Princesses (55 page)

They heard that the Princess of Wales – having learnt that she was to be a grandmother in November – was coming to England, and that Miss Frances Garth, her former lady, was to meet her at Dover. But Mary placed hope in a forged bond that the Princess had given her brother the Duke of Brunswick before his death, and which she hoped would help to expose and bring down her sister-in-law.

Mary forgot about the Princess of Wales on a bridal visit with her husband to Weymouth, originally a Gloucester ‘fiefdom', where they were besieged by a host of friendly inhabitants. When they visited the Ilchesters at Nutting, a house ‘full of fine old chinoise and japan and some good pictures', the Duchess noticed, among a sea of Frampton and Seymour relations, ‘a most agreeable old lady with a wonderful memory' who told her stories of fifty years back ‘with a degree of cheerfulness that is
delightful.'
Was Mary thinking of her mother, now aged seventy-three, who was neither cheerful nor delightful, but ill and old and cross? Weymouth seems to have awakened in Mary no painful recollections of her last visit there with Amelia, and triumphantly she proceeded to Brighton, to batten on her brother from the comfort of one of his houses – ostensibly to see if a course of sea bathing would keep off'the Saint', or erysipelas, that coming winter.

Princess Elizabeth, meanwhile, was spending her time painting glass for a window in her new ‘castle in the air' – the dairy she dreamt of building at her Old Windsor cottage. ‘I have no such thing,' she told Augusta Baynes, who had traced her a design
for her
project, ‘but I love living on
hope. She is at times a sad girl, but still one cannot live without her.' Elizabeth now planned to japan a large screen with ‘bold patterns of birds, plants and
figures',
and asked Augusta to trace her some. She would ask Mr Festrage, the great japanner, to send her some tracing paper of quality that did not stick.

After her hopes of marriage with the Duke of Orleans had been dashed eight years earlier, Elizabeth had increasingly inhabited the role of eccentric in her cottage at Old Windsor. Adhering to her rustic character, she wrote of putting the pieces of wedding cake her friends sent her under her pillow and lying in wait for bridegrooms. But of course this was daft nonsense; bridegrooms could not ‘come along' for Princess Elizabeth as they might for a Miss Compton or even a Miss Perceval. If she were to come by a husband, it would be by treaty with a foreign state. Meanwhile, outside were the cattle and Chinese pigs that she bred. Inside, the house was chock-a-block with the ‘old china' and teapots that she collected, her library of books, and her portfolios of prints and drawings. There were also to be found the raw materials of myriad artistic endeavours – scissors and black paper for the silhouette scenes of mothers and babies which she cut out with such dexterity, screens and inks and paints for her japanning projects, the large albums which she illuminated with texts and then grangerized, or filled with appropriate prints and engravings in the margins, and even a decorative garland or two from the countless fêtes and parties that she delighted in arranging for her friends and family.

Her artistic plans were put on hold in November 1817 when she was appointed companion to her mother on a journey to Bath. The Queen had at last consented to try the waters there. The physicians' dire warnings about the consequences of her remaining without remedy had at last overcome her aversion to leaving the King at Windsor. With the experienced and faintly ominous remark, after a visit to Claremont, that Charlotte was very large indeed, although some way off full term, and with anxious imprecations to Princess Augusta, left in charge at Windsor, about the care of the King, the Queen departed.

At Bath, Princess Elizabeth and Queen Charlotte settled into a routine of going to the Pump Room in the morning and dining early with their ladies at the capacious house in New Sydney Place which they had rented. But only days after they had arrived, on the morning of 6 November, before they left for the Pump Room, they received the unhappy news that Charlotte had gone into labour a month early the previous evening, and that her baby – a large and handsome boy – had been stillborn. The Princess's labour had been unexpected. She had come in from a walk and
was laying aside her bonnet and cloak when the pains began. It was agonizing and protracted, they heard, and Sir Richard Croft, her accoucheur, and the midwives had done their best, but to no avail. When she was told the news, they learnt, Princess Charlotte had been stoic and, before settling to rest, had comforted her afflicted husband by speaking of many children to come.

Queen Charlotte in Bath, who had ‘long been uneasy about Charlotte', did not at all like the account of her granddaughter's condition after the delivery, and all day worried and waited for a further express to bring more news. The Duke of Clarence, who had taken a house at the other end of the terrace, supported his mother before leaving to dress for a banquet that the City and Corporation of Bath were giving him at the Guildhall. The Queen and Elizabeth meanwhile – after some hesitation, and in all their diamonds – received the Lord Mayor and Deputation in advance of the dinner, as had been arranged. Worse news, the worst of news then arrived, and Princess Elizabeth wrote that
night
of the ‘tremendous
blow'
they were dealt, when that second fateful express arrived while they were at dinner in New Sydney Place.

‘General Taylor was asked out; our hearts misgave us. He sent out for Lady Ilchester, which gave us a moment for to be sure that something dreadful had happened.' The moment General Taylor came back into the dining room, Queen Charlotte said, ‘I am sure it is over.' The express did indeed bring the news for which the Queen seemed to have been preparing herself. Princess Charlotte, not yet twenty-two years old, a beaming bride a year before, a proud wife and mother-to-be days earlier, had died in the night from complications following the stillbirth of her premature son.

‘Horror, sorrow and misery', wrote Elizabeth to Lady Harcourt, ‘struck the heart, and no word could fall after such a
dreadful shock.'
And dolefully she wrote to one of her brother's confidential attendants, ‘In our lives have we never been so
completely shocked.'
At the Bath Guildhall, where the King's messenger had stopped to give the news to the dead Princess's uncle, the Duke of Clarence, the banquet was abandoned. In Bath, as throughout the country, as the news spread, the reaction was shock – and universal and genuine mourning. The lawyer Henry Brougham wrote, ‘It really was as if every household throughout Great Britain had lost a favourite child.' The Prince Regent was prostrate with grief and ‘deep affliction'.

At Windsor Princess Augusta, who had so recently written happily to Lady Harcourt, now told her, ‘I even dared to expect the poor child could have lived, after all the sufferings, to the third day – You may suppose that
I am exactly in that situation of the man who stands till he falls. It is so sad a calamity that I am still quite stunned.' After Sir Brent Spencer had broken the news to her, it had been her ‘very cruel' task to ‘tell the fatal conclusion' to Sophy, and she dreaded the
effect
it would have on her. ‘I sent for Battiscombe [the apothecary] to be with us and, thank God, the last accounts had been so bad that she expected a sad close as much as I did.' As she wrote, they were waiting for the Queen and Elizabeth, and then ‘All our meetings and seeing Baillie will be over.' But, thinking of the funeral ahead, she added, ‘till the necessary distressing scenes are past, we shall be constantly tracing open the wound
afresh.'

The Queen, who returned with Elizabeth to Windsor on 7 November, continued to be the chief object of concern for Princess Augusta. She had dinner ready half an hour after the Queen arrived, having travelled ninety miles from Bath overnight. She had Dr Baillie tell ‘the grievous tale' to her mother ‘at least two hours before she went to bed', and tried in every way to ‘lessen all the horror she had to meet with.' And she hoped that the Queen would adhere to Sir Henry's advice, to return to Bath to complete the cure – ‘what little of the waters she had taken had acted like a charm upon her stomach' – after the funeral. But still, she admitted, not being able to go about their usual avocations, they all brooded too much upon their ‘severe affliction'.

The details of the ‘grievous tale' were enough to keep anyone awake, whether told at midday or late at night. Hours after the commotion surrounding the stillbirth, when the house was quiet, Charlotte had begun to moan and cry aloud in her room at Claremont. She called for Leopold, but he had ingested an opiate to help him sleep, and they did not at first wish to wake him. It took a while to shake him into consciousness, and by the time he arrived it was too late. His loving wife, despite her promise of more children only hours earlier, was a corpse, and guarding it were Mrs Louis, Charlotte's old nurse, and Croft, the wretched accoucheur, who had watched aghast as Princess Charlotte, before their eyes, suffered a fatal haemorrhage and died.

Augusta wrote again on the day of Charlotte's funeral, ‘This most melancholy sad day … it is true that we see nothing of the last sad ceremony, but I shall be glad when it is all over.' They spoke to Prince Leopold, who talked to them of Charlotte's character as it had unfolded to him in the last happy year of her life: ‘Her disposition expanding from prejudice into justice, and a self examination of the nervousness of her former ideas.' He said she had told him how ‘long before she married … her mind had been impressed with a very unjust character of the Queen and her aunts. That
she had been repeatedly told that she was brought to Windsor to be meddled and interfered with, and dictated to by them; that she found out, at last, it was
false.'
This comforted Augusta.

And the Queen, who had so short a time before chosen her granddaughter's bridal dress and trousseau and had now returned to Windsor to bury her, wrote of Charlotte, ‘Claremont was indeed her earthly
Paradise.'
When the Queen returned from Bath, where she went in obedience to her doctors to complete her cure after Charlotte's funeral was over, she still looked ‘ill in the
face',
and was nervous and easily overcome. The force of her grief for Charlotte shocked the Queen's dressers the Beckedorffs, mother and daughter.

Prince Leopold, whom the Queen and her daughters visited towards the end of November at Claremont, was also desolate, though calm. He had not yet returned to live in his former married quarters, he said, although he ‘made it a rule to walk into these rooms every day'. The bonnet and cloak that ‘she' had taken off before she was confined still lay where ‘she' had placed them. He could not bear to move them yet, he said, and he meant to keep all – he gestured to the house and grounds where he and Charlotte had walked and planned their life to come – as ‘she' had liked it.

Prince Leopold, as the widower rather than as the husband of the heir presumptive to the throne of England, all of a sudden faced a very different future, and his new income of £50,000 a year – the sum allotted him in the event of Charlotte's death – was as yet little consolation. Not so slowly, other reverberations of the heir presumptive's death were felt among Charlotte's uncles and aunts. The Prince Regent pursued with new vengeance his old project to divorce Charlotte's mother, now that ‘much
delicacy'
had been set aside by his daughter's death. Caroline wrote from Italy, ‘England, that grand country, has lost everything in losing my ever beloved daughter,' and doubted she would return there. Rumours redoubled that the Duchess of Cumberland was expecting a baby. And Charlotte's uncles Clarence and Kent began to look about them for wives, while the Duke of Cambridge, who had fallen in love with a young HesseCassel princess at Hanover, pressed for his brother's consent to his marriage, and a Parliamentary grant to reflect that status.

Princess Sophia, who had loved Charlotte's spirit, was overcome with grief, and a ‘melancholy meeting' with her sister Mary, who came to the Castle on her return from Brighton, only increased it. The Duchess of Gloucester herself, whose feelings were shallow by comparison with those of most of her family, was shocked to see the Duchess of York, who came
on a visit from Oatlands and who had loved Charlotte, ‘so altered'. Even so, the Duchess of Gloucester twined strands of Amelia's and Charlotte's hair together in ‘two eternities' as a gift for her brother, the Regent, and told him that ‘The two hearts open with a little
hasp.'
But in the midst of this mourning, when the Duke of Gloucester went to Norfolk in the New Year of 1818 to shoot, Mary found Princess Elizabeth in unaccountably high spirits, declaring that the waters at Bath had set her up: ‘I am twenty years younger and walk and do as I
usually do.'

Their mother was the reverse of well. The Queen's breathing had grown short and laboured, and the doctors were so nervous about her condition that Sir Henry warned the princesses that ‘any sudden surprise, be it pain or pleasure, might cause sudden death'. A sudden surprise, and pain unmixed with pleasure, came barely a week later when Princess Elizabeth read a letter to her mother. Frederick, the Hereditary Prince of HesseHomburg – who had once offered for Augusta, and who had hung about Charlotte a year or so earlier – had offered for Elizabeth's hand in marriage. Elizabeth said it was a surprise to her. It was certainly a surprise, not only to the Queen but to all Elizabeth's sisters, Princess Mary wrote to the Prince Regent. And she enclosed, at Elizabeth's urging, the letter that had confounded their mother – but had, by good fortune, not caused her sudden death. She was too angry with her daughter for that.

The Duchess of Gloucester was calm itself. There was no reason for any consternation, she wrote. ‘Eliza having never concealed her wish and desire to marry,' she argued, ‘she is only acting up to what she has always said.' Naturally Elizabeth wanted the Prince Regent's approbation, Mary continued, but she was old enough, in her younger sister's opinion, to judge for herself. She would be a dreadful loss to the Queen, Mary feared. And yet, if the match did not take place, she warned her brother, ‘she will make the Queen more unhappy in the long run than the act of
leaving her.'