Lady Mary coke went to breakfast with Lady Charlotte Finch at Kew on 19 August 1771, specifically ‘to see the young Princesses, who are with her early in the morning: the Princess Royal I think the most sensible agreeable child I ever saw, but in my opinion far from pretty: the Princess Augusta rather pretty, but not so well as she was last year’. She did not see Princess Elizabeth, now nearly fifteen months, but conceded that Prince Ernest, who had been born ten weeks earlier, on 5 June at the Queen’s House in London, was a ‘pretty infant.’
Lady Charlotte had become director of the princesses’ education, and the princesses had begun their daily drive over to her house at Kew from Richmond Lodge, earlier this year, when the Prince of Wales and Prince Frederick acquired their own establishment at Kew, complete with governor, sub-governor and tutors. A merchant’s house opposite the Dowager Princess of Wales’s residence, Kew House, and known as the Dutch House, with a garden gate on to the riverbank, was duly redecorated for the princes, and became known as the Prince of Wales’s House. The previous August, Queen Charlotte had signalled the coming move in a birthday letter to the Prince of Wales that she requested his governess to read to him: ‘Time draws near when you will be put into the hands of governors, under whose care you will study more manly learning than what you have done hitherto.’ At the age of seven, in England, boys’ education became the province of their fathers and they went ‘into men’s hands’. The Prince of Wales and his brother had remained beyond the usual age in the care of Lady Charlotte. The courses of the tight-knit junior royal family were dividing, and the princesses would now receive most of their education at Lady Charlotte’s own new house on the river at Kew and see little of their elder brothers.
Lady Charlotte in her turn would see little of her former charges. Her son George, who had recently succeeded his uncle as Earl of Winchilsea, wrote from Christ Church, Oxford, where he was now an undergraduate, hoping his mother liked her new abode and its ‘charming situation’. ‘It must be quite new to you to have a garden gate to yourself,’ he added encouragingly. Lady Charlotte’s sister, Lady Juliana Penn, however, was sympathetic about her inevitable demotion, and wrote after seeing the Prince of Wales and Prince Frederick installed as Knights of the Garter this summer of 1771: ‘I felt a great part of the beauty of the sight was your work, and what must give you pleasure, in seeing your two sweet little princes brought up by yourself to be fit for anything that can be expected from them. The world indeed does you justice and they were admired by every creature that looked on them.’
From now on, the princes’ governor, Lord Holderness, and his deputies would receive compliments on their prowess. And the following spring, in 1772, a house facing St Anne’s Church on Kew Green was assigned to Prince William and Prince Edward, and a ‘tall and showy’ Hanoverian army officer in his thirties, General Budé, was appointed their instructor. As a royal nursery attendant later related, Prince William ‘exulted beyond measure going into men’s hands. His very housemaids, he said, should be men.’ The appointment of an officer rather than a university man as his instructor was no doubt an additional pleasure, as Prince William was of ‘a strongly marked military turn’. Third and fourth in line to the throne, the younger princes – and Prince Ernest and any other princes who should be born – were destined for the army and navy, not for government, and their education need not include the subtler points of constitutional law.
The admirable Lady Charlotte’s path lay now with the females of the species, and for a while she and the sub-governess, Mrs Cotesworth, undertook the whole of the princesses’ education at Kew, bar the rudiments of the French language, which Mlle Julie Krohme supplied. ‘Till we were seven or eight children,’ the Princess Royal later wrote, ‘we had no English teacher, Lady Charlotte Finch and Mrs Cotesworth having taught us all to read. But the Sub Governess’s [Mrs Cotesworth’s] ill health preventing her giving us the proper attention, Lady Charlotte could not teach us all and begged Mama to take some clergyman’s daughter to assist her. Notwithstanding which Lady Charlotte continued to read with Augusta and me everyday sometimes two but always one hour.’
In 1774, Lady Mary Coke wrote a more forthright account of Mrs Cotesworth’s health problems: ‘It has been said a long time that she had taken to drinking, which must make her very improper for that employment.’ Perhaps also Lady Charlotte Finch had a little less relish for her task as royal governess, now that the excitement of moulding the heir to the throne was no longer hers. Be that as it may, in July 1771 she undoubtedly did governess and clergyman’s daughter Miss Frederica Planta honour in calling her to be ‘about the little Royal family’. She was ‘to teach them to read first English, and the other languages after that’, wrote Miss Planta’s sister Elizabeth. A governess herself, Miss Elizabeth Planta followed the affair with interest, although she disparaged the terms and conditions of the employment, including the salary of £100 a year: ‘Her appointments are quite mediocre.’ Still, her sister was at Kew as she wrote, ready to attend the princesses when they came from Richmond Lodge, and her accommodation was paid for, as were her chairmen – porters who carried her sedan chair – when the royal family was in town. ‘The future promises des avancements,’ Elizabeth concluded dispassionately.
Unfortunately, Frederica was still bound to an employer, Lady Hoskyns, who liked having her children’s governess filched by the royal family no better than had the Holdernesses. And she was a good deal more vocal about the inconvenience. She accused Miss Planta of ‘having made underhand applications’ to the royal household, and wrote in terms, Miss Elizabeth considered, that ‘showed very vividly that she regarded her own interests much more than those of my sister.’
At last Lady Hoskyns was made to cede the invaluable Miss Frederica Planta, but not before the Queen herself had expressed her displeasure at Lady Hoskyns’s obstructiveness. The appointment was one much to the Queen’s taste. Key to her interest in attendants employed about her daughters was that they should be not only Christian but the right kind of Christian. Following Lady Charlotte Finch – mentor in much – she subdued her temperament and exorcised the frustrations of her position by a passionate meditation on sermons and exegeses on the Bible, but she was utterly intolerant of agnostic brands of Christianity.
The Misses Planta followed, in their Christian faith, their father Andreas, a respected pastor in London and founding librarian at the fledgling British Museum. One of those Deist Christians who found themselves able to reconcile recent geological findings with the Story of Creation, he had emigrated from his native Switzerland, when that ‘republic of letters’ became dominated by philosophers who decried his brand of faith. In London he and his wife settled happily, their son Joseph succeeding him as librarian at the British Museum and four of their five daughters becoming governesses. (The fifth married and fled the world of education for Philadelphia in America.)
And so the princesses had their English teacher, and Miss Planta, ‘mistress of seven languages’ – including Latin and Greek – ‘and a most pious Christian’, settled into the community of royal preceptors and tutors and governesses at Kew. The Queen had written to Lady Charlotte: ‘I am sorry that I myself have not more time to spend with them [the royal children] and therefore am thankful to Providence for having worthy people about them.’ She and the King were certainly prepared to fight fair and foul to secure those ‘worthy people’.
State portraits by Allan Ramsay of the King – auburn haired and pink cheeked – and of the Queen – dark, slight and grey-eyed – were copied in these years and sent abroad to confirm the young couple’s status. They were sovereigns of a mighty kingdom following the triumphant end of the Seven Years War in 1763, and of a growing commercial empire, and the Queen’s diamonds in her portrait were commensurately dazzling. Chief among them were those that sparkled on a stomacher the King had commissioned on their marriage for £60,000. ‘The fond [or background] is a network as fine as catgut of small diamonds,’ the Duchess of Northumberland had recorded in 1761, ‘and the rest is a large pattern of natural flowers, composed of very large diamonds, one of which is 18, another 16, and a third 10 thousands pounds price.’ Lord Clive, better known today as Clive of India, added, among other riches, to the Queen’s store of jewels presents from the deposed Great Mogul of India, Shah Alam: ‘two diamond drops worth twelve thousand pounds’.
But in the midst of their public life the royal couple continued to attempt a domestic life, whether in town at the Queen’s House or at the Lodge in Richmond parkland, once the property of the King’s grandfather George II. The princesses were still brought down to visit their parents after breakfast and, now of an age to do so, visited after their parents’ four o’clock dinner. The King continued as devoted and eager a parent as ever, carrying Prince Ernest as a baby around in his arms and sitting on the floor to play with him, just as he had when the older children were infants.
But now, while the King and Queen attended to public business, after breakfast the princesses were driven off to Kew and to the schoolroom at Lady Charlotte’s or, when in town, climbed to their brothers’ old schoolroom at the Queen’s House. All the princes and the princesses, at their father’s behest, pursued a programme of mens sana in corpore sano, which excluded meat from their diet except on certain days, and included daily airings in the garden of the Queen’s House in town or walks in Kew Gardens come rain, come sun. It featured as well a discussion of improving subjects selected from a ponderous commonplace book that the King had kept since boyhood.
The princesses’ schooling in London in the winter months with Lady Charlotte and her subalterns was instructive, and their hours with their parents at Richmond Lodge or at the Queen’s House were precious, but their days at Kew, given the environs where they took their airings, were inspiring. They were old enough to have their imaginations fired on their walks by the strange fancies that the architect Sir William Chambers had placed in the gardens to entertain their grandmother. There was a Chinese pagoda modelled on one he had seen on his travels to Shanghai, a model Alhambra and even a Gothic cathedral, besides innumerable temples. And in the years since their grandmother had established a botanical garden and a menagerie at Kew in 1760, there had come exotic visitors bringing booty from foreign lands to enchant the children.
This very October, following his voyage with Captain Cook to the South Seas, the young naturalist Sir Joseph Banks presented the King and Queen at Richmond Lodge with an Australasian crown and feathers. He also brought to the botanical gardens that occupied part of the Kew property an extraordinary plant with orange and blue shoots from the Cape of Good Hope, and named it the Strelitzia, in graceful compliment to the Queen’s native land of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. In the menagerie in a different part of the gardens, another first fruit of Captain Cook’s voyage to the South Seas – a kangaroo from Botany Bay – was proudly placed, a mate brought over, and a successful breeding programme instituted. Not surprisingly, Kew was to have a powerful hold on all these princesses’ memories and imaginations in later life.
The princesses now saw little of their elder brothers and of tag-along Prince Edward, except when their paths crossed while out on airings. The boys, so recently part of a boisterous family group and meeting their parents twice daily, were now forbidden to stray from the sphere of their houses at Kew – except for those improving walks in the grounds of Kew and, in the case of the eldest two, Sunday dinner, which they took with their governor Lord Holderness and his wife at Sion Hill on the other side of the Thames. Otherwise, spartan conditions reigned in the boys’ establishments. Meat was rationed, and even when fruit tart was on the menu it was ‘without crust.’
The Prince of Wales and his brother were, to begin with, obliging pupils and anxious to please all their instructors, although Prince Frederick later condemned one attendant as having been ‘used to have a silver pencil-case in his hand while we were at our lessons … and he has frequently given us such knocks with it on our foreheads that the blood followed them.’ But the King instructed the princes’ governors and preceptors to administer beatings when appropriate. One of the princesses later claimed to have seen her eldest brothers ‘held by their tutors to be flogged like dogs with a long whip.’ The boys, trusting or fearing their father, did not complain. Other boys of their age endured worse at schools, and their regime, with a certain want of imagination, was the same as their father’s had once been.
These indignities the princesses were spared, and the Princess Royal, condemning harshness as counter-productive, later declared, ‘I love a steady, quiet way with children.’ She also wrote, echoing her mother, ‘On the whole I believe that example does more than precept … I think the more they [children] are led to everything, and fancy it is by their own instigation, the better.’ But the princesses probably suffered other ordeals by way of punishment for poor behaviour. Royal thought severe measures – tying girls’ hands was a practice of the time – should be the response to ‘a lie, or the proof of a bad heart … alone.’ But for ‘ill humour’ she endorsed ‘great firmness and coldness’, and her prescription ‘for bad lessons’ was interesting: ‘the making learning a favour and the not allowing her to learn the next day if she is idle.’
‘My pen is not capable of tracing a quarter of what I feel at the moment of your departure,’ Queen Charlotte had written in July 1771 to her brother Prince Charles, who had just left England for his duties as military governor of Hanover after a long summer stay. Her newborn baby, Prince Ernest, was no consolation – nor was the offer her other brother in England, another Ernest, made to delay his return to Zell in the Hanoverian electorate where he was governor. ‘My pleasures are finished for the year by our separation,’ she wrote.
The Queen did not know how truly she wrote. Over the coming months she and the King were to be plagued by family and political crises in the world that lay outside the well-managed promenades of Kew. In the American colonies there was growing discontent with the King’s decision that they should be taxed and the revenue raised put to their defence. Thirty years before, the then Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole had been wary of such a measure when it was proposed to him in 1739. ‘I have old England set against me, and do you think I will have new England likewise?’ The King had lit a ‘long fuse’ when he insisted on Prime Minister Lord North exacting duty on newspapers and other printed material in the colonies with the Stamp Act. In March 1770 a mob, incensed by the continuing tax on tea, had attacked the Customs House in Boston. Five of the assailants had been shot, but the protests grew bolder. Within two years, another mob was to board a revenue cutter, the Gasparee, and burn it. Within six, the American colonies were to declare their independence from the Crown, and a bloody war would be launched.
The King was to be similarly obstinate in a situation at home which he regarded as a challenge to his authority, and which he could not control – the behaviour of his younger brother the Duke of Cumberland.
The King’s relations with his brothers and sisters had never been easy. His parents had always favoured lively Prince Edward, Duke of York, over him and had greeted his own more faltering essays into social intercourse, ‘Do hold your tongue, George: don’t talk like a fool.’ Given that the Duke of York liked nothing better than to roam expensively in Italy, the King was perhaps less sorry than he might have been when his brother died in 1767. (Lady Mary Coke, who, without much justification, had considered herself practically affianced to the Duke, was devastated.) But now it was the King’s brother Henry, Duke of Cumberland who posed a problem. He had shown his character at his brother the King’s wedding in 1761. When someone had questioned his early departure from the family group on the wedding night, he had replied, ‘What should I stay for?… if she cries out, I cannot help her.’
The Duke, having succeeded his uncle ‘Butcher’ William, Duke of Cumberland, as ranger of Windsor Great Park, caroused at the Ranger’s residence there, Cumberland Lodge, and on the Continent with his mistress Lady Anne Horton. Lady Anne was the daughter of an Irish peer who sat on the Whig benches, and her constant companion was her sister Lady Elizabeth Luttrell – known in all the capitals of Europe as a hardened gambler.
The King was furious and confounded when the Duke of Cumberland handed him a letter to read on 1 September 1771, while the brothers were out walking in the woods at Richmond. It informed him that the Duke had married Lady Anne, and was now looking for greater Parliamentary provision as a married man. The King described his reaction to this news to his brother the Duke of Gloucester: ‘After walking some minutes in silence to smother my feelings, I without passion spoke to him to the following effect. That I could not believe he had taken the step in the paper, to which he answered that he would never tell me an untruth.’
The scandal this mismatch brought on the royal family, and the harm it did to the King’s endeavours to create a more moral atmosphere at Court, made him and others think longingly of the system that obtained at many Continental Courts to deter this sort of thing. The Duke’s conduct, the King wrote to his mother, was ‘his inevitable ruin and … a disgrace to the whole family’, and he encouraged him to go abroad. ‘In any country,’ the King told his brother, ‘a prince marrying a subject is looked up [on] as dishonourable, nay in Germany the children of such a marriage’ – a morganatic match, as it was termed there – ‘cannot succeed to any territories but here where the Crown is but too little respected, it must be big with the greatest mischief. Civil wars would by such measures again be common in this country; those of the Yorks and Lancasters were greatly giving to intermarriages with the nobility.’ He went on, ‘I must therefore on the first occasion show my resentment, I have children who must know what they have to expect if they could follow so infamous an example.’
This letter made very uncomfortable reading for the Duke of Gloucester, who – although five years his junior – the King regarded as ‘the only friend to whom I can unbosom every thought’. Gloucester, weak and flaccid except in the pursuit of women, made a perfect recipient for the King’s laborious thought processes. On this occasion, the message of the letter was clear. Gloucester must settle the question that perplexed Society: had he married Lady Waldegrave or not? For the King to have one brother married to a commoner and with family among the Whig Opposition in the House of Commons – five of the new Duchess of Cumberland’s brothers and her father had seats there – was unfortunate. Were Gloucester married, too, and, should he wish to go into opposition, he could count on the political support of those strong Whigs the Walpoles and Waldegraves, as Maria belonged to the first family by birth and to the second by her first marriage.
The Duke of Gloucester answered approvingly, soothingly, condemned his brother Cumberland’s behaviour and added for good measure that he himself would never marry. Honour was apparently satisfied, and Gloucester, pointedly leaving Lady Waldegrave in England, went abroad to Tuscany where he almost immediately fell ill with a ‘bloody flux’. For companionable nurses, fortunately, he had the attentions of not one ‘Madame Grovestein’ from Holland but two. In January 1772, however, Lady Mary Coke in Vienna heard from Lady Charlotte Finch in England, ‘the Royal family does not flatter themselves with the Duke of Gloucester’s recovery … the accounts are so bad as to leave little room for hopes.’ He was then at Naples. And as late as March, having flitted to Rome, the devoted Grovesteins hot on his heels, the itinerant Duke was still ‘at death’s door’.
In England, meanwhile, the King’s ‘resentment’ was immediately manifested in the announcement that those who visited the Duke of Cumberland and his new Duchess would not be welcome at Court. But he went further, despite the pleas of his mother, the Dowager Princess of Wales. She, more concerned for the dying Duke of Gloucester in Italy, preached family harmony in the case of Cumberland. ‘All I beg of you is,’ she wrote to her son the King in November, after expressing her chagrin that Henry had behaved so badly, ‘do not have vengeance against him in your heart and if he has the good fortune to be quit of his wife, pardon him.’ She knew her eldest son’s capacity for resentment. Instead of listening to her, the King meditated a Royal Marriages Act, making it illegal for members of the royal family to marry without the previous consent of the sovereign. With his brother Gloucester’s assurance that he was a bachelor, this and other provisions in the bill that the King personally drafted should deter him from ever making an honest duchess of his bastard Walpole mistress. And looking ahead, the King would be sure of controlling his own children’s marriages.
The brooding lawmaker had other family matters to attend to. His mother, who had been suffering from agonizing throat pains, had been much affected by the initial reports of her son Gloucester’s imminent death abroad and by the family strife over her other son Cumberland’s marriage. By the end of November 1771, her situation had deteriorated – ‘her speech grows less intelligible, she hourly emaciates, and her dreadful faintings towards night must soon put an end to a situation that it is almost too cruel to wish to see’, the King reported. No one thought she would last a fortnight. Her malady was now described as ‘a cancer in her mouth and risings of the viscera.’
But the redoubtable Dowager Princess lived on and on beyond the prescribed fortnight. ‘Nothing ever equalled her resolution,’ wrote Horace Walpole. ‘She took the air till within four or five days of her death, and never indicated having the least idea of her danger, even to the Princess of Brunswick [her daughter], though she had sent for her.’ Ghastly with illness, the old Saxe-Gotha Princess dressed and received her son the King and the Queen in a travesty of their usual evening ritual on the last night of her life, Friday, 7 February 1772. She ‘kept them four hours in indifferent conversation, though almost inarticulate herself, said nothing on her situation, took no leave of them – and expired at six in the morning without a groan.’ The Princess was unpopular to the last: her coffin was hissed and booed on its way to its resting-place in the royal chapel of Henry VII in Westminster Abbey. Meanwhile, Prince William, who was tender hearted, asked Miss Planta to read him the funeral service, and ‘wept bitterly.’
There was more to come. On the day before the Dowager Princess died, Horace Walpole had written to his friend Horace Mann, ‘No more news yet from Denmark, which is extraordinary, but one should think therefore that nothing tragic has happened, or Mr Keith [the English Minister in Copenhagen] would have dispatched messengers faster. You may imagine the impatience of everyone to hear more of this strange revolution…’
Whether the Dowager Princess was apprised or unapprised of her daughter Caroline’s misadventures, the story that arrived in London at the end of January 1772 gripped Society and horrified the King. Queen Caroline of Denmark, the royal princesses’ aunt who had married the King of that country two days after the Princess Royal’s birth, had been lying in bed in the early morning on 17 January, after a masked ball that she and the King had given. Hearing a commotion below, she believed that it was the servants clearing up, and called for quiet.
It was, in fact, the King’s stepmother, the Dowager Queen Juliana, and her son Prince Frederick, confronting the King with evidence of the Queen’s adultery with Count Struensee, the Prime Minister. The King, whose mind was weak but affectionate, resisted for a time their demand that he sign a death warrant for his favourite Minister and an order for his wife’s imprisonment. But they persisted. Struensee had been seized earlier as he left the ball. And now into the Queen of Denmark’s bedchamber sprang armed guards, who bore her off to the fortress of Kronborg.
The English Minister at Copenhagen, Sir Robert Murray Keith, was the hero of the hour in England when it became known there that he had threatened that gunboats would be trained on the offending capital if the Queen was not released. But for the King – and in due course for his daughters – when Keith’s despatch reached him, this was a defining hour. For two months his sister the Hereditary Princess of Brunswick had poured into his ear complaints of her husband’s adultery and contemptuous treatment of her. Now his sister Caroline had been, as he saw it, ‘perverted by a cruel and contemptible court’. When she was released from Kronborg, he sent her to live in the city of Zell in his Electorate of Hanover, where his brother-in-law Ernest was governor, and where their sister Brunswick became a constant visitor. There he hoped that ‘by mildness’ Caroline would be ‘brought back to the amiable character’ she had previously possessed.
King George III never forgot his sisters’ fates in foreign Courts beyond his control, and it weighed heavily with him that he had promoted the matches. This would prey on his mind with fatal consequences when his own daughters came of an age to marry. His brother the Duke of Gloucester was to hold that the King believed his daughters did not wish to settle out of England. Meanwhile his sisters, who had never been close, forged an agreeable friendship on a foundation of religion and tears. And Lady Mary Coke summed it up – the Queen of Denmark had exposed herself, so too had the Duke of Cumberland with his disgraceful marriage, the Princess of Wales had an ‘incurable distemper’, and the Duke of Gloucester was, ‘with one foot in the grave, lavishing his poor remains of life in pursuit of his intrigues with Madame de Grovestein. This is a picture full of shades.’ It was an evil hour for the English royal family, and was felt to be so by no one more than the King.
The reputation of the monarchy, however, was even more severely tarnished when the King drove through his ill-considered Royal Marriages Act at the end of March 1772 with the reluctant assistance of his Prime Minister, Lord North. The temper in the House of Commons was inflamed. The MPs did not hesitate to speak ill of every member of the royal family, and the recently deceased Princess of Wales came in for a great deal of abuse.
Furthermore, on 16 September, just over a year after the Duke of Cumberland had broken the unwelcome news of his marriage to the King at Richmond, another storm broke. The Duke of Gloucester told the King that he too was married – had been married, in fact, since 1766, secretly but perfectly legally. The ceremony had taken place days before his niece the Princess Royal’s birth.
All through the brouhaha about their brother Cumberland’s marriage, it transpired, Gloucester had played a false part. Lady Charlotte Finch told Lady Mary Coke at Kew that she thought the Duke of Gloucester very ungrateful to the King. (Coke, with more important things on her mind, decided at the drawing room on 22 September 1772 that Princess Elizabeth was now ‘much the prettiest’, when the three princesses saw company in the old drawing room.) And the reason for divulging this information now? The Duchess of Gloucester, as Lady Waldegrave was revealed to be, was expecting their child in May of the following year.
The King turned on his once favourite brother and not only barred him from Court, declaring that, as with the Cumberlands, anyone who visited the Gloucesters would not be welcome at Court, but instigated a humiliating and vindictive investigation by the Privy Council into the validity of his brother’s marriage. His supposed object was that there should be no doubts about the child’s legitimacy. In the meantime, his own wife, Queen Charlotte, appeared in satin and ermine at the January drawing rooms in 1773 until a week before she gave birth on the 27th of that month to their sixth son and ninth child, Augustus. The Queen, naturally stoic, rarely had sympathy for the woes of pregnant women, but even she might have felt a pang for the Duchess of Gloucester concerning the ordeal that now awaited her.
The Privy Council hearing took place days before the Duchess was to give birth, and she was forced to appear to defend the marriage, despite her condition. A flurry of depositions later, the King conceded on 27 May that the marriage had been valid after the Privy Council registered it as such, and the child born two days later – Sophia Matilda of Gloucester – at the Duke’s house in Upper Grosvenor Street was duly given the title of princess. Any sympathy the Queen might have felt for her sister-in-law was no doubt extinguished when the Gloucesters summoned members of the Opposition to attend the birth.
The unchivalrous Privy Council enquiry had been most unfortunate, not least for its author. It earned the King the hatred of Horace Walpole, fond uncle of the Duchess of Gloucester, who had earlier been well disposed towards him. Walpole took revenge on the King in his later writings on the Court of King George III. As for Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester, her mother wrote that she seemed to smile at all the world to make up for being unwanted. But Horace Walpole was less enthusiastic about what he called the ‘royalty of my niece and nieceling.’ Asked by a lady at Court if he had seen the infant and was she not very pretty, he replied curtly ‘that he had no idea’. All he knew was that she was very red.
Following the example of the Cumberlands, the Gloucesters left England with their baby daughter and, as Lady Mary Coke observed in December 1773, ‘I wonder after having made such disgraceful marriages that they cannot stay at home, as they certainly do nothing but expose themselves when they come abroad.’ Both couples spent their time running from Continental Court to Court to establish whether, if their own King would not receive them, anyone else’s would. Meanwhile, the King and Queen and family were isolated not only from the London Society that he shunned, but from the other members of the royal family. As a result, and because the King and Queen did not encourage their daughters to make friends with other children, dreading ‘party’, the princesses’ youth was spent almost exclusively with each other, their younger brothers and their attendants.
The Queen had written to her brother Charles in March 1772, ‘We have changed our home this summer. We exchange Richmond for Kew, our chez nous will be better and the solitude greater than ever.’ With the Princess Dowager’s death, her summer residence at Kew – the White House, or Kew House – became available to the King and Queen. While the building in Kew Gardens could accommodate only the royal parents, their daughters and a skeleton household, the princesses could at least wave to their elder brothers in the Prince of Wales’s House opposite, whose northern windows gave on to the Thames. Should they so choose, the princesses could walk from the gardens of Kew House into the back of Prince William’s House, which fronted Kew Green. Following Prince Ernest’s birth in 1771, Prince Augustus and then Prince Adolphus were born in 1773 and 1774. These ‘younger princes’, as they were known, acquired in due course their own house – known, imaginatively, as Prince Ernest’s House, at the top of the Green, close to Lady Charlotte Finch’s house.
In other houses on Kew Green, in Kew Village, by Kew Bridge and by the ferry over to Brentford the rest of the royal household was disposed. They might not be perfectly housed, but the royal family had left Richmond Lodge, which it had long outgrown, for good, and in due course it was demolished. Kew became a full-blown royal campus, which the royal children rarely left during the summer months, where servants intrigued against each other, and where tradesmen in the village that had grown up around the church on the Green vied for preferment.
The two younger princesses – Augusta and Elizabeth – and their brother Ernest enjoyed a rare outing from Kew at the end of June 1773, when they were four, three and two. They were despatched ‘in great state’ to visit their great-aunt Amelia, daughter of King George II, at her villa at Gunnersbury outside London – one of the few relations whom they were allowed to meet. ‘They were all dressed in the clothes they had for the King’s birthday and the two princesses had a great many diamonds. They came in a coach of the Queen’s,’ reported Lady Mary Coke,
with six long-tailed horses, four footmen, and a great many guards. The Princess had the whole apartment above stairs open for them to play in, and a long table in the great room covered with all sorts of fruit, biscuits, etc of which they ate very heartily. There was also music for Prince Ernest who, though only two years of age, has a fondness for it very extraordinary in one of that age. The moment he heard it he danced about the room so ridiculously as made everybody laugh: then laughed so excessively himself as very much diverted the Princesses! They stayed two hours without tiring HRH or themselves, and said they were sorry to go.
Their days were rarely so exciting.
In the autumn of 1774 a domestic fracas threatened the peaceful campus, and the relationship between the Queen and Lady Charlotte soured. The health of the princesses’ sub-governess, Mrs Cotesworth, finally failed, and she left royal employ. While searching for a replacement, Lady Charlotte Finch requested that she should herself devote fewer hours to the royal children. The Queen, believing the trouble with Mrs Cotesworth had been exacerbated by Lady Charlotte’s increasingly skimpy attendance on the royal children, wanted her instead to devote more hours to her charges. ‘I am fully convinced’, wrote the Queen, ‘that besides the dependence you can have upon those that are there for a constant confinement’ – the sub-governors and sub-governesses ‘lived in’ – ‘your presence as the first not only will encourage them in theirs, but will make them look upon it as a less confinement. This I swear by experience for though with my sons Mr Smelt [the princes’ sub-governor] is to be depended upon, yet Lord Holderness’s presence in the house [the Prince of Wales’s House] for so many hours is the only and essential thing that prevents those under him from repining.’
Lady Charlotte’s reply – or at least her draft on 31 October 1774 – was magnificent; not for nothing had she grown up at the Court of King George II. ‘The attendance I have hitherto given has been regularly a double daily attendance of two and oftener three hours in the morning and from before seven in the evening till dismissed by your Majesty, besides numberless occasional and additional attendances.’ She, besides, ever made her own concerns ‘except when of a particular or melancholy nature, in which I shall ever acknowledge the indulgence I have met with from both your Majesties’ give way to the duties of her place, ‘as everything belonging to me has experienced’.
And now as she advanced more in years and very much declined in spirits, Lady Charlotte wrote:
How can I without deviating from my own principles undertake an additional duty of a kind for which I am conscious I am growing every day more unfit, as your Majesty must know what an uncommon stock of spirits and cheerfulness is necessary to go through the growing attendance of so many and such very young people in their amusements, as well as behaviour and instruction, besides ordering all the affairs of a nursery.
A letter that Miss Planta wrote in 1774, giving an account of the royal children to her sister in America, describes the ‘so many and such very young children’ to some purpose. The royal children, she recounted, had ‘all fine skins and blue eyes, some of them have brown hair, particularly Princess Augusta’ – Prince Edward was also a very dark child – ‘and they are all straight and healthy, and from what we can judge at present, are sensible and good tempered … In short, they would attract attention, though they were clothed in rags. Their dress is as unadorned as their rank will permit … their diet is extremely plain and light.’ Referring to the children’s attire on their parents’ birthdays and on feast days, she wrote, ‘the little sword the boys wear, makes one laugh. Imagine to yourself litle Prince Augustus at eighteen months old, in his nurse’s arms with a sword by his side, and a “chapeau bras” under his arm; such was his figure.’
Asking the Queen to ‘signal’ to her the additional attendance required, Lady Charlotte wrote, ‘I shall either endeavour faithfully to discharge it, or humbly and fairly own my incapacity for it…’ The old warhorse had one further feint to make. Speaking of her own wish for ‘the real good of the children’, she was ready, should the Queen wish it, to resign her office ‘into the hands of any person younger and more fitted for it.’ No further request was made for any ‘additional attendance’ from Lady Charlotte. Moreover, she had written of having ‘really nobody I wish particularly to recommend’ as sub-governess, but she had in fact selected a candidate – Miss Martha Gouldsworthy – whose good health and lack of family or friends seeking her company were of prime importance.
Lady Charlotte’s daughter Miss Henrietta Finch describes the consternation that their family at St James’s was thrown into by a message from the King and Queen after dinner one stormy night in September 1774 to say they would come and drink tea – and the good use the Finch family made of the occasion to promote Lady Charlotte’s candidate. ‘I was fortunately in a sack and hoop,’ Henrietta wrote to her sister Sophia, ‘which looked a little dressy, but my hair catted up without any curl, in a new way, and not so well consequently as it might be done.’ The royal party was ‘so good humoured – particularly the King – who I am more in love with than ever … He gave me an opportunity … (by speaking of Miss Gouldsworthy) to make mention of her good temper and cheerful spirits … things I knew would recommend her to him, more than anything.’
‘Gouly’, as Miss Martha Gouldsworthy became known, was the successful candidate, and was soon an established fixture in the princesses’ lives, chaperoning them from Kew to the Queen’s House or St James’s, sitting at their lessons with masters, and supervising their preparation for lessons with Miss Planta. She walked with them at Kew between their morning and afternoon lessons, sat with them while they ‘worked’ – sewed – and generally clucked after them (snatching an hour for dinner) from before breakfast until she escorted them to bed.
The princesses were not only fortunate in their sub-governess Gouly, but, aged eight, nearly six and four, were cheerful students in the schoolroom. For the benign Miss Planta, their ‘English teacher’, used a variety of educational aids to develop – from an early age – their memories and knowledge. ‘I believe they all love me,’ she wrote, ‘and I have gained their affection by making their learning as much play as possible … I have put together a set of cards which contains the history of England, or more properly an idea of it, and have reduced the chronology of England to a game, by means of which the Princesses are better chronologists than I was three years ago.’
Miss Planta was nothing if not optimistic. She put Princess Elizabeth, at the age of four, to learning by this method ‘the succession of Kings according to their several lines’. But she had help from the princesses themselves. ‘One thing more, common to them all,’ she noted of the royal children, ‘is a very retentive memory.’ The Princess Royal, who later advocated teaching her niece from Bible pictures, also recommended – perhaps from personal experience – having the child begin a ‘short history of England’ once she had learnt to read. ‘And have her accustomed,’ she wrote, ‘as soon as she is finished reading, to give a little account of her lesson and then lead her to make some slight reflections on what she has learnt.’
There was no escaping an element of classroom grind – namely, the need to acquire good handwriting. This affair was taken very seriously, as all the princes, especially when serving abroad, and the princesses, on marrying abroad, would be required in later life to maintain a large correspondence with members of their own and other royal families. The Prince of Wales, whose father the King employed no secretary but undertook all his own official correspondence himself, had begun the process when he was five with Mr Bulley, a writing master.
Now it was the turn of the Princess Royal and her sister Augusta with their writing master Mr Roberts to cover sheets of paper, shakily ruled, with such maxims as might do, faithfully inscribed in copperplate writing. (Perhaps Mrs Hannah More, the Sunday-school pioneer, who was a near relation of Mr Roberts, furnished some of the maxims.) The process took time, and would not be complete until they were well into their teens. It was among the most wearisome elements of their education. However, a geography teacher was also employed for the princesses from when they were young to display to them the extent of their father’s dominions, and the lands of others, and it is said that jigsaw maps of Europe were employed in the nursery. There were also in the King’s libraries in the Queen’s House scale models of the forts which guarded English property in America and India and further a field, to excite the children’s imaginations.
In many ways, the education which the Queen and Lady Charlotte ordained for the princesses would be as rigorous as that that the King ordained for his sons, for the Queen wrote that she thought women with a good education would be capable of as much as men. Princesses’ deportment, proficiency in music and dancing, and skills with needle, paintbrush and pencil were traditionally important, but in Lady Charlotte and Miss Planta the Queen had provided her daughters with accomplished women as teachers who themselves read English, Continental and classical literature for pleasure. And now the princesses began to learn German from the Reverend Heinrich Schrader, of the Savoy Chapel, to add to their French.
The Princess Royal was, in 1774 and at the age of nearly eight, ‘a noble girl’, in Miss Planta’s opinion. ‘She looks the daughter of a King,’ she wrote:
She is remarkably sensible, the propriety of her behaviour is very great, and she has shining parts. She speaks French very well, is well versed in ancient history, and to my knowledge, there is not an event of importance in the history of England, she is not pretty well acquainted with. She writes well, makes pertinent observations on what she reads, and has a competent knowledge of geography.
Miss Planta was writing a private letter to her sister Mrs Minicks in America, who had begged a description of her royal charges. Aware that the letter would be shown around her sister’s circle, Miss Planta might not have been above exaggerating the princesses’ achievements under her tutelage, but there was little need. The Princess Royal was always a quick, calm and competent student, whatever the subject of study. It was outside the schoolroom that this ‘noble girl’ would experience difficulties, and Miss Planta’s reference to her ‘shining parts’ obscures these.
The Princess Royal savoured her position as eldest daughter of the King – sometimes to the point of arrogance – but she also stammered, especially in the presence of her mother. Furthermore, for all the learning she would acquire and despite the attentions of the royal dancing master, M. Denoyer, she was a clumsy dancer, possibly because she had no ear – and certainly no liking – for music. So although she looked every inch the daughter of a king, she was a self-conscious and awkward one, who was aware of her failings. And the Queen, a naturally elegant woman with a fine appreciation of music, could not understand it.
A painting two years later by Benjamin West, an American artist the King favoured, shows the Queen and Princess Royal at congenial ‘women’s work’. They are embroidering a length of silk. But the Princess looks strained and uncomfortable, and appears to be seeking her mother’s approval for her work. The Queen seems distant and oblivious of her daughter. It is a far cry from Cotes’s intimate rendition of their relationship at the Princess Royal’s birth.
Miss Planta’s report card for the Princess Royal, though full of admiration, betrays little affection. Her portrait of five-year-old Princess Augusta, on the other hand, is full of love. ‘Princess Augusta is the handsomest of all the Princesses,’ she announced. ‘She is five years old, of a small make and very lively, and when compared to Princess Royal, very childish. She wants, however, neither feelings nor parts and will, I dare say, unfold to advantage.’ She went on, ‘It is amazing how much the little creature knows of the history of England, down as far as James I,’ and she revealed her method of imparting it. ‘I chose some striking facts in every chapter and dressed them in words adapted to her capacity and then told them as diverting stories. This method has taken, and she tells them again in words of her own, with as much pleasure as she would a fairy tale.’
The Princess had also learnt to repeat such maxims as ‘To be good is to be happy, angels are happier than men, because they are better.’ ‘Any things of this kind she often repeats to herself, and is generally extremely influenced by them,’ wrote Miss Planta. But when not influenced by them Princess Augusta threw quite violent tantrums. Miss Planta had her revenge: ‘I displeased her today, by saying, I would go to Otaheite’ – or Tahiti – ‘to be English teacher to the Otaheite children.’ This remarkable declaration needed, at the time of writing, no explanation. That summer, following Captain Cook’s voyages to the South Pacific, an Otaheitan ‘prince’ called Omai had appeared in London, and made his bow – as Sir Joseph Banks’s guest – at Kew in July. Miss Planta’s remark, or rebuke, to Princess Augusta reflected the boundless curiosity about the natives of Tahiti that resulted from this exotic visitor’s appearance. But Princess Augusta would not succumb to it. ‘She says, indeed she cannot part with me,’ Miss Planta reported to her sister.
And what of Princess Elizabeth? From the attentions of her wet-nurse Mrs Spinluffe, she had passed into the care of her sisters’ dresser Miss Mary Dacres, and from there into Miss Planta’s hands. As a third princess, she had not rated the attention that the Princess Royal had commanded as firstborn of the species. No artist detailed her infant wardrobe or depicted her doll as had Humphry and Cotes and Zoffany for the Princess Royal.
Nor was Princess Elizabeth the subject, as Princess Augusta had been from birth, of anxious and minute comparisons with an elder sister, where she was judged prettier or less pretty, more ‘sensible’ or less ‘sensible’ than the other. As foil to her elder sister, Princess Augusta features in a celebrated Zoffany group portrait of the royal family in Van Dyck dress when it numbered two parents, four sons and two daughters. Princess Elizabeth – seventh child – appears once in a Zoffany conversation piece as a baby, then not again till depicted by Benjamin West.
Her primary distinction, and an unfortunate one for a princess, had been that she was a fat baby. At the age of three she was still fat, but Miss Planta discovered great potential in her. She traces a determined personality that was to be key for this artistic Princess’s survival in a world where her sisters’ looks and figures would be widely admired. ‘Princess Elizabeth is a lovely little fat sensible thing and so tidy’, she exclaimed, ‘that she never leaves her needles, or scrap of work without putting them all in a tiny bag, for the purpose.’
As we have already heard, Miss Planta dwelt on Princess Elizabeth’s achievements in learning the lines of succession, and then revealed that the three-year-old was not always a paragon. ‘Her reward to being good, is giving me a flower or some such trifle, and I make it a point not to accept anything from a naughty child.’ Elizabeth and her sister Princess Augusta later separately recalled that Lady Charlotte Finch had taught them – as soon as they could speak, Elizabeth said – to memorize for recital the maxim, ‘Content is wealth, the riches of the mind, / And happy he who can that treasure find.’ Unfortunately, frustration rather than contentment was long to be the tenor of this gifted girl’s life.
Even that harsh critic Lady Mary Coke thought when she saw the three girls on 25 October 1774, with two of the young princes in ‘what is called the queen’s apartment’, that ‘the Princesses are much improved’. She wrote, ‘The two youngest are really pretty, especially the Princess Augusta.’ But Lady Mary had private information to impart about Augusta: ‘I’m told she is not so agreeable as the Princess Royal. She tells long stories which is not a good habit.’ However, she recorded with more pleasure that on the child’s sixth birthday, 8 November 1774, an entertainment and supper were projected, which the Duchess of Argyll and Lady Betty Stanley were to attend. But in this sort of situation Princess Augusta was not at her best. Her elder sister may have stammered, but Augusta was painfully shy, and in this sense was much more ‘childish’ than her sister.
Princess Augusta’s comfort and enjoyment lay within the family circle, and in this setting she showed early on the large-minded and rational character that was always to distinguish her, as her brother the Prince of Wales reported to his governor Lord Holderness, who had gone abroad to recover his health in the autumn of 1774. The Prince wrote, ‘Last Sunday, William, Edward and Augusta were talking together about pistols, and Edward complained that his brothers had pistols but he had none. Upon which Augusta turned to William and said, “Give one pistol to Edward and then you will be equal”. “O Madame”, said William, “if I have not a pair of pistols I am worth nothing”.’ Seven-year-old Prince Edward’s response is not recorded, but, just as the elder brother guarded his privileges, so did the younger one resent them. On one occasion, Prince Edward was told that Prince William was going to Court. ‘Then,’ said the younger brother, ‘I shall button myself up and go to bed.’ Upon being asked why, he replied that, if he were not accompanying his elder brother to Court, it must surely be because he was ill and needed his bed.
The princesses’ youngest brother, Prince Adolphus, born on 24 February 1774, was weaned the following spring, and the Queen wrote with relief on that occasion, ‘Adolphus seems to relish the taste of potatoes and apple pudding extremely well, nor did it disagree with him, of which I was very fearful.’
And there were other things to be fearful of. In America, the colonies were in ferment. Despite conciliatory proposals from the House of Commons, as Prince Adolphus supped his apple purée at Kew in April 1775, the first shots had rung out in a skirmish between British troops and American patriots in Lexington, near Boston. As the situation darkened, the English government was forced to despatch more troops to General Howe, commander-in-chief across the Atlantic – and hire still more from German warlords as General Washington proved Howe’s superior.
In the meantime, what with America and the princes in need of subjection, exhortations for the daughters of King George III to ‘be good’ came more than ever thick and fast. Their mother’s love had always been conditional. In the spring of 1775 she had written from Kew to Lady Charlotte Finch: ‘If everybody is well behaved at the Queen’s House of the female party I should be glad to see my daughters on Wednesday morning between 10 and 11 o clock.’
The princesses learnt that, as the King’s rule was benevolent, so any infringement of it – their uncle Gloucester’s defiance, the American colonies’ violent assertion of independence, let alone their own brothers’ dissidence – was to be abhorred and punished. Thus the royal children grew up to detest alike highwaymen, Opposition politicians and General Washington. And in later – if not more mature – years, they were to deplore the measures of Catholic emancipation and Parliamentary reform, which ran contrary to their deceased father’s will. Nourished on the legend of the blood of Englishmen shed on American battlefields and on the sin of lèsemajesté, few of the princesses would venture to stray over the lip of conservatism – except those who determined to launch their own rebellion against their father. For the others, and most of all for Princess Augusta, whose brothers and sisters teased her when they were older about her ‘rage militaire’, their politics were to be an expression of loyalty to their father.
Just before their mother was due to give birth to her eleventh child in late April 1776, the elder princesses went with her to observe a thousand guardsmen march off to take ship for America. Queen Charlotte wrote to her brother in Hanover, ‘the affair is so interesting that it possesses me entirely.’ In particular, the reluctance of the Quakers of Pennsylvania to take up arms appealed to her. Her husband’s reaction was more violent, for he could never understand why the colonies should wish to revolt against a benevolent Crown. But the Queen did not voice her sentiments openly, and the princesses at Kew learnt a specific form of patriotism during a childhood in which remote conflict in America anguished their father and returning generals brought not eagles to lay before him, but increasingly sombre budgets.
The Declaration of Independence which Washington and other principals signed on 4 July 1776 was to enlarge the American patriots’ ambitions and further to incense the King. The conflict was not to end until 1783, after France, Spain and Holland had joined arms and nearly all Europe had formed an armed neutrality in 1780 to resist the British seizing American goods from their ships. These seven fruitless years of war were to change the reputation and character of England as firmly as the end of the Seven Years War had assured her a new prestige and power. The eventual loss of the colonies was – unlike the outcome of the royal Dukes’ rebellions and that of their nephew the Prince of Wales – not to be punishment and removal of privileges but liberation and a scot-free, not to say tax-free, existence.
Princess Augusta, however, when recalling her childhood, spoke not of the generals who came to report on the progress of the war, but of games of cricket and football and hockey: ‘When she was a little girl, she played at all these games with her brothers, and played cricket particularly well.’ Her elder sister Royal, by contrast, advocated learning through play with dolls. The play at Kew could certainly get quite rough. On one occasion, Princess Augusta recalled, the Queen’s brother Prince Ernest of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was visiting and nearly had his eye knocked out when his nephews swarmed all about him and one got on his back and clawed at his face. For all the segregation of princes and princesses, in Princess Augusta’s memory, at least, they were much together. And her younger brother Ernest later fondly remembered days at Kew: ‘How gay did the Green appear … from the middle of May till the beginning of November, and how cheerful did the Green look on a fine Sunday evening when all the servants in their red liveries were strolling about and sitting under the old trees by the church, and every house was inhabited.’