But I don’t care, thought Elizabeth. All I care is that I escape.

She looked at her mother and believed she had fallen asleep.

How unlike her! And how grey and old she looked in sleep!

Poor Mamma! thought Elizabeth. She is as ill in her way as Papa is in his.

And she thought of her father, and how it was sometimes necessary to put him into a strait-jacket, and her cold-hearted mother, who had helped to ruin so many of their lives, and George with his wild affairs and the other brothers with their matrimonial difficulties.

What a family!

The Landgrave of Hesse-Homburg had arrived in England and the public was amused. What was this creature who had come to marry the Princess? There was something ridiculous about a woman of forty-eight behaving like a coy young bride which, it was insisted, was what the Princess Elizabeth was doing. She was over-plump, somewhat unwieldy in fact; and when her bridegroom appeared the cartoons came thick and fast.

When he arrived in England, it was said, his face and body were so caked with dirt that no one could see his features. He had never washed in his life. He did not think washing necessary. He smoked continuously and the smell of his smoky unclean person sent people scurrying away from him.

They had had to insist that he take several very hot baths one after another to make some inroad into the grime; and to take his pipe away from him, which made him peevish.

The truth was that hygiene at the English Court had become something of a fetish owing to the Regent’s habits. He himself bathed every day and he expected everyone who came into contact with him to do the same. Thus the bathing habit was taken up throughout the Court but baths were rarities in Hesse-Homburg; and remembering the disastrous meeting of the Regent with Caroline of Brunswick when the odour which emanated from her person so sickened him that he turned away calling for a strong brandy, the Landgrave was advised to bath and change his linen before being presented to his future bride.

He seemed to be an easy-going fellow and submitted to the baths with a good grace; and when he was presented to Elizabeth she blushed deeply with pleasure. He was extremely fat but she was no sylph. They might appear to be a most unromantic-looking couple but he was willing to marry her and more than anything else on earth she wanted to be married.

So the bride and groom were satisfied with each other.

The press was delighted with its Landgrave. He was such a good subject for caricature. Because he was from Hesse-Homburg he was quickly christened the Humbug; and the bridal pair were known as The Two Humbugs.

Their wedding gave rise to coarse comment and much that was caustic too.

Naturally the Princess was lavishly endowed.

‘A fresh attack on John Bull’s Purse,’ commented the papers.

The Regent offered to lend the pair one of his houses for the honeymoon, but the bridegroom declared ungraciously that he did not care for the country; however, no one took any notice of this except the Queen who expressed her surprise that Elizabeth could consider marrying such a creature. To which Elizabeth retorted that she was completely content.

The Queen took to laughing at him – at his manners, at his lack of cleanliness and most of all his clumsy attempts to speak English.

‘Many foreign princes – princesses – have to learn a new language when they marry,’ retorted Elizabeth. ‘There is nothing unusual in that.’

They all changed, thought the Queen sadly, once they married. Look at Mary! Now she was the Duchess of Gloucester how different she was from when she had been plain Princess Mary – and all because of her alliance with that Slice of Gloucester Cheese whose mother had been a milliner and had no right to marry into the royal family at all.

At the wedding ceremony the Queen could not control her laughter at the strange manner in which the Landgrave spoke English. It was too comical; and the whole wedding was a farce. So said the Queen. But it was not so much amusement that made her laugh as the desire to ridicule her daughter’s bridegroom. She hated losing her daughters. She wanted them all at her side, waiting on her as they had done in their youth.

The Regent was kind to his sister. After the ceremony he embraced her warmly and wanted to know if she was happy.

‘I am completely content,’ she told him.

‘Then I am happy, too.’

Dear George, he didn’t really care, but he always pretended to so charmingly.

And she was married at last. She would not be the old maid of the family. That would be Augusta. For in view of her adventures no one would ever be able to call Sophia an old maid.

Shortly after the marriage of Elizabeth and the Landgrave, Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, was married to his lovely Augusta at her father’s Belvedere Palace in Cassel.

Adolphus, the forty-four-year-old bridegroom, was happy. He was marrying for love; he could not forget his great good fortune in coming to Hesse-Cassel to seek a bride for Clarence and finding one for himself. He was gentle, rather naïve; and they were very happy.

Even the Queen of England approved of the bride and had sent her warm messages of welcome and an invitation to come to England.

‘We must,’ said Adolphus, ‘be married in England as well as here in Hesse-Cassel; and after the ceremony we’ll come back here.’

Augusta was delighted; she had no wish to leave her beautiful mountain home where she had spent the happiest of childhoods with the kindest of parents and her brothers and sisters. Even the Napoleonic Wars had not greatly disturbed Hesse-Cassel, for Duke Frederick had successfully managed to remain in a sense neutral while he placated both sides.

He agreed with Adolphus that the marriage must be celebrated in England and announced his intention of accompanying the pair to England to assist at the ceremony.

Augusta herself was a little nervous of the visit. She had naturally heard a great deal about the happenings at the English Court. The affairs of that family had been the scandal of a Continent; for one thing no other family seemed to behave quite so outrageously and Germany was so closely linked with the English royal family, which was after all the House of Hanover, that all Germans were particularly interested.

‘I am very nervous of meeting the Queen and the Regent,’ Augusta told her husband.

‘You need have no fears of the Regent. He is the most charming man alive – particularly to beautiful women.’

Adolphus looked complacently at his bride with her tall slim figure, her dark eyes, her abundant dark hair and thick well-arched brows; she was beautiful, entirely feminine; she could sing delightfully – which, Adolphus said, would please the Regent who fancied he had a very fine singing voice himself.

‘But the Queen?’ she asked.

The Queen? Well he was not sure of the Queen. She would admire Augusta’s dexterity with the needle. Augusta was a very fine needlewoman and examples of her exquisite embroidery adorned her father’s palaces; she could arrange flowers with true artistry. The Queen would find those pleasant accomplishments.

‘The Queen does not disapprove of our marriage,’ said Adolphus; ‘and as she is disapproving of so much recently it may well be that she will be pleased to find something which she can like.’

And so they set out for England, and how rough was the crossing and how sick poor Augusta, tossing on her bunk and wishing she were anywhere on earth rather than on a frail boat in a malicious sea on a trip to see a fractious Queen of England.

But when the trip was over she looked very lovely with her white gown and lavender-coloured pelisse which accorded so well with her dark hair and bright complexion and her lovely eyes shaded by the white ostrich feathers in her hat.

The people thought her beautiful and cheered her. What a change from the fat, dirty Humbug from Homburg.

Adolphus was delighted by her reception but Augusta who could not understand what the people were shouting was a little alarmed. When she drove through the streets of London and grinning faces came close to the carriage windows she drew back in some alarm. These noisy streets were so different from what she had been used to in Hesse-Cassel where the people were orderly and disciplined and showed proper respect to their ruling house.

‘They are admiring you, my love,’ said Adolphus proudly.

She smiled faintly at the people and they began to think her aloof, so they did not care for that however beautiful she was, and Augusta, sensing a certain hostility, was longing to go home to Hesse-Cassel, although she dreaded another sea crossing.

The Queen, however, received her with the utmost affability. Augusta showed the proper deference to her; they spoke in German together, and Charlotte was less of an ogress than she had feared. The Regent was, as she had been led to believe, perfectly charming. Adolphus was the luckiest fellow on earth to have won such a beauty, he told her; and he sighed to imply that he envied his brother, and was faintly melancholy, in the most charming way, because the happiness of the newly married pair could not but remind him of his own sorry plight with the Princess of Wales.

Clarence and Kent were inclined to be suspicious. She felt they were weighing her up, assessing her fertility. Adolphus whispered that now the race was on they were all eager to have the child which would be heir to the throne.

‘And we, my darling, have the start of them. Clarence and Kent are not even married yet.’

The meeting with the Duke of Cumberland was less successful, for she did not meet the Duchess who was not received at Court. He had a terrifying countenance and she could well believe all the stories she had heard of him.