The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  For all the hope that radiates from Elizabeth’s letter, it was the last she wrote on the subject of marriage to Louis Philippe. The duke, it seems, lacked Elizabeth’s perseverance. Perhaps he was reluctant to agree to such a potentially open-ended and uncertain engagement; perhaps the complications involved in navigating the provisions of the Royal Marriages Act put him off. Whatever his reasons, he drifted out of Elizabeth’s life with the same vagueness with which he had apparently drifted in. Just over a year after Elizabeth had written to her brother about the legitimacy of any children she might have had with him, in November 1809, the Duke of Orléans married Maria Amalia, the unencumbered daughter of the King of Naples and Sicily. When, against all expectations, Louis became King of France in 1830, it was she and not Elizabeth who became queen.

  Elizabeth had promised her mother that if her marriage plans came to nothing, ‘you shall never see a wry face, and believe me, she never shall, for I have gone on just the same’.158 If she was bitter, she did not show it (she was too well trained for that); but whatever demeanour she felt obliged to adopt publicly, she perhaps drew some private comfort from a relationship which had far deeper roots than the cruelly tantalising encounter with the Duke of Orléans. While the duke was a pragmatic if ultimately flawed marriage prospect, Lord St Helens was the man whom, if she had been free to do so, she would have chosen for a husband.

  Alleyne Fitzherbert, Lord St Helens, was an experienced, highly regarded diplomat who had served in France, Spain and Russia, and a friend of writers, politicians and travellers. Mount St Helens in Washington State was named after him. The king liked him and made him a privy councillor and a Lord of the Bedchamber. Glenbervie, who knew him well, described him as being ‘for several years of the select society at Windsor and the Queen’s House’. He was a rather reluctant courtier, complaining to Glenbervie that he had ‘been in a manner forced to become a Lord of the Bedchamber, which adds nothing to his income’.159 He was a self-contained, sharp-witted man, and an undiplomatic diplomat who was ‘apt to say very blunt things to the different royal personages of the court’. Princess Sophia once asked him to ‘say something to the king which she thought would gratify him’. St Helens stubbornly refused to do so, adding that ‘you know very well he never would hear, and never will hear the truth from anybody’.160 He was said to have treated the Empress of Russia with similar abruptness. She asked him once how well she played whist. ‘Like everyone else,’ he answered. She protested that people had told her that she played rather well. ‘They flatter you,’ he said.161

  His disdain for court life and the directness of his manner must have appealed strongly to Elizabeth, who prized those qualities in herself. He was a man of the world, seventeen years her senior, admired by everyone around her, including her father. It was hardly surprising she found him so attractive. She called him her saint. ‘You know, it is always holiday with me when he is near, for I love him to my heart and must say it,’ she told Lady Harcourt in a long letter. ‘There is no man of my acquaintance I love so well, and his tenderness to me has never varied, and that is a thing I never forget.’ For all her superficial bravado on the subject of men and marriage, Elizabeth was in reality far from confident in her powers of attraction. ‘I am sure I was never, from my earliest days, a person to please men in general, and … if ever I was such a fool and tried to be agreeable, I have often gone to bed thoroughly dissatisfied and displeased with myself.’ With her saint it was different. Secure in his regard, she was able to be herself, shrugging off the part she usually felt obliged by her position in life to adopt. She yearned to see him ‘at all times, hours, minutes, days, nights, etc.’. She was old enough now to appreciate how rare it was to find a man like him: ‘God knows, they are not found often, they are diamonds without flaws.’162

  Elizabeth wrote this at the end of 1808, when she was still hoping that she might marry Orléans. This made no difference at all to what she felt for St Helens, even though she knew it would never end in marriage. Whether she followed her heart or her head, it must have seemed as though the result was always the same – hers were always the wrong lovers.

  Writing to the Prince of Wales in 1810, she tried to be philosophical. ‘The good times not coming, and yet time going on, I fear all my bright castles in the air (which have so entirely failed in this world, and left, I fear, a deep scar not to be effaced, though smothered in my breast) are nearly at an end.’ She hoped she would learn to bear her disappointments with ‘good humour’, and was determined to approach middle age with dignified resignation. If love, marriage and a family were denied to her, she would attempt to find comfort in smaller pleasures. ‘I have been well tried in my spring and summer of life; I expect my autumn and winter to be free from chilling cold and whilst I have kind and good friends, a great chair, a pinch of snuff, a book and a fireside with a kind brother, I think I shall in the end rest very quietly.’163

  *

  Such stoic renunciation would never be Amelia’s way. Beneath her rather dreamy, voluptuous exterior, the youngest of all George and Charlotte’s children concealed a will stronger than any of her sisters, perhaps because she had less experience than they did of being thwarted in her wishes. When she fell in love, she pursued the object of her desire with an intensity that was in the end to consume her.

  She first met Charles Fitzroy in 1800, when she was seventeen. He shared many of the characteristics of the men to whom her sisters were attracted. Like General Garth and Lord St Helens, he occupied a trusted place in the royal household. He too was an equerry and was liked by the king, who seems to have felt at ease in his undemanding company. He was twenty-one years older than Amelia, making him exactly the same age as her idolised eldest brother. But unlike the ‘hard-favoured Garth’, Fitzroy was extremely good-looking. As a young soldier in Germany, he had caught the eye of the susceptible Frederick the Great, who enjoyed the company of attractive young men and ‘the attentions of the veteran monarch to the handsome youth were especially marked’.164 Fitzroy was unmoved by Frederick’s appreciation, or indeed, it seems, by anything very much. He was a decent, good-natured man – ‘we love him for his good affectionate heart and his attachment to his parents’, wrote the Duchess of Brunswick, the king’s sister, who knew him in Germany in 1786 – but he was placid rather than passionate, with a sedate self-containment that revealed little to the world. He was of respectably aristocratic parentage, the second son of Lord Southampton, though allegedly also descended through an illegitimate line from Charles II, which may have added a whiff of the exotic to his otherwise straightforward appeal.

  In 1801, during the regular retreat to Weymouth, Amelia’s health had been poor. When the rest of the family returned to Windsor, it was decided she should stay by the sea to benefit from the fresh air. Miss Gomme, her elderly governess, remained with her, as did Fitzroy, who was charged with overseeing her daily rides. It was perhaps here that their relationship began. When Amelia went back to Windsor in the winter, Fitzroy came too; their rides continued, and it was noticed that he was always her partner at cards. The Princess of Wales, that energetic transmitter of scandal, told Glenbervie that once, when she was at Frogmore, she had seen Amelia and one of her ladies ‘in one of the retired walks’; the lady ‘took a piece of paper from her pocket, wrote something on it and threw it into a hedge or bush near the walk’. After they had gone, the princess picked up the paper, saw the number twelve written on it ‘in large Roman letters’ and put it back. ‘Soon afterwards, General Fitzroy came into that walk, and looking with apparent eagerness on each side, when he came up to the same place, perceived the note and put it in his pocket.’ At supper that night, Amelia insisted that she had a headache and wanted to go to her room, but the princess deliberately kept her talking ‘till considerably past XII o’clock’.165

  By 1803, the attraction between Fitzroy and Amelia was so apparent that Miss Gomme grew alarmed, and begged Amelia to behave more prudently. When this had no effect, the governess went
to the queen, urging her to act to put an end to a relationship she considered damaging to the princess. Amelia was furious, and demanded that her mother dismiss Miss Gomme. In response, Charlotte wrote her daughter a lengthy and circuitous letter, whose principal object seems to have been the avoidance of any further discussion of such a difficult subject. In it, she revealed that she was aware of Amelia’s behaviour, and had already issued warnings intended to put a stop to some of its more obvious public manifestations. There was to be no more dawdling along next to Fitzroy whilst out on horseback, but beyond these remarks, she had little more to say. She refused to consider her daughter’s appeal to send the governess away; Miss Gomme’s ‘motive did her honour, as it was meant to make you sensible of the necessity to watch every step in your conduct’. Nor would she respond to Amelia’s rather petulant demand to cancel her rides if Fitzroy was no longer allowed to accompany her. ‘I am sorry that the request about the riding must also meet with a refusal. This must be done for your health.’ The queen was aware that the sudden discontinuance of her outings would probably give rise to more gossip. She was firmest of all in declaring that no mention of the affair was to reach her father, to whom Amelia had clearly threatened to appeal. ‘To say anything on this subject to the king would expose you more than anything – make him unhappy, and make our home unhappy, and as there is sufficient distress to be found out of doors, there can be no good reason why it should be unnecessarily increased indoors.’166

  At no point did Charlotte mention Fitzroy’s name, or specifically instruct her daughter to stop seeing him. To do so would have been to acknowledge the reality of a relationship she hoped could be wished away. ‘Let it from this moment be buried in oblivion,’ she instructed Amelia forcefully, but her commands did not have the effect that they might have had on her more pliant elder daughters. Amelia’s response, as she told Mary, was uncompromising. ‘I cannot but say I am no longer a child, and though ready to take advice, yet I cannot … submit to government at my age.’167 She was now twenty years old and had no intention of ending her affair with Fitzroy, in whom she was certain she had found the love of her life.

  From the earliest days of their relationship, Amelia was all but overpowered by the strength of her feelings for him. ‘O God, how I do love you! … I live but for you. I love you with the purest affection, the greatest gratitude; I owe you everything. All my happiness and comfort I derive is through you.’168 It was Amelia, always unswerving in her determination to achieve what she wanted, who had begun the affair. ‘I have liked you from the first I sought you,’ she reminded Fitzroy in one letter to him, ‘and Blessed be God – I gained you.’169 None of his letters to her survive, so it is not known how he responded to this avalanche of passion. He did not run away, as he might have done if the situation had been truly intolerable to him; his staying at court, where Amelia’s very visible obsession placed him in a difficult position for the better part of a decade, suggests that he felt something for her in return. Yet nothing about his passive character implies that he could match the fervency of her devotion. His undemonstrativeness sometimes drove her into agonies of anxiety. ‘Don’t be angry, but tell me the truth, I felt as if your manner towards me today still as if you had doubts about me … I think something I did annoyed you last night.’ To be happy, she required repeated proofs of his affection. ‘If you can, give me a kind word or look tonight … look for me tomorrow morning riding … I go to Chapel tomorrow … do sit where I may see you, not as you did last Sunday morning, good God, what I then suffered. Do have your dear hair cut and keep it for me.’170

  She was strongly attracted to Fitzroy, and clearly longed for their relationship to go beyond clandestine meetings in midnight gardens. ‘Oh God, I am almost mad for you, my blessed and most beloved Charles … Oh God, that dear soft face, that blessed sweet breath.’ She promised him that once they were married, she would keep him in bed for a week, ‘the joy would be so great’.171 Yet, for all the undoubted power of Amelia’s feelings, it seems unlikely that they consummated their relationship. ‘Her amours with Fitzroy have long been notorious to the courtiers,’ wrote Glenbervie, ‘but whether carried to the furthest extent seems uncertain.’172 Amelia herself told her friend Mrs Villiers that ‘General Fitzroy was the most noble and honourable of men … and that she never did anything to be ashamed of.’173

  Her lack of shame was in other ways quite remarkable. She wrote to Fitzroy with a candour extraordinary for a woman of her background. With him, there was nothing she would not discuss; even her most intimate bodily difficulties were considered suitable subjects on which to seek his reassurance. In a revealing letter discovered by Flora Fraser, Amelia opened her heart to him about gynaecological problems which were clearly the source of great distress to her. After so much sickness in her teens, she was perhaps used to the close observation of her body, and had become concerned about symptoms in her genitalia. ‘Don’t be angry or shocked, but do you think my spot being out is likely to prevent my having children if I was married to you? And what is its being out owing to? I ask you anything, I say anything to you so don’t be angry.’ She did not want to disgust him, ‘but from all I have suffered in those parts, I have often thought and dreaded having a cancer in my womb’.174 The Princess of Wales told Glenbervie that Amelia’s later illnesses could be traced back to a venereal disease she had contracted whilst convalescing in Worthing in 1798, with the complaint on her knee, where the nephew of her surgeon Keate ‘communicated the infection to her’.175 It seems unlikely that Amelia, who had a high sense of her own status, would have engaged in a sexual relationship with a provincial surgeon’s assistant (and the fact that the Princess of Wales was involved in passing on the story is noteworthy); but the episode may reflect a history of gynaecological difficulties that were not discussed publicly by her doctors.

  Amelia’s frankness, so untypical of the time, was perhaps the result of her conviction that she and Fitzroy were linked by ties so profound that they were not subject to conventional niceties of behaviour. As she assured him, ‘no two ever loved or was as tried as we are, and instead of separating us – which in all others it would – it has bound us tighter and more sacredly together’.176 She was convinced that the strength of their devotion meant that they were married in all but name, insisting that ‘for years I have considered myself his lawful wife’.177 But despite her confidence that their relationship was sanctioned in the eyes of God, she nevertheless yearned for the conventional recognition of the relationship: ‘Marry you, my own dear Angel, I really must and will.’ Sometimes she sought to persuade herself that the formalities of marriage did not matter to her, but this was overshadowed by what she thought was their destiny: ‘O God, why not be together? I pine after my dear Charles more and more every instant … I really must marry you, and though inwardly united, and in reality that is much more than the ceremony, yet that ceremony would be a protection … would to God my own husband and best friend and guardian was here to protect me and assist, as I am sure was destined in heaven, I should have nothing to fear.’178

  Precisely what Amelia had to fear became evident at the end of 1807. Miss Gomme, whose efforts to regulate Amelia’s behaviour towards Fitzroy in 1803 had been so unsuccessful, received a series of anonymous letters accusing her of deliberately ignoring the intimacy between the princess and Fitzroy, which had now become a public scandal. (These letters were eventually revealed to have been written by Lady Georgiana Bulkeley, the ‘Venus’ the king had found so attractive during his illness in 1804.) Panicked, Miss Gomme demanded to see Princess Elizabeth, always regarded as the queen’s de facto secretary, and poured out to her a torrent of pent-up hysteria in which rumour, anxiety and accusation were fairly equally mixed. ‘That there was still time to save Princess Amelia who was all but ruined – all the world talked of Gen FR and Princess Amelia’s behaviour – the queen [had] connived at it, and had sanctioned the promise of marriage the moment the king was dead – that the queen was equally ru
ined.’ When Elizabeth refused to carry such a scandalous account to her mother, Miss Gomme declared that if she would not do so, she would feel it her duty to speak to the king. Shaken, Elizabeth took the story to Charlotte, whose response was ‘outrageous … She thought it the height of infamy to be accused of deceiving the king and ruining her child.’179

  Amelia was horrified when told what had happened by her brother, Frederick, Duke of York; but she was also perhaps secretly relieved at having matters in the open at last. When Amelia told him that she considered herself married to Fitzroy, the duke replied that he thought ‘a time will come when you may do as you please, and the queen will be your friend, but don’t say so, all this has offended her very much, her being said to have deceived the king’.180 In fact, Frederick’s assessment of his mother’s state of mind was far too optimistic. If Charlotte had ever been prepared to turn a blind eye to Amelia’s affair until the king’s death made marriage a possibility, she would have done so only if it were conducted with sufficient discretion to allow her to maintain a studious public ignorance of the true facts. The anonymous letters sent to Miss Gomme, together with her terrified and outspoken response to them, made such tactical unknowing on Charlotte’s part unsustainable.

  A bright light had been shone on to things best kept hidden, and the queen was forced into action. She wrote a letter to Amelia intended to put an end to any glimmers of hope she might have mistakenly entertained about future possibilities. ‘You are now beginning to enter into the years of discretion and will, I do not doubt, see how necessary it is to SUBDUE every passion in the beginning, and to consider the impropriety of indulging any impression which must make you miserable and be a disgrace to yourself and a misery to all who love you.’ Had the king known of what had passed, ‘he would have been rendered miserable for all his life and I fear it would create a breach in the whole family’.181 It was a bleak message, but a clear one. Whilst the king lived, Amelia must give up all thoughts of marriage to Fitzroy and abandon any idea of an informally acknowledged engagement.