Despite the great popularity of the excellent Duchess, the caricaturists spared neither her nor her royal father and mother-in-law. In one of the satirical prints by Gillray, the King and Queen—the latter most outrageously caricatured—are represented in ridiculous attitudes of joy: the King is fairly ‘kicking up his heels’ in ecstasy, offering eager welcome to the Duchess. The Queen is holding out her apron to receive some of the wealth and jewels which her daughter-in-law was popularly supposed to have brought with her. The latter has her apron full of money, and the Duke is introducing her to his parents.
The poor Duchess was soon one of the unhappiest of wives. The profligacy and shameless infidelity of her husband, to whom she had been fondly attached, disgusted her. His extravagance involved him in a ruin from which he could never relieve himself, and which his creditors never forgot. It made many a hearth cold, and it brought misery to that of the Duchess. For six years she bore with treatment from the ‘commander-in-chief’ such as no trooper under him would have inflicted on a wife equally deserving. At the end of that time the ill-matched pair separated, and the Duchess withdrew from the world; but in her retirement she forgot none of the duties which it could fairly demand of her. She was beloved by all, and was popularly and affectionately mentioned by the popular voice as ‘the poor soldier’s friend.’
She was indeed the friend of all who needed her service, and did not refuse even to give to poor ‘Monk’ Lewis the meed of admiration which his little vanity required. He was once met coming in tears from the Duchess’s drawing-room; and on intimating to his questioner that they had their source in the very kind and flattering things the Duchess had said to him, the weeper was roughly consoled by his acquaintance, with the soothing advice, to ‘Never mind, as perhaps she did not mean it!’
Never was the alleged avarice of the King and Queen more bitterly satirised than during this year (1791). The King, however, was a cheerful giver, and the amount of property which the Queen left at her death proves that she was no hoarder. The caricaturists, nevertheless, smote them mercilessly. Peter Pindar assailed them in coarse and witless lines, that had in them a certain rough humour, but as ill-natured as rough. Gillray exhibited them as cheapening wares in the streets of Windsor. In another print, the King, in the commonest of garbs, was seen toasting his own muffins; and the Queen, with a hideous twist given to her now plain features, and with pockets bursting with the national money, was depicted busily engaged in frying sprats for supper. In another, the Queen is sourly commanding her highly-disgusted daughters to take their tea without sugar, as a saving to papa. There were many of a similar cast, and not a few which exposed the vices to which the Princes of the family—young men of great hopes and with much kindliness of feeling, but with little principle—had unfortunately surrendered themselves.
The King himself was ever depicted as slovenly both in dress and gait—the Queen as mean in attire and sharply sour of visage. The latter always wears a far more acute, but a less inquiring, air than her husband. This was a true reflection. After Dr. Johnson had his celebrated interview with the monarch at Buckingham Palace, he is said to have declared that ‘His Majesty seems to be possessed of some good nature and much curiosity; as for his nous, it is not contemptible. His Majesty, indeed, was multifarious in his questions; but, thank God, he answered them all himself.’
The public discontent and the general distress increased greatly at this time, and had their effect in throwing a gloom over the court circle. The old formality and not a very diminished festivity were still, however, maintained there, and the republican fashions of France were held in abhorrence at Windsor.
The sons of Queen Charlotte were not so formal in their behaviour towards her, before witnesses, as the daughters were. The Duke of York was now the most observant of ceremony, but he exhibited therewith a show, perhaps a reality, of very tender feeling. Even on common occasions the household of the Queen was encumbered by much stiffness of observance of etiquette. It was not an uncommon occurrence for the Duke of York to attend at his mother’s toilette, conversing with her during its closing progress. When this was the case, and the dresser’s task was done, that lady could not leave the room if the Duke happened to stand between her and the door; to cross the Duke would have been a terrible breach of good manners. Nor could the Queen help the dresser; all that the illustrious lady could do was to watch till the Duke changed his position, and then with a smile, and a ‘Now, I will let you go,’ give freedom to the dresser, longing for liberty.
The Prince William (Duke of Clarence) was the least courteous of the sons of Charlotte. But it must be remembered that he not only went early to sea, but it was at a time when roughness of manner was considered as more becoming to a naval officer than refinement; to support the character, the young Prince probably assumed more coarseness of style and speech than was really natural to him. The Queen’s birthday drawing-room, in 1791, was followed by a ball, at which the pretty Princess Mary was to dance her first minuet in public, and her brother, the sailor Prince, had promised to be her partner. But previous to the ball there was a dinner, and at a birthday dinner more champagne was drunk by the Prince than on ordinary days. Under its inspiration, the Duke found his way to the table of some of the ladies and gentlemen in waiting. There he ruled as king, insisted upon more champagne, compelled the not-unwilling gentlemen to drink with him glass after glass, laughed at its effects upon them and himself, smacked the servants on the shoulder, abused them good humouredly, praised his sister Mary, had more champagne, kissed the hand of old Madam Schwellenberg with infinite mock heroics, was always going and never went, and ended all he said with the common oath of gentlemen, a loudly-uttered ‘By G—!’ With a morning so spent, he was not likely to be steady enough for the minuet at night. In fact, he was incapable of appearing at the ball at all; much to the chagrin of the Queen; still more to that of the Princess Mary, to whom, however, the offender made less apology the next morning than confession, that on the Queen’s birthday he had been ‘too far gone’ to think of dancing.
The Prince of Wales was not more temperate even on ordinary occasions; and he was less heartily courteous to ladies than his brothers, while perhaps he was more formally polite. Miss Burney describes him as staring at her when she was in attendance upon the Queen, not haughtily or impertinently, she says, but in an ‘extremely curious manner’—probably as Don Juan may have looked upon Zerlina.
With all the Queen’s respect for the formality of court, she enjoyed herself most when she was least observant of it. Reading the letters of Johnson and Mrs. Thrale, she liked to talk them over with Miss Burney, who could explain so many circumstances connected with them which would, otherwise, have been incomprehensible to the Queen. She loved to hear her dresser’s graphic account of Warren Hastings’ trial, whither she had sent her with a reticule stuffed full of cakes from the Queen’s own table. At Cheltenham, when she accompanied the King thither previous to his late illness, the royal residence was of such contracted dimensions, and so scant of accommodation, that her Majesty dressed and undressed in the drawing-room. Many of her ladies would not have submitted half so cheerfully as she did to such an arrangement. In the rural expeditions of the royal pair, there was indeed a comic sort of mixture of formality and fun. At Weymouth, for instance, when the King went to take his ‘dip,’ the royal machine was followed by another full of fiddlers and other musical persons, who, as the monarch plunged into the ocean, saluted him and the bold deed with ‘God save the King,’ horribly out of tune!