One thing was certain. Over the Queen of England’s dead body would her sister-in-law the Duchess of Brunswick succeed in the campaign she had recently resumed to secure the Princess Royal as a bride for her ill-favoured son, the Hereditary Prince of that duchy. ‘I would much rather keep all my daughters with me for ever than see them marry there,’ the Queen wrote to her brother Duke Charles in July 1783. The King’s sister Augusta – Duchess of Brunswick since 1780 – had recently married off her own eldest daughter Augusta, at the age of fifteen, to the Hereditary Prince of Württemberg. The King rejected his sister’s advances in November 1782, saying that he intended none of his daughters to leave home before they were seventeen. He later ignored the Duchess’s riposte, ‘Your princesses must be very different from all other girls, if they did not feel themselves unfortunate not to be established.’ The Princess Royal turned seventeen in September 1783, but her father made no plans to interrupt her round of education ‘reasonable occupation’ and entertainment with her sisters in England.
Details of that round follow from the correspondence that Princess Augusta struck up with her brother William in Hanover: ‘We walk for two hours of a morning and our instructions last from eleven till two. Then I have an hour’s English reading from three to four and sometimes go out with Mama,’ wrote Princess Augusta on 6 November 1783. One imagines her sucking her pen and thinking what next to say. Inspiration came: ‘We went the other day to Baron Alvensleben [the Hanoverian Minister at the Court of St James’s] at Ham Common who gave us a very handsome breakfast. From thence we went to Hampton Court Palace, which I think very fine. Last Thursday we went to Kew, and we drove around Richmond Garden, where there are great alterations for the better. We always go to town with Papa and Mama, and then go to the drawing room and the play. Sometimes we play at cards in the evening, sometimes work, and draw.’ But Princess Augusta’s letter was not finished. William had sent her a ‘pin’ or brooch bearing a ‘shade’ or silhouette of his profile, Augusta had sent him some of her hair. ‘I cannot help once more thanking you for your dear little shade which I love being your gift and being yourself. You cannot have more love for my hair as you are so good to say you have than me for this pin.’
Given time and practice, Princess Augusta would become an excellent and reliable source of family news. But the Queen did not now encourage her daughters to write to their brother. ‘Their mornings are so taken up with their different masters,’ she wrote to William in February 1784, ‘that unless they make use of every moment, they hardly can find time for writing letters.’ And the Queen wrote to William of a promised gift: ‘I shall be glad to have your picture, but give me leave to advise you that your income is not that of your elder brothers.’
William, for all his sisters’ good wishes, was failing to reap the advantage of the courses in Hanover which his father had hoped would teach him to become a useful officer. His governor, General Bude, commented on the Prince’s ‘great hauteur … extremely good opinion of himself’ and ‘lightness of character. All he hears in praise of his brother [Frederick] excites his jealousy, not his emulation.’ And a passion William developed for the daughter of his uncle Charles of Mecklenburg, ‘Lolo’ or Charlotte, ended with that Princess, on Queen Charlotte’s advice, being despatched to her maternal grandmother in Darmstadt to evade the importunate Prince.
The elder princesses at home revelled in William’s attention, the Princess Royal writing on 30 March 1784: ‘I wish that the air balloon earrings that you sent-me could transport me through the air, that I might see you and Frederick, and that after having spent a few hours with you, I might return in the same way.’ Princess Augusta hoped, too, and for the same reason, that ‘the air balloons were brought to perfection’. ‘But she added, not knowing how famous one Vincenzo Lunardi would become within a few months, ‘I don’t think that will be very soon.’
Like her father, the Princess Royal was incapable of writing without casting a damper on things, and her letter had begun, ‘My dear William, I am very happy to hear from the Queen that you pass your time pleasantly at Hanover. Perhaps you may wonder that, knowing this, I should be selfish enough to wish you to be here, where you would certainly not enjoy as many amusements. But, however, there are some pleasures which I do not doubt would afford you much satisfaction.’ And she wrote of Mary and Sophia attending the opera for the first time the night before, ‘they were very much entertained with the dancing.’
While the schoolroom – with its lessons in history, geography and needlework – was still the usual province of the younger princesses Mary and Sophia, the three eldest were much with their parents. Their ‘instructions’ came more and more often from art masters and music masters, and from those among them who had some speciality or ‘fancy work’ to offer – painting on velvet, etching, sculpting in wax or in clay, and even ‘blotting’, the art of creating landscapes out of ink blots. And of course the princesses continued to draw – daily, nightly. Mrs Delany attests to them sitting with their mother round a large table after dinner with ‘books, work, pencils and paper’ spread out. The Queen, always on the alert for dispelling ‘oisiveté’ or leisure time with ‘reasonable occupation’ for her daughters, made sure that they pursued these studies as seriously as though their lives depended on it.
The Princess Royal etched her image of Prince Octavius in 1785, copying a copy by her drawing master, John Gresse, of the Gainsborough original. In addition, she made five etchings of languorous ladies, entided The Five Senses, which she copied from drawings by Benjamin West, apparently made for her specific use. (West was everywhere at Windsor – even called in, when the Queen and her daughters were with their hairdresser at the Lodge, to give his opinion of the arrangement of jewels in their hair.) In the King’s libraries in London, Kew and Windsor were remarkable sets of drawings by artists ranging from Leonardo da Vinci to Piazzetta, and even prints by John Hamilton Mortimer, who specialized in theatrical portrait heads. With this splendid resource to hand, and with the guidance of John Gresse, the princesses copied the heads of philosophers, of peasant children and of turbaned Saracens. Princess Elizabeth even produced much later a portrait of Lady Charlotte Finch, copying the image from an earlier miniature.
Just as at Kew, like their mother and the other ladies of the household, the princesses did not ‘dress’ till dinner at Windsor, but wore morning gowns. Thus on a visit to Bulstrode in 1783 all five princesses, and the other ladies of the party, wore ‘white muslin polonaises, white chip hats, with white feathers.’ The Queen alone was distinguished by a black hat and cloak. Cloaks and greatcoats were useful when the need came to broach the great outdoors, or even just the wind in the passages at Windsor. Even after the princesses had ‘dressed’, they did not always appear in splendour. On an evening visit in 1779 to Bulstrode they wore, like their mother and her ladies, ‘blue tabby, with white satin puckered petticoats, with a blue border, and their heads quite low.’ Mrs Delany noted on a visit to the Queen’s Lodge in the autumn of 1783: ‘All the royal family were dressed in a uniform for the demi-saison, of a violet blue armozine, with gauze aprons, etc’ The Queen was distinguished by ‘the addition of a great many fine pearls.’
For high days and holidays, and for appearances in public – at Court, at the theatre, at the Ancient Music concerts of which the King and Queen were so fond – the princesses were dressed distinctively, either exactly alike or in the same dress in different colours. As early as the Princess Royal’s thirteenth birthday, for instance, she was in ‘deep orange or scarlet’ – by candlelight, Mrs Delany could not distinguish which – with Princess Augusta in pink and Elizabeth in blue. In addition their dress generally referred to or replicated that of their mother’s grander production.
Augusta wrote of attending five oratorios in Lent 1784 with her mother ‘and once to see Mrs Abington the famous comic actress.’ Dresses were needed for all such public occasions, as well as for Court appearances, and the Queen and her milliners in consultation at the Queen’s House generally chose the cloth for the princesses. The princesses had their own part to play, choosing trimmings, painting fans and buying, with their pin money, cheap ornamental jewellery. But the Queen experienced financial woes, which she described to her brother Charles: ‘My expenses with five daughters, of whom the oldest appear at Court and are always with us in public, require all the economy imaginable. A sum immense. Their masters, servants and wardrobes above all consume a considerable sum’ – the last item, she estimated, between £1,500 and £2,000 pounds a quarter.
Although the King was to add £8,000 annually to the Queen’s income of £50,000 beginning in August 1786, the following month she presented her Lord Chamberlain with a paper her Treasurer, Lord Guilford, had given her at the end of July, showing a shortfall of £11,000 to be paid. When the King enquired about these debts, the Lord Chamberlain ‘told him it was likely to be worse rather than better as the Princesses grew up.’ On Princess Mary and Sophia at that date the Queen reckoned to spend a thousand pounds each a year, and even on Princess Amelia, who was then just three, £500. Later Princess Mary was to confirm that she and Sophia had a thousand a year, but she added that her three elder sisters received double that sum. Where possible, the Queen kept the younger children in clothes made by country dressmakers, and their food was plain. But otherwise she appears to have made no economies. Her instinct was to give her children – and especially her elder daughters – the very best, particularly where their education was concerned.
The Queen found educational opportunities even where others saw only pleasure. At the theatre in 1783 the royal family thrilled – like the rest of the theatre-going public – to Mrs Sarah Siddons’s displays of disdain and indignation in her great role as The Mourning Bride. ‘It was worth the trouble of a day’s journey to see her but walk down the stage,’ wrote one admirer. But then the Queen summoned the tragedienne, as she had once summoned David Garrick, to give readings at the Queen’s House. Mrs Siddons was too stately to feel much awe as she waited to perform in her sacque, hoop, double ruffles and lappets. She reasoned that she was in her natural element, as she had frequently ‘personated’ queens on the stage. But the appearance of the King on one occasion, pushing Amelia in her cane baby chair, and the child, released, showing an interest in the flowers at her bosom did help the situation. ‘What a beautiful child. How I long to kiss her,’ Mrs Siddons said aloud. But young Amelia had her own ideas, and ‘instantly held her little hand out to be kissed, so early had she learnt the lessons of Royalty.’
Garrick too had been disconcerted by the royal family’s lack of expression – and lack of applause – when he read to them, but Mrs Siddons was more confident. With queenly grace she wrote later, ‘Their Majesties were the most gratifying of audiences, because the most marvellously attentive.’ Her reward was to be appointed ‘reading preceptress’ to the princesses – she was, according to Mrs Papendiek, the diarist wife of a royal page, appointed to ‘teach the two youngest princesses to read and enunciate’ – although the post was ‘without emolument.’ At any rate, she read plays to the royal family on a regular basis at the Queen’s House, and performances from Mrs Siddons at Windsor became an established treat for the princesses on their birthdays. The King and Queen generally commissioned the great actress, with scant regard for her art, to enact ‘sentimental comedy.’
The three eldest princesses were becoming a familiar sight in public, in attendance on their parents – all ‘uncommonly handsome, each in their different way’, according to one observer: ‘The Princess Royal for figure, the Princess Augusta for countenance, and the Princess Elizabeth for face.’ The Prince of Wales had the royal favourite, Gainsborough, paint them as a group this summer – for the salon at his new palace, Carlton House. When exhibited by the painter, the princesses’ polite faces – masks of impersonal beauty – fascinated the public. Only their different accessories hinted at different personalities and tastes. The public could choose to see the images again when Gainsborough showed the painting two years later. The Carlton House salon, for which the painting was destined, was not yet ready to receive either real-life or painted princesses.
The Prince of Wales was proving, like his brother William, a less than tractable son. At the general election in March 1784, when the Duchess of Devonshire famously kissed a butcher to secure his vote for the Whig candidate Charles James Fox, the young Prince gave a party to celebrate the victory that followed. An introduction to a Catholic widow, Maria Fitzherbert – an intimate of the Duchess of Devonshire – sealed the callow Prince’s fate. He became obsessed, the plaything of his emotions – in which frustration predominated, when Mrs Fitzherbert refused to become his mistress. He had taken no notice of expense in rebuilding Carlton House. In pursuing a Catholic with extravagant offers of marriage, as he now did, he took no notice of two distinct acts of Parliament which forbade any such activity.
Mrs Fitzherbert, with great good sense, paid little attention to the Prince’s offers of marriage, until startled into consent after the frustrated Prince stabbed himself. The play-actor Prince so frightened his lady-love with groans and cosmetic pallor that she agreed to have a ring placed on her finger – the Duchess of Devonshire provided it. Next day Mrs Fitzherbert fled – and did not stop till she reached the comparative safety of Aix-la-Chapelle.
Mrs Fitzherbert was wise to depart. The ring-giving, though scarcely a contract of marriage, had come too close to an act – namely, the heir apparent’s marriage to a Catholic and without his father’s permission – which would have been illegal on two counts. Had the couple married, by the Act of Succession of 1689, which forbade the Prince’s marriage to a Catholic, and by the 1772 Royal Marriages Act, which invalidated his marriage without his father’s permission, the Prince would have forfeited his place in the succession. As matters stood, no harm had come to the throne from the Prince’s theatricals. But when, as he had to, he revealed his growing debts to his father, the King, who had heard all about his bedroom theatricals and was already furious with him, was disinclined to help. As a result of all this, the princesses saw little of their eldest brother at this time.
The King was barely more pleased with William, writing in August 1784 that, with thirteen children, he could not afford to pay any of the Prince’s further debts. He despatched Prince Edward, a son of whom he had higher hopes, to join that paragon Prince Frederick in Hanover. With great economy the ship that took Edward across the North Sea to Hamburg in May 1785 found both Frederick – newly created Duke of York and Albany – and William waiting there. The Duke of York was to lead Edward into good ways at Hanover, reprobate William was to board the ship and set sail for the West Indies.
In their letters to their brothers abroad, the princesses did not mention a very cautious offer of marriage that was aired in the summer of 1785. Some at the Court of Denmark were eager to secure ‘a Princess of England’ as a bride for their cousin the Prince Royal of that important state, but they had heard at St Petersburg ‘that the King of England would not consent to send any of the English princesses to Denmark’. Hugh Elliot, the British Minister at Copenhagen, joined in the intrigue with zest and journeyed to London in June expressly to discover the truth of this.
The Prince Royal was willing to break off ‘other engagements’ that were being considered in favour of an English bride, he announced. But the King was dismissive of the proposal: ‘After the treatment my late sister received, no one in my house can be desirous of the alliance.’ (The Crown Prince was, of course, the product of that unhappy marriage between King George Ill’s sister Caroline and King Christian VII which had seen that Queen exiled and living out the last few years of a short life under her brother’s protection in Germany.) The King firmly discouraged ‘all negotiation … till time may show to both Courts that it would be right to think of it’, which would not be before the Prince Royal succeeded his father. But the proposal, and especially the Danish Court’s apparent preference for Princess Augusta over her elder sister, caused a stir in the family circle. Even a year later, M. Guiffardiere, who took liberties others did not dare to, made Princess Augusta blush with some teasing references to her imaginary fondness for the plays of a particular country, which, it emerged, was Denmark. ‘How can you be such a fool!’ was her response.
Princess Augusta was still happy at home with her sisters – and ‘doted on’ the company of her younger brothers Ernest, Augustus and Adolphus. Adolphus, benevolent if not blessed with brains, was a general favourite. Augustus, intelligent and bookish, had romantic aspirations to join the navy, although he suffered attacks of asthma. And handsome, boisterous Ernest was quite as entertaining and unmanageable as he had been as a child. The King arranged, rather than promoted, the education of these younger princes, just as the Queen did not lavish on the education and upbringing of the younger princesses the thought and care that she had given, and that she continued to give, despite their advancing ages, to that of their elders.
Prince Ernest was to claim of their life at Kew, ‘we used to sup alone and be as lonely as monks.’ But their preceptors were on the whole young and cheerful, and he exaggerated. Everyone in the royal household enjoyed the company of the younger princes, certain in the knowledge that they would soon be following their elder brothers abroad. Princess Augusta gives a flavour of the princesses’ relationships with these younger brothers in an account she wrote of a visit in 1785 to Nuneham Courtenay, a magnificent country villa near Oxford and home of the Harcourts, one of the few ‘fashionable’ couples to hold key positions at Court.
The royal party, including the King and Queen, the three eldest princesses and Princes Ernest, Augustus and Adolphus with a tutor, set out in three chaises and a coach from Windsor at seven in the morning so as to be at Nuneham for breakfast. ‘A very good one indeed!’ commented Augusta, ‘and I think I was one of them who relished it the most, though I had eaten a sandwich before with the greatest appetite …’ That misdemeanour was ‘my sisters’ fault’, Augusta wrote in exculpation, ‘for they ordered that some might be put in the carriage’.
Only a day’s visit was planned, but in the interval before dinner in the octagon room Lord Harcourt mentioned to the King that ‘he had a private key of Christ Church Walk, and that he could see Oxford without the least trouble … and that if his Majesty would like to make Nuneham his inn, it would make the owners of it very happy.’ Princess Augusta reported her father’s reply, ‘Why, Lord Harcourt, it’s very tempting,’ and went on:
Mamma, my brother, sister, and myself (not by far the least delighted of the family) kept our wishful eyes upon the King, who fixed his upon Mamma; and upon her saying, ‘I will do as you please,’ he said, ‘Well, with all my heart let us stay’. During all this conversation, I think our countenances were so curiously ridiculous, and I don’t doubt that our soliloquies were as much so, that anybody must have laughed if they had looked on us, without knowing why we looked ‘so strange, so wondrous strange’. For my part, I know I could not refrain from saying, ‘And O ye Ministers of Heaven protect me! For I shall be in despair if we do not stay.’ However I was so completely happy when I found we did not go back till the next day, that my spirits rose mountains high in half a second. ‘Thank you, my dear Lady Harcourt,’ ‘God bless you, Lord Harcourt, heaven preserve you both’, ‘You are the very best people in the Kingdom after Papa and Mamma’. These were the sayings for the rest of the day.
Princess Augusta’s account of the royal children’s conversation on the subject of the bedrooms in the fashionable mansion they were to inhabit is compelling.
‘Dear Augustus’ (said Ernest), ‘think how amazing good of Lord Harcourt; he has promised me that I shall sleep alone. I have seen my room, it has a yellow damask bed. I have got a toilette too, with fine japan boxes on it. Beautiful Lady Jersey has that room when she is here. I suppose it is a great favour to let me have it; I fancy strangers in general are not allowed to sleep in it …’
‘Say what you please’ (says Augustus), ‘Lord Harcourt has given me a much better room. I have got a fine view out of the window; and what signifies a damask bed when one has not a fine view. Besides, I am next room to Co Co [Lady Caroline Waldegrave]; and I shall knock against the wall and keep her awake all night.’
(Adolphus), ‘I suppose you none of you have seen my room, I have got a tent bed in it; I should have you dare speak against a tent bed. It puts me in mind already that when I am an officer, and that I am encamped against an enemy, I shall have one then.’
‘Well,’ cries Princess Royal, ‘mine is a charming room; the dear Duchess of Ancaster sleeps in it when she is here; I shall tell her of it when I see her. I am to take care of Augusta tonight, she sleeps in my dressing room.’
‘Your dressing room, madam! Your nonsense,’ said I, ‘I think it the best room; for I can see into dear Lady Harcourt’s passage, and maybe I shall see her in it tomorrow morning. Lord, how happy I am to get a little look of her whenever I can.’
‘So we went on all day long,’ concluded Princess Augusta, ‘and I am sure we shall never hear the last of it, it was the most perfect thing that was ever known.’
The younger princesses had remained at Windsor during this foray under the eye of Mlle Charlotte Salomé de Montmollin, their new French governess, who had previously been briefly with the princesses’ cousins, the Württemberg children. She was, according to a contemporary, ‘one of the best and finest work-women to be met with’, and taught Princess Mary and Princess Sophia, and in due course their sister Amelia, ‘a thousand ingenious uses of the needle’. Among the accomplishments they accrued were fancy needlework, beadwork and the netting of silk purses. Miss Jane Gomm, a governess last employed in Prussia, who had been educated in St Petersburg, joined them in 1786 as English teacher, and supervised the rest of their education.
Princesses Mary and Sophia wrote letters in beginner’s French to their father recounting their daily doings at Windsor, Sophia writing: ‘I hope my cold gets better soon, because I do not dare to read with Mlle Montmollin, and that grieves me, because we read such nice things together.’ Mary, too, reports on her sister Sophia’s ‘rhume’ while giving an account of an evening at Mrs Delany’s house in Windsor: ‘We played dominoes and we were very well amused.’
Mrs Delany had been installed by the King and Queen this autumn in a house at Windsor cheek by jowl with the Queen’s Lodge, and lived in a permanent daze at the condescension of the royal family who made a habit of stopping in unannounced to see her. The King, in particular, treated Mrs Delany’s house as an extension of his own. But her house also served as a useful retreat in the evening for his youngest daughters. Mrs Delany records in her diary Princess Mary’s good voice, and Sophia’s softer tones, as they played and sang Handel’s ‘Hallelujah’ chorus for her on one of these evenings. ‘My dear papa,’ Princess Sophia wrote again to the King in French,
… You will hear with pleasure that my dear Mary has had the best lesson she ever had in her life with Mademoiselle Montmollin and I am doing the same, because I do not want to fall behind. On the contrary I shall always try harder and harder, and what I like above all is the history of the Greeks. My dear Mary wants to write to Mama this evening for the first time. I wrote yesterday so today she has her turn. Believe me, my dear Papa, I shall always be your respectful daughter, Sophie.
The appetite for books that Mlle de Montmollin fostered in her charge was not to diminish. All her life, Princess Sophia was to be a voracious and adventurous reader in French and in English. Appropriately then she was the dedicatee of the best-selling children’s book, The Story of the Robins, which Mrs Sarah Trimmer, a prime mover in the Sunday-school movement and daughter of George Ill’s clerk of the works at Kew, published in 1786. But the younger princesses were not always studious. ‘We had great pleasure yesterday in seeing our brothers,’ Princess Sophia informed her father in a letter, ‘we played at “poule” [a French card game] and greatly enjoyed ourselves.’
The younger princesses’ letters to their parents show how much they lived apart from them, sometimes with the younger princes at Kew, often at the Lower Lodge at Windsor – usually with Princess Amelia and Che Che, or Mrs Cheveley, too. When the Queen arranged for Mrs Siddons to read at the Queen’s Lodge in April 1785, it was for the benefit of her elder daughters. After John Adams, the first American Ambassador to Britain, had delivered his compliments and a bow on presentation to the Queen, and she had returned a curtsey, the Princess Royal and Princess Augusta, as well as the King and Queen, all spoke to him ‘very obligingly.’ A meeting in July of that year between the Queen and Mme de Genlis, whose books had so crucially guided the education of the elder princesses, did not lead the Queen to make any new experiments with her younger daughters’ upbringing. There was much that was done on the model of their elder sisters’ plan of education, and still more that was makeshift about the younger princesses’ education.
These princesses were less disciplined than their elder sisters, as the history painter John Singleton Copley discovered when he embarked on an ambitious group portrait of the three children, complete with family pets. Years before, Johann Zoffany had painted a successful, if stiff, group of King, Queen and the elder princesses and princes in Van Dyck costume. Copley’s experience was quite different. ‘During the operation the children, the dogs, and the parrots became equally wearied,’ wrote an observer. ‘The persons who were appointed to attend them while sitting complained to the queen; the queen complained to the king and the king complained to Mr West, who had obtained the commission for Copley.’ The artist contrived to finish the work and, charming and pouting in a baby carriage with a fringed parasol, Princess Amelia steals the show. But Copley had had enough. He returned to history painting, and never took on another portrait commission.
During an outbreak of whooping cough at Windsor in December 1785 which laid low all six princesses, and had attendants, physicians and parents running from one house to the other, Princess Mary, who was later to be very careful of her health, reported to her father, ‘I cough much more than my sisters, but I hope things will go better.’ In general, the princesses were in good health. Certainly Princess Elizabeth appeared so when, in front of Mrs Delany, the Queen made her daughter try on a pair of stays and rejected them as too small. The teenage Princess, mortified, insisted that they did fit, but her mother overruled her and sent for a larger pair.
Princess Elizabeth had seemed, if annoyed, in perfect health on this occasion. But a few days later Mrs Delany was concerned, as all at Windsor were. Elizabeth was suddenly extremely ill – she was diagnosed first ‘with an inflammation on her lungs’, and then with severe ‘spasms’. Mrs Papendiek, the page’s wife, wrote that it was a ‘scrofulous abscess on her left side.’ Her parents feared for her life, the images of Alfred and, in particular, of Octavius’s sudden sickening in their minds, as well as the Dowager Princess of Wales’s Gotha blood. The Princess was bled twice in forty-eight hours. At an early January conference, the London doctors did not know what else to suggest. The New Year’s drawing room was abruptly cancelled, and it was thought that Elizabeth had only days to live. And then she recovered, to the bewilderment of her doctors, if to their relief.
Had the royal family but known it, there was calamitous news of a different kind in another quarter. The Prince had married Mrs Fitzherbert in December 1785, having prevailed on her to return from France and listen to his serious proposal that they marry secretly but legally, at least in the eyes of her Church. The deed was done in extreme secrecy at Mrs Fitzherbert’s house in Park Street, Mayfair, on the 15 th of that month, under cover of an evening party. Nevertheless, the news crept out, and within months a set of well-informed cartoons with titles such as All for Love and Wife or No Wife, informed an avid public of the ceremony.
After this clandestine marriage, Mrs Fitzherbert played the part of hostess at Carlton House, a house where, in Horace Walpole’s opinion, every ornament was ‘at a proper distance, not one too large, but all delicate and new’ – and all in the French taste. ‘How sick one shall be, after this chaste palace, of Mr Adam’s gingerbread and sippets of embroidery,’ wrote Walpole. The task of renovating and decorating the Prince’s grandmother’s house had been agreed by Parliament in 1784 at a figure of £30,000. Unfortunately, work on this palace of ‘august simplicity’ had to stop shortly after Mrs Fitzherbert became its mistress with costs running £220,000 over budget. The Prince had no funds, and his father refused to contribute.
Abandoning London life – and debt – for the moment, the Prince retired to the seaside at Brighton in 1786, where he lived quietly with Mrs Fitzherbert, and occupied himself making essential repairs to a small ‘marine villa’ – destined, many years and many, many thousands of pounds later, to become Brighton Pavilion, that fabulous tortured product of Eastern opulence and princely extravagance.
Meanwhile, although the sharp anxiety about Princess Elizabeth’s health had decreased, she was so weak that she spent much of this same year – 1786 – at Kew. In January, Queen Charlotte wrote of her being struck by a ‘new series of attacks’. And then again in August the Princess was at Kew, with Gouly attending her, and with Sir George Baker ministering to her. Her ‘long illness’ was never specifically diagnosed, but, involving spasms and supposedly a scrofulous abscess, it was probably tubercular in origin. The rumours that had circulated in the old Dowager Princess of Wales’s life, that she had brought from her native Saxe-Gotha a ‘king’s evil’ prevalent in that family – tuberculosis of the lungs – had been given weight not only by the deaths of her own children and by a mysterious illness the King suffered in 1765, but by the deaths of Prince Alfred and Prince Octavius. The royal family was by now widely held to have an ‘hereditary weakness in the lungs’ and several of the children had besides a well-developed tendency to violent spasms.
Elizabeth was not to be free from suffering entirely for another two years, and she was to write long afterwards in a Book of Common Prayer, ‘This prayer book was given me by General Gouldsworthy in 1786, during my great illness, and has ever proved my truest and most comforting friend in all my distresses.’ She also spoke feelingly of care administered by the General’s sister Miss Gouldsworthy: ‘She never was away from me any part of the day and she was so very good as to have a chaise longue brought into the room that she might sleep by me. I always loved her extremely, but my illnesses have made me love her and esteem her ten times more.’
Rumours later spread that during this time – and in a later year – Elizabeth gave birth to not one but two children, and that the father was a royal page called George Ramus, whom she married. William or ‘Billy’ Ramus, the most likely candidate, was page in several households at Kew over a number of years, and there were others of his family in royal employment too, but no George. There seems no substance to the story which includes the King being present at the wedding. It probably arose after one of Billy’s family was dismissed, and can itself be dismissed.
The year at Kew away from her family was in many ways formative for this third Princess, this seventh child. Not only was Elizabeth away from her elder sisters, but even her three noisy younger brothers, and the governors and tutors who tried to control them, were no longer there. In July 1786 the three younger princes were ordered abroad by their father to the University of Gottingen near Hanover, where they were to learn German and pursue a military education. As a result Kew was a haven of peace, an ideal place for steady study, and Princess Elizabeth always spoke with gratitude of the Smelts, with whom she spent a great deal of time there. Leonard Smelt, the elder princes’ former sub-governor, had settled at Kew, with his wife following his resignation, and remained a royal favourite. He and his wife encouraged Elizabeth in a ‘course of reading’ that occupied her for much of the year. Moreover, she had Mr Smelt, a noted amateur artist, to encourage her in her drawing. And the festoons of painted roses that decorate Queen Charlotte’s teahouse in the grounds of Kew Gardens, by repute the work of Princess Elizabeth, and the Hogarth prints varnished on its walls may have been produced in this year away from ordinary occupations.
At the beginning of July 1786, with the departure of their brothers for Gottingen, the princesses had a new correspondence to begin. Princess Augusta wrote to Prince Augustus soon after he had set off, hoping that the seasickness he had suffered would not make him give up his thoughts of being a sailor. ‘I beg if you are so good as to answer this letter that you will let me have some account of Frederick and of Edward, for I shall be more inclined to believe what you and your brothers say about him than anybody else …’ She wanted to hear ‘if you are pleased and happy at Gottingen, in short every particular concerning you. You will think me certainly mad to be so inquisitive but every little thing that happens to you is most interesting to me. I forgot to tell you that Mrs Oaks has dressed us some excellent spinach and I could not help mentioning it as I know she is a great favourite of yours.’
The Princess Royal gave advice on how her brother could prevent the tinnitus of which he complained:
I wish that you could find some means to stop your ears for to prevent your hearing the variety of false sounds of which you complain. Perhaps custom may use you to them, but, if it has not that effect, I should advise your keeping a canary bird which will out-scream all the other noises. Pray in your next letter let me know how you like German. I hope that when you have studied this language long enough for to understand what you read you will read Gellert. His works will do you and every body that reads them good. He is a favourite author of mine.
While their brothers began on an extensive curriculum, the Princess Royal turned to what really interested her this year, her expanding circle of female friends. She told Augustus: ‘the Miss Howes are gone into the country, therefore I cannot give them their message that you send them. A fortnight ago I spent a charming evening with them. They left London the next day and I am afraid that we shall not meet for two months.’ Besides Miss Mary and Miss Louisa, Lord Howe’s daughters, there were other new female friends named by the Princess Royal in these letters. ‘Lady Harriot Elliot [Lord Chatham’s daughter, recently married and now expecting a baby] in her present situation cannot venture to come to Kew which prevents my having the pleasure to see her, but I hope that we shall meet in November, for she will then come to London and, I hope, be able to come frequently to the Queen’s House.’
In the meantime, on 5 August 1786 the King appeared in his wife’s dressing room at the Queen’s House with an announcement that dumb-founded her and their two eldest daughters who were with her: ‘Here I am safe and well as you see, but I have very narrowly escaped being stabbed.’ Lady Harcourt received an account of what had prompted this declaration from her sister-in-law, Mrs Harcourt, who had the tale ‘exactly and with a candour that does him honour’ from the King. The King had alighted earlier that day at St James’s, and made to take from a woman standing there a petition she held out to him. Upon which she drew a knife and tried to drive it through his side.
He said that if he had not happened to have seen the woman preparing her petition, and from her eagerness kept his eyes fixed on her he could not have escaped, for she was close to him, and on her drawing the knife from the paper he stepped back. That she aimed a second blow, but was caught by the Guard, and a servant wrested the knife from her hand. It was a large servant’s eating-knife with a horn handle, made sharp on both sides … he is not sure whether it struck against him or not, but he thinks it did not. He said he called to them directly to take the knife from her but not to hurt the woman, for he was not hurt.
The would-be assassin, Margaret Nicolson, ‘lived servant with Mrs Rice’, Mrs Harcourt heard, and had ‘left her … from being wrong in her mind. She is so certainly on this subject, and Monro [Dr John Monro, superintendent of the lunatic asylum known as Bedlam] declares her so.’
The thanks given for the King’s escape included an address from the senate of Oxford University: ‘upon the miraculous escape that he had of being murdered by that wicked mad woman’, as the Princess Royal put it, ‘who, if she had succeeded in her horrid attempt would have made us the most wretched family in the world. But providence who watches over all things was pleased most mercifully to preserve the life of the best of kings and of fathers.’ Princess Augusta described to her brother Augustus the royal family’s stay at Nuneham this year, which preceded the solemn ceremony at Oxford: ‘I was particularly pleased with the sermon, which was preached by Lord Harcourt’s chaplain Mr Hagget … Good God! My dear Augustus how miserable how abject and how low should we have been thrown if… we had had such an unheard of misfortune.’
Princess Elizabeth, upon recovery from her ‘great illness’, was filled with energy, and wrote in November 1786 to Augustus: ‘Having been some length of time separated from all the family, as well as masters, I now must make up for the time I have been without them.’ She had begun to learn the harpsichord, and wished to sing the praises of London now as well as Kew: ‘never has a winter begun more delightfully for me than this one has. I trust in God it will continue so. The constant kindness and affection I receive from Papa and Mamma adds very greatly to it and all the amusements they can think of for us, we are always sure of having.’ Still occupied with her studies, she wrote to Augustus, five months later, ‘It has not been in my power to write for some time as the day passes very quickly with all my different employments. So that trying to perfect myself in everything, I hope, will plead my excuse which, if I did set about to do, must be very long.’
The Princess Royal was less contented. ‘My dearest Augustus,’ she wrote in the new year of 1787,
I have been very much mortified by a provoking rash, which prevented my being at the birthday. I had the last month worked very hard for to complete four fans and two muffs which were intended for that day. On the Monday I finished everything expecting with the rest of the family to go to London on the Tuesday but helas, when I was a going to get up, I was so red that it would have been dangerous to have moved me. I therefore remained at Windsor, which I shall leave next Monday if no fresh misfortune prevents my going to London.
She took some comfort in the fact of ‘several other young ladies who have been prevented going to the birthday, Lady Charlotte Bertie by a fever, Lady Frances Bruce by a cold, Miss Howes by being at Bath. The eldest of them having a complaint in her stomach has been ordered to spend six weeks at those wells. I am very sorry for it, as it prevents my enjoying their company, particularly that of little Mary, who you know is a great friend of mine, and was that of poor Lady Harriot.’ (Lady Harriot Elliot had, to the horror of the Princess Royal and friends – and as a warning that there were perils as well as pleasures consequent on marriage – recently, and very soon after her marriage, died in childbirth.)
She continued, in her old admonitory style: ‘Pray, do you understand German enough yet to read plays? For if you do, that is the most likely way to make you learn to speak it tant bien que mal but however you must walk before one runs … Pray give my love to my brothers and believe me your ever affectionate sister, Charlotte Augusta Matilda…’
‘Since I wrote last, I have had the pleasure to spend many evenings with dear Miss Mary Howe,’ the Princess Royal recorded soon after, ‘who I think more charming than ever.’ But Miss Howe was cast down. ‘She is very low at the thoughts of parting from her sister, Miss Louisa, who is going to be married to Lord Altamont, an Irish peer of great fortune.’ Princess Elizabeth, two months later, added to this picture of sisters parted by the demands of matrimony, not a future apparently in prospect for the princesses themselves: ‘Louisa Howe is not as yet concluded with Lord Altamont, but will be soon. She is prettier than ever. Her sisters are miserable at the thought of parting with her, particularly Mary, who has always lived with her ever since she was born and constantly slept in the same room. But they have the pleasure of thinking that she will be perfectly happy, as everybody gives him the best of characters.’
Princess Augusta was the brothers’ most faithful correspondent, giving them news of each other now that they were separated. She wrote to Prince Augustus at Gottingen in April 1787: ‘I thank you for your pretty letter and in return send you a shade of your humble servant, which I fancy you will find like from the forehead to the upper lip. I kiss that, and then the chin is like, for I must say that I don’t think that pouting lip like mine, though mine is nearly as thick as Edward’s.’ She added, having good information from Hanover, ‘By the by I understand that Edward is grown quite a giant. If so, I hope he will never be a grenadier or else he will be quite a frightful sight. Pray send me your shade and I shall love it as much as your sketch, which I would not part with for the whole world. I hope you are still determined to go to sea. It is the finest profession in the world and you are made for it.’ But for all her encouragement, Prince Augustus’s severe asthma was to put an end to those dreams.
‘I had a letter from dear William last week,’ the newsletter went on.
He is at the island of Nevis in the West Indies. He says he is happy as the day is long and that the Pegasus is his whole and sole delight and pleasure. He has a little band of music that serves to make his ship’s company dance, and he says, ‘I doat to see my men happy.’ Everybody speaks well of him and I believe him, as I always did, a very hearty good honest English tar, liking better a hammock than a bed and plain salt beef than all the fine dishes and luxury that townspeople fare upon. He always wears his uniform and curls, and yet looks as well dressed, and more of a man, than any of the fashionable powder monkeys, and talks of affectation in a man as the one thing in the world that takes the same effect upon him as an emetic. God bless you my dear boy, believe me your affectionate sister and friend, Augusta Sophia. I have got so bad a headache, I can hardly see, so can write no more.
Augusta continued a fluent correspondent, sending off descriptions of scenes at home that would appeal to or interest her brothers, including an account of a royal doctor’s lingering death after he attended her and her sisters for measles:
Poor Sir Richard Jebb lived just long enough to see us all in a recovering state, but was so ill when he attended us and so very weak, that he was very near dying at Windsor and was in that state when he left us, that he was obliged to lay on mattresses in his coach and to go through the park, as he could not bear the shaking of the stones. We did not see him for some days before he went away, he was so thoroughly adying. But as we were on the same floor, we heard constantly how he was. And nothing gave him any pleasure but when us sick ones either sent to enquire after him – or that the last people he attended were the King’s children. For he loved nothing so much as Papa. He quitted Windsor on the Thursday and died the Tuesday after, much regretted by everybody who knew him.
The princesses’ return to health coincided with the excitement of their brother Frederick’s arrival at Windsor on 2 August 1787, after six years away in Germany. ‘Joy to great Caesar!’ wrote Princess Augusta. ‘Our dear dear Frederick just arrived this afternoon when we were at dinner. I am overjoyed to see him! Quite quite drunk with joy and spirits but not spiritual liquors.’ While the reprobate Prince of Wales’s birthday on 12 August went unmarked for the first time by cannon fire at Windsor, four days later the King and Queen gave a great ball there for his younger brother, the Duke of York. Princess Elizabeth for one enjoyed it so much that she wished to stay on, but ‘as everyone went away I could not possibly stay to dance capers alone so I also returned to bed’. But all the King’s pleasure in his second son’s arrival in England and in his military successes abroad was to be swiftly spoilt by the alacrity with which he joined the Prince of Wales’s parties of pleasure at Newmarket and elsewhere.
Augusta had another source of satisfaction. Her father this year permitted her to have a door broken through from her bedroom at Windsor to the little dressing room on the stair, so that she had two rooms. ‘I have two nice bookcases on each side of the chimney and my harpsichord so that altogether I am more comfortably lodged than I can express.’ She was learning the harpsichord, like her sister Elizabeth, with Charles Horn, a new music master. She enjoyed it so much that she had begun composing, and a minuet and a march were already to her credit. ‘You see what an enemy to mankind luxury is. I have been seven years at Windsor with only one room, and now that I have two, I find the total impossibility of ever submitting to live in one again …’ she wrote. There was a very ‘neat’ wallpaper in her new apartments and her friends had done many pretty drawings. But as she told her brother Augustus in August, the shade or silhouette he had just sent her had pride of place. It was ‘hung up just over against where I now sit’, she informed him, and she thought it ‘very like … I look at it as often as I come in and go out of my room and constantly when I am in it.’
News later that month that Prince Augustus was suffering from ‘another attack’ of his ‘terrible complaint’ – asthma – led his sister to write again: by way of cheering the invalid, she described a recent family outing to Hampton Court. ‘We did not go into the old straight walks that are seen from the windows for they are like the oldest part of Kensington Garden, but we went to the maze or labyrinth … It is certainly the most tantalizing thing I ever saw for I thought myself near out of it often. And then the shortest turn brought us far from the end of it. Old Toothacker the foreman is still there. I assure you he makes a very venerable appearance in the old gardens for now he has left off his wig and wears his own hair which is quite grey. It improves his looks very much.’
Royal joined in the chorus of pleasure at the Duke of York’s return, but wrote less happily to Augustus of her lot, which included going to the Ancient Music concerts which specialized in Handel’s music: ‘I think that my dislike for music rather increases.’ However, she continued to draw a great deal and looked on it as one of the most entertaining ways of employing herself. ‘This summer my drawing has not gone on as well as usual, on account of my having been forbid during three months after the measles to apply my eyes to anything.’ But she had now begun again and hoped to make up for lost time. ‘Mama has been so good to me,’ she wrote, ‘that she has now taken Miss Meen, a flower painter, to instruct me till we leave the country in colouring flowers. I continue every Monday heads with Gresse. Indeed if I do not come on I must be wanting in capacity, for I have every advantage and therefore no excuse but my own stupidity if I do not improve.’
At least reports of the younger princes were better. ‘The other young fry at Gottingen are the happiest of beings: they constantly write to me of the different entertainments they have both at Gottingen and Rotenburg,’ Augusta told William. Prince Edward had been despatched, after two years in Germany, to university in Geneva with his governor, General Wangenheim. She heard that ‘as he is exceedingly attached to his profession, he preferred Hanover’, a centre of military excellence. ‘But he soon made up his mind to quit it as it was by the King’s desire.’
The princesses’ daily round continued. Errands for their mother brought the elder princesses into the backstairs sphere, to be commented on by the author Fanny Burney, who for five years had a position as second keeper of the robes to their mother. The Princess Royal brought Miss Burney the Queen’s snuffbox to be filled and ‘took her leave with as elegant civility of manner as if parting with another Queen’s daughter’. If the Princess Royal’s regal manner disconcerted Miss Burney, she praised Princess Augusta, as did others, for the easy friendship she showed all the attendants in the house. When Miss Burney gave a workbox to Augusta’s wardrobe woman to put on the Princess’s table on her birthday, the courtier received her reward. She was led by none other than the Queen into Augusta’s room, where the Princess was seated at her desk writing letters and was thanked for ‘the little cadeau’ in ‘a manner the most pleasing’. Princess Elizabeth came asking Fanny’s superior, Mrs Schwellenberg, to send a basin of tea into the music room for Mrs Delany, and all the attendants in the tearoom ‘rose and retreated a few paces backward with looks of high respect’. But Miss Burney rather noticed Princess Elizabeth’s bluntness – which she prided herself on: ‘Miss Burney, I hope you hate snuff? I hope you do, for I hate it of all things in the world.’
Nor were the younger princesses exempt from Miss Burney’s scrutiny. Princess Sophia, ‘curtseying and colouring’, came looking for her mother’s dog Badine, which the Queen was accustomed to leave in Miss Burney’s care while she was at early prayers. The author begged permission to carry the basket to the Queen’s room, but Princess Sophia insisted on taking it herself, ‘with a mingled modesty and good breeding extremely striking in one so young’. Princess Mary Miss Burney encountered earlier the same morning in the Queen’s Lodge when the Princess was ‘capering upstairs to her elder sisters’. She ‘instantly stopped and then, coming up … enquired how her mother’s attendant did, with all the elegant composure of a woman of maturest age’. Miss Burney had already seen how three-year-old Princess Amelia could be ‘decorous and dignified when called upon to act en princesse to any strangers, as if conscious of her high rank, and the importance of condescendingly sustaining it’. Now she reflected: ‘Amazingly well are all these children brought up. The readiness and the grace of their civilities, even in the midst of their happiest wildnesses and freedom, are at once a surprise and a charm to all who see them.’ But the princesses were also trained to be civil when in the midst of their wildest misery.
Miss Burney saw how the Princess Royal performed many secretarial tasks for her mother, including, on one occasion, efficiently labelling a ‘new collection of German books, just sent over’, while keeping up a conversation. In the spring of 1788, the Queen wrote to her botanical mentor, Lord Bute, offering him ‘a sight of the beginning of an herbal from impressions on black paper’. The Princess Royal and she together, she explained, meant to attempt this work of pressing plants – ‘not only the leaves, but the flowers and stalks, which I believe had not been done before with any success’. With the summer before them, the Queen declared blithely, and with the assistance of Mr Aiton, the royal gardener, she hoped to take her specimens ‘quite in the botanical way’.
With the encouragement of Sir Joseph Banks, director of the royal gardens at Kew, and of the head gardener there, the Princess Royal had already begun to copy, with growing skill, nature in the form of botanical specimens. She began with a wavering painting of a lily. Soon she was drawing parts of the flower as well, and writing Latin inscriptions beneath flower paintings, copied from the engravings illustrating John Miller’s An Illustration of the Sexual System of Linnaeus. ‘There is not a plant in the Gardens of Kew … but has either been drawn by her gracious Majesty, or some of the Princesses, with a grace and skill which reflect on these personages the highest honour,’ wrote the author of The New Illustration of the Sexual System of Linnaeus a decade later. Mrs Delany’s astonishing flower mosaics cut from paper were a shining example. And no doubt Lady Charlotte Finch, who took up botany, and Miss Hamilton, who was an enthusiast, encouraged their work. Confirming royal interest in this new branch of the natural sciences, the Queen, in 1784, had accepted the dedication of Lord Bute’s Botanical Tables: ‘I am much flattered to be thought capable of so rational, beautiful and enticing amusement, and shall make it my endeavour not to forfeit his good opinion by pursuing this study steadily, as I am persuaded this botanical book will more than encourage me in doing it.’
She appointed the Princess Royal her assistant in the spring of 1788, as the Princess’s ‘natural steadiness never makes her shun labour or difficulty’. She added, ‘I do not mean any reflection upon my other daughters, for all are equally amiable in their different ways.’ But she and Royal had left the initial execution to M. Deluc: ‘The specimens of plants being rather large, it requires more strength than my arms will afford, but in the smaller kind I constantly assist.’
How long would the Princess Royal be content to act as her mother’s secretary and ‘scholar’? She was never at her best in her mother’s company. Furthermore one observer described her as ‘born to preside’, which she could certainly never do at her mother’s Court. ‘Timidity, with a want of affectionate confidence in the Queen’s commands and wishes, always brought her Royal Highness forward as ill at ease,’ wrote another courtier, ‘while out of the Queen’s presence she was a different being.’ Mrs William Harcourt, Lady Harcourt’s sister-in-law, added: ‘Princess Royal has excessive sensibility, a great sense of injury, a great sense of her own situation, much timidity: without wanting resolution, she wants presence of mind, from the extreme quickness of her feelings, which show themselves in her perpetual blushes. She has excellent judgment, wonderful memory, and great application … She is unjustly considered proud, and a peculiarity in her temper is mistaken for less sweetness.’
The King and Queen had both been against the matches proposed so far, but they could not hope to fend off for much longer the matter of the Princess Royal’s marriage – not now that she was rising twenty-two. Her letters to her brothers make it clear that marriage was on her mind. Did her ‘timidity’ make it impossible for her to speak of it? Or was it an unmentionable subject?
All agree that, whatever the Princess Royal’s relationship with her mother, she dearly loved her father, ‘whom she resembled in many points of character, and she was his comfort and [his] darling.’ On 3 July 1788 she therefore wrote from Windsor to her brother Augustus in a less collected state than usual to give a hurried family bulletin: they had stayed unusually long – a fortnight – at Kew, owing to an unexpected bilious attack that had seized the King.
My dear Augustus by this time knows how ill our dear papa has been. His complaint was very disagreeable and indeed alarming for the time that it lasted – the spasm beginning at three in the morning, and continuing till eight o’clock in the evening. He is, thank God, perfectly recovered, but is advised by Sir George Baker to drink the Cheltenham waters, which are particularly good for all bilious complaints. We are to go to Cheltenham on the twelfth. Lord Fauconberg has lent papa his house. Lady Weymouth, Mr Digby and Colonel Gwynne are to be of the party, also Miss Planta and Miss Burney. Mary, Sophia and Amelia are to remain at Kew during our absence with all those that belong to them.
The Queen wrote a supplementary letter to Prince Augustus the next day, ascribing her husband’s ‘violent attacks’ to ‘the dryness and heat of the season … everybody has been troubled by this complaint…’. More on her mind was the farmers’ and country gentlemen’s anxieties about the harvest in these arid conditions – and for once with reason, as she suggested. ‘Providentially’ an abundance of rain had come in good time, and ‘everything bears a prosperous and plentiful aspect.’
She could not have been more wrong. The kingdom was about to be plunged into chaos and confusion. But in an excellent frame of mind the small royal party, as described by the Princess Royal, set off for Cheltenham and in good hope that the King would soon be fully recovered. The patient himself, unperturbed by his ailment, had no doubt, he wrote to Prince Augustus, ‘that the efficacy of the waters which are not unlike those of Pyrmont, the salubrity of the air, the change of scene, privation of long conversations at St James’s and, above all, the exercise of riding and good mutton will do what may be at present wanting’. And the King too was to be proved wrong.