Princesses (13 page)

‘Princess Elizabeth and my sweet engaging child Pss Sophia are playing about like butterflies in the sun and culling wild flowers on the grass,' wrote Miss Hamilton, turning to less weighty matters, ‘whilst I am watching them and scribbling
to you.'
The Queen at
Windsor
wished she was with them, and was to write, in the last month of her pregnancy,
to her
brother Charles in Germany, ‘I don't believe a prisoner
wishes
more ardently for his liberty than I wish to be rid of my burden … If I knew it was for the last time I would be
happy.'

Now she wrote to Lady Charlotte: ‘How happy should I be to make dear Sophia a visit in her bathing machine and how surprised would you be to find me in it, hélas! I must only think of it; in thoughts I am very very often with
them all.'
The Queen admired from afar Elizabeth's ‘steadiness' in undergoing what the mother termed ‘that dreadful operation of bathing'. ‘You will allow her I am sure great merit', she had told Lady Charlotte, ‘in feeling so much, saying nothing and yet doing what was
right.'
Lady Charlotte herself stayed well clear of the bathing machine.

The Queen teased Miss Hamilton:

Pray can you tell me what punishment is to be made use of when the physician recommends bathing in the sea and it is not complied with? I am very impatient to have that
point
determined as I intend practising it upon a certain Miss M H who promised Dr Turton to wash herself quite clean, and who since her arrival at Eastbourne pretends to be a little fearful, for I dare not make use of the word which begins with a C for fear of shocking your
delicacy
…

Queen Charlotte wrote to Lady Charlotte Finch in July 1780, ‘Tell Miss Hamilton I hope soon to answer her letter. She makes me guilty of breaking a commandment, for I envy her writing
so well.'

Princess Royal wrote to Miss Hamilton this summer from the Queen's Lodge: ‘Dear Hammy, I have behaved well in every occasion except last Wednesday, that I danced ill. I am very sorry to be obliged to add that, but alas it is too true. However, I hope that you will not give me quite up, since I have
done
everything else well, and that [sic] I dance better last
Friday.'
But the Princess Royal had greater sins to report, and wrote again at greater length: ‘My dearest Hammy, I return you ten thousand thanks
for your
letter, which is filled with the most undeniable truths. I have not now much time and therefore must defer for the present to give you an ingenuous account of myself, which I am afraid will not be very pleasant, but I hope with the next post to send you one which will please you better and give you more satisfaction.' Turning to domestic news with relief, she added:

We have been at Windsor, Miss Planta and M Guiffardiere accompany us there. I have one hour every morning with the latter. Mama has worn the trimming you saw me work her last summer. She has ordered me for the present to put by my waistcoat, not because it was too great a piece of work for me but because she was afraid as I have not much time to work, it would dirty. I have bought myself a little Spa toilet for two guineas, which contains everything that can possibly be wanted. Pray give my love to all those it is due. Pray tell Elizabeth that next week I shall write to her.

This letter was very likely in reply to a remonstrance from Miss Hamilton. The Princess Royal had been behaving less than well to her attendant Miss Gouldsworthy, who wrote from Kew, worn out from having escorted the elder princesses three times in a week to the Queen's House: ‘I return to this dungeon … heated to death and wishing… for the hour of going to
bed.'
A month later she complained of ‘being dragged for two hot hours upon the
terrace
at Windsor'. Meanwhile, Miss Planta, the
princesses' English teacher, decried the damp at Kew, and ascribed her rheumatism of the last two years to the insalubrious surroundings.

In July Miss Planta wrote that the Queen would be most unhappy when she heard of the Princess Royal's conduct to Gouly: ‘Miss G is much dissatisfied with the Pss R's conduct and I am sorry to say it is far from amiable.' Miss Planta had warned her pupil of the consequences to come: ‘Unless she corrects herself in time, the Queen will grow indifferent to her.' But Gouly, that much tried sub-governess – who had now been with the family for nearly five years – tendered her resignation, which the Princess Royal had plainly hoped would be the result of her behaviour. She said to all and sundry that she wished Miss Hamilton – for whom she still had a passion – would replace Miss Gouldsworthy. The angry young Princess – fourteen on 29
September,
six days after Prince Alfred's birth – did not get her wish. Miss Gouldsworthy remained at the Queen's request, and the Princess Royal's rage subsided once the Eastbourne party – and dear Hammy – returned in October.

The Princess Royal's sister Princess Augusta had a more equable temperament, and was much happier within the family circle, as a letter she wrote to Miss Hamilton the year before shows. It was the morning of her eleventh birthday:

My dear Hamy, This morning I waked at four and I found all my
presents
. But I would not look at them for fear that I should disturb Gouly and Princess Royal. At half after six the maid came in to make the fire. Then I waked a second time and I looked at them and I assure you that I liked them very much and when I came to the beautiful little purse you was so good as to give me I was as happy as a Queen, for if your present had not been what it was I should have had no play purse for tonight. As soon as I come to Kew you shall see all my presents …

Now she wrote from the Queen's Lodge in July 1780: ‘Dear Hamy, I am now (as you see) performing my promise. You must promise to answer all my letters or else I will not write to you. We are now come to Windsor and for our sins are forced of Sunday evenings to walk on the terrace. I hope you mind and never show the scrawls that I write to you. We now always dine at the castle, for the King is fitting up a library here as well as at Kew.' After adding the information that ‘We now do our hair in a new sort of fashion, we wear hats all day and no caps,' she ended, ‘My dear Hamy, the letters having to go in half an hour, I can write now no more. My dear Madam, I am with the most profound respect your most humble and obedient servant as I know you like those
titles.'

Augusta was cheerful, but other tempers were riding high in Windsor, including the King's in the course of a tempestuous general election this August. Irritated by the Whig party's plan of economy for the Court, he went into one of the silk mercers' in the town and said, as one anecdotalist had it, ‘in his usual quick manner, “The queen wants a gown – wants a gown – No Keppel – No Keppel”.' The mercer was convinced that he should vote for the Tory candidate in lieu of Admiral Lord Keppel, the Whig MP who had recently seen off the French fleet, and ‘all the royal brewers and butchers and bakers' in the town followed suit. Further, the princes' page Billy Ramus and some of the Queen's band who lived at Kew Green were ordered by the King to appear at the Castle on the eve of the election, and ‘were put to bed at Windsor so as to vote as
inhabitants.'

But Admiral Lord Keppel had his admirers within the royal family. Prince Augustus, aged seven, was locked up ‘in the nursery at Windsor for wearing Keppel
colours.'
Presumably he had been
dressed
up by his elder brothers, for, in a first display of the sympathy with the Opposition that enraged their father, the Prince of Wales and Prince Frederick became ardent Keppelites during this bitter local contest. Indeed, the Prince of Wales would not speak to an equerry who cast his vote for the Tory candidate, Mr Peniston Portlock Powney – widely known as ‘The King's Pony' – who gained the seat.

Princess Augusta, for her part, found the political hullabaloo at Windsor tiresome, and wrote to Miss Hamilton: ‘I wish that the election was at an end for the noise is inexpressible. I believe that if you had all the children of Sussex all together in one room could not if possible be greater [sic].' She was herself busy with a new pastime, making a coin
collection
:

Col Lumsden showed me some shillings, half crowns and one guinea of Q Eliz that one of the drummers dug up from under Herne's Oak. They are to be sure very curious … My collection goes on
very well,
for General Freytag [the Hanoverian Minister] has given me some German coins of the late King [her great-grandfather King George II] and of the present King [her father].

At Eastbourne a month later, Princess Elizabeth received a letter from her father with less controversial news. ‘I was made glad to hear that my dear mama was so well and that I had got another brother,' she wrote in reply. ‘Sophia says she has got a little grandson; Octavius she calls her son. Last night Lord and Lady Dartrey drank tea with Edward and me.' Alone of the princesses and princes, Princess Elizabeth was to preserve a fondness
for her brother Edward in later years, which was perhaps promoted by these months they spent together.

The cannons fired from the ships, and from the beach both yesterday and today. I was so overjoyed when I had your letter this morning, my dear Papa, that I could not settle myself to write. I beg my best duty to my dearest Mama. I have the
pleasure
of telling you that my brothers and sisters are well. I remain my dear papa your most dutiful and most affectionate daughter Elizabeth

Four months after the birth of Prince Alfred, her fourteenth child and ninth son, the Queen rejoiced in January 1781 to find that ‘the new year is begun without the want of a nurse'. And indeed as the next two years wore on without that need arising, there may have been agreement between husband and wife at this point that their family could be said to be complete. Nevertheless, the Queen and all the family were sincerely sorry to lose another of their number. While Prince William pursued his midshipman career in the Atlantic, the King despatched Prince Frederick in December 1780 to Hanover to pursue the military studies for which the boy had already showed some aptitude.

Over the course of the new year, the royal schoolroom and nursery were in some confusion. Not only had Miss Hamilton leave of absence for some weeks to nurse her mother in Derbyshire but Lady Charlotte Finch sailed for Lisbon to nurse her son, Lord Winchilsea. Stalwart Miss Gouldsworthy's health declined so badly that she had not the breath to stoop to a writing table, Miss Hamilton told Lady Charlotte in early September. And to cap it all, one of Mrs Cheveley's own three children had a bad eye, requiring her to take the whole brood to Margate for a month.

When she returned from Derbyshire, Miss Hamilton kept the absent Lady Charlotte informed about the progress of the princesses back home, writing on one occasion:

I must tell you a little anecdote of Pss Mary's. When Lady J P [Juliana Penn, Lady Charlotte's sister] came last night Pss M said, I am glad Lady Joully is come. One of her sisters told her she ought to call her Lady Juliana. ‘Oh,' says she, ‘I don't care how I call her, God bless her – I love her – she is so like dear Ly Char.' And Pss Sophia, who is my great great favourite, says ‘Ly Cha is very ill natured to stay so long.' She is continually enquiring after you.

Lady Charlotte Finch was still in Portugal, embroiled in family crises of her own, when the Princess Royal made her debut, not yet fifteen, at the King's Birthday on 4 June 1781. Not only the Princess, but her mother, the masters and attendants who had coached her for the important event,
and the whole household had to steel their nerves. But all went well. From Caldas on the coast north of Lisbon, Lady Charlotte wrote to Princess Elizabeth of the ‘satisfaction' the King and Queen must have had ‘in seeing dear Princess Royal's first appearance at the ball on the birthday'. She thought of it ‘continually', she wrote, ‘tho, as my dear Princess Elizabeth will conceive, with almost as great regret, that I should have been absent at such a time; I can think of nothing that can make me amends for such a disappointment, till the time comes for my dear Princess Augusta and Princess Elizabeth to be called forth upon the like occasion, when I have no doubt they will do
themselves
as much honour as Princess Royal has done.'

Princess Elizabeth wrote to Miss Hamilton, ‘Last Wednesday William returned home from Portsmouth.' The princesses' beloved brother, now nearly sixteen, had stories to tell of being present at two sieges of Gibraltar, but his naval superiors in general were tried by his liking for drinking and brawling. ‘I hope you are better and will
continue
so,' Princess Elizabeth wrote. ‘Augusta and me have got a delightful house [at Windsor] which is called the Lower Lodge, the rooms are delightful and very pleasant. I hope to
see you
in them soon, my dear. I hope you have not had so much thunder as we have had here. Mama has read a
very fine
sermon and two very pretty
Spectators.'

The princesses took their cue in relationships with their attendants from their mother, who continued to endear herself to all her daughters' attendants by the attention and great civility she showed them. ‘My dear Miss Hamilton,' she wrote on one occasion, ‘What can I have to say? Not much indeed! But to wish you a good morning in the pretty blue and white room where I had the pleasure to sit and read with you
The Hermit,
a poem which is such a favourite with me that I have read it twice this summer. Oh what a blessing to keep good company. Very likely I should never have been acquainted with either poet or poem was it not for you.' And again the Queen wrote to the same correspondent:

My dear Miss Hamilton, I find it with regret, that notwithstanding all my envy I cannot obtain that agreeable style of writing both you and Lady Charlotte Finch are possessed of. I grieve and fret for days about it, but it avails me nothing else but making me dissatisfied with myself, which is the true way of preventing my poor head to make any real progress in such a desirable talent. I shall therefore renounce all claim to elegance of style and desire you to be contented with a very simple natural way of writing, well meant at all times but making no pretensions whatever. Having prepared you for this I may without the least fear of offending your feelings upon
that subject say
anything
that occurs to me without being criticized. I mean by that, severely, for a little will do me good, as I love to improve. Pray do not think me too old for that. It would be mortifying indeed.