Princesses (10 page)

The princesses and their brothers and immediate ‘family' were housed temporarily in towers and eyrie apartments on the east and south fronts of the Upper Ward, or in the state apartments occupying the entire north front with a view of Eton College chapel across the Thames. As for other members of the household, some had to climb the many steps to apartments at the top of the historic and moated Round Tower in Middle Ward which divided Upper Ward from Lower Ward. Others needed to be of a religious or humble cast of mind, as they were appointed apartments in the Deanery adjoining St George's Chapel that Edward IV had built long before in the centre of the Castle buildings, or were lodged in the almshouses reserved generally for the quaintly named Poor Knights of Windsor. To make way for this royal assault, indignant tenants had been ejected from grace-and-favour lodgings everywhere within the Castle which time and monarchs had so long forgotten.

Some of the alterations to the Lodge that the Queen had made were finished, seven or eight rooms or so, and on the eve of the Prince of Wales's birthday she and the King took the princesses over to view them. A day or so earlier, Miss Hamilton had seen them and wrote that the rooms were ‘furnished in a
style
of elegant simplicity … beautiful paper hangings, light carved gilt frames for looking glasses, worked chairs and painted frames, every room different. Curtains of fine white dimity with white cotton fringe – one set of chairs are knotted floss silk of different shades, sewn on to imitate natural
flowers …'

What made more of an impression on eleven-year-old Princess Royal and her sisters than some rooms furnished with the Queen's familiar elegance, or even the state rooms inside the castle – which had a tendency to admit rain – furnished by their Stuart kinsman King Charles II, were the festivities arranged for their brother's birthday. And what no doubt made most impression of all was that their lessons on that day were deferred in honour of the event.

Cannons fired and bells rang to mark the day, and the royal family activities included a carriage procession through the Home Park and a tour of
a newly built country house in the locality, before they dressed in their best in the evening to walk on the terrace beneath the south wall of the Castle that was the place of popular promenade. Even sixteen-month-old Princess Mary, who Miss Hamilton described as ‘a lovely elegant made child', wore a lace frock over a blue silk coat, and was carried out of the Castle gate to take part in the procession. Both she and her elder sisters – ‘with their hair dressed upon high cushions, with stiff large curls powdered and pomatumed, small dress cap and diamond ornaments set in a formal manner such as stars etc.' – were admired greatly. Their satisfied attendant, Miss Hamilton, thought that they looked uncommonly well and that the sophisticated costumes ‘suited them despite their
tender years.'

The King was delighted by the enthusiasm and respect the townspeople of Windsor
showed
for the royal crocodile on the terrace, flattening themselves against the curtain wall of the Castle so as not to touch their exalted visitors and periodically shouting their regard. Miss Hamilton, who was shepherding the princesses' younger brothers behind them, recorded the scene: ‘There was a great crowd, each saying aloud what they thought, without restraint… a host of nobility, fashionable persons, pretty women, smart girls, coxcombs, and abundance of
clergy.'

Slowly the royal family processed to the end of the terrace, the King constantly halting to accost someone in the crowd, and bringing the rest of the family behind him up sharp in a flurry of silks and polonaises, powdered curls, dress-swords and governesses. At last he decreed the ‘terracing' at an end, and the royal family finished the evening, listening from their apartments within the Castle to Sir George Lennox's regimental band play in the quadrangle before their
windows
.

The princesses returned to Kew and to their studies the following day, but their brother's birthday celebrations were the beginning for them of a long and not always happy association with Windsor, bringing with it dissipation of the children's paradise that was Kew. The King their father would fire several of his daughters with the new enthusiasm he felt for all things rural, equestrian and agricultural. Long walks in the mud and riding and hunting in the rain would make of them true English countrywomen, as their Hanoverian aunts and great-aunts had not been. But the softer and more civilizing influence of their mother, who regarded long walks as barbaric and pined and suffered from crippling headaches within the thick walls of the Castle while the rest of the family braved the elements, would diminish – and her temper would fray.

There was dissipation of a happier kind, however, at Kew this summer when pretty young Miss Hamilton, who enjoyed giving the children treats,
provided for the elder princesses and for Lady Charlotte's granddaughter, Miss Augusta Feilding, in her apartment there a ‘little entertainment of fruit, flowers, cakes, tea etc.'. First the children played in the garden. Then Lady Charlotte, Gouly and Mrs Feilding joined them, and they played at Dumb Crambo, with forfeits ‘which gave rise to much amusement in framing punishments'. The princesses were ‘quite rakes', recorded the successful hostess, ‘as Lady Charlotte allowed them to stay up till 10 o'clock'. When the party was at last at an end, wrote Miss Hamilton, ‘the flowers were tied up in nosegays and Princess Royal had the distribution of them, the cakes, etc.'.

The younger princes, Ernest, Augustus and Adolphus, also enjoyed Miss Hamilton's ministrations. She lodged – and held her party – in the house that had recently been appropriated to their use on Kew Green, and that was now known as Prince Ernest's House. On one occasion, when she formed part of the princes' escort back to Kew from Windsor, they would not leave her, although they now had, with their new
establishment,
their own
attendants
. They even came into her room at Prince Ernest's, she wrote: ‘the dear children had so completely found out my
weak side.'

For the Queen, the King's enthusiasm for Windsor engendered many logistical problems. Four days after the excitement of the Prince's birthday at Windsor, Prince Frederick's fourteenth birthday was spent in the comparative calm of Kew, but later that month of August 1777 it was decided that all his brothers and sisters should be present to celebrate Prince William's twelfth birthday at Windsor. Under Miss Gouldsworthy's and Miss Hamilton's supervision, coaches shipped the three elder princesses, their three younger brothers and Princess Mary, in her wet-nurse Mrs Adams's care, from Kew to Windsor and back again, with an escort of Light Horse to protect them en route. Mrs Adams was a useful member of the nursery for such expeditions, but when her charge was eighteen months old in October 1777 an event that was not unfamiliar in this royal family occurred. The approaching birth of a new baby dislodged the old wet-nurse from rooms that would be needed for the new one.

From the Queen's House, Princess Augusta wrote to Miss Hamilton's mother, shortly before the new baby was due, introducing herself and saying she hoped to encounter Miss Hamilton, who was at Kew, ‘when she comes to see the cradle of the new child
Mama
is to have …' And she wrote again to her new correspondent, saying, ‘I hope you are as well as I expect. My dear friend your daughter, tell her when you see her that she is very good
to me.'
Princess Augusta, aged just nine in the winter of 1777, was from an early age consumed with the problem of ‘being good' and troubled by her lapses from that holy state.

Princess Sophia was born at the Queen's House on 3 November 1777. ‘I was taken ill and delivered in the space of fifteen
minutes,'
the Queen informed her brother Charles the following month. On this occasion, the King was very likely not hovering, as he had done so anxiously for the births of his elder daughters. While Queen Charlotte and the midwife, Mrs Johnson, were taken unawares by the speed at which the child shot into the world, the King was working against the clock, as the French moved closer to declaring war on Britain in sympathy with the Americans and in indignation against the English embargo of French ports.

Princess Sophia's sisters, too, were preoccupied, as their beloved dresser Miss
Dacres
had suddenly abandoned her employment to become wife to their brothers' page, Mr Henry Compton. Their letters to Miss Dacres on her departure and on her October marriage show how dependent they had been on this companion of their early childhood.

Princess Augusta's response to the terrible loss of Miss Dacres was markedly mature, although her handwriting was huge and unformed. ‘I am very sorry that you do go away from me,' she wrote on 20 October, ‘though at the same time I am glad that you will be happy. I hope sometimes you will come and see me and I hope that you will lead a happy life. I hope your sister [Mrs Adams, who had just quitted her post as wet-nurse to Princess Mary] is well. Dear heart, you can't conceive what I felt when
Mama
told me you was to be married to Mr Compton. It caused me many tears when I
heard
it.' The Princess rationalized her feelings in a letter to Gouly the same day: ‘Dear Miss Dacres is a great loss to me, for I love her with all my heart. I would [not] have lost her for all the world, but you know one can't have always what one wants. She is the first loss I have had, for Mlle Krohme was a loss to me but not such a great one as Miss Dacres.' When Mlle Krohme had died in April 1777, it was the Princess Royal who had been greatly affected.

The birth of Princess Sophia did not long distract Princess Augusta from writing affectionate letters. ‘My sisters and me have got in the lottery [a prize of] twenty pounds and what I have got is
for you,'
she told ‘Cuppy' – this was the name Prince Adolphus had manufactured for Mr Compton's new bride – on 4 November. ‘I desire that you will always remember your poor child,' she entreated her former dresser in another – undated – letter. ‘I assure you that she was very sorry when the Queen told her that you was to go away from her.'

‘I shall always remember how my dear Mrs Compton
loved
me,' wrote Princess Augusta again, manfully to the new Mrs Compton. ‘And now I begin to repent that I did not behave well to you … I promise you that you
shall always hear that I have been good.' Pursuing this theme, she was to write to her mother from the Queen's House on Boxing Day 1777,

Dear Mama, I am very glad to tell you that I am very good; this morning I behaved pretty well and this afternoon quite well. All my brothers and sisters send their duty to you and Augustus in particular for he told it to me about six times, give my love and duty to Mama, little dear Sophia is quite well and little Mary is pretty good. Dear Mama I am your most affectionate dauter December
26
1777 Augusta Sophia Queens House London.

The Princess Royal's response to Miss Dacres's happy change of circumstances was distinctly less affectionate than that of her younger sister. ‘How could you be so sly as not let anybody know of when you was to be married?' the Princess Royal upbraided her former attendant the day after Princess Sophia's birth, and wished her joy of a marriage ‘done, done, never to be
undone.'
She tried blackmail: ‘I beg you will not go till after the christening.' She was only sorry it was so soon. ‘I do not think you love me though I
do you …'
wrote the unhappy Princess. Her angry refrain did not quickly diminish. ‘I am very much hurt at your loss,' she wrote three days later, ‘… too soon of a week, of a year, at least I
think so.'
For a month or more the Princess Royal bombarded her with requests and directions. ‘Princess Royal presents her compliments to Mrs Compton and begs she will do her the favour to come to breakfast next Sunday at nine
o clock,'
ran one note. ‘Pray do tell me where your house is that I may kiss my hand to you every day, when I walk by your window,' ran another. But it was swiftly followed by a rebuke. ‘Mr Compton told me it was his fault that I did not see you at the window … It was a baulk … I hope to see you there
tomorrow.'

The Princess Royal's amour-propre and sense of grievance were assuaged when Mrs Compton visited and showed contrition. And in addition the Queen and Lady Charlotte were taking steps to introduce the Princess Royal to an adult world. Earlier in the year she had been present at a private performance at the Queen's House when the actor David Garrick had read from his tragedy
Lethe.
‘Today,' Royal wrote grandly to Mrs Compton on 5 December 1777, ‘I went on an airing with mama.' But the Princess Royal was not out of the nursery yet. Thanking Mrs Compton two days later for another visit, she announced, ‘I now write by the light of the fire; laying on the
ground.'
And on the day after Boxing Day she wrote to her mother, ‘Tomorrow I give a breakfast to my brothers and sisters and some other people. Last
night
we saw a magic lantern of Mrs Cheveley's which made me laugh very much.' She ended politely that she hoped the Queen had been able to go to Windsor.

Seven-year-old Princess Elizabeth was direct in her affection to her former dresser. She drew an accomplished picture of Cuppy's new home on Kew Green and sent it, inscribed ‘this is your house', to her with the message, ‘My dear Mrs Mary I love you with all my heart… I and my sisters wish that you will come to see us… Mary says your name very often.'

Mrs Henry Compton was not to enjoy the princesses' regard long, for she died the following autumn at Kew, after giving birth in September 1778 to a daughter named Augusta. The princesses, however, had already transferred their affection to Mary Hamilton, the well-born young woman whom the Queen had appointed in April 1777 to join Lady Charlotte and Miss Gouldsworthy as ‘a third lady to be at the head of the establishment'. Although Miss Hamilton later wrote that she ‘never in [her] life had the least desire to belong to a Court', this clever, lively – and young – companion was to play a major part in the princesses' lives for five and a half years. The papers Miss Hamilton preserved after she had left royal employ include such examples of indentured schoolroom labour as the following improving text, copied out by Princess Augusta, aged nine, in her best – but not very good – handwriting on 17 July 1778: ‘Recreation, moderately used, is profitable to the body for health, and to the mind for refreshment: but it is a note of a vain mind, to be running after every garish pomp or show.'