Princesses (3 page)

When the Archbishop of Canterbury christened the Princess Royal on 27 October 1766, the new Queen of Denmark was among her godparents, but that in its turn was a proxy appearance. Caroline Matilda had embarked for Copenhagen and for a fateful dynastic marriage overseas that her brother, King George III, was bitterly to regret having arranged.

Another of the Princess Royal's aunts, Princess Augusta, had not fared well in a foreign land either. Her sophisticated soldier husband, the Hereditary Prince of Brunswick, taunted her with a succession of mistresses, and she took disconsolately to religion, and to trumpeting the superiority of her native land. In England two years after her 1764 marriage, and with an infant son, Prince Charles of Brunswick, in tow, she told anyone who would listen that she hoped he would in due course marry his new cousin, the Princess Royal.

There was another royal marriage in the air at the time of the Princess Royal's birth. Her fainthearted uncle William, Duke of Gloucester married beautiful Maria, Dowager Countess of Waldegrave on 6 September – but was too afraid to admit the fact to his mother or brother. For Maria, although the widow of the King's former governor and the mother of three beauties, all of whom were to marry well, was herself illegitimate. She was the daughter of Sir Edward Walpole, Horace's brother, and of a Miss Dorothy Clements who some said had been a washerwoman and, others,
worse
.

The Duke of Gloucester and the Dowager Countess of Waldegrave prosecuted their romance at Windsor, a castle conveniently neglected by the Court since the days of Queen Anne. Maria and her daughters had apartments in the deserted royal stronghold, and her father, Sir Edward, inhabited a country house at Frogmore, close by. When the Duke took a
house at St Leonard's Hill in the Great Park, the town gossip became unstoppable. ‘As soon as the castle clock at Windsor had struck twelve', ran one account, ‘and of consequence all was quiet', Lady Waldegrave ‘ordered a rocket to be let off in the great walk in Windsor Park, which it seems was the signal, for soon after it a Royal chaise came down, and out of it a certain Duke, who usually passed the remaining part of the night in her
lodgings.'
The irregular arrangement, the truth of which neither party owned to anyone, became a talking point – had they or had they not married? And if they had, when would they own it?

The baby Princess Royal knew nothing of her aunt Caroline's and uncle Gloucester's marriages in the year of her birth. But the time was not far off when, while she was still an infant, her future as well as that of her siblings would be dramatically determined by the King's unmeasured response to the consequences of these and other marriages of his own siblings.

Towards the end of November Lady Charlotte Finch wrote in her diary, ‘To the Queen's House at eleven o'clock, the hour I have fixed every day for giving the Princes their
lesson.'
At this time of year the royal family and attendants settled in town for the winter – Lady Charlotte and others in apartments at St James's Palace – and the damp Kew and Richmond houses were
abandoned
until summer weather the following May made them habitable again.

In Mrs Muttlebury's quarters, women known as ‘rockers' soothed the Princess Royal when she cried by pulling her cradle, a
thing
of gleaming wood, soft mattresses and silk coverlets, to and fro on strings. Household accounts show that Mrs Muttlebury had the use of a nursing chair in her bedroom, while Mrs Chapman, the ‘dry-nurse' who looked after the baby's other needs, was in a more modest room with harateen or coarse linen
covers
. Lady Charlotte, however, had superior red and white check covers
to her
chairs, and the Princess Royal, gifted with a good memory, recalled the colour and check of these chairs years later when recounting how, as a child, she jumped off one of them, pretending to descend from a bathing machine into the
sea
.

The Queen's German dressers, the formidable Mme Schwellenberg and her deputy, Mrs Hagedorn, shared the attic quarters with the royal children and their attendants. Mme Juliana Schwellenberg, who had come with the Queen from Germany, was of immense value to her mistress. In guttural English she kept all comers away from her beloved Queen with an unholy enthusiasm for her task which irked others. Swollen with self-importance, she was heard to say that what was good enough for the Queen was not good enough for her, and a page, Robère, would always
crouch outside her door, ready to speed to her assistance at the peal of a silver bell. Fortunately for the King and Queen below – in view of the racket that all these various inhabitants could make – the original owner of the house, the Duke of Buckingham, had soundproofed the upper storey, with ‘floors so contrived as to prevent all
noise'
over his wife's
head
.

The week after the princes joined their sister in town, they ‘as usual' visited their grandmother Augusta, Dowager Princess of Wales, on her birthday at her home, Carlton House, a short distance down Pall Mall from St James's Palace. This year they were joined by their two-month-old sister on one of the first airings she took outside the
walled
brick garden behind the Queen's House. Their grandmother was widely reviled in England – partly for the simple fact of being German, partly for the influence, following the early death of her husband Frederick, Prince of Wales, that the politician Lord Bute had exerted on her. Some accused the Princess of having taken the Scots peer as her lover. Other xenophobes held – more accurately and with more import for the lives of the grandchildren who visited her on 1 December 1766 – that she had brought scrofula with her into the Hanoverian royal family of England from the Saxe-Gotha line.

Scrofula, a horrifying disease giving rise to scars and chronic swelling of the lymphatic glands – in the neck especially – led at best to intractable inflammation of skin, bones, joints and other parts and to a weakened resistance to other disease. At worst the tubercular disease spread to the lungs and proved fatal. Scrofula – also known as the king's evil – was already believed to have been responsible for the death of one of Augusta's children, would be adduced as the cause of the death of another within a year, and those with imagination believed it would weaken the succession. With some satisfaction every ailment and death in the royal family over the next century would be claimed when possible for what became known as the ‘family disease'. But, ignoring the fatal inheritance she supposedly brought him, the Dowager Princess's son the King paid his mother every respect and made sure his children did too.

On 18 January 1767 the Princess Royal was on display with her brothers at a drawing room at St James's marking her mother's official birthday – she had now graduated to wearing a ‘pink and silver watered tabby [or taffeta] coat'. But Lady Charlotte Finch, who had ordered the outfit, could not be present. Having suffered the death of one daughter in the year Prince William was born, she was now in mourning for her estranged husband, the Hon. William Finch.

Finch had died on Christmas Day 1766 after a period of hideous mental instability which had begun after his wife's appointment as royal governess,
and which had led her to take her children and leave the marital home in London for apartments in St James's and for a house in Kew. The wonder is that Lady Charlotte, who presided over all nursery matters with competence and grace, was not undone by her double duty – to her royal charges and to her own three teenage daughters and her son at Eton. She continued to rule the royal roost and to order her children's lives with a zest stoked by reference to devotional works, her energy flagging only when her royal employers insisted on keeping her with them in the evenings after the children were in bed. For not only were their young children a central focus of the King and Queen's day, between public business, but, eschewing the formal dining that had been the rule at Hampton Court and St James's Palace during the reign of the King's grandfather George II, this royal couple liked to dine every day at home with the same small selection of their household in attendance.

Horace Walpole was apoplectic about the King and Queen's decision to live a retired life. He wrote in the summer of 1764 from Strawberry Hill, his spectacular Gothic villa near Twickenham, ‘The Court, independent of politics, makes a strange figure. The recluse life led here at Richmond, which is carried to such an excess of privacy and economy, that the Queen's friseur waits on them at dinner, and that four pounds only of beef are allowed for their soup, disgusts all sorts of people. The drawing rooms are abandoned …' Walpole had earlier praised the new Queen's unshowy appearance and behaviour on her arrival from Mecklenburg-Strelitz in London in 1761, which had disappointed some hoping for great beauty and hauteur. ‘She looks very sensible, cheerful, and is remarkably genteel …' he wrote. ‘She talks a great deal – is easy, civil, and not
disconcerted.'
And he had perspicaciously noticed the taste she showed for the decorative arts, and her enthusiasm for the burletta – comic opera – and for the theatre.

‘The Queen is so gay,' Walpole added, shortly after her arrival, ‘we shall not want sights; she has been at the opera,
The Beggar's Opera
and
The Rehearsal
, and two nights ago carried the King to
Ranelagh …'
Fortunately he was not privy to the opinion of English opera that Queen Charlotte later shared with her brother Charles in Germany. ‘They sing but like
parrots.'
He, and others, praised the Queen's passion for music, as well as her playing on the harpsichord and singing at weekly concerts with her brothers- and sisters-in-law. (The King, a less sure performer, sometimes in private accompanied her on the German flute.) Walpole's disappointment when the couple lost that initial enthusiasm for gaiety was all the greater.

The King and Queen did not buckle. Complaints on every side – not least from the select few who were chosen to be their intimates every evening at cards and to have as entertainment the company of the royal children – continued to dog their life of retirement. But the King was well satisfied, and the Queen was determined to love and obey her husband, and to defer to his wishes – in particular, the lust for a plain life which he visited on her and their children. ‘If there is a shade in her
character,'
one of her intimates was to aver, ‘it was due to a natural
timidity.'
This timidity, to which her children later testified, was later in many instances to test the whole family, when the Queen insisted on bowing to the King's desires in matters where she felt very differently from him.

It was hardly surprising that the King wanted some kind of domestic respite. Much had occurred in the course of the six years since Prince George was told, while riding across Kew Green with his mother's mentor, Lord Bute, that his grandfather King George II – a man he hardly knew and whose closest companions at Richmond were his spinster daughters Caroline and Amelia – had died, and that he had become, at the age of twenty-two, King George III. Lady Charlotte Finch's then loving and sane husband William had been present at the palace on 25 October 1760, and wrote to his wife, ‘My dearest dear', that the King had died of an apoplexy at seven or eight in the morning. He had been particularly cheerful, ‘dressed, drunk his chocolate, and then retired as usual [to the water closet]; soon after a noise was heard of something having fallen, upon which one of the pages opened the door and found him upon the floor stone
dead.'

The following year, the new King, anxious to secure both a companionable consort and the succession – of his four brothers and two sisters then living, none as yet was married – seized on Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz to be his queen. She was a seventeen-year-old princess of'very mediocre education', according to the reports, from an unimportant north German Duchy, and spoke no English. Hence, ran his thinking, unlike grander brides, ‘being isolated, she could never involve England in affairs of the Continent'. The Queen was only too happy to adhere strictly to the line that the King had instructed her to follow in politics on her arrival in London – not to meddle. ‘Having been brought up without pomp and in the simplicity of a small court,' as a diplomat informed the French Foreign Minister, Choiseul, ‘she has no knowledge of politics, and no idea of intrigues, or of the interests of Princes.'

The English found her ‘plain', criticized her complexion as sallow, and noticed her spreading nostrils and mouth, but the marriage was an immediate success; an astute courtier observed that they had an immediate air of
pleasure in each other. To his delight the King and his new, submissive Queen appeared to agree on all things, especially the need to live a good Christian life.

Within a year of his marriage, in 1761, the King had an heir, George, Prince of Wales. Within two years he had shown himself a patron of the arts, embellishing the new Queen's House with libraries and with collections of paintings from Italy. And when, by September 1766, Queen Charlotte, speaking
accented
but fluent English, was a mother of three sons at the age of twenty-one and heavily pregnant with her next child, they could not fault her fecundity.

But the weekly drawing rooms and levees over which the King and Queen presided at the ancient palace of St James's, emphasizing England's power, where all was splendour and formality, were exhausting. And party politics were a further minefield for the inexperienced new sovereign and his consort to circumnavigate while they built their marriage – of vested landed interests and patronage centring around the powerful Whig and Tory families. In the six years since his accession, the King had had five different administrations – led, in turn, by the Duke of Newcastle, the Earl of Bute, George Grenville, the Marquess of Rockingham and, since July, William Pitt, newly Earl of Chatham. These changes brought, in turn, five Oppositions to contend with. And the King could hardly be blamed for wishing for a little domestic comfort in such trying circumstances.