Princesses (52 page)

It was a chastened Charlotte who left London, as her father had originally directed, a few days later for Cranbourne Lodge in Windsor Great Park. At Connaught House her mother had rejected her daughter's impassioned plea to save her from the prison her father meant to condemn her to. (The failure of her many relations among the visiting dignitaries to call on her, for fear of losing the Regent's favour, had left Caroline wretched and humiliated and she was now set on going abroad.) Likewise Charlotte's uncle Sussex had, with the other advisers who crowded the house in Connaught Street, counselled obeying her father.

Indeed, the lawyer Henry Brougham had led the quivering Princess to a window that overlooked Hyde Park and had spoken of the potential scene should he show her to the populace that would gather there next morning with the advent of a Parliamentary election. Blood there would be, and marches and riots in her defence, but the English public would never forget that she was the cause of that bloodshed. Just as surely as Charlotte's aunts had had to obey their father thirty years before, so this wilder, more head-strong Princess – seeking emancipation as they had before her –
agreed
to be driven to Carlton House and to do her father's bidding.

At Cranbourne Lodge, to compound her hurt, Charlotte learnt from her father that her mother was preparing, in the wake of Napoleon's expulsion from France and the restoration of his satellite kingdoms to their former sovereigns, to travel to her brother William's restored Duchy of Brunswick. It was a trip that the Princess of Wales had often meditated during her years of distress in England before her father's death and the incorporation of her homeland into Napoleon's Empire. The Regent had ‘no objection', and had no wish to
‘interfere'
in his estranged wife's plan. Her daughter wrote, ‘I really am so hurt about it that I am very low …' But Princess Mary told the Regent, ‘I congratulate you on the prospect of a good riddance. Should a storm blow up and the ship go to the bottom I will send you a small fashionable pocket handkerchief to dry your tears – it will be the only black gown I shall ever put on with pleasure.'

Charlotte slowly recovered from a year and more of exceptional agitation and distress at Cranbourne Lodge which, after all, turned out to be a ‘very cheerful and very good' house, ‘the view
lovely.'
She visited Weymouth in company with her chaperone, Lady Ilchester, and General Garth, her grandfather's former equerry, and bathed in hope of a cure for her knee, which swelled unaccountably. And she forgave her aunts and grandmother for their previous behaviour. Indeed, she found her aunt Sophia a strong ally when she expressed fears that the Regent had not entirely lost sight of reviving the Orange match. ‘The thing was
impossible,'
said Sophia
firmly.
Charlotte came away, more relieved than she had felt for some time, ‘though I still see mountains and hills before me are to be passed over, if not quite
inaccessible.'

All the princesses were utterly convinced that Charlotte, despite her youth, should marry. ‘The country and your family wish you to marry, and I am sure all who really love you must too,' said Sophia, ‘for you never can be
happy
or enjoy anything like liberty or comfort going on as you do now, so subject and
subjected.'
Royal wrote to Lady Harcourt: ‘Il n'y a nulle rose sans espine [there is no rose without a thorn], but
I believe
that it is ever better for Princesses in particular to be settled.'

The Princess of Wales's failings were a subject on which the Queen and the princesses had ‘naturally agreed' with the Regent – all bar Sophia. But Caroline had departed now for the Continent. And the Queen began, as Charlotte observed, ‘to have her eyes opened and see now … that the Regent only used her as a
cat's paw.'
The Queen meanwhile told the Regent, ‘You do not see Charlotte at all to advantage. She is quite different with us, I assure you.' But he answered, ‘You always say so, I know. It
is very unfortunate, but she appears to me half in the
sulks.'
And Charlotte never lost her fear in her father's company.

The only princess whom Charlotte was wary of was Mary. She suspected her of still being likely to take the Regent's part if he tried to revive the Orange match. And she regarded her also as something of a rival. Mary, after all, though she was thirty-eight next birthday, was the beauty of the family, and Princess Charlotte, heir presumptive though she might be – and sought by many – had little confidence in herself. When Charlotte mentioned Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, she said she believed Princess Mary ‘coloured not a little' and then was made ‘quite satisfied and cheerful again' when Charlotte said he did not suit her taste.

Charlotte concluded darkly, nevertheless, ‘I suspect there was something or other.' But when she questioned her aunt Sophia about Mary's feelings, Sophia said irritatingly she knew nothing of it. ‘If there is any tendresse, it is all her side
certainly,'
concluded Charlotte. However, when she departed for Weymouth that winter, she gave Mary credit for ‘feeling it exceedingly, as she had the example of poor Amelia before her eyes too fresh, easily to forget and not to feel uneasy about my knee'. Indeed, Mary also expressed her astonishment that the Regent was not more unquiet. ‘If the country takes an interest in me and about me,' wrote Charlotte gloomily, ‘that shall stand to me in lieu of family and everything else.'

At Weymouth Charlotte was discomposed by her attendant, General Garth, pressing his ‘adoptive son' Tommy Garth on her – ‘a more lovely boy I never beheld', she admitted. But she ‘was taken aback' when the General paraded the boy on the esplanade, and when Charlotte stopped overnight at his house at Ilsington the General said, ‘Pray see and speak to him, as he would be dreadfully mortified if you took no notice
of him,
but don't let him be seen or let your ladies see you take any notice of him.' Furthermore, the old General said roughly that Princess Charlotte should not believe any of the abominable stories she had heard of his birth. Charlotte nearly
fainted.

‘It looks like this,' she explained, ‘that not being able to torment her [Sophia] now any longer with the sight, he will continue it upon the relative she loves best besides the Duke of York, a sort of diabolical revenge that one cannot understand.' However, her ladies, Lady Ilchester and Mrs Campbell, she wrote, believed that ‘it cannot be and is not Garth's child, that he has the care of it, and is proud and vain that it should be thought his, and knowing he has it in his power probably to disclose whose it is, if offended, makes him so very bold and impudent about the whole thing.' The feeling in the county, on the other hand, she said, was ‘that there is something to come out yet and that if it ever does, it will turn out to be some secret marriage or something of
that kind.'

Charlotte was no stranger to stray children with question marks over their parentage, following her childhood with a mother who adopted first a French orphan, Edwardine Kent, and then a docker's son, Willy
Austin.
She was also happy to guess at those children's parentage, believing them both to be her mother's, and the elder child – whom her mother had just married off to an aide-de-camp of her brother's in Brunswick – the daughter of a military hero, Sir Sidney Smith. Edwardine had the same black hair as his, Charlotte said. As for Willy Austin, removed from Dr Burney's school at Greenwich and tagging after the Princess of Wales as she toured the Continent, the Delicate Investigation and childhood memories had convinced her he was the child of the naval officer Captain Manby. ‘As for my mother taking a flight to Turkey,' Charlotte opined, reporting rumours that became fact some months later, ‘I should not wonder at it, as it is quite possible for her to do anything strange and out of
the way.'

Charlotte herself had decided to do something very reasonable by the time she left Weymouth – and marry Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, the young man who had asked to visit her that June. ‘That I should be as wholly occupied and devoted as I am to one [Prince Augustus of Prussia], and yet think and talk and even provide for another would appear unnatural in the highest degree were it written in a novel, yet it is true. It is not
overstrained.'
On Charlotte's return to Windsor, Mary's became the room at the Castle where she most often found herself, and in January 1815 she seized an opportunity to confide to Mary her marriage plans, when her aunt asked if there were any one prince she had seen in England that she did not dislike the appearance of. She said that she was ‘not in the least in love' with Prince Leopold, but that she ‘had a very good opinion of him' and would rather marry him, for that reason, than any other prince.

Then her hopes were dashed. ‘Only think of Elizabeth and Augusta saying to me just before we parted for the night', Charlotte wrote on 26 February, ‘how much they hoped I should be tormented and worried no more on the P[rince of] O [range] business, how they longed for an answer from me which might set my mind at rest.' And Princess Royal had written from Stuttgart, ‘saying the reports were that Lord Castlereagh was going to Brussels' – the new Orange capital – ‘on his way to England. That, if it was true, she only hoped to God it was not to renew any more torment or worries for me.' Charlotte went on, ‘the letter came to wash down again all my air-built hopes of quiet'.

Princess Mary told the Prince that she and her sisters were trying to encourage the Orange match, as they knew his feelings on the matter. Charlotte had a more committed supporter in Princess Sophia. ‘As for the O[range] business,' she wrote to her niece, ‘I have my doubts whether all hopes are yet given up at headquarters [Carlton House]. They still flatter themselves that the event may take place. At least, so I hear. But I live so very much to myself, and so very retired, that I do not learn much. My health … does not allow me to trudge about sufficiently to get much information.' And she was ‘in complete
quarantine'
with her family, as their ideas did not agree.

The Queen, however, was strong in support of her granddaughter. She was ‘deeply overcome, and she wept which is very uncommon for her', wrote Charlotte. ‘She was very affectionate to me, implored me on her knees not to marry ever a man I did not like, that it would be endless misery…' She did not wish to encourage Charlotte to disobey her father's wishes, the Queen told her granddaughter. But, Charlotte recorded, she insisted that, ‘in what so wholly concerned my earthly
happiness
and well-doing, I had a right to have my own opinion, and by it to be firm.'

As the country flamed in riots over the Corn Bill, and it was written on the wall, ‘Prince Regent, dissolve this Parliament directly or your head shall pay for it,' the Queen was firm herself with her son, saying sternly: ‘Prince of Wales, you must, if you persist, talk to your daughter yourself. For both myself and mine choose to keep quite out of it, as we will never press what will, we know, make Charlotte
miserable.'
Charlotte's own unhappy conclusion was ‘The Prince must be gone mad if he goes on persecuting me with his abominable
Dutch man.'

On the Continent, Royal was at last diverted from her niece Charlotte's peccadilloes by news of Napoleon's escape from Elba. ‘His landing in France at the head of so small a body of men would have appeared romantic', she warned the Regent on 16 March 1815, ‘to all who were not acquainted with the talents and good fortune he displayed till last year.' The Queen of England, suffering from erysipelas and a swollen face, was as anxious as her daughter in Württemberg – and was to become more so, when another marriage scheme divided the royal family, making the Regent's and Charlotte's tussles over her choice of bridegroom look feeble by comparison.

The final conflict of the Napoleonic Wars was played out on the fields and farmland around Brussels in June 1815, and Royal's supporter Napoleon, vanquished for ever, was despatched to the remote Atlantic island of St Helena. Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, with many others,
headed for a Continent no longer, as the older royal houses of Europe saw it, in chains to an upstart. And while others prepared to gather once more at Vienna to fight for territory, Ernest – saturnine and scarred – found, at his mother's old home of Strelitz, a bride. Unfortunately, the woman he wished to take as his wife was his cousin Frederica. A woman of fascinating and natural manners, she had also, when a widow with two children by Prince Louis of Prussia, jilted Ernest's brother Adolphus for the Prince of Solms. Solms then divorced her, citing her ‘loose behaviour'.

The Prince Regent gave his assent to the marriage in Strelitz – and opened Carlton House to the couple when they wished to say their vows again in England in 1815. But the Queen, who loved her brother Charles more than anyone in the world, could not bring herself to receive her niece, his daughter and now her daughter-in-law. She feared that ‘her [Frederica's] character is so well known in this country that it may cause you many difficulties', Mary wrote of her mother to the Regent, ‘which don't strike you at this moment… Should the Princess of Wales ever come to England again (and find the Pss of Solms well received) it may place us all under great difficulties.'

The Queen's nephew the Hereditary Prince of Mecklenburg-Strelitz came begging her to reconsider, and still she could not. When he retaliated by sending a ‘very improper letter', his aunt declared to all her children ‘that she never will see her nephew again', and she commanded them ‘to have no further communication with him'. Given the Queen's ‘adoration for her own family', Mary wrote to the Regent, ‘the feeling herself under the necessity of acting against them is one of the greatest trials she could have in the world,' and the Queen's health deteriorated from this summer of 1815. Elizabeth asserted to her brother Sussex, ‘as she acts from principle and a thorough knowledge of the King's opinion, she cannot err'. The princesses meanwhile were persuaded by their mother to write an uncomfortable letter to the Regent, the day before their brother Ernest married in England, avowing their intention to follow the Queen's ‘line … in the propriety of which we entirely
concur.'
The next day the miscreant couple were married at the Regent's home. And Charlotte believed that her uncle Ernest must have had her father in his power in some way to cause him to upset his mother and sisters so.