Princesses (43 page)

‘Dear Lord E, how I love him,' Amelia wrote of Lord Euston, Charles Fitzroy's uncle, who had been let into their secret plans:

Do you think he could settle how to be called in church, or get a licence, and when I am next in town, I could manage it. With a licence I might, for I might go to Dumergue [the royal dentist] with Mrs Tant Mieux [Mrs Villiers] and then meet you and go to Chapel St, where, with a clergyman
and licence we might be married. That would be the best of any plan, I think – and if
witnesses
were necessary, and Tant Mieux did not like to be one, Lord E, I am sure, would, or any of your mother's old
servants.

Although Fitzroy seems from Amelia's side of the correspondence to have played a supine part in the relationship, he dared much in openly accepting the affections of one of the King's daughters. And he sometimes showed himself as rash as his lover. When one of
Princess
Amelia's ladies, Lady Georgiana Buckley, tried to alert the King to his daughter's romance, which was clear to all with eyes to see it, Fitzroy said he would resign if ‘those
devils',
the Buckleys stayed. But the
Queen
did not dismiss the offender for many months, until Lady Georgiana's
‘flippant'
talk about the royal family provided an excuse. The misfortune, Princess Sophia said, was that, when ‘all does not
swim for
them', Princess Amelia and Fitzroy lost their heads and acted on the impulse of the moment. But they never did put into effect their scheme of marriage by special licence or otherwise.

In part, the matter of witnesses was a difficulty. Unless Amelia gave notice
of her
intention to marry to the Privy Council, any witnesses to any marriage she contracted, the clergyman who officiated and possibly Fitzroy as well would be subject to the strange penalties of ‘praemunire' with which the Royal Marriages Act threatened those participating in an unlawful marriage. Supposedly they would be stripped of all their possessions. In practice, as had happened in relation to the marriage of Amelia's brother Augustus to Lady Augusta Murray fifteen years before, all involved would be disgraced, and the marriage declared null and void.

The Princess nevertheless wrote eagerly of her future as Fitzroy's wife. Where she could, Amelia made purchases towards the married
life
she envisaged, commissioning silver to be engraved with their initials intertwined, buying furniture inappropriate to her present circumstances but to be installed one day at Sholebrook Lodge, Fitzroy's house in Northamptonshire. ‘Promise our bedrooom and your
dressing
room
may be quite close for I shall be in and out all the time we are dressing.'

Passionate and single-minded, Amelia created in her mind and in her letters a world of ‘ifs' and ‘one days'. Attempting intimacy everywhere while true intimacy was denied them, she sought by her letters to create a union of ‘hearts' where marriage there was none. ‘For years have I considered myself his lawful wife,' she wrote of Fitzroy, ‘without ever enjoying my
rights.'
And she declared: ‘No two ever loved or were so tried as we, and instead of separating us … it has bound us tighter and more sacredly together… I can never help praying and hoping a time yet may come when
the Almighty may bless and join us in persons, as we are in
hearts,
ever
inseparable.'

In other uninhibited letters to Fitzroy Amelia went into Chaucerian detail, recalling the pleasure of the hours of intimacy they snatched together. And she revelled in their every encounter: ‘Oh God I am almost mad for you, my blessed and most beloved Charles. You are more dear to me and mine than ever today … Oh God, that dear soft face, that blessed sweet
breath …'
More often, prevented from enjoying such ‘ecstasy', she wrote of what she
longed
for: ‘I
should
like to cuddle to you … and then talk over everything
unpleasant

And again, and poignantly, she wrote without shame and in detail about her
womb
and other sexual organs which she feared were diseased, and would leave her unable to bear Charles's children: ‘Don't be angry or shocked, but do you think my spot being out is likely to prevent my having children if I was married to you? And what is its being out owing to? I ask you
anything.
I say anything to you, so don't be angry. But if you are, pray tell me. I should hate to disgust you, you dear, dear soul… Don't be angry, but from all I have suffered in those parts, I have often thought and dreaded having a cancer in my womb.' She asked, ‘Could you not, my darling, consult any good surgeon and say it was a relation in the country who had been ill?' He could tell the surgeon this fictitious relation's husband was ‘uneasy', or suspicious, so that Fitzroy could not ‘betray the
name.'

All the time she was busy, thinking up how they could next meet. ‘You cannot be more anxious, my blessed darling,' she insisted, writing of their mutual wish to meet, ‘than I am for it. I own I think it will be safer when you leave the dear [the King]. However, you had perhaps go home first… then I shall be sure of Mama's being in her room with the dear …' She had another idea later in the letter. Could Fitzroy somehow get ‘the key [hanging] by St George's Hall', she asked. ‘Is it practicable?' Then he could explore ‘those little rooms one day, when we are perhaps at breakfast. Try the back staircase and where it
leads to.'
They rode next to each other when they could in the royal cavalcade, and they touched feet or knees or reached for each other's hands under the card table in the royal drawing room. The rest of the time, Fitzroy was more often than not out riding with the King, or playing backgammon with him in his northern apartments in the Castle. Amelia wrote in one hurried note, ‘… I am just returned from walking on the Terrace … I walked three times under the window where you were playing at backgammon, and I think you may guess what I felt and longed for.'

Alone in her room, with her pen ever ready to confide her thoughts, Amelia reflected deeply on her relationship with Charles. She reasoned that it would have been that of husband and wife, but for their father's ban, and so in the eyes of God it was such. ‘I wish you had known no other woman but me and yet so far being preferred to all by you after, that, I think, insures its lasting more than anything.' She declared on another occasion, ‘I hate your
speaking
to a soul but me. It robs me of my
right,
my only right. How could you say I had not wore your watch lately? How little you must observe me, as you must know I never go without it, and so particular am I that, unless forced to be gewgawed, I never wear but what you
give me.'

Between her bouts of letter writing Amelia was being treated for an acute
pain
in her side which caused her to suffer this spring of 1809. ‘By God, if ever I lost an atom of your
kindness,
affection and good opinion,' she said, hoping to bind Fitzroy to her, ‘may some charitable being destroy me, for what a wretch I should be.' But, under the weight of her
suffering,
her charitable feelings towards some of her family declined – noticeably towards her mother and her sister Elizabeth, whom she called ‘Fatima', no doubt in allusion to her size. For her father, however, Amelia retained an affection and sympathy which
nothing eroded,
although he was the cause of her unhappiness over not marrying Fitzroy. And this double vexation, that his
life
stood in the way of her marriage, for which she longed, that his
death
which she dreaded would allow her wish, preyed on her mind.

‘Why is he so tried?' Sophia asked, after the eye surgeon Phipps had put leeches on the King's blind inflamed eyes without result. ‘Dark and unknown indeed are the ways of
providence.'
With the help of his secretary, General Taylor, the King dealt reliably enough with his official correspondence, although it was a laborious process. In his private affairs he became easily agitated. ‘He cannot find his things without
assistance,'
Princess Sophia explained to her father's master of music Sir William Parsons, and he trusted only one servant to arrange his property. Princess Sophia, that partisan of her father, in April 1809 thought it was anxiety preying upon her sister Amelia's mind that caused her to appear so ill. ‘She looks wretched,' she noted, ‘and just a
skeleton.'
And she wondered that her mother and elder sisters Elizabeth and Augusta should ‘think so lightly of dear Amelia's
illness.'

The Villierses persuaded Amelia to seek advice for the troublesome pain in her side from a Quaker doctor they favoured at Staines, Dr Robert Pope. A cough plagued her. ‘I go out in the garden,' she wrote in May, ‘but I am tired of self and
believe
I never shall
recover.'
She told her brother the Prince of Wales, ‘None but your dear self know what human feelings are,
none of my family do but you, I like to think we resemble each other.' Though twenty-one years apart, he and she equally felt ‘to their full extent the blessings of love and friendship,' she wrote, referring to his relationship with Mrs Fitzherbert. He could therefore judge what she must feel, ‘deprived
as I
am of the enjoyment of
either.'
For now in this illness Amelia's relationship with Fitzroy had been nearly extinguished. She was not well enough to go to chapel, or downstairs, or out riding. Those
meeting
places on which she had so depended were one by one excluded. A favourite poem of Amelia's had been:

Unthinking, idle, wild and young,
I laughed and danced and talked and sung;
And, proud of
health,
of freedom vain,
Dreamed not of sorrow, care or pain …

The Princess of Wales had once supposedly detected one of Amelia's ladies leaving a note in a hedge when out for a walk during a fête at Frogmore. On plucking it from the hedge, before General Fitzroy could come upon it, the Princess – and her companion the Duchess of York – found marked on it the Roman numeral XII. According to the tale, the Princess put the note back where she found it, then kept Amelia in conversation till past midnight that evening, so that she could not keep the meeting.

The days of unthinking idleness and assignations were over. Sorrow, care and pain were from now on the Princess's lot, as she submitted to different doctors' prescriptions for what was then known as consumption, now as tuberculosis. But she managed her illness with courage. First she summoned Mrs Williams, who had years before been her wet-nurse, to be her companion at Windsor when the others went to town for the Birthday. Mrs Williams was her nurse when Dr Pope ordered a seton, or silk cord supposedly efficacious as a drainage device, to be drawn
through
a fold of skin on Amelia's chest. Then, in midrjuly, again on the orders of Dr Pope – ‘No medicine having in any way removed the pain in her side' – another seton was introduced into that troublesome area. Four days later Princess Elizabeth, though
regretting
her sister Amelia's delicate health, was writing of her ‘perfect
cure'
as being sure, albeit a considerable way off. But she was overly optimistic.

Amelia was too weak – following the insertion of this seton into her side – to attend a housewarming at her sister Elizabeth's cottage to celebrate the Prince's birthday in August. But a few days later, still determinedly following Pope's advice, she wrote
to ask
her father to allow her, with Princess Mary as her companion, to go to Weymouth for a ‘change of
air'
–a formidable journey for someone in her state of health. She told the King that the royal doctor Sir Francis Millman concurred with Pope's view that ‘there was great tenderness
remaining'
in her lungs, which accordingly needed strengthening with warm baths and the mild air of Weymouth – and even with sailing.

The King consented, and expressed himself as desperately sorry that he could not, on
account
of his eyes and public affairs, go with her. Amelia departed, not neglecting to write a spirited new will before she went, leaving all, as usual, to her Charles: ‘Nothing but the cruel situation I am placed in of being daughter to the King, and the laws made by the King respecting the marriages of the Royal Family, prevents my being married to him, which I consider I am in my heart and which vow and sole object has been my comfort and guide these last ten years and can end but with my life.'

Of her sister's fateful journey to Weymouth, Princess Mary wrote, ‘Her suffering was such that it was impossible for her hardly to speak.' Nevertheless, Amelia did all she could to keep up the spirits of Princess Mary and their lady, Lady George Murray, ‘assuring us whenever she could, she felt
better.'
Princess Augusta wrote of her sister on another occasion: ‘I never saw so good a disposition, so thoughtful and considerate to those about her, so afraid to fatigue them by their sitting up with her, I never saw anybody more careful to disguise her sufferings, for fear of vexing others; and truly it is most vexing to see her so long in such a sad state of health.'

Amelia's health was becoming more than vexing. She wrote to her wet-nurse Mrs Williams, some days before setting out for Weymouth, that she had given up calomel. (She called only for ‘salts or lavender
water'
when the shooting pain in her side was at its worst, Mary told the King from the bathing resort.) And the silk setons, at Pope's direction, were to be changed for india rubber the following day. ‘I feel very nervous as the hour [of departure] approaches and yet I must
hide it.'

Amelia felt secure in her confidences to Mrs Williams, as did Mary when she wrote to her own wet-nurse Mrs Adams, or Elizabeth to Miss Compton. The princesses' correspondence with Lady Charlotte Finch dried up, as the royal governess was ill and old for some years before dying in 1813. But the favourite confidante of all the sisters – Lady Harcourt – remained a faithful correspondent, even after she left Nuneham on her husband's death in 1809. Others to whom the princesses wrote, known for a shorter time, were to prove less trustworthy.