The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  When the grief subsided, it was clear some action would need to be taken to fill the vacancy Charlotte’s death had created. It was impossible for the regent to have another legitimate child, separated as he was from a wife who showed no sign of dying. This placed the responsibility for ensuring the succession firmly on his brothers, not one of whom had a legitimate child. Thus began the process of ‘hunting the heir’ as the middle-aged dukes cast off long-standing and long-suffering mistresses – the Duke of Kent had lived with the unfortunate Mme de St Laurent since 1790 – and applied themselves stoically to the business of courting eligible princesses. Not surprisingly, given the potential prize on offer, they soon found willing candidates, and in the course of a few short weeks in 1818, the regent gave his consent to the marriage of three of his brothers. But, to everyone’s surprise, in the same year he also agreed to another wedding – that of the family’s most forceful advocate of the married state, who had long since despaired of ever achieving it herself.

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  Elizabeth’s life had been one of uninterrupted domesticity since the onset of her father’s final illness. She painted and cut out pictures of cupids with mothers and babies. She planned fêtes and other small parties, and entertained guests at her cottage. When she had no company, she had learnt to depend on her own resources to make herself happy. ‘I have read a great deal and seen nobody,’ she told Lady Harcourt, ‘and I can assure you I have been extremely agreeable to myself.’ She worked hard to keep her temper sweet and was never angry, ‘but when I read the papers’.170 However, for all her apparent cheerfulness, she admitted her spirits were ‘sadly broken’ by all she had endured, and the energy which had once been the defining quality of her character had largely evaporated. Her hopes for the future were muted now, her ambitions for herself much diminished. ‘Though I do not expect to be happy, believe me,’ she told the regent, ‘I shall ever be content.’171 But for all her best intentions, barely suppressed bitterness at her single state lurked just below her superficial serenity. In 1813, she urged her friend Augusta Compton not to refuse a proposal she had received, even though the man who had made it was elderly. Any husband was better than no husband in Elizabeth’s eyes. She put the wedding cake of more fortunate friends beneath her pillow, but with no effect. By 1814, she had all but given up hope of finding a partner. When her old friend Lady Harcourt visited her, ‘we build castles in the air which amuses us, or rather, she builds them for me, and when she has worked up my imagination to the summit of bliss, I still find myself in my own fireside, with my own comforts around me … I don’t disown that, like an infant, my card house is fallen to the ground.’172

  Then, in January 1818, without warning a letter arrived that seemed to promise an entirely unexpected release. It informed her that the Hereditary Prince Frederick of Hesse-Homburg was on his way to London ‘and his purpose of coming here to ask me in marriage. You may easily conceive the kind of flurry it threw me into.’ The prince, perhaps aware of the fate of previous suitors, had informed neither the queen nor the Foreign Secretary of his plans, but had addressed himself directly to Elizabeth, who knew next to nothing about him, except that he was a middle-aged man whose character was said to be ‘excellent’. She went to Augusta and Mary, ‘and we agreed I must instantly inform the queen of it in the morning which I did before my sisters’. The queen’s first response was surprisingly measured. ‘She answered, upon my reading the letter, “You always wished to settle, and have always said that you thought a woman might be happier and more comfortable in having a home.” I added that I have ever thought so, and a time may come when I shall bless God for a home.’ Elizabeth was astonished that such an opportunity had arisen at a stage in life when she least expected it. She was nearly forty-eight years old, and she knew a chance like this would not come again. ‘I therefore candidly own I wish to accept this offer.’ She begged the regent to help her achieve her aim, as she suspected that without his support, the queen would soon renege on her initial approval of the proposal. As she reminded him, she and her sisters had always sacrificed themselves to the needs of others. ‘God knows, our lives have been lives of trial, and ever will be so. I have tried to the utmost of my power to do my duty as a daughter and a sister.’ Was she not now entitled to seize this last chance of fulfilment? She assured him that if allowed to do so, she would not abandon those principles of obligation that had guided her life till now. The values that had served her well as a spinster would, she was sure, be even more important in her role as a wife. ‘If I did not feel I should in every sense try to make my husband happy, you may depend upon it that I should think it very wrong were I to wish to change my situation.’173

  As Elizabeth had feared, her mother’s mild response to the idea of her marriage did not last long. She had let Mary go without a protest; but she had moved only as far away as Bagshot, and was still actively involved in family life. If Elizabeth married, she would go to live in Germany, a separation Charlotte could not contemplate without horror. She was closer to Elizabeth than to any of her other daughters. Elizabeth had been her secretary, her companion and her confidante, her partner in so many of her schemes and plans. In the shifting balance of family politics, she was always considered the queen’s staunchest ally, ‘her oracle’, according to Princess Charlotte. As her health grew increasingly precarious, the queen relied more and more on Elizabeth’s good humour and cheerfulness for comfort and support. Mary’s marriage was not, in the end, a source of much regret to the queen; Elizabeth’s was a different matter. She could not and would not give the match her blessing.

  In response to Elizabeth’s increasingly desperate requests, the regent came to Windsor to try to reconcile his mother to the marriage. He had limited success. ‘No sunshine,’ Elizabeth told him after his departure, ‘and the clouds are as thick, if not thicker, than when you arrived on Sunday.’174 The queen was soon so cross and miserable that Halford was summoned to examine her. He was shocked to find her in such a state of fury that both her pulse and her breathing were affected. This was extremely upsetting for a daughter as dutiful as Elizabeth to witness, but she refused to be either bullied or blackmailed into renouncing the proposal. It had been ten long years since she had been forced to give up the idea of marrying the Duke of Orléans; she would not make the same mistake again. Perhaps the battles of 1812, and her mother’s lacerating accusation that her attempts to obtain some small freedoms for herself were an insult to the king, had hardened her heart.

  Certainly the Elizabeth of 1818 reached very different conclusions about what she owed her mother than the Elizabeth of a decade earlier. She was strengthened in her resolve by the support of her sisters, who took a bleak view of the queen’s motives and encouraged Elizabeth to do the same. Augusta urged her to ‘look on the bright side of the measure and don’t kill yourself with pining over my mother’s manner’. It was hard to ignore such a flamboyant display of frustration and ill humour, but she must not be swayed by it. ‘My mother is a spoilt child,’ Augusta declared, ‘for my father spoilt her from the hour she came, and we have continued to do the same from the hour of our birth, and she is vexed that she cannot manage this her own way.’175 As advised, Elizabeth held her nerve; and the prince was invited to attend the next Drawing Room. On 14 February, Valentine’s Day, Elizabeth wrote in her prayer book: ‘Saw the Hereditary Prince of Hesse-Homburg for the first time at the Queen’s House.’176

  If she did not recall having seen him before, it is possible that the prince had seen her, for Hesse-Homburg had been one of the many sovereigns to crowd into London during the celebratory summer of 1814. His name had even been suggested as a potential husband for Charlotte, who had dismissed him without further thought as ‘not a man at all calculated to make me happy’.177 When the prince arrived at the Drawing Room, he did not make a good impression. One observer commented cruelly that he would make an ideal husband for Elizabeth as he was ‘as fat as herself’.178 He wore a beard and whiskers when most Englishmen
were clean-shaven, and smoked a pipe when the acceptable English vice was drink. ‘It is impossible to describe the monster of a man,’ wrote another outraged observer, ‘a vulgar-looking German corporal, whose breath and hide is a compound between tobacco and garlic. What can have induced her nobody knows; he has about £300 pa.’179 When the prince was introduced to the queen, the formal presentation quickly descended into farce. The queen dropped her fan, and the prince politely bent to pick it up ‘with such alacrity that the exertion created so parlous a split and produced such a display that there was nothing left to the bride’s imagination’. The royal brothers suggested that he retire, but the prince declined to do so, saying that ‘as the Duke of York was so much more large, that he was sure his breeches would go on over all’.180 All this was a gift to the caricaturists and gossip-mongers. News of the proposed marriage even reached Napoleon in remote exile on St Helena. The fallen emperor was scornful, commenting that ‘the English royal family lowered themselves with little petty princes to whom I would not have given a brevet of sub-lieutenant’.181

  None of this did anything to deter Elizabeth. The disdain of the fashionable world was far easier to deal with than her mother’s wrath. She made no comment on the prince’s appearance. She had been assured he was a man of honour, and that was enough for her. ‘In our situation, there is nothing but character to look to … and the prince’s is excellent.’182 Finally, in the face of her daughter’s intransigence, weakened by ill health and assailed on all sides by the urgings of her sons and daughters, the queen gave up her opposition and bowed to the inevitable. On 7 April 1818, Elizabeth achieved the ambition of a lifetime and became a bride at last. The couple spent their honeymoon at the regent’s house in Brighton, where the hereditary prince commented that he was not as bored as he expected to be, and enjoyed many serene hours ‘in his dressing gown and slippers, smoking in the conservatory’.183

  Having spent so long brooding on matrimony, Elizabeth was determined that her experience of it would be as fulfilling as she had always imagined. She made up her mind to adore her husband, and did so from the moment they were married. Nothing deflected her. On the journey down to Brighton, the prince ‘through not being used to a closed carriage’ was so sick that he was obliged to ride outside, holding on grimly at the back as the coach thundered down the road. Elizabeth did not care; her new husband’s unlucky ability to put himself in embarrassing situations, his lack of urbane sophistication, his indifference to the requirements of polite behaviour meant nothing to her. She knew she would make him an excellent wife and was certain their marriage would be a success. ‘The Princess of Hesse-Homburg will redeem the character of good behaviour in the conjugal bonds, lost or mislaid by her family,’ wrote her friend Mrs Trench. ‘She is delighted with her hero, as she calls him.’184 Elizabeth was pleased, but not surprised, to discover that in private the prince was everything she hoped he would be – respectful, considerate and affectionate. The more she knew him, the more she liked him. She wrote to the regent from Brighton that she was ‘grateful to God and you for having given me so excellent a being, whose one thought is to make me happy’.185

  Elizabeth’s high opinion of Homburg was justified, as, beneath his unprepossessing exterior, there was much to appreciate. The prince – or ‘Bluff’, as Elizabeth was soon calling him, perhaps in tribute to the straightforward, unpretentious candour that was his defining quality – was indeed a far more worthy and likeable figure than many of those who had mocked him so unmercifully when he arrived in London. He was a career soldier who had fought bravely in many engagements and had been wounded severely in the leg at the Battle of Leipzig. Cornelia Knight, who met him when she visited Homburg in 1824, was most impressed with him. He was a highly intelligent man, who spoke French ‘without any unpleasant accent. He was well versed in history and geography, and had a good library of books, of that description, all of which he was most willing to lend me.’ After six years of marriage, his appearance had also improved somewhat, and Miss Knight noted approvingly that he was now ‘remarkably neat in his person, and never came into company without changing his dress if he had been smoking’. She admired his ‘noble frankness of character’ too, but it was ‘his generous and humane care of his subjects’ which she thought ‘rendered him truly worthy of being loved by all who knew him’. He was a diligently paternal ruler in the old style who administered his kingdom with a genuine and active concern. He found physicians for the sick and sometimes paid for their medicines. If they recovered, he called to congratulate them. If they died, he attended their funerals. He was indeed, Miss Knight concluded, ‘the father of the people’.186 The prince’s paternalism was made easier by the diminutive size of his principality, which was only fifty square miles. It was as poor as it was tiny. Elizabeth’s substantial dowry transformed the finances of both Hesse-Homburg and its ruler; indeed, it was probably the prospect of her money that had inspired him to ask for her hand in the first place. But from the moment of their marriage, Bluff treated Elizabeth with great affection, and seems to have grown very fond of her. ‘My beloved husband is kind enough to say he can well understand what my mother felt at parting from me now, knowing me as he does,’ she told the regent proudly. Whenever they were apart, which happened rarely, she wrote him pages of loving letters. She knew they would provoke his amused laughter – ‘Voilà des phrases!’ – but she wrote them nonetheless.187

  Elizabeth confessed that leaving Britain gave her ‘quite a pang which as long as I exist I shall never forget’.188 She departed immediately after her honeymoon, in June 1818, without returning to Windsor to say goodbye to her mother, judging that the experience would be too painful for them to bear. Arriving some weeks later at Homburg, she found her new home very different from the solid grandeur of Windsor or the gilded sophistication of Carlton House. ‘You would be astonished at the extreme filth and dirt one meets with – it drives me near wild, but I have a regiment of females who I keep to sweep, to wipe, to clean.’189 For all her exasperation with the ramshackle provinciality of her new kingdom, she never played the grande dame, and worked hard to make Bluff’s family like her. ‘She is so good, so excellent, and loves Homburg and all of us,’ enthused one of her many sisters-in-law, ‘and she fits into everything so wonderfully that one cannot believe it unless one sees it.’190 The only thing she missed was someone to share her jokes. ‘Privately, I do not think the Germans have much humour. They are a sedate, quiet people whereas you know what a cheerful being I am,’ she observed. She also thought most of the men were ugly, ‘looking as if they had been picked out to prevent the dear prince being jealous, for I do declare such a frightful set of men was never seen – Monsters!’191

  In everything that really mattered, Elizabeth was, however, genuinely and effusively happy with her new existence. She had always said that all she really wanted was to live simply in the company of a man who appreciated her – and after three decades of denial and subjection, she finally achieved her long-desired dream. At the age of forty-eight, it was too late for her to translate the paper images of mothers and babies she was so expert in creating into the real thing – the obstructive attitude of her parents had ensured that the princess who most loved children never had any of her own. She satisfied her maternal urges by founding in Hanover a school ‘for the infant children of mothers who go out to work all day’. There, watching the older ones play whilst the babies slept, she was satisfied. ‘There is nothing I love more than children.’192

  She refused to regret what might have been. On her honeymoon, she had reflected that ‘my trial has been severe’, but was determined that the sadness of the past should not overshadow her present joy. ‘I thoroughly believe few in my situation of life are as happy as I am’, she wrote in 1826. It had taken half a lifetime for that happiness to arrive; when it was finally offered, she had grasped it eagerly, determined to do everything possible to make it work. Elizabeth had no doubt to whom she owed the great transformation of her life. Until
her death, she never failed to mark the anniversary of her first meeting with her adored Bluff. Each year on that day, armed with ‘the blessing and pleasure of memory’, she would ‘look back at the sun beginning to shine on me as it did when he arrived, and I am sure it never set afterwards’.193

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  It weighed very heavily on Elizabeth that she had left her home just as the queen’s health began to break up. She did not regret the decisions she had made, but could not help feeling a sense of guilt that she might not be present, alongside her sisters, to support their mother as she grew ever more frail.

  For most of her life, Charlotte’s health had been remarkably robust. She suffered from severe headaches, and from a recurring ‘complaint of the bowels’, but she had few serious illnesses and seemed extraordinarily resilient for a woman who had endured so many eighteenth-century pregnancies. Her only untoward symptom had been a strange fluctuation in her weight. She had always been slender to the point of thinness, but in 1805 ‘had grown very fat’ quite suddenly, and two years later was ‘so enormous … that she looked as if she carried all the fifteen princes and princesses before her’.194 By 1810, she was again very thin; a few years later, she was being treated for ‘pain in her chest’. Her symptoms suggest she was suffering from the early stages of what contemporaries referred to as dropsy, but which would now be diagnosed as heart failure.

  For as long as she could, she attempted to carry on as usual, but in 1817, at the age of seventy-three, she knew she was not well. Her eldest son did his best to raise her flagging spirits, insisting that ‘you are blessed with a better, sounder and stronger constitution than any other person living’. He urged her to think no more about illness, assuring her that she was ‘very well and very young also’.195 But he agreed that she might benefit from a trip to Bath, where she could take the waters. It was whilst staying in the city that she heard the terrible news of Princess Charlotte’s death in November. Despite the shock, for a while she seemed to rally, but her improvement did not last. In January 1818, the regent received a gloomy assessment of her condition from Halford: ‘The principal symptom is a distressing shortness of breath … on any exertion, and this recurs with so much severity as to justify an apprehension … that it may be more than her nature could sustain.’196