Princesses (63 page)

Royal did not forget her family at home in Württemberg, and told Lady Louisa Stuart, showing her some ornaments she had bought from the jewellers Rundell and Bridge, that they were for her ‘granddaughter' Pauline. But the Queen Dowager was ‘very low' when she had to leave England. Her brother the King escaped the last farewells, telling Augusta to make his excuses and say ‘he had a little gout'. Augusta, on whom the burden of Royal's slow and cumbersome tour of scenes past and present had rested, wrote crisply, ‘I rather think it was nonsense not to see her again.'

Shortly before Royal departed, Sophia wrote to her niece Victoria excusing her lack of letters. ‘Since my sisters have been in town, my mornings have been so occupied and so many interruptions
occurring.'
After her sister had left, Sophia conceded to a friend, ‘She certainly tried all she could to show how rejoiced she was to see us again, and naturally kindness begets a return.' But if Sophia and Royal had not warmed to each other, the Queen Dowager returned to the Continent, glad to have rekindled with others relationships of which she had cherished the memory all these years.

Augusta was ordered to Brighton for a ‘cure' in the winter months following her sister's departure, but before she went, William and Adelaide, now in a new-built house at St James's, Clarence House, came to dine with her at Stable House. ‘We had some of my favourite Irish melodies,'Augusta told her friends the Arrans, ‘simple ballads which we like better than anything else, and then I played to amuse William every Paddy tune I could think of – O'Carrol – O'Rafferty – O'Casey, all his
delights.'

That December it grew dark in St James's Palace by half-past three. ‘Dear William has just been with me,' Augusta wrote again, ‘and pulled down my blinds and had the candles lighted, for he said it was too melancholy.' At Brighton she lived comfortably in the White House, a house belonging to the King on the Steyne, and, having promised Sir Henry Halford that she would walk, she attempted a quarter of a mile along the sea front with a stick. Days later, she proclaimed triumphantly, ‘I am grown bold, and stomp away with my stick in a most happy independent manner.' When indoors, she again abided by Sir Henry's instructions, the physician
having charged her ‘on no account to sit in
hot rooms.'
Accordingly, she sat in the evening in the light of very few candles.

Augusta remained nearly three months in the Brighton house, determined to persevere and walk sturdily once more. The spectre of Royal, who had effectively lost the use of her lower limbs, may have frightened her into this determined action. Occasionally, melancholy thoughts occurred to the Princess. She regretted Frederick's death – she had visited him here at Brighton shortly before it – and the loss of another link in the family chain. But she bound up her knee, and in January 1828 she announced she could walk on flat ground as firmly and as fast as ever. ‘When in the streets or on the chain pier', she added, however, ‘I take my stick for
safety'

Later that year Princess Sophia was at Kensington Palace reading a letter from her sister Royal that had just arrived, when a message was brought to her that her correspondent had died on 6 October. The Dowager Queen's sufferings had been dreadful, Augusta told Ernest, but short. She had spent her Saturday as usual, was indisposed on the Sunday and on the following day: ‘The water rose so much to her chest and occasioned such palpitations at the heart' that, ‘had her existence been prolonged, it would have been but for her to suffer
torture and misery.'

In Ludwigsburg, so Elizabeth heard, the Dowager Queen's death had aroused strong emotion. Her ‘son' King Wilhelm had earlier irritated Elizabeth by selling off the china that Royal had painted for his father, but now he redeemed himself by his constant watch, with his family, at his stepmother's deathbed. And his niece Pauline could not be detached from the side of the Dowager Queen's dead body for
some hours
.

Royal herself had written of her hopes to be reunited after death with the daughter whose stillbirth she had never forgotten. Now those two sets of baby clothes that she had brought with her from England, and which had so long lingered among her effects, were sold off with a dress of cloth of gold and other costly possessions dating from more recent times. In England Augusta was consoled by the thought that Royal had been so
happy
in England the previous year. Sophia agreed, and admitted to Lady Louisa Murray, ‘Her visit last year revived feelings which I do not conceal from you were dormant after an absence of thirty years …'

Augusta was vexed by the behaviour of her brother-in-law the Duke of Gloucester. He had ‘taken it as a heinous
offence'
when Robinson, a page of many years' service, expressed a desire to become a messenger, and had sacked him. Augusta asked Sir William Fremantle, who appointed her brother the King's household, if Robinson might try out as a King's page. Mary, she said, had begged her to help.

The Duchess of Gloucester was often very unhappy with her husband's behaviour, but she had found a spiritual refuge at Bagshot in the
flower
garden and arboretum she had made with the help of her husband's agent Mr Edmund Currey and of Mr Toward, her gardener. She would always love Mr Currey, she wrote later, ‘for all the amusement and pleasure he afforded me in first giving me taste and pleasure in my garden and for the country'. The agent had had only one object when he originally undertook the management of Bagshot Park – ‘to make the Duke like it and give him a taste for that place, and prevent him leaving it, as he used to do for shooting before he had game enough at Bagshot Park'. But with Mary's enthusiastic support the flower garden and arboretum flourished too.

At Frogmore Augusta was apparently fully engaged in charitable works, gardening, farming and playing duets with Lady Mary Taylor. Whether General Spencer still formed part of her life is not known, just as it is not known whether they ever succeeded in marrying. When he died in December 1828 at his estate at Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire, his obituarist wrote: ‘Since the peace [of 1815] Sir Brent Spencer has passed his time in perfect retirement, enjoying the pleasures of a rural life, and the society of a few chosen friends …' Augusta herself, whether one of Spencer's ‘few chosen friends' or not, made no reference to his death.

Meanwhile, others were very concerned about the behaviour of Tommy Garth, now a captain on half-pay aged twenty-eight. Following a year in Paris after Harrow, learning French – and visiting the gaming tables – he had made little of the career in the army offered to him. Despite every kind of assistance, his progress had foundered on his own lack of enthusiasm. By the early 1820s, on the other hand, he was a familiar sight on the Leicestershire hunting fields, and had become a member of the ‘wild Meltonians' set who hunted round Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire. His first crime was to fall in love with a fellow Meltonian's wife, Lady Astley. The second was to elope with her in 1826, carrying her off from the London house where she left behind her not only Sir Jacob Astley, her husband, but two tiny children.

Tommy Garth's elopement with
Georgiana
Astley, earlier a Miss Dashwood of West Wycombe, was the talk of the town, and his relationship with Princess Sophia was hinted at in caricatures of the night-time escape. Sir Jacob, betrayed, sued his fellow Meltonian for ‘crim con' damages. (‘Criminal conversation' was the term then used for adultery in legal proceedings.) But Asdey was allotted a shilling after Garth brought counterclaims that Asdey was no stranger to prostitutes and girls of the town in London and Leicestershire. Astley's petition for divorce failed, too,
as the supplicant needed ‘clean hands', and the evidence brought by Garth's lawyers in the civil suit proved they were filthy. So Garth and Georgiana, with great effrontery, lived a sort of twilight existence together in a series of inns and lodgings. Georgiana's husband asked her to return to him, but she refused. Tommy and she were apparently oddly happy.

So was Princess Sophia in the late summer of 1828 when she wrote tranquilly to her niece Victoria: ‘Has Polly learnt any new words?' Princess Victoria's parrot had gone with her to Tunbridge Wells and Ramsgate. Sophia apologized for not writing earlier, and thanked her nine-year-old niece for her well-written letter. ‘I have walked very often all around the gravel walks under your windows,' wrote Aunt Sophia on 29 September at the palace in Kensington Gardens. ‘In looking up at your windows how I missed that little voice which always makes me cheerful, as it gives me the delight of feeling that my dear Vicky is near me.'

Then Tommy's past, or rather his birth, caught up with him, indeed with everyone concerned. General Garth, thinking himself in 1828 on the point of death, summoned his ‘protégé' and showed him an iron box containing letters and documents relating to his birth, which Tommy took away with him to study. The General recovered, but his son did not give the documents back. On the point of going to prison for debt the following spring, he was ‘compelled to address the illustrious lady', he recorded later, by whom he meant Princess Sophia, for assistance. Sir Herbert Taylor, private secretary to King George IV as he had been to George III, and the Duke of York before him, was then entrusted with the delicate business of engaging young Garth to deposit at a bank the box of documents he had received from the General. In return he would receive an annuity of £3,000, and the payment of his debts. But all parties played unfair, and Sir Herbert took the box from the bank, while young Garth publicized his wrongs in an affidavit declaring robbery.

Meanwhile, the Duke of Cumberland came over to England as a guest of his brother the King this spring – and one determined to oppose the Duke of Wellington's cowardly volte-face, as he saw it, in sponsoring a bill for Catholic Emancipation shortly after becoming Prime Minister. Among allegations levelled against the Duke by those who favoured the bill were the old – false but potent – claims of his incestuous relationship with his sister Princess Sophia. These intensified with newspaper hints at Captain Garth's doubly royal parentage. It all made for a harrowing year for Sophia. And when General Garth – Captain Garth's real father – died in November 1829, and left the bulk of his estate to his nephew Captain Thomas Garth RN, in the belief that Tommy Garth was provided for, it was the harbinger
of a further trail of misfortunes. But for the moment Tommy Garth played the part of chief mourner for his protector – and continued to stave off attacks from Sir Jacob Astley, who still, despite all, wanted his Georgiana back.

While Sir Herbert Taylor defended Princess Sophia's tarnished name against all comers, Sophia herself made no public or known private response to the allegations and rumours about the birth of Tommy Garth, but continued her correspondence with her niece in the next-door apartments at Kensington Palace. Ten-year-old Victoria announced that August from her uncle Leopold's Surrey home, ‘Claremont is in high beauty now. I have been this morning sitting in the flower-garden.' Later in the summer she wrote from Broadstairs, enquiring after her aunt's dog. ‘How is poor little Cosmo? I hope that he does not whine any more.' The younger Princess spoke proudly of her own dog: ‘Fanny comes every morning to the breakfast table to get some biscuits; and Shrewsbury [the Duchess of Kent's new horse] comes close to the door in the morning to be fed with carrots.'

Victoria thanked her aunt for offering to make a dress for her – ‘I shall like the pattern very much,' she told her – and announced that Sir John Conroy's daughter Victoire was tormented by a
boil.
Aunt Sophia responded with thanks for Victoria's letters: ‘I know my dear little friend is not
very
fond of letter writing, therefore I am doubly pleased with your so kindly devoting so much
time to me.'
And she asked for news of Victoria's drawing and singing with Mama. ‘Cosmo I must speak for,' she reported in October 1829; ‘he is very well now' – he had fallen from a window ledge – ‘and fancies himself fond of me, but I think him a little of a rogue … he makes up to his mistress, as within the last few days we have had fires, and he enjoys lying on the rug before the fire, and follows me for that
purpose.'

Earlier in the year George IV, lying in bed and increasingly gout-ridden at Royal Lodge, his mansion in Windsor Great Park, had been incensed that his sister Sophia should have such trouble brought upon her by these public airings of her past. At one point, he wanted to sack both Garths – the elderly General and his half-pay Captain son – from the army. Most of the time, however, he plotted peaceably with Jeffry Wyatville to ‘Gothicize' still further the medieval fastness of Windsor Castle. But this brother, who meant more than anyone to the princesses, and whose appearance in their lives had always represented light and hope, was dying. George IV was so puffed up with dropsy, wrote the Duchess of Gloucester in dismay, that he resembled a feather counterpane. He rallied, but he was mortally ill. Days
before he died, the King was ‘as clear, as communicative, as agreeable, nay as facetious as he ever had been', his physician and man of business Sir William Knighton wrote. Wellington visited the King, and was ‘astonished at his strength, both of body and mind'. On 26 June 1830 George IV summoned Knighton at three in the morning, after calling out, ‘Sir Henry, Sir Henry! Fetch him – this is death!' After Halford – and Knighton – duly appeared, the King's ‘lips grew livid, and he dropped his head on the page's shoulder'. At 3.15 a.m., confirming his prophecy, came death.

The Times
asserted on 16 July, ‘There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased King.' But the newspaper forgot the sisters of George IV. One and all they were stricken by the death of a brother who had ever been kind to them, and especially kind when they were in deep distress. He had raised their spirits with letters and presents and jewellery, with his effulgent regard, with his confident promises. Now the glow of George IV's personality was extinguished, and with his death the princesses had virtually lost a third parent. Bluff, friendly William was a very different sort of brother, and would be a very different kind of king.