CHAPTER 12

Three Weddings

ALMOST A YEAR AFTER FANNY Burney had accompanied the king and queen on their ill-starred holiday to Cheltenham, she found herself on the road again as part of the royal entourage, travelling to the seaside resort of Weymouth. If the crowds that had marked their progress on that first journey had been vocal in their appreciation for their monarch, in the summer of 1789 they seemed even more delighted to see him. ‘His popularity is greater than ever,’ thought Fanny. ‘Compassion for his late sufferings seems to have endeared him to all conditions of men.’1 As the party travelled through Hampshire, they passed under floral arches festooned with mottoes celebrating ‘the king restored’, to the ever-present sound of the national anthem played by what Fanny called ‘the crackiest of bands’. At Lyndhurst in the New Forest, where the royal family stayed for a few days, they were greeted by ‘the delighted mob’ singing ‘God Save the King’ with great gusto. When George and his family sat down to dine, the villagers were allowed to watch the spectacle from the grounds of the house, looking in at the window. ‘They crowded so excessively,’ noted Fanny ‘that this can be permitted them no more, for they broke down the all the paling, much of the hedges and some of the windows.’ They had, she hastened to add, meant no harm; it was only their eagerness to catch a glimpse of the king that had led them on, ‘for they were perfectly civil and well behaved’.2

It was a small royal group that eventually arrived in Weymouth. The three youngest princesses had been left behind at home with their governesses, but even so it proved a tight fit to squeeze everyone into the accommodation arranged for them. Just as he had in Cheltenham, the king borrowed a house, Gloucester Lodge, to stay in, this time from his brother William. Again, there was not much space for the attendants. Fanny Burney was lodged in the attic, and although she enjoyed the views of the sea and the sands from her lofty perch, these did not, she felt, compensate for the pokiness of her room. ‘Nothing like living at a court for exaltation,’ she observed dryly.3 She was luckier than her male colleagues, who were obliged to find lodgings where they could; even the grand Colonel Goldsworthy, the king’s senior equerry, boarded at the house of a local farmer.

What Weymouth lacked in luxury, it made up for in loyalty. ‘Not a child could be seen that had not a bandeau round its head, cap or hat of “God Save the King”,’ noted Fanny. The town’s principal business was selling the curative powers of sea-bathing to sick or convalescent visitors, and it lost little time in attaching the king’s name, as prominently as possible, to the source of its prosperity. ‘It is printed in golden letters on most of the bathing machines, and in various scrolls and devices it adorns every shop and almost every house in town.’4 The phrase also adorned the women known as ‘dippers’ whose job it was to immerse their clients in the water. ‘The bathing women had it in large coarse girdles round their waists,’ wrote Fanny. They ‘wear it in bandeaux on their bonnets, to go into the sea; and have it again, in large letters round their waists to encounter the waves’. Fanny was not sure it was a good idea to allow one’s loyalty to so decisively overwhelm one’s sense of taste. ‘Flannel dresses tucked up, and no shoes nor stockings, with bandeaux and girdles, have a most singular appearance; and when I first surveyed these local nymphs, it was with some difficulty I kept my features in order.’5

It was Dr Willis who had suggested Weymouth as a place for the king to convalesce. In keeping with contemporary medical opinion, Willis considered sea-bathing a stimulant to sluggish bodily function. Bathing, for Willis and his patients, did not mean swimming, but immersion, or ‘dipping’, below the waves, aided by professional attendants. Men could take the plunge naked; women were always fully clothed. Charlotte, who disliked the whole idea of watery immersion, was content to spend her time quietly, in a spacious bathing-machine where she could read and pursue her needlework uninterrupted. The king, in contrast, was a dutiful bather, arriving early in the morning to take his cure. However, at Weymouth, not even a royal wade into the sea could be attempted without due ceremony. ‘Think of the surprise of His Majesty,’ exclaimed Fanny, ‘when, the first time of his bathing, he had no sooner popped his royal head under the water than a band of music, concealed in a neighbouring machine struck up “God Save Great George Our King”.’6 In the face of such a relentless barrage of enthusiasm, even Fanny decided shortly after her arrival that ‘The loyalty of this place is excessive.’ But the king was undeterred, convinced that the sea air and the healthy regime of the little resort would do him nothing but good.

The king enjoyed himself so much on his first visit to Weymouth that the family returned again, this time with all six daughters, plus Prince Ernest, in 1794, 1798 and then on an almost annual basis for as long as his health allowed. Gradually, as the town became accustomed to its royal guests, it became less fervent in its demonstrations of loyalty, allowing them to spend time there with a minimum of ceremony and fuss. At Weymouth, and in the countryside that surrounded it, George came closest to living the life he so often declared he would have chosen for himself – ‘that of a Berkshire gentleman and no king’.7 Robert Greville went with the family on their 1794 trip, and accompanied the king on the bucolic, low-key activities he most enjoyed. Both George and Greville particularly relished the lengthy daily rides they took meandering over the rolling Downs that ran down to the coast. Even though he was now middle-aged and not in perfect health, the king still spent hour after hour in the saddle in the open air, devoting whole days to the pursuit of stags and hare. As late as 1801, when he was sixty-three, he spent from nine in the morning till four in the afternoon on horseback, hunting deer.8 As his equerry Colonel Goldsworthy had once mournfully complained to Fanny Burney, bad weather did nothing to diminish the king’s enthusiasm. He actively sought out punishing rides, sometimes covering thirty or forty miles at a time. For him, these demanding journeys were an escape from the pressures of office, a physical and emotional release from the confinement of his daily routine. They were also a vital form of exercise, an indispensable tool in his lifelong battle against corpulence.

The king’s rides also allowed him to indulge one of his great sustaining passions – investigating local farming practices. Nothing pleased him more than detailed, technical conversation with knowledgeable farmers. He was passionately interested in agricultural improvement, particularly in the breeding of sheep. He had converted some of the deer park at Richmond into grazing land, and later carved out three model farms from the parkland at Windsor. He was the first to import the merino breed from Spain into Britain, and reared them with more success than many of his competitors, making a real contribution to the improvement of the British wool stock. Although he showed little interest in the processes of mass production that were beginning to transform the industrial landscape of Britain, George was a keen and informed advocate of the new practices in agriculture whose effects were just as significant. Under the pseudonym Ralph Robinson – borrowing the name of one of the shepherds on the Windsor estates – the king contributed two letters to the influential periodical Annals of Agriculture, edited by Arthur Young, the campaigning proselytiser for the radical farming techniques that were so rapidly enhancing the productivity of the eighteenth-century countryside. He invited the great agriculturalist to inspect his farms at Windsor, giving him a personal guided tour. He was delighted to be told that all was ‘in admirable order, and the crops all clean and fine’. In return, George told Young: ‘I consider myself more obliged to you than any other man in my dominions.’9

The king’s stays at Weymouth, so close to the fertile sheep runs of the Dorset Downs, placed him in the ideal position – both intellectually and geographically – to indulge his interests to the full. ‘On the Esplanade, the king met Mr Bridge, the eminent farmer and breeder of Wenford Eagle in this county,’ recorded Greville. ‘Talked much with him on the management of his farm and his sheep and promised to come and look at them.’10 The king’s reputation for buttonholing those who worked the land, with scant regard for ceremony, was well enough known for it to become the subject of one of James Gillray’s best-known caricatures of him. In Affability, produced in 1797, George peers closely into the face of a startled peasant farmer, rather lower down the social scale than the eminent Mr Bridge, and subjects him to a barrage of questions that mimics George’s idiosyncratic patterns of speech: ‘Well friend, where a’you going, hay? What’s your name, hay? Where d’ye live, hay, hay?’

In August 1794, on one of their rides across the Downs, Greville and the king met ‘an intelligent young Somersetshire farmer’. So impressed was the king by the enthusiasm and ingenuity with which he cared for his flocks that he invited himself to Farmer Ham’s home, and soon became a regular visitor and confidant of his entire family. Ham’s niece Elizabeth recalled that the king would send

one of his equerries to my father to enquire if his brother were at home, as it was the king’s intention to visit his farm that day. The king was so well pleased that this continued an annual event until his mind began to fail. As my father always received notice of this intended visit, he took it for granted that he was always to accompany His Majesty, and in consequence they became quite gossiping acquaintances. The king was scarcely ever in Weymouth a day before he took my father by the button to learn all the news.11

The young Elizabeth Ham was an interested, if sceptical, witness to her farming family’s dealings with the king. Unlike almost everyone else in Weymouth, she was defiantly resistant to the tide of loyalty that had engulfed the little town. She secretly wore a locket containing a picture of Napoleon Bonaparte, and, given those sympathies, her recollections inject a more astringent tone into the vision of royal life at the sedate resort. She refused to be beguiled into rose-coloured pictures of any kind, even when applied to her own close family. Thus, in her account, her uncle, ‘the intelligent young farmer’ of Greville’s description, is ‘a shrewd, hard-headed man’ whose machinations are driven by greed and rarely bode well for his naive brother, her father. She adds a similarly barbed footnote to Greville’s story of the king’s professional interest in Farmer Ham’s livestock. ‘The king admired some sheep of my uncle’s, and commissioned him to procure a flock of the same sort for his farm in Windsor. This was accordingly done through a cousin who resided in Somersetshire, and who sent his own shepherds with the flock to Windsor. Neither the sheep nor the expenses attending to them were ever paid for.’12 In Elizabeth Ham’s world, idylls – whether rural or royal – did not have much of a place.

Unconscious of the beady-eyed disapproval of this unimpressed young observer, the king was probably as happy on the Downs above Weymouth as he was anywhere else in his world. There he could surround himself with men whose work he respected and understood, with whom he felt naturally and unselfconsciously at home. He was as at ease in their houses as he was in their fields. His conversation was of ewes and rams rather than Cabinets and treaties. It was surely this enticing image of the life he might have enjoyed as a private man that lured him back year after year to this unexceptionable small town. Nothing else Weymouth had to offer could compete with the compelling vision of an alternative existence that destiny, inheritance and duty had combined to deny him.

There were other attractions, of course, although some found them more pleasurable than others. When the royal family was in residence, Weymouth Bay was patrolled by the Royal Navy, and the king made full personal use of the warships, organising excursions up and down the coast, standing out to sea to catch a sight of the Channel fleet in full sail, or crossing over to Portland, where ‘their Majesties, with their family, dined at the Portland Arms at the small romantic village of Chesilton’. Whether the promise of such treats was enough to compensate the queen and her daughters for numerous, less successful trips – such as the one to Lulworth Cove when they endured hours of hard sailing and were forced to beat back towards Weymouth in the teeth of a hostile wind – seems doubtful. With the exception of Augusta, who never lost her love for all things nautical, any pleasure the queen and her other daughters took in maritime expeditions did not long survive their repeated experiences of seaborne misery at Weymouth. Greville, who delicately absented himself from the king’s boating projects, witnessed one unhappy ending to ‘a party of pleasure’, which ‘had not exactly answered its expectations’. Conditions that day were so bad that ‘the coming on board and leaving the ships was by no means an easy ceremony, and Her Majesty and the princesses were a great deal alarmed in rowing in and from the frigate’.13 Some of them were seasick; all of them were distressed; and the queen was so badly shaken by the first part of her journey that she had to be persuaded to leave the frigate at all when it was time to get back in the boats and head for the shore. She was so terrified of these excursions that eventually the king put a reluctant stop to them.

The royal women were happier with land-based entertainments, especially visits to the theatre. Although Fanny Burney, who took a semi-professional interest in the stage, viewed Weymouth’s theatrical offerings with faintly patronising disdain (‘’Tis a pretty little theatre, but its entertainment is quite in the barn style; a mere medley – songs, dance, imitations – and all very bad’), the king and queen, whose tastes were less exacting, were regular attendees.14 Greville saw She Stoops to Conquer there, as well as lesser works such as Animal Magnetism and Ways and Means, which he thought ‘very tolerably acted’. There were, however, ‘no actors of any note’ until the arrival of Sarah Siddons, the most highly regarded female performer of her generation. Like the king, she was in Weymouth for her health – Fanny Burney spotted her walking purposefully with her family on the sands, ‘a lady of very majestic port and demeanour’ – but she was soon enticed to take to the stage for George and Charlotte. In Fanny’s view it was not a great success; Mrs Siddons specialised in the epic tragic roles, and was not well suited to the type of comedies the king enjoyed. Fanny noted: ‘Gaiety does not sit naturally on her – it seems like disguised gravity.’ Comic actors fared much better at the seaside, the best winning over even the hard-to-please Fanny, who admitted that ‘the burlesque of Quick and Mrs Wells made me laugh immoderately’.15

When the theatre palled, other gatherings filled up the time. ‘On Sunday evenings,’ recalled Elizabeth Ham, ‘the Assembly Rooms were opened for tea and promenade. This the king never missed.’ A cord was drawn across the room to distinguish ‘those who had the entrée’ from those who did not, and the royal family were conducted beyond it by the Master of Ceremonies, ‘with a candle in each hand, who walked backwards before them, up the stairs and into the ballroom’. Curious Weymouth-ites could also attend public breakfasts where, before the dancing began, they were permitted to gaze through an open marquee and watch the king enjoying his favourite simple meals. ‘His loving subjects could enjoy the satisfaction of seeing their beloved monarch draw a drumstick through his teeth, in which he seemed to delight,’ wrote Elizabeth Ham tartly, ‘and hearing him call for “Buttered Peas” and “Moneymusk” to set the dancers in motion.’ These were the tunes that accompanied the country dances that were then ‘the only ones in vogue’; but Elizabeth Ham noticed ‘the princesses never joined in … on these occasions’.16

Like the king, Charlotte and her daughters appreciated Weymouth’s lack of formality. ‘The princesses enjoy the ease they have here,’ noted Mrs Harcourt, observing that ‘even the queen goes about with only one lady and goes into the shops’.17 The favoured shopping destination was Delamotte’s, which opened at half past five in the morning to accommodate the early hours kept by the king. When they had made their purchases, the princesses accompanied their father on his lengthy walks along the Esplanade, on one occasion waiting patiently while the king ‘stopped and talked to all the children he met’.18 For other occupation, the princesses had their needlework, which they undertook with their mother, sitting in covered chairs on the lawns in front of Gloucester Lodge. Sometimes their quiet days were enlivened by the arrival of unexpected visitors. In August 1794, a caravan drew up near Gloucester Lodge which turned out to be ‘the conveyance of two brothers called the Albinos from the mountains of Chamonix’. Everyone – the king, the queen, the princesses and of course the ever-inquisitive Greville – ‘honoured them with a visit inside their caravan, and were surprised at these extraordinary-looking people. They have strong milk-white hair, their eyebrows, eyelashes and beards white. The skin of their heads was of a pinkish colour, and their eyes also inclined to pink.’ Despite their unusual appearance, ‘they spoke very tolerable French, were affable in their manner and well bred in their behaviour’.19

In the evenings, there were cards, played with a determined regularity that even news of the death of the queen’s elder sister Christiane – who died a spinster, Charlotte’s marriage having made her own planned union with the Duke of Roxburghe impossible – did not interrupt, somewhat to the surprise of onlookers. Sometimes there were ‘parties at home’, but, as Mrs Harcourt noted, these did not include any company from outside the inner household, and especially no new male guests: ‘Lord Chesterfield and the other gentlemen in attendance are the only men who are invited; they do not wish to encourage people to pursue them here.’20

There were occasional visits from the princes and their friends, who descended on the sedate surroundings of Gloucester Lodge bringing with them the unmistakeable whiff of dissolute bad behaviour. The Prince of Wales, Ernest and Lord Clermont arrived back from a trip on HMS Minotaur, where they had ‘taken so liberal a potation that they were much animated, and poor Lord Walsingham totally overcome by it. They left him, stripped and laid out on a couch aboard the Minotaur under the care and protection of Admiral McBride, who promises to return him safe on shore tomorrow.’21 The brothers rarely stayed very long in Weymouth, unless compelled to do so. They had no appetite for its quiet pleasures, preferring the gamier appeal of the Prince of Wales’s house along the coast at Brighton.

It was not just the princes who found that time at the king’s favourite little town dragged out slowly. ‘Nothing but the sea affords Weymouth any life or spirit,’ confessed Fanny Burney. Infected perhaps by the same sense of ennui, the queen’s dislike of the town grew stronger with every visit. She described it to Lady Harcourt as ‘this unenjoyable place’, and was convinced that, in spite of its alleged health-giving properties, it actually made her ill. ‘The heat, when we first arrived did not agree with me,’ she wrote in 1800, ‘and according to old custom, brought on my complaint in my bowels and rendered me so stupefied that I could not employ myself, which is, I do assure you, the strongest proof of my being disordered.’22

The most passionate denunciation of the resort’s limitations came from the queen’s fourth daughter, Mary, who, beneath a polite demeanour, boiled in frustration. ‘This place is more dull and stupid than I can find words to express,’ she fumed on her second visit to Weymouth in 1798, ‘a perfect standstill of everything and everybody, except every ten days a long review, that I am told is very fine, but being perfectly unknowing in these things, come home less amused than before I left home.’23 She was resentful at the isolated existence she and her sisters led there, surrounded by elderly courtiers. ‘I do not know one soul except Sir William and Lady Pitt, the Pouletts and that poor little duet, Lord and Lady Sudeley.’ The tedium of it all provoked her beyond measure. ‘George Pitt’s stupid old father is now at Weymouth. He looks as if he died three months ago, and was taken out of his coffin to come and show that he was alive to the king.’24 Her older sisters, as was their custom, were more discreet; but it is hard to imagine Mary was alone in her condemnation of their somnolent visits.

The king, for whom Weymouth was a welcome interlude of peace in otherwise crowded days, found it a soothing balm for his frazzled spirits. In the more circumscribed lives of the queen and her daughters, their sojourns at Weymouth served less as breaks from daily routine than as amplifications of it. If the princesses had nursed hopes that their lives might change following the terrible catalyst of their father’s illness, the limitations of their experiences at Weymouth soon extinguished them. Whatever the landscape, their role in it seemed destined to remain the same: dutiful deliverers of support and comfort to their parents.

The queen had her own disappointments. Any optimism she may have cherished that things could return to the way they had been before her husband’s illness ebbed away during the early 1790s. Sea-bathing and fresh air could do nothing to help her recover the playful pleasure in life that had briefly emerged as such an attractive aspect of her character. Now the best of which she felt herself capable was a detached resignation, a disciplined withdrawal from any greater expectations. ‘I am … of the opinion that the best thing is to enjoy what I have and not to make myself uneasy about things in which no human power can direct,’ she wrote to her son Augustus in 1791. ‘The real wants in life are few; sufficient for myself, and if possible, a little more for the relief of neighbours, is perfect happiness for me.’25

It was not at Weymouth but at Frogmore, the little house she owned in Windsor Park, that Charlotte came closest to achieving this ideal. There she sought to create for herself a calm retreat where the stresses of the public world were kept firmly at bay and only those she truly loved were welcome. ‘A life of constant hurry and bustle is not reasonable,’ she mused, as she surveyed her small domain. ‘A country life is to be preferred, but we must not forget the society of which we are part. My own taste is for a few select friends, whose cheerfulness of temper and instructive conversation will pass the time away without leaving any time for remorse.’26

Regretful feelings were kept at bay by filling her days with the mild, rational enjoyments she loved. Botany remained her favourite pursuit, and exotic plants arrived at Frogmore from collectors around the world; they were sketched, dried and duly classified, her daughters acting as her assistants in her studies. ‘Mama sits in a very small green room which she is fond of,’ wrote Elizabeth, ‘reads, writes and botanises. Augusta and me remain in the room next to hers across a passage and employ ourselves in much the same way.’27 Soon Charlotte was keen to translate what she had learnt into an ambitious programme of practical gardening. She had a greenhouse erected, ‘by all connoisseurs allowed to be very fine’, and employed a horticulturally inclined clergyman to help her plan the planting. ‘It is at present in the midst of a kitchen garden, where there is no garden stuff except a few old cabbages,’ noted Princess Elizabeth, although she was certain it would, with a little work, emerge as ‘a perfect bijou’.28

As the garden flourished, Charlotte extended her ambitions to the landscape around it, erecting a number of decorative buildings to adorn the view. Elizabeth, the most artistically gifted of the sisters, was encouraged to design many of them. The intention was to create an elegant retreat, which was to be simple, but certainly not austere. The grounds soon included a thatched hermitage, an octagonal Temple of Solitude and a barn big enough to be used as a ballroom. There was also a lake backed by artificial hills and a specially constructed Gothic ruin, where Charlotte and her daughters had their breakfast when the weather allowed. In her comfortably appointed and, above all, very private home (visitors were strictly by invitation only) the queen was as happy as she was anywhere. To Fanny Burney she spoke ‘with delight of its quiet and ease, and her enjoyment of its complete retirement’.29 It was not for nothing that she described Frogmore as ‘my little paradise’.30

But however hard Charlotte tried to keep the real world at a distance, some events proved impossible to ignore. The royal family had been at Weymouth in 1789 when the first accounts of the Revolution in France began to break. On 17 July – three days after the storming of the Bastille – ‘Mr Parish, a brother-in-law of Miss Planta’s came in the evening, just arrived from France’, and horrified Fanny Burney with his account of the ‘confusion, commotion and impending revolution’ he had witnessed there.31 At Gloucester Lodge the news was received with apprehension and concern. But for some, the fall of a monarchy that had ruled without offering voice or influence to those who lived under its government was an occasion to be celebrated. ‘How much the greatest event this is that ever happened in the world!’ declared the Whig Charles Fox. ‘And how much the best!’ Now, optimists declared, there was the opportunity to bring about the establishment of the first genuinely modern state, founded on rational and equable principles rather than sclerotic and unjust customary right.

Not surprisingly, neither George nor Charlotte shared any of this enthusiasm. Both realised the magnitude of what was unfolding across the Channel, and saw that it struck at everything they represented and believed. As an assiduous reader of Rousseau, the queen understood that the Revolution was the crucible in which a war of ideas was being fought out, a conflict in which the new thinking of the Enlightenment was poised to do battle with older traditions of hierarchy, duty and obligation. ‘God knows, the want of principle and the forgetting of all duties towards God and man, and the want of religion are regarded as the causes of the unhappiness of our neighbours,’ she wrote to her brother Charles at the end of 1789. Charlotte struggled to understand God’s purpose in allowing it to happen at all. ‘Perhaps Providence has sent these unhappy events to bring man back to right.’32

Most of her thoughts were directed not at the high politics of the Revolution but towards the horrible predicament of Louis XVI and his family. As a fellow queen, she felt a special sympathy for Marie Antoinette, whose earlier peccadilloes – which Charlotte herself had been quick to condemn – counted as nothing compared to the trials of her current situation. ‘Whatever faults she had,’ Charlotte told Mrs Harcourt, ‘she could but pity her – she had more than paid in suffering for them. She thought her present conduct had much merit, and her former errors much excuse.’33 Throughout the early months of the Revolution, Charlotte hoped fervently that somehow the French queen and her family would escape their dark destiny. ‘I pity both the king and her, and anxiously wish that they may meet with some well-disposed people to extricate them hourly out of their great, horrible distress.’34

The king, whilst he recognised his wife’s sympathies, was reluctant to intervene, sharing the opinion of his government that it was impossible for Britain to involve itself in the internal politics of another nation. Month by month, the position of the French royal family grew progressively worse. In October 1789, hungry Parisian crowds marched on Versailles, demanding bread and storming the palace. The desperate violence of the mob moved Charlotte to appalled astonishment: ‘I often think this cannot be the eighteenth century in which we live at present, for ancient history can hardly produce anything more barbarous and cruel than our neighbours in France.’35 She was not alone in the strength of her reaction.

Both Charlotte and Fanny Burney found much to admire in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, the most influential British refutation of revolutionary principles and practices, and one of the foundations of modern conservative thought. ‘It is truly beautiful,’ wrote Fanny, ‘alike in nobleness of sentiment and animation of language.’ It was also marked by a profound feeling for the personal sufferings of the French royals, arguing that Marie Antoinette in particular deserved the sympathy, if not the more active support, of any honourable, chivalric man. Burke’s florid and emotional style earned him a good deal of ridicule from his erstwhile Whig colleagues, but Fanny, whose father knew Edmund Burke well, was not among them: ‘How happy does it make me to see this old favourite once more on the side of right and reason!’ With a faint echo of the occasional spasms of liberalism that had surfaced since she entered the royal service, she did ask herself whether, ‘I call it the right side only because it is my own?’ But in truth, Fanny was in little doubt where her loyalties lay. In 1792, she was present at a private dinner with Burke, in which he treated the other diners to a passionate diatribe on the threats posed by the French Revolution, ‘even to English liberty and property from the contagion of havoc and novelty’. ‘I tacitly assented to his doctrines,’ confided Fanny to her journal. She had little difficulty in agreeing with Burke on the importance of monarchy, and the absolute necessity of protecting the persons of kings. ‘Kings are necessary,’ Burke insisted, ‘and if we would preserve our peace and prosperity, we must preserve THEM! We must put all our shoulders to the work, and aye, stoutly too.’36

All Burke’s persuasive powers had done nothing, however, to deliver any practical assistance to the beleaguered Louis XVI. In the summer of 1791, he and his family had failed in a last-ditch attempt to flee France. They were caught at Varennes, just miles from the Belgian border, spotted by a man who recognised the king’s familiar profile from the coinage. Both George and Charlotte were said to be ‘much affected’ by the news. It was hard to see what hope now remained for their stricken French counterparts. In August 1792, the Tuileries Palace was attacked, Louis’s Swiss Guards were massacred and he and his family taken into custody. ‘Nothing can be so dreadful as the affairs of that unfortunate country,’ wrote the Princess Royal, who was as shocked by the extremity of events as her parents. ‘I think they must defeat their own plans by pushing them on with such violence, as it opens everyone’s eyes.’37

Royal’s hopes were unfounded – in fact, the establishment of a European military coalition to restore order in France had probably already sealed Louis’s fate. In a pre-emptive action, France declared war on Austria in April 1792, instigating over two decades of worldwide hostilities that ended only with the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. The unexpected defeat of Austria’s Prussian allies, routed by French forces at the village of Valmy as they attempted to march on Paris, transformed the prospects of the revolutionary government. Buoyed up by the extraordinary and unexpected success of their armies, the French briskly abolished the monarchy on 21 September 1792 and proclaimed the First Republic. In December, Louis – or ‘Citizen Capet’ as he was now known – was brought to trial. He was allowed no legal representation, and on 21 January 1793, he was executed. Marie Antoinette followed him to the guillotine in October. Their children were imprisoned in the Conciergerie fortress where they were abused and humiliated, treated with such systematic cruelty and neglect that the dauphin, Louis’s ten-year-old heir, died in 1795. His older sister survived the ordeal, but was so traumatised by her experiences that she did not speak for years.

This horrifying sense in which the personal was now irrevocably linked to the political – where no indulgence was extended on grounds of age or complicity, when it was no longer what you had done, but what you had been born that made you a target for popular hatred – must have introduced a new level of anxiety into the lives of George III and his family. The execution in Paris of Louis and Marie Antoinette could not have been contemplated by their counterparts in London without some apprehension that, if events in Britain followed the revolutionary pattern of those in France – a circumstance closer in the 1790s than at any time since the English Civil War – then they too might share the fate of the French monarchy.

The prospect of sudden and unexpected public death was not of course an entirely unfamiliar prospect for any member of the royal family, but before 1789, it seemed more likely to come about through the act of a madman than a revolutionary tribunal. George’s family had always lived with the knowledge that their role exposed them to the unwelcome attentions of the disturbed and the obsessed. ‘As soon as a man is mad,’ wrote Anthony Storer to his friend Lord Auckland, ‘he is sure to fall in love with someone of the royal family, or, as love and hatred are very near akin, to wish to assassinate some of them.’38 The principal target was, almost without exception, the king. One of the best-documented attempts on his life had occurred in 1786, as he arrived at St James’s Palace. As George told the story to Fanny Burney, he had just alighted from his carriage, ‘when a decently dressed woman who had been waiting for him for some time approached him with a petition’. As he bent forward to take it, she drew a knife ‘which she aimed straight at his heart!’ When the king started back, the woman made a second thrust ‘which touched his waistcoat before he had time to prevent her’. It was just as well she had not pushed harder or had a sharper knife, the king maintained, ‘for there was nothing for her to go through but a thin linen and fat’. Immediately, ‘the assassin was seized by the populace’, who were carrying her away when the king, ‘the only calm and moderate person there present’, came forward and said, ‘The poor creature is mad! Do not hurt her! She has not hurt me!’ Once he was satisfied that his assailant was safe, he ‘gave positive orders that she should be taken care of, and went into the palace and had his levee’.39

George was always remarkably phlegmatic about the ever-present danger of meeting a violent end. Responding to an earlier threat to kill him as he rode to the theatre in 1778, he observed that ‘as to my own feelings, they always incline me to put trust where it alone can avail – in the Almighty ruler of the Universe, who knows best what suits his all wise purposes’.40 When, in 1794 – at the height of the Terror in France – the London Corresponding Society, one of the most influential organisations of radical protest, was alleged to have concocted a plot to murder him with a poisoned arrow fired from an air gun, he took a similarly philosophical view.41 ‘I have ever had but one opinion,’ he maintained. ‘We are all with the utmost caution open to events of the most fatal kind if men will at any hazard prosecute their plans, therefore anyone would be ever miserable if, not trusting in his own honest endeavours to act uprightly, and trusting in the protection of Providence, he did not banish the thought that men will be found to harbour such wicked intentions.’42

The king’s wife and daughters, however, did not share his sangfroid. When Fanny Burney first heard of the 1786 assassination attempt, she ‘was almost petrified with horror at the intelligence’. The queen took the news even worse, although the king did not perhaps break it to her in the most considerate manner. ‘He hastened up to her with a countenance of striking vivacity, and said, “Here I am! – safe and well – as you see! But I have very narrowly escaped being stabbed!”’ The two ladies-in-waiting immediately burst into floods of tears, and the Princesses Royal and Augusta ‘wept even with a violence’, while Charlotte sat stupefied, unable to speak at all. ‘After a most painful silence, the first words she could articulate were … “I envy you! I can’t cry!”’ The king, ‘with the gayest good humour did his best to comfort them’, and related the whole story in great detail, ‘with a calmness and unconcern’ that Fanny thought wholly admirable. He also insisted that the regular routine of walking on the terrace should not be postponed. Pale and silent, the queen dutifully accompanied him. The atmosphere of barely suppressed anxiety had still not lifted when the nightly concert performance was held as usual at their father’s insistence. ‘It was an evening of grief and horror to his family,’ wrote Fanny. ‘Nothing was listened to, scarce a word was spoken; the princesses wept continually and the queen, still more deeply struck, could only, from time to time, hold out her hand to the king and say, “I have you yet.”’43

The queen, thought Fanny, was convinced ‘some latent conspiracy’ lay behind the attempt, and ‘this dreadful suggestion prays upon [her] mind, though she struggles to conquer or conceal it’. In fact, the king’s would-be assassin at St James’s was, as he had instantly recognised, motivated by insanity rather than political malevolence. Margaret Nicholson was an impoverished seamstress who lived alone after the failure of an unhappy affair. Neighbours in her lodging house later testified that she was often to be heard muttering to herself; in her room were found many letters to the king, asserting her claim to the throne. She had perhaps sewn for herself the stylish black silk cloak and fashionable hat that proved such a gift to the illustrators and caricaturists who rushed to picture the almost-fatal scene; but she had no other assets, her entire resources amounting to no more than one sixpence and three halfpennies. When the case was investigated, she was declared to be mad, and confined for the rest of her long life in Bethlem Hospital for the insane at Moorfields.

In 1795, a very different kind of attack was made upon the king, which had as its cause exactly the kind of political purpose the queen had so feared a decade earlier. Britain had by then been at war with revolutionary France for nearly three years; taxes were high, a succession of poor harvests had raised the price of food beyond what the poor could afford, and political ideas advocating a more equal distribution of wealth and power were proving unsurprisingly attractive to those suffering most acutely in such desperately hard times. ‘Everyone is in great trouble about the scarceness of provisions,’ wrote Charlotte to Lady Harcourt in July. Things were so bad that she had heard several families ‘are come to a determination not to use pastry or white bread and to furnish all the family with brown bread’.44 It was not long before the royal household followed their example. The queen sent the Prince of Wales a recipe ‘for the making of potato bread which proves to be remarkably good, and we have had it baked with great success at Windsor’. It is hard to imagine such a homely dish making an appearance in the studied elegance of Carlton House; but George and Charlotte, naturally economical and abstemious, had not needed the grim example of Marie Antoinette to remind them of the political inexpediency of eating cake when others went hungry. ‘The king has given orders to have no other bread served to the household but brown bread,’ Charlotte told her eldest son with satisfaction, ‘and it is to be hoped this will encourage others to do the same.’45 But the queen was not convinced that, even if other wealthy families did follow their lead, it would have the necessary calming effect. ‘Whether the poor will be brought to that submission is a question,’ she admitted to Lady Harcourt. ‘The proverb says necessity has no law, who knows but that this distress may serve those who are unfriendly as a foundation for many unpleasant scenes.’46

At the end of October 1795, just such an ‘unpleasant scene’ erupted in central London, with the king at its heart. The mood of the capital was volatile in the extreme, the tension increased by the knowledge that legislation was about to be introduced which would curtail severely traditional rights and liberties. The Treasonable Practices Act outlawed serious criticism of the king, the government or the constitution, whilst the Seditious Meetings Act banned mass political meetings. The previous year, George had supported the suspension of habeas corpus, effectively sanctioning imprisonment without trial in certain cases. For all his genuinely paternalist sympathies for the sufferings of the poor, George had no doubt that mass disorder was to be suppressed at all costs. His candid advocacy of measures he described as ‘highly right and salutary’ made him as unpopular amongst reformers as he had once been amongst American rebels. In response, radical balladeers composed songs which contrasted strongly with the loyal declarations of the populace in Weymouth.

May we but live to see the day,

The crown from George’s head shall fall,

The people’s voice will then bear sway,

We’ll humble tyrants one and all.47

All this contributed to the hostile reception the king met with as he travelled to open Parliament. Along the route, an angry crowd surrounded the royal carriage shouting, ‘Peace and bread! No war! Down with George!’ Lord Onslow, who was sitting alongside the king, was appalled at what happened next: ‘a small ball, either of lead or marble, passed through the window glass on the king’s right hand, and perforating it, passed through the coach out of the other door … We all instantly exclaimed “This is a shot!”’ The king displayed his customary self-control, which was more than some of the other passengers could manage. ‘Sit still, my lord,’ he rebuked one of his companions who was fidgeting in alarm, ‘we must not betray fear whatever happens.’ The shaken entourage eventually forced its way through to Westminster, where George delivered his speech.

The journey home was worse. The crowd had grown bigger and far more restive, and threw so many stones at the royal carriage that all its windows were shattered. ‘Several stones hit the king, which he bore with signal patience, but not without sensible marks of indignation … at the indignities offered to his person and his office.’ At the end of the fraught journey, Onslow recorded that the king ‘took one of the stones out of the cuff of his coat, where it had lodged, and gave it to me saying, “I make you a present of this as a mark of the civilities we have met with today.”’48

The queen and the princesses, waiting for the king’s return at St James’s, were greatly unnerved by the events of the day, which they had seen and heard from within the palace. ‘It is impossible to paint to you in any degree what we have gone through,’ wrote Elizabeth to Lady Harcourt. The possibility that a bullet had been fired at her father was clearly ‘a most shocking thought’; but it was the hostility of the crowd that upset her most, the behaviour of ‘the Mob, who followed the coach in an insolent fashion, moaning and screaming “peace, no war”, “give us bread”, “down with Pitt” and “off with your guards”’.49 The princess was unable to get the images out of her mind. ‘I trust in God never to be again in the agonies I felt the whole of that day. It was indeed very horrid; and my poor ears I believe will never get the better of the groans I heard that Thursday in the Park, and my eyes the sight of that mob.’50 As she listened, transfixed, to ‘the hootings, the screams’, did the experiences of Louis XVI pass through her mind?

She did not feel properly safe until back in Windsor, where, considering the circumstances, she thought ‘my sisters and myself are surprisingly well; but it has had such an extraordinary effect on me that I, who naturally cry a great deal, have scarcely shed a tear’. In contrast, her mother, as traumatised as her daughters by what she had seen and heard, finally gave way to her feelings. ‘I am much more comfortable about Mama,’ Elizabeth wrote, ‘as she cried yesterday, which she has never done while she remained in Town; for she always said that did she let herself once go she could never conduct herself as she ought.’51

Charlotte had embarked on the new decade of the 1790s with a renewed determination to keep her feelings firmly under control. Bruised, insulted and undermined by her husband’s illness, she fought hard not to give in to grief and despair. As a result, even her small domestic pleasures often seem undertaken as much in the spirit of ‘banishing remorse’ as in pursuit of genuine enjoyment. Anxiety dominated her existence. In the public sphere, a new threat, both political and personal, far-reaching and yet horribly immediate, had been introduced by the French Revolution, and given a cruel pertinence by the sad fates of Louis XVI and his family. In her private world, things were, if anything, worse. The king’s health remained a subject about which everyone worried and nobody spoke. The 1794 trip to Weymouth had been undertaken in an attempt to head off what had seemed like an ominous return of his old disorder. Princess Elizabeth told Lady Harcourt she thought the holiday ‘absolutely necessary’ in the light of ‘much hurry of mind’ and sleeplessness that everyone had noticed in her father although it was not openly discussed. ‘Never write to me on the subject, nor own to the family that I have mentioned it,’ she warned Lady Harcourt; ‘but the truth will out to you. We never talk on the subject.’52

But amongst all Charlotte’s trials, it was the behaviour of her children that caused her most distress. This was the decade in which the first serious challenges appeared from within the family to the emotional authority established by the king decades earlier. As the struggles grew more prolonged and unpleasant. Charlotte’s attempts to carve out a quiet space for herself, where she could retreat into a somewhat chilly and isolated calm, became ever less successful.

*

Relations between the queen and her eldest daughter had not been good for some time. Alongside Augusta and Elizabeth, the Princess Royal had endured her father’s illness as a member of the suffering sisterhood who rarely left their mother’s side. But as the king recovered, it became clear that Royal did not entirely approve of her mother’s conduct during those difficult months. Like her eldest brother, her political sympathies lay with the opposition Whigs, and she was said to object strongly to the queen’s passionate identification with the king’s ministers. Soon her disapproval was reported to have tipped over into something much stronger. ‘Her Royal Highness now averred that she had never liked the queen, from her excessive severity, that she doubted her judgement on many points, and went so far as to say that she was a silly woman.’53 It seems unlikely that the painstaking and punctilious Royal would ever have described her mother in terms of such dismissive disrespect, certainly not in any place where she might be overheard; but there is little doubt that as the new decade opened, the twenty-four-year-old princess was plumbing new depths of unhappiness. Her principal complaint was boredom. Whether at Weymouth, Windsor or Frogmore, there was little to break the monotony of royal routine. Sometimes even the resilient Elizabeth’s spirits wilted when she was forced to contemplate the emptiness of their lives, in which nothing marked one day out from another except the playing of a little cards followed by the prospect of some cursory squabbling.

For the princesses, the lowering effects of this life were made harder to bear by their mother’s increasingly bad temper. The misery that Charlotte fought so hard to conceal under a veneer of disciplined resignation too often exploded into angry words, ‘sour looks’ and bitter recrimination. Her daughters, who spent nearly all their time in her company, bore the brunt of it. ‘I am sorry to hear the behaviour of a certain person continues so bad,’ wrote the queen’s youngest son Adolphus to his eldest brother. He could not understand why their mother chose to be ‘so odd, and why make her life so wretched when she could be just the reverse’.54 James Bland Burges – junior minister, poet and friend of the princesses’ lady-in-waiting, Lady Elgin – had heard similar stories of Charlotte’s irascibility: ‘I understand that the smiles and graces worn at court are generally laid aside with the full-dressed gown and jewels.’55 Burges thought the Princess Royal was particularly susceptible to the peevish moodiness of the queen, ‘before whom she is under the utmost constraint, and who maintains a very strict discipline and the most formal etiquette even in her moments of relaxation’.56 By 1791, this combination of isolation, aimlessness and squabbling had exhausted even Royal’s much-practised powers of endurance. Driven to desperation, she approached the one member of her family who she hoped would not only take her plight seriously, but might also help her change it: the Prince of Wales.

In the eyes of his sisters, their eldest brother could do no – or very little – wrong. To them, he was not only the very model of aristocratic elegance and refined modern taste, he was also generous, charming and indulgently kind. Even his more disreputable behaviour, of which they were not unaware, did little to affect their rosy view of him. He brought excitement and a touch of glamour into their otherwise monochrome days. They enjoyed his immersion in the life of high society, seeing him as an emissary from a raffish and exotic world which they knew they could never themselves enter. In return, the prince made a genuine attempt to live up to the standards set by the unconditional admiration of his sisters. More than anyone else, they penetrated the armour of his monumental self-regard; he made time to write to them, visit them and send them presents. He remained a part of their lives when it would have been only too easy for him to have drifted away into the louche world that was his accustomed habitat.

There was, of course, another dimension to both the princesses’ desire to confide in the prince and his willingness to listen to their problems. All knew that a time would come when he might have the power to change their situations. The prospect of his succeeding their father was never openly discussed, but it was the unspoken undercurrent to all the conversations the prince was to have with his sisters for over two decades. The extraordinary exchanges he had with the Princess Royal in 1791, when, for the first time, she openly declared the depth of her unhappiness and called upon her brother to help her find a way out of it, was the first of many appeals to come.

In May, the Prince of Wales had gone to the Queen’s House to sit with his mother on the occasion of her birthday. As he wrote in a letter to Frederick, Duke of York, their eldest sister was there too, ‘with whom I joked much in a good-humoured way about herself in the presence of my mother’. This was quite clearly family business as usual for the prince, and he had not at all expected what happened next. ‘Soon afterwards I took my leave and went upstairs to sit with my other sisters, when the eldest followed me and begged to speak two minutes in private with me, to which I immediately assented. She then told me how much obliged she would be if I would never joke with her respecting the smallest trifle in the presence of her mother, as I did not know how she suffered from it afterwards, how she was treated, etc., etc.’ Clearly somewhat bemused, the prince promised that he ‘would do as she asked, and had I known it sooner, she never should have suffered a single moment’s uneasiness by my means, as it ever was the principal object of my life to do everything in my power to render every individual of my family as happy as possible’. Royal seems to have taken her brother’s polite apology as an invitation to further confidences. She asked to see him again, and when the prince agreed to do so, described with passion how miserable she felt:

She said that the evident partiality which was shown on every occasion and in every trifle by her parents to all her other sisters in preference to her, the manner in which she was treated on all occasions, particularly by her mother, the constant restraint she was kept under, just like an infant, the perpetual and tiresome and confined life she was obliged to lead, no attempt being made at settling her abroad, or giving her a species of establishment at home, but what was worse than all, the violence and caprice of her mother’s temper, which hourly grows worse, to which she is not only obliged to submit, but to be absolutely a slave – in short, these circumstances combined were such as had led her to speak her mind.57

Having stated her grievances so powerfully, Royal expected something more from her brother than just sympathy. As the prince described it to the Duke of York, she had made it clear that ‘Nothing should make her undergo another year of what she had for some years past … anything was preferable to the misery she was slave to at present.’ All the prince’s attempts to calm her down were brushed aside; she was not to be fobbed off.

Both Royal and her brother knew there was only one way to extricate her from the sad life she had described with such loathing, and that was marriage. She begged her brothers to ‘endeavour to form some sort of alliance for her abroad, or in case that did not succeed, to press for some sort of establishment being formed for her here … If we would not, both of us, enter into these views cordially and engage to do the most we could for her, she gave me to understand she was determined to pursue her own plans and schemes.’ This was fighting talk indeed for the dutiful daughter of a dutiful queen, educated to believe that submission to the requirements of the family must always take precedence over her own happiness. Made reckless perhaps by the exhilaration of her defiance, Royal went even further, making it pathetically clear to her brother with whom she hoped her happiness might be found. ‘She then entered into an argument with me about what the propriety would be, supposing no attachment could take place abroad for her, were an alliance to be thought of with our friend the Duke of Bedford, and to tell you the truth, my dearest Frederick, I think she seems more anxious about this than for any foreign match in the world. She says she is come to a time of life that will not admit of any scheme of this sort being any longer postponed.’ The prince found this such an extraordinary idea ‘that to tell you the truth I could hardly forbear laughing’.

He knew such a marriage would never take place. Bedford was one of the greatest of the great Whig grandees, and therefore effectively an hereditary member of the opposition. The king’s hostility to seeing his daughters marry British peers would only have been intensified by the knowledge that it was Bedford whom Royal had chosen. The prince told his sister bluntly that such a match was impossible. ‘I told her I thought if I knew my father, which I thought I did pretty well, that he would never think of giving his consent to anything of this kind.’ He considered a foreign alliance was a far more realistic prospect, and promised her that both he and the Duke of York would consult ‘mutually what was best for her interests, and to endeavour … to alleviate those distresses which seem to press so much upon her mind’. In the meantime, ‘she must take a little patience’.58

However, when he responded to his brother’s long letter, the Duke of York was pessimistic whether much could be done. ‘Nobody pities her more than I do,’ he wrote, ‘or wishes to see her married sooner, knowing what a dreadful life she must lead,’ but he thought there were no opportunities in Prussia, where he was then living. ‘I cannot think that she can expect to marry the Prince Royal here because she is now five and twenty and he is only one and twenty. Besides, though I know that it is his great plan to marry one of our sisters, yet I believe he looks forward to Mary, who is certainly in every respect more suited to him in age. Tell Princess Royal however from me that I will give her my opinion very full how to proceed.’59

In the end, nothing came of Royal’s attempt to force the issue of her unhappy situation. No more was said about the Duke of Bedford, who died young and unmarried. The only union that came out of Germany in 1791 was that of the Duke of York himself, who married the woman he called his ‘old flame’, his cousin, the King of Prussia’s eldest daughter, Frederica. ‘I do not say that she is the handsomest girl ever formed,’ wrote Frederick contentedly to his elder brother, ‘but she is full enough so for me, and in disposition she is an angel.’60 When she arrived in England, the stylish and sweet-natured Duchess of York soon became one of the Princess Royal’s closest friends and confidantes; but she was no substitute for the husband and independence that she had so desperately desired. As time passed and her hopes ebbed away, Royal’s only resource was the patience her brothers so insistently urged upon her, to sustain a life she found unendurable.

It is possible that Royal’s parents were not even aware of her abortive bid for freedom. Her failed attempt was followed, however, by a far more direct challenge from within the family, both to the legal authority the king had established for himself in the Royal Marriages Act of 1772 and the desire for emotional control that lay behind it. No one saw it coming, perhaps because it was mounted by one of the least flamboyant of the princes.

Augustus was the second youngest of George and Charlotte’s surviving sons, a bookish and thoughtful boy. He was originally destined for the navy, but suffered from asthmatic attacks so severe that he was often unable to lie down to sleep at night, and was forced to try to rest sitting up in a chair. The king therefore decided that, after he had finished his studies at Göttingen, a career in the Church would suit him better than the sea. In the meantime, he sent him off to Rome, where it was hoped the climate might improve his health. Augustus was at first a reluctant traveller, disliking the attendants his father had chosen for him, and soon exhausting the pleasures of the tourist sights. Things looked up outside the church of San Giacomo when he met Lady Dunmore and her daughter Lady Augusta Murray. Noticing that Lady Augusta’s shoelace was untied, he knelt down and tied it for her. Soon they were reading The Tempest together; next they exchanged love letters, full of passionate references to ‘Goosey’ and ‘Gussy’; and not long after that, on 4 April 1793, in defiance of the Royal Marriages Act, they were married by an English clergyman at Lady Dunmore’s hotel. Augustus was only twenty; his new wife was some years older, and as a result was generally regarded as a cradle-snatcher. Augusta was clearly more experienced in the ways of the world than the rather innocent Augustus. Lady Harcourt thought she ‘had the address to conceal or gloss over some of the earlier transactions of her life’.61 The diarist Joseph Farrington, no stranger to worldliness himself, thought Lady Augusta ‘coarse and confident-looking’, concluding that the prince ‘is generally considered as having been drawn into it’.62

Rumours about the affair must have reached the king by the spring of 1793, as he ordered Augustus to return home. The prince took his time and did not arrive in London until the autumn. As soon as she met him, his mother suspected, ‘by the agitation Augustus is in’, that the gossip was right, but she surely cannot have suspected just how far matters had gone. Lady Augusta was now pregnant, and, at Augustus’s urging, the couple underwent a second marriage ceremony. On 5 December at St George’s, Hanover Square, in the very early morning, a man calling himself Mr Augustus Frederick, in a greatcoat pulled up to hide his face, married Miss Augusta Murray, who was eight months pregnant, the bride maintaining ‘she had married Mr Frederick in Italy when he was under age and so she decided to be re-married’.63

If Augustus hoped this second wedding in Britain would give some extra degree of security to his wife, he was wrong; neither ceremony had any validity in English law, as both contravened the terms of the Royal Marriages Act. He later described his marriage as ‘a misunderstanding’, but it is hard to imagine he was not aware of the provisions of an Act that loomed so large in the lives of all his siblings. In January 1794, a few days before his son was born, Augustus wrote to his eldest brother in frantic anxiety. ‘My situation I believe to be one of the most unpleasant in the world, from various reasons I cannot mention … Many times has my mind been so overcome with despair that I have been almost distracted.’64 He must have known by then that the king had ordered him back to Italy. He left a few days later, having said nothing to his father about his wife and child, leaving them in London to face the consequences alone.

The king was officially informed of his son’s illegal actions at the end of January, and coolly instructed the Lord Chancellor to ‘proceed in this unpleasant business as the law directs’.65 It took just over six months for the inevitable verdict to be reached. On 14 July 1794, the Arches Court of Canterbury pronounced the marriage between Prince Augustus and Lady Augusta Murray null and void. The King’s first grandson – another Augustus – was by this action declared illegitimate. Lady Augusta was established quietly in the country with her son, on a small pension, but warned not to try to join her erstwhile husband abroad.

Meanwhile, the prince brooded on his situation in Rome. Cut off from all contact with the princesses – he was convinced there was ‘an order existing which forbids any correspondence betwixt my sisters and me’ – he relied on his brothers to keep any link with home alive. As many of his exiled forebears had done before him, he began to assemble a picture gallery of his closest relatives. He wrote to Ernest in October asking him to ‘sit for a miniature for me and send it by the first opportunity’. He had already managed to gather together images of almost everyone else. ‘The Prince [of Wales]’s and Adolphus’s are the only ones missing as the Princess Royal has promised me hers, and the queen that of Amelia. Pray put the Prince of Wales in mind of it. In my solitary and unhappy moments, the sight of these pictures affords me great comfort.’66

Despite his miserable state, he insisted to the Prince of Wales that he would not capitulate; but the king was implacable, and as the months passed, Augustus’s loneliness gnawed away at his resolve and a more conciliatory tone crept into his letters. He begged the king to understand the difficulty of his situation: ‘Can a man of feeling who, through involuntary error, has become a father, forsake his child because the law is ignorant of his birth? Who is to protect the unfortunate companion of my misfortunes and my helpless infant if I do not stand forward?’67 Throughout 1795, Augustus tried to persuade his father to accept that he could not repudiate his wife and child, ‘those who have suffered on my account and whom I love’. He repeatedly begged him ‘to find some efficacious remedy’ for his impossible position, but to no avail. In the end the king refused to respond at all to his pleas, and gradually it became clear to Augustus that there was nothing to be done.

Kept away from both his families, new and old, this inoffensive and affectionate man began to sink into a deep depression. ‘I want nothing but to be left alone. My whole disposition is altered, that I hate society, and only feel less uncomfortable when alone.’68 For the next four years, Augustus cut a sad and solitary figure among the classical ruins of Rome. It was not only George and Charlotte’s daughters whose lives were blighted by the king’s cold determination to command emotional obedience from his children. As Augustus’s story suggests, a sensitive son could suffer as profoundly as any of his sisters.

By 1794, it seemed as though the misery engendered by Augustus’s exile and Royal’s disappointment threatened to overwhelm the entire household. ‘I assure you, from what I have lately heard,’ wrote James Bland Burges in December, ‘that royalty, when closely inspected, has few charms for reasonable people. I do not believe there is a more unhappy family in the kingdom than that of our good king. They have lately passed whole hours together in tears; and often do not meet for half a day, but each remains alone, separately brooding over their misfortunes.’ Burges cited a long list of reasons for the atmosphere of despair, all of them related to the behaviour of the princes. There was ‘the bad conduct’ of Augustus; ‘the ill-success and disgrace’ of the Duke of York, who had been removed from his role as commander-in-chief of British forces after a series of defeats fighting the French in the Low Countries; and inevitably, ‘the strange caprices and obstinacies of the Prince of Wales’. All these causes, Burges believed, ‘are perpetually preying on them and make them miserable’. Hunkered down behind her impenetrable façade of detachment, it seemed to Burges as if ‘the queen seems to suffer and feel the least’. Other members of the family were less constrained in expressing their distress. ‘The king sometimes bursts into tears – rises up and walks about the room – then kisses his daughters and thanks God for having given them him to comfort him – whilst the princesses are variously agitated, and sometimes so much as to go into fits.’

This atmosphere of hysterical distress weighed heavily on the already wilting spirits of the princesses. Burges thought ‘the effect of this kind of life’ upon them

has been very different according to their constitutions. Princess Augusta, soft and tender-hearted, vents her sorrows at her eyes and cries until she becomes composed and resigned. Princess Elizabeth feels very strongly, but soon recovers her spirits, and observes that, thank God, she does no harm herself and that she will not be such a fool as to make herself more unhappy than she is obliged to be; and therefore, she will be merry if she can, and drive away all the care, which she is strong enough to keep at a distance.

As Burges saw, the eldest of the princesses lacked either Elizabeth’s robust refusal to succumb to unhappiness or Augusta’s ability to cry the misery out of herself. ‘The effect of all this on the poor Princess Royal is very different. She is naturally nervous, and susceptible of strong impressions. Convinced she now has little chance of altering her condition; afraid of receiving any impressions of tenderness or affection; reserved and studious; tenderly loving her brothers and feeling strongly every unpleasant circumstance attending them, she is fallen into a kind of quiet desperate state, without hope and open to every fear; in other words, what is called broken-hearted.’ Sunk in sadness, Royal’s mute dejection was so severe that she had been seen by the doctor Sir Lucas Pepys, who was shocked by her depression, whilst correctly diagnosing its cause. Burges reported that he ‘expresses considerable apprehension for her and even privately hints that he thinks her in great danger, as from her particular situation, there is no chance of her being able to marry, which, he pretty plainly says, is the only probability he can see of saving her life or her understanding’.69

The knowledge that there was nothing she could do for herself to change her prospects was undoubtedly a factor in Royal’s decline. Her one attempt to take the initiative had ended in failure, illustrating forcefully her total dependence on the intervention of others to bring about any change in her life for the better. Her elder brothers were not indifferent to her fate; but when there proved no easy solution to her problem, it gradually slipped down the list of their priorities, emerging as an issue only when other women achieved the ‘settlement’ Royal so craved. ‘I suppose I was as much vexed as you,’ wrote Frederick to the Prince of Wales in 1793, ‘that my two brothers-in-law [the princes of Prussia] are engaged to marry the two Princesses of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.’ These were the daughters of the queen’s beloved brother Charles, on whose education she had been so eager to advise years before. ‘I had hoped they would have married two of our sisters,’ commented Frederick ruefully. ‘However that cannot be now.’70

There was, the brothers concluded, little that they could do for Royal. Besides, her eldest brother had other things on his mind. With a freedom to make his own choices that was denied to her, the Prince of Wales had decided to have for himself the very thing his eldest sister wanted most in the world. It was, he considered, time for him to marry.

His decision came as a surprise to everybody. The prince had always insisted that he had no wish to take a wife, and declared himself perfectly happy to see the royal line continue through the children of his brothers. In 1791, in the course of an interview in which he sought the king’s approval for the marriage of the Duke of York, who was absent in Prussia, he explained in detail exactly why he believed marriage for himself was not a likely option: ‘I was come to a time of life when I thought I had tolerably weighed all my own sentiments and prospects, that it was not everyone who could expect to be as lucky as His Majesty had been to meet with a person whose disposition suited so perfectly with his own as the queen’s did, if one might presume to judge by the unanimity that appeared to reign between them.’ Dropping the circumlocutory politeness that characterised most of the prince’s exchanges with his parents, he then spoke more plainly: ‘That as to us princes particularly, the choice of a wife was indeed a lottery, and one in which I did not at present intend to draw a ticket. There were very few prizes compared with the number of blanks.’ It was possible, he admitted, that his feelings on the subject might one day change, but at present he thought them unconquerable. ‘I did not mean to bind myself not to marry at all, but thought it most likely I should not, as the sentiments I had expressed were prejudices I could not get the better of.’71

There is little doubt that the prince meant what he said; but with his usual ability to convince not just others but also himself that a partial truth represented the whole of a story, he had omitted one important detail from his explanation.

He was, in fact, already married.

*

The Prince of Wales had met Maria Fitzherbert in 1784 through his Whig friends. Twice widowed, like so many of his mistresses, she was older than him, by six years. Her deceased husbands had left her comfortably provided for, and she surveyed the churning metropolitan social scene with an air of quiet confidence in her own value. She was handsome rather than beautiful, with a good bosom, striking eyes, fair hair and a clear complexion. Her critics considered her ‘perhaps too much inclined to fullness of figure’, but the prince was always drawn to amply proportioned women.72 She was thought good-natured, if a little proud; and beneath her calm exterior, she shared some of the hair-trigger temper and unpredictable mood swings of her royal lover. She was not a sparkling conversationalist, but was a kind and patient listener, which appealed to the loquacious and needy prince.

When they met, he was twenty-two and already the veteran of a string of affairs with women of every conceivable background. His lovers had included grand ladies of the court, opera singers, Maids of Honour, the wife of the Hanoverian ambassador, actresses and a number of semi-professional courtesans, many of whom he inherited or poached from his closest friends. Despite her affection for him, Maria was made of sterner stuff than most of George’s conquests, and refused to become his mistress. This only served to fan the flames of George’s desire. With his usual theatricality, George declared that he would die if she did not surrender, and attempted – somewhat half-heartedly – to stab himself. Seriously alarmed, Maria ran away to France. Whilst there, the prince bombarded her with letters, some over forty pages long, declaring that he could not live without her, that he would ‘ever remain unto the last moments of his existence unalterably thine’. He declared that he considered himself married to her in spirit, and insisted that the king could be persuaded to ‘connive’ at their union, although his rational mind must have known this was impossible. He called her ‘his dearest wife’, ‘his beloved wife’ and urged her to return to him. ‘Come then, oh! Come then, dearest of wives, best and most adored of women, and forever crown with bliss him who will through life endeavour to convince you by his love and attention of his wishes to be the best of husbands.’73 Mrs Armistead, Charles Fox’s mistress, was horrified by the violence of the prince’s behaviour, ‘rolling on the floor, striking his forehead, tearing his hair’. He repeatedly declared that he would ‘abandon the country, forgo the crown, sell his jewels and plate and scrape together a competence to fly with the object of his affections to America’.74 The prince was clearly in a state of hysterical distress. He’d always had a volatile personality, but beneath the drama lurked a hint of real feeling, a kernel of perception that, more than any of his other transient relationships, his love for Maria Fitzherbert offered the prospect of something genuinely transformative in his life. ‘Save me, save me,’ he urged her repeatedly, ‘save me on my knees, I conjure you, from myself.’75

Eventually, Mrs Fitzherbert capitulated, came back to London, and on 15 December 1785, she and the prince were married. It took the prince’s aides some time to find a clergyman who was willing to perform the ceremony; finally a curate, currently imprisoned for debt, agreed to conduct it in return for the payment of creditors and the promise of future preferment. The wedding took place in Mrs Fitzherbert’s drawing room, behind securely locked doors.

As the prince must have known, the marriage was invalid, as it breached every provision of the Royal Marriages Act. But it did more than that. Maria Fitzherbert was a Catholic, and the 1689 Act of Settlement required succession to the throne to be forfeited if the heir married a Catholic. The prince, focussed as ever on achieving his short-term desires, paid no attention to all to the possible consequences of his actions. The couple did not actually live together, but Mrs Fitzherbert was soon established in a house in Brighton, close to George’s retreat at the Royal Pavilion. In London, she lived in St James’s, not far from Carlton House. The marriage could never be formally acknowledged, but the pair were often seen together in society. The prince made it known that she was to be invited to all events he was expected to attend, and required that she was always to be placed at his table.76 The exact nature of their relationship was the subject of much speculation. Only months after the supposedly secret ceremony, the Catholic aristocrat Lady Jerningham was certain, from all she had heard, that the prince and Mrs Fitzherbert were indeed married. Seemingly better aware of the laws he had flouted than the prince himself, she thought it ‘a very hazardous undertaking … God knows how it will turn out’.77 The rumours finally surfaced in the House of Commons in 1787, and were put directly to Charles Fox, the leader of the Whig opposition and the prince’s close friend. Fox assured the House that the stories were false: the marriage ‘not only never could have happened legally, but never did happen in any way whatever’.78 He claimed ‘the immediate authority of the Prince of Wales’ for his assertion. This was indeed the case. Fox had been against the union from the beginning, recognising the dangers it posed to the prince’s future, and had done all he could to dissuade him from taking so potentially dangerous a step. In response to his warnings, the prince had assured his old friend that he had no plans to marry Mrs Fitzherbert, telling him that ‘there not only is, but never was, any ground for these reports which have of late been so malevolently circulated’.79 Fox told the truth as he believed, or wanted to believe, he knew it; but Mrs Fitzherbert was furious, declaring that Fox had ‘rolled her in the kennel like a streetwalker’, and never spoke to him again.80

For a while, it seemed as though Mrs Fitzherbert had succeeded where so many others had failed, and had indeed saved the prince from himself, enticing him into the enjoyment of a more domestic life. Certainly his family thought so, and considered this more settled relationship as a great improvement on its ramshackle predecessors. They did not know – or chose not to know – that it was based on a double illegality. But as the years went by, the partnership began to founder, partly on George’s duplicity. He took other lovers – his pledges of lifelong fidelity had not proved long-lasting – and justified himself to his friends by arguing that he knew his marriage had no real meaning, although his wife persisted in believing in it.81 Painfully anxious about her ambiguous status, wife and yet no wife, Mrs Fitzherbert grew resentful. The couple argued over the prince’s affairs, his drinking, his habitual and wounding dishonesty, and his recklessness with money.

Soon it was well known that their romantic idyll was over; one popular caricature showed Mrs Fitzherbert throwing a cup of tea in the prince’s face. Then, in the summer of 1794, the prince met someone new, the elegant and manipulative Lady Jersey, who was as experienced as he was in the conduct of extramarital affairs. Mrs Fitzherbert was brutally dismissed, the separation announced by a curt letter which, she insisted, ‘was preceded by no quarrel, or even coolness and came upon her quite unexpectedly’, whilst she was sitting down to dinner with William, Duke of Clarence.82 George was unrepentant. Should his letter ‘not meet with the success which the good intentions with which it is written merit and entitle it to, I have nothing further to say or reproach myself with’. He wrote to Frederick in Germany that though ‘we are finally parted … you will not lay the fault, whatever it may have been, at my door’.83

The ink was hardly dry on the prince’s letter ending almost ten years of life with Mrs Fitzherbert, than he was on the road to Weymouth to announce to his father his plans to marry. The prince’s complete volte-face on the subject of matrimony produced a rich crop of speculation about his motives, but it seems likely that three different factors had brought him to act so swiftly. Firstly, he saw marriage as a way of paying off his huge debts, which by this time approached £630,000. As a married man, he would be entitled to a greater payment from the Civil List, which would secure him more credit, even if it did not wipe out all his indebtedness. Secondly, Lady Jersey, now fully established as his principal mistress, was said to have encouraged him in the scheme as a way of preventing any resurgence of feelings for Mrs Fitzherbert. And finally, and in some ways most significantly, the judgement declaring his brother Augustus’s marriage invalid in July must have reassured him that his own union would not be held binding if brought to a court of law. Having effortlessly shrugged off any sense of moral obligation, he could now plan a marriage in the reasonable assumption that he was also legally free to do so.

It is often asserted that it was the king who selected the Prince of Wales’s wife for him, but that was not the case. The prince made the decision himself, declaring his choice to the king in the same conversation in which he had announced his intention to marry. Exactly why he chose his cousin, Princess Caroline, the Duke of Brunswick’s daughter, will probably never be known. Contemporary gossip attributed it to the malign influence of Lady Jersey, who hoped ‘that disgust for the wife would secure constancy to the mistress’.84 It was even suggested that the prince had been swayed by admiration for her father, a military hero of some renown. It seems more likely, however, that the prince pursued the project with a characteristic lack of reflection, intent only on considering the immediate benefits of the alliance, without giving any serious consideration to the life-changing implications of his choice. Back in 1791, he had told the king that he would never take a wife ‘unless at the moment I did, I thought I preferred the woman I was going to marry to every other creature existing in the world’. The thrill of a passion immediately and intensely indulged was everything to him. He was a romantic, of a particularly narcissistic and indulgent kind. He sought out sensation and extremity of emotion, perhaps in an attempt to deliver into an otherwise purposeless existence a sense of meaning and excitement. All this made him a particularly bad candidate to cope with the requirements of an arranged marriage. He had none of the traits which had served his father so well in a similar situation: a dogged determination to make the relationship work combined with an iron resolution not to indulge the lure of passion. Nor was he prepared to take precautions, as the king had done thirty years before, to ensure he did not find himself yoked to a woman who did not suit him. He maintained that he would never marry unless ‘I knew enough of the disposition of my wife to think it would form the happiness and not the misery of my future days.’85 Now he disregarded entirely his own advice, making no enquiries at all about the character of his future bride. This was, perhaps, the biggest mistake of his life. A little more care in making his choice might have spared all of those concerned the years of grief, bitterness and recrimination which made it the unhappiest royal marriage in modern times, and in whose throes the royal family was engulfed, divided and almost destroyed.

The king told the prince that he was entirely satisfied with his choice of bride. She was the daughter of his older sister, Augusta, and it was therefore not surprising that he thought it ‘the only proper alliance’. The queen, on the other hand, was horrified. Neither her son nor her husband had thought it worth seeking her opinion before the decision was made, although if they had done so, they would not have liked what she had to say. Charlotte was an assiduous collector of Continental gossip with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the reputations of female German royalty, and what she had heard about her niece Caroline was far from good. Coincidentally, Caroline had been the subject of a conversation between Charlotte and the king only weeks before the prince’s surprise announcement. ‘A fortnight ago I went into the king and found him busy sealing some letters, and he gave me one to show me it was for you,’ explained the queen to her brother Charles. In it, the king offered his recently widowed brother-in-law advice on finding another wife, and suggested as a possibility his niece, Caroline of Brunswick. ‘I was stupefied by these words; fortunately he did not notice; and said, “What do you think of it?” I said, “Perhaps Your Majesty is in more of a hurry over this event than my brother,” and that said, I shall take care not to reopen the conversation.’ Had the queen broken her usual self-denying ordinance, and ventured to offer her husband her true opinion, a great deal of misery could have been avoided. Instead, she confided only to her brother everything she knew about Caroline of Brunswick’s many and alarming shortcomings. ‘They say her passions are so strong that the duke himself said she was not to go from one room to another without a governess, that when she dances, this lady is obliged to follow her for the whole of the dance to prevent her from making an exhibition of herself by indecent conversation with men.’ Charlotte had also been told that ‘all amusements have been forbidden her because of her indecent conduct on account of which her father and mother have spoken with pain’. Breathless with indignation, the queen rested her case. ‘There, dear brother, is a woman I do not recommend at all.’86

Having successfully warned off her brother, Charlotte must have been appalled to have the unsuitable Caroline now produced as a potential wife for her son. In desperation she seems to have made at least one attempt to persuade the king to veto the idea, even to the extraordinary extent of disagreeing with him. ‘Something is in agitation, God knows what,’ wrote Prince Ernest at the end of August to his eldest brother, ‘but the honoured authors of our days have had yesterday a very long conversation tête-à-tête which seemed to be very boisterous, for though the wind made a horrible noise, one could perfectly well hear them talking.’ Ernest was not sure what was at the heart of their argument, ‘but I suppose you was. The king was in remarkable spirits, but his counterpart the very reverse.’87

However forceful their discussions, nothing the queen said made any difference, and the preparations for the wedding went on. Unable to halt the inevitable, Charlotte retreated back to her customary position of mute, self-consuming anger. ‘She said that she had resolved never to talk, no never to open her lips about your marriage,’ reported Ernest to the prince, ‘so that no one should say she had a hand in anything.’ She promised she would treat the princess well; more than that she would not say. ‘Her opinions she could not give, as she never intended to speak about it. She hoped you would be happy, and all this she said with tears in her eyes. God knows what is the matter with her, but she is sullen.’88 When the Prince of Wales wrote to his mother to try to discover why she was so upset, she refused to engage with him on the subject at all. She no longer hoped to prevent the marriage, but was determined to absolve herself from any responsibility for it. ‘When a person keeps silent upon every subject as I do and have done,’ she replied, ‘I cannot plead guilty.’89

In November 1794, the prince’s envoy arrived in Brunswick to escort the princess to London. James Harris, later created Earl of Malmesbury, was an experienced and sophisticated diplomat who knew the prince and his tastes well. His first impressions of Caroline’s physical appearance were not, on the whole, very favourable. ‘Pretty face – not expressive of softness – her figure not graceful – fine eyes – good hand – tolerable teeth, but going – fair hair and light eyebrows, good bust – short, with what the French call des épaules impertinantes.’90 Although he bravely listed the princess’s best features, Malmesbury was clearly uneasy. He knew that the prince was accustomed to select his mistresses from among the most elegant and sophisticated women of the fashionable world. It was true that his preference was often for women who were both larger and older than convention dictated, but he considered himself an appreciative connoisseur of female beauty and his standards were high. Malmesbury suspected he would not respond well to Caroline’s unexceptionable and slightly overblown looks; nor was he reassured by what he had begun to discover about her character.

His first conversation with Caroline’s father did nothing to calm his mounting sense of disquiet. The Duke of Brunswick confessed that he was very worried about how his daughter might behave once she arrived in England. ‘He was extremely anxious about her doing right … He wished to make her feel that the high situation in which she was going to be placed was not simply one of amusement and enjoyment; that it had its duties and those perhaps difficult and hard to fulfil.’ Confirming what Queen Charlotte had heard, the duke admitted that anxiety about Caroline’s flightiness had indeed led to her having been raised ‘very severely’. He hinted that the ‘free and easy unreserved manners’ of his wife, George III’s sister Augusta, had not provided his daughter with a very satisfactory model for correct regal behaviour. The duchess, who had already regaled Malmesbury with her dislike of Queen Charlotte and told him an indiscreet story about her eldest brother’s bedwetting habits as a child, was, as Malmesbury diplomatically concluded, ‘at times … certainly apt to forget her audience’. The duke was even more worried when he considered what he knew about the behaviour of his future son-in-law, who, he correctly deduced, was unlikely to act as a stabilising influence on his daughter’s uncertain grasp of correct behaviour. He told Malmesbury that ‘he dreaded the prince’s habits’. He had already urged Caroline never to appear jealous, and ‘not to notice’ any of his affairs. In conclusion, he begged a clearly shaken Malmesbury ‘to be her adviser, not to neglect her when in England’.91

Malmesbury soon saw for himself why her father was so apprehensive. Sitting beside the princess for the first time at dinner, whilst he noted approvingly that Caroline was ‘cheerful and loves laughing’,92 he was less satisfied with other aspects of her personality. She was loud, impulsive and unrestrained, with little of the dignity he knew she would be required to demonstrate in her new life. The more he got to know her, the more his concern grew. She was gushing and indiscreet, lavishing endearments upon relative strangers, ‘making miss-ish friendships that last twenty-four hours’. She would talk to anyone who amused her, and say anything to anyone. ‘I find her inclined,’ he confided to his diary, ‘to give way too much to the temper of the entertainment, and to get over cheerful and too mixing.’93 She prided herself on her ability to discover the secrets of those around her, and eagerly passed them on. She was, Malmesbury concluded, an even more inveterate gossip than her mother. At twenty-six, she still behaved as if she were a naive and impressionable teenager. He was dismayed to hear her make ‘improper remarks’ about the supposed affairs of her friends, and was even more unhappy to hear rumours of her own flirtations, of over-familiarity with dancing partners, of tokens allegedly given to handsome young officers and of romantic feelings harboured – indeed openly admitted – for unsuitable men.

But for all her obvious shortcomings, Malmesbury gradually warmed to Caroline. Although it was only too clear to him that she had ‘no fixed character, a light and flighty mind’,94 he thought she meant well, and came to believe that beneath her obvious failings was concealed an essentially good heart. Declaring encouragingly that ‘she improves very much on closer acquaintance’,95 he decided it was worthwhile doing all he could to improve her prospects for success in her life to come. Casting himself as her unofficial mentor, he sought to tone down those aspects of her personality he knew would not serve her well, whilst attempting to instil in her a more realistic sense of what her new role would require. Above all, Malmesbury tried to persuade her of the importance of adopting a dignified bearing, encouraging her to become less dependent on the noisily solicited approval of those around her.

To this end, the earl prescribed a plan of action strikingly similar to the guidance George III had given the young Charlotte a generation before. He was horrified by Caroline’s repeated insistence ‘that she wished to be popular’ in her new home,96 and urged her instead to place herself above all considerations of liking and disliking. ‘I recommend perfect silence on all subjects for six months after her arrival,’97 he advised. After that, he instructed her ‘to avoid familiarity, to have no confidantes, to avoid giving any opinions; to approve, but not to admire excessively; to be perfectly silent on politics and party’.98 When she complained that he ‘recommended too much reserve’,99 he merely repeated his advice with even greater force. Again and again he begged her ‘to think always before she speaks’.100 He was unsure how much, if any, of his advice she heeded. She listened to his lectures with good-humoured patience, but, as Malmesbury noted with a sinking heart, they did little to depress her ebulliently high spirits. She was still ‘vastly happy with her future expectations’, undaunted by his attempts to make her reflect more soberly on her future. Even her future husband’s reputation as a womaniser did not dismay her. She was naively confident that she could manage him, telling Malmesbury that she ‘was determined never to be jealous … and was prepared on this point’.101 Malmesbury, suspecting that her avowed resolution would be pretty quickly tested, urged her to do all she could to stay true to it, maintaining that ‘reproaches and sourness never gained anybody … and that the surest way of reviving a tottering affection was softness, enduring and caresses’.102

After two months in Brunswick, Malmesbury and the princess set out in freezing weather on the long journey through war-torn Germany to reach the North Sea coast, from where they would embark for England. The journey was slow, and during it Malmesbury had plenty of time to reflect on his feelings for his complex and often contradictory charge. He remained impressed by her resilient good nature. Few things made her angry; she had submitted to his many admonitions with good, if not always very attentive, grace. She was, he thought, no fool; Malmesbury believed she had ‘quick parts’, though ‘without a sound or distinguishing understanding’. It was her lack of mental discipline which Malmesbury believed undermined all her more positive qualities. She was ‘caught by first impressions, led away by the first impulse; turned away by appearances or enjoyment’. Nor did she seem to possess any real ideas of right or wrong. She had, Malmesbury concluded, ‘some natural, but no acquired morality, and no strong innate notions of its value and necessity’. With a better upbringing, he thought she might have been a very different person. ‘If her education had been what it ought, she might have turned out excellent, but it was that very nonsensical one that most women receive – one of privation, injunction and menace, to believe no man and never to express what they feel or say what they think.’103

If Malmesbury was concerned about the shortcomings of Caroline’s inner life, he was even more anxious about the image she presented to the world. For all his efforts, her manners remained crude and unpolished. He explained to her repeatedly that she must learn to be less blunt in her language as the ‘English were more nice than foreigners. Never to talk about being sick, etc.’104 He was horrified when she sent a bloody tooth she had just had extracted down from her room for him to inspect. And he was genuinely shocked by her lack of personal delicacy. Despite his embarrassment, he felt it necessary to have a very explicit conversation with her on the subject of hygiene and general cleanliness. ‘On these points, I endeavoured, as far as was possible for a man, to inculcate the necessity of great and nice attention, as well as to what was hid as to what was seen.’ She was, Malmesbury maintained, often ‘offensive’ from lack of attention in this regard. He knew she wore coarse petticoats and shifts ‘and these [were] never well washed nor changed enough’. Nor was she very particular about her toilette, preferring to wash quickly rather than properly. For this, as for so many of her other failings, Malmesbury blamed the Duchess of Brunswick. ‘It is remarkable how on this point her education has been neglected, and how much her mother, though an Englishwoman, was inattentive to it.’105 Cheerfully impervious to shame, Caroline obediently followed Malmesbury’s advice and, for a while at least, appeared each morning properly scrubbed and tidied; but none of this promised well for her eventual reception in London by a prince of famously fastidious temperament.

Whilst Malmesbury strenuously applied himself to preparing the princess for her uncertain future, back at Windsor, Charlotte and her daughters diligently assembled her trousseau. There too Caroline’s mother was found wanting. ‘I received yesterday the pattern of the princess’s nightdress,’ wrote the queen, but ‘what to do about shoes I do not know, and feel very sorry for it, particularly as I thought to have expressed myself circumstantially enough on every subject for the duchess.’106 Nothing could prevent Charlotte making peevish remarks about her Brunswick sister-in-law, but her daughters were heroically optimistic about the approaching wedding. Who could not be delighted at the prospect of marriage with their brother? ‘Were I the princess,’ wrote Elizabeth to the prince, ‘I should certainly sing when I came to St James’s. Oh! Had I the wings of a dove, I’d fly away and be at rest, and by what one has heard, she must thank God to have let her take flight and that to you. I trust in God that neither of you will ever know what it is to have an uneasy moment.’107

Little of this anxious optimism survived the first meeting of the prince and princess in April 1795. Already disconcerted to discover that Lady Jersey – whose exact relationship with her husband-to-be had been communicated to Caroline by an anonymous letter sent to her whilst still in Germany – was to be her lady-in-waiting, the princess arrived in London flustered and ill at ease. She tried to behave well, kneeling to the prince as Malmesbury had instructed, but he was unmoved. ‘He raised her (gracefully enough) and embraced her, said barely one word, turned round, retired to a distant part of the apartment and calling me to him, said, “Harris [i.e. Malmesbury], I am not well; pray get me a glass of brandy.”’108 The princess, shocked by his behaviour, commented with typical bluntness that she thought him very fat and nowhere near as handsome as his portrait.

From a bad start, things only got worse. A formal dinner held later that night was a disaster. Caroline forgot everything she had been told about the value of regal discretion; her behaviour, ‘flippant, rattling, affecting raillery and wit, and throwing out coarse vulgar hints’ about Lady Jersey, embarrassed everyone present, and in Malmesbury’s opinion fixed for ever the prince’s dislike of her.109 The marriage ceremony, which took place a few days later, was a painful harbinger of the couple’s future relationship. The prince arrived drunk, did not look at his bride, but gazed instead at Lady Jersey. When the archbishop asked whether there were any lawful impediments to the marriage, ‘he laid down the book and looked earnestly at the king, as well as at the bridegroom, giving unequivocal proof of his apprehension that some previous marriage had taken place’. With equally heavy-handed significance, the archbishop twice repeated the passage requiring the husband to be faithful to his wife. ‘The prince was much affected, and shed tears.’110

The couple’s brief honeymoon was spent in the unpromising company of some of her new husband’s more disreputable friends at Kempshott in Hampshire, who were, Caroline later asserted, ‘constantly drunk and filthy, sleeping and snoring in boots on the sofas’. Their wedding night was an ordeal for both of them; in their very different accounts of what went wrong, each blamed its failure on the other, in a pattern that was to recur throughout their partnership. The prince told Malmesbury that Caroline had gasped, ‘Ah, mon Dieu, qu’il est gros’, when they finally got to bed and she saw how he was endowed, but far from finding this encouraging, it had convinced him that ‘her manners were not those of a novice’.111 He maintained he slept with her only three times, disgusted ‘by such marks of filth both in the fore and hind part of her … that she turned my stomach, and from that moment I made a vow never to touch her again’.112

Caroline told a rather different story of what had happened on those fateful Kempshott nights. ‘If I can spell out her hums and haws,’ wrote Lord Minto, to whom she confided the tale years later, ‘I take it that the ground of his antipathy was his own incapacity, and the distaste which a man feels for a woman who knows his defeats and humiliations.’113

After only a few weeks of marriage, George ceased to appear in public at all with his wife. The king was obliged to give Caroline his arm as the family walked on the terrace without the Prince of Wales. It was obvious to all that something was seriously wrong, but his sisters nevertheless bravely attempted to seek out reasons to be cheerful about this increasingly ill-starred union. Writing to her brother, Elizabeth praised the ‘open character’ of ‘my sister’ the Princess of Wales. ‘I flatter myself you will have her turn out to be a very comfortable little wife,’ she insisted optimistically. The news that the princess was pregnant briefly inspired the family to invest new hope in the tottering relationship, and when, in July, the couple retreated to the country for a brief stay, every letter received was scrutinised for phrases that might suggest a better understanding between them. ‘Mama is … happier than words can express at your ending your letter with the words “we are all very happy and comfortable here”,’ wrote Elizabeth. ‘It has not only made Mama happy, but all of us who love you in every sense of the word, and could the wishes of your poor sisters have been of any use, you certainly had them from the first to last … I am commissioned with loves, loves, loves on all sides to you as well as the princess to whom I beg to be very kindly remembered.’114

But, as time went by and the prince showed no real signs of softening in his harsh and unrelenting attitude, the queen gave in to despair. She told Lady Harcourt in August that she was ‘so low and dejected that I had every difficulty in the world to muster up some degree of cheerfulness for the evening. The situation is truly deplorable, for what to say I do not know.’ She grew increasingly disenchanted with her daughter-in-law, whom, for all Charlotte’s protestations that she would treat her fairly, she had never learnt to like. ‘The utmost we can do’, she concluded wearily, ‘is to keep out of the scrap ourselves.’115

The princess’s baby was born on 6 January 1796, after what the prince described as ‘a terrible hard labour for above twelve hours’. She had given birth to ‘an immense girl’ whom her father greeted ‘with all affection possible … notwithstanding we might have wished for a boy’. The king declared himself delighted – ‘indeed I always wished it should be of that sex’. (‘You know Papa loves little girls,’ commented Princess Mary.) The king hoped parenthood would bring them closer together, as it had done for himself and Charlotte. ‘I trust they will have many more children, and this newcomer will be a bond of additional union.’116

In fact, the birth of his child drove the prince into an even greater frenzy of hatred for his wife. A few days later, in a state of nervous collapse, he convinced himself he was dying and rewrote his will. As ever when he was in desperate straits, his thoughts turned to Maria Fitzherbert, and it was to her, ‘the wife of my heart and soul’, that he bequeathed all his property. ‘To she who is called the Princess of Wales’ he left only a shilling. For all its empty posturing, it was a gesture that indicated the depth of his repulsion for Caroline, with whom he never lived again.

In April, for the first time, he suggested a formal separation which, he informed his wife, he would not infringe ‘by proposing at any period a connection of a more particular nature’, even if their daughter – now baptised Charlotte after her grandmother – were to die. The queen sympathised with her son’s unhappiness, but thought there was little chance of his father agreeing to a separation of any kind; indeed, the king was not prepared to countenance any open acknowledgement of the couple’s incompatibility. ‘You seem to look upon your disunion as merely of private nature,’ he wrote to his son. He had ‘totally put of sight’ the fact that as heir apparent, the prince’s marriage was a public act, and one which could not simply be set aside by everyone agreeing it had been a regrettable mistake: ‘a separation cannot be brought forward by the mere interference of relations’. The king advised him instead to think of his daughter, and do all he could ‘to make your home agreeable’.117

Although his decision correctly reflected the political realities of their position, the king’s refusal to allow the ill-matched couple a separation effectively consigned them to years of mutually aggravated misery. Most blamed the prince for the unhappy situation. Everyone – with the possible exception of his sisters, for whom he could do no wrong – agreed that he had treated Caroline in an insulting and brutal manner from the very moment of her arrival. He paraded his mistress Lady Jersey before her, and appointed her as one of the ladies of her household, compelling his wife to spend most of her days with her preening rival. He gave Lady Jersey jewellery that had originally been presented to the princess, which his mistress wore as ostentatiously as possible. On the rare occasions the princess visited the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, she was sure to find Lady Jersey already in confident residence. So many and so public were the humiliations heaped upon his wife by the prince that his ill-treatment of her was common knowledge. ‘If a twentieth part of them have any foundation,’ commented Lord Glenbervie, ‘that is sufficient to fix the highest degree of blame on his conduct.’118

It was true that Caroline’s behaviour was, as Malmesbury had observed in Germany, sometimes unpredictable. She did not always seem to understand the distinctions between what could and could not be said or done – as the prince saw, and trumpeted to anyone who would listen, there was something odd about her, and she was to grow progressively stranger as she grew older – but in the early days of her marriage she was never malicious, although she had a great deal to bear; and she was a conscientious and affectionate mother to her baby daughter. The extremity of the prince’s behaviour was a puzzle, even to those closest to him. ‘My brother has behaved very foolishly,’ Prince William was reported to have said in 1796. ‘To be sure, he has married a foolish, disagreeable woman, but he should not have treated her as he has done, but made the best of a bad bargain as my father has done.’119

It was not until 1797 that the king was finally persuaded to concede that the warring prince and princess might live apart, although it was hoped the separation would be a temporary one. Caroline eventually settled at Montague House in Blackheath, a few miles south-east of London. She furnished it with none of her husband’s famous good taste; instead, it was a triumph of exuberance over style. Lady Charlotte Bury, who became Caroline’s lady-in-waiting, described it as ‘an incongruous piece of patchwork; it may dazzle for a moment when lifted up at night, but it is all glitter and trick and everything is tinsel and trumpery about it; it is altogether like a bad dream’.120 The princess was delighted by her new home. ‘I was free,’ she later declared to Charlotte Bury, who sought, somewhat laboriously, in all her reminiscences to capture Caroline’s strong German accent: ‘Oh, how happy I was! Everybody blamed me, but I never repented of dis step. Oh mine god, what I have suffered! Lucky I had a spirit, or I never would have outlived it!’121

The Prince of Wales, in contrast, could summon up no comparable sense of cheerful detachment. His sense of revulsion for Caroline remained raw and visceral. ‘My abhorrence of her is such,’ he wrote, ‘and the rooted aversion and detestation that I feel towards her, that I shudder at the very thoughts of sitting at the same table with her, or even of being under the same roof with her.’ ‘Never, dearest and best of mothers,’ he begged the queen, ‘propose to me to humiliate myself before the vilest wretch this world was cursed with, who I cannot feel more disgust for from her personal nastiness than I do from her entire want of all principle.’122 His passionate rejection of his wife was, as he so often and so vituperatively declared, a reaction to who she was, to a personality he despised and a body that repulsed him; but it may also be possible that the fervency of his hatred owed at least some of its intensity to what Caroline represented – that his overwrought reaction to her was an unconscious revolt against the very idea of an arranged marriage, even one that he had arranged himself.

The campaign of spite and persecution that the prince waged against Caroline makes it hard to feel much sympathy for his predicament – in the matter of his marriage, as in so many other aspects of his life, George was his own worst enemy; but perhaps behind his blustering venom was concealed a deep sense of shame and humiliation at the position in which he found himself. On his wedding day, a rare sympathetic witness, looking beyond the drunkenness and tears, caught a glimpse of a desperately unhappy man, ‘who looked like death and full of confusion, as if he wished to hide himself from the looks of the whole world’.123 Even George’s first biographer, writing in the year he died and in a tone deeply critical of his many moral and political failings, thought his marital position pitiable. ‘That the heir apparent to the throne of a free country should be compelled, against his inclinations, to unite his destiny with an individual he did not love is a circumstance which the statesman, the moralist, and the philanthropist must deplore.’124 Everything in his character and his chequered amatory history suggested that, despite all the earnest hopes of his sisters, George would never have found it easy to adapt himself to the demands of a calm, companionable marriage. Asked by a fellow diplomat before he left Germany how he thought Caroline would cope, Malmesbury had warily reflected that ‘with a steady man, she would do vastly well, but with one of a different description, there are great risks’.125 Much the same might have been said about the prince. He might never have been a particularly satisfactory husband, but the uninformed and unreflecting alliance he entered into with a complete stranger cauterised something deep in his soul, destroyed his always shaky moral compass, and introduced into his character a sense of bitterness that he carried with him until the day of his death. He was not a very attractive victim, it is true, but in his own self-regarding and theatrical way, the Prince of Wales suffered too from the unpredictable iron dictates of the royal marriage market.

The prince was not, however, one to keep his sufferings to himself, seeking to draw all his family into the tense atmosphere of accusation and blame he created around himself. His mother was soon exhausted, both by her proximity to so much misery and her inability to do anything about it. ‘How many unpleasant things have passed since we last saw each other,’ she wrote sadly to Lady Harcourt in the spring of 1796. ‘To know them and not to have the power of soothing and assisting the sufferer is real martyrdom. I hear all sides and know so many things which must not be revealed that I am most truly worn down with it; and my dislike of the world in general gets the better of me.’ Everyone involved, ‘all say most cutting things’.126 Her daughters were equally in thrall to their brother’s unhappiness. ‘We are all truly miserable about you, and the first question in the morning and the last at night is, have you heard anything from London?’127

By the beginning of 1797, the queen had simply had enough. The prince had worried and harassed her throughout the autumn, demanding that she admit his mistress Lady Jersey to court. Bolstered perhaps by her deep-seated dislike of her daughter-in-law, and her desire to please her son, Charlotte did so, and found herself at the centre of a whirlwind of criticism as a result. It was the final straw. In January, she took the unusual step of writing to the king, putting down on paper the long list of her many grievances, and stating her intention effectively to withdraw from public life. ‘Your Majesty saying on Friday last at dinner that you supposed I would shut up shop until the town filled, induces me to beg leave of you to shut up shop entirely as far as relates to assemblies.’ This was not, she explained to her husband, solely the result of recent difficult events. ‘Before anything unpleasant happened last year, I found the fatigue almost too much for me.’ Fortified by a doctor’s prescription, she had managed to keep going, ‘though not without great exertion, and Your Majesty will I am sure be sensible that as from Monday to Saturday, we live in a constant bustle, either upon the road or in public, I may now begin to feel the consequences of that life.’ But it was the disintegration of her son’s marriage, and the pain attendant upon it, that had stiffened her resolve to remove herself from the spotlight. ‘Since the unpleasant affair of the Prince and Princess of Wales began, I will fairly own to Your Majesty that my dislike of everything public is greatly increased, and I have given full proof of that by appearing but three times on the Terrace last year, and not oftener at the Esplanade at Weymouth.’ The widespread criticism of her reception of Lady Jersey had increased her habitual suspicion of the press: ‘I found every word I spoke in the papers, and thereby was convinced that spies were sent to watch me.’ Her inability ‘to clear my character when things were at their worst in London’ had been the final straw. ‘I then determined never to appear but where my duty called me. I have been so thoroughly wounded at this time that nothing can ever make it up to me, and my dislike to mankind is so general that I distrust every soul and everybody that surrounds me.’ She concluded by asking the king to consider moving the time of dinner from four to five, as ‘this would certainly make the evening less long for the females of the family’, and reduce the opportunity for depressing gossip. ‘The encouragement for me,’ she observed in the closing lines of her long letter, ‘is not great in doing anything but what is merely my duty.’128

If, at the beginning of the 1790s, the queen had hoped that she and her family might end the decade in better shape than they had begun it, she was miserably disappointed. The public world had grown infinitely more threatening, whilst the carefully nurtured calm of her private life had foundered on the disastrous attempts made by two of her sons to establish their independence through marriage. Her daughters, she knew, were restive and anxious; even her once-dependable husband had become a source of terrible anxiety, to be treated with trepidation, lest his terrifying and inexplicable illness return with the same speed and severity with which it had descended from nowhere in 1788. Charlotte’s response was, as ever, one of retreat, fleeing not just from the glare of her public role, but from any honest and open emotional engagement with her family and their seemingly insuperable problems. Ignored when she had attempted to offer advice, and recruited into recriminatory contests she was powerless to resolve, the queen effectively abdicated all responsibility for any further role in shaping the destinies of her children. Intent instead on preserving her own sense of self-righteousness – as she had declared when she failed to persuade either her husband or her son to listen to her misgivings about Caroline’s character, ‘no one should say she had any hand in anything’ – she left them to shape their own futures as best they could. For her daughters, dependent as they were on the advocacy of others to promote their interests, this was a dark development in lives already shadowed by disappointment. If their mother would not fight for them, who would?

*

Almost the only unalloyed pleasure the princesses enjoyed during the 1790s had been the birth of their baby niece Charlotte in January 1796. ‘God grant every blessing and happiness may attend my (already) dear little niece,’ wrote Elizabeth as soon as she had heard all was well, ‘and may she resemble in everything (what is most affectionately loved by me), her dear father.’129 The excitement with which the news was received contrasted starkly with the chilling disregard shown by the king for the welfare of his other grandchild, Augustus, born in such difficult circumstances two years earlier. For the baby Charlotte, things were very different. ‘The king could talk of nothing but his pretty little grandchild,’ Elizabeth assured the prince. ‘He said there was never so perfect a little creature, and everybody here was delighted to see him in such ecstasies of joy.’130 The happiness the princesses took from the safe arrival of their brother’s child was genuine, generous and strongly felt; but it also focussed their minds on their own unchanging state, still at home, still single and with no immediate prospect of motherhood looming for any of them. Telling the prince once again that ‘my sisters are quite enchanted’, Elizabeth added a telling postscript: ‘Old one rather anxious to follow your example.’131

The Princess Royal lost no opportunity to tell anyone how desperately she still wanted to be married; but for all their concern over the depressed state into which they knew their eldest daughter had fallen, her parents made no attempt to help her out of it. It was left to others to do what they could to further her interests. The Harcourt women were particularly active on her behalf. Mrs Harcourt, living alongside her soldier husband, who was fighting in the Low Countries, was constantly looking out for suitable candidates for Royal’s hand. In 1795, she had been much impressed by the widowed thirty-nine-year-old Duke of Oldenburg, with whom she had spent a very agreeable evening. Mrs Harcourt worked on him as hard as she could, telling him that ‘he was much considered and esteemed by our royal family’, how much ‘his virtues must naturally be the object of their attention’, and that ‘I was sure they would be glad to see him.’ Surely, she exclaimed, this ‘must suggest to him that an alliance might take place?’132 In the midst of all his marital difficulties, even the Prince of Wales found time to advance his sister’s case, writing to the queen’s younger brother Ernest, and asking him to help in bringing about the Oldenburg marriage. Royal was effusively grateful and was, she maintained, ‘perfectly convinced that the Duke of Oldenburg’s character is such that could this be brought about, it would be the properest situation’.133 Princess Elizabeth was soon teasing her sister by calling her ‘the Duchess of Oldenburg’, noting ‘that her maiden-blush cheek is turned to a damask rose whenever the duke’s name is mentioned’.134 But, as with so many of Royal’s hopes for change, nothing happened. No more was heard about it, and the Duke of Oldenburg, who never remarried, drifted gently but permanently away from the royal family’s ambit.

On this occasion, however, the Princess Royal was not left to nurse her disappointment for long. In December 1795, Frederick, Hereditary Prince of the Duchy of Württemberg, wrote to the king asking to marry his eldest daughter. As usual, George’s initial response was to refuse, but this time he did so on the basis of something other than his wish not to see a daughter go abroad. ‘Knowing the brutal and other unpleasant qualities of this prince,’ he told his Foreign Secretary, ‘I could not give an encouragement to this proposal.’135 Frederick of Württemberg had been the subject of dark speculation in Europe for some years. He had been married to Augusta of Brunswick – the sister of the new Princess of Wales – and had taken her to Russia whilst he served in the army there. The couple lived in Russia for six years, and had three children. In 1786, Frederick and the children returned home, but without his wife. No one seemed to know exactly what had precipitated their separation; there were rumours of an affair, but these were never substantiated. Others said Augusta had simply chosen to stay at the behest of her then great friend, the Empress Catherine the Great. At some point, Augusta fell out of favour with the empress, and was sent to live at the remote castle of Lhode. There she died, of unknown causes and in circumstances sufficiently inexplicable to ensure that gossip about her possible fate continued to circulate around the courts of Europe for years afterwards. It was never spelt out exactly how Frederick was considered accountable for his first wife’s death, but it was an unhappy story that did not make the king eager to consider a marital alliance with him. ‘I shall not consent to his request,’ he declared, ‘and if he will not take a gentle hint, I have no objection to adding that after the very unhappy life my niece led with him, I cannot as a father bequeath any daughter of mine on him.’136

Frederick proved impervious to all attempts, gentle and otherwise, to reject him. Württemberg was poor and surrounded by bigger and hostile principalities; the prospect of an alliance with the wealthiest and most powerful state in Europe was not one to be easily surrendered. For months, Frederick’s envoy, Count Zeppelin, laboured in London, ‘going door to door’ to remove ‘the ridiculous prejudices’ harboured against his master. With the help of John Coxe Hippesley, a barrister who had worked for the East India Company and who had experience of investigating tricky questions of law, a body of evidence was assembled that appeared to exonerate Frederick from any complicity in his wife’s fate by placing the blame on her alone. A picture was gradually assembled in which Augusta was depicted as an irresponsible woman, swayed by strong emotions, without much self-discipline or restraint, a character, indeed, not unlike that of her younger sister, the hapless Princess of Wales. It was also implied that she had added infidelity to this catalogue of faults, which may, or may not, have resulted in the birth of an illegitimate child.

Augusta’s parents had been ‘lately undeceived’ by learning details such as these, which Frederick claimed he had been too delicate to reveal to them at the time.137 The Empress of Russia too had stood forward to declare the hereditary prince’s innocence. ‘Can it be supposed,’ exclaimed Hippesley, ‘that the Duke and Duchess of Brunswick, the Emperor and Empress Queen of Russia would all enter in a conspiracy to impose upon His Majesty, and sacrifice the Princess Royal to a prince so undeserving of Her Royal Highness?’138 The king, outflanked by the negotiators, and aware of his eldest daughter’s overpowering desire to see herself ‘settled’, capitulated, and on 15 June 1796, he wrote to Frederick giving his formal consent to the match.

There is no written account of how Royal responded when she at last achieved the object she had wished for all her adult life, but soon she was seen wearing a medallion with a portrait of the prince hanging from it, tangible proof that against all her expectations, she had been claimed at last, and would not now live out her days in her mother’s increasingly dismal shadow. Fanny Burney, who knew her so well, did not doubt that the translation from dutiful daughter to independent duchess would do more than provide Royal with the happy prospect of a husband and family; it would also satisfy a deeply rooted desire in her to exercise authority, rather than be perpetually subject to it. ‘She is born to preside,’ mused Fanny, ‘and that with an equal softness and dignity; but she was here in utter subjection, for which she had neither spirits nor inclination. She adored the king, honoured the queen and loved her sisters and had much kindness for her brothers; but her style of life was not adapted to the royalty of her nature, any more than of her birth; and though she only wished for power to do good and confer favours, she thought herself out of place in not possessing it.’139

Royal had bought her freedom at what some considered a fairly high price. When Frederick arrived in London, the newspapers were explicit about his physical failings. ‘His Serene Highness is in truth a most excessively corpulent man,’ commented The Times, ‘so much so that his servants, in assisting him to put on his pelisse [cloak], are obliged to walk quite around him to put it on from one shoulder over the other.’140 Napoleon, who thought him ‘a man of talent’, commented that nature had created the prince to see how far human skin could be stretched without bursting. His size was an undoubted gift to the caricaturists, who drew him waddling into St James’s like a great moustachioed whale. When presented at court, the sisterhood loyally looked past the prince’s shortcomings, tactfully commending his manly looks and strength of character. When finally brought face to face with her husband-to-be, however, the Princess Royal’s nerve failed her; she was ‘almost dead with terror and agitation and affright … She could not utter a word. The queen was obliged to speak all her answers. The prince said he hoped this would be the last disturbance his presence would ever occasion her.’141

A few weeks later, on 18 May 1797, the couple were married. Royal wore a dress of white and silver, every inch of which she had painstakingly embroidered, knowing, as her sister Augusta told Fanny Burney, ‘that three stitches done by any other would make it instantly said it was none of it by herself’. The result had been far more elegant than anything the princess usually wore. ‘’Twas the queen herself that dressed her! You know what a figure she used to make of herself with her odd manner of dressing herself; but Mama said, “Now really, Princess Royal, this one time is the last, and I cannot suffer you to make such a quiz of yourself; so I really will have you dressed properly.” And indeed the queen was right, for everybody said she never looked so well in her life.’ (‘The word quiz, you may depend on it,’ observed Fanny, ‘was never the queen’s.’142)

On 2 June, the new Duchess of Württemberg set off with her husband for Germany. Everyone in the family knew it was unlikely they would see her again. Princess Amelia, the youngest of the sisters, reflected the complicated mix of emotions that marked her departure: pleasure at seeing Royal achieve the matrimonial status for which she had so long and desperately pined, tinged with sadness at her loss. ‘My heart is so full with parting with my dear sister, I can hardly write … I am rejoiced to see how much she feels the going, but to be sure it makes me much more a fool.’143 The queen’s response was more circumspect. She wished the princess well, but regarded her future with a distinctly sombre eye. ‘I have just separated from my daughter Royal,’ she wrote to her brother. ‘It has cost us much, God hopes she will be happy. The prince has esprit, worldliness, and knows how to get what he wants. They are both of an age when they must know how to discern what true contentment consists of, and first youth being past, they must endeavour to make themselves mutually happy.’144

The duke and his duchess seemed determined to do the best they could to achieve that mutual happiness as they travelled towards their new home in Germany. After a crossing of the North Sea that made her Weymouth excursions seem very tame – ‘I have been most miserably sick, not being able to leave my bed the whole time’ – the couple arrived eventually in Hanover, where they were met by the princess’s young brother Adolphus. He had not seen his sister for some years, and ‘must own I find her charming and I am convinced that with her excellent understanding and goodness of heart she will be very happy with the prince; he is extremely fond of her’. The duke had described his wife ‘as a blessing from heaven’, and, Adolphus told the king, ‘I really do believe he thinks so. It would be very unnatural if he did not, for it is impossible to behave in a better manner towards a husband than she does to him.’145

The contrast with the first weeks of her elder brother’s marriage could not have been more striking. In July, now established at her new home at Ludwigsburg in the heart of the duchy, Royal assured the family that ‘my dear prince is unwearied in his attentions and love, doing everything that he can imagine which will give me pleasure; in which he so totally succeeds that I am never so happy as when we are at home, and am always anxious for the moment when I can return’.146 Over the next months, she often described him as ‘the best of husbands’, and although in later life the couple’s relationship was to be tested to the extreme by the experience of war, occupation and personal grief, she never departed from that conviction.

Not everyone shared Royal’s determinedly positive assessment of her marriage and her husband. There was, as had been earlier suspected, a less genial side to Frederick’s character. Queen Charlotte declared in 1802 that she had never liked him, that ‘he had a vanity that made him detested in England’, that he had not known ‘how to govern his bad humour in the presence of the women of my daughter’s suite’, and that ‘he displeased us totally and his departure was not regretted’.147 It is possible that Charlotte’s openly critical attitude towards her son-in-law – which she had not expressed in 1795 – was in part explained by his devious political manoeuvring. Desperate to hold on to his duchy when so many of his German counterparts had lost theirs to the French, he was as persistent a supplicant as he had been a suitor, nagging the king for expressions of support, both financial and diplomatic. In a letter his wife wrote to her father on the very day of her departure from England, she added a postscript, clearly written at the behest of her husband, hoping that the king ‘will be so gracious as to join your influence to that of the two Imperial courts in support of the interest of his family’.148 It was the first of a lifetime of such requests. Frederick was an astute opportunist: by 1805, he had thrown in his lot with Napoleon, to the extent that the emperor’s brother married Frederick’s daughter (news that was not well received at Windsor). Frederick had no illusions that his marriage was not based on political necessity, but he never treated his wife with the callous and insulting hostility that Royal’s brother had meted out to Caroline, and for this she was sincerely and lastingly grateful. In later life, his temper worsened, and he was sometimes seen to bully and harangue his increasingly long-suffering duchess, but she never uttered a word of criticism of him, and reacted severely to those who did.

In 1817, she scolded the Prince of Wales for listening to ‘idle reports of those whose only object must have been to do mischief’ in suggesting all was not always well between herself ‘and my adored husband … Believe me, dearest brother, never could I have been as happy with him as I was had not our minds been congenial.’149 In 1823, when the duke had been dead for seven years, Royal delivered to Lady Harcourt her verdict on their life together which, in its calm admission of the importance of compromise in marriage, might be allowed to stand as the final word on its success. ‘I believe that in my married life, I enjoyed as much reasonable happiness as falls to the lot of most mortals. Perfect happiness is not to be sought for on this earth; but affection enables us to counter even disagreeables with courage; and the great mainspring of leading a comfortable married life is confidence in each other, and the making it the rule to bear and forbear.’ If, in later life, most of the forbearing had been done by Royal, who, it was said, was ‘always puffing up the conjugal fidelity of her husband’, she would never have swapped the risks and challenges of marriage for the dreary certainties of spinsterhood. ‘Many people laugh at me for being such a great advocate of matrimony,’ she admitted, ‘but I am every day convinced that few single women are happy.’150

Although, from the moment of her arrival in her new husband’s home, Royal was determined to find everything about it good, she missed her family, especially her father, whom, as she must have known, she was never to see again. As she wrote sadly to the king, her arrival at her new home had been a forceful reminder of what she had left behind. At a dinner given to welcome her to Ludwigsburg, ‘the duke had “God Save the King” performed by both vocal and instrumental music, and Your Majesty’s health drunk with a royal salute. I own that I required all the strength in my power not to burst into tears. However, I fought with my feelings and behaved pretty well.’151 She had new relations to meet, especially her husband’s children by his first marriage, among whom was a teenage daughter, Catherine. Frederick had written rather brusquely to his daughter, as he and his second wife travelled through Germany, instructing her to behave well ‘to her new Mama’; but Royal was very far from being the harsh stepmother of fairy tale. At their first meeting, Royal had been delighted by Trinette, as she was known. ‘She is really very handsome, being the image of her father,’ she commented approvingly, and had soon won the girl’s affections. She was pleased that her stepdaughter seemed to like her: ‘from the beginning she took to me very much, and her age being the same as my dearest Amelia’s makes her doubly interesting to me’.152

Her happiness was crowned with the discovery, in August 1797, that she was pregnant. Throughout the summer, she wrote constantly to the Prince of Wales, hungry for news of the young Princess Charlotte – ‘all the letters I receive from home are full of her praises’ – and anticipating the imminence of her own motherhood. ‘I look forwards with great anxiety to the moment when I shall be equally blest.’153 She was still waiting by the middle of April 1798, and did not go into labour until the 27th; then, after a long and difficult delivery, she gave birth to a stillborn daughter, ‘a big and beautiful child’. The English minister at Stuttgart reported to the Prince of Wales that the duchess ‘suffered very greatly in her lying-in, and so much fever ensued, that for a short time, the physicians were very apprehensive of her safety’.154 She was not told for some days that her longed-for child was dead. Her first letter was to her father, to whom she wrote in an uncertain hand on 4 May: ‘Do not think me ungrateful to Providence for the many blessings with which I am surrounded when I say that the loss of the dear child has deeply affected me.’ She was, she assured the king, doing all she could to ‘submit to the will of the Almighty; but nature must ever make me regret the loss of the little thing I had built such happiness on’.155

A few days later, she was ‘much better and stronger’, but still sunk in grief. ‘I can with truth assure you that at the moment, I feel the most deeply the loss of my little angel.’ She sought to find some comfort in religion. ‘Though I shall long and silently mourn my child, I am so convinced of the wisdom of the Almighty, and of her happiness, that were it in my power to recall her to life, I would not do it. These times are not those to make one pity children it pleases God to save from the miseries of this life.’156 On the same day she wrote to the Prince of Wales, confessing that, although ‘I gain strength every day, I am very low,’ adding despondently, ‘you who have the blessing of so charming a little girl as Charlotte will feel for my loss’.157 There would be no other children. The ‘two sets of children’s clothes, supposed to last the first three years, one for a boy and one for a girl’, which Royal had brought with her as part of her trousseau, ‘were never needed and were sold at her death.’158

For the rest of her life, Royal would take a compassionate interest in the welfare of young girls, devotedly fulfilling her thwarted maternal affection through her loving care of other people’s daughters. If she felt any sense of injustice when she compared her situation to that of her prolifically fertile mother, she kept such thoughts to herself. Though she never forgot her lost baby, Royal was long schooled in dutiful submission to events beyond her control. Replying to a letter from her father which had given her ‘great comfort’, full as it was with ‘motives for resignation’, she bravely summoned up those aspects of her life that kept her from despair: ‘Parents that I so justly love and respect, to whom I owe the principles which at all times are the only source of happiness, and can in times of affliction be the only true comfort … a husband whose affectionate tenderness has attached me to him in the strongest manner, sisters I dearly love, and friends that are kind to me. Ought I then to repine or murmur when it pleases God to afflict me?’ Despite the rawness of a grief she rightly expected would never completely fade, Royal refused to rail against her fate. ‘The Almighty has granted me blessings which he has refused to most women, and still more to the greatest number of princesses.’159

Of the three weddings which took place in the royal family during the 1790s, that of the Princess Royal was by far the most successful. It was not always characterised by ‘the inexpressible bliss’ that the queen had felt radiating from the letters she sent home in its earliest days; but for Royal, it delivered a degree of satisfaction enjoyed neither by Augustus, unwillingly separated from his wife and son and living in crushed and lonely exile abroad, nor by the Prince of Wales, consumed by an all-pervasive hatred for a partner from whom he knew he could never be free. Of all the family, only Royal ended the decade in a happier situation than she began it; only she, contrary to all her own expectations, salvaged something positive from a period in which all other attempts by her siblings to create more settled lives for themselves ended in disaster.

Her brothers must bear some of the blame for what went wrong for them: Augustus was reckless, and the Prince of Wales gave no thought at all either to the character of the woman he chose or the demands married life would make upon him. Yet the miserable situation of their two sons was also partly of George and Charlotte’s making. The king rigidly enforced his legal right to control the formal relationships of his children, but, during ten years, made not a single effort to help any of them find a partner of whom he could approve. At the same time the queen withdrew from further involvement in the emotional difficulties of her children, hiding her bitterness behind an air of resentful disapproval.

The resulting unhappiness affected everyone in the family. ‘The world never appeared to me so bad as this year,’ wrote Elizabeth in September 1796, in a heartfelt response to the plight of her idolised eldest brother. But whilst she sympathised with his sufferings – ‘I cannot conceive how anybody can treat you ill in any way whatever’ – they had done nothing to dampen her own desire to be married. On the contrary, she was now more eager than ever. ‘I trust that the Princess Royal’s lot being determined upon, it may open the way for others,’ she declared, ‘for times are much changed, and every young woman who has been brought up as we have, by the goodness of Mama, must look forward to settlement.’160 Royal’s example proved to Elizabeth that a husband and establishment, and perhaps even love, were still within the sisters’ grasp. Not all the experience of marital misery she had witnessed at such close hand would deter her from seeking a similar opportunity for herself.