Princesses Read online

  Princesses

  The Six Daughters of George III

  FLORA FRASER

  For Peter Ross, Stella Elizabeth, Simon Tivadar and

  Thomas Hugh

  Contents

  Preface

  Book One: Youth 1766–1783

  1. Early Days

  2. Growing Up

  3. The Younger Ones

  4. Adolescence

  Book Two: Experience 1783–1797

  5. Brothers and Sisters

  6. Fear

  7. Hope

  8. Despond

  Book Three: Scandal 1798–1810

  9. In Spirits

  10. Agitation

  11. Outcry

  12. Passion

  Book Four: Maturity 1810–1822

  13. Breaking Up

  14. Emancipation

  15. Daughters in Distress

  16. Princesses at Large

  Book Five: Piano Piano 1822–1857

  17. Royal – Queenly Dowager

  18. Elizabeth – The Largesse of a Landgravine

  19. Augusta – A Princess for All Seasons

  20. Sophia – The Little Gypsy

  21. Mary – Last of the Line

  Family Tree

  Select Bibliography

  Notes

  Footnotes

  About the Author

  Also by the author

  Preface

  I first became curious about the six daughters of George III when I was researching The Unruly Queen, my biography of their sister-in-law Queen Caroline, in the Royal Archives. The princesses’ close involvement in their brother George IV’s quarrels with his wife led me to wonder why they were not all themselves married to foreign princes and busy with child-bearing, or at least with their own marital difficulties. Rumours of affairs, secret marriages and pregnancies in their contemporaries’journals fuelled my interest. Above all, the princesses’ letters – confidential, conspiratorial, allusive – in the Archives intrigued me. And so I started Princesses.

  At first I was unsure of my subject. The princesses’ letters were often difficult to read, sometimes illegible. And others were less inquisitive than I about these shadowy sisters from a Regency past. The conversation with those whom I told of my project tended to be short: ‘George Ill’s daughters? Who did they marry?’ No one in particular. ‘How many were there?’ Six. ‘Any brothers?’ Nine. End of conversation, or a coda: ‘Fifteen children! All by one woman?’

  But I was not put off. As the princesses’ story and the extraordinary circumstances of their existence took on form and substance, I grew ever more absorbed. No one could have guessed, when these princesses of England were born, that any particular struggle would be theirs – except to secure a foreign prince for a husband and successfully to bear him heirs. But each of them was forced, by successive strokes of fate that Princesses describes, into subversive behaviour and even acts of desperation. Their letters reveal the transformation of these attractive, conventional princesses into resilient, independent-minded women. The sadness is that this transformation occurred only as a result of spectacular illness that their father George III suffered, and that destroyed their mother Queen Charlotte’s domestic happiness. Earlier admirable, the Queen did not behave well to her daughters in later years. But she had been greatly tried.

  Given other circumstances, the letters of these six royal sisters might have been filled only with Court gossip, pomp and fashion. Instead their correspondence makes harrowing reading, revealing the humility with which they met pain and horror, the tenacity with which they pursued their individual dreams, and the stratagems they devised to endure years of submission and indignity. For some but not for all of the princesses, there were happy endings, their letters dwelling more on family news and less on family suffering. For all of them, I developed the greatest respect and admiration, and I hope that readers of Princesses will share those feelings.

  I thank Her Majesty The Queen for kind permission to consult and publish the papers of the daughters of King George III. I am also most grateful to Pamela Clark, Registrar of the Royal Archives, her predecessor in that post, Sheila de Bellaigue, and Jill Kelsey, Deputy Registrar. I owe thanks besides to all in the Royal Archives, especially Allison Derrett, Maud Eburne, and Angeline Barker, for generous help and advice during the preparation of this biography. I would also like to thank Oliver Everett, formerly Librarian to The Queen, for his constant encouragement of my project, and Stuart Shilson, Assistant Keeper of The Queen’s Archives, for his friendly professional advice.

  The daughters of George III, as inhabitants of many royal residences, as sitters to many artists, and as decorative artists themselves, have left their mark on the Royal Collection. In that context I urge readers of Princesses to study the magnificent catalogue from the 2004 exhibition at The Queen’s Gallery, London, George III and Queen Charlotte: Patronage, Collecting and Court Taste, edited by Jane Roberts. I would like myself to thank Jane Roberts, Librarian to The Queen, Christopher Lloyd, Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures, Hugh Roberts, Director of the Royal Collection and Frances Dimond, Curator of the Royal Photograph Collection, for much generous help. I am in addition grateful to many other curators and members of staff at the Royal Collection, including Siân Cooksey, Martin Clayton, Gay Hamilton, Shruti Patel, Prue Sutcliffe, Bridget Wright and Margaret Westwood. I also record my thanks here to Susanne Groom, Joanna Marschner and their colleagues at Historic Royal Palaces for much helpful advice.

  The six daughters of George III corresponded mightily all their lives. So Princesses is a book in which I have drawn heavily on private British family papers, and I would like to thank all their owners for allowing me to make use of them, and many of them for memorable hospitality. Among those I especially thank are: Sir Peter and Dame Elizabeth Anson, the Marquess of Bute, the Earl of Home, Richard Jenkins, the Earl of Pembroke, David Scott and David Smythe. I am in addition indebted to, among others, Robin Harcourt Williams, Andrew Maclean, Charles Noble and Michael Shepherd for their professional advice.

  I am also most grateful to the archivists and staffs of all the County Record Offices where papers relating to the princesses are deposited, and whom I visited or corresponded with. Carl Harrison at Leicestershire Record Office, Sally Mason of Buckinghamshire County Archives, and David Rimmer at Gwent Record Office are among others who have given me great assistance.

  I owe thanks to Michael Borrie, of the British Library Department of Manuscripts, to Christopher Kitching, of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, and to Ian G. Brown, at the National Library of Scotland, for advice about the whereabouts and extent of various collections of papers. I would also like to thank the staffs of the British Library, of the London Library and of the Public Record Office for their help, and John Saumarez Smith of Heywood Hill for much generous advice.

  I would like to thank Prince Ernst August of Hanover for permission to consult family papers, and for an illuminating discussion about the House of Hanover in Germany and in England. Two of the princesses married into other German royal families, and I would like to thank Dr Iris Reepen for her great assistance to me on two memorable research trips. We saw castles, collections, archives and curatorial departments from Bad Homburg and Frankfurt to Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg and, on the other side of Germany, to Greiz in Thuringia.

  Thanks are also due, for help with manuscripts in Germany, to Eberhard Fritz at the House of Württemberg Archives in Altshausen, to Johann Krizsanitz of the House of Hanover Archives in Hanover, to Anja Moschke of the Thuringian State Archives in Greiz, and to Gerta Walsh and Ursula Stiehler of the House of Hesse-Homburg Archives in Bad Homburg. In addition I would like to thank the staffs of the State Archives in Stuttgart and in Hanover for their help and advice. Thanks also go,
again in Europe, to Monique Droin-Bridel in Geneva and to Silke Redolfi at the Fundaziun de Planta, Samedan.

  In the earlier part of the twentieth century British royal documents were purchased with enthusiasm by American collectors and bibliophiles, and innumerable letters of the princesses and their circle then found their way across the Atlantic, some of which I have consulted. I am most grateful to Roger Horchow for arranging introductions for me at various American libraries; to Stephen Parks and his colleagues at the Beinecke and Lewis Walpole Libraries, Yale; and to Robert Parks, Inge Du Pont and others at the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, for help and advice. I am also grateful to Stephen Crook and others at the Alfred A. Berg Collection in the New York Public Library.

  I would also like to thank, among others who have shed light on the princesses’ artistic output and on their sittings to artists: Henry Adams, Norman Blackburn, Elizabeth Fairman, Charlotte Gere, Bryony Kelly, Martin Royalton Kisch, Stephen Lloyd, Amy Meyers, Lucy Peltz, Marcia Pointon, Aileen Ribeiro, Nancy Richards, Jacob Simon, Kim Sloan, Kay Staniland, Arthur Tilley and Lord Ullswater. In addition I thank Matthew Bailey and Tom Morgan of the National Portrait Gallery Picture Library for their help in providing images.

  For sharing with me their knowledge of places important in the princesses’ story here and in Europe I thank among others: Gotthard Brandler, Kathleen A. Burgess, Dr Fritz Fischer, Kurt Hoffmann, Dr Heinz Krämer, Julian Litten, Sister Manda, Dr Klaus Merten and Christopher Woodward.

  Others I owe thanks to are: Maureen Attwooll, Clarissa Campbell Orr, Kate Chisholm, Leo Cooper, Amanda Foreman, Michael Holroyd, Giles Hunt, Rana Kabbani, Linda Kelly, Mark Le Fanu, Lowell Libson, Sacha Llewellyn, Giles MacDonogh, Philip Mansel, David Michaelis, Sir Oliver Millar, Diane Nash, Michael Nash, Mimi Pakenham, Robin Piguet, Andrew Roberts, John Rogister, Francis Russell, Carlos Salinas, Stephen Simpson, Paul and Daisy Soros, Gina Thomas, John Wardroper and Edmund White.

  For professional aid during the researching and writing of Princesses I am, as ever, grateful to Leonora Clarke for typing my work. I owe thanks also for research or help at different times to: Georgie Castle, Georgina Gooding, Linda Peskin, Carole Taylor and Otto Wilkinson. I thank Katarina Ardagh for translation from the German, and Barbara Peters for checking printed sources at the British Library. And I am most grateful to Lesley Robertson Allen, to Rowan Yapp of John Murray and to Diana Tejerina of Knopf for their professional help with the production of the manuscript and illustrations. I thank Reginald Piggott for providing the family tree, and it gives me great pleasure to thank Douglas Matthews for compiling the index.

  I am fortunate beyond words in my agent, editors and publishers here and in America, and they are all too distinguished to need my praise. Nevertheless I wish to thank Jonathan Lloyd, my literary agent, for his rock-solid encouragement of this project. I thank Peter James for his steely editorial work. I am grateful to Bob Gottlieb for, among much else, crucial advice during narrative crises. I thank Sonny Mehta of Knopf in the US for his steady support. And I am delighted to be publishing once more with Roland Philipps and with John Murray (Publishers) in England.

  I am grateful for good conversation and stimulating professional advice from my mother Antonia Fraser and, until recently, from my grandmother, the late Elizabeth Longford. I thank Sheila de Bellaigue, Christopher Hibbert and Jane Roberts for reading the manuscript at different stages and for their valuable comments. I thank also Jane Birkett for reading the proofs with such care. Finally, I have, throughout the writing of this book, had the unflinching support of my husband Peter Soros, to whom, with my children, I dedicate it.

  June 2004

  Note to Paperback Edition

  I am grateful to John Murray for the opportunity to make some small corrections here. I am also delighted by the news that a ‘baby house’ or dolls’ house belonging to the Princesses has been acquired by Historic Royal Palaces. It will form part of a new Georgian display at Kew Palace in Kew Gardens, I am told, when that odd and atmospheric Royal house re-opens to the public in 2006 after many years of closure.

  November 2004

  Book One: Youth 1766-1783

  1 Early Days

  Towards the end of September 1766 the Prince of Wales, who was only four, told a lady at Court that ‘about next week’ he reckoned they should have ‘a little princess.’ George Augustus Frederick, the eldest son of King George III and Queen Charlotte, was known to be precocious. His mother’s Mistress of the Robes called him ‘the forwardest child in understanding’ that she ever saw. And so, far from doubting the child’s prediction, his confidante, Lady Mary Coke, added in her journal, ‘I find the King and Queen are very desirous it should be one [a girl] and hope they shall have no more sons.’

  The additional information probably issued from Lady Mary’s friend Lady Charlotte Finch, who had been appointed royal governess the day after the Prince of Wales’s birth on 12 August 1762. Lady Charlotte and her deputy, or sub-governess, Mrs Cotesworth had since received into the nursery establishment two further princes, Frederick and William, in 1763 and 1765. To these ladies, who looked after their boisterous charges in the summer at Richmond and Kew, and in the winter at the Queen’s House in London, as much as to the royal parents, a baby girl represented a hope of dulcet peace and feminine charms.

  In the event, George, Prince of Wales was confirmed as a prophet in the land when his mother Queen Charlotte, at the age of twenty-two, gave birth in London to a baby princess the following Monday – Michaelmas Day, 29 September. The celebrated anatomist and royal obstetrician Dr William Hunter hovered with the King and the King’s mother, the Dowager Princess of Wales, in an adjoining room at the Queen’s House, the royal family’s private residence overlooking the Mall and St James’s Park.1 But nothing untoward took place in the crimson damask bedchamber next door to require their presence. Lady Charlotte Finch, who had moved up to nearby apartments at St James’s Palace the evening before to oversee the practical arrangements for the new baby, wrote in her journal that night: ‘At a quarter past eight this morning the Queen was safely delivered of a Princess Royal. Passed all morning at the Queen’s House …’ That date, 29 September – the quarter-day when, in the greater world, rents became due and, in the royal household, salaries were paid – was to be long dear to the Queen, who was not sentimental by nature, as the day she gave birth to her ‘Michaelmas goose.’

  Names were awaiting the baby Princess: Charlotte, for her mother; Augusta, for her father’s mother; and Matilda, for the King’s sister Caroline Matilda, who, aged fifteen, was leaving England within a few days to marry the King of Denmark. (The English Houses of Parliament gave economical thanks on the same occasion for the birth of the Princess and the marriage of her aunt.) But, as her new governess’s journal entry indicates, by none of her Christian names was King George Ill’s and Queen Charlotte’s eldest daughter to be known. At birth, her proud father and sovereign of England had bestowed on her for life the style of Princess Royal, and this (shortened to Royal by her family) is how she was always known in England – although, curiously, the style was only officially granted her years later on 22 June 1789.

  The Stuart King Charles I’s eldest daughter Mary had been, in 1642, the first English princess to have been styled Princess Royal. She was eleven and leaving England to be the bride of William of Orange, the future Stadholder in Holland. No other princess was so honoured until 1727, when the Hanoverian King George II of England styled his daughter Anne – who also became a princess of Orange and lived until 1759 – Princess Royal, when she was nineteen years old. King George Ill’s decision in 1766 to make his daughter while still a baby a princess royal in part reflected England’s recent surge in prestige since his accession in 1760, notably with the successful outcome of the Seven Years War in 1763. But it also reflected the unreserved and almost awestruck delight that he exhibited as a young father – some felt, to the detriment of royal dignity – in his infant daughter.

  The day after the Pr
incess Royal’s birth, her three brothers, George, Prince of Wales, Prince Frederick and thirteen-month-old William, came up to London to inspect their new sister. Prince William, till now the baby of the family, was a general favourite at Richmond Lodge, the King’s house in woods adjacent to Kew Gardens, where the royal children generally lived during the summer months. As it was not a large house, the children’s attendants – their governess Lady Charlotte Finch among them – were mostly lodged in houses grouped around the King’s mother’s house, the White House in Kew Gardens, and the children spent much of their time there.

  A few weeks before the Princess Royal was born in September 1766, Miss Henrietta Finch, one of Lady Charlotte’s daughters, wrote to an absent sister:

  We saw the King and Queen last night, they was in Mama’s parlour. We stayed in the room the whole time, they was vastly good humoured and enquired vastly after you. Little Prince William was undressed quite naked and laid upon a cushion, the King made him stand up upon it. I thought I should have died with laughing at his little ridiculous white figure.

  The King adored Prince William’s sturdy elder brother Prince Frederick, who was aged three when his sister was born. A year earlier Lady Charlotte Finch recorded the royal father’s close involvement in all his second son’s doings in the autumn of 1765:

  Mr Glenton the tailor is the happiest man in the kingdom. He has been sent for to make a coat for Prince Frederick, and when he came, was ordered to go and take measure of him in the room where the King was. At which he was so astonished and so terrified that his knees knocked together so, they could hardly persuade him to go in. And when he was there, he did not know what he did. And when he came upstairs, he begged he might stay till the prince came up, for he owned he did not know anything of his measures. However, he has made the clothes so excessively neat and fit, that when he brought them home, the King spoke to him himself and commended them. And he is now so happy you cannot conceive anything like his spirits. He is now making another suit for Prince Frederick. However, it is only by way of dressing him in them sometimes, as the King is fond of seeing him in breeches … The Queen likes to keep him a little longer in petticoats.