Princesses (35 page)

Dr Francis Millman attended the Princess, and by 15 August she was judged well enough to take another airing on the sands. Progress continued slowly, and she benefited from the ‘warm bath', or bathing in heated seawater, while the rest of the royal family made ‘aquatic
excursions.'
The King rode about Dorset with his son Ernest and with General Garth for companions, while the Queen and the other princesses ‘worked' or took airings on the sands. Finally, in early October Sophia was declared fully recovered, and the extended royal visit came to a stop. And shortly before she left with the royal party for Windsor on the 8th, Dr Millman received the King's congratulations and a baronetcy, although it was later said that the monarch put his daughter's recovery down to eating good roast
beef.

At any rate, the party returned to Windsor, after the extended stay at Weymouth, in high good humour to prepare for celebrations to mark the new century. These were to commence on New Year's Day 1801, but there were to be other celebrations soon – for, after seven years of war, peace was at hand.

In December 1800 the Duchess of Württemberg and her children – as she called Paul and Trinette – were threatened directly in the
‘paper house'
in which they lived at Erlangen. Moreau, having defeated Archduke John, was headed for Vienna, but other French forces had taken Nuremberg and their troops were now constantly marching through Erlangen itself. They were ‘quartered in all of the villages around about, which makes me an absolute
prisoner',
wrote the Duchess. Only the day before she tried to walk round the town, then saw a patrol which stopped them in their tracks. Later that month, during exchanges between the Austrian and French positions, ‘one could hear every shot as distinctly as if we were at a
Review',
but there was no decisive outcome. ‘The whole day there is nothing but firing to be heard. God grant the Austrians success,' she wrote with remarkable calm.

The Austrian outlook was hopeless and the Emperor sued for peace on Christmas Day. The Treaty of Lunéville, signed on 9 February 1801 and confirming Campo Formio, put an end to the Holy Roman Empire, concluded the War of the Second Coalition, and closed the eighteenth century with complete victory for France on the Continent – though not as yet in the newly United Kingdom of the British Isles. Over the New Year, congratulating her father on the union of Great Britain and Ireland and wishing him well for the new century, the Princess Royal wrote in disgust that the Austrian troops had simply thrown down their arms on hearing of the
armistice
.

A few days later she had more delicate information to offer from her husband, who was still in Vienna. The Duke had had to send a representative to Paris. His instructions were to keep in the background and ‘come forward' – only when there was no thought of continuing the war, of course – to make a separate treaty with France. The Duke could not, Royal pleaded, maintain war against the might of France with only 7,000 men if Austria had made peace. The English, who had been suspicious of Royal's husband at Vienna, were confirmed in their opinion of him, as he took the first steps towards alliance with Napoleon, and pulled with him Napoleon's foe, the King of England's eldest daughter.

Even as the Peace of Amiens was being celebrated,
Princess
Elizabeth mentioned to Dr Thomas Willis in
March
1801 ‘a very delicate subject – the cruelty of a fabricated and most scandalous and base report concerning P.S. [Princess Sophia]'. The rumour was that she had given birth to a child at Weymouth the previous summer. ‘Such a report', wrote Willis indignantly, ‘must
in it
s nature be false as those who are acquainted with the interior of the King's houses must
testify.'
But the rumour or ‘report' was almost certainly true.

Princess Sophia was in no doubt about the origin and fount of the rumours – her brother, the Prince of
Wales,
who so disliked her championing of his estranged wife. ‘He has trifled with my character, and a young woman's character once gone is not so easily regained,' she averred. For even before Lord Glenbervie and Princess Elizabeth gossiped and protested, Princess Sophia had confided in her oblique
way
– to Lady Harcourt on 30 December 1800 – her distress at the stories that were circulating about her. Referring to a ‘private conversation' they had had, and to her
happiness
that she had ‘had courage to begin it', she wrote:

the excessive kindness of your manner has, I assure you,
greatly
soothed my distressed and unhappy
days
and hours …

I have no doubt that I was originally to blame, therefore I must bear patiently the reports, however unjust they are, as
I have
partially myself to thank for them; but, dearest Ly H, when I reflect of the difference of your behaviour and that of others, it shows me how insincere the generality of this
world
are, and how one ought to value and revere a true friend, which is most justly styled the most precious jewel in life. It is grievous to think what a little trifle will slur a young woman's character for ever. I do not complain, I submit patiently, and promise to strive to regain mine, which, however imprudent I have been, has, I assure you, been injured
unjustly
.

For all her fighting words, Sophia almost certainly gave birth at Weymouth – in circumstances which remain mysterious – to a baby who
was baptized in the parish church there on 11 August 1800. The infant was described in the parish register as ‘Thomas
Ward,
stranger' or foundling, ‘adopted by Samuel and Charlotte Sharland', and as having been born on the 5th of that month. Samuel Sharland, a colonel of the Weymouth Volunteers, had a prosperous tailoring business on the Weymouth esplanade, and the birth of his own child was noted earlier in the month in the same register.

There is no doubt about Thomas Ward's existence or about his presence during the first few years of his life at the Sharlands' house on the esplanade at Weymouth. But great doubt surrounds the
whole
business of his birth, including his birthplace and his birthdate – notwithstanding the date given in his baptismal entry. The child may have been born when Sophia stopped en route at General Gouldsworthy's on 30 July, or somehow, somewhere when she reached Weymouth – not necessarily at Gloucester Lodge, the royal residence on the esplanade, where there was little privacy. Sophia later said that it was her ‘old
nurse'
who was with her at that dreadful time, and stopped the story from coming out then, but gives no further details. Apparently she did not realize for a very
long
time into her pregnancy that
she was
having a child.

Still
more
doubt obscures the identity of the child's
father
. General Thomas Garth is, of course, the natural candidate, given Sophia's ‘passion' for him. A teasing
letter
without a date and addressed to ‘My very dear, dear General' – almost certainly General Garth – refers to their exchange of rings and in other ways convinces the reader that their relationship was
intimate
. And less than four years after Sophia had given birth, Glenbervie was writing, ‘The foundling which was left at the tailor's [Samuel Sharland] at Weymouth about two years ago, is now in a manner admitted by the people about the Court to be the Princess Sophia's and, as the story generally goes, by General Garth … It is now said the Queen knows the child to be the Princess Sophia's, but that the King does not, but that the Queen thinks Garth the
father.'

As if to confirm part of the opinion that Glenbervie ascribes to the Queen – that General Garth was Thomas Ward's real father – the equerry went on to adopt and educate the child at Harrow, renaming him Tommy or Thomas Garth in the process, making him his heir, and fostering his career in his old regiment. The letter Sophia wrote in 1805 referring to her ‘old nurse' shows plainly that she was the child's
mother
.
Nothing
would appear to be clearer than that, by some lapse in morals or contraception, Sophia and the General had
together
conceived Tommy Garth in the autumn of 1799. For evermore the Princess was to bear the shame of this
ill chance, forfeiting all hope of
marriage
or domestic happiness. And the General behaved honourably by the boy in giving him his name, if his adoption of young Tommy unhappily confirmed the rumours that he was the
illegitimate
offspring of the equerry and the Princess.

But Glenbervie inserted an astonishing caveat into his story about Tommy Garth's parentage. After his remarks about the General openly maintaining the child, he added, ‘But the Princess of Wales told Lady Sheffield the other day, that there is great reason to suspect the father to be the Duke of Cumberland. How strange and how disgusting. But it is a very strange
family,
at least the children – sons and
daughters.'

This claim by the Princess of Wales, which probably issued from one of Cumberland's brothers or even from the Duke
himself,
who was ‘underhand the great friend of the Princess of Wales' this year – that he was the real father of his sister's child – was to dog Sophia for a long time. As the child grew up, sly references to the story multiplied, and the matter ended by exploding into the public arena when Tommy Garth was nearly thirty years old. Old letters from Sophia to General Garth complaining of Ernest making ‘attempts on her
person'
were supposedly among other documents bandied about at that time to prove that her brother was responsible
for her
pregnancy.

That Ernest made ‘attempts' on Sophia or, in plain language, tried to rape his sister is certainly
possible
or even likely. The Prince – that boisterous, rude darling of his nurse Mrs Cheveley – knew no boundaries where appetite or decency were concerned, and all his life not only used the grossest language about women, but made the grossest of physical assaults on them – all women, married, unmarried, young, old, innocent and knowing. As a young soldier on the Continent he had to be restrained from trying his luck at a nunnery. In later life one of his victims' husbands committed suicide.

However, let us not forget to whom Sophia wrote these letters complaining of her brother's ‘attempts' – to her lover, General Garth. And while Ernest had the opportunity to be the father of Tommy Garth – he was at Windsor during the late autumn of 1799 – Sophia's letter to ‘My very dear, dear General' makes it perfectly plain that her relationship with the equerry was long-standing, consensual and intimate. In other words, if an ‘attempt' by the Duke of Cumberland was responsible for the child to which his sister Princess Sophia gave birth at Weymouth, rather than the more regular attentions of her lover Garth, she was particularly unlucky. That Garth was the father of Princess Sophia's child is the commonsense and probable, if unromantic and not so scandalous, answer.

Before we leave Tommy Garth in 1801 still at the Sharlands', not due to take up residence for another three years at the
home
his ‘adoptive' father General Garth provided for him at Ilsington Manor at Puddletown near by, it will be as
well
to quote the undated letter from Sophia already mentioned: ‘Though I never can be really angry with you, my very dear, dear General, yet at this moment I almost am so, for you have indeed been excessively naughty. How can you, my dearest General, go on so long, when you do not feel well, without seeing Dr Turton?' This physician to the royal household, who died in 1806, was no doubt required to alleviate General Garth's chronic gout from which he unromantically suffered agonies. Sophia continued:

Your dear ring has given me some tremendous pinches, but I have bore them like a heroine. If you looked at your little finger when you were so naughty, I believe a certain little ring would have been impertinent enough to have given you a pinch. I think you deserve it – And now, my dearest General, do not forget that, when you are neglecting your own health, you are the cause of giving many unhappy moments to those who love you. And that was the case yesterday, for, as we were going to dinner, I heard you were not well and till the evening, when I saw Miss Gomm, did not know you was better. Therefore, you may easily imagine, dinner went down but so so, but, upon looking at the ring, I was frightened to death and ate like an Alderman.

The letter concludes:

I assure you I do all in my power (which God knows is but little) to please my
sisters,
but alas! I fear I do not succeed – I can say no more at present. My heart is too full, but, though I own I am not
happy,
yet I shall never forget you, my dear General, to whom I owe so much. Your kind remembrance of me is a cordial. Your calling me your S makes me as proud as Lucifer … I love you more and more every day. God bless you, my dearest dear General. Think of me tomorrow at 2 o clock. I shall then be happy for two
minutes
as I shall be speaking to dear Gooly
once more
.

The King was
ill
. How ill was unclear, but in mid-February 1801, he told General Garth out riding that he was ‘very bilious and unwell' and had not
slept.
It seemed that he had stayed too long in church on the Friday, which had been a fast day. ‘The weather was so snowy and cold that His Majesty became excessively
chilled.'
Shortly thereafter the symptoms of thirteen years before that had so alarmed the royal family and disrupted public business came flooding back – colic, sweating and hoarseness – and led to acute delirium and coma.

Thomas Willis had visited the King on Monday, 16 February at the Queen's House, and was satisfied, after spending an hour with him, that the patient had a severe cold and was hoarse but nothing more. Yet within days, although the King attended a Council – convened, out of respect for his ailment, at the Queen's House – he was ‘hurried' and dwelt on his
illness
of 1788. He told Henry Addington, the incoming Prime Minister – Pitt had resigned over the question of Catholic Emancipation on the 5th – that in 1788 his father Dr Anthony Addington had counselled
quiet.