Princesses (31 page)

But the new Hereditary Princess was at last in a situation, as Miss Burney wrote, to make her happy. ‘She is born to preside,' wrote the novelist, ‘and that with equal softness and dignity; but she was here in utter subjection, for which she had neither spirits nor inclination … her style of life was not adapted to the royalty of her nature, any more than of her birth; and though she only wished for power to do good, and to confer favours, she thought herself out of her place in not
possessing it.'
If that power came at a price, the Princess Royal was never to regret her marriage. Exhilarating was the moment after a night at Harwich when the Hereditary Princess stepped aboard the
San Fiorenzo,
and that when she stepped ashore at Cuxhaven, to be greeted by her brother Adolphus. ‘He is grown much larger since he left England and having let his hair grow as long as Ernest's was, it has altered his appearance very much,' she wrote to the Prince of Wales.

The couple proceeded to Hanover, in her father's Electorate, for balls and drawing rooms, all etiquette and formality at Herrenhausen, and then on through the countryside, where ‘the peasants enquired which was the King's daughter', and asked the King to come and visit them. The Princess had her first encounter with Mme de Spiegel, who was to be her
lady-in-waiting at Stuttgart. Onward she drove to Brunswick, to Nordheim, to Münden, and to the gates of Cassel, while her mother in England wrote to her brother Charles, ‘I have just separated from my daughter Royal. It cost us much, God hopes she will be happy. The Pce has esprit, worldliness, and knows how to get what he wants. They are both at an age when they must know how to discern what true contentment consists of, and, first youth being past, they must endeavour to make themselves mutually happy.'

The Prince, who had gone ahead, greeted the new Hereditary Princess – with full honours and with his two sons – at Heilbron, frontier to the Duchy of Württemberg, on 23 June. Prince Wilhelm and Prince Paul were, their new stepmother wrote, ‘so like my brothers that I was both pleased and
overcome.'
And the next day, arriving at Stuttgart, she met both her parents-in-law. That evening, at Ludwigsburg, the massive castle in the country where the Württemberg family liked to live as much as possible, she met her nine-year-old stepdaughter Catherine. All three of her stepchildren were to be encouraged by their father to call his new wife ‘Maman'. And for the first time ever this new bride and stepmother, who had been known as ‘Royal' by her intimates, was known by her husband as ‘Charlotte'.

Timid the Princess Royal might appear in company, nervous and sometimes reduced, for fear of stammering, to speaking little, but she had achieved her heart's desire – to marry. On her arrival at Ludwigsburg she found her husband Fritz had sent ahead a copy of Gainsborough's portrait of her dear father to hang in her closet. Whatever his faults as a husband to her cousin Augusta, this Prince of the Holy Roman Empire seemed determined to please her.

The King had found parting with his eldest daughter very
painful,
and was hardly
better
disposed towards his new son-in-law than was the Queen. He resented the Hereditary Prince's attempts to secure his interest for the Duchy with
letters
and even via petitions from the Princess. The Hereditary Princess had to reassure her father that, on her instructions, the Prince would write no more, as the King disliked answering letters. Accordingly, when they heard at Windsor that the Prince had had an accident out shooting in Germany, no great sympathy was felt for him.

But at Scharnhausen, the Hereditary Prince's country retreat near Stuttgart, it was a major drama. The Hereditary Princess told her father she had been ‘seized with … an unaccountable uneasiness' after she had seen her husband mount and ride off. She could not go on with her book, but went up ‘to sit with Madame de Spiegel in her
room.'
Fifteen
minutes
later that lady was called out to go to Prince Wilhelm, the Prince's son, and when she returned she begged Royal to join her in the garden. ‘The moment that I had reached the bench I burst into tears,' wrote that Princess, ‘entreating that she would acquaint me with what had happened to my husband. She then by degrees told me that he had fallen from his horse.'

After a short time her stepson Wilhelm came out to bring Royal into the house. She found the Prince in bed, ‘and he then told me himself that his arm was broke. It is a great mercy that he was not killed, as in the
first
fall he broke the right arm in the joint… and afterwards, as it was on the side of a mountain, rolled four times. His eyes was much bruised but providentially not hurt essentially.' With great
presence
of mind, as the Hereditary Princess lovingly wrote, ‘before they could lift him off the ground, [he] ordered his son to go to Madame de Spiegel, to desire that she would break it
to me
in the gentlest manner and gave directions that I should be taken into the garden, that I might be spared the pain of seeing him lifted out of the coach.' Royal was entranced by this proof of her husband's consideration for her. Their being in so remote a part of the country, the surgeon could not arrive for hours to set the arm, but when Royal
went to her husband, ‘he kept laughing and talking with me for above three hours, when he insisted on my going to supper, and the moment I left him he fainted
away.'

The princesses in London were, as Miss Hayman, in attendance on their niece Charlotte, observed at the Queen's House a few days after Royal's departure, ‘very pleasing and affable, but still lamenting, I believe, the loss of their
sister.'
But by early August Princess
Elizabeth
had become callous, telling Lord Cathcart that her brother-in-law in Württemberg was none the worse for his mishap. ‘No more has happened than a broken arm … notwithstanding he never quits his room.'

Princess Elizabeth, however, had grown in confidence since she had published a book in 1795 entitled
The Birth and Triumph of Cupid,
containing some twenty-four designs she had made on that theme, engraved by the Queen's ‘Historical Engraver' Mr Peltro
Tomkins
. The following year, the plates were republished as
The Birth and Triumph of
Love,
accompanied by a set of 109 Spenserian
verses
on the same amatory theme by that enterprising young man of letters – and subsequently member of the King's household – James Bland Burges. A connection of Martha, Lady Elgin, when she was one of the Queen's ladies, and a sometime Foreign Office employee, Burges enjoyed versifying in assorted magazines of the day. He had his reward when he learnt in November 1794 that all the princesses copied and kept his verses, considering him ‘an astonishing genius', and that Princess Elizabeth was in addition the author of some anonymous poetry he had received. At a drawing room
shortly
thereafter, his ‘Muse' – Princess Elizabeth – asked him the names of some French émigré officers awaiting presentation, and their introduction was effected.

‘I will satisfy your curiosity about my epic
poem',
wrote Burges to a friend when busy at work the following year on his Spenserian verses, ‘on condition that you will confine what I say to yourself for the present … I have already finished the first book of it in the metre of Spenser's
Fairy Queen,
but not in his antiquated language. How the idea may have been executed is not for me to say; but the idea in itself is so entirely original, that I am confident nothing like it is to be found in any language. I caught it from some drawings of Pss Elizabeth, and I am writing this poem for
HRH.'

On Twelfth Night 1796 the poem was complete, and Lady Elgin wrote from the Queen's Lodge to Burges that she had given it to the Princess, whom she saw briefly. ‘I was … most completely gratified by her manner of reading,' wrote Burges's champion, ‘and the delighted expressions that burst out, I may say, as she went through the
lovely
poem.' The Princess, not wishing to have her Cupid ‘mortified' by being set aside, did not show
it to the Queen, as the Oranges were on the point of arriving to dine. But while she was showing it to Mr Smelt, the Queen came in and, as Princess Elizabeth herself wrote, ‘I had the pleasure of putting into Mama's hands Sir James B B's most beautiful and elegant poem … my poor little foolish silent Cupid owes all its worth to the poetry, for I never saw him before in the favourable light you all did, till he was privileged with verse.'

Burges had considered that, if the publication he envisaged of the manuscript he was working on were a success, ‘it will place me not very low among the English
poets.'
Princess Elizabeth was more modest, and sent a copy of her original Cupid engravings to Lord Harcourt, with the note: ‘As you was so very good as to wish to have a copy of
The History of Cupid,
I do beg your acceptance of it. It is in so terrible an undress, that I am really afraid to send it.' Nevertheless, she wrote, ‘I send it the moment I received it, in hope that it might give you a moment's amusement, which if it does, will gratify me
very much.'
All the princesses in different ways relied on Lord and Lady Harcourt as sounding boards for the great world, from which they were aware they lived secluded. Ever since her ‘great illness' at Kew, Princess Elizabeth had felt sustained in her artistic endeavours by Mr Smelt. In this new adventure of publication, Lord Harcourt, who was not only a distinguished amateur artist himself but also a noted patron of poets and artists, supported her.

Once encouraged by publication, there was no stopping the Princess. (She may, in 1794, have been author of the illustrations Tomkins provided for an edition of the royal ladies' favourite volume of poetry, Thomson's
The Seasons.)
And Tomkins executed soon after a further set of engravings from her drawings, entitled
The Birthday Gift or The New
Doll.
In March 1796, Princess Elizabeth wrote to Lady Harcourt:

As I make it a rule never to push, I was not so lucky as to get near you [at
Court
]; which you will now have occasion to be sorry for, being troubled with one of my very stupid notes; which will be made double so, by being forced to name the insignificant present of the ‘Delights of a new Doll,' which I shall be very much flattered if you will accept. I send you two copies, one for yourself, one for Mrs Darner, if you don't think it impertinent. I forget whether I ever sent you the engraving of the dancing
dog.

Lady Harcourt, whose work Horace Walpole had wished to publish, provided in return by way of compliment
Philip, A Tale,
dedicated to Princess Elizabeth.

When Miss Burney visited the royal family in July at Windsor to present to the Queen her new novel
Camilla,
Princess Elizabeth was still full
of her own publishing venture. She related ‘the whole of her own transaction, its rise and cause and progress, in the Birth of Love', wrote Miss Burney in her journal. But Miss Burney failed to record these details, judging that she must abridge her account of her visit to Windsor there,
else
she would never finish. She had energy enough however to note, of her own book, that Princess Elizabeth had exclaimed, ‘I've got leave – and Mama says she won't wait to read it first.' With permission so graciously given, ‘I wrote immediately to order six sets, bound in white and
gold,'
recounted a delighted Miss Burney, one for each of the Queen's daughters.

While her sister Royal was glorying in the sumptuous palaces of Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg, set in a land of plenty famed for its Rhenish wine and romantic forests, Princess Elizabeth had a very different view of how best to live in a changing world. She wrote from Kew to Lord Harcourt, thanking him for arranging a trip to inspect Strawberry Hill, where Horace Walpole worshipped the Gothic and classical past: ‘My life has certainly been spent at Court, but my actions and affections have ever been guided by sincerity and truth, and have no tint whatever of a courtier. At this place my great hoop is dropped, and my plumes lowered so that the Pss is left in town and the humble miss steps
forward.'

Princess Elizabeth did not, for all that, abjure luxury. The Queen gave Miss Burney in July 1796 an account of her new house at Frogmore, of ‘its fitting up, and the share of each Princess in its
redecoration.'
Miss Burney had already heard from a Windsor correspondent of Princess Elizabeth's work there painting ceilings and designing buildings in the
gardens.
And when she visited the princesses' different apartments at Windsor this summer, she spoke of Elizabeth's as the ‘most elegandy and fancifully ornamented of any in the lodge, as she has most delight and taste in producing good
effects.'
In consequence, the artistic Princess knew what it was to be in debt and, James Bland Burges claimed, she had said she would soon go to jail.

But Elizabeth had a liking for comfort of a more substantial kind too, which her friends the Harcourts enjoyed supplying. She thanked them in December 1796 for ‘the best Bath buns that ever were eat which saved me from a lethargy of cold which I suffer with more than ever. Now picture me sitting in the fire with all my different comforts round me in my own room, in the act of copying, when a knock at the door made me turn and your kind present entered the room. I will own to you the moment the box was open I looked with an anxious eye to see whether you had sent me a few
lines.'

The Princess Royal withdrew, and then departed for another life. Princess Elizabeth resorted to Bath buns for comfort. Their younger sister Sophia found a confidante, as the troubles worsened between the Prince and Princess of Wales, in the shape of Miss Frances Garth, who had been appointed sub-governess to the couple's daughter, Princess Charlotte, on her birth in January 1796. Miss Garth, niece of the King's equerry Colonel Thomas Garth, had been companion to Lady Harewood, and was a plain, modest young woman with a talent for embroidery and fancywork. Princess Elizabeth on one occasion wrote to thank her for a cloak she had made for the Queen: ‘so perfect a piece of work, which Mama says is done more like a fairy than anything else'. The Queen added that it was the only cloak that had ever fitted in her life. Sophia, alone of the princesses, felt that the Princess of Wales was unfairly treated, and Miss Garth struck her fancy. But Miss Garth may also have acted as an emissary, with the Princess of Wales's encouragement, for a romantic correspondence – or something more – between Princess Sophia and Miss Garth's uncle the Colonel.