Princesses (5 page)

The princesses' parents continued to cultivate their rural idyll at Richmond and Kew. Prince Frederick had told Lady Mary Coke in the month before Princess Augusta's birth that the King had been ‘working in the garden, cutting down trees, and that he had carried away the
boughs.'
Before she left for Nice, Lady Charlotte Finch told Lady Mary that the
Queen at Richmond, not pregnant for once, ‘wears an English nightgown and white apron … ‘tis a dress his Majesty likes; formerly nobody could appear before the Royal family with a white apron …' And Lady Charlotte added that the King had ordered her to wear this homely dress too. Lady Mary Coke's outrage knew no bounds when she heard, in July 1769, that the King and Queen with the Queen's brother Prince Ernest – on a visit from Mecklenburg – and Lady Effingham had walked through the town of Richmond without a single servant. ‘I am not satisfied in my own mind', she wrote stiffly, ‘about the propriety of a Queen walking in a town
unattended.'
There was really no limit to the King's liking for living ‘in a retired manner, but easy of access'.

But in fact outside the rural bliss constructed at the royal residences on the Thames – at Richmond Lodge with its shabby Indian paper on the walls and its rolled lawns and orange trees outside, and at Kew in Lady Charlotte's house with views of passing traffic on the Thames – there were strained relations between Crown and country in this year following Princess Augusta's birth. At home, and to the King's fury, the radical Mr John Wilkes had been returned as Member of Parliament for Brentford, just across the Thames from Richmond. News from the recalcitrant British colony of Boston in America was hardly more encouraging. Horace Walpole wrote, days before Princess Augusta's birth, of the new Parliament: ‘A busy session it must be. The turbulent temper of Boston, of which you will see the full accounts in all the papers, is a disagreeable
prospect.'

When the silk weavers of Spitalfields in London, who supplied their costly fabric for Court levees and drawing rooms and royal birthdays, protested – and rioted – against foreign imports of silk in 1769, the King and Queen naively attempted to turn public opinion in their favour and seduce the Spitalfields weavers with an additional opportunity for them to display their wares at a ‘junior drawing room' at St James's presided over by the seven-year-old Prince of Wales in a crimson silk suit and his three-year-old sister, the Princess Royal, reposing on a sofa in a Roman toga, also of silk.

The Queen was excessively proud of the silken tableau that her children created at St James's, and declared it fit to be painted. But the vain effort to woo public opinion broke up when the London mob, yelling defiance, drove a hearse into the Palace courtyard. The Prince of Wales said afterwards that he ‘thanked God it was over', and told Lady Mary Coke two days later, when she hoped it had not fatigued him, ‘Indeed, Madam, but it did, and the Princess Royal was terribly
tired.'
There was no attempt to repeat this public display of the royal children.

Tempers could fray in the royal nursery itself, as when, exasperated by Prince William, his nurse Mrs Abbott ‘had not only the presumption to strike him, but knocked his head against the wall'. The affair attracted some publicity – Lady Mary Coke heard of it in Vienna – and Mrs Abbott was dismissed. This was an offence, lèse-majesté, that could not be overlooked by the Queen and Lady Charlotte. The offender's pension, however, was paid to her for the remainder of her life – an indication, perhaps, that it was felt that she had had much to try her.

Lady Mary Coke recorded on one occasion that the Princess Royal's ‘temper was a good deal tried by her brothers, who pulled her about most
unreasonably.'
She now regarded the Princess as ‘much improved', and, perhaps necessarily, ‘the best humoured child that ever was'. The Queen was to write to Lady Charlotte in 1771 with some relief after the royal governess returned from a journey, ‘They never can be in better hands than
yours.'
Three years later, with her family still growing, she wrote that she was ‘thankful to providence for having worthy people' about her children.

Inevitably, when Lady Charlotte had returned unexpectedly to London in the spring of 1770, leaving her son in Nice, there was speculation that the Queen was ‘a-breeding' again. Lady Charlotte could not comment, as there was – despite the frequency of the occurrence – a coyness at Court observed about the Queen's very visibly increasing person. The tattlers were proved right. A wet-nurse, Mrs Spinluffe, was in place at the Queen's House by mid-May, and Princess Elizabeth – named after her maternal grandmother, with a nod to the great Tudor Queen – was born there on 22 May 1770.

With the birth of a third daughter and seventh child, Princess Elizabeth, King George III and Queen Charlotte, had they been otherwise, might have seen fit to draw their childbearing to a close. But it would never have entered the King's head. On hearing that a lady of his acquaintance, already blessed with nineteen children, was lying in with her twentieth, he wished sincerely that she might have
twins
. And it would not have entered Queen Charlotte's head at this point to have ideas of her own on the subject.

The elements of a formula for the education and management of princes and princesses continued to evolve. The Princesses Royal and Augusta acquired an attendant they doted on, Miss Mary Dacres, in the year of Princess Elizabeth's birth. The sister of a rear admiral and a Cumberland connection of an intimate of the Queen's, Lady Effingham, Miss Dacres appears in the nursery accounts as the princesses' ‘dresser'. On Miss Dacres the Princess Royal and Princess Augusta showered affection, and while Lady Charlotte and Mrs Cotesworth taught them to read,
Miss Dacres managed their ‘passions' and was patient with Royal's stammer – ‘hesitation in speech', that princess later recorded, was ‘unfortunately very common on all sides of the
Brunswick family'
– and Princess Augusta's shyness.

These princesses were unusual and fortunate among European princesses – and, still more so, among girls in England – in having such high-minded and bookish parents who treated their education seriously and took great care over their attendants. They were also unusual and fortunate as young royal children in having parents who preferred their children's company and that of a small domestic circle to the glamour and turbulence and power-broking that characterized most other great Courts in full flow. But they were to be unfortunate in having parents who could not – given their public duties, given the number of children they continued to produce, and given the domestic and foreign calamities that were soon to strike the royal family – adequately oversee the implementation of the Utopian child-rearing policies they earnestly advocated.

Lady Mary coke went to breakfast with Lady Charlotte Finch at Kew on 19 August 1771, specifically ‘to see the young Princesses, who are with her early in the morning: the Princess Royal I think the most sensible agreeable child I ever saw, but in my opinion far from pretty: the Princess Augusta rather pretty, but not so well as she was last year'. She did not see Princess Elizabeth, now nearly fifteen months, but conceded that Prince Ernest, who had been born ten weeks earlier, on 5 June at the Queen's
House
in London, was a ‘pretty
infant.'

Lady Charlotte had become director of the princesses' education, and the princesses had begun their daily drive over to her house at Kew from Richmond Lodge, earlier this year, when the Prince of Wales and Prince Frederick acquired their own establishment at Kew, complete with governor, sub-governor and tutors. A merchant's house opposite the Dowager Princess of Wales's residence, Kew House, and known as the Dutch House, with a garden gate on to the riverbank, was duly
redecorated
for the princes, and became known as the Prince of Wales's House. The previous August, Queen Charlotte had signalled the coming move in a birthday letter to the Prince of Wales that she requested his governess to read to him: ‘Time draws near when you will be put into the hands of governors, under whose care you will study more manly learning than what you have done
hitherto.'
At the age of seven, in England,
boys'
education became the province of their fathers and they went ‘into
men's
hands'. The Prince of Wales and his brother had remained beyond the usual age in the care of Lady Charlotte. The courses of the tight-knit junior royal
family
were dividing, and the princesses would now receive most of their education at Lady Charlotte's own new house on the river at Kew and see little of their elder brothers.

Lady Charlotte in her turn would see little of her former charges. Her son George, who had recently succeeded his uncle as Earl of Winchilsea, wrote from Christ Church, Oxford, where he was now an undergraduate, hoping his mother liked her new abode and its ‘charming situation'. ‘It
must be quite new to you to have a garden gate to
yourself,'
he added encouragingly. Lady Charlotte's sister, Lady Juliana Penn, however, was sympathetic about her inevitable demotion, and wrote after seeing the Prince of Wales and Prince Frederick installed as Knights of the Garter this summer of 1771: ‘I felt a great part of the beauty of the sight was your work, and what must give you pleasure, in seeing your two sweet little princes brought up by yourself to be fit for
anything
that can be expected from them. The world indeed does you justice and they were admired by every creature that looked
on them.'

From now on, the princes' governor, Lord Holderness, and his deputies would receive compliments on their prowess. And the following spring, in 1772, a house facing St Anne's Church on Kew Green was assigned to Prince William and Prince Edward, and a ‘tall and
showy'
Hanoverian army officer in his thirties, General Budé, was appointed their instructor. As a royal
nursery
attendant later related, Prince William ‘exulted beyond measure going into men's hands. His very housemaids, he said, should be men.' The appointment of an officer rather than a university man as his instructor was no doubt an additional pleasure, as Prince William was of ‘a strongly marked military turn'. Third and fourth in line to the throne, the younger princes – and Prince Ernest and any other princes who should be born – were destined for the army and navy, not for government, and their education need not include the subtler points of constitutional law.

The admirable Lady Charlotte's path lay now with the females of the species, and for a while she and the sub-governess, Mrs Cotesworth, undertook the whole of the princesses' education at Kew, bar the rudiments of the French language, which Mlle Julie Krohme supplied. ‘Till we were seven or eight children,' the Princess Royal later wrote, ‘we had no English teacher, Lady Charlotte Finch and Mrs Cotesworth having taught us all to read. But the Sub Governess's [Mrs Cotesworth's] ill health preventing her giving us the proper attention, Lady Charlotte could not teach us all and begged Mama to take some clergyman's daughter to assist her. Notwithstanding which Lady Charlotte continued to read with Augusta and me everyday sometimes two but always one hour.'

In 1774, Lady Mary Coke wrote a more forthright account of Mrs Cotesworth's health problems: ‘It has been said a long time that she had taken to drinking, which must make her very improper for that
employment.'
Perhaps also Lady Charlotte Finch had a little less relish for her task as royal governess, now that the excitement of moulding the heir to the throne was no longer hers. Be that as it may, in July 1771 she undoubtedly did governess and clergyman's daughter Miss Frederica Planta honour in
calling her to be ‘about the little Royal family'. She was ‘to teach them to read first English, and the other languages after that', wrote Miss Planta's sister Elizabeth. A governess herself, Miss Elizabeth Planta followed the affair with interest, although she disparaged the terms and conditions of the employment, including the salary of £100 a year: ‘Her appointments are quite mediocre.' Still, her sister was at Kew as she wrote, ready to attend the princesses when they came from Richmond Lodge, and her accommodation was paid for, as were her chairmen – porters who carried her sedan chair – when the royal family was in town. ‘The future promises des avancements,' Elizabeth concluded dispassionately.

Unfortunately, Frederica was still bound to an employer, Lady Hoskyns, who liked having her children's governess filched by the royal family no
better
than had the Holdernesses. And she was a good deal more vocal about the inconvenience. She accused Miss Planta of ‘having made underhand applications' to the royal household, and wrote in terms, Miss Elizabeth considered, that ‘showed very vividly that she regarded her own interests much more than those of
my sister.'

At last Lady Hoskyns was made to cede the invaluable Miss Frederica Planta, but not before the Queen herself had expressed her displeasure at Lady Hoskyns's obstructiveness. The appointment was one much to the Queen's taste. Key to her interest in attendants employed about her daughters was that they should be not only
Christian
but the right kind of Christian. Following Lady Charlotte Finch – mentor in much – she subdued her temperament and exorcised the frustrations of her position by a passionate meditation on sermons and exegeses on the Bible, but she was utterly intolerant of agnostic brands of Christianity.

The Misses Planta followed, in their Christian faith, their father Andreas, a respected pastor in London and founding librarian at the fledgling British Museum. One of those Deist Christians who found themselves able to reconcile recent geological findings with the Story of Creation, he had emigrated from his native Switzerland, when that ‘republic of letters' became dominated by philosophers who decried his brand of faith. In London he and his wife settled happily, their son Joseph succeeding him as librarian at the British Museum and four of their five daughters becoming governesses. (The fifth married and fled the world of education for Philadelphia in America.)