On hearing the news of the death of Prime Minister William Pitt in January 1806, Princess Amelia wrote with some acumen, ‘I do not fear the present moment so much as the future, for you know with him [her father], distress blazes out long after the blow.’ A blow was coming which would distress the King as much, in its way, as the death of his long-serving Prime Minister. For a few months later the Prince of Wales’s lawyers placed before the new Prime Minister, Lord Grenville, papers containing such allegations against the Princess of Wales that the King felt he had no option but to appoint – on 29 May – a Secret Commission of four Cabinet ministers to look into the charges.
The papers not only alleged outrageous behaviour with various men on the part of the Princess of Wales, but also claimed that she had given birth to a son whom she was raising in her own house in the guise of an adopted child. It was further alleged that the Princess had announced her intention at a future date of declaring the boy, called Willy Austin, hers – and naming the Prince as his father. The King’s instructions to the committee were that they should ‘enquire into the truth of the written declarations touching the conduct of her RH the Princess of Wales’. To her daughter-in-law the Queen sent a message by Princess Elizabeth on 31 May that Caroline would not be expected at the Queen’s House on the King’s Birthday the following week – ‘nor in the evening, nor in the morning.’ And three days after the Birthday, on 7 June, the Duke of Kent appeared at Blackheath to warn his sister-in-law that within hours many of her servants would be sent for to Downing Street, to be questioned on the evidence they had given – earlier in the year and without her knowledge – to the Prince of Wales’s lawyers.
The Princess of Wales spoke of returning home to Brunswick. But on the first day at Downing Street the child whom the Princess had indeed looked after in her house since shortly after his birth four years before was proved beyond any doubt to be William Austin, son of an unemployed docker and his wife. Nevertheless there were other parts of her conduct that the Commissioners viewed with grave concern, and so they reported to the King in July 1806. The King passed the document without comment to his son, beyond saying, as the Prince told his sister Amelia, that the Commissioners’ conclusion was ‘they could not, as a result, recommend to the King not to receive the Princess, nor to receive her’.
The Prince, furious, still vowing divorce and vengeance on his estranged wife, sought his sisters’ company. Princess Amelia wrote to Charles Fitzroy: ‘Do you know the Prince’s visit made me very nervous, for I love him and yet how all my brothers concern me in their characters.’ The Prince told Amelia that ‘The King was very kind to him and he thought him remarkably well … he was sorry the King wd talk so little to him on the subject [of the Princess], that he had tried to bring the subject forward but could not.’ Amelia continued,’ The Prince does not mean to let the thing rest here and he swears, if she is received, he will not put his foot into this house or at Court. But he persists that he is sure whatever the K does is not meant unkind to him, and that he is forced into it, and not does it unkindly.’
The Prince, she declared, said the Princess was ‘a perfect streetwalker’. And he said to her in front of their sister Mary, ‘I tell you what, my dear Amelia, the Princess says, if things don’t quite end to her satisfaction, she will bring forward many things she has seen and heard here of your sisters, and will say the K allows things here which he finds fault with in her. Don’t be uneasy, it cannot injure your plans and perhaps it might prove a blessing and make you all much happier.’ Amelia went on:
I felt myself colour. Minny laughed. And had she not been present, I really think I could have ventured to speak.
He then asked about the ride, ‘Who rode?’ I said, ‘General Spencer and Taylor.’ ‘And who did Augusta ride with?’ I said, ‘With us.’ ‘No no,’ says he. ‘I know all.’ ‘She did not,’ I said. ‘Ranger [Spencer’s mount] was near her, but she rode amongst us.’ He then said, ‘I know you all. If things turn out well, I shall often come here and ride with you, and we shall, I hope, have many a comfortable pleasant chat and ride, and I will tell you all I see and think.’ He appeared good humoured.
There was much that the Princess of Wales could have ‘brought forward’ about the behaviour of her sisters-in-law had she wished. And she continued to tell Lord Glenbervie privately ever more scandalous snippets about the birth of Tommy Garth, now five years old and living for the last three years at General Garth’s house near Weymouth. But Sophia’s affair with General Garth was over, its demise hastened by his habit of parading the boy about Weymouth when the royal family was in residence. In January 1805 the Princess wrote to Mrs Villiers: ‘I agree with you that it is very, very desirable that some check should be put to the odd conduct of a certain person [General Thomas Garth] … At the same time I will candidly avow to you that that person is very difficult to manage, and thus I have more than once endeavoured to point out to him how ill-judged it was allowing … the younger object [Tommy Garth] to be with him.
‘All my entreaties proved very useless’, she continued, ‘and I merely received a cold answer, that it was selfish and that I could not pretend affection as I never had expressed a desire of even seeing what God knows was out of my power [her illegitimate child]. This wounded me beyond measure, for my conduct had shown but too plainly that I am not selfish, and I own to you that what hurt me the more was the indelicacy this year of knowing it so near me and that I never could go through the town [Weymouth] without the dread of meeting what would have half killed me, had I met it [the child].’
After further remarks on Garth’s conduct, Sophia vowed ‘to try in my poor way to serve what I ever must feel an instinct and affection for [Tommy Garth]’. At the same time she recognized that she could never go ‘abroad’, that is marry a foreign prince. She declared, ‘… I never could answer it to myself to marry without candidly avowing all that has passed …’ Sophia continued,
… there is one love to whom I am not indifferent, I will not name him till we meet, and it is this, my beloved friend, that I think of with fear and trembling; could it some time or other be allowed, I think it would make me happy, but though I know the difficulties and above all, I feel that, did he know the full content of this story, he might think me very unworthy of him. And how could I blame him? For I know but too well how I have lost myself in the world by my conduct, and alas, have felt it humbly, for many, many have changed towards me … The person in question bears the most honourable character and was very kind about me at the time of this sad story …
Would settling with this unknown man with a respectable name in England be wrong, given her shameful situation? This was the quandary Sophia now expressed to her confidante. As the years passed, so did these references and allusions by the princesses to a future – after their father’s death, or possibly after his symptoms made a regency necessary – multiply, when much would be possible that was not now.
Shortly after she wrote this letter, Sophia declared that she had been in pain since the Queen’s birthday drawing room: ‘From my head to my heels I know not a spot free from pain; the weight of the clothes [at the birthday] almost destroyed my poor stomach, and just now I feel a perfect rag.’ But within days she was elated by a speech from the object of her affection: ‘That evening he did find me out and came up of himself, said he was delighted to see me and lamented his misfortune in coming to Windsor on the very day I was taken ill, to which I answered I was very much obliged to him; we then spoke upon indifferent subjects and [he] at last said, “Pray take care of yourself and do not be ill again for you are of too much consequence to give this fright to your friends too often”.’
This speech was enough for Sophia to savour, to build upon, to treasure and repeat – although she was never to ‘settle’ with this unknown man of ‘honourable’ character, or any other. ‘I have lost myself in the world by my conduct,’ Sophia wrote in 1805, and it was unfortunately true. There was little she could do to change that, especially when General Garth thrust her illegitimate child in the way of Society.
In July the following year the General wrote to his niece, Miss Garth, that he had ‘some idea of remaining in town a month, and this I cannot do without my family, in short, I cannot live longer without the child’. He added, referring to the Princess of Wales, of whose household his niece was still a member, ‘I am not sure I expressed myself to HRH sufficiently respectful or grateful for the superb present made the child, nor indeed did I know how to act, yet I hoped I have not been wanting in respect – if I have, make me so, I beg. The present was too great for the child – Mine on my life and honour, if there is truth in woman, and no ways under the influence of the abominable and idle stories set about the world.’ So it would appear that, although they had now quarrelled, Sophia had earlier assured the General that Tommy Garth was his and not her brother’s child.
‘It is so delicate a thing to attack the honour of a woman,’ wrote the Duchess of Brunswick the following month – in August 1806 – to her brother the King, when he delayed responding to the Commissioners’ Report, beyond asking the Cabinet to discuss it, and requesting that a copy of it be sent to his daughter-in-law, which was done on 11 August. She and the Duke of Brunswick begged him to publish the particulars of the Delicate Investigation and to receive their daughter. Indeed, she asked for her daughter’s innocence to be proclaimed, else the King’s and Queen’s characters would suffer ‘in the eyes of all Europe’. She ended: ‘I close this letter with tears.’ But the eyes of Europe were elsewhere. That August pusillanimous King Frederick William III of Prussia at last went to war against Napoleon and his Grande Armée – and was soundly beaten for his pains at the battles of Jena and Auerstädt in November.
The commander he employed to head the disastrous force was the Princess of Wales’s father, whose attachment to Prussia was so great that he came out of retirement at the age of seventy. Badly wounded at Auerstädt in October, and carried to safety on a litter, near blind in one eye, he begged Napoleon, moving northward, to show clemency to his Duchy of Brunswick. The Emperor agreed, on condition that the Duke abandon the service of the Prussian enemy. But the old Duke replied that as long as he could use his limbs and vital air was in him, he would defend his King and country. He died from his wounds on 10 November at Altona, his wife and the rest of the Brunswick family having scattered in advance. Princess Elizabeth from Windsor wrote in December of Napoleon’s victories and his establishment of the Confederation of the Rhine, which included Brunswick and other conquered territory: ‘whole countries ruined, burnt, pillaged… in short, the Duke of Brunswick’s death is a most happy release.’ But the Princess of Wales in England, on hearing the news of her father’s death, fell ill, believing, according to the politician Mr Spencer Perceval, ‘… it is intended that she shall never be permitted to see the King again, at least not to see him alone.’ In October she had sent a spirited defence of her conduct to the King, drawn up by her lawyers, but she had heard nothing in response.
The King wrote at last in January 1807 to say that he would indeed receive her, and that no further steps were to be taken against her. But he noted that there had ‘appeared circumstances of conduct on the part of the Princess which his Majesty never could but regard with serious concern’. The evidence of flirting and the allegations of lovers had startled the King, who had fortunately no memory of his own unrestrained and inappropriate behaviour with his daughter-in-law in earlier years. The Princess, furthermore, stood accused of abusing members of the royal family – calling her cousin William, now Duke of Gloucester since his father’s death in 1805, the ‘grandson of a washerwoman’, and Prince Ernest ‘a foolish boy’. The rest of her brothers-in-law she thought ‘very ill made and [they] had plum pudding faces, which she could not bear’. Adolphus, besides, looked like a sergeant, ‘so vulgar with his ears full of powder.’ ‘Honourably acquitted; but a reprimand’ was Caroline’s summary of the letter from her father-in-law.
But then the Prince decided that, before his wife should once more be received, his lawyers should respond to the report – ‘that I may not have to charge myself with any possible hazard affecting the interests of my daughter and of the succession.’ And so, uncomfortably, while the King awaited the arrival of his widowed, stateless sister, the Duchess of Brunswick, who had begged a home, he waited too for his son’s lawyers to permit him to receive his sister’s child once more.
A change of ministry brought an end to the affair, and in April the King at last received the Princess. But, as Princess Elizabeth noted, the public had taken very badly the royal family’s treatment of the Princess of Wales, both over the Delicate Investigation, as the enquiries at Downing Street became known, and over her father’s death. It was believed, the princesses lamented, that none of the royal family had paid her any visit even of condolence during her bereavement. And although it was not true, it soured the public mood against the Queen as well as against her son, the chief offender. At the Birthday in June 1807, which both Prince and Princess of Wales attended, husband and wife did not speak but came out ‘close together, both looked contrary ways, like the print of the spread Eagle.’
The matter of the Princess Royal’s happiness with her husband had for some time concerned her parents. One matter on which they were united at least was the infamy of the turncoat Napoleonic King, her husband. Despite all the difficulties of gaining private access to the Queen of Württemberg – a title the royal family in England did not accord her – an English lady secured from Royal the following: ‘when peace was settled, she would put her favourite plan into execution, that of seeing her family. But as long as certain matters were not settled [the acknowledgement of the Kingdom of Württemberg’s existence by her father’s government] she could not go.’
Royal’s concluding words were:
I should be afraid of contributing to the ruin of the House of Württemberg, for Bonaparte has eyes and ears everywhere, and you know best what we have to fear from the great preponderance of power. Tell this, Madam, to your obliging correspondent [a Mr Home] and thank him for the interest he takes in my behalf. Request him to inform my dearest father not that I am happy, for this would be telling an untruth, but that his Majesty’s love and the care he is graciously pleased to take on my behalf amply compensates for all my sufferings.
That very summer she had the pleasure mixed with pain of seeing her stepdaughter Trinette depart for Paris, where, in the presence of an avuncular Emperor Napoleon and of her own father, the Württemberg Princess married none other than the Emperor’s young brother Jerome, King of Westphalia. A year later Royal wrote to her brother the Prince. Napoleon and Tsar Alexander had meanwhile met at Erfurt in September 1808 to concert plans for partitioning Turkey and to renew their alliance formed in mid-river at Tilsit the previous year. She told him, ‘I am indebted to the French for the pleasure of conversing with you, dear brother … little did I hope to have it in my power to recall myself to my friends when the King my husband set out for Erfurt to visit Emperor Napoleon, who at his first interview with him enquired most particularly after me and hearing how much I was affected with not being able to correspond with my family, was so good as to desire the King to acquaint me that he would undertake to have my letters sent to England.’
That July of 1807, Royal’s aunt, the Duchess of Brunswick, who knew what it was to suffer from ‘the great preponderance of power’ vested in Napoleon’s small person, arrived in London. She was ‘very deaf and looking much older than she ought at her time of life. Her memory fails her very much, and her whole system is very much shook.’ But she took a house at Blackheath next door to her daughter the Princess, and invited her brother the King to dine on ‘all the German dishes that you like – send me your bill of fare that it’s to your taste.’ Her daughter Caroline invited ‘particularly old fogrums and old cats’ when the Duchess came to dine. Princess Charlotte was allowed by her father to dine on Sundays at her grandmother’s. ‘It is settled that my mother don’t go to the royal family without me,’ wrote Caroline that July. ‘By that means it will come all again upon the footing as it was two years ago.’ In this she was very much deceived.
Eleven-year-old Princess Charlotte was now much with her aunts the princesses at Windsor, according to the King’s desire that she be educated there. But her mother was no longer granted the easy access that the King had envisaged and accorded her before the Delicate Investigation, and the offer of a house at Windsor was not made good. When in London, Charlotte, her governess Lady de Clifford and a gossiping female household filled Warwick House, a tall, narrow seventeenth-century building at the end of a dark alley behind Carlton House, where the Prince forbade his wife to go.
In the absence of mother and father, the princesses cooed over Charlotte and dressed her up in clothes like a doll or the daughters they did not have and lavished inexpensive jewellery on her. Her resemblance to her father – and her looks were very boyish – delighted them. But her wilfulness – and she could be imperious with the ladies of her household – and her tantrums, which had now become rages, dismayed them, as did her dislike for books in particular and education in general. The elder princesses and Queen Charlotte were especially distressed by Charlotte’s disdain for literature, and not even the enthusiasm of her tutor Bishop Fisher, who had as a young man taught Charlotte’s uncles and given her aunt Princess Elizabeth art lessons, succeeded. Her passion for horses and riding, however, Augusta and Sophia and Amelia could all sympathize with, even if the Queen complained that her granddaughter whistled like an osder and walked like a groom.
Among other entertainments for Charlotte at Windsor was the cottage with a thatched roof and rustic porch that her aunt Elizabeth took on a lease from a farmer at Old Windsor and rebuilt. Inside, Elizabeth kept her collection of teapots in all kinds of shapes and designs and other ceramics which she had been acquiring for nearly ten years. Several times a year she invited the rest of the family to join her, usually in celebration of a family birthday, and then the cottage was en fête with garlands of artificial roses. It was a perfect answer to Elizabeth’s earlier wish to be a plain farmer’s wife. She should be a farmer herself instead, with fields of corn whose harvest she could compare with those of her father’s Flemish and Norfolk farms. The public, who had previously admired Elizabeth’s artistic productions, learnt of her new avocation from an article in the Lady magazine which featured her cottage, with a field of bristling corn in front.
Princess Augusta, meanwhile, wrote from Windsor to thank Lady Harcourt for a ‘very happy day’ at Nuneham in the autumn of 1807. She confessed that she had ‘not for a long time been so free from care, though at times (even in that delightful spot) I could not help thinking of my soldiers and sailors, my anxiety on their account having oppressed my mind beyond measure. Judge then what my happiness must have been when we were stopped in going up Henley hill with the intelligence that Copenhagen had really surrendered and that we had met with very little loss.’ 4 General Spencer had been appointed in July to the command of a brigade in the British expedition against the Danish capital, and when the British navy captured the Danish fleet in September, the General distinguished himself in the successful attack on the Danish land forces.
‘Still my heart was very ill at ease,’ Augusta wrote,
until I came home and heard that all my friends were safe – Since the troops sailed which is seven weeks today, I have never had an instant’s comfort passing what might be the consequence. But thank God all is well – all is as it should be. We have acted like truly brave men – sensible men, steady and not vengeful. I only wish you could have seen my face, it was perfectly broad with delight, for my pride is as much gratified as my heart. Today the Gazette has not lessened these delightful sensations, but it has added to my gratitude to heaven to think what dangers they escaped.
The Gazette paid due tribute to General Spencer’s part in the hostilities, and to Augusta’s relief he returned home in October. She could confide in few – Lady Harcourt was a chief comforter – about her anxiety for the General’s safety. She too thought ahead to a day when her father’s objections to members of the royal family marrying commoners might no longer stand in her way.
The following spring Spencer left for Gibraltar with 5,000 men to cooperate with Sir John Moore against the Russian fleet at the mouth of the Tagus river. When he joined Arthur Wellesley at Cadiz, and supported him in the battles of the Peninsular War that followed at Rolica and Vimeiro,5 Spencer’s exploits gained him the Order of the Bath, and his grateful superior, Wellesley, wrote: ‘There never was a braver officer or one who deserved it better. ‘But the experience of waiting at home in England without news tried Augusta’s nerves. She wrote in June to Lady Harcourt of reading the Thirty-fourth Psalm, and ‘my sweet comfort the 94th …’. Both had often, ‘in the multitude of sorrows which have encompassed my heart … refreshed my soul. We have had good reports from Spain by the Alcmene frigate,’ she added. T trust they are true, and I trust your fellow servant General Spencer may again show us what bravery and discretion can do, for he joins all these great qualities in one. I am very anxious for him, for he is one of my Elite friends in the bunch with you. It is very small but choice.’
Two months later she wrote in relief: ‘The Gazette will have informed you of the dangers and valour of the army, and that of Sir Arthur Wellesley and General Spencer … every army officer and man did their duty to the utmost.’ One of her brother Frederick’s aides-de-camp had stood by Spencer under fire, she reported. ‘He says he never in his life saw anything like his coolness, good temper, intrepidity and steadiness – that he was, if possible, greater on the 21st [at Vimeiro] than on the 17th [at Rolica] and that his conduct on the first day was enough to establish his military character, if it had not been often seen before, and each time with credit to his head and heart.’ Her father’s happiness at the news of these ‘great Peninsular victories’, she declared with joy, was ‘not elated and noisy, but only calm, smiling, and content and gratitude to heaven for having helped his endeavour.’
Princess Elizabeth was taking steps to secure her happiness. In February 1808 she passed some happy hours with their old nurse Miss Dacres’s daughter Augusta Compton, in whom the princesses had long taken an interest. Elizabeth sent her ‘a little box for your work which I have long prized, I mean the top for it was your mother’s work for me when I was five years old. The netting I did myself.’ Elizabeth stayed at her cottage in March when Amelia was infectious with the measles and thought of going to live there permanently. She even sounded out Miss Compton as an agreeable companion, who shared her skills in drawing and was otherwise accomplished. She wrote to the Prince, ‘The cottage scheme was a delightful one and like yourself – he would have financed it – ‘but between friends a mate not being there (who I hope makes its appearance one day though time flies) it would have been lonely’
Bidding the Prince happy birthday in August – the sisterhood sent him some china – Elizabeth told him that she had opened the doors of her dear little cottage to her neighbours to celebrate. ‘I am new from top to toe.’ The King was relatively well this summer, but the family seems on this occasion and others to have shielded him from anything unfamiliar on the ground that it might strain his nerves – even an event as innocuous as a visit to his daughter’s cottage. ‘We had all the natives [inhabitants of Windsor and environs] on Thursday,’ Elizabeth wrote to the Prince of their parents’ wedding anniversary, 8 September 1808, usually a red-letter day in the Court calendar, ‘but my mother very wisely proposed nothing gay as it is cruel by my father …’ The doctors had prescribed absolute regularity – to the point of monotony for all around him – in his diet, his exercise and, in so far as was possible, his duties.
Spencer Perceval, Prime Minister since 1807, could not however shelter George III from the worries that Wellesley’s and Sir John Moore’s expeditions to Portugal and Spain brought, following the French invasion of the latter country and Joseph Bonaparte’s installation there as king. The King received full details of Wellesley’s triumphs at Vimeiro and Rolica in 1808. As Princess Mary wrote in July, he was cheered by ‘the spirited conduct of the Spaniards which appears to continue through that country’.
Meanwhile Miss Gomm had handed in her resignation in March 1808. ‘Gouly will miss her sadly,’ wrote Princess Mary, but later that month Miss Gouldsworthy, ‘in consequence of declining health and increasing deafness’, thought it advisable to retire from her situation. So Princess Mary informed her old nurse, Mrs Adams. Miss Gomm and Miss Gouldsworthy set up home together in a small house in Hill Street in London, but Princess Mary said gloomily of Gouly, ‘Thirty-four years constant habits and never having been used to the trouble of housekeeping etc will go deeper and deeper with her.’ A boiling tale underlay her calm news of two governesses hanging up their slates and anticipating a retirement together. It was a story that would have a tragic resolution within only a very few years, and that had reached one of many crisis points when Princess Amelia caught the measles in March and was blooded and blistered for it.
Miss Gomm, suffering from an attack of guilt that she had allowed Princess Amelia so long to prosecute her affair with General Fitzroy, tried simultaneously to confess all and to ‘save’ Amelia from ‘being ruined’. Seeking an interview with Princess Elizabeth, the governess had no more joy than when she had brought up the matter with the Queen four years earlier. The Queen, on hearing that Miss Gomm in her distress described her as contributing to Amelia’s ruin by sanctioning the romance and indeed planning to sanction the Princess’s marriage to her lover once the King was dead, was ‘outrageous’, or outraged. Elizabeth tried, not altogether with success, to prevent Miss Gomm from uttering further on the subject. But matters had gone too far, and while Amelia and Fitzroy continued to meet, to ride and to play always together at cards – headlong to ruin, as Miss Gomm saw it – resignation for the governess herself was the only route forward.
‘We have had great and sad changes this year,’ wrote Mary, and she did not find they were any the better for them. But by her twenty-fifth birthday on 7 August 1808 Princess Amelia was calm. Lady Charlotte Finch, to celebrate the day, sent her a snuffbox, having counselled her never to use one before that day. Other presents she received ranged from a lace vest and sleeves to a necklace of gold chains and monkey heads from her brother the Prince, and a gold turban from Princess Elizabeth. But she was no longer extravagant, Amelia wrote. Though there were ‘squibs’ in the papers about her ‘economy in dress’ when it became known that she had set her maid Mary Gaskoin to make her ‘birthday petticoat’, the Princess declared that she was proud to scrimp, ‘which I shall continue to do till I am clear [of debts] and therefore think it much more honourable than buying things I cannot pay for.’
Her debts were not small. To David Bolton, a tutor – and father of the earlier royal tutor Sir George – who had acted as investor and more often lender to the princesses and their brothers for some years now, Princess Amelia owed £9,000 – but it was a tangled web which the royal siblings could not divulge to their parents, who were still their financial masters. When Princess Sophia asked for the return of the £5,000 that she had invested with Mr Bolton, she was told he had lent it to her brother Frederick. Among other services Charles Fitzroy performed for Amelia was the writing of letters to that ‘rogue’ Bolton to attempt to set her financial affairs in order.
Princess Elizabeth of all the sisterhood was the most agitated this year. The acquisition of her cottage at Old Windsor had delighted her the year before, and she had written to Lady Harcourt of a visit to Nuneham: ‘The blues of the flower garden I shall never forget, but I must be troublesome and beg you to ask Flora how she manages your beautiful hydrangeas for in my life I never saw anything to equal them – I have spent my whole morning at the cottage walking about and determining what shall be done – for I must plan a great deal, and the flower garden shall be as pretty as I can make it. You cannot think how well it all looked today and having setled my plans I am quite enchanted.’ She would have loved to remain at Nuneham, and longed to ask: ‘Will you receive me without my canister at my tail and feel as if you had any of your friends with you?’ Princess Elizabeth dubbed ‘the HRH’ a garrison round her and her sisters. ‘I wish I could cut through that fence, maybe a rabbit hole would let me through though my size comes in my way. Modern dress might let me squeeze out, we live in strange times, I will not give up,’ she wrote.
But this year all seemed only to fuel her discontent. ‘We go on vegetating as we have done for the last twenty years of our lives,’ she wrote on 11 September 1808. ‘I am just going to walk so cannot write as much as I intended, besides which the wind is so high that it stupefies me.’ For the first time, at thirty-eight she was at odds – severely – with her mother. She and her sisters vegetated alongside the Queen, she wrote. ‘My madre goes out very little, though she thinks she does, and takes so little exercise that I believe it unwholesome.’ The Queen was, as a result, growing very large.
Elizabeth had begun a regimen of walks at eight in the morning, ‘for the sake of not losing the use of my legs’. Nothing was going to shift the weight which she had carried all her life, and which she did not have the height to carry off. Her pretty face and full bosom nevertheless show to advantage in engravings of the Beechey portrait, originally commissioned for the Prince, and now often ornamented with an easel and paints to mark her fame as an amateur artist. As she said, ‘All my amusements keep me at my desk.’ At Windsor Castle she wrote cosy scribbles to her brother the Prince. She cut out silhouettes, painted borders to books and decorated china. She japanned panels and boxes. And in 1804 she had published a book of plates entitled Cupid Turned Volunteer, dedicated to her sister Augusta. Two years later came The Power and Progress of Genius. If sedentary, she was nothing if not energetic.
She told the Prince that she kept equanimous even in the rain of the last four or five days by drinking sugar and water at night. As he knew, ‘It requires not only a great flow of spirits to follow up a day’s duty,’ she wrote, ‘but a degree of submission which seldom falls to the lot of any but a RH which to make you smile I tell you en secret is the canister to my tail.’ She added, ‘When scribbling to you I blow all my stiffness away and write comme une bourgeoise, or why may I not say the cottager, whose comforts have been so much owing to your unparalleled kindness.’
Days later Elizabeth wrote again in a panic, ‘having heard a letter of confidence has been written to you on my subject by a person who shall be nameless.’ She referred to a letter that Louis Philippe, the impoverished Duke of Orleans who was living in Twickenham with a number of other French princes in reduced circumstances, had written to her brother. In it he referred to his wish to marry Princess Elizabeth – and possibly to her acquiescence in the scheme, which had been promoted by Edward, Duke of Kent. Edward had spent some years in North America with Louis Philippe, when the French Prince was in exile there, and had continued the friendship in England.
Unfortunately the Queen heard of this letter and asked Elizabeth what she knew about it. ‘I thought it more honourable,’ wrote Elizabeth, ‘by her and just towards myself, to let her know I was not ignorant of what had passed with my sentiments and feelings upon it.’ To her brother she wrote: ‘If there is no possibility of the thing now, I only entreat you … that you will not dash the cup of happiness from my lips, yet. Believe me, whatever I may feel at present – and flattered at having been thought of… if I did not hope and flatter myself I might make them [Louis Philippe] happy, I would not think of it…’ Louis Philippe, son of Philippe Egalité and grandson of Louis XIV, was Roman Catholic, but she was unruffled. There being no soul ‘near them that might worry or plague on the score of religion I do not fear it for you know I hate meddling, having no turn for gossiping, and being firm to my own faith I shall not plague them upon theirs’.
There were many advantages to the scheme. Three years her junior, Louis Philippe was a handsome man. At thirty-eight, Elizabeth could hope at least for a child, and they would, for want of a home in France, remain in England, where she would become not a cottager but a householder, and independent. But there was of course an impediment.
The Queen, when she received her own letter from Louis Philippe, said firmly, ‘It can never be.’ Elizabeth told the Prince, ‘She will never hear of it again.’ The Prince of Wales wrote back in support, encouraging her to hold fast – ‘be prudent and silent and I trust happiness may yet be your lot’. Brother and sister of course both referred to what might take place after their father’s death, or during a regency. ‘All I wished’, wrote Elizabeth of her interview with her mother,
is that she had named it, that I might have acted by her with the degree of honesty … I thought she would have deserved, which was, ‘Let me accept it, but never mention it while that life is preserved to us.’ Do you think, my dear brother, I would have wished it brought forward after all I have seen? Good God no, and I think by the whole manner of the conduct they would have agreed to what may be unfortunate to us, but which will make everything couleur de rose afterwards, by considering my father before ourselves – I said that day on which my mother spoke with me, ‘You shall never see a wry face.’
And Elizabeth swore she never would. ‘Without being a perfect good daughter,’ she wrote, ‘I never can make a good wife.’
Nevertheless, during her discussion with her mother when she was ‘almost wild’, Elizabeth determined to ‘Never Give It Up’. The reason was, she said, that ‘it was hinted many, many things had been brought forward and rejected without a word from us, and therefore we felt the sun of our days was set’. One proposal at least in recent years had not been made known to the Princess in question. Prince William of Hesse Philippsthal Barchfeld – ‘a good looking young man yet poor in every way’ – proposed for lovely Mary, to no effect. Without her mother’s knowledge, Elizabeth was sorrowfully determined to proceed with the Orleans match under the protection of her brother the Prince, as a future project. And Augusta, she said, ‘has really stood forward nobly for me’.
Elizabeth reported to her brother in November 1808 that the Duke of Orleans was anxious that the Prince should ‘insure the legitimacy of children, should there be any … if the least doubt should arise as to their legal situation she should feel he was scandalizing the world’, as well as ruining Elizabeth, ‘and entailing misery on his children’. Elizabeth begged the Prince to send for Orleans, who was about to depart for Spain, so that her suitor could ‘hear what you have said to me from your own mouth’. She had herself been ‘examining the business more closely’, since she and the Prince had spoken: ‘I find no marriage whatever can be looked upon as valid without the Sovereign’s consent which alone makes the law.’
Princess Elizabeth was looking ahead to a time when her brother would be ‘sovereign’, and was anxious to assure the Duke of Orleans that the Prince would without fail consent to – and so legalize – their marriage and children. But she was wrong in her facts, and would appear to have misunderstood the Royal Marriages Act, if she had secured a copy of it. After the age of twenty-five the King’s children could, on giving twelve months’ notice to the Privy Council, marry a suitor to whom their father – or those who succeeded him as sovereign – had previously objected, or even one to whom they continued to object. There was, however, one proviso of which Elizabeth may or may not have been aware – that the Houses of Parliament should not, during the term of notice, declare their ‘disapprobation’ of the match. And in the case of a penniless French Catholic and émigré prince, that ‘disapprobation’ might possibly be forthcoming.
In the event the project foundered. Louis Philippe decided that the opposition was too strong, and the wait too open-ended. Princess Sophia added a sad note on 5 October: ‘Eliza’s conduct towards my mother is perfect, and I lament her total want of confidence in her children.’
These were difficult years for the Queen. She had slid into a depression, in which her nerves were irritable and her temper short. ‘The Queen’s temper is become intolerable, and… the Princesses are rendered quite miserable by it,’ Lord Glenbervie had commented four years earlier. The pleasure she had taken in her reading, her flower garden, her clothes and her children was vanished. Her little jokes with her ladies and fanciful letters to her brother dried up. She never spoke on the subject but she dreaded the extreme symptoms of this nameless illness to which her husband periodically succumbed. Her sons ranged from unfilial, like the Duke of Cumberland, to wastrel, like Clarence and Kent. Her beloved Prince of Wales alone, on whom she saw she might soon become dependent, she pursued with blandishments. The last thing she wanted to do was lose any of her daughters – or to inflame her husband’s symptoms by proposing that one of them marry a Frenchman, a Catholic and the son of Philippe Egalité, who had early favoured revolution in France!
The discussion of putative children and their legitimacy acted to inflame Princess Elizabeth’s maternal instincts. Writing at the end of November of a Mrs Fulford’s pregnancy she confessed that she herself was ‘always wishing (don’t tell) to be in that way myself (I mean properly’). Her correspondent was Augusta Compton, who could be trusted not to divulge these longings. Miss Compton heard, less controversially, of the painful blisters Mary had had applied to her feet for her gout. ‘The caustics tortured her and inflamed the foot sadly.’ The result was that she was back lying on her couch in her room. Elizabeth was enjoying mornings at the cottage en fermière. She was altering the garden and planting it for spring.
Over the winter Elizabeth’s hopes of matrimony, high in November, were whittled away. But a sentence in a letter to her brother – ‘If you have anything more to say you can write me a line, for I should like privately to know how the message is taken’ – ends the affair. By September 1809 Louis Philippe was writing gracefully to the Prince of Wales to announce his engagement to King Ferdinand IV of Naples and Sicily’s daughter, Princess Maria Amalia, and to say how sorry he was not to be joining the Prince’s own family. (He was made commander-in-chief of his father-in-law Ferdinand’s Sicilian forces.)
During March 1809 there appear to have been a succession of messages and even a ‘principal adviser.’ Elizabeth walked with her sister Mary, who was not in on her secret, and fobbed her off when she said she knew the identity of the ‘person supposed to be the principal adviser’. But these may have referred to a scandal that now engulfed the royal family. On 27 January 1809, the Radical MP Gwyllym Wardle, formerly a lieutenant-colonel in the army, moved to appoint a committee to investigate the Duke of York’s conduct as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Frederick was accused of having abused his position to profit from the sale of army commissions that his mistress Mary Anne Clarke had arranged. Elizabeth wrote, ‘It is most cruel to see people wretched enough to try and ruin all the Royal Family which I am persuaded is their great wish.’
Although the Duke appeared, by the end of a long and publicly aired hearing, to have taken part in none of the commerce himself, as Mrs Clarke’s lodger in town he had undoubtedly shared in the proceeds at her ever more luxuriously appointed house. And culpable of leniency, laziness and negligence – as well as of adultery – he was removed from his position as commander-in-chief.
In December Elizabeth, her thoughts of matrimony extinguished, turned back to old friendships and to dependable friends. She asked Lady Banks to tell her husband Sir Joseph that they had feasted on the mushrooms she had sent over. ‘Now I have two ridiculous questions to add to your collection of conundrums,’ she added. ‘When is the Queen like a farmer? Answer, when she cuts her corn, and Why is the soul like a thing of no consequence? Because it’s immaterial.’
The Princess confided in that repository of private royal thoughts, Lady Harcourt. She hoped to see her old confidant Lord St Helens – ‘my dear and invaluable Saint’ – at Christmas. Seventeen years older than Elizabeth, the retired diplomat and lord of the bedchamber was a great connoisseur of the arts.
It is always holiday with me when he is here, for I love him to my heart and may say it. There can be no harm as I do not see why one may not speak the truth. There is no man of m y acquaintance I love so well, and his kindness to me is never varied, and that is a thing I never forget. His advice is my rudder, his approbation my delight, and I have that respect and regard in that quarter that even a disagreeable truth I could bear from him which from others I could not take, and I am quite sure he would not say it if I did not deserve it, and I should be monstrously hurt if I did not flatter myself he liked me.
You see I am honest, maybe too much so, but that is the nature of the beast. You know, young men I never could bear, and though there may be exceptions to every rule … any young man I like, I must think older than his years. But that you seldom find, and then I am sure I never was from my earliest days a person to please men in general, and though not at all shy, I always dreaded showing off. And if ever I was such a fool and tried to be agreeable, I have often gone to my bed thoroughly dissatisfied and displeased with myself.
And now, I am neither young enough nor fool enough to run into that error. I take things as they come and people as they are and leave the matter to chance, whether I turn out pleasant or not. Half the world I associate with, I don’t care if I ever see again. So they become indifferent and also stop gaps, I mean men. Women, better to see them nothing other than very agreeable in society, but not for one’s room or intimates. Others such as my Saint at all times, minutes, days, nights … but God knows, they are not found often, they are diamonds without flaws.
The Princess was right, these ‘diamonds without flaws’ were not easy to find. But the unfortunate outcome of her nuptial negotiations with the French Prince was not to deter her from seeking other means of escape.