Princesses (60 page)

Before the breach the Duchess of Gloucester had heard with pleasure Lord Hutchinson, one of the many who had been drawn into the ‘Queen's affair', speak ‘affectionately' of the King ‘to please my feelings'. ‘Both your ears ought to have burnt,' she told him. But Hutchinson failed in his brief – to offer Caroline in France the enormous sum of £50,000 a year to stay away and renounce the tide of queen. An ambitious alderman, Matthew
Wood,
got to Caroline first, and persuaded her to continue her journey to England.

A former lord mayor, Wood, with other City Radicals – merchants and bankers among them, who wished to end the monopoly of aristocratic political power – took up Caroline's cause with gusto from February when the
Republican
newspaper proclaimed her virtues as an ‘injured princess'. Princess Augusta, horrified with all her family by Caroline's dependence on a ‘Cit', heard later that Wood had laid a massive bet that the Queen would come to England. And he had made his trip to France, she declared, simply to ensure that she did cross the Channel so that he could obtain his winnings.

Mary told the King on 12 June, ‘I am not surprised at the arrival as I never doubted she would come.' And in a gesture of support for their brother – who stayed at Windsor – Augusta came up from Frogmore and Mary from Bagshot, to be present in London on 19 August. On this day,
the Bill of Pains and Penalties, a punitive measure to deprive Caroline of her rights as queen and to condemn her for adultery with her Italian ‘low man', began its second reading in the House of Lords. Notwithstanding the Duchess of York's grave illness – she died later that day – her husband, the Duke of York, was there in the House, with his brothers Clarence and Sussex, to support the honour of their brother.

A small dumpy figure in a black wig and with heavily arched eyebrows and rouged cheeks, Caroline was unrecognizable even in private life to those who had known her earlier in England. But none of the princesses met their strange sister-in-law during her residence now in London. In a letter later in the year to her brother Ernest, Augusta made her views clear, writing of ‘the wicked who have made this horrid woman their tool. Bad as she is I am sure' – and here she differed from Mary – ‘she never would have come to England', Augusta believed, ‘if it had not been for Wood'.

The evidence brought against the Queen in the House of Lords and given by a couple of naval captains and by nearly ninety Italian witnesses – boatmen, ostlers, grooms and maidservants of varying degrees of respectability – failed, overall, in its effect. And when Henry Brougham, Caroline's lawyer, browbeat the Lords in November into abandoning the bill – he prophesied revolution should they continue
with it
– George IV's ‘language and manner were those of a
Bedlamite',
Charles Arbuthnot recorded. Fulminating against those who had brought the catastrophe about, the King blamed particularly his cousin Gloucester for supporting a woman whom he knew to be a virtual criminal.

Mary suffered greatly from the double strain of her husband's support for Caroline – a woman she had long detested – and her brother's anger against her husband. It was impossible for her to see the King or even correspond normally with him, as it would be rank disloyalty to her husband. But how she longed to! The Queen's affair drove a wedge not so much between King and Duke as between Duke and Duchess. For Mary concluded that the Duke's support for Caroline was born of his jealousy of the King, though it was probably just muddle-headed chivalry. When the trial was over, the Duke took up his gun and resumed his annual slaughter of game, but the damage was done between him and Mary. The King moreover did not forgive him or show him one mark of favour till 1827, when he made him governor of Portsmouth.

The other princesses raised the King's spirits with reports that the Queen's popularity was waning in the New Year. ‘Loyal addresses are coming in every day,' Augusta wrote to Ernest, now a supporter of the King, in Hanover. Their brother Frederick, staunch Tory and also loyal to
the King, had been given the Freedom of the City of Norwich and had been very well received there, though it was ‘all but a Radical town'. She concluded, ‘Things getting better by degrees are more sure to
hold.'
In Ludwigsburg, where Elizabeth was at last visiting her sister Royal – they met after more than twenty years – welcome news arrived that a thanks-giving service for Queen Caroline in St Paul's, following the abandonment of the bill, had been a paltry affair and ill attended. The Queen's conduct had disgusted everyone, Elizabeth wrote to Bluff in Homburg, and her pious hope was that, at the end, even the most blind would have their eyes opened.

At home in England, the King felt popular enough to warrant holding a drawing room at the Queen's House, with a ball to follow in the evening at Carlton House. Augusta, her brother's hostess, informed Ernest in Hanover that the attendance had been splendid. ‘Every person of proper feelings made it a point to come up to London on purpose to be present at it.' By midnight the Princess was ‘pretty well
fagged',
having already received Society for four and a half hours before dinner at six. Having optimistically ordered her carriage for three in the morning, she was delighted to accept the offer of her brother's a good hour and a half earlier. The drawing room and ball had been especially splendid, in the King's view, as his wife had failed to appear at either. Caroline was not yet a spent force, but her power had waned dramatically with the grab at £50,000 a year she had made when it was offered her for a second time (after her earlier refusal) as an inducement to leave the country. This behaviour contradicted all that she had supposedly stood for, and made her supporters look fools. The game was not yet over, however.

At the Coronation of George IV on 12 July – or rather, hours before – Caroline of Brunswick, Queen Consort of England, made her last attempt to breach her husband's defences and demanded entrance at first one door and then another of Westminster Abbey. Denied at each of them, to a chorus of cheers that turned to jeers from the crowd waiting for the ceremony, she at last turned away – with a cry as if mortally afraid. Hours later, the King – effulgent in gold brocade and velvet bloomers, feathers nodding from his cap – stepped along the royal blue carpet that led from Westminster Hall to the welcoming Abbey doors. When the crown was placed upon his head and the peers and peeresses rustled obeisance, his expression was one of deep satisfaction. It had been a long time coming.

When George had first dreamt of kingship – in 1788, when his father had seemed mortally ill – the Irish Parliament had offered him the unrestricted regency of Ireland. Now king of that country, he determined to
pay his subjects there, who had been so generous in the past, a visit. As he departed, Queen Caroline, uncrowned and ill, lay at Brandenburg House, her home at Hammersmith. Before the King's yacht had reached Holyhead, news came: she was dead, of an obstruction on the liver. The King had been on board shockingly drunk, or, as the Tory scribe John Croker put it, ‘gayer than it might be proper to tell'. But after he heard of the Queen's death the royal widower did not appear on deck and Croker heard that he was, if not ‘afflicted', at least ‘affected at the first accounts of this event'.

Caroline's hour was not yet over. Honouring her wish to be buried at Brunswick, her executors negotiated with the government for her coffin to be carried to Harwich to be embarked for Stade. But tempers ran high, and, when the authorities tried to turn the procession aside from a route leading to the City, where the Queen's support had been greatest, two protesters were killed in the fray that developed in Hyde Park. Princess Mary condemned from Bagshot ‘all the disgraceful and disgusting scenes that have taken place within this last week, first at Brandenburg House and then as the Procession went on'. She regretted, particularly, the part of Caroline's executors, her lawyers Stephen Lushington and Thomas Denman. ‘How thankful I feel', she told her brother, ‘that you was not in town, for whatever blame may be attached to any of those who made the arrangements you … have had little or nothing to do with it.' Citing ‘infamous, designing invidious people' and those in Brandenburg House and Radicals besides who had ‘espoused her cause from the beginning', Mary ended, ‘hand and head ought to join hand and heart to spurn them out of society'.

Augusta had been spared the ‘disgraceful and disgusting scenes' of her sister-in-law's funeral procession, having set out at the end of July for Germany to visit both her sisters. The newly crowned George IV, too, felt the need to travel abroad, and, leaving the United Kingdom for the first time in his life, he spent a happy month in the restored Electorate, newly a kingdom, of Hanover, where he was feted whenever his gout allowed him to appear.

It was all that he could have wished, as there was no Caroline to disturb his Coronation, no Radicals to taunt him, not even the threat of Napoleon – dead this year on St Helena – to alarm him. He wept when presented with an address from the University of Göttingen where his younger brothers long before had harassed their tutors. Perhaps what meant most to the King, however, was his visit to the battlefield of Waterloo en route to Hanover. None other than the Duke of Wellington was his guide as he
visited the different battle positions adopted on that fateful day. It poured with rain but George persevered – to inspect the spot where his friend Lord Anglesey's leg lay buried. Given time, he was to declare that he had been present at Waterloo not just on this visit, but on the day of the battle itself, six years earlier in June 1815. And with the dawning of another era, when memories dimmed of what had occurred and what had not in a previous age, he came to believe his own story.

Following the débâcle of the ‘Queen Caroline affair' in 1820, there was a welcome diversion for the Dowager Queen of Württemberg in Ludwigsburg. Elizabeth at last came from Homburg to stay
with her
sister for several weeks over Christmas 1820 and New Year 1821, while Fritz – newly Landgrave Friedrich VI of Hesse-Homburg – attended the Austrian Emperor to Munich. The sisters had not seen each other since the elder left England in 1797, when Royal the bride had been aged thirty and Elizabeth twenty-seven. Now fifty
years
old, the new Landgravine was shocked by her sister's size, which made her appear older than her age, and by her immobility. The Dowager Queen did not walk, but was carried in an armchair everywhere in the palace by
attendants.

Once she had recovered from her surprise at her sister's condition, Elizabeth wrote daily to her husband of the state and opulence by which she was surrounded. ‘Even
you,
dear angel, who is the grand mogul in your presents,' Elizabeth told Bluff on Christmas Eve 1820, after partaking in her sister's Christmas Eve rituals, ‘would have been enchanted to see the magnificence.' The Dowager Queen had arranged ‘thirteen tables filled with all sorts of things, silverware, jewellery, clothes, toys, bonbons …' Charlotte and
Pauline,
her stepson Prince Paul's daughters, for whom the majority of the gifts were destined, were overcome.

The Dowager Queen had been delighted earlier this year when her
good-for-nothing
stepson in Paris had given her custody of these princesses, his daughters. She had been determined to make this, their first Christmas together, special. But Baroness Veronica de Stein, Elizabeth's
lady,
was also ‘aux anges' when she
received
from the Queen Dowager, among other treasures, an amethyst cross and a silk dress. Elizabeth herself was given her sister's portrait and was
pleased
to see that Royal got a handsome porcelain vase – doubtless from the Ludwigsburg factory – from her ‘son' the
King.

The contrast between the sisters' living standards could not have been more marked. On his father's
death
in January that year, Fritz had found
the small state or landgraviate of Hesse-Homburg still deeper in debt to the bankers of Frankfurt and further afield than he had suspected. And he and Elizabeth had only her English income with which to service the debts that his father had incurred over many years. Stoically the new Landgravine declared herself very glad to be going home, and in general very glad not to be a rich widowed queen with a doting family and a busy life. She was stifled by the heat of the apartments at Ludwigsburg, she said, and exhausted by the number of steps leading from one apartment to another.

While the Dowager Queen still had her sister Elizabeth at Ludwigsburg, good news came from England. Following several miscarriages, Adelaide, William, Duke of Clarence's ugly but agreeable wife, had given birth to a daughter in early December. ‘She was born
nearly
without assistance,' Elizabeth heard, and sent further details to her husband on 28 December 1820 of this interesting royal baby. The accoucheur had been in the
country,
and the wet-nurse had not yet been brought to bed, the baby being two months premature. ‘Good old Halford ran for Sir William Knighton. A lady en couche [in labour] gave up her accoucheur, and they found a wet-nurse in three hours.' The reason for the early delivery, Elizabeth believed, was that six days
before
she gave birth, Adelaide ‘went to church with Eliza Fitzclarence when she was marrying [the Earl of Erroll], and after that she was
never well.'

Princess Sophia, in England, paid a visit of three hours to St James's Palace to see her new niece, and told her sisters in Germany that she had come away enchanted. ‘She will be a worthy Queen if she does not have a
brother,'
wrote Elizabeth to her husband from Ludwigsburg. Born at seven months, the child, although small, thrived ‘beyond anything that was ever
known',
and was given the name of Elizabeth, to the pleasure of her Homburg aunt. It was ‘a name very dear to the English and in these cruel
times
I think they have done very well to choose what will please,' the Landgravine told her husband.