Charlotte & Leopold (6 page)

But this was never an argument that was going to have any effect on her father. In the last of several heated meetings, in the presence of the Queen and the Lord Chancellor, who had been brought along to add legal weight to the Prince’s prejudices, he informed his daughter that the best he was prepared to do would be to describe Miss Knight as a ‘lady companion’ and not a ‘sub-governess’.

‘Besides’ he said, with all the self-deluding confidence of someone who barely knows the half of it, ‘I know all that passed in Windsor Park; and if it were not for my clemency, I would shut you up for life. Depend upon it, as long as I live you shall never have an establishment, unless you marry.’

The Prince Regent was still determined to treat his daughter as a child. But there was not another man in the kingdom who felt inclined to do the same.

Five months later, over eight hundred miles away, Wellington defeated the French at Vittoria and prepared to drive them back over the mountains into France. According to Captain Gronow of
the 1st Foot Guards, one of the officers wounded in that battle was Lieutenant Charles Hesse of the 18th, who received his first slash on his sword arm. While he was recovering, Hesse was honoured by a visit from Wellington himself. The General gave him a package that had been sent out from London, apparently by ‘a royal lady’. It contained a beautiful gold watch, a hunter, and there was a portrait of the lady inside the cover.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

‘Protracted Childhood'

‘D
EPEND UPON IT
, as long as I live you shall never have an establishment, unless you marry.'

The Prince Regent did not always mean what he said, but Princess Charlotte knew all too well that he had been serious when he said that. For her, marriage was the price of freedom. If that was not enough of an incentive to marry the first man who asked her, the regime of the Duchess of Leeds was another.

It was not that the Duchess was in any way strict. On the contrary, she was easy-going and avoided every kind of conflict. She concurred with ‘the Great UP' at every opportunity. When Charlotte was in London, she only came to Warwick House between 2 and 5 p.m., which gave the Princess the evenings to herself. But she was a boring, graceless, self-important hypochondriac. She was forever telling ‘stories of an hour's length' and taking cold showers to wash away her latest ailment. Worst of all, in Charlotte's eyes, she was ‘a
violent Tory
'.

The daughter of the Accountant-General to the Court of Chancery, the Duchess had won her Duke's heart on the basis of her
beauty alone, and her exalted new rank had gone to her head. To Charlotte's embarrassment, she often ‘overacted' her part and was patronising with people whom she regarded as inferiors.

Even so, the Duchess's ‘disagreeable' company might have been worth suffering if her easy-going nature had allowed Charlotte to meet and correspond with anyone she pleased. But protecting the Princess from undesirable influences was the one duty that she tried to take seriously. She was always, as Charlotte put it, ‘keeping close' to her in public, and, with an air of innocence, the Duchess introduced her fifteen-year-old daughter, Lady Catherine Osborne, into Charlotte's household.

To everyone outside that household, it seemed ideal that the Princess should have a companion closer to her own age. It does not seem to have occurred to any of them that a fifteen-year-old girl who danced well had nothing in common with a sophisticated seventeen-year-old Princess who looked and behaved as though she were at least twenty. But the people who were actually members of that household were very soon suspicious of Lady Catherine. She asked too many questions, and she was all too often found alone in Charlotte's room without a good reason for being there. As Charlotte wrote to Mercer, ‘That odious Lady Catherine is a
convenient spie
upon everybody in the house, with her
long nose
of bad omen, & her
flippant
way of walking
so lightly
that one never hears her.'

Things were not as bad as they could have been, however. The tedious Duchess and her prying daughter were effectively thwarted by the conspiratorial loyalty of Miss Cornelia Knight.

‘The Chevalier', as Charlotte called her, was, like Mercer, the daughter of an admiral. As a child she had met many of England's leading authors and artists, including Dr Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith and Sir Joshua Reynolds. After her father's death she and her mother had lived for many years in Italy, where she wrote several books, including a guide to the Roman countryside,
Latium
, and a historical novel,
Marcus Flaminius.
When her mother died the almost
penniless Miss Knight was offered a home at the British Embassy in Naples by Sir William and Lady Hamilton, and on her return to England she was appointed a lady companion to the Queen on the recommendation of the novelist Fanny Burney, who was also one of Her Majesty's ladies.

At the end of her entertaining life Cornelia Knight published a long, revealing memoir. But until the day she sat down to write it she was resolutely discreet. She had lived in Naples at a time when Lady Hamilton was conducting her notorious affair with Lord Nelson, and yet she insisted that ‘the attention paid to Lord Nelson appeared perfectly natural'. It was she who checked regularly and caught Lady Catherine so often in Charlotte's room. Like Mercer, she was a true friend and confidante to the Princess. She was the most reliable of the couriers who carried letters between them, and when the need for security called for it, she even wrote some of the letters herself.

From the moment she set foot in Warwick House, which was, she wrote, ‘falling to ruins', Cornelia Knight was overwhelmed with sentimental sympathy for Charlotte. When she first went with her to dine with her father at Carlton House, she was initially flattered by the warmth of his greeting and then disillusioned by the way in which he patronised and ignored his daughter. A few days later, at a small gathering in the Duke of York's apartments, her disillusion turned to indignation when she discovered that she was expected to be as much of a spy and a guardian as the Duchess.

As he shook her hand in greeting, the Prince Regent asked her in a whisper to remember what his sister Princess Mary had said to her.

Since the Princess had not spoken to her, a bewildered Miss Knight went up to Her Royal Highness later in the evening and asked what her brother had meant.

‘Oh, nothing', said Princess Mary. ‘He is only afraid lest Charlotte should like the Duke of Gloucester; and there is no danger. He wanted me to set you on your guard.'

After that Cornelia Knight could be in no doubt about the Regent's intentions. ‘Every consideration', she wrote, ‘was to be sacrificed to the plan of keeping the Princess Charlotte as long as possible a child; and, consequently, whoever belonged to her was to be thought a nurse or a preceptress'.

But the intellectual admiral's daughter was not the sort of person who was prepared to be thought of as a nurse or a preceptress; from then on she did all that she dared to counteract the plan.

When the
Morning Chronicle
announced that Miss Knight had been appointed ‘sub-governess' to the Princess, she insisted that they retract the statement and print that she had been appointed ‘lady companion'. At the age of fifty-seven she was too old to call herself a lady-in-waiting to so young a princess, but that did not prevent her from behaving like one. Whenever she accompanied the Princess in public she made it plain by her manner that she was in attendance, not in charge. There was never any of the air of self-important authority that always accompanied Mrs Udney.

Despite the policy of ‘protracted childhood', however, there was one sign that the Prince Regent might be relenting a little. Two days after the exchange in the Duke of York's apartments, on 5 February, Charlotte was allowed to attend her first ball at Carlton House. The Duchess and Miss Knight went with her. In accordance with fashion, they were ‘all in white'. The Duchess and Miss Knight wore white trimmed with gold. Charlotte wore white trimmed with silver, and for the first time, again in the height of fashion, she wore ostrich feathers in her hair.

For Charlotte, the ball was a bit of a disappointment. She had been led to believe that it was being given for her, but when the time came it was Princess Mary and not Charlotte who was asked to lead off the dancing. She had hoped that she would be able to dance with the young Duke of Devonshire, but soon after she arrived she was told that he was indisposed.

The son of the famously beautiful Duchess, Georgiana, the 23-
year-old Duke of Devonshire was very deaf and consequently shy and silent. Charlotte had ‘liked him very much' when she first met him. She was proud that she had put him at his ease and induced him to ‘talk a great deal'. But she was not attracted to him. As she told Mercer, ‘he is certainly very plain'.

Nevertheless, as with the Duke of Gloucester, Charlotte's father was worried by his apparent interest in her, and particularly so in this case because the Duke of Devonshire was a leading Whig. ‘Really the Prince Regent is so excessively tiresome & absurd about everything of that sort', she wrote to Mercer, ‘…& he is so suspicious always about my politics'. It may be therefore that the Duke was not present because the Prince had told him to stay away.

Without the young Duke, Charlotte could only dance with her uncles and other, much older, partners. As one of the other guests, Miss Mary Berry, put it, ‘all very magnificent, but such a lack of dancing young men and, indeed, women, I quite pitied the Princess Charlotte from the bottom of my heart for the dulness of the ball'.

But this, at least, was not due to any exaggerated caution on the part of the Prince Regent. There was a dearth of good dancing partners in London in 1813. Like George FitzClarence and Charles Hesse, most of the young men worth dancing with were serving with Wellington in Spain.

Cornelia Knight enjoyed the ball even less than the Princess. In the course of the evening the Prince Regent took her aside and subjected her to a long, detailed and embarrassing diatribe against his wife. At the end of it he ‘even accused her of threatening to declare that Princess Charlotte was not his daughter'.

Miss Knight was ‘horrified'. ‘I really knew not what to answer.'

In the light of what happened next, it is possible that the Prince Regent was trying to earn Miss Knight's sympathy, so that she, and hopefully his daughter, would be on his side when the storm broke.

O
N 10
F
EBRUARY
the
Morning Chronicle
printed a letter that had been written by Charlotte's mother to her father.

In it the Princess of Wales complained at length about the injustice of reducing her meetings with her daughter from one a week to one a fortnight. The ‘Delicate Investigation' had been unable to substantiate any of the charges against her, and yet, by limiting her contact with Charlotte and thereby treating her as though she were a corrupting influence, the Prince Regent was implying to the world that she was guilty of all of them.

In one paragraph she wrote, ‘Let me implore you to reflect on the situation in which I am placed: without the shadow of a charge against me; without even an accuser; after an inquiry that led to my ample vindication, yet treated as if I were still more culpable than the perjuries of my suborned traducers represented me, holding me up to the world as a mother who may not enjoy the society of her only child.'

When he first received this letter, the Prince Regent had returned it unopened. The Princess of Wales had then sent it to the Prime
Minister and the Lord Chancellor, who also returned it unopened. When she sent it a second time to her husband, he read it but did not deign to answer. After that, in what she saw as justified exasperation, she had decided to put her case before the people and asked the
Morning Chronicle
to publish it.

But, as she admitted herself in the opening paragraph, her letter concerned matters that were more personal than public. Even the Prince Regent was taken aback when her next step was to publish without warning.

He went round to Warwick House accompanied by the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool. While Miss Knight waited with an embarrassed Lord Liverpool in the dingy Library, the Prince Regent went upstairs to the drawing-room with Charlotte. ‘The scene', she wrote afterwards, was ‘most painful'. Her father spoke of her mother in ‘constant strong language'. As a result of the letter, her mother's conduct would have to be investigated again. For the time being, therefore, Charlotte was forbidden to see her at all, and for the sake of appearances she must spend more time with her father. But apart from that, he told her callously, her life would not be affected in any way. There was no need to worry. She could go to as many balls as she wanted.

When he had finished, the Prince summoned Lord Liverpool and Miss Knight and, on the grounds that he regarded them as ‘his confidential servant' and ‘Princess Charlotte's friend', tactlessly repeated everything that he had just said to his daughter.

Afterwards, when the Prince and Miss Knight were alone in the library, he asked her why Charlotte had seemed so upset by this. She had taken it all ‘perfectly well' when they were alone together. ‘The Chevalier' turned on her Prince. What Her Royal Highness was prepared to hear from him alone, she told him, was not necessarily something she was prepared to hear in front of ‘persons unconnected with the family'.

Charlotte was mortified. But she was not deceived. As she told
Mercer Elphinstone, the Prince and his Tory friends were wrong if they thought they had ‘gained me over to their side by promising me gaities'.

As for her mother's letter, she saw it for what it was. It was not the plea of a neglected parent. Nor was it another protest of innocence from a woman who had been wronged. It was simply a piece of political vengeance. Although the
Chronicle
claimed that the letter was written in her mother's hand, it was clear from the pomposity of the language that the real author was Henry Brougham.

Charlotte's father had risen to the bait, and as always he was handling the crisis badly. But she could find no fault with her muddleheaded mother. This time at least the blame lay with the man who was manipulating her. Despite her respect for Brougham as ‘a very able man', Charlotte was scathing in her contempt for what he had done. To have published the letter in his own interest ‘to be bought for 6 pence in every shop' was in her view ‘stooping very low'.

Over the next three weeks, while the press and the gossips speculated again, the conclusions of the ‘Delicate Investigation' were circulated and discussed among all the members of the Privy Council.

Throughout it all Charlotte lived very quietly. For the first ten days she never ventured beyond the garden of Warwick House. The promised balls never materialised, and she would not have gone to them if they had. She did not believe that it would be appropriate to be seen in pubic while her mother was ‘under a cloud'. She declined politely when Lady Liverpool suggested that she should go to the theatre or the opera. She even refused when the royal doctor, Sir Henry Halford, told her that it would be better for her health if she took the air in her carriage occasionally.

But then, on the morning of 22 February, she received a visit from the Hervey sisters, who warned her about the latest gossip. It
was being said that the Princess was not showing herself in public because she was pregnant, and that the father was Captain Fitz-Clarence. After that Charlotte and Cornelia Knight went out almost every day in her carriage and drove up and down for an hour or two in the Mall.

On 1 March they returned from their drive to find that the Duchess of Leeds had been summoned to Carlton House. When she came back she told Miss Knight that the deliberations of the Privy Council had ‘finished dreadfully'. A paper was to be sent at eight o'clock that evening, and the Duchess was under orders to read it aloud to Charlotte and Miss Knight.

At eight the paper duly arrived, sealed and addressed to the Duchess of Leeds. The Duchess handed it unopened to Charlotte.

From that delicate moment onwards, Charlotte's opinion of the Duchess changed. She still resented her regime, and she still found her company ‘disagreeable'. But she no longer disliked her.

Charlotte read the paper. ‘I have no objection to anyone hearing this', she said.

According to Cornelia Knight, she then read it out loud to them. It was nothing more than the Privy Council's re-wording of the report from ‘The Delicate Investigation', together with the conclusion that in the light of this the Prince Regent was justified in limiting his daughter's visits to her mother.

Judging by what Charlotte wrote to Mercer next day, she does not seem to have known much about the original investigation. The document, she wrote, was merely a ‘vague & incomprehensible & undefined' answer to her mother's letter, although towards the end it contained ‘most insidious & infamous insinuations'.

As for her father's threat that she should no longer be allowed to see her mother, ‘it
does not say a word against it
, but only that my visits should be subjected to
restrictions & limitations
as usual'. ‘After all this farce', she added, ‘it leaves you just where you were before'.

But the continuing farce did not leave the Prince Regent just where he was before.

Urged on by her Whig advisers, his wife milked the situation for all it was worth. She wrote to the Speaker of the House of Commons demanding that Parliament should pass a motion exonerating her from all the unfounded charges that her husband had laid against her.

For the first three weeks of March the original findings of ‘The Delicate Investigation' were debated in the House of Commons. Whitbread spoke passionately and at length. Several members proposed that the Douglases should be charged with perjury. But eventually, when the Whigs realised that they could not push the embarrassed government any further without seeming sanctimonious, the debates petered out inconclusively.

Outside Parliament, on the other hand, the discussion continued for some time. The investigation's findings were now public knowledge. In the little world of society gossips they provided fuel for further salacious speculation. But to the press and the people at large they were just more evidence that the Prince Regent was a scoundrel. To them, his wife was a heroine who had borne his calumnies with commendable courage. She was cheered and clapped wherever she went; and she went everywhere she could to make the most of it.

Using the most sinister of his many raffish friends as go-betweens, the Prince Regent tried to bribe or bully some of the newspapers into printing an attack on his wife's character. But he was rebuffed so disdainfully that he was lucky not to be exposed for it. His only successful vengeance lay in continuing to prevent his wife from seeing his daughter.

They did meet once fortuitously, when their carriages passed each other in the street. Ordering their drivers to halt as they drew level, they leaned out of the windows to embrace and then stayed there talking for several minutes while the people on the pavements
clapped. Despite this additional humiliation for the Prince, there were also two occasions on which he relented and allowed Charlotte a brief visit to her mother. One was when she went to take her a present on her birthday. The other was when she went to offer unnecessary consolation after the unlamented death of the old Duchess of Brunswick.

For Charlotte the spring and summer of 1813 were for the most part dreary and sad. The only balls that she attended were in the houses of her father or her uncles, and at all of them the Prince Regent was as paranoid as ever.

At one ball, given by the Duke and Duchess of York, the Prince saw that his daughter was again sitting on a sofa talking to the Duke of Gloucester, for whom, if he only knew it, she did not have ‘the smallest partiality'. He instructed Lady Liverpool to go over and tell her to change places with Lady Bathurst, who was sitting on the other side of her. Instead of obeying, Charlotte stood up and strode out of the room. Later she went back and apologised to the Duke, and she went home, in the words of Cornelia Knight, ‘indignant and hurt at having been watched and worried'.

The Prince was equally suspicious of the Duke of Devonshire, who was certainly very attentive to Charlotte. But, as she told Mercer, she only wished he would bestow his attentions somewhere else, where they might at least be appreciated. Sir Henry Halford, who was fast becoming the Prince's favourite messenger, was sent more than once to admonish the Duchess of Leeds and Miss Knight for not keeping a close enough watch when the Duke of Devonshire was around. And on another occasion he was sent to tell Miss Knight that the Prince was not pleased to learn that she and Charlotte had been seen out in her carriage one morning on the road to Chiswick, where the Duke was giving a breakfast party at his villa – to which Miss Knight
pleaded honestly that life at Warwick House was so dull that they had simply gone out to watch all the fancy carriages drive by.

The Prince even forbade Charlotte to continue sitting for the painter George Sanders at his studio, because while she was there she was exposed to the bad influence of such visitors as Lady Jersey. Both the Duchess of Leeds and Miss Knight insisted defiantly that the pious painter and his studio were beyond reproach. Charlotte was having her portrait painted as a birthday present for her father, and the visitors were only there to see how it was coming on, sometimes at the Prince's request. But it was to no avail, and since Sanders refused to paint at Warwick House, where the light was as bad as everything else, the birthday present was never finished.