Princesses (14 page)

But in June, when Miss Hamilton tried to resign in a letter stressing her delicate constitution, the Queen was as iron: ‘The contents of your letter I am inclined to take as the effect of low spirits and therefore won't indulge you with an entire belief of what you have said …' If her attendant persisted in her opinion, she must inform no one but the Queen, until the latter had gone through the ‘disagreeable' business of finding a ‘proper person' to replace her.

At the Prince of Wales's nineteenth-birthday ball at Windsor in August, which lasted till six in the morning, Miss Hamilton wrote, ‘the Queen, Pss R and her sisters wore different coloured clothes, trimmed with silver and were all very fine', while their brothers and father and others danced in the full Windsor dress uniform. ‘I wish I could convey a proper idea of the very brilliant and magnificent appearance of St George's Hall which was the supper room,' she wrote earlier in the letter. ‘It put me in mind of descriptions in the Tales of the
Genii.'
Without incident the Princess Royal opened the ball with her brother, over 2,000 candles illuminating their progress down St George's Hall, and there were even rumours of an approaching marriage – to none less than the Emperor of Austria – to confirm her adult status after a bold-faced English duchess in Vienna suggested her as a bride to that elderly and widowed sovereign. On His Imperial Majesty's replying with courtesy that he thought the Princess might prefer a younger husband the determined peeress replied, ‘That is nothing, I married to my first husband an old man, and it did very well.'

At chapel on the birthday morning, Miss Hamilton wrote, the gentlemen wore ‘the undress uniform, the ladies, hats – smart polonaises – the hair well dressed, white cloaks, etc – each dressed agreeable to their own taste, except the princesses, who all wore rose colour trimmed with gauze'. Apropos of the Prince of Wales and churchgoing, Miss Hamilton noted demurely that he had taken up shooting and was very fond of it. ‘This morning he was going to set out [for a shooting party] as we went to chapel, he has quite left off attending divine service. On Sunday mornings,' she added pointedly ‘their Majesties and the psses attend both the chapel and
cathedral
[the name by which St George's Chapel was known].' The Prince of Wales did not as yet enjoy independence in Carlton House in fashionable Pall Mall, but he had achieved a level of autonomy, having
his own apartments in town at the Queen's House as well as in the Castle at Windsor.

Meanwhile, Princess Augusta sent to Lady Charlotte Finch at Caldas what her governess described as ‘not only the most gracious, but the most entertaining' two letters she ever received. ‘I have read them over and over again with the greatest pleasure.' She went on to mention ‘a dear little girl here, that is excessively like my sweet Princess Augusta who dances delightfully, she is the cleverest little creature here and I am quite fond of her, I believe you can guess why'. Lady Charlotte encouraged Princess Augusta's new hobby. She was acquiring ‘the different coin of this country to add to your Royal Highness's collection', although she had found no medals. She spoke of the formal dress for little girls in Portugal, and appeared to think of Princess Augusta, whom the first Miss Planta had earlier thought ‘childish' for her age. And indeed, although in duty bound to follow her sister into the world, now that the Princess Royal had made her debut, twelve-year-old Princess Augusta was still fully occupied with her lessons.

In February 1781 she had copied out: ‘No character is more glorious, none more attractive of universal admiration and respect than that of helping those who are in no condition of helping themselves.' And a month later she had written to Miss Hamilton, who was ill, from a schoolroom at St James's Palace, ‘My dear Hamy, I am very sorry that it was not in my power to write to you this morning but I was a-doing my French lesson and I could not leave it off for to write … I looked when we came into the court to see if I could see you at the window but I don't believe there was so much as a fly to be seen. We were very anxious to hear how you was, but nobody could tell. I am sorry that as I am under the same roof as you … I cannot see you.'

But she could also be upon occasion an unruly schoolgirl. ‘Madam,' she wrote to Miss Hamilton, ‘I beg your pardon for what I did to you this morning. I promise you I won't do so any more. I beg you will forgive me and indeed I won't do so again. Indeed I shall be very sorry if you go away from us, for indeed I love you very much. Indeed I won't behave ill to you again. I am very much ashamed of what I did and said this morning, upon my word, and won't do so again.' And she wrote again: ‘Madam, I beg that you will have the goodness to forgive me for all the impertinences I did you. I promise you that I won't do so any more and promise you that I will do everything that you
bid me.'
A small piece of paper bearing the faded inscription ‘Augusta Sophia, Queen's Lodge, Windsor, August 14th 1781' was docketed by Miss Hamilton with the words ‘As a mark of affection,
Princess Augusta Sophia pricked herself with a pin and wrote this in her blood to give Miss Hamilton.'

The King was increasingly caught up in business about the war in America, especially after the news in November 1781 that the British commander-in-chief, Lord Cornwallis, had had to surrender in humiliating circumstances at Yorktown on 19 October to the American forces. The princesses grew up in an atmosphere rarely free of increasingly gloomy discussion about the great struggle overseas. Princess Augusta was nevertheless, under the influence of her father, to become particularly patriotic and fervently attached to the idea of the British soldier as the apogee of all that was valorous.

Prince Frederick in Hanover had been adventuring: ‘I was about one week ago in the mines of the Hartz where we were obliged to go down ladders for above thirteen hundred feet and up again, as for me I did not feel it in the least, but Grenville complained that his wrists ached the next day so terribly he could hardly
stir.'
But nothing could compare with the glamour of Prince William joining the English forces deployed against the American rebels in New York. His sister Royal wrote to him in March 1782: ‘I hope that you do not really think that there is even a possibility of your being forgot at home, for indeed if you have the smallest suspicion of it, you do us all very great injustice, for you are generally spoken of several times in the course of the day.' She wished that she could have seen him skate: ‘I am sure that before the end of the winter you will be able to do it very well.' (As William was not yet adept, the other officers would skate along pulling him on a sledge over the frozen Hudson river, shouting, ‘Hooray for the Prince, hooray for the Prince.') ‘All my brothers and sisters send their love to you. Octavius is very much improved since you have seen him by his change of dress,' she ended.

At home Princesss Augusta's behaviour was still erratic, and she was often repentant. ‘I assure you my dear Hamy', she wrote in the summer of 1782, ‘that it is my most earnest desire to please the King and Queen and you, and that I will be obedient to everything you say and that I will put off childish things from this day forward and for ever more, and that I will always take it for granted that I should never be told anything if it was not for
my good.'

But when the Queen broke the news in 1782 to this younger daughter that she was to appear at the King's Birthday that year, the thirteen-year-old ‘was perfectly silent for some time' from surprise. So the Queen told Lady Charlotte Finch, who was at the seaside at Deal this year – with
Prince Alfred, who had recently been inoculated, and Mrs Cheveley. She added that, from not wishing her daughter to dwell upon her coming debut, she had told her of it only two days before it was to occur.

The Queen recorded that, even so, her daughter – who had not by any means grown out of her childhood shyness – ‘grew more timorous' as the moment of her appearance approached. Public life of any kind and crowds in particular held terrors for this Princess. ‘We are … for our sins… forced of Sunday evenings to walk on the terrace,' she had written two summers before at Windsor. But she ‘went through it very properly', the Queen reported to the royal governess with relief after the Birthday that June; and ‘her behaviour was approved of. The newspapers, she went on, had been very kind to the juvenile debutante, saying that ‘the world admired the elegance of Princess Royal, and not less the modesty of the Royal Augusta'. Princess Augusta may have been formally ‘out', but she was still a child. ‘I am very much obliged to you my dear Hamy,' she wrote in September, ‘for having let me have a fire and assure you that you shall not be mortified by my proving that you did wrong, but I will not only be obedient to you and not meddle with it and not only be obedient about that but about all things which can give you any pleasure.'

Into this picture of domestic tranquillity – barring the Prince of Wales's dissipations in the equerries' room after dinner with his parents, and some debauchery in town – came, unannounced, death. Shortly after Princess Augusta made her debut in London in June 1782, Prince Alfred endeared himself at Deal to – among others – an old bluestocking lady by waving at her when asked to do so. He was at the seaside resort to recover his strength after being inoculated against smallpox. But he did not profit from his bathing. His face and especially his eyelids were still troublesome, with eruptions from his inoculation, and his chest continued
weak
. Nor did a session of horse riding – what his mother termed the ‘four-footed
doctor'
– answer, an activity which Mr Pennell Hawkins the Queen's Surgeon had recommended, disapproving of the child being carried around in Mrs Cheveley's arms. Prince Alfred's chest continued to be a problem on his return from Deal, and the doctors convened at Windsor in August to discuss his case. But it came as a complete shock to the family when they concurred in the opinion that the child could not survive more than a few weeks.

None of the fourteen royal children had ever been in more than passing poor health, or less than an advertisement for the skills of the Hawkins brothers, Mr Pennell and Sir Caesar (a baronet since 1778), who inoculated them and attended them in illness, and of Augustus Brande, the Mecklenburg apothecary who had set up shop at Kew. At one point when the
Queen sent to her brother Charles a medical book that contained, she wrote, ‘the manner in which they care for children here from the moment of their birth', she boasted, ‘Follow our method a little, and you will find that your children will become strong as anything.'

After prolonged bouts of fever, Prince Alfred – not yet two – died at Lower Lodge, Windsor in late August, despite the dedicated nursing of Lady Charlotte and Mrs Cheveley. They, first among others, received mourning lockets of pearl and amethyst containing curls of the dead boy's light gold hair. The household did not, however, go into mourning, as it was not prescribed in the case of deaths of children under the age of seven. Alfred's small body was buried with full honours at Westminster Abbey beside those of larger men of greater note, and his death affected the whole household. The Queen ‘cried vastly at first', Lady Charlotte reported, ‘and … though very reasonable' – she dwelt on her good fortune in having thirteen healthy children – was ‘very much hurt by her loss and the
King also.'
The King, who was a blunt man, found his own comfort. He said that if it had been three-year-old Octavius who had died, he would have died too.

Princess Augusta had another cross to bear later this year. In November she wrote on a piece of paper for Miss Hamilton:

‘Question: Do you think I have behaved well this summer? Ans: (Pretty well upon the whole.)' By your saying pretty well, I perceive you mean not quite yet what you could wish for. Therefore I hope that at the end of next winter when I ask you the same question, you will be able to answer ‘Yes,' that I may have the pleasure of seeing that I have made you happy and improved myself, which I always
mean to
do.

But there was to be no such appraisal the following November, for six days after Augusta penned her memorandum Miss Hamilton departed, to live with her friends in London. Leave had at last been granted by the Queen for her resignation, and Miss Hamilton, like Miss Dacres before her, passed quietly out of the secluded circle within which the princesses existed.

Six months later, however, deeply agitated, Miss Hamilton made her way to the Queen's House, seeking confirmation of a hideous rumour. Miss Planta wrote from Kew on 5 May 1783 to confirm the truth of what she had heard. ‘My heart bleeds for the King and Queen for indeed you see in them the resigned Christian in the afflicted parent,' wrote the English teacher. ‘I need not say more to you, who were witness to the melancholy event which happened not many months ago [Prince Alfred's death]. I believe we shall remain here till the last duty is paid to the dear departed
angel.'

Out of the blue at Windsor a few days earlier, from being his usual ebullient self, Prince Octavius had sickened over a period of less than forty-eight hours, and, despite the frantic attentions of all the royal doctors, had died at Kew at 8.40 in the evening of 3 May. Although he had been inoculated with Sophia weeks earlier, smallpox had had nothing to do with his death. Mrs Cheveley, who had nursed him as she had nursed Alfred, was unfortunately firm on the point. So rumours that he was a victim of his Gotha blood, and that both he and Alfred had succumbed to the ‘family disease' – sometimes named as scrofula, and sometimes as ‘a weakness in the lungs', or tuberculosis – circulated. Whatever the cause of the child's death, the King was quite undone by it. As Princess Augusta was later to recall, the next day her father passed through a room at Windsor, where the artist Gainsborough was putting the finishing touches to portraits of the royal family. The King sent a message to beg the artist to desist, but, on hearing that the work on which he was engaged was the portrait of Prince Octavius, allowed him to continue.