Princesses by Flora Fraser

Author:Flora Fraser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2004-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

12 Passion

Princess Amelia’s passion for General Fitzroy continued to rage, her open assertions of it causing difficulties in a household where feelings might run deep but were customarily confided sub rosa, or carried unspoken to the grave. And she thought and dreamt and acted always with her eventual marriage to Charles in mind. Some time before her twenty-fifth birthday, she wrote to him:

How dearly and gratefully I do love you, my own CFR. I am miserable without you. Yes, judge of my feels [feelings] by your own. I do want you much more than you have an idea of. I am sure we must be hours together before we knew each other. The joy would be so great, I mean to keep you in bed for a week at least when we marry. We must somehow settle to meet. I think at Ernest’s we might, if you would come in plain clothes and if I could get Hely the man out of the way.

When Amelia turned twenty-five in August 1808, her obsession with Fitzroy twisted in her side still more. For, as we have seen, under the terms of the Royal Marriages Act, she had reached the age when she no longer needed her father’s consent to marry. But in the event she never gave the required notice to the Privy Council on her twenty-fifth birthday or thereafter, for fear of inflaming her father’s condition. She did, however, write numerous letters to her beloved Charles and even, as we have seen, a number of wills in his favour, in which she, like her sisters Elizabeth and Augusta, looked ahead to a day when their brother, as sovereign, would allow her to marry. Younger, more impetuous than her sisters, Amelia also now dreamt of a clandestine marriage.

‘Dear Lord E, how I love him,’ Amelia wrote of Lord Euston, Charles Fitzroy’s uncle, who had been let into their secret plans:

Do you think he could settle how to be called in church, or get a licence, and when I am next in town, I could manage it. With a licence I might, for I might go to Dumergue [the royal dentist] with Mrs Tant Mieux [Mrs Villiers] and then meet you and go to Chapel St, where, with a clergyman and licence we might be married. That would be the best of any plan, I think – and if witnesses were necessary, and Tant Mieux did not like to be one, Lord E, I am sure, would, or any of your mother’s old servants.

Although Fitzroy seems from Amelia’s side of the correspondence to have played a supine part in the relationship, he dared much in openly accepting the affections of one of the King’s daughters. And he sometimes showed himself as rash as his lover. When one of Princess Amelia’s ladies, Lady Georgiana Buckley, tried to alert the King to his daughter’s romance, which was clear to all with eyes to see it, Fitzroy said he would resign if ‘those devils’, the Buckleys stayed.

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