CHAPTER 13

The Wrong Lovers

GEORGE AND CHARLOTTE’S THREE YOUNGEST daughters grew up in an atmosphere very different from that which had shaped the characters of their elder sisters. As with so many other aspects of family life, it was the king’s illness which changed everything. When, in 1788, both doctors and politicians insisted that the queen must in future devote all her energies to her husband, Charlotte’s first thought had been to lament the effect it would have on the upbringing of the junior princesses: ‘I pity my three younger daughters,’ she observed, ‘whose education I can no longer attend to.’1 The king’s eventual recovery did nothing to alter this seismic shift in her responsibilities and, as a result, Mary, Sophia and Amelia rarely found themselves exposed to the sustained, demanding programme of academic and moral instruction that had been the daily experience of the senior princesses. Charlotte’s expectations were reluctantly tailored to accommodate her new burdens, and the education of the youngest girls was competent rather than outstanding. They were mainly instructed by governesses, with whom they lived in sometimes uneasy proximity at the Lower Lodge at Windsor. They were physically and emotionally more detached from their mother than the older princesses, less dependent on the ebb and flow of her restrained but powerful personality.

The impact on their development was marked. Removed from the glaring intensity of the queen’s ambition, not one of the girls grew up to share the breadth of their mother’s intellectual tastes, nor the rigour with which she pursued them. But if they lacked the hard-won accomplishments of their more studious sisters, they were also far less consumed with their anxious desire to excel. They displayed none of the punishing obsession with self-improvement that characterised the Princess Royal, desperate to prove her worth by the quality of her painting and the range of her reading; they were untouched by the collecting mania which drove Elizabeth to accumulate china and porcelain she could not afford, and to cultivate ferociously an ever-expanding list of new skills, from japanning to woodcuts to etching. On the surface at least, the younger princesses seemed calmer, blander personalities than their intense and striving elder sisters.

Yet, beneath their polite demeanours, each of the younger princesses nurtured, as the older princesses had not, a small but resilient core of rebellion, which would have major consequences for the family as they grew into adulthood. Two of these younger daughters would challenge more powerfully than any of their elder sisters the moral framework of the world their parents had created for them. Their attempts to follow the promptings of their emotions led them into extreme and unexpected situations, and both, in their different ways, would eventually be overwhelmed by the consequences of the choices they made. Without the accident of their father’s illness and the resulting degree of separation from their mother’s dominating presence, it is hard to imagine any of Charlotte’s daughters seizing the opportunity to follow their own inclinations in defiance of the principles of sacrifice and submission their parents valued so highly. The queen may have suspected that turning her attention away from her younger daughters would have untoward results, but even she could not have predicted quite how far-reaching and disruptive to the family those results would be.

Of all the sisters, it was Princess Mary, the fourth daughter, born in 1776, who presented the least troubled face to the world. The most classically beautiful of the princesses, her slim figure, fair hair and blue eyes gave her an almost doll-like prettiness. Mrs Papendiek remembered her as ‘exquisite, both in figure and grace’.2 The diarist Sylvester Glenbervie sat next to her once at dinner when she was in her mid-twenties, and found her ‘perfect, a very pretty small face, full of sense and sweetness’.3 The Earl of Malmesbury – who, as a much-travelled diplomat, had had plenty of opportunities to survey the physical attractions of female royalty across Europe – was equally captivated, declaring her ‘all good humour and pleasantness, her manners perfect … [I] never saw anyone so exactly what she should be’.4 Mary enhanced her natural advantages by dressing with particular care and attention. She was seriously interested in clothes and spent a great deal of time honing and developing her taste. The result was a pared-down, minimal elegance that made her immediately identifiable among her sisters. Mary would never have allowed herself to be painted, as was her youngest sister Amelia, in a curious and fussy confection of ruff and cap that muffled up her youth in a frumpish and unflattering form of fancy dress. In 1802, Mary took matters directly in hand, remodelling Amelia’s eccentric fashion choices to reflect her own more worldly tastes. ‘I flatter myself Amelia will look in great beauty,’ she told her eldest brother, ‘as I have given her a dress in my own style to make her look less like an old woman than usual.’5 Everyone commented on her warmth and the frequency of her smile. The miniaturist Andrew Robertson, who painted her in 1807, found her beguiling: ‘Beautiful creature – most difficult to paint, fidgets about, nor sits steady one moment – affable and laughs.’6

Although she shared with almost all her family a well-developed musical talent, Mary was not an intellectual. References to books and other literature are rare in her correspondence, in stark contrast to the stream of comments, reviews and recommendations that pepper the letters of her mother, elder sisters and, much later, her niece. Once she had finished her formal education, she seems to have given up books for ever. She had few pretensions to cleverness, but nurtured an acute observer’s eye for the foibles of the world around her. She was a lively and entertaining writer, whose letters are characterised by an Austen-like directness that often leaves behind it a surprisingly tart sting. No one described the boredom of the lives she and her sisters led with more economy or more bite than Mary. And no one was safe from her brusque and unforgiving judgements, not even her much-admired older brothers. ‘Frederick left us on Monday,’ she wrote to the Prince of Wales from Weymouth in 1798; ‘he is grown very fat, but looks well in the face. He does not like to hear that he is fatter, but it is so very visible that I could not help making the remark.’7 Even her father, regarded by her sisters as beyond even the lightest criticism, was not immune. ‘We go two or three times a week to the play,’ she reported to the prince during the same trip. ‘It was pleasant enough, but one may have too much of a good thing, and that is my case in going so often to see a set of very bad actors; however, it amuses the king, and we have nothing to do but submit and admire his being so easily pleased.’8

For a woman whose beauty was so celebrated, Mary attracted surprisingly little attention from male admirers. She was never the subject of any scandal, and her name was seriously linked with no one except her cousin, the Duke of Gloucester, who was said to have yearned fruitlessly after her since his teens. Others suitors – both legitimate and unsuitable – kept their distance. For all her easy charm, there was a quality in Mary that did not encourage approaches. Her sister Elizabeth once described the natural condition of king’s daughters as ‘noli me tangere’ (‘touch me not’), and it was a prescription Mary seems to have internalised very early in life. Her closest relationships were conducted safely within the confines of the family circle. Like all her sisters, she preserved a special place in her heart for her eldest brother. He was her ‘eau de miel’, whose letters gave her intense and lasting pleasure. ‘Anything from you can create that sensation in my heart, as no one loves you more than she who is now addressing you.’9 He fully reciprocated her admiration. Mary was often regarded as the prince’s favourite sister. He appreciated her beauty and equally admired her sensible, grounded character. ‘Oh, what an angel she is,’ he wrote in 1799, ‘how gifted she is in body and mind by Providence, and what a blessing she is to us all.’10

As the younger princesses had grown up it was clear that Mary’s deepest bond was with her youngest sister Amelia. Seven years Amelia’s elder, there had always been a hint of the maternal in Mary’s protective affection for the last, and most indulged, of George and Charlotte’s children. Mary’s family nickname – Miny – was a result of Amelia’s toddler attempts to say her sister’s name, and by the time they were adults the pair formed one of the sisterhood’s most resilient and mutually supportive partnerships. Once, when the two women quarrelled, both were bereft. ‘After the number of years we have loved each other, you could not be so blinded or so led away,’ reproached Mary. ‘The more I think of it, the more it hurts me … No one will feel the more mortified to hurt you than I should.’11 The row had arisen from Amelia’s suspicion that Mary had been too accommodating to the queen, too ready to reveal confidences; that she was, in short, ‘Mama’s tool’. Others shared her misgivings in this regard. Princess Elizabeth was reluctant to confess a secret with her sister, ‘for fear of it coming out elsewhere’;12 and Mary’s niece, Princess Charlotte, later described her as ‘too great a repeater’ and ‘the carrier of everything back to the Prince [of Wales] whose great favourite she is’.13 But these criticisms also perhaps reflect Mary’s powerful desire to act as an emollient negotiator between the increasingly bitter factions that divided her family. Not suffering great peaks and troughs of emotion herself, she felt ideally placed to smooth away, as best she could, the disturbing results of intense feelings in others. She once told her eldest brother that it was the object of all the sisters ‘to keep the peace, and when they can do no good, they will do no harm’.14 It was as good a description as any of her own sense of her role within the complicated and shifting family dynamic.

If the defining tone of Mary’s outward character was one of calm self-possession, her youngest sister was a far more volatile and forceful personality. As a teenager, the passionate intensity that was to distinguish all Amelia’s actions in later life was largely hidden, shrouded beneath a lazy-eyed, sweet-natured voluptuousness that beguiled those susceptible to her rather ripe appeal. ‘Lovely creature, fine features, melting eyes,’ noted the painter Andrew Robertson, ‘charming figure, dignified, finest hair imaginable.’15 She had none of her sister’s discreet elegance; Amelia was majestic rather than slender, and, thought Mary, ‘promised … to be very large indeed in time’. Fanny Burney, who remembered the toddler Amelia as her father’s indulged favourite, met her again when she visited Windsor in 1798. ‘She is now as tall as Princess Royal,’ she wrote, ‘and as much formed; she looks seventeen, though only fourteen, but has an air of innocence, a Hebe blush, an air of modest candour and a gentleness so caressingly inviting, of voice and eye, that I have seldom seen a more captivating young creature.’16 Neither had Fanny’s four-year-old son Alexander, who had been brought along on the visit and had so far proved embarrassingly resistant to the appeals of the older princesses to play with them. When Amelia entered, it was quite a different story. ‘The child was instantly delighted with her! … She stooped down to take his unresisting hands, and exclaiming “Dear little thing!” took him in her arms, to his own as obvious content as hers. “He likes her!” cried Princess Augusta, “the little rogue! See how he likes her!”’17

When Fanny met Amelia again, later that year, it was in far less happy circumstances. Amelia had been ‘extremely ill … of some complaint upon the knee, which caused spasms and was most dreadfully painful’. She had been sent to Worthing to try the effects of sea-bathing as a potential cure, and was now on her way home. Fanny, who lived near to where Amelia had broken her journey back to Windsor, visited her. ‘The princess was seated on a sofa in a grey French riding dress, with pink lapels, her beautiful and richly flowing and shining fair locks unornamented.’ She received Fanny ‘with her brightest smile’, but Fanny, who had not forgotten the manners she had learnt at court, at first refused the invitation ‘to come and sit by her’ and ‘drew a chair at a distance’. Only when the princess insisted did Fanny finally agree to come closer, and spent a happy hour exchanging family news. At the end of their meeting, it was very clear that the Worthing cure had not worked. Amelia was unable either to get up or walk, and had to be ‘painfully lifted from her seat’ and carried out. Though she did so ‘with a dignity and self-command extremely striking’, it was plain to the shocked Fanny that she was far from well.18

Amelia had been a boisterous and healthy child. It was not until 1798, when she was fifteen, that she had the first hints of serious illness. Although it started with an acute pain in her knee, other worrying symptoms soon emerged. She was always tired, and lost her appetite. She was, she wrote to the Prince of Wales from Worthing in August, ‘suffering a great deal’. The strengthening diet that had been prescribed made her ‘very sick, and I confess it was I think owing to eating and drinking the porter, for I could hardly lose the taste of it’.19 In September, the prince was sufficiently worried to travel along the coast from Brighton to visit her. He was not reassured by what he saw there. ‘Her appetite’, he told the queen, ‘is shocking and if she goes to force it at all, her stomach throws up in a short time what she has swallowed.’ As well as the troublesome knee, ‘the smallest touch’ of which gave her ‘the most dreadful agonies’, he was concerned to see that she now had ‘a most dreadful cough’.20

When she grew no better, more rigorous solutions, aimed at addressing her manifestly deteriorating physical condition, were tried. ‘Since I last had the pleasure of seeing you,’ wrote Amelia to her eldest brother, ‘I have taken two emetics, but I cannot say as yet I find my appetite improved. I have been electrified, which I hope I shall find shall do me a great deal of good, but as yet there is no judging, it is so short a time since I first began it.’21 Dr Thomas Keate, who attended Amelia during her stay at Worthing, hoped that passing an electrical current through her inflamed knee might diminish the pain. When Mary went to visit her sister in October, she saw no improvement. Amelia herself knew she was no better. ‘As to my own sufferings, I find them the same; every little exertion adds a great deal to my pain.’22 In fact, none of the treatments prescribed by Keate could have made the slightest difference to Amelia’s condition. She was suffering from the early stages of tuberculosis, and the pain in her knee resulted from an inflammation of the joint caused by the disease.

She remained weak and ill throughout 1799, and in the summer was again taken to the sea for the benefit of her health, this time accompanying the rest of the family to Weymouth. There, in August, she at last seemed to improve. This was not, as was later to become so painfully apparent, the complete cure for which everyone had so fervently hoped; the progress of her tuberculosis had been held in check, but the disease had not been eradicated. It would later reappear, with symptoms so sadly familiar to Georgian doctors that there was little doubt about the probable outcome. Yet, for some years, Amelia seemed to recover some of her health, and a good deal of her cheerfulness. She felt well enough to trade gossip again with her eldest brother, the acerbic wit she shared with her sister Mary reappearing along with her health. Her own sufferings had not given her much compassion for her eldest sister, the Princess Royal, whose situation in far-off Württemberg she mercilessly lampooned: ‘Don’t tell, but I hear she is so prodigiously large she can scarcely walk up or downstairs. This is out of compliment, I suppose, to her duke; very romantic, but if I was her, I would not, if I could help it, show my affection in this manner.’23 To the Prince of Wales, she showed a far sweeter, more affectionate face. When, after repeated promptings, he sent her a new dress, which she had insisted ‘I am in great want of’, she was touchingly grateful: ‘The beautiful gown … arrived this morning; it made me particularly happy, since it showed you sometimes thought of me, even when I was not with you.’24

Throughout her illness, Amelia’s affection for her generous and entertaining eldest brother grew more and more heartfelt. During her long stay at Worthing, she had little direct contact with her parents; it was the Prince of Wales who visited her, and kept her cheerful with ‘perfect and kind’ letters that raised her spirits and made her laugh. Gradually, the prince came to dominate the landscape of Amelia’s emotions, edging out other, more distant familial figures. He was twenty-one years older than Amelia, and increasingly seemed more like a father to her than her real, much-respected but increasingly remote parent. She made her own reading of their relationship very clear, signing one of her letters to the prince as ‘your own child (meaning myself)’.25 A year later she again assured the prince, ‘you know, I have always been so vain as to consider myself as your child’.26 For the rest of her life, this was the signature with which she concluded all her correspondence with George. He was the only one of her male relations she really trusted, and to him alone she poured out all the feelings for which she found no expression elsewhere.

Sometimes, the strength of her affection for her eldest brother was expressed in terms that mirrored in their intensity the language of romantic love. ‘No words can express half how dearly I love you,’ she assured him in 1801, ‘or how vain I am of the place I have in your heart. If you ever changed towards me, it would break my heart.’27 Her love for her parents, whilst always dutifully observed, was described in far cooler terms. ‘I think dearest Mama pretty well,’ she wrote on Christmas Day, 1799. ‘How great has been her affection and kindness for me, and indeed, how grateful I ought to be, and indeed, am, in having always such a model before my eyes.’28 Her mother and father were examples to be admired; but for unconditional affection and liveliness she had learnt to look elsewhere. Amelia’s little world had long since ceased to revolve around her parents.

The queen was not unaware of this. She recognised that with her younger daughters she had never quite achieved the emotional ascendancy she still preserved with the senior princesses. She also suspected that, of all her girls, it was Amelia who had travelled furthest from her influence. She was later to attribute this to ‘the indulgence you have met with through a long series of ill health, which both affection and humanity led myself and those about you to yield to at that time, and which none of your sisters were ever allowed to enjoy’.29 Charlotte saw correctly that there was a steeliness in Amelia, fostered in those years when she was freer than any of her other daughters to shape the world around her to suit her own tastes. But it was not from Amelia that the first challenge to the precarious status quo of royal respectability was to come; it was from her older sister, Sophia.

*

With the possible exception of Augusta, who as a grown woman seems deliberately to have turned as blank a face as possible to the world, Sophia was the most elusive of the sisterhood. As she grew older she had become increasingly withdrawn. The fifth daughter, she sat almost invisibly between the classically perfect Mary and the statuesque Amelia. At first glance, she lacked in every way the immediacy of their impact. She was small, delicate and extremely short-sighted, ‘as to be almost blind’.30 The queen had given Sophia permission to wear spectacles in public, but the princess, as self-conscious and embarrassed about her sight as Elizabeth was about her weight, refused to do so. She would not even put them on to go to the theatre ‘for fear of some paragraph in the paper’. Her sister Augusta was airily dismissive. ‘Well, I ask her, what can they say? That the Princess Sophia wears spectacles. Well, and what harm can that do her? Would it not be better they should say it than she should lose all sight of the performers?’31 Sophia was never one to relish bravura displays of defiance; shy and uncomfortable in the glare of public attention, she much preferred the privacy of her own rooms.

In less exposed situations, her muted virtues became far more visible. As a child, she had been the favourite of nearly all her teachers, who responded with pleasure to her quiet concentration, ‘her attentive sensible countenance’. Clever and perceptive, she was adored by her governess Mlle Moula, who maintained that ‘she had more sensibility, more energy and more imagination than all the others put together’.32 She shared a gift for mimicry with the Prince of Wales, and in private she occasionally revealed a sharp tongue. But her wide eyes, set in a small, pale face, gave her a vulnerable, fragile look that reflected her shrinking, anxious character. Mlle Moula had, when she was very young, identified Sophia’s tendency to ‘nervous irritation’, and thought her cruelly ‘subject to low spirits’. She was to suffer from these complaints all her life, coupled with an imperfectly described and undiagnosed physical debility that saw her endlessly confined to her room or to her bed. She was not without admirers in the family – her brother Edward, Duke of Kent, referred to her as ‘that clever little thing and my first favourite, Sophy’ – but her cleverness and sensibility were generally less apparent to those around her than the many physical difficulties she endured. Eventually, these problems came to define her, and she was almost always referred to in terms that accentuated her weakness and fragility. She was ‘poor Sophy’ or ‘little Sophy’ or ‘Madam Little’.

Sophia’s health problems seem to have started in her teenage years. In 1793, when she was sixteen, she began to experience problems in her throat with what she called her ‘swallow’; she also suffered from fainting fits that attacked her many times a day. Later that year, having made no improvement, she was sent to take the waters at Tunbridge Wells, but with little tangible benefit. It was hardly surprising that she was so often depressed. ‘Things are so-so here,’ she wrote to her eldest brother from Tunbridge, coining a phrase she was to use throughout her life, and which perfectly sums up her assessment of her low-key unhappiness. Some of her misery resulted from her lack of sympathy for those around her. Far less gregarious than her sisters, she often found herself out of step with their moods and puzzled by their shifting alliances. She did not always find their company congenial. When her eldest sister was still at home, Sophia thought her dominating and managing. ‘Many unpleasant things have passed since we have last met,’ she told the Prince of Wales in 1793. ‘Princess Royal and Lady Cathcart I strongly suspect are at the bottom of everything. I should not say this unless I was quite sure. My reasons I will give you when we meet.’33 A year later, she was still oppressed by ‘the ups and downs of life’, telling Lady Harcourt that ‘my spirits are weak. I am easily overset, however I struggle as much as possible’.34

Her poor health contributed greatly to her weakness of spirit. Her recoveries were only ever temporary, mere gaps in a catalogue of cramps, fits and spasms that went on for year after year. In 1797, she collapsed at a review at Weymouth. ‘She was so ill that she could not be taken home for some time,’ and had to be undressed by her ladies, ‘for the violence of the pain swelled her so much that she could not bear her clothes on, and she was purple in the face’.35 It is not at all clear what caused Sophia’s attacks, which are too imprecisely described to suggest any real diagnosis, but it has been suggested in recent years that they may have been a result of porphyria, which she may have inherited from her father.

The sad regularity of Sophia’s bouts of sickness meant that, at first, little attention was paid to the news that she been again taken ill in the summer of 1800. She had apparently recovered by August, when the queen wrote to Lady Harcourt, noting that ‘my dear Sophia, on whose account we prolong our stay’, was by now ‘so much amended in her health that the physician thinks she may, without any risk, give up the warm sea-bathing’.36 But by the following spring, gossip had begun to circulate that the princess’s indisposition had not been quite what it seemed. The diarist Lord Glenbervie was one of the first to hear the stories. ‘I heard yesterday a recapitulation of Princess Sophia’s extraordinary illness last autumn at Weymouth, from the most authentic information.’ With uncharacteristic circumspection, he chose at that point not to transcribe the rumours: ‘They are of too delicate a nature for me to choose to commit them (at least according to my present feelings) even to this safe repository. But they are such as to scarce leave a doubt in my mind.’37 In the same year Thomas Willis, who had assisted his father in treating the king in 1788/89, was in correspondence with Princess Elizabeth over the state of her father’s health. He was shocked to hear from Elizabeth herself news of ‘the cruelty of a most scandalous and base report concerning P.S.’. He was deeply indignant on behalf of the whole family: ‘Such a report must be in its nature false, as those who are acquainted with the interior of the royal houses must testify.’38 But Glenbervie was right and Willis wrong. The rumour – that Sophia had given birth to a child in or around Weymouth in late July or early August 1800 – was, it seems, the truth.

It was widely believed in Weymouth that something scandalous had taken place there during the summer. Elizabeth Ham – the teenage girl whose farmer uncle was so often visited by the king to discuss agricultural matters when the royals were in residence – was dimly aware of the stories circulating around the resort’s tea tables:

It was about a fortnight after the royal family had come for the season, and so, according to custom, there were aunts and other visitors staying at our house. I was listening to all these discussions going on, and of course, saying nothing. When the conversation ceased for a minute, I looked up from my work and said, ‘I wonder what is the reason that the Princess Sophia has never been seen out since the family came?’ Upon this, the whole party burst into a laugh, for it was very evident that everybody had been thinking the same thing, but had deemed it high treason to give it utterance.39

Elizabeth Ham soon knew all the details of the gossip that had so entertained the female members of her family. The ‘delightful story’ centred on a wealthy tailor by the name of Sharland, whose wife had just given birth. During Mrs Sharland’s confinement, the doctor attending her found an excuse to send the midwife away; when she returned, ‘she found two babies where there had been only one’. Under pressure from the inquisitive midwife, Mrs Sharland revealed that ‘a few minutes after she was sent away, a carriage stopped at the door. The doctor had brought a newborn infant and placed it by her side, with a purse of money, and told her that she must say that it was her own.’ This she clearly did not do, for it was soon known to all the town that the child was not hers. Mrs Sharland admitted as much to Elizabeth, who went to investigate a few weeks later. ‘Seeing an infant in its cradle, and stopping to kiss it, I asked if this were her own child or the little foundling and she told me it was the latter. I gazed upon it with great interest, for I was sure it would turn out a hero.’40 The baby, a boy, was given the name Thomas Ward and baptised on 11 August.

A few years later, Glenbervie reported that ‘the foundling, which was left at the tailor’s at Weymouth … is now in a manner admitted by the people about the court to be Princess Sophia’s’. How the birth had been managed, or where it had taken place, he did not know; but he was confident he knew the identity of the father, naming him as ‘General Garth, one of the king’s equerries, and a very plain man with an ugly claret mark on his face.’41

Major General Thomas Garth was a career soldier, like all the royal equerries, and had served in Germany, the West Indies and Flanders. He was thirty years older than Sophia, closer to her father’s age than to her own. There clung about him something not quite of the modern world, one observer describing him as ‘a fine gentleman of the old school, in powder and pigtails’. He was hardly a conventionally handsome man, his appearance dominated by the birthmark that was the first thing anyone noticed about him. Captain Landmann, another soldier, who met him in Weymouth, described him as ‘a little man with good features, but whose face was much disfigured by a considerable purple mark on the skin, extending over part of his forehead and one eye’.42 Elizabeth Ham, still young enough to have rather naive ideas about the unpredictable wellsprings of mutual attraction, thought it impossible that ‘a fair young princess’ could possibly have chosen for a lover ‘a little old man with a clarety countenance’.43

But there was more to Garth than his unprepossessing looks. Fanny Burney had known him at Windsor and he more than satisfied her very exacting standards for what constituted good company and gentlemanly behaviour. When he left court, she declared she had been ‘very sorry to lose … a man of real worth, religious principles and unaffected honour, with a strong share of wit and a great deal of literature’.44 He had a cultivated appreciation of art, and could lay claim to having recognised the raw talent of one of the greatest artistic talents of the day: he discovered the young Thomas Lawrence drawing the customers at his father’s tavern at Devizes, and kick-started his career as a portraitist by introducing him to wealthy aristocratic patrons. He was a generous and considerate host, known for his excellent dinners. When the sickly Princess Amelia was making her slow and painful journey to Weymouth in 1809, he opened his comfortable, if old-fashioned house to her, diligently scouring the countryside for the asses’ milk he was told might help her condition.

Perhaps his best qualities were displayed in the unswerving love and pride he showed for the child left at Weymouth. Garth took the boy – named Thomas, like himself – into his own home, bought him horses and sent him to expensive schools, first at Datchet, then to Harrow. He introduced him to all his visitors, even the grandest. ‘He tells me he dotes on him beyond anything,’ reported an incredulous Princess Charlotte, daughter of the Prince of Wales, who visited General Garth in 1814, and was shocked to find herself in the presence of a child whom she clearly believed to be her illegitimate cousin. Garth proudly confessed to Charlotte the strength of his feelings for the child. ‘He is afraid that he spoils him … He thinks of nothing else, morning, noon and night.’45 It was not unknown for eighteenth-century fathers to recognise their responsibilities to their illegitimate children. In acknowledging the boy and making him his heir, Garth had behaved well, if not exceptionally, by the standards of the time; but the lifetime of affection lavished by the general on young Tom Garth, whom he always treated as a much-loved son, blithely indifferent to the disapproval of others, illuminated his most attractive qualities, and perhaps explains what drew Sophia to him in the first place. Proud as he was of his paternity, Garth remained silent on the subject of the boy’s maternal origins. ‘He now acknowledges himself to be the father,’ noted Glenbervie, ‘but does not say who is or was the mother. His niece, Miss Garth … has often thrown out hints to him … but he has always given the subject the go-bye, by saying, I perceive what you mean, but you are mistaken.’46

For all Garth’s delicacy, there seems little doubt that Princess Sophia was the mother of young Thomas Garth, and that she and the general had conceived him in the autumn of 1799, when Sophia was twenty-two. Glenbervie attributed their unlikely pairing to the whim of a moment, ‘in which opportunity had, with HRH, proved too strong for reason, principle and good taste’.47 The diarist Charles Greville also thought that the couple’s relationship could only be explained as the momentary product of an overwhelming and irrational desire. Unlike other scandalmongers, Greville did not think that Garth’s unimpressive looks made the liaison unlikely, ‘for women fall in love with anything, and opportunity and the accidents of passion are of more importance than any positive merit, either of mind or body’.48 Sophia’s susceptibility to ‘accidents of passion’ had been intensified, Greville believed, by the seclusion in which she and her sisters had been brought up, ‘mixing with few people, their passions boiling over and ready to fall into the hands of the first man whom circumstances enabled to get at them’.49

It never occurred to either man that Sophia might have chosen for herself the man who became her lover, nor that their relationship was anything more than a momentary impulse of gratification. A single line in a letter written by Princess Mary as early as 1798 suggests that Garth’s name already had some romantic significance among the sisters. ‘As for General Garth, the purple light of love, toujours la même’.50 The general was obviously a figure of sufficient familiarity to be worthy of a somewhat patronising dismissal by the sharp-tongued Mary. The existence of a more established understanding between the couple has recently been further confirmed by the biographer Flora Fraser. An undated letter, written by Sophia to ‘my very dear, dear general’, suggests, in tone and content, that the princess and the soldier were more than just good friends. Certainly, they were close enough to have exchanged tokens of affection. ‘Your ring has given me tremendous pinches,’ wrote Sophia, in an uncharacteristically playful and flirtatious style, ‘but I have bore them like a heroine. If you looked at your little finger when you were naughty, I believe a certain little ring would have been impertinent enough to give you a pinch. I think you deserve it. And now my dearest general, do not forget that when you are neglecting your own health, you are the cause of giving many unhappy moments to those who love you.’ The letter closes with a declaration that leaves little doubt of the strength of her feelings: ‘I shall never forget you, my dear general, to whom I owe so much. Your kind remembrance of me is a cordial. Your calling me your S makes me proud as Lucifer … I love you more and more every day.’51

Charles Greville, whose source of information was Lady Caroline Thynne, daughter of Queen Charlotte’s Mistress of the Robes, believed the affair had been consummated at Windsor: ‘The princesses lived at the Lower Lodge. Princess Sophia, however, was unwell, and was removed to the Upper Lodge, and a few days after, the king and queen went to town, leaving the princess there. Garth … remained also, and his bedroom at the lodge was just over hers. Nine months from that time she was brought to bed.’52 It is impossible to say why the couple were prepared to take such a risk. Caroline, Princess of Wales, thought Sophia was too naive and inexperienced to have understood what she had done, arguing that she ‘was so ignorant and innocent as really not to know until the last moment that she was with child’. Yet, as Glenbervie commented dryly, ‘everybody says the Princess S is very clever’. He asked the Princess of Wales if she really thought Sophia ‘did not perceive something particular had passed, and if she could think it a matter as indifferent as blowing her nose’.53

Despite his scepticism, Glenbervie transcribed into his diary a lengthy account given to his wife by ‘a person of unquestionable veracity’, which confirmed the idea of Sophia’s naivety. Lady Glenbervie’s source was sitting ‘tête-à-tête with the princess [when] the latter mentioned to her the continued motions, and as she called them, convulsions in her inside, and bid her put her hand on her belly that she might feel them. The lady did so, and having had many children, was so certain of the nature of the motion that she was quite panic stricken. But neither on that, or any other occasion, ever spoke or looked as if she thought or suspected that others might think she was pregnant.’54

If Sophia did not know what was happening to her, it is hard to imagine that her mother, a woman with twenty years’ experience of childbearing behind her, would not have recognised the signs of pregnancy in her daughter. Perhaps Charlotte knew more than she ever disclosed. An undated letter from the queen to Lady Harcourt, perhaps written in the summer of 1800, appears to refer, albeit obliquely, to the events of that time. Charlotte is pleased to report ‘a most unexpected though long wished-for change in dear Sophia’s health. Not without much suffering and pain, but as I am sensible that our wishes could not properly be obtained without it, I was prepared for it, and thank God that I can say she goes on as well as circumstances allow.’55 There is nothing else in Charlotte’s surviving correspondence that hints she was aware that her daughter gave birth to a son during these months, nor is there any report of any comment made by her on the stories that began to circulate so soon after the event. Yet again, it seems she trusted in ‘that little word, silence’ which had so often seen her through difficult times.

For all her refusal to confirm or deny the facts, however, Charlotte was believed to be in full possession of them a few years later. ‘It is now said,’ wrote Glenbervie in 1804, ‘that the queen knows the child to be Princess Sophia’s, but the king does not.’56 Greville too thought that George’s ignorance had been successfully maintained by being kept away from his daughter during the crucial months: ‘The old king never knew it, for the court was at Weymouth when she was big with child. She was said to be dropsical, and then suddenly recovered. They told the old king she had been cured by eating roast beef, and this he swallowed, and used to tell it to people, all of whom knew the truth, as a very extraordinary thing.’57

In the immediate aftermath of the birth, Sophia herself made no comment on her situation. In December 1800, she wrote an ambiguous letter to Lady Harcourt, assuring her that ‘our private conversation has often occurred to my mind’ and ‘how happy I was that I had the courage to begin it’, as the outcome ‘has greatly soothed my distressed days and unhappy hours’. Without declaring the subject of her thoughts, she concludes that ‘no doubt that I was originally to blame, therefore I must bear patiently the reports, however unjust they are, as I have partially myself to thank for them’. Sophia’s extreme discretion makes it impossible to know whether she is, in the most guarded manner, referring to her pregnancy. Her next sentence is no easier to interpret: ‘It is grievous to think what a little trifle will slur a young woman’s character for ever. I do not complain. I submit patiently, and promise to strive to regain mine, which, however imprudent I have been, has, I assure you, been injured unjustly.’58 It is hard to think of any woman at any time describing the birth of a child as ‘a little trifle’; perhaps Sophia was attempting to deny the reality of what had happened to her; perhaps, only a few months after the event, she still hoped it might somehow be concealed or forgotten, and that she could start life again.

In the event, neither proved possible, not least because the boy’s proud father insisted on displaying his son to the fascinated gaze of the public at every opportunity. The general’s country house was not far from Weymouth, and young Tom Garth was frequently to be seen playing on the sands there, even when the royal family were visiting the resort. This was very painful for Sophia, as she confessed in a letter of 1805. Writing to her friend Mrs Villiers, she lamented the general’s insensitivity in placing her son so visibly before her. It would, she said, be ‘very desirable’ if ‘some check could be put to the odd conduct of a certain person’, but admitted that ‘that person is very difficult to manage, and thus I have more than once endeavoured to point out to him how ill-judged it was … allowing the younger object to be with him’. It is apparent from the tone of the letter that Sophia’s affair with Garth was now over. It also contains the clearest possible acknowledgement that she was indeed the mother of ‘the younger object’, even though she was powerless to admit to the relationship publicly. ‘All my entreaties proved useless, and I merely received a cold answer that it was selfish, and that I could not pretend affection as I had never expressed a desire of seeing what God knows was out of my power. This wounded me beyond measure, for my conduct too plainly showed that I am not selfish.’

It was possible for a bachelor general to brave the stares of the curious and raise his son with pride, but it was inconceivable for an unmarried princess to do the same. Whatever her feelings, Sophia could never behave as if she was the child’s mother; this made the situation Garth had so thoughtlessly created intolerable to her. ‘I own to you that what hurt me more was the indelicacy this year of knowing it so near me, and that I could never go through the town without the dread of meeting what would have half killed me, had I met it.’ Compelled to be near a son whom she could never recognise, to catch sight of a child in whose life she could have no part, there was nothing she could do but ‘try in my poor way, to serve what I must ever feel an instinct and an affection for’.59

It is hard to imagine a sadder predicament than the one in which Sophia found herself. She knew now that all hopes of future settlement for her were at an end: ‘I never could answer it to myself to marry without candidly avowing all that has passed.’ She later confessed to Mrs Villiers that there was ‘one love to whom I am not indifferent’ and with whom she thought she could have been happy, but she knew that such an outcome was now impossible. ‘I feel that, did he but know the full content of this story, he might think me very unworthy of him; and how could I blame him? For I know too well that I have lost myself in the world by my conduct, and, alas, have felt it humbly, for many, many have changed towards me.’60 Weighed down by unhappiness, Sophia retreated into her rooms and saw no company. ‘I live away from everybody,’ she wrote in 1805; ‘I find silence in the situation in which I am placed the best thing, for as to one person who does understand me, hundreds don’t, and to a feeling heart, it chills and kills you.’61 She wished she could take upon herself the sorrows that she saw afflict her friends. Unlike them, she now had nothing to lose. ‘For me, it would be of no consequence, having no home, nor no blessings of husband and family.’62

In her miserable state, the best Sophia could hope for was to achieve a resigned acceptance of her fate; and there were times when it looked as though she had done so. When Glenbervie sat next to her at dinner in 1810, he was impressed by her air of self-effacement. ‘The Princess Sophia, if a sinner, has the demeanour of a very humble and repentant one. She has something very attentive, kind and even affectionate in her demeanour.’63 But his fleeting sympathy did nothing to quell his appetite for gossip about her, and he soon had something extraordinary to record in his diary: ‘The Duke of Kent tells the Princess [of Wales] that the father is not Garth, but the Duke of Cumberland. How horrid.’64 (Ernest, the king and queen’s fifth son, was created Duke of Cumberland in 1799.) In fact, Glenbervie had heard this story before, as early as 1804. It was the Princess of Wales, Glenbervie records, who ‘told Lady Sheffield the other day that there is great reason to suspect the father to be the Duke of Cumberland. How strange and how disgusting. But it is a very strange family, at least the children – sons and daughters.’65

The rumour that Sophia’s brother Ernest was the true father of her child was to haunt both of them for the rest of their lives. Over thirty years after the disputed event, gossip which had simmered away for years, whispered behind hands at dinners and card parties, finally exploded into a public scandal. With the general long dead, Tom Garth was encouraged to put pressure on the royal family, in an attempt to recover his ‘rights’. He wanted an income sufficient to pay his extensive gambling debts, and hinted at the possibility of exposure if no cash was forthcoming. His inept and ineffective attempts at blackmail succeeded only in reviving rumours that he was not the general’s son at all. The newspapers fell on the story with hungry enthusiasm, and Sophia found herself once again the focus of crude speculation about the paternity of her unacknowledged son.

Glenbervie – who, over the years, eagerly chronicled every version of the scandal that came his way – summarised the essence of the rumour with brisk economy. The Duke of Cumberland ‘called upon her when she was in bed with a cold, took advantage of the family temperament in her, and without her having a very precise idea what had happened, got her with child’.66 The narrative was identical to that which had been used to explain Sophia’s liaison with Garth. It was a story of opportunity seized, of ignorance exploited, and repressed passion overwhelming prudence.

Most of those who gave credence to the accusation probably responded much as Glenbervie did, with a mixture of horror and curiosity. Incest was clearly and unequivocally a sin, but it was one which exerted a particular power of fascination in eighteenth-century culture. It featured prominently in the immensely popular Gothic novels of the period, where it operated both to drive plots and provide a frisson of shock amongst readers. Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother, which had so repulsed Fanny Burney when she was asked to assess its suitability as royal reading matter, was entirely typical of its genre in allowing the forbidden liaison to develop as a result of hidden or disguised identities, which meant neither protagonist was aware of their genuine relationship to the other. Some romantic observers justified the rumoured connection between Ernest and Sophia by passing it through exactly such a fictional prism.

Elizabeth Ham, who wrote her memoirs after ‘the shocking story’ of the royal brother and sister had become the subject of public speculation, was sure she had seen evidence of their closeness back in Weymouth in the fateful year of 1800. Elizabeth – along with all her female friends and relations – was certain Sophia had been delivered of a child during the summer, and had at first concluded that the princess must have been secretly married before the birth. Then, she later asserted, doubts arose in her mind once the Duke of Cumberland arrived in the resort. She noticed that the princess was often to be seen leaning on his arm. She saw the couple visit the Sharland family together, and watched as the contested baby boy was shown to them at the door. ‘Her brother must know of the marriage and is a good friend of the husband, thought I.’ But as she herself tellingly noted, Elizabeth was ‘soon obliged to weave another framework for my romance’. She was watching when the Duke of Cumberland met his sister as she disembarked from the royal yacht; he ‘seized on the Princess Sophia, and kissed her, then drew his arm through hers and conducted her on shore’. Elizabeth was sure there could be only one explanation for such behaviour. She concluded, as the plot of so many novels had encouraged her to do, that the duke ‘was not really the son of the king and queen, but of some foreign potentate, who, for political reasons, they had brought up as their own’.67

It helped that Sophia seemed, in many ways, the very image of the Gothic heroine: fragile, innocent and abused. It was far less disturbing to consider her as the victim of male passion, rather than a willing partner in love. General Garth was past middle age and plain, with no hint of mystery or intrigue about him; the relationship which genuinely resulted in the birth of Tom Garth was, to many observers, so much less exciting than rumours of an incestuous union.

The resilience of the story linking Sophia and Ernest did not solely stem from the dark appeal of a transgressive scandal, however. It was also actively disseminated from within the royal family itself, giving it a credibility it would otherwise have lacked. Many of the stories about the duke and princess can be traced back to the extravagantly imaginative Caroline, Princess of Wales. Lady Glenbervie was a member of her household, and a great deal of Lord Glenbervie’s scurrilous gossip was based on what he heard at the princess’s table at Blackheath. Not everything Caroline said was wrong; but as she found herself marginalised by the hostility of the Prince of Wales, her desire to shock the narrow sensibilities of his female relations became increasingly marked. Wildly inventive about her own emotional life – which had by then become baroque in its complications – she was always ready to seek out the shameful secrets of others. If she did not create the rumours, she certainly seems to have made sure they were well circulated.

Finally, there was the issue of Ernest himself. By the time stories of an incestuous connection with his sister began to be murmured abroad, the prince’s reputation was so black that any accusation levelled at seemed felt credible. From his earliest days, George and Charlotte’s fifth son was always to be found in close connection to trouble. Even as a small boy, he was considered the most intemperate of the royal children – noisy, boisterous and uninhibited. He was much loved by his governess, the redoubtable Mrs Cheveley, who admired his high spirits, referred to him indulgently as ‘my boy’, and stoutly defended him against the disapproval of the other staff; but his parents were less sympathetic and, like his younger brothers, he was shipped across to Germany at an early age to have his high spirits quashed and to learn to become a soldier. He was eventually commissioned into the Hussars, where he cut a good figure on a horse; he was over six feet tall and, unlike most of his family, slim and taciturn, with brooding good looks. He loved the army life, and fought bravely in the early days of the French revolutionary wars. He was involved in hand-to-hand combat, writing to his father that in one encounter, he had been forced to kill a man. Later, his face was injured by a cannonball, which resulted in a severe and lasting disfigurement. His left eye was ‘shockingly sunk and has an amazing film grown over it’, reported the Prince of Wales to the queen.68

As well as his bravery, in other respects he was a typical soldier, swearing and drinking to excess. Mrs Harcourt, the wife of his commander, and sister-in-law to the queen’s best friend, tried to see the best in the young man, but even she found her affection for him tested by his uncontrolled conduct. On campaign with her husband in northern France, she and Ernest visited a convent together. It was not a success. ‘I had some difficulty in endeavouring to make him behave well. He would kiss the abbess and talk nonsense to the poor nuns. I know a thousand good traits of his heart,’ she wrote sadly, but now even she reluctantly concluded that he was ‘too wild for England’.69

Ernest was desperate to come home to recuperate after his injury. He petitioned the king for years before he was finally granted grudging permission to return. As Mrs Harcourt had foreseen, Ernest did not fit into the decorous life of his parents’ court, and was soon bored and resentful. In 1797, Fanny Burney encountered him haunting the corridors of St James’s with a disconcerting intensity. Fanny was chatting to Princess Augusta whilst she dressed to go to the theatre, when she noticed Ernest’s silent arrival at the door of the apartment. ‘A tall, thin young man appeared at it, peeping and staring, but not entering. “How do you do Ernest?” cried the princess. “I hope you are well; only pray do shut the door.” He did not obey, nor move, either forward or backward, but kept peeping and peering. She called to him again, beseeching him to shut the door; but he was determined first to gratify his curiosity, and when he had looked for as long as he thought pleasant he entered the apartment.’ By then Augusta had lost patience and told Ernest that she would see him at the play that night. ‘He then marched out, finding himself so little desired, and only said, “No you won’t, I hate the play.”’70

It was this sort of unsettling behaviour that made people talk, and made the princesses treat him with wariness. In 1794, Sophia had written to Lady Harcourt about ‘dear Ernest’, whom she insisted was ‘as kind to me as is possible, rather a little imprudent at times, but when told of it, never takes it ill’.71 What form his ‘imprudence’ took is not alluded to. Over a decade later, Amelia assured the Prince of Wales that she would not receive Ernest in her rooms without company. ‘I am grieved to think there should be a necessity for avoiding being left alone, but I fully understand and you may depend on my remembering your kind injunctions on this subject.’72 The prince was at that point engaged in one of his periodic quarrels with Ernest, so it is possible that his real concern was to prevent Amelia being dragged into their disagreement; but he argued with most of his brothers at one time or another, and never sought to stop them seeing any of his sisters in private. Clearly, Ernest was considered to pose a different kind of threat. The prince’s daughter, Charlotte, certainly found him a sinister figure. She had nothing but contempt for her uncle, whom she described as ‘pest to all society’, ‘a bird of the most fatal omen’, and ‘at the bottom of all evil’. She disliked ‘his indecent jokes’ and deplored his language as ‘not of the choicest kind’. He was, she said, hated by her aunts, who dreaded his periodic visits to Windsor. ‘I must say, he has no heart nor honour,’ she concluded, ‘but a deep, dark, vindictive and malicious mind, brooding over mischief and always active in pursuit of everything that is bad.’73

In later life, Ernest was involved in fiercely contested adultery cases and accusations of physical assault. In 1810, he was badly injured in what appeared to be an attempt by his valet to murder him in his bed; the motives suggested for the attack ranged from jealousy at an affair Ernest was alleged to be having with the valet’s wife, through to the man’s angry rejection of the prince’s homosexual advances. Ernest was a character around whom a whiff of violence and deceit persistently hovered, and the sheer scale of his alleged misdeeds made it easy to believe the worst about him. However, it seems that in the case of young Tom Garth’s parentage, Ernest was almost certainly innocent of the charges levelled against him. Sophia’s own testimony suggests that she was both Garth’s lover and the mother of his child, and that the general’s proudly declared paternity was in fact wholly justified.

*

Whilst Amelia and Sophia spent months in the sickroom, and the Prince of Wales was frequently felled by disabling attacks of gout or stomach pain, their father, who turned sixty in June 1798, seemed to march stoically onwards. For almost a decade he had enjoyed better health than many of the younger members of his family. He had been a prominent actor in what he called ‘the active theatre of the world’ for over forty years, and had seen his reputation shift profoundly during that time.

For the first half of his reign, he had enjoyed only sporadic periods of popularity. His early connection with the much-disliked Bute, his eager support of the governmental attacks on the radical John Wilkes, and his unsuccessful prosecution of the war with America meant that for many years George struggled to win the hearts and minds of many of his subjects. All this had changed in 1788/89, when there was a genuine upsurge in affection for him at the time of his recovery from his disabling illness. He was by then a familiar figure, having been on the throne for nearly three decades; the brief possibility of his being replaced by his unsatisfactory son no doubt helped make his solid if unexciting virtues seem even more appealing. These warmer feelings had been intensified by the opening scenes of the French Revolution, which made many of the liberal, propertied classes reconsider where their loyalties lay, as the foundations of the old order were overturned throughout Europe. Edmund Burke was not alone in deciding he preferred to live with the shortcomings of a constitutional monarchy rather than expose himself to the unpredictable and violent upheavals of early republican government.

But for those who held on to their beliefs in the revolutionary origins of English liberty, and especially for those encouraged by events in France to claim new rights for themselves, George appeared a far less benevolent figure. He was opposed to all calls for constitutional change for which political reformers campaigned, and had no desire to see the franchise either rationalised or extended. He keenly supported the measures William Pitt introduced to combat the looming threat of popular disorder, provoked by a succession of bad harvests and the expensive and ineffective prosecution of a war in which it seemed impossible to land a decisive, knockout blow. In 1797, a serious naval mutiny at the bases of Spithead and the Nore seemed, albeit briefly, to compromise the military effectiveness of the nation’s most important fighting force. In the same year, a financial crisis led to the collapse of the gold standard, and the introduction of a paper currency. In 1799, income tax was introduced for the first time, in the face of great discontent from those obliged to pay it. These were perhaps some of the most dangerous and unsettling years of George’s reign. Whilst he benefited from the support of those who preferred the stability of the old order to the challenges of the new, the nature and character of politics changed hugely during these years.

Opposition to the king’s administration moved out of Parliament and onto the streets, where working men, inspired by events in France, formed societies to challenge the entire basis of the constitutional settlement. These radical movements were often underpinned by an ideological opposition to the very existence of kingship. For their most extreme members, it was not only the institution of monarchy that came under attack, but the person of the king himself. In his pamphlet King Killing, published in 1795, the radical bookseller Richard Lee argued that the assassination of kings was not murder, but ‘a patriotic duty’. There was nothing sacred or untouchable about the person of a prince; his murder was, Lee declared, entirely justified as ‘the infliction of terrible justice by the people’.74 This was the same year in which George’s carriage had been attacked as he went to open Parliament. Two years later, a former British Army officer, Edward Despard, and a small number of conspirators were charged with plotting to assassinate the king en route to Parliament; their group was infiltrated by informers, and Despard was tried and hanged.

George’s response to the challenges – both personal and political – he faced in the final decade of the century was constant: he never wavered in his conviction that firm and decisive action was as necessary in the war against political radicalism at home as it was against the revolutionary armies abroad. He was personally courageous in the face of genuine threats to his own safety, and was also tireless in his attempts to rally the propertied and the anxious to the loyalist cause. He showed himself to the public – in the south of England at least – attending reviews of troops and inspecting local yeomanry exercises. He personally congratulated the commanders of successful naval actions, rewarding admirals on their quarterdecks and ensuring enterprising officers were duly promoted. He led the procession of Naval Thanksgiving held in St Paul’s in 1797, receiving a better reception from the London crowds than he had two years before. He took a deep interest not only in the strategic prosecution of the war, but also in the administration of military matters, commenting on issues as abstruse as the proposed reform of the dockyards or the commissioning of captains in the West Indies stations.75

As a result, at least amongst those who felt they had a stake in the existing order, the tide of opinion turned steadily in George’s favour. The monarchy was increasingly seen as a totem of order and continuity, a counterbalance to the insecurities and chaos of France exemplified by the horrors of Robespierre’s Reign of Terror. The rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, who became First Consul in 1799, and was crowned emperor five years later, also shifted the nature of the conflict in Europe, making it less a battle of ideologies and more a struggle of national powers in which it was easier for most Britons to decide where their loyalties ultimately lay. The transformation is nowhere better demonstrated than in a comparison between two satirical prints made by the master of the form, James Gillray. In 1795, Gillray had drawn the king, sitting unmoved in his coach, assailed on all sides by missiles, including a dead cat, whilst his coachman Pitt drives over the shattered figure of Britannia; the crowd waves a French flag inscribed ‘Peace and Bread’. The image could be read as one of royal imperturbability in the face of danger; but it also suggests an indifference to the plight of suffering subjects, and a willingness to trample over traditional rights in the service of self-preservation. In 1803, George appears very differently. Gillray portrays him as Jonathan Swift’s King of Brobdingnag, a giant image of benign authority, holding a tiny Napoleon in his hand, inspecting him with a spyglass. George, uniformed, grizzled and hefty, regards the newly crowned emperor with relaxed contempt. The king is now the embodiment of all the virtues that will eventually ensure a British victory: immovable, stoic; dismissive of the gimcrack, gaudy pretensions of a strutting enemy.

The consolidation of George’s role as the personification of British patriotism did not arise from his own exertions alone; he was the beneficiary of a shift in attitudes brought about by political forces operating far beyond his power. He had never been an original philosophical thinker, nor a strikingly imaginative politician; but his exacting, solid qualities now appeared far more attractive than they had done at any time in the previous three decades. His sense of endurance and application, his limitless capacity for detailed, bureaucratic work, his willingness to identify with the hopes and aspirations of the unsophisticated heartland of the nation he ruled all earned for him a degree of general approbation.

But then, just as his reputation was thrown into positive relief by changing times, he stumbled, reviving for his family terrifying memories of the ordeal that had threatened to overwhelm them in 1788, and which they had prayed never to have to endure again.

It began, as it had done before, with a chill. On 15 February 1801, George was visited by the new first minister, Henry Addington, who found him ‘with a severe cold upon him, and almost total loss of voice’; a few days later, Addington called again and found the king ‘wrapped up in a long black velvet cloak’. He also noticed that ‘his manner was more hurried, and his countenance more heated than usual’.76 By the 19th, he was worse. ‘Bad accounts from the Queen’s House,’ commented Lord Malmesbury. ‘The answer at the door is, the king is better but it is not so – he took a strong emetic on Thursday and was requested to take another today, which he resisted.’ Malmesbury was worried. ‘God forbid he should be ill!’77 No one wanted to put a name to their fears, but everyone felt them, especially those closest to the sufferer himself. ‘The prince yesterday, after seeing the king, said to the queen he was heated and feverish; the queen, with warmth, hastily said, “He is not. He has not been feverish.”’ Glenbervie thought everyone was in a state of wilful denial. ‘Not a hint of his state of mind, of his ever being mad in his life, or the Catholic question having ever existed.’78

In fact, as suggested by Glenbervie’s reference to ‘the Catholic question’ in the same breath as the king’s madness, everyone in the political world knew the king had spent the previous few months in a condition of extreme and all-consuming anxiety. He had been horrified by the declared intention of his then first minister William Pitt to remove, at the earliest possible opportunity, historic restrictions imposed on Catholics that prevented their holding major public office in Britain. The recent Act of Union with the Parliament of Ireland made it impossible, Pitt believed, to sustain a policy that excluded so many British subjects from full participation in political life. The king, however, was implacably opposed to the measure, believing that it violated his coronation oath to uphold and protect the Established Church of England. Pitt would not back down and, in the midst of a ferocious controversy, offered his resignation on 3 February 1801, which two days later the king felt obliged to accept. It was the end of a political partnership that dated back to 1784. Without his valued first minister, George was utterly bereft. Pitt left office on 5 February; the king’s illness began a few days later. For most observers, the two events were closely linked. ‘Fatal consequence of Pitt’s hasty resignation,’ noted Malmesbury gloomily.79

By 22 February, the king had deteriorated even further. The true extent of his illness could no longer be denied, and Thomas Willis was again summoned. He found the king in a very bad state, ‘in the height of frenzy fever, as bad as at the worse period when he attended him in 1788’.80 ‘It is now known that the king is deranged,’ wrote Glenbervie in his journal. On the same day, at a private concert, the Prince of Wales was overheard declaring that ‘my father is as mad as ever’. His brother William took a similar view. ‘Well, we shall have it all our own way now,’ he assured a shocked courtier, ‘for he is not only mad but dying.’81

At the end of the month, death indeed appeared the most likely outcome of the king’s worsening condition. Malmesbury did not think a Regency Bill would need to be drawn up, as ‘the case was different’ from that of 1788. ‘There was no room to fear a lasting derangement of intellects; he would either recover or sink under the illness; and the physicians said that at his time of life, the probability of one of these events happening much sooner than in 1788 was very great.’82 On the evening of 3 March, it looked as if it was all over. The king’s fever increased and he fell into a coma, with his teeth clenched, unable to swallow. The doctors were so certain he was dying that the queen, the Prince of Wales and the princesses were summoned to take their leave of him.

Then, in the midst of the crisis, he started to rally. Thomas Willis had given him ‘a strong dose of musk’ to stimulate his nerves; the politician Henry Addington, who had replaced Pitt as first minister, had recommended the use of a pillow stuffed with hops to bring on sleep, a favourite remedy of his father, a country doctor of the old school. Both claimed success for their own remedy. By 5 March, the king could sit up and even feed himself.

The news of his recovery was greeted with spontaneous relief. Glenbervie watched with astonishment ‘the crowds on foot, on horseback and in carriages who press through all the avenues to see the bulletin’ that announced the king’s improvement. ‘They are prompted by various motives, but I really believe love, affection and pity for the king predominate.’ He recounted a story that poignantly illustrated what the king had endured in his two weeks of confinement. On the very morning of the celebrations, ‘when the king was dressing … and the page had laid his ordinary dress by him, he turned to Willis and said, “Must I put on the [strait] waistcoat?” and Willis replied, “I trust in God, sir, that it will not be necessary.” What can be so affecting?’83 A year later, Glenbervie was to hear darker accounts of the king’s treatment at the hands of the Willises. ‘The king cannot bear the name of any of the family, and he ascribes the weakness which he now complains of in his limbs to their severity during his illness.’ Their ‘only medicine was the strait waistcoat and they generally employ that improperly’; it was also said that they beat him ‘most violently’.84 But no one – not least the king himself – wanted to cast a shadow across the apparently rosy prospect of his steady progress to complete recovery.

On 6 March, the king wrote to senior members of the Cabinet declaring himself entirely well again. He received in reply, Malmesbury reported, a letter from Pitt, ‘which was dutiful, humble and contrite and said he would give up the Catholic Question’. ‘Now my mind will be at ease,’ responded the king. The next day he met the Duke of York, who found him ‘looking pale and ill, but perfectly collected’. The king, who had determinedly forgiven his second son for his behaviour at the time of his previous illness, was sufficiently in control of himself to tease the duke about his obvious apprehension. ‘Frederick, you are more nervous than I am; I really feel quite well, and I know full well how ill I have been.’ He went on to enquire about the queen’s health, ‘and expressed great solicitude lest she and the princesses should have suffered a great deal of uneasiness on his account. “They certainly did, sir,” replied the duke, “but the only uneasiness now remaining on their minds … [is] lest Your Majesty should, as you get well, not take sufficient care of yourself.” Much affected, the king declared, “You may depend upon it … Be assured, I will be more careful for the future.”’85

Sadly the duke’s cheerful vision of the welcome awaiting the king as he prepared to re-enter family life could not have been further from the truth. The reappearance of her husband’s mania had awoken all the fears Charlotte had suppressed for nearly thirteen years, and she now dreaded his return to her presence. As in 1788, she was terrified of being left alone with him. When Thomas Willis met her on 12 March, she was in a desperate state, ‘greatly distressed’ and adamant that ‘she wished not to remain so long with the king. It was more than she could sustain,’ she told Willis, who recorded in his notes that ‘she appeared to despair’.86 But now that the king was officially cured – he had resumed state business some days before – she had no choice but to take her place by his side.

She did so with extreme reluctance. When the royal couple, together with Princesses Mary and Amelia, went on an excursion to Battersea, it was a difficult experience for them all. The king was irritable and excited. Princess Elizabeth told Willis that the queen endured ‘a hard time of it’ in the coach whilst the king vented his anger on everyone around him. On her return, Charlotte told Willis that if she was obliged to accompany her husband in the coach again, she would not see him in the evening.87 Willis conceded that the king was very voluble, and that he concentrated his attentions on his wife, which Willis accepted she might find ‘irksome and distressing’; but he could offer her no respite. The king was much offended by Charlotte’s obvious anxiety in his presence, ‘talked much of German coldness’ and deeply resented any attempt she made to avoid his company.88 The doctors did all they could to encourage her to spend more time with her husband, but she would not be persuaded, and in early April Glenbervie heard that ‘the queen is sometimes two days without seeing him’.89

However, on 16 April, all Charlotte’s attempts to put some distance between herself and her husband were overturned when, with the tacit approval of his doctors, the king ‘crept upstairs to the queen’. He was now so well, Willis declared, that ‘there was no objection to his sleeping above stairs in the queen’s apartment’.90 Charlotte never told anyone what took place when the king joined her in the privacy of her rooms – she confessed to Willis that the king ‘had sworn never to forgive her if she relates anything that passes in the night’ – but whatever happened, it was clearly too much for her to bear. Three days later, acting on her mother’s wishes, Princess Elizabeth wrote to Thomas Willis asking him and his brothers to return and take the king under their care again. Willis did not need to be invited twice; but he sought to legitimise his actions by appealing to Addington. The first minister refused to accept responsibility for the king’s possible detention, and referred Willis back to the queen. It was a measure of Charlotte’s desperation that she, usually so cautious and tentative in pursuing any course not sanctioned by her husband, was willing to authorise Willis’s actions, ‘only requesting that she might not be named or be supposed to know anything that was intended’.91

On 20 April, the Willises entered the house in Kew where the king was staying and effectively took him into custody. ‘I spoke to him at once of his situation, and the necessity there was that he should be immediately under control again,’ wrote Willis; ‘His Majesty sat down and … looking very sternly at me, exclaimed, “Sir, I will never forgive you while I live.”’92 The queen told Willis she was ‘very thankful’ for what he had done, telling him ‘it is not to be conceived what I have endured for the last five nights’.93

If her own experiences had not been enough to convince Charlotte that all was far from well with the king, his attitude to their errant daughter-in-law confirmed her worst fears. The Princess of Wales, living in increasingly eccentric isolation in Blackheath, was still the object of the prince’s passionate detestation. She had, as a result, few friends among her female relations, who mostly took his side in the destructive battles that erupted periodically between them; and her imprudent friendships with unsuitable men had not endeared her to the king. She was, therefore, as she told Glenbervie, ‘very much surprised’ to find her father-in-law arrive without warning at her villa on 18 April. She assumed he had come to visit his five-year-old granddaughter but, as he explained, it was she and not Princess Charlotte he had come to see. He began by declaring ‘his entire approbation of her conduct and his affection for her’, adding that he had thought about her a great deal during his illness. He had resolved to visit her as soon as he was well, to assure her ‘that she would in future find the greatest kindness from all his family, with the exception of one, he was sorry to say’.94 In a final flourish, he assured the bemused princess: ‘I shall always regard you as a sixth daughter’. (The Princess Royal, lost to marriage in far-off Germany, perhaps no longer qualified as a proper daughter in the king’s mind.)

The king knew his visit would cause disquiet among his wife and daughters. On his return, he ‘bid them guess where he had been’. Everyone imagined he had gone to see his granddaughter; but the king soon put them right. ‘I have been to see the Princess of Wales and I was determined none of you should know till I had been there.’95 The queen saw clearly that the king’s sudden embracing of the princess’s cause could only make his already sour relations with their eldest son even worse. But she was also fearful that his new-found interest in his daughter-in-law might conceal a more predatory intent. Princess Elizabeth confided to Willis that the king was ‘most extraordinary about the princess – you do not know how he torments and plagues Mama about it’. He ‘was very full of taking the Princess of Wales over to Hanover’, saying ‘he would take her away by stealth’. Caroline herself, who relished anything dramatic or exciting, added to the family’s sense of foreboding by telling Elizabeth ‘she would never reveal what had passed’ when the king came to Blackheath. It was hardly to be wondered at that, as a result, the queen was ‘frightened to death’, and welcomed her husband’s renewed confinement at Kew.96

Even when he was securely under Thomas Willis’s eye, Charlotte tried to regulate the degree of intimacy she was expected to extend to her husband. If she and her daughters agreed to walk with him, she said they should not be required to attend him in his rooms as well, and was ‘extraordinarily angry’ when Willis failed to enforce this. She complained when the king smuggled letters out to her, and Princess Elizabeth was instructed to write to Willis, telling him ‘not to suffer’ any more such missives to leave his apartments. For nearly a month the king made the best of it, bizarrely conducting public business from inside his informal place of detention, but, by 19 May, he had had enough. He informed the Lord Chancellor that ‘unless he were, that day, allowed to go over to the house where the queen and his family were, no earthly consideration should induce him to sign his name to any paper, or do one act of government whatever’.97 Faced with the imminent implosion of the entire machinery of government, Willis and the queen capitulated. The king left the apartments where he had been closeted for a month and went to rejoin his family. It was Charlotte’s fifty-seventh birthday.

In June, the king took his wife and daughters to recuperate at Weymouth. None of the royal women had wanted to go, terrified that his behaviour would be subject to unwelcome public scrutiny. Elizabeth had written to Willis in despair at the very idea. ‘Oh, consider the precipice we stand upon … here we can keep a secret … but at a public water-drinking place, the thing’s impossible, and was he to expose himself there, I firmly believe we should die of it, for what we go through now is almost more than we can stand.’98 In fact, the king behaved perfectly well during his time by the sea. Glenbervie saw him in July, and although he thought him ‘very much altered indeed, with … an emaciated face and his clothes hanging about him’, also saw that he took care to avoid ‘any unnecessary hurry’ and ‘every thing of fatigue’ so that he felt himself ‘gradually gaining ground’.99 ‘I have been a very unhappy man for the last four months,’ the king assured a concerned courtier calmly; ‘however, it is all over now.’100

A year later, Glenbervie saw him again at Weymouth, ‘in the hottest of dog days, at a very crowded play, where two tolerable female performers danced a sort of dumb show duet to the tune of “God Save the King”, the audience standing up and humming in chorus. The king remained seated, attentive to his own applause, but not unbecomingly so.’101 It may have seemed as though the equilibrium of royal life, disturbed yet again by the jolt of the king’s illness, had been restored to a kind of order – but this was not the case.

At the beginning of January 1804, the king was attacked by painful symptoms of gout. At a party held for the queen, ‘He was too lame to walk without a cane,’ observed Lord Malmesbury, a guest at the event, ‘and his manner struck me as so unusual and incoherent I could not help remarking on it to Lord Pelham.’ Pelham, who was playing cards with the queen, noticed that her attention was not on the game: ‘her anxiety was manifest, since she never kept her eyes off the king, during the whole time the party lasted’. By the end of the month, ‘it could no longer be concealed that the king had a return of his old illness’.102

For a fortnight, the royal physicians attempted to cope with the king’s relapse. By mid-February, when it was apparent that his mind was as impaired as his body, Addington sent for the Willises. However, when they arrived at the Queen’s House, they were refused entry by the Dukes of Kent and Cumberland. The dukes explained to Addington that their father had, after his last illness, extracted ‘a solemn promise and engagement’ from them both, by which they undertook ‘to use every means in our power to prevent anyone of the Willis family from being placed about him’. Forcing them upon him would, they thought, ‘be productive of an irritation of mind from which the worst consequences might be apprehended’; but significantly, it was not only their father’s health which they feared would suffer from the return of the Willises. ‘We are fully convinced that if it were persisted in, another evil of the greatest magnitude would in all probability ensue – no less a one than His Majesty taking up a rooted prejudice against the queen.’ The dukes believed no argument would ever persuade the king that Charlotte had not agreed to the Willises’ presence during his previous illness. The king was right – it was indeed at Charlotte’s behest that he had spent an extra month confined at Kew under the humiliating supervision of the detested doctors. He was determined this should never happen again, and extracted a binding commitment from his sons to prevent it. As a result, the dukes were resolved to avoid ‘the consequences to be apprehended from such a calamity’ in which ‘the destruction of the peace of the whole family would be involved, more especially the female part of it’.103 Reluctantly, Addington capitulated, and Dr Simmons, physician to St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, was appointed in place of the Willises.

The king’s illness followed a pattern similar to the attack in 1801. For forty-eight hours he seemed close to death, and for some weeks afterwards remained in an extremely unsettled state. As ever, his condition pressed hardest on his wife and daughters; the princesses felt very severely the burden of supporting their mother, whilst also comforting their disturbed father. ‘The king never left us till half past seven,’ wrote Mary to her eldest brother on 13 February, ‘and such a day I never went through in my life.’ Amelia had been sent away, as ‘she had not been strong enough to bear such scenes of misery’.104 The queen’s nerves were ‘shot to pieces’, confided Elizabeth to Lady Harcourt, adding that she herself had ‘never quitted my mother’s room morning, noon, nor night … I am told I am very much altered, look twenty years older … [but] if my father gets well, what care I for my looks?’105

By May, he was no better. Edward, Duke of Kent, noted that his father was hurried and restless, and that ‘a great coolness of manner towards our mother is predominant, and a general asperity towards the whole family on the subject of his confinement frequently shown’.106 Mrs Harcourt, now back in England with her soldier husband, confirmed Edward’s bleak assessment. She observed that ‘the king was apparently quite well when speaking to his ministers or those who kept him in a little awe; but that towards his family and dependants, his language was incoherent and harsh, quite unlike his usual character’. Dr Simmons, she thought, could not control him, unlike the Willises, ‘who had this facility to a wonderful degree and were men of the world’. With no one to discipline his actions, the king turned the household upside down: ‘he had dismissed and turned away and made capricious changes everywhere, from the Lord Chamberlain to the grooms and footmen’. All this ‘had afflicted the royal family beyond measure; the queen was ill and cross and the princesses low, depressed and quite sinking under it’.107 Most unlike his normal abstemious self, the king developed a voracious appetite. He had also begun once more to draw up extravagant architectural designs, planning building after building to replace existing royal homes with no consideration for the expense involved. His unpredictable whims and manic energy reduced his wife and daughters to exhaustion. ‘God knows, I am more wretched than I can express,’ confessed Amelia to the Prince of Wales, ‘and I can see no end to it. Could an extinguisher fall upon the whole family, I think, as things are, it would be a mercy.’108

George was in no condition to undertake his usual summer sojourn in Weymouth, but he was determined to go; it is a measure of the collective inability to defy him that he got his way, despite the well-placed misgivings of his family. From the minute of their arrival, the king’s behaviour attracted curious and increasingly disapproving attention. Sir Robert Wilson, a visitor to the resort, kept a critical account of the king’s actions, describing them with a combination of prurience and relish. He noted that the king vacillated between ‘being sometimes very intelligent and communicative, at other times sullen or childishly trifling’. He was particularly shocked to observe that ‘his original propriety is a fugitive quality’.109

George’s new-found willingness to engage in suggestive sexual banter came as a great shock to those around him. On 1 October, he went on an excursion on the royal yacht with three of his daughters and one of their ladies, a Mrs Drax. Wilson heard that the king had ‘commenced the conversation … by observing, “Mrs Drax, you look very well, very well indeed dear lovely Mrs Drax, how I should love to stroke you.”’ As everyone on board the Royal Charlotte knew, ‘stroke’ was then a colloquial term for sexual intercourse. ‘The officers of the ship and many of the sailors who heard the speech, which was attended with particular emphasis and strength of voice, could scarcely contain themselves.’ Sir Robert, clearly something of a prude, was shocked to find that ‘the speech of the king was not misunderstood by any even of the youngest of the ladies’, including, presumably, the three princesses.110

From the beginning, the king’s illness had been characterised by what his son Edward called ‘a variety of shades, some of these highly unpleasant’.111 The courtier George Villiers told William Pitt that he had personally witnessed ‘what is quite wrong, particularly at the stables yesterday before the grooms, indecent and obscene beyond description’.112 Colonel Macmahon, a friend of the Prince of Wales’s, said he had been told by the princes themselves that their father ‘gives loose to every improper expression, and is so violent in his family, that all dread him’.113 As in 1788, the king certainly seemed to be in the grip of a strong sexual impulse. He again wrote love letters to Lady Pembroke, the object of his obsession in his first bout of madness. She was now, like him, approaching old age, but still as dignified as ever. ‘In favour of his taste, she is the handsomest woman of seventy I ever saw,’ admitted Lady Bessborough.114 Colonel Macmahon heard that the king wished ‘to take Lady Pembroke into keeping … but that if Lady P declines his offer (which he has made through Dundas his apothecary) he will then make it to the Duchess of Rutland’.115 An ever-growing number of aristocratic female courtiers were cited as having attracted his less than honourable attentions. ‘The king frequently threatens to keep a mistress,’ wrote Sir Robert Wilson, ‘and several times has declared that since he finds Lady Yarmouth will not yield to his solicitations, he will make love elsewhere.’116 Lord Essex reported in November that George had now set his sights upon a woman closer to his daughter’s age than his own. ‘I hear Lady Georgiana Bulkeley is supposed to be a favourite, for in this subject he still continues to be absurd and to talk as much nonsense as ever … he calls Lady Georgiana Venus, and I find there is a party of the princesses against her.’117

The king also sought satisfaction rather closer to home. Glenbervie recorded that George rode out two or three times a week to call upon the Princess of Wales in her exile at Blackheath. She told Lady Glenbervie that she dreaded his visits, claiming that her father-in-law persistently tried to seduce her, that ‘the freedoms he took with her were of the grossest nature’.118 On one occasion ‘he made such a violent attempt on her person that it was with the greatest difficulty she escaped being ravished by him’. He had thrown her down ‘on one of the sofas, and would certainly have ravished her, if, happening to be without a back, she had not contrived to get over it on the other side.’119

The Princess of Wales was not always the most reliable of witnesses, but during his illness the king had clearly lost all sense of which women were legitimate objects of desire, and which were not. Glenbervie heard rumours that the king could not always be trusted to behave appropriately even with the closest female members of his family. For a while, he had not been allowed to travel alone in a coach with the queen ‘or any other of the ladies, a circumstance which seems to confirm the very many well-authenticated reports concerning one particular symptom attending his disorder’.120 The Marquess of Buckingham heard that whenever the king went out on an airing in a coach, he was only ever accompanied by one of his sons, ‘the queen and princesses following in another carriage, having found it impossible to control the king to any propriety of conduct in their coach’.121 The Duke of Kent saw it as evidence of his father’s improving state of health that by June he again possessed enough self-control to ensure that ‘to all my sisters, [he was] particularly kind, but in a proper and not in an outré way’.122 But as late as December 1804, Sophia admitted all was still far from well, confiding in her friend Mrs Villiers that her father was ‘all affection and kindness to me, but sometimes an over-kindness if you can understand that, which greatly alarms me’.123 At the very time when it was first rumoured she had been impregnated by her brother, Sophia was fending off the unwelcome attentions of her sick and delusional father. No wonder she described herself as ‘wretched’.

As his illness drew him into ever darker places, the king turned on his wife with the same passionate rejection that had marked his behaviour to her in 1788. He abused her to the Princess of Wales, explaining that he had determined to part from her ‘and had made arrangements accordingly’.124 He declared ‘before his sons and the princesses that … he’ll never have connexion more with her’. In fact, it was the queen who seems to have put an end to whatever sexual relations had survived the king’s sickness in 1801. Now she was implacable. ‘I have never been able to ascertain the cause of the queen’s great disgust for the king since his last illness,’ mused Sir Robert Wilson, ‘for disgust it amounts to, but no doubt she must have very good reasons to resist nature, her duty, the advice of physicians and the entreaties of ministers, for all have interested themselves in the matter.’125 Even on the night of their wedding anniversary, in September, ‘when it had been presumed that the king would be allowed to sleep with the queen, which hitherto had not been the case’, she refused to allow him into her rooms. ‘The precautions are, first the occupation of the bedchamber by the two German ladies at an early hour. When the queen retires, two or three of the princesses constantly attend her, and stay until the king leaves the apartment.’126 Malmesbury heard the same story. In his account, Charlotte ‘never says … a word; piques herself on this discreet silence; and … locks the door of her white room against him’.127 Sophia, called upon to undertake the uncomfortable task of acting as the queen’s chaperone, hated the horror of the situation – and resented her mother deeply for involving her in it. From a position of limitless reverence for her father, whose behaviour to her seems to have done nothing to diminish him in her eyes, Sophia had no doubt the queen should have done her duty and submitted to her husband’s demands. She could not bear to sit in her mother’s bedroom and hear the king dismissed. ‘Will you believe she keeps us there and at last says, “Now sir, you must go for it is time to go to bed” – My God … how can she refuse him anything?’128 Her mother’s heart, she thought, must be ‘as hard as stone’. It was not, she insisted, that ‘I am insensible to [the king’s] faults, but I know what he was. And how can I love him less when I reflect that this sad change arises from the will of God?’129

By the autumn of 1804, it was clear that much of the warmth and affection that had sustained the king and queen’s marriage for over forty years had withered away. The old habits of intimacy that had withstood so many pressures and difficulties finally shrivelled into nothing under the impact of George’s illness. It seems unlikely that they ever slept together again; soon it was apparent that they no longer wished even to share each other’s company. ‘Nothing can be worse than he is with the queen,’ wrote Lord Essex ruefully. ‘That breach is, I believe, never to be healed, beyond the outside appearances.’130

Even after his slow recovery, the king showed no desire for the old, uxorious way of life. He decided not to return to the Queen’s Lodge at Windsor, where he and Charlotte had lived before his illness, and began to restore the castle itself, creating apartments where ‘he could select his own society’. ‘He sees the queen now but in company,’ recorded Glenbervie, spending most of his time with the Princesses Sophia and Amelia, avoiding the other members of the family, ‘all of whom he suspects of caballing against him’.131 Lord Auckland too had heard that ‘within the family there are strange schisms and cabals and divisions amongst the sons and daughters’. Auckland acknowledged that the king never mentioned the queen with overt disrespect, ‘but he marks unequivocally, and by many facts that he is dissatisfied with her and is come to a decided system of checking her knowledge of what is going forward’. He clearly regarded the new arrangements as permanent, and ordered his library to be sent down to Windsor from the Queen’s House in London. ‘The discontinuance of all residence at the town house’ seemed to Auckland to indicate ‘another mark of separation’. ‘It is a melancholy circumstance to see a family that had lived so well together for such a number of years completely broken up,’ lamented one of Auckland’s correspondents.132

Charlotte herself made only an opaque comment on her new situation. ‘We are now returned to the castle in our new habitation,’ she wrote to Lady Harcourt, ‘and I will only tell you that I have changed from a really comfortable and warm habitation to the coldest house, rooms and passages that ever existed, and that all idea of comfort is vanished with it.’ Did she refer solely to the underheated rooms she occupied, or was there a nod to the chillier emotional landscape that now surrounded her? ‘I tell myself every moment – il faut s’y faire – but oh! Stubborn heart!’ It was hard, she acknowledged sadly, not to give way to ‘melancholy reflections’.133

It must have been a dispiriting task to survey the bleak outcome of so many years of devotion to the shared ideal of rational, affectionate, family harmony, to see the relationship which she had tended so assiduously, for so long and at the cost of so many other thwarted desires, founder so completely on the unfathomable mystery of her husband’s illness. In the spring of 1805, when the new life had become more familiar to her, Charlotte wrote again to Lady Harcourt, attempting to summon up her accustomed attitude of resignation. It was fortunate, she concluded bitterly, that it was impossible to predict the future, for it was best not to know what unhappiness it would bring. ‘I acknowledge fairly that I have every day more reason to adore Providence for keeping us in ignorance of what is to come, as I am perfectly sure that with our best endeavours to prepare for it, we should miss our aim. For our walk within this twelve month has been in a maze, but n’importe, I will go on, do my duty and endeavour not to forfeit the good opinion of those I love and also the world, for I am not above that.’134 As she so often said, she would put a good face on what could not be changed, and endure, because she could do nothing else.

What the king thought, as he surveyed the troubled landscape of his family life, riven by dissension, scarred by unhappiness and dragged down by a powerful undertow of unacknowledged frustration, must remain conjecture, as he confided his feelings on the subject to no one. Perhaps he did not allow himself to contemplate the ever-widening gulf between the optimism of his early hopes for a new kind of domestic happiness, and the bleak reality of more recent experience. George had never been a particularly reflective man; he was not given to fluent articulation on big subjects, especially where they touched upon ideas and emotions. The grand family mission had always been for him a project to be lived rather than talked about, and, as it began to founder, he showed no willingness to examine – publicly at least – what had gone wrong. To do so would have involved asking some very uncomfortable questions about his own role in its collapse, and nothing in his character suggests that he would willingly have undertaken such a potentially painful form of self-examination. Instead, like the queen, he sought to put the best possible construction on what had been achieved, concentrating on those aspects of his private world that still offered fulfilment and pleasure, and carefully turning his gaze away from more challenging issues.

*

By the beginning of 1805, much of the work on the new apartments at Windsor was done, and the new living arrangements were in place. Charlotte was not impressed. When the king asked her to inspect the alterations with him, she declined, declaring herself ‘not an enthusiast’. Only one tantalising prospect raised her spirits. At the end of 1804, her brother Charles had written from Mecklenburg suggesting that one of her daughters might marry George, his eldest son. The queen was delighted; there was nothing she wanted more than to cement her lifelong affection for her brother with an alliance of this kind.

She did not feel it right to approach the king with the idea until the spring, when he seemed at last to have recovered from the worst effects of his illness. The letter she wrote to him advocating the match was unusually bold in its tone, reflecting both her love for her brother and a determination to forward his proposal. For the first time in any of her correspondence, she suggested to the king that he might put the wishes of his daughters above his own and agree to what Charlotte knew they wanted. In the past, she said, ‘I have made it a rule to avoid a subject in which I know their opinions differ with those of Your Majesty’s. For every one of them have at different times assured me that, happy as they are, they should like to settle if they could, and I feel I cannot blame them.’135 The king replied with polite good nature that ‘after having had the happiness of possessing such a treasure from Strelitz’, he would not hesitate to say ‘that if my daughters are disposed to marry, I should prefer an alliance with this family than any other in Germany’. He went on to add perhaps the clearest explanation he ever gave for his failure to find suitable husbands for the princesses: ‘I cannot deny that I have never wished to see any of them marry: I am happy in their company and do not in the least want a separation.’

He was quite unembarrassed by a confession of such frank self-interest, and does not seem to have thought it made him appear either selfish or heartless. For George, this simple assertion of the primacy of his feelings merely reflected the natural order of things. His needs ranked higher than those of his daughters, and it was he who would determine whether or not they should be fulfilled. He was not an intentionally cruel man, but he found it very difficult to distinguish between his own interests and those of the princesses. He was entirely satisfied with things as they were and could not understand why his daughters were not. If he was content, how could they be unhappy? He never appreciated their desire for a life that did not have him at its centre. However, perhaps age and illness had mellowed him, for on this occasion he decided not to stand in the way, telling Charlotte that if she considered this ‘a serious offer’, he would put his own feelings aside: ‘I should certainly not want to oppose what they feel will add to their happiness.’136

The queen told her brother that she was ‘full of joy and impatience’ at this unexpectedly positive response, although she advised the hereditary prince not to come to England immediately, but to wait until after the summer trip to Weymouth. She was still exuberantly happy in May, telling her brother that she could not express all she felt, ‘especially when I picture one of my daughters in the home where I was so happy’.137 But the months went past, the family returned from Weymouth, and still the hereditary prince did not come, Finally, in 1806, Charlotte received a letter from Charles announcing that his son had decided not to marry yet.

It was a bitter blow. There seemed little now to engage the queen’s hopes for the future. Wherever she looked amongst her close family, she saw nothing but unhappiness. Relations between her eldest son and his wife had deteriorated to new levels of acrimony. The prince, who told his sisters that the princess was ‘a perfect streetwalker’, had accumulated extensive written evidence of her numerous alleged adulteries. He had presented the incriminating documents to the Cabinet and demanded they take action against her. Reluctantly, the ministers had agreed to appoint a commission to investigate. It was hard to see what good could possibly result from such a public display of private misery, and the queen despaired.

The king’s physical health was another source of anxiety. For many years, he had been troubled by cataracts in one eye; now the other was attacked, leaving him virtually sightless. Even though their relations were cooler now, Charlotte was still deeply affected by this disabling blow to her once robust husband, and although George showed ‘an exemplary fortitude … under this heavy calamity’, she admitted to Lady Harcourt that she found his dependency hard to bear. ‘The necessity of keeping up before him is such a strain on both body and mind that all idea of amusement, excepting what is necessary to enliven him, vanishes.’138 Her life at Windsor became even more restricted; one day followed another with little to distinguish them. Even the steady flow of correspondence to her loyal confidante began to dry up. ‘I thought it just as well not to increase the number of letters from a place like this,’ she told Lady Harcourt mournfully at the end of 1808. ‘Where nothing occurs to entertain, [they] must soon become very stupid.’139 After enduring two years of an existence she found exhausting and enervating in equal measure, Charlotte sent Lord Harcourt a verse couplet which she believed summed up ‘our style of living’:

They Eat, they Drank, they Slept – what then?

They Slept, they Eat, they Drank – again.

She added ruefully that she and her daughters could no longer be described as ‘la bande joyeux’. Those days seemed long past. The best they could aspire to now was to be considered ‘la bande contente’.140 That would be enough to satisfy her diminished expectations. Charlotte must have known that even this was an optimistic assessment of the princesses’ shared state of mind. Sophia was angry, resentful and increasingly withdrawn; Mary and Augusta concealed depths of frustration beneath superficially calm exteriors; Amelia was fragile in health and emotionally volatile.

Even Elizabeth, her mother’s most active supporter and the most determinedly upbeat of the sisters, had been ground down by the challenges of the past few years. She had turned thirty in 1800, and knew that every year that passed made the likelihood of her becoming a wife and mother more remote. In the absence of any credible marriage prospect, she did everything she could to offset the boredom of her life. She engraved, she painted, she embroidered – and still the empty hours yawned before her. That was especially true at Weymouth, where time dragged even more slowly. ‘I amuse myself with an hour’s German, then write, and draw and dress for dinner, read to the queen the while till cards, when I play at whist till my eyes know not hearts from diamonds and spades from clubs.’ The conversation was as dull as the amusements. ‘News there is none, but who bathes and who can’t,’ she wrote in 1802, ‘and who won’t and who will, and whether warm bathing is better than cold, who likes wind and who don’t, and all these silly questions and answers.’141 Six years later, nothing had changed: ‘We go on as we have for the last twenty years of our lives’; life continues ‘much as usual, as you know, vegetating’.142

No one worked harder than Elizabeth at the business of being cheerful. She said she always preferred being happy to being sad, and could not understand why others did not feel the same. Life did not have to be so dull or so depressing, but those around her, she felt, had fallen into the habit of misery: ‘It is astonishing to me that they can have happiness within their grasp, but not trouble to put out their hand.’143 In spite of all reverses, she did her utmost to see the best in her situation. ‘Trials we must have, and they would not be trials if they were not felt. I therefore rejoice in the good, try to go on mildly with the bad, and bear all good-humouredly.’144 She worked hard to keep up ‘that great flow of spirits’ which alone enabled her to get through the long days, and gamely sought to bury her own discontents. However, there were some frustrations which overwhelmed even her relentless cheerfulness.

As she grew older, she became increasingly impatient with her royal status. On the one hand, she was proud of her high social standing; on the other, she was painfully aware of the limitations that accompanied it. She referred more than once to her royal identity as ‘the canister at my tail’ and felt its weight upon her keenly, declaring that she was not at all suited to the world into which she had been born. The world of the court was hateful to her, ‘a hotbed of insincerity, jealousy and a thousand other stings of uncomfortable littleness belonging to human nature’. She liked to think of herself as a plain dealer, unimpressed by pretension, and impatient of hollow ceremony. ‘Though born at court,’ she declared to Lady Harcourt, ‘I have no court cant, and love my friends as truly as any plebeian in this or any other country.’145 She longed to escape from the false, artificial and purposeless life she felt closing in on her: ‘I wish I could cut through that fence, maybe a rabbit hole would let me through, though my size comes in my way. Modern dress might let me squeeze out, we live in strange times, I will not give up.’146 What she needed was a way out, an escape route to a different existence. Like her mother with her Frogmore retreat, Elizabeth found it in the shape of a private place she could truly call home.

With a loan from the Prince of Wales, she leased a small cottage, ‘The Garden House’, in Old Windsor. Here she planted a garden and ran a model farm, of which she was very proud. She had inherited, as none of his sons had done, the king’s passion for agriculture. ‘You are perfectly right in thinking that I feel and think all most perfect at the Cottage for eggs, butter, cream and milk,’ she wrote in 1808. ‘I am unworthy of pigs, though I watch them with a hawk’s eye and my broods of chickens and ducks are beyond everything my delight.’147 A cottage of her own offered Elizabeth the sliver of privacy and independence that enabled her to survive the grim years of the early 1800s. Yet, for all the pleasure she took in her rural retreat, something was missing. ‘Between friends,’ she confessed to her eldest brother, ‘a mate not being there (though I hope will make an appearance, though time flies)’, she was still lonely and unfulfilled.148

None of her sisters was as frank or as unashamed in declaring the urgency of their desire to marry as Elizabeth. ‘I continue my prayer,’ she had told Lady Harcourt in 1802, ‘of, Oh how I long to be married, be married, before that my beauty decays.’149 News of a wedding always made her think of her own stark marital prospects. When her friend Augusta Compton announced her engagement, Elizabeth was heartfelt in her congratulations, although the disdain she felt for her own single state tinged her goodwill with bitterness. ‘Thank God again and again that you have determined to quit that vile class, you know what I mean … You have set me a good example, and I will follow it whenever I can.’ The desire to put behind her the shame and humiliation, as she saw it, of spinsterhood was one important aspect of Elizabeth’s desperate desire to find a husband. But she was also aware that she was missing out on other pleasures. Her vision of the married state was never fey or over-romanticised. She anticipated the physical side of wedlock with the same gusto with which she applied herself to the large meals she so enjoyed. She offered Augusta Compton her cottage as ‘the place where you will pass your HONEYMOON’, and signed off her letter, in words an inch high, ‘Amen and A-Man’.150

As the years passed and there was still no prospect of a husband in view, it grew harder to keep her hopes alive. ‘Time is a vile old gentleman, for though I court him as much as anybody, he, like all other gentlemen, gives me the slip.’151 Neither she nor her sisters had known of the Mecklenburg proposal in 1805, as the queen had not told them of it; and in any event, it was extremely unlikely that Elizabeth would have been selected as the suitable candidate for the hereditary prince, as she was nine years older than him. But then in 1808, when she was thirty-eight and after so many years of fruitless anticipation, she at last received a proposal of marriage, from a completely unexpected quarter.

When his name was first linked with hers, Louis Philippe, the exiled Duke of Orléans (and cousin of the executed Louis XVI), was living a modest life at Twickenham. Since the Terror, during which his father was guillotined despite actively supporting the Revolution, his family had scattered across continents, and he had pursued a variety of careers. For a while he had been a schoolmaster in America; and it was probably during his travels in Canada in the late 1790s that he met Edward, Duke of Kent, after which he came to settle in England. The two men became firm friends and remained close – Edward had lent the needy Orléans money, and kept a bedroom available for him to use at Kensington Palace – and it may have been at Kent’s prompting that Orléans came to consider Elizabeth as a potential wife. It is not known whether Louis Philippe and Elizabeth ever met, although it seems probable that they carried on some form of private correspondence. Certainly they seem quickly to have developed favourable opinions of each other. Orléans was confident enough of his position to write to the Prince of Wales in 1808, declaring that he wished to marry Elizabeth, and suggesting that she was likely to accept him. Elizabeth confirmed this, telling her brother that ‘I own that this has been the wish of my heart for so long … and that my esteem has been gaining ground for so long that it has truly been my prayer.’152

In late September, the queen discovered the existence of the Orléans letter, and confronted her daughter, demanding to know if she had been aware of it. Elizabeth was deeply hurt at the implication she had sought to conceal the proposal from Charlotte. ‘I had flattered myself that from my constant attendance upon my mother, with my natural openness of character, I had hoped she would have gained confidence in me at my time of life.’ She was grieved to find that this was not the case, but was not prepared to be cowed into submission. ‘I let her know that I was not ignorant of what had passed, with my sentiments and feelings on it.’ She begged the Prince of Wales to help bring the match about, pleading ‘that you will not dash the cup of happiness from my lips’.153

Perhaps emboldened by the princess’s enthusiasm, Louis Philippe now made an open declaration of his intentions, writing directly to the queen to ask her to speak to the king. Charlotte replied with an uncompromising negative, as she informed her unhappy daughter. ‘My mother … though kind to me, has assured me it can never be, and that she never will hear of it again.’154 Orléans was an impoverished refugee, living on the charity of others, with no prospects before him. He was also a Catholic. This did not concern Elizabeth – ‘being firm to my own faith, I shall not plague them on theirs’ – but as the queen knew, the king would never allow his daughter to marry a man who was not a Protestant. Still Elizabeth refused to give up, and she was encouraged by the Prince of Wales, who urged her not to despair. Her resolve had been further stiffened by the support of her sisters, and by secrets that had come to light in the upheavals following the proposal. ‘Many things I will tell you which determined me at once to say I would NEVER GIVE IT UP, for, it was hinted, many things had been brought forward and rejected without a word from us, and therefore we all felt the sun of our days was set.’155 Elizabeth and her sisters now learnt, probably for the first time, of offers and refusals made for their hands going back over many years. It was unlikely to have made any of them more resigned to their fates.

It may have been these revelations which spurred Elizabeth to explore every possibility rather than see this offer too pass away from her. After the queen delivered her refusal, Elizabeth claimed that what she hoped for was not an immediate union – she seems to have accepted that her father would never agree to it – but some form of engagement, which would allow her to marry the duke after the king’s death. She was confident Louis Philippe would agree to these terms, which ‘may be very unfortunate to us, but which will make everything couleur de rose afterwards by considering my father before myself’. These, she declared, were the only terms on which she would consider proceeding, ‘for without being a perfect good daughter, I can never make a good wife’.156

However, despite her protestations that she would never abandon that ‘degree of submission’ that she believed was the particular burden of ‘an HRH’, there are indications that Elizabeth may have considered defying her parents and making a private marriage with the duke. Her correspondence suggests she and Orléans had discussed the terms on which this might be brought about. In November, she wrote to the Prince of Wales seemingly on the duke’s behalf, asking her brother to confirm that when he became king, he would regularise the position of any children they might have. ‘He wishes, in justice to himself, as well as out of delicacy to me, that you would merely ensure the legitimacy of children, should there be any, for that subject once clearly decided upon, his mind will be at ease.’ An undertaking of this kind would only have been necessary if the couple planned to marry before the death of the king. ‘I must now only make one request to you,’ asked Elizabeth of her brother, ‘from myself, which is that you would send for him before he goes, and not feel shy in talking the subject over with him, for it must be an ease to his mind as well as to mine to hear what you have said to me from your own mouth, and that he would swear never to reveal what passes.’157

For all the hope that radiates from Elizabeth’s letter, it was the last she wrote on the subject of marriage to Louis Philippe. The duke, it seems, lacked Elizabeth’s perseverance. Perhaps he was reluctant to agree to such a potentially open-ended and uncertain engagement; perhaps the complications involved in navigating the provisions of the Royal Marriages Act put him off. Whatever his reasons, he drifted out of Elizabeth’s life with the same vagueness with which he had apparently drifted in. Just over a year after Elizabeth had written to her brother about the legitimacy of any children she might have had with him, in November 1809, the Duke of Orléans married Maria Amalia, the unencumbered daughter of the King of Naples and Sicily. When, against all expectations, Louis became King of France in 1830, it was she and not Elizabeth who became queen.

Elizabeth had promised her mother that if her marriage plans came to nothing, ‘you shall never see a wry face, and believe me, she never shall, for I have gone on just the same’.158 If she was bitter, she did not show it (she was too well trained for that); but whatever demeanour she felt obliged to adopt publicly, she perhaps drew some private comfort from a relationship which had far deeper roots than the cruelly tantalising encounter with the Duke of Orléans. While the duke was a pragmatic if ultimately flawed marriage prospect, Lord St Helens was the man whom, if she had been free to do so, she would have chosen for a husband.

Alleyne Fitzherbert, Lord St Helens, was an experienced, highly regarded diplomat who had served in France, Spain and Russia, and a friend of writers, politicians and travellers. Mount St Helens in Washington State was named after him. The king liked him and made him a privy councillor and a Lord of the Bedchamber. Glenbervie, who knew him well, described him as being ‘for several years of the select society at Windsor and the Queen’s House’. He was a rather reluctant courtier, complaining to Glenbervie that he had ‘been in a manner forced to become a Lord of the Bedchamber, which adds nothing to his income’.159 He was a self-contained, sharp-witted man, and an undiplomatic diplomat who was ‘apt to say very blunt things to the different royal personages of the court’. Princess Sophia once asked him to ‘say something to the king which she thought would gratify him’. St Helens stubbornly refused to do so, adding that ‘you know very well he never would hear, and never will hear the truth from anybody’.160 He was said to have treated the Empress of Russia with similar abruptness. She asked him once how well she played whist. ‘Like everyone else,’ he answered. She protested that people had told her that she played rather well. ‘They flatter you,’ he said.161

His disdain for court life and the directness of his manner must have appealed strongly to Elizabeth, who prized those qualities in herself. He was a man of the world, seventeen years her senior, admired by everyone around her, including her father. It was hardly surprising she found him so attractive. She called him her saint. ‘You know, it is always holiday with me when he is near, for I love him to my heart and must say it,’ she told Lady Harcourt in a long letter. ‘There is no man of my acquaintance I love so well, and his tenderness to me has never varied, and that is a thing I never forget.’ For all her superficial bravado on the subject of men and marriage, Elizabeth was in reality far from confident in her powers of attraction. ‘I am sure I was never, from my earliest days, a person to please men in general, and … if ever I was such a fool and tried to be agreeable, I have often gone to bed thoroughly dissatisfied and displeased with myself.’ With her saint it was different. Secure in his regard, she was able to be herself, shrugging off the part she usually felt obliged by her position in life to adopt. She yearned to see him ‘at all times, hours, minutes, days, nights, etc.’. She was old enough now to appreciate how rare it was to find a man like him: ‘God knows, they are not found often, they are diamonds without flaws.’162

Elizabeth wrote this at the end of 1808, when she was still hoping that she might marry Orléans. This made no difference at all to what she felt for St Helens, even though she knew it would never end in marriage. Whether she followed her heart or her head, it must have seemed as though the result was always the same – hers were always the wrong lovers.

Writing to the Prince of Wales in 1810, she tried to be philosophical. ‘The good times not coming, and yet time going on, I fear all my bright castles in the air (which have so entirely failed in this world, and left, I fear, a deep scar not to be effaced, though smothered in my breast) are nearly at an end.’ She hoped she would learn to bear her disappointments with ‘good humour’, and was determined to approach middle age with dignified resignation. If love, marriage and a family were denied to her, she would attempt to find comfort in smaller pleasures. ‘I have been well tried in my spring and summer of life; I expect my autumn and winter to be free from chilling cold and whilst I have kind and good friends, a great chair, a pinch of snuff, a book and a fireside with a kind brother, I think I shall in the end rest very quietly.’163

*

Such stoic renunciation would never be Amelia’s way. Beneath her rather dreamy, voluptuous exterior, the youngest of all George and Charlotte’s children concealed a will stronger than any of her sisters, perhaps because she had less experience than they did of being thwarted in her wishes. When she fell in love, she pursued the object of her desire with an intensity that was in the end to consume her.

She first met Charles Fitzroy in 1800, when she was seventeen. He shared many of the characteristics of the men to whom her sisters were attracted. Like General Garth and Lord St Helens, he occupied a trusted place in the royal household. He too was an equerry and was liked by the king, who seems to have felt at ease in his undemanding company. He was twenty-one years older than Amelia, making him exactly the same age as her idolised eldest brother. But unlike the ‘hard-favoured Garth’, Fitzroy was extremely good-looking. As a young soldier in Germany, he had caught the eye of the susceptible Frederick the Great, who enjoyed the company of attractive young men and ‘the attentions of the veteran monarch to the handsome youth were especially marked’.164 Fitzroy was unmoved by Frederick’s appreciation, or indeed, it seems, by anything very much. He was a decent, good-natured man – ‘we love him for his good affectionate heart and his attachment to his parents’, wrote the Duchess of Brunswick, the king’s sister, who knew him in Germany in 1786 – but he was placid rather than passionate, with a sedate self-containment that revealed little to the world. He was of respectably aristocratic parentage, the second son of Lord Southampton, though allegedly also descended through an illegitimate line from Charles II, which may have added a whiff of the exotic to his otherwise straightforward appeal.

In 1801, during the regular retreat to Weymouth, Amelia’s health had been poor. When the rest of the family returned to Windsor, it was decided she should stay by the sea to benefit from the fresh air. Miss Gomme, her elderly governess, remained with her, as did Fitzroy, who was charged with overseeing her daily rides. It was perhaps here that their relationship began. When Amelia went back to Windsor in the winter, Fitzroy came too; their rides continued, and it was noticed that he was always her partner at cards. The Princess of Wales, that energetic transmitter of scandal, told Glenbervie that once, when she was at Frogmore, she had seen Amelia and one of her ladies ‘in one of the retired walks’; the lady ‘took a piece of paper from her pocket, wrote something on it and threw it into a hedge or bush near the walk’. After they had gone, the princess picked up the paper, saw the number twelve written on it ‘in large Roman letters’ and put it back. ‘Soon afterwards, General Fitzroy came into that walk, and looking with apparent eagerness on each side, when he came up to the same place, perceived the note and put it in his pocket.’ At supper that night, Amelia insisted that she had a headache and wanted to go to her room, but the princess deliberately kept her talking ‘till considerably past XII o’clock’.165

By 1803, the attraction between Fitzroy and Amelia was so apparent that Miss Gomme grew alarmed, and begged Amelia to behave more prudently. When this had no effect, the governess went to the queen, urging her to act to put an end to a relationship she considered damaging to the princess. Amelia was furious, and demanded that her mother dismiss Miss Gomme. In response, Charlotte wrote her daughter a lengthy and circuitous letter, whose principal object seems to have been the avoidance of any further discussion of such a difficult subject. In it, she revealed that she was aware of Amelia’s behaviour, and had already issued warnings intended to put a stop to some of its more obvious public manifestations. There was to be no more dawdling along next to Fitzroy whilst out on horseback, but beyond these remarks, she had little more to say. She refused to consider her daughter’s appeal to send the governess away; Miss Gomme’s ‘motive did her honour, as it was meant to make you sensible of the necessity to watch every step in your conduct’. Nor would she respond to Amelia’s rather petulant demand to cancel her rides if Fitzroy was no longer allowed to accompany her. ‘I am sorry that the request about the riding must also meet with a refusal. This must be done for your health.’ The queen was aware that the sudden discontinuance of her outings would probably give rise to more gossip. She was firmest of all in declaring that no mention of the affair was to reach her father, to whom Amelia had clearly threatened to appeal. ‘To say anything on this subject to the king would expose you more than anything – make him unhappy, and make our home unhappy, and as there is sufficient distress to be found out of doors, there can be no good reason why it should be unnecessarily increased indoors.’166

At no point did Charlotte mention Fitzroy’s name, or specifically instruct her daughter to stop seeing him. To do so would have been to acknowledge the reality of a relationship she hoped could be wished away. ‘Let it from this moment be buried in oblivion,’ she instructed Amelia forcefully, but her commands did not have the effect that they might have had on her more pliant elder daughters. Amelia’s response, as she told Mary, was uncompromising. ‘I cannot but say I am no longer a child, and though ready to take advice, yet I cannot … submit to government at my age.’167 She was now twenty years old and had no intention of ending her affair with Fitzroy, in whom she was certain she had found the love of her life.

From the earliest days of their relationship, Amelia was all but overpowered by the strength of her feelings for him. ‘O God, how I do love you! … I live but for you. I love you with the purest affection, the greatest gratitude; I owe you everything. All my happiness and comfort I derive is through you.’168 It was Amelia, always unswerving in her determination to achieve what she wanted, who had begun the affair. ‘I have liked you from the first I sought you,’ she reminded Fitzroy in one letter to him, ‘and Blessed be God – I gained you.’169 None of his letters to her survive, so it is not known how he responded to this avalanche of passion. He did not run away, as he might have done if the situation had been truly intolerable to him; his staying at court, where Amelia’s very visible obsession placed him in a difficult position for the better part of a decade, suggests that he felt something for her in return. Yet nothing about his passive character implies that he could match the fervency of her devotion. His undemonstrativeness sometimes drove her into agonies of anxiety. ‘Don’t be angry, but tell me the truth, I felt as if your manner towards me today still as if you had doubts about me … I think something I did annoyed you last night.’ To be happy, she required repeated proofs of his affection. ‘If you can, give me a kind word or look tonight … look for me tomorrow morning riding … I go to Chapel tomorrow … do sit where I may see you, not as you did last Sunday morning, good God, what I then suffered. Do have your dear hair cut and keep it for me.’170

She was strongly attracted to Fitzroy, and clearly longed for their relationship to go beyond clandestine meetings in midnight gardens. ‘Oh God, I am almost mad for you, my blessed and most beloved Charles … Oh God, that dear soft face, that blessed sweet breath.’ She promised him that once they were married, she would keep him in bed for a week, ‘the joy would be so great’.171 Yet, for all the undoubted power of Amelia’s feelings, it seems unlikely that they consummated their relationship. ‘Her amours with Fitzroy have long been notorious to the courtiers,’ wrote Glenbervie, ‘but whether carried to the furthest extent seems uncertain.’172 Amelia herself told her friend Mrs Villiers that ‘General Fitzroy was the most noble and honourable of men … and that she never did anything to be ashamed of.’173

Her lack of shame was in other ways quite remarkable. She wrote to Fitzroy with a candour extraordinary for a woman of her background. With him, there was nothing she would not discuss; even her most intimate bodily difficulties were considered suitable subjects on which to seek his reassurance. In a revealing letter discovered by Flora Fraser, Amelia opened her heart to him about gynaecological problems which were clearly the source of great distress to her. After so much sickness in her teens, she was perhaps used to the close observation of her body, and had become concerned about symptoms in her genitalia. ‘Don’t be angry or shocked, but do you think my spot being out is likely to prevent my having children if I was married to you? And what is its being out owing to? I ask you anything, I say anything to you so don’t be angry.’ She did not want to disgust him, ‘but from all I have suffered in those parts, I have often thought and dreaded having a cancer in my womb’.174 The Princess of Wales told Glenbervie that Amelia’s later illnesses could be traced back to a venereal disease she had contracted whilst convalescing in Worthing in 1798, with the complaint on her knee, where the nephew of her surgeon Keate ‘communicated the infection to her’.175 It seems unlikely that Amelia, who had a high sense of her own status, would have engaged in a sexual relationship with a provincial surgeon’s assistant (and the fact that the Princess of Wales was involved in passing on the story is noteworthy); but the episode may reflect a history of gynaecological difficulties that were not discussed publicly by her doctors.

Amelia’s frankness, so untypical of the time, was perhaps the result of her conviction that she and Fitzroy were linked by ties so profound that they were not subject to conventional niceties of behaviour. As she assured him, ‘no two ever loved or was as tried as we are, and instead of separating us – which in all others it would – it has bound us tighter and more sacredly together’.176 She was convinced that the strength of their devotion meant that they were married in all but name, insisting that ‘for years I have considered myself his lawful wife’.177 But despite her confidence that their relationship was sanctioned in the eyes of God, she nevertheless yearned for the conventional recognition of the relationship: ‘Marry you, my own dear Angel, I really must and will.’ Sometimes she sought to persuade herself that the formalities of marriage did not matter to her, but this was overshadowed by what she thought was their destiny: ‘O God, why not be together? I pine after my dear Charles more and more every instant … I really must marry you, and though inwardly united, and in reality that is much more than the ceremony, yet that ceremony would be a protection … would to God my own husband and best friend and guardian was here to protect me and assist, as I am sure was destined in heaven, I should have nothing to fear.’178

Precisely what Amelia had to fear became evident at the end of 1807. Miss Gomme, whose efforts to regulate Amelia’s behaviour towards Fitzroy in 1803 had been so unsuccessful, received a series of anonymous letters accusing her of deliberately ignoring the intimacy between the princess and Fitzroy, which had now become a public scandal. (These letters were eventually revealed to have been written by Lady Georgiana Bulkeley, the ‘Venus’ the king had found so attractive during his illness in 1804.) Panicked, Miss Gomme demanded to see Princess Elizabeth, always regarded as the queen’s de facto secretary, and poured out to her a torrent of pent-up hysteria in which rumour, anxiety and accusation were fairly equally mixed. ‘That there was still time to save Princess Amelia who was all but ruined – all the world talked of Gen FR and Princess Amelia’s behaviour – the queen [had] connived at it, and had sanctioned the promise of marriage the moment the king was dead – that the queen was equally ruined.’ When Elizabeth refused to carry such a scandalous account to her mother, Miss Gomme declared that if she would not do so, she would feel it her duty to speak to the king. Shaken, Elizabeth took the story to Charlotte, whose response was ‘outrageous … She thought it the height of infamy to be accused of deceiving the king and ruining her child.’179

Amelia was horrified when told what had happened by her brother, Frederick, Duke of York; but she was also perhaps secretly relieved at having matters in the open at last. When Amelia told him that she considered herself married to Fitzroy, the duke replied that he thought ‘a time will come when you may do as you please, and the queen will be your friend, but don’t say so, all this has offended her very much, her being said to have deceived the king’.180 In fact, Frederick’s assessment of his mother’s state of mind was far too optimistic. If Charlotte had ever been prepared to turn a blind eye to Amelia’s affair until the king’s death made marriage a possibility, she would have done so only if it were conducted with sufficient discretion to allow her to maintain a studious public ignorance of the true facts. The anonymous letters sent to Miss Gomme, together with her terrified and outspoken response to them, made such tactical unknowing on Charlotte’s part unsustainable.

A bright light had been shone on to things best kept hidden, and the queen was forced into action. She wrote a letter to Amelia intended to put an end to any glimmers of hope she might have mistakenly entertained about future possibilities. ‘You are now beginning to enter into the years of discretion and will, I do not doubt, see how necessary it is to SUBDUE every passion in the beginning, and to consider the impropriety of indulging any impression which must make you miserable and be a disgrace to yourself and a misery to all who love you.’ Had the king known of what had passed, ‘he would have been rendered miserable for all his life and I fear it would create a breach in the whole family’.181 It was a bleak message, but a clear one. Whilst the king lived, Amelia must give up all thoughts of marriage to Fitzroy and abandon any idea of an informally acknowledged engagement.

Yet again, the wishes of the daughters had been weighed against the king’s peace of mind, with no doubt as to who would be required to make the necessary sacrifice. Charlotte had tactfully stressed only the unhappiness that would result from George’s discovery of Amelia’s defiance, but others were more explicit in the pressure they exerted on the recalcitrant princess. When Amelia told her friend Mrs Villiers that she was ‘making up her mind to leave the castle with General Fitzroy and take her chance of forgiveness’, Mrs Villiers did not hesitate to invoke the spectre of the king’s precarious health as a means of bringing Amelia to her senses. ‘What would be her feelings of remorse if, as more than probable, such a shock as this would be to the king brought on a return of insanity? She was the most devoted of daughters to him, and this touched her.’182 Even her doctor resorted to similar methods of emotional blackmail. When, weighed down by depression, Amelia’s health began to fail, she asked her physician Sir Francis Milman to explain to the king that her sickness was aggravated by the misery of her situation. He refused to do so, ‘saying that for the king’s sake, she must sacrifice herself and patiently bear all the hardships that were imposed upon her’.183

Suffering with new symptoms from the tuberculosis which had first appeared in her knee, prostrated by anxiety, and lectured and criticised by so many of those around her, still Amelia refused to give up her dream of marriage to Fitzroy. In April 1808, when she thought she was dying, she wrote a long letter to be given to her lover after her death. ‘I feel our wishes are known and sanctioned in heaven,’ she wrote, ‘and there we shall meet to part no more. I solemnly declare the truth that you are the only person who ever suited me, for whom I could ever find the same confidence and affection.’ He was, she declared, ‘my husband! Though from situation, the rights I have not enjoyed.’184

She had no doubt now whom she blamed for her intolerable situation. Her mother had let her down when she most needed her support; and close examination of the Royal Marriages Act had proved to her the degree to which her father was the architect of the laws from which her unhappiness flowed. From 1808 onwards, a new harshness towards her parents was evident in all Amelia’s letters. ‘You know how little reason I have to love my family,’ she wrote to Fitzroy, ‘or esteem them in any way, and though I never hurt any of them, they God knows, have me – in many ways, various and cruel.’185

Amelia turned twenty-five in August 1808, and as she knew from her study of the Act, she could now apply to the Privy Council for the right to marry without the king’s permission. She drew up a formal letter to the Prince of Wales announcing her intention to do so; but throughout it, she referred to the king as ‘my late father’, suggesting that she could not bring herself to begin the process during his lifetime. The resentment towards her family so evident in her letter to Fitzroy was now focussed upon the king, as she bleakly recapitulated ‘the trials I have gone through, on account of not offending my late father, which cause has so long made me submit to them … You must know,’ she admonished her brother, ‘how cruel our situation has long been, and I may say, how unjust.’186 A year later she repeated her complaint, with an even greater sense of anger directed towards ‘the laws made by the king respecting the marriage of the royal family’ which had prevented her from becoming Fitzroy’s wife, ‘which I consider I am in my heart’.187 Alone of the sisters, Amelia was prepared to declare that it was the actions of her father – both past and present – which had so effectively denied her the only form of happiness she sought for herself.

This sobering realisation did nothing to improve Amelia’s state of mind or body. By the spring of 1809, she was again seriously ill. Mrs Villiers found her ‘bled and blistered’ and extremely unhappy in April, concentrating much of her anger on her parents. ‘She says herself, poor thing, that she must die for the ill-treatment she receives,’ wrote Mrs Villiers, adept at stoking up Amelia’s resentment. ‘It really makes me boil with rage! And then one hears of the king and queen being patterns of conjugal fidelity and parental affection! I am sure the queen never had one grain of the latter quality in her composition – the former I daresay she may boast of, for I don’t believe there is one person in the kingdom who would ever have had bad taste enough to propose to her to be otherwise.’188 It was remarks of that kind which resulted in the effective dismissal of Mrs Villiers from Amelia’s company. As she grew weaker, Amelia’s world shrank in on itself. ‘As to myself, I have nothing new to say, but I am sadly plagued with a cough,’ she wrote to the Prince of Wales in July. ‘I go out in the garden but am tired of myself, and believe I shall never recover. None but your dear self know what human feelings are; none of my family do.’189 Only her sister Mary was exempt from the bitterness that now consumed her. Mary’s calm presence soothed her mind, whilst her practical helpfulness sought to relieve her physical sufferings.

There was little however anyone could do to improve Amelia’s worsening condition. She had a persistent pain in her side which no medicine helped. Eventually it was decided to insert a seaton, a skein of silk placed inside a surgically created wound, intended to act as a form of primitive drainage tube. She already had one in her chest, and now submitted ‘to this very severe remedy’ again. But the seatons made no lasting difference to her state, and her doctors, with nothing else to suggest, recommended she retreat to Weymouth. She was quite willing to go. ‘My only wish is to get well, and God knows I long to feel I am no longer a burden to my family.’ Her only request was ‘that Miny [Mary] might go with me’.190

The journey from Windsor was a hard one; ‘obliged to rest at every place we stopped to change horses … in one constant fainting from the fatigue and violence of the pain in the side’. The sisters spent the night at General Garth’s Dorset house, where he treated them with his customary generosity, despite being lame with gout. He had arranged their apartments at Weymouth, and had ‘secured good milk and butter for our breakfast and fruit of all sorts, particularly grapes for Amelia; indeed he has forgot nothing, and thought of everything’. At the resort, Amelia made little progress. Taken into a bathing machine ‘to breathe the sea airs, she lay a quarter of an hour on a couch we contrived to place in the machine’; but, reported Mary, she remained ‘faint and low’.191 Soon she was too weak to walk down the seven steps of the pier to get into a boat. ‘She now finds great comfort in sitting quiet all day and not speaking,’ reported Mary sadly.192

At the end of September, she was worse, ‘thoroughly good for nothing … sickish all day and the pain in my side continues very much the same … For the last three days I have looked very yellow, they tell me. I feel it all swimming about me.’193 A letter from the Prince of Wales cheered her up, and she particularly enjoyed the fun it poked at their mother. ‘Your account of your interview with the queen amused me very much, and did not astonish me, for I see her snuffing and her so-ing you with all her might.’194 Throughout the autumn, the misdeeds of the queen and Amelia’s sister Elizabeth – or Fatima, as she called her, with cruel reference to her weight – occupied her mind. Elizabeth was regarded as the queen’s ally, and, as such, became the object of much of Amelia’s frustration and anger. ‘I shan’t mind the queen’s ill and cross looks now, or Fatima’s; her letters are such that they surpass one another in hypocrisy.’ It was impossible, she told her brother, ‘for me to say what I wish or what I ought; silence sometimes says most, and does so in this case’. She was convinced her mother had no appreciation of the true state of her health. ‘I must tell you that in one of her last letters to Miny, she don’t name me, but in a post script says “I am glad Amelia is better, and hope very soon to hear she is perfectly well.” This has provoked Miny … though she has always tried to make me think the queen’s letters are not unkind.’195

Amelia’s belief that her mother lacked ‘feeling or pity’ and was indifferent to her suffering was painful, as she knew her health was failing fast. ‘I can’t boast much of myself,’ she told her brother. Mary heard her moaning in her sleep and noted that ‘she complains of constantly dreaming that she is in pain’.196 The seatons, which were badly inflamed, had to be treated with caustic, which was ‘a sad trial’, wrote Mary. ‘I never remember her in all this long illness suffering more pain.’197 By the beginning of November, it was clear that the stay in Weymouth had done nothing to improve her health and that she would have to go home to Windsor for the winter.

Amelia was prepared to return, but only if she was not required to spend time in close company with her mother. Mary agreed that it would be disastrous for her sister to live with the queen again. Charlotte had objected strongly to Mary’s accompanying her sister on the extended stay in Weymouth. She had disliked her prolonged absence from home, ‘which is not thought right, and is considered selfish of Amelia’. Mary dreaded any of this being said to Amelia; as she told her father, ‘you must understand, it will half kill her, who really, poor soul, never thinks of herself, and only wishes to give as little trouble as possible’.198 The king was touched by his daughter’s plight and agreed that a place must be found for Amelia where she could enjoy some respite from her mother’s bad temper, and avoid ‘unpleasant situations’. Now that he was ‘aware of the real object in view, nothing shall be wanting on my part to facilitate it’. An old house belonging to one of the king’s physicians, Dr Heberden, which was comfortable and at a safe distance from the castle, was fitted up for her. Amelia and Mary began the slow, painful journey home.

The cause of the queen’s lack of sympathy for her suffering daughter is not easy to understand, but it may have been an aspect of her descent into an increasingly depressed state of mind which was remarked upon by everyone around her. The pressures of her position had often driven Charlotte into melancholy sadness, as her letters to her brother during the early years of her marriage attested; but since the king’s first illness, her low spirits were often accompanied by anger and frustration, usually directed at those closest to her. After George’s 1804 bout of sickness, her moods grew even worse. ‘The queen’s temper is become intolerable,’ Glenbervie observed, ‘and the princesses are rendered miserable by it.’199 It is also possible that Charlotte considered her youngest daughter had brought some of her miseries upon herself.Amelia had refused to give up a relationship which had no future and could only end in pain for all concerned. She had paid no attention to her mother’s warnings, nor had she obeyed her direct instruction to ‘subdue every passion’, as Charlotte herself had sought to do throughout her life. Instead, she had abandoned herself to irrational emotions which could never be gratified in the way she sought. It was hardly surprising that her health had suffered as a result. If these were her thoughts, Charlotte would not have been alone in holding them. Mary, who was closer to Amelia than anyone, and ministered to her with a truly selfless devotion, was equally convinced that her sister’s misplaced love for Fitzroy was the cause of her illness. She talked of it later as ‘that most unfortunate attachment, which destroyed her health by degrees … As far as I am concerned upon the subject that I look upon as having killed her, I have nothing to reproach myself with, as I never encouraged what could not be for her happiness.’200

Once she was back at Windsor, Amelia’s attitude to her father grew warmer, as she saw for herself how worried he was about her; but for her mother, she continued to feel nothing but cold fury. ‘As for the queen,’ she wrote to the Prince of Wales in December 1809, ‘to describe her feelings, her manner and her visit to me yesterday, all I can say till we meet is that it was the STRONGEST CONTRAST to the dear king POSSIBLE, but I am too used to it to feel hurt, but I pity her.’201 Her mother visited her every day, but ‘never names my health’.202

Amelia had not seen Fitzroy since she had been sent to Weymouth some four months earlier. She was now too weak to venture out alone, and their secret meetings, so avidly awaited and planned for, had come to an end. Her illness had achieved what nothing else in over a decade had done, and made the secret prosecution of their affair impossible. Amelia no longer had the strength to enjoy anyone’s company beyond the narrow circle of her sister Mary, her maid Mary Anne Gaskoin and her doctors. By May 1810, she could no longer hold a pen and the tirelessly loyal Mary Anne was obliged to act as secretary for her. Sir Henry Halford, a new doctor brought in to consult on her case, was pessimistic about her prospects: ‘I cannot persuade myself that HRH is better,’ he informed the king. ‘I think her weaker, and I do not find that any one of the symptoms … has disappeared. They are all to be found distressing in their turn, and HRH has less power to bear up against them.’203 A spasm in her bowels added ‘a violent sickness’ to her long litany of medical problems; by June she could keep down only beef tea, hock and laudanum. But in all her pain, she had not lost sight of the aim that had been her most cherished ambition for so long: in the last months of her life, when she could hardly move or eat solid food, she made a final effort to bring about her much-desired marriage to Charles Fitzroy.

In July, she wrote to the Prince of Wales, appointing him her executor and sending him a copy of her will. In the same letter, she urged him to speak to Halford, who ‘is now become so good a courtier that he does not venture to oppose anything the king and queen like, though it may be very contrary to my wishes’. She begged her brother to ‘impress upon him how greatly you know the unhappiness of my mind increases my bodily sufferings’.204 The prince was, in effect, to prepare the ground for an approach Amelia intended to make herself upon Halford, whom she believed was uniquely positioned to persuade the king to change his mind on the subject of her marriage. Through him, she would exert the same emotional blackmail on her father that had been used on her all her adult life, and planned a last-ditch attempt to convince the king that by removing the principal cause of her unhappiness, he could improve her chances of recovery. The king had assured her that ‘there is no object dearer to my heart, no blessing for which I pray more fervently than that you may be restored to me’.205 Amelia wanted to test the truth of those assurances.

She wrote to Halford, asking him to explain to her father that her condition was greatly impaired by her reduced emotional state, and that marriage was the only solution to her misery. Halford – whose slippery disingenuousness later earned him the nickname of ‘the eel-backed baronet’ – refused point-blank to entertain the idea. He did not believe her father would agree to her request, and it was his opinion that merely raising the subject might fatally endanger the king’s fragile state of health. His message to Amelia was both uncompromising and sadly familiar: in the scale of both public and private importance, her wellbeing would always be secondary to that of her father.

Matthew Baillie, a colleague to whom Halford had shown the letter he wrote to Amelia, commented that it would be ‘perhaps not much to her taste’. Amelia was appalled by it and drew on all her feeble resources of energy to deliver the response she thought it deserved. Mary watched her working on it, spending ‘all day writing and erasing’. The result was a chilly dismissal of Halford’s egregiousness, coupled with an unsparingly accurate depiction of the reasoning that lay behind it. Although Halford had himself told her that he was ‘thoroughly convinced that my disease is more of the mind than the body and that affliction is shortening my days, you have nothing to offer but an exhortation to filial duty and respect to my parents’.206 She was sorry that he should ‘think so meanly of me as to believe me deficient in either, or that my conduct is likely to be such as to become the object of impertinent remark at every street in every town in this island’. Amelia was convinced she knew where to place the blame for his refusal to help: ‘I cannot but apprehend that the sentiments contained in your letter are the suggestion of some part of my family.’207 Baillie doubted that would be end of it: ‘Probably in the course of two or three months, she will make an application through some other channel.’208 But that was not to happen.

Everyone, including Amelia herself, knew there was little hope now. A skin infection that ‘erupted in her face and is now nearly all over her body’ caused her pain ‘far beyond anything I can describe’, wrote the devoted Mary in September. Knowing that her sister had not long to live, Princess Augusta broke through the cordon of propriety that surrounded Amelia and arranged a final secret meeting between her and Fitzroy. After he had gone, Mary Anne Gaskoin wrote on Amelia’s behalf her last letter to the man she had loved with passionate intensity since she was seventeen years old. ‘The princess had desired me to tell General Fitzroy how very happy his visit of this evening has made her, so much that all words must fail in description. HRH wished me to say how much she had to say, but that it was impossible for her, being so short a time with you.’209 As a leave-taking, it was as poignant in its simplicity as anything else she wrote to her lover, a sparely forceful comment on the ‘cruel situation’ which had blighted her youth and ruined her chances of happiness.

On 25 October, the Prince of Wales wrote to the Duke of York, asking him ‘to come directly here, as well as William and Edward, as Amelia is anxious to see all you three … Pray bring them (if you can find them) with you as quick as possible.’210 Certain that she was dying, Amelia prepared to say goodbye to her family. When she saw the king, beside himself with grief and ‘weeping … all day long’, she gave him a ring which contained a small lock of her hair set under a crystal tablet, engraved ‘Remember me’. She asked him to ‘wear this for my sake and I hope you will not forget me’. The king replied, ‘that I can never do, you are engraven on my heart’, and then burst into tears.211 He was said to be ‘much distressed that she gave nothing to the queen’. Finally, in extremis, Amelia relented and, putting aside the bitterness that had dominated her relations with her mother in her last years, ‘she did at last give the queen a locket’.212

Princess Mary, Amelia’s companion and support during all her suffering, was with her when she died on 2 November. Sir Henry Halford felt her pulse, held a candle to her mouth and told her sister it was all over. Mary kissed her and then went upstairs to tell her parents.213 The king, already in the grip of the relapse of madness that was shortly to overwhelm him, refused to believe she was dead, declaring: ‘I know very well she can be brought to life again.’ Lady Cranley, a courtier, noticed the queen standing, alone and unregarded, in the passage outside Amelia’s room, ‘looking half distracted’. She took her hand and led her away.214 Mary had already gone to write a note to Fitzroy. ‘Our beloved Amelia is no more, but her last words to me were, “Tell Charles I die blessing him.” Before I leave the house, I obey her last wishes.’215 Fitzroy acknowledged her death with grave dignity. ‘To the memory and transcendent purity of the adored and departed angel, I owe every self-value I possess.’216 A few months later, Mary Anne Gaskoin, Amelia’s companion through so many years of sickness and adversity, died herself, probably of the same tuberculosis that had killed her mistress. The king, who was moved by her death, had her buried ‘as near as might be’ to ‘his beloved daughter’.217 In her own way, Mary Anne was the final victim of a complex web of unhappiness that had tainted the lives of everyone caught up in it – and which, as the queen had predicted, had in the end produced nothing but misery for all concerned.

*

In the last months of her life, Amelia had occupied herself reading Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, which she had not altogether enjoyed. It is not surprising that the novel, with its unforgiving moral message, did not entirely please her, for Amelia was at heart a romantic. The intensity of her emotional life was far closer to the dramas later to be imagined by the Brontës, in which passions too profound and powerful to be contained by the ordered world of everyday life end up consuming the lovers themselves. It was her sister, Sophia, whose experience was far closer to the tragic heroines of Richardson’s severe mould, in which a single departure from moral rectitude, whether willed or not, results in a lifetime of bitter atonement. Elizabeth’s thwarted attempts to find happiness might be seen as a dark inversion of the plots of Jane Austen – presented with two men who offered different visions of rational happiness, she would have been content to accept either, but was denied both. It had been powerfully demonstrated to the sisters that each of them had, in their different ways, chosen very much the wrong lovers; but there was no suggestion at all as to what might constitute a more acceptable solution, and they prepared to enter the next decade no more advanced in the pursuit of happiness than they had been ten years before.