Princesses (72 page)

News was sparse in England. Word of battles and of the killed or wounded came slowly, and Aunt Gloucester's sleep was disturbed by the anxiety she felt on her nephew's behalf. A month later, following news from George of Russian counter-attacks, she told the Duchess of Cambridge, ‘I am still in a shake with thinking what danger he was in.' But, responding to the news that her nephew meditated coming home, Mary added: ‘I feel sure, without it is necessary, George never could think of doing so at such a moment.' But George, exhausted, left the scene of war following the battle of Inkerman on 5 November and rested in a hospital ship, the
Retribution,
off Balaclava. Even there he was not left undisturbed, and had to retreat, after a thunderbolt hit the ship, to Constantinople to convalesce.

‘I should be miserable if his health obliged him to come home,' Queen Victoria told her aunt Mary, as the latter informed George's mother the Duchess of Cambridge in December. The Queen expressed the hope that her cousin had gone back to his post, and, as if to deny the possibility of his return to England, reported to Aunt Gloucester that she was at
work
making the Duke a comforter, to send
out to him.
But the Duke was homeward bound, regardless of his female relations'views. ‘You can not be more annoyed or more miserable [than I] at George having asked to come home on sick leave,' lamented Aunt Mary to Queen Victoria as the new year of 1855 dawned. Thinking of ‘all the
disagreeable
things that … will be said', she wrote, ‘it is a sad pity his nerves have been so shaken'.

Before George returned to England in late January, his examination by a medical board at Constantinople had confirmed – to the invalid's relief – his opinion that he should not rejoin the army for the moment. Still, his martial aunt did not give up hope, and she wrote to the Duke's mother on 23 March, ‘I consider George's return [to the Crimea] … only put off for the time and, as a proof of this, all his horses are left there.' Meanwhile Mary took up her paintbrush to produce sixteen paintings for the Patriotic Fund exhibition in aid of Crimean War
victims.

When not fretting over her nephew's nerves, the Duchess of Gloucester had passed the festive season arranging her glass cabinets and bringing out the treasures she had accumulated and inherited over many years. Among them was a satin pochette containing a prayer she had written when she was twelve and frightened during her father's strange illness at Kew. And she had, should she wish to sigh over it, wrapped up in tissue paper the hair of many of her sisters – a great auburn coil from Amelia's head – and even some iron-grey wisps identified as her mother's during her last years. There were as well items of her sisters' ‘work' to turn over – including the maroon
and lemon chequered workbags in which her sister Sophia had hung her correspondence on her chair arms.

But there were more cheerful mementoes of the past – her family's ‘pictures', ranging from miniatures of her parents and Reynolds's painting of her sister-in-law Sophia Matilda as a child to recent photographs of the Cambridges and of Victoria's family. There was even one prized photograph taken by the fashionable photographer Claudet. It showed not only Queen Victoria, her son Bertie, Prince of Wales and his younger sister Alice, but also their great-aunt Mary, tiny and hunched but smiling, in a highly decorated dress. Her equerry the Hon. Augustus Liddell took another photograph of the Duchess of Gloucester – alone this time, but again in a very striking outfit adorned with a shawl. Other treasures at Gloucester House included books, Bibles and almanacs that had once belonged to her brothers and sisters. And the Duchess owned besides a magpie collection of jewellery and less substantial trinkets now all hers as sole survivor of a large family who had religiously exchanged gifts all their lives on high days and holidays.

While staying in Brighton in the autumn of 1855, the Duchess of Gloucester was gratified to hear – in confidence – from Queen Victoria of another royal marriage to come. Vicky, Princess Royal, was engaged to Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, future King of Prussia, and the couple met the Duchess's criteria for happiness – ‘the young people have been allowed (fortunately) opportunities of becoming well acquainted with each other'. Mary welcomed ‘an alliance that is so desirable in every way and one I always considered as the most natural to be thought of. But she then turned tearful. ‘It is not likely I should live to see this event take
place.'

‘It appears like a dream to me', she told Victoria, ‘that you should have a daughter old enough to begin to think of settling down for life – when I remember your birth as if it happened only
yesterday.'
In fact, Vicky would not marry her Prince of Prussia for another two years, and, in visiting this long engagement on their daughter, Victoria and Albert were breaking the Duchess's tenet that long love affairs were ‘very disagreeable'. But they were at least providing for their daughter the dynastic match that Mary's own father, King George III, had so singularly failed to produce for her.

The guns that sounded the end of war in the Crimea in March 1856 led the Duchess to speak of ‘the blessings of peace'. She had lived through three terrible carnages – the American War of Independence, the Napoleonic Wars and now this. ‘Pray God it may be a lasting one,' she wrote to Queen Victoria on 30 March. Honour was restored in July when,
as one of the blessings of peace, George, Duke of Cambridge became commander-in-chief. But Bertie, the Prince of Wales, rather than his cousin George, was now the old Duchess's pride and joy. As the future sovereign, he naturally attracted her attention, and she was delighted when, with his tutor Mr Gibbs, he paid her a visit at White Lodge in Richmond Park when she was recovering from a serious illness. ‘She had become so thin,' her dresser Mrs Gold later recalled, that ‘her bones had nearly come through the
skin.'
But Mary received visitors, sitting up in bed supported by cushions, and looked ‘very cheerful and … so nice and venerable' – according to Queen Victoria – ‘in her white
night-cap
and everything so neatly and prettily
arranged.'

When the fourteen-year-old Prince of Wales visited his great-aunt during her convalescence, he brought her five game birds he had shot himself. ‘I hear', wrote the Duchess to the boy's mother, ‘the keeper says he will be an admirable shot as he sets about it so
steadily.'
A few years before she had encouraged Bertie's earliest sporting attempts: ‘I can well believe how delighted you must have been at being allowed to go out shooting for the first time, and the being so fortunate as to have killed two rabbits gives every hope that you will be a good sportsman
by and by.'

After receiving her great-nephew in bed, the Duchess roused herself to entertain him downstairs. ‘He made himself very agreeable, full of wishing to have the particulars of every picture that hangs up in the room and the history of every picture in the house, making very sensible remarks… in short, I was delighted with him,' she told Queen Victoria, ‘and I hear he gained all hearts below
stairs.'
Already a ladies' man, the future King Edward VII said, before he left to catch his train, that ‘he was so glad he had seen Aunt Gloucester up and dressed, as she looked so much prettier up than in bed'.

The only one of the family who now worried Aunt Gloucester was Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge. At twenty-three she had spurned one suitor, the Prince of Sardinia – which she now regretted – and she was growing disquietingly large. But the Duchess of Gloucester endorsed the tour of Germany on which the Duchess of Cambridge led her younger daughter, and, while wishing marriage for Princess Mary Adelaide, did not for a moment neglect her other junior relations. The ninth birthday of Princess Louise in March 1857 produced a packet of books and a letter from her great-aunt Gloucester, and in addition, twenty pounds despatched separately to her mother ‘for any trinket you may fancy for her'. Mary, who had had little money herself when young, liked to give generous sums to children, once sending a ‘little bit of paper' for three sisters to
divide, with the message, ‘As there are balls, it may assist in making you all a little
smart.'

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were not neglectful of Aunt Gloucester in their turn. When he heard that Mary had been taken ill in April 1857, Prince Albert sent over to Gloucester House ‘a very handsome useful piece of furniture' – a sofa that could be raised ‘an inch at a time' and was a ‘perfect
convenience.'
The Duchess had had it brought upstairs and would probably try it in the course of the day, her equerry Liddell wrote in thanks. The Duchess was ‘very weak and much oppressed' that day, as her niece Mary Adelaide noted, but she nevertheless wrote to Albert herself: ‘It is impossible to express, my dear Albert, how deeply I feel your kindness in sending me so beautiful and useful a chair, and one that I feel sure will be such a comfort for me when once I get used to use it, and how much I am impressed with your kindness. Thank God that dear Victoria is going on well, my affte love to her, Yours, Mary,
April the 15th, GH.'
This was to be the last letter she ever wrote.

Next morning an account came to Cambridge Cottage of the Duchess of Gloucester having had ‘an attack of spasms at the heart in the night'. That afternoon George – who was out of London – and Gussy – in Mecklenburg-Strelitz – were telegraphed for, and the rest of the family, forbidden for the moment to see the Duchess, waited downstairs in the small front drawing room at Gloucester House. It was ‘wretched work', wrote Princess Mary Adelaide after some hours of sitting there, talking and reading with her mother. And the next two days were much the same. But on the 18th, after the Duchess of Cambridge and Mary Adelaide returned from seeing the Queen's new baby, Princess Beatrice, at Buckingham Palace, back at Gloucester House the ailing Duchess awoke from a doze and kissed her hand to her niece Mary Adelaide, when she visited her. But this small sign of life meant little, and Hawkins the Duchess's surgeon
⁶
said ominously on 18 April that ‘he felt much alarmed as a torpor was stealing over the
brain.'

Visitors continued to come to Gloucester House – Prince Albert, the Prince of Wales and Vicky, the Princess Royal, the Duchess of Inverness, Aunt Kent, even Princess Feodora and her husband, Prince Ernest of Hohenlohe-Langenburg. Queen Victoria visited with her daughter Alice.
George, Duke of Cambridge arrived, and then on the 21st Gussy, from Mecklenburg-Strelitz with her son Dolphy. Mary Adelaide peeped at her aunt from behind a screen as the Duchess was given beef tea, and wondered at her marvellous tenacity. But the days hung heavy for those assembled at the house.

The Prince of Wales sneaked up the back way to look in on his aunt. On the 25th, her eighty-first birthday, Mary gave signs of life, and pressed Mary Adelaide's hand twice when her niece kissed hers. Two days later she was confused, and did not know her visitors. She asked if the Duchess of Cambridge was coming. They replied that she was in the house. Would Aunt Mary like her to come? ‘By all means, let her come,' was their great-aunt's reply. But when the Duchess of Cambridge came, the patient did not speak.

The Duchess stopped eating the next day, on 28 April, and there was a ‘marked change' in the night that followed. After seeing her aunt on the 29th, Mary Adelaide of Cambridge cried in the room of Mary's dresser Mrs Gold, and after dinner Hawkins directed the family that they should remain for the night. At three-thirty the following morning the family knelt around the Duchess's bed. Mr Nepean, the chaplain, read the prayers for the dying. ‘The pulse was beating feebler and feebler and death had set its stamp upon her much loved features,' recorded Mary Adelaide. The old Princess's heavy breathing was loud in the room, and she hovered ‘between life and eternity'. At five-fifteen in the morning of 30 April 1857, ‘with another stretch and a momentary convulsive contraction of the face', Princess Mary, Duchess of Gloucester died.

‘With her is gone the last link, which connected us with a bygone generation,' Victoria wrote, on receiving the news of her aunt's death in a note from George, written at half-past five that morning. ‘She was an authority on everything, a bright example of loyalty, devotion and duty, the kindest and best of mistresses, and friends. She had become like a grandmother to us all, from her age, and from her being the last of the
family.'
Meanwhile the mourners at Gloucester House wandered sadly from room to room, watching the servants unbar the shutters and draw the blinds as day dawned. Then they drove away, leaving Mrs Gold to wash and dress and lay out the corpse of the mistress whom she had served so long. The story of the six daughters of George III, which had begun with the Princess Royal's birth in the Queen's House ninety-one years before on Michaelmas Day 1766, was concluded.