Charlotte & Leopold (7 page)

Throughout all this Charlotte spent a large part of every day nursing Mrs Gagarin. She had not been well for several months, and by the end of March it seemed likely that she would not recover.

‘While she was capable of taking airings', wrote Cornelia Knight, ‘her Royal Highness constantly sent her out in a carriage, and when she grew so weak as to be confined to her room, visited her two or three times a day, carried her in her arms to the window, and exerted every faculty to soothe and comfort her.'

Her death was recorded in the
Gentleman's Magazine:

‘July 1. At Warwick House, Mrs Gagarin, many years an affectionate and faithful attendant of the Princess Charlotte of Wales. Her last moments were solaced by the condescending and unremitting attentions of her Royal Highness, reflecting a lustre on the native goodness of her heart, superior to all the appendages of her exalted rank.'

Charlotte, wrote Miss Knight, ‘was very low for a long time afterwards, though she endeavoured to suppress and conceal her feelings'.

Yet amid all this sadness and frustration there was one element of happiness – the presence of Mercer Elphinstone.

Mercer came down from Scotland in the middle of March and stayed until the end of July.

When she knew her friend was coming, Charlotte wrote to her father, saying that she had heard the news from a third party and asking his permission to see her. Their correspondence had been, as Charlotte put it, ‘conducted with such secrecy & prudence' that the Prince was convinced they had not been in touch with each other. All Charlotte's letters were still being opened by his agents at the Post Office, and there had been no sign of it. He therefore acceded to what he regarded as a reasonable request.

There were some, including Cornelia Knight, who suspected that the Prince had written to Mercer saying that he would only let her see his daughter if she promised to persuade her not to be too supportive of her mother. But Mercer, who was always wary of Charlotte's mother, would have done that anyway if she thought it appropriate.

For more than four months Charlotte and Mercer saw each other as often as they pleased. But the Prince Regent had forbidden Mercer to stay in the same house as Charlotte. So when Charlotte was in London, Mercer came round to Warwick House from her own house in Harley Street, and when Charlotte was in Windsor at Lower Lodge, Cornelia Knight arranged for Mercer to stay nearby with a friend, Mrs Hallam.

Throughout those months there were no letters. There is therefore no record of what they discussed. But there is no doubt that one of the most important topics was the rumour that Mercer mentioned in one of her last letters from Scotland.

In her reply Charlotte wrote that she too had heard it. Perhaps, if the Princess were willing to pay it, the price of freedom would soon be available.

It was being said that the Prince Regent and his ministers were
planning to arrange a marriage between Princess Charlotte and the Hereditary Prince of Orange.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

‘Slender Billy'

B
ACK
IN
1795, while Charlotte's mother and Lord Malmesbury were held up in Hanover by the fighting in Holland, the Dutch Stadholder and his family had escaped to England. But his eldest son, Prince William VI, who succeeded him as head of the House of Orange in 1806, did not like England or the English. He blamed his British allies for abandoning his army as soon as the French returned to the attack. After only a few months in London, he left for Prussia, where he spent the next twelve years attempting to ingratiate himself with Napoleon.

Since Napoleon had made his brother Louis King of Holland, it was never likely that he was going to give it back to the House of Orange; in 1807 Prince William realised at last that it would be wiser to hedge his bets. He may not have liked it, but he had to accept that, if Napoleon were ever to be defeated, the people who were most likely to help him were the British. He approached Lord Malmesbury, who had once been British Ambassador at The Hague, and suggested that the natural alliance between Holland and England should be strengthened by a marriage between his son
and heir, known as the Hereditary Prince of Orange, and the heir presumptive to the throne of England, Princess Charlotte.

Malmesbury could see the benefits. Britain's security would be greatly enhanced if the state that lay between England and Hanover were tied irrevocably to the British crown, and if the Dutch fleet were to be combined with the Royal Navy, Britannia's rule of the waves would be unassailable. It was a good idea, and it was not, after all, a new idea. At the end of the seventeenth century the son of the Stadholder had married the daughter of the King of England, and they had ruled England jointly as William and Mary.

Encouraged by Malmesbury, the Dutch Prince decided to prepare his son for this possible opportunity by sending him to Oxford to get an English education. In 1811, after Charlotte's father had become Regent, the Prince of Orange flattered him by consulting him about his son's future: it was agreed that the young man, now twenty years old, should be commissioned into the British army. So when he came down from Oxford, the Hereditary Prince of Orange went out to Spain, to serve as an aide-de-camp to Wellington.

By the spring of 1813 the tide had turned against Napoleon. Everywhere his armies were falling back towards France. In the north, the Russians and Prussians were driving them southwards. In the south, Wellington and his allies were driving them northwards. The monarchs and statesmen of Europe were beginning to plan for the peace that was now within their grasp.

From the British point of view, the best way to maintain that peace was to create a strong ‘buffer state' separating France from Prussia, and the ideal state for that was Holland. But Holland would have to be strong enough to withstand any initial threat, and stable enough to remain reliable. To make it strong enough, why not increase its size by incorporating part of the Austrian Netherlands, in the area that is now Belgium? To make it stable, why not give it a constitutional monarchy, like England's, and make the Prince of Orange a king instead of just a stadholder? And to extend the buffer
even further, and make the new state susceptible to British influence, why not arrange a marriage between neighbours – between the ruling families of Holland and Hanover?

So that was the plan. The Prince of Orange was delighted. He was going to be a king, and king of an enlarged kingdom as well. It was more than he could have dreamed possible.

But so far no one had bothered to mention it to the future Queen of England or the Prince who might one day succeed his father as King William II of Holland.

Nevertheless there were too many whispers. Charlotte was sure that the plan was true, and she was in two minds about it. On the one hand the Hereditary Prince of Orange came from a family that her mother ‘detested', and Charlotte would never ‘be tempted to purchase temporary ease by
gratifying the Windsor & Ministerial cabals'
. On the other hand, if the Prince had enough ‘qualities of the head & heart' to make him ‘likeable and desirable', he offered a chance to change her life for the better, even if ‘love' was ‘out of the question'.

All that was certain for the time being was that Charlotte was prepared to give the plan a chance. But her first experience of the House of Orange did not leave her with a good impression.

It was on 12 August, at the Prince Regent's birthday party – the one to which Charlotte went without a present. The party was held at Sandhurst, the new home of the Military Academy. In the morning ‘the Great UP', now Bishop of Salisbury, consecrated the chapel, and the Queen presented new colours to the cadets. In the evening, the entire company sat down to dinner. The royal family and the guests of honour, including the Prince of Orange, who was in England to negotiate his son's future, sat at a table inside the house, and all the other guests sat in tents in the grounds.

According to Charlotte, the only man in the royal party who was not ‘dead drunk' was her favourite uncle, the Duke of Brunswick. In the course of the evening the Prince Regent slid silently under
the table, where he was eventually joined by the Prince of Orange, the Commander in Chief and almost all his ministers. By the time they got there, the dishevelled Prince of Orange had managed to discard his coat and waistcoat, most of the ministers were incapable of speaking and the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, was in such a state that, by his own admission, he could not remember next day where he had been or who he had been with.

The last to fall was the Commander in Chief, the Duke of York, who did so by rolling backwards out of his chair, banging his head against a wine cooler and pulling the table cloth and everything on it on top of him. He was revived by the Duke of Brunswick, who poured iced water over his head, and he was then sent back to London in a post-chaise, wrapped in a greatcoat.

When the Queen left, she was kept waiting for ‘a full half hour' while various nervous equerries searched for her host and helped him out to see her into her carriage.

In Charlotte's opinion, the double celebration of the opening of Sandhurst and the Prince Regent's birthday ‘began badly and ended in tragedy'. Miss Knight agreed. ‘It was a sad business. We went home very quietly in an open carriage by the lovely moonlight.'

Two days later Charlotte described the chaos in a letter to Mercer, who was now back in Scotland, and two days after that she wrote again, reporting that Wellington had defeated the French in the Pyrenees and was advancing into France, and that the news had been brought to London by the Hereditary Prince of Orange.

Charlotte was sure that the Prince had been summoned to meet her, and in support of this she recounted a conversation that had taken place between her and ‘a Government person' at Windsor. According to this unnamed minister, it was being said that Charlotte
had ‘persistently refused' to consider her planned marriage to the Hereditary Prince of Orange.

Charlotte was incensed by his impertinence and infuriated to learn that she was already being blamed for her response to a plan that had not yet even been put to her. So she decided to tease the minister and add a red herring to his rumour. Without denying what he had said, she told him that she much preferred the Duke of Gloucester.

‘Good God', said he. ‘I can hardly believe you are serious.'

When he then reminded her that she could not marry without her father's permission, Charlotte answered that ‘nothing was so easy as to make a publick declaration that I never would marry anyone else'.

The trick worked. The ‘Government person' was clearly ‘both surprised & frightened'.

‘I was rather amused I confess', wrote Charlotte, and she ‘laughed heartily' after he was gone.

But in reality she felt threatened. Even the government was gossiping. She went on the defensive. She declined to attend every event at which she thought the Hereditary Prince of Orange might be present. But she was curious enough to ask about him, and she learned a bit from one of his dancing partners, Georgiana Fitzroy. The Hereditary Prince was apparently ‘very gentlemanlike, well informed & pleasant' and he was ‘the
best waltzer
that ever was'. But he was also ‘excessively plain' and ‘thin as a needle'. Georgiana thought that Charlotte would find him ‘frightful'.

Had Charlotte but known it, the Hereditary Prince was as apprehensive as she was. It was a relief to both of them when he went back to Spain after less than a month without being introduced to her. But she still felt that the plan was brewing, and she knew that she was being watched more closely than ever. Lady Catherine Osborne was everywhere. For a while Charlotte and Miss Knight had avoided being understood by her by talking to each other in
German. But Lady Catherine, who had her own governess, had learned enough German to make out what they were saying. So now they were talking to each other in Italian, and Lady Catherine was busy learning that from a music master.

One night, when Charlotte found ‘her little Ladyship' loitering yet again in a dark passage, she lost patience, pushed her into the water closet, locked the door and kept her there for a quarter of an hour. ‘It did for a good laugh to Miss K & me', she told Mercer, ‘as the young ladies dismay was not small, & her
assurances
thro' the door
very amusing
'.

At last, on 14 October, while Charlotte was still isolated at Windsor, she had her first ‘sounding out' about marriage. It came from Sir Henry Halford, who spent ‘a full hour and a half' with her, asking her opinion and praising the Hereditary Prince of Orange.

Charlotte could see that things were ‘coming to a crisis', but she was a long way from being ready to commit herself. She tried a trick that she had tried before. She told the doctor that she was ‘resolved firmly' not to accept the Hereditary Prince of Orange and that she much preferred the Duke of Gloucester, who was after all an Englishman.

The trick worked again. Sir Henry believed her. When he took his leave, he told her solemnly that he would have to report all that she had said to her father.

As she told Mercer, Charlotte would have much preferred this to have happened when she was back in London, where it would be easier to get good advice. But she shrewdly wrote to the leader of the opposition, Earl Grey, asking him to tell her what to do.

Four days later the Prince Regent appeared at Lower Lodge. Since Charlotte had to change for dinner at Windsor Castle as soon as he left, Cornelia Knight wrote to Mercer that evening to tell her what had been said, and Charlotte followed with her own letter next day.

They were both ‘shocked & disgusted' by the language that the
Prince used to describe the Duke of Gloucester, despite the persistent protesting of Miss Knight. ‘It was so excessively indecent', wrote Charlotte, ‘that I hardly knew which way to look'. They were also indignant when he accused his daughter of being regularly drunk, and then added that she could not possibly have fallen for the Duke of Gloucester if she had not been. But they were amused when he suggested that her affection for the Duke Gloucester might just be a ruse to disguise her true and equally unacceptable fancy for the Duke of Devonshire. And they were both suspicious at the end when he became magnanimous. There were plenty of eligible princes to choose from, he said, and then assured them that he was not the sort of man who would force his daughter to marry anyone against her will.

‘The
fluency
with which he
utter'd falsehoods'
left Charlotte ‘convinced that there does not live one who is a greater coward or a greater hypocrite'. But, as Mercer had advised, she held her tongue.

Next day, a long letter arrived from Earl Grey. The leader of the opposition's advice to Charlotte was to do what she was doing already – play for time.