In the midst of the princesses’ new independence, with their mother resigned to their new life in London, and with her strong feelings that this showed disrespect to the King softened by the Regent’s blandishments, there was extra need for them to attend town. Their niece Charlotte had lost her governess and chaperone. ‘We have lived in the high road to town for the last fortnight,’ wrote Princess Mary cheerfully to Mrs Adams in January 1813, ‘in consequence, entre nous, of Lady de Clifford having resigned, and the difficulties were great in trying to make the new arrangements.’
She was being economical with the truth, even when she added, ‘The Prince has therefore begged the Queen to assist him, and that has caused much anxiety and as yet nothing is settled.’ Lady de Clifford had been asked to ‘quit directly’ after it was discovered she had condoned her charge’s flirtations the previous year. Not one by-blow of an uncle – George Fitzclarence, the Duke of Clarence’s son – but two, the other being Captain Charles Hesse, an illegitimate son of the Duke of York, had ridden alongside Charlotte’s carriage in the Great Park at Windsor without protest from her governess. But Charlotte, indifferent to Lady de Clifford’s removal, wanted her fidgety replacement, the Duchess of Leeds, to be named her lady-in-waiting. She also wanted to purloin her grandmother’s reader, Miss Knight, and have her named ‘lady companion’. Other girls of seventeen, she said, were not subject to governesses.
The Regent huffed and puffed, his mother cried at Miss Knight’s perfidy when she accepted the position, and her daughter Mary wrote, ‘It really is very selfish of the Queen not to consider the consequence it is to find proper people for Charlotte.’ It was true, nevertheless, that Charlotte went under the aegis of her grandmother and aunts to a series of London events including the Queen’s birthday drawing room – and to a ball at the beginning of February which the Regent gave in his daughter’s honour.
Princess Mary was cheerful about these outings, unaware of the bilious tone of her niece’s letters. A few days after the Carlton House ball, which went on till past six in the morning, Princess Charlotte wrote, ‘I really enjoyed it and though very far from well, exerted [myself] to the utmost, and danced down every dance. Princess M[ary] opened the Ball, though it was given for me, and was always the couple above me, as jealous and ill natured the whole night as she could be. I did not care, as I am not quite so mean as to care about trifles.’ In Charlotte’s opinion: ‘There is a cabal and a wheel within wheel about everything,’ and she held Princess Elizabeth and Princess Mary, in particular, to have great influence over her father: ‘It is infamous to make such a use of a brother … as Princess Mary does of the Prince Regent towards her … Their low jealousy was let out yesterday at dinner, and in the evening at the fête it was obliged to be concealed. They could not endure [me] being heard and seen, the Prince Regent being pleased with me, and his having gone for the partners for me, and having left me to make choice of them.’ She wrote of her father with delight, ‘He was just opposite to what he had been before.’
William, Duke of Gloucester, though absent from London on military duties, heard tell of ‘grand doings’ at ‘the Court of Carlton House’. He moved, with his sister Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester, uneasily between his cousin the Regent’s new Court and his aunt Brunswick’s and cousin Caroline’s houses. Princess Mary reported to her brother, who was always morbidly interested in the doings of his estranged wife, that the party had been only family at Kensington Palace when Charlotte visited her mother on her birthday: just Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester and her lady, and Charlotte’s maternal uncle, the Duke of Brunswick – a widower – and his two young boys.
Despite a rapprochement that had existed for many years now between William, Duke of Gloucester and his sister Sophia Matilda and their cousins the King’s offspring, he and Sophia Matilda had never been given the tides ‘royal highness’. And the omission rankled. It was suggested – perhaps to account for the romantic vacuum of Princess Mary’s existence – that the Duke had proposed not once but many times to his beautiful cousin, who had been born Her Royal Highness at the Queen’s House months after plain Prince William’s own birth in Rome; and that her refusals rankled too. But there were other rumours, that the Duke of Gloucester was ‘always in love with somebody … very amorous.’ It was also said that he was ‘a good man, but amazingly stupid, tiresome and foolish’ – which would explain why anyone might reject him.
Princess Mary was cast down when Mr George Villiers – husband of Mrs Villiers and once the King’s favourite equerry until his dismissal for peculation – turned blackmailer. In his possession, he wrote to Sir Henry Halford, were letters from Princess Amelia and from Princess Mary to his wife regarding ‘the subject which’, he declared, he knew to be the cause of the younger Princess’s death. ‘In the number of years Mrs Villiers was intimate in our house, I cannot pretend to say’, Mary wrote, ‘that I may not have written many things I should be very sorry appeared before the public.’ And that Amelia died of a broken heart, she believed, she had quite possibly asserted, although she did not recall that she had explicitly mentioned General Fitzroy’s name. But she was defiant. ‘I don’t care what he says or does to the living, however disagreeable, but to disturb her poor ashes is more than I can stand.’
The matter was resolved, quietly, discreetly. General Taylor and Sir Henry Halford with Sir Benjamin Bloomfield, the Prince’s secretary, employed what was to become over the years, in defence of several of the princesses’ reputations, an effective mixture of emolument and emollience – with belligerence as a last resort. The princesses’ sister-in-law the Princess of Wales, however, had no such supporters in positions of power when the Regent refused to read a letter she wrote, protesting that she had lately had no access to her daughter. But she had as supporters the Whigs, she had the public, and she had her brothers-in-law, the Dukes of Kent and Sussex, and her cousin the Duke of Gloucester, who for their own reasons wished to spar with the Regent.
Caroline’s letter, published in The Times as the ‘Regent’s Valentine’ on 14 February 1813, rehearsed old arguments. But her mother, the old Duchess of Brunswick, died in the midst of a new Parliamentary committee being appointed to examine the conduct of her daughter, and the evidence collected in the Delicate Investigation being revisited. New waves of sympathy and applause met Caroline’s every appearance in public, even as she was being driven by debt – and a wish for greater privacy in which to indulge a new friendship with a handsome Italian music master – to move out of Kensington and into a rented house in Bayswater. But, while the Princess of Wales gained public sympathy, she lost much of the confidence her daughter had till now placed in her. The Regent forced Charlotte to read the Parliamentary Report, which was mostly a commentary on the charges brought against her mother seven years before and going back to a time when Charlotte was a small child.
Many bitter recollections came back to the young woman who read the evidence for the first time. Charlotte wrote six months later, ‘after the publication of things I was wholly ignorant of before, it really came upon me with such a blow and it staggered me so terribly, that I never have and shall not ever recover [from] it, because it sinks her so very low in my opinion …’. She continued: ‘it has taken away any feeling of respect or duty … I will add that I think she had her aggravations, that she was ill-used, and is still now more than before, after this double clamour …’ But, she said, ‘the horror of the knowledge of the whole can never make those feelings ever return again that might have allowed influence’.
The burial of the Duchess of Brunswick disturbed her nieces the princesses at Windsor, recalling, with its night-time ceremony, the laying to rest with similar honours of their sister Amelia. They heard the bell toll. As before, soldiers of the Blues and Royals, holding flambeaux, surrounded St George’s Chapel, while the Duke of Brunswick, cloaked and booted as his cousins had been before him, honoured his mother as they had their sister.
Royal, the Duchess’s eldest niece, had recently renewed correspondence with her family in England, after her husband realigned himself with the Austrian and Russian emperors following years as a Napoleonic satellite. She explained to Lady Harcourt, ‘Having been so many years deprived of letters from my friends and of all English newspapers, I am a little like a person who has been in India, and returns home quite ignorant of most transactions which have taken place in England.’ Many of her first letters were, in fact, concerned with the depreciation of her income since 1805, thanks to a fluctuating foreign exchange. And she wrote now, begging on her stepsons’ behalf for a share – as Augusta of Brunswick’s children – of their grandmother the Duchess’s estate. With unusual tact, she did not ask for any sum for the Duchess’s granddaughter Trinette, now Jérôme Bonaparte’s wife and Queen of Westphalia, perhaps judging a Brunswick inheritance unlikely to be forthcoming for Napoleon’s sister-in-law.
Another disruption occurred in the stillness of the Castle to alarm especially the Queen. Princess Augusta wrote to Sir Henry Halford from Windsor on 2 May 1813: ‘The chambermaid Davenport (who has been very strange for a long time past) went raving mad in the night and at five this morning she flew down to the Queen’s door.’ Davenport knocked and called out to Mrs Beckedorff who went out to her. Davenport declared she would see the Queen, and Princess Augusta too. Upon Mrs Beckedorff telling her ‘in her mild way’ that she would not wake the Queen but that she should see her in the morning, the chambermaid ‘threw herself on the floor and swore and screamed in the most violent manner’.
The matter passed out of the royal ladies’ hands when Dr Willis’s men, hastily summoned from across the quadrangle, placed the girl under restraint. ‘In that state’, wrote Augusta with horror, she was now – ‘thank God’ – gone to London. And, Dr Millman, for whom her mother had an ‘adoration’, not being available, Dr Baillie came to quiet the Queen. The Queen would be seventy the following year, and not only were her nerves fraying, but she suffered increasingly from headaches and from bowel complaints – a debilitating duo. Sir Francis Millman, her doctor of many years, who her dresser believed ‘understands the Queen better than all the world put together’, spoke of a cure or rest at Bath or at another watering-hole, but the Queen refused to leave the King. Her temper and her nerves were now accepted by her daughters and those who inhabited their reduced circle.
At Frogmore, where Queen Charlotte continued to botanize and garden, they had, she said, ‘a very small society’. ‘With walks, reading, work and a collection of engravings,’ she wrote flatly, ‘our time passes, if not joyously, at least reasonably, and that is all qu’il nous faut.’ Entertainments now were always subject to the Queen’s calculation – were they seemly, given the King’s condition? When one of the princesses wished to sit for her portrait to Henry Edridge, the Queen said ‘she would allow no painters to come to the Castle as she did not think it proper, ill as the King was’. Princess Mary circumvented this neatly six months later by saying she would sit to Mr Thomas Lawrence the next time she went to town. When Hanover was restored that year to England, and Adolphus went out to head the new civil government, his mother’s first thought was of the King, who knew nothing of the matter. She lamented that her husband was denied the pleasure of hearing of the return of this possession whose loss had caused him such suffering.
In some ways the Queen was still energetic. She joined with her daughters in advising Augusta Compton to accept in marriage Captain Thomas Baynes, a retired naval captain with a post at the Royal Naval Asylum at Greenwich, whom she had refused earlier in the year. The Queen hoped Augusta Compton’s ‘natural shyness’ would not get the better of her good sense, and Princess Mary, too, was swift to urge haste. ‘Pray don’t let her go on with a long courtship,’ she wrote to Augusta’s aunt, Mrs Adams, ‘it is such nonsense – in particular, with so old a man as her intended.’
It was ‘downright folly’, wrote Princess Elizabeth, to resist, and she did not stint on her wedding presents to her protégée, giving ‘some dimity for petticoats, two silk gowns, a small lace veil of Brussels, one of patent, not too long, and a skirt of Honiton [lace], a wedding work box’. She continued, ‘I shall send more things by and by’ When the wedding day neared, Elizabeth was beside herself. She rejoiced that Augusta had ‘determined to quit that vile class, you know what I mean [spinsters]. Don’t let anyone know my sentiments, for else I shall bring a hornet’s nest about me but my language is that of truth seldom spoke anywhere, particularly near the dwelling of HRHs.’ Augusta had set her a good example, she added, and she would follow it whenever she could.
In August, when Mrs Baynes was on honeymoon at Hastings, Elizabeth wrote again: ‘A married woman is a much more respectable and estimable one than a tabby, the thing of all others I hate, though alas! it is my own case. But maybe your wedding may bring me luck …’ She had eaten Augusta’s wedding cake ‘by the pound’, and trusted it would have a proper effect. (According to the old wives’ tale, a good helping of wedding cake made spinsters radiate eligibility.) If not, she said, ‘men must be blind, and Phipps [the royal oculist] must couch them [remove their cataracts], that’s all.’
But it was not Elizabeth who had eaten that wedding cake to effect. Princess Charlotte, nearly thirty years her aunt’s junior – barely come out, at seventeen – was suddenly mooted as a bride. For in August 1813 the Hereditary Prince of Orange brought despatches to the Regent from his patron, Arthur Wellington, that announced a great victory over Marshal Soult’s forces in the Pyrenees. And the Regent seized his appearance in London to impress upon his daughter the dynastic opportunities of marriage to this unprepossessing boy, Prince William of Orange. Lord Yarmouth was sent as his emissary, to tell Charlotte that all must wish her to be ‘well together’ with her father. The Regent’s sisters Elizabeth and Mary – whom Yarmouth called ‘intriguantes in every way except being women of gallantry which might be the case too, but there he did not meddle’ – governed her father now, he said. How much more easily might she do so, Yarmouth wheedled, with so superior an understanding? But until Charlotte was married, with her own establishment, how could it be, he sighed?
At first Princess Charlotte resisted. She might say she was free of her mother’s influence, but Caroline had stigmatized the Oranges, when they lived in exile at Hampton Court before proceeding to Berlin, as ‘intriguing and violent’. Furthermore, a friend in London who met the Prince said Charlotte would think him ‘frightful… as thin as a needle. His hair excessively fair, to match a complexion that is burnt brown by the sun; eyes that have no expression at all, but fine teeth that stick excessively out in front.’ And so Charlotte declared herself at Frogmore one August afternoon, to another of the Regent’s emissaries, ‘very much in favour and in preference for everyone to the Duke of Gloucester’. She wrote to her confidante Miss Mercer Elphinstone, ‘I added that I had considered it long and in no hurry, and was convinced of the propriety.’ ‘Good God, I can hardly believe you are serious,’ came the reply of her father’s deputy. The Duke of Gloucester’s attachment to her aunt Mary was common rumour. And Charlotte, well pleased with her effect, ‘laughed heartily after they were gone’. Even the reminder that she could not marry the Duke of Gloucester if the Prince forbade it did not disconcert her. ‘I assured them nothing was so easy as to make a public declaration that I would never marry anyone else.’
Two months later, the Regent held forth to his daughter so strongly and in such indecent language against the Duke of Gloucester, her supposed object of affection, that she hardly knew which way to look – ‘especially as he repeated it twice over’. He accused her of being in love with the Duke of Devonshire – whom, as it happened, the Duke of Clarence favoured that winter as a groom for his illegitimate daughter, Sophia Fitzclarence. But eventually, on the advice of Lord Grey, the Whig leader, who counselled that opposition to her father must not commence her public life – ‘which God grant may be long and glorious’ – Charlotte accepted her fate. Her aunt Mary advised her to marry – although she did not promote ‘Slice’, as Gloucester was known, but rather ‘the Orange’. And Charlotte had an interview in December with William, whom she described as ‘shy, very plain, but he was so lively and animated that it quite went off’. When it was done, the Regent took her into the other room, and, on his asking what she said to it, she hesitated. He was ‘so alarmed that he cried out: “Then it will not do”.’ When Charlotte indicated, rather, that she approved what she had seen, he exclaimed in still greater agitation, ‘You make me the happiest person in the world.’ And without a second’s pause he called in the young Prince, ‘took us both into another room and fianced us, to my surprise’. He took their hands and joined them and gave them his blessing. ‘And when it was over, and I was walking with him [William of Orange], we were both so excessively astonished that we could hardly believe it was true,’ Charlotte ended her tale.
‘Whether it was summer or in spring’, his daughter was ‘equally to be married’, the Regent told his mother days later on Christmas Eve at Windsor after she had expressed her surprise at the heady course of events. And when the Queen attempted to give her granddaughter some ‘good advice’, the Prince was no less impatient. The royal family was gathered to attend Charlotte’s confirmation, which had been planned rather more carefully than her engagement. Not surprisingly, at the end of her confirmation, ‘so awful a ceremony that I felt during it and afterwards exceedingly agitated’, Princess Charlotte saw ‘traces of agitation visible upon all their faces’ when her family greeted her.
But the match, so suddenly come forward, so urgently forwarded, was not destined to stick. Charlotte worried about a black box containing her letters to her admirer Captain Hesse which Mercer seemed unable to extract from him. She worried about her mother, ‘a very unhappy and a very unfortunate woman who has had great errors but is really oppressed and cruelly used.’ She worried about her aunt Sophia, especially when Dr Baillie, her mother’s doctor, said that ‘he saw … no end to her illness … that hers and Amelia’s sickness were precisely the same, though not originating from the same causes… having no digestion at all it is greatly to be feared she will sink under it, having so little strength.’ It seemed that no medicines would remain in Sophia’s stomach.
Charlotte also worried that Mr Augustus d’Este, her uncle the Duke of Sussex’s son by Lady Augusta Murray, was quite her ‘shade’. All the previous summer he had pursued her on her daily drives in the Park in her tilbury; now he was again in evidence, for instance, at the Chapel Royal – ‘opposite to me the whole time of service, never taking his eyes off me and imitating every motion of mine.’ When she went to Kensington Palace to see her mother, where the Duke of Sussex also had apartments, d’Este was ‘planted behind one of the pillars of the colonnade watching me’. An extravagant letter from the boy – Charlotte took exception to her bastard cousin’s use of his father’s royal crest – finished the matter, for she sent it to her uncle Sussex with a request to be no further disturbed.
In June 1814, the Prince of Orange reappeared to play a part in the fetes in London that marked the Allied victories culminating in the imprisonment of Napoleon on Elba, and the successful restoration of the Bourbons to France. All the French princes paraded, and the King of Prussia came with his general, Blücher, who was loudly cheered. The Russian Emperor, Alexander, and his sister, Grand Duchess Catherine (widow of Prince Peter of Oldenburg, son of the Prince of the same name who had once wooed the Princess Royal), came, and put up at Pulteney’s Hotel. The Prince Regent did not dare visit them there for fear of being hissed, of which the Grand Duchess declared herself very glad. She had come to London with a thought of marrying the Regent, but took a strong dislike to him. The Hereditary Prince of Württemberg, though a married man with children, attracted her instead.
The Prince of Orange, whose father had been restored to the throne of Holland the previous winter, and the Hereditary Prince of Württemberg – and his brother Paul – were among countless young princes who made their way to London this June, to begin the jockeying for position in the new Europe that would be continued at the Peace Congress to be held in Vienna shortly thereafter. A handsome prince in the Russian service, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, made Princess Charlotte’s acquaintance when she visited the Grand Duchess, and asked if he might wait on her. His brother was much in favour with the King of Prussia, and his sister was married to the Prince of Leiningen, but his – successful – effrontery was noticed, given that Charlotte was engaged to the Hereditary Prince of Orange. No one knew that, among the mêlée of princes, and while engaged to William, Charlotte had also met and given her heart to Augustus Frederick, a nefarious cousin of the Prussian King.
Meanwhile, Charlotte’s aunts were not without visitors during these days of fêtes and celebrations. And their sister Royal had written to Lady Harcourt from Ludwigsburg that she hoped ‘the various visits which will take place in England will… have some influence on my sisters’ future situation. This is a subject I have much at heart, and trust the Almighty will bless them and reward them already in this world for all they have gone through …’ She herself had had to decline her brother’s invitation to join the imperial and royal visitors in London, as she was ‘so very apt to be sick in a shut carriage and off and on constantly spit blood with a violent spasmodic cough.’ Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt, the Regent’s envoy, believed that the cough was a pretext and that Royal’s husband was furious not to have been addressed on the matter himself. But Royal begged him not to pursue the matter – she said she would be the loser for it. And still she prayed daily that her sisters might yet have a chance to marry.
In 1788, as we have seen, only days before the King of England became ill for the first time, he had said he would take his daughters to Hanover, there hold a court, and invite all the German princes to attend. His daughters might choose whom they wished, within moderation. Now the German and other princes had come instead to England – and, with Princess Charlotte affianced, they looked afresh at her older aunts. The King of Prussia was seeking a bride to act as mother to the seven children his adored wife Louise had left him. The Russian royalties were scouting for brides for their brothers, the grand dukes. Dynastic alliance with England, above all, rather than heirs and maidenly charms was what was desired at this time of acute anxiety on the part of all the imperial and royal houses of Europe.
Princess Elizabeth had remained at Windsor while her brother led a great party of emperors and kings and generals to the Ascot races: ‘I went into my room to sit in my great chair with my books, my papers and writing things, intending to employ myself all day.’ About three o’clock she was startled to receive a note from Mary, written at the race ground. The Emperor Alexander of Russia and his sister, the Grand Duchess of Oldenburg, were on their way to visit her.
Elizabeth dressed and summoned her wits to entertain her distinguished visitors, no doubt making something of the connection between them – her brother-in-law the King of Württemberg being their maternal uncle. ‘When they were gone I sat down to recover myself,’ the invalid wrote. The next moment, the door opened and from without ‘they said, the King of Prussia’. This time there was a double connection to explore. Louise, the adored wife of Frederick William III, had been Queen Charlotte’s niece, and he himself was half-brother to the dear Duchess of York. ‘I almost dropt,’ she wrote the following day, ‘for I did not expect him. He is very shy, very modest, looks manly, good and melancholy … you will allow it was awkward for me, as we had never met and there was no soul to introduce either him to me or me to him.’ It gave her the ‘headache ferociously.’
Although Elizabeth did not know it, her sister’s stepson, Prince Paul of Württemberg – first cousin of the Emperor and Grand Duchess, and the Princess of Wales’s nephew for good measure – had behaved shockingly that day at Ascot. He got the Hereditary Prince of Orange blind drunk, for the second time. The first time, at Carlton House, Princess Charlotte had been present to observe it. The Prince’s stepmother, Royal, disclaimed all responsibility from Ludwigsburg, telling the Regent that she had warned him in April that they could not be answerable for Prince Paul’s conduct. ‘For thirteen years he has done nothing but offend his father by the improprieties of his conduct.’ But Princess Charlotte seized on the displays to refuse outright to marry the Hereditary Prince of Orange. She was as summary with him in this great matter of state as she had been with young d’Este. She wrote to her aunt Mary of ‘an explanation which took place between me and the Prince of Orange and which terminated in a manner which will, I fear, give you pain; but in my situation it was unavoidable. Our engagement is at an end …’
The real truth was that Charlotte feared she would be forced to live in The Hague, and she felt very strongly that her presence in England was her mother’s protection against further designs – divorce, persecution – that she was aware her father meditated once she was gone. If she also felt that her father’s remarriage and the birth of a son – an heir apparent – might follow divorce, it was hardly surprising.
There were so many advisers pressing in with information and hypotheses on this unfortunate young Princess – ranging from her father and his government to her uncles Sussex and Kent, to Lord Grey and Mercer Elphinstone for the Whigs, to her mother’s lawyer Henry Brougham. And then there were the visiting dignitaries who put a finger in the pie, such as the Duchess of Oldenburg, the Tsar’s sister, who saw Holland as a useful Russian satellite and wanted the Prince of Orange as a bridegroom for her own sister. In the midst of it all was Charlotte, with her jutting bosom and hips and her fresh face and chestnut ringlets – outfacing her father’s wrath, and, as it happened, utterly in love with Augustus Frederick of Prussia, whom Miss Knight had allowed into Warwick House after Princess Charlotte had asked him to come and visit her.
The hothouse atmosphere of royal London exploded when the Regent appeared at Warwick House, demanding to see his daughter. Miss Knight said, on the Princess’s instructions, that she was too ill with a swollen knee to descend, but then offended the Prince by saying she must contradict a report that Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, an officer in the Russian service, had been secretly visiting Warwick House. The Regent said grimly that he knew that rumour to be false, and that equally he knew of a certain Prussian prince who had been the visitor in question. A distressed Charlotte then learnt she was to be incarcerated with elderly ladies of the Queen’s in a lodge in Windsor Great Park for her criminality in receiving Augustus and rejecting William of Orange. Seeking sanctuary she fled by hackney carriage, bad knee or no bad knee, to her mother, the Princess of Wales at her house in Bayswater, Connaught House.
It was a chastened Charlotte who left London, as her father had originally directed, a few days later for Cranbourne Lodge in Windsor Great Park. At Connaught House her mother had rejected her daughter’s impassioned plea to save her from the prison her father meant to condemn her to. (The failure of her many relations among the visiting dignitaries to call on her, for fear of losing the Regent’s favour, had left Caroline wretched and humiliated and she was now set on going abroad.) Likewise Charlotte’s uncle Sussex had, with the other advisers who crowded the house in Connaught Street, counselled obeying her father.
Indeed, the lawyer Henry Brougham had led the quivering Princess to a window that overlooked Hyde Park and had spoken of the potential scene should he show her to the populace that would gather there next morning with the advent of a Parliamentary election. Blood there would be, and marches and riots in her defence, but the English public would never forget that she was the cause of that bloodshed. Just as surely as Charlotte’s aunts had had to obey their father thirty years before, so this wilder, more head-strong Princess – seeking emancipation as they had before her – agreed to be driven to Carlton House and to do her father’s bidding.
At Cranbourne Lodge, to compound her hurt, Charlotte learnt from her father that her mother was preparing, in the wake of Napoleon’s expulsion from France and the restoration of his satellite kingdoms to their former sovereigns, to travel to her brother William’s restored Duchy of Brunswick. It was a trip that the Princess of Wales had often meditated during her years of distress in England before her father’s death and the incorporation of her homeland into Napoleon’s Empire. The Regent had ‘no objection’, and had no wish to ‘interfere’ in his estranged wife’s plan. Her daughter wrote, ‘I really am so hurt about it that I am very low …’ But Princess Mary told the Regent, ‘I congratulate you on the prospect of a good riddance. Should a storm blow up and the ship go to the bottom I will send you a small fashionable pocket handkerchief to dry your tears – it will be the only black gown I shall ever put on with pleasure.’
Charlotte slowly recovered from a year and more of exceptional agitation and distress at Cranbourne Lodge which, after all, turned out to be a ‘very cheerful and very good’ house, ‘the view lovely.’ She visited Weymouth in company with her chaperone, Lady Ilchester, and General Garth, her grandfather’s former equerry, and bathed in hope of a cure for her knee, which swelled unaccountably. And she forgave her aunts and grandmother for their previous behaviour. Indeed, she found her aunt Sophia a strong ally when she expressed fears that the Regent had not entirely lost sight of reviving the Orange match. ‘The thing was impossible,’ said Sophia firmly. Charlotte came away, more relieved than she had felt for some time, ‘though I still see mountains and hills before me are to be passed over, if not quite inaccessible.’
All the princesses were utterly convinced that Charlotte, despite her youth, should marry. ‘The country and your family wish you to marry, and I am sure all who really love you must too,’ said Sophia, ‘for you never can be happy or enjoy anything like liberty or comfort going on as you do now, so subject and subjected.’ Royal wrote to Lady Harcourt: ‘Il n’y a nulle rose sans espine [there is no rose without a thorn], but I believe that it is ever better for Princesses in particular to be settled.’
The Princess of Wales’s failings were a subject on which the Queen and the princesses had ‘naturally agreed’ with the Regent – all bar Sophia. But Caroline had departed now for the Continent. And the Queen began, as Charlotte observed, ‘to have her eyes opened and see now … that the Regent only used her as a cat’s paw.’ The Queen meanwhile told the Regent, ‘You do not see Charlotte at all to advantage. She is quite different with us, I assure you.’ But he answered, ‘You always say so, I know. It is very unfortunate, but she appears to me half in the sulks.’ And Charlotte never lost her fear in her father’s company.
The only princess whom Charlotte was wary of was Mary. She suspected her of still being likely to take the Regent’s part if he tried to revive the Orange match. And she regarded her also as something of a rival. Mary, after all, though she was thirty-eight next birthday, was the beauty of the family, and Princess Charlotte, heir presumptive though she might be – and sought by many – had little confidence in herself. When Charlotte mentioned Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, she said she believed Princess Mary ‘coloured not a little’ and then was made ‘quite satisfied and cheerful again’ when Charlotte said he did not suit her taste.
Charlotte concluded darkly, nevertheless, ‘I suspect there was something or other.’ But when she questioned her aunt Sophia about Mary’s feelings, Sophia said irritatingly she knew nothing of it. ‘If there is any tendresse, it is all her side certainly,’ concluded Charlotte. However, when she departed for Weymouth that winter, she gave Mary credit for ‘feeling it exceedingly, as she had the example of poor Amelia before her eyes too fresh, easily to forget and not to feel uneasy about my knee’. Indeed, Mary also expressed her astonishment that the Regent was not more unquiet. ‘If the country takes an interest in me and about me,’ wrote Charlotte gloomily, ‘that shall stand to me in lieu of family and everything else.’
At Weymouth Charlotte was discomposed by her attendant, General Garth, pressing his ‘adoptive son’ Tommy Garth on her – ‘a more lovely boy I never beheld’, she admitted. But she ‘was taken aback’ when the General paraded the boy on the esplanade, and when Charlotte stopped overnight at his house at Ilsington the General said, ‘Pray see and speak to him, as he would be dreadfully mortified if you took no notice of him, but don’t let him be seen or let your ladies see you take any notice of him.’ Furthermore, the old General said roughly that Princess Charlotte should not believe any of the abominable stories she had heard of his birth. Charlotte nearly fainted.
‘It looks like this,’ she explained, ‘that not being able to torment her [Sophia] now any longer with the sight, he will continue it upon the relative she loves best besides the Duke of York, a sort of diabolical revenge that one cannot understand.’ However, her ladies, Lady Ilchester and Mrs Campbell, she wrote, believed that ‘it cannot be and is not Garth’s child, that he has the care of it, and is proud and vain that it should be thought his, and knowing he has it in his power probably to disclose whose it is, if offended, makes him so very bold and impudent about the whole thing.’ The feeling in the county, on the other hand, she said, was ‘that there is something to come out yet and that if it ever does, it will turn out to be some secret marriage or something of that kind.’
Charlotte was no stranger to stray children with question marks over their parentage, following her childhood with a mother who adopted first a French orphan, Edwardine Kent, and then a docker’s son, Willy Austin. She was also happy to guess at those children’s parentage, believing them both to be her mother’s, and the elder child – whom her mother had just married off to an aide-de-camp of her brother’s in Brunswick – the daughter of a military hero, Sir Sidney Smith. Edwardine had the same black hair as his, Charlotte said. As for Willy Austin, removed from Dr Burney’s school at Greenwich and tagging after the Princess of Wales as she toured the Continent, the Delicate Investigation and childhood memories had convinced her he was the child of the naval officer Captain Manby. ‘As for my mother taking a flight to Turkey,’ Charlotte opined, reporting rumours that became fact some months later, ‘I should not wonder at it, as it is quite possible for her to do anything strange and out of the way.’
Charlotte herself had decided to do something very reasonable by the time she left Weymouth – and marry Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, the young man who had asked to visit her that June. ‘That I should be as wholly occupied and devoted as I am to one [Prince Augustus of Prussia], and yet think and talk and even provide for another would appear unnatural in the highest degree were it written in a novel, yet it is true. It is not overstrained.’ On Charlotte’s return to Windsor, Mary’s became the room at the Castle where she most often found herself, and in January 1815 she seized an opportunity to confide to Mary her marriage plans, when her aunt asked if there were any one prince she had seen in England that she did not dislike the appearance of. She said that she was ‘not in the least in love’ with Prince Leopold, but that she ‘had a very good opinion of him’ and would rather marry him, for that reason, than any other prince.
Then her hopes were dashed. ‘Only think of Elizabeth and Augusta saying to me just before we parted for the night’, Charlotte wrote on 26 February, ‘how much they hoped I should be tormented and worried no more on the P[rince of] O [range] business, how they longed for an answer from me which might set my mind at rest.’ And Princess Royal had written from Stuttgart, ‘saying the reports were that Lord Castlereagh was going to Brussels’ – the new Orange capital – ‘on his way to England. That, if it was true, she only hoped to God it was not to renew any more torment or worries for me.’ Charlotte went on, ‘the letter came to wash down again all my air-built hopes of quiet’.
Princess Mary told the Prince that she and her sisters were trying to encourage the Orange match, as they knew his feelings on the matter. Charlotte had a more committed supporter in Princess Sophia. ‘As for the O[range] business,’ she wrote to her niece, ‘I have my doubts whether all hopes are yet given up at headquarters [Carlton House]. They still flatter themselves that the event may take place. At least, so I hear. But I live so very much to myself, and so very retired, that I do not learn much. My health … does not allow me to trudge about sufficiently to get much information.’ And she was ‘in complete quarantine’ with her family, as their ideas did not agree.
The Queen, however, was strong in support of her granddaughter. She was ‘deeply overcome, and she wept which is very uncommon for her’, wrote Charlotte. ‘She was very affectionate to me, implored me on her knees not to marry ever a man I did not like, that it would be endless misery…’ She did not wish to encourage Charlotte to disobey her father’s wishes, the Queen told her granddaughter. But, Charlotte recorded, she insisted that, ‘in what so wholly concerned my earthly happiness and well-doing, I had a right to have my own opinion, and by it to be firm.’
As the country flamed in riots over the Corn Bill, and it was written on the wall, ‘Prince Regent, dissolve this Parliament directly or your head shall pay for it,’ the Queen was firm herself with her son, saying sternly: ‘Prince of Wales, you must, if you persist, talk to your daughter yourself. For both myself and mine choose to keep quite out of it, as we will never press what will, we know, make Charlotte miserable.’ Charlotte’s own unhappy conclusion was ‘The Prince must be gone mad if he goes on persecuting me with his abominable Dutch man.’
On the Continent, Royal was at last diverted from her niece Charlotte’s peccadilloes by news of Napoleon’s escape from Elba. ‘His landing in France at the head of so small a body of men would have appeared romantic’, she warned the Regent on 16 March 1815, ‘to all who were not acquainted with the talents and good fortune he displayed till last year.’ The Queen of England, suffering from erysipelas and a swollen face, was as anxious as her daughter in Württemberg – and was to become more so, when another marriage scheme divided the royal family, making the Regent’s and Charlotte’s tussles over her choice of bridegroom look feeble by comparison.
The final conflict of the Napoleonic Wars was played out on the fields and farmland around Brussels in June 1815, and Royal’s supporter Napoleon, vanquished for ever, was despatched to the remote Atlantic island of St Helena. Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, with many others, headed for a Continent no longer, as the older royal houses of Europe saw it, in chains to an upstart. And while others prepared to gather once more at Vienna to fight for territory, Ernest – saturnine and scarred – found, at his mother’s old home of Strelitz, a bride. Unfortunately, the woman he wished to take as his wife was his cousin Frederica. A woman of fascinating and natural manners, she had also, when a widow with two children by Prince Louis of Prussia, jilted Ernest’s brother Adolphus for the Prince of Solms. Solms then divorced her, citing her ‘loose behaviour’.
The Prince Regent gave his assent to the marriage in Strelitz – and opened Carlton House to the couple when they wished to say their vows again in England in 1815. But the Queen, who loved her brother Charles more than anyone in the world, could not bring herself to receive her niece, his daughter and now her daughter-in-law. She feared that ‘her [Frederica’s] character is so well known in this country that it may cause you many difficulties’, Mary wrote of her mother to the Regent, ‘which don’t strike you at this moment… Should the Princess of Wales ever come to England again (and find the Pss of Solms well received) it may place us all under great difficulties.’
The Queen’s nephew the Hereditary Prince of Mecklenburg-Strelitz came begging her to reconsider, and still she could not. When he retaliated by sending a ‘very improper letter’, his aunt declared to all her children ‘that she never will see her nephew again’, and she commanded them ‘to have no further communication with him’. Given the Queen’s ‘adoration for her own family’, Mary wrote to the Regent, ‘the feeling herself under the necessity of acting against them is one of the greatest trials she could have in the world,’ and the Queen’s health deteriorated from this summer of 1815. Elizabeth asserted to her brother Sussex, ‘as she acts from principle and a thorough knowledge of the King’s opinion, she cannot err’. The princesses meanwhile were persuaded by their mother to write an uncomfortable letter to the Regent, the day before their brother Ernest married in England, avowing their intention to follow the Queen’s ‘line … in the propriety of which we entirely concur.’ The next day the miscreant couple were married at the Regent’s home. And Charlotte believed that her uncle Ernest must have had her father in his power in some way to cause him to upset his mother and sisters so.
The Prince Regent ignored his mother’s advice not to recognize his immoral sister-in-law. But he was eager to know details of his daughter’s past passages with that immoral woman his estranged wife. And Princess Mary had acted as confessor to Charlotte, when, on Christmas Day 1814, she told a rambling tale of her visits to her mother over the past years. Charlotte was at the time distraught on account of lawyer Henry Brougham’s reports about Caroline’s behaviour on the Continent. ‘There is no hazard or risk to serve my poor mother that I would not run if it would be of any avail,’ she told Miss Elphinstone. But she could not conceive that breaking her promise to her father not to write to her mother would do anything but mischief. ‘When he talks of her being completely in a man’s power I do not exactly know to what extent of evil I am to prepare myself,’ she wrote fearfully of Brougham’s reports.
Charlotte’s recital to Mary included an account of how the Princess of Wales had taken her and Captain Hesse by the hand and shut them in a bedchamber with the words, ‘I leave you to enjoy yourselves.’ Much else followed, to the grim satisfaction of the Prince Regent, to whom Princess Mary wrote immediately a full account of her conversation with her niece. ‘I never knew whether Captain Hesse was her lover or mine,’ said Charlotte forlornly.
After she made her confession, Charlotte passed the night ‘in the horrors … I fear so terribly that I may have tended … to incriminate her … She is still my mother and as her child I have no right to cavil in her conduct.’ Charlotte begged Mary – ‘you are perhaps a more impartial judge than the Prince’ – to tell her if she had acted justly. ‘Except it be absolutely necessary,’ she wrote, ‘I hope all that passed in your room yesterday will be kept sacred within your bosom.’ But of course Mary had passed it all on.
Once the rupture of Charlotte’s engagement had become known, other princes did not hesitate to visit the Regent’s Court, some latecomers being two Austrian archdukes in the autumn of 1815. ‘I have such a dread of foreign princes, the sight as well as the name of them alarm me from the idea of some intrigue or other going on for my marrying some one of them, that I am on the qui vive,’ Charlotte confessed, longing for Leopold to appear and declare himself. Of another prince who appeared, the Hereditary Prince of Hesse-Homburg, she wrote: ‘a husband in petto for me too, I suppose … the best thing I can do to make all easy and equally pleased is to marry them all at once in the lump. He is not a man at all calculated for me or that could make me happy’
Indeed, beside smooth young Leopold, the mature and soldierly charms of the Prince from Homburg stood no chance. They were not always on show, anyway, as he was often obscured by pungent plumes of smoke rising from his beloved meerschaum pipe. There was too the reek of tobacco that clung about his hairy person – he boasted, besides a full head of hair, bushy sideburns and luxuriant whiskers – to discourage Charlotte.
Meanwhile, the Prince whom the Princess had once declared herself willing to marry, the Duke of Gloucester, had at the ripe age of forty, proposed to a wealthy widow, Lady Monson – and been rejected. Under this blow, wrote Charlotte, ‘my cousin seems strangely to have kept his dignity and love of pride etc. She has done more than anybody else ever effected, I believe’ – she meant, jokingly, in getting the Duke to propose. But Charlotte was soon cast down by new reports about her mother who, it was said, had taken as her lover an Italian who acted as her travelling courier. ‘I am in despair at what you tell me about a courier. I had not the slightest or smallest suspicion of the kind … Surely, surely, my dear Marguerite,’ she wrote to Mercer Elphinstone, ‘there can be nothing there, a low common servant, a servant too. And yet you seem to insinuate it from the influence he has in disgracing the boy Austin.’
Charlotte was distracted from these meditations when she won her object, and the Prince Regent finally agreed to Prince Leopold as a suitable choice of husband for her. On a cold damp morning in February 1816, she came flying over to the Castle from Cranbourne Lodge with a ‘face of delight’ to show her aunts her father’s ‘perfect’ letter on the subject. Later that month her suitor arrived from the Continent and was interviewed by his prospective father-in-law at the Pavilion at Brighton, where the Regent was increasingly spending his time. (His latest inamorata, Lady Hertford, could not abide London, all her comfort was ‘destroyed’ there, and so anyone, government ministers included, wishing to hold the Regent’s wavering attention had to go down to the Sussex coast.) Princess Augusta, who had visited her brother in January, was delighted with her brother’s taste: ‘The house is quite beautiful, the ground floor entirely Chinoise of the very best taste – and magnificent, the bedchamber storey all plain handsome, good, substantial furniture.’ Prince Leopold found the corps diplomatique who assembled there less entertaining than the Princess. ‘Who would have thought that I could have put a morsel in my mouth sitting with an ambassador?’ she wrote. ‘But I did or I must have starved.’ He complained of the oppressive heat of the rooms, which was doing immense damage to his chest, and Charlotte was all solicitude.
The marriage went forward, despite the Regent’s ill humour. As host at Brighton to the young fiancés and suffering from the gout, he wheeled himself about in a ‘merlin chair’, not being able to put his feet to the ground, ‘and in that sits the whole evening with his legs down’, wrote Charlotte. The Queen, who told her son that this was a match she most highly approved of, gratified her granddaughter by consulting with her about ‘fine lace’ and other items for her trousseau before ordering it. Charlotte had delightful evenings with Leopold, ‘full of long conversation on different subjects interesting to our future plans of life … A Princess never, I believe, set out in life (or married) with such prospects of happiness, real domestic ones like other people.’
Although the wedding was being planned according to ‘some old documents’ Lord Liverpool had found relating to her aunt the Princess Royal’s marriage, Charlotte considered herself luckier than that Princess. When they were in town, she and Leopold met daily, ‘and she did not’, she wrote of her aunt, ‘after the first day till they were married’. But then the Princess Royal did not have so many sexual escapades or such bizarre parents to discuss. Leopold hoped very much that the Prince Regent would not pursue his prospective mother-in-law for a divorce. He dreaded the ‘éclat’. ‘We did not say much about my mother,’ wrote Charlotte, ‘as he told me honestly her conduct was so notorious and so much talked of abroad that he was as well informed as everyone else about her.’
By mid-March 1816 Parliament had voted a generous sum to the bridal pair, and had agreed to the purchase of Lord Clive’s house, Claremont in Surrey, as their residence. The nation was caught up in the love affair that blossomed between Charlotte and her fiance, and their marriage, which took place on 2 May before an imported altar in the drawing room at Carlton House, was widely celebrated. ‘Everyone complimented me upon the composure and dignity of my manner, and the audible manner in which I answered the responses,’ Princess Charlotte wrote from Oatlands, which the Duchess of York had lent the bridal couple for their honeymoon. ‘It all seems to me like a dream, and I ask if it is not so sometimes to myself, and I forget it all for a time, and then it comes back in full force. I cannot say I feel much at my ease or quite comfortable in his society, but it will wear away, I dare say, this sort of awkwardness.’ Also Charlotte and Leopold both found the ‘air of the house’ at Oatlands ‘quite unwholesome, it is so infected and impregnated with the smell and breath of dogs, birds, and all sorts of animals’ – the Duchess of York’s close companions for many years since she and the Duke had amicably parted.
Charlotte declared that the foundation of her own marriage was ‘very reasonable and therefore there is less chance of its ever being otherwise than with most others; indeed, on the contrary, I am more inclined to think that it will improve. I do not see how it can fail to go on well, tho sometimes I believe it is best not to analyse one’s feelings too much or probe them too deeply or nearly.’ She had not completely forgotten Prince Augustus Frederick of Prussia.
While Charlotte became a wife and the mistress of her own house at Claremont, with firm hopes of becoming a mother as well, lightning struck out of a clear blue sky. Princess Mary, aged forty, followed her niece to the altar and married her first cousin William, Duke of Gloucester on 22 July 1816. Lady Albinia Cumberland described the scene to her daughter:
Well, the wedding is over! Dear Princess Mary looked most lovely and angelic – really. Her dress a rich silver tissue of dead silver … no trimming upon it – lace round the neck only. Diamond necklace. The hair dressed rather high. The diamonds put round the head, something in the form of a diadem. When everybody was assembled in the saloon, the Dukes of Cambridge and Clarence handed her in. She looked very modest and overcome. The Prince Regent stood at the other end to the Duke of Gloucester. She stood alone to the former, quite leaning against him. Indeed she needed support. I pitied the Duke of Gloucester for he stood a long time at the altar waiting till she came into the room, giving cakes, carrying wine etc … She then went to the Queen and her sisters, and was quite overcome, was obliged to sit down, and nearly fainted …
Lord Eldon, the Lord Chancellor, said afterwards of the new Duchess of Gloucester that ‘her behaviour was so interesting and affecting at the ceremony. Even the tears trickled down my cheeks.’ Impossible for the Princess not to miss the presence of her father at this sacred ceremony. But the King inhabited a world of his own at Windsor, full of its own ceremonies. On one occasion, alone in the room with Willis, he ‘took leave of all his company before he went to bed as if the room had been full of people’. When Dr Willis attempted to hurry him, the sovereign bowed acceptance: ‘But I beg Lord Hardwick may first tell his story to Mr Smelt.’
Princess Mary wrote when the Duke’s offer had just become public, in late June, to a friend who was a recent bride herself, ‘it is difficult to describe what my mind is suffering at the prospect of leaving my first and most beloved of homes’. She declared, however, that, as the Duke’s seat, Bagshot Park, was so close to Windsor, she would hardly spend a week without seeing her mother and sisters. And she wrote warmly, ‘The Duke of Gloucester made so good a son himself– his warring parents were both now dead – ‘that he enters into all my feelings in regard to my family and my wish to take my share of duty in the attendance at Windsor in illness or in any distress.’
What had precipitated this marriage? The Duke of Gloucester had lately, as we have seen, proposed to another lady, and so was presumably in the mood to marry. Perhaps his thoughts had turned to marriage when his cousin Charlotte ‘declared’ for him. With marriage he won the coveted HRH, and even became a field marshal, as Leopold had done weeks earlier. But if it was true that he had earlier proposed to his cousin Mary twenty or thirty times and she had rejected him, why did she now accept him? Not much had changed in his circumstances to make him more or less attractive than at any time since he had become duke in 1805. Married life would centre on a town house, Gloucester House, which faced Hyde Park to the west, and, in the country, Bagshot Park, where the Duke was accustomed annually to shoot his way through the autumn and winter months. Nevertheless Princess Augusta believed Mary had ‘every prospect of happiness’.
Mary herself guarded that prospect of happiness, and refused to allow her brother Ernest to visit her at the Queen’s House before her marriage. ‘I am quite certain’, she wrote, ‘the Queen would be greatly offended if he came into her house, and secondly, was he to say anything against the Duke of Gloucester, it would place me in a most awkward situation.’ Mary was marrying a cousin from a ‘weaker branch of the family’, whom most if not all of her brothers had long regarded as a tiresome fool, and she, quite reasonably, did not wish to hear it said.
One of the chief reasons, it emerges, that Mary accepted Gloucester, or even possibly promoted the match herself, was that she hoped, as a married woman, to see more of her adored Prince Regent. ‘I hope’, she told him, ‘I may be permitted to find my way into your room occasionally of a morning when in town. I shall be very careful never to get out of the carriage until I know you can receive me.’ In return she directed him, ‘Come when and as often as you please to my house, it will be the joy of my life to see you.’ She had told the Duke ‘how completely and entirely my happiness depends on my remaining on this blessed footing with you and all my family.’ She ended this document that spoke only of her ties to her own family and of none to the Duke, ‘I trust and hope my intended marriage will rather add and increase … my devotion to my family, and that as a married woman I can come forward and be of more use to you all than I can now.’
Charlotte wrote a few weeks after Mary’s marriage: ‘I have seen the Gloucesters twice. They seem very comfortable and happy. He is much in love, and tells me he is the happiest creature on earth. I won’t say she does as much, but being her own mistress, having her own house, and being able to walk in the streets all delights her in their several ways. He is not at all in favour with the regent, who quizzes him and shrugs up his shoulders at him upon all occasions…’ Charlotte herself found the Duke of Gloucester ‘tiresome’, but, after he and the Duchess had stayed at Claremont in August, wrote, ‘though they are not the most agreeable people in the world, still they are exceedingly good humoured, good natured, kind and easily pleased … the Duke seems very fond of Mary and to be very happy; he is certainly all attention to her, but I cannot say she looks the picture of happiness or as if she was much delighted with him.’