Charlotte & Leopold (16 page)

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-
O
NE

‘The Perfection of a Lover'

O
N THE SECOND
day of her honeymoon at Oatlands, where the ‘unwholsome' air of the house was ‘infected & impregnated with the smell & breath of dogs, birds & all sorts of animals', Charlotte wrote to Mercer. Leopold, she said, was ‘the perfection of a lover', although she went on, ‘I cannot say I feel much at my ease or comfortable yet in his society, but it will wear away I dare say, this sort of awkwardness.'

It would have been difficult not to feel awkward on a honeymoon that was anything but private. Although they did their best to keep out of the way, Leopold was accompanied by Baron Hardenbroek and Dr Stockmar, and if Charlotte had not resisted her father's pressure, she would have been accompanied by Mrs Campbell as well.

Fortunately, however, Charlotte did have Mrs Louis with her. Her trousseau, which had been made by Mrs Bean of Albermarle Street as well as Mrs Triand, contained thirty dresses and seventeen bonnets and caps, but most of the dresses needed to be altered before Charlotte could wear them. There was so much for Mrs Louis to do that ‘a girl' had to be brought up from the village to help her.

The privacy of their honeymoon was also disrupted by ‘a
very unexpected & undesired
' visitor. On only the second day, soon after Charlotte had written to Mercer, the Prince Regent suddenly appeared. To Charlotte's relief, he was ‘in good humour'. He said nothing that was ‘disagreeable' or ‘unpleasant'. Instead he sat down and subjected Leopold to a two-hour dissertation on the uniforms of ‘every regiment under the sun' – ‘the cut of such a coat, cape, sleeve, small clothes &c..' Although Charlotte and Leopold had barely contributed to the conversation, she heard later from both her aunt Mary and from Mrs Campbell that her father had been ‘
delighted
with his visit'.

Next day Charlotte met Stockmar for the first time. As he admitted candidly in his diary, he was not particularly impressed by her, but the opening of his entry for that day reveals the extent to which his opinion was soon revised.

From the outset Charlotte made it plain to Stockmar that she liked him and enjoyed his company. She was soon calling him ‘Stocky' and introducing him proudly to every distinguished visitor, and before long, as the entries in his diary reveal, he was as devoted to her as any of her staff.

After little more than a week, Charlotte and Leopold went up to
London, to Camelford House, where they began to receive a tedious series of ‘loyal addresses' from various city councils and guilds. The first was from the Lord Mayor of London, who was received incongruously by the new bride in black because the court was in mourning for the Empress of Austria. But now that Charlotte was mistress of her own house she was in a position to receive anyone she pleased, and in the mornings, before the official engagements began, there were frequent visits from Cornelia Knight.

On 16 May they drove through huge crowds to Buckingham House, where the Queen gave a reception in their honour for over two thousand guests. Next day they received visits at Camelford House from Charlotte's uncles the Dukes of York, Clarence and Gloucester, and then they went round to call on the Duchess of York and thank her for lending them Oatlands.

Yet, despite their inevitably crowded social calendar, Charlotte and Leopold found time to indulge their shared interests in music and, above all, theatre.

After leaving the Duchess of York, they went on to Drury Lane to see the great Edmund Kean in his latest tragedy,
Bertram
. The visit to the Duchess had delayed them so much that they arrived well after the performance had started. As they sat down in their box, the audience interrupted the play with hisses and shouts of ‘Stage Box!'. Leopold was taken aback: he thought they were being criticised for coming late. But Charlotte explained that this was what the audience did when they wanted a royal party to move their chairs forward so that they could see them better. So Leopold and Charlotte did as they were asked. That night and for ever afterwards, they sat well forward in their box, and the audiences were soon noticing how often the uninhibited Princess sat with her hand resting on her husband's arm.

A week later they went to the theatre again, this time to Covent Garden to see
The Jealous Wife
. As they entered the Prince Regent's box, several minutes before the performance was due to start, the
curtain suddenly rose and the entire company sang the national anthem with a few additional verses which had been written hurriedly for the occasion and did not quite fit the cadence of the tune.

A fortnight after that, Charlotte and Leopold were due to attend a performance of
Macbeth
, in which the ageing Mrs Siddons had agreed to make one last appearance. But when the day came Charlotte was in bed suffering from what Dr Matthew Baillie, the King's Physician Extraordinary, described as ‘a severe cold', which had come on suddenly and forced her to leave in the middle of a charity concert a few days earlier.

Charlotte remained in bed for a week, although she was well enough to receive visits from the Queen and her aunts and uncles, and soon after that she was again going to the theatre and dinner parties.

On 3 July Charlotte gave an important dinner party of her own, to which she invited the Duke of Wellington and his staff. When her father heard about it, he reverted to his old self. So far he had shown nothing but goodwill towards his daughter and her husband. Five weeks earlier he had invested Leopold with the Orders of the Garter and the Bath. But the thought of Charlotte playing hostess to the nation's greatest living hero reduced him to childish jealousy.

The Regent instructed Lord Castlereagh to give a dinner for the Cabinet on the same evening and invite Wellington to attend. When he received the invitation, Wellington declined politely, saying that he was already engaged on that evening. When the day came, however, the Regent sent a messenger to Wellington ordering him to join him at Lord Castlereagh's dinner. Wellington had no choice but to obey the royal command. So he sent his staff to dine with Charlotte and Leopold, and as soon as he could after dinner, without being rude to his host or disobedient to the Regent, he left Castlereagh's house in St James's Square and went up to Camelford House to join them. Charlotte was flattered. ‘I like him of all things', she told Mercer. ‘His little short, blunt manner is not at all against him, I think, when once known.'

Three days later Charlotte was suddenly taken ill at the opera. She was well enough to go to church next day, but on the day after that Dr Baillie ordered complete rest. A week later, to universal relief, she was seen out taking the air in her carriage. But on 22 July she was not well enough to attend the wedding at which her former suitor the Duke of Gloucester was married to her aunt Princess Mary.

For a while Dr Baillie was not sure what was wrong. It was possible that the Princess was suffering from the irregular menstruation that sometimes happens in the first few weeks of marriage. But by the end of the month he was ready to announce ‘that H.R.H.'s indisposition arose from her having been in a state which gave hopes that she would, in a few months, have the happiness of giving birth to a Royal heir'.

The newspapers were sad about the miscarriage, but not despondent. The Princess was young and healthy. On 8 August they were glad to report that she had been seen out again in her carriage. Three days later they reported that she had held a musical evening, at which she had sung a German air in honour of her husband.

On the day after the musical evening, Charlotte wrote to Mercer, who was in Scotland. The bachelor Duke of Kent had been among
her guests, and she was delighted to report that he wanted to ‘get rid of' his apartments in Kensington Palace. His long-standing French-Canadian mistress, Julie de St Laurent, was very fond of their magnificent house in Ealing, but she disliked London. As a result the apartments were hardly ever used, and their ‘very fine & spacious rooms' were exactly what Charlotte wanted. She had already looked at ‘6 houses at least' and none of them had been any better than Camelford.

She also reported that she had seen ‘the Glosters'. ‘They seem very comfortable & happy', she wrote. ‘He is much in love & tells me he is the happiest creature upon earth. I won't say she does as much, but being her own mistress, having her own house & being able to walk in the streets all delights her in their several ways.'

At the end of the letter, however, Charlotte allowed herself a little dig that showed how much she was falling under the influence of her husband's opinions. ‘Flahaud is gone to Scotland. He has been at Woburn for some days where they were the gayest of the gay, dancing, masking & God knows what all. I hope you won't see him.'

Charlotte's next letter to Mercer was written, not from Camelford House, but from Claremont. On 23 August the servants and furniture went down from London in stagecoaches and military wagons. Next day Charlotte and Leopold went down in their green carriage. As they drove towards the gate in time for dinner, the bells of the village church pealed out in greeting.

Two days later Charlotte wrote to Mercer:

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
T
WO

‘The House that Never Prospered'

I
F
C
HARLOTTE
AND
Leopold were not already in love by the time they went to live at Claremont, they were certainly deeply in love soon afterwards. Each had married for selfish reasons. Leopold was ambitious, and Charlotte was the most eligible woman in Europe: she would one day be Queen of England, and he would be her consort. For her part, Charlotte was desperate to be free from her family, and Leopold was the handsomest refuge available. But they were both eager to make it work, in the course of their first few weeks together they found that they had more in common than they expected.

‘Except when I went out to shoot', wrote Leopold later, ‘we were together always, and we
could
be together, we did not tire'.

They read to each other, they played duets on the piano together, they walked in the park together, they drove together. But they did not ride together – Charlotte no longer rode, partly because the doctors did not think it was wise, and partly because Leopold did not approve of it. As she put it, ‘
He does not much like a ladies
riding
, he thinks it too violent an exercise.'

They even checked their expenditure and paid bills together, despite having several people whose job it was to do that for them. Once, when Cornelia Knight came down to visit them, she halted in a doorway for fear of disturbing them because they were both at a table engrossed in piles of paper. ‘Come in, come in!' shouted Charlotte, ‘'tis only Mr and Mrs Coburg settling their accounts.'

Charlotte enjoyed making a regular habit of little affectionate rituals like combing Leopold's hair or folding his cravats, and to please her Leopold grew a moustache, a continental adornment, still rare in England, which Charlotte had loved ever since she saw one on her favourite and much missed uncle, the late Duke of Brunswick.

Within two months of their arrival at Claremont, Stockmar wrote in his diary, ‘In this house reign harmony, peace and love – in short everything that can promote domestic happiness. My master is the best of all husbands in all the five quarters of the globe; and his wife bears him an amount of love, the greatness of which can only be compared with the English national debt.'

Vice-Admiral Sir Henry Hotham, the man who prevented Napoleon from escaping to America after Waterloo, recorded that Leopold's English equerry, Sir Robert Gardner, told him, ‘if he had been asked when he had observed domestic happiness approaching the nearest to perfection he should, with the most scrupulous adherence to truth, have pronounced it to have been at Claremont'.

In the tranquillity of their country estate, Leopold tried to teach Charlotte to behave more like a proper princess, with composure and dignity. But it was a course of study which both master and pupil approached light-heartedly and lovingly. Leopold's most frequent method of instruction was simply to whisper ‘doucement, cherie, doucement', each time Charlotte became too loud or animated; it was a lesson that soon bore fruit, although the most immediate result was that Charlotte's first nickname for him was ‘Doucement'.

Only a week after Stockmar had compared Charlotte's love with the national debt, he was recording Leopold's success.

There were some, including satirists and cartoonists, who said that Leopold had to be strict in order to control his wilful wife. But Leopold always denied this. Many years later he wrote to his niece Queen Victoria, ‘I know that you have been told that she ordered everything in the house and liked to show that she was mistress. It was not so. On the contrary, her pride was to make me appear to my best advantage and even to display respect and obedience when I least wanted it from her.'

With the exception of the cynical Princess Lieven, all the visitors to Claremont were impressed by the relaxed, harmonious atmosphere. And during the first few months there were many visitors. These included the Regent, who expressed his satisfaction at the noticeable change in his daughter's demeanour, and the Gloucesters, the other newlyweds, who to Charlotte's ill-concealed irritation came to stay at their own invitation.

When the Gloucesters had gone, Charlotte wrote to Mercer:

In the next paragraph, however, Charlotte expressed very different feelings about the Duke and Duchess of York, who had come over from Oatlands to dine while the Gloucesters were staying. ‘I cannot tell you what a pleasure it is to us having Oatlands so near. We like her so much…'

Then, in the last paragraph, she wrote, ‘Have you seen the pamflets upon the divorce? they were sent to me.'

The only disturbances in Charlotte's new-found tranquility were the rumours that her father was again planning to divorce her mother. Old hands, like Brougham, were, as usual, taking advantage of the situation, but, although most people still wanted to support the Princess of Wales, the stories that were now leaking out made it more and more difficult to sympathise with her.

Just over two years earlier, after learning a little bit more about the Princess of Wales, Jane Austen expressed what was now becoming a more general opinion when she wrote, ‘Poor woman, I shall support her as long as I can, because she is a Woman, & because I hate her Husband… But if I must give up the Princess, I am resolved at least always to think that she would have been respectable, if the Prince had only behaved tolerably by her at first.'

Political pamphlets, dealing with the constitutional consequences of a divorce, were not the only publications which featured Charlotte's mother, and one of the most sensational of the others,
The Journal of an English Traveller; or Remarkable Events and Anecdotes of the Princess of Wales
, also found its way to Claremont. In it, the anonymous author purported to list some of Princess Caroline's most indecorous escapades and describe the efforts of her husband's agents to find witnesses who would testify to them.

It was said that the Princess of Wales was now very fat and wore a black wig, that she danced with her servants, and that she had had
her portrait painted naked from the waist up. And it was also said that the tall, dark, handsome, young Italian whom she had engaged as a courier to organise her journeys, Bartolomeo Pergami, was now her lover. Apparently she enjoyed making love with him in unusual places, such as in a moving carriage and in a tent on the deck of a Sicilian ship while sailing from Tunis to Greece.

There was no knowing how much or how many of the stories were true, but the more reliable reports in the letters of those who saw Caroline were disturbing enough. Lady Bessborough, daughter of the first Earl Spencer and sister of the famously beautiful Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, described, ‘a short, very fat elderly woman, with an extremely red face (owing I suppose to the heat) in a girl's white frock-looking dress, back and neck quite low (disgustingly so) down to the middle of her stomach; very black hair and eyebrows, which gave her a fierce look, and a wreath of light pink roses on her head.'

Nevertheless, while the Prince Regent and his agents tried in vain to collect enough evidence to convince the Whig press, let alone a court, public opinion was still so much against him that his carriage was stoned in the streets of London. If Charlotte and Leopold had gone up to town, they would undoubtedly have been cheered with equal enthusiasm. But they did not go. They were more than happy to stay out of the limelight. They even cancelled the public engagement that must have been closest to their hearts. They had agreed to be the patrons of a new theatre, and they were due to lay the foundation stone on 14 September, but when the day came, to the disappointment of the dwindling crowd, the ceremony was performed by one of the City Aldermen instead.

The theatre, named after its patrons ‘The Royal Coburg', opened in 1818. It had a sumptuous interior with a unique ‘looking-glass curtain', which reflected the entire audience when lowered. But it survived only by producing lurid melodramas, and in 1833 a change of name to the Royal Victoria did nothing to make it more
successful. In 1871 it reopened, again unsuccessfully, as a music hall, the New Victoria Palace, and ten years later a social reformer, Emma Cons, turned it into the strictly temperance Royal Victoria Hall and Coffee Tavern, where she presented concerts and excerpts from operas and plays by Shakespeare. In 1912, however, after Cons' death, the building was inherited by her niece, Lilian Baylis, who restored it to the purpose that its original patrons had envisaged. Known by the name that survives to this day, the Old Vic, it became the first theatre in the world to perform the entire canon of Shakespeare's plays.

At the beginning of December Charlotte and Leopold went to stay with other members of the royal family at her father's pavilion in Brighton. She did not feel well before she left Claremont, and the journey made her feel so much worse that she was unable to join the rest of the party for dinner when she arrived. But she was able to appear at dinner every evening after that, if only because ‘everybody kept their own hours' and she had nothing to do all day but stroll around the town with Leopold. On their first outing they were so heavily jostled by an eager crowd that every day after that they had their carriage following, so that they could get away if necessary.

On 16 December, after their return to Claremont, Charlotte was well enough to hold a large dinner party to celebrate Leopold's birthday. Next day they gave a servants' ball, which was attended by as many servants as could be spared from Oatlands as well, and at which, Charlotte told Mercer, ‘I never saw people enjoy themselves more.'

Christmas Eve was spent at Oatlands, where the Duchess of York held ‘a sort of fete & fair for everyone'. ‘It was the gayest & prettiest sight I ever saw', wrote Charlotte. Everybody ‘great and small' was there – the houseparty, neighbours, servants and their children. They were all given presents, and in keeping with a charming German custom that Leopold's nephew Albert was one day to make popular throughout the kingdom, there was a little pine tree decorated with baubles and candles.

On 7 January, Charlotte's twenty-first birthday, the Prince Regent gave a ball at the Royal Pavilion. But, again, Charlotte did not feel well, and this time she could not even manage the journey. While others danced and drank her health in Brighton, Charlotte spent her birthday at Claremont, where all the villagers of Esher, whose houses were decorated with garlands, came up to the house at nightfall and stood beneath rows of torches and lanterns listening to the band that played on the lawn.

By now Charlotte's bouts of sickness were arousing suspicion. Many gossips and journalists inferred that she had suffered another miscarriage. But better suspicions were aroused and strengthened in the course of the next four months, during which Charlotte hardly ever ventured beyond the gates of Claremont.

Then, on 30 April, Leopold drove up to London and called on the Prince Regent at Carlton House. They had not wanted to say anything until they were sure. But now they were. Charlotte was over three months pregnant.