Princesses (39 page)

The Queen brought up with her more pliant husband in April 1805 the subject of a proposal from her brother Charles in Mecklenburg. He wished his son, the Hereditary Prince, to marry one of their younger daughters. She had not ‘named the subject to any of the Princesses', the Queen told the King, ‘for I have made it a rule to avoid a subject in which I know their opinions differ with your Majesty's. For every one of them have at different times assured me that, happy as they are, they should like to settle if they could, and I feel I cannot
blame them.'
The King was remarkably gracious in return – ‘My dearest Queen, After having had the good fortune to possess such a treasure come from Strelitz, it is impossible for me to hesitate a moment, if my daughters wish to marry, to declare I would like to see them allied with this house above all others in Germany' Four days later the Queen wrote to her brother in encouraging terms. The King had agreed that the Hereditary Prince of Mecklenburg-Strelitz should come – in July – but had stressed that he should be aware that the princesses' dowries were fixed in England. The King had written, ‘I cannot deny that I have never wished to see any of them marry: I am happy in their company, and do not in the least want a
separation.'
Still, he would not oppose what they felt would add to their happiness.

The Queen advised her nephew, in fact, to visit only after the royal family had made their summer visit to Dorset. ‘The stay at Weymouth is sad. We have very mediocre lodgings and the place really only exists as lodgings for
invalids.'
She also suggested coming after the summer because, in any event, nothing in the way of settlements could be arranged till Parliament met in the autumn.

By chance, Mrs Delany's niece, now a Welsh matron Mrs Waddington, saw all the bridal candidates for the Mecklenburg Prince, as well as their elder sisters, in Lady Charlotte Finch's apartments at St James's this summer. About to join their mother and embark on a drawing room, the princesses with their hoops took up almost all the space in the very small room. Elizabeth was conspicuous by her size in a blue gown, not to mention ‘eleven immense yellow ostrich feathers on her head', which Mrs Waddington said ‘had not a very good effect'. But Princess Mary shone for her ‘beauty' and taste combined. Her headdress was ‘a large plume of white ostrich feathers, and a very small plume of black feathers placed before the white ones: her hair was drawn up quite smooth to the top of her head, with one large curl hanging from thence almost down to her throat. Her petticoat was white and silver, and the drapery and body … were of purple silk, covered with spangles, and a border and fringe of silver.' Then the call came for the princesses to attend the Queen, and Mrs Waddington
observed, ‘if they had been anyone else, I must have laughed at seeing them sidle out of the room, holding their hoops with both
hands.'

Was Princess Mary – the calm, bland beauty, the fashion plate, the nurse – the bride for the Mecklenburg Prince? Or would he choose troubled, attractive Sophia, or passionate Amelia? Mary was undoubtedly the one without complicated ties to England. Romantically she had only ever been known to favour distantly her cousin Prince William of Gloucester and, before that, more faintly, a man whose proposals of marriage, it was said, she had refused – still another cousin, Prince Frederick of Orange, who had died – and, of course, General Taylor.

The trip to Weymouth this summer was remarkable only for the suffering of both King and Queen. The Queen endured crippling headaches ‘in the back part of my head', an inheritance, she declared, from her mother. Only drops from her Kew apothecary, Augustus Brande, relieved the ‘tormenting
evil.'
The King's eyes were so bad meanwhile that he could not recognize people coming into the room – not even, some said, his own children. He had taken an aversion to his green eyeshade and would not even wear it under his hat.

Under these circumstances the princesses, so subject to their parents' moods, were out of sorts. ‘Nothing can be more dull than this place, not a creature we know,' Sophia wrote. ‘General Fitzroy I have only seen for a moment; thank God somebody else is not here,' she added, thinking presumably of General Garth, who had made her dread going out the previous year when he walked about the town with young Tommy Garth.

Princess Sophia was herself not well, being dosed regularly with laudanum. She was mortified to be taken ill on board the yacht, in the middle of dinner with the King in his cabin, and ‘carried upon deck more dead than
alive.'
In that state, ‘spasmed all over', she remained till they came to anchor. She continued, well or ill, in her passionate hatred of their mother – ‘She makes my blood boil in some things' – and in her compassion for their father's sufferings. There was nothing absolutely wrong or incoherent about him, she said, ‘but a triviality about him that greatly alarms me, for it is so unlike himself'.

The Queen's misdeeds consumed her, especially her refusal to share her bed with the King, extending now to fitting locks on the bedchamber door. ‘Will you believe it possible that she keeps us there [in her bedchamber] and at last says, “Now, sir, you must go, for it is time to go to bed” – My God … how can she refuse him anything?' Sophia wished she were the King's little dog: ‘what a little Fidel I would be and lay all day at his feet'. And, expressing her wish to escape these scenes, Sophia claimed that,
‘could astronomical observation be made', their Windsor neighbour the astronomer William Herschel would see that ‘there was a just mistake in my birth, for surely I never was intended for an R HÙ. Of ‘those dull [assembly] rooms', the Princess exclaimed, ‘Oh ye Gods, how deadly dull it is, and only think of our going to the Master of Ceremonies' ball and sitting in a circle there – I wished myself a kangaroo.'

Back in London the royal family received in early November news of the victory at Trafalgar that put an end to fears of invasion and of enemy sea power for the duration of the war. The King and Queen were overcome. ‘But you know of old,' wrote Princess Elizabeth to Lady Charlotte Finch, her former governess who was now in retirement, ‘they place the victory with gratitude at the foot of the throne of grace and though they feel happy, far from
exalted.'

Trafalgar put an end to French hopes of naval supremacy, but meanwhile the Napoleonic armies had beaten the Austrian forces into submission when they rose up against their conquerors that summer. As the wife of a Napoleonic elector, the Princess Royal was obliged to abandon her horticultural schemes at Ludwigsburg, and the ouvrages, the ormolu and the porcelain with which she was embellishing all the palaces of the Duchy. In October she fled the advances of the Austrians, once her husband's overlords, for the safety of Heidelberg. There she received the welcome news – from her point of view – that the French had defeated the Austrians at Ulm on the 19th. ‘Most providentially the [river] Neckar rose in the night which stopped their [the Austrians'] march,' she informed Lady Charlotte.

With the French defeat of the Russians, the Austrians' allies, at Austerlitz in December 1805, the Continent was truly under French dominion – to the Queen of England's fury. Writing earlier in the year to suggest that her nephew the Prince of Mecklenburg-Strelitz come from Strelitz, she had been so confident that a match would occur that she was led to ‘picture one of her daughters in the home where she had been so happy'. But when she had hoped the Prince would visit, in the autumn, the King had called for delay, given the uncertain state of the Continent. At the end of the year, the Queen told her brother that the King had said to tell him that nothing had changed. ‘As soon as I see the moment this alliance can take place, I will tell him,' the King told her. ‘If only', the Queen wrote crossly, ‘on the Continent they had encouraged the soldiers with Nelson's order, “England expects every man to do his duty”, and that was all the orders given that day. If Mack and Prince Aursberg [Auersperg] had thought like that, Vienna would not be in the hands of the
tyrant.'

The Princess Royal had further details of the French campaign that had so destroyed the chances of one of her sisters joining her on the Continent. And they could not fail to disturb and fascinate her family in England. Just before the Ulm campaign began, the Emperor Napoleon himself visited her and her husband at Ludwigsburg on 2 October. The previous day his marshal, Ney, had taken up residence in the palace of Stuttgart, after the Elector had made a spirited defence of his state against the ‘violent Austrians'.

‘You will easily believe, my dear brother,' she wrote to the Prince,

that this was not a pleasant moment for me, but I should despise myself, could I, out of weakness, at such a moment have left my husband …

Certainly, the Emperor Napoleon's enemies have done him great injustice. I can say with truth that he went out of his way to be attentive to all the Electoral family, but most particularly so to me. Soon after his arrival he made me a visit and sought to say something polite to all present. I am convinced that he wishes to have peace with Great Britain, for he not only spoke with regard of the King, but of you, dear brother, on different occasions with
esteem
…

The Electress's belief that her conduct would do the Electorate no harm had been confirmed days later, before she wrote to her brother. As she wrote to Lady Charlotte Finch, ‘by an article of the treaty [of Pressburg, signed on Boxing Day 1805] the Elector has been acknowledged by these two sovereigns [the Austrian and French emperors] as King of Württemberg'. The new King ordered a general thanksgiving upon hearing the news, ‘and I was obliged to dress in the greatest hurry', wrote the new Queen, ‘to attend him to church … the whole day was filled up by drawing rooms dinners plays and redoutes'. Royal had determined that Lady Charlotte should be ‘the first of my friends acquainted with this alteration in my situation'. Writing to her brother the Prince now, she asked for ‘that same place in your affection as Queen that I have enjoyed under so many different
names.'
(The new Queen did not succeed in this wish with her mother. ‘Ma très chère Mère et Soeur', she tried writing to Queen Charlotte. ‘You may guess how it was received,' wrote Lady Bessborough. The new King of Württemberg meanwhile put an enormous gold crown on top of his palace in Stuttgart to announce his new dignities to all the birds of the air.)

Royal mentioned to her brother, besides Napoleon's visit to Stuttgart on his way to victory at Ulm, that of his Empress, Josephine, ‘on her road to Munich'. Both visitors had been charming, the Empress ‘a very well-bred pleasant woman [who] does a great deal of good'. Josephine's son,
Royal wrote meditatively, was about to marry Princess Augusta of the ancient house of Bavaria – ‘the settlements are very great'.

Years later Napoleon himself recalled his meeting with Royal: ‘She soon lost whatever prejudices she might have originally entertained against me. I had the pleasure of interfering to her advantage, when her husband, who was a brute, though a man of talent, had ill-treated her, for which she was afterwards very grateful.' Two years later Royal ‘contributed very materially towards effecting the marriage' of Napoleon's brother Jérôme, King of Westphalia, with her stepdaughter Princess Catherine of Wurttemberg.

On hearing the news of the death of Prime Minister William Pitt in January 1806, Princess Amelia wrote with some acumen, ‘I do not fear the present moment so much as the future, for you know with him [her
father
], distress blazes out long after the
blow.'
A blow was coming which would distress the King as much, in its
way,
as the death of his long-serving Prime Minister. For a few months later the Prince of
Wales's
lawyers
placed before the new Prime Minister, Lord Grenville, papers containing such allegations
against
the Princess of Wales that the King felt he had no option but to appoint – on 29 May – a Secret Commission of four Cabinet ministers to look into the charges.

The papers not only alleged
outrageous
behaviour with various men on the part of the Princess of Wales, but also claimed that she had given birth to a son whom she was raising in her own house in the guise of an adopted child. It was further alleged that the Princess had announced her intention at a future date of declaring the boy, called Willy Austin, hers – and naming the Prince as his father. The King's instructions to the committee were that they should ‘enquire into the truth of the written declarations touching the conduct of her RH the Princess of Wales'. To her daughter-in-law the Queen sent a message by Princess Elizabeth on 31 May that Caroline would not be expected at the Queen's House on the King's Birthday the following week – ‘nor in the evening, nor in the
morning.'
And three days after the Birthday, on 7 June, the Duke of Kent appeared at Blackheath to warn his sister-in-law that within hours many of her servants would be sent for to Downing Street, to be questioned on the evidence they had given – earlier in the year and without her knowledge – to the Prince of Wales's
lawyers.

The Princess of Wales spoke of returning home to Brunswick. But on the first day at Downing Street the child whom the Princess had indeed looked after in her house since shortly after his birth four years before was proved beyond any doubt to be William Austin, son of an unemployed docker and his
wife.
Nevertheless there were other parts of her conduct
that the Commissioners viewed with grave
concern,
and so they reported to the King in July 1806. The King passed the document without comment to his son, beyond saying, as the Prince told his sister Amelia, that the Commissioners' conclusion was ‘they could not, as a result, recommend to the King not to
receive
the Princess, nor to receive her'.