Imbecility finally settled on the mind of George III.—Intercourse between the Princess and her daughter obstructed—The Whigs betrayed by the Prince—Sketch of the Duchess of Brunswick—The Princess’s Court at Kensington diminished—Her pleasant dinners there—Lively outbreaks of the Princess—Her sketches of character—Her indiscretion—An adventure—Description of the Princess Charlotte—The Princess of Wales’s demeanour to her mother—Thoughtlessness of the Duchess of Brunswick—Popularity of the Princess on the wane—Her determination to bring her wrongs before the public—She becomes more melancholy—An incident—Continued agitation of the Princess—She becomes querulous—The poet Campbell presented to her—A humorous fault of orthography—The Prince and John Kemble.
By the exertions chiefly of Mr. Perceval the Princess had been declared innocent of the charges brought against her, had been received at court, and had apartments assigned her in Kensington Palace, which she occupied conjointly with her house at Blackheath. The clever friend of the Princess was high in the popular esteem for these things, and the public awaited at his hands that banquet of scandal which he had promised them in the volume to be called ‘The Book.’ When, however, they found the work suppressed by its author, and that he was soon after made Chancellor of the Exchequer, the public professed to discern here both cause and effect. They looked upon the elevation of Perceval as the reward of his literary self-denial. The honourable gentleman cared little for what the public thought, nor can it be said that, either as friend of the Princess or servant of the Prince, he served either of these illustrious persons, or even the public, unfaithfully.
In 1810, when imbecility settled upon the mind of George III., Perceval proposed a restricted regency, but there was less cause for restriction now than there had been before, and the restriction was only maintained during one year. It was a period of great distress at home, and abroad of such costly triumphs as made victory itself a glory not to be glad over. At this juncture the Regent acquired some degree of public esteem, and it was not ill-earned, by declining to receive an increase of revenue when the people were taxed to an extent such as no nation had ever before experienced. The public, however, would fain have seen the Princess of Wales raised also in a corresponding degree with the Regent, by some distinctive mark to show that she was the Regent’s wife.
It was rather an unreasonable expectation, and Mr. Perceval was rather unreasonably censured for not realising it. The deed of separation was, if not a cause, at least an apology or authority, for keeping the Princess in the condition of a private person. She could claim no higher title till the period that should make her husband a king. But this was no reason that she should be irritated by obstructions thrown in the way of her seeing her daughter. These obstructions were unworthy of their author, and failed in their object. They were excused on the ground that the manners of the mother were not edifying to the child, but when the two did meet there was ample evidence of an affection existing between them stronger than might have been expected at the hands of a daughter who had certainly not been educated in the holy faith that her mother was worthy of all the filial reverence that child could pay her.
In the meantime the Regent had his difficulties. He who betrayed the Whigs, by whose advice he had been guided during the time of his father’s sanity, but who had cast them off after the death of Fox in 1806, now sought to strengthen his government by the accession of some of his old friends. The Whigs, however, would not act with Perceval, and after the assassination of that minister in 1812 they lost, by their arrogance, the opportunity of forming an independent administration. The boast of Grey and Grenville that they would ride rough-shod through Carlton Palace led to the formation of the Liverpool Tory Ministry, which began its long tenure of office in June 1812.
During these changes and negotiations the Princess of Wales remained at Kensington or Blackheath, while her mother was very indifferently lodged in New Street, Spring Gardens, in half-furnished, dirty, and comfortless apartments. Amid filthy lamps on a sideboard, and common chairs ranged along dingy walls, sat the aged Duchess, ‘a melancholy spectacle of decayed royalty.’ She is described as having good-nature impressed upon her features, frankness in her manners, with a rough, abrupt style of conversation, that rendered her remarkable. She loved to dwell upon the past, though it was full of melancholy remembrances; and she is said to have been charitable to the frailties of the period of her own early days, but a strict censurer of those of the contemporaries of her old age.
Up to the period of the King’s illness the Princess of Wales did not want for friends to attend her dinners and evening parties. When the only advocate she had among the royal family virtually died, and the Prince of Wales became really King, under the title of Regent, the number of her allies seriously diminished. They had to choose, as in the days of the first and second George, between two courts. They declared for that which was most likely to bring them most profit in galas and gaieties. Still the diminished court at Kensington was not so dull as that made up of a few venerable dowagers at the Duchess of Brunswick’s. The Princess called her mother’s court a ‘Dullification,’ and yawned when she attended it, with more sincerity than good manners. But freedom from restraint was ever a delight to her, and she has been known on a birthday, kept at Kensington, to receive her congratulating visitors wrapped up in a pink dressing-gown. It was at a birthday reception that her brother, the Duke of Brunswick, who afterwards fell at Quatre Bras, presented her with a splendid compliment and a worthless ring. It was as much as duchyless duke could afford. On the other hand, on the same natal day, Queen Charlotte showed a good-natured memory of the festival by sending the Princess a very handsome aigrette. The young Princess Charlotte was with her mother on that day, and she observed, rather flippantly, that the present was ‘really pretty well, considering who sent it!’[11] The Princess was at this time a fine girl, somewhat given to romping, but with the power of assuming a fine air of dignity when occasion required.
At the pleasant dinners at Kensington, when the servants were out of the room, and a dumb waiter (all the better, as Sir Sidney Smith used to say, for being a deaf waiter also) was at the elbow of every guest, the Princess would seem to take delight in going over the history of the past. What little there was good in her, she once remarked to Count Munster, was owing to the count’s mother, who had been her governess. She acknowledged that the natural petulance of her character was rather active at the period of her marriage. ‘One of the civil things his Highness said just at first was to find fault with my shoes; and as I was very young and lively in those days, I told him to make me a better pair and send them to me. I brought letters from all the princes and princesses to him from all the petty courts, and I tossed them to him and said: “There ——, that’s to prove I’m not an impostor.”’ She married, she said, entirely to please her father, for whom she would have made any sacrifice. She regretted that the union was determined on before the parties had been introduced to each other. ‘Had I come over here as a Princess, with my father, on a visit, as Mr. Pitt once wanted my father to have done, things might have been very different; but what is done cannot be undone.’[12] Her own condition at home, however, was, at the time, but melancholy. She had there but a sorry life, between her father’s mistress and her own mother. Civility to the one always procured her a scolding from the other. No wonder that she was, as she asserted, ‘tired of it.’
Her spirit, depressed as it often was during her presence at Kensington, except on the few occasions when her daughter was permitted to see her, sometimes experienced the very liveliest of outbreaks. She thought nothing, for instance, of slipping through the gardens, with a single lady-in-waiting, both of them attired, perhaps, in evening costume, and, crossing Bayswater, stroll through the fields, and along by the Paddington Canal, at the great risk of being insulted, or followed by a mob, if recognised. She thought as little of entering houses that were to let, and inquiring about the terms. These are but small, yet they are significant, traits. One of more importance is her study and perception of character. At Kensington she kept a book, in which she wrote down, in indifferent English, but with great boldness and spirit, the characters of many of the leading persons in England. It is doubtful whether this book was destroyed, as the writer, when dying, ordered it to be. If it could be recovered, with the diary of Queen Charlotte and that kept by poor Sophia Dorothea, something from them might be culled of more interest than anything that is yet to be found in the histories of these three Queens.
The indiscretions of the Princess of Wales were attributed by her mother to a touch of insanity. On an occasion when Lord and Lady Redesdale were invited to meet the Duchess of Brunswick at dinner at the Princess’s house at Blackheath, they found themselves there long before any of the rest of the company. For half an hour the Duchess was alone with them. She had known Lord Redesdale from her childhood, and she talked with him unreservedly. Alluding to the eccentricity and imprudence of her daughter, she added: ‘But her excuse is, poor thing, that she is not right here,’ putting her hand to her forehead. Lord Redesdale told this story to Miss Wynn in 1828, and that lady has recorded it in her ‘Diaries of a Lady of Quality.’