Princesses (32 page)

Fanny Burney visited the Queen's House on Sophia's twentieth birthday in early November 1797, and was interested both by her appearance and by her self-consciousness:

She had a pair of spectacles on, which, with her uncommonly young face – its shape being as round as a baby's, and its colour as rosy – had a most comic and grotesque appearance … She is so near-sighted, that she is almost blind; and the Queen now permits her always to wear spectacles. ‘And I want her', said Princess Augusta, ‘to wear them at the play, where we are going tonight; but she is afraid, she says, of some paragraph in the newspapers; but what, I ask her, can they say? That the Princess Sophia wears spectacles! Well, and what harm can that do her? Would it not be better they should say it, than she should lose all
sight
of the
performers
?'

Augusta herself, although shy, was not vain. She ‘let the hairdresser proceed upon her
head,
without comment', wrote Miss Burney, ‘and without examination, just as if it was solely his affair, and she only supported a block to be dressed for his service … And when he begged she would say whether she would have any ribbons, or other things, mixed with the feathers and jewels, she said, “You understand all that best, Mr Robinson, I'm sure – there are the things – so take what you
please.'
”

Sophia supported her sister-in-law the Princess of Wales with difficulty, her mother and sisters being partisans of the Prince. On one occasion the Princess said, ‘I perceived you withdrew from me, but I saw your motive, and approved
greatly.'
In June 1796, when Carlton House was ablaze with
emotion after the Princess of Wales had forced the resignation of her husband's lover, Lady Jersey, as her lady-in-waiting, Sophia wrote in flattering terms
again
to Miss Garth, hoping she would wear the hair she sent around her neck: ‘Your uncle also told me you had desired him to give me your duty. Indeed, be assured you will, in time if not already done, turn my head.'

The uncle of whom she spoke was Colonel Thomas Garth – major-general from January 1798 – with whom Frances Garth lived after her father's
death.
He was one of the King's favourite equerries, and was much with the royal family.

On another occasion Sophia, thanking Miss Garth for helping her with a troublesome piece of needlework she had sent her, wrote, ‘O! Were I my own mistress how often I would fly to you.' She was glad the accounts were good of the Colonel. ‘May I beg you to thank him for his remembrance of me, and
to mention
how sensible I am of his not having forgot me, and that I am very sorry I have not seen him for so
long.'

Thomas Garth was a small man, ‘a hideous old
devil'
according to one account, and marked by a claret-coloured birthmark that extended down over one eye. In compensation, contemporaries speak highly of his wit and, indeed, of his stories of his own soldiering adventures in the West Indies. At any rate, Sophia had entangled herself romantically with him by the autumn of 1798. Her sister Mary wrote in September to the Prince of Wales: ‘As for General Garth, the purple light of love toujours le
même.'
While this may or may not have been a cruel allusion to the General's birthmark, or just a quotation from the poet Cowper, a daughter of one of the Queen's ladies later recalled, ‘the princess was so violently in love with him that everyone saw it. She could not contain herself in his presence …'

A year earlier, in the summer of 1797, with Miss Garth now a woman of the bedchamber to the Princess of Wales and part of that estranged Princess's establishment at Blackheath, Princess Sophia wrote that she had found an emissary to be trusted with correspondence for Miss Garth when she accompanied the Princess of Wales to Carlton House to see Princess Charlotte: ‘His name is Robinson, he has lived with us many years and may be depended upon – He will therefore walk to Carlton House with his son, who will I trust be allowed to give you my letter without further
enquiries
…'

Far away from the intrigue that sometimes characterized royal family life in England, the Hereditary Princess of Württemberg was absorbing the new country over which she would preside with her husband when the Duke his father died. ‘She has won the hearts of all who have seen her from her great affability and desire to please,' wrote an English resident there, Sir John Stuart. Sir John considered the Princess ‘particularly fortunate' in her choice of Grande Maitresse, or Mistress of the Robes – Mme de Spiegel. She was ‘a woman of great merit, nearly her own age, of much information, of irreproachable moral character, and who has conducted herself with great propriety in her own family through difficult circumstances'. Charlotte also had acquired Mme de Spiegel's young niece and daughter-in-law as ancillary ladies – ‘Her RH treats them as if she was educating them herself with all the good humour possible.' Stuart considered the Prince and Princess had made a wise choice in appointing ladies from outside the Stuttgart ‘Circle'. ‘Another generation must pass before the ravages made by the Duke Charles' – Fritz's uncle and a former reigning Duke – ‘in the morals of every rank can be
repaired,'
wrote Stuart ominously.

It was of another generation that the Princess wrote to her father on 30 August 1797 in some excitement: ‘The Prince has desired me to present his humble duty to your Majesty and to express his great regret at not being able to write. But not having it in his power to do more than sign his name with his
left hand
he does not think it respectful to acquaint your Majesty in that manner he has reason to hope that I am
with child.'

They were off to the Prince's house at Ludwigsburg to escape the heat of Stuttgart as she wrote. Court functions, balls, assemblies and levees took place in that city at the Neupalais or new palace – a huge Baroque edifice accommodating within its gilded marble corridors, as well as state rooms, a multitude of doors and staircases leading to apartments for all the branches of the ducal family. In the small town of Ludwigsburg, halfway up the hill, a former duke had built an enormous palace rivalling Versailles in size, featuring wall-to-wall classical paintings and Pompeian rooms, and commensurate acres of garden. But, just as at Windsor the royal family lived in the shadow of the Castle in the Queen's Lodge, so at Ludwigsburg the Hereditary Prince and the rest of the family inhabited more informal residences abutting the Palace.

That October, congratulating her father on the British naval victory of Camperdown, Charlotte resumed a plea for his aid, as Elector of Hanover, for her new home, Württemberg, at the forthcoming Congress following the conclusion of
peace
between Austria and France. The Ducal House of Württemberg had lost so much – in both territory and revenue – by this ‘cruel war', she wrote. Looking with confidence to the future, she added that, in supporting the Prince, her father would be ‘taking in hand the interest of a son sincerely attached to your family, of your daughter and of your
grandchildren.'
While the Duke had sent Count Zeppelin to Vienna and then on to St Petersburg to seek the backing of those imperial Courts,
the Princess believed her father's support would be most effective. The friendship between her husband and Count Zeppelin may have been more than platonic, but it does not seem to have disturbed Royal: Zeppelin was welcome at Court, with his wife and daughter. (His friendship with one Count Karl Dillen was anyway judged now to be closer than that with the Hereditary Prince.)

From Scharnhausen, four months pregnant, Royal wrote in late November 1797 to England – now standing alone though firm against France – of the
‘dreadful'
times, of the new King of Prussia's difficult inheritance, and of Austrian regiments marching daily through Stuttgart. To her husband, who was away shooting, she wrote on the 22nd an account of how she passed the hours. It had
snowed
all morning the day before, and when darkness fell, she and Mme de Spiegel had worked and drawn for five hours till
nine.
Falling back on patterns familiar from Frogmore days, she was embroidering a chair cover with eagles and, she wrote to Fritz on the 23rd, she hoped to finish it
that day.

This peaceful way of life came to an end at midnight on 22 December 1797 when Fritz's father dropped down dead. And as his mother's health weakened, Royal increasingly had the care of her stepdaughter, Princess Catherine, who had been living with her grandmother. Also, with the theatre of war now moved to an area north of Switzerland, the Duchy, positioned between France's eastern frontier and Austrian territories, had become a favourite route for both French and Austrians on their way to attack each other's territories. The damage the troops did as they passed through, to say nothing of the foraging and plundering that went with such mass movements, was fast impoverishing the normally wealthy Duchy. Earlier in December Royal had written to her father in England that the Austrian artillery were now marching through the country – and in heavy rain – for the fourth time that year, and that Austrian troops passed frequently through Stuttgart on their way to their new Turkish territories.

Frederick wanted Royal to rest, to abjure long drives. Royal, following the example which she had seen her mother set so often, intended to continue a normal life until the last month of her pregnancy. Her husband did not wish her to attend a card party of English émigrés from Switzerland that she had arranged. Royal dismissed his worries: the Court doctor, M. de Weimar, was on hand, and her health seemed good.

Another of George Ill's children was hoping this winter to marry and provide further grandchildren. Prince Adolphus had been invited in August by the Prussian King to join a family party at Pyrmont with the Crown Prince and Princess – a Mecklenburg cousin, Louise – and with another,
widowed cousin, Princess Louis of Prussia and her two children. (Prince Louis had been killed in action the previous year.) Years before, Prince William had been smitten in Hanover by their cousin Charlotte or Lolo of Mecklenburg. Now his brother Dolly fell passionately in love with her younger sister Frederica, the widowed Princess Louis, and in December won her agreement to their engagement. The King in England sanctioned the match, made his son a colonel and even bought Dolly a house on the Leinestrasse in Hanover for a married home. But the marriage contract would have to wait, he warned, until Parliament – sore from war expenses – was in a mood to grant his son the income of a married man.

The very public if unofficial separation that had taken place between the Prince and Princess of Wales did not commend to Parliament the idea of financing another royal marriage. The King ordered a great
Thanksgiving
at St Paul's for the naval victories of that year – Camperdown in October against the Dutch, and Cape St Vincent in February against the Spanish -and, for good measure, Lord Howe's victory on the Glorious First of June in 1794. But neither the Prince nor the Princess was present. After a good deal of wrangling over carriages and appeals from both to the King, he decreed that their finances allowed neither of them to appear. Unfortunately, the couple's wrangles, as much as the prospect of the Thanksgiving, gave the Queen a wracking headache which prevented her appearance at the drawing room – ‘crowded with
heroes'
– on 12 November preceding it. By December that year the Prince was petitioning the King for a full separation from his wife, but George III refused it.

Meanwhile in Württemberg the new Duchess, although six months pregnant, had to throw off her previous ‘retirement' when her husband inherited. Sir John Stuart had written, ‘I imagine she will not think her situation so agreeable, when Duchess. If she indulges herself in retirement then, she must become unpopular at a German Court.' But although the new Duchess informed her father that, from economy, she was to take no more ladies to reflect her new station, and her husband meant to keep his father's establishment, she happily moved into the new palace at Stuttgart. ‘This evening I am to have an English card party,' she wrote to her father. ‘We are in hopes that many who have left Switzerland will settle here, at least till they see what turn affairs are likely to take.' The previous year the French had made of Switzerland a Cisalpine Republic. ‘Every moment the people come in to move some of the furniture. My new apartment is both fine and convenient, as on one side I have my private rooms and on the other those to receive company.' The portrait of her father, she wrote, was to be hung in her ‘favourite
closet.'

They moved, too, into central apartments in Ludwigsburg, a palace where ‘everything had been allowed to go to ruin' and no doors shut, and lived with workmen all around them while Royal neared her time. They were planning to make Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg comfortable and ‘to attempt nothing more', she said, citing that reprobate Duke Charles's ‘folly of constantly launching into the expense of building new palaces and neglecting the old ones'. She would send her father a plan of the alterations at Ludwigsburg when all was complete, but wondered, as they were to have a menagerie there, ‘will your Majesty forgive my entreating you to send us a pair of congaroos [kangaroos] which would be a great pleasure
to us?'

The death of her mother-in-law in March 1798 gave Royal yet another ‘undertaking': ‘I am now very much taken up with Trinette' – Catherine her stepdaughter – ‘who, unless she has
lessons,
never leaves me for a moment. One thing gives me great pleasure … that from the beginning she took to me very much, and her age being the same as my dearest Amelia's makes her doubly interesting to me.' She was grateful to her father for the advice he gave her ‘to try by my example to imprint those principles [of religion] on the mind of Trinette … I trust I shall succeed in my endeavours to make her, as far as I can, go through the same course of religion that Mama made us read with
Schrader
[the German Reform Church pastor in London].'