The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  The inquiry ‘into the Conduct of Her Majesty Highness the Princess of Wales’ was carried out at the behest of the Prince of Wales into allegations that his wife was guilty of adultery with a number of men; it also enquired into rumours that William Austin, a young boy whom the princess raised at her house at Blackheath, was in fact her illegitimate son. The ministers who conducted the procedure eventually concluded that William Austin was not the princess’s child, but that her behaviour was in all other respects far from satisfactory. One of her footmen told the investigators succinctly that ‘the princess was very fond of fucking’.74 Among the men named as her possible lovers were the politician George Canning, the artist Thomas Lawrence (who painted the most flattering of all Caroline’s portraits, showing her resplendent in a red velvet dress) and the naval hero Sir Sydney Smith.

  None of this proved enough to secure for the Prince of Wales the divorce he longed for, but it did empower him to limit the princess’s access to their young daughter to once a week. As her father rarely visited, Charlotte’s closest relationships were with her governess Lady Elgin and her dresser, Mrs Gagarin, for whom her affection was said to be ‘like that of a child for its mother’.75 The Princess Royal wrote regularly to Lady Elgin from Germany, offering lengthy, well-intentioned advice on Charlotte’s upbringing. Inevitably, her moral development was at the forefront of Royal’s concern. She was convinced the chief objective of her education must be the eradication of any tendencies to vanity, ‘which is a little in her blood, as you know full well’.76 She suggested as a corrective ‘a selection of interesting stories in which humility and goodness of heart’ prevailed.77 Perhaps to add a little pleasure to this rather starchy diet, she also recommended Mme de Beaumont’s Magasin des enfants, which she recalled having read under her mother’s direction when she was small.

  In the schoolroom, Charlotte displayed a quick and energetic mind. Although she never really acquired the habit of concentrated study, she learnt to read early and, like her father, displayed a natural aptitude for both music and languages (although to the disappointment of her grandmother, she never really mastered German). In common with most of her female relations, she was a voracious reader of novels. She shared her father’s and aunt Sophia’s gift for mimicry, but like so many of the Brunswick family, suffered from a painful stammer which grew worse when she was nervous or excited. Her spelling was very poor, littered with errors ‘a common servant would have blushed to commit’. She was very well informed about British history – at least as seen through the prism of the Whig Party, the Prince of Wales having taken pains to ‘instil into the mind and heart of my daughter the knowledge and love of the true principles of the British Constitution’, using as a ‘model for study, the political conduct of my most revered and lamented friend, Mr Fox’.78 Her mathematics, like her spelling, was undistinguished.

  The patchy nature of Charlotte’s education reflected the lack of steady supervision in her early life. As a child, she rarely encountered a will of equal determination to her own. Lady Charlotte Campbell, one of the Princess of Wales’s long-suffering ladies, acknowledged that Charlotte ‘has quickness, both of fancy and penetration’ and that she was ‘kind-hearted, clever and enthusiastic’; but, she added, ‘I fear that she is capricious, self-willed and obstinate. Her faults have evidently never been checked, nor her virtues fostered.’79 George Keppel, the 6th Earl of Albemarle, knew her very well when they were growing up. His grandmother, Lady de Clifford, was appointed as Charlotte’s second governess, and on Saturdays Charlotte was allowed to visit the Keppel mansion in Earls Court, where she seemed to Keppel ‘like a bird released from a cage’. Her spirits were always boisterously high. As soon as she arrived she would dash to the kitchens; once she persuaded the cook to let her prepare a mutton chop for the duchess’s lunch. It was not a success, ‘so ill-dressed and so peppered as to be uneatable’.80 In the gardens, she would entice Keppel’s younger sisters to the top of a grassy mound ‘in order to roll them down into a bed of nettles below’. If they were brave enough not to cry, she would reward each of them with a doll.81 Charlotte was generous to Keppel – she gave him his first pony, and sent him back to school at Westminster each term with extra pocket money, which made him her devoted admirer for years. But for all his appreciation of her kindness, he thought his friend was often too uncontrolled and ‘free in her deportment’. She was also sometimes ‘excessively violent in her disposition’, once beating him with her riding whip. She was a fearless rider, happier in the stables than in a drawing room, enjoying the company of her grooms. She liked male company, and had acquired some masculine habits. ‘One of her fancies’, Keppel recalled, ‘was to ape the manners of a man. On these occasions, she would double her fist and assume a defence that would have done credit to a professional pugilist.’82 Hers was not a delicate or conventionally feminine character. She was said to walk with a determined and forceful stride, and she spoke more loudly and directly than was considered polite for an aristocratic young woman.

  Charlotte was too much of a Hanoverian to be considered classically beautiful. Like her father and grandfather, she struggled with her weight. At fifteen, Lady Charlotte Campbell thought her ‘extremely full for her age’ and worried that her ‘voluptuous’ looks would be lost to ‘fat and clumsiness’ unless she took a great deal of exercise.83 In her bluntness, as well as in her size, she somewhat resembled her aunt Elizabeth – although no girl brought up under the queen’s unforgiving eye would have been allowed to behave as Charlotte did. Lady Glenbervie, meeting her one night, found her ‘forward, dogmatical on all subjects, buckish about horses and full of exclamations very like swearing. She was sitting with her legs stretched out after dinner, and showing her drawers, which it seems she and most young women wear.’84

  Across the North Sea, the Princess Royal fretted about her niece, wondering anxiously how this clever, perceptive child would react when old enough to understand how much her parents hated each other. Royal was right to be concerned. Charlotte was soon only too aware of the hostility which blazed so rancorously between the prince and princess. Much of the ‘nervousness’ which observers commented upon as one of the defining attributes of her character arose from conflicted loyalties towards her mother and father that troubled her for the rest of her life. As each placed the worst possible interpretation on the actions of the other, it was not surprising that their daughter responded to any perceived slight in the same painfully hysterical way. When she was only nine years old, the Princess of Wales passed by her daughter in her carriage without acknowledging her. Charlotte rushed home and wrote a furious letter in which she declared her mother was ‘a monster’, and ‘struck her pen a great many times against the paper, saying, “This I do to show how many devils there were that took hold of her!”’85 When she was older, she tried to extend to her mother a sympathy that neither of her parents, absorbed in their mutual hatred, ever troubled to offer their daughter. On the whole, she thought the princess was more sinned against than sinning, although she conceded she was no saint. ‘My mother was wicked,’ Charlotte famously concluded, ‘but she would not have turned out so wicked if my father had not been much more wicked still.’86 ‘The truth is,’ she later reflected, ‘I believe her to be both a very unhappy and a very unfortunate woman, who has great errors, great faults, but really is oppressed and cruelly used.’87

  However, as she grew older, Caroline’s increasingly irrational and outrageous behaviour made it harder and harder for her daughter to hold on to the respect she longed to feel for her. Caroline’s house was full of raffish men, the nature of whose relationship with her was the subject of scandalous public speculation. Her attitude to her husband was one of extravagant, even baroque, disdain. One of her ladies described how, after dinner, it was the princess’s custom to make a wax figure of the prince ‘and give it the amiable addition of three horns; then take three pins out of her garment, and stick them through, and then put the figure to roast in the fire’.88 (The ho
rns were the traditional emblem of the cuckold.) Her father hardly set a better example of parental responsibility. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he refused to allow Charlotte to live with her mother, and, once she was out of the schoolroom, established her in Warwick House, a rather gloomy building adjacent to his own London base at Carlton House. But close proximity did not mean he saw very much of her. He did not invite Charlotte to any of the social events he held there, and when he was away barely found time to write to her. When he did pick up his pen, his daughter knew him well enough to distrust what she accurately described as his ‘sugary’ style. It was, she said, ‘all but des phrases without any meaning’. On his rare visits, he spent most of the time regaling her with denunciations of her mother’s behaviour. His unpredictable moods disturbed her. Sometimes his mere presence was enough to bring on the stutter that plagued her. ‘His visits strike a damp and create fears long after they are over,’ she confessed, ‘and I fancy evils that do not exist.’89 Even the queen, who noticed how Charlotte ‘seems very strongly to feel any apparent neglect’, was aware how badly the Prince of Wales managed his daughter, and begged him to reconsider the way he treated her. He should call upon her more frequently, and take the trouble to display more of his famous charm when he did so. ‘From the bottom of my heart, do I wish that she should connect with her filial duty a sincere friendship for you, which may be gained by seeing a little more of her, and by making her look upon you as the source of every amusement and pleasure granted to her,’ she told him.90

  The prince ignored his mother’s good advice. He still declined to invite Charlotte to dinners and balls at Carlton House – she had to have them described to her by others – and snubbed her in public when he thought she had shown too much favour to her mother, refusing to speak to her or turning his back upon her. It was difficult for him to see in his daughter anything but ammunition to fuel the war he waged against his wife. He once complained to the author Cornelia Knight, who for a time was the queen’s literary adviser, of ‘the little regard the Princess of Wales had shown for the Princess Charlotte when she was a child, and how by her negligence, there was a mark of the smallpox on her nose, having left her hands at liberty; whereas he used to watch continually by her cradle’.91 Not surprisingly, Charlotte came to distrust all manifestations of her parents’ erratic and self-interested demonstrations of feeling towards her, telling Miss Knight that their ‘unfortunate quarrels with each other rendered their testimonies of affection to her at all times precarious’.92

  Against such a background, it had proved impossible to instil in Charlotte the powerful combination of awe and respect for her parents that had acted so significantly upon the minds of her aunts. The first major clash with her family took place in 1812, and was triggered by the political manoeuvrings of her father. When the restrictions on the prince’s regency were lifted, it was assumed that he would dismiss the Tory ministers appointed by his father before his final illness and call into office the Whigs who had been his friends and supporters all his life. To everyone’s surprise – including the ministers themselves, who had fully expected to be turned out – he decided instead to retain the existing administration. It was said that he had been persuaded to do so by Halford, who told him the knowledge of a change of government would probably kill the king, if he were ever to recover. The regent’s decision caused outrage amongst his erstwhile supporters, who considered he had betrayed a lifetime’s political principles. Few disapproved of his actions more than his daughter. ‘Is it not too clear,’ she wrote indignantly, ‘that he has given up friends, party, promises, professions and everything? … All these things must make good Whigs tremble – but not give up, as the motto must be perseverance.’93 Charlotte was indeed as good a Whig as the regent had been himself in his youth. ‘God knows,’ she wrote, ‘I hope we shall never sink into a tyrannical government such as in the time of Henry 8th and the unfortunate but misguided and grossly blinded Charles the 1st.’ At another point she called herself ‘a decided Jacobin’.94 Fearing that his daughter’s very obvious disavowal of an already controversial action could only make his position more exposed, in the spring of 1812 the regent sent her to spend six months at Windsor, where he hoped she would repent of her unfortunately expressed opinions.

  He also forbade her to see her closest friend, whom he suspected – with some justification – of encouraging Charlotte’s opposition sympathies. Mercer Elphinstone was indeed an outspoken and committed Whig. A wealthy heiress in her own right and the daughter of a highly regarded admiral, she was twenty-three and the princess fifteen when they became friends. For the next five years, theirs was the single most important relationship in Charlotte’s life. Mercer provided her with the unconditional affection she craved and which was so painfully unforthcoming from anyone else in her family. She was also highly intelligent, and offered Charlotte a great deal of thoughtful advice as she sought to navigate her way through the various ‘difficulties and tracasseries’ that lay in her way. Charlotte’s dependence on Mercer was soon as absolute as her grandfather’s had been on Lord Bute a lifetime ago. In her language to Mercer, Charlotte echoed the willingness with which the king had once gladly submitted to Bute’s guidance, almost celebratory in its deference to a more active, controlling intelligence. Everything she did that turned out well was attributed by Charlotte to the excellence of Mercer’s counsel. ‘May I ever follow those precepts, and may I be able to convince you of that gratitude and affection with which my heart is bound to you.’ Mercer was her guide and mentor in everything she did. ‘I shall regularly transmit to my commander-in-chief my plan of operations, my manoeuvres, my skirmishes, etc. If I win the battle and obtain the flag, I will lay it at your feet, for you gave me yourself my armour.’95

  To be deprived of Mercer’s emotional support was punishment enough for Charlotte; but to be consigned to the tedium of Windsor, with no company but her grandmother and aunts, was worse. Charlotte had always disliked her visits to the castle – ‘heavens, how dull!’ – perhaps because she knew it was used by her father as a form of punishment. Certainly, that was how it felt. ‘I assure you, I hate going there’, she told Mercer. ‘It will be dreadful to be shut up in the evening in the royal menagerie, for the evenings are so short that there is no going out after dinner. So they work without a word being uttered.’ She urged her ‘dearest Mercer’ to ‘take pity on me and write to me whilst au grand couvent’.96

  Exiled to the convent, she was happiest in the company of Sophia, who made great efforts to please her niece. Charlotte found Mary just about bearable, but had no sympathy for ‘the old girls’ – the two eldest princesses still at Windsor – whom she thought ‘very much altered’ for the worse. Augusta was cross, and Elizabeth ‘false and artful’. Elizabeth fully returned her dislike. ‘I am not sorry her visit is over,’ she told Lady Harcourt in October 1811; ‘I do not think her at all improved. Self-opinionated to a great degree and holding every soul as cheap as dirt.’ It was obvious to Elizabeth that her niece ‘in her heart hates being here and she confessed it yesterday saying three days was enough’.97

  Charlotte had few illusions about the miserable and divided state of her family. A short stay at Windsor was enough to make that plain. ‘No family’, she told Mercer, ‘was ever composed of such odd people, I believe, as they all draw their different ways, and there have happened such extraordinary things, that in any other family, either public or private, are never heard of before.’ Just as it had done for the king before her, first-hand experience of acute disharmony persuaded Charlotte that there had to be a better way to manage these things. ‘In so large a family as there happens to be, it is of great consequence to be well together; it is impossible that one can like all the same, or have the same opinion of them all indiscriminately; but yet to keep up appearances and have no wide breaches is what is required.’98

  It is impossible to know what the mature Charlotte might have done with such ideas if she had survived to inherit the crown, but as a te
enage girl, sequestered at Windsor for month after uneventful month, Charlotte’s good intentions crumbled away. She was soon as deeply mired in family conflict as any of her more combative relations. Her anger was most frequently directed at the queen and her daughters, whom she regarded as her gaolers, and whom she thought were determined to belittle and insult her. ‘I have causes every day of being shocked with some fresh proof of bitterness, meanness or ill humour. I am treated very cheaply by them, and they look upon me as but to obey.’ As she complained to Mercer, she had now fallen out with Mary, ‘who is the most violent person I ever saw, as well as Princess Elizabeth. There is but one difference, that the former, being a fool, cannot contrive things so well as the other, who has cleverness and deepness both.’99

  Charlotte was not allowed to leave Windsor until the end of October. The end of her six months of confinement in ‘that infernal dwelling’ was welcomed by all the women of the family, none of whom had found her stay congenial. But the lesson Charlotte drew from her experience was not one that her father would have been pleased to hear. ‘This cannot go on for very long I think,’ she wrote to Mercer. ‘Emancipation cannot be very far away, I trust. It is to that desired point that I look.’100 Soon she would be seventeen. She was convinced that the imminence of adulthood must bring with it ‘my own power, my own account and deed, independent of everyone’. Her father, however, had other ideas. Cornelia Knight, who had recently joined Charlotte’s household, was tapped on the shoulder one night by the regent with a message for his strong-minded daughter. ‘Remember,’ he told her, ‘that Charlotte must lay aside the idle nonsense of believing she has a will of her own; while I live, she must be subject to me, as she is at present, if she were thirty or forty or five and forty.’101 There was, as both Charlotte and Cornelia Knight knew, only one form of release from the authority of a father: replacing it with that of a husband.