A new character was now added to the group of princesses, a sister born nearly ten full years after Princess Royal, a child born in wartime as her elder sisters had not been, a child with three elder sisters and seven elder brothers whose needs would come before hers, and a child who would have, of all the royal siblings, by far the most commonplace mind. Nevertheless of all the princesses, Princess Mary – as the girl born on 25 April 1776 was to be christened – would have the most self-confidence and exhibit the most tenacity in achieving her desires, for she was to be the beauty of the family. Princess Mary reigned serene, and for eighteen months enjoyed the attentions – at £200 a year, with a pension of a hundred for life to follow – of wet-nurse Mrs Anna Maria Adams, sister to the elder princesses’ beloved dresser or nurse, Miss Mary Dacres.
The even keel of the royal children’s life at Kew over which Lady Charlotte Finch and the princes’ governors presided was rocked violently in the spring of 1776. But Princess Mary’s birth was not responsible, nor was that of her cousin Prince William of Gloucester on 15 January 1776, at the Palazzo Teodoli in Rome, although his mother, the Duchess of Gloucester, exclaimed on 5 October of that year in a letter to her friend Elizabeth, Lady Nuneham that her son was ‘the surprise of all Rome’. Although only nine months old, his prodigious intelligence, she wrote fondly, caused a furore among her friends, as did his unswaddled limbs. ‘Several ladies have followed his fashion in dress,’ the Duchess informed her friend, ‘and some new born babies are now stretching and enjoying their limbs at liberty, who but for him would be bound up like mummies.’ Unfortunately, evidencing their royal uncle’s disapproval of their existence, this Italianate prodigy and his elder sister, Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester, were undignified by the title of royal highness and were unprovided for by Parliament.
The convulsion occurred at Kew in April 1776 and took the form of a ‘junior rebellion’ when Princess Mary was a few days old and the Declaration of Independence in America two months off. Lord Holderness, the Prince of Wales’s and Prince Frederick’s absentee governor, returned from the Continent to find the boys laughing in his face, and the Dutch House, or Prince of Wales’s House, at Kew alive with disobedience. With many apologies for the need to distract the King even for a moment from affairs of importance across the Atlantic, Lord Holderness and the sub-governor, Mr Leonard Smelt, resigned. The whole household was swept away, and new and grimmer preceptors installed. But the Shockwaves that the princes’ rebellion had caused in the community of Kew were not to be so easily brushed aside.
The Prince of Wales might still learn to box and fence and construe in Greek, and the new governor, the Duke of Montagu, might put on paper details of a Spartan regime, but the Prince had felt his power, and the struggle between royal father and son, which was to strain the princesses’ loyalty to both, had begun. ‘He is rather too fond of wine and women,’ the seventeen-year-old Prince was to write of himself in the autumn of 1779. If this was fantasy – he was still in the hands of governors, to whom his father had earlier deplored the Prince’s ‘bad habit … of not telling the truth’, as well as now his poor German – the wish would soon be father to the act. Suddenly with war in America, and the princes out of control, life at Kew was not so safe. ‘You shall always hear that I have been good,’ Princess Augusta wrote to her dresser. The princesses must be good for everyone.
‘Unhappily for me we have begun to hunt deer at Windsor,’ the Queen wrote to her brother Charles, ‘and since that moment all rational occupation cannot take place.’ A few months after the junior rebellion at Kew, as the rebel American colonists congregated in Philadelphia, fancy led the King of England to take up the sport of hunting at the ancient seat of Windsor, following the example of numerous monarchs from William the Conqueror, who built the castle, to the last of the Stuarts, dropsical Queen Anne, who pursued her quarry in a curricle. For a lodging King George III chose a house facing the south terrace of Windsor Castle that he had until recently rented out to Lord Talbot, and here he and the Queen stayed for the first time in early July 1776. It would be charming once the brown woodwork had taken on ‘une autre face’, the loyal wife told Charles.
But the Queen’s decorative schemes had to be put on hold, and her enthusiasm for Windsor flagged, after the King, with his architect Sir William Chambers, decreed that the house as it stood was far too small and that a new one, the Queen’s Lodge – a veritable barracks, with seventy rooms – should rise in its place. ‘The King is building it,’ the Queen wrote, informing Charles that the house was to be a gift to her, ‘but I am buying the furniture and I settle my accounts the moment they are delivered. Besides, I am in treaty for a garden and house next door to it, for which I am paying £4000.’ In the meantime, the King and Queen occupied apartments in Windsor Castle itself. As they had found six years earlier when they stayed there for the installation of their eldest sons as Knights of the Garter, it was cold, uncomfortable and inconvenient.
From this point on, when not occupied with public business, the King indulged himself to an unusual degree, in hunting and supervising the building of the Queen’s Lodge – with battlements on top to match those of King William the Conqueror on the Norman castle opposite. The royal couple spent a commensurate period of time, sometimes two days a week, at Windsor. ‘Ma vie sera tout à fait campagnarde,’ the Queen prophesied on 18 June 1776. With the demands of Court levèes and drawing rooms occupying another three days, she increasingly fretted that she was with her children only on Fridays and Saturdays. After a few years she wrote to her brother with exasperated good humour, ‘It is true we are pilgrims on earth, for we are very often at three different places in a week.’
The Queen valued the months at Kew from May to October as prime time for inculcating in her daughters the principles of orthography, religion, royal genealogy (Hanoverian and other), history ancient and modern, geography and languages. At Kew neither she nor her daughters nor any of the ladies who supervised or taught her daughters ‘dressed’ until shortly before dinner – and when they did, they employed their wardrobe women rather than hairdressers to attend to their coiffure. In 1777 the royal mother could not necessarily count on more than five years in which to conclude her plan of education for her eldest daughters at Kew and elsewhere before they took up the burdens associated with marriage which had deflected her from her own studies. Even now, when in London the two eldest princesses began to attend their parents in public – to breakfasts, to the play, to the opera. Their curled and powdered heads, their polonaises and ‘gewgawed’ or bejewelled necks and arms entranced the public when they issued forth, and were described in flattering detail in the newspapers. But their mother, equally bedecked and bedizened, regretted the hours lost to what she called ‘rational occupation’, while accepting the need to encounter Society.
The princesses had a first exposure to Windsor – a place that would be as much a part of their lives as Kew – in the summer of 1777, when they were of an age to appreciate the grandeur and history of the place, as well as the hugeness of both Castle and park. A new attendant, Miss Mary Hamilton, formed, with the princesses, part of an enormous royal caravan that travelled to Windsor in the earlier part of August, and stayed in apartments in the Castle. They were there to inspect the rising Queen’s Lodge, and to celebrate the beginnings of a late-come but earnest Hanoverian royal residence at William the Conqueror’s stronghold. The principal celebrations were fixed not for 1 August, the sixty-third anniversary of the accession in 1714 of the first Hanoverian King of England, George I – but for 12 August, his great-great-grandson George, Prince of Wales’s fifteenth birthday.
The princesses and their brothers and immediate ‘family’ were housed temporarily in towers and eyrie apartments on the east and south fronts of the Upper Ward, or in the state apartments occupying the entire north front with a view of Eton College chapel across the Thames. As for other members of the household, some had to climb the many steps to apartments at the top of the historic and moated Round Tower in Middle Ward which divided Upper Ward from Lower Ward. Others needed to be of a religious or humble cast of mind, as they were appointed apartments in the Deanery adjoining St George’s Chapel that Edward IV had built long before in the centre of the Castle buildings, or were lodged in the almshouses reserved generally for the quaintly named Poor Knights of Windsor. To make way for this royal assault, indignant tenants had been ejected from grace-and-favour lodgings everywhere within the Castle which time and monarchs had so long forgotten.
Some of the alterations to the Lodge that the Queen had made were finished, seven or eight rooms or so, and on the eve of the Prince of Wales’s birthday she and the King took the princesses over to view them. A day or so earlier, Miss Hamilton had seen them and wrote that the rooms were ‘furnished in a style of elegant simplicity … beautiful paper hangings, light carved gilt frames for looking glasses, worked chairs and painted frames, every room different. Curtains of fine white dimity with white cotton fringe – one set of chairs are knotted floss silk of different shades, sewn on to imitate natural flowers …’
What made more of an impression on eleven-year-old Princess Royal and her sisters than some rooms furnished with the Queen’s familiar elegance, or even the state rooms inside the castle – which had a tendency to admit rain – furnished by their Stuart kinsman King Charles II, were the festivities arranged for their brother’s birthday. And what no doubt made most impression of all was that their lessons on that day were deferred in honour of the event.
Cannons fired and bells rang to mark the day, and the royal family activities included a carriage procession through the Home Park and a tour of a newly built country house in the locality, before they dressed in their best in the evening to walk on the terrace beneath the south wall of the Castle that was the place of popular promenade. Even sixteen-month-old Princess Mary, who Miss Hamilton described as ‘a lovely elegant made child’, wore a lace frock over a blue silk coat, and was carried out of the Castle gate to take part in the procession. Both she and her elder sisters – ‘with their hair dressed upon high cushions, with stiff large curls powdered and pomatumed, small dress cap and diamond ornaments set in a formal manner such as stars etc.’ – were admired greatly. Their satisfied attendant, Miss Hamilton, thought that they looked uncommonly well and that the sophisticated costumes ‘suited them despite their tender years.’
The King was delighted by the enthusiasm and respect the townspeople of Windsor showed for the royal crocodile on the terrace, flattening themselves against the curtain wall of the Castle so as not to touch their exalted visitors and periodically shouting their regard. Miss Hamilton, who was shepherding the princesses’ younger brothers behind them, recorded the scene: ‘There was a great crowd, each saying aloud what they thought, without restraint… a host of nobility, fashionable persons, pretty women, smart girls, coxcombs, and abundance of clergy.’
Slowly the royal family processed to the end of the terrace, the King constantly halting to accost someone in the crowd, and bringing the rest of the family behind him up sharp in a flurry of silks and polonaises, powdered curls, dress-swords and governesses. At last he decreed the ‘terracing’ at an end, and the royal family finished the evening, listening from their apartments within the Castle to Sir George Lennox’s regimental band play in the quadrangle before their windows.
The princesses returned to Kew and to their studies the following day, but their brother’s birthday celebrations were the beginning for them of a long and not always happy association with Windsor, bringing with it dissipation of the children’s paradise that was Kew. The King their father would fire several of his daughters with the new enthusiasm he felt for all things rural, equestrian and agricultural. Long walks in the mud and riding and hunting in the rain would make of them true English countrywomen, as their Hanoverian aunts and great-aunts had not been. But the softer and more civilizing influence of their mother, who regarded long walks as barbaric and pined and suffered from crippling headaches within the thick walls of the Castle while the rest of the family braved the elements, would diminish – and her temper would fray.
There was dissipation of a happier kind, however, at Kew this summer when pretty young Miss Hamilton, who enjoyed giving the children treats, provided for the elder princesses and for Lady Charlotte’s granddaughter, Miss Augusta Feilding, in her apartment there a ‘little entertainment of fruit, flowers, cakes, tea etc.’. First the children played in the garden. Then Lady Charlotte, Gouly and Mrs Feilding joined them, and they played at Dumb Crambo, with forfeits ‘which gave rise to much amusement in framing punishments’. The princesses were ‘quite rakes’, recorded the successful hostess, ‘as Lady Charlotte allowed them to stay up till 10 o’clock’. When the party was at last at an end, wrote Miss Hamilton, ‘the flowers were tied up in nosegays and Princess Royal had the distribution of them, the cakes, etc.’.
The younger princes, Ernest, Augustus and Adolphus, also enjoyed Miss Hamilton’s ministrations. She lodged – and held her party – in the house that had recently been appropriated to their use on Kew Green, and that was now known as Prince Ernest’s House. On one occasion, when she formed part of the princes’ escort back to Kew from Windsor, they would not leave her, although they now had, with their new establishment, their own attendants. They even came into her room at Prince Ernest’s, she wrote: ‘the dear children had so completely found out my weak side.’
For the Queen, the King’s enthusiasm for Windsor engendered many logistical problems. Four days after the excitement of the Prince’s birthday at Windsor, Prince Frederick’s fourteenth birthday was spent in the comparative calm of Kew, but later that month of August 1777 it was decided that all his brothers and sisters should be present to celebrate Prince William’s twelfth birthday at Windsor. Under Miss Gouldsworthy’s and Miss Hamilton’s supervision, coaches shipped the three elder princesses, their three younger brothers and Princess Mary, in her wet-nurse Mrs Adams’s care, from Kew to Windsor and back again, with an escort of Light Horse to protect them en route. Mrs Adams was a useful member of the nursery for such expeditions, but when her charge was eighteen months old in October 1777 an event that was not unfamiliar in this royal family occurred. The approaching birth of a new baby dislodged the old wet-nurse from rooms that would be needed for the new one.
From the Queen’s House, Princess Augusta wrote to Miss Hamilton’s mother, shortly before the new baby was due, introducing herself and saying she hoped to encounter Miss Hamilton, who was at Kew, ‘when she comes to see the cradle of the new child Mama is to have …’ And she wrote again to her new correspondent, saying, ‘I hope you are as well as I expect. My dear friend your daughter, tell her when you see her that she is very good to me.’ Princess Augusta, aged just nine in the winter of 1777, was from an early age consumed with the problem of ‘being good’ and troubled by her lapses from that holy state.
Princess Sophia was born at the Queen’s House on 3 November 1777. ‘I was taken ill and delivered in the space of fifteen minutes,’ the Queen informed her brother Charles the following month. On this occasion, the King was very likely not hovering, as he had done so anxiously for the births of his elder daughters. While Queen Charlotte and the midwife, Mrs Johnson, were taken unawares by the speed at which the child shot into the world, the King was working against the clock, as the French moved closer to declaring war on Britain in sympathy with the Americans and in indignation against the English embargo of French ports.
Princess Sophia’s sisters, too, were preoccupied, as their beloved dresser Miss Dacres had suddenly abandoned her employment to become wife to their brothers’ page, Mr Henry Compton. Their letters to Miss Dacres on her departure and on her October marriage show how dependent they had been on this companion of their early childhood.
Princess Augusta’s response to the terrible loss of Miss Dacres was markedly mature, although her handwriting was huge and unformed. ‘I am very sorry that you do go away from me,’ she wrote on 20 October, ‘though at the same time I am glad that you will be happy. I hope sometimes you will come and see me and I hope that you will lead a happy life. I hope your sister [Mrs Adams, who had just quitted her post as wet-nurse to Princess Mary] is well. Dear heart, you can’t conceive what I felt when Mama told me you was to be married to Mr Compton. It caused me many tears when I heard it.’ The Princess rationalized her feelings in a letter to Gouly the same day: ‘Dear Miss Dacres is a great loss to me, for I love her with all my heart. I would [not] have lost her for all the world, but you know one can’t have always what one wants. She is the first loss I have had, for Mlle Krohme was a loss to me but not such a great one as Miss Dacres.’ When Mlle Krohme had died in April 1777, it was the Princess Royal who had been greatly affected.
The birth of Princess Sophia did not long distract Princess Augusta from writing affectionate letters. ‘My sisters and me have got in the lottery [a prize of] twenty pounds and what I have got is for you,’ she told ‘Cuppy’ – this was the name Prince Adolphus had manufactured for Mr Compton’s new bride – on 4 November. ‘I desire that you will always remember your poor child,’ she entreated her former dresser in another – undated – letter. ‘I assure you that she was very sorry when the Queen told her that you was to go away from her.’
‘I shall always remember how my dear Mrs Compton loved me,’ wrote Princess Augusta again, manfully to the new Mrs Compton. ‘And now I begin to repent that I did not behave well to you … I promise you that you shall always hear that I have been good.’ Pursuing this theme, she was to write to her mother from the Queen’s House on Boxing Day 1777,
Dear Mama, I am very glad to tell you that I am very good; this morning I behaved pretty well and this afternoon quite well. All my brothers and sisters send their duty to you and Augustus in particular for he told it to me about six times, give my love and duty to Mama, little dear Sophia is quite well and little Mary is pretty good. Dear Mama I am your most affectionate dauter December 26 1777 Augusta Sophia Queens House London.
The Princess Royal’s response to Miss Dacres’s happy change of circumstances was distinctly less affectionate than that of her younger sister. ‘How could you be so sly as not let anybody know of when you was to be married?’ the Princess Royal upbraided her former attendant the day after Princess Sophia’s birth, and wished her joy of a marriage ‘done, done, never to be undone.’ She tried blackmail: ‘I beg you will not go till after the christening.’ She was only sorry it was so soon. ‘I do not think you love me though I do you …’ wrote the unhappy Princess. Her angry refrain did not quickly diminish. ‘I am very much hurt at your loss,’ she wrote three days later, ‘… too soon of a week, of a year, at least I think so.’ For a month or more the Princess Royal bombarded her with requests and directions. ‘Princess Royal presents her compliments to Mrs Compton and begs she will do her the favour to come to breakfast next Sunday at nine o clock,’ ran one note. ‘Pray do tell me where your house is that I may kiss my hand to you every day, when I walk by your window,’ ran another. But it was swiftly followed by a rebuke. ‘Mr Compton told me it was his fault that I did not see you at the window … It was a baulk … I hope to see you there tomorrow.’
The Princess Royal’s amour-propre and sense of grievance were assuaged when Mrs Compton visited and showed contrition. And in addition the Queen and Lady Charlotte were taking steps to introduce the Princess Royal to an adult world. Earlier in the year she had been present at a private performance at the Queen’s House when the actor David Garrick had read from his tragedy Lethe. ‘Today,’ Royal wrote grandly to Mrs Compton on 5 December 1777, ‘I went on an airing with mama.’ But the Princess Royal was not out of the nursery yet. Thanking Mrs Compton two days later for another visit, she announced, ‘I now write by the light of the fire; laying on the ground.’ And on the day after Boxing Day she wrote to her mother, ‘Tomorrow I give a breakfast to my brothers and sisters and some other people. Last night we saw a magic lantern of Mrs Cheveley’s which made me laugh very much.’ She ended politely that she hoped the Queen had been able to go to Windsor.
Seven-year-old Princess Elizabeth was direct in her affection to her former dresser. She drew an accomplished picture of Cuppy’s new home on Kew Green and sent it, inscribed ‘this is your house’, to her with the message, ‘My dear Mrs Mary I love you with all my heart… I and my sisters wish that you will come to see us… Mary says your name very often.’
Mrs Henry Compton was not to enjoy the princesses’ regard long, for she died the following autumn at Kew, after giving birth in September 1778 to a daughter named Augusta. The princesses, however, had already transferred their affection to Mary Hamilton, the well-born young woman whom the Queen had appointed in April 1777 to join Lady Charlotte and Miss Gouldsworthy as ‘a third lady to be at the head of the establishment’. Although Miss Hamilton later wrote that she ‘never in [her] life had the least desire to belong to a Court’, this clever, lively – and young – companion was to play a major part in the princesses’ lives for five and a half years. The papers Miss Hamilton preserved after she had left royal employ include such examples of indentured schoolroom labour as the following improving text, copied out by Princess Augusta, aged nine, in her best – but not very good – handwriting on 17 July 1778: ‘Recreation, moderately used, is profitable to the body for health, and to the mind for refreshment: but it is a note of a vain mind, to be running after every garish pomp or show.’
Rather more revealing is the following scrawl by the same author written from Kew House:
My dear Miss Hamilton, I am very sorry for the blow I gave to you the night before last. I am very sorry indeed, and promise you I won’t do so any more. I have written to Gouly and she has forgiven me, because I have been very good with every body and her too, and I learnt very well with Monsieur Guiffardière. I read very well, and I said my verses well also. I beg you will forgive me, for indeed I will be very good to you, and I will mind every thing you bid me. I am very sorry that I hurt Miss Gouldsworthy. I promise you I won’t do so any more. But I hope I have not hurt you, and I was very sorry to find you put brown paper and arquebade upon your breast. I hope it will be of no consequence to you for I assure you that if it is, it will make me very unhappy. I am your ever affectionate Augusta Sophia.
And early in their acquaintance, discovering a taste for writing and for finding new correspondents, Princess Augusta wrote, while sitting with Miss Hamilton, a letter to her companion’s mother in Derbyshire: ‘My dear Madam, I hope that you are well Miss Ham sends her love to you but pray don’t forget to write to Miss Ham. Madam I am your most obedient servant AS.’ But then, apparently dissatisfied with these formal pleasantries, she added on the front: ‘28 November 1777, London, at night. Madam, Miss Ham. has a very bad headache, but for all that, she sat down and has writ you a very long letter and I shall be very angry with you if you don’t thank her.’ And finally, on the back fold, she added:
Dialogue between Clare and Eloise at Lambeth in Cornwall.
E: My dear friend, I had the pleasure to see your little brother last night.
Pray, has not he got a wig, for he had something like one?
C: He had, my dear, for he did tear his hair off his head. He is very sorry now that he has tore his hair off his head.
E: He was very handsome before he had that trick.
C: So he was.
And there the dialogue ends, with a note from the dramatist, ‘And good night, I am very sleepy.’
The Princess Royal’s letters to Miss Hamilton, on the other hand, like those she wrote to Mrs Compton, are full of threats and scolds and teases. ‘Princess Royal presents her compliments to Miss Hamilton,’ she wrote shortly before Christmas 1777, ‘and begs to know why she would not kiss her last night.’ And in the early part of the next year the Princess Royal, aged eleven, was in commanding form:
Madam, I am very sorry that you did not sleep well last night. I beg you will lay down and then not think of any thing but of a flock of sheep, and if you do not do that I shall not love you in the least, and I know that you will be very sorry for that, and if you do what I desire I will love you very much. Madam, your friend, Charlotte Augusta Matilda.
Miss Hamilton was quite up to such tricks, and called the eleven-year-old autocrat’s bluff next morning. The Princess Royal had to concede: ‘Madam, Though you did not think last night of a flock of sheep, yet as you did sleep more than the night before, I will love you a little bit. Pray give my love to your mama.’
Brought to heel, the Princess Royal wrote three days later on 17 January, ‘My dear, I thank you for your note, and I hope you think I minded what you told me, and that it will encourage you to continue your correspondence with me.’ And then she put a note in Miss Hamilton’s workbag: ‘Day and night I always think of you, for I love and esteem you.’ And she wrote again: ‘My dearest Hammy, I that love and adore you, think it very hard, that you will not kiss me today. I will tell you why I love you,’ she added, attempting to subdue her feelings. ‘This is the reason, for it is that I think you have a good character.’
The awkward, hungry notes continued, sometimes twice a day. The Princess wrote late in January: ‘Ma chère, Je vous assure que je vous aime de tout mon Coeur et je vous prie d’avoir la bonté de m’accorder votre amitié et si vous avez cette bonté vous me rendrez fort heureuse.’ But she had not finished there. On returning to the Queen’s House that night from drinking tea at Gouly’s apartment in St James’s, the Princess Royal’s first thought was of Miss Hamilton, who had had the evening off. And she sat down to write: ‘When we came home, only think, we went all three in Lady Charlotte’s [sedan] chair, and she walked on the side. I hope you was much pleased with the play and the farce. I assure you of my love and promise you always to continue it.’
Romantically, the lovesick Princess signed another note a couple of days later, ‘your most affectionate unknown friend’. She sent her love to Miss Hamilton’s mother in Derbyshire: ‘tell her that though I have not the happiness of knowing her, yet I love her because she belongs to you’. And she added, ‘Pray give me your love, for I wish for your love so much that I think you must give it to me, My dearest love, your little affectionate friend, Charlotte Augusta Matilda’. She returned to the theme two days later, afraid that she had made Miss Hamilton ill on some account. ‘Pray love me for I love you so much, and so it is fair. The publicans and sinners even loved those that loved them,’ she wrote with muddled logic but clear-eyed determination.
Despite the Princess’s declarations of affection, she made her attendant’s life difficult in time-honoured fashion, as the following letter of 6 February shows: ‘My dearest Hammy, I am very sorry to have tormented and hurt you, in not learning my lesson for Monsieur de Guiffardière, but I promise you to do my utmost for to know it perfecdy tomorrow.’ M. de Guiffardiere, a French émigré doctor of letters, had been chosen as the princesses’ principal master this year, and he was to suffer much at their inky hands. Later this year Princess Augusta begged Miss Hamilton to ask M. de Guiffardière ‘to not tell that foolish thing I did this morning, for I promise that I won’t do so any more’. (It had been a bad morning. Augusta was also seeking forgiveness from Gouly for ‘being so foolish this morning about my rhubarb.’ ) There would be more good intentions and inattention to follow from the princesses’ younger sisters over the next decade. Inclined to lose his temper with poorly prepared pupils, in this opening year M. de Guiffardière was full of hope. Eventually beloved, he was to dedicate to his royal pupils his Cours élémentaire d’histoire ancienne, à l’usage des LL. AA. Royales, Mesdames les Princesses de l’Angleterre, published at Windsor in 1798.
The princesses had lost another long-standing teacher this year. Although a Miss Planta continued to be the elder princesses’ English teacher, and to teach them other subjects including their own royal history, this was not Frederica Planta but her sister Margaret or Peggy. So discreet, so efficient and so self-effacing was the Planta family that when on 2 February 1778 Miss Frederica Planta died suddenly, she was immediately replaced by her younger sister. And her brother Joseph was only sorry to disturb the royal household with arrangements for removing his sister Frederica’s body from the room it occupied at St James’s Palace. As a Miss Planta continued to be the princesses’ companion, sit, walk and sup with them, and draw the same salary, many people never noticed the substitution. Besides, there were so many attendants now for the royal children that it was difficult for anyone to keep up with them – except for the children themselves.
Miss Hamilton appears to have directed the energies of her emotional pupil the Princess Royal effectively back into her studies. Besides M. de Guiffardière and the new Miss Planta and Mlle Suzanne Moula, the French teacher who replaced Miss Krohme, the princesses had other tutors for specific subjects ranging from their writing master Mr Peter Roberts to their geography master Mr George Bolton, and to dancing and music masters. In addition, the Princess Royal and Princess Augusta continued to learn German with Mr Schrader. By the time the royal family took up residence at Kew for the summer months, the Princess Royal was writing on a more respectful note: ‘My dearest, I beg you will forgive me intruding upon your morning leisure, but must beg that tomorrow you will breakfast with me. I am very sorry to find that you have so bad a headache, and beg that if tomorrow you have such another you will not think of coming to my breakfast.’
Her mother the Queen believed the Princess Royal to be a steady, conscientious pupil, and indeed she was when interested. When she was twelve, in 1778, for the first time an artist, John Alexander Gresse – known in London as Jack Grease – was employed as drawing master to the princesses, and the Princess Royal found something of a métier. With Gresse and other art masters Royal began ‘drawing heads’ every week, or copying Old Master profile drawings by Leonardo da Vinci and other heads by Italian and English eighteenth-century artists in her father’s library. The results were creditable, and marked the beginning of a passion for drawing and painting copies of superior originals in the pursuit of artistic excellence – as Sir Joshua Reynolds in his fashionable Discourses on Art advised.
In March 1778, the French broke off diplomatic relations with England and the King was at work from six in the morning until midnight without respite. ‘I speak, read and think of nothing but the war,’ wrote Queen Charlotte with energy, having recovered quickly from the birth of Princess Sophia. ‘Je deviendrai politique malgré moi.’ But busy King George III marked the birth of his fifth daughter – a round-headed, fair-haired baby with blue eyes – and sought Parliamentary provision in the spring of 1778 for the princesses and for his younger sons, which he had neglected to do until this point, and even for those of his brother Gloucester as princes and princesses of the blood. Although other woes would accrue to her lot, as she lay in her cradle round-faced Princess Sophia was assured of £6,000 a year for life, to be paid to her on marriage or on her father’s death. Her brothers were to receive £8,000 on the same terms, and her cousins Prince William of Gloucester and Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester won respectively £6,000 and £4,000 on their own father’s death.
The Queen wrote to the King in April 1778, ‘Dear little Minny [Mary] remains quite uneasy about not finding you anywhere in the house, every coach she sees is Papa coming and nothing satisfies her hardly but sitting at the window to look for you.’ For the King spent much of the summer months of that year reviewing troops at camps in locations varying from the West Country to Warley Common in Essex and Cox Heath in Kent, visiting the fleet at Portsmouth and elsewhere, and making preparations. These covered the vexed subject of arrangements for the care of the royal family against a French invasion that became a real threat the following year.
But the family still found time for a fleeting visit to Windsor to inspect the Queen’s Lodge. ‘It is astonishing to see the progress… since last year,’ Miss Hamilton wrote; ‘it is a spacious elegant structure, though standing on a confined space of ground.’ And the celebrated botanist Mrs Delany was lost in admiration at the effect of the Queen’s interior decor: ‘The entrance into the first room [in the Queen’s Lodge] was éblouissante after coming out of the sombre apartment in Windsor, all furnished with beautiful Indian paper, chairs covered with different embroideries of the liveliest colours, glasses, tables, sconces, in the best taste, the whole calculated to give the greatest cheerfulness to the place …’ The Queen and the princesses – Mary and the baby Sophia included – all lodged with the King and necessary attendants at the unfinished house for the few days they were at Windsor this summer. The Queen was later to refer to a neighbour’s unfinished country house as ‘unfurnished, unfinished, dirty and uncomfortable to the greatest degree’, and to complain of it as not appearing ‘the least cheerful’. She expanded on her theme: ‘A thing the most essential in a country place, is its being cheerful; for else it is not worth living at it.’
But the King was content, and surveyed energetically all the ‘improvements’ in a smart new ‘Windsor uniform’ – a blue coat with red collar and gold buttons – which he had devised, and which, it was decreed, not only he but all his sons and the equerries and male members of the ‘family’ were always to wear while resident at that place. When a royal cavalcade of ‘fifty-six personages’, counting the thirty-three servants in attendance, descended on the elderly Duchess of Portland and her companion Mrs Delany at Bulstrode, the King and all his ‘attendants’ besides wore this smart new uniform ‘of blue and gold’. Bidden to Windsor the following day with the Duchess to meet the remaining royal children – seven only having accompanied their parents to Bulstrode – Mrs Delany does not record whether the King, appearing at the head of all his seven sons, again sported the ‘Windsor uniform’. But she described young Princess Mary as ‘a delightful little creature, curtseying and prattling to everybody.’ And the child engaged Mrs Delany herself in conversation while they looked down from a bow window in the Castle at the crowds on the terrace below.
Mrs Cheveley – or Che Che, as she was known to the younger princes and princesses, who adored her – was the younger girls’ nurse, and had been their elder brother Ernest’s wet-nurse. Once described unforgettably as ‘rather handsome and of a showy appearance and a woman of exceeding good sense’, she was very much the younger children’s champion and took enormous pride in all their doings. She wrote after one visit to Windsor: ‘sweet Pss Mary has conquered and captivated every human being that has seen her. There never was a child so consummate in the art of pleasing, nor that could display herself to such advantage.’ Prince Ernest was her other favourite; she called him ‘my boy’, and described him approvingly as ‘rude’, ‘big’ and ‘noisy’. ‘I do not know that I have a right to hold the scales when Prince Ernest is to be weighed …’ she wrote, admitting her partiality.
Mrs Delany shared Mrs Cheveley’s admiration for her charge when the royal children partnered each other, over at the Queen’s Lodge, in minuets and country dances. The little ‘ball’ ended with the ‘delightful little Princess Mary’, a spectator all this time, dancing with her brother Adolphus ‘a dance of their own composing’. Lady Charlotte Finch had not lost her touch in twenty years of organizing displays of the children’s skills for their parents and guests to admire. Mrs Delany was less taken by the performance of the Princess Royal, observing with some surprise, when the girl danced with her eldest brother – a beautiful dancer – that she had ‘a very graceful, agreeable air, but not a good ear’.
One of the Duchess of Gloucester’s nieces who had apartments in the Deanery had written early on, echoing Lady Mary Coke’s earlier remarks on the lack of formality at Kew: ‘The King and Queen live at Windsor rather in too easy a style.’ And the Duchess’s niece Miss Laura Keppel – no friend to a family who did not recognize her aunt – further remarked of the King and Queen: ‘They make themselves, I think, too cheap. They walk about the park as other people do … They know all the tittle-tattle of the place and the Queen sits in the room Lord Talbot’s servants used to sit in to see everything that passes. I wish they had not thought of coming to Windsor …’ she concluded.
But the royal family had come to stay, and in the summer of 1779 they were finally installed for good in the Queen’s Lodge – ‘our new habitation, just the thing for us’, Queen Charlotte wrote approvingly. ‘The new building of offices advances very well and the Duke of St Albans’s house’ – to be known as Lower Lodge – ‘will be finished by the beginning of autumn.’ Usefully the garden of Lower Lodge connected with the southern stretches of the Queen’s Lodge garden. And so the children housed in either place – including a new Prince, Octavius, born that February – might come and go with ease. At Kew, at the top of the Green, Prince Ernest’s house had meanwhile, as we have seen, been acquired to accommodate that Prince, his two younger brothers, Augustus and Adolphus, and a swarm of attendants.
Prince William had left home – and a vexed relationship with his younger brother Edward – at the age of fourteen in June 1779, to board the Prince George, Rear Admiral Robert Digby’s flagship, at Portsmouth, and enter the Royal Navy as an able seaman. The impetuous Prince was cock-a-hoop. Less so was one of his tutors from Kew, Dr Majendie, whose unpleasant task it was to share the boy’s stateroom, monitor his behaviour on deck and on shore, and attempt to din some Latin and Greek into the royal recruit’s head. General Bude and the other tutors remained at Kew with dark, clever Prince Edward, who continued, in his solitary splendour, to be unpleasant to his elder brothers and haughty to his attendants. The princesses wrote to William in letters that spoke in every sentence of their affection for him, but Miss Hamilton noted that the Princess Royal was the only one of the royal children who seemed at all affected when their brother departed.
Mrs Delany, visiting Windsor this summer, found the sight of the King carrying around in his arms by turns Princess Sophia, not yet two, and the latest arrival, Octavius, delightful. Princess Mary – in a ‘cherry-coloured tabby’ or frock and ‘with silver leading strings’ – could not quite put a name to her interlocutor of a year earlier, but made her a ‘very low curtsey’ and greeted her: ‘How do you do, Duchess of Pordand’s friend?’ Less benign members of the small Court sighed at their seclusion, and reserved a special dislike for the now established practice of terracing, or walking on the terrace – whatever the weather. ‘Bring heavy shoes,’ ran one dismal note from Miss Gouldsworthy during an especially rainy spell at Windsor to Miss Hamilton at Kew, ‘the gravel on the terrace is so wet, thick shoes will not suffice.’
The royal females themselves were not above joining in the complaints. This summer, on 26 September, nine-year-old Princess Elizabeth wrote to Miss Hamilton at Kew from Windsor: ‘I ought to have told you that Lady Holderness and Lady Weymouth [two of the Queen’s ladies] are here. You know how I do dislike her, and like Lady Holderness, but I do promise you that I will take a great deal of care not to sit by her at dinner.’ The Queen herself wrote to Miss Hamilton the following year on 20 August: ‘Mrs Vesey … is in this neighbourhood and come twice to Lady Courtown in order to see the Royal Family upon the terrace. I made her two curtseys from the window and was told my politeness had almost thrown her down. I was sorry to find that I had been doing mischief. The princes’ and princesses’ liking for the company of their social inferiors – the nurses and pages and housekeepers and grooms at Kew and Windsor – and their tendency to make confidants of their attendants was of their parents’ making, and born of the seclusion in which they were kept.
The Queen was worried above all about the effect of this seclusion on her beloved eldest son. His liking for ‘low company’ and his influence on his younger brothers were not lost on her, and in private she and the King began to think of sending their second son Frederick to Germany to embark on a course of military studies there – away from the elder brother who was fast becoming, in their gloomy view, unfit to be useful to the world.
Meanwhile, Miss Hamilton was in the unhappy situation of having excited the Prince of Wales’s first amorous attentions. It being Princess Mary’s turn to be inoculated against smallpox by Surgeon Pennell Hawkins with her brother Adolphus in the spring of 1779, Miss Gouldsworthy had remained with them some weeks at Kew, while they lay in darkened rooms. During a previous inoculation the Queen trusted that ‘some Providence which has hitherto given me uncommon success in all my undertakings will not withhold it from me this time, as I can say it is not without praying for his assistance as the greatest and best of medicines I can put my confidence in.’ Providence was kind again, and Mary and Adolphus, or ‘Dolly’, came through their ordeal, although not without the three-year-old Princess, who was full of spots, being very fretful, especially when stopped from itching those on her scalp.
Miss Hamilton was obliged to take Gouly’s ‘post at the marble table’, against a wall of the drawing room in the Queen’s House, where the sub-governess was accustomed to spend her evenings standing while the elder princesses, seated within a family circle, ‘worked’ and read and played cards. Their companion, the sixteen-year-old Prince of Wales, was inspired to expostulations of excitement by his nightly viewing of sentinel Miss Hamilton, and he poured out his admiration for his sisters’ attendant in a series of impulsive letters that he smuggled to her over the course of the summer and autumn. Between – rejected – requests that he and his correspondent exchange lockets with romantic mottoes, the Prince revealed that he hoped he and his brother Frederick were to move to his grandmother’s former home, Carlton House on Pall Mall, within the year, abandoning governors: ‘towards midsummer we are both of us to dash in to the wide world.’ In preparation for this worldlier role, the Prince stole into Miss Hamilton’s apartment at Kew and seized a bouquet she had worn in her bosom to place it in his.
Like many who would come after her, and like his mother before her, Miss Hamilton appealed to the intelligence, feeling and sense she believed the Prince to possess: ‘I want to raise your virtues, for you have virtues. You have a heart too good ever totally to eradicate the love and admiration of what is virtuous.’ But she shuddered at the Prince’s impetuosity, and her side of the correspondence consisted more and more of remonstrances – about his liking for the company of his servants and grooms, about his habit of cursing like them. She had had her last reprimand delivered on New Year’s Eve 1779, after the Prince informed her – to her horror – that he had shifted his affection to a new object of admiration, an actress, Mrs Mary Robinson, whom he had contrived to meet. ‘A female in that line’, Miss Hamilton prophesied earlier in the month, ‘has too much trick and art not to be a very dangerous object.’
And now this boy so long secluded from the world did indeed plunge into vice, climbing out of his bedroom at Kew to keep midnight appointments with the actress – and, consequently, entering into an opposition to his father that would sorely try his sisters’ loyalties. Within months, Mrs Robinson was suing for breach of the many, many promises that her besotted young lover had made her, and the King had to pay her £5,000 in settlement of her claim.
To add insult to injury, the Prince took up with his reprobate uncle the Duke of Cumberland, who favoured the Whig cause. Long forbidden to appear at Court, the Duke was welcomed back into the fold with his brother Gloucester by the King after they supported him in restoring order in June 1780, when London was convulsed by serious riots. Under a banner of ‘No Popery’, with a willing London mob at their heels, Lord George Gordon and others, who objected to Parliamentary proposals to free Catholics from restrictions passed a century before, captured the streets, let loose prisoners and burned the Lord Chancellor Lord Mansfield’s house and library at Kenwood.
The King decreed that his brothers – but not their wives – should meet his children. So one week the Duke of Gloucester came. The next the Princesses Royal and Augusta, with their elder brothers, and the three little princes duly received the reprobate Duke of Cumberland, according to the Queen’s commands, in the Gallery at Kew House. The Duke stayed half an hour during which ‘the elder Princes, a l’ordinaire, made the little ones as noisy as possible’, wrote Gouly. But the main point had been established, in the King’s view – the princesses had not enquired after the health of their uncles’ duchesses. He failed to foresee that his brother would seem an object of glamour to his sons, and that, when the princes took their uncle back to their own house, where he remained till ten o’clock, it would be the beginning of an unwelcome friendship, and of a penchant for the Whig party.