Виктория Холт: Caroline the Queen

THE Prince of Wales lay on his back, snoring. To sleep after a heavy meal in the middle of the day was a custom he had brought with him from Hanover. This was no light afternoon nap; but like everything the Prince did it was performed with precision. He lived by the clock; there was a time for eating, sleeping, doing business, and even making love. In fact, throughout the Court his habits were a joke of which he was ignorant; but his wife, who had made it her first duty to discover as much as she could of what was going on around her, was well aware of this.

Poor George Augustus, although he was more popular than his father, the King, who could not speak a word of English, appealed strongly to the people’s ridicule. He was choleric and a lack of inches had made him ready to assert his importance; his quarrels with his father, his habit of walking up and down his mistress’s apartments, watch in hand that he might visit her at exactly the appointed time, had provided material for the lampooners who frequented the city’s coffee houses and taverns and seemed to be of the opinion that the royal family’s chief duty was to amuse its subjects.

But on this hot June afternoon when the bees buzzed busily in the lavender which formed the sweet scented border in the flower gardens of Richmond Lodge, the Prince slept, unaware that it was to be one of the most important days in his life.

Close by in her apartments Caroline Princess of Wales was knotting, an occupation she favoured because it kept the hands occupied while the brain was not in the least concerned with the thread in her hands.

So hot! she thought. And on these hot days she felt fatigued nowadays. It was something she never admitted to others but occasionally in the privacy of her own apartments she faced the fact that her health was not what she would wish it to be. The subject was like a threatening cloud—not overhead at the moment—just perhaps a shadow on the horizon; but it was there, and each week she fancied it was a little bigger.

Of course, she told herself angrily, I’m perfectly healthy.

Women had these troubles. After all she had had seven children, and a few miscarriages. Louisa the youngest was now three, and it had been after her birth that the trouble had started. It frightened her, for an internal rupture could be a dangerous and humiliating affliction, and she was terrified that someone would discover her secret. George Augustus had once been aware of it. He hated illness in those around him. She supposed it reminded him that he too was not immortal.

‘It will clear up,’ she had told him. ‘It is nothing ... it happens after a difficult childbirth now and then.’

He had accepted that; and she had been fortunate in being able to hide from him the pain she felt. She wondered though whether he was later aware of it and preferred to pretend, as she did, that it did not exist.

Henrietta Howard was sitting in the antechamber now with Charlotte Clayton, no doubt dozing, but ready to come in at precisely the right moment when they would prepare the Princess for her husband’s visit.

Henrietta was George Augustus’s mistress, but the affair was certainly not one of tempestuous passion. He had selected her long ago in Hanover whither she had come to seek her fortune and it was merely because he believed he ought to have a mistress that he had chosen her. At that time he had been very content with his wife. Now of course he had other mistresses, but she always believed it was to prove to these cynical observers his immense virility rather than due to any overriding passion. However, Henrietta remained—a habit. Yet a man who made love with his eye on the clock could not really be seriously involved.

She smiled fondly. She felt affectionate towards her little man; her position was a difficult one, but she knew how to keep it tenable. He was fond of her, for he was a sentimental man; he was proud of her, for she was a good-looking woman; there was one quality which she must not make too obvious and that was her intelligence, for George Augustus was not the man to tolerate a woman who was known to be cleverer than himself. But it was not beyond the wit of a clever woman to hide her cleverness. It had been done in the past and would be done again. She in any case had been successfully doing it for many years.

She dismissed her fears. The King was in Hanover. Long might he stay there. What a pleasure to have the old ogre out of the country. She believed that if he would only stay away for a year, she and George Augustus would wean any affection the people had for the King completely from him. He was a silly old man in many respects. He did not appreciate this country which had fallen into his lap like ripe fruit from a tree. He preferred his little Hanover principality to this great kingdom, Herrenhausen to Hampton, the old Leine Schloss to St James’s. He, with his German speech and his German habits, kept his two German mistresses whom he had brought with him thirteen years ago from Hanover; they were the delight of the people because surely they must be the two ugliest women in the country and did such good service to the writers of lampoons. But the King did occasionally show an interest in English women. There was that saucy creature, Anne Brett, who was at this moment giving herself such airs at St James’s Palace and would doubtless receive her title and coronet when her lover returned to England. But it was Ermengarda Schulemburg who had accompanied him to Hanover—Ermengarda, now Duchess of Kendal, the mistress who was like a wife to him and with whom, some said, he had even gone through a form of marriage in the last year or so since he had heard of the death of George Augustus’s mother in the prison of Ahlden in which he had placed her.

There was such joy in contemplating his absence.

He despised George Augustus, but she happened to know that he had far more respect for the Princess of Wales than he had for the Prince. That meant, though, that he was more watchful of her than of his son; and she had had to be very careful, knowing him for the vindictive man he was. She would never forget what he had done to his wife—the mother-in-law whom she had never met—because she was guilty of one infidelity, and had not only divorced her but sent her to a dreary exile which had lasted thirty years and had such a short while ago ended.

From her first days at Hanover she had realized that she must never put herself in a similar position to that of her unfortunate mother-in-law.

Not that she ever would. Sophia Dorothea must have been a foolish, frivolous creature; Caroline would never be that.

She yawned and looked at the clock. Not yet three. Another hour before the Prince came to her apartment and they took their walk together in the gardens. He was a great walker and so had she been before she had begun to feel this affliction—slight, she insisted, and something many women suffered from. She fancied there was a little gout in her feet. She shuddered, remembering the stories she had heard of the King’s predecessor, Queen Anne, who had so often had to be carried in her chair to important functions.

Anne had been the Queen and Caroline, though she might one day bear that proud title, would be but a Queen Consort, and that was very different from a Queen Regnant. Very different indeed. For when a Queen Consort depended on the whims of a choleric little husband she would have to be very careful.