By George! The Prince Has Sisters?

George the Fourth’s daughter, Princess Charlotte, died in childbirth not long after he ditched is wife, Princess Caroline. Now the Regent has no heir and no wife. We return for another installment of Mr. Al’s take on the life and times of George IV.

As distraught as the Prince Regent was over Charlotte’s death, there were many who believed him partly responsible. Or ,at least, not being as deeply affected as he claimed to be. As the grief of Charlotte’s death passed, Prinny discovered that nothing had changed as far as the publics loathing of his August Personage was concerned.

Catcalls and animal dung thrown at his carriage were once again on the menu. But a new problem had arisen, or,I should say, been publicly acknowledged. The future Queen of England was dead, as was it’s future king. Even if the Regent got a divorce, and even if a princess could be found who was willing to marry the Prince Regent, a very big “if”, his health was such that there was a question mark over his ability to father another child.

Other plans had to be made. However, the problems were several. Most of the Prince Regent’s brothers, not surprisingly, remained unmarried. Nor did they seem interested in getting married to anyone acceptable. Public opinion of the Prince Regents brothers differed from the Regent himself only by degree.

Since the end of the war various taxes that had been enacted as a wartime expedient had been repealed. There was little extra money for extravagant households for the various dukes. Said the Duke of Wellington of these fellows;

“My God! The proposals to augment the establishments of the royal dukes, they are the damnedest millstone about the necks of any government that can be imagined. They have insulted- personally insulted- two thirds of the gentlemen in England, and how can it be wondered at that they take their revenge upon them when they get them in the House of Commons? It is their only opportunity, and I think, by God, they are quite right to use it.”

None of them were popular. Some were only less offensive than others. The princesses were another matter altogether. None of them were unpopular, but they were never allowed to appear in public long enough for anyone to form an opinion of them, negative or otherwise.

It was not a situation conducive to producing an “Heir and a spare.” However, no national emergency was going to change the Queens mind about letting her daughters, any of them, have lives of their own. Apparently, Her Majesty believed that her daughters would behave quite as badly as her sons, given half a chance. There was no evidence for this. It never dawned on the Queen that she might be harming her girls, keeping them on so short a leash. But she was, after all, the Queen. It was the duty of all her children to obey, regardless of how they felt about any given order.

The fact that her boys acted as though her orders were more along the lines of unwanted motherly advice, to be acted upon or ignored as they saw fit, was all the more reason to keep all the girls close to home. And the princesses, to a woman, bitterly resented this.

It was a situation that only got worse as time went on. By the time Charlotte began coming into her own, with her own house no less, the situation was coming to a head. One problem that affected the Queen’s judgment was the state of her health. She had grown so large that one unsympathetic observer noted that she looked “as though she were bearing all her fifteen children at once.” Meow.

This did nothing for her disposition, which the girls reported was uniformly rotten. She also suffered from something called erysipelas, “Which not only reddened her face but made it swell to a distressing size.” Ye Gads! When the princesses demanded that they be allowed to go to London more often than mom saw fit, mom hit them with, “Oh, so y’all want to go flitting off to London and leave me here to look after your poor, crazy father all by my lonesome.” (My words, in case you couldn’t tell.)

This was pure poppycock and the girls knew it. The Queen never saw the King alone. She usually dragged one or more of the girls with her. She found her husband, who had by this time totally withdrawn into a world of his own, “both frighting and embarrassing.” If there was any love left for her husband, she did an outstanding job of hiding it. Which was something else that caused the girls great distress.

When Princess Augusta, the oldest, was bold enough to mention this one night, the Queen exploded. Wrote Augusta to the Prince Regent; “Upon my honor, my sisters, Elizabeth, Sophia and Mary were perfectly respectful in both manner and words, though she was too violent to allow it and even when she told them that she would never forgive them. Eliza said, “May God forgive you for saying so.” She won’t allow that any of us feel for the King’s unhappy state of mind…She declared that after tonight the subject is never to be mentioned again and that she COMMANDS us to be silent upon it.”

Elizabeth also wrote to her brother about the confrontation, telling him that she was stunned by the accusation that she and her sisters didn’t care for the Queen or their sad, mad father. The Queen, well aware that her daughters were writing to the Prince Regent, decided to get her boot in before he formed the wrong idea of what REALLY happened that night.

In her own letter she wrote that she was more than happy to let his sisters go to London… “sometimes”… But not as often as they would like. If she allowed that, she’d never see any of them. And as to the night in question. “Whether this conduct is what a mother ought to expect from her children I leave to the judgments of those that have any…for them coming to ask my advice and hearing my objections and not following is treating me like a fool.”

She went on to say that she believed the girls were telling anyone who would listen what a horrid mom she was. With the servants getting an earful and the tabloids paying real money for that kind of trash talk, where would it end?

The Prince Regent went to see mom as soon as he received that letter. It took all of his charm to calm her down. When he finally did, he invited her and all his sisters to a big feed at Carlton House. That went very well. Wrote Augusta to the Prince in a thank you letter; “ I am very certain that it is to your good offices that we are indebted for her assurances that she misunderstood us….I only hope that we shall not have any occasion to plague you with our applications for redress.”
Wrote one historian, “It was a hope that was not to be realized.”

– Mr. Al