Princesses (47 page)

Windsor, in a diarist's words, took on ‘an Asiatic
stillness',
with the Queen and princesses living far across the quadrangle and under considerable financial restraint, and the King often under physical restraint in his northern apartments. There was, the doctors agreed, ‘perfect alienation of mind'. His daughter Mary remarked that his changeable days were like ‘the shield in Homer which represents a city in war during the day as well as in peace in the evening'. Sometimes he was dosed with laudanum to counter his paroxysms, sometimes he was put in the strait waistcoat to curb violence. And he indulged for hours in fantastic thoughts and dreams – among them that Princess Amelia was alive and living at Weymouth, that King George I was a huge expense to him at the Great Lodge, that Prince Octavius was alive and his other sons dead. He refused to be shaved, on the ground that he was too young to have a beard, he planned for Princess Sophia to marry Prince Octavius, and he announced that the Duke of Clarence was to marry the Princess of Wales, and emigrate with her and the Queen to Botany Bay in Australia.

The doctors were nonplussed. The
large
imaginary company that the King summoned up in his mind's eye was sometimes so turbulent that he put his hands to his
ears
to block the noise out. He also liked to have lavender water applied to his head. This suggested to them that something
was going on ‘within the head with which the mental disorder is associated'. However, the nature of the ‘wrong' was not clear enough for them to ‘found any practice
upon it.'

Every medicine or management they tried
‘disagreed'
with the King. They even prevailed on the Queen to allow Drs Simmons and Monro and Dr John Willis to observe the King in October and November. For in the closing months of 1811, with the restricted regency coming up for renewal or closure in February of the following year, members of the Council – the Chancellor Lord Eldon among them – visited the Castle and ‘expressed great disappointment … that not one of the physicians in constant attendance could give any comfort'. There was no sign of the King recovering. Mary wrote in October to Lady Harcourt, ‘Sir Henry Halford, Baillie, Heberden, Willis and Dundas call the last month the very worst they ever witnessed … the King was all day Friday under confinement and the whole of the night from the Friday to the Saturday' Within weeks, unless the King surprised his doctors, his son the Prince would become regent without restrictions.

Princess Augusta, meanwhile, had an opportunity during her ride on the morning of 10 October to have ‘a very long and serious conversation' with General Taylor. ‘We spoke of what might take place when the year expired …', and of the ‘great and important changes' that would almost certainly take place then in the royal household. The physicians and Council might possibly want the King to be nearer at hand at Kew, and it had much to recommend it. ‘The Queen's House in point of lodging would be better, but it would be most cutting to our feelings', she wrote, ‘that the King should be within a stone's throw of the Regent's House where all the royal horses must reasonably be fixed – and that he could not stir out in the garden for a little air without being overlooked by all the houses in Grosvenor Place …' At Kew, though necessarily in different houses, she went on, she and her sisters ‘would not be so far off from him, as we are here across the Quadrangle'.

The Princess went to her mother, to forewarn her of these plans, and found her obdurate. She would never leave Windsor, Queen Charlotte said, even when Augusta told her that it would be impossible for a large establishment to be kept up there for the King. Probably, Augusta said, the King's attendants, ‘which were only those of State', would be dispersed, while those who were his ‘private friends' – his equerries and Taylor and a few others – might be continued. ‘For everything would be done with respect and kindness, but … his family must be very much
reduced.'

Princess Charlotte, visiting her grandmother and aunts in late October, not unnaturally was unhappy herself. Her aunt Elizabeth wrote: ‘She in her
heart
hates being here and confessed it
yesterday.
She said three days was enough, more was horrid …' Elizabeth declared herself ‘never in favour' with her niece, ‘for you know I will not toady. Therefore I come out with the truth, and truth is often too rightly told to
please
a lady's ears.'

Amelia, when alive, had complained of Elizabeth's plain speaking and lack of sympathy during her unhappiness. And Mary, as she had been Amelia's favourite, was now Charlotte's. ‘She has been all kindness to me but
otherwise
you know that I am always happy to quit the castle,' noted Charlotte. Meanwhile Elizabeth said of her niece, ‘I do not think her at all improved, self-opinionated to a great degree, and holding every soul as cheap as dirt.' Her governess, Lady de Clifford, had no control over her whatever, ‘and I believe she is so clever that she does not mind her in the least. I hope these visits will not harm her head but everyone here shows her so much adulation, that how can it be otherwise?'

Towards the end of November the Council proposed to the Queen that they should bring in Dr John Willis and Dr Simmons to help Dr Robert Willis manage the King's case. The Queen fended off Simmons successfully, but failed to keep John Willis at a distance, even when she cited the promise she had given her husband years before never to let that doctor have his management again. Overruled by the Council, she wrote to her brother Duke Charles with colossal understatement, ‘It is not a situation designed to lift the
heart.'
When Dr John was introduced to the King on 23 November as a new doctor who would assist Dr Robert in the management of his case, George III did fall into a violent rage. But he appeared to have no memory of that time at Kew in April 1801 when Dr John had cornered him and kept him captive. The royal patient returned to arranging imaginary concerts, playing his harpsichord and ‘exerting his power of sending various individuals to the lower world'.

Princess Mary herself was dejected, writing in January 1812, ‘No one that really loves the King ought to pray for his life being prolonged a moment in so deplorable a state.' And a few days later on 4 February her father was declared, in a question-and-answer session between Council and doctors, unlikely to recover. ‘Is it insanity?' the Council questioned. ‘Yes,' the doctors replied firmly, and a full regency was inaugurated that month.

With the passing of the unrestricted Regency Bill, an uncontroversial and necessary measure, if a lamented one, the Prince Regent acquired all the powers that his father had held. The Prince's decision to retain Perceval and his father's Tory ministers, however, on the same plea as before, that
he could never forgive himself if the King one day cast off his delirium and suffered a relapse on finding the enemy Whig party in power, was spectacular.

At Windsor the Queen and the princesses, while regretting the need for a full regency, were happy, as stout defenders of the King, that his ministers should remain in power, although the King himself, under the care from now on of both Willises and their keepers in his northern apartments at Windsor, knew nothing of the matter. But the Dukes of Portland and Devonshire, Lord Grey and the other leaders of the Opposition were from now on the Prince's implacable enemies; Princess Charlotte, a fervent Whig, rushed from her father's table when he proposed a toast to Mr Perceval. And, as in a game of cards, the Whigs picked up Charlotte's mother, Caroline, Princess of Wales, when the Tories dropped her as a Court card of lesser value now that they had the Prince in their deck.

The previous autumn the Prince had outlined to his sisters at Oatlands the measures he intended to include, for their
happiness,
in the Regency Bill, then being drafted. Sophia, giving her address as ‘The Nunnery, No. 3 Castle Court', wrote to him afterwards: ‘My
heart
overflows with gratitude for all your noble and generous intentions
towards us …'
And she hoped that ‘your kindness to four old cats' would not cause the Regent any trouble with his ministers. ‘How good you are
to us…
Poor old wretches as we are, a dead weight upon you, old lumber to the country, like old clothes, I wonder you do not vote for putting us in a sack and drowning us in the Thames. Two
of us
[Augusta and Elizabeth] would be fine food for the fishes, and as to Minny and me, we will take our chance
together.'

If the ministerial arrangements pleased the Queen, the financial arrangements that the Prince was making for his sisters occasioned in her some bitterness, or ‘jealousy of your kindness', as Princess Mary told her brother. The Queen said that no one appeared to feel for her, and that she thought it
best
not to discuss anything with her daughters. Nevertheless, Princess Augusta was worried to death by their mother's complaints, her sister Mary believed. ‘Poor soul … she has, I believe, spoke more to her than to any of us.'

In Parliament there were eyebrows raised at the additional sums of £9,000 that the Prince wished settled on each of his four sisters in England. But they had their supporters, notably in the person of William Fremantle MP, who spoke movingly of the princesses and of ‘the filial affection and amiable and captivating submission with which they have borne the calamities which have lately fallen upon them. Throughout the Empire,' he
declaimed, ‘there can be but one sentiment on their
conduct
and sufferings. Every father of a family may truly say to his
children,
imitate but the virtues and the example of your Princesses the King's daughters, and my wishes will be
gratified.'
The Regent's and Mr Fremantle's wishes were granted, and Sophia thanked her brother for ‘the energy you have shown' and ‘the steadiness with which you have persevered on our account'.

With the additional £9,000 a year came a new carriage for each of the princesses, plus a page and a footman. The livery was to be the same as that of their brothers – crimson, lined and trimmed with green, very handsome. Furthermore, the princesses could now appoint a new lady each on half-duty at £300 a year. But when General Taylor brought the princesses letters to sign regarding their proposed allowances, the Queen became enraged that Mr Perceval had not written to her. Augusta replied boldly that in this delicate matter it had been right for the Regent instead to speak to her. The Queen looked ‘very steadfastly at me', wrote Augusta to her brother, ‘and said with a kind of suppressed anger, “That may be, but still I think I ought to have been addressed straight to
myself
”.' It was all very wearing.

Princess Elizabeth was no less affected. ‘The changes are great here, which has nearly broke my heart,' she reported to Miss Compton on 29 February. In January, before the passage of the Act, she had written of the disagreeable duty of parting with old friends among the household: ‘I wish to do everything handsomely, properly and soberly.' Miss Planta had resigned, and Elizabeth told Lady Harcourt, ‘The Queen has behaved like an angel, she gave her a present of £100 a year. Augusta and me intend to make it [up to] three, for she then will be comfortable. She thinks of going to Bath … You may suppose she was violently affected and how much pleased at our mother's kind and gracious conduct.'

When the day came in February to make the final farewells, Elizabeth recorded:

It was Miss Planta's last day and she was the picture of misery and breaks her heart. Which of course affected us much, and leaving after so many years and having done her duty thoroughly, made me … recollect nothing but the good. Then came a servant, he was a porter on the King's side [of the quadrangle] who had belonged to us, to tell us he was going. There was another
scene
. And so it went on all day – grief and vexation of spirit. Every hour something springs up to rend our hearts – letters from other servants, occasioned by the present melancholy change. It will be soon over, but these days are misery to us. This morning my sisters have persuaded our dear old Cox … the old servant in the Queen's ladies' room, to retire … she has behaved
extremely well and really like a sensible woman, thoroughly a gentlewoman. She came into my room and I said, ‘I hope you will be happy.' ‘I cannot be otherwise,' she responded. ‘You have all done everything to make me so.'

Elizabeth noted sorrowfully, ‘I appear like a brute to
everybody
… I can scarcely bring myself to see them. It so totally unhinges me, and this a.m. it has seized my bowels and made me
bilious.'

Other servants and certain members of the royal households left, too, who felt their dignity forbade them remaining under the new arrangements, where only five tables instead of twenty were to be ‘kept', so that equerries would dine with doctors, and ladies of the bedchamber with keepers of the robes. ‘I look forward with a degree of dread to all we have to bear still,' Elizabeth wrote. Displaying a certain guilt, she added, ‘If anyone thinks we are much pleased with the
idea
of an establishment, they must think we are born without hearts and feelings. God knows it is a most bitter pill to swallow, for the cause' – the King's illness – ‘is death to us.'

The King's merino sheep in the Home Park at Windsor, procured for him from Spain and Portugal by Sir Joseph Banks, were sold off. The Staffordshire Regiment and the Blues and Royals were no longer to guard the Castle. The Queen's German band was dismissed. Castle Street in Windsor no longer echoed to the hooves of the King's glossy saddle horses, and Highflyer, Perfection and Othello were sold off, and Spanker, Frolic, Traveller and Boldfeather too. But there was for Princess Sophia, when she felt well enough to resume her riding – she had been plagued by ‘cramps' for some months – room for comfort. She and Augusta, the only equestrians among the princesses now that Amelia was dead, took ownership of Skyscraper and of five further mounts.