Princesses (26 page)

The Princess Royal, meanwhile, grew discontented and solitary, and railed against her mother for inviting to Windsor the daughters of government families who, she said, ‘could not amuse the King, but only ran idly about the house, interrupting everybody'. Rudely, she instructed her lady-in-waiting to ‘tell all these visitors that she never received anyone in the morning'. Princess Elizabeth meanwhile dedicated herself to a bevy of artistic projects; Princess Augusta took refuge in friendships, and her family. The arrival of letters from brothers continued to be for all the princesses red-letter days. ‘My great joy at finding it on my dressing table', Elizabeth wrote to Augustus of one letter of his, ‘caused a general laugh for I quite
screamed.'

Unfortunately this year Augusta lost Lady Elizabeth Waldegrave, whom she called her best and dearest friend, to the altar. Admittedly, she would still see her former lady-in-waiting, as she had married Lord Cardigan, Governor of Windsor Castle. But Augusta wanted acknowledgement of her generosity in blessing the match. ‘Don't you think I behave very handsomely upon this affair?' she asked Augustus, before adding, ‘you must allow me to feel a great deal upon this occasion, as in our situation a true friend is the most valuable of possessions'.

The careful catalogue of her friends which the Princess now made for her brother was not large. First came her family, then there were those that ‘have been with me from my childhood' – Lady Howe, Lady Harcourt and Lady Cremorne; these were her ‘particular friends'. Of the ‘younger people' she favoured Lady Caroline Waldegrave, Lady Frances Howard and Lady Mary Howe. She said firmly, ‘And I feel that quite sufficient. I have of course many pleasant acquaintances, but there is a wide difference between such and friends.' As for Lady Char and Gouly, she declared, ‘I never can mention them with any body else … owing everything to them.' This was a princess who loved to confide, but felt the difficulty of forming
new friendships, she noted, ‘too suddenly as they may prove fatal to us'. She wrote without emotion, ‘The highest disadvantage in our elevation is the being subject to flatterers and false friends – both of which are shocking calamities to which we are
liable.'
To her delight, in April the King and Queen appointed two of her ‘particular friends', Lady Elizabeth's sister Lady Caroline Waldegrave and Lady Mary Howe, ‘to be our ladies'.

The elder princesses' unmarried state was acutely on show this June when their younger sister Mary made her debut, aged fifteen, at the Birthday ball. The Duke of York had written to Augustus on 29 March 1791, ‘You would hardly know your younger sisters, they are so much grown and so much improved, particularly Mary.' Her dark hair and pale skin had always made her stand out among her sisters. Now came the moment when she would for the first time dance at Court and furthermore lead off the first minuet. For her sisters standing beneath her in the set, it was also a moment that would nudge them – six, eight and nine years older than her – into the shadows of spinsterhood.

Princess Mary like her mother was ardently interested in clothes, and savoured her dress for the Queen's Birthday: ‘the colour of the gown is green with gold spots and stripes, the trimming is to be crepe, with a little running pattern of gold spangles. I think it will be very pretty.' Her younger sister Sophia – a foot shorter and looking much younger than she was – declined to describe the dresses for the birthday – ‘They are always the same sort of thing.' In ‘a great shew of
royalty',
later that year Prince William of Gloucester – only a few months older than Princess Mary – and his elder sister were made welcome at the King's Birthday. But Mary's appointed partner was her brother Prince William.

Unfortunately, at twenty-five the veteran of more than nine years' active service at sea, Prince William relied on strong drink to cheer all social occasions, and his sister's debut in society was no exception. He arrived incapable from alcohol, and Mary had to sit disconsolate in her gown and spangles while another couple led off the dance. Prince William did not mend his ways. Later that year he plied drink on his mother's learned reader, M. Deluc, at a dinner given by Mrs Schwellenberg, and the poor man became tipsy just before he was to go to the Queen. But Princess Mary's beauty had at least struck many beholders – her cousin Prince William of Gloucester for one, and her two eldest brothers for others, who thought they saw a way of turning it to their advantage.

While the French King and Queen's plight disturbed other crowned heads of Europe – news of their flight from Paris in June 1791 was swiftly followed by that of their capture at Varennes, and of the abolition of the
monarchy on 16 July – the Prince of Wales in London and the Duke of York in Berlin were writing of the twenty-one-year-old Crown Prince of Prussia as a suitor for one of their sisters.

The Duke of York had left England that month for the Court of Berlin, hoping to enlist as a volunteer in the Prussian army in a war against the Austrians that did not in the event transpire. But he remained there, rekindling romantic feelings that he had harboured ten years earlier in Berlin for the King of Prussia's daughter by his first marriage, Princess Frederica. And there he received a letter from his brother the Prince of Wales, written from Brighton and outlining his remarkable suggestion that their sister Royal should marry Frederica's half-brother, the Crown Prince of Prussia.

Not only was this youth of twenty-one unknown to Royal; he was also four years younger than her. And it was at this point that the Duke of York remarked in a letter to his brother that the Prussian heir would make a better bridegroom for Mary, and indeed he believed the Crown Prince already had her in mind. The Prince of Wales's plan was, to the Duke of York's mind, unfeasible and, anyway, he was far too preoccupied negotiating his own match with Princess Frederica at the Prussian Court and in correspondence with their father to be an envoy in this matter.

But the Prince's account of his conversations and his correspondence in May with their sister the Princess Royal shows just how desperate and nervous she was, shortly before Mary's debut. ‘I had occasion to go to the Queen's House,' the Prince began, ‘and sit with my mother, where our eldest sister also was, with whom I joked much in a good-humoured way about herself …' Afterwards the Princess begged him never to tease her again in that way before her mother. He did not know ‘how she suffered for it afterwards'. A few days later the Princess Royal poured out her heart in a private interview with her brother. All her sisters were favoured over her. In addition, she spoke of'the violence and the caprice of her mother's temper which hourly grows worse'. And her parents made no attempt to supply any sort of establishment for her – at home or abroad. She was kept under ‘constant restraint … just like an
infant.'

Failing marriage abroad, she would be happy, she said, astonishing her brother, to marry the Duke of Bedford, his friend. Indeed, he said, she seemed eager for it. ‘She says she is grown to a time of life that will not admit of any scheme of this sort being long postponed.'

The Princess Royal's plans, radical though they were, were most interesting to her brother, in that they might be of
assistance
in his attempts to secure loans on the Continent. He was at present negotiating through an
agent, Zastrow, a large loan from the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, and Zastrow had said he had heard the King of Prussia would be ‘ready to assist' with more money, if his son the Crown Prince married a princess of England. When the Prince rashly mentioned this to his sister, she seized upon it, only to have her dreams shattered by the Duke of York's
response
.

The Duke of York thought no more highly of her other scheme, to marry his friend the Duke of Bedford. It was perhaps with the Duke in mind – a leading Whig and agriculturalist – that she had fulminated against those idle daughters of government. But in her rage against the world the Princess Royal now said, according to Mrs Papendiek, that ‘she had never liked the Queen, from her excessive
severity.'
She added ‘that she had doubted her judgement on many points, and went so far as to say that she was a silly woman'.

The Bedford plan was, like the Prussian plan, dismissed by her brothers as one their father would never agree to. The project of an establishment and independence, which the Princess Royal had introduced with such fire, crumbled into cinders. And Royal, baulked of her attempt to escape, retreated from the family circle, while her younger sister Elizabeth whiled away the wet hot summer with long drawing lessons from Mr Gresse. At the Lodge at Frogmore, where she and Augusta and the Queen went almost every day, Elizabeth sat in a room with her sister and read, wrote and
‘botanized',
while their mother sat in another room – very small and green – across the passage where she did likewise. On Saturdays, the younger princesses, having no lessons, came too. But Royal was rarely there.

In February this year, the Queen had written to her son Augustus – about to embark, for his health, for the south – a letter describing the mild winter in England: ‘No frost nor snow, and everything in blossom. The hazels, lilacs, primroses, wallflowers, polyanthus, are all out this present time, in Kew, Richmond and Windsor gardens.' Four days earlier she had begun to plant, with the help of a Yorkshire clergyman, ‘who undertakes to render this unpretty thing pretty', the neglected garden at Frogmore. From that day accordingly she dated ‘the beginning of my little
paradise'
where Mr William Aiton, the gardener at Kew, had finished making her a greenhouse. She was also taking up the botanical studies that the King's illness had interrupted, again with a vengeance. ‘Curtis's books of botany, Lees, Sowerby, and Miller's English garden calendar and dictionary are to be my chief studies when there, and the drying of plants – both foreign and natives – an endless resource. Of the former I make a collection and have hitherto gone on with great success.'

The Queen's immersion from that time on in her houses and gardens at Frogmore was to please some of her daughters more than others. Elizabeth was an enthusiast from the beginning, and wrote this year: ‘Our few days in the country every week suit me extremely and Mama's little cottage at Frogmore fills my thoughts at present very much.' She had just been there with Augusta and ‘It looked in beauty, at least we wish to think
it did …'
Elizabeth described to Augustus the ‘shades' or silhouettes that she was now making from black paper with amazing dexterity – not only portraits but whole scenes of figures, often mothers with children and, very, very often, babies. ‘I shall enclose two or three of my cuttings out, and if you like them, I will send you more. But you must remember that I do not draw figures, and cut out these without drawing them first.' She declared herself content with her secluded life: ‘It is a very lucky thing for me that I do not live more in the world, for I am sure it would not do for me.' But Elizabeth often declared an airy lack of interest in the world while being a keen participant in it. Of a regiment stationed at Windsor and said to be ‘the finest regiment … quite perfection,' she wrote, ‘I do not understand anything about it!'

The younger princesses were despatched to Nuneham and the Harcourts in the late summer of 1791, for their elders were once again off to Weymouth, where the King, who had been looking ‘full and bloated', could bathe. ‘I shall take
Don Quixote
as my companion, which is very rude of me when I add that I go in the carriage with Pss Royal and our 2 ladies,' wrote Elizabeth a week before they set out in early September, ‘but I cannot keep up conversation for a whole day.'

The King bathed with energy at Weymouth, and rode desperately hard also – thirty-two miles to Lulworth in the heat one day, and perspiring violently. But he was judged to be well. His wife was not. ‘The Queen looks, I think, very ill,' wrote Mrs Harcourt, ‘and, by all accounts, has been so low and languid, that nothing but real illness can account for it.' She had, in addition, been troubled by a bad foot for six months. But above all, Mrs Harcourt was interested in news about the Duke of York and his bride. They married in Berlin – on his sister Princess Royal's twenty-fifth birthday, 29 September 1791 – in a double ceremony in which the bride's sister Wilhelmina married the Prince of Orange.

‘We have nothing to do with any former attachments she may have had,' Mrs Harcourt wrote, and did not elaborate. All the reports were that the couple were deeply in love and talked of nothing but retiring to England, ‘and living with and for each other'. Upon hearing that Princess Frederica's brother the Crown Prince of Prussia was to accompany his sister to
England, Mrs Harcourt wrote with excitement, not knowing of the Princess Royal's disappointed hopes: ‘We shall see which of our three goddesses will have the apple.'

But the Crown Prince did not come. And to Queen Charlotte's discomfiture her brother Charles's motherless daughters, on whose education she had advised, scooped the pool. His daughter Louise became the bride of the Crown Prince of Prussia on Christmas Eve 1793 and in due course queen of that country. Her younger sister Frederica married two days later the Crown Prince's younger brother, Prince Louis of Prussia.

Augusta bathed for the first time this year at Weymouth. ‘I like it very well, and think it will do me good, I feel very hungry, all very good signs, first hunger, and then
faith',
was her tepid response to the sensation. She preferred joining a party that sat in one of the bathing machines, working, while Lady Mary Howe read aloud. And she walked along the strand almost in the sea – ‘the spray is charming and the sands so soft to walk upon that I am quite delighted. It is quite an indulgence to me who am tortured with the bad gravel on Windsor Terrace.' At Weymouth, the princesses and even the Queen walked about with only a lady, and went into the few shops as they pleased. But there was little enough to do. When they went to the play twice a week, ladies of their circle secured the boxes to either side ‘to keep off improper company'. Alas, they could not improve the quality of some of the actors'performances. For entertainment, Princess Augusta was reduced to making an attendant's young son – with ‘little legs like two sticks … feet like little bits of sealing wax' – dance round the room while she played her harpsichord.