Princesses (7 page)

The brooding lawmaker had other family matters to attend to. His mother, who had been suffering from agonizing throat pains, had been much affected by the initial reports of her son Gloucester's imminent death abroad and by the family strife over her other son Cumberland's marriage. By the end of November 1771, her situation had deteriorated – ‘her speech grows less intelligible, she hourly emaciates, and her dreadful faintings towards night must soon put an end to a situation that it is almost too cruel to wish
to see',
the King reported. No one thought she would last a fortnight. Her malady was now described as ‘a cancer in her mouth and risings of the
viscera.'

But the redoubtable Dowager Princess lived on and on beyond the prescribed fortnight. ‘Nothing ever equalled her resolution,' wrote Horace Walpole. ‘She took the air till within four or five days of her death, and never indicated having the least idea of her danger, even to the Princess of Brunswick [her daughter], though she had sent for her.' Ghastly with illness, the old Saxe-Gotha Princess dressed and received her son the King and the Queen in a travesty of their usual evening ritual on the last night of her life, Friday, 7 February 1772. She ‘kept them four hours in indifferent conversation, though almost inarticulate herself, said nothing on her situation, took no leave of them – and expired at six in the morning without a
groan.'
The Princess was unpopular to the last: her coffin was hissed and booed on its way to its resting-place in the royal chapel of Henry VII in Westminster Abbey. Meanwhile, Prince William, who was tender hearted, asked Miss Planta to read him the funeral service, and ‘wept
bitterly.'

There was more to come. On the day before the Dowager Princess died, Horace Walpole had written to his friend Horace Mann, ‘No more news yet from Denmark, which is extraordinary, but one should think therefore that nothing tragic has happened, or Mr Keith [the English Minister in Copenhagen] would have dispatched messengers faster. You may imagine the impatience of everyone to hear more of this strange
revolution
…'

Whether the Dowager Princess was apprised or unapprised of her daughter Caroline's misadventures, the story that arrived in London at the end of January 1772 gripped Society and horrified the King. Queen Caroline of Denmark, the royal princesses' aunt who had married the King of that country two days after the Princess Royal's birth, had been lying in
bed
in the early morning on 17 January, after a masked ball that she and the King had given. Hearing a commotion below, she believed that it was the servants clearing up, and called for quiet.

It was, in fact, the King's stepmother, the Dowager Queen Juliana, and her son Prince Frederick, confronting the King with evidence of the Queen's adultery with Count Struensee, the Prime Minister. The King, whose mind was weak but affectionate, resisted for a time their demand that he sign a death warrant for his favourite Minister and an order for his wife's imprisonment. But they persisted. Struensee had been seized earlier as he left the ball. And now into the Queen of Denmark's bedchamber sprang armed guards, who bore her off to the fortress of Kronborg.

The English Minister at Copenhagen, Sir Robert Murray Keith, was the hero of the hour in England when it became known there that he had threatened that gunboats would be trained on the offending capital if the Queen was not released. But for the King – and in due course for his daughters – when Keith's despatch reached him, this was a defining hour. For two months his sister the Hereditary Princess of Brunswick had poured into his ear complaints of her husband's adultery and contemptuous treatment of her. Now his sister Caroline had been, as he saw it, ‘perverted by a cruel and contemptible court'. When she was released from Kronborg, he sent her to live in the city of Zell in his Electorate of Hanover, where his brother-in-law Ernest was governor, and where their sister Brunswick became a constant visitor. There he hoped that ‘by mildness' Caroline would be ‘brought back to the amiable character' she had previously possessed.

King George III never forgot his sisters' fates in foreign Courts beyond his control, and it weighed heavily with him that he had promoted the matches. This would prey on his mind with fatal consequences when his own daughters came of an age to marry. His brother the Duke of Gloucester was to hold that the King believed his daughters did not wish to settle out of England. Meanwhile his sisters, who had never been close, forged an agreeable friendship on a foundation of religion and tears. And Lady Mary Coke summed it up – the Queen of Denmark had exposed herself, so too had the Duke of Cumberland with his disgraceful marriage, the Princess of Wales had an ‘incurable distemper', and the Duke of
Gloucester was, ‘with one foot in the grave, lavishing his poor remains of life in pursuit of his intrigues with Madame de Grovestein. This is a picture full of
shades.'
It was an evil hour for the English royal family, and was felt to be so by no one more than the King.

The reputation of the monarchy, however, was even more severely tarnished when the King drove through his ill-considered Royal Marriages Act at the end of March 1772 with the reluctant assistance of his Prime Minister, Lord North. The temper in the House of Commons was inflamed. The MPs did not hesitate to speak ill of every member of the royal family, and the recently deceased Princess of Wales came in for a great deal of abuse.

Furthermore, on 16 September, just over a year after the Duke of Cumberland had broken the unwelcome news of his marriage to the King at Richmond, another storm broke. The Duke of Gloucester told the King that he too was married – had been married, in fact, since 1766, secretly but perfectly legally. The ceremony had taken place days before his niece the Princess Royal's birth.

All through the brouhaha about their brother Cumberland's marriage, it transpired, Gloucester had played a false part. Lady Charlotte Finch told Lady Mary Coke at Kew that she thought the Duke of Gloucester very ungrateful to the King. (Coke, with more important things on her mind, decided at the drawing room on 22 September 1772 that Princess Elizabeth was now ‘much the
prettiest',
when the three princesses saw company in the old drawing room.) And the reason for divulging this information now? The Duchess of Gloucester, as Lady Waldegrave was revealed to be, was expecting their child in May of the following year.

The King turned on his once favourite brother and not only barred him from Court, declaring that, as with the Cumberlands, anyone who visited the Gloucesters would not be welcome at Court, but instigated a humiliating and vindictive investigation by the Privy Council into the validity of his brother's marriage. His supposed object was that there should be no doubts about the child's legitimacy. In the meantime, his own wife, Queen Charlotte, appeared in satin and ermine at the January drawing rooms in 1773 until a week before she gave birth on the 27th of that month to their sixth son and ninth child, Augustus. The Queen, naturally stoic, rarely had sympathy for the woes of pregnant women, but even she might have felt a pang for the Duchess of Gloucester concerning the ordeal that now awaited her.

The Privy Council hearing took place days before the Duchess was to give birth, and she was forced to appear to defend the marriage, despite her
condition. A flurry of depositions later, the King conceded on 27 May that the marriage had been valid after the Privy Council registered it as such, and the child born two days later – Sophia Matilda of Gloucester – at the Duke's house in Upper Grosvenor Street was duly given the title of princess. Any sympathy the Queen might have felt for her sister-in-law was no doubt extinguished when the Gloucesters summoned members of the Opposition to attend the birth.

The unchivalrous Privy Council enquiry had been most unfortunate, not least for its author. It earned the King the hatred of Horace Walpole, fond uncle of the Duchess of Gloucester, who had earlier been well disposed towards him. Walpole took revenge on the King in his later
writings
on the Court of King George III. As for Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester, her mother wrote that she seemed to smile at all the world to make up for being unwanted. But Horace Walpole was less enthusiastic about what he called the ‘royalty of my niece and
nieceling.'
Asked by a lady at Court if he had seen the infant and was she not very pretty, he replied curtly ‘that he had no idea'. All he knew was that she was very red.

Following the example of the Cumberlands, the Gloucesters left England with their baby daughter and, as Lady Mary Coke observed in December 1773, ‘I wonder after having made such disgraceful marriages that they cannot stay at home, as they certainly do nothing but expose themselves when they come abroad.' Both couples spent their time running from Continental Court to Court to establish whether, if their own King would not receive them, anyone else's would. Meanwhile, the King and Queen and family were isolated not only from the London Society that he shunned, but from the other members of the royal family. As a result, and because the King and Queen did not encourage their daughters to make friends with other children, dreading ‘party', the princesses' youth was spent almost exclusively with each other, their younger brothers and their attendants.

The Queen had written to her brother Charles in March 1772, ‘We have changed our home this summer. We exchange Richmond for Kew, our chez nous will be better and the solitude greater
than ever.'
With the Princess Dowager's death, her summer residence at Kew – the White House, or Kew House – became available to the King and Queen. While the building in Kew Gardens could accommodate only the royal parents, their daughters and a skeleton household, the princesses could at least wave to their elder brothers in the Prince of Wales's House opposite, whose northern windows gave on to the Thames. Should they so choose, the princesses could walk
from the gardens of Kew House into the back of Prince William's House, which fronted Kew Green. Following Prince Ernest's birth in 1771, Prince Augustus and then Prince Adolphus were born in 1773 and 1774. These ‘younger princes', as they were known, acquired in due course their own house – known, imaginatively, as Prince Ernest's House, at the top of the Green, close to Lady Charlotte Finch's house.

In other houses on Kew Green, in Kew Village, by Kew Bridge and by the ferry over to Brentford the rest of the royal household was disposed. They might not be perfectly housed, but the royal family had left Richmond Lodge, which it had long outgrown, for good, and in due course it was demolished. Kew became a full-blown royal campus, which the royal children rarely left during the summer months, where servants intrigued against each other, and where tradesmen in the village that had grown up around the church on the Green vied for preferment.

The two younger princesses – Augusta and Elizabeth – and their brother Ernest enjoyed a rare outing from Kew at the end of June 1773, when they were four, three and two. They were despatched ‘in great state' to visit their great-aunt Amelia, daughter of King George II, at her villa at Gunnersbury outside London – one of the few relations whom they were allowed to meet. ‘They were all dressed in the clothes they had for the King's birthday and the two princesses had a great many diamonds. They came in a coach of the Queen's,' reported Lady Mary Coke,

with six long-tailed horses, four footmen, and a great many guards. The Princess had the whole apartment above stairs open for them to play in, and a long table in the great room covered with all sorts of fruit, biscuits, etc of which they ate very heartily. There was also music for Prince Ernest who, though only two years of age, has a fondness for it very extraordinary in one of that age. The moment he heard it he danced about the room so ridiculously as made everybody laugh: then laughed so excessively himself as very much diverted the Princesses! They stayed two hours without tiring HRH or themselves, and said they were
sorry to go
.

Their days were rarely so exciting.

In the autumn of 1774 a domestic fracas threatened the peaceful campus, and the relationship between the Queen and Lady Charlotte soured. The health of the princesses' sub-governess, Mrs Cotesworth, finally failed, and she left royal employ. While searching for a replacement, Lady Charlotte Finch requested that she should herself devote fewer hours to the royal children. The Queen, believing the trouble with Mrs Cotesworth had been exacerbated by Lady Charlotte's increasingly skimpy attendance on the royal
children, wanted her instead to devote more hours to her charges. ‘I am fully convinced', wrote the Queen, ‘that besides the dependence you can have upon those that are there for a constant confinement' – the sub-governors and sub-governesses ‘lived in' – ‘your presence as the first not only will encourage them in theirs, but will make them look upon it as a less confinement. This I swear by experience for though with my sons Mr Smelt [the princes' sub-governor] is to be depended upon, yet Lord Holderness's presence in the house [the Prince of Wales's House] for so many hours is the only and essential thing that prevents those under him from
repining.'

Lady Charlotte's reply – or at least her draft on 31 October 1774 – was magnificent; not for nothing had she grown up at the Court of King George II. ‘The attendance I have hitherto given has been regularly a double daily attendance of two and oftener three hours in the morning and from before seven in the evening till dismissed by your Majesty, besides numberless occasional and additional attendances.' She, besides, ever made her own concerns ‘except when of a particular or melancholy nature, in which I shall ever acknowledge the indulgence I have met with from both your Majesties' give way to the duties of her place, ‘as everything belonging to me has experienced'.

And now as she advanced more in years and very much declined in spirits, Lady Charlotte wrote: