Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (5 page)

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Authors: Laurence Lerner

Tags: #History, #Modern, #19th Century, #Social Science, #Death & Dying, #test

BOOK: Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century
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Page 8
comportment that will not betray them; in the latter, the Dukes are aware of the comportment and have deduced the feelings from it. This puts them in a position similar to that of the writer, who knows what Leopold's behaviour was and concludes that it partly hid, partly revealed his inner turmoil. Here we encounter a question that will constantly recur in this book: what can we know about the feelings of real people by observingor reading abouttheir behaviour? To study past deaths and how they were responded to is to explore the relation between the texts we have and the experience of past generations to which they provide the only access. Like the Dukes, we are eager to know what Leopold felt; but whereas their concern was practical and immediate (would he fall down?), we have the leisure to reflect on our own acts of interpretation, to pause and ask how one can know such things and whether such knowledge can be reliable.
Shortly after Charlotte's death, Leopold had sent a message to his friend the Earl of Lauderdale, who arrived at Claremont the day after the funeral. The following account of this meeting follows shortly after the description of his behaviour at the funeral:
It is said that on his entering the room, his Serene Highness rushed into his Lordship's arms with the violence of a heart-broken man, and remained in that situation for a full half-hour, during which time his grief found vent only in sobs and moans. Lord Lauderdale at last gently tore himself away, and endeavoured to lead the Prince's mind to the consideration of minor objects. "How delightful it is," said his Lordship, "to breathe the sweet odour of these flowers, so diversified, so rich. An eternal spring seems to embellish these domains; it is a terrestrial paradise." It is added that these observations aroused Prince Leopold, and, for the first time, he found himself momentarily relieved. "I will," exclaimed he, "live and die at Claremont. I will devote every moment of my future life to carry into effect all the ideas of that blessed angel whom I have lost for ever!" Here he burst into a flood of tears. (
Times
, 19 Nov.)
Here the situation is different. Whereas the writer may well have been present at the funeral, we are now, as the passage goes out of its way to make plain, dealing with hearsay. The exclamatory sentences of Lauderdale, flowery in more than one sense, and the polished parallels of Leopold, show that the dialogue is not meant to be literally accurate (especially since it immediately precedes a flood of tears!). The conventionalized style, though it deprives us of authenticity, could be thought of as a way of making
 
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the intrusion less impertinent, as if we are seeing a Leopold who already conforms to a stereotype and so to a more public role. His true grief is, then, left private.
And are we being told the truth? The question thrusts itself upon us when we compare the accounts of Leopold with those of his father-in-law. The assurances about the Prince Regent's emotions are almost as emphatic as those about Leopold's. When he saw the body of his daughter, we are told, he had a stroke of apoplexy; and the
Gentleman's Magazine
went so far as to write,
If there be one trait which is more marked than another in the character of the Prince Regent, it is his affection for all the members of his family; and if there was one individual in whom that affection was more intensely centred than another, it was his beloved and only Daughter. (
Gentleman's Magazine
, Nov. 1817)
This is (not to put too fine a point on it) a pack of lies. The Prince's treatment of some of his family had been notoriously callous, and, having taken little notice of Charlotte for much of her life, he had quarreled with her for her refusal to accept the arranged match with the Prince of Orange. So what are we to think of his apoplexy? It is hard to believe that it was a burst of true fatherly feeling and unkind to assume that it was calculated hypocrisy. Should we see it as the expression of a histrionic and shallow character, or an example of the inherent difficulty of relating behaviour to emotion?
If we cannot believe the newspapers about the Prince Regent, why, it seems natural to ask, should we believe them about Leopold? The cynical answer is that we know less about Leopold and therefore have less reason to question them; but there are other reasons: that the motive to cover up is much less powerful in his case, since he was not the sovereign (as the Prince was in fact and would soon be in name); that the much fuller descriptions of his behaviour have not the blandness of the lies about the Prince Regent; and also that since he was a foreigner the press might feel less need to conform him to a stereotype, might even feel some satisfaction in reporting his slightly un-English feelings.
The two important members of Charlotte's family are her husband and her father, but there are three others who form a shadowy presence in the reports. One is King George III, now almost eighty years old and hopelessly insane. Two papers (the
Observer
and the
Examiner
) inserted a paragraph
 
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about the illustrious and venerable personage "who is not dead, and yet who partakes not of the joys or the afflictions of his kindred or his people." The author of this paragraph, which attempts to probe the consciousness of the mad king, did not know what he was talking about and realized that he did not know: "It is saidbut who can tell whether truly or not, for nothing concerning his mysterious insulation can be affirmed except the meagre fact of his perpetuated existence in a general state of forlorn tranquillity and occasional perturbation " (after that parenthesis, it does not seem to matter what "is said"). This ignorance enables him to end on a pious note, claiming that the king is not forsaken "by Him whose loving kindness is better than life" but also, and more interestingly, lends the paragraph a certain power, deriving from the correspondence between the writer's inability to make contact with the king's consciousness and the king's inability to make contact with the external world.(
Observer
, 16 Nov.)
The second shadow in the story is Caroline, the estranged wife of the Prince Regent. She was kept out of the picture for political reasons, and it is therefore the radical "reptiles" who bring her in. She may have been almost as much to blame as her husband for the collapse of the marriage, but this did not prevent her from being seen as a victim when the Prince's unpopularity was being emphasized. So when the inhabitants of Reading met in the town hall to send an address of condolence to the Prince Regent, an attempt was made to propose sending a similar condolence to Caroline, "the unfortunate and highly to be pitied mother." It was voted down, because it "would much diminish the compliment to be paid to the Prince Regent" (
Examiner
; 30 Nov.). Since there is not even mention of a condolence for Leopold, I take it the motivation of the whole event was clearly political (and conservative). In New York, I am glad to report, where the royal influence was naturally weaker, a gathering of loyal merchants condoled with the Prince, and the English reformers, to Cobbett's delight, responded by sending a similar address "to the royal mother instead of the father" (
Cobbett's Political Register
; 25 April 1818).
Finally, the most shadowy figure of all: the dead child, who provides the link between this episode and the rest of this book. He was not even given a name, and does not figure in the royal genealogies; yet politically, his loss was in the long run the most important. The hopes placed on him can perhaps be seen from this somewhat bizarre detail: the bulletins declared him to be "perfect, and one of the finest infants ever brought into this world" (
Times
, 7 Nov.)as if a dead Prince is finer than a living commoner! If there
 
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is any one point on which it would be revealing to penetrate the inaccessibility of the private feelings of the dead, it would be to find out if there was any grief for this infant. Leopold cared only for his wife: when the news of the child's death was brought him, he exclaimed, "Thank God, thank God, the Princess is safe!" (
Times
, 7 Nov.). Charlotte received the news of the child being born dead "with much resignation." In the light of what this book will go on to explore, it is extraordinary that this baby died so unmourned.
We even have a comparison to hand; four years later, another infant heir to the throne died. William, Duke of Clarence, the third son of George III, who later became king when George IV died, married in 1818, at the age of 53, as did his younger brother, the Duke of Kent, because the need to produce an English-born heir was now considered urgent. Adelaide, Duchess of Clarence, gave birth to a daughter in 1820, but though she lived long enough to be given a name, the young Elizabeth died on 4 March 1821. Nothing remotely like national grief took place, and if we ask why, there seem several possible answers. First, the mother was still alive. As we shall go on to see, the death of a child alone could be a cause of intense grief, but notare we to conclude?of public grief. Second, William and Adelaide were by no means such popular figures as Charlotte: they were not young and serious, and they did not contrast with a dissolute and unpopular father. And third, William was not the immediate heir to the throne (Frederick, Duke of York, the second son, lived until 1827), though there is no doubt that the daughter, Elizabeth, had she lived, would have succeeded in 1837. As far as I have been able to trace, no poems on the occasion were published in the national press, whereas the death of Princess Charlotte produced dozens, including one by Thomas Campbell, one by the ever-popular Felicia Hemans, and an adaptation of Milton's "Lines on a Fair Infant" to make it fit the occasion. In the
Times
on 12 March 1821 we read that Elizabeth was buried without fuss at Windsor, the coffin being put into a coach belonging to the king, "in which were two gentlemen of the Duke's household. Only one mourning coach and six followed."
***
This book is about the death of individuals and the grief of parents: unless we have individual records, we can only study child deaths statistically, not as a matter for grief. But to place the study in context, I will for a moment follow the lead of Shelley, Cobbett, and Wooler, and point out that

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