Princesses (15 page)

At the Royal Academy summer exhibition a week after Octavius's shocking death, the royal family inspected Gainsborough's ‘numerical' work – oval heads of the King and Queen, and of all their children, excluding the absent Prince Frederick. There in the bottom right-hand corner were Octavius, bright eyed and golden haired–just as he had been in life – and diminutive Alfred, still in baby clothes, ‘painted by
remembrance.'
The princesses, trained not to show emotion in public, were overcome and cried, regardless of their company. These portraits of their dead brothers, when hung in the Queen's House and when later engraved, became life-long talismans for the princesses of what had been.

Over the Birthday in June 1783 hung the cloud not only of the coming peace negotiations with a victorious America, but of Octavius's death. The King was at least as cast down by his four-year-old son's death in May as he was by the negotiations that in Paris that September would accord the American rebels full independence and establish an American republic.

But, for the Queen and for her daughters, there were immediate concerns to divert them from their grief. In July, Princess Royal and Princess Augusta acquired their first ever lady-in-waiting – Lady Elizabeth Waldegrave. It was a practical acknowledgement that, at rising seventeen, Princess Royal now took drawing, painting and even the dread music lessons to avoid idleness rather than because her education was incomplete. The Queen warned her old friend Lady Holderness, who had recommended Lady Elizabeth, to put the new recruit on guard: ‘See her and tell her my way of things, particularly how I hate intrigues and that I must insist
that in case she ever sees anything improper in the princesses' behaviour I must be told of it, and that I am the person she must
talk to.'

At the age of thirty-nine, the Queen herself was expecting a fifteenth child, conceived after Prince Alfred's death and due early this August. A cradle with satin curtains and a matching coverlet was made ready. Mrs Johnson, who had been first employed as royal midwife seventeen years before at the Princess Royal's birth, was in attendance. And on 7 August 1783 Queen Charlotte gave birth to a sixth princess, named Amelia in compliment to her wealthy great-aunt in London.

The birth of Princess Amelia at Windsor – the only child of the King and Queen to be born there – acted as a tonic on her father's spirits. While grieving for Octavius, he was as proud and possessive a parent as though Princess Amelia had been his first child. Amelia was to be the most turbulent and tempestuous of all the princesses. She would show a strength of will that would surprise and divide her doting relations, but as yet, beneath the ivory satin curtains of her cradle and under the coverlet embroidered with garden flowers, she was merely the latest royal baby in a long line.

The birth of Amelia did not obliterate for her sisters the memory of their brothers Alfred and Octavius, but they did not dwell on the death of the latter, as their father did. Three months after Amelia was born, the King wrote to Lord Dartmouth that every day ‘increases the chasm I do feel for that beloved
object
[Octavius]'. The artist Benjamin West probably best soothed the King's ‘woe', if he astonished others, with a huge painting entitled
The Apotheosis of Prince Octavius
exhibited at the Royal Academy the year after that Prince's death, and featuring Prince Alfred perched on a cloud and stretching out baby arms in welcome to his elder brother. Way below, an earthly landscape features Windsor Castle, from which Prince Octavius has presumably been launched.

The King's feelings of political frustration about the humiliating final stages of the American war had led him to consider abdicating the throne of England and retiring to Hanover. Amelia's birth, following so swiftly on Octavius's death and followed itself a month later by the firing of the Tower guns signalling peace between England and the new United States of America, was felt, and was always to be remembered within the family, as a time of hope and redemption.

For many years Amelia was to repay this investment in her by being quite as beautiful and winning a child as her brother Octavius had ever been. With hindsight, it is possible to say that she was a child of whom too much was expected. ‘Our little sister is without exception one of the prettiest children that I have ever seen,' the Princess Royal, in September,

wrote with satisfaction to her brother William, who had been despatched the previous month to Hanover. (His parents had been horrified at his rough sailor's manners and hoped that a course in his father's Electorate would prepare him better to be an officer.) She regretted that, being absent, he would miss Amelia's christening, and, with the material rather than spiritual comforts the day would bring in mind, wrote, ‘I wish that I could send you some of the plum cake in my letter … but that being impossible you must be satisfied with my wishes.'

So great was the gap in age between the Princess Royal and Princess Augusta and their baby sister, that the elder sisters, at nearly seventeen and nearly fifteen, stood godparents – with their brother the Prince of Wales – when the Archbishop of Canterbury baptized the child on 17 September 1783 at the Chapel Royal, St James's. Princess Elizabeth, whose debut had not yet been decided upon, looked on with her younger brothers and sisters. Princess Amelia was the fifteenth child of King George III and Queen Charlotte to be christened there – and, although no one knew it, she was to be the last. Before the chapel would again host a royal baptism, one or other of the children gathered around Amelia's font must first take a bride or groom.

One thing was certain.
Over
the Queen of England's dead body would
her
sister-in-law the Duchess of Brunswick succeed in the campaign she had recently resumed to secure the Princess Royal as a bride for her ill-favoured son, the Hereditary Prince of that duchy. ‘I would much rather keep all my
daughters
with me for ever than see
them
marry
there,'
the Queen wrote to her brother Duke Charles in July 1783. The King's sister Augusta – Duchess of Brunswick since 1780 – had recently married off her own eldest daughter Augusta, at the
age
of fifteen, to the Hereditary Prince of Württemberg. The King rejected his sister's advances in November 1782, saying that he intended none of his daughters to leave home before they were seventeen. He later ignored the Duchess's riposte, ‘Your princesses must be very different from all other girls, if they did not feel themselves unfortunate not to be
established.'
The Princess Royal turned seventeen in September 1783, but her father made no plans to interrupt her round of education ‘reasonable occupation' and entertainment with her sisters in England.

Details of that round follow from the correspondence that Princess Augusta struck up with her brother William in Hanover: ‘We walk for two hours of a morning and our instructions last from eleven till two. Then I have an hour's English reading from three to four and sometimes go out with Mama,' wrote Princess Augusta on 6 November 1783. One imagines her sucking her pen and thinking what next to say. Inspiration came: ‘We went the other day to Baron Alvensleben [the Hanoverian Minister at the Court of St James's] at Ham Common who gave us a very handsome breakfast. From thence we went to Hampton Court Palace, which I think very fine. Last Thursday we went to Kew, and we drove around Richmond Garden, where there are great alterations for the
better
. We always go to town with Papa and Mama, and then go to the drawing room and the play. Sometimes we play at cards in the evening, sometimes work, and draw.' But Princess Augusta's letter was not finished. William had sent her a ‘pin' or brooch bearing a ‘shade' or silhouette of his profile, Augusta had sent him some of her hair. ‘I cannot help once
more
thanking you for your dear little shade which
I love
being
your gift and being
yourself
. You cannot have more love for my hair as you are so good to say you have than me for this
pin.'

Given time and practice, Princess Augusta would become an excellent and reliable source of family news. But the Queen did not now encourage her daughters to write to their brother. ‘Their mornings are so taken up with their different masters,' she wrote to William in February 1784, ‘that unless they make use of every moment, they hardly can find time for writing
letters.'
And the Queen wrote to William of a promised gift: ‘I shall be glad to have your picture, but give me leave to advise you that your income is not that of your elder brothers.'

William, for all his sisters' good wishes, was failing to reap the advantage of the courses in Hanover which his father had hoped would teach him to become a useful officer. His governor, General Bude, commented on the Prince's ‘great hauteur … extremely good opinion of himself' and ‘lightness of character. All he hears in praise of his brother [Frederick] excites his jealousy, not his
emulation.'
And a passion William developed for the daughter of his uncle Charles of Mecklenburg, ‘Lolo' or Charlotte, ended with that Princess, on Queen Charlotte's advice, being despatched to her maternal grandmother in Darmstadt to evade the importunate Prince.

The elder princesses at home revelled in William's attention, the Princess Royal writing on 30 March 1784: ‘I wish that the air balloon earrings that you sent-me could transport me through the air, that I might see you and Frederick, and that after
having
spent a few hours with you, I might return in the same
way.'
Princess Augusta hoped, too, and for the same reason, that ‘the air balloons were brought to perfection'. ‘But she added, not knowing how famous one Vincenzo Lunardi would become within a few months, ‘I don't think that will be very
soon.'

Like her father, the Princess Royal was incapable of writing without casting a damper on things, and her letter had begun, ‘My dear William, I am very happy to hear from the Queen that you pass your time pleasantly at Hanover. Perhaps you may wonder that, knowing this, I should be selfish enough to wish you to be here, where you would certainly not enjoy as many amusements. But, however, there are some pleasures which I do not doubt would afford you much satisfaction.' And she wrote of Mary and Sophia attending the opera for the first time the night before, ‘they were
very much
entertained with the
dancing.'

While the schoolroom – with its lessons in history, geography and
needlework
– was still the usual province of the
younger
princesses Mary and Sophia, the three eldest were much with their parents. Their ‘instructions' came more and more often from art masters and music masters, and
from those among them who had some speciality or ‘fancy work' to offer – painting on velvet, etching, sculpting in wax or in clay, and even ‘blotting', the art of creating landscapes out of ink blots. And of course the princesses continued to draw – daily, nightly. Mrs Delany attests
to them
sitting with their mother round a large table after dinner with ‘books, work,
pencils and paper'
spread out. The Queen, always on the alert for dispelling ‘oisiveté' or leisure time with ‘reasonable occupation' for her daughters, made sure that they pursued these studies as seriously as though their lives depended on it.

The Princess Royal etched her image of Prince Octavius in 1785, copying a copy by her drawing master, John Gresse, of the Gainsborough original. In addition, she made five etchings of languorous ladies, entided
The Five Senses,
which she copied from drawings by Benjamin West, apparently made for her specific use. (West was everywhere at Windsor – even called in, when the Queen and her daughters were with their hairdresser at the Lodge, to give his opinion of the arrangement of jewels in their hair.) In the King's libraries in London, Kew and Windsor were remarkable sets of drawings by artists ranging from Leonardo da Vinci to Piazzetta, and even prints by John Hamilton Mortimer, who specialized in theatrical portrait heads. With this splendid resource to hand, and with the guidance of John Gresse, the princesses copied the heads of philosophers, of peasant children and of turbaned
Saracens
. Princess Elizabeth even produced much later a portrait of Lady Charlotte Finch, copying the image from an earlier miniature.

Just as at Kew, like their mother and the other ladies of the
household,
the princesses did not ‘dress' till dinner at Windsor, but wore morning gowns. Thus on a visit to Bulstrode in 1783 all five princesses, and the other ladies of the party, wore ‘white muslin polonaises, white chip hats, with white
feathers.'
The Queen alone was distinguished by a black hat and cloak. Cloaks and greatcoats were useful when the need came to broach the great outdoors, or even just the wind in the passages at Windsor. Even after the princesses had ‘dressed', they did not always appear in splendour. On an evening visit in 1779 to Bulstrode they wore, like their mother and her ladies, ‘blue tabby, with white satin puckered petticoats, with a blue border, and their heads quite
low.'
Mrs Delany noted on a visit to the Queen's Lodge in the autumn of 1783: ‘All the royal family were dressed in a uniform for the demi-saison, of a violet blue armozine, with gauze aprons, etc' The Queen was distinguished by ‘the addition of a great many fine
pearls.'

For high days and holidays, and for appearances in public – at Court, at the theatre, at the Ancient Music concerts of which the King and Queen were so fond – the princesses were dressed distinctively, either exactly alike
or in the same dress in different colours. As early as the Princess Royal's thirteenth birthday, for instance, she was in ‘deep orange or
scarlet'
– by candlelight, Mrs Delany could not distinguish which – with Princess Augusta in pink and Elizabeth in blue. In addition their dress generally referred to or replicated that of their mother's grander production.