The indiscretion of the Princess was very strongly marked by her selecting Sundays as the days for her greatest dinner-parties and her evening concerts. Queen Charlotte, before her, used to hold drawing-rooms on Sundays, without any idea of wrong. Since her time, too, the Countess St. Antonio, and indeed other English ladies, were accustomed to hold highest festival on this holiest day. In the case of the Princess, no doubt much prejudice was excited against her, in consequence of such proceedings. Yet she was not insensible to public opinion; and she not only wished to know what was said of her, but wished to hear it from the lips of the people.
‘One day,’ says the author of the ‘Diary of the Court and Times of George IV.,’ ‘the Princess set out to walk, accompanied by myself and one of her ladies, round Kensington Gardens. At last, being wearied, her Royal Highness sat down on a bench occupied by two old persons, and she conversed with them, to my infinite amusement, they being perfectly ignorant who she was. She asked them all manner of questions about herself, to which they replied favourably. Her lady, I observed, was considerably alarmed, and was obliged to draw her veil over her face to prevent her betraying herself, and every moment I was myself afraid that something not so favourable might be expressed by these good people. Fortunately, this was not the case, and her Royal Highness walked away undiscovered, having informed them that if they would be at such a door, at such an hour, at the palace, on any day, they would meet with the Princess of Wales, to see whom they expressed the strongest desire.’ These off-hand adventures she delighted in, as she did in off-hand expressions. One day, when the Princess was ready to set out on a visit to the British Museum, and three of her gentlemen, Keppel Craven, Gell, and Mercer, stood awaiting her orders, ‘Now,’ said she, as she stepped into her carriage, ‘toss up a guinea to know which shall be the happy two to come with me!’ The trio had not a guinea amongst them, and the Princess named Mercer and Keppel Craven.
Except in reading aloud, the Princess does not appear to have had any intellectual pursuits at Kensington. Her health too was at times indifferent, but her constitution was not undermined, mentally and physically, as the Regent’s was at this period; and she had one joy, which, however, she seemed to appreciate less than at its true worth, in the occasional society of the Princess Charlotte. The daughter is described as having been at this time ‘extremely spread for her age; her bosom full, but finely shaped; her shoulders large, and her whole person voluptuous.’ There was thus early a prospect of that obese development which so soon despoiled the attractions of her mother, and which very early marred the grace and beauty of the Princess Charlotte.
‘Her skin is white,’ says Lady Charlotte Campbell, ‘but not a transparent white; there is little or no shade in her face, but her features are very fine. Their expression, like that of her general demeanour, is noble. Her feet are rather small, and her hands and arms are finely moulded. She has a hesitation in her speech, amounting almost to a stammer—an additional proof, if any were wanting, of her being her father’s own child; but in everything she is his own image. Her voice is flexible and her tones dulcet, except when she laughs; then it becomes too loud, but is never unmusical.’ Her Royal Highness exhibited to this observer traits of disposition which seemed to certify to an existence in her character of self-will, some caprice, and also obstinacy; but in a person so kind-hearted, clever, and enthusiastic as this young Princess these symptoms were susceptible of being converted into positive virtues; for a sensible, kindly-natured, and ardent character can sooner be taught to bend its own will to the liking of others—caprice becomes fixedness of principle, and obstinacy gives way to resolution, which is only determinedly maintained on conviction of its being rightly grounded. The young heiress to the throne was more gentle in her demeanour to her mother than the latter was to her parent, the old Duchess of Brunswick. To her the Princess of Wales was harder in her demeanour than she was to others. The Duchess was certainly a mother who had never won her daughter’s respect, and who did not now know how to properly estimate her daughter’s sorrows. The Duchess was not only visited by Queen Charlotte, but she was invited to dinner by the Regent; and of this last honour she triumphantly boasted in the presence of that daughter who was ejected from the Regent’s house. But the poor ‘Lady Augusta’ was as awkward in her remarks in her old days as she had been in the days of her youth. When the dismayed circle amid which the invitation was boasted of observed a silence, which a sensible old lady would have taken for as severe a comment as could be passed, she broke the silence by abruptly asking the daughter, ‘Do you think I shall be carried up stairs on my cushion?’ To which the Princess coolly replied: ‘There is no upstairs, I believe: the apartments are all on one floor.’ ‘Oh charming! that is delightful!’ rejoined the Duchess; and with a few more queries, to which the Princess always replied with the greatest self-possession and sang-froid, as though she were not in the least hurt, this strange royal farce ended.
The brother of the Princess of Wales, if he had not an unbounded regard for his sister, at least knew what was due to her and propriety better than his mother. By his directions the Princess represented to the Duchess that if she accepted the Prince’s invitation she would tacitly acknowledge that he was justified in his treatment of his wife. The old lady, as obstinate as her own grandfather, George II., was not to be moved. She saw the matter, she said, in quite another light. She loved her daughter, would do anything in the world for her, but certainly she would not give up going to Carlton House. And in this determination she remained fixed, till, meditating upon the matter, and conceiving that the invitation may have been less out of compliment to herself than intended to draw her into a tacit condemnation of her daughter, she suddenly declined to go, and with mingled womanly and especially matronly feeling she invited the Princess to dine with her, instead.
The Princess of Wales was, undoubtedly, fast losing the small remnant of popularity among the higher classes which had hitherto sustained her. As her more noble friends silently cast her off she filled the void left by them with persons of inferior birth, and sometimes of indifferent reputation. Her own immediate attendants laughed at her, her ways, her pronunciation, and her opinions. She was indeed a puzzle to them. Sometimes they found in her a tone of exalted sentiment; at others she was coarse or frivolous: the ‘tissue of her character’ was made up of the most variegated web that ever went to the dressing of a woman. Perhaps one of the most foolish, if not the most unnecessary, of her acts, was an attempt which she made to sell a portion of her jewels. It was doubtless intended by way of proof that an application to parliament for an increased allowance was a necessity on her part.
She was, however, most intent on bringing forward the story of her wrongs before the public; and she was doubtless encouraged in this by a party, some members of which, without any of the sympathy which they affected to feel, looked upon her as an admirable tool wherewith to shape their particular and political ends. In the meantime the dinner parties at Kensington were of a joyous and unrestrained character. The Princess had poets and philosophers at her table when the royal fugitives from France invented maladies as an excuse for not visiting her, and she gained by the exchange; but, strange to say, with a very liberal income, irregularly paid, perhaps, she was as poor as the poets, and had not the consolation of philosophy. The house of Drummond and Co. declined to advance her the poor sum of 500l., although she is said to have offered to pay cent. per cent. for the loan. Probably the stupendous liberality promised by the would-be borrower rendered the bankers suspicious.
As she failed to acquire all the public sympathy which she thought herself entitled to by her condition, she became at once more melancholy and more recklessly mirthful. The dinner-parties, beginning late, continued to sit till dawn. On one of these heavily entertaining occasions, one of the guests, weary of his amusement, ventured to hint that morning was at hand. ‘Oh!’ exclaimed the Princess, ‘God, he knows when we may meet again.’ And then, using her favourite expression, she added, ‘To tell you God’s truth, when I am happy and comfortable I would sit on for ever.’ The describer of this scene says: ‘There was heaviness in the mirth, and every one seemed to feel it; so they sat on. At last one rose from the table, many of the guests went away, some few lingered in the drawing-room, amongst whom I was one. I was left the last of all. Scarcely had Sir H. Englefield, Sir William Gell, and Mr. Craven reached the drawing-room, when a long and protracted roll of thunder echoed all around, and shook the palace to the very foundations; a bright light shone into the room, brighter than the beams of the sun; a violent hissing noise followed, and some ball of electric fluid, very like that which is represented on the stage, seemed to fall close to the window where we were standing. Scarcely had we recovered the shock, when all the gentlemen, who had gone out, returned, and Sir H. Englefield informed us that the sentinel at the door was knocked down, a great portion of the gravel walk torn up, and every servant and soldier was terrified. “Oh!” said the Princess, undismayed, but solemnly, “this forbodes my downfall,” and she shook her head; then rallying, she desired Sir H. Englefield to take especial notice of this meteoric phenomenon, and give an account of it in the “Philosophical Transactions;” which he did.’[13]
So passed away her life up to the period when restrictions were taken off the Regency, and the Prince of Wales became virtually King. The friends of the Princess in the House of Commons served her cause with some dexterity, and seldom made a statement in reference to her without temporarily reviving some of the half-extinct sympathy of the general public. Others of her ‘faction,’ as her friends were called, kept her in a state of irritability and excitement by speaking of publishing her memoirs in full detail. Some persons, with less pretence to the name of friends, injured her extremely by statements affectedly put forward in her behalf. Her agitated condition of life was still further aggravated by the obstacles put in her way so as to prevent her seeing her daughter as often as she desired. She was even bold enough, and justifiably bold enough under the circumstances, to go down to Windsor to see the Princess. This audacious step, as it was considered, was met by a message from the Regent, through Lord Liverpool, requesting her never to repeat so uncalled-for an expedition. She promised obedience, on condition that she should be permitted to see the Princess once a-week; but otherwise she threatened a repetition of the visit. Such menaces gratified those who provoked them. The more they could goad the Princess of Wales into demonstrations of violent and vulgar indignation, the more, as they well knew, would she lose the public esteem. Her nature was too prone thus to lose sight of dignity and self-possession on being provoked. The grandeur of endurance was a flight beyond her ken. She mourned the loss of a wise friend in Perceval, who was partly lost to her, however, before his death, as soon as he became minister. There were reports, too, at this time, probably ill-founded, that she was to be removed to Hampton Court, the apartments at Kensington Palace being required for the Princess Charlotte. This, and the abandonment of her by some of her old partisans among the nobility, rendered her naturally querulous. ‘No, no!’ she said, ‘there is no more society for me in England; for do you think, if Lady Harrowby and the Duchess of Beaufort, and all of that set, were to come round to me now, that I would invite them to my intimacy? Never! They left me without a reason, as time-servers, and I never can wish for them back again.’[14] She felt that she could hold no court in presence of that of the Regent, and that as long as he lived she must be patient, and ‘nothing.’ Could she only have been the former, she perhaps would not have come to be of such small esteem as that which she ultimately experienced.
The Princess, however, still had some good taste. She patronised poets in other fashion than that followed by Sophia Dorothea, who gave them rings; or by Caroline, who made poor parsons out of poetic ploughmen, like Duck; or by Charlotte, who gave to the sons of the Muses little beyond empty praises and smiles that would not nourish. The Princess of Wales was a great admirer of Campbell, and in 1812 he was presented to her by his own ‘chieftain’s fair daughter,’ Lady Charlotte Campbell—a lady who has etched the doings of her royal mistress in aqua fortis. The Princess showed her esteem for the Scottish poet by dancing reels with him in her drawing-room at Blackheath. Campbell has left his opinion of her at this time in a letter addressed to a friend. ‘To say what I think of her, without being bribed by the smiles of royalty—she is certainly what you would call in Scotch a fine body; not fine in the English sense of the word, but she is good-humoured, appears to be very kind-hearted, is very acute, naïve, and entertaining; the accent makes her, perhaps, comic.... I heard that she was coarse and indelicate. I have spent many hours with her and Lady Charlotte alone, and I can safely say she showed us no symptoms of that vulgarity attributed to her.’ An instance of the mistakes, rather than the peculiarity of pronunciation, which distinguished her, is given by Dr. Wm. Beattic. He relates that, one day, the Princess was showing her pleasantly-arranged house to a noble peer of great celebrity. They were both in the gallery, where the Princess had recently hung some new pictures, and to one of these she directed the attention of her guest. It was his own portrait, and he acknowledged the honour by a very profound bow. The Princess, to enhance the value of the compliment, said, ‘You see, my lord, that I do consider you one of my great household dogs.’ She meant ‘gods,’ poor lady; but she did terribly abuse the divinities, and her daughter was ever her very dear ‘angle.’ These faults of orthography and errors in pronunciation bring less blame upon her than upon her mother. That the child of an Englishwoman born should have been so ignorant was the fault of the Englishwoman, and not of her child. The sister-in-law of Queen Charlotte was incapable of instructing her children as that Queen did, but she might have taught her daughter English by conversing with her in that language. The latter knew, however, less of it than she did of French and German; and when she conversed in these, it was not upon subjects that were edifying to the future Queen of England or creditable to herself. Queen Charlotte was far more particular on the question of correct delivery. In the case of her husband, Quin had ‘taught the boy to speak;’ and it was the exact propriety of the utterance of Mrs. Siddons that led to her appointment as reading preceptress of Queen Charlotte’s daughters.