Charlotte’s Funeral

In a nation still sunk in economic depression, the focus for hope had been taken away. But for the time being the people were still united, although it was only grief that united them. Public buildings were draped in black. Everyone who could afford it was dressed in black. Even the most destitute unemployed labourers were wearing ragged black armbands. Every place of worship, whatever the religion, prepared to hold a memorial service. Shops, most of which still displayed the portraits of Charlotte and Leopold that had been put there for their wedding, closed for business and they, when they opened again, filled their windows with mementoes – glass, pottery, porcelain, pewter, all engraved or crudely painted with Charlotte rising through an escort of angels to take her place in the heavenly palace. A fund was established to pay for a fitting marble memorial, and the poor were as eager to contribute as the rich: among the long list of ‘subscribers’ there is an unnamed child who gave sixpence. The national grief and sentimental melancholy were unprecedented. No monarch, no minister, no national hero had ever been so deeply mourned as ‘the Beloved Princess’.

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On 15 November Charlotte’s heavy state coffin was delivered to Claremont. It was made of mahogany, studded in gold and covered in crimson velvet. The little Prince’s coffin was smaller, with silver studs instead of gold. The simple inner coffins were placed inside them. The urn containing the child’s heart was wrapped in velvet.

In the early evening of 18 November a black carriage drawn by six black horses set off down the drive for Windsor carrying the little Prince and his heart. Charlotte followed in a hearse drawn by eight black horses with tall black plumes. Leopold rode in the carriage behind, accompanied only by Dr Short.

They were escorted by a squadron of the 10th Hussars. At Egham the Hussars were relieved, and the escort for the rest of the journey was provided by the Royal Horse Guards. It was late and dark when they arrived in Windsor. While Charlotte was installed in Lower Lodge, her son was laid in his temporary resting place in the Royal Vault in St George’s Chapel. When the short service was over, Leopold went down to the lodge and spent the rest of the night, as usual, sitting beside Charlotte.

Next day Charlotte lay in state at Lower Lodge. At eight o’clock in the evening her heavy coffin was carried up to St George’s Chapel by eight Yeomen of the Guard, one of whom injured his spine under the strain and died soon afterwards. Leopold walked behind them, his solemn face streaked with tears. Behind Leopold came the Royal Dukes of York, Clarence, Cumberland and Sussex. Behind the Dukes came the Cabinet, then the Archbishops, the Bishops, the officers of state and all the members of the royal households. On either side, in front of huge silent crowds, their path was lined by foot guards and lit by the burning torches that were carried by every fourth guardsman instead of a reversed musket.

The Prince Regent was not there. Nor was the Queen. He was moping in Carlton House, and she and her sobbing daughters were in her apartments nearby in the castle, listening to the bells and the muffled drums.

The service, which was disrupted at the outset by a few squabbles over seating, lasted until eleven o’clock. When it was over, Leopold waited in the deanery until the congregation had dispersed. Then he went down with Dr Short and stayed praying for a long time in the Royal Vault, where his wife and son were to remain until the tomb and the memorial that the people were buying for them were ready.

In the weeks that followed, Leopold lived alone and inconsolable at Claremont. On 16 December Sir Thomas Lawrence came down to deliver the finished portrait of Charlotte. When they saw it, the entire household burst into tears. Leopold, said Lawrence, ‘was greatly affected’ and spoke to him in ‘that low subdued voice that you know to be the effort at composure’.

In his precise English accent, the Prince lamented:

Two generations gone. Gone in a moment! I have felt for myself, but I have felt for the Prince Regent. My Charlotte is gone from this country – it has lost her. She was good, she was an admirable woman. None could know my Charlotte as I did know her! It was my happiness, my duty to know her character, but it was my delight!

Meanwhile, public sorrow evolved into recrimination. The press blamed the Queen and the Prince Regent for not being with Charlotte when she died, although, had they known it, Charlotte had said that she did not want them at birth. They blamed the doctors, and some of the doctors blamed themselves. Sir Richard Croft, who may already have been contemplating suicide, wrote to Stockmar, ‘May God grant that neither you nor any connected with you may suffer what I do at this moment.’*

*He indeed committed suicide three months after Charlotte’s death.

[an extract from ‘Charlotte&Leopold’ by James Chambers]

Painting: The Apotheosis of Princess Charlotte Augusta, Princess of Wales (1796-1817) by Henry Howard, RA, 1818, Petworth House and Park, West Sussex, London and South East, National Trust http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/486162

Charlotte and Leopold Meet Again

It was not till the 26th, five days later, that he did see her. The Princess, with her grandmother and aunts, drove down to Brighton at the Regent’s command, and in the evening the young couple met.

Charlotte’s letter to Mercer, written that night before she retired, is almost incoherent with joy. ‘I find him charming,’ she said, ‘and go to bed happier than I have ever done yet in my life.’ She was entranced to find that they could converse so freely – ‘long conversation on different subjects interesting to our future plans of life &c.’ ‘I am certainly a most fortunate creature,’ she continued, ‘& have to bless God. A Princess never, I believe, set out in life (or married) with such prospects of happiness, real domestic ones like other people.’

The rumour which Miss Knight had heard of Charlotte’s being obliged to live in Hanover with Prince Leopold was dismissed as ‘all a humbug‘, started, she believed, by her mischievous uncle Cumberland. And to her delight an article was inserted into the marriage agreement ‘without even my asking for it’, to the effect that she would never be obliged to leave England against her inclinations. She began to feel that – as she had always hoped – the advent of Prince Leopold had smoothed away all the anxieties and terrors which had plagued her for so long. Even the Regent, wheeling himself dexterously through the overheated rooms at the Pavilion in his merlin chair,* was ‘in high spirits, good looks & humour’. He was much thinner, said Charlotte, and his legs, which had been swollen with gout, were considerably reduced.

The Queen, at this auspicious party, refused to play cards, preferring to sit and talk. ‘I never saw her so happy,’ said Charlotte, ‘or so gracious as she is, delighted at my marriage, & with him.’

At last the engagement was made public, and Charlotte could tell her friends what most of them already knew. ‘I shall fire off in all directions my letters to announce an event that everybody has been in such profound ignorance of.’

There was some uncertainty as to where Prince Leopold should stay. Weymouth was talked of, and in the meantime, when Charlotte returned to Cranbourne Lodge, he remained in Brighton.

* An early form of wheeled invalid chair, invented by a Belgian instrument maker named Merlin, who introduced roller skating into England. The Regent’s chair remained in the passage outside his bedroom till 1846 when Queen Victoria had it removed during alterations.

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

Charlotte’s First Opening Of The Parliament

In December 1812, Princess Charlotte was invited to be present for the first time at the Opening of Parliament. This event, which should have been a happy and auspicious one for her, turned out to be a sore disappointment. Ignored by her father on her arrival at the House of Lords (she did not know that he had just had a carriage accident, and may have been a little ruffled), she was ordered to fall back in the procession: her three aunts, by the Prince Regent’s orders, were to go first: ‘so I,’ said the Heiress Presumptive, ‘went into the House the last.’

She refused to show that she minded: according to Lady Charlotte Bury, she talked and laughed animatedly, ‘turned her back often upon papa’, and during the Speech from the Throne, made no effort to conceal her dislike of the Tory complacency which it displayed. ‘I did not admire any of it, I may say,’ she told Mercer.

The Prince, said Lady Charlotte Bury, ‘was much displeased at her manner’, and he was probably even more displeased at her reception by the crowds on the return drive. Charlotte, in the second carriage with the Duke of Cumberland, observed with some satisfaction that her father, gorgeously dressed in the Regimentals of the 10th Hussars, was received in total silence; but ‘they were civil and good-humoured to me,’ she wrote, ‘&cheered as I past, shouting my name.’

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

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Family Politics

The year 1812 started propitiously for Charlotte. On January 7, her sixteenth birthday was handsomely acknowledged by the Family, and the Prince not only gave her, for the first time, a birthday present, but held a dinner party for her at Carlton House. ‘I think you will say, wonders never end,’ she said, reporting this to Mercer. The party consisted of her uncles York, Clarence and Cumberland, the Queen, a brace of princesses, Augusta and Mary (the Regent’s favourites), and was presided over by the Regent, ‘in so good a humour that they spoke of it with surprise’.

Before dinner their gracious host conducted them over ‘the whole of Carlton House’ showing off his latest acquisitions of paintings and furniture; and then they sat down amid ‘much joking and good humour’ to a splendid repast. Unfortunately Charlotte had to dine with her mother at Blackheath immediately afterwards, and so was unable to do full justice to the vast and delectable meal, at the end of which the Prince, oozing with amiability, toasted his mother in a large bumper. He does not appear to have toasted his daughter, whose birthday it was, but ‘I am never so happy,’ he said, ‘as when in the bosom of my family. I trust we may very often meet again in this way…and that your Majesty will do me the honour of frequently presiding at this board…’

‘I was thunderstruck,’ said Charlotte. But she found this excessive affection for his mother a disconcerting portent. Every change of mood, each wind that blew within the Royal Family, had its meaning: Charlotte was by now familiar with the signs. There were reasons, she felt certain, for this sudden attack of filial piety. ‘The Queen has quite got master of the Prince,’ she had observed a week earlier, and now she endorsed it, adding, ‘I know [it] is not a good sign with regard to his measures in Government&politics.’ ‘The Prince,’ she told Mercer, ‘is quite governed by his mother and the Manchester Square folks.’ These were the Hertfords, staunch Tories. Charlotte was not alone in her fears. ‘From now on,’ wrote Lord Holland, ‘the Prince was charged by the Whigs with ingratitude and perfidy. We all encouraged every species of satire against him and his mistress.’ The cartoonists licked their pencils: the print shops, said Charlotte, were full of ‘scurrilous caricatures’.

The Royal Family were beginning to regard Princess Charlotte as someone to be reckoned with: she held strong views and aired them freely. ‘Fortunately’, wrote Princess Mary in 1812, ‘Charlotte is not at all afraid of the Queen, as she runs on from subject to subject and into all her jokes with the Q., just as she does with us, and stands over Queen’s chair & yesterday afternoon kept the Queen laughing from eight o’clock until 10.’ Though they were to cross the swords in the future, the time came when Queen Charlotte developed a respect for her granddaughter and namesake and became her champion.

The young Princess was critical of what she called the Royal Menagerie, and commented shrewdly, if not always kindly, upon their characters. ‘No family,’ she asserted, ‘was ever composed of such odd people: and there have happened such extraordinary things, that in any other family…are never herd of before.’

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

Picture: Portrait of Queen Charlotte by Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1789, National Gallery

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Charlotte’s Lamentable Dinner With Her Father

Charlotte, to her intense relief, was back in London. Even though Miss Knight described Warwick House as ‘miserably out of repair, and almost falling into ruins’, it was, she said ‘a seat of happiness to Princess Charlotte compared to Lower Lodge at Windsor’. The present arrangement was that she and her charge were to be one week in London and one at Lower Lodge. But Charlotte was ‘anxiously desirous’, said Miss Knight, ‘to remain in Town as much as possible.’ There, the prospect of a more entertaining life opened out: ‘when in Town we were to dine at Carlton House, to go to the Play and Opera, and to have a party at Warwick House, besides balls and great parties at Carlton House.’ And indeed, this gay life seemed to be beginning when Miss Knight, two days after her arrival, was invited to accompany the young Princess to dinner with her father.

‘We went at 7, and I was presented to the Regent in form.’ But she was surprised to find no ladies present, only Miss Goldsworthy, the Princesses’ governess, now very old, very deaf, and inclined to drop asleep over her dinner. However, there were three Royal Dukes, York, Cumberland and Cambridge, and Miss Knight’s feelings, so easily upset, were appeased by their princely graciousness. She could find no fault with the meal or with the surroundings; the rooms were ‘fitted up with great splendour and elegance’, though far too hot.

But she could not approve of her host’s manner to his daughter. He hardly spoke to her, and showed her no affection. ‘His greatest attentions,’ she wrote, ‘were for Miss Goldsworthy,’ to whom he evidently chose to show more favour than the daughter of Sir Joseph Knight. Her conclusion was that ‘every consideration was to be sacrificed to the plan of keeping the Princess Charlotte as long as possible a child; and consequently, whoever belonged to her was to be thought a nurse or preceptress, inferior, of course, to the nurses and preceptresses of the Princesses her aunts’. Although inclined to be huffy on her own account, Miss Knight was far more concerned on Charlotte’s, now that she had seen her vis-a-vis her father.

When they returned to Windsor, Cornelia found this opinion confirmed. The Duchess of Leeds’s daughter was considered by the Queen to be a suitable companion for Charlotte, and parties were to be given of ‘young ladies not present’ – or, as Miss Knight put it scornfully, ‘children’s balls’. She was as indignant as Charlotte, whom she described as having ‘in understanding, penetration and stature…become a woman’.

It must also be remembered that Charlotte had already had a love affair, was attractive to men, and enjoyed their company. The Prince was aware of this, and warned Miss Knight in the course of an evening party that she must see that there was no nonsense with the Duke of Gloucester. The Duke, who was known as Silly Billy, was thirty-seven and a gift to the caricaturists, but he was kind and friendly: perhaps, though, from later events, the Prince’s instincts were right, for the time came when Charlotte was quite ready to accept her goggle-eyed cousin Gloucester as a suitor.

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

Picture: Portrait of Prince William Frederick, Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh by an unknown artist, 1813-22

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Charlotte’s Family: Ernest Augustus I King of Hanover

CHARLOTTE’S PATERNAL UNCLE

Ernest Augustus (5 June 1771 – 18 November 1851), fifth son of George III of the United Kingdom and Charlotte of Mecklenburg – Stirlitz, the Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale (1799–1837), King of Hanover as Ernest Augustus I (1837 – 1851), Charlotte’s paternal uncle.

Picture: Portrait of Ernest Augustus I of Hanover by George Dawe, circa 1828 (National Portrait Gallery)

Two Cousins

‘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.’

[an extract from ‘Charlotte&Leopold’ by James Chambers]