Charlotte & Leopold (11 page)

The next time Leopold sat down to write to his favourite sister his plans had changed. The Tsar was taking him in his entourage to London.

Leopold borrowed a carriage from Sophia’s husband, and in return he lent him the castle in Austria which had just been given to him by the grateful Emperor. He visited the best tailors in Paris. He spent so much that when he reached crowded London the only lodgings he could afford were two rooms on the second floor of number 21 Marylebone High Street, which he rented from Mr Hole, who ran a greengrocer’s shop on the ground floor. The simple lodgings were not without advantages, however. When he was not in attendance on the Tsar or out and about in London society, Leopold spent most of his time with Mr Hole’s young housemaid, who was overwhelmed by the handsome Prince and adored the way his eyelids drooped slightly when he bowed.

In the light of all this, it may not have been a coincidence that Leopold was waiting at the foot of the back stairs when Charlotte left the Grand Duchess’s apartments after saying goodbye to her; it may be that the Tsar was only testing her when he asked her to make peace with the young Prince of Orange. Certainly his dismissive sneer at ‘a Mister Whitbread’ was disingenuous. The liberal Tsar was in sympathy with the Whigs. He had received Samuel Whitbread at the Pulteney Hotel; and he had angered the Regent by greeting him warmly at a reception.

A few days after the Tsar left London, Leopold wrote significantly to his eldest brother:

By then Leopold had visited Charlotte. He left a state concert before it ended and went round to Warwick House wearing his full dress uniform. While he was there, Mercer arrived. She was delighted by the surprise. She already knew the Prince and she approved of him. For her, this was much more the sort of prince who ought to be courting the future Queen of England.

After that, more often than not, when Charlotte and Miss Knight took the air in Hyde Park, Leopold just happened to be there as well. Each time the Princess acknowledged him with a nod, and each time, in response, the Prince trotted up to her carriage and rode beside her for a while.

During the last ten days of June and the first ten of July, ‘the Great UP’ called at Warwick House at least twice to warn Charlotte that, if she did not submit to her father and agree to marry the Hereditary Prince of Orange, ‘arrangements would be made by no means agreeable to her inclinations’. But Charlotte was having too good a time to take notice. She was being courted by two handsome suitors, each one supported, encouraged and championed by one of her two closest confidantes. Prince August of Prussia was still Cornelia Knight’s candidate, and Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg was now Mercer Elphinstone’s.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

‘I Have Run Off'

J
UST BEFORE
5 p.m. on the evening of Monday, 11 July 1814, Cornelia Knight walked over from Warwick House for a meeting with the Prince Regent at Carlton House. Princess Charlotte had been summoned as well, but she had stayed behind, claiming that a sore knee prevented her from walking.

Miss Knight was anxious, the more so for being left to face the Regent on her own. A few days earlier her friend Lady Rolle had warned her that the Prince was planning changes, and had reassured her that, if she suddenly needed somewhere to stay, she would always be welcome at the Rolles' London house. Since then she had learned that the Duchess of Leeds had been asked to resign. Naturally the lady companion now feared for her own position as well.

The Regent was ‘very cold, very bitter, and very silent'. He had heard that a German prince had been paying court to his daughter.

Miss Knight assured him that Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg was an honourable man. He had called only once at Warwick House and had behaved impeccably, and both she and the Duchess had been present throughout his visit.

The Regent did not disagree. He knew that Prince Leopold had behaved entirely properly. He had just received a long letter from the young Prince assuring him that his intentions were honourable and that he had only gone to Warwick House at the invitation of the Princess. The Prince about whom he complained was Prince August of Prussia.

When Miss Knight had delivered a similar but slightly less honest defence of Prince August, the Regent dismissed her and warned that, if his daughter did not come next day to explain herself, he would go to her.

Back at Warwick House, where Mercer was waiting with Charlotte, Miss Knight reported all that had been said. Charlotte and Mercer were disappointed. They had hoped that Prince Leopold was romantic enough to keep his courting a secret, and Miss Knight was dismayed to have discovered that Prince August's courting was even less of a secret.

Next day, after Mercer had returned from spending the night at her own house, Charlotte sent a note asking her father to come to her. Eventually he came, at six in the evening, accompanied by the ‘Bish-UP' of Salisbury.

While the Bishop waited downstairs, the Regent went up and saw Charlotte alone behind closed doors in the drawing room. Miss Knight waited in the anteroom where she and the Regent had once waited with the door open. After three quarters of an hour, he came out and summoned the Bishop.

A quarter of an hour after that Charlotte came out, almost hysterical. Her father had now summoned Miss Knight. They had only ‘one instant' to talk.

Miss Knight followed the Princess into her dressing room. Her father, she said, had decided to dismiss everyone. All the servants were to go, and Miss Knight would be required to leave immediately. New ladies were waiting to take over from her. As soon as possible, within a few days, Charlotte was to be sent to
Windsor, not to Lower Lodge, but to Cranbourne Lodge, in the middle of the forest, where she was to be kept in isolation. No one would be allowed to visit her but the Queen, and even she would only come once a week.

The Princess fell on her knees. ‘God Almighty grant me patience!'

Cornelia Knight began to comfort her, but Charlotte insisted that she must go to the Regent before he became angrier.

The admiral's daughter went into the drawing room and stood defiantly in front of the Regent and his pompous Bishop. He told her what Charlotte had told her already. He asked her to leave at once since he needed her room for the new ladies. When she asked what she had done to offend, he refused to give a reason and said simply that he had ‘a right to make any changes he pleased'.

When she came out of the drawing room Miss Knight was met by Mercer and Mrs Louis, who was weeping. The Princess had run away. Mrs Louis thought she might have gone to Carlton House, but Mercer had heard her say she was going to her mother.

Mercer and Miss Knight went in to tell the Regent together. To their surprise, he seemed rather pleased. He said, Miss Knight wrote later, that ‘he was glad that everybody would now see what she was, and that it would be known on the Continent, and no one would marry her'.

Meanwhile, in Pall Mall, Mr Collins, an architect, was looking out of the window above his uncle's print shop when he saw a frantic young lady who was obviously in great distress. He went down and asked if he could help her. She asked him to call her a hackney-coach. He found one, handed her into it and watched as it drove away westward and then turned north-west.

Inside the coach the passenger instructed the driver, Mr Higgins, to take her to Oxford Street. When they reached it she directed him to Connaught House, where she told the servant who opened the door to give her driver an extravagant three guineas. It was only
then, when he saw the house and the low bow of the servant, that Mr Higgins realised who his passenger had been.

The Princess of Wales had gone to dine in Blackheath. Charlotte sent a groom to gallop after her and bring her home as fast as possible. She ordered dinner, and then she gave quickly-scribbled notes to two of her mother's coachmen and sent them off to find and bring back Brougham and her Whig uncle, the Duke of Sussex. Each note began with the same words: ‘I have run off.'

The groom caught up with Charlotte's mother on the road. By 9 a.m. she was back in her own house and sitting down to dinner with Henry Brougham and her daughter. Brougham was not hungry, he had already dined, and he was exhausted. He had been up all the previous night working on a case. When Charlotte suggested that he could at least carve, he told her that the only dish he felt fit to carve was the soup.

Charlotte recounted all that had happened and said that she had run away because she could take no more of her father's bullying. Her plan now was to stand by her mother and live with her if she could. But it was a plan that her mother met with somewhat less enthusiasm than might have been expected. Unknown to Charlotte her father had offered to increase her mother's allowance to £50,000 a year, and now that Europe was at peace again, her mother was contemplating exactly what her father had hoped – a little bit of foreign travel.

The party was upstairs in the drawing room when Mercer arrived accompanied by ‘the Great UP'. After Charlotte's flight, when the Prince Regent went off to join a card party at the Duke of York's apartments, Mercer and the Bishop had agreed to go up to Con-naught House and try to persuade Charlotte to come home, and Cornelia Knight had refused to come with them because she could no longer bring herself to set foot in a house that belonged to the Princess of Wales.

Mercer was invited up to the drawing room, while the Bishop
was shown into the dining room. It was a pattern of precedence that was to be maintained throughout the night. Partisans of the Princess were brought straight upstairs: representatives of the Regent were at best shown into the dining room and in most cases not even admitted to the house.

The Bishop did not have to wait too long, however. He was soon sent back to find the Regent with a note from Charlotte, in which she promised to return to Warwick House provided she was allowed to see Mercer as often as she wished, and provided Miss Knight and Mrs Louis were allowed to remain members of her household.

He had not been long gone when a series of coaches and carriages arrived carrying the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Chief Justice and the other law officers, advisers and privy councillors who had been summoned and sent out by the Regent. To Brougham's much amused embarrassment, Charlotte merrily instructed the servants to tell them all to wait in their carriages.

Then Cornelia Knight arrived. As soon as Mercer and the Bishop had left Warwick House she had become so anxious about Charlotte that she changed her mind. She would have come after them then and there if she could. She had sent a note to Lady Salisbury explaining the emergency and asking if she could borrow her carriage. But the carriage had not been available until after it had dropped Lady Salisbury at the opera house.

In her memoir, Cornelia Knight wrote that once she was in the drawing room she gave Charlotte her royal seal, a key and a letter that had arrived after her departure. But she did not say who it was from.

The next to come was the Duke of Sussex. He had been dining with friends when Charlotte's cry for help arrived. It was so illegible that he had stuffed it in his pocket. It had taken a second note from Brougham to bring him.

Outside in the street, accepting that they were never going to be admitted, the law officers, advisers and privy councillors turned
their carriages and drove away. Upstairs in the drawing room the Duke of Sussex asked Brougham whether it would be lawful to resist if the Regent tried to take Charlotte away by force.

Brougham shook his head. ‘It would not', he said.

The Duke turned to Charlotte. ‘Then my dear, you hear what the law is. I can only advise you to return with as much speed and as little noise as possible.'

But Charlotte was not yet ready to take that sort of advice, even though Mercer and her mother agreed with it. She was still waiting for the Bishop to come back with her father's answer to her note – and Miss Knight was already tired of waiting. She would go down to Carlton House and see what was happening, and if possible she would confront the Regent. Since Lady Salisbury's carriage had been sent back to the opera house, she went in one of the carriages from Connaught House.

When the impetuous ‘Chevalier' reached Carlton House she found that all the eminent lawyers who had been waiting for Charlotte outside Connaught House were now waiting for the Regent in his drawing room. He was still playing cards, they said. But they knew that the Bishop had reached him, and that the Bishop was now on his way back to Connaught House.

Suspecting that Charlotte might want to spend the night with her mother, Miss Knight went over to Warwick House and asked Mrs Louis to pack a bag with Charlotte's nightdress and anything else she might need. When it was done, they set off together in the carriage.

By the time they reached Connaught House the Bishop had delivered the Regent's answer. Charlotte could go on seeing Mercer, but that was all. It was not enough. The friendly pleading and the obstinacy continued.

Some time between two and three in the morning the Duke of York arrived. He had always been a good friend to Charlotte, and as a Royal Duke he deserved to be received with respect, but on this
occasion he was the Regent's representative. He was shown into the dining room.

If the party upstairs had known that he was carrying a warrant empowering him to take the Princess home by force if necessary, they might have been a bit more cautious. Nevertheless the Princess of Wales did go down to talk to him. When she came back she reported that the Duke had been sent from his own card party to bring Charlotte back to Carlton House. He had not mentioned the warrant.

The night went on. Everybody pleaded. Charlotte, her eyes red with tears, still insisted that she would not go.

At last, shortly after dawn, Brougham led Charlotte to the window and showed her Hyde Park in the early sunlight. There was to be a by-election that morning. ‘In a few hours', he said, ‘all the streets and the park, now empty, will be crowded with tens of thousands. I have only to take you to that window and tell them your grievances, and they will all rise in your behalf.'

‘And why should they not?' said Charlotte.

Brougham replied:

Brougham had won again. The tearful Princess submitted. She would go back with the Duke of York to Carlton House. But she was a princess, and as such she insisted that she must be taken back in a royal coach. And while she waited for that coach to come she asked Brougham to write a short statement to the effect that she
was determined never to marry the Prince of Orange, and that ‘if ever there should be an announcement of such a match, it must be understood to be without her consent and against her will'. When it was written, she asked for six copies to be made, signed all of them and gave one to each person present.

Brougham was deeply impressed. ‘I had no idea of her having so much good in her', he said.

The carriage came. While everyone else went downstairs to see the Princess off, Cornelia Knight stayed in the drawing room. By her own admission she was too miserable to go.

Charlotte took the Duke of York's hand and climbed into the carriage. The Duke stepped in and sat beside her. Her mother came forward. The Princess, she said, must be accompanied by her maid. The Duke refused. Charlotte insisted. Mrs Louis climbed in and sat shyly opposite the Duke and the Princess.