by Julia Baird
Suddenly, and unexpectedly, the succession had been opened up; the crown would now pass down through the aging brothers or their children, not to Charlotte, a young and beloved woman barely out of her teens. Who, they asked, would be the next heir to the throne?
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King George III and Queen Charlotte led quiet and respectable lives, much like the British middle class. Their debauched sons, though, were unpopular, fat, and lazy. Oddly, the one son who was disciplined, upright, and truthful was the one his parents seemed to like the least: Victoria’s father, Edward, the Duke of Kent.
By 1818, King George was deaf, blind, and deranged, suffering from what is thought by some to be a rare metabolic disorder called porphyria, although it was also quite possibly dementia or bipolar disorder. Residents of his castle could hear “unpleasant laughing” from the wings he wandered in, and he was often found strumming a harpsichord, wearing purple robes. He was haunted by apocalyptic visions of drowning in a large flood, spoke constantly to invisible friends, and embraced trees he mistook for foreign dignitaries. In 1811, at the age of seventy-three, he was declared officially mad.
The Prince Regent, later George IV, was friendly and mildly intelligent. By the time he reached his mid-fifties, he was a miserable man. He suffered from gout and took large doses of opium to numb the pain in his legs. His relationship with his wife, Princess Caroline, was toxic and brutal. The Prince Regent banned her from his coronation in 1821 (a door was slammed in her face when she arrived at Westminster Abbey clad in her finery). Three weeks afterward, Queen Caroline died. The cause is unknown; it was rumored that the king had poisoned her.
By the time the Prince Regent’s daughter died, in 1817, the seven sons of George III were all middle-aged; the youngest was forty-three. So who would produce an heir? Ernest, the Duke of Cumberland, was the only one both officially married and not estranged from his wife.
When they were very young, King George III had decreed that none of the royal offspring could enter into marriages without the king’s consent and the approval of Parliament. The resulting Royal Marriages Act of 1772 gave the princes a convenient excuse to wriggle out of any commitments to their lovers. They acted, Lord Melbourne later told Queen Victoria, like “wild beasts.” The result was a large pile of illegitimate grandchildren—fifty-six in total, none of whom could ever occupy the throne. Charlotte had been the only grandchild produced from an officially recognized marriage. What was at stake, then, was not just this generation but control of the next. (Too far down the succession to count were King George III’s five surviving daughters, who were all over forty and childless.)
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Could such an enormous family have become extinct? It may seem ludicrous now to think that the Hanoverian dynasty, which began with King George I in 1714, could have ended with King George III’s sons. It was entirely possible, though, given the behavior of his progeny. When Charlotte died, a hubbub surrounded the future of the throne, and Parliament insisted the four unwed brothers marry.
The brothers immediately powdered their hair and cast their eyes upon the royal courts of Europe. France was out of favor because of the decades-long battle with Napoleon. Germany was preferred, partly because it was thought that a Lutheran upbringing made for chaste and obedient wives. Three of the four quickly complied, marrying by mid-1818. The youngest of the royal princes, Adolphus, the Duke of Cambridge, sent a marriage proposal to Augusta, the German princess of Hesse-Cassel, to which she agreed.
Victoria’s father, Edward, the Duke of Kent, was now fourth in line, and the only son who had adopted his parents’ Spartan, disciplined lifestyle. He was more than six feet tall, proud and muscular, and called himself the “strongest of the strong.” Though he privately conceded it was presumptuous, he boasted that he would live longer than his brothers: “I have led a regular life,” he often said; “I shall outlive them all; the crown will come to me and my children.” He was a composite of opposites that his daughter would later reflect: gentle and tough, empathetic and needy, severe when crossed and tender when loved.
Unlike his brothers, Edward was clever, eloquent, and a conscientious letter writer. He was a progressive who was in favor of popular education, Catholic emancipation, and the abolition of slavery. Despite his tyrannical military reputation, he had a kind heart. He was also extravagant: whims he indulged included a library of five thousand books dragged across the seas, fountains installed inside closets, bed ladders covered in velvet, and bright lights of every hue placed along driveways. He kept a hairdresser on staff for himself and his servants.
When the duke first asked for Victoire’s hand, it was not guaranteed she would say yes. Her two children, Charles and Feodora, were just thirteen and ten, and the independent life of a widow was in many ways preferable to that of a wife. But days after Charlotte died, Leopold, her widower, who was Victoire’s brother, sent a letter urging Victoire to reconsider the Duke of Kent’s proposal. Suddenly Edward had greater prospects: he was now much closer to the throne. Finally Victoire agreed. In response, Edward was tender and romantic, vowing to make his young bride happy.
Edward and Victoire were lucky: they were quietly thrilled with each other and settled into a domestic routine. On December 31, 1818, Edward wrote his new wife a loving note: “God bless you. Love me as I love you.” As the new year rang in, three new brides were pregnant. They lay curled up next to their husbands, with rounded bellies and sweet hopes, thinking of the year ahead.
In 1819, the race began in earnest. On March 26, Augusta, the wife of the Duke of Kent’s younger brother Adolphus, gave birth to a healthy son. On March 27, Adelaide, the wife of Edward’s older brother William, produced a premature baby girl who lived only a few hours. And on March 28, Edward, the Duke of Kent, began his journey from Amorbach, Germany, to London. Victoire, at eight months pregnant, endured a 427-mile journey over rough roads and wild seas. The duke had worried that the trip might bring on an early labor. But Victoire was full of “joyful anticipation” at the life in store for her in England. As she rattled along next to her husband, her hands kept creeping to her stomach, her fingers tracing the skin where tiny feet kicked and limbs tickled inside her.
On April 18, the long caravan of children, nurses, midwives, clerks, doctors, and a string of servants, lapdogs, and parrots reached Calais, the French seaside town that overlooks the narrowest point of the English Channel. The Prince Regent had reluctantly agreed to let his brother use the royal yacht for the crossing. They crossed a week later. A gale was blowing, and Victoire’s face was a pale shade of green; she threw up several times in the three-hour journey. After they finally landed in Dover, they went straight to Kensington. It was then much like a country village, and their large palace was dilapidated. The walls were damp, and the place stank with dry rot. The duke, who was an eager and lavish interior decorator, immediately bought curtains, fabrics, and furnishings: white for the bedrooms and red for the dining room. (He also privately sent anxious letters to friends, asking how his former partner, Julie, was.) As he and Victoire prepared for the birth of their daughter, who would reign over the British Empire for the better part of a century, few blinked. It was just another overspending, big-bellied prince with another pregnant German wife. The only people paying attention were those who had the most to lose from Victoria’s birth: the royal family. Not long after she pulled the first fistfuls of air into her lungs, there were rumors that her wicked uncles were plotting to kill her.
CHAPTER 2
The Death of a Father
“Do not forget me.”
—THE DUKE OF KENT, 1820
The Duchess of Kent was instantly smitten with her baby girl. She insisted on breastfeeding for six months, although most aristocratic women employed wet nurses then, often because their tightly laced corsets affected their ability to produce milk. While her peers raised their eyebrows, the public was pleased with the duchess’s commitment to nurse, especially the bourgeoisie, who favored the practice themsel
ves. Her decision was more significant than she would have known: as breastfeeding is a useful, if not ironclad, contraceptive, this meant that the duchess was unlikely to get pregnant again quickly. If she had, and had borne Victoria a brother, he could have taken the throne.
The duke was only briefly disappointed at not having a son. After all, under the Settlement Act of 1701, his daughter would be able to inherit the crown, if she had no brothers. Privately, while recognizing that her chances were slight—his older brothers might produce an heir yet—he still boasted: “Look at her well, for she will be Queen of England.” Victoria’s father would always regard his stout, pretty baby as miraculous. It was, after all, a dangerous thing to be born in the nineteenth century. Of every thousand infants, about 150 died at birth. Even then, the prevalence of measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever, and cholera meant that the likelihood that a child would survive to the age of five was little more than 70 percent. Children from poor, urban families who were not breastfed or were weaned too early had even slimmer chances.
It was also a common practice to give infants opium to stop their crying, and many babies lost their appetite and starved as a result. Predictably, the mothers were blamed for working long days in factories and leaving their children with strangers. A piece published in 1850 in Household Words, the journal edited by Charles Dickens, attributed this practice to “ignorant hireling nurse(s)” who managed eight or nine babies at a time by keeping them drugged. Concoctions called “Soothing Syrup,” “Mother’s Quietness,” and a laudanum-based potion called “Godfrey’s Cordial” meant “the quiet homes of the poor reek[ed] with narcotics.” Karl Marx, writing in Das Kapital in 1867, described the “disguised infanticide and stupefaction of children with opiates,” adding that their parents were developing addictions of their own.* Infant deaths were so common that parents insured their newborns, and were typically paid £5 if they died, a practice that was thought to encourage infanticide. By 1900, 80 percent of babies were insured.
But Victoria bloomed with such vigor that the duke boasted that she was “rather a pocket Hercules, than a pocket Venus.” She was a solid child, “a model of strength and beauty combined,” according to her father, who personally oversaw the nursery schedule and operations. She was also quite chubby, with enormously fat legs: the duke’s lawyer, Baron Stockmar, called her a “pretty little Princess, plump as a partridge.” Victoria’s uncles were not happy. The Regent, soon to be King George IV, hated his brother the Duke of Kent with a longstanding visceral passion.
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Victoria was born at a glorious time in the British Empire. Four years earlier, in 1815, Napoleon had been defeated at the Battle of Waterloo, which ended a seventeen-year war with France. Britain had rejoiced at the humbling of the most powerful man and country in Europe. Now Napoleon was safely locked up on St. Helena, a tropical island in the South Atlantic, and, to the delight of the English, had embraced gardening. The Battle of Waterloo marked the beginning of Pax Britannica—a ninety-nine-year peace that would last until World War I. The empire expanded steadily, staining countries in Asia, Africa, Australia, and North and South America an imperial red (as maps then showed the British Empire to be). This growth was accompanied by enormous strength in manufacturing and a wealth of coal and iron production. The swift, seemingly unstoppable expansion of the empire in the nineteenth century made the British throne a glittering prize. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Britain was the world’s only industrialized economy and the greatest naval power. But London was brimming with discontent.
In 1821, half of the British workforce was under the age of twenty. In the year Victoria was born, 1819, an act was passed to limit the hours children worked in factories and cotton mills to twelve; but it was rarely enforced. Children as young as five worked from dawn to dark in match and nail factories, gasworks, shipyards, and construction. In 1833, the Factory Act made it illegal for children under nine to work, though it applied only to textile factories. In 1834, it was made illegal to apprentice any boys under age ten as chimney sweeps or to “evil treat” any who were older—but, again, this act was ineffective and not enforced. Chimney sweeping became a great symbol of child abuse, with tales of children having fires lit under them to make them work faster, or getting stuck and dying in the winding dark crevices. By 1840, still only 20 percent of children in London had been to school.
The Industrial Revolution was rapidly accelerating, and the population shifted from country to city. At the beginning of the century, 20 percent of the British population lived in towns or cities; by the end of the century, 75 percent did. Slums spread across London, and in once-grand houses, sometimes thirty or more people lived in a single room. For most of those inhabiting slums and shantytowns, sanitation meant using a bucket and tipping it into an open drain. When Victoria was born, food was cooked in open fireplaces, horses carried messages, half of the population was illiterate, and a narrow band of property owners were the only ones with political power. By the end of her life in 1901, people traveled by subway, telegraphs shot messages across oceans, education was compulsory, and women had some basic rights.
At the time of Victoria’s birth, the indulgent Prince Regent was far removed from the struggles of many of his impoverished subjects. The government passed the Corn Laws in 1815 to protect English wheat with tariffs; as a result the price of food had risen, which infuriated an overstretched working class. Common land, where country workers had collectively grazed animals, was enclosed into plots for which higher rent could be charged, creating much hardship. The rest of the world’s demand for British exports had dropped along with wages and employment. Riots had erupted over the price of bread days before Victoria’s birth; even in well-to-do areas around Kensington Palace, signs of poverty were visible.
Although Victoria was born in Britain, she was surrounded by Germans; even her bouts of crying were soothed with German lullabies (though she would not formally start learning the language until she was seven). Her blood was almost entirely Germanic. Her mother, her mother’s daughter, Feodora, her uncle Leopold, and her governess were all German. All four of her grandparents were German, and her most recent British ancestor came from the seventeenth century. Between 1714 and 1901, all the Hanoverians who reigned over England married Germans—Victoria followed suit, as did six of her own nine children.
Germany was then a collection of states that had been bundled together in a union called the German Confederation in 1815 after Napoleon was defeated. (The country would not exist as one nation until 1871.) Some of these states had sided with France in the Napoleonic Wars, but the largest and most powerful—Prussia—was allied with England. One small state, Hanover, was, oddly, ruled from London by the English kings, who were Hanoverian by heritage. This century-long arrangement, begun in 1714 by King George, who was both British and German, would stop when Victoria became queen. Only men could rule Hanover.
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On June 24, 1819, in a grand, high-ceilinged room on the top floor of Kensington Palace, a small crowd stood staring at the baby Victoria and her flustered parents. They were gathered around a gold baptismal font brought in from the Tower of London for the day. The rooms were draped with crimson velvet, which concealed a row of busts high up on the wall depicting the proud profiles of a clutch of emperors and pharaohs: Nero, Caligula, Cleopatra. (Protocol required that their faces be concealed to protect the sensibilities of the Archbishop of Canterbury.)
The Regent, who was irritated that the brother he despised had produced an heir, had insisted that the christening be small, private, and held in the middle of the afternoon. He did not want the ceremony to be elaborate, or in any way to signal that it was being held for a potential future monarch. No one was permitted to dress up or wear uniforms or gold lace. Even worse, the Regent did not permit the Duke and Duchess of Kent to name their own daughter. They had wanted to call her Victoire Georgiana Alexandrina Charlotte Augusta, but the Regent wrote to them beforehand to say he would not let
the child be called Georgiana because he did not want a derivative of his own name, George, to be placed before that of the czar of Russia, Alexander (who had given the Duke of Kent money for his marriage and was the baby’s godfather). The Regent said he would tell them at the ceremony which other names they could use.
At the christening, the Archbishop of Canterbury held the plump baby expectantly and asked the Regent, “By what name does it please Your Highness to call this child?” The Regent announced, firmly, “Alexandrina,” and paused. The Duke of Kent offered up Charlotte as a second name, then Augusta, but the Regent shook his head. He also rejected the name Elizabeth. He did not wish this baby, a rival for the throne, to inherit any of the traditional, historic names of the British royal family. After the duchess burst into tears, the Regent finally said, “Give her the mother’s name also, then, but it cannot precede that of the emperor.” Alexandrina Victoria was an unpopular choice, as both names were foreign; the child was known as Drina until she was about four. After then, it was always Victoria. When attempts were made to change it to Charlotte or Elizabeth in Parliament in 1831 due to the belief that the names Alexandrina and Victoria were not then well-known in England, Victoria insisted her name remain the same.
The Regent left the christening without talking to his brother. His animosity did not abate: when the Duke of Kent brought little Drina to a military review on Hounslow Heath when she was just three months old, the Regent shouted, “What business has that infant here?” The royal uncles were not particularly fond of the child’s mother, either. The Duchess of Kent had a heavy German accent and made little effort to learn English—though Lord Melbourne was later to infer that she knew the language well and it just suited her to pretend that she did not. Her speeches were written out phonetically: “Ei hoeve to regret, biing aes yiett so little cônversent in thie Inglisch.” The royals had been pinning all their hope on the Duke of Kent’s older brother, the Duke of Clarence, and his wife to produce an heir instead of the disliked Edward: little Victoria was “a real thorn in their side.”
