Princesses (59 page)

But there were alarms in the New Year to discompose even the Duchess of Gloucester. Word came towards the end of January 1820 – the Kents' governess wrote to Sophia – that the Duke of Kent was seriously ill with a fever at Sidmouth, where he and the Duchess and the children had gone
before Christmas in search of sea air. Prince Leopold meant to go down to his sister, if the Duke's condition worsened. And Mary wrote to her brother the Regent asking for a further bulletin. Edward had his faults, she wrote, but he had ever been a most affectionate brother to her. ‘I own I feel his distance from us sadly.'

In the meantime, Dr Robert Willis had returned to Windsor after Christmas to find the King ‘very much weaker and thinner'. At first he called it ‘a very gradual decay with no
appearance
of immediate danger'. But days later he spoke of a ‘great change in the King's whole appearance'. The Duke of York, heavy with grief, stood inside his father's apartment to witness ‘the prodigious alteration in the poor King's face and
countenance.'

Shocking news came on 24 January. The Duke of Kent, whom his brothers and sisters had considered so hale and hearty that he would outlive them all, had died at Sidmouth. He left his widow, her children and their baby daughter, Princess Victoria, virtually penniless. The weather was cold and damp at Windsor, where his sisters gathered to mourn their brother as best as they could. Mary wrote of ‘many circumstances that go to my heart', and Sophia was ‘much
shocked'
by her brother's death. But of all the royal siblings, dark, clever Edward had always been the least likeable – awkward, exacting and quick to give and take offence. Only Elizabeth had felt a bond with him, and Mary warned that care should be taken to break the news gently at Homburg. ‘It is an
event
that will go very hard with her.' Sure enough, Elizabeth wrote, ‘Upon the Continent he will be much regretted as he was very thoroughly esteemed by all those who lived with him.' She added, ‘Poor fellow, he has been taken off in a moment when he was enjoying much domestic comfort, and that broke up is a very sad,
sad thing.'
All Edward's disappointments had been forgotten, not only in his contentment with the Duchess of Kent, but in his pride at producing the heir presumptive to the throne.

Above all else that made the month of January 1820 ‘gloomy and melancholy' was the prospect, as Mary wrote, that this misfortune of Edward's death would soon be followed by another. The King had had a mammoth paroxysm at Christmas, when he neither slept nor stopped talking for fifty-eight hours. ‘Thank God he does not suffer,' Mary said of him. ‘Our beloved father,' wrote Augusta, ‘I find from the physicians, is daily declining and growing weaker. And what makes the thing of worse import, perhaps, I do not make out that he has any
disease.'
Two days later in those apartments on the north terrace at Windsor where he had idled away the years since Amelia died, abusing his keepers, plucking at the bedclothes and ordering worlds of ‘ideal' inhabitants conjured up from the past, King
George III himself died, just after half-past eight in the evening of 29 January – the eve of the anniversary of the execution of Charles I, whose martyrdom he revered. He had borne his own sufferings with grace.

Augusta wrote a letter to Lady Harcourt at a dark hour. The Prince Regent, now, at the age of fifty-seven, King George IV, had sent Frederick to Sophy. ‘He spent the evening alone with us two,' and the Duke of Gloucester had sent Mary to them.

This letter has been written over strange intervals … and I hope you can understand it but really my heart is so full and so much that is necessary but disagreeable I must attend to this morning I hope you will pardon my not looking over it again. I am very glad we shall be some days quite alone and Sophy wants quiet, and we are the best company for each other when we can meet. I am fully employed in writing all I can pick up to my two sisters – I dread their hearing of the fatal conclusion before they receive my letter of yesterday.

Augusta told of her ‘poor stricken heart' and of the ‘very very great sorrow' they had gone through in ten days. ‘The blow is struck but now the first recovery opens our eyes to our affliction. I have cried a great deal today, and feel relieved
by it,'
she wrote on 4 February. Mary and Augusta and Sophia sat and worked in the evenings as they waited for the interment, first of their brother Edward and then of their father.

When the Duchess of Gloucester visited Windsor four days later she found that Princess Augusta and Princess Sophia were ‘making great exertions to get their things all packed up to leave the Castle'. Mary herself thanked the new King for the gift of the furniture ‘in the room I used to live in in the Castle', which would embellish Bagshot, and also for the gift of one of her father's
carriages.
Mary was always a materialist, and these acquisitions helped dull the pain of the two January deaths and the loss of Windsor.

Princess Augusta and Princess Sophia departed the Castle the day after their father's funeral, an event at which their brother Frederick was chief mourner in place of the King. While his father lay dying, George IV had fallen suddenly and gravely ill and, still weak, feared the night air. His feelings were as ever overset by death, this time to the point of contracting a pleurisy that had made some of his doctors think a third royal funeral might be in the offing. But it was not to be.

‘The seeing this dear old place at this moment', Mary wrote from Windsor, ‘is very melancholy.' She believed that Sophia's ‘strength of mind' would help her to survive the move. It was a ‘great object to get her to
town' and into the care of Sir Henry Halford. She was to occupy apartments first in her brother Adolphus's
home,
Cambridge House in Mayfair, and then at Kensington Palace.

Augusta, on the other hand, was bound for Frogmore, where she meant to live most of the time, keeping apartments at the Queen's House for forays to
town.
She had sent for Lady Harcourt, who had been with them after the Queen's death, to join her there. And although she ‘began to flag sadly' while making her final arrangements in early February at Windsor, within the month she was beginning to have things as she wanted, even promising her brother, General (newly Sir) Herbert Taylor, Sir Benjamin Bloomfield and others of the new King's inner circle a ‘famous good dinner' at her new home.

From now on the princesses and, indeed, their brothers would be welcome only as the King's guests at Windsor. And although he was too preoccupied with putting together further damning evidence against his wife to feel any urge as yet to take possession of the Castle, Augusta and Sophia had a home, as well as a parent, to mourn.

With George Ill's death came an outpouring of reverent prose in the public press and a flood of images for sale extolling his virtues in life – balm to his daughters' eyes and ears when they had so minded his treatment the year before. The sentiments they expressed in the days after George Ill's death – ‘clouded as his precious life has been for many years, it has pleased the Almighty to spare him many a pang which would have severely tried him' – were to be repeated and printed in newspapers and sermons and broadsheets. This image of a pious, benevolent father of the people might have come as a surprise to earlier subjects of George III, whose caricaturists and pamphleteers had not been so kind. But now, with the prospect of George IV as monarch, there was no stopping the pious flow.

‘May you when your hour comes be as much loved, respected and regretted as he must be,' Elizabeth intoned, writing to her brother, the new King, on 6 February after hearing the news. That seemed unlikely, however, although Mary had recently told her brother that she could ‘only lament you are not known all over the world as you are in your own house and at Brighton, for you are not done justice to by anybody'. For some, like his sister, George IV's charm was undimmed from when he was a boy, and he enlivened and brightened every occasion at which he was present, for all his auburn wig and florid, womanish face, his great girth and gouty legs. But this was not the case with most. In particular, his estranged wife Caroline endorsed Leigh Hunt's 1812 judgement that her husband was ‘a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a
despiser of domestic
ties.'
When she heard that he had, almost as the first act of his reign, ordered that her name be omitted from the prayers for the royal family in church, the new Queen of England made plans immediately to return to England.

The oddities of the situation that the regency of ten years had created at Windsor were identified by Sophia when she wrote of her father's death to the new King: ‘While I am mourning the loss of one who must and ever will live in my recollection, I am addressing one who has acted as such [that is, as fatherly protector and ruler] for some years.'

Princess Elizabeth had a hard time adjusting to the idea that her father was dead and that her brother was king in his stead. She even found it difficult to address her brother by his new title: ‘I am a strange mortal and cannot help being easy with what I love. Therefore he must forgive me if I am not proper enough.' Then she heard in Homburg of the new King's dreadful pleurisy. According to Princess Mary, when a second express arrived, announcing his recovery, Elizabeth ‘completely lost her head and for some time would not attend to reason'. So her English maid, Sarah Brawn, wrote home to the housekeeper at Kew, and she said she never saw her poor mistress ‘in such a state of nerves in her life'. Perhaps Elizabeth had not forgotten that dark day in Bath when they learnt of Princess Charlotte's stillbirth – and then came that fateful second express, bearing the news of the young mother's own death.

Elizabeth refused – ‘at great personal sacrifice to her own private feeling' – her brother's invitation to come over in the spring of 1820 for his Coronation, an invitation which her brothers Ernest in Berlin and Adolphus in Hanover had already accepted. Bluff, her husband, had only just become sovereign in his father's place, she explained, and not only did they have to look after his widowed mother, but they had found everything ‘at 6's and 7's', with terrible debts to pay. Elizabeth would not wish to appear, should she make the journey, ‘otherwise than as your sister ought to appear', but she could not think of making the necessary outlay at this time of hardship in Homburg. ‘I make my excuse with running-over eyes,' she concluded, ‘but my duty and affection for Bluff make me feel I am acting right.'

Royal, far away in Ludwigsburg, also refused her brother's invitation to attend the Coronation he was planning in London. Gratified as she was, she wrote, the health to which she was a martyr, and her ‘grandchildren' – Prince Paul's daughters, whose care was her delight, as well as King Wilhelm's children on whom she doted – were twin duties forbidding her to take her place in Westminster Abbey. She only regretted that the peeresses
were to walk at the Coronation – ‘much as I shall ever rejoice at everything that can encourage trade'. She feared this would bring forward ‘fresh fuel for those who are resolved to begin many unpleasant discussions concerning an illustrious lady [Queen Caroline], who I understand will force herself on the public, and is determined to run any risk for the sake of
mischief.'

But it seemed that, while Royal and Elizabeth would not see their brother crowned, his sister Sophia might be well enough to be present. Her move to London had given her a new lease of life, and she wrote to her brother, ‘I am very well satisfied with my abode …' She added, ‘the hopes of being able to see so much more of you and to be near at hand' to Carlton House had been a prime reason, an ‘essential
inducement',
for fixing upon Cambridge House as a permanent home.

Emerging at last from long years immured in twilit sickrooms, Sophia wrote of ‘trying to look at all around one in a favourable light'. She was, she reckoned – and in this she mistook the matter sorely – ‘not very difficult to please'. And she said she wished only for a ‘quiet snug home' – which was what she now had. With an energy that was new to her, she walked in the gardens of the empty Queen's House, drove out to Hyde Park and Regent's Park with her sister Mary, and had one or two ladies in for the evening. She sat in a red dress to the painter Thomas Lawrence. She even mimicked her mother talking to one of Amelia's doctors: ‘Really, had I shut my eyes,' Mary said of their dead mother, ‘I should have thought she was in the room.' And finally one morning in April Sophia excelled herself. ‘Judge of my joy,' wrote Mary, ‘when the door opened, and who should walk into the room but dear Sophy. The first visit she had made – and she actually came up to the top of the house, and really did not appear the worse for it, went all over it, and sat with me nearly an hour.' Mary told their brother, ‘All nervous people must be a little humoured in regard to their health.' She did not, therefore, like to let Sophia know how well she thought her. But, she concluded, ‘being her own mistress… has been of great use to her general health'. She showed insight into Sophia's turbulent mind that dictated her varying poses from invalid to intrepid horse-woman when she concluded that it was ‘by doing it
her own way'
that her sister would flourish.

And then reports came of an impediment to a peaceful Coronation. Queen Caroline, the wife whom the King refused adamantly to have crowned or to allow to be present at his own ceremony – was about to set out for England. Mary was quick in her outrage at the prospect of what she called ‘the Illustrious Traveller' coming to England. She had heard that,
before the Liturgy was changed, someone had said it ought to read ‘Praise our gracious Queen Caroline.' ‘Good Lord
defend us …'
she exclaimed.

The rest of the year was dedicated to ‘the Queen's affair'. It had been a rare year since 1795, when George and Caroline's misconceived marriage took place, that the Treasury and ministers – not to mention the royal family – were not dealing with fresh and unreasonable demands from one or the other. Not for nothing did one of the myriad cartoons published in this momentous year feature Queen Caroline as a kettle calling George IV – a coalscuttle – black. It had been a relationship which had caused untold damage to their daughter Charlotte before her marriage. But in this year of 1820 the couple's private and public disagreements lit the fuse of seething political discontent in the country. Now the rancorous arguments of King and Queen fed the nation, as the Radicals took up the Queen's cause. All the Parliamentary time that might have been devoted to debating reform of rotten boroughs was given to searching out the details of this rotten marriage. In the process,
‘Silly Billy',
as the Duke of Gloucester was aptly named, did untold damage to his own marriage when he rose in Parliament to support his cousin Caroline and denounce his brother-in-law the King.