The office held by the Queen was not a pleasant one, but she contrived to reconcile it with a considerable amount of enjoyment. The events of her life, which brought her in collision with her daughter-in-law, will be found detailed in the story of the latter. Those of her office as guardian of the King sometimes brought her in connection with touching incidents. Thus, she one day found him singing a hymn to the accompaniment of a harpsichord, played by himself. On concluding it, he knelt down, prayed for his family, the nation, and finally that God would restore to him the reason which he felt he had lost! At other times he might be heard invoking death, and he even imagined himself dead, and asked for a suit of black that he might go into mourning for the old King! These incidents were great trials to the Queen, who witnessed them, or had them reported to her. But she had trials also from another source.
In 1816, the public distress was very great, and those in high places were unpopular, often for no better reason than that they were in high places, and were supposed to be indifferent to the sufferings of the more lowly and harder tried. The Queen came in for some share of the popular ill-will, but she met the first expression of it with uncommon spirit; a spirit indeed which gained for her the silent respect of the mob, who had begun by insulting her. As her Majesty was proceeding to hold her last drawing-room, in the year 1815, she was sharply hissed, loudly reviled, and insultingly asked what she had done with the Princess Charlotte. She was so poorly protected that the mob actually stopped her chair. Whereupon, it is reported, she quietly let down the glass, and calmly said to those nearest to her: ‘I am above seventy years of age; I have been more than half a century Queen of England; and I never was hissed by a mob before.’ The mob admired the spirit of the undaunted old lady, and they allowed her to pass on without further molestation.
Her son, the Prince Regent, sent several aides-de-camp to escort his mother from St. James’s to Buckingham House, but she declined their attendance. They told her that, having had the orders of the Regent to escort her safely to her residence, they felt bound to perform the office entrusted to them by the Prince. ‘You have left Carlton House by his Royal Highness’s orders,’ said Queen Charlotte; ‘return there by mine, or I will leave my chair and go home on foot.’ She was, of course, carefully watched, in spite of her commands, but the cool magnanimity she displayed was quite sufficient to procure respect for her from the crowd.
Although the King had some lucid intervals, he never again became perfectly conscious of the bearing of public events, and if he was deprived of some enjoyment thereby, he was also spared much pain. He was as little aware of what passed in his own family; and although he could make pertinent questions, and sometimes argue correctly enough from wrong premises, he was unable to comprehend the meaning of much that was told to him. Thus the marriage of his grand-daughter, a circumstance to which he used to allude playfully, was now to him a perfect blank. This ceremony took place on the 2nd of May 1816. It will be more fully alluded to hereafter. In this place it may, however, be stated that the drawing-room in honour of the marriage of the Princess Charlotte to Prince Leopold was held at Buckingham House. It was brilliant, the Queen was gracious, and only the Regent exhibited a want of his usual urbanity, by turning his back on a lady who was about to enter the service of the Princess of Wales. The bride did not look her best on this public occasion. She stood apart from the royal circle, in a recess formed by a window, with her back to the light, and was ‘deadly pale.’ There was an expression of pleasure on her countenance, but it was thought to be forced. ‘Prince Leopold,’ says a contemporary writer, ‘was looking about him with a keen glance of inquiry, as if he would like to know in what light people regarded him.’ The Queen either was, or pretended to be, in the highest possible spirits, and was very gracious to everybody. All the time I was in this courtly scene, and especially as I looked at the Princess Charlotte, I could not help thinking of the Princess of Wales, and feeling very sorry and very angry at her cruel fate.... I dare say the Princess Charlotte was thinking of the Princess of Wales when she stood in the gay scene of to-day’s drawing-room, and that the remembrance of her mother, excluded from all her rights and privileges in a foreign country, and left almost without any attendants, made her feel very melancholy. I never can understand how Queen Charlotte could dare refuse to receive the Princess of Wales at the public drawing-room, any more than she would any other lady of whom nothing has been publicly proved against her character. Of one thing there can be no doubt—the Queen is the slave of the Regent.’
Of this assertion, however, very grave doubt may be entertained. The Regent, at this time, certainly loved the ‘old Queen,’ as she was familiarly called, if a service of tender respect, deference, courtesy, and apparent good-will may be taken as proofs of such a love existing.
Her own health was now beginning to give way, and she sought to restore it by trying the efficacy of the Bath waters; but with only temporary relief. She was at Bath when the news of the death of the Princess Charlotte reached her, in November 1817, and her health grew visibly worse under the shock. Her absence from the side of the young Princess at this period, which was followed by such fatal consequences, was at the request of the Princess herself, who knew that the Queen’s good-will in this case was stronger than her ability. The popular voice, however, blamed her, and it was unmistakably expressed on her return to London.
The last visit paid by the Queen to the City differed in every respect from that which she had paid it when a bride. Her first visit had been one of form and ceremony; mingled, however, with a hearty lack of formality in some of the occurrences of the day. She went amid the citizens surrounded by guards; and this attendance was not as doubting the loyalty of the Londoners, but that royalty might look respectable in their eyes. On the occasion of the last visit her Majesty intimated to the Lord Mayor, Alderman Christopher Smith, that she wished to be received without ceremony; and this wish the corporate magnates construed as meaning without protection; there was as little of that as of civil politeness. The High Constable of Westminster attended near her Majesty’s carriage as far as Temple Bar, the eastward limit of his jurisdiction. On arriving there, however, he found no one in authority to receive the Queen, and accordingly he continued to ride by the side of the royal carriage until it reached the Mansion House. The mob was a-foot, active, numerous, and rudely-tongued that day. As the Queen passed through she was assailed by the most hideous yells, and many of the populace thrust their heads into the carriage, and gave expression to the most diabolical menaces. If it be true, as has been reported, that the Queen minutely detailed in writing the memoirs of her own life, the events of this day must have been penned by a trembling but indignant hand. At the Mansion House, so little protection was afforded her that the foremost of the people were almost thrust upon her, their violence of speech shocked her ears, and they attempted, but unsuccessfully, to disarm one of her footmen of his sword. In the evening of this melancholy last visit she dined with the Duke of York, and it was there that she first suffered from a violent spasmodic attack, from the effects of which she never perfectly recovered. The Lord Mayor stoutly maintained that the visit had very much improved her Majesty’s health. He thought, perhaps, that excitement was a tonic to age and infirmity. The Queen’s health really suffered materially from the excitement; and it was not with her wonted calmness that she could even listen, on the following Sunday, to the usual weekly sermon, always read aloud to her by one of the princesses.
It is certain that from the early part of the year 1818 the aged Queen may be said to have been in a rapidly declining state. Her condition, however, was not highly dangerous till the autumn, when her spasmodic attacks became more frequent and the progress of dropsical symptoms more alarming. Her sufferings were very great, and if she experienced temporary ease the slightest variation of position renewed her pain. She continued in this condition until the 14th of November, when, by a slight rupture in the skin of both ankles, from which there took place a considerable effusion of water, the venerable lady experienced some relief. Her condition, however, was not bettered thereby, for mortification soon set in, and that portion of her family which was in attendance upon her soon learned that all hope was abandoned; after an interval of more than eighty years England was again about to lose a Queen-consort; but no Queen-consort had for so long a period shared the throne of the empire as Charlotte. For fifty-seven years she had occupied the high place from which she was now about to descend. On Tuesday, the 16th of November 1818, at one o’clock P.M., the Queen calmly departed, at her suburban palace at Kew. Her last breath was drawn in a low arm-chair, that cannot be called an easy chair, and which is still preserved at Kew. The Regent, the Duke of York, the Princess Augusta, and the Duchess of Gloucester were present. The Princess Elizabeth of Hesse Homburg was said to have been absent, on account of some difference between herself and her royal mother, but it was afterwards ascertained that a reconciliation had taken place between mother and child before the Princess left the kingdom for her own home. How far the Queen had acquitted herself as a parent towards her children was made a ‘vexed question’ at the time of her death; and an endeavour was made to connect the fact of the dispersion of several of the princes and princesses in foreign countries with the mother as an irritating cause thereof. The ‘Times,’ at the period of which we are treating, entered largely upon this subject; and that organ was evidently inclined to conclude that her Majesty had not succeeded in attaching to her the hearts of her children. ‘The Duke of Cumberland,’ said the ‘Times,’ ‘is out of the question. The inflexible, but well-meant determination of the Queen to stigmatise her niece, by shutting the doors of the royal palace against her, may excuse strong feelings of estrangement or resentment on the part of the Duchess and her kindred. But that the Dukes of Clarence, Kent, and Cambridge at the same time should have quitted, as if by signal, their parent’s death-bed, is a circumstance which, in lower life, would have at least astonished the community.’ The ‘Times’ adds, that ‘the departure of the Princess Elizabeth, the Queen’s favourite daughter, who married and took leave of her in the midst of that illness which was pronounced must shortly bring her to the grave, may, perhaps, have been owing to the express injunctions of her Majesty. The Duke of Gloucester stands in a more remote degree of relationship; Prince Leopold more distant still; but they all quitted the scene of suffering at a period when its fatal termination could not be doubted; and, as these have departed, it is no less apparent to common observers that the Queen of Wurtemburg might have approached the bed of a dying mother, from whom, by the usual lot of princes, she has been so long separated, as that her royal parent has not accepted from her the performance of that painful duty.’ The same authority, however, confesses that the leading members of the royal family who remained in England were unwearied in their attendance on their dying parent, and so far set an example to the people of England, over whom they had been placed by Providence.
The influence of Queen Charlotte in political affairs, even had she been as much inclined to exercise it as her enemies charged her with, was but small. It could not be otherwise in a country with such a constitution as ours—a limited monarchy, the ministers of which are sure to be made responsible for grave consequences arising from the surrender of their authority to a power unrecognised by the constitution. That the influence, however, was not quite dormant was seen in the fact of the government paying the debts of her Majesty’s brother, the Prince of Strelitz, with 30,000l. of the public money; and the same influence was suspected when the Queen’s friend, the Earl of Suffolk, who had undertaken to arrange the embarrassed affairs of the Prince of Strelitz, was appointed to the office of Secretary of State.
If the Queen was not always a liberal recompenser, she, at least, was a punctual payer. In this respect she excelled the King himself. On the other hand, when the latter was at issue with his brothers or children, because of objectionable marriages entered into by them, the Queen did not aggravate the quarrel, although she felt keenly on the subject. She was in many respects a ‘homely’ woman, but in matters of homeliness the King set the example. He watched incessantly over the mental and physical education of his children; ‘and the daily discipline of the nursery itself did not escape his paternal solicitudes.’ But, says the ‘Times,’ ‘that her Majesty’s voluntary tastes were not exactly those which had been inferred from the habits of her matrimonial life, may be conjectured from the revolution which they seemed to undergo soon after the period when her royal husband ceased to exercise the supreme authority in this realm. At that period a transition was observed “from grave to gay.” The sober dignity, the chastened grandeur, the national character of the English court seemed to vanish with the afflicted sovereign. A new species of grandeur now succeeded, in which there was more of the exterior of royalty and less of its becoming spirit. A long series of what was meant to be festivities—crowded balls and elaborate suppers, glittering pomp, gaudy and gorgeous, yet fluttering decoration—reckless, capricious, yet never-ending profusion—all the apparatus of commonplace magnificence were introduced with the Regency and countenanced, or apparently not discountenanced, by the Queen.’ It must be remembered, however, that in these matters she had no control over the Regent; indeed we have, in a former page, seen her called his ‘slave.’ During her life she, at all events, had influence enough to maintain a regal retinue about the person of her afflicted husband. She had no sooner expired, however, when her son dismissed immediately nearly the whole of this retinue, on the ground of its uselessness to the unconscious King, and the very great expense it was to the country. The country was not unwilling to see a few thousands a-year economised by stripping the fine old monarch of some of the superfluous grandeur by which he was surrounded. The country, nevertheless, was sorely perplexed and bitterly indignant when it saw that the thousands which had been paid to numerous officers in daily service on the King were now to be paid to the Duke of York, who, for ten thousand a-year, constrained his filial affection to the severe labour of inquiring after his sick sire once a week.