very difficult to manage, and thus I have more than once endeavoured to point out to him how ill-judged it was … allowing the younger object to be with him’. It is apparent from the tone of the letter that Sophia’s affair with Garth was now over. It also contains the clearest possible acknowledgement that she was indeed the mother of ‘the younger object’, even though she was powerless to admit to the relationship publicly. ‘All my entreaties proved useless, and I merely received a cold answer that it was selfish, and that I could not pretend affection as I had never expressed a desire of seeing what God knows was out of my power. This wounded me beyond measure, for my conduct too plainly showed that I am not selfish.’
It was possible for a bachelor general to brave the stares of the curious and raise his son with pride, but it was inconceivable for an unmarried princess to do the same. Whatever her feelings, Sophia could never behave as if she was the child’s mother; this made the situation Garth had so thoughtlessly created intolerable to her. ‘I own to you that what hurt me more was the indelicacy this year of knowing it so near me, and that I could never go through the town without the dread of meeting what would have half killed me, had I met it.’ Compelled to be near a son whom she could never recognise, to catch sight of a child in whose life she could have no part, there was nothing she could do but ‘try in my poor way, to serve what I must ever feel an instinct and an affection for’.59
It is hard to imagine a sadder predicament than the one in which Sophia found herself. She knew now that all hopes of future settlement for her were at an end: ‘I never could answer it to myself to marry without candidly avowing all that has passed.’ She later confessed to Mrs Villiers that there was ‘one love to whom I am not indifferent’ and with whom she thought she could have been happy, but she knew that such an outcome was now impossible. ‘I feel that, did he but know the full content of this story, he might think me very unworthy of him; and how could I blame him? For I know too well that I have lost myself in the world by my conduct, and, alas, have felt it humbly, for many, many have changed towards me.’60 Weighed down by unhappiness, Sophia retreated into her rooms and saw no company. ‘I live away from everybody,’ she wrote in 1805; ‘I find silence in the situation in which I am placed the best thing, for as to one person who does understand me, hundreds don’t, and to a feeling heart, it chills and kills you.’61 She wished she could take upon herself the sorrows that she saw afflict her friends. Unlike them, she now had nothing to lose. ‘For me, it would be of no consequence, having no home, nor no blessings of husband and family.’62
In her miserable state, the best Sophia could hope for was to achieve a resigned acceptance of her fate; and there were times when it looked as though she had done so. When Glenbervie sat next to her at dinner in 1810, he was impressed by her air of self-effacement. ‘The Princess Sophia, if a sinner, has the demeanour of a very humble and repentant one. She has something very attentive, kind and even affectionate in her demeanour.’63 But his fleeting sympathy did nothing to quell his appetite for gossip about her, and he soon had something extraordinary to record in his diary: ‘The Duke of Kent tells the Princess [of Wales] that the father is not Garth, but the Duke of Cumberland. How horrid.’64 (Ernest, the king and queen’s fifth son, was created Duke of Cumberland in 1799.) In fact, Glenbervie had heard this story before, as early as 1804. It was the Princess of Wales, Glenbervie records, who ‘told Lady Sheffield the other day that there is great reason to suspect the father to be the Duke of Cumberland. How strange and how disgusting. But it is a very strange family, at least the children – sons and daughters.’65
The rumour that Sophia’s brother Ernest was the true father of her child was to haunt both of them for the rest of their lives. Over thirty years after the disputed event, gossip which had simmered away for years, whispered behind hands at dinners and card parties, finally exploded into a public scandal. With the general long dead, Tom Garth was encouraged to put pressure on the royal family, in an attempt to recover his ‘rights’. He wanted an income sufficient to pay his extensive gambling debts, and hinted at the possibility of exposure if no cash was forthcoming. His inept and ineffective attempts at blackmail succeeded only in reviving rumours that he was not the general’s son at all. The newspapers fell on the story with hungry enthusiasm, and Sophia found herself once again the focus of crude speculation about the paternity of her unacknowledged son.
Glenbervie – who, over the years, eagerly chronicled every version of the scandal that came his way – summarised the essence of the rumour with brisk economy. The Duke of Cumberland ‘called upon her when she was in bed with a cold, took advantage of the family temperament in her, and without her having a very precise idea what had happened, got her with child’.66 The narrative was identical to that which had been used to explain Sophia’s liaison with Garth. It was a story of opportunity seized, of ignorance exploited, and repressed passion overwhelming prudence.
Most of those who gave credence to the accusation probably responded much as Glenbervie did, with a mixture of horror and curiosity. Incest was clearly and unequivocally a sin, but it was one which exerted a particular power of fascination in eighteenth-century culture. It featured prominently in the immensely popular Gothic novels of the period, where it operated both to drive plots and provide a frisson of shock amongst readers. Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother, which had so repulsed Fanny Burney when she was asked to assess its suitability as royal reading matter, was entirely typical of its genre in allowing the forbidden liaison to develop as a result of hidden or disguised identities, which meant neither protagonist was aware of their genuine relationship to the other. Some romantic observers justified the rumoured connection between Ernest and Sophia by passing it through exactly such a fictional prism.
Elizabeth Ham, who wrote her memoirs after ‘the shocking story’ of the royal brother and sister had become the subject of public speculation, was sure she had seen evidence of their closeness back in Weymouth in the fateful year of 1800. Elizabeth – along with all her female friends and relations – was certain Sophia had been delivered of a child during the summer, and had at first concluded that the princess must have been secretly married before the birth. Then, she later asserted, doubts arose in her mind once the Duke of Cumberland arrived in the resort. She noticed that the princess was often to be seen leaning on his arm. She saw the couple visit the Sharland family together, and watched as the contested baby boy was shown to them at the door. ‘Her brother must know of the marriage and is a good friend of the husband, thought I.’ But as she herself tellingly noted, Elizabeth was ‘soon obliged to weave another framework for my romance’. She was watching when the Duke of Cumberland met his sister as she disembarked from the royal yacht; he ‘seized on the Princess Sophia, and kissed her, then drew his arm through hers and conducted her on shore’. Elizabeth was sure there could be only one explanation for such behaviour. She concluded, as the plot of so many novels had encouraged her to do, that the duke ‘was not really the son of the king and queen, but of some foreign potentate, who, for political reasons, they had brought up as their own’.67
It helped that Sophia seemed, in many ways, the very image of the Gothic heroine: fragile, innocent and abused. It was far less disturbing to consider her as the victim of male passion, rather than a willing partner in love. General Garth was past middle age a
nd plain, with no hint of mystery or intrigue about him; the relationship which genuinely resulted in the birth of Tom Garth was, to many observers, so much less exciting than rumours of an incestuous union.
The resilience of the story linking Sophia and Ernest did not solely stem from the dark appeal of a transgressive scandal, however. It was also actively disseminated from within the royal family itself, giving it a credibility it would otherwise have lacked. Many of the stories about the duke and princess can be traced back to the extravagantly imaginative Caroline, Princess of Wales. Lady Glenbervie was a member of her household, and a great deal of Lord Glenbervie’s scurrilous gossip was based on what he heard at the princess’s table at Blackheath. Not everything Caroline said was wrong; but as she found herself marginalised by the hostility of the Prince of Wales, her desire to shock the narrow sensibilities of his female relations became increasingly marked. Wildly inventive about her own emotional life – which had by then become baroque in its complications – she was always ready to seek out the shameful secrets of others. If she did not create the rumours, she certainly seems to have made sure they were well circulated.
Finally, there was the issue of Ernest himself. By the time stories of an incestuous connection with his sister began to be murmured abroad, the prince’s reputation was so black that any accusation levelled at seemed felt credible. From his earliest days, George and Charlotte’s fifth son was always to be found in close connection to trouble. Even as a small boy, he was considered the most intemperate of the royal children – noisy, boisterous and uninhibited. He was much loved by his governess, the redoubtable Mrs Cheveley, who admired his high spirits, referred to him indulgently as ‘my boy’, and stoutly defended him against the disapproval of the other staff; but his parents were less sympathetic and, like his younger brothers, he was shipped across to Germany at an early age to have his high spirits quashed and to learn to become a soldier. He was eventually commissioned into the Hussars, where he cut a good figure on a horse; he was over six feet tall and, unlike most of his family, slim and taciturn, with brooding good looks. He loved the army life, and fought bravely in the early days of the French revolutionary wars. He was involved in hand-to-hand combat, writing to his father that in one encounter, he had been forced to kill a man. Later, his face was injured by a cannonball, which resulted in a severe and lasting disfigurement. His left eye was ‘shockingly sunk and has an amazing film grown over it’, reported the Prince of Wales to the queen.68
As well as his bravery, in other respects he was a typical soldier, swearing and drinking to excess. Mrs Harcourt, the wife of his commander, and sister-in-law to the queen’s best friend, tried to see the best in the young man, but even she found her affection for him tested by his uncontrolled conduct. On campaign with her husband in northern France, she and Ernest visited a convent together. It was not a success. ‘I had some difficulty in endeavouring to make him behave well. He would kiss the abbess and talk nonsense to the poor nuns. I know a thousand good traits of his heart,’ she wrote sadly, but now even she reluctantly concluded that he was ‘too wild for England’.69
Ernest was desperate to come home to recuperate after his injury. He petitioned the king for years before he was finally granted grudging permission to return. As Mrs Harcourt had foreseen, Ernest did not fit into the decorous life of his parents’ court, and was soon bored and resentful. In 1797, Fanny Burney encountered him haunting the corridors of St James’s with a disconcerting intensity. Fanny was chatting to Princess Augusta whilst she dressed to go to the theatre, when she noticed Ernest’s silent arrival at the door of the apartment. ‘A tall, thin young man appeared at it, peeping and staring, but not entering. “How do you do Ernest?” cried the princess. “I hope you are well; only pray do shut the door.” He did not obey, nor move, either forward or backward, but kept peeping and peering. She called to him again, beseeching him to shut the door; but he was determined first to gratify his curiosity, and when he had looked for as long as he thought pleasant he entered the apartment.’ By then Augusta had lost patience and told Ernest that she would see him at the play that night. ‘He then marched out, finding himself so little desired, and only said, “No you won’t, I hate the play.”’70
It was this sort of unsettling behaviour that made people talk, and made the princesses treat him with wariness. In 1794, Sophia had written to Lady Harcourt about ‘dear Ernest’, whom she insisted was ‘as kind to me as is possible, rather a little imprudent at times, but when told of it, never takes it ill’.71 What form his ‘imprudence’ took is not alluded to. Over a decade later, Amelia assured the Prince of Wales that she would not receive Ernest in her rooms without company. ‘I am grieved to think there should be a necessity for avoiding being left alone, but I fully understand and you may depend on my remembering your kind injunctions on this subject.’72 The prince was at that point engaged in one of his periodic quarrels with Ernest, so it is possible that his real concern was to prevent Amelia being dragged into their disagreement; but he argued with most of his brothers at one time or another, and never sought to stop them seeing any of his sisters in private. Clearly, Ernest was considered to pose a different kind of threat. The prince’s daughter, Charlotte, certainly found him a sinister figure. She had nothing but contempt for her uncle, whom she described as ‘pest to all society’, ‘a bird of the most fatal omen’, and ‘at the bottom of all evil’. She disliked ‘his indecent jokes’ and deplored his language as ‘not of the choicest kind’. He was, she said, hated by her aunts, who dreaded his periodic visits to Windsor. ‘I must say, he has no heart nor honour,’ she concluded, ‘but a deep, dark, vindictive and malicious mind, brooding over mischief and always active in pursuit of everything that is bad.’73
In later life, Ernest was involved in fiercely contested adultery cases and accusations of physical assault. In 1810, he was badly injured in what appeared to be an attempt by his valet to murder him in his bed; the motives suggested for the attack ranged from jealousy at an affair Ernest was alleged to be having with the valet’s wife, through to the man’s angry rejection of the prince’s homosexual advances. Ernest was a character around whom a whiff of violence and deceit persistently hovered, and the sheer scale of his alleged misdeeds made it easy to believe the worst about him. However, it seems that in the case of young Tom Garth’s parentage, Ernest was almost certainly innocent of the charges levelled against him. Sophia’s own testimony suggests that she was both Garth’s lover and the mother of his child, and that the general’s proudly declared paternity was in fact wholly justified.
*
Whilst Amelia and Sophia spent months in the sickroom, and the Prince of Wales was frequently felled by disabling attacks of gout or stomach pain, their father, who turned sixty in June 1798, seemed to march stoically onwards. For almost a decade he had enjoyed better health than many of the younger members of his family. He had been a prominent actor in what he called ‘the active theatre of the world’ for over forty years, and had seen his reputation shift profoundly during that time.
For the first half of his reign, he had enjoyed only sporadic periods of popularity. His early connection with the much-disliked Bute, his eager support of the governmental attacks on the radical John Wilkes, and his unsuccessful prosecution of the war with America meant that for many years George struggled to win the hearts and minds of many of his subjects. All this had changed in 1788/89, when there was a genuine upsurge in affection for him at the time of his recovery from his disabling illness. He was by then a familiar figure, having been on the throne for nearly three decades; the brief possibility of his being replaced by his unsatisfactory son no doubt helped make his solid if unexciting virtues seem even more appealing. These warmer feelings had been intensified by the opening scenes of the French Revolution, which made many of the liberal, propertied classes reconsider where their loyalties lay, as the foundations of the old order were overturned throughout Europe. Edmund Burke was not alone in deciding he preferred to live
with the shortcomings of a constitutional monarchy rather than expose himself to the unpredictable and violent upheavals of early republican government.
But for those who held on to their beliefs in the revolutionary origins of English liberty, and especially for those encouraged by events in France to claim new rights for themselves, George appeared a far less benevolent figure. He was opposed to all calls for constitutional change for which political reformers campaigned, and had no desire to see the franchise either rationalised or extended. He keenly supported the measures William Pitt introduced to combat the looming threat of popular disorder, provoked by a succession of bad harvests and the expensive and ineffective prosecution of a war in which it seemed impossible to land a decisive, knockout blow. In 1797, a serious naval mutiny at the bases of Spithead and the Nore seemed, albeit briefly, to compromise the military effectiveness of the nation’s most important fighting force. In the same year, a financial crisis led to the collapse of the gold standard, and the introduction of a paper currency. In 1799, income tax was introduced for the first time, in the face of great discontent from those obliged to pay it. These were perhaps some of the most dangerous and unsettling years of George’s reign. Whilst he benefited from the support of those who preferred the stability of the old order to the challenges of the new, the nature and character of politics changed hugely during these years.
The Strangest Family Page 65
