Charlotte & Leopold

by James Chambers

  Charlotte’s mother had always been less supportive than Charlotte had hoped, and more of a liability than Charlotte was prepared to recognise. But her planned departure was as much of a blow to Charlotte as it was to Brougham, and the way in which she said farewell was very painful. When Charlotte went to Connaught House, she faced the truth for the first time. Her mother did not really care for her. The Princess of Wales was so excited about her impending adventure that she could not even bring herself to pretend. Her manner was ‘indifferent’.

  ‘I feel so hurt at that being a leave-taking’, Charlotte wrote to Mercer, ‘for God knows how long, or what events may occur before we meet again, or if ever she will return.’

  The Royal Navy laid on the one warship that was accustomed to carrying important ladies. On 9 August the Princess of Wales boarded HMS Jason off Lancing and sailed south for France. Charlotte never saw her again.

  For the rest of that month the principal preoccupation at the isolation lodge was the holiday that the Duke of Sussex mentioned in his questions to the Prime Minister. Charlotte, as the Duke knew, was longing for a holiday by the sea, and her doctors were all in favour of it. She really did have a sore, swollen knee, which was now so bad that they told her to stop riding, and since her arrival at Cranbourne Lodge she had been displaying symptoms of depression. The sea air, in their view, would be ideal for both. But, to everybody’s exasperation, the Prince Regent prevaricated. As Earl Grey put it in one of his letters to Mercer, ‘All the best season will be wasted before she gets to the sea-side.’

  Charlotte wanted to take Mercer with her, but the Regent said no. He claimed that Mercer’s father would not allow it. Lord Keith, he said, did not want his daughter to spend too much time in isolation with Charlotte, where there would be no chance of her meeting a suitable husband.

  Charlotte wanted to go to fashionable Brighton, but the Regent said no to that as well. He wanted Brighton to himself. Eventually he asked the Queen if they could borrow Gloucester Lodge, a house that she and the King owned far away in Dorset, in no longer quite so fashionable Weymouth. The Queen took her time and then said yes, reluctantly. And so, at last, with September approaching, Weymouth was chosen as the setting for Charlotte’s seaside holiday.

  Shortly before she left, Charlotte went to a musical evening at Windsor Castle. When the music was over, one of her aunts, Princess Mary, took her aside and expressed genuine concern for her future. ‘I see no chance for you of comfort’, she said, ‘and certainly not at present as things are, without your marrying’.

  As she often did when marriage was mentioned, Charlotte threw in a red herring. She knew that everyone in the royal family disapproved of the recent marriage between her uncle the Duke of Cumberland and a widowed daughter of the Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Princess Frederica, who had once jilted his brother the Duke of Cambridge. So Charlotte suggested that she might marry Prince Charles of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

  ‘Oh, God, no’, said Princess Mary, and then added, ‘I would be the last now to recommend or to wish for anyone in particular.’

  Charlotte then decided to ask her aunt about someone whom she genuinely regarded as a candidate.

  She knew that there was no point in mentioning Prince August. Everyone in the royal family was aware that he had been paying court to Charlotte and they all disapproved of him. The well-meaning Duchess of York had even tried to put her off him by warning her that he liked ladies excessively and that his breath smelt. But the first criticism was one of the attributes that made him so dangerously attractive, and the second, if true, was clearly something that Charlotte and a great many other ladies were prepared to overlook.

  August was still the favourite. He had just left London and, like Leopold, was on his way to Vienna. Most of the European rulers and their retinues were assembling there for the congress that everybody hoped would bring lasting peace. But Charlotte fully expected to stay in touch with August while he was away, not only through Miss Knight, but now through Mercer as well.

  Nevertheless, although August was still the favourite, Leopold was not as much out of favour as Mercer had made out. Charlotte asked her aunt what she thought of him.

  Princess Mary blushed noticeably. ‘From what I saw of him, he was very good looking’, she said. ‘A very gentlemanlike young man.’

  ‘I don’t like him’, said Charlotte, ‘for he does not suit my taste’.

  Princess Mary thought for a moment and then said, ‘You don’t… don’t.’

  The enigmatic answer, combined with the blush, convinced Charlotte that her aunt was being as deceptive as she was.

  A few days later she screwed up the courage to ask another aunt directly whether her Aunt Mary was in favour of Prince Leopold or not. Princess Sophia honestly did not know, but she did know that the Duchess of York supported him. Leopold, she said, was ‘the greatest possible favourite’ with the Duchess of York. As for her own opinion, Princess Sophia felt that Leopold would not do, if only because he did not have any money.

  Charlotte could not help feeling that her family was making plans for her behind her back again. Certainly everyone was being much warmer and more attentive to her now, and for the time being Charlotte was determined to be docile in return. As she told Mercer in her last letter before leaving for her holiday, ‘I think of nothing but how I can get out of their clutches & torment them afterwards.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ‘Princess Charlotte Is Made of Ginger-bread’

  CHARLOTTE, HER LADIES and her servants set out from Windsor for the town of Weymouth in a column of coaches on Friday, 9 September.

  If she had forgotten the warmth of the crowd’s reception on the day when her father opened Parliament, she was soon reminded. She was still the most popular member of the royal family. ‘Wherever I changed horses’, she told Mercer, ‘there were people assembled to see me, & they all looked good humoured and took off their hats’. She stopped in Andover for an early dinner and then drove on to spend the night at the Antelope Inn in Salisbury, where, she was delighted to report, the ‘Bish-UP’, as usual, was not in residence. She had to press through the crowd to get from her carriage to the inn, and in answer to their calls, she stood at her bedroom window for a long time with a candle held up so that they could see her.

  Next day the party drove on through crowded towns and villages towards Weymouth. They stopped for dinner at Puddletown, where General Garth, who had gone ahead of them, had rented a house for himself. There was a young boy running around in the house, and the General, who said he was his adopted nephew Tom, told Charlotte after dinner that the boy would be ‘much mortified’ if she did not take notice of him. ‘A heart of steel could not have refused that’, wrote Charlotte, ‘for a more lovely boy was never beheld’.

  Skinny old Lady Rosslyn and her nieces, whom Charlotte was now calling ‘Famine and the Consequences’, were no longer in the room by then, but Lady Ilchester and Mrs Campbell were still there, and they were both shocked that the General had introduced the boy to the Princess.

  If not also shocked, Charlotte was at least taken aback when she was told his true identity. Tom’s mother was her favourite aunt, Princess Sophia, and General Garth was his father.

  In the course of the next week all the ladies were surprised by the extent to which the strict old General spoiled the boy. He even allowed him to stay on for a few days after the new term had started at Harrow. But now that Charlotte knew who he was – and the General clearly knew that she knew – it was embarrassing for her to have him around. Everyone in Weymouth seemed to know who he was as well. People even gathered to have a look at him when he was taken into town to have his hair cut. As she told Mercer, Charlotte suspected that the General was making her feel uncomfortable on purpose, probably because it was an indirect way of getting his own back on her aunt for having spurned both him and their son. It was not Tom’s fault, but Charlotte was relieved when he did at last go back to school.

  When Charlotte reache
d Weymouth, the whole town was filled with people, and the military band that greeted her went on playing for an hour after she went into Gloucester Lodge. But the holiday began with what she saw as a bad omen.

  The evening of her arrival, Charlotte was playing backgammon with the General when she noticed that the heart-shaped turquoise had fallen out of the ring that had been given to her by Prince August. She knew that it had still been there when she arrived at Gloucester Lodge, but she could not find it anywhere; and she never did, although the empty ring stayed on her finger throughout her stay in Weymouth. ‘You don’t know for such an apparent trifle what an effect it has had on me’, she told Mercer, ‘nor indeed how bitterly I have cried’. Charlotte was sure that the loss was a portent of ill fortune for her relationship with the Prussian Prince.

  She had not had a letter from August since he left England, and she could not read the old ones because she had burned them. The only news of him came from Mercer, and most of that consisted of rumours that were soon contradicted. It was not true that he had secretly married a Miss Rumbold. Nor was it true that he had been appointed Governor of Saxony, which was also good news because, if he had been, he would never have been able to live in England.

  Throughout the holiday Charlotte could only fantasise. She imagined August coming over and making a proposal to her father; and then she made herself anxious because she knew her father would refuse him. He would have to come over while Parliament was sitting. An appeal to Parliament would lead to a debate; a debate would be reported in the papers, and when the people read them they would be bound to support her against her father. If only August would make up his mind.

  In one of her long outpourings to Mercer, however, Charlotte admitted that she was so miserable she might marry almost anyone. She would rather it was August. But if August did disappoint her, ‘The P. of S-C decidedly would be accepted by me in preference to any other Prince I have seen.’

  When she read in the newspapers that there had been a quarrel between two young princes at the Vienna Congress, she fantasised again and imagined it was August and Leopold quarrelling over her. After all, she insisted unconvincingly, they were ‘visibly’ jealous of each other when they were in London.

  To add to her worries, there was bad news about Charles Hesse, now a Captain. Although Mercer had enlisted her father’s assistance, they had still failed to persuade him to send back any of Charlotte’s letters or presents, and they had no hope of succeeding soon. The little hussar was not in England. According to the most reliable report, he had gone out to join Charlotte’s mother and her reputedly dissolute touring party.

  Yet Charlotte was determined to enjoy her holiday and put on a brave face for all the ‘good people’ who came to look at her. For much of the time her mood was not far from the slightly hysterical merriment with which she greeted the law officers of the Crown during the melodrama at her mother’s house.

  She went to performances at the Theatre Royal and the occasional ball at the Assembly Rooms; she was allowed to give dinner parties, to which she invited some of the aristocracy and gentry who came to stay in rented houses or at Ressell’s Royal Hotel. Like the General, one of the constant guests at these dinners was ‘the Great UP’, who took a house for his family on the seafront.

  On one Sunday Charlotte went to church and heard the ‘Bish-UP’ preach a sermon for the first time. ‘I never heard so weak a voice & so bad a delivery’, she wrote to Mercer. ‘It is enough to spoil the very best sermon that ever was composed.’ But this was nothing compared with the sermon preached on another Sunday by the apparently famous Dr Dupré. This preacher went on for forty-five minutes without notes with so many ‘blunders’ and ‘repetitions’ that he ‘kept the whole pew in a titter’. Fortunately Charlotte was able to turn her head and hide her giggles inside one of the large bonnets made fashionable by the Grand Duchess Catherine.

  There were expeditions to places of interest, such as Lulworth Castle and the monastery nearby. The monastery had been taken over by some Trappist monks who had been expelled from France during the Revolution. Charlotte rang the bell and asked to be shown round, but the porter, who was the only monk who was allowed to speak, explained that women were not allowed into the monastery. Charlotte insisted. The porter went away and spoke to the Abbot. The Abbot remembered that their rule, which excluded women, allowed the admission of royalty.

  So while all the other ladies waited outside, the brightly dressed Princess was taken in among the black and white habits, shown round the monastery and its gardens and given a humble meal of milk, brown bread, vegetables and rice, which was served in wooden cups and bowls.

  When she was not sailing, Charlotte’s lunch was usually whatever was available at an inn, or a picnic on a beach. At one of these picnics, on the pebbled beach between Portland and Bridport, some children climbed up from the water’s edge to the high bank above the beach, so that they could get a good look at the Princess. With each step they dislodged showers of pebbles which tumbled down towards the royal party.

  Charlotte called up to them. ‘Hallo, there! Princess Charlotte is made of ginger-bread. If you do that you’ll break her.’

  But Charlotte’s favourite picnics were those that were served on deck when she was sailing, at which, according to one guest, she consumed large quantities of ‘roast beef…with plenty of mustard!’

  In her love of the sea, Charlotte was much more like her uncle the Duke of Clarence than her father, who was always seasick. She adored sailing, and she had been allowed the use of the royal yacht, which, by happy coincidence, was named, as she was, after the Queen, the Royal Charlotte.

  One slightly rough afternoon when Charlotte and her party were out sailing, a third rate ship of the line, HMS Leviathan, which was anchored off Portland, sighted the royal yacht and fired a salute to her. The yacht hove to and signalled to the warship to send a boat. A boat was lowered and the captain himself came over in it to pay his respects to the Princess. When Charlotte asked to inspect his ship, he was honoured to agree.

  Charlotte, two ladies and the trembling ‘Bish-UP’ climbed down to the boat and were rowed across through choppy water to the warship. By the time they reached her, to Charlotte’s great amusement, they were all drenched.

  As they went alongside, a chair was lowered on ropes from the great height of the main deck. But Charlotte refused to use it. She wanted to climb the steps on the ship’s side like a seaman, and when she had done just that, she stood and watched while the Bishop and the ladies were hauled up one at a time in the chair.

  By mid-October, when bad weather had brought an end to sailing, the doctors were able to report that Charlotte’s health and spirits were much improved. Her knee was much better as well, as the climb up the side of Leviathan had demonstrated, and she had started to ride again. But it was not time to go home. The Regent was happy to have his daughter out of the way in Weymouth, and he kept her there for another two months.

  There was less to do during those two months. With the hotel and the rented houses almost empty, there were fewer guests for dinner parties. On most of the long evenings the ladies sat around while Charlotte read aloud to them. The gloom that had never really gone seeped up to the surface again.

  By the middle of November both Mercer and Cornelia Knight had written to Prince August, but the weeks went by without either of them receiving a reply. Charlotte could not believe that a man who had written to her so passionately did not mean at least some of what he said. She still clung to the hope that he would one day come back for her. But Mercer was clearly trying to persuade her to face up to harsh reality, and as one desperate letter succeeded another, Charlotte began to give more serious consideration to what she described as ‘the next best thing…a good tempered man with good sence, with whom I could have a reasonable hope of being less unhappy & comfortless than I have been in a single state.’ And ‘that man’, she told Mercer, was ‘the P of S-C.’

  Yet though the Prince of Saxe-Cobur
g was now a practical proposition, the Prince of Prussia was still the one who inspired Charlotte’s romantic longings. In a letter written a month later, on 11 December, she surpassed herself. ‘If grief is to be my only share, then I will cherish, nourish, feed & love it, for nothing that comes from him can be otherwise than dear, tho’ it may cut me to the soul.’

  Mercer’s letters have not survived, but whatever she wrote in response to that must have come close to convincing Charlotte that she was making a fool of herself and that August was a philanderer.

  Shortly before she left Weymouth she wrote, ‘If the plain & damning proofs are brought to me, such as must, however unwillingly, convince me of the faithlessness of the most beloved of human beings, the struggle, the effort, however painful, must be made.’

  On 18 December, after a ‘sad, uncomfortable’ journey, on which she was driven to distraction by Lady Rosslyn’s ‘eternal fidgets & frights’, Charlotte returned to Windsor, in time to spend Christmas with her family.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A Crisis at Christmas

  ON 21 DECEMBER Charlotte received a surprise visit from her father at Cranbourne Lodge. It was a surprise in more ways than one. He listened attentively to all she had to tell him about what she had been doing in Weymouth, and he told her all the news and gossip that he thought might interest her about the family and friends. Charlotte was amazed. He could not, she said, have been ‘kinder or more affectionate… It has been the most comfortable visit to me and my feelings that I have ever had…’

  Two days later she received another surprise visit, this time from her old friend and tutor, and Mercer’s uncle, Dr Short. The dandy doctor of divinity had been sent by her father to warn her that her mother was again making claims about the paternity of William Austin, ‘the boy who she took abroad with her’.