Princesses (64 page)

George IV's
death
in June 1830 was hard for Princess Elizabeth in Homburg. She had been much affected by her sister Royal's death twenty months before, especially because, after their initial reunion at Ludwigsburg at Christmas in 1820, the two had visited each other several
times.
Then Elizabeth's husband, the Landgrave, died in April 1829 after complications, following a bout of influenza, when an old leg wound broke out. ‘No woman was ever more happy than I was for eleven years,' she wrote, ‘and they will often be
lived
over
again in the memory of the
heart.'
But the train of Elizabeth's life as a widow did not alter greatly, given that Bluff's younger bachelor brother
Louis,
the new Landgrave, was so congenial, so eager to enter into all her ideas for embellishing Homburg – with her income.

Now the death of George IV had removed a brother who had, in the widowed Landgravine's
eyes,
been ‘all heart, and had he been left to his own judgement, would ever have been
kind
and just. But people got hold of him, and flattery did more harm in that quarter than anything'. Comparing her brother and father, she observed, ‘My brother was
always
in a dazzle. My father was always seeing things composedly, sensibly, and seeing much further into the danger of what such and such things would
produce.'

Elizabeth had been at Hanover and, around the time
of her
sixtieth birthday, on the point of setting out for England with the Cambridges in May 1830 to spend a year there, ‘making the dear King my first object', as she told
Sir
William Knighton, when she heard that George IV was ill. She had written cheerfully to him a month
earlier,
‘Only promise when I am with you, that you look upon me as a quiet old dog to whom you can say, “Now leave me, go for a month to Mary” – and so on, without an idea of offending. In the
way
I shall not be, for once in my own room and not with you, I have employment enough never to annoy
anyone.'
Now, surmising correctly that she would not see the King again, she begged Knighton from Hanover, ‘Put by a glass or a cup, or any trifle, ever so small,
that he has used, even a pocket handkerchief which he has used,
for me.'

Elizabeth proceeded, despite her brother's death, to England with the Cambridge family, who were going to leave eleven-year-old Prince George to be educated there. It would never, she told Knighton, in a letter she wrote from Brighton later that year, have been an easy journey, as she had ‘nearly lost the use of her legs' since the ‘shock of the Landgrave's death'. Now it was a journey made in sorrow. Not only was King George IV dead, but every corner of London and Windsor recalled him to his sister's mind. Windsor Castle, in particular, called forth painful thoughts. It was ‘a very severe trial' to Elizabeth to find herself in ‘that magnificent castle, and the being I most valued and
loved
gone; everything which I saw showing his taste, and every spot calculated to please and delight – his own formation.' She told Knighton, ‘I give you my word, I went
about
half dead … you may believe the wound is far from healed, though I am able to show myself and appear cheerful in
society'

To reflect the changes that had occurred in Homburg since Fritz's death, Elizabeth had recently remade her will, leaving to the new Landgrave Louis all her ‘funded property' – £36,000 – in England, and her ‘library, prints, drawings', many of which she had brought on marriage from England. The rest of her bequests were mementoes, snuffboxes, bracelets, which she parcelled out in her will between her family in England and her in-laws in Homburg. Now in London she herself received mementoes. George IV had left her two snuffboxes filled with his own mixture. Elizabeth, who had once said she hated the
stuff
her mother and eldest brother took with such enjoyment, was overjoyed, and declared, ‘The snuff will never be taken out, so dear is it
to me.'

But barely a month after she had arrived in England, Elizabeth spoke of leaving, her nerves frayed by the double exertion of mourning her brother and of adapting to the new reign. Her brother King William's behaviour was lamented by many. First, he created his eldest son George Fitzclarence, Earl of Munster, and gave all his illegitimate children the titles of the younger sons and daughters of a marquess. Then he went into mourning upon the death of the husband of his illegitimate daughter Augusta Fitzclarence, the Hon. John Kennedy-Erskine, which scandalized many. After a military review, the new King put on plain clothes and went rambling up Pall Mall. To
cap
it all, his wife Adelaide's complexion was muddy.

There was nothing of majesty here, and people began to remember George IV with kindness. However, Elizabeth took a liking to the comfortable company of William and Adelaide, and busily ‘sided' with her brother when he condemned the Duchess of Kent's upbringing of their
niece Victoria, his heir. In September, after spraining her knee and becoming completely
‘fixed'
to her chair, she tried the ‘warm bath' at Brighton, and did not return to Homburg till the following summer.

King William IV had much to undergo in the first years of his reign. Not only was he beset by members of his family, and by members of the current and previous administrations, with exhortations and
advice
about Parliamentary reform. But his eldest son, George Fitzclarence, now Earl of Munster, chose this moment to denounce his father to the Duchess of Gloucester – for failing to provide him with the funds and estate necessary to the dignity of a peer. He cited a previous letter of his father in which William had refused him money: ‘Dear George, I cannot admit primogeniture, and must give 10,000 to each of your brothers and sisters before I can think of any other money for you.' Munster pointed out to his aunt Mary ‘the utter contradiction … the virtual acknowledgement of primogeniture in raising me to the hereditary peerage.' When Duke of
Clarence,
and in comparative financial difficulty, his father had made ‘every use' of him. Now he was king, he was trying to get rid of him ‘at the cheapest rate
possible.'
Munster gained nothing by his appeal to his aunt Gloucester but kind words. However, he and the ‘Fitzclarence set' that he
headed
continued to hang about their father and about Queen Adelaide, who accepted their existence with pious resignation.

Meanwhile, the Duke of Gloucester left the Whigs over the issue of reform, and remonstrated with the King on the danger it presented, warning that the measures proposed would deprive him of the crown. ‘Very
well,
very
well,'
said William equably. ‘But sir,' the Duke pressed, inspired for a moment by wit, ‘your Majesty's head may be
in it.'
Nevertheless the second Reform Bill was approved in the summer of 1832, following a letter from William to Tory peers warning them not to vote against it again, or else he would be constrained to create enough new Whig peers to pass it. So just as Mary's husband, when a Whig, had fallen out with her brother George IV over one Parliamentary bill in 1820 – the Pains and Penalties against Queen Caroline – so, now that he was a Tory, he fell out with her brother the new King. And once again she was in a quandary – whether to visit her brother in Brighton, where her husband would not go, or remain on uneasy terms with her husband at Bagshot.

Before his death George IV had discreetly arranged that his sister Elizabeth should no longer make repayment of Homburg state debts to Mayer Amschel Rothschild, the banker in Frankfurt, without her English trustees' approval. Early on in her marriage she had impulsively sent her
jewels to the banker without her husband's knowledge, naively wishing to secure a sum to ease Fritz's worries about the debt he had inherited with his principality when his father died. Rothschild then informed an aghast Fritz that he could not produce the sum Elizabeth had requested for over three months, but that ‘he would buy the jewels for his wife, who would like to have them'. As Elizabeth remarked to her brother the King in England, ‘if you had seen Fritz's face of
horror. …'
Fritz said he would sell his woods rather than do as the banker suggested.

As a widow, Elizabeth continued to pay £6,000 of her ‘appanage' from England to settle other state debts in Homburg. And with the £5,000 she kept
for herself,
she carried on supporting the variety of projects she had already begun while Bluff was alive. She built a new coach
house
and stables at the castle, and she planted an English garden, and erected buildings and follies in the Little Wood immediately below the castle. Just as Elizabeth had arranged her collection of china in her cottage at Windsor, now she installed her ‘china closet' in a house she had built for it in the Little Wood, and ‘peu à
peu'
she hoped to make the house pretty, which was now ready to receive furniture. In the Great Forest that lay beyond, she worked with a pliant Louis on a great Gothic house roofed with copper to serve as a location for woodland picnics.

In the town, she supported, among other charities, a sewing and knitting school for poor children, and arranged for the distribution of layettes for expectant mothers in need. The quality of life for inhabitants of castle and town had improved dramatically, thanks to the energy of this busy Princess. Things had, in fact, been transformed since Bluff had written home urgently from St James's in 1818, bidding his steward to cleanse the Augean stables of the castle, and paint afresh the hallmark white tower. She was optimistic that she and her brother-in-law Louis could continue the work she had laboured at with Fritz, simultaneously to enhance the
country
and clear it of debt.

Elizabeth still occupied the married quarters in the castle at Bad Homburg which she and Fritz had restored with the Hesse Darmstadt architect Georg Moller, and which had become known as the ‘English wing'. When the writer Fanny Trollope visited Homburg, Elizabeth walked her, as she recorded, through ‘a suite of rooms … from the windows of which a beautiful view was enjoyed. The library contained a large and excellent collection of books. The Princess said, “I brought these volumes
with me
from England”, adding, with a smile, “I am very proud of my library.” Speaking of the beauty of the scenery, she said, “I can never forget Windsor and Richmond, but Germany is a glorious
country.”'
Mrs
Trollope stopped before a portrait of George III. ‘You know that portrait,' said the Princess. ‘It is my father. It is quite
perfect.'

But life as a dowager was not quite as agreeable as the Landgravine had hoped it would be. Optimism, Elizabeth's chief characteristic, waxed and waned now. The children of her brother- and sister-in-law Gustav and Louise, thirteen-year-old Caroline, nine-year-old Elizabeth and their two-year-old brother Friedrich, had the scarlet fever in December. And although the children recovered, the whole family was in quarantine over Christmas. Young Elizabeth sent word to Aunt Elizabeth to say that her dolls all had the scarlet fever and she had put their clothes in the fire. ‘The poor dear children are peeling and they have forbid Gustav and Louise to come near me,' wrote Elizabeth, ‘for the infection is much stronger at that time.' So the Christmas tables heaped with presents that she had bought in Frankfurt for the children were not wanted this year.

Elizabeth's letters were always full of coded allusions to the shortcomings and oddities of her in-laws at Homburg. Gustav and Louise's habit of keeping themselves to themselves meant she saw little of their children, which upset her. But she tried to avoid ‘clashing with those whom I love … How strange it is! But one must smile often upon what would at times make me cry, for I always wish to be kind.' She wrote again, ‘I never ask questions or meddle with anybody else's
concerns.
If they tell me, I hear, if not, I do not take it ill. It is the only way to go on when one has such various people in one house …'

The numerous charities Elizabeth had established or to which she contributed at Homburg occupied much of her time. ‘I am wanted for rich and poor, halt, maimed, etc., and it is one's duty to do what one can, and I don't like to appear to run
away,
as if I would not
assist,'
she told a new English
acquaintance,
Miss Louisa Swinburne, who had settled with her family at nearby Wiesbaden. Nevertheless, she left her cares at Homburg behind her in the first half of 1833 on a visit to her brother Adolphus in Hanover, where she lived in a whirl at his vice-regal Court. Appointed godmother to her brother's latest child, Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, she was amused at the christening by the enormous weight of the infant's dress and the cushions which formed part of the ensemble she had to lift to the font. Elizabeth's sister Mary in England, another godmother, wrote to her elder Cambridge niece, eight-year-old Augusta, as the ceremony approached: ‘You have no idea how a kind and good elder sister assists a younger one.' Augusta could save Mary Adelaide from getting into many scrapes, Mary suggested, and help her in her education. ‘I speak from experience,' the Duchess of Gloucester wrote, ‘as I once had
three elder sisters, and your Aunt Eliza who was always most particularly good natured to me when a child, always came forward to give me good advice.'

Elizabeth obliged her brother by holding a drawing room in Hanover, and an assembly afterwards. But as a widow, she explained, she never took off her black, except for a birthday. ‘Then I wear white as my grand dress, and grey for the smaller days when colours are
expected.'
Abhorring idleness, she hosted a party of thirty to hear a Swede, whom her sister-in-law the Duchess of Cambridge supported, lecture on French literature. Back at Homburg she no longer sighed for London. ‘All that is going on so affects my feelings that I might unintentionally sport sentiments which would be very highly
improper,'
she wrote, referring to the meetings of the first reformed Parliament. ‘I am no politician, I hate the whole trade.' She preferred, she declared, to ‘watch my poor, my gardens, my cows'.