Princess Augusta wrote on 3 February 1792: ‘Elizabeth and me (who were always each other’s best friend) are sitting opposite each other at the same table and talking between whiles.’ They had been quiet that New Year, while they discovered what entertainments their new sister-in-law the Duchess of York, who was visiting, might like. But the Duchess was not unnaturally distracted. Following their joint declaration at Pilnitz, in September 1791, her father the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria signed a defensive alliance against France this month, based on the repugnance they felt for illegitimate republican regimes.
‘What joy it must be to Papa and Mama and all of us to see how fond they are of each other,’ wrote Sophia, nevertheless, of her brother Frederick, on whom she doted, and of his Duchess. Sophia was now included with her sister Mary in more of the family doings, and found the farce, The Town Hunchback, ‘very laughable’, though Mary did not. ‘The little idol Amelia’ still ate in the nursery, as Miss Burney on a visit in January noted, and the six-year difference in age between Sophia and her younger sister was also apparent in the elder sister’s note: ‘Amelia played about the room with Lady Douglas’s two daughters and with Lady Harrington’s little girl, Lady Anna Maria Stanhope. Mary and me played at cards.’
While the Duchess of York’s father and brothers prepared to go to war over France’s demand in March 1792 that Prussia’s ally Austria withdraw from territories in Flanders, her new family in England felt no such call to arms. They were living in more or less domestic contentment, or at least idleness. The Prince of Wales was at Brighton with Mrs Fitzherbert, who was incidentally angry that the Duchess of York would not treat her as belle-soeur or sister-in-law. Prince William, Duke of Clarence had set up house with the celebrated comic actress Mrs Jordan at Bushey, and even Edward had found happiness, at Quebec, with a Mme de St Laurent. Only the princesses’ younger brothers were without known romantic attachments – Ernest and Adolphus in the Hanoverian cavalry and infantry, and, at Portici near Naples, Augustus. From there this last Prince, disappointed in his hopes of a naval career, was considering academe as an alternative. He wrote to his former tutor Dr Hughes on 10 January 1792: ‘very probably next October in a year I shall be going or gone to Cambridge or Oxford; but… this is a great secret.’
The princesses continued to spend much of their time at Frogmore Farm, Mr Floyer’s house which the Queen had rechristened Amelia Lodge. When Miss Burney visited the royal ladies at the Queen’s House in May 1792, the Queen opened her ‘work repository … a very curious table and work bag in one’, and showed her a sample of the chair covers she was making for ‘her cottage at Frogmore’. It was Princess Elizabeth’s twenty-second birthday that month, but, no suitor beckoning, she wrote instead for Lady Harcourt’s amusement an answer to a hypothetical advertisement: ‘Rug Lane 1792, To the person intended for getting all proper people for the Queen’s small establishment at the Cottage Royal at Frogmore.’ She sought ‘the place of housekeeper’, and went on, ‘Now my love, I am a pretty good hand at conserves, pickling, and so forth … When I lived with the late Lord Orford [Horace Walpole] I gave great satisfaction to him and Miss Polly. I was a great favourite of the latter’s, I used to read to her. In case of that’s being wanted, I could read to her Majesty, as I am told she is fond of that amusement.’
The Queen was indeed ‘fond’ of reading, but had a way of dealing with books given or even dedicated to her that were not to her taste. She deftly put Dinarbas, for instance – a turgid sequel to Dr Johnson’s Rasselas by a lady author – into Fanny Burney’s hands, for ‘some account’, as the Queen put it, ‘of its merits’ before she read it. Miss Burney praised it, and even recommended it to the princesses’ attention: ‘I am sure their Royal Highnesses could read nothing more chastely fitted for them.’ For reward, she received later in the year the author Miss Ellis Cornelia Knight’s new publication Marcus Flaminius. Like many others, Miss Burney believed the princesses isolated from the world, allowed to read neither novels nor newspapers without their mother’s permission. And the princesses traded on this supposed isolation to appear blank-faced and innocent, while a constant diet of letters and newspapers and Court gossip – as well as the books that circulated among the household – kept them immensely well informed of what was ‘moving’ in the world.
For Elizabeth and for the Queen, the purchase of first Frogmore Farm, or Amelia Lodge, and then the neighbouring Great Frogmore estate in 1792 featuring Frogmore House offered distinct possibilities. The Queen was to avoid both the cares of her position and her husband. Elizabeth seized on the opportunity the acres of neglected garden at Frogmore House afforded for designing architectural ‘surprises’ in the Gothic or Olde English style as well as small buildings on the more established classical model, both being then fashionable. Moss huts, Gothic ruins and octagonal temples appeared in the grounds under her direction. And while the French Queen’s creation, Le Petit Trianon, lay neglected at Versailles, the Queen of England and her daughters established what she called a ‘terrestrial paradise’ in the Home Park at Windsor.
Fanny Burney, hovering around the passages and corridors of the Queen’s House on the King’s Birthday, was invited by Princess Elizabeth to join them in the state dressing room where the Queen was sitting with her head attired superbly for the drawing room, her Court dress awaiting her at St James’s. All the princesses (bar Princess Amelia) and the Duchess of York were with her. In the background stood M. de Luc, Schwelly, Mme de la Fite and Miss Gouldsworthy. For this day was to be fourteen-year-old Princess Sophia’s debut at Court.
With five princesses now ‘out’, established routines of thirty years were ending. This summer, Lady Charlotte conducted Princess Amelia daily to her mother in the White Closet at the Queen’s House, as she had escorted so many royal children since she was first appointed as governess to the infant Prince of Wales in 1762. But Lady Charlotte was now old, deaf and unwell, Princess Sophia writing this autumn, ‘I am grieved to death about her, she is if possible more kind to us than ever. Indeed, both Gouly and her are so good to us that we should not be deserving of having such treasures about us, if we did not feel their kindness in the highest degree.’
Lady Charlotte resigned from her post in November 1792, and with the New Year the Queen must look for other governesses and companions for her younger daughters. Even the Queen’s dresser, Mrs Schwellenberg, who had ruled backstairs longer than Lady Charlotte had the schoolroom, was now a very sick dragon. Too ill to preside in the eating room where she had persecuted Miss Burney and others, Schwelly rose from her sickbed only to attend the Queen at her dressing and at her going to bed. The Old Guard was passing.
Unfortunately, the princesses’ remaining attendants did not pull well together as Mary and Sophia completed their teenage years, and as Amelia approached them. Miss Gouldsworthy, though unremittingly kind to all her charges, even to those who abused her, was often ill. And Miss Burney’s opinion of the two ‘English teachers’, Miss Planta and Miss Gomm, was that they ‘humiliate, dislike and distrust each other …’.
Princess Mary of all the sisters adored children, and she enjoyed hearing from Fanny Burney about a nephew’s fantasy island called Protocol. ‘Had we been alone’, wrote Fanny, she was sure Mary ‘would have insisted upon hearing every particular.’ Mary, intensely interested in the world around her, was no great student, but Sophia and Amelia were naturally quick and avid readers. It was a pity that the Queen had no educational aspirations for them, as she had had for their elder sisters. Instead, with Mlle Julie de Montmollin their instructor, they became beautiful needlewomen, adept at lacemaking, crochet work and all kinds of fine embroidery. But their handwriting, in contrast to their elder sisters’, was shocking, the very texts of their letters less assured, their knowledge of history, geography and botany skimpy, and their artistic and musical education sketchy.
This year, for the first time, the younger princesses were allowed to join their sisters at Weymouth, where the royal party proceeded in mid-August, and Mary vividly remembered her first sea bathe there half a century later. Her bathing dress was a ‘regular one’ made for the occasion, which ‘no floating about deranged. If all the world’, she recalled, ‘had been looking on, they would of [sic] seen me as well-dressed as if in a drawing room.’ She remembered the fatigue of bathing. ‘I began with jumping into the sea from the first step of the machine, but I would not go on so doing, and then the two bathing women dipped me into the sea which saved much fatigue and I liked it much better.’ However, the experience did not agree with her. At last ‘I was obliged to lay down and could not walk at all, so that it was given up.’
They were at Weymouth for the Princess Royal’s twenty-sixth birthday, but she did not raise the subject of her future. No one wanted to dispute with the King now, for fear his old and shocking illness might re-emerge. On being informed this year that the great Dr Burney’s remedy for depression was to compose canons to solemn words, the King told the musicologist’s daughter that he, too, found that grave or difficult employment composed him when ill or disturbed.
The prospects of the princesses marrying abroad had anyway diminished as the prospect of full-scale European war loomed. Shocking news arrived from Paris – of the mob entering the Tuileries Palace on 10 August, of their killing the Swiss Guards, and other Swiss in the English Minister’s house – and of the French royal family taking refuge with the National Assembly.
Still worse news came. The Prussians, who with Austria had declared war on France in July, assembled an allied army at Coblenz. Hoping to take advantage of the social and military chaos in France, the army marched on Paris under the command of the famed but elderly Duke of Brunswick – and was routed by French cannonade at Valmy on 21 September. Next day, the French republic was declared, and – further news came – the French had defeated an Austrian army at Jemappes and taken Flanders.
Weymouth, by contrast, remained the most peaceful town imaginable, where the King and Queen of England went weekly to the public assembly rooms, and took tea in friendly fashion with people ‘with a claim to their notice’ in an inner room. On her return to Windsor, Princess Elizabeth wrote to Lady Harcourt on 3 October 1792: ‘Of all parties to Weymouth this has been infinitely the most agreeable to me …’ Only breakfast at an inn on the way back had been a disappointment: ‘anything so disgusting I thank God I never saw before and never wish to see again, bad butter… plum cake as stowage for the stomach’. She hoped Lady Harcourt would pardon ‘the badness of my handwriting, but I have so horrid a pen that it is scarcely possible to write, and another thing is that I am scrawling, while my hair is dressing’.
Sophia wrote on 14 November of having been to see ‘Mama’s new house [at Great Frogmore], in time it will be charming. Pray tell Lord Harcourt (for I assume it will amuse him) that we went all over the house not excepting the kitchens and cellars which are very good.’ In January the Queen had written of her plans for a Gothic cottage at Frogmore Farm which the architect James Wyatt was to design. (The King had also given her the long elm walk which used to lead to Shaw Farm and she had planted 4,000 trees there, on the advice of her new consultant Major William Price.) But, as we have seen, the Queen had persuaded the King to buy her the much larger neighbouring estate of Great Frogmore, and so all ideas of a cottage were at an end. Amelia Lodge was demolished and its grounds united with those of Frogmore House, the Queen’s new residence.
Meanwhile, the princesses’ brothers Ernest and Adolphus, to their delight, were under arms. Following the trial and execution of Louis XVI in early January 1793, an emboldened France declared war on Britain and the United Netherlands (which comprised the Austrian and Dutch territories in northern Europe). Austria, Prussia and Holland dispatched their finest generals to lead their armies in the coalition that responded to this aggressive move. Hanover was supplying nearly 4,000 men out of a force of 20,000 that the states of the Holy Roman Empire were drumming up against the French. And King George III yielded to his sons’ pleas to serve. Accordingly Adolphus was ordered in November to join the Hanoverian Foot Guards, and Ernest the Hanoverian Light Dragoons.
Adolphus, aged nineteen, was thrilled to be off to join the coalition: ‘I always have wished to make a campaign.’ And the King of England had insisted that his second son the Duke of York, aged twenty-nine, be appointed commander-in-chief of the British forces, who set off with the declared intention of knocking France out of Flanders and restoring order – and with the undeclared intention of thereby acquiring some part of the French West Indies. Lady Harcourt was moved to compose ‘A song written on the occasion of the Guards being sent to the Continent under the command of HRH the Duke of York, 16 Feb 1793’. But Mrs Lucy Kennedy, a lady diarist with apartments in Windsor Castle, tells us that Princess Sophia fell extremely ill at that leave-taking. ‘She went with the family to Greenwich to see her brother, the Duke of York with the British Guards, embark for Germany … It affected P.S. so much, that she fell into fits, which have increased, and continued ever since …’
In the early summer of 1793, following the Duke of York’s departure and a bad bout of chickenpox, Princess Sophia was three weeks in bed, the Queen told her brother, with a bad ‘swallow’. She remained alarmingly ill for many months, and Mrs Kennedy called her illness in October ‘a violent nervous disorder’. She elaborated: ‘She takes from 50 to 80 [fits] in the 24 hours, falls back in her chair, more or less convulsed, recovers soon, does not complain of pain, and goes on with her work, or book as if nothing had happened, until she sinks again. Sir Lucas Pepys attends her.’
To try and cure this puzzling complaint, Princess Sophia was first sent for six weeks to Kew, with her sister Mary and Lady Charlotte Bruce, Mrs Gouldsworthy and Mrs Cheveley for companions. (Che Che slept in Princess Sophia’s room as she had slept in those of other royal invalids whose lives were judged in danger.) But on 8 July her sister Elizabeth wrote to Lady Harcourt: ‘I make no scruple of telling you that Sophia is just the same – patience itself, but making us all very uneasy, though we are assured she is not in the least shadow of danger, which we must thank God for. You know well enough how many unhappy hours that makes me pass in every sense of the word. But at Court, one learns deceit…’ Elizabeth gave way to ‘low spirits’ only in her own room.
‘My swallow has improved within these last few days,’ wrote Sophia to the King from Kew House on 19 August, and spoke of her gratitude to her father during her ‘long and tedious illness’. But in the autumn and back at Lower Lodge she was nervous and paranoid: ‘Many more unpleasant things have passed since we met; Princess Royal and Lady Cathcart [their new lady-in-waiting] … I strongly suspect are at the bottom of everything … my reasons I will give you when we meet… I have very good ones and I heard many a story that Princess Royal has repeated to the Queen.’ She ended by begging: ‘You will not mention to any of my sisters what I said to you.’
At the beginning of October, Sophia was despatched by her alarmed parents to Tunbridge Wells with Lady Cathcart, Lady Charlotte Finch’s replacement, and Mrs Cheveley as attendants, to drink the waters there. Mrs Kennedy wrote:
she was not told of it, until the coach drove to the door, in hopes the flurry of spirits, and agitation would make her weep, which it did violently, which relief made her perform her journey better than they could have expected … The queen only told Lady Cathcart and Mrs Cheveley the day before, took no leave of her [Sophia], and took all the Royal family to Frogmore immediately after breakfast … when they returned at 12 o clock, she was gone. They all wept much, especially Princess Mary, who had never been separated [from her] one day in her life.
But the ‘cure’ answered, and Sophia could write of her mysterious illness on 15 October to the King, ‘My faintings are less, though not as much diminished as I could wish, as to my swallow with your leave I will not mention that.’
The royal family had anxieties this autumn other than Sophia’s health. In August, after the Hanoverian troops had successfully taken Valenciennes from the French, the Queen had written, ‘Thank God my sons behaved well.’ But on 6 September the French attacked Hanoverian forces – among them Adolphus – retreating after dark from Dunkirk. In the hand-to-hand fighting that ensued, Prince Adolphus was ‘wounded in the shoulder, and had a deep cut with a sabre so near the eye that it is a wonder it escaped’. So General William Harcourt wrote from the British lines to his wife, and off flew Mrs Harcourt to the Queen’s Lodge with her letter. The Queen was much affected by the news of her son’s wounds, ‘and the Princesses all cried very much.’
The King heard simultaneously from the Duke of York of a desperate and unsuccessful sortie the British forces had made to try and take Dunkirk from the French on the 6th. (When the Duchess of York received word at Oatlands of these events, she finished her game before opening the despatch, as befitted the granddaughter of Frederick the Great.) The Duke was safe, if humiliated, and the British forces had to lift their siege anyway soon enough and go to the support of the Hanoverian army, which had been forced to retreat still further. Here at least Adolphus could rest from his wounds, and here he received orders from his brother to make for England and a full recovery.
Adolphus’s sisters had last seen him seven years before, when he went off, a skinny twelve-year-old, to study at the University of Göttingen. Elizabeth wrote from Weymouth on 17 September 1793,’… I am at this moment the happiest creature with my brother [Adolphus] who is quite an angel…’ But Adolphus was puzzled by changes that he observed, and he wrote later, ‘I am very sorry to hear that the ill humour of a certain person (you know who I mean) [the Queen] continues so bad: particularly her behaviour towards dear Mary and Sophia is so very singular, as they certainly by no means deserve it. What can possess her to be so odd and why make her life so wretched when she could have it just the reverse?’ Mary, Adolphus said, was ‘a charming creature, and one of the sweetest tempered girls I ever saw.’ But the Queen could not shake off the misery and feelings of doom that the King’s illness and the fate of the French royal family had engendered in her. Steely of purpose, she worked on an ‘entertainment’ she and Princess Elizabeth had planned for Coronation Day – 25 October – and ordered ‘a certain quantity of green paper’ stained the colours of laurel and oak leaves. She wanted thin rose-coloured paper too, and some ‘for fashioning yellow and dark red roses.’ But the celebration had to be postponed after Queen Marie Antoinette was executed in Paris on 16 October.
‘Augustus is hourly expected. I do not understand why he is so long a coming,’ Elizabeth wrote in September. But, as the political situation in Europe declined, Augustus lingered abroad, although the King had called him north from Rome in May. The King and Queen had heard then that he was romantically inclined towards the Earl of Dunmore’s daughter, Lady Augusta Murray, who was travelling with her family on the Continent. But they had no inkling that he had married her – secretly and in defiance of the Royal Marriages Act – in the Hotel Sarmiento in Rome. And, before he answered his father’s call to head north, Lady Augusta became pregnant.
When Augustus did arrive, his mother showed herself well aware of the passion he had formed in Italy, saying to Elizabeth when Lady Augusta arrived in England in October: ‘I see it is not over, by the agitation Augustus is in.’ Elizabeth could say little. Fear of discovery did not prevent Augustus and Augusta, back in England, from going through another marriage ceremony at St George’s, Hanover Square, on 5 December 1793. They also had clandestine meetings before the birth of the coming baby – not only in London, but at an inn in Windsor. Prince Augustus crept away there between engagements at the Castle – including his confirmation at St George’s Chapel two days before Christmas.
The King and Queen continued to follow anxiously the progress of the British forces under the command of their second son in Flanders. ‘There is a subscription set on foot in most of the towns in England for procuring flannel waistcoats for the British troops, now serving under the Duke of York. The conductor of the newspaper called The Sun has offered to receive all the donations …’ Mrs Kennedy wrote. ‘Everybody is interested about this charity. Her Majesty has ordered 2000 flannel waistcoats to be made immediately.’ But the British campaign was going badly.
Adolphus, recovered, was sent back to the theatre of war early in the New Year, and Ernest, still out there, was moved, to his disgust, into the heavy dragoons. The Harcourts’ sister-in-law Mrs William Harcourt, who was at Tournai with her husband the General, became reacquainted with the boy she had known at Windsor over seven years before. ‘He is excessively liked here,’ she wrote, ‘but would not do in England; he talks too much, and I am sure he would not bear the life of Windsor three days. He is a true Hussar; but open, lively, and very good-natured.’ On further acquaintance with Ernest, Mrs Harcourt noted, ‘I have some difficulty in endeavouring to make him behave well.’ When they paid a visit to a convent where he had been quartered the previous summer, she added despairingly: ‘He would kiss the Abbess and talk nonsense to all the poor nuns. I know a thousand traits of the goodness of his heart, but I fear he is too wild for England.’
But the princesses now were occupied most of all by their brother Augustus’s coming departure for Leghorn, since Elizabeth and Sophia at least knew that he was about to become a father. Mrs Kennedy recorded, ‘On Monday the 13th [January 1794] the Royal Family all went to the play, the Princesses wept the whole time, and both K and Q looked grave. The two young Princes were to set out early next morning, Prince Augustus to Rome, and Adolphus to join the army and [the] Duke of York … The King thought it was better to go to the play, that it would keep them all more composed, but it was [a] pity as they could not compose themselves …’
That very day at Lower Berkeley Street, Lady Augusta gave birth to a son, whom she imaginatively named Augustus. But the Prince had barely time to see his son before he was off on L’Aquilon and ordered back to Italy. Princess Elizabeth, fearing their father’s wrath, had prevented her brother from handing the King a confession that he had written on 9 January. She even produced the exact terms of the Marriage Act to warn him against revealing his secret to their father. But she may not have guessed just how implacable the King was to be when the news leaked out.
‘Today the King told me’, runs Queen Charlotte’s diary for 25 January, ‘that the Lord Chancellor had acquainted him yesterday after the levee with the disagreeable news of Augustus’s marriage with Lady Augusta Murray … That the register was found. And that he had given orders to the Chancellor, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the other Ministers to proceed in this unpleasant business as the law directs, Augustus having married under age being against the Marriage Act.’ She added: ‘Also orders were given to stop Lady Dunmore and her daughter joining him or leaving England.’ After this account of the measures the King had taken, she wrote further on the 29th: ‘we went into my room to read, then acquainted the Princesses of their brother’s imprudent match with Ly Augusta Murray. Then read and wrote till one…’
The King spared Lady Augusta and her family no humiliation, hauling them before the Privy Council to make affidavits, until, on 14 July 1794, the Arches Court of Canterbury declared both Prince Augustus’s marriages to have been a ‘show or effigy of a marriage’ and therefore null and void. Hence the Prince, the Court declared, ‘was and is free from all bond of marriage with the said Right Honourable Lady Augusta Murray’. And the Prince’s son, the King’s firstborn grandson, was declared illegitimate.
The King had made his position clear when his brother Cumberland married Lady Anne twenty years before: ‘I must … on the first occasion show my resentment, I have children who must know what they have to expect if they could follow so infamous an example.’
Prince Augustus, weeping with frustration, remained on the Continent. Lady Augusta, barred from joining him, lived – on a pension from the King admittedly – in retirement at Teignmouth with their baby son, who, owing to the shenanigans surrounding his birth, was not even baptized until he was two years old – and then as ‘Augustus Frederick, son of Augustus Frederick and Augusta Augustus Frederick’.
Barely two weeks after Prince Augustus’s marriage was discovered, the King suffered another humiliation at the hands of his sons. The Prime Minister came to him and made it clear that the Duke of York had to be withdrawn from his command. His inexperience was having disastrous effects; he should never have been placed in command. The King tried to save face and appoint the Duke of Brunswick, his brother-in-law, in his son’s place, but Brunswick, still smarting from defeat at Valmy, refused. And on 14 February 1794, diverting attention from his recall, the Duke of York brought with much pomp to England the standard once carried by Louis XVI which the British forces had seized from the French.
The recall proved disastrous for the Duke of York’s marriage. The Duchess, still caught up in Prussian affairs, showed little respect for the husband who had so publicly been proved an inadequate commander, and he turned in his discomfiture to his brother the Prince of Wales for the comfort of revelry. The Duchess stayed at Oatlands, pursuing musical and charitable projects and amassing a menagerie of animals in place of a husband. No child was ever born of this union which had begun so well, and which had been intended to secure the Hanoverian line, given the Prince of Wales’s disinclination to make a dynastic marriage. And so, although it was an amicable separation, and the Duke visited Oatlands at regular intervals, the succession to the throne was endangered once again.
Meanwhile, on 10 May 1794, Ernest, who was nothing if not brave, had been leading a charge at Tournai, when he was badly wounded in the eye, and had to return to England to recover. He did not lose the eye, but a film settled over it, and, as he had been shortsighted before, his chagrin was considerable. The great sword-cut in his cheek he regarded with some satisfaction, following his education in Germany, where duelling scars were a source of pride. But this tall, handsome and energetic Prince’s career as a cavalry officer seemed in doubt, as he rested in England and reviewed the family he had not seen for eight years.
For a time there was only Adolphus, of all George Ill’s sons, serving on the Continent, and he was mostly confined to barracks in a defensive position near the Prussian border. (Edward was stationed with a garrison in Canada, from where word of his excessive love of discipline only slowly reached critics in England.) In March, however, Prince William of Gloucester, aged eighteen, was sent to join his cousin Adolphus in Flanders, and the Duke of York returned there later in the year.
Fortunately, Lord Howe, father of the princesses’ friends, scored a tremendous naval victory, known afterwards as the Glorious First of June, to divert the nation’s attention from the calamitous campaign that Britain had waged in Flanders. The Queen and princesses, accompanied by Prince Ernest, drove down to Portsmouth to congratulate the victor when he arrived on his flagship, the Queen Charlotte, and Princess Elizabeth afterwards wrote to Lady Charlotte Finch: ‘Of all days of my life, this is the one that I may indeed call the proudest.’ Augusta told Fanny Burney two years later that ‘when she was at Portsmouth at church, she saw so many officers’ wives and sisters and mothers helping their maimed husbands, or brothers, or sons, that she could not forbear whispering to the Queen “Mama – how lucky it is Ernest is just come so seasonably with that wound in his face! – I should have been quite shocked else, not to have had one little bit of glory!”’
But all was not well. And on 25 July Elizabeth wrote to Lady Harcourt that they were bound the following month for Weymouth, in search of rest for the King. ‘I think it absolutely necessary,’ she said bleakly, citing ‘much hurry of mind, owing to unpleasant business, sleepless nights but much better this last week’. The King was ill again, although not so ill that it had been publicly announced. The Queen was about to call in Dr Willis’s son Thomas for an opinion. ‘That is the true reason why I did not write, but never write to me on the subject, nor own to the family that I have mentioned it but the truth will out to you …’ She wrote, ‘We never talk on the subject and continue doing the same things as we have always done, going to chapel, breakfast, reading, work and drawing. Sometimes squabbling takes us till dinner, after that we sit together unsociably till card time when we have a little conversation.’
From Weymouth Sophia reported to Lady Harcourt on 24 August, ‘Going to sea is as usual our greatest amusement – that is to say the greatest to those that love it but for my part I prefer land.’ And of her father, she wrote, ‘I cannot say some people are bright by any means – however, better than when we left Windsor.’ She confessed, ‘I find that at present very much my spirits are very weak. I am easily overset. However I struggle as much as possible.’
Down to the anxious household at Gloucester Lodge at Weymouth the Prince of Wales drove at the end of August, and announced to his parents his earnest desire to marry – and marry soon – his aunt the Duchess of Brunswick’s daughter, Caroline. Very typically, he had ended his relationship with Mrs Fitzherbert in cowardly fashion by having his brother Ernest call on her with the information that the Prince would be visiting her no more. But he could not end their secret marriage of 1785 without openly acknowledging it. Now the Prince disregarded the danger his bride Caroline would encounter crossing Europe to reach him, and he disregarded the fact that he had never met her. He owed so much money that to get his debts paid by Parliament he would have to indicate his wish to settle down, so that he could demand the income of a married man. And he had fixed on his unknown cousin as the bride most likely to win his father’s approval most swiftly, as being his sister’s child.
The King, still far from well, approved the scheme, but the Queen, who knew much more Continental gossip than her husband, and who was decidedly less fond of the Brunswick family than he, was dismayed. Not only had the chastity of Caroline’s deceased sister, the Hereditary Princess of Württemberg, been in doubt, but the Queen had counselled her widower brother Charles only months before against considering Princess Caroline as a second wife. She had heard that the Princess was so flirtatious that a governess was deputed to follow her round the ballroom to prevent impropriety.
Neither husband nor son listened, and by December the matter was set in stone. The Princess in Brunswick had eagerly accepted the flattering offer, the King had announced the Prince’s intended marriage to Parliament, and the Queen and princesses in England were busily preparing for the bride’s arrival. As the New Year came in, Lady Charlotte Bruce remarked that the Queen and princesses and some of the ladies had been ‘as closely employed for three weeks in embroidering dresses for the birthday and the forthcoming marriage of the Prince of Wales, “as if they had been working for their daily bread”’.
When Mrs Harcourt had joined her husband General William Harcourt – the new commander-in-chief – at the British lines in Flanders in December 1794, she had found the army ‘weak and sick’. Every foggy night they expected another attack. But this did not stop her speculating about one of the Allied officers she found there – Prince Frederick of Orange – as a husband for one of the princesses. His father the Stadholder was rich, and the wife of his elder brother the Hereditary Prince – the Duchess of York’s sister Wilhelmina – was too amiable to let any younger brother’s spouse feel inferior.
Mrs Harcourt was easily seduced. Prince Frederick of Hesse, another officer present, spoke of a nephew’s hope for an alliance with one of the princesses, and after spending an agreeable day in December with the scion of the Hesse house in question, Mrs Harcourt felt no hesitation in declaring for Hesse over Orange: ‘He is the only man worthy of our Princesses; he even deserves Princess Augusta, angel as she is.’
When the French took Holland in January 1795, putting an end to British military operations on the Continent until 1807, and the Orange family fled their Court at The Hague for exile in England at Hampton Court, Prince Frederick of Orange, at least, ceased to be mentioned as an eligible groom for the princesses. And matchmaker Mrs Harcourt had to abandon other speculation when she was deputed to leave her husband and escort the Princess of Brunswick to her destined husband in England.
In London the princesses cheered on their brother as his marriage approached, and with it the Parliamentary debates on the size of his income. Augusta wrote to him in February 1795, thanking God that ‘all things wear a good face’. Elizabeth told him in the same month, ‘If you are ever in want of a friend … remember the corner room at the Queen’s House.’ The groom himself was in a state of steaming disappointment, however, by the time his bride arrived in London in April. The money paid by Parliament had covered his debts, but had left him – in his view – with a tiny income, on which he could barely afford to maintain Carlton House and his Marine Villa at Brighton. His bride, he argued, far from being the golden goose he had hoped for, would instead merely bring him nothing but expenses.
The meeting of the Prince and of his cousin Princess Caroline was perhaps doomed, given the groom’s resentful feelings towards their coming union. At that ceremony – in the Chapel Royal, St James’s – the Prince was drunk. On their wedding night he was drunker. But the person who should have been most concerned at the Prince’s deficiencies, Princess Caroline, did not show any outward perturbation. Fair-haired, sharp-nosed and sloe-eyed, she smiled and nodded at all those who were presented to her in this new strange land whose language she had only just begun to learn.
But it was not all bad at the beginning. On 13 May, the Princess Royal wrote to Lord Harcourt of the preparations at Frogmore for a proposed nuptial fête she and her sisters and mother were giving for the Prince and his bride. ‘I am a little like Mary in The Fête Champêtre,’ she exclaimed, ‘running every way and doing little to the purpose.’ And she instructed him to tell Lady Harcourt of the dress for the occasion: ‘all the fair that are assembled at the cottage are to endorse the uniform of shepherdesses, and strut across the lawn in muslin gowns and elegant fancy hats. However we do not complete the fair vision by bearing a crook, as we fear mischief might move among so many belles, were they trusted with offensive weapons.’
The Princess Royal could be, as her mother’s former Assistant Keeper of the Robes wrote, ‘very gay, and very charming; full of lively discourse, and amiable condescension.’ Like all the other princesses – and the Duchess of York – she subscribed to Heideloff’s Gallery of Fashion, an expensive magazine showing the latest modes. Like Princess Augusta, the Princess Royal apparently managed well on £2,000 a year, loved jewels, and bought from Duval. When her art master, John Gresse, died in 1794, she did not repine, but tried out new teachers.
Despite this evidence of loving the material world, it is noticeable in her mother’s diary of the previous year that Royal often now did not form part of the crocodile of princesses that the Queen led – to Frogmore, to St George’s Chapel, to the Ancient Music concerts at Tottenham Court Road, to Kew. Even when she accompanied her family, she was not always a willing companion. On 24 August 1794, the Princess Royal left the church at Weymouth ‘on account of the heat’, according to Queen Charlotte’s diary. Her continuing resentment towards her mother, her wish for escape from the state of subjection in which she considered she was kept, and her belief that such escape was impossible, had resulted, in short, in withdrawal from the world.
Suddenly there was a bridegroom in view, and in August 1795, walking on the sands at Weymouth, Princess Augusta teased her elder sister, calling her ‘Duchess of Oldenburg’, while Princess Elizabeth wrote of her sister’s ‘maiden-blush cheek’ being ‘turned into a damask rose’ whenever that Duke’s name was mentioned. For in a match fostered apparently by Mrs Harcourt and by the Prince of Wales, the Princess Royal was now seriously considering as a husband Prince Peter of Oldenburg, a widower with children, and cousin and heir of the reigning Duke of that name. She wrote to her brother: ‘I am perfectly convinced that the Duke of Oldenburg’s character is such that could this be brought about, it would be the properest situation, and knowing your kindness, shall leave it totally to you.’
News came while the princesses were at Weymouth that their sister-in-law the Princess of Wales was pregnant, and the Queen diligently sent pigs to Brighton to provide bacon and ham for the Princess. But the Prince was never there. Indeed, his sisters were grateful for his presence in London in November 1795 when a mob surrounded their father’s carriage and abused him and his government. Afterwards a hole was found in one of the windows, indicating that someone had fired at him. And Elizabeth, who had been drawn to the window of the Queen’s House by the hubbub far off, recorded, ‘When the coach turned round the corner of the end of the Mall near this house the hooting, screams, and horrid sayings which reached my ear, being at the open window, it scared me in a manner which no words can ever express.’ Princess Augusta told Lady Harcourt that at the play next night ‘my poor agitated mind was more fit for a fireside than for pomp and noise.’ When they came out, they faced a mob once more, and the Prince of Wales and Duke of York – the chief objects of hatred that evening – dispersed it, to her relief, by riding off in separate directions and so leaving them a clear passage home.
At the end of the year, while his own marriage was complicated by a passion he had discovered for Lady Jersey, a grandmother, the Prince of Wales encouraged his maternal uncle Ernest of Mecklenburg-Strelitz to endorse the Oldenburg alliance. But meanwhile, whether by coincidence or stimulated by rumours of the approaching Oldenburg match, the Princess Royal had received a proposal of marriage from quite another quarter – and it was not one that, at first, pleased her father.
On 13 November 1795, de Wimpfen, the Württemberger Minister in London, sought an audience with Lord Grenville, the British Foreign Secretary, and suggested the Hereditary Prince of his country as a bridegroom for the Princess Royal. The Hereditary Prince was the elder brother of Prince Ferdinand of Württemberg, who had proposed four years earlier for Princess Augusta. But he was also a widower with three children. And his deceased wife was the King’s niece, Princess Augusta of Brunswick – and the Princess of Wales’s sister. The Hereditary Prince had, at the least, abandoned his wife in Russia, when he took their three children back home to Stuttgart. The King replied to Grenville: ‘In the course of the summer I was astonished at the Duchess of Brunswick mentioning in a letter to me a desire of such an alliance, but knowing the brutal and other unpleasant qualities of this Prince, I could not give any encouragement to such a proposal.’ He therefore ordered Grenville to refuse the request, and he continued, ‘if he will not take a gentle hint, I have no objection to his adding that, after the very unhappy life my unfortunate niece led with him I cannot as a father bequeath any daughter of mine to him’.
But the Hereditary Prince was not daunted. A month later, he himself wrote to the King: ‘The eminent qualities of Mme Princesse Royale, no less her virtues universally acknowledged, have given birth in me to the most lively desire to see my fate united with hers.’ And the King of England, under pressure from the Imperial Court of Russia – the Hereditary Prince’s sister had married Catherine the Great’s son, the Emperor Paul – began to shift from his earlier position.
Slowly another story began to emerge in which the Empress Catherine, with whom Augusta of Brunswick had been a favourite, had persuaded the Princess to stay in Russia when her husband left with their children, against his wishes. Catherine had tired of her protégeé, in this story, and banished her to the castle of Lohde, where Augusta duly died. It was a shocking story, to be sure, but one in which the Hereditary Prince seemed to show no worse than anyone else involved. This story emanated from the Russian Court, where the Hereditary Prince’s sister, wife of Catherine’s son Paul, was now empress, and keen to promote her brother’s cause.
The Prince of Wales’s own marital situation did not improve, not even when his wife gave birth to a healthy girl on 7 January 1796, who was named Charlotte Augusta – good Hanoverian names. Princess Mary wrote from Windsor on the 9th, ‘I am almost distracted with joy at the birth of my little niece. I am sorry for my brother and sister [-in-law]’s sake that it was not a boy as I believe they both wished it, but I am sure in a very short time my brother will be as much pleased that it is a girl.’ She went on: ‘Papa is so delighted it is a daughter. As you know, he loves little girls best. He was, I am sure, more kind than I can ever express to us in a speech he made to Lord Jersey, which was: “If the Prince of Wales is blessed with such a daughter as mine are to me, he will be a happy man indeed.” … I may say in return that, if my brother is as good a father to my niece as the King has always been to us, she will be a very happy little girl.’
But the Prince was truly het up. He wrote a will the night that Charlotte Augusta was born, condemning her mother on every count and leaving the few groats he believed he possessed to ‘my Maria [Fitzherbert], my wife, the wife of my heart and soul.’ This testamentary bequest occupied twenty-six pages.
The Queen, so practised in the business of childbirth, had sent cradles to Carlton House and had appointed rockers and nurses, dry and wet. Lady Elgin became governess to the baby destined for a majestic calling. From the first, it was pretty much established that Princess Charlotte of Wales was to be the one and only child of the Prince’s marriage to Princess Caroline – and hence heir to the throne following her father.
The Prince had no justice on his side. He had taken a dislike to his cousin which largely hung on his continued love for Mrs Fitzherbert, although, a fastidious man, he found Caroline’s slatternly approach to dressing and even washing off-putting. The Queen took his side, at least partly from a dislike of the Princess’s mother. The princesses, for too long accustomed to defend the Prince against all comers, were beguiled by their brother’s stories of his wife’s insubordination. They sympathized with him and made few attempts to see their cousin and sister-in-law. And so the Princess of Wales found no support in the unknown country of England – except, indeed, from her uncle the King. But, powerful though he was, the King could not command his son to reconcile with his niece. Besides, he believed that wives should obey their husbands. And the princesses, when they tried to be even handed, failed too. Princess Elizabeth wrote to her brother on 6 June 1796 of the King ‘constantly saying that you should never yield to the Princess, and she must submit which every woman ought’. She added, ‘He has said and re-said that you must be supported by the whole family, for, if you was to fall, the rest of the family would soon follow.’ The reference was unmistakably to the Duke and Duchess of York, whose amicable separation had already caused England’s ally the King of Prussia some grief.
Meanwhile, the negotiations for the Princess Royal to marry the Hereditary Prince of Württemberg began – and proceeded at a snail’s pace. The Württemberg commissioner who had been despatched to London that month was Count Zeppelin, the intimate friend of the Hereditary Prince since they had been brothers-in-arms in the Russian military service. Indeed, he was said to be such an intimate friend that the previous Hereditary Princess had objected, and the King’s reference to the Hereditary Prince’s ‘brutal ways’ may have been occasioned by such rumours. At any rate, on 4 May Count Zeppelin had ‘a long conversation with M. le Comte de Woronzow’ – the Russian Ambassador to London – ‘who informed him of the zealous interest taken by the Empress [of Russia, the Hereditary Prince’s sister] in respect to the object of M. de Zeppelin – and he [Woronzow] had the most positive orders of Her Imperial Majesty to use any means in his power to her name to facilitate its accomplishment.’ Two days later, Zeppelin made the formal proposal in his master’s name for the Princess Royal’s hand in marriage, and on 4 June the Hereditary Prince wrote to an English baronet, Sir John Coxe Hippisley, who had interested himself in the affair, of his joy at the successful outcome of ‘my dear Zeppelin’s negotiations’.
The King’s response was cautious, and he wrote of his daughter to the Hereditary Prince from Kew on the 15th, ‘In an affair so essential to her happiness it would have been contrary to my duty not to leave her perfectly free in taking time to fully reflect’ before declaring her sentiments. He gave his consent to the match, but he could not think of sending his daughter to Germany until it was in a more tranquil state. Likewise, he stated: ‘You must defer coming to this country until circumstances are such that it [the marriage] can take place.’
The Prince in Stuttgart was impervious to snubs, and the Princess Royal wrote on 7 September to the Prince of Wales to say that she had received ‘a very handsome letter’ from him. Everything that had been anathema to her was enchanting now. ‘We were out to see the line,’ she reported, describing the spectacle of part of the British fleet sailing in formation past Weymouth Bay. Generally the Princess hated her family’s daily pursuits – music, cards and the sea – but on this occasion, she added, ‘I own I was much amused.’ Baron de Rieger, the Württemberg Envoy Extraordinary, left Stuttgart for London with the marriage contract in his luggage on 3 October, charged by the Hereditary Prince to tell the King ‘of the happy change in our affairs … the tranquillity of this country’. And the King, resigning himself, told Lord Grenville on 6 November: ‘Baron Rieger is to arrive in the course of this month to conclude the treaty of marriage.’ Promptly next day the Baron duly arrived, and presented his credentials from the Duke and Hereditary Prince to the Duke of Portland.
Unfortunately, towards the end of that month the Princess Royal caught jaundice, and was ‘as yellow as a guinea’. But, her sister Augusta wrote, she bore ‘the inconvenience of the complaint with uncommon patience and Sir Lucas Pepys foretells the greatest good from it.’ Early in the New Year she wrote again to Lady Harcourt: ‘All the spare time I have is devoted to poor Pss R who, after a week’s amendment, is worse than ever … It is a detestable complaint and I fear, will not leave her as soon as she thinks. She is as yellow as gold and as weighty as lead – suffers more than she ever ought to do and is as patient as a lamb.’
Jaundice, wicked weather, reverses on the Continent in the war against France, and many other obstacles notwithstanding, the determined bride was dressed and ready when the Prince, having disembarked on her native coast from the Prince of Orange packet on 10 April 1797, appeared at the Queen’s House on the evening of the 15th for their first interview. Princess Elizabeth wrote to Lady Charlotte Finch immediately afterwards, ‘We are just come upstairs and I can say with great truth and pleasure that nothing could go off better than the interview of this evening with the Prince of Wurttemberg. My sister is very well pleased with him, and I really think that he appears delighted with her. He has a very handsome countenance, is certainly very large – but very light with it and a most excellent manner. In short, we are all pleased with him.’
‘Very large’ indeed: Frederick, Hereditary Prince of Württemberg had a huge stomach, so large and round that Napoleon said of him: ‘God put him on earth to see how tight you could stretch, without bursting.’ ‘Sensible and well informed’ he might be, ‘… though not exactly the picture of a young lover’, as Lord Grenville wrote. But his appearance was a gift to the London cartoonists, who seized on this German prey and dubbed him the great ‘Bellygerent’.
The Princess Royal did not flinch from her purpose, although a private letter of 13 May from Windsor told Fanny Burney she was ‘almost dead with terror and agitation and affright at the first meeting – she could not utter a word – the Queen was obliged to speak her answers.’ The Prince said courteously that he hoped this would be the last disturbance he would cause her, and paid court successfully to her sisters until she was recovered.
A note written by the Princess Royal exists from the days that followed: ‘My dearest Lady Harcourt, I have received the Queen’s commands to acquaint you that if you wish to see my trousseau, she desires that you will be so good as to be at the Queen’s House tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock. Pray mention this to nobody, as the Queen does not wish it to be spoken of.’ And among the gowns and dresses laid out at the Queen’s House were two complete sets of baby clothes, one for a girl, one for a boy, till the age of three. Most of the dresses, however, were unmade. Queen Charlotte, who had taken on the task of equipping her daughter, had merely selected material to be made up in Germany according to fashions there.
As for the wedding ceremony itself, the Queen declared that she and no other would dress Royal for the occasion, as Augusta told Miss Burney when the latter said she had heard ‘the bride had never looked so lovely’. Proclaimed the younger sister, “Twas the Queen dressed her! – You know what a figure she used to make of herself, with her odd manner of dressing herself; but Mama said, “Now really, Princess Royal, this one time is the last; and I cannot suffer you to make such a quiz of yourself; so I will really have you dressed properly.” And indeed’, added Augusta, ‘the Queen was quite in the right, for everybody said she had never looked so well in her life.’
Augusta’s light-hearted recital does not disguise the tension that existed between Royal and the mother she was about to leave. But the Queen spoke admiringly of Royal insisting on embroidering her ‘wedding garment, and entirely … well knowing that three stitches done by any other would make it immediately said it was none of it by herself. With her mother’s sanction, the silks she used were white and silver, her right as eldest daughter of the King, although, marrying a widower, she should, according to etiquette, have been in white and gold. James Bland Burges, as knight marshal of the King’s household, walked ahead of the tremulous Princess and her husband ‘immediately after the drums and trumpets, and in front of the pursuivants and heralds.’ And in the accomplished cartoon by James Gillray entitled The Bridal Night that depicts this scene, not only does the coronet, ‘set with brilliants’, that the bride wore, shine, but a bag marked £80,000 floats above the procession.
The new Hereditary Princess of Württemberg brought to the marriage a dowry of £80,000, which would become her widow’s jointure if she survived her husband. The King, citing the uncertainties of Continental war and hence the uncertainties of currency valuation, insisted on keeping the sum lodged in Britain. The Hereditary Prince did not argue, but he protested on another point, ‘extended a finger and said, “not a ring to show”’. In Germany it was the custom for the bride to give the groom a present of value. Even the Princess’s hair in a ring surrounded by brilliants would answer for his marriage. The Harcourts returned a dusty answer: ‘I hope … that upon reflection the Pce will consider that every country has its own customs, and that it is as reasonable that he should at present be satisfied with those established here, as it will soon be for the Princess to adopt those of the place she is going to. It would be very painful for her to find that there was dissatisfaction, after all the pains that have been taken to show every attention.’
The Princess Royal was up early on 2 June 1797 to make her departure with her bridegroom on this great adventure, having said her goodbyes to her sisters and parents the evening before. ‘The parting was very severe,’ noted her niece Charlotte’s sub-governess, Miss Anne Hayman. ‘There was to be no leave taking by mutual agreement, and the sisters dropped away one by one the evening before. But when the King went to wish the Princess of Württemberg good night, she fainted in his arms, and he was obliged to leave her in that state, not daring to encounter the scene that might follow.’
Her brother the Prince of Wales walked about Carlton House till midnight, meaning every instant to go and bid his sister farewell, but, feeling too much, he put it off till morning. When morning came, he was too affected to depart the house, and then it was too late. The new Princess of Württemberg, however, the night before forgotten, ‘sailed in good spirits’. Her family was less sure than she was of a successful outcome to this step into matrimony, less sure of her husband and of his character. Five years later, on 11 October 1802, Queen Charlotte wrote of the Hereditary Prince to her brother, ‘I agree with you, he is agreeable in society.’ Among the Hereditary Prince’s friends in England were Sir Joseph Banks, with whom he stayed, and who advised him on an agricultural and manufacturing tour he made of the country while he waited for his bride to complete her arrangements for departure. ‘But he has a vanity which made him detested in England,’ continued the Queen. ‘He did not know how to govern his bad humour in the presence of the women of my daughter’s suite, and for a man who prides himself in knowing the world, that was to forget himself entirely. In a few words, he displeased us totally and his departure was not regretted.’
But the new Hereditary Princess was at last in a situation, as Miss Burney wrote, to make her happy. ‘She is born to preside,’ wrote the novelist, ‘and that with equal softness and dignity; but she was here in utter subjection, for which she had neither spirits nor inclination … her style of life was not adapted to the royalty of her nature, any more than of her birth; and though she only wished for power to do good, and to confer favours, she thought herself out of her place in not possessing it.’ If that power came at a price, the Princess Royal was never to regret her marriage. Exhilarating was the moment after a night at Harwich when the Hereditary Princess stepped aboard the San Fiorenzo, and that when she stepped ashore at Cuxhaven, to be greeted by her brother Adolphus. ‘He is grown much larger since he left England and having let his hair grow as long as Ernest’s was, it has altered his appearance very much,’ she wrote to the Prince of Wales.
The couple proceeded to Hanover, in her father’s Electorate, for balls and drawing rooms, all etiquette and formality at Herrenhausen, and then on through the countryside, where ‘the peasants enquired which was the King’s daughter’, and asked the King to come and visit them. The Princess had her first encounter with Mme de Spiegel, who was to be her lady-in-waiting at Stuttgart. Onward she drove to Brunswick, to Nordheim, to Münden, and to the gates of Cassel, while her mother in England wrote to her brother Charles, ‘I have just separated from my daughter Royal. It cost us much, God hopes she will be happy. The Pce has esprit, worldliness, and knows how to get what he wants. They are both at an age when they must know how to discern what true contentment consists of, and, first youth being past, they must endeavour to make themselves mutually happy.’
The Prince, who had gone ahead, greeted the new Hereditary Princess – with full honours and with his two sons – at Heilbron, frontier to the Duchy of Württemberg, on 23 June. Prince Wilhelm and Prince Paul were, their new stepmother wrote, ‘so like my brothers that I was both pleased and overcome.’ And the next day, arriving at Stuttgart, she met both her parents-in-law. That evening, at Ludwigsburg, the massive castle in the country where the Württemberg family liked to live as much as possible, she met her nine-year-old stepdaughter Catherine. All three of her stepchildren were to be encouraged by their father to call his new wife ‘Maman’. And for the first time ever this new bride and stepmother, who had been known as ‘Royal’ by her intimates, was known by her husband as ‘Charlotte’.
Timid the Princess Royal might appear in company, nervous and sometimes reduced, for fear of stammering, to speaking little, but she had achieved her heart’s desire – to marry. On her arrival at Ludwigsburg she found her husband Fritz had sent ahead a copy of Gainsborough’s portrait of her dear father to hang in her closet. Whatever his faults as a husband to her cousin Augusta, this Prince of the Holy Roman Empire seemed determined to please her.