Princesses (58 page)

And now the executors obeyed one of the Queen's last instructions: ‘Of the papers all that were material have been destroyed,' they announced, ‘including, with their Royal Highnesses' permission, the letters from the Princesses.' Only those from Elizabeth were not
burnt,
and were ‘reserved for
her pleasure'
when she should next visit England. It was a pyre of paper in which the most inflammable topics touched on included the King's illnesses, Princess Sophia's own illness and its outcome at Weymouth in 1800, and Princess Amelia's passion for General Fitzroy.

By the terms of her mother's will – and by the terms of the original grant – although Princess Augusta had inherited Frogmore, she did not move in immediately. As General Sir Brent Spencer lived close to Frogmore, the situation would seem to have been ideal, but while her father lived she refused to abandon her apartment in the Castle, for all that she never saw
him.
And Sophia, who equally refused to move, could not be left alone at Windsor. So, much though Augusta might have wished to take up residence at Frogmore – which had always provided balm for her
spirits
– and although she and Sophia were among the least compatible of
the sisters, the elder Princess remained in residence at the Castle. She had anyway to refurnish Frogmore after the depredations of the auctioneers.

‘The Executors must take it upon themselves to act as they think best,' Augusta wrote, as the Queen's possessions were parcelled up for sale. ‘We cannot do better than to leave everything to them. I have made up my service of
plate,'
she announced, and she kept back looking glasses, chandeliers and linen besides. She agreed that the further reduction on the King's establishment being meditated in Parliament – the grant for his establishment including that of his daughters at Windsor, following the Queen's death, was to be cut to £50,000 – was 'a poor way of proving the love and respect of so great a nation for a King who has protected them and defended them and saved them by his religion, his integrity, his firmness and his morality – but all these qualities are registered “where neither mirth nor wit doth corrupt” – I own this subject makes me low.'

Royal, in Stuttgart, was ‘most deeply affected by the sad debates in Parliament' concerning the Windsor establishment. ‘It makes me shudder to see all ready to give up the rights of my beloved father … It is not only the King's dignity, but the honour of the country which suffers from his being deprived of the small remnant he had hitherto kept of Royalty.' When she thought of all these dreadful changes at Windsor, Royal remembered the day in the Great Room at Kew during her father's first illness, when he had said he was better off than King Lear in his madness, for he had no Regan or Goneril, but three Cordelias to look after him: ‘Poor dear angel, how good of him to say this, which is frequently a comfort to me when I am much out of spirits.'

While Augusta and Sophia led a twilit existence at Windsor, mourning their mother and honouring their father, that November the Duke of York visited their father, who looked now very like King Lear. ‘He was amusing himself with playing upon the harpsichord,' recorded York, ‘and singing with as strong and firm a voice as ever I heard him … but we must not conceal from ourselves that His Majesty is greatly emaciated within the last twelve months… the frame is so much weaker that we can no longer look forward … to his being preserved to us for any length of time.'

In Württemberg her sisters' situation continued to grieve Royal, and she was sorry they had remained at the Castle. ‘Nothing should have induced me to continue in a situation which appears to me lowering their dignity, and in which they are exposed to many disagreeables. Never could I have borne the thought of applying to others to invite the company I wished to have; or not have it in my power to give direction about what I thought necessary to be done in the house.' And ‘not from pride but from propriety',
she insisted, ‘I would never have submitted to accept as a favour the dining at the table of the Custos [or Governor of the Castle], when I had a sufficient income to keep my own.' She would have dined in her own apartment
with her
ladies, and now and then have invited some of the gendemen to join her party.

Royal continued to brood on the disgrace done her father and sisters. She remembered Pitt defending the King's dignity in both his first and his third illness, and lamented to Lady Harcourt Pitt's and Fox's passing: ‘They certainly had, as you rightly say, another manner of seeing and feeling from their great connections, which accustoms people from their youth to have a noble way of thinking.' But Royal was low in spirits. The unexpected death of Catherine, Queen of Württemberg, had been another blow. She wanted her sister Elizabeth to
come
to her, so that they could combine in grief for their mother, but it proved difficult. Elizabeth appeared ‘too much taken up' to be able to fix ‘that happy moment' when they would meet. ‘I cannot press her as I feel what a melancholy companion I am.'

The entrance into the world of new sprigs of royalty brought a sentimental reaction from the Dowager Queen of Württemberg. Very much the older sister, she rejoiced with the Duke of Cambridge on the birth of his son, Prince George, in March 1819 in Hanover. ‘Only think of me remembering your birth as if it was
yesterday,'
she wrote to him. Enquiring if the Duchess suckled the child, she approved there being an Englishwoman at the head of the nursery. ‘By that means the baby will learn at once English and
German.'
There were soon more royal pregnancies to interest her.
Sadly
the Duchess of Clarence gave birth to a stillborn child in April 1819, but endured with
strength
of mind and goodness the christening of the Cambridge Prince in Hanover. Princess Augusta tried to cheer her brother Clarence with news that the May weather at Windsor was delightful, and she rode and walked and went out in the open carriage. ‘The thorns – trees in blossom – and the verdure is quite
wonderful.'
But Clarence's ill luck in childbearing with Adelaide gave Kent – next in line to his brother – every ground for hope for the future of his own coming child.

Kent was soliciting funds for his return to England with his pregnant Duchess, on the ground that a birth of such possible importance should not occur out of the country. But the Duke of Clarence stood nearer the throne, his sister Augusta replied, refusing the request on the Regent's behalf, and that Duke's return for the birth of his child had not been thought necessary. She reminded him also that the princesses were anxious to do justice to the Prince's feelings – ‘which are most delicate upon the
occasion'. The implication was that the death of Princess Charlotte in childbirth was still much in the Regent's mind. But he was also forging ahead with his plans to divorce Caroline, and had prevailed on his Cabinet to appoint a team of lawyers and other agents to go out to Italy and sift such evidence against her as they might find there.

Kent and his pregnant Duchess set out anyway, though his brother Sussex warned that his rooms at Kensington Palace were not yet ready. These rooms where the Kents were to take up residence had belonged to the Princess of Wales. ‘So fearful have they been that she should return', Augustus added, ‘that they have been rendered totally unusable by all the features having been
removed.'
At Frankfurt Princess Elizabeth saw the Duchess of Kent, who was proceeding – by cheap and easy stages – to the unsatisfactory apartments at Kensington. ‘She is very big [with child] and, not being tall, shows it much,' wrote Elizabeth.

When the Duchess of Kent gave birth at Kensington to a daughter, Princess Victoria, on 24 May 1819, the Duke was ecstatic. In August he instructed the gardener at Kew to produce three bunches of flowers on the Duchess's birthday by 6.00 a.m. – ‘a very large posy for myself to give her, and 2 smaller ones'. One was for his stepdaughter Feodora to give her mother. The other was ‘to be put into the hands of our little baby, which, of course,
must be
so composed as to have nothing to prick her hands'.

It was not paternity alone that caused the Duke to be so tender. If the Duchess of Clarence continued to miscarry, Princess Victoria, by dint of Kent's own position in the royal family, must one day be queen of England – unless, should the Regent remarry, a younger sibling supplanted her. Prince George of Cambridge, though born earlier, and though male, ranked after Victoria in the succession, being the child of Kent's younger brother Adolphus – as indeed did Prince George of Cumberland, the child whom Frederica, Duchess of Cumberland produced in Berlin days after her sister-in-law in England produced ‘Vicky'.

Mme d'Arblay (née Fanny Burney) visited Princess Augusta in the summer of 1819 at Frogmore during one of the Princess's first tentative occupations of the estate. She found there the ‘Queen presumptive', as she named the baby Princess Victoria, with her proud father the Duke of Kent. Burney's propensity for sentiment where royal females were concerned remained boundless. She proposed to Princess Augusta, now enjoying her ‘maternal bequest' at Frogmore, that one day an urn recording ‘she who
made it'
– Queen Charlotte – would look well in the grounds.

Augusta, with Mary, lived quietly, but kept up the connections with their expanding family, dining at Oatlands with the Duchess of York,
whom they found ‘in
high spirits',
and joining the Kents at Kensington on the Duchess's birthday – after she had earlier received her abundance of posies at Kew. The sober doings of the turtledove Kents entertained the Duke's brothers and sisters time and again. At Windsor in September the Duke and Duchess and entourage, including baby, all retired together at nine o'clock for the night ‘and actually went to bed, to the very great amusement of the whole
society
of Windsor', Mary reported.

Princess Sophia began to show signs of improving in health, and of improving in affection towards her sisters. Augusta invited Lady Harcourt to join her and Sophy at Frogmore in July 1819: ‘It is cool there and you shall have tea, cold meat or white soup at your command. I can from my heart say I would kill any fatted calf, if I had one, upon the joyful
occasion.'
Sophy would meet her, and Augusta would see her after her sister went to
dinner.
It was so hot, the new mistress of the estate said, that she had for once not ridden, but had sat enjoying the shade under her trees.

Mary took Sophia to see the Regent's ‘Cottage' or Royal Lodge in the Great Park, which her sister had never seen. ‘It was a great exertion to Sophy walking about the house and garden, and certainly fatigued her, but the ice being broke,' the energetic elder sister reported, ‘I hope it is the beginning of getting on and of more improvements in strength.' Indeed, the invalid Princess showed some signs of interest when the Regent sent three bracelets as presents to his sisters. Augusta chose the one ‘in squares', Sophia reported. As to the others ‘the debate was a long one between Mary and me', her invalid sister wrote. Mary decided at last on the ‘turquoise, ruby and gold', leaving the one with ‘ruby and brilliants' for Sophia. What clinched it was that Mary objected to ‘any bracelet on the upper part of the arm', while her younger sister said mysteriously that she was ‘compelled from necessity to wear such an
ornament.'

But Mary was nowhere nearer breaking the ice between her brother the Regent and her husband. A request to her brother for the Duke to be allowed to shoot
occasionally
in the Great Park brought a resounding refusal from General Taylor. ‘I felt awkward in making the request,' Mary acknowledged to her brother, ‘but sometimes one can not help being under the necessity of doing what in one's heart one had
rather not.'

She was still torn between her husband and her brother, with her brother generally the easy winner. She wrote a long letter to the Regent outlining in distress the various obstacles which she believed would make the Duke, when asked, reluctant to go to Brighton for Christmas. She ended quaintly, ‘for man is man and does not like to be put out of his way – and still less by a wife than
anybody
else.'
The Duchess was happiest with
the Duke when they were visiting friends of his who were at best formerly acquaintances to her and could now form part of the expanding circle of society she craved. At Hatfield, she was breathless with excitement over a ‘very uncomfortable business concerning Lord and Lady Westmeath'. Although the Marquess and Marchioness of Salisbury, her hosts, and their son Lord Cranborne were doing all they could to keep it out of a ‘public court', Lady Westmeath, the Salisburys' daughter, was accusing her husband of adultery with five women, all of whom she wished to name.

Her sisters' company at Windsor was very tame for Mary after this taste of high
life
and country-house visits. The prospect of a visit from the Regent, however, was
enough
to keep her sitting on till five with them, at the Castle, ‘hoping every time the door opened it might
be you.'
And to Brighton that Christmas she went without her husband – to be the hostess she had dreamt of being to her brother. The Conynghams, the Warwicks, Colonel Whately were all at dinner with her, as she had supposed would be the glorious case. But to her consternation the Regent was called away by inconsiderate ministers.

‘I felt so dull and stupid', wrote Mary, ‘when your carriage drove off that I thought I could not make myself agreeable.' His servants and household were ‘all attention and kindness', she assured him, ‘but still the master was missing.' She went shopping and met an old friend, Lady Elizabeth Berkeley – ‘so altered I did not know her, and I suppose time has altered me likewise, as she did not me'. Mary was now aged forty-three. (Her dark hair, pink cheeks and blue eyes in Lawrence portraits of this time recall her earlier self, although her complexion has grown florid; her figure is still handsome, though stouter.) The two ladies then took a long walk to celebrate finding each other out. ‘I have begged for the band,' Mary told her brother, ‘as I feel I shall be a bad substitute in your absence to keep up the
ball.'
And she wished his ministers at the bottom of the sea for calling him away. ‘Nobody can tell how dull Brighton is
without you.'
She bathed and walked with Lady Charlotte Belasyse, and dined, and hoped she would eat her Christmas dinner with her brother. Once Mary was back at Bagshot in the New Year, however, her Brighton days glowed in her memory. ‘I follow you about from room to room like a tame dog fawning,' she wrote to the Regent. ‘I see you at dinner offering the punch and brown bess all round the table. I see your calling for all the favoured music.'