Towards the end of September 1766 the Prince of Wales, who was only four, told a lady at Court that ‘about next week’ he reckoned they should have ‘a little princess.’ George Augustus Frederick, the eldest son of King George III and Queen Charlotte, was known to be precocious. His mother’s Mistress of the Robes called him ‘the forwardest child in understanding’ that she ever saw. And so, far from doubting the child’s prediction, his confidante, Lady Mary Coke, added in her journal, ‘I find the King and Queen are very desirous it should be one [a girl] and hope they shall have no more sons.’
The additional information probably issued from Lady Mary’s friend Lady Charlotte Finch, who had been appointed royal governess the day after the Prince of Wales’s birth on 12 August 1762. Lady Charlotte and her deputy, or sub-governess, Mrs Cotesworth had since received into the nursery establishment two further princes, Frederick and William, in 1763 and 1765. To these ladies, who looked after their boisterous charges in the summer at Richmond and Kew, and in the winter at the Queen’s House in London, as much as to the royal parents, a baby girl represented a hope of dulcet peace and feminine charms.
In the event, George, Prince of Wales was confirmed as a prophet in the land when his mother Queen Charlotte, at the age of twenty-two, gave birth in London to a baby princess the following Monday – Michaelmas Day, 29 September. The celebrated anatomist and royal obstetrician Dr William Hunter hovered with the King and the King’s mother, the Dowager Princess of Wales, in an adjoining room at the Queen’s House, the royal family’s private residence overlooking the Mall and St James’s Park.1 But nothing untoward took place in the crimson damask bedchamber next door to require their presence. Lady Charlotte Finch, who had moved up to nearby apartments at St James’s Palace the evening before to oversee the practical arrangements for the new baby, wrote in her journal that night: ‘At a quarter past eight this morning the Queen was safely delivered of a Princess Royal. Passed all morning at the Queen’s House …’ That date, 29 September – the quarter-day when, in the greater world, rents became due and, in the royal household, salaries were paid – was to be long dear to the Queen, who was not sentimental by nature, as the day she gave birth to her ‘Michaelmas goose.’
Names were awaiting the baby Princess: Charlotte, for her mother; Augusta, for her father’s mother; and Matilda, for the King’s sister Caroline Matilda, who, aged fifteen, was leaving England within a few days to marry the King of Denmark. (The English Houses of Parliament gave economical thanks on the same occasion for the birth of the Princess and the marriage of her aunt.) But, as her new governess’s journal entry indicates, by none of her Christian names was King George Ill’s and Queen Charlotte’s eldest daughter to be known. At birth, her proud father and sovereign of England had bestowed on her for life the style of Princess Royal, and this (shortened to Royal by her family) is how she was always known in England – although, curiously, the style was only officially granted her years later on 22 June 1789.
The Stuart King Charles I’s eldest daughter Mary had been, in 1642, the first English princess to have been styled Princess Royal. She was eleven and leaving England to be the bride of William of Orange, the future Stadholder in Holland. No other princess was so honoured until 1727, when the Hanoverian King George II of England styled his daughter Anne – who also became a princess of Orange and lived until 1759 – Princess Royal, when she was nineteen years old. King George Ill’s decision in 1766 to make his daughter while still a baby a princess royal in part reflected England’s recent surge in prestige since his accession in 1760, notably with the successful outcome of the Seven Years War in 1763. But it also reflected the unreserved and almost awestruck delight that he exhibited as a young father – some felt, to the detriment of royal dignity – in his infant daughter.
The day after the Princess Royal’s birth, her three brothers, George, Prince of Wales, Prince Frederick and thirteen-month-old William, came up to London to inspect their new sister. Prince William, till now the baby of the family, was a general favourite at Richmond Lodge, the King’s house in woods adjacent to Kew Gardens, where the royal children generally lived during the summer months. As it was not a large house, the children’s attendants – their governess Lady Charlotte Finch among them – were mostly lodged in houses grouped around the King’s mother’s house, the White House in Kew Gardens, and the children spent much of their time there.
A few weeks before the Princess Royal was born in September 1766, Miss Henrietta Finch, one of Lady Charlotte’s daughters, wrote to an absent sister:
We saw the King and Queen last night, they was in Mama’s parlour. We stayed in the room the whole time, they was vastly good humoured and enquired vastly after you. Little Prince William was undressed quite naked and laid upon a cushion, the King made him stand up upon it. I thought I should have died with laughing at his little ridiculous white figure.
The King adored Prince William’s sturdy elder brother Prince Frederick, who was aged three when his sister was born. A year earlier Lady Charlotte Finch recorded the royal father’s close involvement in all his second son’s doings in the autumn of 1765:
Mr Glenton the tailor is the happiest man in the kingdom. He has been sent for to make a coat for Prince Frederick, and when he came, was ordered to go and take measure of him in the room where the King was. At which he was so astonished and so terrified that his knees knocked together so, they could hardly persuade him to go in. And when he was there, he did not know what he did. And when he came upstairs, he begged he might stay till the prince came up, for he owned he did not know anything of his measures. However, he has made the clothes so excessively neat and fit, that when he brought them home, the King spoke to him himself and commended them. And he is now so happy you cannot conceive anything like his spirits. He is now making another suit for Prince Frederick. However, it is only by way of dressing him in them sometimes, as the King is fond of seeing him in breeches … The Queen likes to keep him a little longer in petticoats.
It was evident that the King did not dote on his heir, a less manly child than Frederick. In this sultry summer of 1766, Miss Henrietta Finch noted encouragingly, ‘I think the King grows very fond of the Prince of Wales, though he does certainly snap [at] him sometimes.’ The King’s coolness towards his heir was not lamented as it might have been. It was understood by all that, in the Hanoverian succession, there was an unfortunate tendency for the monarch and his heir to have differences. And the Prince of Wales’s sophistication and insouciant charm continued to attract many admirers, not least his mother and governess. Queen Charlotte was always to love her firstborn best of all her children, and Lady Charlotte recounted her eldest royal charge’s bons mots with pride.
Asked earlier that year if he found tedious the hours spent in a darkened room that custom prescribed following inoculation against smallpox, the Prince replied, ‘Not at all, I lie awake and make reflections.’ Lady Mary Coke, visiting Lady Charlotte Finch and her charges at Kew shortly before the Princess Royal’s birth, found the Prince, as she graciously put it, ‘comical.’ When she left off playing with him, explaining that she was expected at his great-aunt Princess Amelia’s, the Prince looked her up and down before asking, ‘Pray, are you well enough dressed to visit her?’
The princes were among the few privileged visitors to view the Princess Royal at the Queen’s House at this point. From the fashionable sandy Mall, and indeed from Green Park and from St James’s Park north and south of it, the courtyard and modest redbrick façade of this royal residence were open to view. But while all Society made formal enquiries after the health of mother and child, they made them at St James’s Palace, that warren of great antiquity with suites of apartments for royal servants jostling state rooms and throne rooms which sprawled north of the Mall. At this palace, as well, officials of the Court of St James’s received royal and imperial felicitations from other Courts of Europe on the Princess’s birth – and took in coachloads of mayoral addresses on the subject besides.
Here at St James’s, in the dilapidated state apartments, the King held his levees and gave audience to ministers. Here ambassadors presented their credentials. Here the Queen received Society twice a week at formal drawing rooms. And here, on the King’s and Queen’s birthdays, Court balls followed the drawing rooms. Other high days and holidays of the reign – Accession Day, Coronation Day and the King and Queen’s wedding day – were all marked too. Here, in due course, the Princess Royal would make her debut, signalling that she was of an age to take a husband. But for the moment the only ceremony beckoning her there was her baptism, which would take place in October in the Chapel Royal, St James’s.
At the Queen’s House – which the King had bought two years after he ascended the throne as a London home to which he and the Queen could retreat from the fatigue of public life at St James’s Palace – mother and daughter recovered. The Queen rested in rooms decorated in a style reflecting her Continental upbringing and showing a great deal of taste, as a visitor to the Queen’s House recorded the following spring when the royal mistress was not in residence: ‘The Queen’s apartments are ornamented, as one expects a Queen’s should be, with curiosities from every nation that can deserve her notice. The most capital pictures, the finest Dresden and other china, cabinets of more minute curiosities … On her toilet, besides the gilt plate, innumerable knick-knacks… By the Queen’s bed … an elegant case with twenty-five watches, all highly adorned with jewels.’
Evidence of children on that occasion was lacking, and now too, in September 1766, the focus of celebration, the Princess Royal, was nowhere in sight downstairs at the Queen’s House. Queen Charlotte, observing the prevalent custom among Royalty and society at this time, did not breastfeed her children. Shortly after birth the Princess Royal had been whisked upstairs to somewhat different surroundings – the attic storey, far from frescoed staircases and damask chambers – to forge an intimate relationship with a mother of two named Mrs Muttlebury, who had been selected as her wet-nurse.
Mrs Muttlebury had been carefully vetted as a milk-cow in August 1766 – not only by Lady Charlotte Finch, a mother of four herself, but also by Dr Hunter and even by Mr Caesar Hawkins, the King’s Serjeant-Surgeon, and by his brother Mr Pennell Hawkins, Surgeon to the Queen – in preparation for her important task. First she had had to bring for her critics’ inspection the child she was then suckling, then she was asked to show her elder child too, to see if it thrived. Only then, in return for a formidable salary of 200 pounds, and a hundred, after her employment ceased, for life – with the interest of the royal family permanently engaged for her own children – was Mrs Muttlebury retained to devote herself for six months unconditionally to breastfeeding the royal baby. (A limner’s or painter’s wife was put on warning as a substitute wet-nurse should Mrs Muttlebury’s milk fail before the royal infant appeared.)
But Mrs Muttlebury remained somewhat bewildered by the honour done her. ‘She told Mama she had not the least notion of anything she was to do,’ recorded Lady Charlotte’s daughter Sophia, ‘and begged her to tell her…’ She was surprised to hear she must provide a maid – ‘I suppose from a notion of having people to do everything for her,’ commented Miss Sophia. ‘Mama told her of several other expenses, viz providing her own washing, always wearing silk gowns morning and evening …’ The royal baby should come into contact only with superior materials – tussore and brocade and Mechlin lace for ruffles, as supplied by Lady Charlotte.
It was a world unto itself, that of the Princess Royal and Mrs Muttlebury. The wet-nurse was allowed no visitors, not even her own children, to divert her from her duty. Up on the attic floor of the Queen’s House, among plain mahogany furniture and striped ticking mattresses, and at Richmond Lodge, the country retreat which the King and Queen inhabited from May to November, the Princess Royal grew. Lady Charlotte Finch, the royal governess, supervised the arrangements for this new addition to the royal nursery. But, mostly, she was engaged with the three princes, who spent their days with her at her house in adjoining Kew Gardens.
The attention of the Princess Royal’s parents downstairs was meanwhile diverted elsewhere. Two days after her birth, as we have seen, on 1 October 1766, her aunt Princess Caroline Matilda married King Christian VII of Denmark by proxy in London in the Great Drawing Room at St James’s. For want of a husband her brother Edward, Duke of York stood groom. And for want of a father – the fifteen-year-old Princess had been born posthumously, months after a cricket ball fatally injured her father, Frederick, Prince of Wales in 1751 – her brother William Henry, Duke of Gloucester gave her away. ‘Before she set out in the procession,’ a wedding guest noted, ‘she cried so much that she was near falling into fits. Her brother the Duke of Gloucester who led her was so shocked at seeing her in such a situation that he looked as pale as death and as if he was ready to faint away.’
When the Archbishop of Canterbury christened the Princess Royal on 27 October 1766, the new Queen of Denmark was among her godparents, but that in its turn was a proxy appearance. Caroline Matilda had embarked for Copenhagen and for a fateful dynastic marriage overseas that her brother, King George III, was bitterly to regret having arranged.
Another of the Princess Royal’s aunts, Princess Augusta, had not fared well in a foreign land either. Her sophisticated soldier husband, the Hereditary Prince of Brunswick, taunted her with a succession of mistresses, and she took disconsolately to religion, and to trumpeting the superiority of her native land. In England two years after her 1764 marriage, and with an infant son, Prince Charles of Brunswick, in tow, she told anyone who would listen that she hoped he would in due course marry his new cousin, the Princess Royal.
There was another royal marriage in the air at the time of the Princess Royal’s birth. Her fainthearted uncle William, Duke of Gloucester married beautiful Maria, Dowager Countess of Waldegrave on 6 September – but was too afraid to admit the fact to his mother or brother. For Maria, although the widow of the King’s former governor and the mother of three beauties, all of whom were to marry well, was herself illegitimate. She was the daughter of Sir Edward Walpole, Horace’s brother, and of a Miss Dorothy Clements who some said had been a washerwoman and, others, worse.
The Duke of Gloucester and the Dowager Countess of Waldegrave prosecuted their romance at Windsor, a castle conveniently neglected by the Court since the days of Queen Anne. Maria and her daughters had apartments in the deserted royal stronghold, and her father, Sir Edward, inhabited a country house at Frogmore, close by. When the Duke took a house at St Leonard’s Hill in the Great Park, the town gossip became unstoppable. ‘As soon as the castle clock at Windsor had struck twelve’, ran one account, ‘and of consequence all was quiet’, Lady Waldegrave ‘ordered a rocket to be let off in the great walk in Windsor Park, which it seems was the signal, for soon after it a Royal chaise came down, and out of it a certain Duke, who usually passed the remaining part of the night in her lodgings.’ The irregular arrangement, the truth of which neither party owned to anyone, became a talking point – had they or had they not married? And if they had, when would they own it?
The baby Princess Royal knew nothing of her aunt Caroline’s and uncle Gloucester’s marriages in the year of her birth. But the time was not far off when, while she was still an infant, her future as well as that of her siblings would be dramatically determined by the King’s unmeasured response to the consequences of these and other marriages of his own siblings.
Towards the end of November Lady Charlotte Finch wrote in her diary, ‘To the Queen’s House at eleven o’clock, the hour I have fixed every day for giving the Princes their lesson.’ At this time of year the royal family and attendants settled in town for the winter – Lady Charlotte and others in apartments at St James’s Palace – and the damp Kew and Richmond houses were abandoned until summer weather the following May made them habitable again.
In Mrs Muttlebury’s quarters, women known as ‘rockers’ soothed the Princess Royal when she cried by pulling her cradle, a thing of gleaming wood, soft mattresses and silk coverlets, to and fro on strings. Household accounts show that Mrs Muttlebury had the use of a nursing chair in her bedroom, while Mrs Chapman, the ‘dry-nurse’ who looked after the baby’s other needs, was in a more modest room with harateen or coarse linen covers. Lady Charlotte, however, had superior red and white check covers to her chairs, and the Princess Royal, gifted with a good memory, recalled the colour and check of these chairs years later when recounting how, as a child, she jumped off one of them, pretending to descend from a bathing machine into the sea.
The Queen’s German dressers, the formidable Mme Schwellenberg and her deputy, Mrs Hagedorn, shared the attic quarters with the royal children and their attendants. Mme Juliana Schwellenberg, who had come with the Queen from Germany, was of immense value to her mistress. In guttural English she kept all comers away from her beloved Queen with an unholy enthusiasm for her task which irked others. Swollen with self-importance, she was heard to say that what was good enough for the Queen was not good enough for her, and a page, Robère, would always crouch outside her door, ready to speed to her assistance at the peal of a silver bell. Fortunately for the King and Queen below – in view of the racket that all these various inhabitants could make – the original owner of the house, the Duke of Buckingham, had soundproofed the upper storey, with ‘floors so contrived as to prevent all noise’ over his wife’s head.
The week after the princes joined their sister in town, they ‘as usual’ visited their grandmother Augusta, Dowager Princess of Wales, on her birthday at her home, Carlton House, a short distance down Pall Mall from St James’s Palace. This year they were joined by their two-month-old sister on one of the first airings she took outside the walled brick garden behind the Queen’s House. Their grandmother was widely reviled in England – partly for the simple fact of being German, partly for the influence, following the early death of her husband Frederick, Prince of Wales, that the politician Lord Bute had exerted on her. Some accused the Princess of having taken the Scots peer as her lover. Other xenophobes held – more accurately and with more import for the lives of the grandchildren who visited her on 1 December 1766 – that she had brought scrofula with her into the Hanoverian royal family of England from the Saxe-Gotha line.
Scrofula, a horrifying disease giving rise to scars and chronic swelling of the lymphatic glands – in the neck especially – led at best to intractable inflammation of skin, bones, joints and other parts and to a weakened resistance to other disease. At worst the tubercular disease spread to the lungs and proved fatal. Scrofula – also known as the king’s evil – was already believed to have been responsible for the death of one of Augusta’s children, would be adduced as the cause of the death of another within a year, and those with imagination believed it would weaken the succession. With some satisfaction every ailment and death in the royal family over the next century would be claimed when possible for what became known as the ‘family disease’. But, ignoring the fatal inheritance she supposedly brought him, the Dowager Princess’s son the King paid his mother every respect and made sure his children did too.
On 18 January 1767 the Princess Royal was on display with her brothers at a drawing room at St James’s marking her mother’s official birthday – she had now graduated to wearing a ‘pink and silver watered tabby [or taffeta] coat’. But Lady Charlotte Finch, who had ordered the outfit, could not be present. Having suffered the death of one daughter in the year Prince William was born, she was now in mourning for her estranged husband, the Hon. William Finch.
Finch had died on Christmas Day 1766 after a period of hideous mental instability which had begun after his wife’s appointment as royal governess, and which had led her to take her children and leave the marital home in London for apartments in St James’s and for a house in Kew. The wonder is that Lady Charlotte, who presided over all nursery matters with competence and grace, was not undone by her double duty – to her royal charges and to her own three teenage daughters and her son at Eton. She continued to rule the royal roost and to order her children’s lives with a zest stoked by reference to devotional works, her energy flagging only when her royal employers insisted on keeping her with them in the evenings after the children were in bed. For not only were their young children a central focus of the King and Queen’s day, between public business, but, eschewing the formal dining that had been the rule at Hampton Court and St James’s Palace during the reign of the King’s grandfather George II, this royal couple liked to dine every day at home with the same small selection of their household in attendance.
Horace Walpole was apoplectic about the King and Queen’s decision to live a retired life. He wrote in the summer of 1764 from Strawberry Hill, his spectacular Gothic villa near Twickenham, ‘The Court, independent of politics, makes a strange figure. The recluse life led here at Richmond, which is carried to such an excess of privacy and economy, that the Queen’s friseur waits on them at dinner, and that four pounds only of beef are allowed for their soup, disgusts all sorts of people. The drawing rooms are abandoned …’ Walpole had earlier praised the new Queen’s unshowy appearance and behaviour on her arrival from Mecklenburg-Strelitz in London in 1761, which had disappointed some hoping for great beauty and hauteur. ‘She looks very sensible, cheerful, and is remarkably genteel …’ he wrote. ‘She talks a great deal – is easy, civil, and not disconcerted.’ And he had perspicaciously noticed the taste she showed for the decorative arts, and her enthusiasm for the burletta – comic opera – and for the theatre.
‘The Queen is so gay,’ Walpole added, shortly after her arrival, ‘we shall not want sights; she has been at the opera, The Beggar’s Opera and The Rehearsal, and two nights ago carried the King to Ranelagh …’ Fortunately he was not privy to the opinion of English opera that Queen Charlotte later shared with her brother Charles in Germany. ‘They sing but like parrots.’ He, and others, praised the Queen’s passion for music, as well as her playing on the harpsichord and singing at weekly concerts with her brothers- and sisters-in-law. (The King, a less sure performer, sometimes in private accompanied her on the German flute.) Walpole’s disappointment when the couple lost that initial enthusiasm for gaiety was all the greater.
The King and Queen did not buckle. Complaints on every side – not least from the select few who were chosen to be their intimates every evening at cards and to have as entertainment the company of the royal children – continued to dog their life of retirement. But the King was well satisfied, and the Queen was determined to love and obey her husband, and to defer to his wishes – in particular, the lust for a plain life which he visited on her and their children. ‘If there is a shade in her character,’ one of her intimates was to aver, ‘it was due to a natural timidity.’ This timidity, to which her children later testified, was later in many instances to test the whole family, when the Queen insisted on bowing to the King’s desires in matters where she felt very differently from him.
It was hardly surprising that the King wanted some kind of domestic respite. Much had occurred in the course of the six years since Prince George was told, while riding across Kew Green with his mother’s mentor, Lord Bute, that his grandfather King George II – a man he hardly knew and whose closest companions at Richmond were his spinster daughters Caroline and Amelia – had died, and that he had become, at the age of twenty-two, King George III. Lady Charlotte Finch’s then loving and sane husband William had been present at the palace on 25 October 1760, and wrote to his wife, ‘My dearest dear’, that the King had died of an apoplexy at seven or eight in the morning. He had been particularly cheerful, ‘dressed, drunk his chocolate, and then retired as usual [to the water closet]; soon after a noise was heard of something having fallen, upon which one of the pages opened the door and found him upon the floor stone dead.’
The following year, the new King, anxious to secure both a companionable consort and the succession – of his four brothers and two sisters then living, none as yet was married – seized on Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz to be his queen. She was a seventeen-year-old princess of’very mediocre education’, according to the reports, from an unimportant north German Duchy, and spoke no English. Hence, ran his thinking, unlike grander brides, ‘being isolated, she could never involve England in affairs of the Continent’. The Queen was only too happy to adhere strictly to the line that the King had instructed her to follow in politics on her arrival in London – not to meddle. ‘Having been brought up without pomp and in the simplicity of a small court,’ as a diplomat informed the French Foreign Minister, Choiseul, ‘she has no knowledge of politics, and no idea of intrigues, or of the interests of Princes.’
The English found her ‘plain’, criticized her complexion as sallow, and noticed her spreading nostrils and mouth, but the marriage was an immediate success; an astute courtier observed that they had an immediate air of pleasure in each other. To his delight the King and his new, submissive Queen appeared to agree on all things, especially the need to live a good Christian life.
Within a year of his marriage, in 1761, the King had an heir, George, Prince of Wales. Within two years he had shown himself a patron of the arts, embellishing the new Queen’s House with libraries and with collections of paintings from Italy. And when, by September 1766, Queen Charlotte, speaking accented but fluent English, was a mother of three sons at the age of twenty-one and heavily pregnant with her next child, they could not fault her fecundity.
But the weekly drawing rooms and levees over which the King and Queen presided at the ancient palace of St James’s, emphasizing England’s power, where all was splendour and formality, were exhausting. And party politics were a further minefield for the inexperienced new sovereign and his consort to circumnavigate while they built their marriage – of vested landed interests and patronage centring around the powerful Whig and Tory families. In the six years since his accession, the King had had five different administrations – led, in turn, by the Duke of Newcastle, the Earl of Bute, George Grenville, the Marquess of Rockingham and, since July, William Pitt, newly Earl of Chatham. These changes brought, in turn, five Oppositions to contend with. And the King could hardly be blamed for wishing for a little domestic comfort in such trying circumstances.
The Queen was a great favourite with her ladies, and, even if she might have wished for more gaiety, she still sparkled in the small domestic setting her husband imposed on her. ‘She is timid at first,’ according to a report on her character, ‘but she talks a lot, when she is among people she knows … She is capable of friendship and attachment to those who attach themselves to her.’ The beneficiaries of the Queen’s entertaining commentary on Court life or of her remarks on the books she consumed were her ladies at Court who had travelled abroad and imbibed Enlightenment ideas, like Lady Charlotte Finch, or who were foreign themselves, like Lady Holderness, the Dutch wife of the eldest princes’ new governor. With these intimates the Queen carried on a rattling, vivacious correspondence which might well have surprised her husband or even her children accustomed to their dependable but somewhat austere mother. ‘The Queen did not see this,’ she wrote in a postscript to a particularly lively letter to one of her ladies in which she had commented on some absurdity of Court life.
In the year 1767, the Duchess of Northumberland wrote with admiration of the royal nursery arrangements: ‘The Queen sees everything, but says nothing.’ This was by marked contrast with the King, who was prone to go up and check on his sleeping children at six in the morning, to the discomfiture of their half-dressed attendants. No detail of their life was too small to interest him. But just as he knew every facing of every military uniform and did not know why the American colonies were rumbling with dissatisfaction, so he had no particularly good grasp of his children’s different personalities.
A remarkable portrait that the artist Francis Cotes created in early 1767 of the Princess Royal asleep in her mother’s lap shows how the child must have appeared in her first year of life. ‘The Queen, fine,’ wrote Horace Walpole in the margin of his catalogue on viewing the painting exhibited at the Society of Artists show later that year, ‘the child, incomparable … The sleeping child is equal to Guido.’ In November 1767 a new son, Prince Edward, displaced Royal as the baby of the family when she was just thirteen months old.
Unfortunately for the Princess Royal, even before Prince Edward’s arrival the Queen’s careful childcare arrangements were a distinct failure in the first year of her eldest daughter’s life. For Lady Charlotte, that incomparable governess who apart from anything else spoke ‘the purest Tuscan’ following youthful years in Florence, was suddenly consumed by her own concerns and those of her children. Not only was she dealing in her few hours of private life with the trauma of her husband’s death, and with the management of her four children, but the health of her beloved eldest daughter Charlotte was failing, and her case increasingly resembled that of Frances, the daughter who had died two years earlier from tuberculosis.
When the Princess Royal was weaned from Mrs Muttlebury’s ample bosom in April 1767 on to a diet of pap, she found no Lady Charlotte Finch in command of a highly organized nursery. The royal governess had embarked on a desperate and ultimately unsuccessful tour of watering holes with her eldest daughter. Mrs Cotesworth, the sub-governess, was left in charge of a bevy of nurses who dealt as well as they could with the demands of the royal children. The Prince of Wales told Lady Mary Coke that the Princess Royal ‘lived at the Lodge [in Richmond] with the Queen and … was extremely pretty.’ But until Lady Charlotte returned in November, having buried Miss Finch, the royal nursery – with three children under three, and the Prince of Wales and Prince Frederick five and four respectively – was in a degree of confusion.
Order, restored with the grieving Lady Charlotte’s return and further improved when a French mademoiselle was taken on to assist with the Princess Royal, came under threat again soon enough. For six days after Prince Edward’s first birthday – he was born on 2 November 1767 and named after his lately deceased paternal uncle Edward, Duke of York – the Queen gave birth to a second daughter. As a sense of injury was to be one of Edward’s most developed characteristics, it is perhaps appropriate that he had an opportunity to experience it so early.
Princess Augusta Sophia, second of the daughters of George III and named after her paternal grandmother and after her mother who was christened Sophie Charlotte, was born on 8 November 1768. Anatomist Dr Hunter again hovered in the adjoining room, while Queen Charlotte went through her travail at the Queen’s House with a female midwife. It was an extremely swift labour, lasting an hour and a half. But then Princess Augusta was the King and Queen’s sixth child – and besides, in a long life, she never gave anyone any trouble if she could help it. The labour was not without another kind of incident. The waiting father was extraordinarily eager that the child about to enter the world should be a girl – so much so that Dr Hunter, anxious that, if it occurred, the repugnant alternative should not be regarded as his fault, protested. ‘I think, sir, whoever sees those lovely Princes above stairs’, the doctor ventured, ‘must be glad to have another.’ ‘Doctor Hunter,’ the King replied, ‘I did not think I could have been angry with you, but I am; and I say, whoever sees that lovely child the Princess Royal above stairs must wish to have the fellow to her.’ The agitated King then interrupted his wife’s labour to repeat the dialogue to her. The Queen was no doubt relieved to give birth to a small and pretty girl, a foil to the Princess Royal, who was destined to be among the most loved and loving of the royal children, and to win the grudging respect of one with no liking for the House of Hanover as ‘certainly the best of the whole family’.
Princess Augusta was in later life to display an eye for the absurd that marked her out. An incident that occurred during a public reception at St James’s Palace shortly after her birth is worth recalling in that context. Traditionally, a few days after members of Society had paid their respects, members of the public came to enquire after the health of the royal mother and child, and were rewarded with ‘cake and caudle’. The latter was a mixture of thin gruel and wine served to women in childbirth and to their visitors. Traditionally also, the throngs – mayors and corporations included – who passed through the chambers of the Palace were ludicrously greedy. At the ‘enquiries’ for Princess Augusta, two young ladies, having drunk deep of the caudle, made a bid to carry off ‘a large quantity of cake, and some of the cups in which the caudle had been served up’. Detected, the inebriated misses were allowed to go free after a severe reprimand, and after begging a pardon on their wavering knees.
Princess Augusta was swiftly absorbed into the ebb and flow of royal family life, and was so accommodating as to spend her first Christmas – with her wet-nurse and brother Edward – at Lady Charlotte Finch’s apartments in St James’s Palace, while the Princess Royal and Prince William were inoculated against smallpox, a disease that was often fatal if caught, at the Queen’s House. Lady Charlotte, never having had smallpox, customarily remained with those royal children who had not yet been inoculated. Lady Mary Coke visited the Queen’s House on Boxing Day 1768 and found Prince William ‘excessively full’ of spots, while the Princess Royal had ‘not twenty all over her’. She told her correspondent that she was surprised to find the Princess Royal a healthy child, ‘for instead of colour in her cheeks there is a yellow mark, which I should never think denoted health.’
In defiance of Lady Mary’s pronouncement, Princess Royal was back at her lessons with her French teacher, Mile Anne Dorothée Krohme, without delay. Her education, destined to be a great source of pleasure and interest to her, had begun when she was a mere eighteen months, in the spring of 1768. The King and Queen, however, had shown a bewildering lack of manners in ‘poaching’ Mile Krohme from their intimate friends the Holdernesses, who lived across the river from Richmond at Sion Hill where she was their daughter Lady Amelia d’Arcy’s beloved governess.
’The whole was transacted’, wrote Lady Mary Coke, ‘before any notice was taken to Lord and Lady Holderness; that is to say, the proposals were first made to Mile Krohme, which seems, I think, a little strange, and does not, I think, please them.’ It was indisputably in the English royal family’s interest that the Princess Royal should speak and write French fluendy. Later she herself was to ask repeatedly of a niece’s governess: ‘Do not you soon intend getting in somebody in playing to accustom her to hear French spoke? If she does not learn early, she will never acquire the accent ...’ For the Princess Royal was destined for marriage on the Continent, and to a great Protestant prince, where French would be the language of the Court, regardless of whether German or another tongue was the language of the country. Presumably anxiety on this point led the royal parents to treat their friends the Holdernesses with such unusual discourtesy.
Within a few months, as it turned out, the hijacked Frenchwoman returned to her own country. ’She says herself for only a short time,’ reported the vigilant Lady Mary Coke, ‘but others think that a melancholy in her temper, which has been observed by their Majesties, made them think her improper to educate the Princess Royal, and that she is not likely to return.’ A substitute was found in the form of Mlle Krohme’s cousin Julie, who proved thoroughly popular, as she acted as the Queen’s unofficial secretary as well as her daughters’ French teacher.
The Princess Royal’s memory – and in due course that of Princess Augusta – was trained before reading and writing were even thought of. Thirty years later she had not forgotten the pleasure she took in her early lessons, and endorsed the method employed with her to a niece’s governess, when that Princess was just two: ‘Pray begin to employ her, as early as possible, with some reasonable little things, for everything in which memory alone is required can be learnt early. Let her have little prints of the history of the Bible – tell her the stories and they will already get in her head and she will never forget them …’ The Princess Royal was an apt pupil. She and her siblings were to have, after this early training, an uncanny recall of names, faces and incidents, even from childhood, as well as a remarkable grasp of historical facts.
Remembering other less pleasant scenes from childhood, Princess Royal spoke of the importance of ‘breaking’ children of any ‘sad passions’ to which they might be subject, although she advocated ‘gentleness’ to subdue ‘temper’. But above all else, and here she followed her mother, she believed, in the education of princesses, that ‘making her a good Christian’ rather than concentrating on making a ‘wonderful’ child full of accomplishments was, with the duty of guarding her from ‘folly’, the chief labour for a princess’s superintendents.
A little folly, however, was sometimes permissible in the royal nursery. In late September 1769 Princess Augusta, at nearly eleven months, and Royal – a couple of days before her third birthday – were dressed up with their brothers for ‘an entertainment given at Kew in the house assigned to the young Princes by Lady Charlotte Finch …’. Princess Royal represented Columbine in a dress of crimson and black, ornamented with gold. (‘Her royal highness appeared rather too plump for the character,’ was one onlooker’s comment.) She and Princess Augusta sat in a shared pavilion in Lady Charlotte’s apartment, ‘a sort of illuminated temple, very picturesque’. Princess Augusta wore a ‘well-fancied dress of silver gauze, with painted gauze wings at her shoulders, and a chaplet of flowers on her head’.
The eldest princes, meanwhile, in Hussar dresses of white satin trimmed with fur, awaited their parents in a military tent. They were joined there by a charity boy, Master Blomberg, whom, on a misguided impulse, the Queen had taken in some years before to be a companion to her eldest sons, and who now wore a ‘Mercury’ dress. The Prince of Wales by no means liked this addition to the nursery, Lady Charlotte Finch’s daughter Henrietta sighed, adding that he took no pleasure in sharing his possessions with Master Blomberg or anyone else. He was happy, nevertheless, to make all around him cry while he took theirs. Later the Princess Royal was to write with feeling that taking a ‘humble companion’ for children in an ‘exalted situation’ was a ‘sad thing’.
When the King and Queen arrived, the two eldest princes emerged from their pavilion to perform a ‘warlike dance, to martial music’. Then Prince William, in harlequin dress, stepped out of another pavilion that he shared with Edward, a Bacchus with trailing ivy leaves, and made two or three trips around the room ‘with the true harlequin step (which he had learned very perfectly)’. And finally Princess Royal, his Columbine, came out and accompanied him in the dance as well as a child of not quite three could, while Princess Augusta was carried round the room ‘fluttering her little silken pinions, like a real sylph.’
The Princess Royal was later implicitly to criticize these tableaux, and declare that she did not like ‘wonderful children’. Displays of their accomplishments stoked vanity, she asserted, perhaps remembering not being a ‘wonderful child’ herself. She found music ‘horrid’ later, while some of her brothers and sisters were both very musical and fairly ‘wonderful’ as children. Moreover, when Princess Augusta was a month old, Lady Mary Coke found her ‘the most beautiful infant I ever saw’. But she was not so kind about the child’s elder sister. ‘I forgot to ask you’, she wrote to a correspondent, ‘if you did not think the Princess Royal very plain.’ Lady Mary’s criticism was to be, if not accurate, prophetic. The Princess, though never ‘very plain’, was never to be beautiful, as her sister Augusta would be, or elegant, as her mother was. And although her figure and height would be in her favour, her reputation was established early.
The royal parents at any rate heartily applauded this exhibition of their children’s prowess, although the atmosphere was tinged with sadness. This performance was a farewell gift from Lady Charlotte, whose Etonian son Lord Winchilsea was now ill. No longer trusting the spas of England after her experiences at Bristol and Scarborough with her poor daughters, she took her son abroad to Nice.
The princesses’ parents continued to cultivate their rural idyll at Richmond and Kew. Prince Frederick had told Lady Mary Coke in the month before Princess Augusta’s birth that the King had been ‘working in the garden, cutting down trees, and that he had carried away the boughs.’ Before she left for Nice, Lady Charlotte Finch told Lady Mary that the Queen at Richmond, not pregnant for once, ‘wears an English nightgown and white apron … ‘tis a dress his Majesty likes; formerly nobody could appear before the Royal family with a white apron …’ And Lady Charlotte added that the King had ordered her to wear this homely dress too. Lady Mary Coke’s outrage knew no bounds when she heard, in July 1769, that the King and Queen with the Queen’s brother Prince Ernest – on a visit from Mecklenburg – and Lady Effingham had walked through the town of Richmond without a single servant. ‘I am not satisfied in my own mind’, she wrote stiffly, ‘about the propriety of a Queen walking in a town unattended.’ There was really no limit to the King’s liking for living ‘in a retired manner, but easy of access’.
But in fact outside the rural bliss constructed at the royal residences on the Thames – at Richmond Lodge with its shabby Indian paper on the walls and its rolled lawns and orange trees outside, and at Kew in Lady Charlotte’s house with views of passing traffic on the Thames – there were strained relations between Crown and country in this year following Princess Augusta’s birth. At home, and to the King’s fury, the radical Mr John Wilkes had been returned as Member of Parliament for Brentford, just across the Thames from Richmond. News from the recalcitrant British colony of Boston in America was hardly more encouraging. Horace Walpole wrote, days before Princess Augusta’s birth, of the new Parliament: ‘A busy session it must be. The turbulent temper of Boston, of which you will see the full accounts in all the papers, is a disagreeable prospect.’
When the silk weavers of Spitalfields in London, who supplied their costly fabric for Court levees and drawing rooms and royal birthdays, protested – and rioted – against foreign imports of silk in 1769, the King and Queen naively attempted to turn public opinion in their favour and seduce the Spitalfields weavers with an additional opportunity for them to display their wares at a ‘junior drawing room’ at St James’s presided over by the seven-year-old Prince of Wales in a crimson silk suit and his three-year-old sister, the Princess Royal, reposing on a sofa in a Roman toga, also of silk.
The Queen was excessively proud of the silken tableau that her children created at St James’s, and declared it fit to be painted. But the vain effort to woo public opinion broke up when the London mob, yelling defiance, drove a hearse into the Palace courtyard. The Prince of Wales said afterwards that he ‘thanked God it was over’, and told Lady Mary Coke two days later, when she hoped it had not fatigued him, ‘Indeed, Madam, but it did, and the Princess Royal was terribly tired.’ There was no attempt to repeat this public display of the royal children.
Tempers could fray in the royal nursery itself, as when, exasperated by Prince William, his nurse Mrs Abbott ‘had not only the presumption to strike him, but knocked his head against the wall’. The affair attracted some publicity – Lady Mary Coke heard of it in Vienna – and Mrs Abbott was dismissed. This was an offence, lèse-majesté, that could not be overlooked by the Queen and Lady Charlotte. The offender’s pension, however, was paid to her for the remainder of her life – an indication, perhaps, that it was felt that she had had much to try her.
Lady Mary Coke recorded on one occasion that the Princess Royal’s ‘temper was a good deal tried by her brothers, who pulled her about most unreasonably.’ She now regarded the Princess as ‘much improved’, and, perhaps necessarily, ‘the best humoured child that ever was’. The Queen was to write to Lady Charlotte in 1771 with some relief after the royal governess returned from a journey, ‘They never can be in better hands than yours.’ Three years later, with her family still growing, she wrote that she was ‘thankful to providence for having worthy people’ about her children.
Inevitably, when Lady Charlotte had returned unexpectedly to London in the spring of 1770, leaving her son in Nice, there was speculation that the Queen was ‘a-breeding’ again. Lady Charlotte could not comment, as there was – despite the frequency of the occurrence – a coyness at Court observed about the Queen’s very visibly increasing person. The tattlers were proved right. A wet-nurse, Mrs Spinluffe, was in place at the Queen’s House by mid-May, and Princess Elizabeth – named after her maternal grandmother, with a nod to the great Tudor Queen – was born there on 22 May 1770.
With the birth of a third daughter and seventh child, Princess Elizabeth, King George III and Queen Charlotte, had they been otherwise, might have seen fit to draw their childbearing to a close. But it would never have entered the King’s head. On hearing that a lady of his acquaintance, already blessed with nineteen children, was lying in with her twentieth, he wished sincerely that she might have twins. And it would not have entered Queen Charlotte’s head at this point to have ideas of her own on the subject.
The elements of a formula for the education and management of princes and princesses continued to evolve. The Princesses Royal and Augusta acquired an attendant they doted on, Miss Mary Dacres, in the year of Princess Elizabeth’s birth. The sister of a rear admiral and a Cumberland connection of an intimate of the Queen’s, Lady Effingham, Miss Dacres appears in the nursery accounts as the princesses’ ‘dresser’. On Miss Dacres the Princess Royal and Princess Augusta showered affection, and while Lady Charlotte and Mrs Cotesworth taught them to read, Miss Dacres managed their ‘passions’ and was patient with Royal’s stammer – ‘hesitation in speech’, that princess later recorded, was ‘unfortunately very common on all sides of the Brunswick family’ – and Princess Augusta’s shyness.
These princesses were unusual and fortunate among European princesses – and, still more so, among girls in England – in having such high-minded and bookish parents who treated their education seriously and took great care over their attendants. They were also unusual and fortunate as young royal children in having parents who preferred their children’s company and that of a small domestic circle to the glamour and turbulence and power-broking that characterized most other great Courts in full flow. But they were to be unfortunate in having parents who could not – given their public duties, given the number of children they continued to produce, and given the domestic and foreign calamities that were soon to strike the royal family – adequately oversee the implementation of the Utopian child-rearing policies they earnestly advocated.