As the year turned the King had begun to recover his wits a little. The Prince of Wales, on the other hand, was a mess of prostrations and nervous tremblings and couldn’t get through a morning without nipping at the curaçao. It seemed that whoever reigned over us was liable to wear a straitcoat sooner or later so the regency was declared. The King didn’t oppose it. He said it was time he retired anyway. The Queen though was furious. Bad enough that a daughter now addressed her as ‘Sister’, worse still that Wales was no longer obliged to defer to her. But the regency was limited, to be reviewed after one year, and anyway the Prince Regent, as we were now to call him, proceeded very tentatively. He kept the Tories in government, to the great annoyance of his Whiggish friends who thought their day had dawned. Even his enemies allowed that he had begun creditably and showed consideration for the opinions of His Majesty. Little by little the King’s delirium was abating and Wales was careful not to do anything that might bring on a reversal.

I was twice at Windsor that year. I went in April because Sofy had been sick, feverish and full of aches and pains. By the time I got there the worst of that was over and she had a new affliction: she had fallen in love with her physician. Sir Henry Halford had been recommended by the Prince Regent. He was a kind, comfortable man who did what he could to reassure the invalid while Nature cured her in its own good time. When he went home to Lady Halford and his children I doubt it crossed his mind that he left behind a love-struck patient.

‘Don’t look at me so, Nellie,’ she said. ‘What else am I to do but dream?’

After a week she was sufficiently recovered to ride out and the King was reckoned to be well enough to go with her. The equerry General Spencer accompanied them. Also Augusta, who never missed an opportunity to be in Spencer’s company, and young Princess Charlotte, rising fifteen and no shy violet. Minny and I watched them go off from the stable yard. She wiped a tear from her eye.

She said, ‘I never thought to see His Majesty go out in the park again. At this rate perhaps we shan’t need the regency next year.’

But the King sat his horse like a feeble old man and as the summer came on he relapsed into mania. By the time I visited again in September he was entirely mad. He believed Amelia was still alive and talked to Octavius and Alfred, his two little sons who had died, as though they were playing at his feet. And even though the Prince Regent was almost as demented as his father there was no longer any talk of dispensing with the regency.

Sofy wanted me with her in September for a particular reason. Tommy was due to start at Harrow School and Garth had suggested bringing him to Windsor. They would put up at an inn for a few days so she might see how Tommy had grown and have some time with him. She was very nervous. Everything was managed from a careful distance. Garth and the boy hacked up from Windsor town. Augusta, Sofy and Princess Charlotte hacked out from the castle with Spencer in attendance, and Minny and I followed in a donkey cart. We couldn’t hear what was said but it has been my experience that a great deal can be learned about people by observing their deportment and gestures. In that pretty tableau it was clear that Tommy had no interest in Sofy and regarded himself as superior to everyone else present, that Princess Charlotte knew him to be sadly mistaken in the matter, and that Augusta was in love with General Spencer.

Sofy came in very pleased with what she’d seen.

I said, ‘What do you feel, when you look at Tommy?’

‘Sheer delight,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t be more pleased.’

‘Do you feel love for him?’

‘With all my heart.’

‘And will he ever be allowed to know you’re his mother?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Perhaps when he’s very much older. I suppose it’s rather for Garth to decide.’ I said, ‘And what do you feel towards him?’

I could never quite leave it alone, like a tongue that will seek out a rotten tooth and not stop until it’s caused a twinge of pain.

‘Towards Garth?’ she said. ‘Well, immense gratitude, of course. I think he is doing a fine job, don’t you?’

I stayed two weeks at Windsor and while I was there Billy Clarence dined with the Queen no fewer than five times. Her Majesty, who grew shorter and wider and yellower every time I saw her reminded me very much of a toad.

‘Our Illustrious Personage,’ Sofy said, ‘has a new project. She means to separate Billy from his wife and I think it very mean of her. They seem perfectly contented and no trouble to any of us. I don’t see why the Queen must interfere.’

But I could see why. With seven sons living and still only one grandchild, the Queen was thinking of the succession. It was time to remind the royal dukes of their duty, and as Fred York had a wife he could neither breed from nor get rid of, she proposed to start with Billy Clarence.

Poor Dora Jordan stood no chance. She was offered £1500 a year and a house for herself and her daughters. Clarence would keep and maintain the sons. All this was on condition that she gave up acting in plays and promised never to write a memoir. It was grossly unfair, to deprive her at one stroke of her husband and her public. Heaven knows, Clarence had been glad enough in the past for her to drag herself from theatre to theatre—Hull, Glasgow, Manchester—playing Widow Cheerly six nights out of seven because he had only £٠٠٠ a year and twelve hungry mouths to feed.

It was a spineless thing Clarence did to give in to the Queen and he should have had the sense to know that Dora Jordan couldn’t afford to keep her side of the bargain. But Royalties never did understand the cost of a pair of boots.

24

Windsor looked very different the next time I saw it. By the spring of 1812 a full regency had been declared and everything now devolved to Carlton House. Servants had been let go, horses sold. There were fewer guards, no bustle and clatter of comings and goings, no bands playing. It was dead. There was talk of moving the King to Kew, his needs were so modest and the chief of them being quiet and privacy, but Her Majesty wouldn’t hear of it. She didn’t see why she should reduce her household and threw up objections to every economy that was proposed. She was the Queen of England and she intended living as such. A person could see her point. No one else was being asked to retrench. Wales was still ordering gloves by the dozen pair. Indeed one of his first acts as regent was to raise his sisters’ allowances. Sofy now had £10,000 a year.

I said, ‘You could set up in your own house.’

‘I could,’ she said. ‘But the Queen says it would be improper as long as we’re at war, and unfeeling towards His Majesty too. And she’s right, Nellie. What if the King recovered all at once and discovered I’d abandoned him?’ She knew as well as I did that the King wouldn’t recover.

He had slipped too deep into madness. But he served as her excuse for not living her life. She discovered new pains and spasms every day, seldom rode, and rarely bought a gown or a bonnet with her new wealth.

‘Why would I?’ she said. ‘Who is there to admire it? My sun has set, Nellie. They might as well put me in a sack and drown me. I’d be less of an expense to the nation.’

Her only pleasure was to buy things for her niece. Sofy indulged Princess Charlotte. Over-indulged, according to Minny. She said, ‘Charlotte needs to learn self-control. If she isn’t reined in she’ll go the way of her mother. The Queen should do it or the Prince Regent, but no one listens to me.’ The Prince Regent did try to minimize his wife’s influence on Charlotte. She could only meet her when he gave his permission, and Charlotte was kept in close orbit of the Queen and the Royal Highnesses. But her nature was to be loud and headstrong, and she was all too aware of her important position. Her grandfather was too frail to reign and too mad. Her father was half-destroyed with food and drink and sleeping drops. Some day she would be queen, and perhaps not so very far in the future. She knew too that the public took an interest in her, in where she went and what she wore. She was no beauty, being rather heavy-set and inelegant, but she loved to display herself, riding about, nodding and waving, and every curl and dimple got written up.

I have many reasons for remembering the month of May in 1812. On the 4th, Mr Crosby of Exeter Street wrote to offer me forty pounds for the publication of The Blessed, on commission. The title would have to be changed and fifty pages cut, at the publisher’s discretion. The author to receive twenty copies, sewed, not bound. I accepted but told no one. I wanted to save my moment of triumph for when I held a copy in my hand.

Early in the morning of the 5th Sally and Henry’s first child was born, in the rooms above the Pink Lemon. A girl, very small but sound and healthy. They named her Cornelia, for me, and Ann, but she was soon called Annie, Cornelia being such a mouthful.

Jack said to Henry, ‘She’ll do, for a start. Your next one’ll be a lad.’

On the evening of the 11th, as I walked back from my daily inspection of little Annie, I saw my neighbour Mrs Cutler in a cluster of excited people on the corner of Portman Street. They had it from a watchman who’d heard it from a constable who’d had it on good authority from a Bow Street horse patrol that Mr Perceval, the Prime Minister, had been shot and killed and in the very Houses of Parliament themselves. I ran back to the shop to tell Jack.

‘Damnation,’ he said. ‘We’ve twenty custard tarts finished and ready to go to Lady Radnor’s. She’ll cancel, for sure. Well, she’ll be billed for them whether she eats them or not.’

Morphew said, ‘Is he took? The assassin?’

The word was that the killer had given himself up without a struggle.

Morphew said, ‘Then I’ll give notice now, I shall expect a day off for the hanging.’

It was a terrible business. Mr Perceval was a mild man, and as politicians go quite honourable. There were plenty of candidates more deserving of John Bellingham’s bullet, I’m sure, but Bellingham was more interested in the principle than the particulars. He said His Majesty’s government had done him a great wrong and left him to moulder for some years in a Russian gaol, that his patience was all used up, and though he was sorry to deprive Mrs Perceval of a husband and their thirteen children of a father, nevertheless it was a fair outcome because his own family was ruined too. He was tried at the Bailey. More than one person testified that he was as crazed as a sack of ferrets and had been so for many years. He was convicted of wilful murder and sentenced to be hanged. A seat could be secured for half a crown but a guaranteed view cost a guinea. Morphew said he preferred to stand for an execution. More respectful, he said. He left the house before six to be sure of getting a good position and was home by noon, quite subdued.

‘I’ve seen better hangings,’ he said. ‘I’ll quote you Harry Jacques, who snivelled and begged for his life. That was years ago, at the Tyburn Tree. And I’ll quote you Ida Parkin, the poisoner. She went off at Newgate, singing and laughing. This morning though, there was something wanting. When you think what he did, this Bellingham, you’d have expected him to put on a better show. They brung him out and he seemed to say he didn’t want the hood but they told him he had to have it and he let them put it on him, very polite. He was dropped on the seventh stroke of eight and I tell you, Miss Nellie, all my years I never heard such quiet. They left him swinging about an hour, then they put him on a cart to take him up to Smithfield to be anatomized. So then I come back here. And that’s the top and bottom of it.’

Lord Liverpool was sworn in as the new Prime Minister, John Bellingham was forgotten and through the thundery summer months, while the milk soured and fish turned before it could be cooked, the news sheets grubbed about for a story. Any story. Princess Charlotte was rising sixteen so there began to be speculation about who she would marry, but there wasn’t yet fuel enough to make that topic catch fire. It was the old story of Ernie Cumberland and the valet Sellis that broke out again. How had Sellis failed to kill his sleeping master? How had the Duke failed to identify his attacker when the room was lit? And what could have been Sellis’s motive, employed fourteen years in the royal household, well-regarded, treated with such kind condescension that the Queen had even sent his child a christening gift? Dark secrets, blackmail and unnatural relations were hinted at, Miss Tod said when she applied to me to know what was meant by ‘Italian orgies’. I was unable to help her.

Sofy was outraged:

Poor Ernie. Why do they pick on him so? He truly has nothing but bad luck. All he wishes for is a corps to command but he’s been refused even that. He says there’s nothing for it but to go overseas and try his luck and as sad as I shall be to see him go I believe he’s right.

Cumberland did go abroad. He offered himself to Bernadotte in Sweden and to the Russian Tsar but neither of them wanted him. Then he went to Hanover, expecting he’d be given the governorship, but he didn’t even get that. It was given to Dolly Cambridge instead. Ernie’s luck did turn though. He found a wife, or at least someone else’s wife. Frederica was one of his Mecklenburg cousins and was very conveniently about to be divorced. The Queen was appalled. Even when Frederica’s husband was obliging enough to die, rendering a divorce unnecessary, the prospect still laid Her Majesty so low with catchings of her breath and swimmings of her head that she bowed to medical opinion and went to Brighton to take the waters.

Sofy was chosen to go with her, an honour she would have been happy to cede to one of her sisters but they insisted that Sofy was in need of a cure herself. It was true she’d never entirely thrown off the slow fever and she had grown so thin that her gowns hung loose. Now, when a royal pebble drops into a pond the ripples travel far. Billy Clarence’s discarded wife was supposed to open in The Beaux Stratagem at Brighton the very week the Queen wished to go there. Clearly something had to be done, and quickly. Dora Jordan found her engagement suddenly postponed and she was obliged to go to the Isle of Wight to play Mrs Sullen instead. How she must have fumed, for the Queen tried the Brighton waters for two days, declared she felt no improvement and hurried back to Windsor. Sofy stayed on and wrote immediately, begging me to keep her company. As London was so stifling and we were caught, if there was a breeze at all, between the smell of the Guards’ stables and the flies from Copley’s slaughterhouse, I took Sal and baby Annie with me, and we lodged a week at the Old Ship.

It was the first time I’d been there in twenty-three years, since I’d visited with Aunt Hanne in 1790. I should hardly have known the place. Where Papi’s accommodations had stood there was now a garden and a conservatory, and curved wings had been added either side of the oval drawing room with bedchambers and wardrobes and toilettes for Princess Caroline and her Ladies, who had never occupied them. The old breakfast room had been made a library, and where the old library had been a wall had been removed and a yellow room created, all paradise birds and bamboo chairs and Chinese wallpaper. The ceiling of the drawing room was painted like a summer sky and its gas lights were housed in immense tassled Chinese lanterns. And the work was by no means finished. I believe Wales enjoyed dreaming up new schemes for his houses far more than he enjoyed living in them. Plans were already underway for a great banqueting hall, and a music room that would be even more fantastical with serpents and dragons and painted scenes that tricked the eye. Only the stillroom, where I tasted my first water ice and Jack Buzzard had decided I’d do for a wife, remained unchanged.

Sally’s great hope was that she’d be presented to the Prince Regent so that when she was grown up Annie would be able to say, ‘King George? I met him, when I was a babe in arms’, but we saw him only from a distance, lumbering about like a caparisoned old elephant.

Sofy said, ‘His hands shake, Nellie. I believe he takes too much laudanum.’

She may have been right. Too much laudanum, too much cherry brandy, too many roasted chickens and candied chestnuts. His great project that summer was to find a husband for Princess Charlotte. The Duke of Gloucester was available, but he was a first cousin, a closeness some people advised against, and anyway he was no sprig.

Sofy said, ‘I think Gloucester would do very well. He may not have the most brilliant mind but he’s not completely ancient and he seems not to have any vices. I believe Charlotte might agree to him. But the Prince Regent, you know, is pressing for her to make a foreign match. He’s very keen on Dutch William. I see his stratagem. He wants her out of the country. She begins to put him too much in the shade.’ On that point she was certainly right. Our Prince Regent was getting up in years, fifty-two, and still the King omitted to die and vacate the throne. The country had had years enough of the Prince’s debts and his dramas. It was avid for something new, like a young Princess it might take to its heart. Wales was no fool. He understood that a daughter can eclipse her father without even trying. And then, what if she conspired with her mother to bring him down? What if they wore him out with their lies and their plotting and he never gained the throne he’d waited for all his life? No, marriage to Prince William of Orange was the thing. Pack her off to the Low Countries and the sooner the better.

25

We had a hard, hard winter of it. The Thames froze, the last time I remember it happening. That was 1814. The first week of February we went down to the Frost Fair, Sally and I and Morphew, who carried little Annie on his shoulders. He could still out-skate me. There was a skittle alley set up at Hungerford Stairs and two book stalls. Sal told the man at Nicol’s stall that Thomas Crosby was going to publish my book.