Princesses (48 page)

They might have splendid new establishments, a carriage and a lady each, but, Elizabeth wrote, ‘You may depend that we do not intend doing anything extravagant or silly, we only wish to have that degree of liberty which is right… The trials of these years have made me more sedate and more willing to yield on many points than I ever was. In short, a home sans ma mère I hate the
thought of.'
But of course with an income of £13,000 any of the princesses could now set up their own households, were they not subject to their mother's wishes.

Princess Augusta no longer felt subject to those wishes, and wrote a letter to her brother on 5 March on a very confidential matter. She reminded him that, when her heart was ‘full of care' one evening after dinner four years before, she had told him, as she had earlier told the Duke of York, the secret of her heart – her love for General Sir Brent Spencer.
The Prince of Wales had responded then that he had often marked ‘a gloom' upon her countenance which, he was certain, ‘proceeded from some secret cause of anxiety'. No action was possible then, but now, writing her letter, Augusta looked to the Prince's sanction for a ‘private marriage' with the object of her affection. Though Sir Brent was not her match in birth or station, it had been twelve years since they were first acquainted, and nine since their attachment had been ‘mutually acknowledged'. She was now forty-three.

‘Long and great has been my trial, and correct has been my conduct,' Augusta proclaimed with feeling. In the circumstances, she begged the Prince to stand witness at the secret marriage she craved. If he thought it not proper to attend himself, she asked him to send Frederick in his place to give royal sanction to the match. Almost as ardently, she desired her mother's blessing, but she wished the Regent to broach the matter to the Queen. Though her mother's consent was not necessary, Augusta wanted Queen Charlotte to acknowledge that her daughter had never shrunk from any of her duties, ‘though suffering martyrdom from anxiety of mind and deprivation of happiness'. In the event, Princess Augusta did not send her letter to her brother until June, while her mother continued to be cold and difficult with her daughters.

Anxiety about an approaching drawing room – the first in eighteen months, and one marking the return of the Queen and princesses to public life – brought forth a tirade from the Queen on 2 April directed at her daughters. The occasion was another letter written to her by Augusta. It began by thanking the Queen for ‘the many years she had so liberally provided everything
for us',
and mentioned the resolve the princesses had taken to go about in Society despite their father's condition. When Augusta came in from her ride after breakfast, she had her answer. ‘I was fully aware', the Queen wrote, ‘that the happiness of an independent establishment must carry the idea of liberty with it, and … this may perhaps be the last time that any one of you may be inclined to take a mother's advice.' But, she warned them, ‘your situation is very different to that of your brothers'. They were duty bound to appear in public. ‘Your sex and … the present melancholy situation of your father' must be counted in. And, the Queen declared, ‘the going to public amusements excepting where duty calls you would be the highest mark of indecency possible.'

Finally she addressed the visits the princesses had begun to make to their brothers in their new coaches and carriages. ‘You never can be in the house with those that are unmarried without a lady – even that pleasure, innocent as it is, should be considered before it is done.' Bidding Augusta keep in mind
that ‘no age whatever is exempted from being
criticized',
the Queen closed her letter by saying that she had seen that Augusta had fixed her course, so she would not say more.

Her mother's reply was ‘written in anger', Augusta told her brother the Prince, ‘and I put a person in a passion and a person that is drunk upon the same
footing.'
Hence she would not copy it to him, and, when she saw the Queen in the evening with her sisters – their mother had dined alone and cried a great deal – the Queen smiled and said nothing. Augusta said nothing in her turn.

The quarrels between the Queen and Mary and Augusta did not occlude the joy brought by the Regent's visit to Windsor on his father's Birthday in June 1812. Elizabeth was suffering from a bout of St Anthony's fire on her face, and Sophia was still invalid. But Mary and Augusta and the Queen were a harmonious trio for the occasion. The Prince Regent crossed to the northern apartments his father occupied, and stood silent spectator of the King's activity for some time. ‘He was struck', Mary reported, ‘with the King's good
looks.'
The Regent, however, thought their father had ‘grown very fat and large'.

When, on the 12th of this month, Princess Augusta sent her March letter to the Regent and begged him to show it to her mother, saying of it, ‘there is not one syllable not strictly true', she enclosed a covering note: ‘I feel that the longer I delay the making my sentiments known to you, the more completely miserable I grow, particularly as I do not nor cannot name the subject on which I have written to any one but
yourself
…'

Augusta's March letter would have moved a stone: she had originally been led to speak to the Prince when the General was abroad, and her ‘anxiety for his safety and welfare' had been ‘put to the trial for a second time'. She told the Prince that the General had offered to give up his ‘situation about the King', to spare her unhappiness, which she forbade. ‘A third time he was ordered abroad, and painful as the thoughts were of our being separated again, it was a mutual consolation to us both', she wrote, ‘that you and dear Frederick … were apprised of our attachment.' Had the General fallen, she knew they would have shared her sorrow. Now that the General was returned, ‘I am sensible', she said, ‘that should you agree to our union, it can only proceed from your affection for me, and your desire of promoting my happiness, and that of a worthy man … of course it will be necessary to keep it a secret and … it must be quite a private marriage … Nothing is more repugnant to my principles… than the not acting with candour to every individual, and more particularly towards my own family, but … there is no duplicity in silence.' As for the Queen, ‘if she merely
thinks of my birth and station', she could not approve, ‘but that is the only reason she can object to it and I shall never blame her for it'. Augusta ended, ‘I am proud of possessing the affection and good opinion of an honest man and of a highly distinguished character.'

She continued, it seems, to possess that ‘affection and good opinion', even though no answer from her brother, not even a letter from her mother exists, and it seems unlikely that any marriage took place. The only material evidence of Augusta's relationship with her General is a locket bearing her miniature and taken from his neck after death, with an accompanying card claiming that they had
married.
It is a claim impossible to substantiate.

Before she had sent her letter, Princess Augusta with Princess Mary had been the Regent's sisters with the appetite for town. Shortly after the King's Birthday of 1812 they dined one day at York House, the next at Carlton House. But, Princess Mary told Mrs Adams, ‘all this has been done with great difficulty and given us much pain and sorrow'. She could not enter into particulars in a letter, but, she wrote, with obvious reference to the Queen's opposition, ‘if you knew everything you would think we are quite right'. Mrs Kennedy wrote compassionately at Windsor of the Queen and princesses, ‘They have been shut up so long, that they have lived a most melancholy life.'

Sophia's health yielded under the strain twice within eighteen months. Only weeks after she had nursed Amelia for the last time, Mary found herself looking after her other younger sister, Sophia, when she was ‘much
subdued'
and had a ‘bilious fever' for five weeks. Halford and Baillie both feared that her case resembled Amelia's. ‘And in many things she puts me so dreadfully in mind of poor Amelia, it makes me quite
sick,'
wrote Mary, who had known her dead sister's case better than any doctor. These morbid feelings did not, in fact, herald any deterioration in Sophia. She grew thinner, her niece Charlotte noticed, over the year, and was quickly fatigued, but she continued to ride out, getting into a post-chaise that followed behind when her energy dimmed.

But on the King's Birthday in 1812 Sophia remained with Elizabeth at Windsor, the younger sister very ill once more with spasms and other symptoms that so reminded her sisters of Amelia's case. Halford and Baillie rather now feared she was ‘nervous'. It was a nebulous condition, but it was one that was now to persist for years, not months. It effectively immured Sophia in her rooms at Windsor, and – by association with the invalid King in the northern apartments of the Castle – this incarceration easily gave rise to rumours about her health to join those others that circled about her. Six
years later Dr Baillie's sisters answered enquiries from a guest, the novelist Maria Edgeworth. Princess Sophia was ‘not insane', they told her, ‘only nervous and weak'. Miss Edgeworth recorded, ‘this is the truth, and nervous is not here used as a soft equivocal word'. The Misses Baillie also quelled the rumour that Amelia had died ‘a martyr to the King's evil and all scars and sores – absolutely false'. Their brother had seen the Princess ‘after death', and ‘her neck and every part of her was free from all scar or sore or swelling or any symptom of that disease'. But one of the Misses Baillie started new hares – ‘all about her children true', noted Miss Edgeworth, ‘Fitzroy her husband I think she said but am not sure – was not always kind to her'. And she added: ‘The princess [Sophia] is married, it is believed, to General Garth. Miss Baillie says you would be surprised if you
saw him.'

Leaving aside the accuracy of the information Miss Edgeworth acquired about the two princesses, Sophia's letters to Sir Henry Halford show her very ‘nervous' indeed. Usually clear-headed and lively in her correspondence, she now betrayed extreme anxiety and morbid sensitivity in matters of no moment to a person in normal health. Halford was her lifeline, her dependence was all on him. He heard from her daily in letters that listed in equally minute detail the dishes she had tried to eat and the range of emotions through which she passed while she lay in her bed at Windsor.

For Princess Mary, the purchase of ‘finery' to set off her good looks had always been a pleasure. Now, with a new lady, Lady Isabella Thynne, as chaperone, and with her more capacious purse, she made frequent visits to West End haberdashers and mantua makers. Sophia, too, had looked forward to emancipation. She and Mary had made a pact to share the costs of a coach, a chaise and two footmen out of their handsome new incomes. Mary, visiting her brothers and her friends in London in defiance of her mother, had sole use of the stable, as Sophia lay in her room, guarding her ‘cramps'.

Her nerves frayed, Sophia was ‘quite overcome' when news of a terrible incident in Parliament reached her in May 1812. An assassin, John Bellingham, shot dead Prime Minister Spencer Perceval. ‘To think that we live in a country that could produce so great a
monster,'
exclaimed Princess Mary. Princess Elizabeth, like Sophia, was ‘truly overpowered' and ‘completely
overset.'
The whole House of Commons felt horrified, she recounted, and ‘all party animosity' was put to one side when ‘poor Mrs Perceval and her twelve children' were recommended for a pension.

Perceval, apart from his earlier championing of the Princess of Wales,
had been a politician greatly to the princesses' liking. He had protected the interests of the King. In addition, he had been largely instrumental in the successful passage of the Regency Bill and of the provision for the princesses. They were right to mourn his passing and regret the advent of his successor, the tremulous Lord Liverpool.

Princess Elizabeth, declaring herself a ‘bad courtier', went less and less to London in her search for independence. She wrote of her rooms in the Castle that they were ‘altered, old friends with a new face', with the help of her new income. Her old bedchamber too was changed into ‘an elegant sitting room and all as pretty as possible, my old china perfect and altogether it is quite the thing. It has been an amusement, and the only one I have had.' Ever industrious, Elizabeth claimed to have ‘of late been idle to an excess', but she shared with Miss Augusta Compton her latest artistic achievements. She had done ‘some few drawings in a slight state … on blue paper'. Had she had more to copy she would have been happy, but her supplier had gone into Wales. She wished she had Augusta's ‘hand and pen' to make all her studies and books perfect, and, searching perhaps for a companion in her artistic projects, she offered to her friend another cottage close to her own at Windsor.

Augusta Compton's father, the Queen's page Henry Compton, had died recently. ‘Do you think to live in town or in the country?' Elizabeth opened, moving on swiftly to enquire, ‘how was you to like being near here?' She could, she explained, ‘manage' – that wonderful new income – a ‘very pretty little cottage which I think I can get', where Augusta could live rent free, and with a friend if she liked. ‘Be honest and tell me', Elizabeth concluded, ‘if you do or do not like the idea.' Elizabeth continued eagerly with her plan for Augusta Compton to be her companion in the country. ‘The room below is lovely,' she wrote on 13 June of the cottage she had acquired; ‘you may make as pretty a room above if you will sleep in one of the back
bedrooms.'
Within the week, Miss Compton was at Windsor, which offered Princess Mary the opportunity for some sharp words about her letting down her maternal relations by spending time with Elizabeth's maids. Mary concluded, ‘without she keeps herself up properly … I cannot ask Miss Townshend and many of the respectable people at Windsor to
visit her.'