Princess Augusta and her sister Mary moved out of the Dutch House and into their brother Adolphus’s house at Kew, Cambridge Cottage, so as not to be present for the laying out of their mother’s corpse and its removal to Windsor. And they walked a last time in late November 1818 round the grounds of Kew that they had tramped daily since the summer – ‘to take leave of everything we love here, at least forever in the style we have hitherto lived here’. They remembered, Augusta better than her younger sister, the gay young mother Queen Charlotte had been at Kew, superintending the education of her children, taking tea in her thatched cottage, enjoying the music of Bach and Cramer and Fischer in her drawing room at Kew House. Frogmore had darker associations, for it had been for the Queen a retreat from the world – a world of anxiety and dread – that she inhabited following the King’s first illness.
‘Very little oversets Augusta,’ Mary wrote, but they were ‘fumbling’ into their old ways. With awe they observed the preparations being made to inter in the royal vault the woman whose will and authority had so dominated and crushed theirs. The blind, deluded King, once Queen Charlotte’s loving husband, knew nothing of his wife’s death or funeral when she was laid beside the coffins of her granddaughter Princess Charlotte and of that Princess’s stillborn son, whose deaths a year earlier had instigated the race for the succession.
Sophia inherited Lower Lodge, where she had spent so much time as a child, under the terms of her mother’s will so painfully made only days before her death. But it seemed clear that, in her invalid state, Sophia should remain instead in the Castle at Windsor, where she was well cared for by the doctors and, above all, by Sir Henry – who attended her father. She was very conscious of his presence in the apartments that lay across the quadrangle and through Engine Court.
While her mother was at Kew, Sophia had received a daily report on her father’s health from the physicians, ‘to be transmitted to the Queen in her absence from Windsor – This was by her own special order – Now alas! The mouth that gave the order is shut for ever!’ Sophia wrote that it would give her great pain to be ‘without the daily comfort’ of an authentic report of her father’s state. The trembling invalid’s request was duly granted, and a copy of the report continued to be furnished to her every day.
In the following months, the effect of Queen Charlotte’s death on Augusta and Sophia at the Castle went deep. At Windsor was everything to remind them of the Queen, and when on 4 January 1819 they bid goodbye to Lady Harcourt, who had sustained them these six months at Kew, Augusta was again overcome. ‘My heart was so full,’ she wrote, ‘when I saw you there this morning, not only with the thoughts of parting with your kind self but with the thoughts of going to the Cathedral, that I hardly knew what I was about. The only chance I had of behaving tolerably was not speaking at all, and I fear that my silence might appear lacking in gratitude or want of affection, both of which I deeply feel for you and more particularly so since the sorrows have been so equally shared between us which we have gone through the last seven months…’ Augusta and Mary had made a pact to go that morning to St George’s Chapel, in whose vault the remains of their sister Amelia and their mother now lay. She wrote, ‘Our visit to the cathedral was very affecting indeed, particularly as… it is eight years and two months since I put my foot into it.’ She and Mary passed to the right of ‘the two great chairs where my excellent parents always sat, and which will never be filled by either of them. I am glad I have been there … now we will go there every Sunday. It is right and what I am sure the dear King would approve and that is all I wish.’ And so Augusta condemned herself to more suffering, in the cause her mother had taught her, of doing ‘what the dear King would approve’.
She wrote in February: ‘With all the letters I have to write abroad I have not a minute to myself. I have all Eliza’s business to do besides my own – and to write, or at least try to write, very clearly to her upon various subjects. Beckedorff is here, and every day she has something to say or to show to consult me about. And I must account to the trustees for everything that is done for Eliza … My time does not hang heavy on my hands, for they are always full from morning to night, but the subject is always painful. I get my walks daily, and go some days to Frogmore.’ But she did not go often into her mother’s room there ‘whilst all her effects are still laying about… It is so very melancholy that I avoid seeing them as much as possible. I fear it will take full another week before it is all cleared away, and then I trust I can go with pleasure.’
The Queen had left her house but not its contents to Augusta. Almost all her possessions, including her library, were to be sold, with the proceeds going to her daughters. Before her books went on sale, however, at Mr Christie’s auction rooms in London, the princesses chose to keep some of those in which their mother had written or which she had annotated. Some others the Regent retained for the royal library, with the portfolios of drawings and etchings that Royal and Augusta and Elizabeth had done under the eye of their drawing masters fifty years earlier. Kept back also were the great illustrated albums the Queen and princesses had filled in their hours at Frogmore – the ‘Extracts of the History of England’ that Princess Mary had copied from Hume and that her mother had illustrated, the badges of the ‘Dukes of York’ with their armorial bearings which Princess Elizabeth had painted so beautifully.
Bacon’s bust of the King the princesses donated to the royal library, after having casts made for themselves. They gave to the Prince Regent the red and white tents that Tippoo Sultan had once owned and that the Queen had used for garden fetes. The Beckedorffs, mother and daughter, cleared from the Queen’s presses and bureaux her dresses, ‘made and unmade’, and all her lace and trinkets, their reward for long service. As for the Queen’s magnificent jewels, those that had been hers were for her four younger daughters to keep or sell. Difficulties arose when the Regent declared that the Queen’s jewels were really Crown jewels, and not hers to dispose of. But her daughters were adamant that they were not, that they had been bought by George III for his wife at their marriage, on the births of their children and after his periods of illness.
And now the executors obeyed one of the Queen’s last instructions: ‘Of the papers all that were material have been destroyed,’ they announced, ‘including, with their Royal Highnesses’ permission, the letters from the Princesses.’ Only those from Elizabeth were not burnt, and were ‘reserved for her pleasure’ when she should next visit England. It was a pyre of paper in which the most inflammable topics touched on included the King’s illnesses, Princess Sophia’s own illness and its outcome at Weymouth in 1800, and Princess Amelia’s passion for General Fitzroy.
By the terms of her mother’s will – and by the terms of the original grant – although Princess Augusta had inherited Frogmore, she did not move in immediately. As General Sir Brent Spencer lived close to Frogmore, the situation would seem to have been ideal, but while her father lived she refused to abandon her apartment in the Castle, for all that she never saw him. And Sophia, who equally refused to move, could not be left alone at Windsor. So, much though Augusta might have wished to take up residence at Frogmore – which had always provided balm for her spirits – and although she and Sophia were among the least compatible of the sisters, the elder Princess remained in residence at the Castle. She had anyway to refurnish Frogmore after the depredations of the auctioneers.
‘The Executors must take it upon themselves to act as they think best,’ Augusta wrote, as the Queen’s possessions were parcelled up for sale. ‘We cannot do better than to leave everything to them. I have made up my service of plate,’ she announced, and she kept back looking glasses, chandeliers and linen besides. She agreed that the further reduction on the King’s establishment being meditated in Parliament – the grant for his establishment including that of his daughters at Windsor, following the Queen’s death, was to be cut to £50,000 – was ’a poor way of proving the love and respect of so great a nation for a King who has protected them and defended them and saved them by his religion, his integrity, his firmness and his morality – but all these qualities are registered “where neither mirth nor wit doth corrupt” – I own this subject makes me low.’
Royal, in Stuttgart, was ‘most deeply affected by the sad debates in Parliament’ concerning the Windsor establishment. ‘It makes me shudder to see all ready to give up the rights of my beloved father … It is not only the King’s dignity, but the honour of the country which suffers from his being deprived of the small remnant he had hitherto kept of Royalty.’ When she thought of all these dreadful changes at Windsor, Royal remembered the day in the Great Room at Kew during her father’s first illness, when he had said he was better off than King Lear in his madness, for he had no Regan or Goneril, but three Cordelias to look after him: ‘Poor dear angel, how good of him to say this, which is frequently a comfort to me when I am much out of spirits.’
While Augusta and Sophia led a twilit existence at Windsor, mourning their mother and honouring their father, that November the Duke of York visited their father, who looked now very like King Lear. ‘He was amusing himself with playing upon the harpsichord,’ recorded York, ‘and singing with as strong and firm a voice as ever I heard him … but we must not conceal from ourselves that His Majesty is greatly emaciated within the last twelve months… the frame is so much weaker that we can no longer look forward … to his being preserved to us for any length of time.’
In Württemberg her sisters’ situation continued to grieve Royal, and she was sorry they had remained at the Castle. ‘Nothing should have induced me to continue in a situation which appears to me lowering their dignity, and in which they are exposed to many disagreeables. Never could I have borne the thought of applying to others to invite the company I wished to have; or not have it in my power to give direction about what I thought necessary to be done in the house.’ And ‘not from pride but from propriety’, she insisted, ‘I would never have submitted to accept as a favour the dining at the table of the Custos [or Governor of the Castle], when I had a sufficient income to keep my own.’ She would have dined in her own apartment with her ladies, and now and then have invited some of the gendemen to join her party.
Royal continued to brood on the disgrace done her father and sisters. She remembered Pitt defending the King’s dignity in both his first and his third illness, and lamented to Lady Harcourt Pitt’s and Fox’s passing: ‘They certainly had, as you rightly say, another manner of seeing and feeling from their great connections, which accustoms people from their youth to have a noble way of thinking.’ But Royal was low in spirits. The unexpected death of Catherine, Queen of Württemberg, had been another blow. She wanted her sister Elizabeth to come to her, so that they could combine in grief for their mother, but it proved difficult. Elizabeth appeared ‘too much taken up’ to be able to fix ‘that happy moment’ when they would meet. ‘I cannot press her as I feel what a melancholy companion I am.’
The entrance into the world of new sprigs of royalty brought a sentimental reaction from the Dowager Queen of Württemberg. Very much the older sister, she rejoiced with the Duke of Cambridge on the birth of his son, Prince George, in March 1819 in Hanover. ‘Only think of me remembering your birth as if it was yesterday,’ she wrote to him. Enquiring if the Duchess suckled the child, she approved there being an Englishwoman at the head of the nursery. ‘By that means the baby will learn at once English and German.’ There were soon more royal pregnancies to interest her. Sadly the Duchess of Clarence gave birth to a stillborn child in April 1819, but endured with strength of mind and goodness the christening of the Cambridge Prince in Hanover. Princess Augusta tried to cheer her brother Clarence with news that the May weather at Windsor was delightful, and she rode and walked and went out in the open carriage. ‘The thorns – trees in blossom – and the verdure is quite wonderful.’ But Clarence’s ill luck in childbearing with Adelaide gave Kent – next in line to his brother – every ground for hope for the future of his own coming child.
Kent was soliciting funds for his return to England with his pregnant Duchess, on the ground that a birth of such possible importance should not occur out of the country. But the Duke of Clarence stood nearer the throne, his sister Augusta replied, refusing the request on the Regent’s behalf, and that Duke’s return for the birth of his child had not been thought necessary. She reminded him also that the princesses were anxious to do justice to the Prince’s feelings – ‘which are most delicate upon the occasion’. The implication was that the death of Princess Charlotte in childbirth was still much in the Regent’s mind. But he was also forging ahead with his plans to divorce Caroline, and had prevailed on his Cabinet to appoint a team of lawyers and other agents to go out to Italy and sift such evidence against her as they might find there.
Kent and his pregnant Duchess set out anyway, though his brother Sussex warned that his rooms at Kensington Palace were not yet ready. These rooms where the Kents were to take up residence had belonged to the Princess of Wales. ‘So fearful have they been that she should return’, Augustus added, ‘that they have been rendered totally unusable by all the features having been removed.’ At Frankfurt Princess Elizabeth saw the Duchess of Kent, who was proceeding – by cheap and easy stages – to the unsatisfactory apartments at Kensington. ‘She is very big [with child] and, not being tall, shows it much,’ wrote Elizabeth.
When the Duchess of Kent gave birth at Kensington to a daughter, Princess Victoria, on 24 May 1819, the Duke was ecstatic. In August he instructed the gardener at Kew to produce three bunches of flowers on the Duchess’s birthday by 6.00 a.m. – ‘a very large posy for myself to give her, and 2 smaller ones’. One was for his stepdaughter Feodora to give her mother. The other was ‘to be put into the hands of our little baby, which, of course, must be so composed as to have nothing to prick her hands’.
It was not paternity alone that caused the Duke to be so tender. If the Duchess of Clarence continued to miscarry, Princess Victoria, by dint of Kent’s own position in the royal family, must one day be queen of England – unless, should the Regent remarry, a younger sibling supplanted her. Prince George of Cambridge, though born earlier, and though male, ranked after Victoria in the succession, being the child of Kent’s younger brother Adolphus – as indeed did Prince George of Cumberland, the child whom Frederica, Duchess of Cumberland produced in Berlin days after her sister-in-law in England produced ‘Vicky’.
Mme d’Arblay (née Fanny Burney) visited Princess Augusta in the summer of 1819 at Frogmore during one of the Princess’s first tentative occupations of the estate. She found there the ‘Queen presumptive’, as she named the baby Princess Victoria, with her proud father the Duke of Kent. Burney’s propensity for sentiment where royal females were concerned remained boundless. She proposed to Princess Augusta, now enjoying her ‘maternal bequest’ at Frogmore, that one day an urn recording ‘she who made it’ – Queen Charlotte – would look well in the grounds.
Augusta, with Mary, lived quietly, but kept up the connections with their expanding family, dining at Oatlands with the Duchess of York, whom they found ‘in high spirits’, and joining the Kents at Kensington on the Duchess’s birthday – after she had earlier received her abundance of posies at Kew. The sober doings of the turtledove Kents entertained the Duke’s brothers and sisters time and again. At Windsor in September the Duke and Duchess and entourage, including baby, all retired together at nine o’clock for the night ‘and actually went to bed, to the very great amusement of the whole society of Windsor’, Mary reported.
Princess Sophia began to show signs of improving in health, and of improving in affection towards her sisters. Augusta invited Lady Harcourt to join her and Sophy at Frogmore in July 1819: ‘It is cool there and you shall have tea, cold meat or white soup at your command. I can from my heart say I would kill any fatted calf, if I had one, upon the joyful occasion.’ Sophy would meet her, and Augusta would see her after her sister went to dinner. It was so hot, the new mistress of the estate said, that she had for once not ridden, but had sat enjoying the shade under her trees.
Mary took Sophia to see the Regent’s ‘Cottage’ or Royal Lodge in the Great Park, which her sister had never seen. ‘It was a great exertion to Sophy walking about the house and garden, and certainly fatigued her, but the ice being broke,’ the energetic elder sister reported, ‘I hope it is the beginning of getting on and of more improvements in strength.’ Indeed, the invalid Princess showed some signs of interest when the Regent sent three bracelets as presents to his sisters. Augusta chose the one ‘in squares’, Sophia reported. As to the others ‘the debate was a long one between Mary and me’, her invalid sister wrote. Mary decided at last on the ‘turquoise, ruby and gold’, leaving the one with ‘ruby and brilliants’ for Sophia. What clinched it was that Mary objected to ‘any bracelet on the upper part of the arm’, while her younger sister said mysteriously that she was ‘compelled from necessity to wear such an ornament.’
But Mary was nowhere nearer breaking the ice between her brother the Regent and her husband. A request to her brother for the Duke to be allowed to shoot occasionally in the Great Park brought a resounding refusal from General Taylor. ‘I felt awkward in making the request,’ Mary acknowledged to her brother, ‘but sometimes one can not help being under the necessity of doing what in one’s heart one had rather not.’
She was still torn between her husband and her brother, with her brother generally the easy winner. She wrote a long letter to the Regent outlining in distress the various obstacles which she believed would make the Duke, when asked, reluctant to go to Brighton for Christmas. She ended quaintly, ‘for man is man and does not like to be put out of his way – and still less by a wife than anybody else.’ The Duchess was happiest with the Duke when they were visiting friends of his who were at best formerly acquaintances to her and could now form part of the expanding circle of society she craved. At Hatfield, she was breathless with excitement over a ‘very uncomfortable business concerning Lord and Lady Westmeath’. Although the Marquess and Marchioness of Salisbury, her hosts, and their son Lord Cranborne were doing all they could to keep it out of a ‘public court’, Lady Westmeath, the Salisburys’ daughter, was accusing her husband of adultery with five women, all of whom she wished to name.
Her sisters’ company at Windsor was very tame for Mary after this taste of high life and country-house visits. The prospect of a visit from the Regent, however, was enough to keep her sitting on till five with them, at the Castle, ‘hoping every time the door opened it might be you.’ And to Brighton that Christmas she went without her husband – to be the hostess she had dreamt of being to her brother. The Conynghams, the Warwicks, Colonel Whately were all at dinner with her, as she had supposed would be the glorious case. But to her consternation the Regent was called away by inconsiderate ministers.
‘I felt so dull and stupid’, wrote Mary, ‘when your carriage drove off that I thought I could not make myself agreeable.’ His servants and household were ‘all attention and kindness’, she assured him, ‘but still the master was missing.’ She went shopping and met an old friend, Lady Elizabeth Berkeley – ‘so altered I did not know her, and I suppose time has altered me likewise, as she did not me’. Mary was now aged forty-three. (Her dark hair, pink cheeks and blue eyes in Lawrence portraits of this time recall her earlier self, although her complexion has grown florid; her figure is still handsome, though stouter.) The two ladies then took a long walk to celebrate finding each other out. ‘I have begged for the band,’ Mary told her brother, ‘as I feel I shall be a bad substitute in your absence to keep up the ball.’ And she wished his ministers at the bottom of the sea for calling him away. ‘Nobody can tell how dull Brighton is without you.’ She bathed and walked with Lady Charlotte Belasyse, and dined, and hoped she would eat her Christmas dinner with her brother. Once Mary was back at Bagshot in the New Year, however, her Brighton days glowed in her memory. ‘I follow you about from room to room like a tame dog fawning,’ she wrote to the Regent. ‘I see you at dinner offering the punch and brown bess all round the table. I see your calling for all the favoured music.’
But there were alarms in the New Year to discompose even the Duchess of Gloucester. Word came towards the end of January 1820 – the Kents’ governess wrote to Sophia – that the Duke of Kent was seriously ill with a fever at Sidmouth, where he and the Duchess and the children had gone before Christmas in search of sea air. Prince Leopold meant to go down to his sister, if the Duke’s condition worsened. And Mary wrote to her brother the Regent asking for a further bulletin. Edward had his faults, she wrote, but he had ever been a most affectionate brother to her. ‘I own I feel his distance from us sadly.’
In the meantime, Dr Robert Willis had returned to Windsor after Christmas to find the King ‘very much weaker and thinner’. At first he called it ‘a very gradual decay with no appearance of immediate danger’. But days later he spoke of a ‘great change in the King’s whole appearance’. The Duke of York, heavy with grief, stood inside his father’s apartment to witness ‘the prodigious alteration in the poor King’s face and countenance.’
Shocking news came on 24 January. The Duke of Kent, whom his brothers and sisters had considered so hale and hearty that he would outlive them all, had died at Sidmouth. He left his widow, her children and their baby daughter, Princess Victoria, virtually penniless. The weather was cold and damp at Windsor, where his sisters gathered to mourn their brother as best as they could. Mary wrote of ‘many circumstances that go to my heart’, and Sophia was ‘much shocked’ by her brother’s death. But of all the royal siblings, dark, clever Edward had always been the least likeable – awkward, exacting and quick to give and take offence. Only Elizabeth had felt a bond with him, and Mary warned that care should be taken to break the news gently at Homburg. ‘It is an event that will go very hard with her.’ Sure enough, Elizabeth wrote, ‘Upon the Continent he will be much regretted as he was very thoroughly esteemed by all those who lived with him.’ She added, ‘Poor fellow, he has been taken off in a moment when he was enjoying much domestic comfort, and that broke up is a very sad, sad thing.’ All Edward’s disappointments had been forgotten, not only in his contentment with the Duchess of Kent, but in his pride at producing the heir presumptive to the throne.
Above all else that made the month of January 1820 ‘gloomy and melancholy’ was the prospect, as Mary wrote, that this misfortune of Edward’s death would soon be followed by another. The King had had a mammoth paroxysm at Christmas, when he neither slept nor stopped talking for fifty-eight hours. ‘Thank God he does not suffer,’ Mary said of him. ‘Our beloved father,’ wrote Augusta, ‘I find from the physicians, is daily declining and growing weaker. And what makes the thing of worse import, perhaps, I do not make out that he has any disease.’ Two days later in those apartments on the north terrace at Windsor where he had idled away the years since Amelia died, abusing his keepers, plucking at the bedclothes and ordering worlds of ‘ideal’ inhabitants conjured up from the past, King George III himself died, just after half-past eight in the evening of 29 January – the eve of the anniversary of the execution of Charles I, whose martyrdom he revered. He had borne his own sufferings with grace.
Augusta wrote a letter to Lady Harcourt at a dark hour. The Prince Regent, now, at the age of fifty-seven, King George IV, had sent Frederick to Sophy. ‘He spent the evening alone with us two,’ and the Duke of Gloucester had sent Mary to them.
This letter has been written over strange intervals … and I hope you can understand it but really my heart is so full and so much that is necessary but disagreeable I must attend to this morning I hope you will pardon my not looking over it again. I am very glad we shall be some days quite alone and Sophy wants quiet, and we are the best company for each other when we can meet. I am fully employed in writing all I can pick up to my two sisters – I dread their hearing of the fatal conclusion before they receive my letter of yesterday.
Augusta told of her ‘poor stricken heart’ and of the ‘very very great sorrow’ they had gone through in ten days. ‘The blow is struck but now the first recovery opens our eyes to our affliction. I have cried a great deal today, and feel relieved by it,’ she wrote on 4 February. Mary and Augusta and Sophia sat and worked in the evenings as they waited for the interment, first of their brother Edward and then of their father.
When the Duchess of Gloucester visited Windsor four days later she found that Princess Augusta and Princess Sophia were ‘making great exertions to get their things all packed up to leave the Castle’. Mary herself thanked the new King for the gift of the furniture ‘in the room I used to live in in the Castle’, which would embellish Bagshot, and also for the gift of one of her father’s carriages. Mary was always a materialist, and these acquisitions helped dull the pain of the two January deaths and the loss of Windsor.
Princess Augusta and Princess Sophia departed the Castle the day after their father’s funeral, an event at which their brother Frederick was chief mourner in place of the King. While his father lay dying, George IV had fallen suddenly and gravely ill and, still weak, feared the night air. His feelings were as ever overset by death, this time to the point of contracting a pleurisy that had made some of his doctors think a third royal funeral might be in the offing. But it was not to be.
‘The seeing this dear old place at this moment’, Mary wrote from Windsor, ‘is very melancholy.’ She believed that Sophia’s ‘strength of mind’ would help her to survive the move. It was a ‘great object to get her to town’ and into the care of Sir Henry Halford. She was to occupy apartments first in her brother Adolphus’s home, Cambridge House in Mayfair, and then at Kensington Palace.
Augusta, on the other hand, was bound for Frogmore, where she meant to live most of the time, keeping apartments at the Queen’s House for forays to town. She had sent for Lady Harcourt, who had been with them after the Queen’s death, to join her there. And although she ‘began to flag sadly’ while making her final arrangements in early February at Windsor, within the month she was beginning to have things as she wanted, even promising her brother, General (newly Sir) Herbert Taylor, Sir Benjamin Bloomfield and others of the new King’s inner circle a ‘famous good dinner’ at her new home.
From now on the princesses and, indeed, their brothers would be welcome only as the King’s guests at Windsor. And although he was too preoccupied with putting together further damning evidence against his wife to feel any urge as yet to take possession of the Castle, Augusta and Sophia had a home, as well as a parent, to mourn.
With George Ill’s death came an outpouring of reverent prose in the public press and a flood of images for sale extolling his virtues in life – balm to his daughters’ eyes and ears when they had so minded his treatment the year before. The sentiments they expressed in the days after George Ill’s death – ‘clouded as his precious life has been for many years, it has pleased the Almighty to spare him many a pang which would have severely tried him’ – were to be repeated and printed in newspapers and sermons and broadsheets. This image of a pious, benevolent father of the people might have come as a surprise to earlier subjects of George III, whose caricaturists and pamphleteers had not been so kind. But now, with the prospect of George IV as monarch, there was no stopping the pious flow.
‘May you when your hour comes be as much loved, respected and regretted as he must be,’ Elizabeth intoned, writing to her brother, the new King, on 6 February after hearing the news. That seemed unlikely, however, although Mary had recently told her brother that she could ‘only lament you are not known all over the world as you are in your own house and at Brighton, for you are not done justice to by anybody’. For some, like his sister, George IV’s charm was undimmed from when he was a boy, and he enlivened and brightened every occasion at which he was present, for all his auburn wig and florid, womanish face, his great girth and gouty legs. But this was not the case with most. In particular, his estranged wife Caroline endorsed Leigh Hunt’s 1812 judgement that her husband was ‘a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties.’ When she heard that he had, almost as the first act of his reign, ordered that her name be omitted from the prayers for the royal family in church, the new Queen of England made plans immediately to return to England.
The oddities of the situation that the regency of ten years had created at Windsor were identified by Sophia when she wrote of her father’s death to the new King: ‘While I am mourning the loss of one who must and ever will live in my recollection, I am addressing one who has acted as such [that is, as fatherly protector and ruler] for some years.’
Princess Elizabeth had a hard time adjusting to the idea that her father was dead and that her brother was king in his stead. She even found it difficult to address her brother by his new title: ‘I am a strange mortal and cannot help being easy with what I love. Therefore he must forgive me if I am not proper enough.’ Then she heard in Homburg of the new King’s dreadful pleurisy. According to Princess Mary, when a second express arrived, announcing his recovery, Elizabeth ‘completely lost her head and for some time would not attend to reason’. So her English maid, Sarah Brawn, wrote home to the housekeeper at Kew, and she said she never saw her poor mistress ‘in such a state of nerves in her life’. Perhaps Elizabeth had not forgotten that dark day in Bath when they learnt of Princess Charlotte’s stillbirth – and then came that fateful second express, bearing the news of the young mother’s own death.
Elizabeth refused – ‘at great personal sacrifice to her own private feeling’ – her brother’s invitation to come over in the spring of 1820 for his Coronation, an invitation which her brothers Ernest in Berlin and Adolphus in Hanover had already accepted. Bluff, her husband, had only just become sovereign in his father’s place, she explained, and not only did they have to look after his widowed mother, but they had found everything ‘at 6’s and 7’s’, with terrible debts to pay. Elizabeth would not wish to appear, should she make the journey, ‘otherwise than as your sister ought to appear’, but she could not think of making the necessary outlay at this time of hardship in Homburg. ‘I make my excuse with running-over eyes,’ she concluded, ‘but my duty and affection for Bluff make me feel I am acting right.’
Royal, far away in Ludwigsburg, also refused her brother’s invitation to attend the Coronation he was planning in London. Gratified as she was, she wrote, the health to which she was a martyr, and her ‘grandchildren’ – Prince Paul’s daughters, whose care was her delight, as well as King Wilhelm’s children on whom she doted – were twin duties forbidding her to take her place in Westminster Abbey. She only regretted that the peeresses were to walk at the Coronation – ‘much as I shall ever rejoice at everything that can encourage trade’. She feared this would bring forward ‘fresh fuel for those who are resolved to begin many unpleasant discussions concerning an illustrious lady [Queen Caroline], who I understand will force herself on the public, and is determined to run any risk for the sake of mischief.’
But it seemed that, while Royal and Elizabeth would not see their brother crowned, his sister Sophia might be well enough to be present. Her move to London had given her a new lease of life, and she wrote to her brother, ‘I am very well satisfied with my abode …’ She added, ‘the hopes of being able to see so much more of you and to be near at hand’ to Carlton House had been a prime reason, an ‘essential inducement’, for fixing upon Cambridge House as a permanent home.
Emerging at last from long years immured in twilit sickrooms, Sophia wrote of ‘trying to look at all around one in a favourable light’. She was, she reckoned – and in this she mistook the matter sorely – ‘not very difficult to please’. And she said she wished only for a ‘quiet snug home’ – which was what she now had. With an energy that was new to her, she walked in the gardens of the empty Queen’s House, drove out to Hyde Park and Regent’s Park with her sister Mary, and had one or two ladies in for the evening. She sat in a red dress to the painter Thomas Lawrence. She even mimicked her mother talking to one of Amelia’s doctors: ‘Really, had I shut my eyes,’ Mary said of their dead mother, ‘I should have thought she was in the room.’ And finally one morning in April Sophia excelled herself. ‘Judge of my joy,’ wrote Mary, ‘when the door opened, and who should walk into the room but dear Sophy. The first visit she had made – and she actually came up to the top of the house, and really did not appear the worse for it, went all over it, and sat with me nearly an hour.’ Mary told their brother, ‘All nervous people must be a little humoured in regard to their health.’ She did not, therefore, like to let Sophia know how well she thought her. But, she concluded, ‘being her own mistress… has been of great use to her general health’. She showed insight into Sophia’s turbulent mind that dictated her varying poses from invalid to intrepid horse-woman when she concluded that it was ‘by doing it her own way’ that her sister would flourish.
And then reports came of an impediment to a peaceful Coronation. Queen Caroline, the wife whom the King refused adamantly to have crowned or to allow to be present at his own ceremony – was about to set out for England. Mary was quick in her outrage at the prospect of what she called ‘the Illustrious Traveller’ coming to England. She had heard that, before the Liturgy was changed, someone had said it ought to read ‘Praise our gracious Queen Caroline.’ ‘Good Lord defend us …’ she exclaimed.
The rest of the year was dedicated to ‘the Queen’s affair’. It had been a rare year since 1795, when George and Caroline’s misconceived marriage took place, that the Treasury and ministers – not to mention the royal family – were not dealing with fresh and unreasonable demands from one or the other. Not for nothing did one of the myriad cartoons published in this momentous year feature Queen Caroline as a kettle calling George IV – a coalscuttle – black. It had been a relationship which had caused untold damage to their daughter Charlotte before her marriage. But in this year of 1820 the couple’s private and public disagreements lit the fuse of seething political discontent in the country. Now the rancorous arguments of King and Queen fed the nation, as the Radicals took up the Queen’s cause. All the Parliamentary time that might have been devoted to debating reform of rotten boroughs was given to searching out the details of this rotten marriage. In the process, ‘Silly Billy’, as the Duke of Gloucester was aptly named, did untold damage to his own marriage when he rose in Parliament to support his cousin Caroline and denounce his brother-in-law the King.
Before the breach the Duchess of Gloucester had heard with pleasure Lord Hutchinson, one of the many who had been drawn into the ‘Queen’s affair’, speak ‘affectionately’ of the King ‘to please my feelings’. ‘Both your ears ought to have burnt,’ she told him. But Hutchinson failed in his brief – to offer Caroline in France the enormous sum of £50,000 a year to stay away and renounce the tide of queen. An ambitious alderman, Matthew Wood, got to Caroline first, and persuaded her to continue her journey to England.
A former lord mayor, Wood, with other City Radicals – merchants and bankers among them, who wished to end the monopoly of aristocratic political power – took up Caroline’s cause with gusto from February when the Republican newspaper proclaimed her virtues as an ‘injured princess’. Princess Augusta, horrified with all her family by Caroline’s dependence on a ‘Cit’, heard later that Wood had laid a massive bet that the Queen would come to England. And he had made his trip to France, she declared, simply to ensure that she did cross the Channel so that he could obtain his winnings.
Mary told the King on 12 June, ‘I am not surprised at the arrival as I never doubted she would come.’ And in a gesture of support for their brother – who stayed at Windsor – Augusta came up from Frogmore and Mary from Bagshot, to be present in London on 19 August. On this day, the Bill of Pains and Penalties, a punitive measure to deprive Caroline of her rights as queen and to condemn her for adultery with her Italian ‘low man’, began its second reading in the House of Lords. Notwithstanding the Duchess of York’s grave illness – she died later that day – her husband, the Duke of York, was there in the House, with his brothers Clarence and Sussex, to support the honour of their brother.
A small dumpy figure in a black wig and with heavily arched eyebrows and rouged cheeks, Caroline was unrecognizable even in private life to those who had known her earlier in England. But none of the princesses met their strange sister-in-law during her residence now in London. In a letter later in the year to her brother Ernest, Augusta made her views clear, writing of ‘the wicked who have made this horrid woman their tool. Bad as she is I am sure’ – and here she differed from Mary – ‘she never would have come to England’, Augusta believed, ‘if it had not been for Wood’.
The evidence brought against the Queen in the House of Lords and given by a couple of naval captains and by nearly ninety Italian witnesses – boatmen, ostlers, grooms and maidservants of varying degrees of respectability – failed, overall, in its effect. And when Henry Brougham, Caroline’s lawyer, browbeat the Lords in November into abandoning the bill – he prophesied revolution should they continue with it – George IV’s ‘language and manner were those of a Bedlamite’, Charles Arbuthnot recorded. Fulminating against those who had brought the catastrophe about, the King blamed particularly his cousin Gloucester for supporting a woman whom he knew to be a virtual criminal.
Mary suffered greatly from the double strain of her husband’s support for Caroline – a woman she had long detested – and her brother’s anger against her husband. It was impossible for her to see the King or even correspond normally with him, as it would be rank disloyalty to her husband. But how she longed to! The Queen’s affair drove a wedge not so much between King and Duke as between Duke and Duchess. For Mary concluded that the Duke’s support for Caroline was born of his jealousy of the King, though it was probably just muddle-headed chivalry. When the trial was over, the Duke took up his gun and resumed his annual slaughter of game, but the damage was done between him and Mary. The King moreover did not forgive him or show him one mark of favour till 1827, when he made him governor of Portsmouth.
The other princesses raised the King’s spirits with reports that the Queen’s popularity was waning in the New Year. ‘Loyal addresses are coming in every day,’ Augusta wrote to Ernest, now a supporter of the King, in Hanover. Their brother Frederick, staunch Tory and also loyal to the King, had been given the Freedom of the City of Norwich and had been very well received there, though it was ‘all but a Radical town’. She concluded, ‘Things getting better by degrees are more sure to hold.’ In Ludwigsburg, where Elizabeth was at last visiting her sister Royal – they met after more than twenty years – welcome news arrived that a thanks-giving service for Queen Caroline in St Paul’s, following the abandonment of the bill, had been a paltry affair and ill attended. The Queen’s conduct had disgusted everyone, Elizabeth wrote to Bluff in Homburg, and her pious hope was that, at the end, even the most blind would have their eyes opened.
At home in England, the King felt popular enough to warrant holding a drawing room at the Queen’s House, with a ball to follow in the evening at Carlton House. Augusta, her brother’s hostess, informed Ernest in Hanover that the attendance had been splendid. ‘Every person of proper feelings made it a point to come up to London on purpose to be present at it.’ By midnight the Princess was ‘pretty well fagged’, having already received Society for four and a half hours before dinner at six. Having optimistically ordered her carriage for three in the morning, she was delighted to accept the offer of her brother’s a good hour and a half earlier. The drawing room and ball had been especially splendid, in the King’s view, as his wife had failed to appear at either. Caroline was not yet a spent force, but her power had waned dramatically with the grab at £50,000 a year she had made when it was offered her for a second time (after her earlier refusal) as an inducement to leave the country. This behaviour contradicted all that she had supposedly stood for, and made her supporters look fools. The game was not yet over, however.
At the Coronation of George IV on 12 July – or rather, hours before – Caroline of Brunswick, Queen Consort of England, made her last attempt to breach her husband’s defences and demanded entrance at first one door and then another of Westminster Abbey. Denied at each of them, to a chorus of cheers that turned to jeers from the crowd waiting for the ceremony, she at last turned away – with a cry as if mortally afraid. Hours later, the King – effulgent in gold brocade and velvet bloomers, feathers nodding from his cap – stepped along the royal blue carpet that led from Westminster Hall to the welcoming Abbey doors. When the crown was placed upon his head and the peers and peeresses rustled obeisance, his expression was one of deep satisfaction. It had been a long time coming.
When George had first dreamt of kingship – in 1788, when his father had seemed mortally ill – the Irish Parliament had offered him the unrestricted regency of Ireland. Now king of that country, he determined to pay his subjects there, who had been so generous in the past, a visit. As he departed, Queen Caroline, uncrowned and ill, lay at Brandenburg House, her home at Hammersmith. Before the King’s yacht had reached Holyhead, news came: she was dead, of an obstruction on the liver. The King had been on board shockingly drunk, or, as the Tory scribe John Croker put it, ‘gayer than it might be proper to tell’. But after he heard of the Queen’s death the royal widower did not appear on deck and Croker heard that he was, if not ‘afflicted’, at least ‘affected at the first accounts of this event’.
Caroline’s hour was not yet over. Honouring her wish to be buried at Brunswick, her executors negotiated with the government for her coffin to be carried to Harwich to be embarked for Stade. But tempers ran high, and, when the authorities tried to turn the procession aside from a route leading to the City, where the Queen’s support had been greatest, two protesters were killed in the fray that developed in Hyde Park. Princess Mary condemned from Bagshot ‘all the disgraceful and disgusting scenes that have taken place within this last week, first at Brandenburg House and then as the Procession went on’. She regretted, particularly, the part of Caroline’s executors, her lawyers Stephen Lushington and Thomas Denman. ‘How thankful I feel’, she told her brother, ‘that you was not in town, for whatever blame may be attached to any of those who made the arrangements you … have had little or nothing to do with it.’ Citing ‘infamous, designing invidious people’ and those in Brandenburg House and Radicals besides who had ‘espoused her cause from the beginning’, Mary ended, ‘hand and head ought to join hand and heart to spurn them out of society’.
Augusta had been spared the ‘disgraceful and disgusting scenes’ of her sister-in-law’s funeral procession, having set out at the end of July for Germany to visit both her sisters. The newly crowned George IV, too, felt the need to travel abroad, and, leaving the United Kingdom for the first time in his life, he spent a happy month in the restored Electorate, newly a kingdom, of Hanover, where he was feted whenever his gout allowed him to appear.
It was all that he could have wished, as there was no Caroline to disturb his Coronation, no Radicals to taunt him, not even the threat of Napoleon – dead this year on St Helena – to alarm him. He wept when presented with an address from the University of Göttingen where his younger brothers long before had harassed their tutors. Perhaps what meant most to the King, however, was his visit to the battlefield of Waterloo en route to Hanover. None other than the Duke of Wellington was his guide as he visited the different battle positions adopted on that fateful day. It poured with rain but George persevered – to inspect the spot where his friend Lord Anglesey’s leg lay buried. Given time, he was to declare that he had been present at Waterloo not just on this visit, but on the day of the battle itself, six years earlier in June 1815. And with the dawning of another era, when memories dimmed of what had occurred and what had not in a previous age, he came to believe his own story.