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- Herausgeber: Old Street Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
This is the story of the doomed romance between Charlotte, heir to the English throne, and Leopold, uncle of Queen Victoria and first King of the Belgians. Charlotte was the only legitimate royal child of her generation, and her death in childbirth was followed by an unseemly scramble to produce a substitute heir. Queen Victoria was the product. Chambers brilliantly demonstrates how the personal and the political collide in scheming post-Napoleonic Europe, offering a vivid and sympathetic portrait of a couple whose lives are in many ways not their own. Charlotte & Leopold is a moving and always entertaining royal biography with an alluring contemporary resonance.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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For Josephine
CONTENTS
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Charlie Viney, Ben Yarde-Buller, Sam Carter, Francesca Yarde-Buller, Dr Stephen Steinberg, Ben Illis and Emily Carter. Without their encouragement, enthusiasm and help it would not have been possible to tell this story.
James Chambers
London 2007
PROLOGUE
‘Daughter of England’
No one knows better than a medical man how to kill himself. Sir Richard Croft did it very neatly. He slouched in a tall wing chair and put a pistol in his mouth. When he pulled the trigger, his blood and brains were caught by the back of the chair. Only the bullet tore on through into the wall.
For the last three months, the tall, grey, dignified and normally over-confident Sir Richard had been suffering from serious depression. So what he did was hardly a surprise to anyone. Yet, even so, it must have seemed selfishly melodramatic to do it in someone else’s house rather than in the privacy of his own.
Despite his imposing manner, Sir Richard was not an eminent or even qualified physician. He was merely the most fashionable of the many accoucheurs, or ‘men-midwives’, who practised in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and his title was an inherited baronetcy rather than a well-earned knighthood. On the day of his death he was attending a patient, the wife of a rich clergyman, who was about to give birth in their large house in London’s Harley Street. After a preliminary examination, he had as usual left his patient alone with her husband and gone downstairs to wait for the next contractions. Shown by a servant into the study, he had selected a book, and somehow, unusually in the house of a clergyman, he had discovered a case with pistols in it.
Soon afterwards, when the crump of exploding black powder brought the vicar and his servants running, they found that Sir Richard had died instantly. The pistol had fallen from his right hand onto the floor, and the book, Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, was lying on the table beside him beneath his limp left hand. It was open at the point towards the end of Act V, Scene II, where the King of Navarre asks,
‘Fair Sir, God save you! Where is the Princess?’
It was, said the coroner, ‘a singular coincidence’.
The princess whose whereabouts were the obvious cause of Sir Richard’s remorse was another of his patients, Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales and Saxe-Coburg, and for the last three months she had been lying in her tomb at Windsor with the stillborn son whom she had survived for only five hours.
Her father, the Prince Regent, had written to Sir Richard to reassure him of his ‘entire confidence in the medical skill and ability which he displayed during the arduous and protracted labour’. But if the Prince Regent meant what he said, there was not a man or a woman in the kingdom who agreed with him. Their Princess was dead. There was no one to replace her. The nation’s heart was broken, and Sir Richard Croft was the only man who could be blamed for it.
On the day after Princess Charlotte’s death the leader in The Times proclaimed clumsily, ‘We never recollect so strong and general an expression and indication of sorrow.’ The wife of the Russian Ambassador, the famously libidinous Princess Lieven, put it much better: ‘One met in the streets people of every class in tears, the churches full at all hours, the shops shut for a fortnight (an eloquent testimony from a shop-keeping community), and everyone, from the highest to the lowest, in a state of despair which it is impossible to describe.’
Many years later in his memoirs, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Brougham, wrote, ‘It really was as though every household throughout Great Britain had lost a favourite child.’
Princess Charlotte had been the most popular member of the royal family. Indeed, for most of her short life she had been the only popular member of it. When she was born, on 7 January 1796, the poet Leigh Hunt, not at his best, wrote, ‘Such a fine young royal creature – Daughter of England!’ When she died, little more than twenty-one years later, another poet, Thomas Campbell, echoed Hunt’s words in an equally unremarkable dirge, which was performed to packed houses by Sarah Bartley at the new Drury Lane Theatre:
‘Daughter of England! for a nation’s sighs,
A nation’s heart went with thine obsequies.’
By the time the costly war with Napoleon was over, the Daughter of England had become a symbol of hope. The reputation of the royal family still stood lower than it had for centuries. But eager, warm-hearted, unpretentious Charlotte was a happy and auspicious contrast to her dissolute father, her variously ineffectual or ‘wicked’ uncles and her sad, mad grandfather. Because of her, the future seemed more secure. Old King George III was bound to die soon, and the Prince Regent had wrecked his own health so much that he was unlikely to outlive him for long. Until the dreadful news broke on 7 November 1817, everyone in the now disconsolate kingdom had been looking forward to the not-too-distant day when young Queen Charlotte would ascend the throne.
‘She would have behaved well’, said the Duke of Wellington, ‘her death is one of the most serious misfortunes the country has ever met with’.
CHAPTER ONE
‘The Brunswick Bride’
FOR CHARLOTTE TO have grown up worthy of the Duke of Wellington’s compliment was very nearly a miracle. She had emerged confident and merry from a childhood that would have turned almost anyone else into a suspicious recluse. She had never known the security of family life. Instead, her little world, like the great world beyond it, had been a world of conflict and duplicity. From the day she was born until the day she was married, she had seldom been anything but a victim. Her tutors and governesses had misrepresented her whenever it suited them in the course of their vindictive little rivalries. The leaders of the opposition had manipulated her cynically in their political manoeuvring. Worst of all, her own parents, whom she hardly ever saw, had used her as the principal pawn in their embarrassingly public squabbles.
Charlotte’s father only married her mother for money – not because Princess Caroline of Brunswick was rich, but because the Prime Minister, William Pitt, had told him that, when he married, the government would raise his income. The increase was intended to cover the cost of an appropriately enlarged household, but to the Prince it was an opportunity to continue his notorious extravagance.
He longed to be regarded as the leader of fashion, the nation’s foremost sportsman and the most eminent connoisseur of art and architecture. To that end, he had squandered absurd sums on clothes and horses, and he had lavished fortunes on building and embellishing his pavilion in Brighton and his home in London, Carlton House, each of which he had crammed with an indiscriminate clutter of both exquisite and tasteless pictures and furniture. By 1794, when it was suggested that he should get married, he was hopelessly in debt.
Many of the ‘beaux’ and ‘bucks’ who called themselves his friends were almost as extravagant as he was. A few of them had reduced themselves to penury on no more than the turn of a card. But these men had property to sell or pledge for credit. Charlotte’s father did not. As Prince of Wales and heir to the throne he had an annual allowance of £60,000 from the privy purse, and as Duke of Cornwall he had an income of £13,000 a year from his duchy. That was all, and by 1794 it was no longer even enough to cover his cost of living, let alone pay the interest on a debt of over £600,000. His desperate creditors had petitioned the Prime Minister for help, but the government, which had bailed him out once already, had no intention of doing so again.
A suitable marriage was the Prince’s only hope. The promised increase would raise his allowance from the privy purse to £100,000 a year. Although, in itself, even this would not be enough to support all his extravagance, it would at least enable him to start making annual payments to some of his creditors, and that in turn might encourage others to lend him more. He was unmoved when he was told that it was his duty to get married and provide the kingdom with an heir. But when he was told that a marriage would bring in more money, he agreed at once.
There was still one small problem, however. By his own admision, His Royal Highness was already married. Nine years earlier, when he was only twenty-three, he had been secretly married to an older woman, a beautiful widow called Maria Fitzherbert. When the King and his Cabinet recovered from the initial shock of this news, they learned to their relief that it was not the impediment it might have been. In the opinion of the Lord Chancellor and the Attorney General, and with the reluctant concurrence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the marriage was undoubtedly null and void. Since Mrs Fitzherbert was a Roman Catholic it was forbidden by the Bill of Rights of 1689 and the Act of Settlement of 1700, and since the Prince had married without his father’s permission, it was also in breach of the Royal Marriages Act of 1772.
The Prince was genuinely fond of Mrs Fitzherbert. But he was not so fond as to be faithful. He had recently acquired a mistress, the beautiful but sinister Lady Jersey, who was almost ten years his senior (even older than Mrs Fitzherbert). And he was not so fond of anyone as to allow them to stand between him and an opportunity to increase his income. The news that he was not legally married was as much of a relief to the Prince as it was to the government.
Once it was agreed that the Prince was free to marry, the next step was to find him a bride. There were two candidates, both of whom were his cousins. One was Princess Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, whose father was the brother of his mother, Queen Charlotte. The other was Princess Caroline of Brunswick, whose mother was a sister of his father, the King.
The Queen was enthusiastically in favour of Princess Louise, not only because Louise was her niece and reputedly the better looking, but also because, like many other people at court, she had heard too many unsavoury rumours about Princess Caroline. The Brunswicker Princess was said to be coarse and uninhibited. She was said to have had several affairs, one with an Irish officer in her father’s army, and it was known that earlier marriage negotiations had been broken off without reason.
But the woman who had the most influence over the Prince of Wales, Lady Jersey, was equally enthusiastic in her support for Princess Caroline. Lady Jersey had managed to replace Mrs Fitzherbert in the Prince’s bed, but she had not succeeded in replacing her in his heart. Now that good fortune had come to her aid and removed Mrs Fitzherbert from the stage altogether, Lady Jersey was determined to ensure that the next wife should be the least formidable rival; if only half the stories were true, Princess Caroline was certainly that.
Naturally the Prince was persuaded by Lady Jersey. Yet even after he had plumped for Princess Caroline, his mother made no secret of her continuing disapproval. From all that she was saying, it was obvious that she was going to make her daughter-in-law’s life as difficult as she could – and she clearly realised what Lady Jersey was up to. Applying the old adage ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’, she invited Lady Jersey to visit her regularly at Windsor. She lobbied everyone at court on Lady Jersey’s behalf, recommending her for a position in the Prince’s new household. In the end she succeeded. At the insistence of the mischievous old Queen, her son’s mistress was appointed to serve as lady-in-waiting to his wife.
So a heartbroken but dignified Mrs Fitzherbert retired to a beautiful villa by the Thames at Twickenham, Marble Hill, and the greatest British diplomat of the age, James Harris, who had been created Baron Malmesbury six years earlier, was instructed to go to Brunswick and escort Princess Caroline to England.
Malmesbury was in King George’s electorate of Hanover when he received his orders. He had gone there to rest after visiting Berlin, where he had used the promise of huge British subsidies to persuade the King of Prussia to keep his army on a war footing along the north bank of the Rhine.
Ever since the outbreak of the French Revolution, Pitt had been using British money to bind the rest of Europe together in a coalition against the new republic. At the outset he had even managed to persuade the Prussians to go on the offensive. In 1792, after the French imprisoned their royal family, the Prussians had sent an army south across the Rhine, commanded by none other than Princess Caroline’s father, the Duke of Brunswick.
When he reached Valmy, Brunswick was halted by an artillery barrage. It cost him only a few hundred men and should not have delayed him for long. But in the days that followed he lost thousands more to dysentery and was forced to march back into Prussia.
Meanwhile, further west, it was the French who went on the offensive. They invaded and occupied Belgium, which was then known as the Austrian Netherlands. But in the following year, shortly after they had guillotined their King, the French were routed at Neerwinden by an Austrian army, which was mostly paid with British money and was commanded by the brilliant Prince Frederick, the younger son of the Duke of Coburg. It was said in Paris at the time that the greatest enemies of the Revolution were Coburg and Pitt.
A few days after the battle twenty thousand British soldiers landed in Holland commanded by their King’s second son, the Duke of York. The Duke joined forces with a small Dutch army led by the two sons of the Prince of Orange, and together they put themselves under the overall command of Prince Frederick.
At first Prince Frederick’s success continued. The allies invaded France. The remnants of the French army faded away ahead of them. The road to Paris lay open. The city was undefended. It was one of the great lost opportunities of history. If the Princes of the Houses of Hanover, Orange and Saxe-Coburg had only been allowed to advance on the capital, the French monarchy might have been restored, Europe might have been spared the terrible war that ravaged it for the next twenty years, and Napoleon Bonaparte might have had nothing better to do with his life than accept the Ottoman Emperor’s invitation to go east and take command of his artillery.
But the allies did not advance. The British and Austrian governments diverted their armies onto much more trivial objectives – the British merely wanted to make a gesture and recapture Calais, which had been lost to the French during the reign of Bloody Mary over two hundred years earlier.
The new rulers of France were given time to recover. While they eliminated their internal enemies in the wanton slaughter that became known as ‘the Terror’, they introduced conscription and spent all the money they could raise on artillery. A few months later they returned to the offensive. Relying entirely on firepower, force of numbers and a cruel disdain for casualties, they defeated the allies and forced them to retreat. While Malmesbury was negotiating in Berlin, British soldiers were falling back through Holland.
Malmesbury was lucky to be in Hanover when he received his orders. He had only to cross the eastern border to be in Brunswick. If he had gone out from England, he would have had to choose between travelling on the direct route through Holland, which would have meant crossing a war zone, or else sailing north on the safe but much longer route round it.
He reached Brunswick on 20 November and was ‘much embarrassed’ on being presented to Princess Caroline. It was clear from the dishevelled state of her clothes that no one had helped her to dress and that no one had ever taught her how to do it herself; it was also obvious for other reasons that it was at least several days since she had washed herself. The great Ambassador’s report on what he saw was more matter-of-fact than diplomatic. ‘Pretty face – not expressive of softness – her figure not graceful – fine eyes – good hands – tolerable teeth but going – fair hair and light eyebrows, good bust…’
The Duke of Brunswick was much more interested in the progress of the war than in his daughter’s impending marriage. But he was concerned enough to take Malmesbury aside one evening after supper and give him what he thought was an honest assessment of her. ‘She is no fool’, he said, ‘but she lacks judgement’.
It was an understatement. Twenty-six-year-old Princess Caroline did nothing discreetly. She was over-familiar with everyone, and her conversation was coarse and tactless. During his stay in Brunswick, Malmesbury spent most of his time teaching her manners, dignity and discretion.
They left for England on 29 December. On orders from London, they took the shortest route, expecting to meet up with the British squadron which, they were told, would be waiting for them off the coast of Holland. But when they came close to the Dutch border Malmesbury received a letter from General Harcourt, who had replaced the Duke of York as commander of the British army. Harcourt warned him that it was too dangerous to continue. The British were still retreating. If he tried to reach the coast now, he would have to pass through the French lines to do it. Despite the Princess’s insistence that she was a Brunswicker and not afraid, Malmesbury took her back as far as Osnabruck, where they waited eagerly for news of a reversal of fortune for the allies.
But the news, when it came, towards the end of the month, was not what they wanted to hear. The French were now in control of Holland, and they were already so sure of keeping control that they were preparing to make radical changes. Although the United Provinces of Holland were known as The Dutch Republic, they were not nearly republican enough for the revolutionary French. Apart from anything else, when electing their head of state – their Stadholder – the Dutch had got into the habit of electing the senior prince of the House of Orange, as though he was a hereditary monarch. So the French and their revolutionary Dutch allies were preparing a new constitution, and they were even planning to give the nation a new name: the Republic of Batavia.
All opposition had vanished. The Stadholder and his family had left for England. The British army was withdrawing across the north-eastern border. Recognising that its mission was now futile, the British naval squadron that had been waiting for the Princess had turned about and sailed for home. It was time to take the long route. But the winter was unusually hard. Some roads were impassable. Rivers were frozen. The northern German ports were inaccessible. Malmesbury took Princess Caroline back to Hanover, and for the next six weeks, in the exemplary decorum of the Hanoverian court, he continued to teach her how the English expected a princess to behave.
At last, when the thaw came, they headed north, accompanied by Mrs Harcourt, the wife of the British commander, who had agreed to attend the Princess on the journey. On 28 March they boarded a frigate, HMS Jupiter, off Cuxhaven at the mouth of the river Elbe. They were safe. Britannia still ruled the waves. The waters around them were crowded with British warships. A few days earlier, twenty miles to the south, the British expeditionary force had been evacuated from Bremerhaven.
When they reached Gravesend Malmesbury, Mrs Harcourt and Princess Caroline transferred from HMS Jupiter to the royal yacht, Augusta, and sailed up the Thames in her. They arrived at Greenwich, as expected, at noon on Easter Sunday.
The Princess stepped ashore eager and radiant. The limitations of a long sea voyage had given her ample excuse for not washing but, with the excited assistance of Mrs Harcourt, she had dressed more neatly than she had ever dressed before. She wore a muslin gown, a blue satin petticoat and a little black beaver hat with blue and black feathers in the hatband.
But there was no one there to meet her. The campaign to destroy her self-confidence had already begun.
The Prince of Wales had done his best. He had ordered carriages to be sent and had provided them with an escort from his own regiment, the 10th Light Dragoons, commanded by his two favourite officers, Lieutenant the Marquess of Worcester and Lieutenant George ‘Beau’ Brummell. But it was a matter of protocol that the royal bride’s lady-in-waiting should go out in one of the carriages to greet her and escort her back into London, and the lady-in-waiting had delayed their departure.
It was over an hour before the carriages arrived and, when they did, rather than apologise, Lady Jersey greeted the Princess with patronising disapproval of her clothes. She was so rude that Malmesbury saw fit to step in and rebuke her for it. But Lady Jersey would not be put off. Although Princess Caroline’s clothes were utterly appropriate for travelling in a carriage, Lady Jersey insisted that she should already be dressed as though she were about to be presented at court, and she forced the flustered Princess to change into a tight white satin dress and an unbecoming turban with tall ostrich feathers on it, both of which she just happened to have brought with her.
From Greenwich they drove through welcoming crowds to St James’s Palace, where the Princess was to stay until her marriage. While she was acknowledging the cheers of the crowd at the open window, the Prince of Wales came into the room. Malmesbury, whom the Prince still addressed by his surname, described what happened next in the most famous passage of his diary:
She very properly, in consequence of my saying to her it was the right mode of proceeding, attempted to kneel to him. He raised her (gracefully enough), and embraced her, said barely one word, turned round, retired to a distant part of the apartment, and calling me to him, said, ‘Harris, I am not well; pray get me a glass of brandy.’ I said, ‘Sir, had you not better have a glass of water?’ – upon which he, much out of humour, said with an oath, ‘No; I will go directly to the Queen,’ and away he went…
Princess Caroline gaped. ‘My God!’ she said, ‘Is the Prince always like that?’ And then, forgetting all that Malmesbury had taught her about tact and restraint, she added, ‘I think he is very fat, and nothing like as handsome as his portrait.’
That evening they all dined together. By then the Prince had recovered his composure. But the Princess had not. She had clearly been hurt by her reception, and she dealt with her pain by being sarcastic, ‘affecting raillery and wit, and throwing out coarse, vulgar hints…’ making it plain that she was well aware of the relationship between her lady-in-waiting and her future husband. ‘The Prince was disgusted’, wrote Malmesbury, ‘and this unfortunate dinner fixed his dislike’.
But there was no going back. Three days later Princess Caroline waited for her groom at the altar of the Chapel Royal, swaying precariously in an enormous, old-fashioned wedding dress with huge hoops inside it and broad ribbons with preposterously big bows wrapped around the outside – it had been chosen for her by the Queen.
Earlier that morning, the Prince had sent one of his brothers, the Duke of Clarence, to tell Mrs Fitzherbert that she was the only woman he would ever love. By the time he reached the chapel, it was obvious to everyone that this time no one had kept him from his brandy. He tottered reluctantly up the aisle, supported in every sense of the word by the Dukes of Bedford and Roxburghe.
The day ended in a manner that might have been expected. According to the new Princess of Wales, her husband ‘passed the greatest part of his bridal night under the grate, where he fell, and where I left him’.
Thereafter the relationship continued as it had begun. For all that the Princess was amiable and eager to please, there was no denying that she was slovenly and she smelt. The Prince displayed his displeasure at every opportunity, and the hurt Princess hit back each time by exaggerating whatever she had done to displease him.
Within three weeks of their wedding they were no longer living together as man and wife. At night the Princess retired to her own small apartments on the ground floor of Carlton House, and the Prince went to his much more splendid apartments above them.
Then came the development that really did fix the Prince’s dislike for ever. He had married for money, and now he learned that, far from increasing his disposable income, his marriage had actually diminished it.
Pitt went further than he had promised. He persuaded Parliament to raise the allowance from the privy purse to as much as £125,000 a year. But the House of Commons also ruled that for the next nine years £65,000 of this, together with all the income from the Duchy of Cornwall, was to be set aside to pay off the Prince’s debts. In real terms therefore his annual income had been reduced from £73,000 to £60,000; on top of that he now had the added expense of paying for his wife’s establishment.
The Prince’s distaste was embittered by resentment. He ignored his wife as much as he could by day as well as by night. On the pretext that he could no longer afford to pay for them, he removed most of the chairs from her private dining room and took back the pearl bracelets that he had given her on their wedding day – although he then gave them to Lady Jersey, who wore them publicly in her presence.
His displays of displeasure became increasingly cruel, and the Princess no longer felt strong enough to meet them all with defiance. Sometimes they reduced her to tears. As one witness, Lady Sheffield, wrote, she lost her ‘lively spirits’, and in their place her mood became one of ‘melancholy and anxiety’.
As the months went by, however, it became clear that, somehow, during his first few days with his wife, the Prince had performed his dynastic duty. One day short of nine months after their wedding, she gave birth to Princess Charlotte.
The birth of a daughter did nothing to heal the royal relationship. At first the best that could be said was that the family was living under the same roof, the Prince and the Princess in their separate apartments and their daughter above them in the nursery. But when Charlotte was only just a year old, her miserable mother moved out and went to live in a villa five miles away near Blackheath.
The Princess of Wales still used her apartments in Carlton House when she came in to London to visit her daughter, and after a while Charlotte was sometimes taken out to visit her in Blackheath, although she was never allowed to stay with her.
During the first few years of her life, Charlotte saw more of her father than of her mother. But it was only just more. The Prince was often away from Carlton House, and when he was there his time with his daughter was always brief. Although he was said to be good with children, he only played with them and he soon tired of it. He devoted much more of his energy to preventing his wife and parents from influencing his daughter than he did to trying to influence her himself.
Eventually, however, when the Prince’s affections were restored from Lady Jersey to Mrs Fitzherbert, he decided that he wanted Carlton House to himself again. So his wife was given apartments in Kensington Palace, and his eight-year-old daughter and all her staff were moved into Warwick House, a crumbling old brick building which stood just to the east of Carlton House.
From then on, for the rest of her childhood and throughout her youth, Princess Charlotte Augusta, who was fully expected to succeed her father one day as Queen of England, lived in a household of her own, in the company of no one who was not paid to be there.
CHAPTER TWO
Warwick House
THE MOVE TO Warwick House was made all the more traumatic for Princess Charlotte by the fact that she had only recently acquired a completely new staff of governesses and senior tutors.
Indeed, there were only two members of her entire household who had been with her for any length of time at Carlton House. One was her personal maid, worthy Mrs Louis, the German widow of a British soldier. The other was her dresser, pretty Mrs Gagarin, who had innocently contracted a bigamous marriage with a Russian aristocrat and had kept his name, although not his title, when she left him soon after. Inevitably, in the circumstances, the little Princess was on what some saw as inappropriately intimate terms with these two, and their mutual devotion was to continue for the rest of their lives.
Charlotte’s governess, Lady Elgin, had been asked to resign just before the move. Her only known offence had been to take Charlotte to visit her grandfather, the interfering old King. But she had done so without first obtaining permission from her father, and that had been more than enough to infuriate him.
When she went, the sub-governess, Miss Hayman, was dismissed as well. Miss Hayman’s sin had been much more severe. She had become too friendly with Charlotte’s mother. But the Princess of Wales stayed loyal to her. On her dismissal Miss Hayman joined the Princess’s household in Blackheath and took charge of her privy purse.
In place of Lady Elgin, Charlotte’s father appointed the Dowager Lady de Clifford, a dignified but barely graceful Irish woman, who was well past fifty years old. She had lived for some time at the Palace of Versailles before the French Revolution; and the Prince, who, despite his many faults, was justifiably renowned for his deportment, hoped in vain that she might be able to imbue his daughter with some of the qualities of that most elegant of courts.
Charlotte was a temperamental tomboy, and Lady de Clifford was too good natured to discipline her effectively. Every time she tried to be strict, the Princess was more than a match for her. Charlotte might not have wanted to behave like a princess, but she was all too well aware that she was one, and she used the fact whenever it suited her.
On one occasion, when she burst merrily into a room, Lady de Clifford attempted to scold. ‘My dear Princess’, she said, ‘that is not civil; you should always shut the door after you when you come into a room’.
‘Not I indeed’, said Charlotte. ‘If you want the door shut, ring the bell.’
Neither took their battles to heart, however. The antagonists were soon fond of each other, and Lady de Clifford did everything she could to make Charlotte’s life less lonely.
At Carlton House, Charlotte’s only playmate had been Annie Barnard, the orphaned niece of her father’s coachman. Annie lived with her uncle and his wife above the stables and played with the Princess every day. She even dined with her, and for a few months they did their lessons together. But the move to Warwick House, beyond the safety of the stable-yard gates, was enough to separate them.
As a replacement for Annie, Lady de Clifford introduced the Princess to one of her grandsons, the Hon. George Keppel, who was three years younger than she was. George was a pupil nearby at Westminster School. He was brought round regularly in a coach to play with Charlotte at Warwick House – and to supplement his meagre school diet in the kitchens – and sometimes, appropriately chaperoned, she went round to visit him at the school.
Over forty years later, after he had succeeded his brother as Earl of Albemarle, George wrote a memoir which contains many of the most endearing anecdotes about the childhood of the Princess with ‘blue eyes’, ‘peculiarly blond hair’ and ‘beautifully shaped’ hands and feet. Among all the usual stories about fisticuffs, bolting horses and tears, he described an afternoon when Charlotte, who was visiting his parents’ house in Earl’s Court, crept out through a side gate and joined in at the back of a crowd that had assembled outside the main gate in the hope of catching a glimpse of the Princess.
He also recorded an afternoon when he and Charlotte helped out in the kitchen at Warwick House. As a result of their efforts, Lady de Clifford was served a mutton chop that was so heavily dressed and over-peppered that she summoned the servants in a fury. But he did not record whether the incident was an intentional prank or merely the result of childish over-enthusiasm.
Although Lady de Clifford dined at Warwick House, she did not live there. She came in from her own house every morning to supervise everything that went on. But she was not in overall command of Princess Charlotte’s education. That was a responsibility for a man, a preceptor; at the instigation of the King, the office had been given to the Rt Rev. Dr John Fisher, Bishop of Exeter. Fisher was a favourite at Windsor Castle. He had been tutor to the Duke of Kent, Chaplain to the King, Clerk of the Closet and Canon of Windsor. He was sincerely pious and a connoisseur of painting and drawing. But he was pompous, humourless, dogmatic, wilful and absurdly old-fashioned. In the manner of a generation that had mostly died out towards the end of the eighteenth century, he still wore a wig and spoke affectedly. When referring to himself, which he did often, he pronounced the word bishop ‘bishup’, emphasising the last syllable. Within weeks of meeting him, nine-year-old Charlotte had nicknamed him ‘the Great UP’.
Lady de Clifford and the Prince of Wales were convinced that the King had appointed the Bishop to act as a spy and report back on everything that was happening at Warwick House. Delegating the duties of his distant diocese to his archdeacon, he called there regularly, sometimes as often as twice a week, and when he did he was almost always critical.
He argued constantly with Lady de Clifford about what Charlotte should be learning and how it should be taught to her. Their debates were heated, acrimonious and noisy, even in the presence of the Princess. But when that happened, Charlotte used to mock the Bishop behind his back, burdening Lady de Clifford with the added strain of trying to keep a straight face.
According to George Keppel, Charlotte had inherited her father’s talents for acting and mimicry. While the Bishop pontificated, she stood behind him jutting out her lower lip, waving her arms and generally ridiculing his expressions and mannerisms in an exaggerated mime.
Deep down, Charlotte may have been disturbed by the extent to which Dr Fisher and Lady de Clifford argued, but the person who bore the brunt of the conflict was the Rev. Dr George Nott, her chaplain and sub-preceptor. Kindly, liberal, patient Dr Nott was responsible for religious instruction, English, Latin and ancient history, and he received conflicting instructions from the governess and preceptor in almost every field. On top of that, since he saw himself as Charlotte’s moral tutor, he added to his burden by trying to teach her to be honest. But he was no more successful in that than in spelling.
Charlotte wanted to mend her ways. She liked Dr Nott and was eager to please him. She told him so several times. In one note to him she wrote, ‘Let me most humbly implore your forgiveness… Never shall another lie come out of me.’ But, like many children in discordant households, she had discovered that a little falsehood here and there could go a long way towards establishing her innocence or reducing the burden of her studies; it was a tool too useful to abandon completely.
Apart from Dr Nott, there were two other sub-preceptors, who came in as he did to teach English literature, French, German and modern history; and there were masters for music, dancing, drawing and writing. The only resident members of Charlotte’s tutorial staff were the two widows who acted as sub-governesses, Mrs Campbell, whose husband had been a Governor of Bermuda, and Mrs Udney, whose husband, according to the Prince of Wales, had been the ugliest man he ever saw.
Mrs Campbell was small, angular and argumentative. Unknown to the Prince of Wales, who affected support for the Whig opposition, she was also, like Dr Fisher, a high Tory. But she was intelligent and strong-willed. As a governess she was strict but fair, and Charlotte respected her for it. Before long the Princess was announcing poignantly that Mrs Campbell and Dr Nott were her adopted parents.
Mrs Udney, on the other hand, was good-looking, ill-tempered and fickle. She was so fond of drink that even Charlotte noticed, and she adored gossip. According to Lord Glenbervie, who heard it from Mrs (by then Lady) Harcourt, she took one of Charlotte’s tutors as a lover. Sadly, however, he was unable to name him. In a letter to his wife, who was one of Lady Jersey’s successors as lady-in-waiting to Charlotte’s mother, he wrote, ‘She says Mrs Udney had an intrigue with one of the Princess Charlotte’s music or drawing masters – that they used to be locked up together in Mrs Udney’s room, which opened into the Princess’s, and that when any friend or intimate came there, and was going to open the door of communication, the Princess would say: “You must not try to go there. Mrs Udney and —— are there, and they always lock themselves in.”’
Although Mrs Udney tried to worm her way into Charlotte’s affections by indulging her, she was never successful. The Princess, who referred to her behind her back as ‘Mrs Nibs’, was unimpressed by her fondness for drink and her depravity, and she may have had other unrecorded reasons for disliking her as well. But to Lady de Clifford and Dr Nott, Mrs Udney’s most serious weakness was her fondness for gossip. The drawing rooms of London were buzzing with scandalous stories about Charlotte’s parents, particularly her mother, and there was a real danger that sooner or later Mrs Udney might pass some of them on to her.
