Princesses (54 page)

Princess
Charlotte
had not been entirely enthusiastic about her aunt's marriage. The new Duchess of Gloucester gave tit for tat. ‘Our visit to Claremont went off very well,' Mary wrote on 29 September 1816, ‘considering that we went to see two people completely engrossed with each other … I doubt that the sort of
life
they are now leading can last, but I wish it may with all my
heart.'
Mary had very little conversation with Charlotte, who had once confided in her. ‘She really appears … to have no eyes or thoughts but for the Prince of Coburg and he is much in the same
state.'
Charlotte herself admitted with delight, a month after marriage, that her ‘reasonable marriage' had flowered into a love match.

Her own husband, averred the Duchess, was ‘all affection and kindness and has no
object
but my happiness'. She wrote of ‘a marriage which promises every comfort' and of the Duke's ‘honourable character and excellent
heart.'
And they both thoroughly enjoyed the marriage feast that her sister Princess Elizabeth contrived in their honour at her cottage at Old
Windsor
– a splendid fête, with rustic emblems and trophies of plenty and fruitfulness jostling ‘pan pipes twisted with tassels', trumpets, fifes and drums, painted on a blue background. The guests danced in a tent, and were offered a ‘sandwich
supper',
and Elizabeth told Mrs Baynes that, if she had let her imagination have fair play, there would have been turtle-doves in pairs and cupids in every corner.

The new Duchess endorsed the work of the Duke's steward, Mr Edmund Currey, who had done much recently to make the estate into a first-class shoot. For this Princess Mary was grateful, as she learnt that the Duke had only rarely been at Bagshot before Currey's landscaping of the property, which included ‘wood walks, fine large trees' and a ‘variety of ground that is striking for so small a
park.'
She could see opportunities for thinning here and planting there, she wrote. Gardening, an activity in which Mary had taken little interest till now, was to become her passion, under the tutelage of the personable Mr Currey and with an excellent gardener, Mr Toward. She intended to make a flower garden, once the Duke
and her brother the Prince had settled on which side of the house additions
should
be made, she told Miss Henrietta Finch in October.

The Prince Regent had sent Mr John Nash, the celebrated architect, to survey Bagshot Park and grounds with the plan of making additions. ‘He passed two hours with us yesterday, and will put his ideas on paper for you to approve or disapprove,' Mary wrote to her brother. She had told Mr Nash again and again that he should add only what was necessary ‘from comfort', having no wish to ‘drive any unnecessary expenses upon any of the [government]
Offices.'
Nevertheless, Mary had found on arrival at Bagshot that what the Duke thought necessary for a lady's comfort was very far from her own. ‘You know how many things are required in a lady's apartment,' she wrote to Miss Finch on 4 October 1816, ‘and that never can come into the head of any man, still less one who never was used to live with ladies before he
married me.'

Even before he married, the Duke had been badly off at Bagshot for lodging
rooms
for his staff and even for servants' rooms. All was now to be rationalized and adapted by Mr Nash for the new couple's convenience. According to Princess Mary, the house had only two good rooms, her own and the Duke's. The apartment – and dressing room – that her sister-in-law Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester had occupied when she stayed had recently been greatly ‘injured' by rain, and, as for the Duke's gentlemen, they had to sleep in a garret. Only their long attachment to the Duke made them put up with being lodged among the servants. The basics for the ‘common convenience of a
family'
were not to be found in the house, and she continued to beg the Regent to urge Lord Liverpool to give his consent for their supply.

The Duke, when not out in his newly stocked woods with his gun, or travelling England in pursuit of game elsewhere, had found his comfort till now not at home, but in his sister Princess Sophia Matilda's house in London, or in male society at the numerous London clubs that he belonged to. With a marked liking for institutional life, he felt most strongly about the African Institution, of all the many bodies whose dinners he attended and whose
meetings
he chaired. Promoting the rights of African slaves, he thus found himself in company with Mr William Roscoe of Liverpool, lawyer Mr Henry Brougham and other Radical MPs. Gloucester was here, as in other charitable enterprises, always a generous donor. But it was whispered that he did not always fully follow the arguments that raged around him at Cambridge, at the African Institution or in other committee rooms.

The new Duchess, taking a hand at philanthropy herself, was building a small schoolroom for Bagshot parish which was ‘much wanted'. In case
these activities palled, the new Duchess was going to have ‘a master for landscapes, which', she said, ‘I think will amuse me
very much.'

She and the Duke received morning visits from her mother and sisters, the Regent called from Royal Lodge at Windsor, and Charlotte and Leopold came to stay. But their most frequent guests were Princess Sophia Matilda, with her companion, formerly her governess, Miss Dee, and the guests who came on shooting parties during the autumn. When the Duke was away shooting – often for ten
days
or more at a time – his bride generally visited her mother and sisters at Windsor. Thus she made good her promise that she would continue to play as full a part as possible in Castle life.

Poor health dominated the lives of the Queen and of Mary's sisters at Windsor, where every ailment became a hideous encumbrance. Sophia was now never long free from spasms, although there were days when she could sit up and play at cards. And, mysteriously, there were days when the invalid went out for a hearty ride with her sister Augusta. Mary, visiting from Bagshot, was drawn into this
world
of indisposition and was laid up for several days in November with a very bad chilblain on her foot, reminding her, she wrote to her brother, of another chilblain ‘in the very spot that caused me so much suffering two years
ago.'

The Queen's poor health – her bilious complaints and her sinking spirits – was apparent to all her daughters. On certain anniversaries, like the day on which the
King
fell ill, 25 October, grief
overcame
her. When she received the news of the
death
of her brother Grand Duke Charles, Elizabeth wrote, ‘She was struck so cold … that I was privately anxious.' Years earlier Royal had written of her mother's difficulty in giving vent to the strong emotions that disturbed her, and the years had not
altered
that failing. ‘After all that has passed, one cannot wonder at its being a most painful thing to her to feel that, in acting the part of a truly great and excellent Queen, she was obliged to take a step which for the sake of the country was so extremely painful to herself … if she had not done what she did, the morals of the country were
gone.'
But the Queen gained some pleasure from visiting her granddaughter Charlotte and Prince Leopold at Claremont. Their plans to attend the Lord Mayor's Banquet and to take part in public life met with the Queen's firm approval, and though she tried to dissuade her own daughters from attending Charlotte and Leopold, frailty made her less obdurate in general. Only in one matter was she unbending. She would not quit Windsor, though the King did not register her presence when she made her impassive visits to his northern apartments, for the ‘cure' her doctors implored her to take.

For Princess Mary, marriage was a brave new world. Among other difficulties to contend with, she had to reconcile her loyalty to her brother the Regent with her new duty to her husband. Her dreams, expressed before marriage, of acting as hostess – which she could never do in her spinster state – to her brother at Brighton were with difficulty realized. Although the Gloucesters spent the New Year of 1817 there with the Regent, who was, according to Charlotte, ‘as well with them as
can be',
the Duke's feelings for his cousin remained those of anger and envy. And the Regent did not forget that, throughout his battles with their mutual cousin his wife, the Gloucester family had played an ambiguous part and had never ceased to visit the Princess of Wales till she left England.

When an assassin made an attempt on the life of the Prince Regent early in 1817, the Duchess of Gloucester seized the opportunity to rush to the Castle, where her brother was recovering. Royal wrote from Württemberg warmly, if not knowledgeably, of ‘the spirit of anarchy' abroad in Britain, and praised her brother for cancelling the drawing room – for fear of riots – at which their mother had been due to preside. ‘It would be terrible to have her exposed to any hurry', she wrote of the Queen, ‘at this time of life.' She said of her mother further that ‘at her time of life, she ought to give up having long drawing rooms… Augusta and Eliza might with great propriety do the honours of them at Carlton House or … like our late aunt Princess Amelia they might once a month have their own drawing room, which would help to keep up
trade.'
Royal was referring to the silk merchants, dressmakers and milliners who benefited from orders for the new outfits that were de rigueur for drawing rooms.

Royal herself had no wish to return to England and host any such drawing room, although she was now free to do so. Momentous news had come from Stuttgart in November. Royal's husband, Frederick, King of Württemberg – that great survivor who had twisted and turned his way through the Napoleonic Wars – had died on 30 October 1816. And the Duke of Kent, who had by chance been with his sister when the King expired, would do justice to their mutuál attachment to the last, wrote Royal. Her sisters and brothers were less convinced about that attachment, and considered that the Queen was too proud to admit that she was the victim of domestic violence. Over the years, reports of the King's mishandling his wife had filtered back to England, but, given Württemberg's status as a French vassal state, it had seemed impolitic to raise the issue. Now the matter must be allowed to rest, with the King in his
grave
.

Royal's stepson Wilhelm and his new wife Catherine had also stayed with her to the last – although Catherine was ‘taken in labour as she was
sitting in the next room to the late King when he was
dying.'
(Bewitched by the Grand Duchess of Oldenburg in London, the Hereditary Prince had divorced his wife and married the Russian Princess, who was now expecting their first
child
.) With great firmness of
mind,
hours after the King's
death
and twelve hours after the delivery of her own child, this new Queen of Württemberg wrote to Queen Charlotte ‘to ease her mind' about Royal, Elizabeth told Lady Harcourt.

As Dowager Queen of Württemberg, Royal wrote six months later to Lady Harcourt that, although supported wonderfully by the Almighty throughout ‘the
severe
trial it has pleased him to afflict me with', her heart was ‘too
deeply
wounded' not to mourn constantly her ‘dearest friend' – the dead King. She thought of her husband constantly, led the same sort of life he had been partial to, and employed herself in those things that had given him satisfaction. And this, she found, was ‘in a degree prolonging his existence beyond the grave'. In Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg she had a respected position and could live, on her generous English jointure, an extremely grand and luxurious life. Each year she kept up a sort of summer court at Teinach, the watering place in the Black Forest where she had first gone years before, after the stillbirth of her daughter. This year she wrote of the waters, ‘But although I submit to their prescription, I have little faith in it as nothing can ease a broken heart.' Why would Royal wish to exchange this respectable life of mourning for the daughter's lot in England that would be hers, queen and widow though she was?

The day after her husband died, Royal wrote to Sir John Coxe Hippisley, one of the trustees who had been appointed on her marriage to invest her dowry: ‘I believe that from the day of the King's death, I am entided to the whole interest of my
fortune'
– £80,000 in 1797. For dowager residences she chose apartments in the new Palace at Stuttgart, a set of rooms in the great complex at Ludwigsburg, and the pretty villa, Mon Repos, outside the latter town. It was from Ludwigsburg in August 1817 that she wrote to wish her brother the Regent a happy birthday: ‘I look forward with delight to the moment which will make you a happy
grandfather.'

Princess Charlotte was expecting a baby in November 1817. Even before she was pregnant she had surprised visitors who remembered her rakish teenage habits by the taste she exhibited for domestic life at Claremont. She and Leopold sang, sharing a piano stool. As the pregnancy advanced, they went hand in hand for slow walks in the grounds. Charlotte sat to Mr Thomas Lawrence the fashionable painter, and in the portrait, her happiness outshines even the lavish gold embroidery on her Russian
blue dress. People began to say that she would make – in due course – an excellent queen. Charlotte's old foibles – her impulsiveness, her arbitrary favouritisms and dislikes – were forgotten. And she moved happily about her new home, entertaining family and friends with pleasure. ‘It is not à façon de parler to say that this is Liberty Hall, and that we are only too happy to dispense with form and
ceremony,'
she said contentedly one evening. But that was going too far for one visitor who found the circle they sat in impossibly formal and German, and the conversation deadly.

The weather cleared in September, and the Duchess of Gloucester – and her sister Augusta, who visited – quite lived out of doors at Bagshot and Windsor. On receiving a letter from Lady Harcourt, Augusta wrote that it was a real pleasure to reply to her – ‘but so many people would expect me to correspond with them because my sisters are fond of writing that I give out I cannot bear writing which really is not the case, but the fact is, I love my few friends so very much that I cannot make a hospital of my heart – a phrase I have often made use of to dear Miss Gouldsworthy, who entered perfectly on my feelings upon the
subject…'