The queen had written wistfully once of Bath, the watering place, which she said was ‘as full as an egg’ with fashionable summer visitors – English and foreign nobility among them – dancing and sniffing out scandal. Now she wrote, ‘I fear for my daughters one day or another, because one has to know the world to judge it, and to know how to behave there.’ Being alone, she went on, the tendency was to create a wicked world which had no basis; and on entering that world, it vanished into the air. The Queen also expressed doubts to her brother Charles about the wisdom of a policy which she intimated to be now not hers but the King’s – of keeping their elder children, and particularly their daughters, in the country and out of the way of a world which she did not believe to be any more wicked than it had ever been. ‘As we all do the same as each other, our conversation cannot be animated, and our life is too uniform and retired for us to gain knowledge of the world.’ It was not stimulating, she declared.
Horace Walpole, who had rejoiced in the Queen’s appetite for gaiety on her arrival in England and regretted her subsequent seclusion, would have agreed with her. Indeed had the Princess Royal been allowed to go about in the world a little, or permitted some friends of her own age, a fracas that developed in the summer of 1780 and came to a head shortly before her brother Prince Alfred was born in September might never have occurred.
The Princess Royal and Princess Augusta were left under the care of Miss Gouldsworthy this June, while Lady Charlotte and Miss Hamilton led a party of invalids in search of sea breezes and bathing machines at Eastbourne on the Sussex coast. Princess Elizabeth had been suffering from disfiguring boils that spring, and Prince Edward was sickly; Princess Sophia and Prince Octavius would profit from the change of air. Princess Mary remained with Gouly and her two elder sisters at Kew, while nurse Mrs Cheveley accompanied the younger children to Eastbourne.
Prince Edward with his retinue was lodged separately, but the two parties met each morning in the relaxed atmosphere of Compton House, a delightful villa in the neighbourhood with a library and garden pavilion. Here Prince Edward worked with his tutor, the Reverend John Fisher; here Princess Elizabeth read the Psalms and the chapter of the day with Lady Charlotte Finch and attended to ‘Various lessons from Lady Charlotte and myself in the absence of her teachers’, as Miss Hamilton recorded.
Among the early writings of the royal children that Miss Hamilton preserved is a ruled sheet on which Princess Elizabeth wrote out six times in some previous year, with varying degrees of success, ‘Forgetting of a wrong is a mild revenge.’ Three times she failed to fit the last word on the line. But she was by now an accomplished penwoman, having at the age of nine and a half on New Year’s Eve 1779 copied out: ‘Superiority in virtue is the most unpardonable provocation that can be given to a base mind, innocence is too amiable to be beheld without hatred and it is a secret acknowledgement of merit which the wicked are betrayed into when they pursue good men with violence.’
‘Sometimes Mr Fisher stays and obligingly instructs the pss in drawing, or she is again employed by lessons,’ Miss Hamilton told her colleagues at Kew. Princess Elizabeth was fortunate in her instructor. Her brother Edward’s preceptor or tutor, the Reverend John Fisher, was a gifted amateur artist, and the trouble he took with her at Compton House suggests that he recognized the flair that she was to bring to a remarkable career as a decorative artist.
‘Princess Elizabeth and my sweet engaging child Pss Sophia are playing about like butterflies in the sun and culling wild flowers on the grass,’ wrote Miss Hamilton, turning to less weighty matters, ‘whilst I am watching them and scribbling to you.’ The Queen at Windsor wished she was with them, and was to write, in the last month of her pregnancy, to her brother Charles in Germany, ‘I don’t believe a prisoner wishes more ardently for his liberty than I wish to be rid of my burden … If I knew it was for the last time I would be happy.’
Now she wrote to Lady Charlotte: ‘How happy should I be to make dear Sophia a visit in her bathing machine and how surprised would you be to find me in it, hélas! I must only think of it; in thoughts I am very very often with them all.’ The Queen admired from afar Elizabeth’s ‘steadiness’ in undergoing what the mother termed ‘that dreadful operation of bathing’. ‘You will allow her I am sure great merit’, she had told Lady Charlotte, ‘in feeling so much, saying nothing and yet doing what was right.’ Lady Charlotte herself stayed well clear of the bathing machine.
The Queen teased Miss Hamilton:
Pray can you tell me what punishment is to be made use of when the physician recommends bathing in the sea and it is not complied with? I am very impatient to have that point determined as I intend practising it upon a certain Miss M H who promised Dr Turton to wash herself quite clean, and who since her arrival at Eastbourne pretends to be a little fearful, for I dare not make use of the word which begins with a C for fear of shocking your delicacy …
Queen Charlotte wrote to Lady Charlotte Finch in July 1780, ‘Tell Miss Hamilton I hope soon to answer her letter. She makes me guilty of breaking a commandment, for I envy her writing so well.’
Princess Royal wrote to Miss Hamilton this summer from the Queen’s Lodge: ‘Dear Hammy, I have behaved well in every occasion except last Wednesday, that I danced ill. I am very sorry to be obliged to add that, but alas it is too true. However, I hope that you will not give me quite up, since I have done everything else well, and that [sic] I dance better last Friday.’ But the Princess Royal had greater sins to report, and wrote again at greater length: ‘My dearest Hammy, I return you ten thousand thanks for your letter, which is filled with the most undeniable truths. I have not now much time and therefore must defer for the present to give you an ingenuous account of myself, which I am afraid will not be very pleasant, but I hope with the next post to send you one which will please you better and give you more satisfaction.’ Turning to domestic news with relief, she added:
We have been at Windsor, Miss Planta and M Guiffardiere accompany us there. I have one hour every morning with the latter. Mama has worn the trimming you saw me work her last summer. She has ordered me for the present to put by my waistcoat, not because it was too great a piece of work for me but because she was afraid as I have not much time to work, it would dirty. I have bought myself a little Spa toilet for two guineas, which contains everything that can possibly be wanted. Pray give my love to all those it is due. Pray tell Elizabeth that next week I shall write to her.
This letter was very likely in reply to a remonstrance from Miss Hamilton. The Princess Royal had been behaving less than well to her attendant Miss Gouldsworthy, who wrote from Kew, worn out from having escorted the elder princesses three times in a week to the Queen’s House: ‘I return to this dungeon … heated to death and wishing… for the hour of going to bed.’ A month later she complained of ‘being dragged for two hot hours upon the terrace at Windsor’. Meanwhile, Miss Planta, the princesses’ English teacher, decried the damp at Kew, and ascribed her rheumatism of the last two years to the insalubrious surroundings.
In July Miss Planta wrote that the Queen would be most unhappy when she heard of the Princess Royal’s conduct to Gouly: ‘Miss G is much dissatisfied with the Pss R’s conduct and I am sorry to say it is far from amiable.’ Miss Planta had warned her pupil of the consequences to come: ‘Unless she corrects herself in time, the Queen will grow indifferent to her.’ But Gouly, that much tried sub-governess – who had now been with the family for nearly five years – tendered her resignation, which the Princess Royal had plainly hoped would be the result of her behaviour. She said to all and sundry that she wished Miss Hamilton – for whom she still had a passion – would replace Miss Gouldsworthy. The angry young Princess – fourteen on 29 September, six days after Prince Alfred’s birth – did not get her wish. Miss Gouldsworthy remained at the Queen’s request, and the Princess Royal’s rage subsided once the Eastbourne party – and dear Hammy – returned in October.
The Princess Royal’s sister Princess Augusta had a more equable temperament, and was much happier within the family circle, as a letter she wrote to Miss Hamilton the year before shows. It was the morning of her eleventh birthday:
My dear Hamy, This morning I waked at four and I found all my presents. But I would not look at them for fear that I should disturb Gouly and Princess Royal. At half after six the maid came in to make the fire. Then I waked a second time and I looked at them and I assure you that I liked them very much and when I came to the beautiful little purse you was so good as to give me I was as happy as a Queen, for if your present had not been what it was I should have had no play purse for tonight. As soon as I come to Kew you shall see all my presents …
Now she wrote from the Queen’s Lodge in July 1780: ‘Dear Hamy, I am now (as you see) performing my promise. You must promise to answer all my letters or else I will not write to you. We are now come to Windsor and for our sins are forced of Sunday evenings to walk on the terrace. I hope you mind and never show the scrawls that I write to you. We now always dine at the castle, for the King is fitting up a library here as well as at Kew.’ After adding the information that ‘We now do our hair in a new sort of fashion, we wear hats all day and no caps,’ she ended, ‘My dear Hamy, the letters having to go in half an hour, I can write now no more. My dear Madam, I am with the most profound respect your most humble and obedient servant as I know you like those titles.’
Augusta was cheerful, but other tempers were riding high in Windsor, including the King’s in the course of a tempestuous general election this August. Irritated by the Whig party’s plan of economy for the Court, he went into one of the silk mercers’ in the town and said, as one anecdotalist had it, ‘in his usual quick manner, “The queen wants a gown – wants a gown – No Keppel – No Keppel”.’ The mercer was convinced that he should vote for the Tory candidate in lieu of Admiral Lord Keppel, the Whig MP who had recently seen off the French fleet, and ‘all the royal brewers and butchers and bakers’ in the town followed suit. Further, the princes’ page Billy Ramus and some of the Queen’s band who lived at Kew Green were ordered by the King to appear at the Castle on the eve of the election, and ‘were put to bed at Windsor so as to vote as inhabitants.’
But Admiral Lord Keppel had his admirers within the royal family. Prince Augustus, aged seven, was locked up ‘in the nursery at Windsor for wearing Keppel colours.’ Presumably he had been dressed up by his elder brothers, for, in a first display of the sympathy with the Opposition that enraged their father, the Prince of Wales and Prince Frederick became ardent Keppelites during this bitter local contest. Indeed, the Prince of Wales would not speak to an equerry who cast his vote for the Tory candidate, Mr Peniston Portlock Powney – widely known as ‘The King’s Pony’ – who gained the seat.
Princess Augusta, for her part, found the political hullabaloo at Windsor tiresome, and wrote to Miss Hamilton: ‘I wish that the election was at an end for the noise is inexpressible. I believe that if you had all the children of Sussex all together in one room could not if possible be greater [sic].’ She was herself busy with a new pastime, making a coin collection:
Col Lumsden showed me some shillings, half crowns and one guinea of Q Eliz that one of the drummers dug up from under Herne’s Oak. They are to be sure very curious … My collection goes on very well, for General Freytag [the Hanoverian Minister] has given me some German coins of the late King [her great-grandfather King George II] and of the present King [her father].
At Eastbourne a month later, Princess Elizabeth received a letter from her father with less controversial news. ‘I was made glad to hear that my dear mama was so well and that I had got another brother,’ she wrote in reply. ‘Sophia says she has got a little grandson; Octavius she calls her son. Last night Lord and Lady Dartrey drank tea with Edward and me.’ Alone of the princesses and princes, Princess Elizabeth was to preserve a fondness for her brother Edward in later years, which was perhaps promoted by these months they spent together.
The cannons fired from the ships, and from the beach both yesterday and today. I was so overjoyed when I had your letter this morning, my dear Papa, that I could not settle myself to write. I beg my best duty to my dearest Mama. I have the pleasure of telling you that my brothers and sisters are well. I remain my dear papa your most dutiful and most affectionate daughter Elizabeth
Four months after the birth of Prince Alfred, her fourteenth child and ninth son, the Queen rejoiced in January 1781 to find that ‘the new year is begun without the want of a nurse’. And indeed as the next two years wore on without that need arising, there may have been agreement between husband and wife at this point that their family could be said to be complete. Nevertheless, the Queen and all the family were sincerely sorry to lose another of their number. While Prince William pursued his midshipman career in the Atlantic, the King despatched Prince Frederick in December 1780 to Hanover to pursue the military studies for which the boy had already showed some aptitude.
Over the course of the new year, the royal schoolroom and nursery were in some confusion. Not only had Miss Hamilton leave of absence for some weeks to nurse her mother in Derbyshire but Lady Charlotte Finch sailed for Lisbon to nurse her son, Lord Winchilsea. Stalwart Miss Gouldsworthy’s health declined so badly that she had not the breath to stoop to a writing table, Miss Hamilton told Lady Charlotte in early September. And to cap it all, one of Mrs Cheveley’s own three children had a bad eye, requiring her to take the whole brood to Margate for a month.
When she returned from Derbyshire, Miss Hamilton kept the absent Lady Charlotte informed about the progress of the princesses back home, writing on one occasion:
I must tell you a little anecdote of Pss Mary’s. When Lady J P [Juliana Penn, Lady Charlotte’s sister] came last night Pss M said, I am glad Lady Joully is come. One of her sisters told her she ought to call her Lady Juliana. ‘Oh,’ says she, ‘I don’t care how I call her, God bless her – I love her – she is so like dear Ly Char.’ And Pss Sophia, who is my great great favourite, says ‘Ly Cha is very ill natured to stay so long.’ She is continually enquiring after you.
Lady Charlotte Finch was still in Portugal, embroiled in family crises of her own, when the Princess Royal made her debut, not yet fifteen, at the King’s Birthday on 4 June 1781. Not only the Princess, but her mother, the masters and attendants who had coached her for the important event, and the whole household had to steel their nerves. But all went well. From Caldas on the coast north of Lisbon, Lady Charlotte wrote to Princess Elizabeth of the ‘satisfaction’ the King and Queen must have had ‘in seeing dear Princess Royal’s first appearance at the ball on the birthday’. She thought of it ‘continually’, she wrote, ‘tho, as my dear Princess Elizabeth will conceive, with almost as great regret, that I should have been absent at such a time; I can think of nothing that can make me amends for such a disappointment, till the time comes for my dear Princess Augusta and Princess Elizabeth to be called forth upon the like occasion, when I have no doubt they will do themselves as much honour as Princess Royal has done.’
Princess Elizabeth wrote to Miss Hamilton, ‘Last Wednesday William returned home from Portsmouth.’ The princesses’ beloved brother, now nearly sixteen, had stories to tell of being present at two sieges of Gibraltar, but his naval superiors in general were tried by his liking for drinking and brawling. ‘I hope you are better and will continue so,’ Princess Elizabeth wrote. ‘Augusta and me have got a delightful house [at Windsor] which is called the Lower Lodge, the rooms are delightful and very pleasant. I hope to see you in them soon, my dear. I hope you have not had so much thunder as we have had here. Mama has read a very fine sermon and two very pretty Spectators.’
The princesses took their cue in relationships with their attendants from their mother, who continued to endear herself to all her daughters’ attendants by the attention and great civility she showed them. ‘My dear Miss Hamilton,’ she wrote on one occasion, ‘What can I have to say? Not much indeed! But to wish you a good morning in the pretty blue and white room where I had the pleasure to sit and read with you The Hermit, a poem which is such a favourite with me that I have read it twice this summer. Oh what a blessing to keep good company. Very likely I should never have been acquainted with either poet or poem was it not for you.’ And again the Queen wrote to the same correspondent:
My dear Miss Hamilton, I find it with regret, that notwithstanding all my envy I cannot obtain that agreeable style of writing both you and Lady Charlotte Finch are possessed of. I grieve and fret for days about it, but it avails me nothing else but making me dissatisfied with myself, which is the true way of preventing my poor head to make any real progress in such a desirable talent. I shall therefore renounce all claim to elegance of style and desire you to be contented with a very simple natural way of writing, well meant at all times but making no pretensions whatever. Having prepared you for this I may without the least fear of offending your feelings upon that subject say anything that occurs to me without being criticized. I mean by that, severely, for a little will do me good, as I love to improve. Pray do not think me too old for that. It would be mortifying indeed.
But in June, when Miss Hamilton tried to resign in a letter stressing her delicate constitution, the Queen was as iron: ‘The contents of your letter I am inclined to take as the effect of low spirits and therefore won’t indulge you with an entire belief of what you have said …’ If her attendant persisted in her opinion, she must inform no one but the Queen, until the latter had gone through the ‘disagreeable’ business of finding a ‘proper person’ to replace her.
At the Prince of Wales’s nineteenth-birthday ball at Windsor in August, which lasted till six in the morning, Miss Hamilton wrote, ‘the Queen, Pss R and her sisters wore different coloured clothes, trimmed with silver and were all very fine’, while their brothers and father and others danced in the full Windsor dress uniform. ‘I wish I could convey a proper idea of the very brilliant and magnificent appearance of St George’s Hall which was the supper room,’ she wrote earlier in the letter. ‘It put me in mind of descriptions in the Tales of the Genii.’ Without incident the Princess Royal opened the ball with her brother, over 2,000 candles illuminating their progress down St George’s Hall, and there were even rumours of an approaching marriage – to none less than the Emperor of Austria – to confirm her adult status after a bold-faced English duchess in Vienna suggested her as a bride to that elderly and widowed sovereign. On His Imperial Majesty’s replying with courtesy that he thought the Princess might prefer a younger husband the determined peeress replied, ‘That is nothing, I married to my first husband an old man, and it did very well.’
At chapel on the birthday morning, Miss Hamilton wrote, the gentlemen wore ‘the undress uniform, the ladies, hats – smart polonaises – the hair well dressed, white cloaks, etc – each dressed agreeable to their own taste, except the princesses, who all wore rose colour trimmed with gauze’. Apropos of the Prince of Wales and churchgoing, Miss Hamilton noted demurely that he had taken up shooting and was very fond of it. ‘This morning he was going to set out [for a shooting party] as we went to chapel, he has quite left off attending divine service. On Sunday mornings,’ she added pointedly ‘their Majesties and the psses attend both the chapel and cathedral [the name by which St George’s Chapel was known].’ The Prince of Wales did not as yet enjoy independence in Carlton House in fashionable Pall Mall, but he had achieved a level of autonomy, having his own apartments in town at the Queen’s House as well as in the Castle at Windsor.
Meanwhile, Princess Augusta sent to Lady Charlotte Finch at Caldas what her governess described as ‘not only the most gracious, but the most entertaining’ two letters she ever received. ‘I have read them over and over again with the greatest pleasure.’ She went on to mention ‘a dear little girl here, that is excessively like my sweet Princess Augusta who dances delightfully, she is the cleverest little creature here and I am quite fond of her, I believe you can guess why’. Lady Charlotte encouraged Princess Augusta’s new hobby. She was acquiring ‘the different coin of this country to add to your Royal Highness’s collection’, although she had found no medals. She spoke of the formal dress for little girls in Portugal, and appeared to think of Princess Augusta, whom the first Miss Planta had earlier thought ‘childish’ for her age. And indeed, although in duty bound to follow her sister into the world, now that the Princess Royal had made her debut, twelve-year-old Princess Augusta was still fully occupied with her lessons.
In February 1781 she had copied out: ‘No character is more glorious, none more attractive of universal admiration and respect than that of helping those who are in no condition of helping themselves.’ And a month later she had written to Miss Hamilton, who was ill, from a schoolroom at St James’s Palace, ‘My dear Hamy, I am very sorry that it was not in my power to write to you this morning but I was a-doing my French lesson and I could not leave it off for to write … I looked when we came into the court to see if I could see you at the window but I don’t believe there was so much as a fly to be seen. We were very anxious to hear how you was, but nobody could tell. I am sorry that as I am under the same roof as you … I cannot see you.’
But she could also be upon occasion an unruly schoolgirl. ‘Madam,’ she wrote to Miss Hamilton, ‘I beg your pardon for what I did to you this morning. I promise you I won’t do so any more. I beg you will forgive me and indeed I won’t do so again. Indeed I shall be very sorry if you go away from us, for indeed I love you very much. Indeed I won’t behave ill to you again. I am very much ashamed of what I did and said this morning, upon my word, and won’t do so again.’ And she wrote again: ‘Madam, I beg that you will have the goodness to forgive me for all the impertinences I did you. I promise you that I won’t do so any more and promise you that I will do everything that you bid me.’ A small piece of paper bearing the faded inscription ‘Augusta Sophia, Queen’s Lodge, Windsor, August 14th 1781’ was docketed by Miss Hamilton with the words ‘As a mark of affection, Princess Augusta Sophia pricked herself with a pin and wrote this in her blood to give Miss Hamilton.’
The King was increasingly caught up in business about the war in America, especially after the news in November 1781 that the British commander-in-chief, Lord Cornwallis, had had to surrender in humiliating circumstances at Yorktown on 19 October to the American forces. The princesses grew up in an atmosphere rarely free of increasingly gloomy discussion about the great struggle overseas. Princess Augusta was nevertheless, under the influence of her father, to become particularly patriotic and fervently attached to the idea of the British soldier as the apogee of all that was valorous.
Prince Frederick in Hanover had been adventuring: ‘I was about one week ago in the mines of the Hartz where we were obliged to go down ladders for above thirteen hundred feet and up again, as for me I did not feel it in the least, but Grenville complained that his wrists ached the next day so terribly he could hardly stir.’ But nothing could compare with the glamour of Prince William joining the English forces deployed against the American rebels in New York. His sister Royal wrote to him in March 1782: ‘I hope that you do not really think that there is even a possibility of your being forgot at home, for indeed if you have the smallest suspicion of it, you do us all very great injustice, for you are generally spoken of several times in the course of the day.’ She wished that she could have seen him skate: ‘I am sure that before the end of the winter you will be able to do it very well.’ (As William was not yet adept, the other officers would skate along pulling him on a sledge over the frozen Hudson river, shouting, ‘Hooray for the Prince, hooray for the Prince.’) ‘All my brothers and sisters send their love to you. Octavius is very much improved since you have seen him by his change of dress,’ she ended.
At home Princesss Augusta’s behaviour was still erratic, and she was often repentant. ‘I assure you my dear Hamy’, she wrote in the summer of 1782, ‘that it is my most earnest desire to please the King and Queen and you, and that I will be obedient to everything you say and that I will put off childish things from this day forward and for ever more, and that I will always take it for granted that I should never be told anything if it was not for my good.’
But when the Queen broke the news in 1782 to this younger daughter that she was to appear at the King’s Birthday that year, the thirteen-year-old ‘was perfectly silent for some time’ from surprise. So the Queen told Lady Charlotte Finch, who was at the seaside at Deal this year – with Prince Alfred, who had recently been inoculated, and Mrs Cheveley. She added that, from not wishing her daughter to dwell upon her coming debut, she had told her of it only two days before it was to occur.
The Queen recorded that, even so, her daughter – who had not by any means grown out of her childhood shyness – ‘grew more timorous’ as the moment of her appearance approached. Public life of any kind and crowds in particular held terrors for this Princess. ‘We are … for our sins… forced of Sunday evenings to walk on the terrace,’ she had written two summers before at Windsor. But she ‘went through it very properly’, the Queen reported to the royal governess with relief after the Birthday that June; and ‘her behaviour was approved of. The newspapers, she went on, had been very kind to the juvenile debutante, saying that ‘the world admired the elegance of Princess Royal, and not less the modesty of the Royal Augusta’. Princess Augusta may have been formally ‘out’, but she was still a child. ‘I am very much obliged to you my dear Hamy,’ she wrote in September, ‘for having let me have a fire and assure you that you shall not be mortified by my proving that you did wrong, but I will not only be obedient to you and not meddle with it and not only be obedient about that but about all things which can give you any pleasure.’
Into this picture of domestic tranquillity – barring the Prince of Wales’s dissipations in the equerries’ room after dinner with his parents, and some debauchery in town – came, unannounced, death. Shortly after Princess Augusta made her debut in London in June 1782, Prince Alfred endeared himself at Deal to – among others – an old bluestocking lady by waving at her when asked to do so. He was at the seaside resort to recover his strength after being inoculated against smallpox. But he did not profit from his bathing. His face and especially his eyelids were still troublesome, with eruptions from his inoculation, and his chest continued weak. Nor did a session of horse riding – what his mother termed the ‘four-footed doctor’ – answer, an activity which Mr Pennell Hawkins the Queen’s Surgeon had recommended, disapproving of the child being carried around in Mrs Cheveley’s arms. Prince Alfred’s chest continued to be a problem on his return from Deal, and the doctors convened at Windsor in August to discuss his case. But it came as a complete shock to the family when they concurred in the opinion that the child could not survive more than a few weeks.
None of the fourteen royal children had ever been in more than passing poor health, or less than an advertisement for the skills of the Hawkins brothers, Mr Pennell and Sir Caesar (a baronet since 1778), who inoculated them and attended them in illness, and of Augustus Brande, the Mecklenburg apothecary who had set up shop at Kew. At one point when the Queen sent to her brother Charles a medical book that contained, she wrote, ‘the manner in which they care for children here from the moment of their birth’, she boasted, ‘Follow our method a little, and you will find that your children will become strong as anything.’
After prolonged bouts of fever, Prince Alfred – not yet two – died at Lower Lodge, Windsor in late August, despite the dedicated nursing of Lady Charlotte and Mrs Cheveley. They, first among others, received mourning lockets of pearl and amethyst containing curls of the dead boy’s light gold hair. The household did not, however, go into mourning, as it was not prescribed in the case of deaths of children under the age of seven. Alfred’s small body was buried with full honours at Westminster Abbey beside those of larger men of greater note, and his death affected the whole household. The Queen ‘cried vastly at first’, Lady Charlotte reported, ‘and … though very reasonable’ – she dwelt on her good fortune in having thirteen healthy children – was ‘very much hurt by her loss and the King also.’ The King, who was a blunt man, found his own comfort. He said that if it had been three-year-old Octavius who had died, he would have died too.
Princess Augusta had another cross to bear later this year. In November she wrote on a piece of paper for Miss Hamilton:
‘Question: Do you think I have behaved well this summer? Ans: (Pretty well upon the whole.)’ By your saying pretty well, I perceive you mean not quite yet what you could wish for. Therefore I hope that at the end of next winter when I ask you the same question, you will be able to answer ‘Yes,’ that I may have the pleasure of seeing that I have made you happy and improved myself, which I always mean to do.
But there was to be no such appraisal the following November, for six days after Augusta penned her memorandum Miss Hamilton departed, to live with her friends in London. Leave had at last been granted by the Queen for her resignation, and Miss Hamilton, like Miss Dacres before her, passed quietly out of the secluded circle within which the princesses existed.
Six months later, however, deeply agitated, Miss Hamilton made her way to the Queen’s House, seeking confirmation of a hideous rumour. Miss Planta wrote from Kew on 5 May 1783 to confirm the truth of what she had heard. ‘My heart bleeds for the King and Queen for indeed you see in them the resigned Christian in the afflicted parent,’ wrote the English teacher. ‘I need not say more to you, who were witness to the melancholy event which happened not many months ago [Prince Alfred’s death]. I believe we shall remain here till the last duty is paid to the dear departed angel.’
Out of the blue at Windsor a few days earlier, from being his usual ebullient self, Prince Octavius had sickened over a period of less than forty-eight hours, and, despite the frantic attentions of all the royal doctors, had died at Kew at 8.40 in the evening of 3 May. Although he had been inoculated with Sophia weeks earlier, smallpox had had nothing to do with his death. Mrs Cheveley, who had nursed him as she had nursed Alfred, was unfortunately firm on the point. So rumours that he was a victim of his Gotha blood, and that both he and Alfred had succumbed to the ‘family disease’ – sometimes named as scrofula, and sometimes as ‘a weakness in the lungs’, or tuberculosis – circulated. Whatever the cause of the child’s death, the King was quite undone by it. As Princess Augusta was later to recall, the next day her father passed through a room at Windsor, where the artist Gainsborough was putting the finishing touches to portraits of the royal family. The King sent a message to beg the artist to desist, but, on hearing that the work on which he was engaged was the portrait of Prince Octavius, allowed him to continue.
At the Royal Academy summer exhibition a week after Octavius’s shocking death, the royal family inspected Gainsborough’s ‘numerical’ work – oval heads of the King and Queen, and of all their children, excluding the absent Prince Frederick. There in the bottom right-hand corner were Octavius, bright eyed and golden haired–just as he had been in life – and diminutive Alfred, still in baby clothes, ‘painted by remembrance.’ The princesses, trained not to show emotion in public, were overcome and cried, regardless of their company. These portraits of their dead brothers, when hung in the Queen’s House and when later engraved, became life-long talismans for the princesses of what had been.
Over the Birthday in June 1783 hung the cloud not only of the coming peace negotiations with a victorious America, but of Octavius’s death. The King was at least as cast down by his four-year-old son’s death in May as he was by the negotiations that in Paris that September would accord the American rebels full independence and establish an American republic.
But, for the Queen and for her daughters, there were immediate concerns to divert them from their grief. In July, Princess Royal and Princess Augusta acquired their first ever lady-in-waiting – Lady Elizabeth Waldegrave. It was a practical acknowledgement that, at rising seventeen, Princess Royal now took drawing, painting and even the dread music lessons to avoid idleness rather than because her education was incomplete. The Queen warned her old friend Lady Holderness, who had recommended Lady Elizabeth, to put the new recruit on guard: ‘See her and tell her my way of things, particularly how I hate intrigues and that I must insist that in case she ever sees anything improper in the princesses’ behaviour I must be told of it, and that I am the person she must talk to.’
At the age of thirty-nine, the Queen herself was expecting a fifteenth child, conceived after Prince Alfred’s death and due early this August. A cradle with satin curtains and a matching coverlet was made ready. Mrs Johnson, who had been first employed as royal midwife seventeen years before at the Princess Royal’s birth, was in attendance. And on 7 August 1783 Queen Charlotte gave birth to a sixth princess, named Amelia in compliment to her wealthy great-aunt in London.
The birth of Princess Amelia at Windsor – the only child of the King and Queen to be born there – acted as a tonic on her father’s spirits. While grieving for Octavius, he was as proud and possessive a parent as though Princess Amelia had been his first child. Amelia was to be the most turbulent and tempestuous of all the princesses. She would show a strength of will that would surprise and divide her doting relations, but as yet, beneath the ivory satin curtains of her cradle and under the coverlet embroidered with garden flowers, she was merely the latest royal baby in a long line.
The birth of Amelia did not obliterate for her sisters the memory of their brothers Alfred and Octavius, but they did not dwell on the death of the latter, as their father did. Three months after Amelia was born, the King wrote to Lord Dartmouth that every day ‘increases the chasm I do feel for that beloved object [Octavius]’. The artist Benjamin West probably best soothed the King’s ‘woe’, if he astonished others, with a huge painting entitled The Apotheosis of Prince Octavius exhibited at the Royal Academy the year after that Prince’s death, and featuring Prince Alfred perched on a cloud and stretching out baby arms in welcome to his elder brother. Way below, an earthly landscape features Windsor Castle, from which Prince Octavius has presumably been launched.
The King’s feelings of political frustration about the humiliating final stages of the American war had led him to consider abdicating the throne of England and retiring to Hanover. Amelia’s birth, following so swiftly on Octavius’s death and followed itself a month later by the firing of the Tower guns signalling peace between England and the new United States of America, was felt, and was always to be remembered within the family, as a time of hope and redemption.
For many years Amelia was to repay this investment in her by being quite as beautiful and winning a child as her brother Octavius had ever been. With hindsight, it is possible to say that she was a child of whom too much was expected. ‘Our little sister is without exception one of the prettiest children that I have ever seen,’ the Princess Royal, in September,
wrote with satisfaction to her brother William, who had been despatched the previous month to Hanover. (His parents had been horrified at his rough sailor’s manners and hoped that a course in his father’s Electorate would prepare him better to be an officer.) She regretted that, being absent, he would miss Amelia’s christening, and, with the material rather than spiritual comforts the day would bring in mind, wrote, ‘I wish that I could send you some of the plum cake in my letter … but that being impossible you must be satisfied with my wishes.’
So great was the gap in age between the Princess Royal and Princess Augusta and their baby sister, that the elder sisters, at nearly seventeen and nearly fifteen, stood godparents – with their brother the Prince of Wales – when the Archbishop of Canterbury baptized the child on 17 September 1783 at the Chapel Royal, St James’s. Princess Elizabeth, whose debut had not yet been decided upon, looked on with her younger brothers and sisters. Princess Amelia was the fifteenth child of King George III and Queen Charlotte to be christened there – and, although no one knew it, she was to be the last. Before the chapel would again host a royal baptism, one or other of the children gathered around Amelia’s font must first take a bride or groom.