After consulting several times with Mr. Brougham, the princess at last resolved to send the queen a letter claiming free access to her daughter, and complaining that her education was being neglected, and that she was being kept in too close confinement. The prince was in such a rage when he read the letter, which was of course sent to him before it could be answered, that he determined to take his daughter under his immediate control, and to get rid of the governess to whom she was attached, because she was supposed to favor her pupil's mother too much. The prince was shocked when he one day heard his daughter call the queen "the Merry Wife of Windsor," and reprimanded her for her disrespect. "Don't you know my mother is Queen of England?" he asked, sternly. "And you seem to forget that my mother is Princess of Wales!" retorted the pert young lady.
On the eve of her seventeenth birthday Princess Charlotte wrote a letter to Lord Liverpool, in which she declared that as her late governess had been removed, she was now old enough to do without another, and required an establishment with her own ladies-in-waiting. As she wrote all the details of the different scenes she had with her aunts and the queen to her mother, it is probable that she received some secret hints from that quarter.
One morning the young princess was summoned to appear before her father, the queen, the lord chancellor, and her aunts. The regent asked her angrily, "What she meant by refusing to have a governess," adding, "as long as I live you shall have no establishment unless you marry." She referred him to her letter for his reply, whereupon both he and the queen abused her and called her a "perverse, wilful creature."
The chancellor then explained to her, rather roughly, what was her duty, and she asked him as a father what he would do. He replied, that if the princess were his daughter he would lock her up. She said not a word, but on going to the room of one of her aunts burst into tears, and exclaimed, "What would the king say if he could know that his grand-daughter had been compared to the granddaughter of a collier?" As a compromise, the Duchess of Leeds was appointed as governess, merely in name, and the princess was to have two ladies-in-waiting besides. She was now a young lady "out" in society, and a ball was given at Carlton House in honor of her birthday.
Meanwhile, the Princess of Wales sent a letter to the regent, which was returned unopened. This was repeated several times, when it was decided by Mr. Brougham and others to publish it. The mother began by saying how she had waited day by day to see her daughter, but it had been made more and more impossible. "Our intercourse has been gradually diminished," she wrote; "a single interview weekly seemed hardly sufficient for a mother's affections; that, however, was reduced to our meeting once a fortnight, and I now learn that this most rigorous interdiction is to be still more rigidly enforced." Then, after a most touching appeal, she closes by reminding the regent that their daughter had never been confirmed.
The effect of this document was marvellous. The whole country was aroused, and every heart throbbed with indignation at the idea of a loving mother being so cruelly separated from her child. But the prince had made up his mind to get rid of his wife, and so employed an eminent law firm to manage it for him,—by what intrigues and falsehoods he cared not, so long as it was accomplished.
Parliament declared the princess innocent of any of the charges brought against her, still intercourse with her daughter was restricted.
That daughter had shown such a spirit of independence that a household of her own had been established at Warwick House. This was a dilapidated, gloomy building; but the young princess preferred it to the fine apartments she occupied at Windsor, because it freed her from the super-