Raffles by Victoria Glendinning

Author:Victoria Glendinning
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2012-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Sir Stamford Raffles

England 1816–1817

Cousin Thomas was slightly acquainted with two dissolute royal Dukes, and was elated by such encounters: ‘I can scarcely realise my present situation.’ Raffles trumped his cousin by becoming the friend of Princess Charlotte, the only child of the Prince Regent, and the presumptive heir after him to the throne of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

In May 1816, aged twenty, she was married to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Raffles sent her six Javanese ponies and some of the tables and chairs which he had made in London from Amboyna burr timber from Java. Charlotte was delighted with the furniture, which she put in her new home – Claremont House in Surrey. A friendship developed between Raffles and the young royal couple.

Princess Charlotte had been the problem child of dysfunctional parents. Her father, the Prince Regent, hated her mother, Princess Caroline of Brunswick. The pair separated after one year. He lived at Carlton House, she had her own establishment. Charlotte, shuttled between them, became a troubled teenager, loud-mouthed and gauche. She was, like both her parents, overweight, and profligate with money she did not have. She had a fling with a young Hussar, whom she met secretly at her mother’s house – with her mother’s connivance.

At seventeen she was given her own establishment, Warwick House, tucked away across a courtyard from Carlton House. A strategic marriage was arranged with Prince William of Orange, son of William I of the Netherlands, but she refused to marry him. Another fling, with the King of Prussia’s nineteen-year-old nephew Prince Frederick, resulted in the Prince Regent crossing the courtyard to Warwick House in a rage and pronouncing she must live out of London in seclusion. Charlotte ran away down the back stairs of Warwick House and into a hackney cab. The unhappy girl was pursued, and immured at Cranbourne Lodge in Windsor Great Park. Her only permitted outings were to see her grandmother Queen Charlotte, wife of the demented George III.

Among the European princelings hovering hopefully around the next-but-one heir to the British throne was Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the younger son of a minor dukedom in Thuringia. He made himself agreeable to the Prince Regent. He was not very royal, as European royalty went, and he had no money. He was lodging over a grocer’s shop in Marylebone High Street. But Charlotte made up her mind to marry him. It is said that when the Prince repeated the vow ‘With all my worldly wealth I thee endow’, the Princess laughed.

Parliament voted the couple an ample income, plus a lump sum for setting up Camelford House on the corner of Oxford Street and Park Lane in London, and Claremont in Surrey. It was a popular marriage. Charlotte was cheered by the crowd whenever she drove out. People knew all about her misfortunes. Raffles, far away in Java, had known; the Java Government Gazette had reprinted scandalous articles from the London papers, and a special supplement, ‘The Princess Charlotte of Wales: The Dramatic Escape from Warwick House.

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