Princesses (27 page)

The arrival of the clever, sophisticated Duchess of York in November altered the Princess Royal's mood for the better – although the Prussian Duchess had a love of music which the English Princess could not share. The Duchess brought a £30,000 dowry, and the English cartoonists, for the first time, featured Princess Amelia. She was held up by the Queen to greet the Duchess of York – indicating greed on the royal family's part to get the Princess's large dowry. In fact, the Duke of York, a man in love, spent £20,000 on jewels for his bride. The Princess Royal described her new sister-in-law as a ‘charming' little woman, and praised her as very industrious. With the Duke Frederica settled down at Oatlands, the luxurious house complete with games room and pool and grotto that he had furnished three years earlier.

But Royal was distressed that her brother Augustus complained of her silence. She could not, she said, ‘write such long letters as Eliza … our life is so much the same … the history of one day, that of every day …'. She
couldn't think what her sister filled her pages with. ‘Besides,' she continued, ‘ever since we parted, our society is so much altered, and the people we live with so unknown
to you.'
She asked him, rather, to tell her about the pictures he had seen, and the snowy Alps. (All the princesses thrilled to the idea of travel. Princess Elizabeth was reading Pennant's
Tours of Wales,
and meant to try next his
Tours through Scotland.)
How, she wrote, she envied Augustus his sight of Rome; were she there, she would not leave a single spot unseen of that great city. With M. de Guiffardière's ancient history lessons to the fore, she added, ‘The statues are amazingly fine by all accounts, but I am afraid very few of them are not a little
broke.'
Meanwhile, the Queen asked Augustus for some Italian fan leather ‘quite white for to paint on, and if besides you will send us some Naples fan mounts I shall be much obliged
to you.'
Fan painting was a favourite hobby of hers and of the Princess Royal and Elizabeth, she explained. The princes might travel or marry and settle. The princesses had their ‘work' to do.

Princess Augusta wrote
on
3 February 1792: ‘Elizabeth and me (who were always each other's best friend) are sitting opposite each other at the same table and talking between
whiles.'
They had been quiet that New Year, while they discovered what entertainments their new sister-in-law the Duchess of York, who was visiting, might like. But the Duchess was not unnaturally distracted.
Following
their joint declaration at Pilnitz, in September 1791, her father the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria signed a defensive alliance against France this month, based on the repugnance they felt for illegitimate republican regimes.

‘What joy it must be to Papa and Mama and all of us to see how fond they are of
each other,'
wrote Sophia, nevertheless, of her brother
Frederick,
on whom she doted, and of his Duchess. Sophia was now included with her sister Mary in more of the family doings, and found the farce,
The Town Hunchback,
‘very laughable', though Mary did not. ‘The little idol
Amelia'
still ate in the nursery, as Miss Burney on a visit in January noted, and the six-year difference in age between Sophia and her younger sister was also apparent in the elder sister's note: ‘Amelia played about the room with Lady Douglas's two
daughters
and with Lady Harrington's
little girl,
Lady Anna Maria Stanhope. Mary and me played at
cards.'

While the Duchess of York's father and brothers prepared to go to war over France's demand in March 1792 that Prussia's ally Austria withdraw from territories in Flanders, her new family in
England
felt no such call to arms. They were living in more or less domestic contentment, or at least idleness. The Prince of Wales was at Brighton with Mrs Fitzherbert, who was incidentally angry that the Duchess of York would not treat her as belle-soeur or sister-in-law. Prince William, Duke of Clarence had set up
house
with the celebrated comic actress Mrs Jordan at Bushey, and even Edward had found happiness, at Quebec, with a Mme de St Laurent. Only the princesses' younger brothers were without known romantic attachments – Ernest and Adolphus in the Hanoverian cavalry and infantry, and, at Portici near Naples, Augustus. From there this last Prince, disappointed
in his hopes of a naval career, was considering academe as an alternative. He wrote to his former tutor Dr Hughes on 10 January 1792: ‘very probably next October in a year I shall be going or gone to Cambridge or Oxford; but… this is a great
secret.'

The princesses continued to spend much of their time at Frogmore Farm, Mr Floyer's house which the Queen had rechristened Amelia Lodge. When Miss Burney visited the royal ladies at the Queen's House in May 1792, the Queen opened her ‘work repository … a very curious table and work bag in
one',
and
showed
her a sample of the chair covers she was making for ‘her cottage at Frogmore'. It was Princess Elizabeth's twenty-second birthday that month, but, no suitor beckoning, she wrote instead for Lady Harcourt's
amusement
an answer to a hypothetical advertisement: ‘Rug Lane 1792, To the person intended for getting all proper people for the Queen's small establishment at the Cottage Royal at Frogmore.' She sought ‘the place of housekeeper', and went on, ‘Now my love, I am a pretty good hand at conserves, pickling, and so forth … When I lived with the late Lord Orford [Horace Walpole] I gave great satisfaction to him and Miss Polly. I was a great favourite of the latter's, I used to read to her. In case of that's being wanted, I could read to her Majesty, as I am told she is fond of that amusement.'

The Queen was indeed ‘fond' of reading, but had a way of dealing with books
given
or even dedicated to her that were not to her taste. She deftly put
Dinarbas,
for instance – a turgid sequel to Dr Johnson's
Rasselas
by a lady author – into Fanny Burney's hands, for ‘some account', as the Queen put it, ‘of its merits' before she read it. Miss Burney praised it, and even recommended it to the princesses'
attention
: ‘I am sure their Royal Highnesses could read nothing more chastely fitted
for them.'
For reward, she received later in the year the author Miss Ellis Cornelia Knight's new publication
Marcus Flaminius.
Like many others, Miss Burney believed the princesses isolated from the world, allowed to read neither novels nor newspapers without their mother's permission. And the princesses traded on this supposed isolation to appear blank-faced and innocent, while a constant diet of letters and newspapers and Court gossip – as
well
as the books that circulated among the household – kept them immensely well informed of what was ‘moving' in the world.

For Elizabeth and for the Queen, the purchase of first Frogmore Farm, or Amelia Lodge, and then the neighbouring Great Frogmore estate in 1792 featuring Frogmore House offered distinct possibilities. The Queen was to avoid both the cares of her position and her husband. Elizabeth seized on the opportunity the acres of neglected garden at Frogmore House afforded for designing architectural ‘surprises' in the Gothic or Olde
English style as well as small buildings on the more established classical model, both being then fashionable. Moss huts, Gothic ruins and octagonal temples appeared in the grounds under her direction. And while the French Queen's creation, Le Petit Trianon, lay neglected at Versailles, the Queen of England and her daughters established what she called a ‘terrestrial paradise' in the Home Park at Windsor.

Fanny Burney, hovering around the passages and corridors of the Queen's House on the King's Birthday, was invited by Princess Elizabeth to join them in the state
dressing
room where the Queen was sitting with her head attired superbly for the drawing room, her Court dress awaiting her at St James's. All the princesses (bar Princess Amelia) and the Duchess of York were with her. In the background stood M. de Luc, Schwelly, Mme de la Fite and Miss Gouldsworthy. For this day was to be fourteen-year-old Princess Sophia's debut at Court.

With five princesses now ‘out', established routines of thirty years were ending. This summer, Lady Charlotte conducted Princess Amelia daily to her mother in the White Closet at the Queen's House, as she had escorted so many royal children since she was first appointed as governess to the infant Prince of Wales in 1762. But Lady Charlotte was now old, deaf and unwell, Princess Sophia writing this autumn, ‘I am grieved to death about her, she is if
possible
more kind to us than ever. Indeed, both Gouly and her are so good to us that we should not be deserving of having such treasures about us, if we did not feel their kindness in the highest
degree.'

Lady Charlotte resigned from her post in November 1792, and with the New Year the Queen must look for
other
governesses and companions for her younger daughters. Even the Queen's dresser, Mrs Schwellenberg, who had ruled backstairs longer than Lady Charlotte had the schoolroom, was now a very sick dragon. Too ill to preside in the eating room where she had persecuted Miss Burney and others, Schwelly
rose
from her sickbed only to attend the Queen at her dressing and at her going to bed. The Old Guard was passing.

Unfortunately, the princesses' remaining attendants did not pull well together as Mary and Sophia completed their teenage years, and as Amelia approached them. Miss Gouldsworthy, though unremittingly kind to all her charges, even to those who abused her, was often ill. And Miss Burney's opinion of the two ‘English teachers', Miss Planta and Miss Gomm, was that they ‘humiliate, dislike and distrust each other …'.

Princess Mary of all the sisters adored children, and she enjoyed hearing from Fanny Burney about a nephew's fantasy island called Protocol. ‘Had we been alone', wrote Fanny, she was sure Mary ‘would have insisted
upon hearing every
particular.'
Mary, intensely interested in the world around her, was no great student, but Sophia and Amelia were naturally quick and avid readers. It was a pity that the Queen had no educational aspirations for them, as she had had for their elder sisters. Instead, with Mlle Julie de Montmollin their instructor, they became beautiful needlewomen, adept at lacemaking, crochet work and all kinds of fine embroidery. But their handwriting, in contrast to their elder sisters', was shocking, the very texts of their letters less assured, their knowledge of history, geography and botany skimpy, and their artistic and musical education sketchy.

This year, for the first time, the younger princesses were allowed to join their sisters at Weymouth, where the royal party proceeded in mid-August, and Mary vividly remembered her first sea bathe there half a century later. Her bathing dress was a ‘regular one' made for the occasion, which ‘no floating about deranged. If all the world', she recalled, ‘had been looking on, they would of [sic] seen me as well-dressed as if in a drawing room.' She remembered the fatigue of bathing. ‘I began with jumping into the sea from the first step of the machine, but I would not go on so doing, and then the two bathing women dipped me into the sea which saved much fatigue and I liked it much better.' However, the experience did not agree with her. At last ‘I was obliged to lay down and could not walk at all, so that it was given up.'

They were at Weymouth for the Princess Royal's twenty-sixth birthday, but she did not raise the subject of her future. No one wanted to dispute with the King now, for fear his old and shocking
illness
might re-emerge. On being informed this year that the great Dr Burney's remedy for depression was to compose canons to solemn words, the King told the musicologist's daughter that he, too, found that grave or difficult employment composed him when ill or disturbed.

The prospects of the princesses marrying abroad had anyway diminished as the prospect of full-scale European war loomed. Shocking news arrived from Paris – of the mob entering the Tuileries Palace on 10 August, of their killing the Swiss Guards, and other Swiss in the English Minister's house – and of the French royal family taking refuge with the National Assembly.

Still worse news came. The Prussians, who with Austria had declared war on France in July, assembled an allied army at Coblenz. Hoping to take advantage of the social and military chaos in France, the army marched on Paris under the command of the famed but elderly Duke of Brunswick – and was routed by French cannonade at Valmy on 21 September. Next day, the French republic was declared, and – further news came – the French had defeated an Austrian army at Jemappes and taken Flanders.

Weymouth, by contrast, remained the most peaceful town imaginable, where the King and Queen of England went weekly to the public assembly rooms, and took tea in friendly fashion with people ‘with a claim to their notice' in an inner room. On her return to Windsor, Princess Elizabeth wrote to Lady Harcourt on 3 October 1792: ‘Of all parties to Weymouth this has been infinitely the most agreeable to me …' Only breakfast at an inn on the way back had been a disappointment: ‘anything so disgusting I thank God I never saw before and never wish to see again, bad butter… plum cake as stowage for the stomach'. She hoped Lady Harcourt would pardon ‘the badness of my handwriting, but I have so horrid a pen that it is scarcely possible to write, and another thing is that I am scrawling, while my hair is dressing'.

Sophia wrote on 14 November of having been to see ‘Mama's new house [at Great Frogmore], in time it will be charming. Pray tell Lord Harcourt (for I assume it will amuse him) that we went all over the house not excepting the kitchens and cellars which are
very good.'
In January the Queen had written of her plans for a Gothic cottage at Frogmore Farm which the architect James Wyatt was to design. (The King had also given her the long elm walk which used to lead to Shaw Farm and she had planted 4,000 trees there, on the advice of her new consultant Major William Price.) But, as we have seen, the Queen had persuaded the King to buy her the much larger neighbouring estate of Great Frogmore, and so all ideas of a cottage were at an end. Amelia Lodge was demolished and its grounds united with those of Frogmore House, the Queen's new residence.