Princesses (6 page)

And so the princesses had their English teacher, and Miss Planta, ‘mistress of seven languages' – including Latin and Greek – ‘and a most pious Christian', settled into the community of royal preceptors and tutors and governesses at Kew. The Queen had written to Lady Charlotte: ‘I am sorry
that I myself have not more time to spend with them [the royal children] and therefore am thankful to Providence for having worthy people
about them.'
She and the King were certainly prepared to fight fair and foul to secure those ‘worthy people'.

State portraits by Allan Ramsay of the King – auburn haired and pink cheeked – and of the Queen – dark, slight and grey-eyed – were copied in these years and sent
abroad
to confirm the young couple's status. They were sovereigns of a mighty kingdom following the triumphant end of the Seven Years War in 1763, and of a growing commercial empire, and the Queen's diamonds in her portrait were commensurately dazzling. Chief among them were those that sparkled on a stomacher the King had commissioned on their marriage for £60,000. ‘The fond [or background] is a network as fine as catgut of small diamonds,' the Duchess of Northumberland had recorded in 1761, ‘and the rest is a large pattern of natural flowers, composed of very large diamonds, one of which is 18, another 16, and a third 10 thousands
pounds
price.'
Lord Clive, better known today as Clive of India, added, among other riches, to the Queen's store of jewels presents from the deposed Great Mogul of India, Shah Alam: ‘two diamond drops worth twelve thousand pounds'.

But in the midst of their public life the royal couple continued to attempt a domestic life, whether in town at the Queen's House or at the Lodge in Richmond parkland, once the property of the King's grandfather George II. The princesses were still brought down to visit their parents after breakfast and, now of an age to do so, visited after their parents' four o'clock dinner. The King continued as devoted and eager a parent as ever, carrying Prince Ernest as a baby around in his arms and sitting on the floor to play with him, just as he had when the older children were infants.

But now, while the King and Queen attended to public business, after breakfast the princesses were driven off to Kew and to the schoolroom at Lady Charlotte's or, when in town, climbed to their brothers' old schoolroom at the Queen's House. All the princes and the princesses, at their father's behest, pursued a programme of
mens sana in corpore sano,
which excluded meat from their diet except on certain days, and included daily airings in the garden of the Queen's House in town or walks in Kew Gardens come rain, come sun. It featured as well a discussion of improving subjects selected from a ponderous commonplace book that the King had kept since boyhood.

The princesses' schooling in London in the winter months with Lady Charlotte and her subalterns was instructive, and their hours with their parents at Richmond Lodge or at the Queen's House were precious, but their
days at Kew, given the environs where they took their airings, were inspiring. They were old enough to have their imaginations fired on their walks by the strange fancies that the architect Sir William Chambers had placed in the gardens to entertain their grandmother. There was a Chinese pagoda modelled on one he had seen on his travels to Shanghai, a model Alhambra and even a Gothic cathedral, besides innumerable temples. And in the years since their grandmother had established a botanical garden and a menagerie at Kew in 1760, there had come exotic visitors bringing booty from foreign lands to enchant the children.

This very October, following his voyage with Captain Cook to the South Seas, the young naturalist Sir Joseph Banks presented the King and Queen at Richmond Lodge with an Australasian crown and feathers. He also brought to the botanical gardens that occupied part of the Kew property an extraordinary plant with orange and blue shoots from the Cape of Good Hope, and named it the Strelitzia, in graceful compliment to the Queen's native land of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. In the menagerie in a different part of the gardens, another first fruit of Captain Cook's voyage to the South Seas – a kangaroo from Botany Bay – was proudly placed, a mate brought over, and a successful breeding programme instituted. Not surprisingly, Kew was to have a powerful hold on all these princesses' memories and imaginations in later life.

The princesses now saw little of their elder brothers and of tag-along Prince Edward, except when their paths crossed while out on airings. The boys, so recently part of a boisterous family group and meeting their parents twice daily, were now forbidden to stray from the sphere of their houses at Kew – except for those improving walks in the grounds of Kew and, in the case of the eldest two, Sunday dinner, which they took with their governor Lord Holderness and his wife at Sion Hill on the other side of the Thames. Otherwise, spartan conditions reigned in the boys' establishments. Meat was rationed, and even when fruit tart was on the menu it was ‘without
crust.'

The Prince of Wales and his brother were, to begin with, obliging pupils and anxious to please all their instructors, although Prince Frederick later condemned one attendant as having been ‘used to have a silver pencil-case in his hand while we were at our lessons … and he has frequently given us such knocks with it on our foreheads that the blood
followed them.'
But the King instructed the princes' governors and preceptors to administer beatings when appropriate. One of the princesses later claimed to have seen her eldest brothers ‘held by their tutors to be flogged like dogs with a long
whip.'
The boys, trusting or fearing their father, did not complain. Other
boys of their age endured worse at schools, and their regime, with a certain want of imagination, was the same as their father's had once been.

These indignities the princesses were spared, and the Princess Royal, condemning harshness as counter-productive, later declared, ‘I love a steady, quiet way with children.' She also wrote, echoing her mother, ‘On the whole I believe that
example
does more than precept … I think the more they [children] are led to everything, and fancy it is by their own instigation, the better.' But the princesses probably suffered other ordeals by way of punishment for poor behaviour. Royal
thought
severe measures – tying girls' hands was a practice of the time – should be the response to ‘a lie, or the proof of a bad heart …
alone.'
But for ‘ill humour' she endorsed ‘great firmness and coldness', and her prescription ‘for bad lessons' was interesting: ‘the making learning a favour and the not allowing her to learn the next day if she is
idle.'

‘My pen is not capable of tracing a quarter of what I feel at the moment of your departure,' Queen Charlotte had written in July 1771 to her brother Prince Charles, who had just left England for his duties as military governor of Hanover after a long summer stay. Her newborn baby, Prince Ernest, was no consolation – nor was the offer her other brother in England, another Ernest, made to delay his return to Zell in the Hanoverian electorate where he was governor. ‘My pleasures are finished for the year by our
separation,'
she wrote.

The Queen did not know how truly she wrote. Over the coming months she and the King were to be plagued by family and political crises in the world that lay outside the well-managed promenades of Kew. In the American colonies there was growing discontent with the King's decision that they should be taxed and the revenue raised put to their defence. Thirty years before, the then Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole had been wary of such a measure when it was proposed to him in 1739. ‘I have old England set against me, and do you think I will have new England
likewise
?' The King had lit a ‘long fuse' when he insisted on Prime Minister Lord North exacting duty on newspapers and other printed material in the colonies with the Stamp Act. In March 1770 a mob, incensed by the continuing tax on tea, had attacked the Customs House in Boston. Five of the assailants had been shot, but the protests grew bolder. Within two years, another mob was to board a revenue cutter, the
Gasparee,
and burn it. Within six, the American colonies were to declare their independence from the Crown, and a bloody war would be launched.

The King was to be similarly obstinate in a situation at home which he regarded as a challenge to his authority, and which he could not control – the behaviour of his younger brother the Duke of Cumberland.

The King's relations with his brothers and sisters had never been easy. His parents had always favoured lively Prince Edward, Duke of York, over him and had greeted his own more faltering essays into social intercourse, ‘Do hold your tongue, George: don't talk like a
fool.'
Given that the Duke of York liked
nothing
better than to roam expensively in Italy, the King was perhaps less sorry than he might have been when his brother died in 1767. (Lady Mary Coke, who, without much justification, had considered herself practically affianced to the Duke, was devastated.) But now it was the King's brother Henry, Duke of Cumberland who posed a problem. He had shown his character at his brother the King's wedding in 1761. When someone had questioned his early departure from the family group on the wedding night, he had replied, ‘What should I stay for?… if she cries out, I cannot
help her.'

The Duke, having succeeded his uncle ‘Butcher' William, Duke of Cumberland, as ranger of Windsor Great Park, caroused at the Ranger's residence there, Cumberland Lodge, and on the Continent with his mistress Lady Anne Horton. Lady Anne was the daughter of an Irish peer who sat on the Whig benches, and her constant companion was her sister Lady Elizabeth Luttrell – known in all the capitals of Europe as a hardened gambler.

The King was furious and confounded when the Duke of Cumberland handed him a letter to read on 1 September 1771, while the brothers were out walking in the woods at Richmond. It informed him that the Duke had married Lady Anne, and was now looking for greater Parliamentary provision as a married man. The King described his reaction to this news to his brother the Duke of Gloucester: ‘After walking some minutes in silence to smother my feelings, I without passion spoke to him to the following effect. That I could not believe he had taken the step in the paper, to which he answered that he would never tell me an
untruth.'

The scandal this mismatch brought on the royal family, and the harm it did to the King's endeavours to create a more moral atmosphere at Court, made him and others think longingly of the system that obtained at many Continental Courts to deter this sort of thing. The Duke's conduct, the King wrote to his mother, was ‘his inevitable ruin and … a disgrace to the whole family', and he encouraged him to go abroad. ‘In any country,' the King told his brother, ‘a prince marrying a subject is looked up [on] as dishonourable, nay in Germany the children of such a marriage' – a morganatic match, as it was termed there – ‘cannot succeed to any territories but
here where the Crown is but too little respected, it must be big with the greatest mischief. Civil wars would by such measures again be common in this country; those of the Yorks and Lancasters were greatly giving to intermarriages with the nobility.' He went on, ‘I must therefore on the first occasion show my resentment, I have children who must know what they have to expect if they could follow so infamous an example.'

This letter made very uncomfortable reading for the Duke of Gloucester, who – although five years his junior – the King regarded as ‘the only friend to whom I can unbosom every thought'. Gloucester, weak and flaccid except in the pursuit of women, made a perfect recipient for the King's laborious thought processes. On this occasion, the message of the letter was clear. Gloucester must settle the question that perplexed Society: had he married Lady Waldegrave or not? For the King to have one brother married to a commoner and with family among the Whig Opposition in the House of Commons – five of the new Duchess of Cumberland's brothers and her father had seats there – was unfortunate. Were Gloucester married, too, and, should he wish to go into opposition, he could count on the political support of those strong Whigs the Walpoles and Waldegraves, as Maria belonged to the first family by birth and to the second by her first marriage.

The Duke of Gloucester answered approvingly, soothingly, condemned his brother Cumberland's behaviour and added for good measure that he himself would never marry. Honour was apparently satisfied, and Gloucester, pointedly leaving Lady Waldegrave in England, went abroad to Tuscany where he almost immediately fell ill with a ‘bloody flux'. For companionable nurses, fortunately, he had the attentions of not one ‘Madame Grovestein' from Holland but two. In January 1772, however, Lady Mary Coke in Vienna heard from Lady Charlotte Finch in England, ‘the Royal family does not flatter themselves with the Duke of Gloucester's recovery … the accounts are so bad as to leave little room for
hopes.'
He was then at Naples. And as late as March, having flitted to Rome, the devoted Grovesteins hot on his heels, the itinerant Duke was still ‘at death's door'.

In England, meanwhile, the King's ‘resentment' was immediately manifested in the announcement that those who visited the Duke of Cumberland and his new Duchess would not be welcome at Court. But he went further, despite the pleas of his mother, the Dowager Princess of Wales. She, more concerned for the dying Duke of Gloucester in Italy, preached family harmony in the case of Cumberland. ‘All I beg of you is,' she wrote to her son the King in November, after expressing her chagrin that Henry had behaved so badly, ‘do not have vengeance against him in
your heart and if he has the good fortune to be quit of his wife,
pardon him.'
She knew her eldest son's capacity for resentment. Instead of listening to her, the King meditated a Royal Marriages Act, making it illegal for members of the royal family to marry without the previous consent of the sovereign. With his brother Gloucester's assurance that he was a bachelor, this and other provisions in the bill that the King personally drafted should deter him from ever making an honest duchess of his bastard Walpole mistress. And looking ahead, the King would be sure of controlling his own children's marriages.