When we returned home, Princess Charlotte was greatly agitated, and insisted on knowing the whole of Princess Mary’s conversation with me. She had heard most of it, and I concealed nothing from her in that respect; but I was less communicative with respect to my lesson from the Regent. I told her what he said about Lady Jersey, and I hinted that he had expressed his regard for her in preference to her mother, because he had insisted on my so doing. Princess Charlotte said she had of late received much more kindness from her mother than from the Prince, but that their unfortunate quarrels with each other rendered their testimonies of affection to her at all times very precarious. As to Lady Jersey, she said she knew not what the Prince had against her. He had been the first to urge her visiting his daughter, and Lady Jersey declared she would come unless she heard from his own lips a positive revocation of the order. Lady Jersey was now going out of town, so that all difficulties on that subject were suspended.
The affair of the Duchess of York and Lady Anne Smith hurt Princess Charlotte exceedingly; she had a great regard for the Miss Fitzroys, and she thought the Duke and Duchess of York two of her best friends. She therefore resolved to clear up the point with the Duchess, and therefore wrote her a note on the subject, desiring her to put off the party if she thought it more prudent so to do. What the Duchess had or had not said I cannot determine, but that trifling circumstance made a “tracasserie” of long duration. The Duchess wanted to exculpate herself with Lady Anne, who, scandal said, was jealous of her. Lady Anne wrote to Colonel Taylor at Windsor, he told it to Princess Mary, and she wrote me a letter, complaining I had betrayed confidence, after a friendship of so many years.
At last, however, the Duke of Cambridge called on me, and, I believe, set all to rights as far as I was concerned; for I not only told him that I could not deceive Princess Charlotte, whose ears were very quick, and who insisted on knowing the whole, but that I had promised never to deceive her; and that also I had not the slightest idea that Princess Mary wished what she said to me on the subject of the Duchess and Lady Anne to be a secret kept from Princess Charlotte; that I had rather considered it as a warning which it was my duty to repeat; and that the whole would have ended quietly if the Duchess had left it where it was. The Duke said that it had better have rested with the Princess Charlotte’s being to blame in not consulting the Duchess of Leeds. _That_, I said, had no effect; for her Royal Highness would not be persuaded to consider her as more than a nominal governess, and I had some difficulty in making things go on as well as they did in that quarter.