The King had found parting with his eldest daughter very painful, and was hardly better disposed towards his new son-in-law than was the Queen. He resented the Hereditary Prince’s attempts to secure his interest for the Duchy with letters and even via petitions from the Princess. The Hereditary Princess had to reassure her father that, on her instructions, the Prince would write no more, as the King disliked answering letters. Accordingly, when they heard at Windsor that the Prince had had an accident out shooting in Germany, no great sympathy was felt for him.
But at Scharnhausen, the Hereditary Prince’s country retreat near Stuttgart, it was a major drama. The Hereditary Princess told her father she had been ‘seized with … an unaccountable uneasiness’ after she had seen her husband mount and ride off. She could not go on with her book, but went up ‘to sit with Madame de Spiegel in her room.’ Fifteen minutes later that lady was called out to go to Prince Wilhelm, the Prince’s son, and when she returned she begged Royal to join her in the garden. ‘The moment that I had reached the bench I burst into tears,’ wrote that Princess, ‘entreating that she would acquaint me with what had happened to my husband. She then by degrees told me that he had fallen from his horse.’
After a short time her stepson Wilhelm came out to bring Royal into the house. She found the Prince in bed, ‘and he then told me himself that his arm was broke. It is a great mercy that he was not killed, as in the first fall he broke the right arm in the joint… and afterwards, as it was on the side of a mountain, rolled four times. His eyes was much bruised but providentially not hurt essentially.’ With great presence of mind, as the Hereditary Princess lovingly wrote, ‘before they could lift him off the ground, [he] ordered his son to go to Madame de Spiegel, to desire that she would break it to me in the gentlest manner and gave directions that I should be taken into the garden, that I might be spared the pain of seeing him lifted out of the coach.’ Royal was entranced by this proof of her husband’s consideration for her. Their being in so remote a part of the country, the surgeon could not arrive for hours to set the arm, but when Royal went to her husband, ‘he kept laughing and talking with me for above three hours, when he insisted on my going to supper, and the moment I left him he fainted away.’
The princesses in London were, as Miss Hayman, in attendance on their niece Charlotte, observed at the Queen’s House a few days after Royal’s departure, ‘very pleasing and affable, but still lamenting, I believe, the loss of their sister.’ But by early August Princess Elizabeth had become callous, telling Lord Cathcart that her brother-in-law in Württemberg was none the worse for his mishap. ‘No more has happened than a broken arm … notwithstanding he never quits his room.’
Princess Elizabeth, however, had grown in confidence since she had published a book in 1795 entitled The Birth and Triumph of Cupid, containing some twenty-four designs she had made on that theme, engraved by the Queen’s ‘Historical Engraver’ Mr Peltro Tomkins. The following year, the plates were republished as The Birth and Triumph of Love, accompanied by a set of 109 Spenserian verses on the same amatory theme by that enterprising young man of letters – and subsequently member of the King’s household – James Bland Burges. A connection of Martha, Lady Elgin, when she was one of the Queen’s ladies, and a sometime Foreign Office employee, Burges enjoyed versifying in assorted magazines of the day. He had his reward when he learnt in November 1794 that all the princesses copied and kept his verses, considering him ‘an astonishing genius’, and that Princess Elizabeth was in addition the author of some anonymous poetry he had received. At a drawing room shortly thereafter, his ‘Muse’ – Princess Elizabeth – asked him the names of some French émigré officers awaiting presentation, and their introduction was effected.
‘I will satisfy your curiosity about my epic poem’, wrote Burges to a friend when busy at work the following year on his Spenserian verses, ‘on condition that you will confine what I say to yourself for the present … I have already finished the first book of it in the metre of Spenser’s Fairy Queen, but not in his antiquated language. How the idea may have been executed is not for me to say; but the idea in itself is so entirely original, that I am confident nothing like it is to be found in any language. I caught it from some drawings of Pss Elizabeth, and I am writing this poem for HRH.’
On Twelfth Night 1796 the poem was complete, and Lady Elgin wrote from the Queen’s Lodge to Burges that she had given it to the Princess, whom she saw briefly. ‘I was … most completely gratified by her manner of reading,’ wrote Burges’s champion, ‘and the delighted expressions that burst out, I may say, as she went through the lovely poem.’ The Princess, not wishing to have her Cupid ‘mortified’ by being set aside, did not show it to the Queen, as the Oranges were on the point of arriving to dine. But while she was showing it to Mr Smelt, the Queen came in and, as Princess Elizabeth herself wrote, ‘I had the pleasure of putting into Mama’s hands Sir James B B’s most beautiful and elegant poem … my poor little foolish silent Cupid owes all its worth to the poetry, for I never saw him before in the favourable light you all did, till he was privileged with verse.’
Burges had considered that, if the publication he envisaged of the manuscript he was working on were a success, ‘it will place me not very low among the English poets.’ Princess Elizabeth was more modest, and sent a copy of her original Cupid engravings to Lord Harcourt, with the note: ‘As you was so very good as to wish to have a copy of The History of Cupid, I do beg your acceptance of it. It is in so terrible an undress, that I am really afraid to send it.’ Nevertheless, she wrote, ‘I send it the moment I received it, in hope that it might give you a moment’s amusement, which if it does, will gratify me very much.’ All the princesses in different ways relied on Lord and Lady Harcourt as sounding boards for the great world, from which they were aware they lived secluded. Ever since her ‘great illness’ at Kew, Princess Elizabeth had felt sustained in her artistic endeavours by Mr Smelt. In this new adventure of publication, Lord Harcourt, who was not only a distinguished amateur artist himself but also a noted patron of poets and artists, supported her.
Once encouraged by publication, there was no stopping the Princess. (She may, in 1794, have been author of the illustrations Tomkins provided for an edition of the royal ladies’ favourite volume of poetry, Thomson’s The Seasons.) And Tomkins executed soon after a further set of engravings from her drawings, entitled The Birthday Gift or The New Doll. In March 1796, Princess Elizabeth wrote to Lady Harcourt:
As I make it a rule never to push, I was not so lucky as to get near you [at Court]; which you will now have occasion to be sorry for, being troubled with one of my very stupid notes; which will be made double so, by being forced to name the insignificant present of the ‘Delights of a new Doll,’ which I shall be very much flattered if you will accept. I send you two copies, one for yourself, one for Mrs Darner, if you don’t think it impertinent. I forget whether I ever sent you the engraving of the dancing dog.
Lady Harcourt, whose work Horace Walpole had wished to publish, provided in return by way of compliment Philip, A Tale, dedicated to Princess Elizabeth.
When Miss Burney visited the royal family in July at Windsor to present to the Queen her new novel Camilla, Princess Elizabeth was still full of her own publishing venture. She related ‘the whole of her own transaction, its rise and cause and progress, in the Birth of Love’, wrote Miss Burney in her journal. But Miss Burney failed to record these details, judging that she must abridge her account of her visit to Windsor there, else she would never finish. She had energy enough however to note, of her own book, that Princess Elizabeth had exclaimed, ‘I’ve got leave – and Mama says she won’t wait to read it first.’ With permission so graciously given, ‘I wrote immediately to order six sets, bound in white and gold,’ recounted a delighted Miss Burney, one for each of the Queen’s daughters.
While her sister Royal was glorying in the sumptuous palaces of Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg, set in a land of plenty famed for its Rhenish wine and romantic forests, Princess Elizabeth had a very different view of how best to live in a changing world. She wrote from Kew to Lord Harcourt, thanking him for arranging a trip to inspect Strawberry Hill, where Horace Walpole worshipped the Gothic and classical past: ‘My life has certainly been spent at Court, but my actions and affections have ever been guided by sincerity and truth, and have no tint whatever of a courtier. At this place my great hoop is dropped, and my plumes lowered so that the Pss is left in town and the humble miss steps forward.’
Princess Elizabeth did not, for all that, abjure luxury. The Queen gave Miss Burney in July 1796 an account of her new house at Frogmore, of ‘its fitting up, and the share of each Princess in its redecoration.’ Miss Burney had already heard from a Windsor correspondent of Princess Elizabeth’s work there painting ceilings and designing buildings in the gardens. And when she visited the princesses’ different apartments at Windsor this summer, she spoke of Elizabeth’s as the ‘most elegandy and fancifully ornamented of any in the lodge, as she has most delight and taste in producing good effects.’ In consequence, the artistic Princess knew what it was to be in debt and, James Bland Burges claimed, she had said she would soon go to jail.
But Elizabeth had a liking for comfort of a more substantial kind too, which her friends the Harcourts enjoyed supplying. She thanked them in December 1796 for ‘the best Bath buns that ever were eat which saved me from a lethargy of cold which I suffer with more than ever. Now picture me sitting in the fire with all my different comforts round me in my own room, in the act of copying, when a knock at the door made me turn and your kind present entered the room. I will own to you the moment the box was open I looked with an anxious eye to see whether you had sent me a few lines.’
The Princess Royal withdrew, and then departed for another life. Princess Elizabeth resorted to Bath buns for comfort. Their younger sister Sophia found a confidante, as the troubles worsened between the Prince and Princess of Wales, in the shape of Miss Frances Garth, who had been appointed sub-governess to the couple’s daughter, Princess Charlotte, on her birth in January 1796. Miss Garth, niece of the King’s equerry Colonel Thomas Garth, had been companion to Lady Harewood, and was a plain, modest young woman with a talent for embroidery and fancywork. Princess Elizabeth on one occasion wrote to thank her for a cloak she had made for the Queen: ‘so perfect a piece of work, which Mama says is done more like a fairy than anything else’. The Queen added that it was the only cloak that had ever fitted in her life. Sophia, alone of the princesses, felt that the Princess of Wales was unfairly treated, and Miss Garth struck her fancy. But Miss Garth may also have acted as an emissary, with the Princess of Wales’s encouragement, for a romantic correspondence – or something more – between Princess Sophia and Miss Garth’s uncle the Colonel.
Fanny Burney visited the Queen’s House on Sophia’s twentieth birthday in early November 1797, and was interested both by her appearance and by her self-consciousness:
She had a pair of spectacles on, which, with her uncommonly young face – its shape being as round as a baby’s, and its colour as rosy – had a most comic and grotesque appearance … She is so near-sighted, that she is almost blind; and the Queen now permits her always to wear spectacles. ‘And I want her’, said Princess Augusta, ‘to wear them at the play, where we are going tonight; but she is afraid, she says, of some paragraph in the newspapers; but what, I ask her, can they say? That the Princess Sophia wears spectacles! Well, and what harm can that do her? Would it not be better they should say it, than she should lose all sight of the performers?’
Augusta herself, although shy, was not vain. She ‘let the hairdresser proceed upon her head, without comment’, wrote Miss Burney, ‘and without examination, just as if it was solely his affair, and she only supported a block to be dressed for his service … And when he begged she would say whether she would have any ribbons, or other things, mixed with the feathers and jewels, she said, “You understand all that best, Mr Robinson, I’m sure – there are the things – so take what you please.’ ”
Sophia supported her sister-in-law the Princess of Wales with difficulty, her mother and sisters being partisans of the Prince. On one occasion the Princess said, ‘I perceived you withdrew from me, but I saw your motive, and approved greatly.’ In June 1796, when Carlton House was ablaze with emotion after the Princess of Wales had forced the resignation of her husband’s lover, Lady Jersey, as her lady-in-waiting, Sophia wrote in flattering terms again to Miss Garth, hoping she would wear the hair she sent around her neck: ‘Your uncle also told me you had desired him to give me your duty. Indeed, be assured you will, in time if not already done, turn my head.’
The uncle of whom she spoke was Colonel Thomas Garth – major-general from January 1798 – with whom Frances Garth lived after her father’s death. He was one of the King’s favourite equerries, and was much with the royal family.
On another occasion Sophia, thanking Miss Garth for helping her with a troublesome piece of needlework she had sent her, wrote, ‘O! Were I my own mistress how often I would fly to you.’ She was glad the accounts were good of the Colonel. ‘May I beg you to thank him for his remembrance of me, and to mention how sensible I am of his not having forgot me, and that I am very sorry I have not seen him for so long.’
Thomas Garth was a small man, ‘a hideous old devil’ according to one account, and marked by a claret-coloured birthmark that extended down over one eye. In compensation, contemporaries speak highly of his wit and, indeed, of his stories of his own soldiering adventures in the West Indies. At any rate, Sophia had entangled herself romantically with him by the autumn of 1798. Her sister Mary wrote in September to the Prince of Wales: ‘As for General Garth, the purple light of love toujours le même.’ While this may or may not have been a cruel allusion to the General’s birthmark, or just a quotation from the poet Cowper, a daughter of one of the Queen’s ladies later recalled, ‘the princess was so violently in love with him that everyone saw it. She could not contain herself in his presence …’
A year earlier, in the summer of 1797, with Miss Garth now a woman of the bedchamber to the Princess of Wales and part of that estranged Princess’s establishment at Blackheath, Princess Sophia wrote that she had found an emissary to be trusted with correspondence for Miss Garth when she accompanied the Princess of Wales to Carlton House to see Princess Charlotte: ‘His name is Robinson, he has lived with us many years and may be depended upon – He will therefore walk to Carlton House with his son, who will I trust be allowed to give you my letter without further enquiries…’
Far away from the intrigue that sometimes characterized royal family life in England, the Hereditary Princess of Württemberg was absorbing the new country over which she would preside with her husband when the Duke his father died. ‘She has won the hearts of all who have seen her from her great affability and desire to please,’ wrote an English resident there, Sir John Stuart. Sir John considered the Princess ‘particularly fortunate’ in her choice of Grande Maitresse, or Mistress of the Robes – Mme de Spiegel. She was ‘a woman of great merit, nearly her own age, of much information, of irreproachable moral character, and who has conducted herself with great propriety in her own family through difficult circumstances’. Charlotte also had acquired Mme de Spiegel’s young niece and daughter-in-law as ancillary ladies – ‘Her RH treats them as if she was educating them herself with all the good humour possible.’ Stuart considered the Prince and Princess had made a wise choice in appointing ladies from outside the Stuttgart ‘Circle’. ‘Another generation must pass before the ravages made by the Duke Charles’ – Fritz’s uncle and a former reigning Duke – ‘in the morals of every rank can be repaired,’ wrote Stuart ominously.
It was of another generation that the Princess wrote to her father on 30 August 1797 in some excitement: ‘The Prince has desired me to present his humble duty to your Majesty and to express his great regret at not being able to write. But not having it in his power to do more than sign his name with his left hand he does not think it respectful to acquaint your Majesty in that manner he has reason to hope that I am with child.’
They were off to the Prince’s house at Ludwigsburg to escape the heat of Stuttgart as she wrote. Court functions, balls, assemblies and levees took place in that city at the Neupalais or new palace – a huge Baroque edifice accommodating within its gilded marble corridors, as well as state rooms, a multitude of doors and staircases leading to apartments for all the branches of the ducal family. In the small town of Ludwigsburg, halfway up the hill, a former duke had built an enormous palace rivalling Versailles in size, featuring wall-to-wall classical paintings and Pompeian rooms, and commensurate acres of garden. But, just as at Windsor the royal family lived in the shadow of the Castle in the Queen’s Lodge, so at Ludwigsburg the Hereditary Prince and the rest of the family inhabited more informal residences abutting the Palace.
That October, congratulating her father on the British naval victory of Camperdown, Charlotte resumed a plea for his aid, as Elector of Hanover, for her new home, Württemberg, at the forthcoming Congress following the conclusion of peace between Austria and France. The Ducal House of Württemberg had lost so much – in both territory and revenue – by this ‘cruel war’, she wrote. Looking with confidence to the future, she added that, in supporting the Prince, her father would be ‘taking in hand the interest of a son sincerely attached to your family, of your daughter and of your grandchildren.’ While the Duke had sent Count Zeppelin to Vienna and then on to St Petersburg to seek the backing of those imperial Courts, the Princess believed her father’s support would be most effective. The friendship between her husband and Count Zeppelin may have been more than platonic, but it does not seem to have disturbed Royal: Zeppelin was welcome at Court, with his wife and daughter. (His friendship with one Count Karl Dillen was anyway judged now to be closer than that with the Hereditary Prince.)
From Scharnhausen, four months pregnant, Royal wrote in late November 1797 to England – now standing alone though firm against France – of the ‘dreadful’ times, of the new King of Prussia’s difficult inheritance, and of Austrian regiments marching daily through Stuttgart. To her husband, who was away shooting, she wrote on the 22nd an account of how she passed the hours. It had snowed all morning the day before, and when darkness fell, she and Mme de Spiegel had worked and drawn for five hours till nine. Falling back on patterns familiar from Frogmore days, she was embroidering a chair cover with eagles and, she wrote to Fritz on the 23rd, she hoped to finish it that day.
This peaceful way of life came to an end at midnight on 22 December 1797 when Fritz’s father dropped down dead. And as his mother’s health weakened, Royal increasingly had the care of her stepdaughter, Princess Catherine, who had been living with her grandmother. Also, with the theatre of war now moved to an area north of Switzerland, the Duchy, positioned between France’s eastern frontier and Austrian territories, had become a favourite route for both French and Austrians on their way to attack each other’s territories. The damage the troops did as they passed through, to say nothing of the foraging and plundering that went with such mass movements, was fast impoverishing the normally wealthy Duchy. Earlier in December Royal had written to her father in England that the Austrian artillery were now marching through the country – and in heavy rain – for the fourth time that year, and that Austrian troops passed frequently through Stuttgart on their way to their new Turkish territories.
Frederick wanted Royal to rest, to abjure long drives. Royal, following the example which she had seen her mother set so often, intended to continue a normal life until the last month of her pregnancy. Her husband did not wish her to attend a card party of English émigrés from Switzerland that she had arranged. Royal dismissed his worries: the Court doctor, M. de Weimar, was on hand, and her health seemed good.
Another of George Ill’s children was hoping this winter to marry and provide further grandchildren. Prince Adolphus had been invited in August by the Prussian King to join a family party at Pyrmont with the Crown Prince and Princess – a Mecklenburg cousin, Louise – and with another, widowed cousin, Princess Louis of Prussia and her two children. (Prince Louis had been killed in action the previous year.) Years before, Prince William had been smitten in Hanover by their cousin Charlotte or Lolo of Mecklenburg. Now his brother Dolly fell passionately in love with her younger sister Frederica, the widowed Princess Louis, and in December won her agreement to their engagement. The King in England sanctioned the match, made his son a colonel and even bought Dolly a house on the Leinestrasse in Hanover for a married home. But the marriage contract would have to wait, he warned, until Parliament – sore from war expenses – was in a mood to grant his son the income of a married man.
The very public if unofficial separation that had taken place between the Prince and Princess of Wales did not commend to Parliament the idea of financing another royal marriage. The King ordered a great Thanksgiving at St Paul’s for the naval victories of that year – Camperdown in October against the Dutch, and Cape St Vincent in February against the Spanish -and, for good measure, Lord Howe’s victory on the Glorious First of June in 1794. But neither the Prince nor the Princess was present. After a good deal of wrangling over carriages and appeals from both to the King, he decreed that their finances allowed neither of them to appear. Unfortunately, the couple’s wrangles, as much as the prospect of the Thanksgiving, gave the Queen a wracking headache which prevented her appearance at the drawing room – ‘crowded with heroes’ – on 12 November preceding it. By December that year the Prince was petitioning the King for a full separation from his wife, but George III refused it.
Meanwhile in Württemberg the new Duchess, although six months pregnant, had to throw off her previous ‘retirement’ when her husband inherited. Sir John Stuart had written, ‘I imagine she will not think her situation so agreeable, when Duchess. If she indulges herself in retirement then, she must become unpopular at a German Court.’ But although the new Duchess informed her father that, from economy, she was to take no more ladies to reflect her new station, and her husband meant to keep his father’s establishment, she happily moved into the new palace at Stuttgart. ‘This evening I am to have an English card party,’ she wrote to her father. ‘We are in hopes that many who have left Switzerland will settle here, at least till they see what turn affairs are likely to take.’ The previous year the French had made of Switzerland a Cisalpine Republic. ‘Every moment the people come in to move some of the furniture. My new apartment is both fine and convenient, as on one side I have my private rooms and on the other those to receive company.’ The portrait of her father, she wrote, was to be hung in her ‘favourite closet.’
They moved, too, into central apartments in Ludwigsburg, a palace where ‘everything had been allowed to go to ruin’ and no doors shut, and lived with workmen all around them while Royal neared her time. They were planning to make Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg comfortable and ‘to attempt nothing more’, she said, citing that reprobate Duke Charles’s ‘folly of constantly launching into the expense of building new palaces and neglecting the old ones’. She would send her father a plan of the alterations at Ludwigsburg when all was complete, but wondered, as they were to have a menagerie there, ‘will your Majesty forgive my entreating you to send us a pair of congaroos [kangaroos] which would be a great pleasure to us?’
The death of her mother-in-law in March 1798 gave Royal yet another ‘undertaking’: ‘I am now very much taken up with Trinette’ – Catherine her stepdaughter – ‘who, unless she has lessons, never leaves me for a moment. One thing gives me great pleasure … that from the beginning she took to me very much, and her age being the same as my dearest Amelia’s makes her doubly interesting to me.’ She was grateful to her father for the advice he gave her ‘to try by my example to imprint those principles [of religion] on the mind of Trinette … I trust I shall succeed in my endeavours to make her, as far as I can, go through the same course of religion that Mama made us read with Schrader [the German Reform Church pastor in London].’
The move to Stuttgart came at last, and from there Royal wrote to England, a week before the baby was due, that she had taken the Sacrament with her husband: ‘I own I felt a great deal of joy at being enabled to go to the altar, as I think that when one has fulfilled that duty, one’s mind is better enabled to go through any undertaking in life.’ And then the baby did not come. For three weeks the Duchess lay in a state of suspended animation, while the Duke fussed about her. And Princess Amelia, in England, wrote lightly that there was no word of the sprouting branch of the Württemberg family. The ‘heat and the confinement’ of Stuttgart made both Duke and Duchess long for the country and Ludwigsburg where they would go after her confinement. Admittedly it was the ‘fashion’ in Germany not to stir for six weeks after childbirth. ‘However, I plead mama’s example and then they must submit,’ she wrote on 13 April, set on leaving within the month. Looking still further ahead, she pressed Mr Charles Arbuthnot, the British envoy who had come to congratulate the Prince on his accession, to stay on till the christening, there to act as the King’s representative. Her conception of all that was to come was at last realized. All was in place, when the pains began. The Princess prepared herself and the accoucheuse and ladies gathered.
But then all Royal’s hopes and dreams foundered. Her labour produced a stillborn daughter. The Duchess ‘having been delivered of a dead child and having suffered very greatly in her lying-in’, Mr Arbuthnot began a difficult letter to the Prince of Wales, ‘so much fever ensued that for a short time the physicians were apprehensive for her safety.’ The Duke of Württemberg’s Chamberlain, Baron de Wimpfen, wrote more openly on 30 April 1798 to Sir John Coxe Hippisley: ‘Her Royal Highness continues to manage as well as is possible in her situation, but she does not yet know of the death of her child, for which they are preparing her …’ But then, when the body of Fritz’s father had lain in the palace of Stuttgart, Fritz had had a newspaper printed and given to his widowed mother, falsely declaring the body, which she had wished to see, to be instead at Ludwigsburg. Medieval indeed.
When the Duchess was told the evil news of her baby daughter’s death, her husband told her also of their subjects’ concern for her health. Even the country people came into town to get news of her, and the bourgeoisie were planning a fête for her recovery, an event unheard of in the annals of the Duchy. ‘We consider the death of the child as a true sadness,’ wrote Wimpfen. ‘It was a beautiful big girl who, in becoming a new bond of union and tenderness for father and mother would have contributed strongly to her Highness’s happiness. We must hope for the future, today all the wishes are united for her recovery.’
The Duchess wrote to her father from Stuttgart on 4 May: ‘Do not think me ungrateful to Providence for the many blessings with which I am surrounded when I say that the loss of my dear child has deeply afflicted me. I trust that I feel this as a Christian and submit with resignation to the will of the Almighty, but nature must ever make me regret the loss of the little thing I had built such happiness on: when I do this I frequently blame myself as God has made her happier than my warmest wishes could have done.’ She thanked God for her husband’s affection and attention in her distress – ‘I am doubly sensible of this happiness as it falls to the lot of so few people in our situation of life …’ And she even thanked Mr Arbuthnot for his courtesy in giving up the ball he had planned to give to the Duke in honour of the birth of her child. The preparations having been made, he had proposed to give it instead in honour of her recovery. He ‘had the goodness to give it up when he heard how deeply I was afflicted at the knowledge of the death of my child.’
Four days later the Duchess was stronger. ‘Though I shall long silently mourn my child … were it in my power to recall her to life I would not do it. These times are not those to make one pity children it pleases God to save from the miseries of this life.’ The doctors had advised the Duke to take his invalid wife to Teinach, a ‘famous water drinking place … where I am also to take the baths of Liebenzell which they assure will perfectly cure me.’ In the meantime they moved to Ludwigsburg and she was carried into the garden there, hoping soon to be able to walk to the large English garden the Duke was laying out at a distance from the house. Her husband, still tender, made a flower garden outside her dressing room for her more immediate enjoyment, and a year later she was to take pleasure in ‘drawing the flowers that blow there.’
In the months following the stillbirth, Royal was ‘very busy’ with her drawing, and by August could tell her father that she walked a great deal – ‘generally two hours a day and near five or six English miles in the woods and often in the fields. I am afraid that my pace is sometimes a little irksome to the other ladies but having now obtained that they divide themselves, and that some walk in the morning and the others in the evening, I go on in my old way, as I find it agrees very much with me, as notwithstanding all this exercise I continue very fat, without it I should be a perfect sight.’
A portrait commissioned by her husband of Duchess Charlotte about this time shows her golden haired and smiling, but grown sensibly more matronly, in a muslin dress. Schweppe, the artist, may have been exercising some restraint with his paintbrush. The Princess Royal had, of all the three eldest princesses, always been noted for her good figure, but following her pregnancy and the stillbirth of her child, she grew larger with every year until it was eventually reported that she had no shape – like snow. A year after the stillbirth, she was to write uneasily to her father that she was now nearly as large as her husband. The mind boggles. The Duke had had, by 1802, a piece cut out of the whist table at home to accommodate his stomach, although when he was in London an accurate observer, Sir Gilbert Elliot, told his wife that the bridegroom’s belly was not as large as had been advertised. But, although the Duchess ceased to mind about her size, she did not forget the hopes she had had of her dead daughter.
No more children came, although she hoped for them and kept till her death the baby clothes she had brought from England. ‘If ever the Almighty blesses me with girls, it shall ever be my object to have them constantly with me, and to try gently to correct little faults,’ she wrote, in one of many long letters of advice she composed for Lady Elgin, governess in England to her two-year-old niece Charlotte. They contained the wisdom that she would have wished to have lavished on her own child’s education. But, as she wrote to Lady Elgin a few days after the anniversary of her daughter’s stillbirth, she did not think she would wholeheartedly enjoy seeing her niece: ‘The sight of all children is a pleasure mixed with pain.’
Princess Charlotte enchanted others, including her grandfather the King. He played with her on the carpet at the Queen’s House as he had done thirty years earlier with his own children. She sang ‘Hearts of Oak’ for him, and in return he bought her a large rocking horse. ‘She is the merriest little thing I ever saw,’ wrote her sub-governess when she was one and a half. ‘Pepper hot too, if contradicted she kicks her little feet about in great rage but the cry ends in a laugh before you well know which it is.’ Her aunt Royal hoped that she would one day be a bond of union – even a magnet – between her parents, but she was to be more a bone of contention.
Princess Mary reported that Weymouth this September 1798 was ‘very dull and indeed stupid’ after the fun of Windsor, for within two weeks Princess Sophia was ill with ‘cramp in her stomach’, and it was ‘a perfect standstill of everything’. She wrote to the Prince about his ‘amiable left hand’, Mrs Fitzherbert, to whom he thought of returning – and to whom the following year he did return. The Prince’s estranged wife and their daughter were now both settled out of London, the former at Montagu House on Blackheath and her daughter and attendants in the village of Charlton near by.
Princess Sophia was continuing her correspondence with Miss Garth, and was pleased that she had looked ‘fitter than for some time past’ when she walked on the terrace. At Weymouth, when she had recovered from her illness, she rode out with her father every morning, which ‘does not make me a little vain’, and in the evenings they went to the theatre where Kemble and Mrs Mattocks were in residence. Sophia finished by giving Miss Garth an account of her uncle, General Thomas Garth: ‘he is very well but not over and above pleased with Weymouth; notwithstanding he is all good humour and as cheery as ever; you know he is no small favourite of the dear Kings.’
The General’s principal period of attendance each year on the King was during the three winter months, but as Major-General of the district he had a house near Weymouth, and so was a constant visitor there.
Meanwhile, Princess Amelia, youngest of the six princesses, was having an adventure of her own at the staid sea-bathing resort of Worthing. At her sister Royal’s wedding the year before, Amelia, an excited fourteen-year-old debutante, was the tallest of all the sisters with big bones, a fine bosom and mid-brown hair. Further, according to Miss Burney, she had ‘ruby lips’ and ‘an expression of such ingenuous sweetness and innocence as was truly captivating’. The King adored her, while Amelia herself worshipped her eldest brother the Prince, and of all her sisters loved the motherly Mary most. Her life, unlike those of her elder sisters and as befits that of the youngest child of such an enormous family, had been till now free of care. When the King recovered from his 1788-9 illness, the doctors said that the Queen should from now on address herself entirely to his needs. ‘Then I pity my three younger daughters, whose education I can no longer attend to,’ she said. Amelia was then five. The King later inscribed a book that he gave to his eldest daughter, ‘For the Princess Royal, governess to her five sisters’ – and there was some truth in his words. According to Mrs Papendiek, the Princess Royal took a great interest in her youngest sister’s education at least, and gave her lessons. But there seemed nothing to pity Amelia for in having such a serious scholar and affectionate sister for a tutor.
And then her health became alarming. On 8 October 1798 Amelia should have been celebrating, with the rest of her family, Nelson’s annihilation of the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile, of which word had just reached England. But in the summer of this year, as Nelson was chasing the French fleet, she had developed terrible inflammation and pain in the joint of her knee. With Gouly, and Gouly’s brother General Gouldsworthy and other attendants, she was sent in August to Worthing, where, it was thought, she would be more quiet than at Weymouth, and where Dr Thomas Keate, an excellent surgeon, especially in the matter of wounds and injuries of the arteries, and Sir Lucas Pepys attended her. Amelia confirmed in a letter to her father at Weymouth that she could never have reached that resort. Even the short journey to the Sussex coast from London had been agony.
Every morning in August, in pursuit of a ‘perfect cure’, she sat out in ‘a little garden near the sea’, and all afternoon she sat out on the sands. A sofa that the Prince of Wales sent her was pulled up on board a barge attached to a sloop named the Fly, for her to lie on and better enjoy the sea air, but the motion disturbed her. ‘I find my leg at present much the same,’ she wrote to her father on 9 August, ‘but certainly the vapour and warm sea bath are of use and therefore I hope that I shall soon be able to assure you I am better.’ Her brother the Prince was assiduous, and in early August visited her from Brighton further along the coast with more presents. ‘The hats are very pretty and fit me exactly,’ she wrote in thanks. Later in the month she was out on the barge again, this time in ‘a cot which is a very clever invention as it will prevent my feeling a great deal of the motion’. But there was still no ‘material amendment’ in her knee.
Princess Amelia, aged fifteen, was determined not to complain to her parents. ‘Oh dear, that I cannot help saying, but complain I will not,’ she wrote to her English teacher, Miss Gomm, adding, ‘I have given over dining with the ladies, as having no appetite, the smell of meat was very disagreeable to me.’ But she underwent treatments that appalled her. ‘Only think of my being electrified,’ she exclaimed, ‘you well know my horror and fright for it, but I put that aside as well as I could the moment Mr Keate told me he wished me to try it. I must ever think it horrid. It hurts very much when it is upon the knee, although it is done in the slightest manner possible.’ On her arm it was nothing in comparison, ‘though it was done stronger’. To her ‘feels [feelings]’ the knee seemed the same but Dr Keate said it was better, and she had an appetite. ‘Laudanum to a great degree is left off,’ she told the Prince on 28 October. ‘I have attempted to stand up – It gave me very severe pain though I did only do it for half a minute.’ The Prince visited her again, and the Duke and Duchess of York called on her.
When Miss Burney saw Amelia one morning this summer at Sir Lucas Pepys’s house, the Princess, ‘seated on a sofa, in a French grey riding dress with pink lapels’, seemed as lively as ever. But her condition became clear when, on leaving the room, she had to be ‘painfully lifted from her seat between Sir Lucas and Mr Keate’. Grateful for all, Amelia did wish, in her pain and discomfort, that she could have just one sight of her sister Mary’s shining face. ‘Oh dear, never can there be such another angel in this world.’ Amelia’s only fear was that the angel was too perfect to be long for the world. She swore she should die if Mary did. On her parents’ Coronation Day, the Fly sloop, commander Captain William Cumberland, fired a ‘feu de joie’ out at sea, and as she wrote the band was playing a last song out of Blue Beard. Mary and she had sung that ‘almost the minute before my lameness seized me’, she recalled sadly.
When the doctors Sir Lucas Pepys and Mr Keate attended on 13 November and solemnly ordered her to keep her leg down, Princess Amelia obeyed and no longer laid it on the sofa. Sir Lucas, physician in ordinary to the King since 1792, was inclined to be dictatorial and very firm in his manner. ‘It is four months since I have let it hang, and therefore of course it hurts,’ she wrote bravely. She complied also with their directive that she ride, and General Gouldsworthy lent her one of his horses, Frolic, for an attempt out on the downs where no one could see her. Eventually came success. Sir Lucas’s prescription and the electrifying answered – or the knee healed naturally. By Christmas Amelia was back in London. ‘I go on riding every day, and now canter,’ she wrote, and was on her way to join the family for Christmas at Windsor.
A curious story exists about this sojourn at Worthing relating to Amelia and Robert Keate, nephew of surgeon Thomas Keate, who assisted his uncle with the royal patient there. In her August letters she told the King that he seemed to be ‘a very modest, civil young man and anxious to do what is right.’ But she also told the King ‘how attentive and anxious to do right’ was Captain Cumberland. He took her out, lying on a sofa imported for the purpose, to recruit her health on his barge. Nevertheless in early September, when the older Keate had to leave Worthing periodically to attend another patient, young Keate became responsible for her case – ‘his nephew, who is very gentle, attends me, you know’, Amelia told her father. Given the curious circumstances of her isolation, with only Gouly and Mrs Cheveley and General Gouldsworthy for companions – even Lady Charlotte Belasyse, Amelia’s lady, was called away to Yorkshire – it seems perfectly possible that the young nephew and Princess enjoyed during this summer at the least a tender relationship. But there the matter did not end. Lord Glenbervie learnt from the Princess of Wales twelve years later details that she had heard from the Duke of York about this Worthing sojourn – that ‘being engaged one day’ there, Keate had sent his nephew to Amelia, ‘who communicated an infection to her from whence all her subsequent illness originated.’ We shall see that this gossip chimes with fears about her fertility – and with detailed descriptions of symptoms that tally with those of venereal infection – that Amelia herself expressed later in extremely confidential letters.
For the moment, Amelia was restored to health and the following summer could join the rest of the family at Weymouth – where the princesses had their niece Charlotte to dote on. Amelia gloated over the baby one afternoon when, all by herself, she collected her from her nap and gave her her tea. Amelia, when not in pain, continued to be lively and enthusiastic. She was also religious. On 24 December 1799 she was confirmed by the Archbishop of Canterbury in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. She believed that ‘the consequence these two days have been to me’ would long endure, for her happiness depended on it.
Others in the family were not so blessed. After a period of some months in which she had not answered his letters, Prince Adolphus had heard in Hanover on 27 March 1799 that his beloved fiancée Frederica, widow of Prince Louis of Prussia, had married the Prince of Solms the day before. Admittedly there had been obstacles in the way to their own match, as the King was still waiting for peace to ask Parliament for a grant for the marriage. But poor Adolphus was beside himself with grief and mortification in the house on the Leinestrasse in Hanover that he had so lovingly prepared for his bride.
Among the comings and goings of officers and battalions and regiments at Windsor, one arrival was of significance for Princess Augusta herself – that of General Sir Brent Spencer, an Irishman who commanded the 40th Somersetshire Regiment. Since becoming an ensign at the age of eighteen, he had been almost constantly in the West Indies. But now, aged thirty-nine and a bachelor, he returned from an ill-fated expedition with the 40th to the Helder under the command of the Duke of York. When he brought despatches from the Helder to the King at Windsor, Sir Brent made such a favourable impression on the monarch that he was appointed one of his aides-de-camp, and took up residence at Court.
Spencer did not long remain with the King – perhaps fortunately, since he was ‘anxious and fidgety when there was nothing to do’, as a contemporary put it, ‘but once under fire like a philosopher solving a problem.’ Soon he was away again, off to command the 40th in the Mediterranean – Menorca, Malta and then to Egypt with Abercromby’s expedition to force the French out of Alexandria and Cairo. But he had made an impression on Princess Augusta, whose siblings had always teased her about her ‘rage militaire’, and she had equally affected him. She had written in 1793, ‘I intend for the rest of my life to be very despotic until I have a Lord and Master, and then (unless I break the great oaths and promises I shall make when I marry) I shall give myself up to his whims.’
Now Princess Augusta dreamt of having Sir Brent Spencer not only for a lover but for a husband, as she later recounted. But she did not yet reveal her feelings, strong though they were, to Spencer himself. He, for his part, caused much ill feeling when he unaccountably broke his engagement to his cousin Miss Canning this year, but whether this was on account of unspoken feelings he had himself for Princess Augusta cannot be known. It was dangerous for any private gentleman to have feelings for these princesses, when the King their patron would not allow even princes to come near them – unless the princess herself gave encouragement. In due course Princess Augusta would give that encouragement, in pursuit of private happiness within the confines of the Royal Marriages Act, an ambition that she had long pondered. The intensity with which she pursued that goal would startle those she entangled in her scheme – Sir Brent, perhaps, as much as anyone.
The Prince of Wales meanwhile had returned to Mrs Fitzherbert, and Princess Augusta wrote to him on 25 August 1799, without apparent irony, ‘how very much it stands to your mutual credit, that old friends sincerely and unalterably attached, should come together again’. A year earlier she had written that all the sisterhood felt concern at ‘the dejected appearance you made. I am not such a child as for you or anyone else in the world to suppose me ignorant of the cause … After such real affection, not to say adoration on your side, and I am confident from all I have heard pretty near the same on hers, I am certain it is nothing less serious than a reconciliation, which would surely make both of you happy.’
Other unorthodox arrangements proved too fragile to withstand the displeasure of the author of the Act. In Berlin out of the blue Prince Augustus’s wife Lady Augusta Murray had appeared at his side, alarmed to hear he was ill. After an interval of six years apart the Prince and his lady lived contentedly for a time, and even provided for their son Augustus a sister, Augusta. But the Prince was recalled to England by his father, and not long after his arrival there in May 1800, his Berlin sojourn with his wife and son and their daughter’s birth appeared like a dream – as did his promises to Lady Augusta of eternal fidelity. Shrugging off all encumbrances, Augustus took up his father’s offer of apartments at Kensington Palace and became an avid bibliophile. He welcomed visits from his brothers and sisters at Kensington, but bad health, he claimed, kept him away from Windsor.
Meanwhile in the spring of 1799 in Württemberg Augusta’s elder sister Royal had believed herself in real, not romantic, danger as the French drew near. But she had resisted her husband’s attempts to send her to safety. Her sister-in-law Princess Ferdinand, a target as the wife of an Austrian general, had left for Hanover on hearing the report that the French intended marching through the Duchy. As the daughter of the King of England, the Duke argued, Royal would have also a special value to the enemy. But with the stepchildren, and her ladies, she remained in Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg – keeping up lessons in engraving with Friedrich Müller. She preferred not to be parted from her husband, she told her father: ‘some days ago I was low with the thoughts of what might happen but now that the decisive moment approaches I am perfectly calm.’
Notwithstanding her calm, Royal lamented to her father the ruin of the country. The French armies under the command of General Moreau were in and out of the city, eating all they could find, stealing cattle as they pleased, and the Austrian generals imposed equal demands. The Duke dissolved the Stande or Parliament when it advocated making peace with the French, and offered stout promises that he would never leave his people – only to renege on that when the Helder disaster appeared to render flight essential. The Duchess reluctantly agreed to go to Wengen in September 1799, but after a few days she was celebrating her release from captivity. The menace had passed for the time being.
The next spring, however, there was no way out. To Erlangen in the Prussian King’s Franconian lands the Württemberg women and children retreated in 1800. Here in a flat landscape of conifers and sand, far from the fruitfulness of Württemberg and in a small house, Charlotte, Trinette and Paul sat down to endure the war. By a touch of fate, the pair of kangaroos she had requested from England were their companions – an intelligent chamberlain at Stuttgart having divined they would be of interest to the royals in their exile. This was not what Charlotte had expected when she adopted that diamond headdress and had her hair pulled into ringlets for her wedding day. She had hoped above all to be a mother, but she had certainly also looked forward to exercising the power of her position as the matriarch of a major Continental power.
Stoic by nature, self-abnegatory by upbringing, Princess Charlotte Augusta Matilda, Duchess of Württemberg looked out over the desert sand and identical pines in the shifting light and fretted that the French would destroy the improvements she and Fritz had so recently made at Ludwigsburg. Meanwhile, her husband the Duke of Württemberg, with his son Wilhelm, was energetically attempting at Vienna to redress his altered fortunes, and those of his Duchy. He expressed himself as bitter against Britain, which had done so little to aid his country considering their new family connection. And the Mintos heard that he was among those eager to separate themselves from the fading Holy Roman Empire and seek their fortune with Napoleonic France. Colleagues remonstrated with Minto for listening to the Duke, but the diplomat stood firm:
Besides the natural claim he seemed to have as an ally and relation of our own Court to support from an English minister in his relations with this Government, it seemed impossible to refuse a … kind and friendly ear to the lamentations and claims of a prince whose ruin seems so much a consequence of this relation and engagements to us … It is not his merits, but his misfortunes, or rather ruin in a common cause that my indulgence is directed [to]. I admit also that he is no apostle of our cause, and I can easily believe all you say of the mischief done by his indiscreet and perhaps ill affected language. Yet I have not nerves to resist altogether, or rather feel some indulgence for the cries and clamour of a real agonie. For he is at present struggling in the very convulsions of political death.
In England Charlotte’s sisters had recently recovered in May 1800 from convulsions of a different nature. Huddled outside the royal box at Drury Lane Theatre behind their mother, who was waiting to join her husband once he had taken his bow, they heard a shot. At first they thought it was a ‘squib’ backstage. Then the King waved the Queen back, saying, ‘Don’t go forward, a man in the parterre has fired a pistol.’ The Queen, worried that her younger daughters would faint, said nothing, for fear of uttering a ‘bêtise.’ For two minutes the theatre was silent. ‘You could have heard a pin drop,’ the Queen told her brother. Then, with the marksman apprehended, the King advanced, showing himself safe and unharmed, and a hubbub, with ‘cries of joy’, erupted. But the actors were too frightened to start the comedy, and the audience wanted to know what had happened. ‘Finally,’ reported the Queen, ‘an actress was pushed onto the stage.’ The actress announced, ‘I have the pleasure to tell you the man is in custody,’ and the comedy, very badly performed, began. There was no political intention, at least, in the attempt on the King’s life, as Sheridan, the theatre manager, discovered on questioning the marksman. James Hadfield, a hospital orderly who had tried to murder his child two days before, joined Margaret Nicolson, the King’s earlier assailant, in Dr Monro’s asylum, Bedlam.
Sophia wrote to Miss Garth on 25 May of ‘the miraculous escape of my most perfect and angelic Papa’, at the same time complaining of having been very far from well ‘with a complaint in my stomach’. The year before she had been afflicted by this complaint, as in earlier summers, including that first occasion in 1793 when she had stayed for so long at Tunbridge Wells and again in the summer of 1798. She had been forbidden ‘any kind of fatigue or hot rooms’ this time, and therefore would not be at the Birthday, although she told Miss Garth that she would accompany her parents in the following month – July – to Weymouth.
In the event, Sophia and Amelia set off a day before the rest of the royal party, and stopped for the night en route at General Gouldsworthy’s house outside Salisbury. It was said that Princess Sophia was still so weak she had to be carried up the stairs there. The rest of the royal party pursued their usual headlong course by coach from Windsor to Weymouth, there joining on 31 July the younger princesses and Prince Ernest, newly Duke of Cumberland, who was taking a course of sea bathing. (The King had provided royal dukedoms for both Ernest and – at last – for Prince Edward in Canada, who became Duke of Kent, in April 1799.)
After taking an airing on the sands in a ‘sociable’ (an open carriage) with her sisters Augusta and Elizabeth on the 2nd, Sophia was ill off and on at Weymouth in the early days of August until the 8th, when the Prince her brother – with whom she was still on cool terms, due to her support for his hated wife – heard from Amelia: ‘at last we have the prospect of seeing our dear Sophia restored to health very shortly’.
Dr Francis Millman attended the Princess, and by 15 August she was judged well enough to take another airing on the sands. Progress continued slowly, and she benefited from the ‘warm bath’, or bathing in heated seawater, while the rest of the royal family made ‘aquatic excursions.’ The King rode about Dorset with his son Ernest and with General Garth for companions, while the Queen and the other princesses ‘worked’ or took airings on the sands. Finally, in early October Sophia was declared fully recovered, and the extended royal visit came to a stop. And shortly before she left with the royal party for Windsor on the 8th, Dr Millman received the King’s congratulations and a baronetcy, although it was later said that the monarch put his daughter’s recovery down to eating good roast beef.
At any rate, the party returned to Windsor, after the extended stay at Weymouth, in high good humour to prepare for celebrations to mark the new century. These were to commence on New Year’s Day 1801, but there were to be other celebrations soon – for, after seven years of war, peace was at hand.
In December 1800 the Duchess of Württemberg and her children – as she called Paul and Trinette – were threatened directly in the ‘paper house’ in which they lived at Erlangen. Moreau, having defeated Archduke John, was headed for Vienna, but other French forces had taken Nuremberg and their troops were now constantly marching through Erlangen itself. They were ‘quartered in all of the villages around about, which makes me an absolute prisoner’, wrote the Duchess. Only the day before she tried to walk round the town, then saw a patrol which stopped them in their tracks. Later that month, during exchanges between the Austrian and French positions, ‘one could hear every shot as distinctly as if we were at a Review’, but there was no decisive outcome. ‘The whole day there is nothing but firing to be heard. God grant the Austrians success,’ she wrote with remarkable calm.
The Austrian outlook was hopeless and the Emperor sued for peace on Christmas Day. The Treaty of Lunéville, signed on 9 February 1801 and confirming Campo Formio, put an end to the Holy Roman Empire, concluded the War of the Second Coalition, and closed the eighteenth century with complete victory for France on the Continent – though not as yet in the newly United Kingdom of the British Isles. Over the New Year, congratulating her father on the union of Great Britain and Ireland and wishing him well for the new century, the Princess Royal wrote in disgust that the Austrian troops had simply thrown down their arms on hearing of the armistice.
A few days later she had more delicate information to offer from her husband, who was still in Vienna. The Duke had had to send a representative to Paris. His instructions were to keep in the background and ‘come forward’ – only when there was no thought of continuing the war, of course – to make a separate treaty with France. The Duke could not, Royal pleaded, maintain war against the might of France with only 7,000 men if Austria had made peace. The English, who had been suspicious of Royal’s husband at Vienna, were confirmed in their opinion of him, as he took the first steps towards alliance with Napoleon, and pulled with him Napoleon’s foe, the King of England’s eldest daughter.