John Conroy was ten years Sofy’s junior, with a wife and five children at home in Shooters Hill, but that detail didn’t signify. The affair took place entirely inside her head. A prince might live like a tomcat but she had learned the hard way that a princess could not. But she wore new shawls and laughed gaily whenever Conroy was close by, and in the spring she bought a horse and kept it at Fozard’s livery so she could join the party whenever the Duchess and her chamberlain rode out.
For a while I hardly saw her. Jack laughed about it. ‘Out of favour are we?’ he said. ‘You’ll end up in the Tower yet, Nellie.’
It didn’t grieve me. I loved Sofy but I couldn’t sit five minutes with Vicky Kent. She was a silly, vain woman. I was glad of time to myself too. A person can waste a great deal of precious writing time while a Royal Highness dithers over which gloves to wear.
In March the Clarences’ baby girl died, only three months old, and the Kents’ star began to rise again. Drina was third in line, after her uncles Fred York and Billy Clarence. ‘I’m very sorry for Billy and Adelaide’s loss of course,’ Sofy said, ‘but you know the child never did thrive. Drina will make an altogether better heir, so sound and healthy and it’s clear she’s going to be such a beauty.’
Well, there spoke a blind and doting aunt. Drina was a stolid Hanover child, her father all over. Feodora was the one who had the good looks and a blighted blessing that must have been. Bad enough to outshine any half-sister, but to put a little Crown Princess in the shade was unthinkable. I predicted an early marriage for Feodora, to some faraway duke. From then on all efforts were bent to turning Drina into a future queen and the first step was a more queenly name.
Captain Conroy says … three words that I saw with ever greater frequency in Sofy’s letters:
Captain Conroy says we had better call her Victoria, and she must be guarded NIGHT AND DAY. He has secret information that there may be an attempt on her life. Imagine! Vicky believes the threat comes from the Cumberlands. She thinks Ernie will stop at nothing to put his own boy on the throne but she doesn’t know Ernie as I do. He’s quite contented in Hanover and you know Drina, VICTORIA as I must now remember to call her, can never be Queen of Hanover. Their law prevents a female succeeding. So Ernie’s son can have Hanover and VICTORIA can have England and there will be no need at all for any unpleasantness. Nevertheless I do agree with Captain Conroy that we must take the greatest care of our angel child.
Our new King’s coronation was fixed for July 19th and preparations were well in hand. It was a vast project. The robing before the ceremony and the banquet after it were to take place in Westminster Hall and its stone floor had been overlaid with wood and carpet. The path between the hall and the abbey was canopied and carpeted, and inside the abbey boxes were built to seat the Royalties. But of the King’s sisters only Minny Gloucester and Augusta planned to attend.
Sofy said, ‘It would be too long a day for me. I’d have to be in my carriage by five. And then those hateful, heavy robes, and in July. I’d die.’
Elizabeth said she couldn’t come. She’d poured all her money into Humbug’s bottomless pit so she had nothing left to pay for jaunts. Royal pleaded poor health and said she wouldn’t come.
Sofy said, ‘It really doesn’t matter. I’m sure none of us will be missed.’
It was true, the only question that interested people was whether Caroline would be crowned too. She had applied to the Privy Council to know what arrangements had been made for her procession and crowning. The answer came back that no arrangements had been made. There would be only one crown and one throne and the Queen had better stay at home and keep the peace.
Sofy said, ‘But I’m certain she’ll go to the abbey, Nellie.
You know how she is. Nothing will keep her away.’
All the signs were there. Caroline rode about town every day to keep herself in view, and she made sure to have her gig pulled along by broken-down horses and always to have a hole in her stocking so people might think how ill she was treated. It came to two days before the coronation and the question was still being debated: did common usage give a queen the right to be crowned whatever the King might say, or was a coronation in the King’s gift and therefore his to withhold? The lawyers argued the case back as far as King Canute but the material point was this: Caroline had better have her crown or windows and heads would be broken.
Sofy said, ‘I’m sure she’s given the King every opportunity to climb down. You know, she offered to be crowned on a different occasion, perhaps next week, if another throne can’t be brought in by Thursday. One can’t say she’s being unreasonable, but His Majesty won’t have it. Minny says his insides are in knots. Well, the remedy is in his hands. He should make peace with his wife.’
On Wednesday morning foot soldiers appeared on the streets around St James’s and by evening the abbey was surrounded by guards. Sal had planned to take Annie down to Horse Guards to see the new King ride by but Henry wouldn’t allow it. He thought blood would be shed before the day was over and he didn’t want any of it to be Topham blood. Uncle Christoff declined too. He preferred to sleep late. But Morphew minded neither early mornings nor the danger of a riot; in fact I believe he was hoping for a little mayhem at the very least.
I went with Sally and Annie to see the boat races on the Serpentine. It was a perfect, sunny day, not too hot, unless you were the King, sweating under your wig and cap of state. I’d given Jack instructions that Henry was to be let go no later than six o’clock so he could take Sal to the burletta at the Adelphi. There was to be free admittance, in honour of the day, until the theatre was filled up.
Annie and I stayed in Hyde Park until they lit the Chinese lanterns. Every tree, every booth, every boat on the water had lights.
‘Like fairyland,’ Annie said.
She might not have seen King George in his crown but she’d seen a parade of elephants dressed up in pink and gold and she’d seen a hot-air balloon that carried two men in its basket high over the rooftops.
Jack was asleep in a chair when we got back to Seymour Street, worn out from a day of sugar-boiling, and Morphew was in the summer kitchen giving Uncle Christoff a report of the day’s events.
‘What a day, Miss Nellie,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen things today I never would of thought.’ He had managed to get as close to the abbey as Broad Sanctuary, and what he hadn’t seen with his own eyes he had heard passed through the crowd and improved on with each telling.
Queen Caroline had arrived in a coach and six, and with Willy Austin at her side.
Morphew said, ‘She had a lady attending on her of course, a long drink of water she was, and then that lad the Queen keeps, all tricked out, waving and carrying on like a Prince of the Blood. Ask me, he isn’t hooly right in the head.’
It occurred to me then that Caroline had had just one aim that day: to make a spectacle, whatever the cost to her own dignity. If she couldn’t be crowned she could at least steal the show from the King. She had gone first to the west entrance, then to the north, but both doors were barred. At the last she had left her coach and walked round to the eastern cloister but there too the guards wouldn’t let her in. Morphew had witnessed her retreat.
He said, ‘We could hear folk a-shouting. They said she beat on every door. “Let in your queen,” she cried, but they gave her the same answer everywhere she knocked. No ticket, no entry. Then they reckoned somebody took pity on her and gave her a ticket that was meant for their own selves but she wouldn’t take it. She wouldn’t go on in without her suite, see, and the ticket said Admit One. Well, fair dues, a queen don’t go anywhere on her own. So then back they all come in the landau and I seen her myself. She held her head high but you could see she was shooken up and I’ll quote you why. There was more laughing at her than there was cheering and she hadn’t bargained for that. I felt sorry for her, Miss Nellie, and that’s the truth. I harn’t got a lot of time for Royalties but I don’t care to see a lady made a mockery. Then off she went and soon as she was gone out they come, like rats at midnight. All the Highnesses, in a procession. I suppose somebody told them the coast was clear. York come waddling along, looked like he’d tip over if you gave him a nudge, he’s got such a belly on him. Clarence isn’t much better. And the scar-faced one was there too. Cumberland. And the King … well, I’ll tell you something and I don’t care who hears it. I can’t ever think of that great wobbling lummox as king. Know what he looked like? He looked like one of Mr Jack’s almond flummeries, been left out in the sun.’
The news sheets said the coronation had provided a welcome lift to trade. For the banquet, three hundred and fifty bottles of sherry wine and a hundred dozen of hock. One thousand yards of best damask table covering. The embroidery of the King’s velvet train alone had given employment to a dozen needlewomen, and its ermine trim was estimated at a worth of eight hundred pounds. Then there was the new diadem commissioned by the King, said to be decorated with twelve thousand diamonds, but the diamonds were rented and, as Jack said, bottles of hock and new crowns are only good for trade if they’re paid for. He’d lived in dread of being asked to furnish ices for the banquet. An honour like that could ruin a man.
Sofy said, ‘I suffered all day, Nellie. My heart pounded and my insides griped. I felt certain something bad would happen, and I was right. It was altogether badly done. Minny said the King nearly fainted with anxiety of what Caroline might do, and then the heat and the weight of his robes. Twice he had to be given vinegar. And then did you hear what happened at the end? Dear Ernie came in to see me in the evening and told me such a terrifying story. A coach overturned in St Margaret’s and two horses had to be shot and dragged away, so the procession was quite blocked. They had to take another route, through the most terrible, dangerous streets.’
It had been a grimy end after the splendour of the day. The King’s procession had been forced to drive through Devil’s Acre. His Majesty will have been glad of his perfumed handkerchief.
I said, ‘But I think it very fitting for a new-crowned King to show himself to the people of Pye Street. They’re all his subjects, after all.’
‘Oh no, Nellie,’ she said. ‘If they hadn’t had an escort of guards I’m sure they might all have been set upon and killed. Ernie said the King was so frightened he had to be lifted down from the coach when they reached Carlton House. His legs wouldn’t support him.’
The Queen had driven back to Hammersmith and shut herself away. It was predicted she’d soon be gone, back to Brunswick or to Italy, where no one would find fault with the way she carried on. I know Sofy would have liked to visit her but she didn’t quite dare.
‘Poor dear,’ she said, every time I saw her. ‘I wonder if she sees anyone. I wonder if I should write to her?’
After a week of dithering she sent a letter and heard by return that Caroline was unwell. ‘Mine Dear Sister,’ Caroline wrote, ‘I thank you for your Kind Missage. I am very bad with Stomick Colicks since my Ordeal. Dr Rollins have give me magnesia. Dr Woodford have give me calomel and Purges of salt water but still I am costiff. I try to bear up cheerful for sakes off My People. Yr Queen and Sister, Caroline.’
On August 3rd Sofy asked me to have a box of Jack’s chocolate-dipped figs sent to Hammersmith. That was Friday. On the Monday Lady Anne, one of the Bedchamber Ladies, wrote to convey the Queen’s gratitude. The figs were much appreciated and she was feeling a little better. On Wednesday morning Jack woke me before it was light.
He said, ‘Something’s up, Nell. The abbey bells are ringing. I reckon the King must have passed.’
But it was Caroline who was dead. She was fifty-three. Some said a contortion of the bowels had killed her, some said poison. Lady Anne told Sofy she had suffered two days of agony but the last hour had been peaceful. There was to be no viewing. The Queen had expressly forbidden it.
Sofy said, ‘And do you know what her words were? “Those who cared for me came to see me while I lived.” Oh Nellie, now I feel so badly that I didn’t go to visit her at Hammersmith.’
She had the least reason to reproach herself. Minny Gloucester could have paid a call, or Augusta. Men may act pigheaded but women should know better how to treat a sister.
