General Garth Knows More Than He Can Tell

At Weymouth General Garth joined her again; but his visits were spasmodic and most of his duties were performed this year by Colonel Addenbrook, a pleasant old bachelor with a shock of white hair and an enormous nose, whom Charlotte described as ‘quite a treasure’. Garth, still in charge of the expedition, was lectured by the Regent on economy, and, said Charlotte, ‘all expences that are optional are to be paid by me; such as any excurtions about the country’. ‘What provokes me,’ she said, ‘is that nobody cares & likes so little seeing sights…as I do.’ It was Lady Ilchester, she asserted, who was always planning expeditions. ‘Addenbrook thinks like me it is a wipe at the Countess.’ The Regent was ‘quite inexorable’ about her ponies, but the Royal Sovereign yacht was at her service.

On the whole, she was content. Weymouth was ‘dul’, but the quiet was prodigious and she might as well wait there as anywhere. For to wait seemed at present her lot.

Garth did not take up his duties for two weeks: ‘he is a double-faced, interested, cunning old dog,’ said Charlotte, and she believed him to be spying for the Prince Regent. She was astonished to discover that he knew all about her appeal to Lord Liverpool, and the Prince’s brusque dismissal of it. The Regent, said Garth, was jealous and angry at any communications being made to his Ministers in preference to himself, and he told her that she would do better always to apply direct to her father. This, said Garth, was not the moment for Charlotte’s affairs to be settled, there were too many other things ‘on the tapis’. But if she could wait till Christmas, she might call him an old fool if everything were not fixed up just as she wished.

‘I do certainly think he knows more than he likes to say,’ Charlotte commented: but she was resolved never to talk to him about her own affairs: by now she had learnt to hold her tongue.

[an extract from ‘Prinny’s Daughter: A Biography of Princess Charlotte of Wales’ by Thea Holme]

Picture: B. Stanton, Portland Island & Weymouth – 19th-century graphite drawing https://somersetandwood.com/products/b-stanton-portland-island-weymouth-from-green-hill