Even as the Peace of Amiens was being celebrated, Princess Elizabeth mentioned to Dr Thomas Willis in March 1801 ‘a very delicate subject – the cruelty of a fabricated and most scandalous and base report concerning P.S. [Princess Sophia]’. The rumour was that she had given birth to a child at Weymouth the previous summer. ‘Such a report’, wrote Willis indignantly, ‘must in its nature be false as those who are acquainted with the interior of the King’s houses must testify.’ But the rumour or ‘report’ was almost certainly true.
Princess Sophia was in no doubt about the origin and fount of the rumours – her brother, the Prince of Wales, who so disliked her championing of his estranged wife. ‘He has trifled with my character, and a young woman’s character once gone is not so easily regained,’ she averred. For even before Lord Glenbervie and Princess Elizabeth gossiped and protested, Princess Sophia had confided in her oblique way – to Lady Harcourt on 30 December 1800 – her distress at the stories that were circulating about her. Referring to a ‘private conversation’ they had had, and to her happiness that she had ‘had courage to begin it’, she wrote:
the excessive kindness of your manner has, I assure you, greatly soothed my distressed and unhappy days and hours …
I have no doubt that I was originally to blame, therefore I must bear patiently the reports, however unjust they are, as I have partially myself to thank for them; but, dearest Ly H, when I reflect of the difference of your behaviour and that of others, it shows me how insincere the generality of this world are, and how one ought to value and revere a true friend, which is most justly styled the most precious jewel in life. It is grievous to think what a little trifle will slur a young woman’s character for ever. I do not complain, I submit patiently, and promise to strive to regain mine, which, however imprudent I have been, has, I assure you, been injured unjustly.
For all her fighting words, Sophia almost certainly gave birth at Weymouth – in circumstances which remain mysterious – to a baby who was baptized in the parish church there on 11 August 1800. The infant was described in the parish register as ‘Thomas Ward, stranger’ or foundling, ‘adopted by Samuel and Charlotte Sharland’, and as having been born on the 5th of that month. Samuel Sharland, a colonel of the Weymouth Volunteers, had a prosperous tailoring business on the Weymouth esplanade, and the birth of his own child was noted earlier in the month in the same register.
There is no doubt about Thomas Ward’s existence or about his presence during the first few years of his life at the Sharlands’ house on the esplanade at Weymouth. But great doubt surrounds the whole business of his birth, including his birthplace and his birthdate – notwithstanding the date given in his baptismal entry. The child may have been born when Sophia stopped en route at General Gouldsworthy’s on 30 July, or somehow, somewhere when she reached Weymouth – not necessarily at Gloucester Lodge, the royal residence on the esplanade, where there was little privacy. Sophia later said that it was her ‘old nurse’ who was with her at that dreadful time, and stopped the story from coming out then, but gives no further details. Apparently she did not realize for a very long time into her pregnancy that she was having a child.
Still more doubt obscures the identity of the child’s father. General Thomas Garth is, of course, the natural candidate, given Sophia’s ‘passion’ for him. A teasing letter without a date and addressed to ‘My very dear, dear General’ – almost certainly General Garth – refers to their exchange of rings and in other ways convinces the reader that their relationship was intimate. And less than four years after Sophia had given birth, Glenbervie was writing, ‘The foundling which was left at the tailor’s [Samuel Sharland] at Weymouth about two years ago, is now in a manner admitted by the people about the Court to be the Princess Sophia’s and, as the story generally goes, by General Garth … It is now said the Queen knows the child to be the Princess Sophia’s, but that the King does not, but that the Queen thinks Garth the father.’
As if to confirm part of the opinion that Glenbervie ascribes to the Queen – that General Garth was Thomas Ward’s real father – the equerry went on to adopt and educate the child at Harrow, renaming him Tommy or Thomas Garth in the process, making him his heir, and fostering his career in his old regiment. The letter Sophia wrote in 1805 referring to her ‘old nurse’ shows plainly that she was the child’s mother. Nothing would appear to be clearer than that, by some lapse in morals or contraception, Sophia and the General had together conceived Tommy Garth in the autumn of 1799. For evermore the Princess was to bear the shame of this ill chance, forfeiting all hope of marriage or domestic happiness. And the General behaved honourably by the boy in giving him his name, if his adoption of young Tommy unhappily confirmed the rumours that he was the illegitimate offspring of the equerry and the Princess.
But Glenbervie inserted an astonishing caveat into his story about Tommy Garth’s parentage. After his remarks about the General openly maintaining the child, he added, ‘But the Princess of Wales told Lady Sheffield the other day, that there is great reason to suspect the father to be the Duke of Cumberland. How strange and how disgusting. But it is a very strange family, at least the children – sons and daughters.’
This claim by the Princess of Wales, which probably issued from one of Cumberland’s brothers or even from the Duke himself, who was ‘underhand the great friend of the Princess of Wales’ this year – that he was the real father of his sister’s child – was to dog Sophia for a long time. As the child grew up, sly references to the story multiplied, and the matter ended by exploding into the public arena when Tommy Garth was nearly thirty years old. Old letters from Sophia to General Garth complaining of Ernest making ‘attempts on her person’ were supposedly among other documents bandied about at that time to prove that her brother was responsible for her pregnancy.
That Ernest made ‘attempts’ on Sophia or, in plain language, tried to rape his sister is certainly possible or even likely. The Prince – that boisterous, rude darling of his nurse Mrs Cheveley – knew no boundaries where appetite or decency were concerned, and all his life not only used the grossest language about women, but made the grossest of physical assaults on them – all women, married, unmarried, young, old, innocent and knowing. As a young soldier on the Continent he had to be restrained from trying his luck at a nunnery. In later life one of his victims’ husbands committed suicide.
However, let us not forget to whom Sophia wrote these letters complaining of her brother’s ‘attempts’ – to her lover, General Garth. And while Ernest had the opportunity to be the father of Tommy Garth – he was at Windsor during the late autumn of 1799 – Sophia’s letter to ‘My very dear, dear General’ makes it perfectly plain that her relationship with the equerry was long-standing, consensual and intimate. In other words, if an ‘attempt’ by the Duke of Cumberland was responsible for the child to which his sister Princess Sophia gave birth at Weymouth, rather than the more regular attentions of her lover Garth, she was particularly unlucky. That Garth was the father of Princess Sophia’s child is the commonsense and probable, if unromantic and not so scandalous, answer.
Before we leave Tommy Garth in 1801 still at the Sharlands’, not due to take up residence for another three years at the home his ‘adoptive’ father General Garth provided for him at Ilsington Manor at Puddletown near by, it will be as well to quote the undated letter from Sophia already mentioned: ‘Though I never can be really angry with you, my very dear, dear General, yet at this moment I almost am so, for you have indeed been excessively naughty. How can you, my dearest General, go on so long, when you do not feel well, without seeing Dr Turton?’ This physician to the royal household, who died in 1806, was no doubt required to alleviate General Garth’s chronic gout from which he unromantically suffered agonies. Sophia continued:
Your dear ring has given me some tremendous pinches, but I have bore them like a heroine. If you looked at your little finger when you were so naughty, I believe a certain little ring would have been impertinent enough to have given you a pinch. I think you deserve it – And now, my dearest General, do not forget that, when you are neglecting your own health, you are the cause of giving many unhappy moments to those who love you. And that was the case yesterday, for, as we were going to dinner, I heard you were not well and till the evening, when I saw Miss Gomm, did not know you was better. Therefore, you may easily imagine, dinner went down but so so, but, upon looking at the ring, I was frightened to death and ate like an Alderman.
The letter concludes:
I assure you I do all in my power (which God knows is but little) to please my sisters, but alas! I fear I do not succeed – I can say no more at present. My heart is too full, but, though I own I am not happy, yet I shall never forget you, my dear General, to whom I owe so much. Your kind remembrance of me is a cordial. Your calling me your S makes me as proud as Lucifer … I love you more and more every day. God bless you, my dearest dear General. Think of me tomorrow at 2 o clock. I shall then be happy for two minutes as I shall be speaking to dear Gooly once more.
The King was ill. How ill was unclear, but in mid-February 1801, he told General Garth out riding that he was ‘very bilious and unwell’ and had not slept. It seemed that he had stayed too long in church on the Friday, which had been a fast day. ‘The weather was so snowy and cold that His Majesty became excessively chilled.’ Shortly thereafter the symptoms of thirteen years before that had so alarmed the royal family and disrupted public business came flooding back – colic, sweating and hoarseness – and led to acute delirium and coma.
Thomas Willis had visited the King on Monday, 16 February at the Queen’s House, and was satisfied, after spending an hour with him, that the patient had a severe cold and was hoarse but nothing more. Yet within days, although the King attended a Council – convened, out of respect for his ailment, at the Queen’s House – he was ‘hurried’ and dwelt on his illness of 1788. He told Henry Addington, the incoming Prime Minister – Pitt had resigned over the question of Catholic Emancipation on the 5th – that in 1788 his father Dr Anthony Addington had counselled quiet.
Quiet was what the King needed now, and a week after he had first felt symptoms he confided in Thomas Willis, ‘I do feel myself very ill.’ Sunday, 22 February 1801 saw the arrival of the Reverend’s ‘medical’ brother Dr John Willis and of four burly ‘keepers’ from Dr Thomas Warburton’s asylum, both sanctioned by the Duke of York and Addington. Following the pattern of years before, the Opposition began their ‘speculating, anticipating and arranging’ of Cabinet posts in the new regency government they felt would soon ensue. For on 27 February Dr Willis, according to the Prince of Wales, ‘not only thought that the King could not understand what he read, were he disposed to read but that he could not, to the best of his judgement, know a single letter’. How then could he sign his royal assent to public acts? Pitt’s resignation and Addington’s substitution as prime minister still needed the King’s confirmation. Russia was establishing an Armed Neutrality league in the Baltic to menace British shipping as she attempted to violate French commerce there. And at a time when Austria and France had made peace, and the Continent was at last quiet – albeit in the stranglehold of France – there was a growing appetite in England for peace. If the King were incapacitated, who would commission the preliminary discussions with France on that delicate subject?
The King’s very existence rather than just his sanity seemed in doubt on 2 March. The princesses gathered with the rest of the family at the Queen’s House, expecting his fever to end in death. But a stray suggestion from Addington, of putting a pillow of warm hops under the invalid’s head, had a miraculous effect. The King slept, he grew stronger. He ‘cries at almost anything’, the doctors wrote, and he still ‘became so puzzled’ – when reading state papers – ‘that he grew hurried and angry’. But they wrote their final bulletin, predicting complete recovery, on 11 March, and the King accepted Pitt’s resignation on the 14th. He even accepted, through the unorthodox medium of the Reverend Thomas, the need for proposals of peace, and signed them. Princess Augusta wrote with relief to Lady Harcourt on 16 March: ‘We are as well as can be expected, considering what we have gone through – and though all the great distress and horror is now over, we now feel much oppressed from fatigue of mind and hurry of spirits.’ Her mother hoped to see Lady Harcourt the following day, she went on. ‘But of course it depends upon the hours we spend with the King or when we are in expectation of being sent for.’
The Queen held a drawing room on 26 March at the Prime Minister’s insistence and much to the King’s displeasure, when he found that Dr Willis had so blistered his legs that morning that he could not appear. Princess Augusta later recalled her own anguish at this time: ‘When I was very miserable and unhappy at St James’s last winter I told Lord Harcourt that I never would be happy again. And he was so very good as to say, “O fie, le bon temps viendra.” And I was so obliged to him and so incredulous and so low that I could only say, “God knows!” To which he again replied, “He does know best and does best for us all.” I always tried to think so, but my mind was too oppressed then to say more.’
In the meantime, while the King’s mind was wandering, King Frederick William III of Prussia had issued a proclamation declaring that he was compelled to take ‘efficacious measures’ against Hanover, and Prussian troops duly occupied the King of England’s beloved, if obscure German Electorate. Adolphus, leaving his house on the Leinestrasse in Hanover, was back in England by mid-April 1801, where he found his father recovering – but once more in confinement and in rooms that had originally been prepared at Kew House for his own arrival. The King was there alone with the Willises and their keepers. The Queen and the princesses, in deep distress, lived across the way at the Dutch House, or Prince of Wales’s House.
The King had seen his eldest son on 15 April for the first time in a month, and received him with ‘every mark of love and fondness’, speaking of his happiness in embracing him on the day he dismissed Dr Willis’s keepers. He knew of Nelson’s victory in the struggle for domination of the Baltic, when that Admiral destroyed the Danish fleet in their own harbour of Copenhagen. But ‘of the condition of Hanover none had ventured to talk to him’, and he repeatedly declared he was a dying man, and determined to go abroad to Hanover and make over the government to the Prince. The Queen and Prime Minister between them became so agitated by his behaviour that, only days after he had embraced his son and celebrated his freedom, the Willises cornered him on 20 April at Kew, where he had gone to convalesce at the Prince of Wales’s House. While the church bells rang on the Green summoning the inhabitants to hear the prayers of thanks for the King’s recovery, the eager doctors imposed on the object of those prayers their will and the straitjacket. ‘I will never forgive you as long as I live,’ said the King. From April to late May he recovered slowly at Kew House, seeing nobody but the Willises – not even his son Adolphus, who inhabited the same house. The Willises were his constant companions as he walked round the gardens or signed official documents. Even after he was better, they stayed until the end of June on Kew Green to supervise him.
During this time the King took the interests of the Princess of Wales and her rights over her daughter almost painfully to heart. Elizabeth wrote to Dr Willis after a visit to her father in June 1801, when the princesses and the Queen, who camped at the Prince of Wales’s House, were at last allowed to see their father, now he was recovered: ‘The subject of the Princess is still in the King’s mind to a degree that is distressing from the unfortunate situation of the family.’ He meant to build the Princess another wing to her house at Blackheath, and take care of Princess Charlotte himself. But the Princess of Wales had spoken to Elizabeth in some alarm about all the schemes the King had for her. He was ‘heated and fatigued’, Elizabeth said ominously. Dr Robert Willis, a third Willis brother called in, said that there was an increase in ‘hurry’, and his brother Thomas concurred in this opinion: ‘His body, mind and tongue are all upon the stretch every minute …’ But the King was set in his mind, not only to spend a period of convalescence at the Lodge at Weymouth which he had finally bought from his brother the Duke of Gloucester now that his confinement was ended, but to lend his support to his niece the Princess of Wales in her battles with her husband the Prince. Days after he had reconciled with his son on his first recovery, Glenbervie reported, the King rode down to Storey’s Gate and over Westminster Bridge to visit the Princess at Blackheath with only the Duke of Cumberland and two equerries in attendance. ‘She had just breakfasted and was still in bed, and was very much surprised when they brought her word the King was at the door …’ She arose immediately and went down to hear from the King ‘his entire approbation of her conduct and his affection for her’.
One cannot exclude the possibility that the King’s hostess left a bedfellow when she went to greet her father-in-law. Princess Sophia wrote to Miss Garth from Weymouth in the summer of 1801, expressing a new caution about her sister-in-law, whose independent ways at Blackheath were leading to rumours of love affairs. ‘I think it a blessing you are not mixed in her [the Princess of Wales’s] confidence, as you can never be blamed; once and once only, and that was at Kew, Elizabeth said she thought the Pss confided in you; I ventured at random to say I thought not… as to the Pss I never name her to my sisters …’
Meanwhile the King’s virtuous eldest daughter, the Duchess of Württemberg, had returned to her husband’s Duchy after a year in exile, and she recorded, ‘I shall never forget the way in which they received me; the whole road from Lourch [Lorch] to Ludwigsburg was crowded with people. The Duke and his sons came three miles to meet me. Words can but feebly express the gratitude we feel to the Almighty for having restored us to our home.’ The kangaroos came safely home, too, and very shortly, none the worse for their journey, provided two young joeys for the admiration of the citizens of Ludwigsburg.
Royal thought fondly of her niece in England and wrote, ‘Pray tell little Charlotte that I send her a fan and when I go to Stuttgart shall not fail to bespeak some silver toys if she continues a good girl.’ But on hearing from General Melius, her husband’s envoy to England, of her niece’s ‘musical genius, speaking and repeating French well, and of her pretty manner’, she was a little hurt that ‘she displayed all these accomplishments without showing any timidity.’ In Württemberg the Duchess continued to supervise the education of ‘the children’, as she called her teenage stepchildren – Catherine, ‘who certainly puts me much in mind of dear Elizabeth and has a very amiable good heart’, and Paul, who was ‘a very comical boy and, in my partial eyes, his manners are like Adolphus’s’.
The Duchess’s delight now was in the gardens and grounds of Ludwigsburg: ‘After having been so many months deprived of flowers I feel double pleasure in attending to them and to a very pretty aviary the Duke has been so good as to build for me and to fill with common birds, as I object much to fine foreign ones which would not give me more pleasure and would cost much more trouble.’ But all the delights to be savoured on her return from exile paled beside the arrival of a letter her father wrote her from Weymouth, three days after the Willises and keepers had been dismissed for good. ‘It diffused on my whole countenance such a look of happiness that the first question my children asked me was what had given me so much pleasure, that they might share in it.’
Information that the King had ‘taken to botany’ led the Duchess to rejoice: ‘You will find it a constant source of amusement.’ She had herself bought a garden at Ludwigsburg of seven acres, with a house – ‘though in good repair, like old Frogmore and I have made it very comfortable by papering some of the rooms’. And she now tried to ‘acquire some fresh knowledge every day’, having a good gardener who understood both kitchen and flower garden, and a greenhouse and hothouse, ‘for flowers all winter long’.
Furthermore, the Duke increasing her land with the gift of an adjacent three-acre field, the Duchess was able to make hay three times that year, and feed the two Swiss cows she established there – and a calf born that September. But she worried, as a good Duchess should, about the field mice which threatened the potato harvest. Some farmers let their hogs into the fields to devour the mice, but then they ran the risk of swine fever. In graceful compliment to her father, she observed, ‘Your Majesty having taken so much to farming is very much admired abroad and looked on as one of the great causes of the improvements in England.’
At Stuttgart in the late autumn, the Duchess occupied herself with copying some dogs from Ridinger engravings, after a spell of damp weather had prevented her drawing or working – ‘it gives me violent headaches.’ She showed her work to the Stuttgart engraver Müller, and ‘he appears satisfied with those I have finished of late, which encourages me very much to apply [myself]’. At her new house, the Matildenhof, Royal began also to paint the celebrated Ludwigsburg porcelain with images derived from the engravings of Ridinger and others. The palaces of Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg filled with her painted and gilded products – cups, vases, plates and even plaques set into furniture.
The Duke had given her two very fine flower paintings, which, she believed, were by Breughel. ‘I intend to attempt to copy them but whether it will be in colours or in black and white I am not yet determined.’ She was delighted with a visit that she had had in November from Lord Minto, the British Minister at Vienna. ‘Indeed,’ she declared then, ‘it is impossible for those who have not been parted from their family to imagine the joy one feels at meeting with anybody who can give some account of all those one loves. I am like an infant on those occasions …’ She pressed the diplomat to take home to her father an account of her house at Ludwigsburg, her ‘favourite spot’. If possible, she contrived to spend one day there every week ‘and watch a little my workmen, who grow very idle if they are not followed.’
But she had other business in December 1801 which she hoped another British diplomat – Lord Cornwallis, envoy to the Peace of Amiens deliberations – could bring forward: ‘Though I understand Great Britain does not intend to interfere publicly in the interest of the Continent … one word from your Majesty would have great effect and be highly flattering to the Duke, who is much attached to you and has been one of the greatest sufferers by the war.’ The Duke was still waiting for the restitution of territory and financial recompense he had been promised at the Lunéville peace earlier that year.
At Weymouth meanwhile Royal’s sisters endured long weeks of ennui, going to the playhouse nearly every night, and sailing on the days the King bathed, so as not to fatigue him, although they would rather have walked or ridden. But, as Sophia wrote on 25 July to Lady Harcourt, they did not complain. ‘How trifling are our amusements when compared with the blessing of his returning health; all that should be put aside; no self in the case, and his health be our only object … there never existed so good a man, a husband and a father.’ By the end of the summer the King had recovered, but he looked an old man, stooped and less firm on his legs when, on 1 October 1801, he signed the preliminary articles of peace between England and France.
Princess Augusta in London wrote to Lady Harcourt with relief and regret mixed:
On Sunday I read a letter from my sister [Royal] in good spirits, and all happiness at the Peace – I, who am prudence itself, answered her yesterday that I was glad she was so happy, and that the telegraph had brought her such good news – but did not tell her what I will tell you, that she feels like an inhabitant of the Continent and I, like a proud Islander. Talk of the Continent now! It’s all chatter and as good as mouldy cheese.
I heard a long account the other day about the wonderful work the French would set about as soon as their lads returned from their different armies, and amongst other things that they would build a formidable navy. ‘So much the better,’ said I, ‘let them build, and we will take their ships’… It’s no disgrace that we cannot build ships like them and we ought to own that we cannot. Why, Eliza don’t grind her colours, grind her scissors, and yet nobody draws and cuts out like her. It’s all stuff to suppose that one can do everything …
Now what a prose I have been led onto, but you are so good you will excuse your spoiled child. And you must recollect for my excuse that I have been so very long thinking only on one subject [the King’s health] that now thank God as I have no uneasiness on that head, I may let my head run upon various subjects – that, it is always ready to do. It is like a wild colt, running and galloping de cà, de là, partout.
On New Year’s Day 1802 that ‘inhabitant of the Continent’ the Duchess of Württemberg reported to her father the King from Stuttgart that it had snowed above eighteen inches in town and three feet in the country. ‘A man was froze to death last night who had lost his road.’ She was hoping that ‘the road will be sufficiently beat’ in a week’s time to go in a sledge, ‘a favourite amusement of mine and particularly so of all the young people here as these parties end in a ball.’ The Duchess’s amusements were innocent enough, although conscientiously in May she hoped her father could do something for the Duke with the First Consul in Paris. She did not know that in March her husband Frederick had signed a private treaty with Napoleon, surrendering his possessions on the left bank of the Rhine in return for nine towns formerly Austrian. He was preparing the way to be created elector.
The Duchess kept her father informed of her employment: ‘I have bespoke a room to be painted and furnished in humble imitation of the seat at Frogmore but… I believe it will only turn out a bungling piece of work.’ Later in the year English visitors including her brother Adolphus, on his way back to Hanover, described her father’s building plans – to restore Windsor Castle to ‘its ancient Gothic beauty’ and to complete a new castellated palace on the river at Kew, ‘Lulworth Castle improved’. ‘I hope that your Majesty will allow me to draw you some chairs with a pen on velvet to be placed in this new palace, and that you will be so gracious as to decide whether they shall be flowers or landscapes,’ she wrote.
Despite all, the Queen was perturbed by what she heard from Ludwigsburg. Royal had written to her of her cousin the Princess of Thurn and Taxis – ‘spirited and agreeable society, very pretty and with a charming figure’. Sadly, wrote the Queen on 11 October 1802, ‘I don’t think the Princess can say the same of my daughter. I hear from all the English she is enormous. In other respects she does as much good as she can, and studies to make herself respectable by her conduct. That’s the essential, but still I don’t think one should neglect the exterior wholly.’
Brother Adolphus was searching the Continent for a bride, and he concentrated entirely on the exterior of his sister’s stepdaughter Catherine when he rejected her as a bride. For a year now Adolphus and Augustus had, like their brothers, been royal dukes. The King had created Augustus Duke of Sussex and Inverness, while Dolly became Duke of Cambridge, in November 1801. And this Royal Duke was fastidious. Princess Catherine was, following her father’s and now her stepmother’s example, as fat as could be – as fat, indeed, as his sister Elizabeth and not as tall, nor as pretty, he noted. Besides, he added, ‘knowing the violence of her father and mother, I own I am afraid.’ He continued his pilgrimage.
At Weymouth this year Amelia at nineteen delighted in the doings of her six-year-old niece Princess Charlotte. ‘I have dressed our dear little love from tip to toes for tomorrow [the Prince of Wales’s birthday] and dear Mary has dressed me for the day,’ she wrote. Fashion-plate Princess Mary had given her younger sister a dress that the elder described as ‘in my own style – to make her look less like an old woman than usual.’ But Amelia’s odd style of dressing did not prevent her from conducting a very open romance with one of the King’s favourite equerries, General the Hon. Charles Fitzroy. He had apparently stayed behind as part of her escort the previous summer when she remained with Miss Gomm, her English teacher, at Weymouth for her health a few days after the rest of the party left for London. Amelia’s refusal to hide her relationship with Fitzroy, Lord Southampton’s second son, her hanging back and riding with him, her insistence at playing at his table at cards, brought down on her the twittering disapproval of Miss Jane Gomm. But Amelia was impervious to such criticisms, as her elder sisters might not have been.
Princess Elizabeth for her part wrote to Lady Harcourt, ‘Now, if you wish to hear of Weymouth, shut your door and your window, and I will … say in a whisper it is detestable, and I continue my prayer, “Oh, how I long to be married, be married, before that my beauty decays etc”.’ (She had no particular candidate in mind, but a review at which the French princes, including Louis XVI’s cousin Louis Philippe, paraded before her father would soon concentrate her thoughts.) The days were odious, and the evenings, after ‘an hour’s German’, dressing and dinner, were as follows:
Read to the Queen the whole evening till cards, when I play at whist till my eyes know not hearts from diamonds and spades from clubs. And when that is over, turn over cards to amuse the King, till I literally get the rheumatism in every joint of my hand … News there is none, but who bathes and who can’t, and who won’t and who will, whether warm bathing is better than cold, who likes wind and who don’t, and all these very silly questions and answers which bore one to death and provoke one’s understanding.
There was festivity at the New Year at Frogmore with a children’s ball given in honour of the princesses’ niece, Charlotte. She ‘never was not in any one of the figures and danced with great dignity and looked, if I may say so, what she really is born to be’, wrote her aunt Mary, ‘but perfectly the life and spirit a child ought to have with it which makes it the more surprising …’. The children supped upstairs afterwards, ‘in those two rooms’ at Frogmore ‘that open into each other with large folding doors, the plateau was filled with children’s toys and you cannot think what a new and pretty effect it had’.
As Charlotte grew, and the divide between her parents widened, her aunts in England and in Württemberg thought not only of her wellbeing as a child, but of the character she would bring to the role of sovereign one day. The presence of a docker’s child at her mother the Princess of Wales’s house at Blackheath alarmed them. Not only was this hardly proper company for the future Queen of England, but the Princess said ‘everybody must love something in this world’, and lavished attention on this infant, Willy Austin, to the detriment of her relationship with her visiting daughter. These children’s balls at Windsor were an opportunity for her to make ‘proper’ friends. And the Prince her father put in an appearance: ‘all good humour, and as you know he can be when he likes and intends to please and be pleased, his manner to the King was just what it always ought to be and the pleasure he expressed concerning his child and his admiration of her was really quite charming’.
By the autumn of 1803 Napoleon was concentrating his considerable forces on the project of an invasion of England, and 100,000 men stood ready at Boulogne to cross. ‘We are expecting the French but many say that they will not come, but it is as well they should be expected,’ Elizabeth declared stoutly.
The Queen meanwhile told her brother that she and her daughters were amusing themselves at Frogmore ‘with a good read, working there on a long table under the shade of fine trees.’ But while Augusta listened to the Queen read The Lay of the Last Minstrel, far away in a white medieval tower near Frankfurt the Landgrave of Hesse-Homburg wrote on 12 January 1804 to King George III. ‘My eldest son [the Hereditary Prince of Hesse-Homburg] has had only one wish for some time,’ ran his letter, ‘on which his happiness depends; to obtain the hand in marriage of your second daughter, Princess Augusta, and he presses me so strongly to place his wishes at your Majesty’s feet that I cannot refuse his prayer. He has no titles to speak in his favour, except his moral character, and the campaigns which he has made with honour in the Imperial service.’ But Augusta never got to hear of this proposal. As was his custom, the King refused the honour. But he could not refuse a letter from his son-in-law of Wurttemberg, who had a new tide, if no moral character, to inform the King of. The Diet reconstructing western Germany on a Napoleonic model had decreed that he was to be one of the electors of the Holy Roman Empire.3
This came as a bitter blow, especially as the King of England’s own Electorate of Hanover had been lost to the French almost immediately the war began again in May 1803. ‘We have had little contact with the continent since the French entered Hanover,’ the Queen informed her brother two months later. ‘The affair of Hanover is a coup de foudre for the King, but he is well.’ And Elizabeth wrote to Lady Harcourt, ‘The accounts of Hanover almost killed me, as in every sense it was a most melancholy event for the family and all the little hopes we had been building since the treaty of Amiens – like the treaty of Amiens – vanished into air.’ However, she continued with gusto, ‘as long as England shall be England, I still do hope we shall do. I think everybody may be of use, women as well as men, and we should be getting all our old linen together, making lint bandages and everything useful in that way…’
In September Augusta had apologized for the penmanship of a letter she sent to Lady Harcourt, but she was writing in Amelia’s room: ‘Dear Amelia is famously untidy with her inkstand and her pens are six inches deep in black mire.’ That autumn, untidy Amelia composed one of several last testaments that she would execute when illness overcame her. All were dedicated to her lover General Charles Fitzroy, ‘who nothing but my unfortunate situation parts me from, as I feel assuredly I am the chosen of your heart as you are of mine – I leave you everything I have …’.
Illness was to turn Amelia’s mind hard and suspicious, but now her family still hoped for her perfect recovery from her different ailments. ‘Through God’s assistance we may see her what she was,’ wrote Princess Elizabeth in December 1803. And Amelia herself told Lady Harcourt: ‘God knows my heart is gratefully devoted to my family, I possess the greatest of blessings, kind parents and sisters… Our dear King who is our sheet anchor, and whom we look up to next to Heaven is well. If he is preserved to us I think we must do well.’ She loved the Prince almost as much, and complained to him, ‘It is ages since eleven of us have been together.’
But the royal family was soon to need their ministering energies for another invalid. As Napoleon was crowned emperor of the French in January 1804, across the Channel the King caught a cold, and a ‘rheumatic attack’ with malaise and ‘hurry’ followed. Princess Mary, whose cardinal virtue was calm, wrote in distress: ‘The King never left us till half past seven o’clock. Such a day I never went through.’ And the Marquess of Buckingham told his brother of ‘the certainty of the King’s insanity having returned, which is now universally known, and makes a strong sensation.’ Once again the King was for a few days in danger of his life, then he recovered.
This time the King agreed that he was ill. He gave the keys to the private drawers of his desks to the Queen, dismissed his pages for the meantime and awaited medical help – and restraint. A new character, Dr Simmons from St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, was called in, the presence of the Willises being judged likely to bring on dangerous convulsions in their former patient. Although this new doctor – and his keepers – used the same methods the Willises had employed, Prime Minister Addington reported, ‘He submits cheerfully to the restraints which he believes to be necessary,’ and the King was in a straitjacket night and day. As he was on the road to recovery by 26 February, Simmons was able to declare his methods effective. Princess Elizabeth wrote, after it was over, ‘I have never quitted my mother’s room morning noon or night… I am told I am very much altered, look 20 years older. So adieu to looks of any kind, mes beaux jours sont passés.’
By the end of April the Queen could tell her brother that the King was getting better. ‘But one does not recover so easily at 66 as at 50.’ And indeed for the rest of a harrowing year the King was to veer from cool and collected to wild and sometimes lascivious behaviour, and back again. One event at least pleased him, the reappearance of Pitt as prime minister, He was ‘better than I have seen him yet, delighted with Mr Pitt whose presence and conduct have worked a miracle’, wrote Elizabeth in May.
‘The King (with Dr Simmons at his side) used to ride out at the same time with a great cortege of Princesses and their ladies, equerries, attendants, and frequently some of the Royal Dukes,’ an equerry’s wife, Mrs George Villiers, later recorded. Her husband, a favourite of the King’s, was called to Kew in June 1804 to ‘be always at hand to attend upon the King’ while the monarch was recovering, and the Duke of Cumberland’s house on the Green was offered to his wife and children, so that ‘he might have no reason for going away’. Mrs Villiers tells us that she dined every day with the Queen and princesses at the Dutch House: ‘I never saw any daughters… show such assiduous and affectionate devotion to their father … perhaps none so much as Princess Sophia and Amelia.’ In the sad, enclosed world of Kew that summer, these two princesses became intimate with Theresa Villiers, whom they called ‘Tant Mieux’, and her husband George, whom they dubbed ‘Savage’.
Mrs Villiers’s friendship with Sophia was to fade but with Amelia it increased daily. However, she wrote, the Princess never spoke of ‘the attachment that existed between her and General Charles Fitzroy, second son of Lord Southampton … From 1804 … till the year 1808 she never once alluded to it …’ (Amelia was equally discreet with her sister Mary, with whom she was to be on the closest of terms, but to whom she never once spoke of her ‘attachment’.) Mrs Villiers added how strange it was that the King, ‘though perfectly unconscious of the attachment’, never missed an opportunity – when he recovered – of ‘placing Princess Amelia under the care of General Fitzroy, whether in dancing, riding or on any other occasion’.
Although the King rode out and gave other appearances of functioning normally, the Prince of Wales felt justified in accusing ministers of conspiring to hide his father’s real condition from Parliament and the country. He begged the Lord Chancellor to regulate the matter – preferably by the Regency Bill of 1789. In July he bewailed the ‘extraordinary’ circumstance of any king exercising his royal powers while being kept under personal restraint, and begged the Queen to join him in declaring the King incapable.
Princess Augusta wrote to Lady Harcourt on 3 July of ‘the constant state of anxiety we live in … it makes me very low, but that I am so used to now, that I can bear it better than I did six months ago … I think it a great mercy we have so little company,’ she concluded, ‘as a made up face with a heavy heart is a sad martyrdom.’ Kangaroos proving a leitmotif in times of affliction for the royal family, she recounted how there was a tame one in the menagerie at Kew that fed from her hand. To her relief, if not that of the Prince, on the 20th of that month the King was declared restored to health. He left Kew for Windsor, and a few days later prorogued Parliament.
The Prince, abandoning plans for a regency, was now exercised by the very odd ideas the King had about Princess Charlotte, but, as Amelia told him, ‘All I can make out about you is that until the doctor leaves us he will take no steps to see you or the Princess.’ Simmons, having lingered a further month to observe the King, finally departed towards the end of August. The King wrote immediately to Princess Caroline and to his granddaughter’s governess Lady Elgin, requesting that they meet him at Kew, the late scene of his confinement. There he told the Princess of Wales that he meant to take her daughter under his care and that of tutors at Windsor, where Caroline might visit her freely. Indeed, he would provide a house there for her convenience.
Three days later, a furious Prince failed to appear at a meeting to which the King had called him at Kew, where he meant to impart this information. Princess Amelia, sending a snuffbox to her brother a few days earlier, had stressed that all their comfort depended on that meeting: ‘I am more wretched than I can express … could an extinguisher fall on the whole family as things are it would be a mercy.’ Nevertheless, the Prince did not appear at Kew. Instead a note from him was handed by Edward to the King, waiting with his other sons – including Augustus, who had just returned to England – and the Queen and princesses. ‘The Prince is ill,’ the King announced, and set out forthwith for Weymouth.
‘The Queen was much frightened,’ wrote Augustus of the awful day at Kew, ‘as were all my sisters.’ A month later, when Princess Amelia fell from her horse out riding with her father, the King insisted, with unwonted severity and when she was plainly suffering, that she remount and continue. With the Prince’s failure to attend the meeting still in his mind, he said that he had one child already who lacked courage. He would not have more.
When the King reached Weymouth, at six in the morning, he was ‘less hurried than could have been expected’, wrote his daughter Sophia. ‘He went to bed for an hour, and since that has not been off his legs, but I trust in God after a few days he will be more quiet as we must make allowances for his joy at this moment finding himself quite at liberty.’ But, she added, ‘I am sorry to say, he means to wear the uniforms of the different corps… which is vexatious.’ All that summer, according to unkind witnesses, the King dressed in heavy Hanoverian boots and wore great gauntlet gloves, an odd choice of dress for a bathing resort. Buckingham wrote to Grenville, ‘My accounts from Weymouth are the same. Mens non sana in corpore sano.’
But there was worse. Lord Grenville had heard from his brother Buckingham in May that, when the King drove out, his sons accompanied him. The Queen and princesses, meanwhile, followed in another conveyance, as he had shown himself to be ‘lost to all propriety of conduct in their coach.’ The Queen did not now allow the King into her bedchamber, placing two German ladies there and then retaining two or three of the princesses who stayed until he had left the apartment. The fear or disgust the Queen had felt for the King was strong enough to resist the entreaties of ministers, doctors, nature and ‘duty’, according to a memorandum from Weymouth the Prince of Wales received in September. Lord Auckland wrote to Lord Henley that month, ‘With in the family there are strange schisms and cabals and divisions among the sons and daughters. One of the two youngest of the latter dines alternately with the Patron [the King] and nobody else.’ Lord Hobart wrote to Lord Auckland the same month, ‘It is a melancholy circumstance to see a family that had lived so well together for such a number of years completely broken up.’ Dr John Willis had told him confidentially, he added, that ‘things would never be quite right’.
The royal parents, dissatisfied and irritable with each other, effectively separated on their return from Weymouth, when they both took up residence in Windsor Castle, in accordance with the King’s new project of inhabiting the Castle itself and pulling down the Queen’s Lodge. But they lived in separate apartments in different parts of the Casde. The Queen bemoaned the loss of her comfortable warm rooms at the Queen’s Lodge, occupying now with her daughters the south and east towers that looked over the Long Walk and the Home Park. The King moved into the northern wing once lived in by Queen Elizabeth, and there his conversation which had been at times ‘very childish’ at Weymouth became sober and composed.
Other family rifts healed. In November 1804 the King and Prince met at last, ‘a day that has created feelings in me never to be forgotten’, wrote Princess Amelia. ‘The dear king I think wonderfully well. To me he appears more placid and calm than I ever saw him since his illness.’ But the King wrote next day to his niece at Blackheath, saying that he now ‘wished to communicate a plan for the child’s happiness’. And so began a series of conferences at the Princess of Wales’s house which alarmed the royal family. Two weeks later Sophia wrote to Mrs Villiers:
Well my dear, I am completely miserable. The dear angel [the King] gone to Blackheath and probably will not be home till dark. How late it was last night, he could not have been home till one. All this worries us to death. I thought him most hurried when he came in to our dinner, very good humoured, but in a sad fidget, after dinner he talked of nothing but this sad story, but not one word of anger escaped him … the old Lady [the Queen] is in high glee, I suppose at the dear man’s absence – How unnatural, how odious!
Sophia did not relish her growing role as her father’s confidante, and, a few days later, remarked that she wished she had a new dictionary ‘to do justice to all my heart feels’. The Princess of Wales at Blackheath told of having to leap over sofas to escape the King’s passionate lunges, and a housemaid was apparently caught by the King and locked in a stable with him. ‘He is all affection and kindness to me,’ wrote Princess Sophia, ‘but sometimes an over kindness, if you can understand that, which greatly alarms me.’ She hoped the Princess was prudent: ‘I believe he tells her everything.’ Her father’s ‘flow of spirits’ disturbed her.
At Weymouth that summer two physicians speculated that Sophia herself suffered already in some part, and was likely to suffer more, from what people persisted in calling the ‘family malady’ – that scrofulous tendency which, in her father’s case, was held to have ‘fallen upon’ his brain. As someone who lived on her nerves, Sophia felt keenly her father’s changes of mood – and sexual attentions. As she said sorrowfully to Mrs Villiers, ‘I wish I did not feel as I do, for these feelings have ever been my misfortune. I wish sometimes I had all the bonhomie of a princess, it would be better for me, but though born a RH, I must feel like the rest of you, and this your kind heart will forgive.’ Sophia had been prone to ‘spasms’ for nearly ten years now, but these ‘feelings’ and the ‘nervous’ condition from which she had suffered this summer were apparently new. They were to recur.
Yet Sophia was no supporter of her eldest brother: ‘Does he really fancy, because he is the rising sun, anything he says, it is to be swallowed whole?’ she asked. But her venom was reserved now for her troubled mother, whom she saw as the chief agent of her father’s unhappiness. She recorded that the Queen ‘was not pleased at the dear angel’s desiring her to go over the castle with him. She said she was “not an enthusiast”. How true that is. God knows, her enthusiasm consists in nothing but eating black puddings and German dishes at Frogmore.’
Sophia’s spirits were so broke, she declared, that she hoped, ‘when my duty to the best of fathers is at an end’, that she could then ‘retire from this worldly scene and end my days in quiet’. Buckingham, always in the know, declared shortly before Christmas that ‘appearances at Windsor are most unfavourable.’ Even in her relations with Princess Elizabeth – who, with Princess Augusta, was sympathetic to the Queen – there was no peace for Sophia. The elder sister told the younger, who was writing to Mrs Villiers, to say the Queen was in a delightful humour. ‘At this I hesitated,’ reported Sophia. ‘Eliza then left in a huff saying, “Well, say what you like, nobody wants you to say what you do not feel, but it is very unfortunate that people see with such different eyes”.’ For her part, Elizabeth wrote on Boxing Day that she had been ‘more unhappy this year than any one year of my life.’
The King kept to his cold northern apartments at Windsor, where General Sir Herbert Taylor, his new private secretary, now joined him every day. Remarkably George III had managed till now his vast correspondence himself. But an unexpected blow, the loss of sight in his left eye the previous summer, had left him persevering with the aid of a green eye-shade. Now the oculist Phipps declared that there was no way to save the right one, short of couching the cataracts, and Taylor proved an able amanuensis. It was said that Princess Mary developed romantic feelings for him, and that they were reciprocated. But gossips were always eager to ascribe to the blameless, beautiful Mary some romantic attachment.
The father the princesses had known when they grew up was now hardly recognizable. The energetic and authoritarian King of their childhood was now a stooped and blind old man on whose behalf Sir Herbert conducted public business, and to whom he related the progress of the war. The King’s love of farming and of the countryside and hunting could no longer be realized with much vigour, in his poor state of health. He went out for stilted walks with his equerries and pages, and in the evenings music was his one solace. And yet he remained stubborn on the same points which had tried him years before. He would still not yield on the question of allowing Catholics into Parliament – and he would still not yield on the question of his daughters getting married.
‘The kinder the angel King is to me, the more desirous I am of keeping in my own humble sphere … not asking to court popularity and make my little self of consequence,’ Sophia wrote in January 1805. She told Mrs Villiers of an unpleasant ride with her father when he had alarmed her with his hurried expostulations, ‘What! What!’, and said ‘much against the Queen’. He said to Sophia, ‘I look upon you as my friend and I will tell you that I cannot go on as I do, she has turned me out of her room, and a friend I must and will have … I shall find somebody else.’ When the King said he saw she did not approve of this, Sophia simply said, ‘I lament it.’
With her elder sisters, who were more forgiving towards their mother, Princess Sophia reported, she was highly out of favour, and Sir James Bland Burges heard that the princesses now spent hours in their own rooms and were rarely together. Sophia wrote of their situation: ‘to have the whole talked over and canvassed now makes me wretched. It is not that I am invisible to his [the King’s] faults, but I know what he was. And can I love him less, when I reflect that this sad change arises from the will of God? And indeed this house is made so truly uncomfortable that I cannot wonder at his flying from it.’ A day later she avowed, ‘The Queen’s manner to the Angel is, in a word, shameful. Indeed I believe she has lost her head and her heart for I am sure it is as hard as a stone.’
In the meantime a new governess, Lady de Clifford, was chosen for Princess Charlotte, ‘the quantum of access… to be allowed to the mother’ was decided, and in February Charlotte was established at Windsor. The King wrote on the occasion of Caroline’s first visit to her: ‘It is quite charming to see the princess and her child together, of which I have been since yesterday a witness.’ Now that Charlotte had the ‘advantage of excellent air and a retired garden’ at Windsor, which would be the young Princess’s residence for the greater part of the year, he believed his granddaughter would make satisfactory progress in her studies, ‘which have certainly been little attended to.’ And, his mind at peace, the King was well at last. ‘All the hurry of his manners is gone – he never said “hey!” once or “what” twice together,’ wrote the Princess of Wales’s Privy Purse Miss Hayman, ‘and indeed was as quiet and collected as possible.’
The Queen brought up with her more pliant husband in April 1805 the subject of a proposal from her brother Charles in Mecklenburg. He wished his son, the Hereditary Prince, to marry one of their younger daughters. She had not ‘named the subject to any of the Princesses’, the Queen told the King, ‘for I have made it a rule to avoid a subject in which I know their opinions differ with your Majesty’s. For every one of them have at different times assured me that, happy as they are, they should like to settle if they could, and I feel I cannot blame them.’ The King was remarkably gracious in return – ‘My dearest Queen, After having had the good fortune to possess such a treasure come from Strelitz, it is impossible for me to hesitate a moment, if my daughters wish to marry, to declare I would like to see them allied with this house above all others in Germany’ Four days later the Queen wrote to her brother in encouraging terms. The King had agreed that the Hereditary Prince of Mecklenburg-Strelitz should come – in July – but had stressed that he should be aware that the princesses’ dowries were fixed in England. The King had written, ‘I cannot deny that I have never wished to see any of them marry: I am happy in their company, and do not in the least want a separation.’ Still, he would not oppose what they felt would add to their happiness.
The Queen advised her nephew, in fact, to visit only after the royal family had made their summer visit to Dorset. ‘The stay at Weymouth is sad. We have very mediocre lodgings and the place really only exists as lodgings for invalids.’ She also suggested coming after the summer because, in any event, nothing in the way of settlements could be arranged till Parliament met in the autumn.
By chance, Mrs Delany’s niece, now a Welsh matron Mrs Waddington, saw all the bridal candidates for the Mecklenburg Prince, as well as their elder sisters, in Lady Charlotte Finch’s apartments at St James’s this summer. About to join their mother and embark on a drawing room, the princesses with their hoops took up almost all the space in the very small room. Elizabeth was conspicuous by her size in a blue gown, not to mention ‘eleven immense yellow ostrich feathers on her head’, which Mrs Waddington said ‘had not a very good effect’. But Princess Mary shone for her ‘beauty’ and taste combined. Her headdress was ‘a large plume of white ostrich feathers, and a very small plume of black feathers placed before the white ones: her hair was drawn up quite smooth to the top of her head, with one large curl hanging from thence almost down to her throat. Her petticoat was white and silver, and the drapery and body … were of purple silk, covered with spangles, and a border and fringe of silver.’ Then the call came for the princesses to attend the Queen, and Mrs Waddington observed, ‘if they had been anyone else, I must have laughed at seeing them sidle out of the room, holding their hoops with both hands.’
Was Princess Mary – the calm, bland beauty, the fashion plate, the nurse – the bride for the Mecklenburg Prince? Or would he choose troubled, attractive Sophia, or passionate Amelia? Mary was undoubtedly the one without complicated ties to England. Romantically she had only ever been known to favour distantly her cousin Prince William of Gloucester and, before that, more faintly, a man whose proposals of marriage, it was said, she had refused – still another cousin, Prince Frederick of Orange, who had died – and, of course, General Taylor.
The trip to Weymouth this summer was remarkable only for the suffering of both King and Queen. The Queen endured crippling headaches ‘in the back part of my head’, an inheritance, she declared, from her mother. Only drops from her Kew apothecary, Augustus Brande, relieved the ‘tormenting evil.’ The King’s eyes were so bad meanwhile that he could not recognize people coming into the room – not even, some said, his own children. He had taken an aversion to his green eyeshade and would not even wear it under his hat.
Under these circumstances the princesses, so subject to their parents’ moods, were out of sorts. ‘Nothing can be more dull than this place, not a creature we know,’ Sophia wrote. ‘General Fitzroy I have only seen for a moment; thank God somebody else is not here,’ she added, thinking presumably of General Garth, who had made her dread going out the previous year when he walked about the town with young Tommy Garth.
Princess Sophia was herself not well, being dosed regularly with laudanum. She was mortified to be taken ill on board the yacht, in the middle of dinner with the King in his cabin, and ‘carried upon deck more dead than alive.’ In that state, ‘spasmed all over’, she remained till they came to anchor. She continued, well or ill, in her passionate hatred of their mother – ‘She makes my blood boil in some things’ – and in her compassion for their father’s sufferings. There was nothing absolutely wrong or incoherent about him, she said, ‘but a triviality about him that greatly alarms me, for it is so unlike himself’.
The Queen’s misdeeds consumed her, especially her refusal to share her bed with the King, extending now to fitting locks on the bedchamber door. ‘Will you believe it possible that she keeps us there [in her bedchamber] and at last says, “Now, sir, you must go, for it is time to go to bed” – My God … how can she refuse him anything?’ Sophia wished she were the King’s little dog: ‘what a little Fidel I would be and lay all day at his feet’. And, expressing her wish to escape these scenes, Sophia claimed that, ‘could astronomical observation be made’, their Windsor neighbour the astronomer William Herschel would see that ‘there was a just mistake in my birth, for surely I never was intended for an R HÙ. Of ‘those dull [assembly] rooms’, the Princess exclaimed, ‘Oh ye Gods, how deadly dull it is, and only think of our going to the Master of Ceremonies’ ball and sitting in a circle there – I wished myself a kangaroo.’
Back in London the royal family received in early November news of the victory at Trafalgar that put an end to fears of invasion and of enemy sea power for the duration of the war. The King and Queen were overcome. ‘But you know of old,’ wrote Princess Elizabeth to Lady Charlotte Finch, her former governess who was now in retirement, ‘they place the victory with gratitude at the foot of the throne of grace and though they feel happy, far from exalted.’
Trafalgar put an end to French hopes of naval supremacy, but meanwhile the Napoleonic armies had beaten the Austrian forces into submission when they rose up against their conquerors that summer. As the wife of a Napoleonic elector, the Princess Royal was obliged to abandon her horticultural schemes at Ludwigsburg, and the ouvrages, the ormolu and the porcelain with which she was embellishing all the palaces of the Duchy. In October she fled the advances of the Austrians, once her husband’s overlords, for the safety of Heidelberg. There she received the welcome news – from her point of view – that the French had defeated the Austrians at Ulm on the 19th. ‘Most providentially the [river] Neckar rose in the night which stopped their [the Austrians’] march,’ she informed Lady Charlotte.
With the French defeat of the Russians, the Austrians’ allies, at Austerlitz in December 1805, the Continent was truly under French dominion – to the Queen of England’s fury. Writing earlier in the year to suggest that her nephew the Prince of Mecklenburg-Strelitz come from Strelitz, she had been so confident that a match would occur that she was led to ‘picture one of her daughters in the home where she had been so happy’. But when she had hoped the Prince would visit, in the autumn, the King had called for delay, given the uncertain state of the Continent. At the end of the year, the Queen told her brother that the King had said to tell him that nothing had changed. ‘As soon as I see the moment this alliance can take place, I will tell him,’ the King told her. ‘If only’, the Queen wrote crossly, ‘on the Continent they had encouraged the soldiers with Nelson’s order, “England expects every man to do his duty”, and that was all the orders given that day. If Mack and Prince Aursberg [Auersperg] had thought like that, Vienna would not be in the hands of the tyrant.’
The Princess Royal had further details of the French campaign that had so destroyed the chances of one of her sisters joining her on the Continent. And they could not fail to disturb and fascinate her family in England. Just before the Ulm campaign began, the Emperor Napoleon himself visited her and her husband at Ludwigsburg on 2 October. The previous day his marshal, Ney, had taken up residence in the palace of Stuttgart, after the Elector had made a spirited defence of his state against the ‘violent Austrians’.
‘You will easily believe, my dear brother,’ she wrote to the Prince,
that this was not a pleasant moment for me, but I should despise myself, could I, out of weakness, at such a moment have left my husband …
Certainly, the Emperor Napoleon’s enemies have done him great injustice. I can say with truth that he went out of his way to be attentive to all the Electoral family, but most particularly so to me. Soon after his arrival he made me a visit and sought to say something polite to all present. I am convinced that he wishes to have peace with Great Britain, for he not only spoke with regard of the King, but of you, dear brother, on different occasions with esteem …
The Electress’s belief that her conduct would do the Electorate no harm had been confirmed days later, before she wrote to her brother. As she wrote to Lady Charlotte Finch, ‘by an article of the treaty [of Pressburg, signed on Boxing Day 1805] the Elector has been acknowledged by these two sovereigns [the Austrian and French emperors] as King of Württemberg’. The new King ordered a general thanksgiving upon hearing the news, ‘and I was obliged to dress in the greatest hurry’, wrote the new Queen, ‘to attend him to church … the whole day was filled up by drawing rooms dinners plays and redoutes’. Royal had determined that Lady Charlotte should be ‘the first of my friends acquainted with this alteration in my situation’. Writing to her brother the Prince now, she asked for ‘that same place in your affection as Queen that I have enjoyed under so many different names.’ (The new Queen did not succeed in this wish with her mother. ‘Ma très chère Mère et Soeur’, she tried writing to Queen Charlotte. ‘You may guess how it was received,’ wrote Lady Bessborough. The new King of Württemberg meanwhile put an enormous gold crown on top of his palace in Stuttgart to announce his new dignities to all the birds of the air.)
Royal mentioned to her brother, besides Napoleon’s visit to Stuttgart on his way to victory at Ulm, that of his Empress, Josephine, ‘on her road to Munich’. Both visitors had been charming, the Empress ‘a very well-bred pleasant woman [who] does a great deal of good’. Josephine’s son, Royal wrote meditatively, was about to marry Princess Augusta of the ancient house of Bavaria – ‘the settlements are very great’.
Years later Napoleon himself recalled his meeting with Royal: ‘She soon lost whatever prejudices she might have originally entertained against me. I had the pleasure of interfering to her advantage, when her husband, who was a brute, though a man of talent, had ill-treated her, for which she was afterwards very grateful.’ Two years later Royal ‘contributed very materially towards effecting the marriage’ of Napoleon’s brother Jérôme, King of Westphalia, with her stepdaughter Princess Catherine of Wurttemberg.