Princesses (38 page)

Mrs Villiers's friendship with Sophia was to fade but with Amelia it increased daily. However, she wrote, the Princess never spoke of ‘the attachment that existed between her and General Charles Fitzroy, second son of Lord Southampton … From 1804 … till the year 1808 she never once alluded to it …' (Amelia was equally discreet with her sister Mary, with whom she was to be on the closest of terms, but to whom she never once spoke of her ‘attachment'.) Mrs Villiers added how strange it was that the King, ‘though perfectly unconscious of the attachment', never missed an opportunity – when he recovered – of ‘placing Princess Amelia under
the care of General Fitzroy, whether in dancing, riding or on any other occasion'.

Although the King rode out and gave other appearances of functioning normally, the Prince of Wales felt justified in accusing ministers of conspiring to hide his father's real condition from Parliament and the country. He begged the Lord Chancellor to regulate the matter – preferably by the Regency Bill of 1789. In July he bewailed the
‘extraordinary'
circumstance of any king exercising his royal powers while being kept under personal restraint, and begged the Queen to join him in declaring the King incapable.

Princess Augusta wrote to Lady Harcourt on 3 July of ‘the constant state of anxiety we live in … it makes me very low, but that I am so used to now, that I can bear it better than I did six months ago … I think it a great
mercy
we have so little company,' she concluded, ‘as a made up face with a heavy heart is a sad martyrdom.' Kangaroos proving a leitmotif in times of affliction for the royal family, she recounted how there was a tame one in the menagerie at Kew that fed from her hand. To her relief, if not that of the Prince, on the 20th of that month the King was declared restored to health. He left Kew for Windsor, and a few days later prorogued Parliament.

The Prince, abandoning plans for a regency, was now exercised by the very odd ideas the King had about Princess Charlotte, but, as Amelia told him, ‘All I can make out about you is that until the doctor leaves us he will take no steps to see you or the Princess.' Simmons, having lingered a further month to observe the King, finally departed towards the end of August. The King wrote immediately to Princess Caroline and to his granddaughter's governess Lady Elgin, requesting that they meet him at Kew, the late scene of his confinement. There he told the Princess of Wales that he meant to take her daughter under his care and that of tutors at Windsor, where Caroline might visit her freely. Indeed, he would provide a house there for her convenience.

Three days later, a furious Prince failed to appear at a meeting to which the King had called him at Kew, where he meant to impart this information. Princess Amelia, sending a snuffbox to her brother a few days earlier, had stressed that all their comfort depended on that meeting: ‘I am more wretched than I can express … could an extinguisher fall on the whole family as things are it would be a mercy.' Nevertheless, the Prince did not appear at Kew. Instead a note from him was handed by Edward to the King, waiting with his other sons – including Augustus, who had just returned to England – and the Queen and princesses. ‘The Prince is ill,' the King announced, and set out forthwith for Weymouth.

‘The Queen was much frightened,' wrote Augustus of the awful day at Kew, ‘as were all my sisters.' A month later, when Princess Amelia fell from her horse out riding with her father, the King insisted, with unwonted severity and when she was plainly suffering, that she remount and continue. With the Prince's failure to attend the meeting still in his mind, he said that he had one child already who lacked courage. He would not have more.

When the King reached Weymouth, at six in the morning, he was ‘less hurried than could have been expected', wrote his daughter Sophia. ‘He went to bed for an hour, and since that has not been off his legs, but I trust in God after a few days he will be more quiet as we must make allowances for his joy at this moment finding himself quite at liberty.' But, she added, ‘I am sorry to say, he means to wear the uniforms of the different corps… which is
vexatious.'
All that summer, according to unkind witnesses, the King dressed in heavy Hanoverian boots and wore great gauntlet gloves, an odd choice of dress for a bathing resort. Buckingham wrote to Grenville, ‘My accounts from Weymouth are the same. Mens non sana in corpore
sano.'

But there was worse. Lord Grenville had heard from his brother Buckingham in May that, when the King drove out, his sons accompanied him. The Queen and princesses, meanwhile, followed in another conveyance, as he had shown himself to be ‘lost to all propriety of conduct in their
coach.'
The Queen did not now allow the King into her bedchamber, placing two German ladies there and then retaining two or three of the princesses who stayed until he had left the apartment. The fear or disgust the Queen had felt for the King was strong enough to resist the entreaties of ministers, doctors, nature and ‘duty', according to a memorandum from Weymouth the Prince of Wales received in September. Lord Auckland wrote to Lord Henley that month, ‘With in the family there are strange schisms and cabals and divisions among the sons and daughters. One of the two youngest of the latter dines alternately with the Patron [the King] and nobody
else.'
Lord Hobart wrote to Lord Auckland the same month, ‘It is a melancholy circumstance to see a family that had lived so well together for such a number of years completely broken up.' Dr John Willis had told him confidentially, he added, that ‘things would never be quite right'.

The royal parents, dissatisfied and irritable with each other, effectively separated on their return from Weymouth, when they both took up residence in Windsor Castle, in accordance with the King's new project of inhabiting the Castle itself and pulling down the Queen's Lodge. But they lived in separate apartments in different parts of the Casde. The Queen
bemoaned the loss of her comfortable warm rooms at the Queen's Lodge, occupying now with her daughters the south and east towers that looked over the Long Walk and the Home Park. The King moved into the northern wing once lived in by Queen Elizabeth, and there his conversation which had been at times ‘very
childish'
at Weymouth became sober and composed.

Other family rifts healed. In November 1804 the King and Prince met at last, ‘a day that has created feelings in me never to be forgotten', wrote Princess Amelia. ‘The dear king I think wonderfully well. To me he appears more placid and calm than I ever saw him since his illness.' But the King wrote next day to his niece at Blackheath, saying that he now ‘wished to communicate a plan for the child's happiness'. And so began a series of conferences at the Princess of Wales's house which alarmed the royal family. Two weeks later Sophia wrote to Mrs Villiers:

Well my dear, I am completely miserable. The dear angel [the King] gone to Blackheath and probably will not be home till dark. How late it was last night, he could not have been home till one. All this worries us to death. I thought him most hurried when he came in to our dinner, very good humoured, but in a sad fidget, after dinner he talked of nothing but this sad story, but not one word of anger escaped him … the old Lady [the Queen] is in high glee, I suppose at the dear man's absence – How unnatural, how odious!

Sophia did not relish her growing role as her father's confidante, and, a few days later, remarked that she wished she had a new dictionary ‘to do justice to all my heart feels'. The Princess of Wales at Blackheath told of having to leap over sofas to escape the King's passionate lunges, and a housemaid was apparently caught by the King and locked in a stable with him. ‘He is all affection and kindness to me,' wrote Princess Sophia, ‘but sometimes an over kindness, if you can understand that, which greatly alarms me.' She hoped the Princess was prudent: ‘I believe he tells her everything.' Her father's ‘flow of spirits' disturbed her.

At Weymouth that summer two physicians speculated that Sophia herself suffered already in some part, and was likely to suffer more, from what people persisted in calling the ‘family malady' – that scrofulous tendency which, in her father's case, was held to have ‘fallen upon' his brain. As someone who lived on her nerves, Sophia felt keenly her father's changes of mood – and sexual attentions. As she said sorrowfully to Mrs Villiers, ‘I wish I did not feel as I do, for these feelings have ever been my misfortune. I wish sometimes I had all the bonhomie of a princess, it would be
better for me, but though born a RH, I must feel like the rest of you, and this your kind heart will forgive.' Sophia had been prone to ‘spasms' for nearly ten years now, but these ‘feelings' and the ‘nervous' condition from which she had suffered this summer were apparently new. They were to recur.

Yet Sophia was no supporter of her eldest brother: ‘Does he really fancy, because he is the rising sun, anything he says, it is to be swallowed whole?' she asked. But her venom was reserved now for her troubled mother, whom she saw as the chief agent of her father's unhappiness. She recorded that the Queen ‘was not pleased at the dear angel's desiring her to go over the castle with him. She said she was “not an enthusiast”. How true that is. God knows, her enthusiasm consists in nothing but eating black puddings and German dishes at Frogmore.'

Sophia's spirits were so broke, she declared, that she hoped, ‘when my
duty
to the best of fathers is at an end', that she could then ‘retire from this worldly scene and end my days in quiet'. Buckingham, always in the know, declared shortly before Christmas that ‘appearances at Windsor are most
unfavourable.'
Even in her relations with Princess Elizabeth – who, with Princess Augusta, was sympathetic to the Queen – there was no peace for Sophia. The elder sister told the younger, who was writing to Mrs Villiers, to say the Queen was in a delightful humour. ‘At this I hesitated,' reported Sophia. ‘Eliza then left in a huff saying, “Well, say what you like, nobody wants you to say what you do not feel, but it is very unfortunate that people see with such different eyes”.' For her part, Elizabeth wrote on Boxing Day that she had been ‘more unhappy this year than any one year of
my life.'

The King kept to his cold northern apartments at Windsor, where General Sir Herbert Taylor, his new private secretary, now joined him every day. Remarkably George III had managed till now his vast correspondence himself. But an unexpected blow, the loss of sight in his left eye the previous summer, had left him persevering with the aid of a green eye-shade. Now the oculist Phipps declared that there was no way to save the right one, short of couching the cataracts, and Taylor proved an able amanuensis. It was said that Princess Mary developed romantic feelings for him, and that they were reciprocated. But gossips were always eager to ascribe to the blameless, beautiful Mary some romantic attachment.

The father the princesses had known when they grew up was now hardly recognizable. The energetic and authoritarian King of their childhood was now a stooped and blind old man on whose behalf Sir Herbert conducted public business, and to whom he related the progress of the war. The King's love of farming and of the countryside and hunting could no
longer be realized with much vigour, in his poor state of health. He went out for stilted walks with his equerries and pages, and in the evenings music was his one solace. And yet he remained stubborn on the same points which had tried him years before. He would still not yield on the question of allowing Catholics into Parliament – and he would still not yield on the question of his daughters getting married.

‘The kinder the angel King is to me, the more desirous I am of keeping in my own humble sphere … not asking to court popularity and make my little self of
consequence,'
Sophia wrote in January 1805. She told Mrs Villiers of an unpleasant ride with her father when he had alarmed her with his hurried expostulations, ‘What! What!', and said ‘much against the Queen'. He said to Sophia, ‘I look upon you as my friend and I will tell you that I cannot go on as I do, she has turned me out of her room, and a friend I must and will have … I shall find somebody else.' When the King said he saw she did not approve of this, Sophia simply said, ‘I
lament it.'

With her elder sisters, who were more forgiving towards their mother, Princess Sophia reported, she was highly out of favour, and Sir James Bland Burges heard that the princesses now spent hours in their own rooms and were rarely together. Sophia wrote of their situation: ‘to have the whole talked over and canvassed now makes me wretched. It is not that I am invisible to his [the King's] faults, but I know what he was. And can I love him less, when I reflect that this sad change arises from the will of God? And indeed this house is made so truly uncomfortable that I cannot wonder at his flying
from it.'
A day later she avowed, ‘The Queen's manner to the Angel is, in a word, shameful. Indeed I believe she has lost her head and her heart for I am sure it is as hard as a
stone.'

In the meantime a new governess, Lady de Clifford, was chosen for Princess Charlotte, ‘the quantum of access… to be allowed to the mother' was decided, and in February Charlotte was established at Windsor. The King wrote on the occasion of Caroline's first visit to her: ‘It is quite charming to see the princess and her child together, of which I have been since yesterday a witness.' Now that Charlotte had the ‘advantage of excellent air and a retired garden' at Windsor, which would be the young Princess's residence for the greater part of the year, he believed his granddaughter would make satisfactory progress in her studies, ‘which have certainly been little
attended to.'
And, his mind at peace, the King was well at last. ‘All the hurry of his manners is gone – he never said “hey!” once or “what” twice together,' wrote the Princess of Wales's Privy Purse Miss Hayman, ‘and indeed was as quiet and collected as possible.'