We Two: Victoria and Albert

by Gillian Gill

  Augustus, Duke of Sussex, the sixth son of George III, had to be eliminated at the outset, since he too was married (sort of) and had no legitimate offspring (as defined by the Royal Marriages Act).

  Thus there were four royal dukes in a position to supply an heir to the throne: Clarence, Kent, Cumberland, and Cambridge, by order of birth and precedence.

  William, Duke of Clarence, was third in the fraternal hierarchy, and thus the front-runner with numbers one and two scratched. He was as improvident and fond of luxury as his older brothers, on a much smaller income. Unlike them, he was a proven sire, boasting ten boisterous children by his charming actress mistress, Mrs. Dorothy Jordan. These children were known as the FitzClarences, “Fitz” being a standard marker for illegitimacy in English genealogy. The FitzClarences were accepted at court, though their mother, of course, was not, and all ten would ultimately, by royal patronage or marriage, become members of the English aristocracy. However, Clarence’s debts mounted inexorably, and in 1811 he decided, with regret but without warning, to find himself a wealthy and amiable young wife.

  For six years his efforts at courtship went for nothing. Miss Tilney Long, Miss Elphinstone, and Lady Berkeley decided they could not afford the Duke of Clarence. Miss Wykeham accepted the Duke’s proposal of marriage, but, since she was, like the other four, ineligible under the Royal Marriages Act, the prince regent refused to accept her as a sister-in-law. The tsar’s sister found the fat, bumbling, vulgar, pineapple-headed Clarence too ridiculous to even consider as a husband.

  But when his niece Charlotte died, Clarence knew what he needed: a German princess of child-bearing age who would satisfy the requirements of the Royal Marriages Act and get him a raise in his parliamentary allowance. With the help of his brother the Duke of Cambridge, viceroy in Hanover, Clarence settled, sight unseen, on Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen. She was a rather sickly, unattractive young woman of twenty-five, as poor as a church mouse. She was also intelligent, cultured, and pious, but these assets rather counted against her with a fiancé who had gone to sea as a midshipman at fourteen.

  The marriage between William and Adelaide proved to be a happy one. Trained by Dorothy Jordan, William was a profoundly uxorious creature, and Adelaide made him feel comfortable. But she was delicate, and though she conceived again and again, only one child, named Elizabeth, lived more than a few days.

  The fifth royal brother, Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, was the most energetic, the most intelligent, and the most ambitious of the seven. He was also perhaps the most feared and hated man in England. Cumberland was widely believed to have murdered a valet who had been his homosexual partner and to have sired a bastard with his sister Sophia. These accusations were probably unfounded, but Cumberland was indubitably a violent, rapacious, unfeeling man. He was also head of the ultraconservative wing of the Tory Party and used his influence over his brother George IV to block political and economic reform.

  Cumberland, though only brother number five, took an early lead over the other three, since they were bachelors when Charlotte died, and he had providentially thought to acquire a German princess wife in 1815. Cumberland proved his indifference to public opinion and lack of family feeling by choosing to marry Frederica of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. She was once engaged to Cumberland’s younger brother the Duke of Cambridge but then eloped with the Prince of Solms, a German nonentity whom she was later suspected of murdering. Queen Charlotte, the wife of George III, also born a princess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, was Frederica Cumberland’s aunt but refused to receive her at court. Nonetheless, the Cumberland marriage satisfied all the provisions of the Royal Marriages Act, and any child born to the couple would be eligible to inherit the English throne. The prospect that the bogeyman Cumberland might eventually come to the throne of England after his brothers—or at least, with his notorious wife, provide the new dynastic line—was viewed with extreme alarm by both statesmen and ordinary citizens in England.

  The Duke of Cambridge, the seventh and last brother, was not about to be outdone in the dynastic stakes by his loathed elder brother, Cumberland, and his treacherous ex-fiancée, Frederica of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Cambridge was comparatively young, he had led a sober life, and, as viceroy in Hanover, he had the list of available German princesses at his fingertips. A mere two weeks after his niece Charlotte’s death, Cambridge was standing at the altar with twenty-year-old Princess Augusta of Hesse-Kassel. In March 1819, in Hanover, the Duchess of Cambridge went into labor with her first child, the first of the post-Charlotte generation.

  The Duke of Clarence, Cambridge’s older brother, was also living in Hanover at this time, in an effort to save money, since parliament had proved stingy. Clarence’s wife, Adelaide, was heavily pregnant with her first child. Hearing that his sister-in-law Cambridge was in labor, Clarence rushed over to the viceregal palace with two friends and sealed off all the doors leading to the birthing room. Just as Privy Councillors were supposed to attend royal accouchements in England, the men watched from an anteroom as the labor proceeded, ensuring that there could be no substitution of babies. As soon as the Duchess of Cambridge delivered her child, Clarence rushed in to “determine its sex by actual inspection.” Couriers then rode off to England to announce that George III at last had a legitimate grandson, to be called—what else?—George.

  On March 27, in Hanover, a daughter was born to the Duke and Duchess of Clarence, but she died within hours of birth.

  Two months later, on May 29, the Duchess of Cumberland in Berlin produced a son, and he too was named George. Since Cumberland was the fifth duke and Cambridge only the seventh, little George Cumberland at birth took a position in the line of succession ahead of little George Cambridge. The paternal aunties, daughters of George III, were overjoyed by the sudden arrival of not one but two healthy male nephews, either one of whom seemed, surely, destined to follow his uncle King George IV as King George V.

  But it was not to be. For on May 24, a healthy daughter was born in Kensington Palace to the Duke and Duchess of Kent. Since Kent was the fourth brother, and Cumberland and Cambridge were the fifth and seventh, respectively, the Kent girl was fifth in line of succession to the throne and took precedence over her male cousins. Presuming that her uncles the prince regent, the Duke of York, and the Duke of Clarence produced no child, male or female, and that her own parents did not go on to have a son, this baby girl would one day be queen regnant in England.

  The Kent baby would come to be known as Victoria.

  THE DUKE OF KENT was royal brother number four, and when Princess Charlotte died, he too was an aging bachelor. For twenty-seven years, first in Gibraltar and Canada and then in England after he was forced out of his army command, the duke lived in great content and considerable luxury in the company of his French mistress, known to the world as Madame Saint Laurent. But by 1816, Kent’s credit in England had run dry, forcing him to live in Brussels and give over three-quarters of his parliamentary income to trustees in England for scheduled repayment of debt. Kent decided he must give up his mistress. He began looking for a wife who would satisfy the provisions of the Royal Marriages Act, anticipating six thousand extra parliamentary pounds a year as a married man.

  At the inception of his quest for a wife, Kent was helped by his niece Charlotte and nephew-in-law, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Kent was a favorite with the young couple, since he had played a small but vital role in their courtship. Prince Leopold had a sister, Victoire, the Princess of Leiningen, who, though a widow and no longer in the flower of youth, fulfilled all the eligibility requirements for marriage with English royalty. Charlotte urged her uncle Kent to go to Leiningen and propose marriage, and so he did.

  Unfortunately, although the Princess of Leiningen found the Duke of Kent quite personable, she declined to marry him. She had been married young to the elderly, ugly, gloomy Prince Emich Charles of Leiningen. He was the widower of her maternal aunt, had lost his kingdom and his only son during the Napoleonic wars, and he married Victoire
only to beget another son and heir. Except in the bedroom, the relations between the two remained those of uncle and niece. Emich Charles was forced by the great powers after the war to become a “mediatized”— fourth-rank—prince and to exchange his ancestral lands for the small territory of Amorbach near Darmstadt in central Germany. However, he and his children were still ranked as ebenbürtig, a matter of primary importance to all German aristocrats. This meant that “they could contract equal marriages with the Royal Houses, and these marriages were recognized as valid for the transmission of inheritances.”

  Victoire refused the Duke of Kent because she found life a good deal merrier as a widow, even though her income was small and her home modest to the point of decrepitude. She had two children, Charles and Feodora, whose interests would best be served by her remaining in Germany. Furthermore, she was strongly encouraged to refuse the duke’s proposal by Herr Schindler, her former husband’s master of the household. Schindler was a man of low birth but forceful personality who had become indispensable to her.

  So, rebuffed by the Princess of Leiningen, the Duke of Kent returned to Brussels and the loving arms of Madame Saint Laurent until he was catapulted back into action by reading the announcement of his niece Charlotte’s death. Kent decided once more to propose marriage to the Princess of Leiningen, this time not in person but through her brother Leopold.

  Though still wrapped in a pall of grief and frustration following the deaths of his wife, Charlotte, and their baby, Leopold did all he could to advance the marriage of his sister Victoire to Edward, Duke of Kent. If Victoire married Kent and they produced a child, that child would have a decent shot at ruling England one day. That child would be half Coburg and would owe a lot to Uncle Leopold.

  Prince Leopold had no scruples about marrying his favorite sister to the Duke of Kent. He knew that gentleman had a mistress and a mountain of debt, and had committed disciplinary excesses as commander in chief that turned the stomach even of a British army inured to sadism. More troubling was the fact that, in Kent’s twenty-plus years of cohabitation with Madame Saint Laurent, he had sired no children. But Leopold’s sister Victoire was only thirty-one, she was plump and handsome, and she had already produced two healthy children with a very unpromising spouse. Leopold was ready to bet that the union of Victoire and Kent would be fruitful.

  Vigorously lobbied not only by Leopold but by her mother, the formidable dowager Duchess Augusta, Victoire agreed to do her sacred duty by the house of Saxe-Coburg and marry the Duke of Kent. Thus, within six weeks of their niece Charlotte’s tragic demise, the dukes of Clarence and Kent were both standing in the chapel at Windsor, listening to their new German brides mangle the words of the Church of England marriage service. Both brothers then repaired to Germany, where their rival brothers Cumberland and Cambridge were already living with their German wives, to save money and try to sire an heir to the throne.

  Dynastic strategy, not elective affinity, had determined the marriage of Edward, Duke of Kent, and Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, but all the same they were very happy together. The duke was a considerate lover who enjoyed his wife’s company and loved to pamper her—quite unlike the duchess’s late, unlamented uncle-husband, the Prince of Leiningen. The Duchess of Kent adored her new husband in return and savored the experience of living in luxury. As a little girl, Victoire had wept in fear of her mother’s wrath if she so much as tore her good dress. As wartime wife and then widow, she had a threadbare existence. But everything changed when she married the Duke of Kent. As the new duchess discovered on her first visit to England, even her new spinster sisters-in-law lived on a scale that a king of Bavaria or Saxony might envy. Victoire acquired the clothes, the hats, the jewels, the perfumery, the carriages, the diamond-encrusted miniatures, the thousand charming knickknacks that her new English family took for granted. Where her new husband got the money was not her concern.

  When the Kents returned to Amorbach, the duke assumed direction of his new wife’s domestic and financial affairs and followed his usual pattern of borrowing and spending money he had no rational expectation of paying back. Finding the house and stables inadequate, Kent launched an elaborate rebuilding project, borrowing two thousand pounds from gullible German bankers. Dingy Schloss Amorbach was besieged by builders.

  Within a few months, the duchess was pregnant, and the duke determined they must both return to England. His brothers’ wives could give birth in Germany. His child should be born in England, at Kensington Palace, before the eyes of royal relatives and government officials. The legitimacy of his child must be unimpeachable.

  Unfortunately, travel required cash in hand, and the duke had exhausted his credit in Germany. His brother the prince regent flatly refused to send him money, noting tartly that crossing Germany and France on rutted roads was hardly recommended for a woman heavy with child. But the Duke of Kent was the most prominent royal liberal, and liberal members of parliament were determined to do anything possible to keep the archconservative Duke of Cumberland or his child from the throne. They raised a lump sum of fifteen thousand pounds to pay the Duke of Kent’s way back to England.

  Suddenly flush with funds, the duke traveled in style with a party of some twenty-five. His wife brought along from Germany her lady-in-waiting and old friend Baroness Späth; her daughter by her first marriage, Feodora von Leiningen; and Feodora’s governess, Fräulein Louise Lehzen. The teenage Charles von Leiningen, the duchess’s son, remained in Germany at least for the time being, as rapacious relatives were laying claim to the Amorbach estate. But the key person the duchess brought with her was the German obstetrician-midwife, Madame Charlotte Marianne Heidenreich von Siebold. At a time when women were universally barred from the professions, including medicine, this lady had managed to qualify as a doctor at the University of Göttingen, and, in partnership with her doctor husband, she then made obstetrics a lucrative medical specialty. The German aristocracy swore by Madame Siebold.

  An excellent whip, Kent himself, his wife up by his side, took the reins of a well-sprung cane phaeton, a fast, light vehicle precariously perched on two high wheels, but there was also a capacious four-wheel dormeuse lumbering in the rear in case the duchess felt the need to lie down. Fortunately, the sun shone steadily, and the party made good time, though accommodations for so many people were hard to find. However, when they finally bowled into London, the Kents were given a cool reception by the royal family. The duke’s mother, brothers, and sisters considered him a tedious hypocrite, and the prince regent loathed him. It was with great difficulty that Kent secured the leaky and dilapidated rooms at Kensington Palace he had vacated years before. He then set about procuring furniture and fittings worthy of the new child and its mother.

  It was probably not a bad thing that the Duchess of Kent spent most of her pregnancy beyond the reach of the royal English doctors. The weeks she spent jouncing around Europe in an open phaeton and living on innkeeper food seem to have suited her, and she went into labor on schedule. Mindful, perhaps, of the suicide of Sir Richard Croft, the man who presided over the death of Princess Charlotte, Dr. Wilson, the Duke of Kent’s personal physician, allowed Siebold to officiate at the birth. Under this lady’s care, the duchess had a short labor and a problem-free delivery. Then, to the horror of her own mother and of all her husband’s female relatives, the Duchess of Kent refused the services of a wet nurse.

  When the duchess went into labor, the Duke of Wellington and other dignitaries were on hand as witnesses, but the prince regent was conspicuous by his absence. As it turned out, the child was only a girl, but she was still fifth in line of succession, and she was strong—plump as a partridge, as her father boasted. When news of the birth reached them, the duchess’s family in Coburg cheered. Prince Leopold was delighted to see his pawn advance one more square. But to the truculent regent and his sisters and brothers, this baby girl was unwanted and unnecessary. It would be far better for everyone if the successor of the new generation should be a kin
g, not a queen, especially since girls were exempted from inheriting the family’s ancestral domain of Hanover. Wounded in his vanity to learn that his least favorite brother was urging friends to take note of his baby, “for she will be Queen of England,” the prince regent took to turning his back on his brother Kent at public events. When Kent turned up at a military review with his baby in his arms, the regent was coldly furious.

  The Duke of Kent intended to make his daughter’s christening a large, public event. In a letter to his friend the Duc d’Orléans (later King Louis Philippe), Kent said that he and the duchess wished to name their daughter Victoire Georgina Alexandrina Charlotte Augusta. When, as was proper, the Kents asked the prince regent to be godfather to their baby, he agreed without enthusiasm but said he would attend in person. However the regent insisted that the ceremony should be private and advised the Kents in advance by letter that he would not countenance their using the name Georgina. Then, with the small group of family members and the Archbishop of Canterbury gathered about the font, the regent forbade the use of both Charlotte and Augusta. When the duke suggested the name Elizabeth, it too was curtly denied. Finally, with the Duke of Kent fuming in rage and his duchess weeping, the regent grudgingly ordered that the baby be named Alexandrina, after the tsar of Russia, her other male sponsor, and, if a second name was needed, Victoria, after her mother.

  The prince regent had aimed to wound his brother Kent and upset his sister-in-law, and he succeeded. He agreed to be the child’s godfather and then pettishly refused to allow her to be named after him even though he had allowed his brother Clarence’s eldest bastard to be given the name George. He allowed the child only two names even though the most insignificant of princesses received a long string of names when they were baptized. The little girl should have been given names that were traditional in the royal house of Hanover: Mary, Elizabeth, Anne, Augusta, Charlotte, Caroline, or Sophia. Instead she had names so foreign to English history that, when it became virtually assured that the Kent girl would become queen, vain efforts were made on two occasions to persuade her to give up the name Victoria.