‘Well,’ Sofy said, ‘I’m sure all she’ll need is our help and guidance. I certainly intend to be her friend.’
The Queen was overruled, the King gave his consent to the marriage and Lord Malmesbury was dispatched to Brunswick with a necklace and a length of very fine Brussels lace. We were at war and many battlefields lay between Germany and England, but the Prince of Wales was in a hurry. He had creditors baying for his blood and marrying meant money. Caroline would bring a dowry and Parliament would vote him a more generous allowance.
We travelled back to Windsor in the first week of September. Morphew was to take me on to London the next morning.
Sofy said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t go.’ I said, ‘I’ll come for your birthday.’
She whispered, ‘But that’s weeks and weeks away, and you know I depend on you.’
She meant her eyes. They never had been strong and the Royalties were so miserly with tapers she had over-strained them. When I was with her I threaded her needle if she found it too difficult and now, with a wedding promised, they were all in a flurry of sewing. Sofy needed spectacles but she refused to admit it.
Minny said, ‘I know she struggles, and I have spoken to the Queen about it. But Sofy is a little vain, you know. She’s quite convinced she’ll never get a husband if she has spectacles on her nose.’
It was too silly. A princess may get a husband without even being inspected.
I said, ‘But she knows I found a husband and I have something unsightly that can’t be taken off and folded away in a case.’
Minny said, ‘You’re made of stronger stuff, Nellie. When you live twenty years with a mark I suppose it tempers you. Besides, Sofy’s such a noodle. She must know by now that none of us will ever be allowed a husband.’
In town the talk was all of Princess Caroline, who would be Princess of Wales and then our next queen—as long as Prinnie didn’t eat a beefsteak too many and burst before he came to the throne. Miss Tod said Caroline of Brunswick was reported to have as great an appetite as her future husband, and not only for food. ‘Ungovernable passions of the flesh’ were the words being put about. Lovers were hinted at, and that was a serious charge indeed. If she was accustomed to encouraging admirers it was a habit that would have to be abandoned for ever. A Princess of Wales was untouchable. She had to be a sacred vessel of the succession, whatever liberties her prince might take. And on that point there remained the question of Mrs Fitz, and also of the new queen bee in the Prince’s hive, Lady Jersey.
According to Papi Mrs Fitzherbert had settled amicably. He said she must be glad not to have the Prince coming to her door with noisy friends just as she was going to bed. She was nearly forty and had no patience with rowdy young men who had dined too well. As for Lady Jersey, who was even older than Mrs Fitz and I suppose in even greater need of her sleep, it was she who had proposed the Brunswick match. She knew the gravity of the Prince’s situation and that nothing short of a marriage allowance would dig him out of it. Furthermore, if he married he would have less time for the boudoir and more money for buying little tokens of gratitude for a helpful, sympathetic friend, so altogether Lady Jersey had managed things very well.
First the wedding was expected to be in October, but Lord Malmesbury sent word from Brunswick that the bride’s preparations weren’t far enough advanced. Then November was mooted but heavy seas delayed her sailing, and in December a fearful cold blew in from the north and froze the ships in the Hamburg harbour. The marrying had to wait until the spring thaw.
I missed Sofy’s birthday that year. It was her seventeenth. I was not well enough to travel. At night the memory of Enoch Heppenstall kept me awake and in the day the lack of sleep and the smell of hot sugar made me faint. Jack put it down to a bilious derangement and suggested a nettle tonic.
A letter came from Sofy:
Windsor, October 30th 1794
The P of W has been VERY piano. Minny says he is rehearsing for the role of Uxorious Stay-at-Home. We are our usual dull winter selves and spend our days puzzling what our belle-soeur will REALLY look like. We were told she has excellent teeth but later we heard she had at least two pulled since the marriage was agreed. We had better expect her to have three heads and a wart on each nose, then we shall be prepared for anything.
The Illustrious Personage is still GREATLY displeased with the match but tries not to show it for the sake of the King. His health has been so much better since everything is settled. There has been no recurrence of the Agitations in spite of some cross words with Ernie and the worry of what is to be done with Fred.
After the rout of Dunkirk Fred York had been relieved of his command and sent home with his Field-Marshal’s tail between his legs. ‘Incompetent,’ the Morning Chronicle said. ‘A perfect example,’ the True Briton said, ‘of the folly of giving high command to a man on the strength of his lineage.’ Furthermore, York’s Duchess wanted no truck with him and so he hung about St James’s with loud friends who rose late and drank deeply. Ernest had returned to Flanders, his shoulder mended, but not before he had quarrelled with the King:
Ernie has only a regiment, which hardly seems fair when Dolly has a corps to command and he THREE YEARS younger.
Ernie threatened if he was to be so humiliated he would enlist as a private and let it be the talk of the town, but the King still wouldn’t do anything for him, so now he is gone away in a FEARFUL stew. Lady Harcourt says he has BROUGHT IT ON HIMSELF by his unruly temperament. I think it was not her place to say it and I feel VERY sorry for him because I’m sure he’s a splendid soldier.
Dearest Nellie, I miss you greatly and pray that you will soon be recovered from your complaint. What do you take for it?
I had gone as far as St Giles’s to consult an apothecary. The powder he recommended cost ten shillings. I hadn’t seen my monthly indisposition since September and knew I must act quickly. But the powder didn’t work though it gave me powerful cramps. Jack noticed nothing. He was swamped with orders—a meringue island set in a lake of elderflower jelly with sugar paste swans for Lady Haddon, flummery and comfits for Viscount Trimm, cinnamon bonbons in baskets of silvered spun sugar for Mrs Garr-Lonsdale—and I was expected to run between the shop and the stillroom. I couldn’t face Christmas at Hammersmith with Papi fussing about sending for Dr Mayersbach and Aunt Hanne giving me a searching look. My aunt had always been quick to sense when a woman was carrying a child. I threw myself on the mercy of Miss Tod.
‘That’s long engagements for you,’ she said. ‘Men can never contain themselves and it’s the girl who must bear the consequences. Why don’t you marry him and be done? You can both live with me.’
I said, ‘It’s not Jack’s child.’
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Well then.’
She loaned me four guineas out of her burying money to pay a certain Mrs Dacey for removal of an internal obstruction and for a chairman to bring me back from Hosier Street. And that dear woman, who you would think had never kept a confidence in her life, took my story with her to the grave. Mrs Dacey’s place of business was her own bedroom. The tools of her trade were a loop of wire, a basin, and a pot of pennyroyal tea. I have never known such pain. But it passed, and when she told me my obstruction was gone and I could be on my way, I felt so light and free.
‘Women’s troubles,’ Miss Tod had told Jack. ‘She’ll be as good as new tomorrow.’
But that night I took such a fever it was two weeks before I could leave my bed.
‘No need to trouble your mother,’ I remember Miss Tod saying. ‘She’s never been the same since she lost Eliza. We’ll call it a winter chill, shall we, dear?’
She must have been in a terror of me dying but she never showed it. I burned hot, then cold shivers gripped me till the bed shook. I saw my dead sister. I saw demons unbuttoned in haylofts. Jack closed up the Pink Lemon and sat beside me, white with fear.
‘Don’t die, Nellie,’ he kept whispering. ‘I know I’ve worked you too hard. I’ll take care of you. Only don’t die.’
I believe I came close to it. Then, as the fever passed and I grew stronger, I thought over my situation. Enoch Heppenstall had done me a great wrong but it was my own foolish fancy that had put me at his mercy, and since God had been good enough to spare me I would turn over a new leaf. I would forget about Tom Garth and try to love Jack Buzzard.
14
I was in the presence of Princess Caroline only once and that was in the summer of 1795. She had come to England in April, when the seas were safer for travel, and of all the people Wales might have sent to meet her at Greenwich he chose Lady Jersey, or at least, he allowed Lady Jersey to choose herself. It was an unkind act, and insult was added to injury by Lady Jersey’s coming late and straightway finding fault with the Princess’s gown.
No public notice was given of Caroline’s arrival. If there had been I’m sure a great crowd would have turned out to greet our future queen. Miss Tod said she wouldn’t have missed it for the world. But instead Lady Jersey bundled her into a closed carriage and hurried her to St James’s to meet her prince. By Sofy’s account he didn’t like what he saw. Well, perhaps Caroline wasn’t so happy either, once she’d taken a look, for the Prince of Wales had taken to wearing a lilac wig and he had grown fatter than ever. But she was far from home and she had cast her die. Sofy wrote:
Everyone said that Caroline was over rouged which Minnie believes was the handiwork of Lady Jersey, but Lady Jersey is appointed a Lady of the Bedchamber, you know, so I cannot think she would do anything so NAUGHTY. The Prince complained that Malmesbury had dissembled about the excellence of her figure, and that she smelled of yesterday’s fish. Altogether he found nothing to praise in her.
We did not see her until the evening of the wedding and therefore by candlelight, but I thought she looked well enough. Our dear Wales looked magnificent but I regret to say he had been drinking, which Billy Clarence said was to deaden the pain of what he must go through. But all went off well, the King beamed with delight throughout and our Illustrious Personage wore her PLEASANT face. There was no wedding breakfast. The Waleses retired to Carlton House, we returned to the Queen’s House for bread and milk, and Billy set off for Brighton with a letter for A CERTAIN PERSON, but we are not supposed to know anything of that. Now they are making their honeymoon and are soon to come to Windsor so we shall become properly acquainted with our new sister. I hope you are now well enough that I may see you VERY SOON.
And so I went to Windsor though Jack tried to dissuade me. He said he feared I was not sufficiently recovered from my winter fever, but it seemed to me if I was well enough for making two hundred sweetmeat papers and walking to Holborn to buy gold leaf I was well enough to visit my friend. He didn’t have dominion over me yet. Jack wouldn’t marry while he had debts, and he had ovens still to pay for. At the time of our betrothal Papi had seemed to promise an investment in Jack’s business but times had changed. Every month more of our soldiers were shipped to Flanders and our fleet chased the French about the Mediterranean, but an end to the fighting seemed no closer and war creates new opportunities for a man’s money. Much of Papi’s had gone into army blankets and ship’s biscuits and oakum.
The Prince and Princess of Wales went to Kempshott in Hampshire for their honeymoon and a strange affair it must have been because the Prince had invited quite a party of his friends to join them. Viscount Petersham and Lord Ballantyne and heaven knows what other coxcombs, and Lady Jersey too, for a princess can’t be without her bedchamber ladies, no matter who they may be. Then they continued to Windsor as promised and lodged in the Prince’s apartments in the Castle. On their second day, while the King and Wales and Fred York went out with the buckhounds, we walked with the new Princess to Frogmore for one of the Queen’s rustic tea parties.
