The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  By June, she was so ill that, making her way back from the Queen’s House in London to Windsor, she was forced to stop and rest at Kew. She had spent a lifetime travelling up and down the roads that linked her three homes, shaken and harried as the royal coaches traversed them at bone-shaking speed. She could not have known that this was the last of countless such journeys; but, as her condition steadily worsened, she began to suspect that she would never get to Windsor, as she had so fervently hoped. Unable to manage the trip, she spent the summer at Kew. By September, her legs were badly swollen, making even the smallest movement impossible. She also complained of ‘the drag on her chest’ which caused her pain when breathing. When Augusta asked her whether her doctors thought that ‘the swelling in the legs is connected with the compliant on the chest’, Charlotte replied that she did not want to trouble them ‘with my foolish fancies and questions’. In fact, fluid was accumulating throughout her body as a direct consequence of her failing heart; but it was only in the weeks immediately before her death that Halford was finally allowed to examine her properly. He placed his hand on her heart and ‘found it labour and act most unequally and irregularly, so as to feel this was the cause of all the ill’. She told Halford that sometimes ‘she saw her way out of the wood – but when she had made the least effort of any kind, then – alas – alas – she thought it would not do’.197

  Throughout the autumn it was plain to everyone around her that she was dying; but the queen herself would not acknowledge the danger of her situation. Finally she asked her doctors to prepare a candid written assessment of her state. When Augusta read it to her, she was devastated. ‘When I came to the conclusion, she said, “I had not thought it would have come to this. But pray read it again and read it very slow.” I did so, and then she cried and said, “I had hoped to get better, but nobody knows what I suffer.”’ She asked if the doctors ‘named immediate danger’. Augusta did what she could to soften the message, but could not conceal from her mother the physicians’ belief that she was unlikely to recover. ‘She then laid her head on the pillow and cried, but with some difficulty, and after a few minutes of continued silence she said, “I had hoped to see you all happy, and now I fear I shall not arrive at that wish of my heart.”’ Augusta could only reply that ‘we are all very sensible of your affection and most grateful for it’.198

  Charlotte did not have an easy death; she could not lie down, and remained propped upright in a chair, gasping for breath. One of her legs ruptured, and she was in great pain. She wanted, more than anything, to see her husband one last time. ‘I wish I was with the king. I ought to be at dear, dear Windsor.’199 In the midst of her final sufferings, she still hoped this might be achieved, explaining pathetically to Halford: ‘I own, sir, that it is very near my heart to be removed to Windsor before – before – …’200 She must have known that this was impossible. She died on 17 November 1818, with her eldest son holding her hand. The Duke of York was there too, as were Augusta and Mary. ‘We had the consolation of seeing her expire without a pang, and with a sweet smile on her face,’ Mary recalled. Between them they had ‘nearly received her last breath’.201

  ‘What a loss!’ Elizabeth had declared sadly, as she waited for news of her ailing mother’s expected death to reach her in far-off Homburg. ‘What a blow to us all and the nation! You have often heard me say, “No one will thoroughly know the value of my mother till they have lost her.”’202 In the days that followed her death, Charlotte’s daughters struggled to come to terms with the loss of the parent who had so dominated their lives. They returned again and again to what was, for them, their mother’s lasting legacy – the ‘bright example’ she left behind her. Her moral conduct had been without reproach, even when tested by the severest difficulties. ‘Hers was a long life of trials,’ wrote Mary. ‘Religion and her trust in God supported her under her various misfortunes, and so virtuous a life in this world must be happy in a far better.’203 All the sisters agreed that their mother’s virtues had been the glue which held the family together. Her tireless sense of duty and her dogged perseverance in doing right as she saw it were, they thought, the qualities that had preserved a semblance of family unity over the years, even when it felt as though the whole structure was falling apart. She was, Mary wrote, ‘the great link of the chain that brought us all together … and which we must feel the want of, and the loss of, more and more every hour’.204 Royal agreed. When her mother was still alive, she had mused that there was, in every large family, ‘a person at the head of them to whom all look up to. Through their influence a kind of friendly unanimity is preserved; but should they fail, all draw their different ways and outward union is no more to be thought of.’ She had no doubt that Charlotte had fulfilled that role. She too used the term ‘great link in the chain’ to describe the queen’s unique and irreplaceable role in the family hierarchy.205

  Charlotte’s daughters were eloquent in describing those qualities that did the queen credit; but there is a coolness to the epitaphs they composed so carefully. They found it far easier to pay tribute to what they had admired in their mother than to celebrate any of her more engaging, humane characteristics. Perhaps this was because, in recent times at least, they had seen so little of them. As grown women, it was Charlotte’s ‘inborn deficiency’ in these areas, her inability to demonstrate ‘warmth tenderness affection etc.’, which had shaped their lives, frustrated their ambitions and depressed their spirits. The way in which her daughters chose to remember her perhaps reflects what they had all known for many, many years – that it was far easier to respect their mother than it was to love her.

  It is certainly true that many of Charlotte’s most agreeable traits were those she kept best hidden. She had learnt early in her marriage that her feelings were always to come second to those of her husband, and trained herself to bury deep any emotions or desires that appeared to contradict his wishes – the words ‘subdue’ and ‘suppress’ recur throughout her correspondence with depressing regularity. She was capable of genuine affection – her friendship for Lady Harcourt lasted until the day she died, and her granddaughter Charlotte seems to have won a special place in her heart – but she allowed herself to express her feelings only in very cautiously defined and carefully considered circumstances. As a young woman, especially in the company of favoured friends, there had been a vivacious and playful side to her character, but this was always fragile, and collapsed, slowly but surely, under the pressure of the king’s repeated illnesses. Even at her most robust, there had never been much room for emotional spontaneity in her vision of things. She expected from her children a reflection of the obedience she considered she herself owed to the king. Submission was passed down the family, with no opportunity for debate or contradiction. Charlotte became the most visible enforcer of her husband’s authority, with the result that she was blamed by her children for policies which were not always of her own making, and of which she herself sometimes secretly disapproved. Her sad deathbed admission to her daughters that she had hoped ‘to see you all happy’ suggests that she knew they were not content in the situations that had been forced upon them, and that, in that respect, she had failed them. She paid a high price for that failure. Her unwillingness to champion the princesses’ interests tainted her relationships with them, and ensured that all the bitterness they felt for their unsatisfactory lives was directed at her and not their father. With the exception of Amelia, not one of the sisters was prepared to acknowledge the huge role the king had played in creating and maintaining the circumstances of their unhappiness. To the end of his days, he was, for his daughters, ‘the Dear Angel’, the recipient of their warmest feelings, which they rarely directed towards the queen.

  Within the confines of what she considered her duty, Charlotte had tried to do the best she could for her children. She always found it easiest to express her feelings for her children by the concern she showed for their moral and intellectual development. She fought hard to carve out a private space whe
re they could enjoy being young, and did all she could to surround them with people such as Charlotte Finch and Mary Hamilton, who were clever, affectionate and likeable. She had been determined to bring up her sons and daughters according to the most modern and forward-looking educational principles, convinced this would make them happier, better people. She knew all of them, in their different ways, faced complicated futures, and thought providing them with the means to navigate their destinies was the best legacy she could give them. Through all the difficulties that beset her, she always found peace in religion and did the best she could – without much success, in the case of her sons – to encourage her family to share this consolation.

  In many ways, hers was a lonely journey. In an age that did not appreciate female intellectual ability, she was a clever woman who took pride in her learning and in that of other women, and never sought to disparage intelligence of any kind. In the company of other lively, intellectually curious female companions, she was seen at her very best – generous, sprightly and amusing. Her reward was their loyalty. The friendships she forged with Mrs Delany, Lady Charlotte Finch and the Duchess of Portland ended only with their deaths, and her relationship with Lady Harcourt came to a close only with her own. Fanny Burney remained in thrall to her mind and her character until the day Charlotte died, although she found it easier to admire the queen when she was no longer obliged to live with her. Others were not so troubled by proximity. Charlotte had only two Mistresses of the Robes from her arrival in 1761, and lower-ranking members of her household were equally happy to remain in her service. Jane Moore, her ‘necessary woman’, who ensured her baths were hot and her sheets clean, worked for Charlotte for fifty-three years. Anne Boscowen, her ‘mistress laundress’, also served the queen for over half a century.206 The longevity of their commitment is mute testimony to Charlotte’s virtues as employer and mistress.

  She was brave, too, in her own way. She was cowed and broken by the terrifying experience of her husband’s inexplicable illness but not destroyed by it. There was a core of tough self-preservation in Charlotte that outfaced threat after threat, and enabled her to endure what she could not change. She survived the deaths of her children, the physical and mental disintegration of her husband, and the hostility and contempt of other members of her family. She defied threats of revolution, assassination attempts, and mercurial swings of politics that forced her into a public world she hated and feared. None of this, as her daughters could testify, made her an easy person to live with. The vicissitudes of her experiences soured her temper and buried her good qualities – her intelligence, her wit, her loyalty – under an often impenetrable shroud of depression from which they only rarely emerged. But even at the very end of her life there was a certain courage about Charlotte, a refusal to accept defeat that made her, with all her many faults, neither an insignificant nor an ignoble character. In 1816, in the midst of great social and political turmoil, she was challenged by a crowd as she made her way through the streets of London to her Drawing Room. In an atmosphere that threatened to turn violent, she was ‘hissed and reviled’, but remained undaunted. ‘They stopped her chair, and she put down the glass and said, “I am seventy-two years of age – I have been Queen of England for fifty-five years, and I was never hissed by a mob before.” So they let her pass on, without further molestation.’207

  With their mother gone, the sisters tried to adjust themselves to life without her. ‘Our going to prayers yesterday was awful,’ Mary told the regent nearly a month after Charlotte’s death. ‘Passing the queen’s empty chair was quite a trial.’ Little by little they were ‘fumbling into our old ways, and doing all we can to exert ourselves, to be of use and comfort to each other’.208 They had one final ordeal to get through, however.

  It had been extremely difficult to persuade Charlotte to make a will. The first minister, Lord Liverpool, thought her immovable resistance to any suggestion it was time to ensure all her affairs were in order was rooted in terror of her approaching end, a fear he did not understand. ‘For a person whose conduct through life has been so free from reproach, she has a strange and unaccountable dread of everything that pertains to death.’209 When her secretary, General Sir Herbert Taylor, urged her to discuss it, she refused to see him. It was not until several weeks later, only days before she died, that she could be persuaded to draw up the necessary document. Her main concern had been to provide for her unmarried daughters. She left her beloved Frogmore to Augusta, and the Lower Lodge, where the young princesses had grown up, to Sophia. None of her possessions were included in the will’s provisions, however, and her executors, including General Taylor, decided that these were to be sold, and the proceeds passed to the princesses. It was a puzzling decision. The king was believed to have ordered a similar sale when his mother died, and that seems to have been enough to convince the executors that ‘it was proper measure’.210 The princesses were too bereft to oppose it, unable even to visit their mother’s apartments without dissolving into grief, and finding the sight of her familiar things painful. Even in their distracted state, however, the resulting auctions were, as Mary commented, ‘a sad pill to swallow’. The queen’s horses and carriages went first, sold at Tattersalls; the rest of her belongings went under the hammer at Christie’s. China, glass, furniture and even some of her famously vast and valuable collection of jewels were all quickly acquired by eager buyers. The queen’s library, a testament to her tireless intellectual curiosity, took over a month to sell, the catalogue listing over 4,500 lots.211 Her daughters were allowed to choose a few keepsakes from what remained of the wholesale dispersal of a lifetime’s acquisition. Royal’s choices took nearly four months to get to Germany, but when they arrived she was ‘most terribly affected’. She had asked for ‘a little reading desk I remember her having in 1769’, and a small tortoiseshell box ‘she always made use of in her lyings-in. My mind still being oppressed with her loss, the looking over her things gave me a melancholy pleasure.’212

  In his secluded apartments in the quietest part of the castle, Charlotte’s husband had no idea his wife was dead. It was a long time since the king had asked about any of his family, or indeed about anything that related to his former life. ‘He considers himself no longer an inhabitant of the world,’ noted Elizabeth, ‘and often when he has played one of his favourite tunes, observes he was very fond of it when he was in the world.’213 Music was his only pleasure now. Several harpsichords were placed around his room and in the corridors where he took his meagre exercise. ‘The monarch frequently stopped at them, ran over a few notes of Handel’s Oratorios, and proceeded on his walk.’214 His calmer days were spent in a haunting parody of the role he had played for so many years. He dressed for dinner, and insisted upon wearing his Orders. In his silent rooms, he arranged appointments and promotions, often for men long since dead, debating their virtues and shortcomings, and entering into ‘cheerful conversation with some of his ideal friends’. His physicians noticed that he was ‘disposed to laugh and then to shed tears upon very slight suggestions of persons or things that presented themselves to his imagination’.215 Sometimes he occupied himself with trivia – the rearranging of handkerchiefs and nightcaps – for hours at a time. Food was a special treat. After a lifetime of abstinence, he was at last free to eat what he liked. His meals were the highlights of the day, especially when mutton was served – which he preferred to eat standing up – followed by cherry tart.216

  The physicians made occasional attempts to relieve his solitude, arguing that he might respond to a more stimulating environment; but the ‘system of exclusion’ propounded by the Willises remained immovably in place, and there was little talk of any expected improvement in the king’s condition. In January 1819, Halford was granted permission by the all-powerful Willises to see the king alone. For a moment, it looked as if the shock of seeing someone new, someone he had once known and liked, might jolt the king into a brief return of rationality. ‘Having stated his name, and his humble desire to a
sk His Majesty how he did, the king appeared forcibly impressed – collected himself – used the manner of a silent, solemn enthusiastic appeal by lifting up his eyes and his hands – but returned no answer – and precluded all further address by striking rapidly the keys of a harpsichord.’217 The experiment was not repeated. George began to go deaf, which pushed him even further into the private world he now much preferred to the dark, shrouded reality of his daily existence. He refused to be shaved, and grew a white beard. In this remote, withdrawn condition, he was glimpsed by the engraver Samuel Reynolds, who made a poignant drawing of him in his reduced state. In the picture, the king sits isolated in a dark room, with his head resting on his hand, his hair long and flowing, his beard by now reaching his chest. He gazes intently into the distance.

  It is an image of deep and brooding loneliness. When he recovered from his first bout of illness in 1789, George had compared himself to King Lear. In this portrait, made at the very end of his life, that is indeed whom he most resembles, a defeated, exhausted man, overcome by circumstances, baffled by what has happened to him. He stares fixedly into nothingness in an attempt perhaps to comprehend the extent of his misfortune. It is, by any measure, a profoundly sad image. It was also a painfully accurate one. When Reynolds showed it to the regent, ‘he was much struck with the good likeness’, asking only for his father’s hair to be shown in rather less disorder.