On Boxing Day 1814, driven perhaps by a combination of remorse, anger at her mother’s selfishness, and gratitude for the kind treatment she had received from her relations at Windsor, Charlotte related to the regent and Princess Mary a story which horrified them. So disturbed were they by her account that the regent asked his sister to make a record of the conversation, which she did the next day. Charlotte began by admitting that ‘she had witnessed many things in her mother’s rooms which she could not repeat’. She went on to tell them about her relationship with her cousin, Captain Hesse, and to describe in detail her mother’s strange role in it, somewhere between that of an indulgent go-between and a pimp. Charlotte had met Hesse at her mother’s house, ‘and had had interviews with him there with the Princess of Wales’s knowledge and connivance, as the princess used to let him into her apartment’. The princess had done more than allow the young couple a place to meet. She actively encouraged them to take advantage of it. ‘She then left them together in her own bedroom and turned the key on them saying “A present, je vous laisse, amusez vous.”’ (‘There, I leave you to it, have fun.’) Charlotte was appalled at the very recollection of it. ‘God knows what would have become of me if he had not behaved with so much respect to me.’ The regent was convinced his wife had intended to disgrace Charlotte in order to embarrass him. Charlotte found her mother’s motives impenetrable, observing poignantly ‘that she never could make out whether Captain Hesse was her own lover or her mother’s’.128
Although Charlotte told Mary that ‘her mind was greatly relieved once she had told all she had on her mind to her father’, she knew there would be consequences. Perhaps hoping to pre-empt any decision from the regent, she had come to her own conclusions about what to do next. She had decided that the only way to escape from the unpleasant situation in which she found herself was to marry. Plagued and harassed by unsuitable men, and disappointed by the apparent indifference of the one man she cared for, she now saw an arranged alliance as the best way out of her difficulties. As she anticipated, her father had come to a similar decision, but Charlotte was horrified to discover that he was considering a revival of the Orange engagement. Panicked, she wrote to him begging for it not to be thought of again. ‘I think I cannot be too plain in humbly stating my strong and fixed aversion to match with a man for whom I can never feel those sentiments of regard which are surely so necessary to a matrimonial connexion.’129 The regent’s reply was a chilly statement of the foundations upon which royal marriages were traditionally based and an admonition that she resign herself to them. ‘We cannot marry like the rest of the world, for both our elevated rank and our religion limit our choice to few indeed … matrimonial connexions must be guided by a superior sense of the duty we owe to the country, and if we are so far fortunate as to be allied to virtue, it is proved by experience that the comfort of a matrimonial union will follow in a reasonable degree, as to render life comfortable.’130 Ignoring the example of his own unconsidered and disastrous match, which displayed none of the compensating qualities he now urged his daughter to fix her eyes upon, he advised her to ‘conquer her prejudices’ against the Orange marriage, as it was the only respectable choice open to her now.
A few days later, the queen asked Charlotte what response she had received from the regent to her letter. ‘When I told her it was not quite what I could have wished or hoped for, she instantly said, “That is very bad indeed,” and there followed a silence of ten minutes.’ But no one could have anticipated the queen’s reaction when Charlotte read to her what her father had written. ‘She was deeply overcome, and she wept, which is very uncommon for her. She was very affectionate to me, implored me on her knees not to marry ever a man I did not like, that it would be endless misery, that she was not going to encourage me in disobeying my father’s wishes, but in what so wholly concerned my earthly happiness and wellbeing, I had a right to have my own opinion, and by it to be firm.’ It was an extraordinary outburst. In a few sentences, the queen repudiated almost all the principles by which she had conducted her entire adult life. It was a plea for the primacy of affection over duty, for the value of happiness over resignation and for the rights of daughters over the authority of fathers. It was a defence of her granddaughter which she had never mounted for her own daughters. ‘She wished me well out of it, that I might be assured that her opinion was from the first against its ever being urged again, that such it was and such, I might depend, it would remain, and that if the Prince Regent gave her any opportunity to speak, she would stand up for me.’131
In fact Charlotte had already decided on a different method of combating her father’s last-ditch attempt to force the Prince of Orange on her. She had found another candidate as a husband.
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She had met Leopold of Saxe-Coburg when he was in London in 1814 for the victory celebrations. He had very little to recommend him in terms of power and money – his family’s territories were small, he was virtually penniless, and he was not even the eldest son – but he was tall, handsome (‘extremely prepossessing in his figure’, Charlotte observed) and, unlike Augustus Frederick, eminently respectable and not entangled with other women. She had been brooding on him as a possible partner since November, when she first named him to Mercer. She was, she said, looking ‘for a good-tempered man with good sense with whom I could have reasonable chance of being less unhappy and comfortless than I have been in a single state. That man, I can repeat is the Prince of Saxe-Coburg.’ This was an entirely pragmatic decision and made no impact on the strength of her feelings for the absent Augustus Frederick. ‘This appears very odd, does it not? What odd mortals we are, and how little likely to be understood or faithfully represented by those who don’t know us. That I should be as wholly occupied and devoted as I am to one, and yet think, talk and even provide for another would appear unnatural to the highest degree if it were written in a novel and yet it is true.’132
Throughout the next few months Charlotte struggled to subdue the Marianne in her character – the romantic swept away by unregulated feeling – and replace her untrammelled sensibility with a dose of practical sense. She mentioned Leopold to Mary, who, delighted with the idea, ‘launched forth vehemently in his praises, said no one’s character stood higher, and that he was of a very old house’.133 By January 1815, she had ‘decidedly fixed’ upon him. She did so with no great expectations. ‘Nobody was less warm or eager about it than myself, for I don’t at all pretend to have one feeling in the world for Prince Leopold.’ Her affections were still directed elsewhere – ‘I continue to be attached (to my shame, be it said) to another who is quite unworthy of any consideration’ – but she knew there was little to hope for there. Augustus Frederick’s letters had dried up, and he had even returned her portrait. There was nothing to prevent her connecting herself to the Prince of Coburg ‘with the most calm and perfect indifference’. She was resigned to the inevitable, ‘and I don’t see at all why in the end, once tacked to him, that I should not be very comfortable and comparatively happy’.134
With the energetic support of the queen, the regent was persuaded to accept the Prince of Coburg as a potential son-in-law; and for the second time in eighteen months, a new contract of marriage was drawn up. When the prince arrived in England, Charlotte met him at her father’s house in Brighton, and, for the first time in over a year, her black mood lifted. Brought face to face with the handsome reality of her husband-to-be, Charlotte was enthralled. ‘We have had a delightful evening together,’ she enthused to Mercer, ‘full of long conversations on different subjects interesting to our future plans in life. As far as he is concerned, I have not one anxious thought left, as I am thoroughly persuaded he will do all and everything he can to make me happy.’ He had even delighted the queen, who assured Charlotte, ‘it is a match she most highly approved of, and had long wished’.135
Over the next few days, everything she learnt about Coburg made Charlotte like him more. ‘I think him very much talented with a thousand r
esources – music, singing, drawing, agriculture and botany – besides, he is a capital Italian scholar so I have almost all I could wish and desire collected in one.’ She was particularly pleased to discover that he was ‘vastly fond of his family, who are exceedingly united’. He promised Charlotte that ‘he will never act as a tyrant’ but nevertheless very quickly persuaded her to give up her beloved horses as ‘he does not much like a lady’s riding, he thinks it violent an exercise’. She was glad to surrender them in return for the intimate companionship she had always longed for. ‘He says we shall walk together, and be a great deal together, and that he intends to have me a great deal and for very long, and if there are parties he could go to and that I could not, why, that he should decline them, preferring to stay with me and not leaving me alone.’ After a lifetime of conditional affection, here was a man who promised to make her the treasured heart of a happy, settled partnership in which consideration of her wishes would always be paramount. It was hardly surprising that Charlotte could not believe her good luck. ‘I am certainly the most fortunate creature, and have to bless God. A princess never, I believe, set out in life (or married) with such prospects of happiness, real domestic ones like other people.’ Even the regent told her that ‘it would be my own fault if I was not happy’.136
Leopold and Charlotte were married on 2 May 1816. They spent their honeymoon at the Duchess of York’s house at Oatlands. It was possibly the first time they had been alone together. Two days later, Charlotte wrote to Mercer from her honeymoon retreat, clearly much affected by the huge changes that had been so quickly wrought in her life. ‘You ask me about Leo. He is very amiable and affectionate and kind to me, the perfection of a lover (which I still view him as).’ She could not say she was ‘much at my ease, or quite comfortable yet in his society, but it will wear away, I dare say, this sort of awkwardness’.137 A week later, she was cautiously expressing her hopes for the future: ‘the foundation is very reasonable, and therefore there is less chance of its ever being otherwise than with most others; indeed, on the contrary, I am more inclined to think that it will improve’. She had decided not to interrogate her emotions overly. ‘Sometimes I believe it is best not to analyse one’s feelings too much or probe them too deeply.’138
By August, all her misgivings had disappeared and she was entirely captivated. As Leopold had promised, the couple did everything together. They walked, they read, they enjoyed their music, Leopold sitting beside his wife as she played the piano. Charlotte loved to comb his dark hair; in the evening, she contentedly folded his cravats.139 They lived at Claremont near Esher in Surrey, just the right distance from Windsor – close enough for visits, but far enough away for privacy. In choosing it they had followed the advice of the queen, who, continuing to surprise, had implored the young couple to make an independent life for themselves. ‘She was sure it was a bad thing to see too much of one’s family, or be too intimate with them soon after marrying.’140 Soon Charlotte could declare to Mercer that she was completely content. ‘I am so perfectly happy … What makes it more delightful is that our mutual affection has grown by degrees, and with the more intimate acquaintance and knowledge of each other’s dispositions and characters; which will ensure us perfect domestic comfort, as our attachment has founded itself upon too firm and rational a basis for it to be overthrown.’141
There was a price to be paid for such devotion. Charlotte had always made it clear that one of the principal attractions of marriage was that it would free her from the power her father had over her. She had once assured the Princess of Wales that she would marry ‘only in order to enjoy my liberty’. When her mother commented that her husband would one day become a king and ‘you will give him a power over you’, Charlotte was airily dismissive. ‘Never! He will be only my first subject – never my king!’142 That was before she met Leopold. Now she had little to say about the independence she had once been so determined to achieve for herself. Leopold achieved by the exercise of affection what her father had never managed by argument and force; in a few months, unmanned by love, Charlotte submitted to her husband’s will in almost everything he required of her.
Perhaps the greatest casualty of Charlotte’s capitulation was her friendship with Mercer. Leopold did not like what he had heard about her. It was rumoured she planned to marry the Count de Flahault, who had fought for Napoleon, and whose political principles Leopold found as disagreeable as his reputation as a womaniser. The letter Charlotte wrote to her friend immediately after her first meeting with Leopold contained a warning of things to come. ‘I must not forget I am desired by him to scold you for your intimacy with Flahault. He knows him personally and disapproves highly of him, and thinks his acquaintance is likely to do you no good.’143 Mercer’s lover was the first to feel the strength of Leopold’s dislike; Mercer herself soon followed. Leopold was determined to put a stop to the intimate relationship that she had enjoyed with his wife; he wanted no competition for her affection and no challenges to his influence. Gradually, the friendship that had lasted for so many years, that had sustained Charlotte throughout her greatest times of trial, went the way of the horses she had once loved – banished under the kind but firm direction of her husband. The correspondence between the friends that had once been daily slowly stuttered to a halt; and Mercer became to Charlotte little more than an acquaintance with whom she exchanged coolly polite notes.
Charlotte seems hardly to have noticed as Mercer drifted out of her life, so absorbed was she in the amazed contemplation of her own good fortune. Against all expectations, she had achieved that most remarkable thing – an arranged marriage which had turned out well. ‘You are right; it is an unusual sight to see the heiress to a kingdom making a love match,’ she told one friend who complimented her on her good luck. ‘Perfect happiness is by no means common and I will be delighted if you will come and observe it at Claremont.’144 In September 1816, Princess Mary decided to do just that. She drove down to Surrey, hoping to witness for herself such a remarkable example of royal matrimonial affection. Once there, she found herself a superfluous presence, her visit hardly acknowledged by ‘two people engrossed with each other. I doubt the sort of life they are now leading can last,’ she said, ‘but I wish it may, with all my heart.’145
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Mary’s cool assessment of the long-term prospects for happy married love came surprisingly from a woman who had just become a wife herself. She was almost forty when she finally found a husband. But Mary’s marriage, although it had its origins in pragmatic considerations very similar to those which had initially motivated Charlotte’s alliance with Leopold, was never transformed into a partnership of genuine affection. It began as an act of practical convenience, and, on Mary’s side at least, never amounted to much more than that.
It is surprising that Mary had not been more sought after as a bride. She was still handsome enough in early middle age for her niece to regard her as competition in the marriage market. When Charlotte had been captivated by the Duke of Devonshire, she feared that Mary had designs on him for herself; and in the early days of her courtship with the Prince of Coburg, Charlotte wondered whether, despite the difference in their ages, Leopold would pursue her aunt if disappointed in his attentions to herself. But since her youth, only one name had been consistently linked with Mary’s: that of her cousin William, later Duke of Gloucester, whose father was the king’s younger brother. His dogged, unrequited devotion was well known within the family, where it was regarded with amused condescension. Gloucester was not, it seemed, taken seriously by anyone as a credible marriage prospect. Perhaps that was why Princess Charlotte once named him to the regent as one of the few men she might consider as a husband. In doing so, she may have hoped simply to annoy Mary, for whom at that point she harboured jealous and angry feelings. Perhaps she intended to provoke her father, whom she knew was not fond of his cousin. If so, even she was astonished by the ferocity of his response. The regent treated his daughter to a tirade of abuse about the d
uke ‘that became so excessively indecent that I hardly knew which way to look, and especially as he repeated it twice over’.146
Exactly what the regent told his daughter about the duke can only be imagined; but it was a surprising outburst, for Gloucester’s failings were generally thought to be intellectual rather than moral. He was not considered very bright – one of his many family nicknames was ‘Silly Billy’ – but he was generally thought to make up for his lack of cleverness by the decent moderation of his conduct. Gloucester took his religious duties seriously. He was a regular church-goer, a Sabbatarian with strict views about activities which might properly be undertaken on Sundays. He was actively charitable – a generous benefactor to a wide range of good causes. In later life, in contrast to many of his relations, he was a committed supporter of the anti-slave trade movement. But if he lived a more sober life than his ducal cousins, he had none of their worldliness or wit, and was often the butt of their heavy-handed satire. The Duke of Cumberland once stopped his cousin as they walked through Piccadilly, demanding to know who his tailor was. When the hapless Gloucester told him, Cumberland roared with laughter. ‘I only wanted to know because whoever he is, he ought to be avoided like the pestilence.’147 In their letters to each other, the royal brothers referred to him as ‘the Cheese’, or ‘Slice’.
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