Princess Charlotte had not been entirely enthusiastic about her aunt’s marriage. The new Duchess of Gloucester gave tit for tat. ‘Our visit to Claremont went off very well,’ Mary wrote on 29 September 1816, ‘considering that we went to see two people completely engrossed with each other … I doubt that the sort of life they are now leading can last, but I wish it may with all my heart.’ Mary had very little conversation with Charlotte, who had once confided in her. ‘She really appears … to have no eyes or thoughts but for the Prince of Coburg and he is much in the same state.’ Charlotte herself admitted with delight, a month after marriage, that her ‘reasonable marriage’ had flowered into a love match.
Her own husband, averred the Duchess, was ‘all affection and kindness and has no object but my happiness’. She wrote of ‘a marriage which promises every comfort’ and of the Duke’s ‘honourable character and excellent heart.’ And they both thoroughly enjoyed the marriage feast that her sister Princess Elizabeth contrived in their honour at her cottage at Old Windsor – a splendid fête, with rustic emblems and trophies of plenty and fruitfulness jostling ‘pan pipes twisted with tassels’, trumpets, fifes and drums, painted on a blue background. The guests danced in a tent, and were offered a ‘sandwich supper’, and Elizabeth told Mrs Baynes that, if she had let her imagination have fair play, there would have been turtle-doves in pairs and cupids in every corner.
The new Duchess endorsed the work of the Duke’s steward, Mr Edmund Currey, who had done much recently to make the estate into a first-class shoot. For this Princess Mary was grateful, as she learnt that the Duke had only rarely been at Bagshot before Currey’s landscaping of the property, which included ‘wood walks, fine large trees’ and a ‘variety of ground that is striking for so small a park.’ She could see opportunities for thinning here and planting there, she wrote. Gardening, an activity in which Mary had taken little interest till now, was to become her passion, under the tutelage of the personable Mr Currey and with an excellent gardener, Mr Toward. She intended to make a flower garden, once the Duke and her brother the Prince had settled on which side of the house additions should be made, she told Miss Henrietta Finch in October.
The Prince Regent had sent Mr John Nash, the celebrated architect, to survey Bagshot Park and grounds with the plan of making additions. ‘He passed two hours with us yesterday, and will put his ideas on paper for you to approve or disapprove,’ Mary wrote to her brother. She had told Mr Nash again and again that he should add only what was necessary ‘from comfort’, having no wish to ‘drive any unnecessary expenses upon any of the [government] Offices.’ Nevertheless, Mary had found on arrival at Bagshot that what the Duke thought necessary for a lady’s comfort was very far from her own. ‘You know how many things are required in a lady’s apartment,’ she wrote to Miss Finch on 4 October 1816, ‘and that never can come into the head of any man, still less one who never was used to live with ladies before he married me.’
Even before he married, the Duke had been badly off at Bagshot for lodging rooms for his staff and even for servants’ rooms. All was now to be rationalized and adapted by Mr Nash for the new couple’s convenience. According to Princess Mary, the house had only two good rooms, her own and the Duke’s. The apartment – and dressing room – that her sister-in-law Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester had occupied when she stayed had recently been greatly ‘injured’ by rain, and, as for the Duke’s gentlemen, they had to sleep in a garret. Only their long attachment to the Duke made them put up with being lodged among the servants. The basics for the ‘common convenience of a family’ were not to be found in the house, and she continued to beg the Regent to urge Lord Liverpool to give his consent for their supply.
The Duke, when not out in his newly stocked woods with his gun, or travelling England in pursuit of game elsewhere, had found his comfort till now not at home, but in his sister Princess Sophia Matilda’s house in London, or in male society at the numerous London clubs that he belonged to. With a marked liking for institutional life, he felt most strongly about the African Institution, of all the many bodies whose dinners he attended and whose meetings he chaired. Promoting the rights of African slaves, he thus found himself in company with Mr William Roscoe of Liverpool, lawyer Mr Henry Brougham and other Radical MPs. Gloucester was here, as in other charitable enterprises, always a generous donor. But it was whispered that he did not always fully follow the arguments that raged around him at Cambridge, at the African Institution or in other committee rooms.
The new Duchess, taking a hand at philanthropy herself, was building a small schoolroom for Bagshot parish which was ‘much wanted’. In case these activities palled, the new Duchess was going to have ‘a master for landscapes, which’, she said, ‘I think will amuse me very much.’
She and the Duke received morning visits from her mother and sisters, the Regent called from Royal Lodge at Windsor, and Charlotte and Leopold came to stay. But their most frequent guests were Princess Sophia Matilda, with her companion, formerly her governess, Miss Dee, and the guests who came on shooting parties during the autumn. When the Duke was away shooting – often for ten days or more at a time – his bride generally visited her mother and sisters at Windsor. Thus she made good her promise that she would continue to play as full a part as possible in Castle life.
Poor health dominated the lives of the Queen and of Mary’s sisters at Windsor, where every ailment became a hideous encumbrance. Sophia was now never long free from spasms, although there were days when she could sit up and play at cards. And, mysteriously, there were days when the invalid went out for a hearty ride with her sister Augusta. Mary, visiting from Bagshot, was drawn into this world of indisposition and was laid up for several days in November with a very bad chilblain on her foot, reminding her, she wrote to her brother, of another chilblain ‘in the very spot that caused me so much suffering two years ago.’
The Queen’s poor health – her bilious complaints and her sinking spirits – was apparent to all her daughters. On certain anniversaries, like the day on which the King fell ill, 25 October, grief overcame her. When she received the news of the death of her brother Grand Duke Charles, Elizabeth wrote, ‘She was struck so cold … that I was privately anxious.’ Years earlier Royal had written of her mother’s difficulty in giving vent to the strong emotions that disturbed her, and the years had not altered that failing. ‘After all that has passed, one cannot wonder at its being a most painful thing to her to feel that, in acting the part of a truly great and excellent Queen, she was obliged to take a step which for the sake of the country was so extremely painful to herself … if she had not done what she did, the morals of the country were gone.’ But the Queen gained some pleasure from visiting her granddaughter Charlotte and Prince Leopold at Claremont. Their plans to attend the Lord Mayor’s Banquet and to take part in public life met with the Queen’s firm approval, and though she tried to dissuade her own daughters from attending Charlotte and Leopold, frailty made her less obdurate in general. Only in one matter was she unbending. She would not quit Windsor, though the King did not register her presence when she made her impassive visits to his northern apartments, for the ‘cure’ her doctors implored her to take.
For Princess Mary, marriage was a brave new world. Among other difficulties to contend with, she had to reconcile her loyalty to her brother the Regent with her new duty to her husband. Her dreams, expressed before marriage, of acting as hostess – which she could never do in her spinster state – to her brother at Brighton were with difficulty realized. Although the Gloucesters spent the New Year of 1817 there with the Regent, who was, according to Charlotte, ‘as well with them as can be’, the Duke’s feelings for his cousin remained those of anger and envy. And the Regent did not forget that, throughout his battles with their mutual cousin his wife, the Gloucester family had played an ambiguous part and had never ceased to visit the Princess of Wales till she left England.
When an assassin made an attempt on the life of the Prince Regent early in 1817, the Duchess of Gloucester seized the opportunity to rush to the Castle, where her brother was recovering. Royal wrote from Württemberg warmly, if not knowledgeably, of ‘the spirit of anarchy’ abroad in Britain, and praised her brother for cancelling the drawing room – for fear of riots – at which their mother had been due to preside. ‘It would be terrible to have her exposed to any hurry’, she wrote of the Queen, ‘at this time of life.’ She said of her mother further that ‘at her time of life, she ought to give up having long drawing rooms… Augusta and Eliza might with great propriety do the honours of them at Carlton House or … like our late aunt Princess Amelia they might once a month have their own drawing room, which would help to keep up trade.’ Royal was referring to the silk merchants, dressmakers and milliners who benefited from orders for the new outfits that were de rigueur for drawing rooms.
Royal herself had no wish to return to England and host any such drawing room, although she was now free to do so. Momentous news had come from Stuttgart in November. Royal’s husband, Frederick, King of Württemberg – that great survivor who had twisted and turned his way through the Napoleonic Wars – had died on 30 October 1816. And the Duke of Kent, who had by chance been with his sister when the King expired, would do justice to their mutuál attachment to the last, wrote Royal. Her sisters and brothers were less convinced about that attachment, and considered that the Queen was too proud to admit that she was the victim of domestic violence. Over the years, reports of the King’s mishandling his wife had filtered back to England, but, given Württemberg’s status as a French vassal state, it had seemed impolitic to raise the issue. Now the matter must be allowed to rest, with the King in his grave.
Royal’s stepson Wilhelm and his new wife Catherine had also stayed with her to the last – although Catherine was ‘taken in labour as she was sitting in the next room to the late King when he was dying.’ (Bewitched by the Grand Duchess of Oldenburg in London, the Hereditary Prince had divorced his wife and married the Russian Princess, who was now expecting their first child.) With great firmness of mind, hours after the King’s death and twelve hours after the delivery of her own child, this new Queen of Württemberg wrote to Queen Charlotte ‘to ease her mind’ about Royal, Elizabeth told Lady Harcourt.
As Dowager Queen of Württemberg, Royal wrote six months later to Lady Harcourt that, although supported wonderfully by the Almighty throughout ‘the severe trial it has pleased him to afflict me with’, her heart was ‘too deeply wounded’ not to mourn constantly her ‘dearest friend’ – the dead King. She thought of her husband constantly, led the same sort of life he had been partial to, and employed herself in those things that had given him satisfaction. And this, she found, was ‘in a degree prolonging his existence beyond the grave’. In Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg she had a respected position and could live, on her generous English jointure, an extremely grand and luxurious life. Each year she kept up a sort of summer court at Teinach, the watering place in the Black Forest where she had first gone years before, after the stillbirth of her daughter. This year she wrote of the waters, ‘But although I submit to their prescription, I have little faith in it as nothing can ease a broken heart.’ Why would Royal wish to exchange this respectable life of mourning for the daughter’s lot in England that would be hers, queen and widow though she was?
The day after her husband died, Royal wrote to Sir John Coxe Hippisley, one of the trustees who had been appointed on her marriage to invest her dowry: ‘I believe that from the day of the King’s death, I am entided to the whole interest of my fortune’ – £80,000 in 1797. For dowager residences she chose apartments in the new Palace at Stuttgart, a set of rooms in the great complex at Ludwigsburg, and the pretty villa, Mon Repos, outside the latter town. It was from Ludwigsburg in August 1817 that she wrote to wish her brother the Regent a happy birthday: ‘I look forward with delight to the moment which will make you a happy grandfather.’
Princess Charlotte was expecting a baby in November 1817. Even before she was pregnant she had surprised visitors who remembered her rakish teenage habits by the taste she exhibited for domestic life at Claremont. She and Leopold sang, sharing a piano stool. As the pregnancy advanced, they went hand in hand for slow walks in the grounds. Charlotte sat to Mr Thomas Lawrence the fashionable painter, and in the portrait, her happiness outshines even the lavish gold embroidery on her Russian blue dress. People began to say that she would make – in due course – an excellent queen. Charlotte’s old foibles – her impulsiveness, her arbitrary favouritisms and dislikes – were forgotten. And she moved happily about her new home, entertaining family and friends with pleasure. ‘It is not à façon de parler to say that this is Liberty Hall, and that we are only too happy to dispense with form and ceremony,’ she said contentedly one evening. But that was going too far for one visitor who found the circle they sat in impossibly formal and German, and the conversation deadly.
The weather cleared in September, and the Duchess of Gloucester – and her sister Augusta, who visited – quite lived out of doors at Bagshot and Windsor. On receiving a letter from Lady Harcourt, Augusta wrote that it was a real pleasure to reply to her – ‘but so many people would expect me to correspond with them because my sisters are fond of writing that I give out I cannot bear writing which really is not the case, but the fact is, I love my few friends so very much that I cannot make a hospital of my heart – a phrase I have often made use of to dear Miss Gouldsworthy, who entered perfectly on my feelings upon the subject…’
They heard that the Princess of Wales – having learnt that she was to be a grandmother in November – was coming to England, and that Miss Frances Garth, her former lady, was to meet her at Dover. But Mary placed hope in a forged bond that the Princess had given her brother the Duke of Brunswick before his death, and which she hoped would help to expose and bring down her sister-in-law.
Mary forgot about the Princess of Wales on a bridal visit with her husband to Weymouth, originally a Gloucester ‘fiefdom’, where they were besieged by a host of friendly inhabitants. When they visited the Ilchesters at Nutting, a house ‘full of fine old chinoise and japan and some good pictures’, the Duchess noticed, among a sea of Frampton and Seymour relations, ‘a most agreeable old lady with a wonderful memory’ who told her stories of fifty years back ‘with a degree of cheerfulness that is delightful.’ Was Mary thinking of her mother, now aged seventy-three, who was neither cheerful nor delightful, but ill and old and cross? Weymouth seems to have awakened in Mary no painful recollections of her last visit there with Amelia, and triumphantly she proceeded to Brighton, to batten on her brother from the comfort of one of his houses – ostensibly to see if a course of sea bathing would keep off’the Saint’, or erysipelas, that coming winter.
Princess Elizabeth, meanwhile, was spending her time painting glass for a window in her new ‘castle in the air’ – the dairy she dreamt of building at her Old Windsor cottage. ‘I have no such thing,’ she told Augusta Baynes, who had traced her a design for her project, ‘but I love living on hope. She is at times a sad girl, but still one cannot live without her.’ Elizabeth now planned to japan a large screen with ‘bold patterns of birds, plants and figures’, and asked Augusta to trace her some. She would ask Mr Festrage, the great japanner, to send her some tracing paper of quality that did not stick.
After her hopes of marriage with the Duke of Orleans had been dashed eight years earlier, Elizabeth had increasingly inhabited the role of eccentric in her cottage at Old Windsor. Adhering to her rustic character, she wrote of putting the pieces of wedding cake her friends sent her under her pillow and lying in wait for bridegrooms. But of course this was daft nonsense; bridegrooms could not ‘come along’ for Princess Elizabeth as they might for a Miss Compton or even a Miss Perceval. If she were to come by a husband, it would be by treaty with a foreign state. Meanwhile, outside were the cattle and Chinese pigs that she bred. Inside, the house was chock-a-block with the ‘old china’ and teapots that she collected, her library of books, and her portfolios of prints and drawings. There were also to be found the raw materials of myriad artistic endeavours – scissors and black paper for the silhouette scenes of mothers and babies which she cut out with such dexterity, screens and inks and paints for her japanning projects, the large albums which she illuminated with texts and then grangerized, or filled with appropriate prints and engravings in the margins, and even a decorative garland or two from the countless fêtes and parties that she delighted in arranging for her friends and family.
Her artistic plans were put on hold in November 1817 when she was appointed companion to her mother on a journey to Bath. The Queen had at last consented to try the waters there. The physicians’ dire warnings about the consequences of her remaining without remedy had at last overcome her aversion to leaving the King at Windsor. With the experienced and faintly ominous remark, after a visit to Claremont, that Charlotte was very large indeed, although some way off full term, and with anxious imprecations to Princess Augusta, left in charge at Windsor, about the care of the King, the Queen departed.
At Bath, Princess Elizabeth and Queen Charlotte settled into a routine of going to the Pump Room in the morning and dining early with their ladies at the capacious house in New Sydney Place which they had rented. But only days after they had arrived, on the morning of 6 November, before they left for the Pump Room, they received the unhappy news that Charlotte had gone into labour a month early the previous evening, and that her baby – a large and handsome boy – had been stillborn. The Princess’s labour had been unexpected. She had come in from a walk and was laying aside her bonnet and cloak when the pains began. It was agonizing and protracted, they heard, and Sir Richard Croft, her accoucheur, and the midwives had done their best, but to no avail. When she was told the news, they learnt, Princess Charlotte had been stoic and, before settling to rest, had comforted her afflicted husband by speaking of many children to come.
Queen Charlotte in Bath, who had ‘long been uneasy about Charlotte’, did not at all like the account of her granddaughter’s condition after the delivery, and all day worried and waited for a further express to bring more news. The Duke of Clarence, who had taken a house at the other end of the terrace, supported his mother before leaving to dress for a banquet that the City and Corporation of Bath were giving him at the Guildhall. The Queen and Elizabeth meanwhile – after some hesitation, and in all their diamonds – received the Lord Mayor and Deputation in advance of the dinner, as had been arranged. Worse news, the worst of news then arrived, and Princess Elizabeth wrote that night of the ‘tremendous blow’ they were dealt, when that second fateful express arrived while they were at dinner in New Sydney Place.
‘General Taylor was asked out; our hearts misgave us. He sent out for Lady Ilchester, which gave us a moment for to be sure that something dreadful had happened.’ The moment General Taylor came back into the dining room, Queen Charlotte said, ‘I am sure it is over.’ The express did indeed bring the news for which the Queen seemed to have been preparing herself. Princess Charlotte, not yet twenty-two years old, a beaming bride a year before, a proud wife and mother-to-be days earlier, had died in the night from complications following the stillbirth of her premature son.
‘Horror, sorrow and misery’, wrote Elizabeth to Lady Harcourt, ‘struck the heart, and no word could fall after such a dreadful shock.’ And dolefully she wrote to one of her brother’s confidential attendants, ‘In our lives have we never been so completely shocked.’ At the Bath Guildhall, where the King’s messenger had stopped to give the news to the dead Princess’s uncle, the Duke of Clarence, the banquet was abandoned. In Bath, as throughout the country, as the news spread, the reaction was shock – and universal and genuine mourning. The lawyer Henry Brougham wrote, ‘It really was as if every household throughout Great Britain had lost a favourite child.’ The Prince Regent was prostrate with grief and ‘deep affliction’.
At Windsor Princess Augusta, who had so recently written happily to Lady Harcourt, now told her, ‘I even dared to expect the poor child could have lived, after all the sufferings, to the third day – You may suppose that I am exactly in that situation of the man who stands till he falls. It is so sad a calamity that I am still quite stunned.’ After Sir Brent Spencer had broken the news to her, it had been her ‘very cruel’ task to ‘tell the fatal conclusion’ to Sophy, and she dreaded the effect it would have on her. ‘I sent for Battiscombe [the apothecary] to be with us and, thank God, the last accounts had been so bad that she expected a sad close as much as I did.’ As she wrote, they were waiting for the Queen and Elizabeth, and then ‘All our meetings and seeing Baillie will be over.’ But, thinking of the funeral ahead, she added, ‘till the necessary distressing scenes are past, we shall be constantly tracing open the wound afresh.’
The Queen, who returned with Elizabeth to Windsor on 7 November, continued to be the chief object of concern for Princess Augusta. She had dinner ready half an hour after the Queen arrived, having travelled ninety miles from Bath overnight. She had Dr Baillie tell ‘the grievous tale’ to her mother ‘at least two hours before she went to bed’, and tried in every way to ‘lessen all the horror she had to meet with.’ And she hoped that the Queen would adhere to Sir Henry’s advice, to return to Bath to complete the cure – ‘what little of the waters she had taken had acted like a charm upon her stomach’ – after the funeral. But still, she admitted, not being able to go about their usual avocations, they all brooded too much upon their ‘severe affliction’.
The details of the ‘grievous tale’ were enough to keep anyone awake, whether told at midday or late at night. Hours after the commotion surrounding the stillbirth, when the house was quiet, Charlotte had begun to moan and cry aloud in her room at Claremont. She called for Leopold, but he had ingested an opiate to help him sleep, and they did not at first wish to wake him. It took a while to shake him into consciousness, and by the time he arrived it was too late. His loving wife, despite her promise of more children only hours earlier, was a corpse, and guarding it were Mrs Louis, Charlotte’s old nurse, and Croft, the wretched accoucheur, who had watched aghast as Princess Charlotte, before their eyes, suffered a fatal haemorrhage and died.
Augusta wrote again on the day of Charlotte’s funeral, ‘This most melancholy sad day … it is true that we see nothing of the last sad ceremony, but I shall be glad when it is all over.’ They spoke to Prince Leopold, who talked to them of Charlotte’s character as it had unfolded to him in the last happy year of her life: ‘Her disposition expanding from prejudice into justice, and a self examination of the nervousness of her former ideas.’ He said she had told him how ‘long before she married … her mind had been impressed with a very unjust character of the Queen and her aunts. That she had been repeatedly told that she was brought to Windsor to be meddled and interfered with, and dictated to by them; that she found out, at last, it was false.’ This comforted Augusta.
And the Queen, who had so short a time before chosen her granddaughter’s bridal dress and trousseau and had now returned to Windsor to bury her, wrote of Charlotte, ‘Claremont was indeed her earthly Paradise.’ When the Queen returned from Bath, where she went in obedience to her doctors to complete her cure after Charlotte’s funeral was over, she still looked ‘ill in the face’, and was nervous and easily overcome. The force of her grief for Charlotte shocked the Queen’s dressers the Beckedorffs, mother and daughter.
Prince Leopold, whom the Queen and her daughters visited towards the end of November at Claremont, was also desolate, though calm. He had not yet returned to live in his former married quarters, he said, although he ‘made it a rule to walk into these rooms every day’. The bonnet and cloak that ‘she’ had taken off before she was confined still lay where ‘she’ had placed them. He could not bear to move them yet, he said, and he meant to keep all – he gestured to the house and grounds where he and Charlotte had walked and planned their life to come – as ‘she’ had liked it.
Prince Leopold, as the widower rather than as the husband of the heir presumptive to the throne of England, all of a sudden faced a very different future, and his new income of £50,000 a year – the sum allotted him in the event of Charlotte’s death – was as yet little consolation. Not so slowly, other reverberations of the heir presumptive’s death were felt among Charlotte’s uncles and aunts. The Prince Regent pursued with new vengeance his old project to divorce Charlotte’s mother, now that ‘much delicacy’ had been set aside by his daughter’s death. Caroline wrote from Italy, ‘England, that grand country, has lost everything in losing my ever beloved daughter,’ and doubted she would return there. Rumours redoubled that the Duchess of Cumberland was expecting a baby. And Charlotte’s uncles Clarence and Kent began to look about them for wives, while the Duke of Cambridge, who had fallen in love with a young HesseCassel princess at Hanover, pressed for his brother’s consent to his marriage, and a Parliamentary grant to reflect that status.
Princess Sophia, who had loved Charlotte’s spirit, was overcome with grief, and a ‘melancholy meeting’ with her sister Mary, who came to the Castle on her return from Brighton, only increased it. The Duchess of Gloucester herself, whose feelings were shallow by comparison with those of most of her family, was shocked to see the Duchess of York, who came on a visit from Oatlands and who had loved Charlotte, ‘so altered’. Even so, the Duchess of Gloucester twined strands of Amelia’s and Charlotte’s hair together in ‘two eternities’ as a gift for her brother, the Regent, and told him that ‘The two hearts open with a little hasp.’ But in the midst of this mourning, when the Duke of Gloucester went to Norfolk in the New Year of 1818 to shoot, Mary found Princess Elizabeth in unaccountably high spirits, declaring that the waters at Bath had set her up: ‘I am twenty years younger and walk and do as I usually do.’
Their mother was the reverse of well. The Queen’s breathing had grown short and laboured, and the doctors were so nervous about her condition that Sir Henry warned the princesses that ‘any sudden surprise, be it pain or pleasure, might cause sudden death’. A sudden surprise, and pain unmixed with pleasure, came barely a week later when Princess Elizabeth read a letter to her mother. Frederick, the Hereditary Prince of HesseHomburg – who had once offered for Augusta, and who had hung about Charlotte a year or so earlier – had offered for Elizabeth’s hand in marriage. Elizabeth said it was a surprise to her. It was certainly a surprise, not only to the Queen but to all Elizabeth’s sisters, Princess Mary wrote to the Prince Regent. And she enclosed, at Elizabeth’s urging, the letter that had confounded their mother – but had, by good fortune, not caused her sudden death. She was too angry with her daughter for that.
The Duchess of Gloucester was calm itself. There was no reason for any consternation, she wrote. ‘Eliza having never concealed her wish and desire to marry,’ she argued, ‘she is only acting up to what she has always said.’ Naturally Elizabeth wanted the Prince Regent’s approbation, Mary continued, but she was old enough, in her younger sister’s opinion, to judge for herself. She would be a dreadful loss to the Queen, Mary feared. And yet, if the match did not take place, she warned her brother, ‘she will make the Queen more unhappy in the long run than the act of leaving her.’
The Hereditary Prince of Hesse-Homburg’s reasons for seeking Princess Elizabeth as his bride at this point were obscure. At the age of forty-eight, his bride could hardly be considered a strong candidate in the royal race to provide an heir to the British throne, or even for Homburg itself. Indeed the Prince had seven brothers to do battle for the latter cause. Still, members of both their families – Royal, the Duke of Kent, the Duchess of York and her brother Prince William of Prussia, who had married the Hereditary Prince’s sister Marianne – had acted in concert to advance the scheme, of which the bridegroom had written as early as February 1817. And it had advantages for both parties. Elizabeth would gain a property to administer, a husband, freedom from her mother. And her dowry would have a huge effect in the tiny domain of Hesse-Homburg. The state debts were growing, as the Hereditary Prince’s father grew old, and the buildings and lands had been neglected for years. In short, a capable wife with means seemed the answer to the Prince – a professional soldier who ‘shone’ at fortifications – as he contemplated the duty that would soon be his to superintend his Hessian homeland.
And as for his choice of Elizabeth? A report from Frankfurt in 1818 names her as the only princess of England available as a wife for those wishing to ally themselves with that prosperous country. Two princesses – Royal and Mary – were married, ran the note; one – Sophia – was a permanent invalid, and one was privately married. The rumours, if not the truth, about Augusta and Sir Brent had spread wide.
To Sophia the Queen talked fully and, her daughter thought, very reasonably one evening on ‘Eliza’s subject’. She admitted that her daughter, at nearly fifty, was of an age to decide for herself. However, the Queen was ‘vexed and flurried at the quickness with which she had taken her resolution’. Sophia attempted to soothe her mother and palliate her distress – although the Queen still cried bitterly at times – by reminding her repeatedly that ‘she knew this was always Eliza’s object’.
While the Regent declared that he entered deeply into the feelings of all parties – which he would endeavour to conciliate – the Hereditary Prince came to London, where, despite his preference for Elizabeth, he had to have his bride pointed out to him from among her sisters. He was ‘much hurt at the Queen’s manner.’ The Queen tried to prevent him on various pretexts from seeing Elizabeth as she had earlier tried to prevent Mary and William of Gloucester having interviews before marriage. But the Hereditary Prince could arrange nothing until he saw his bride, he told the Duchess of Gloucester. He hated writing, and would far rather talk over his proposals in person with Princess Elizabeth. The sooner Elizabeth and the Queen were parted, the better for both their sakes, wrote Princess Mary on 3 February. All comfort was at an end between them, and Mary blamed Elizabeth’s ‘injudicious friends’. Her departure would be a sad blow to the Queen, she predicted – ‘heaven grant she may not sink under it.’ With Sophia a tactical invalid and Mary busy with duties at Bagshot, it was surely Augusta who would now ‘sink under’ the attendance on her mother.
Two days later Sir Henry Halford was called in to assess the Queen’s health. He found that her ‘suppressed anger made it difficult for him to judge correctly of her pulse or of her breathing’, and he came out astonished at the ‘perturbation and distress of feelings which she manifested.’ Even the Regent was powerless to assuage her mood. Elizabeth, meanwhile, was ‘broken-hearted’ after the series of ‘severe speeches’ that her mother made her. The Queen refused to believe that her daughter had as yet made her ‘final irrevocable decision’ and stuck to her refusal to bless the match, given that the King had never answered the earlier proposal from HesseHomburg for one of his daughters. It was not a match he would have liked, she said. By degrees, however, the Queen was brought round, and within a couple of weeks was counselling the Regent that Elizabeth’s wedding should take place ‘as soon as you can manage it should’. And the sooner the bridal couple left England after that, she instructed Sophia to tell her brother, the better it would be.
Elizabeth now began to receive notes of blessing and congratulations on her forthcoming marriage to ‘Bluff’ – her name for Frederick. (Like his brother-in-law the King of Württemberg, however, the Hereditary Prince was usually called Fritz.) To Miss Gomm, the former nursery governess, she wrote, ‘I have great reason to bless God.’ No man ‘ever stood higher in the world’, she wrote of her Fritz, and his manner and conduct towards her were perfect. Others thought that he stank to high heaven of stale tobacco from the meerschaum pipes he smoked addictively. On one occasion he made a bow at Court and the seat of his breeches ripped loudly. His ruddy face obscured by coarse whiskers and moustachioes gained few admirers. Princess Elizabeth did not know of a letter written by Leopold’s mother to his sister Victoria, Princess of Leiningen, in which the match was called ‘stupid.’ And Napoleon, far away on St Helena, was contemptuous. ‘The English royal family’, he said in February 1818, ‘va incanagliarsi [mean to lower themselves] with little petty princes, to whom I would not have given a brevet of sous lieutenant.’ But she would have condemned Leopold – the likely source of his mother’s comment – and Napoleon too, had she heard of their remarks. For Elizabeth and her reeking warrior prince were, quite by chance, to have a very happy marriage.
The Regent and Council approving the match, Elizabeth in virginal white married the Hereditary Prince in the drawing room of the Queen’s House on 7 April. The maids of honour who had been at Royal’s wedding were summoned, and all the Queen’s ‘family’ was present, as were the great officers of state. With the promise that he would bring her back to England within a year, Fritz gathered up his bride and the many belongings she insisted on taking, and made for the Channel, after a honeymoon during which he would be so considerate as to smoke fewer pipes than usual. Among other possessions Elizabeth took with her to Bad Homburg were exercise books in which she had written down advice from Sir Joseph Banks on rose-growing and comments by Lord Harcourt on feeding orange trees. She took commonplace books and sketchbooks and artists’ paraphernalia – and her dear old china. At the last, Elizabeth’s resolve quivered. She and her sisters were aware that their mother was far from well. But she set her face for the Continent and looked forward to what lay across the Channel after the honeymoon she and the Prince were taking along the Sussex coast.
Bluff, for his part, sent an urgent letter to Bad Homburg to his chamberlain, ordering all the poultry to be removed from beneath the windows of his bride’s proposed apartments and the stables near by to be cleaned. The family, used to their own company and able to put on a show for meals or entertain at Frankfurt when distinguished or royal visitors passed through, were not over-scrupulous in their living habits or in overseeing those of their servants.
In the following few weeks in London the Regent, astonishingly, gave his consent for three of his brothers – Clarence, Kent, and Cambridge – to marry. During the battle to secure royal married allowances for all these bridegrooms, Mr Thomas Creevey, the waggish Whig MP, commented that the royal dukes were ‘the damndest millstone about the necks of any Government that can be imagined.’ One of them had to get rid of what others might have considered a millstone round his own neck. The Duke of Kent, who had been living for over fifteen years first in North America and now at Brussels with Mme de St Laurent, simply handed her the newspaper to reveal to her his engagement to Victoria, Princess Leiningen, Prince Leopold’s widowed sister.
While Elizabeth was still at Brighton on honeymoon, Queen Charlotte’s health worsened. On a journey in June 1818 from the Queen’s House to Windsor, she had to stop at Kew when she developed breathing problems. Sir Henry Halford was summoned, and advised that it would be dangerous to move his royal patient.
‘What my feelings must be at this time being away from my mother that I have always adored since I had sense of reason,’ Elizabeth wrote, distraught, from Brighton. ‘My trial has been severe and only proves how little happiness there is in this world for had I not had these tremendous blows, I might have been much too happy, as I assure you every hour increases my affection, esteem and admiration of my husband, who expresses himself so lucky that I only wish that I really was all he thinks me.’ She and Bluff had had a very quiet time, were going to Worthing for a few days, and then embarked at Dover.
My spirits at times are not what they used to be, but I try to hide it from him, for though my family must be dearer than life to me, the kinder he is the more I ought to bear up. My dear sisters are angels, and I think Augusta particularly deserves every reward that this world can give by her uncommon firm steady friendship and affection for me, and exerting herself as she does for my mother dearest. They say her conduct is angelic – I have sacrificed my comfort in going away when I did, but that is of little consequence if I have done right, which I firmly believe I have, and that must make me content, but feeling that I might have shared with them the attendance on my mother, often occasions me a pang.
And with that, Elizabeth crossed to the German coast and made her way down the Rhine to her new life.
At Kew the Queen fretted that she was away from the King, but her doctor was adamant that she should remain where she was. And at least Princess Sophia, still not well, remained at Windsor. Princess Augusta, however, and the Duchess of Gloucester joined their mother at Kew, while the Duke, as Augusta told Lord Arran, tactfully went abroad. ‘If he stayed at home,’ Augusta explained, ‘and Mary was at Kew the illustrious world would certainly say they had had a quarrel.’
Royal wrote from Ludwigsburg to Lady Harcourt:
Entre nous, when I first heard of the Duke of Gloucester’s intending to make a tour without Mary, I was quite vexed, as all the English appeared to think there was some secret cause of his taking this step. Indeed, reports that reached me made me tremble for my dear Mary’s happiness, and this worked me so much, that nothing but my thinking it wrong to offer advice unasked prevented my entreating Mary to reflect seriously on the consequences of so long a separation; as too frequently when married people have been parted for months, they take up tricks which are calculated to destroy their domestic happiness, and often that confidence which must reign between husband and wife is destroyed by their having accustomed themselves to confide in others.
Although the Duke had longed to marry his cousin Mary, as her husband he grew to delight in inflicting domestic privation on her. And his adoring sister, Princess Sophia Matilda, became for Mary a ‘meddling, fussy’ sister-in-law, who made the Duke’s domestic tyranny still harder to bear. In one turbulent incident Mary was summoned by Sophia Matilda from a family crisis at Windsor to tend the Duke who was ill. The Duke then said he did not want her there, made his sister write to Windsor to say his wife was returning, and refused to send for Mary’s dresser when she stayed. Mary wrote: ‘to have one’s feelings so little considered is to add an unnecessary distress; and want of concern since, nearly drove me wild last night’. Now Royal was quite happy to hear the Duke had been so kind as to let Mary attend the Queen, ‘and assist poor dear Augusta, who I should fear would have been too wretched, had she been quite alone at Kew’. She herself was of course not able to come. ‘My complaints are of a nature not to allow of my being two hours in a carriage,’ she wrote ominously.
While the Queen was confined to her bedroom at Kew, her nurses Augusta and Mary were passing judgement on their new sisters-in-law, Kent, Cambridge and Clarence. Victoria, Duchess of Kent was the ‘livelier’, they considered, although not handsome. The Duchess of Cambridge – Princess Augusta of Hesse-Cassel – was ‘proud’. And the young Duchess of Clarence – Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen – was, although pious, sadly without looks or fortune. But the Queen’s daughters had little enough time to spare for their brothers and their new wives. For they lived in a permanent state of alarm about their mother’s health.
Elizabeth wrote from Homburg in August 1818 to Lady Harcourt:
Alas, all my letters are daggers to my heart when I read of the state of my mother. That really kills me, for to know her so very suffering and not to be near her is almost death, though you will do me the justice to say that, of such an illness, I never dreamt. My agonies have been dreadful, but I can say with truth to you who will not show my letter, that my dread of losing her was always such that I did wish to settle, and my feelings regarding the sentiments I have ever held forth, and the opinion I have given regarding improper society, when once she was out of the way, has been fully justified by those asked to the last party at Carlton House where I hear many were offended at the Dss of A appearing there.
The princesses, in September, thinking their mother’s end near, begged Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister, to send the Archbishop of Canterbury to Kew. They hoped that that prelate might prevail on their mother to receive the Last Rites, which she was reluctant to have administered. Liverpool, in his turn, wrote of the Queen, ‘For a person whose conduct through life has been so free from reproach she has a strange unaccountable fear of death.’ The Queen was reluctant even to make a will and took a dislike to General Taylor when he raised the subject. She prayed ceaselessly, with her eyes and hands lifted up – alarming her assistant dresser, Miss Mary Rice. And she tried various remedies for her condition, including an invalid’s chair to pull her upright. Her swollen legs were not the least of her problems. But the Queen herself feared mostly for her heart, which she was convinced must stop soon, so difficult was it for her to breathe.
From Württemberg and from Bad Homburg came the sighs of daughters not present. The Dowager Queen of Württemberg was conscious of the Regent’s goodness to their mother. Elizabeth agreed with her sisters at Kew that ‘it is almost unkind to wish that precious life prolonged.’ Vanished was any hint of the tensions that had existed between and among the sisters and their mother. Augusta and Mary waited at Kew for the end, walked daily in the gardens of Kew and Richmond, and indeed made some ‘improvements’ there, planting coverts for their brothers’ shooting. But their daily work lay inside the Dutch House that stood between the gardens at Kew and the River Thames. Here their brothers, the Prince and the Duke of York, and their father before them, had been educated, here their father had stayed during his illness in 1804, and here now their mother lay dying. Her sufferings on her chest made it uncomfortable for her to lie in bed, and so she sat day and night in a chair propped up with pillows and with a pillow on a table in front of her on which she often rested her head.
General Taylor informed the Regent in August that the Queen had still not made a will. And Princess Augusta, he added, believed that Frogmore would be hers under the terms of the Crown grant for that property, she being the senior unmarried daughter. Was this indeed explicit, Taylor asked, in the document that she had cited to him? Nearly a month later he returned to the subject, but the Queen herself at last solved the problem of her intestacy when she roused herself at the end of October to confront death. With her old directness she requested an assessment of her condition from the doctors, and Princess Augusta read out their latest bulletin. The Queen heard her daughter out in silence, ‘but under visible emotion’. She asked if the opinion implied there was ‘danger’, and Augusta replied that the doctors had not applied that word to ‘any other state than that of spasm, which certainly occasioned considerable uneasiness to them’. Hump-backed now and crooked with pain, the Queen spoke of her sufferings to Augusta, and of their distressing effect on her mind. She ‘lamented most feelingly their effect upon her temper’ to her daughter, and ‘expressed her anxiety to control that effect’. She said ‘her time was chiefly spent in prayer, and often so when she was thought to be asleep’.
The Queen then interrogated Millman and Halford about her illness. Halford said afterwards that she had ‘not mistaken the opinion [they] conveyed’. And though she still spoke of’soon going to Frogmore’, the Queen secretly employed her dressers, the Beckedorffs, to send for General Taylor to settle her will. ‘The Queen received me in her bedroom,’ Taylor wrote in a later memorandum, ‘and I observed a packet of papers lying upon the table which at once explained to me the object of her Majesty’s summons.’ She told him to look through the draft of her will, and see if anything else needed doing ‘to provide more especially for her unmarried daughters’ and to consider more generally the others. He asked if he might break the seal. ‘She answered, “Oh yes, Sir, do so”, and she laid her head forward on the pillow seemingly much oppressed by her feelings, in which position her Majesty remained a considerable time.’ He suggested assigning Lower Lodge to Sophia. ‘Yes, sir, I think that would be very right. You will put it in so.’
On 11 November Taylor returned and read the Queen her will, and she approved it: ‘Quite right.’ But she ordered him to leave it for her to read over before she signed it. Five days later Mrs Beckedorff found her mistress ‘in a state which alarmed her, seemingly struggling for breath, under violent perspiration and hardly capable of answering a question, apparently quite exhausted’. Halford and Millman went in and, coming back, told Taylor her life was in danger, there was no time to lose, if the act of signing the will was of importance. Taylor said he ‘considered the completion as of the utmost importance to the Queen’s character and to the credit of her name’. The physicians went up ahead to tell the Queen ‘she was in immediate danger’. Taylor followed and ‘found her sitting at the table, her head reclined, and Sir Henry Halford on his knees by the left side, holding her hand and feeling her pulse with a most anxious expression of countenance’. The Queen, looking up and seeing Taylor, ‘gave me her hand with a most affectionate look and a painful smile’. Pressing his hand, she continued to hold it in hers, but soon ‘reclined her head. The perspiration was running down her face, her eyes were moist. She breathed quick and appeared under great suffering.’ He asked whether she would sign the will. She ‘did not hear me (being very deaf on the right side),’ he wrote, ‘and asked Sir Henry Halford, what I said.’ While Sir Francis Millman held her right hand to feel the pulse, Taylor ‘got the will which was in a sealed packet which Mrs Beckedorff took out of a press’. While the Queen was signing it, and the doctors witnessing it, Halford – in Latin – urged Taylor to send for the Prince Regent. ‘I then apprised the Princesses,’ wrote Taylor, ‘who had remained ignorant of the Queen’s state, and Sir Henry Halford wrote to the Princess Sophia at Windsor.’
Princess Augusta could not afterwards forget ‘the seeing her sinking so fast… never complaining more to Mary and myself than that she was very ill – and in great pain – but she exerted herself so much when we were with her that it was often too much for her’. Sometimes she weakened. ‘I wish to God I could see your brothers,’ she told Augusta at one point, crying terribly, ‘tell them I love them … I wish I was near the dear King.’ On Friday the 13th – ‘the last day we were with her to speak to her … she sent for us rather late,’ wrote Augusta. ‘And after speaking most kindly to us both, but evidently under great oppression and pain, she said, “I am so miserably oppressed, so utterly, I don’t know what to do”.’ Augusta ‘moved her pillow for her on the table, and said, “Shall I call anybody?” [The Queen] said, “No, the doctors will come soon. “Mary said, “Had we better not leave you to be quite quiet?” She looked up and smiled, and with tears in her eyes… gave her hand to each of us, nodded her head, but could not speak. And I said to Mary, when we quitted the, room, “Believe me, she will not be equal to see us again!” And I was but too correct in my judgement.’
On the morning of Wednesday, 18 November 1818, Queen Charlotte died, sitting up in her chair and holding her son the Regent’s hand. ‘We were, thank God, in the room when she expired,’ wrote Princess Augusta of herself and Mary. With them also was the Duke of York. ‘The countenance was so placid and her poor features which, for many months, we had never seen free from expression of pain, were quite become natural, and she looked so very free from all care, that the last impression was one I would not forget for worlds.’
Elizabeth, from Homburg, agreed with what Lord Sidmouth had said of the Queen, ‘That the whole nation would for ever mourn the loss of a person who had… performed every duty by it, as well as by her own family – and that morals, conduct and decency would be at an end.’ Speaking of which, she added indignantly, she herself had recently had to see her cousin the Duchess of Cumberland, whom her mother had refused to receive. It was ‘the bitterest pill I had ever swallowed’, she wrote. It had been her duty, as she saw it, to submit to her husband, who had requested it, but she had told Bluff, ‘Civil I would be, intimate never, and … if her husband [the Duchess’s husband, Elizabeth’s brother Ernest] ever names my mother dis-respectfully … whether in my own room or one of the public dinners, I should say nothing but walk out of the room.’