Following the débâcle of the ‘Queen Caroline affair’ in 1820, there was a welcome diversion for the Dowager Queen of Württemberg in Ludwigsburg. Elizabeth at last came from Homburg to stay with her sister for several weeks over Christmas 1820 and New Year 1821, while Fritz – newly Landgrave Friedrich VI of Hesse-Homburg – attended the Austrian Emperor to Munich. The sisters had not seen each other since the elder left England in 1797, when Royal the bride had been aged thirty and Elizabeth twenty-seven. Now fifty years old, the new Landgravine was shocked by her sister’s size, which made her appear older than her age, and by her immobility. The Dowager Queen did not walk, but was carried in an armchair everywhere in the palace by attendants.
Once she had recovered from her surprise at her sister’s condition, Elizabeth wrote daily to her husband of the state and opulence by which she was surrounded. ‘Even you, dear angel, who is the grand mogul in your presents,’ Elizabeth told Bluff on Christmas Eve 1820, after partaking in her sister’s Christmas Eve rituals, ‘would have been enchanted to see the magnificence.’ The Dowager Queen had arranged ‘thirteen tables filled with all sorts of things, silverware, jewellery, clothes, toys, bonbons …’ Charlotte and Pauline, her stepson Prince Paul’s daughters, for whom the majority of the gifts were destined, were overcome.
The Dowager Queen had been delighted earlier this year when her good-for-nothing stepson in Paris had given her custody of these princesses, his daughters. She had been determined to make this, their first Christmas together, special. But Baroness Veronica de Stein, Elizabeth’s lady, was also ‘aux anges’ when she received from the Queen Dowager, among other treasures, an amethyst cross and a silk dress. Elizabeth herself was given her sister’s portrait and was pleased to see that Royal got a handsome porcelain vase – doubtless from the Ludwigsburg factory – from her ‘son’ the King.
The contrast between the sisters’ living standards could not have been more marked. On his father’s death in January that year, Fritz had found the small state or landgraviate of Hesse-Homburg still deeper in debt to the bankers of Frankfurt and further afield than he had suspected. And he and Elizabeth had only her English income with which to service the debts that his father had incurred over many years. Stoically the new Landgravine declared herself very glad to be going home, and in general very glad not to be a rich widowed queen with a doting family and a busy life. She was stifled by the heat of the apartments at Ludwigsburg, she said, and exhausted by the number of steps leading from one apartment to another.
While the Dowager Queen still had her sister Elizabeth at Ludwigsburg, good news came from England. Following several miscarriages, Adelaide, William, Duke of Clarence’s ugly but agreeable wife, had given birth to a daughter in early December. ‘She was born nearly without assistance,’ Elizabeth heard, and sent further details to her husband on 28 December 1820 of this interesting royal baby. The accoucheur had been in the country, and the wet-nurse had not yet been brought to bed, the baby being two months premature. ‘Good old Halford ran for Sir William Knighton. A lady en couche [in labour] gave up her accoucheur, and they found a wet-nurse in three hours.’ The reason for the early delivery, Elizabeth believed, was that six days before she gave birth, Adelaide ‘went to church with Eliza Fitzclarence when she was marrying [the Earl of Erroll], and after that she was never well.’
Princess Sophia, in England, paid a visit of three hours to St James’s Palace to see her new niece, and told her sisters in Germany that she had come away enchanted. ‘She will be a worthy Queen if she does not have a brother,’ wrote Elizabeth to her husband from Ludwigsburg. Born at seven months, the child, although small, thrived ‘beyond anything that was ever known’, and was given the name of Elizabeth, to the pleasure of her Homburg aunt. It was ‘a name very dear to the English and in these cruel times I think they have done very well to choose what will please,’ the Landgravine told her husband.
The princesses took malicious pleasure in the knowledge that the Clarences had produced an heir who would now knock eighteen-month-old Princess Victoria of Kent – who had been, from birth, heir presumptive – on to a lower rung in the succession to the throne. The princesses mistrusted their Coburg sister-in-law, the Duchess of Kent, and her brother Prince Leopold – still living on his £50,000 a year at Claremont. They wondered, however, that the Clarences, ‘as they both are so fond of the country’, did not spend more time at Bushey Park, the Duke’s house on the Thames, now made ‘very neat all fresh papered and yet furnished into thorough comfortable plain gentleman’s rooms’, as Augusta wrote to her brother Ernest on 8 May 1821. The couple’s apartments at St James’s were ‘so dreadfully small that none but such contented creatures as they are could endure it’. But Bushey was where William had earlier raised his Fitzclarence family with Mrs Jordan. Perhaps, even for an insensitive man like William, the ghost of his children’s mother whom he had cast off – and who had died two years before in France – was still strong.
Sophia, meanwhile, had moved from her brother Adolphus’s house in Mayfair into a new house in Connaught Place north of the Park, near Kensington Palace. And the Duchess of Kent and her household comptroller Sir John Conroy – the Duke’s former attaché – visited her there regularly. The house was ‘quite clean, he [the landlord] furnished it only three years ago’, Augusta recorded on 17 December 1820, and Sophia would have only two rooms to paper or paint, ‘on account of his having had some large pictures against the wall’. The situation was very good, she added. ‘It faces the south and looks over all the best part of Hyde Park and is particularly dry and clear of smoke.’ Augusta told her correspondent, their brother Ernest, a few months later in May 1821 that it was quite like being in the country, with all the advantages of London – the Park ‘making a constant gay scene, particularly a string of carriages daily which full still continues notwithstanding the heat and dust.’
There were no more mentions of spasms in connection with Sophia. She paid visits to Kensington Palace in her carriage where her bibliophile brother Sussex occupied rooms stacked with 50,000 volumes. She rode with the Duchess of Kent and Princess Feodora of Leiningen, the Duchess’s daughter by her earlier marriage, in Mr Fozard’s riding establishment behind the Queen’s House. The Duchess of Kent had papered and furnished her apartments, formerly Queen Caroline’s, at Kensington in rich, warm tones according to German taste. Princess Victoria’s cradle was preserved as an object of sentimental regard, her cot was in the room next to her mother’s, her father’s portrait was prominent.
Nothing could have been more intimate – nor, some objected, more stifling. But Sophia was a regular visitor to Kensington, and at least part of the attraction there was the charismatic Sir John Conroy. The Duchess hung on the comptroller’s every word, and included Lady Conroy and their several children – one of them a girl named Victoire of her daughter’s age – in her affection. Sir John was assiduous, and Sophia soon matched her sister-in-law in her attachment to him and his family. Conroy’s son Edward later wrote, ‘We were one family.’
Sophia’s sisters had another reason to dislike the Duchess of Kent. She was linked too closely for their liking not only to the Conroys, but also to her brother Prince Leopold, who had become distinctly unpopular with the princesses following Charlotte’s death. A remark by Royal in Württemberg on 26 November 1824 shows the animus she felt towards him: ‘Will you believe it that Prince Leopold is gone to Paris without having sent me the prints of my two elder brothers which Augusta had given him to have forwarded to me?’ The Duchess of Kent often took her daughters down to Claremont to see Leopold, which hardly helped – and then made difficulties about the royal family visiting Victoria. But Sophia, the Duchess’s Kensington neighbour, was allowed into the charmed circle.
Augusta was more objective about their brother Edward’s child than was her sister Sophia. She wrote to their brother Ernest, who had settled with his family for reasons of economy in Berlin, on 8 May 1821, ‘Our little Victoria is a handful and a very engaging child. She is tall and speaks very plain and is a capital mimic … but her Mama is trying to break her of it … she is too young to understand it is wrong.’ But Augusta of all the princesses was the least involved with her nieces and nephew – except for the Fitzclarences, for whom she had a protective kindness. Her affections she reserved for her siblings, and they reciprocated.
When Augusta voyaged to the Continent to visit her sisters in July 1821 Elizabeth could not do enough for her at Homburg. She introduced her to her brother- and sister-in-law, Gustav and Louise, who had married the same year as she and Fritz, and who lived in the castle with a baby daughter. She drove her around the ‘dear little town’ of Homburg that surrounded the castle and that Elizabeth described in a letter to Mme d’Arblay as ‘not larger than a village’. And they drove around the fertile plain below Homburg, and beyond to what Elizabeth called ‘the finest mountains you can conceive, some covered with wood, others barren and chiefly rock, which makes the scenery picturesque.’ Despite the state’s debts, Elizabeth and Fritz were everywhere contemplating ‘improvements’.
At Ludwigsburg, however, to which Augusta proceeded after two harmonious weeks with the Landgravine at Homburg, she had a great shock. Affection for her sister led the Dowager Queen of Württemberg to drive to a frontier post to greet Augusta. But the younger sister found that the elder had changed dramatically. ‘She says’, Mary wrote to Mrs Adams on 6 October 1821, ‘she never should have known Royal again barring her eyes.’ In her white cap and apron and with her huge girth, her jaw line and neck a solid slab, Royal was enormous, to the point that she found it more comfortable to do without any corsetry. Moreover, she was swollen in every part of her limbs and even in her face from dropsy, and lopsided from where her left breast had grown unaccountably large one year.
Royal, on the other hand, Mary told Mrs Adams, thought Augusta ‘fatter and older, but she should have known her in any part of the world.’ The sisters’ days together were sour-sweet – Augusta still the determined British patriot, Royal after years of exposure to Continental warfare more fluid in her opinions. But they were united in lamenting the death of little Princess Elizabeth of Clarence at only four months. Until William and Adelaide produced another child, Princess Victoria of Kent would once more succeed her uncles George, York and Clarence on the throne. Should she and any issue fail, the throne would go to the Duke of Cumberland, a result many in England were loath to see occur.
Augusta returned to her apartments in the Queen’s House in London, and to Frogmore, via the kingdom of Hanover where Adolphus, vice-regent since 1813, and his Augusta and their son George were living in domestic contentment. After this journey to the Continent, Augusta had sated to some degree the desire to travel abroad that she had long felt, and first expressed when – nearly twenty years before – she had envied her brother Augustus his sightseeing in Italy.
But Augusta was not to be allowed to rest yet. Her brother the King had made up his mind to pull down Carlton House and make the Queen’s House – where Augusta had apartments – a showpiece for the monarchy. When it was proposed that it would be cheaper to build afresh, he said that youthful memories made the choice of his parents’ home sacred to him. And swiftly installing a throne room, larger state rooms and modern fittings, as well as rooms for all the functions for which George III and Queen Charlotte had looked to St James’s, this pious son rendered his parents’ old home unrecognizable, and rechristened it Buckingham Palace.
The King also toyed with the idea of demolishing St James’s Palace, but ended by leaving it. And here Augusta was shown by her brother’s clerk of works a very desirable small house, Stable House, as a substitute for her apartments in the Queen’s House. The King, in a very good mood, after a thunderous welcome in Edinburgh, promised that the house, an annexe to St James’s Palace, across the courtyard from William and Adelaide’s apaartments, could be made comfortable with a door leading from the garden into Green Park, so that his sister need not walk in the streets to visit her family. Augusta did not take the same pleasure in walking the streets that Mary and Sophia did.
But just when she was preparing to take the house, she was persuaded to set off again for Germany. The house at St James’s would not be ready for some months. The King warmly seconded the proposal made by their brother Adolphus, who was in England, that Augusta join him and his family at Hanover for the winter. Meanwhile, in the waltz of siblings that grew a little more ponderous every year, Adolphus and Mary were off to Brighton for a few days, from where Mary would then proceed to stay with the Clarences at Bushey.
When Augusta returned to England early the following year, her brother Adolphus sent her from Hanover a clock as a housewarming present for her new home in Stable House, and she placed it, she told him happily, in her drawing room. Whether it was a wrench to leave the Queen’s House, a home she had known for fifty years, she did not disclose. At times she and her sisters had been more miserable there with their mother than anywhere else. Her views on her brother’s proposed changes for Windsor Castle she also kept to herself, describing on 26 March 1824 a dinner there as ‘very cheerful and pleasant.’ She invited Lady Harcourt to a housewarming in her new abode in London on 29 March, begging her not to dress up, and thanking her for so ably managing a committee for the foundation of an orphanage, to which Augusta planned to donate a library of good works. And several times she invited Mme d’Arblay to join her and Mary, who was with her a great deal, being ill and ‘under the care of Sir Henry Halford and … other medical attendants’ for much of the year.
Royal, from Ludwigsburg, praised Augusta for inviting Mary to stay with her. She herself had been two months at Teinach with her own Court, bathing and attempting to cure pains in her hands that tortured her. At this Black Forest spa, set among velvety woods and precipitous ravines where she had first gone for a ‘cure’ after the stillbirth of her daughter nearly thirty years before, Royal was always happy. Now Miss Cornelia Knight, Charlotte’s former lady, who had been visiting Elizabeth, was staying with her in Ludwigsburg. ‘All my young people much amused,’ Royal noted with satisfaction on 26 November 1824 after a little ball she gave for a Württemberg nephew who had settled in the town to study for the military. The affair lasted from six to eleven-thirty – ‘s’entend, both ball and supper, which is just a good length of time without allowing any dawdling between the dances’, wrote the hostess.
The young consumed Royal’s attention as she prepared to enter her sixties. Prince George of Cambridge’s fifth birthday in Hanover – the age at which he came, according to German tradition, under the care of male governors – had occasioned a generous present from her of a topaz seal (to bear in due course his crest, orders and arms), and a silver fork, knife and spoon. Following German tradition again in making these presents, Royal promised to add pieces each year till he had two dozen of each, and then match that set with another two dozen. ‘I wish I could do more,’ she had concluded her letter to Adolphus on 24 March 1824. ‘I can only go on piano piano.’
Princess Sophia in England had an opportunity of enjoying daily the company of her brother Edward’s child, Victoria, when she left Connaught Place for apartments in Kensington Palace abutting those of the Duchess of Kent. Not only did she see Victoria by day, but she spent nearly every evening with the Duchess, with her daughter by her first marriage, Princess Feodora of Leiningen, and with the Conroys. When the Kent and Conroy group left town for a spell at the seaside, Victoria, aged five, wrote – with the aid either of her mother or of her newly appointed governess, Miss Louise (later Baroness) Lehzen – to her ‘dear Aunt’. Sophia wrote back, on 3 September 1824, ‘You will be sorry to hear that Aunt is quite deaf and cannot hear a word with her left ear. It is very distressing and very uncomfortable. I hope it will be well before I see you again, as you will find it a little troublesome to make me understand you.’
All the princesses, as we have seen, took a close interest in their nieces and nephews, and much appreciated news of them – be they legitimate or their brother William’s Fitzclarence family. And their brothers were no less interested in the coming generation. On 29 March 1825 the Duke of Cumberland from Berlin gave his old tutor a laconic description of his six-year-old nephew, Prince George of Cambridge, and of the boy’s sister Augusta. ‘The little boy is two months older than George [of Cumberland, his own son] but mine is fatter, the little girl is delightful and much more lively than the boy’ Consumed with pride in his own son, Ernest continued, ‘George [of Cumberland] is very like the picture of [Benjamin] West’s where I am with my two younger brothers and the big black Newfoundland dog.’ He did not mention that his son’s eyesight was a source of anxiety.
The Cambridges, meanwhile, visited England from Hanover in the summer of 1825 and stayed in the very house on Kew Green where William and Edward had grown up. It was renamed Cambridge Cottage, and, once all were settled in, the Duchess of Cambridge begged her sister-in-law Victoria of Kent to bring her daughter to play for the day. But the Duchess was short in her responses. It would appear that she preferred Victoria to play with comptroller Conroy’s children rather than with her cousins.
In February 1826 Lady Harcourt, that remarkable correspondent to whom all the princesses had written their most intimate confidences, that friend who had known all their secrets, died. But the princesses kept up other long-standing, if less intimate, relationships. When Princess Sophia invited Mme d’Arblay to spend one Good Friday evening with her, the reply was effusive:
Madam, Oh yes! Sweet princess, yes! Good Friday evening I shall feel – 1 dare not say more good, but more devout I will venture to assert, for spending it with so unchanged, unchangeable and kindly invariable, though so august a personage as the dear and fair Princess, who, from her childhood upwards, has so graciously deigned to receive and to encourage the warm attachment of her Royal Highness’s most obliged, most faithful, most grateful and most respectfully devoted F d’Arblay.
The cold winds of the spring in 1826 were succeeded by a ferocious summer heat. The Duchess of Gloucester longed to sit beneath the shade of her trees at Bagshot, but she was staying in London to see her brother Frederick, who was seriously ill with dropsy. The Duke, aged sixty-two, suffered from this dropsical tendency which some of Queen Charlotte’s children had inherited from her. In addition, he – like the King his brother – had the tendency to gout which George III had suffered, and made no pretence at diminishing his consumption of food or drink, or at increasing the exercise he took to counter his ill health.
This time he had been lucky, and Mary set off for Bagshot on 23 July where she found that a planned ‘party on the water’ which the King had devised for Virginia Water had to be postponed because of the weather, now turned from heat to torrential rain. ‘From the vast quantity of wet that has fallen,’ the King wrote that same day from Royal Lodge, his house in the Great Park at Windsor, ‘the tents will be so wet, and what is sure, will continue damp in consequence for some days to come, that it would be downright madness to think of dining there tomorrow. This, my dearest Mary, is abominably provoking, but I hope by the end of the week we shall be able to make our party on the water good.’
Augusta still liked new experiences, if they were pleasant, and was gratified to have been present – with the rest of the royal family – to observe Lord Liverpool, that good conservative, lay the first stone of a new bridge in Kingston-on-Thames. ‘It was a very pretty town, quite a new one to me,’ Augusta observed, and she was delighted with her invitation from the Corporation and with the ‘deservedly handsome reception’ they gave the Prime Minister. On another occasion she was to stand patron to an ‘Extraordinary Exhibition’ of ‘industrious fleas’ in Regent Street in London, but whether curiosity drew her to see her protégés perform is not known.
She visited Petworth, Lord Egremont’s seat in Sussex, motivated by a reasonable curiosity to see her host’s famous ‘fine statues’ and even the grounds modelled by Capability Brown. The Boulle tables, she noted, ‘would be much the better for Bramble’s polishing’. But there was something of a family connection to explore as well. Her brother William’s eldest son by Mrs Jordan, Captain George Fitzclarence, had married Lord Egremont’s ‘natural’ daughter Mary Wyndham in 1819. With his wife and his father-in-law, George now received his aunt Augusta at Petworth. ‘I wished Lord Egremont to feel that I loved William’s son’s wife, which I really do,’ wrote Augusta to her friends the Arrans, and she kissed Mrs Fitzclarence. ‘I hope you think I was right.’
King George IV was not stopping at making the Queen’s House into a palace or embellishing a lodge in Windsor Great Park as sumptuous Royal Lodge. At Windsor he had decided to ‘Gothicize’ the whole Castle with the aid of architect Jeffry Wyatt. Wyatt, enraptured with the grandeur of the scheme, asked permission to change his name to Wyatville. ‘Veal or mutton. Call yourself what you like,’ came the King’s grumpy answer. A visit to the altered Castle, which was now emerging from under Wyatville’s scaffolding, put the King’s sister Augusta in an equally grumpy mood. ‘The main garden and Bastion terrace is frightful to the greatest degree. Wyatville’, she said with scorn on 13 September 1826, ‘says it’s Classical. I never saw such an unmilitary appearance in my life.’
To soothe such upsets, Augusta and her lady, Lady Mary Taylor, played on the piano and harp for two hours together most evenings at Frogmore – ‘and I have got some new songs which I hope you will command here or at St James’s Palace in the spring’, she told the Arrans later that month. She had had a harp made for Lady Mary by Egan in Dublin. It was ‘in the highest order’ and ‘a great addition to the piano. We play little trifles of our own arranging which, as we play so much together, go very well indeed.’
Augusta’s skill in arranging ‘medleys’ for her instruments of choice – including the Irish songs of Tom Moore, to that poet’s pleasure – had been noted by Fanny Burney not long before. The Princess had begun this hobby of setting words to well-known tunes with the collaboration of Lady Harcourt at the outset of the French wars, when it was the fashion to stir up patriotic feeling by distributing song sheets with suitable sentiments around the theatres. And Tom Moore himself, whom Augusta greatly admired, had recently listened to her perform the ‘new airs’ that she had composed for two of his songs – ‘The Wreath You Wove’ and ‘The Legacy.’ Moore in return sang to her his rebel song, ‘Oh, Where’s the Slave!’ and wrote, ‘it was no small triumph to be chorused in it by the favourite sister of his Majesty George IV.
Augusta also played for Tom Moore a march that she said she had composed for her brother Frederick’s regiment. But the news about Frederick was bad again in September. His limbs were badly swollen. And Sophy wrote a melancholy account from London. Frederick, who thought it was a secret he was dropsical, talked of going to Brighton for a week, but his nerves were irritable – he liked a change ‘even of rooms’. With the New Year it became clear that, racked by spasms and no longer able to swallow food, he had not long to live. Sophia was there when Frederick died on 5 January 1827 at the Duke of Rutland’s house in London. She wrote afterwards to her brother the King: ‘I am still a piece of marble, and can catch myself for ever inclined to call out, “So is it all true?” when the worst I know but too well.’
Frederick had been, according to Adolphus, ‘the chief object’ of Sophia’s life, and her grief was ‘poignant’. She wrote proudly to Lady John Thynne on 18 January, ‘I occupied his last thoughts. Alas! All his property, you know too well what must become of it.’ (It was to be auctioned to pay his creditors.) But the Duke had written, ‘If there is anything over I name my beloved sister Sophia as residuary legatee.’ She continued, ‘Of course there is nothing to inherit, but the naming me in such a manner has made me feel I am Heir of his affection which is the most precious gift I could receive.’ Sophia could be quite nonsensical, but she busied herself distributing mementoes of their brother to the rest of the family. Mary, who helped her, received a print of the Duke. To the King Sophia sent the last opera glass that Frederick had used, for, in showing it to her, she told him, he had said the King much approved it ‘as suiting his eye’.
Sophia tried to be optimistic and chose some new cloth for habits with a view to recommencing her riding. But a series of spasms weakened her, and it was not till April that she felt able to drive out with Augusta, as the latter told Ernest on the 20th of that month, to ‘one of the fine gardens on the King’s Road to see the spring plants in their greatest beauty, that is to say, in the greenhouses.’
The death of Frederick, the father’s favourite who had ever been devoted to his brother’s service, went deep also with George IV. Harking back to former days, he commissioned Augusta to beg a visit from their sister Royal at Ludwigsburg.
The Queen Dowager was thrown into an almighty palaver about this enterprise. She consulted her ‘son’ the King about the journey – and her physician about bringing forward, or omitting, her usual summer trip to Teinach to take the waters. It was ‘not a water drinking place one can go to in general in the spring’, she explained, ‘as the snow remains there often till June’. She wondered if there was a ‘metzo terminé’ (mezzo termine, or middle course) she could take, but she was so flattered by ‘our dear brother’s wishing to see me once more in this world’ that she resolved to make the journey. Requesting the use of Mary’s apartment at Frogmore, the Queen Dowager worried to her sister Augusta on 25 March 1827 that she would be able to do so little. ‘I am troublesome from not being able either to go in a shut carriage or walk. My breath being now so short that I must be carried downstairs as well as upstairs.’ Royal, cataloguing these frailties, finished, ‘Though the shell is altered, the heart ever remains most affectionate.’ And she was ‘quite wild’ with the idea of Augusta meeting her at Greenwich Stairs, as she had once driven herself to Bessig in Germany, ’to wait for your arrival and first catch the sight of your horses driving over the little bridge’. To her brother the King she wrote the same day, ‘I am only afraid that you will be rather hurt … at my appearance as I am very old of my age and infirm, owing to the gout in my hands and feet and a constant shortness of breath.’ She implored him, ‘Look on me as an old woman …’ She was sixty years old.
When the Royal Sovereign, the King of England’s yacht, sailed up the Thames in early June to land the Queen Dowager at Greenwich Stairs, Augusta was duly waiting for her. Together the two sisters entered the City of London, a much larger place than when the elder had left it thirty years before. But it was at Windsor that Royal most marvelled at the changes. The Queen’s Lodge had been pulled down, and following her brother’s Gothic ‘improvements’, the Round Tower had gained a foot for each of the years she had been away. She went all over the Castle ‘without any fatigue – being carried about in her armchair and by her own servants’, Augusta told Ernest, and was ‘pleased and astonished’ with what she saw.
In early July the Dowager Queen sat out in the Priory Woods at Frogmore and told Augusta she was ‘quite delighted to find that the outline of the walks had not been materially altered’. ‘Indeed, Mr Price laid them with so much discretion and taste’, the younger sister fought back gently, as she told their brother Ernest, ‘that they could scarcely be improved, but… taking down some trees and opening places in the shrubbery has given an appearance of depth to the garden which is hardly credible.’
The Duchess of Gloucester made a third late in July at Frogmore, so ‘the house is literally what the common people call “chock full”’, Augusta wrote cheerfully to the Arrans on 25 July. ‘Our sitting room every morning after breakfast is the Colonnade, which is lovely. Mary and I have each our table opposite each other and a good large couch in the middle of which we sit, making a second and third table of each end of it, for all our superfluous articles of baskets, dictionaries, trays for the wafers and wax, etc.’ Every morning at midday the Dowager Queen, who breakfasted in her room, summoned her younger sisters, and they then arranged the rest of the day. ‘Royal’, Augusta told Ernest on 26 July, ‘has enchanted the Eton boys by begging a week’s holidays for them … She delights everybody by her learning and she knows as much and as correctly about all the families in England as if she had never been out of it.’
Royal was happiest when with the King her brother, whom she had feared to disappoint with her appearance. Lady Louisa Stuart wrote kindly, after seeing her old friend, that she was ‘rather shapeless than fat, not having worn stays of any kind these twenty years. And her dress is nothing extraordinary, what anybody’s would be who went with their own few grey hairs instead of wearing a wig.’ But then the King who greeted his sister the Queen Dowager now resembled more a pantomime dame – with rouged cheeks and a slipping wig – than anything else. The Dowager Queen was entranced anyway – and in ecstasy to see her brother Edward’s child Victoria at last, who had been invited with her mama to stay with the King at Windsor and meet her great-aunt from Germany.
Till now, Royal had had to content herself with sending presents – an amethyst cross and earrings on one occasion – and accompanying notes to Princess Victoria. The eight-year-old Princess was not at all shy. In fact, she was ‘quite at home with the King and Queen, very merry and jumping about and never was so happy in her life’. With an eye to the future, Mary wrote that if her brother saw their niece Victoria long enough for her to be at her ease with him, ‘he must be enchanted with her’.
Royal complained to her sisters of ill health, but when the King begged her to ‘send him word at any moments when she felt herself equal to joining an early dinner party by the lake in the Great Park’, she recovered miraculously. ‘The very thoughts of it gave her new life,’ wrote Augusta. Under an August moon, Royal and Augusta joined their brother at the lakeside dinner party that he hosted at Virginia Water. And after dinner, ‘six strong pullers’ rowed the ladies over to an island where they took coffee with the gentlemen of the party in a Chinese pavilion, papered inside ‘with the grey ground and bamboo panels, the same as at the Pavilion at Brighton’. Augusta ended her account, ‘we took a delightful row on the lake till after nine o’clock by moonlight’.
Royal’s time in England drew slowly to a close. She and Augusta went up to the Castle to inspect the ‘magnificent’ designs for wallpapers – and even floor papers – that Mr Robson, the King’s paperhanger, had produced. ‘He is a very clever man,’ wrote Augusta to Ernest at the end of September 1827. ‘He has produced a floor paper with gold, and by a process with oil the floor loses its roughness and looks like a velvet ground.’ Her brother the King spoke of inhabiting the Castle after Easter, she added, but she doubted it would be ready. ‘The gilding of the library has left such a very strong smell of oil paint, that it needs fire and air and sun to get it out of the rooms, before it can be pleasant to sleep in them.’
Royal did not forget her family at home in Württemberg, and told Lady Louisa Stuart, showing her some ornaments she had bought from the jewellers Rundell and Bridge, that they were for her ‘granddaughter’ Pauline. But the Queen Dowager was ‘very low’ when she had to leave England. Her brother the King escaped the last farewells, telling Augusta to make his excuses and say ‘he had a little gout’. Augusta, on whom the burden of Royal’s slow and cumbersome tour of scenes past and present had rested, wrote crisply, ‘I rather think it was nonsense not to see her again.’
Shortly before Royal departed, Sophia wrote to her niece Victoria excusing her lack of letters. ‘Since my sisters have been in town, my mornings have been so occupied and so many interruptions occurring.’ After her sister had left, Sophia conceded to a friend, ‘She certainly tried all she could to show how rejoiced she was to see us again, and naturally kindness begets a return.’ But if Sophia and Royal had not warmed to each other, the Queen Dowager returned to the Continent, glad to have rekindled with others relationships of which she had cherished the memory all these years.
Augusta was ordered to Brighton for a ‘cure’ in the winter months following her sister’s departure, but before she went, William and Adelaide, now in a new-built house at St James’s, Clarence House, came to dine with her at Stable House. ‘We had some of my favourite Irish melodies,’Augusta told her friends the Arrans, ‘simple ballads which we like better than anything else, and then I played to amuse William every Paddy tune I could think of – O’Carrol – O’Rafferty – O’Casey, all his delights.’
That December it grew dark in St James’s Palace by half-past three. ‘Dear William has just been with me,’ Augusta wrote again, ‘and pulled down my blinds and had the candles lighted, for he said it was too melancholy.’ At Brighton she lived comfortably in the White House, a house belonging to the King on the Steyne, and, having promised Sir Henry Halford that she would walk, she attempted a quarter of a mile along the sea front with a stick. Days later, she proclaimed triumphantly, ‘I am grown bold, and stomp away with my stick in a most happy independent manner.’ When indoors, she again abided by Sir Henry’s instructions, the physician having charged her ‘on no account to sit in hot rooms.’ Accordingly, she sat in the evening in the light of very few candles.
Augusta remained nearly three months in the Brighton house, determined to persevere and walk sturdily once more. The spectre of Royal, who had effectively lost the use of her lower limbs, may have frightened her into this determined action. Occasionally, melancholy thoughts occurred to the Princess. She regretted Frederick’s death – she had visited him here at Brighton shortly before it – and the loss of another link in the family chain. But she bound up her knee, and in January 1828 she announced she could walk on flat ground as firmly and as fast as ever. ‘When in the streets or on the chain pier’, she added, however, ‘I take my stick for safety’
Later that year Princess Sophia was at Kensington Palace reading a letter from her sister Royal that had just arrived, when a message was brought to her that her correspondent had died on 6 October. The Dowager Queen’s sufferings had been dreadful, Augusta told Ernest, but short. She had spent her Saturday as usual, was indisposed on the Sunday and on the following day: ‘The water rose so much to her chest and occasioned such palpitations at the heart’ that, ‘had her existence been prolonged, it would have been but for her to suffer torture and misery.’
In Ludwigsburg, so Elizabeth heard, the Dowager Queen’s death had aroused strong emotion. Her ‘son’ King Wilhelm had earlier irritated Elizabeth by selling off the china that Royal had painted for his father, but now he redeemed himself by his constant watch, with his family, at his stepmother’s deathbed. And his niece Pauline could not be detached from the side of the Dowager Queen’s dead body for some hours.
Royal herself had written of her hopes to be reunited after death with the daughter whose stillbirth she had never forgotten. Now those two sets of baby clothes that she had brought with her from England, and which had so long lingered among her effects, were sold off with a dress of cloth of gold and other costly possessions dating from more recent times. In England Augusta was consoled by the thought that Royal had been so happy in England the previous year. Sophia agreed, and admitted to Lady Louisa Murray, ‘Her visit last year revived feelings which I do not conceal from you were dormant after an absence of thirty years …’
Augusta was vexed by the behaviour of her brother-in-law the Duke of Gloucester. He had ‘taken it as a heinous offence’ when Robinson, a page of many years’ service, expressed a desire to become a messenger, and had sacked him. Augusta asked Sir William Fremantle, who appointed her brother the King’s household, if Robinson might try out as a King’s page. Mary, she said, had begged her to help.
The Duchess of Gloucester was often very unhappy with her husband’s behaviour, but she had found a spiritual refuge at Bagshot in the flower garden and arboretum she had made with the help of her husband’s agent Mr Edmund Currey and of Mr Toward, her gardener. She would always love Mr Currey, she wrote later, ‘for all the amusement and pleasure he afforded me in first giving me taste and pleasure in my garden and for the country’. The agent had had only one object when he originally undertook the management of Bagshot Park – ‘to make the Duke like it and give him a taste for that place, and prevent him leaving it, as he used to do for shooting before he had game enough at Bagshot Park’. But with Mary’s enthusiastic support the flower garden and arboretum flourished too.
At Frogmore Augusta was apparently fully engaged in charitable works, gardening, farming and playing duets with Lady Mary Taylor. Whether General Spencer still formed part of her life is not known, just as it is not known whether they ever succeeded in marrying. When he died in December 1828 at his estate at Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire, his obituarist wrote: ‘Since the peace [of 1815] Sir Brent Spencer has passed his time in perfect retirement, enjoying the pleasures of a rural life, and the society of a few chosen friends …’ Augusta herself, whether one of Spencer’s ‘few chosen friends’ or not, made no reference to his death.
Meanwhile, others were very concerned about the behaviour of Tommy Garth, now a captain on half-pay aged twenty-eight. Following a year in Paris after Harrow, learning French – and visiting the gaming tables – he had made little of the career in the army offered to him. Despite every kind of assistance, his progress had foundered on his own lack of enthusiasm. By the early 1820s, on the other hand, he was a familiar sight on the Leicestershire hunting fields, and had become a member of the ‘wild Meltonians’ set who hunted round Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire. His first crime was to fall in love with a fellow Meltonian’s wife, Lady Astley. The second was to elope with her in 1826, carrying her off from the London house where she left behind her not only Sir Jacob Astley, her husband, but two tiny children.
Tommy Garth’s elopement with Georgiana Astley, earlier a Miss Dashwood of West Wycombe, was the talk of the town, and his relationship with Princess Sophia was hinted at in caricatures of the night-time escape. Sir Jacob, betrayed, sued his fellow Meltonian for ‘crim con’ damages. (‘Criminal conversation’ was the term then used for adultery in legal proceedings.) But Asdey was allotted a shilling after Garth brought counterclaims that Asdey was no stranger to prostitutes and girls of the town in London and Leicestershire. Astley’s petition for divorce failed, too, as the supplicant needed ‘clean hands’, and the evidence brought by Garth’s lawyers in the civil suit proved they were filthy. So Garth and Georgiana, with great effrontery, lived a sort of twilight existence together in a series of inns and lodgings. Georgiana’s husband asked her to return to him, but she refused. Tommy and she were apparently oddly happy.
So was Princess Sophia in the late summer of 1828 when she wrote tranquilly to her niece Victoria: ‘Has Polly learnt any new words?’ Princess Victoria’s parrot had gone with her to Tunbridge Wells and Ramsgate. Sophia apologized for not writing earlier, and thanked her nine-year-old niece for her well-written letter. ‘I have walked very often all around the gravel walks under your windows,’ wrote Aunt Sophia on 29 September at the palace in Kensington Gardens. ‘In looking up at your windows how I missed that little voice which always makes me cheerful, as it gives me the delight of feeling that my dear Vicky is near me.’
Then Tommy’s past, or rather his birth, caught up with him, indeed with everyone concerned. General Garth, thinking himself in 1828 on the point of death, summoned his ‘protégé’ and showed him an iron box containing letters and documents relating to his birth, which Tommy took away with him to study. The General recovered, but his son did not give the documents back. On the point of going to prison for debt the following spring, he was ‘compelled to address the illustrious lady’, he recorded later, by whom he meant Princess Sophia, for assistance. Sir Herbert Taylor, private secretary to King George IV as he had been to George III, and the Duke of York before him, was then entrusted with the delicate business of engaging young Garth to deposit at a bank the box of documents he had received from the General. In return he would receive an annuity of £3,000, and the payment of his debts. But all parties played unfair, and Sir Herbert took the box from the bank, while young Garth publicized his wrongs in an affidavit declaring robbery.
Meanwhile, the Duke of Cumberland came over to England as a guest of his brother the King this spring – and one determined to oppose the Duke of Wellington’s cowardly volte-face, as he saw it, in sponsoring a bill for Catholic Emancipation shortly after becoming Prime Minister. Among allegations levelled against the Duke by those who favoured the bill were the old – false but potent – claims of his incestuous relationship with his sister Princess Sophia. These intensified with newspaper hints at Captain Garth’s doubly royal parentage. It all made for a harrowing year for Sophia. And when General Garth – Captain Garth’s real father – died in November 1829, and left the bulk of his estate to his nephew Captain Thomas Garth RN, in the belief that Tommy Garth was provided for, it was the harbinger of a further trail of misfortunes. But for the moment Tommy Garth played the part of chief mourner for his protector – and continued to stave off attacks from Sir Jacob Astley, who still, despite all, wanted his Georgiana back.
While Sir Herbert Taylor defended Princess Sophia’s tarnished name against all comers, Sophia herself made no public or known private response to the allegations and rumours about the birth of Tommy Garth, but continued her correspondence with her niece in the next-door apartments at Kensington Palace. Ten-year-old Victoria announced that August from her uncle Leopold’s Surrey home, ‘Claremont is in high beauty now. I have been this morning sitting in the flower-garden.’ Later in the summer she wrote from Broadstairs, enquiring after her aunt’s dog. ‘How is poor little Cosmo? I hope that he does not whine any more.’ The younger Princess spoke proudly of her own dog: ‘Fanny comes every morning to the breakfast table to get some biscuits; and Shrewsbury [the Duchess of Kent’s new horse] comes close to the door in the morning to be fed with carrots.’
Victoria thanked her aunt for offering to make a dress for her – ‘I shall like the pattern very much,’ she told her – and announced that Sir John Conroy’s daughter Victoire was tormented by a boil. Aunt Sophia responded with thanks for Victoria’s letters: ‘I know my dear little friend is not very fond of letter writing, therefore I am doubly pleased with your so kindly devoting so much time to me.’ And she asked for news of Victoria’s drawing and singing with Mama. ‘Cosmo I must speak for,’ she reported in October 1829; ‘he is very well now’ – he had fallen from a window ledge – ‘and fancies himself fond of me, but I think him a little of a rogue … he makes up to his mistress, as within the last few days we have had fires, and he enjoys lying on the rug before the fire, and follows me for that purpose.’
Earlier in the year George IV, lying in bed and increasingly gout-ridden at Royal Lodge, his mansion in Windsor Great Park, had been incensed that his sister Sophia should have such trouble brought upon her by these public airings of her past. At one point, he wanted to sack both Garths – the elderly General and his half-pay Captain son – from the army. Most of the time, however, he plotted peaceably with Jeffry Wyatville to ‘Gothicize’ still further the medieval fastness of Windsor Castle. But this brother, who meant more than anyone to the princesses, and whose appearance in their lives had always represented light and hope, was dying. George IV was so puffed up with dropsy, wrote the Duchess of Gloucester in dismay, that he resembled a feather counterpane. He rallied, but he was mortally ill. Days before he died, the King was ‘as clear, as communicative, as agreeable, nay as facetious as he ever had been’, his physician and man of business Sir William Knighton wrote. Wellington visited the King, and was ‘astonished at his strength, both of body and mind’. On 26 June 1830 George IV summoned Knighton at three in the morning, after calling out, ‘Sir Henry, Sir Henry! Fetch him – this is death!’ After Halford – and Knighton – duly appeared, the King’s ‘lips grew livid, and he dropped his head on the page’s shoulder’. At 3.15 a.m., confirming his prophecy, came death.
The Times asserted on 16 July, ‘There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased King.’ But the newspaper forgot the sisters of George IV. One and all they were stricken by the death of a brother who had ever been kind to them, and especially kind when they were in deep distress. He had raised their spirits with letters and presents and jewellery, with his effulgent regard, with his confident promises. Now the glow of George IV’s personality was extinguished, and with his death the princesses had virtually lost a third parent. Bluff, friendly William was a very different sort of brother, and would be a very different kind of king.