Princesses (71 page)

The Hereditary Princess, accompanied by her young son, named Adolphus after her father, arrived in London hours too late. Earlier that
evening at Cambridge House her aunt Mary had been sitting with the Duchess of Cambridge when a servant entered to summon the latter ‘instantly' to the dying Duke's side, and that Duchess entered the room where her husband lay, ‘only to hear the last
gasp.'
The Duchess of Gloucester, Mary Adelaide and Prince George, now Duke of Cambridge, and all the Cambridges' servants besides, then joined the newly widowed Duchess and knelt to pray with her round the
bed.

‘His dear
face
looks just as if he was in a happy sleep,' wrote the Duchess of Gloucester to her ‘sister', the Duchess of Kent, after viewing her brother Adolphus's corpse the following day. He deserved his rest, she added, ‘after a life spent in charities and good
deeds.'
The Duke, Queen Victoria echoed her aunt, had been ‘charitable and popular, and even his peculiarities' – like his bright yellow wig – were
well liked.
Aunt Gloucester was calm, Victoria recorded, though, while the Duke of Cambridge had been alive, ‘not a day [had] passed without his writing to her, or, if he was in London or at Kew, going to
see her.'
Now, of all the brothers and sisters on whom, throughout a long life, Princess Mary had lavished affection, only Ernest, the widowed old King of Hanover, still resisting change and even revolution in northern Germany, remained. But he never visited England now, for, when not absorbed in Hanoverian matters of state, he was reluctant to leave his young grandson Ernst – blind Crown Prince George's son – on whom he doted.

Mary of Gloucester spent the morning of Dolly's funeral at home in London with her niece Queen Victoria, who had volunteered to keep her company, while the Cambridge ladies attended the Duke's funeral at the church on Kew Green. The Duke of Wellington disapproved of their being at the funeral – it was against all royal etiquette – and thought they would
have
been better off at Gloucester House.

There, the Duchess of Gloucester, her niece the Queen and all the servants huddled into the dining room where Mr Nepean, the chaplain, ‘read prayers and parts of the burial service', and gave an address. Afterwards Mary and Queen Victoria sat upstairs, and the Duchess gave her niece a beautiful diamond bracelet that Queen Adelaide had only the year before left her in her will. In sombre mood the Duchess said she would prefer to give, ‘rather than
bequeath',
it to Victoria.

Now that her brothers and sisters – all but Ernest – were dead, the Duchess of Gloucester confided to Victoria stories of the Courts of George III and of George IV which she said she had never till now revealed to anyone. ‘She talked much of former times,' Queen Victoria recorded later that year, ‘and the very painful quarrel between the Duke of
Gloucester and George IV about the late Queen Caroline, whom the Duke defended. My aunt could in consequence not go to Court for a long time, as she naturally did not wish to go alone, and could not do so with her husband, exposed to see him
insulted.'

The Duchess of Gloucester was encouraged to reminisce further
over
the next years. And she happily criticized with her niece Victoria the ‘strange, rather over-lively and undistinguished
manners'
of Augusta d'Este, the daughter of her brother Sussex by Lady Augusta Murray who was now Lady Truro, wife of the Lord Chancellor, and very handsome. With Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, now in her twenties, the Duchess shared a memory from sixty years before of her first bathe in the sea at Weymouth. Her bathing
dress
was a ‘regular
one'
made for the occasion, she recalled, which ‘no floating about deranged'. The Duchess wrote, ‘If the world had been looking on, they would have seen me as well dressed as at a
drawing room.'

Energetic – and lonely – in her old age, the Duchess of Gloucester thanked Mary Adelaide
for her
share, on a visit she made to the Cambridge ladies at Plas Newydd, on the Isle of Anglesey, the summer after the Duke died, ‘in making me laugh of an evening. I am sure for years I had not laughed as I did the evening you brought up the Address from Bangor …' She said she was ‘almost ashamed' – at her age – ‘to have been so amused with … such wonderful
nonsense.'
Back at home she drove about the grounds of Frogmore – now the Duchess of Kent's retreat – in a garden chair belonging to her hostess, only to regret it next day. She wrote to Princess Mary Adelaide that it had
shaken
her ‘nearly into a jelly, and I am aching all over'.

Mary looked forward greatly to the opening, set for May Day 1851, of the Great Exhibition in Paxton's ‘Glass Palace' in Hyde Park. And she was firmly of the opinion that Prince George, the new Duke of Cambridge, should return from military duties in Dublin for the event. She told his mother, the Duchess, in April: ‘My own feeling is that as there are so few of us left of the royal family to attend her [Victoria] … he ought to
come.'
Aunt Mary did not count among the royal family the actress Louisa Fairbrother, who had been going under the name of Mrs Fitzgeorge since she and George – ignoring the Royal Marriages Act – had married, and with whom, when in London, together with three small sons, the Duke lived contentedly in a house in Queen Street. George's marriage was a matter that was rarely discussed within the royal family, his aunt Mary limiting herself to counselling him, after his father's death, to honour Adolphus's wishes and ‘disembarrass himself of what would trouble him more every year'. George did not take her advice.

Ten
days
after the opening of the Exhibition, Mary wrote of her ‘admiration' for it to her niece Victoria – ‘it far surpassed anything I ever saw before and requires days and days to see everything. Then I was nearly blinded with looking and seeing such magnificent and such a fine collection of things from all parts of the world – and my chair went about very
comfortably.'
She went a further three times that month. ‘Every day I find more to admire,' she exclaimed, singling out the Russian exhibits for special commendation in a letter to her niece Mary Adelaide, who was on a visit to her mother's Hesse relations at Rumpenheim in Germany. ‘I wish I had wings to fly to make you a visit,' the Duchess of Gloucester told her, ‘and wake you up of a morning by pecking at the window to be let in and oblige you to get out of
bed.'

It is ‘well worth your making the exertion to go there', the Duchess told her sister-in-law, the Duchess of Cambridge, a year or two later when she visited the Crystal Palace, which had housed the Great Exhibition, in its new home in Sydenham in south London. ‘There are plenty of chairs to be drawn about in, and plenty of room for
everybody
to walk about and sit down … and more than you can possibly eat and drink for 2 shillings a head and all well conducted, no noise and the building – as clean and sweet as possible …
come
and meet me there some day … no soul will disturb you as the conductors are all attention and do all they can to oblige everybody.'

The Duchess was as much fascinated by the visitors to the Exhibition in Hyde Park as by the construction itself. She went there in September 1851, she wrote to Mary Adelaide, on ‘one of the shilling days… to see the lower classes milling about in the greatest order looking so happy and pleased amused me … the seeing them sitting down in groups to eat their dinner and displaying the contents of their baskets [was] almost as curious a sight
as the Exhibition.'
Enthralled by the Exhibition and its exotic wares, she wrote after a State Ball at Buckingham Palace that one of the guests, the Duchess of Norfolk, had been so hung about with jewels that she looked ‘as if she had put on all the Indian things …
in the Exhibition.'

News arrived of the death at Herrenhausen of Ernest, King of Hanover in November 1851. And the Duke of Wellington, who had been Ernest's political opponent, was not unmoved when he commented, ‘He had the disorder in his lungs which they all have!' Queen Victoria wrote in November 1851, ‘Poor Aunt G feels it very much, though there never could have been great love for him on her part, but she has always been kind to all her brothers and sisters, and it is a sad feeling to be the last left of so large a family.' As for the Queen herself, Ernest had been ‘an uncle whom I could not love … I never saw anyone like him, who liked to hurt
in everything he said. He was of an extraordinary unflinching courage, for which one must admire him, but there were many dark stories connected with his name which I will not touch upon, but which make me
shudder.'

‘My nephews and nieces … are now my chief object of care and interest,' the Duchess of Gloucester wrote solemnly to Victoria after learning of her brother's death. And, with every intention of keeping up ties of affection with her blind nephew George, the new King of Hanover, she prayed that Victoria might be guided in friendship with him. ‘I consider Hanover an old family estate that it is impossible not to wish to keep in the family,' she explained. ‘Compared with the great country' – the United Kingdom – she conceded that Hanover was ‘a drop in the sea', but she counselled her niece that, ‘well managed and a good understanding
kept up',
the former Electorate was a useful channel for obtaining information of affairs on the Continent. Regrettably, King George began almost immediately, as Queen Victoria informed her aunt, on ‘a track of reaction, so unfortunately the course pursued by almost all the German princes'. The ‘good understanding' for which Mary had hoped perished before it was born. Indeed, the new King of Hanover and his wife soon incurred the old Duchess's wrath by not acknowledging her ‘four letters… Christmas presents and New Year letter'. Her only solace, she told the Duchess of Cambridge, was King George's resolve to ‘keep up all his father's charities at Kew in regard to the school and church … He says he never can forget his happy
childish
days there.'

Marking the anniversary of the Cambridges' wedding in May 1852, Mary surrendered to gloom. ‘Without you,' she told the widowed Duchess of Cambridge, ‘I should be all alone in the world … sometimes I think I must be a dead weight upon you. I feel I grow so stupid, so dull and so old … all and everything', she concluded drearily, ‘is changed as to our family and the world in
general.'
But she kept up her rituals, and as usual marked the Fourth of June, her father's Birthday, with a party. Gout did not cramp her style. ‘I managed by going to one chair and then another (like a child beginning to walk),' she reported. But it was the first time that there were no brothers or sisters with whom to mark the day.

‘Here I am all alone by myself today to drink the health', she wrote to Mary Adelaide, ‘of the only one of my once large family left of us brothers and sisters – It made me low when I first awoke this morning.' She comforted herself with the reflection that ‘such dear ones as yourself, George and Gussy are left to us to love and care about'. And she seized the
moment
to keep up other old ties: ‘Now I am going to drive down to Brompton Square to see the King of Hanover's foster sister, old Miss
Cheveley.'
(Miss Cheveley's mother Louisa had been Ernest's wet-nurse.)

Occasionally lachrymose, the Duchess of Gloucester generally enjoyed a sociable old age. She offered on one occasion ‘a quiet evening with a stupid dull old lady' at Gloucester House to an old friend, Sarah, Lady Abinger. But the tall house on the corner of Park Lane and Piccadilly often hosted greater numbers. And candidates for the crowded children's balls she gave in the upper room there – she brought in ‘little
wonders',
musical prodigies six years old, and ventriloquists to amuse her junior guests – were not hard to find. An elderly Duke of Argyll much later recalled attending children's balls there with his cousins annually. ‘The Duchess of Gloucester, with grey curls on each side of her head and a small cap above her good natured face, was most kind and attentive to
us all.'

All beauty fled, all bosom and benevolence, with a comfortable
shawl
pulled around her and with a large lace cap drawn over her smooth and braided hair and tied under her fleshy chin, the Duchess was now the picture of a complacent Victorian lady – which, indeed, is what she was. She travelled between White Lodge and Windsor, Gloucester House and Brighton – and even Osborne. And she bore with resignation the deaths of public and private characters which the years brought, while rejoicing in the burgeoning royal family at Windsor. The Queen gave birth to an eighth child – Prince Leopold – on 7 April 1853 and used ‘that blessed
chloroform'
for the first time.

But hanging over all else was the threat of war with Turkey and Russia. And when hostilities broke out in 1854, in the thick of it was the Duchess of Gloucester's nephew George, Duke of Cambridge, who had been promoted lieutenant-general and sent out to the Crimea that February in command of a division of Guards and Highlanders. At the battle of Alma in September his men came forward, when the Light Division had fallen back before the Russian counter-attack, and won the engagement. ‘When all was over,' he recorded, ‘I could not help crying like a child.' Disaster then followed success, when he had his horse shot from under him at the battle of Inkerman, and lost half his brigade of Guards.

Shocks and losses, and the suffering of others, to say nothing of the primitive conditions out in Turkey – fever, salt pork, and no vegetables, tobacco or soap – preyed on George's nerves, and he described himself as ‘dreadfully knocked up and quite worn out'. Encamped on the heights within view but just out of sight of Sebastopol, he wrote gloomily to his mother and aunt Mary in early October 1854 that cholera had broken out again very badly among the
troops.
And he felt there was no likelihood that Sebastopol would fall.