Gloucester had none of the confidence and easy insouciance that were considered the marks of a man of rank. He was self-conscious about his status, and thought to stand too much on his dignity. This may have resulted from an uncomfortable awareness that his antecedents were far from unimpeachably aristocratic. His mother, Maria Waldegrave, was the illegitimate daughter of Sir Edward Walpole (son of the former first minister) and his mistress Dorothy Clement, who was said to have been the daughter of a rag-and-bone man. It cannot have been easy for a man as stiff and self-conscious as Gloucester to acknowledge that his grandmother had once ridden on a cart, shouting out her wares. As children, Gloucester and his sister Sophia were not always treated well by the king and queen, both of whom harboured a simmering resentment about their father’s unauthorised marriage, and lost few opportunities to remind them of their ambiguous status. It was perhaps not surprising that, once he had become an adult, Gloucester relished displays of social deference. At a house party he attended in 1805, ‘he never allowed a gentleman to be seated in his presence, and expected the ladies to hand him coffee on a salver, to stand while he drank it, and then to remove the cup’.148
Gloucester was said to have proposed to Mary thirty or forty times over the years. Finally, in 1815, she decided to accept him. A number of motives might have contributed to her change of heart. Her father, unreachable in his sickness, was no longer able to express his opinions on the match, which perhaps made it possible for Mary to persuade herself that he would not have opposed an alliance with a man who was already a member of the family. Her relations with her mother were the worst of all the sisterhood; she had been candid in her criticism of her since Amelia’s death, and during the horrible year of 1812 had told the queen bluntly that living with her was affecting her health. The desire to escape from an uncongenial home seems to have weighed most strongly with Mary in making up her mind to accept her cousin after so many refusals. It was certainly more important than any feelings of love. Whilst she never spoke of Gloucester with anything less than respect, there is nothing in her letters to suggest she felt more than a companionable familiarity for a man she had known all her life, and who she knew admired her.
She became genuinely animated only when she considered the freedoms her marriage would allow her. As a wife, she hoped she would have more opportunities to decide for herself where she would go and whom she would see. Once removed from her mother’s control, she was especially keen to spend time with her brothers in their own homes. She told the regent she could not wait to experience ‘the unspeakable comfort’ of visiting him when she liked. ‘If I might feel empowered to do this, and you promise to come as often as you please to my house, it will be the joy of my life to see you there.’149 She had made it very clear to her husband-to-be that she expected no obstacles to be put in the way of this new liberty. Indeed, as she explained to Lady Harcourt, she had refused to give her final consent to the marriage until she had secured from Gloucester full agreement to her terms. Fortunately, she had now received ‘a very satisfactory answer … therefore I can say now we completely understand each other’. Mary had demanded assurances that her marriage would not remove her from her family, either physically or emotionally. She expected to live near them, to continue to involve herself in their affairs, and to play a continuing role in caring for her stricken father. ‘My intended marriage will rather increase my affection, my attachment, my devotion to my family … as a married woman I can come forward and be of more use to all than I can now.’ No longer a subordinate satellite to her mother, she hoped to be able to make a real difference to the conduct of family life. ‘The Duke of Gloucester has so kindly entered into all my feelings, so faithfully promised I shall be as much with family as possible, and is so convinced how it is in my power to do my duty as his wife, as well as do my duty at Windsor (to a certain degree) that it makes me thank God.’150
It was the understanding that she would not be deprived of Mary’s efficient, managing presence which smoothed away any potential opposition to the match from the queen. Mary’s unsentimental pragmatism, which recalls the brisk, clear-eyed attitude towards matrimony of Mrs Collins in Pride and Prejudice, made possible for her what none of her sisters had achieved since Royal’s wedding nearly twenty years before: a marriage sanctioned and publicly acknowledged by all the royal family. When the wedding day itself arrived, Mary greeted it with no great enthusiasm. ‘I don’t know what other people feel when going to be married,’ she told Lady Harcourt, ‘but as yet I have done nothing but cry.’151 But whatever her private emotions, Mary carried off the event itself with characteristic style. She dressed for the ceremony, which took place at St James’s Palace on 22 July 1816, with elegant understatement, her clothes, as ever, attracting much approving comment. ‘Her dress a rich tissue of dead silver (no shine). No trimming upon it – lace round the neck only. Diamond necklace. The hair dressed rather high.’152
The newly married husband and wife went to live in the duke’s house at Bagshot Park, near Windsor. They were close neighbours of Charlotte and Leopold, and often called on the younger couple. Charlotte did not look forward to their visits with much enthusiasm, but she acknowledged that ‘though they are not the most agreeable people in the world, still, they are exceedingly good-humoured, good-natured, kind and easily to be pleased’. She thought the marriage had satisfied at least one of the partners. ‘The duke seems to be very fond of Mary and to be very happy; he is certainly all attention to her, but I cannot say she looks the picture of happiness or as if she was much delighted with him.’ This imbalance of affection between the Gloucesters always seemed painfully evident to Charlotte; but she could see that her aunt had nevertheless obtained something of what she hoped for from the match: ‘being her own mistress, having her own house and being able to walk in the streets all delights her in various ways’.153
Mary’s experience was not uncommon among her female contemporaries. She had married a man she did not love in order to secure to herself the freedoms she was denied as a middle-aged spinster. If she was unable to offer her husband the heartfelt devotion he must have hoped for, she never treated him with anything less than punctilious consideration. She always fulfilled what she saw as her obligations towards Gloucester with scrupulous dignity, managing his temper and indulging his whims. This became harder as the duke grew older and less malleable, complaining about the length of her stays at Brighton, and refusing to let her travel on Sundays; but she bore it all with resignation. ‘Man is man and does not like to be put out of his way, and still less by a wife than anyone else.’154 She never did or said anything to suggest that she thought she had made the wrong decision in marrying Gloucester; and she nursed him tirelessly during his final illness, in 1834. He asked that when the time came he should be buried with one of her rings on his fingers. It was Mary’s sadness that, after so many years of loneliness, she linked herself to a man for whom she felt little more than mild affection, and it was Gloucester’s tragedy that he cared for her with an intensity she never returned.
The Princess Royal, musing in far-off Württemberg on her sister’s marriage, had no doubt that Mary had made the right decision. She was convinced that the unpredictable trials of matrimony were always to be preferred to the known horrors of the single state. ‘The more I reflect on Mary’s situation and mine,’ she told Lady Harcourt, ‘the more I regret my sisters not having been equally fortunate; as I am convinced they all would have been happier had they been properly established.’155 Connubial happiness was much on her mind, as only three months after Mary’s wedding, Royal’s husband, now King of Württemberg, died. Royal was devastated. ‘I believe there was never anybody more attached to another man than I was to the late king; this affection, which, during our union was the happiness of my life, makes me look forward with impatience to the end of my life, when I trust, through the mercy of Providence, I will be reunited with my husband in a better world.’156
Not everyone saw their relationship in
such rosy terms. In February 1817, Royal felt compelled to write to the regent to contradict his suggestion that her and King Frederick’s marriage had not always been happy. Her brother must surely understand ‘how deeply you have wounded my feelings by attending to idle reports of those whose only object must be to do all mischief’.157
But in the wider world, the King of Württemberg’s reputation was less benign than the shining image Royal chose to present. He had been an ambitious politician, one of Europe’s great survivors, who played a canny hand throughout the wars that ruined so many other similarly placed rulers. An astute calculator, he had switched his allegiance from Britain to Napoleon when circumstances seemed to demand it, and saw his principality elevated by the emperor to the status of kingdom as a result. It was unsurprising that his erstwhile British allies regarded this as a betrayal, especially as he was George III’s son-in-law. He was condemned by British diplomats as both slippery and disloyal. His own people were said to dislike him; he was an autocratic figure, resisting reforms and doing all he could to hold on to personal power at all costs. The politician Lord Castlereagh called him ‘a tyrant, both in his public and private character’.
It was widely reported that he treated his wife with the same high-handed expectation of obedience with which he managed his subjects. The regent’s friend Thomas Tyrwhitt had seen Württemberg’s bullying nature exposed at first hand when he was sent to Germany in 1814 to invite Royal to attend the victory celebrations in London. Infuriated that the invitation had been made to his wife and not himself, the king forced his wife to pretend illness as a pretext for not attending. When Tyrwhitt threatened to confront him, Royal ‘earnestly begged me to take as little notice of it as I consistently could, for, as she said, “I shall ultimately be the sufferer.”’158
And yet, for all her tribulations, Royal never wavered in her conviction that her life had been far better as Württemberg’s wife than if she had remained shut up at Windsor with her mother. Her husband was a difficult man, high-handed, arrogant and untrustworthy, who required a great deal of careful handling. Like her mother before her, Royal learnt quickly that her task was to bend to his will and offer no contradiction to any scheme he decided to pursue. Living with him had called on all her considerable reserves of patience and dedication; but for Royal, it had been worth it. She had spent her life in the active world, where she had well-defined and fulfilling roles to perform. She presided over her husband’s court. She brought up his children, becoming a much-loved mother to her step-sons and -daughters. Even the most difficult times had at least been interesting. She had survived the turbulent changes of fortune that a lifetime of warfare had brought to the heart of her adopted home. She had entertained Napoleon, in whom she had observed a dangerous combination of charm and violence – and decided she rather admired him. She supported her husband’s desire to advance and strengthen his possessions, and had certainly relished her elevation to queenship. As soon as her title was confirmed, she seized the opportunity to write to her mother, addressing her in the formal language of diplomacy as ‘ma chère soeur’. This implication of equals infuriated Charlotte, as her daughter must have known it would.
By the standards of most arranged marriages, Royal had not done too badly; but whilst Mary would have been content to stop there, coolly acknowledging the debits and credits of the matrimonial balance sheet, it had always been vital for her eldest sister to believe that her marriage had meant much more than that. She would not allow that the greatest relationship in her life had been anything less than a truly loving partnership, rooted in mutual affection. Whatever the daily reality of her marriage, that was the vision she had of it in her heart, and that was the version she was determined would be accepted and acknowledged as the last word on the partnership to which she had devoted her life.
*
Royal would surely have endorsed the devotion that linked her niece and namesake to her husband at their Claremont retreat. In February 1817 it looked as if Charlotte and Leopold’s happiness was to be completed by the addition of a child to their ‘earthly paradise’. Charlotte had miscarried twice since their marriage; but this time it seemed as though she would carry the baby to full term. She had appointed Sir Richard Croft, a fashionable accoucheur, to see her through her pregnancy. He encouraged her to stop wearing corsets, and put her on a diet consisting mainly of vegetables, perhaps in an attempt to reduce her weight. Like both her parents, Charlotte had a tendency to run to fat, and readily agreed to the regimen prescribed for her. It did not make her feel particularly well; she complained of tiredness and seemed overwhelmed by the physical changes in her body wrought by pregnancy. She certainly grew very large very quickly, which alarmed her grandmother. The queen, drawing on her own experience of childbearing, was concerned about Charlotte from the outset. ‘God knows, from the moment I saw her advance in her pregnancy, I had a bad opinion of her, and named it to my daughters; for her figure was so immense (to me not natural) that I could not help being uneasy to a considerable degree.’159
As the birth approached, Charlotte was apprehensive, but tried to stay resilient. ‘I am not in bad spirits about it, yet I think it is a very anxious and awful moment to expect, and one that I cannot feel quite unconcerned about.’160 The baby was due in mid-October, but it was not until the early hours of 4 November that Charlotte finally went into labour. In the first stages, Croft declared that ‘nothing could be going on better’; but by the morning of the 5th, he was more concerned. He and his colleague Dr Simms reported to the Cabinet that there had been little change overnight. They still hoped that ‘the child may be safely born without artificial assistance, but still the progress of labour is so very slow that they cannot at present determine in what time it may be accomplished’.161 Croft debated whether to make use of forceps, a relatively recent development in obstetrics, which were of proven efficacy in cases such as Charlotte’s, although the risk of infection was considerable. He decided against, and Charlotte went on to endure another day of suffering. She had been in labour for fifty hours by the time the baby was delivered.
The outcome, after so much pain and effort, was a tragic one. Charlotte’s child, ‘a male and well formed’, was stillborn. Every effort was made to revive the boy, who had not been dead for long, but nothing succeeded, and the doctors had no choice but to tell Charlotte that her protracted labour had all been in vain. She was surprisingly philosophical, telling Leopold that they would have other children. Soon, she was sitting up in bed taking tea and a little soup. Thinking the worst was over, Leopold left his wife for the first time in days and went to get some sleep. He was not with her when, a few hours later, Charlotte awoke in great pain. She complained of nausea and was very cold; the doctors gave her brandy in an attempt to warm her. ‘They have made me tipsy,’ she complained.162 When she began to haemorrhage, there was nothing anyone could do; and at around half past two in the morning of the 6th, she died. She was twenty-one years old.
The queen was staying in Bath, where she had gone for her health, accompanied by Elizabeth, Augusta and Sir Brent Spencer. It was to Spencer that the letter announcing Charlotte’s death was delivered, leaving him to break the news to her grandmother and aunts. ‘He came to my door,’ wrote Augusta to Lady Harcourt, ‘and his step was so heavy and his knock so short, it really was like the knell of death. But when I saw his face, I called out, “Oh! That look kills me.”’ The shock was all the worse because early bulletins had suggested Charlotte was not in danger. Augusta was stupefied by her niece’s death. ‘God knows what my feelings were and are.’163 Elizabeth was equally devastated. ‘What an awful blow to the family and the whole nation,’ she wrote. ‘So young, so happy, so sure she was to be a mother and so thoroughly contented with her lot … all at one solemn moment knocked on the head.’164 For the queen, it was ‘a thunderstroke upon us’.165
Dr Baillie, who hurried to Bath to console Charlotte’s family, had little real comfort to offer. He confessed ‘that the last few
hours were like a hurricane; all was so frightful, even to him as a medical man’.166 Augusta blamed Dr Croft and what she considered his eccentric management of Charlotte’s pregnancy. He had ‘made the poor child change her whole system by taking her off from wine and meat; and just at the time when she ought to have taken nourishment for two, she was deprived of the sort of food which would have supported her in the hour of labour … It is true that there was nothing wrong as to the birth of her baby, but the infant could not have the strength to assist her, nor she the child, to bring it forth with a few strong pains.’ She thought Croft had been ‘sadly neglectful and dreadfully obstinate’.167 Croft himself was acutely aware that his conduct was much criticised; he felt very deeply his failure to bring Charlotte through her ordeal alive, and in February 1818, whilst attending another patient in a difficult childbirth, he shot himself.
It was not customary for women to attend public funerals. None of the princesses were present at Charlotte’s burial, but they heard the carriages bearing her coffin toil up the hill at Windsor, ‘a dreary heavy sound, which is sad and melancholy to the ear and most painful to the heart’. Leopold went with her remains into the chapel vault which was her final resting place. ‘He said he had never left Charlotte while she was alive; and had therefore followed her corpse to the grave; and thus he felt that she had never been neglected by him.’168 Their son – who, had he lived, would one day have been king – was buried with her. No one could remember such an outpouring of national grief as that which greeted the loss of two heirs to the throne. Princess Lieven, the wife of the Russian ambassador, had never seen anything like it: ‘It is impossible to find in the history of nations or families an event which had evoked such heartfelt mourning. One met in the streets people of every class in tears, the churches full at all hours, the shops shut for a fortnight (an eloquent testimony from a shop-owning community) and everyone, from the highest to the lowest, in a state of despair which it is impossible to describe.’169
The Strangest Family Page 78
