Charlotte & Leopold (12 page)

They drove down Park Lane, along Birdcage Walk and up the Mall to Carlton House. It had been a long night. But the Prince Regent's cruelty knew no bounds. The Princess and her maid were kept waiting in the courtyard for half an hour before they were admitted into the house.

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

State Prisoner

O
N
15 J
ULY
1814 the Duke of Sussex wrote to the Prime Minister asking why Princess Charlotte of Wales was being held as a ‘state prisoner’ and demanding to be allowed to visit her.

He knew about Charlotte’s condition because he had received a letter from her. It had been written on stolen paper with a pencil dipped in milk, and it had been delivered by a secret postal service that began with the French master, Mr Sterkey, and then ran on through Cornelia Knight and Mercer Elphinstone.

For all that she was living in the comfort of Carlton House, Charlotte was indeed a prisoner. The warders were the Dowager Countess of Ilchester, the Dowager Countess of Rosslyn, her two nieces, the Misses Coates, and one of Charlotte’s former sub-governesses, Mrs Campbell, who, being a Tory, was now restored to favour with the Regent. There was always at least one of them watching her. Even at night one of them slept in her room, or else in the room beside it with the door open.

The only consolation was that loyal Mrs Louis had been allowed to stay on. But even she was as much of a prisoner as her Princess.
At night she was required to sleep on a sofa in Charlotte’s room. By day, whatever she was doing, she was always accompanied by two of the Regent’s own servants, one watching her and one guarding the door. When she went across to Warwick House to collect some of Charlotte’s clothes, Lady Ilchester herself went with her and told her ‘there must be no talking or messages’.

The only contact with the outside world lay through Mr Sterkey, Miss Knight and Mercer. Mercer did all that she dared to represent Charlotte’s interests. She was in close touch with Brougham, Earl Grey and the Duke of Sussex – and she was in touch with Prince Leopold.

Leopold wrote to Mercer on 17 July, and next day they met. He was anxious about Charlotte and he was eager to see her. But Mercer held out no hope for him. As she told him in her reply to his note, Charlotte had been so offended by his letter to her father that it had ‘put an end to all possibility of a happier future’.

If Charlotte really was offended that much, it can only have been because her father showed her the letter, or else because the naive old Bishop, who certainly did see it, described the contents to her in detail.

The letter was much more than the simple self-justification that the Regent described to Miss Knight. It was a blunt declaration of intent, combined with fawning flattery and not-too-subtle personal propaganda.

Leopold began by saying that he had only visited the Princess because she had invited him to do so. But he felt now that he might have offended her father by not asking his permission first, and that this was probably the reason for the coldness with which His Royal Highness had received him at a subsequent audience. Nevertheless he still had the confidence to assure the Regent that his intentions were serious, and to insist that, at a more appropriate time, they would be worthy of consideration.

‘Your Royal Highness’, he wrote, ‘who knows human nature so
thoroughly, and judges it so wisely, will be too kind to blame me for the desire, but I beg you to be sure that, with a character so cool and steady as mine, I would not dream of making definite suggestions at the present moment.’

It looked as though Leopold was courting her father not Charlotte, and his letter was enough to make August the favourite. Dashing, worldly, carefree August was the one who had been brave enough to write directly, and secretly, to Charlotte; and his letters were apparently so affectionate and romantic that it was too dangerous to do anything but burn them as soon as they had been read.

But for the time being there was little that Leopold could have done anyway. On the day after his meeting with Mercer, Charlotte, her ladies and Mrs Louis were moved down to Windsor, to Cranbourne Lodge, and soon afterwards he received news that Prince Emich Charles of Leningen had died. By the end of the month he was in Bavaria comforting his widowed sister Victoria.

On her arrival at Cranbourne Lodge, Charlotte was alarmed to discover that Lady Ilchester was no longer her ‘chief warder’. She and the other ladies were now under the direction of a male ‘governor’, a seventy-year-old retired general called Thomas Garth. But, to her relief, Charlotte soon formed a good impression of both the General and her new home. The General, she told Mercer, was ‘very good hearted’, even though he was ‘very vulgar in his conversation and language’; the lodge, despite its isolation, was ‘very cheerful’ and ‘far superior to the Lower Lodge’.

Next day the Duke of Sussex, who had received no answer to his letter to the Prime Minister, stood up in the House of Lords and asked him five very well informed questions: was the Princess Charlotte still allowed to receive visits from friends; was she still allowed what he described as ‘the free exercise of her pen’; was she, as he put it, ‘in the same state of liberty as a person not in confinement would be in’; had her doctors recommended a holiday by the sea, and if so would she be allowed to take one; and finally, now that she had
reached the age at which she was constitutionally entitled to ascend the throne and rule without a regent, were there any plans to provide her with her own appropriate establishment?

Lord Liverpool declined to answer, on the grounds that to do so would be to accept the ‘disagreeable’ and ‘unnecessary’ implication of the questions.

The Duke was not satisfied. In response, he told their Lordships that he planned to call for a full debate and bring in a motion of censure against the government. But during the next few days he learned from the newspapers that Charlotte had been seen out riding with the General at Windsor, and Earl Grey persuaded him that public arguments were never the best way of resolving private royal quarrels.

The Duke withdrew his motion. The only outcome was that the Regent summoned him to Carlton House, rebuked him loudly, in language that would have shocked even General Garth, and then dismissed him like a servant and never spoke to him again.

In her isolation at Cranbourne Lodge Charlotte was at least allowed to see newspapers. She read that the motion had been withdrawn. The week went by. The sense of being watched was oppressive. The loneliness without the company of Miss Knight or any hope of being allowed to see Mercer was dispiriting.

Then her father appeared, accompanied by the ‘Bish-UP’, and told her with undisguised pleasure that her mother was planning to leave for an extended tour of the Continent. Charlotte would, of course, be allowed to go up to London to say goodbye.

Charlotte’s mother had always been less supportive than Charlotte had hoped, and more of a liability than Charlotte was prepared to recognise. But her planned departure was as much of a blow to Charlotte as it was to Brougham, and the way in which she said
farewell was very painful. When Charlotte went to Connaught House, she faced the truth for the first time. Her mother did not really care for her. The Princess of Wales was so excited about her impending adventure that she could not even bring herself to pretend. Her manner was ‘indifferent’.

‘I feel so hurt at
that
being a
leave-taking
’, Charlotte wrote to Mercer, ‘for God knows how long, or
what events
may occur before we meet again, or if ever she will return.’

The Royal Navy laid on the one warship that was accustomed to carrying important ladies. On 9 August the Princess of Wales boarded HMS
Jason
off Lancing and sailed south for France. Charlotte never saw her again.

For the rest of that month the principal preoccupation at the isolation lodge was the holiday that the Duke of Sussex mentioned in his questions to the Prime Minister. Charlotte, as the Duke knew, was longing for a holiday by the sea, and her doctors were all in favour of it. She really did have a sore, swollen knee, which was now so bad that they told her to stop riding, and since her arrival at Cranbourne Lodge she had been displaying symptoms of depression. The sea air, in their view, would be ideal for both. But, to everybody’s exasperation, the Prince Regent prevaricated. As Earl Grey put it in one of his letters to Mercer, ‘All the best season will be wasted before she gets to the sea-side.’

Charlotte wanted to take Mercer with her, but the Regent said no. He claimed that Mercer’s father would not allow it. Lord Keith, he said, did not want his daughter to spend too much time in isolation with Charlotte, where there would be no chance of her meeting a suitable husband.

Charlotte wanted to go to fashionable Brighton, but the Regent said no to that as well. He wanted Brighton to himself. Eventually he asked the Queen if they could borrow Gloucester Lodge, a house that she and the King owned far away in Dorset, in no longer quite so fashionable Weymouth. The Queen took her time and then said yes,
reluctantly. And so, at last, with September approaching, Weymouth was chosen as the setting for Charlotte’s seaside holiday.

Shortly before she left, Charlotte went to a musical evening at Windsor Castle. When the music was over, one of her aunts, Princess Mary, took her aside and expressed genuine concern for her future. ‘I see no chance for you of comfort’, she said, ‘and certainly not at present as things are, without your marrying’.

As she often did when marriage was mentioned, Charlotte threw in a red herring. She knew that everyone in the royal family disapproved of the recent marriage between her uncle the Duke of Cumberland and a widowed daughter of the Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Princess Frederica, who had once jilted his brother the Duke of Cambridge. So Charlotte suggested that she might marry Prince Charles of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

‘Oh, God, no’, said Princess Mary, and then added, ‘I would be the last now to recommend or to wish for anyone in particular.’

Charlotte then decided to ask her aunt about someone whom she genuinely regarded as a candidate.

She knew that there was no point in mentioning Prince August. Everyone in the royal family was aware that he had been paying court to Charlotte and they all disapproved of him. The well-meaning Duchess of York had even tried to put her off him by warning her that he liked ladies excessively and that his breath smelt. But the first criticism was one of the attributes that made him so dangerously attractive, and the second, if true, was clearly something that Charlotte and a great many other ladies were prepared to overlook.

August was still the favourite. He had just left London and, like Leopold, was on his way to Vienna. Most of the European rulers and their retinues were assembling there for the congress that everybody hoped would bring lasting peace. But Charlotte fully expected to stay in touch with August while he was away, not only through Miss Knight, but now through Mercer as well.

Nevertheless, although August was still the favourite, Leopold
was not as much out of favour as Mercer had made out. Charlotte asked her aunt what she thought of him.

Princess Mary blushed noticeably. ‘From what I saw of him, he was very good looking’, she said. ‘A very gentlemanlike young man.’

‘I don’t like him’, said Charlotte, ‘for he does not suit my taste’.

Princess Mary thought for a moment and then said, ‘You don’t… don’t.’

The enigmatic answer, combined with the blush, convinced Charlotte that her aunt was being as deceptive as she was.

A few days later she screwed up the courage to ask another aunt directly whether her Aunt Mary was in favour of Prince Leopold or not. Princess Sophia honestly did not know, but she did know that the Duchess of York supported him. Leopold, she said, was ‘the greatest possible favourite’ with the Duchess of York. As for her own opinion, Princess Sophia felt that Leopold would not do, if only because he did not have any money.

Charlotte could not help feeling that her family was making plans for her behind her back again. Certainly everyone was being much warmer and more attentive to her now, and for the time being Charlotte was determined to be docile in return. As she told Mercer in her last letter before leaving for her holiday, ‘I think of nothing but
how
I can get out of their
clutches
& torment them afterwards.’