Princess Caroline talked a great deal. I suppose she was all nerves. As amiable as the Royal Highnesses were they were still strangers to her. She spoke good English, better than my mother or my father who had been so many years in England, and sometimes she lapsed into French, which always helps to give a refined gloss. But there the elegance ended. She was florid, with a very jutting bosom which her gown did nothing to flatter and her stockings were dirty. Mrs Che had it from Lady Herbert that the Princess of Wales had no objection to washing and changing her linen, only that in Brunswick she hadn’t been accustomed to the practice and so would have to be reminded to do it.
She was very jolly, and free with her opinions, roaring with laughter and never hesitating to take a second slice of cake while everyone fixed their smiles and studied the floor. It was so obvious she would not do. I longed for the party to be over. I felt I was watching a fly that was caught in a spider’s web but didn’t yet realize it.
At supper her flaws were dissected.
Amelia’s chief complaint was that her eyelashes were pale and colourless.
‘Also,’ she said, ‘Wales is right, she does wear too much rouge.’
Sofy said, ‘I think she has a naturally high colour.’
Minny said, ‘Her colour doesn’t matter and neither do her eyelashes. What matters is she hasn’t an ounce of circumspection. Imagine rattling on like that, and in Her Majesty’s presence.’
The question was, who should correct her? Not the Queen, who had never wanted her in the first place, and seemingly not the Prince of Wales who was already finding reasons to be away from her as much as possible. Amelia thought Lady Jersey should take her in hand.’
I said, ‘But Lady Jersey will do nothing but mischief. Surely it suits her very well for the Prince to dislike his wife?’
Amelia said, ‘What can you mean?’
Minny rushed in. She said, ‘Nellie means that Lady Jersey loves a project. She’s never happier than when she’s being useful. But this isn’t her affair. Wales must help Caroline to be more to his liking. He must just try a little harder. After all, the King can’t always have enjoyed Her Majesty’s particular little ways but he’s made the best of things.’
For all the talk of the Prince loathing his wife it transpired that he could endure at least a little of her company. Before my visit ended exciting news was whispered around Lower Lodge. The Princess of Wales had missed her monthly show and was believed to have conceived a child.
Sofy said, ‘I do pray it’s true. Now we shall really be aunts.’ Of course Billy Clarence already had two sons of his actress paramour, Dora Jordan, but, like Prince Gus’s child who had been sent to Devonshire, they did not exist.
Sofy begged me to go with them to Weymouth. She said I looked in need of sea air, she said the summer would be dull without me, but I had no wish to go anywhere near Dorset.
I said, ‘I can’t. I have obligations in London now.’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Jack Buzzard. Do you really mean to marry him? You don’t seem very eager.’
‘We have no money. Perhaps next year.’
‘If I had a sweetheart I’d marry him instantly and live on bread and butter. But if Jack Buzzard hasn’t named the day why can’t you come to Weymouth?’
‘Because Jack needs my help and you don’t, now you have your spectacles. Isn’t it good to be able to thread your own needles again?’
‘I suppose so. Even though I look a fright.’ I said, ‘You know you don’t.’
‘Not that it matters,’ she said. ‘As we’re all to be kept walled up like nuns no man will ever have to look at me, spectacles or no. Royal will be twenty-nine in September, you know. It’s all too hopeless.’
But Royal’s wait was nearly over. Fritz, Prince of Württemburg, had her in his sights. Sofy wrote:
Gloucester House, Weymouth, August 3rd
My dearest Nellie,
The Waleses ARE going to have a baby. Isn’t it thrilling? It will be born after Christmas, and now we have another cause for excitement. We may soon be sewing Royal’s trousseau! Fritz Württemburg has made her an offer and it is being SERIOUSLY CONSIDERED. Minny says the portcullis has been raised an inch but will need to go a good deal higher for any Württemburg to squeeze under it as they are quite famous for their rotundity. Royal seems well disposed towards the match and the Queen thinks it very suitable, but the King delays and delays and makes endless investigations into Fritz’s character. There have been RUMOURS. I wish you were here to help me fathom them.
Miss Tod had never heard of Duke Fritz but she made urgent enquiries. In Soho you could always find someone to guide you through the thicket of European royalty. Here is what she discovered.
Royal’s suitor was a widower, with three children. His deceased wife, Zelmira, was the older sister of Caroline, our Princess of Wales. Those were the facts. The rest was conjecture, shrouded in a cold Russian mist. Fritz had married Zelmira when she was fifteen and they had gone to Russia to reap the bounty of his sister’s marriage to the Tsarevich. He was given a governorship and they lived there very well, perhaps more comfortably than they would have done in Württemburg. But when it was time for Fritz to return to his Duchy, to prepare for the day when he would be its king, Zelmira had refused to go with him. She said he was a beast and a brute and she would endure no more of it. So Fritz went home without her and took the children with him, and she stayed in Russia where she soon died, some said of a broken heart, some said from an excess of ecstasy while being ravished by a Cossack, and some said from having a pillow put over her inconvenient face.
Duke Fritz was tried before the Meard Street Kitchen Table Court and found guilty of ‘something unnatural at the very least’. As Miss Tod said in her summing up, ‘What woman would abandon three children, except she has been abominably used?’
Poor Royal. Her first—perhaps her only—chance of a husband, and for the suitor to have such a troubling history. But then, perhaps Royal wouldn’t have known how to live with a kindly husband. The Queen had accustomed her to criticism by discovering some fault in her every day. If Duke Fritz turned out to be all benevolence she might miss her daily scolding.
The Royalties seemed anyway to court bad luck in marriage. York and his duchess lived as strangers, Prince Gus was kept a thousand miles from his true love, Clarence’s wife wasn’t even to be spoken of and Wales, who had married for money, was as hard-pressed as ever. The great improvement he had expected had been eaten away. Parliament said his vast debts couldn’t simply be wiped from the books and therefore monies must be set aside from his new allowance every year until the debt was cleared. We were at war and it wasn’t seemly for a Royal Highness to live so free and easy. But the Prince of Wales never did mend his ways. He couldn’t buy one morning robe or one sabre but must order half a dozen. Furthermore, he was stuck with a wife he disliked.
Morphew drove me to Hammersmith for Papi’s birthday and gave me his assessment of the Hanovers.
‘Bad breeding,’ he said. ‘All this marrying kin is contrary to nature and I’ll quote you a forhinstance. Dogs. If you don’t keep them apart before you know it you’ll have sisters whelping off brothers and all sorts. Then what do you get? I’ll tell you. Temperment, that’s what, and runts, with addled brains. Now I never heard of this Fritz Wartyburg but I’ll lay you a wager now, no good’ll come of it. Boil it down, he’s kin. No, if the Princess Royal is getting skittish they should find her an honest Englishman. And you can tell ’em I said so.’
Mother said, ‘How vass der jorney, Herzchen? I heff told Morvew he moss not drive so fast und he moss not spit. Now ve are in Hemmersmit, you know, he sometimes iss not nice.’
I said, ‘He didn’t spit.’
‘Gut,’ she said. ‘I sink, Nellie, venn you marry Jack ve vill giff you Morvew. Like vedding gift.’
15
On January 7th, 1796 the Princess of Wales was delivered of an enormous, healthy girl. She was given the names Charlotte Augusta. As Sofy wrote:
You may imagine that our Augusta is far from pleased. We already have more than enough Augustas and Augustuses and now we begin to have too many Charlottes. She says she prays the next addition to the family will have four paws so it can be named Spot. The King though is GREATLY DELIGHTED with the child and so is the Prince of Wales whom we hope will now be more civil towards his wife.
But the war between the Waleses was only just beginning. The Prince was more in Brighton than he was in town, though my father had still not been paid for Marine Pavilion, nor ever was, and the Princess lived at Carlton House, ringed about by courtiers of Lady Jersey’s choosing. The word from Brighton was that the Prince stayed away from his wife because he couldn’t bear to look at her or smell her or listen to her silly chatter, but this last criticism won him little sympathy. He had surrounded himself all his life with silly chattering friends. The word from the back stairs at Carlton House was different: that the true reason the Prince declined to share his wife’s bed was that he lacked the vigour expected of a young husband and was embarrassed to be found wanting.
Miss Tod said, ‘It doesn’t matter. He’s got an heir, may God protect her, so let them live apart. There’s plenty of husbands and wives who’d choose to do the same if they only had houses enough.’
It was a subject close to my heart. Through Jack’s hard work and our strict limit to the size of ‘brought forwards’, especially those of the grander addresses, the Pink Lemon was turning a profit. There was talk that we would soon be in a position to marry.
I didn’t quite love Jack but I had grown to appreciate his steadiness and his quiet ways. But I liked my life too, my little room at Miss Tod’s, and my freedom. If Jack said, ‘Come at nine’ and I wanted time to write, I could say Miss Tod needed me till ten. If Miss Tod said she was depending on me to make up a four for whist I could plead ices to be stirred for a ball supper. I knew, though, we couldn’t continue that way for ever and I took some comfort that marrying had not prevented Miss Burney from publishing a new novel. It was the promise of seeing her that made me determined to go to Windsor that summer.
Jack said, ‘I wish you’d give them notice, Nellie. Tell them you’re soon to be wed and you can’t be spared. It was a bad day’s work when your father put you up for that position.’
I said, ‘Some day Sofy will marry. She’ll be carried off to some little kingdom on the Rhine and I’ll never see her again. But as long as she’s kept at home I can’t deny her my company. You don’t know how dull her life is.’
‘My heart bleeds for her,’ he said, but still, he accepted my going. For all his growling about Sofy he was in a happy frame of mind on two counts. First, the tenants in the rooms above the shop talked of quitting. Secondly, he’d found a boy to be his apprentice and learn the sugar work. Ambrose Kersie. He was to sleep on a truckle bed in the dry store until we moved upstairs.
Ambrose was an orphan boy. He’d been left at the Foundling Hospital in January of ’84, a month old as near as they could say, and they’d named him for the strip of grey kersie his mother had pinned to his nightshirt in case she should come to claim him. But she never did. He was small for thirteen, very quiet and cautious but in good health. He didn’t show any great enthusiasm or gratitude for being apprenticed to a master confectioner of Oxford Street. He just followed Jack’s orders and kept his thoughts to himself. In a way they were all he had. He came to us without even a locking box.
I asked him if he could read. ‘Some,’ he said.
I said, ‘Would you like to learn?’
‘Don’t mind,’ he said.
That was Ambrose. You’d have thought he was being charged by the word.
