by Gillian Gill
The Duchess of Kent never forgave her brother-in-law the regent for his insulting behavior at her child’s christening. Henceforward her relations with the members of her husband’s family were charged with suspicion and acrimony. But initially at least the baby girl gained more than she lost from the coldness of her royal English relatives. The Duchess of Kent had been allowed to make her own arrangements for her pregnancy and the care of her child, and, in the first, crucial year of her child’s life, she made good decisions, not only breast-feeding her baby for six months but insisting she be inoculated against smallpox at the age of six weeks.
The Duchess of Kent had been taught by her brother Leopold and Baron Stockmar to beware of English doctors, but in February 1820, when her husband fell ill with a feverish cold, there was little she could do to protect him. The duke had taken his family to a small rented house in the fishing village of Sidmouth, Devon, purportedly so that they could enjoy the benefits of sea air, but in fact to escape his creditors and save money. Kent’s life was important to the Crown, so doctors were dispatched from London and administered the usual enemas, expectorants, stimulants, and purgatives. They drew blood, by lancet, by cupping, by leeches, over and over again, 120 ounces, or 6 pints in all. As the duchess wrote despairingly to her mother in Germany, there was hardly a part of her husband’s body that had not been lanced, blistered, or scarified. When the second most senior doctor finally arrived from London, he decreed that if the patient were to recover, more blood must be drawn. The duke wept in agony and despair, the duchess and Baroness Späth tried to intervene, but they spoke little English and had no authority. Within days, the Duke of Kent, who had boasted to the world of his iron constitution, was dead.
Victoria was just one day short of eight months old when her father died. She was too young to mourn, but she suffered a grievous loss. As girl and woman, the Queen was always in search of father surrogates to guide and protect her. She found several good ones: Leopold, Melbourne, Stock-mar, her doctor James Clark. But as a child, her high place in the line of succession made Victoria vulnerable to unscrupulous men hungry for power.
The Wife Takes the Child
…
ITH HIS LAST RESERVES OF STRENGTH, EDWARD KENT MANAGED TO scrawl a signature on his will. Contrary to royal tradition and legal precedent, the will named the testator’s wife, Marie Luise Victoire, to be the sole guardian of their child, the Princess Victoria. That will had enormous consequences, not just for the child and her mother, but, decades later, for the nation over which the child would reign.
For a mother to receive legal custody and control over her child was not very common in 1821. Until almost the end of the nineteenth century, minor children in England were viewed by the law as belonging not to their parents equally but to their fathers alone. If the father died and made no specific testamentary disposition of his children, the father’s nearest male relatives, not their mother, had the right to determine the children’s destiny.
For a royal princess to be placed in the custody and under the legal guardianship of her mother was virtually unprecedented. As the Duchess of Kent boasted in 1837, she was “the only parent since the Restoration [the restoration to the throne of Charles II in 1660 following Cromwell’s Protectorate] who has had uncontrolled power in bringing up the heir to the throne.”
If her father had not made a will, the guardianship and custody of the Princess Victoria would have gone to her eldest male kinsman, the prince regent. As a ward of the Crown, she would have grown up in the household of one of her many female relatives until she was considered an adult and given a household of her own. She would have grown up a Hanoverian, from babyhood an habituée of the English court under the direct influence of her two uncle kings, George IV and his successor, William IV.
A Hanoverian Victoria would have been introduced as a girl to the notorious set that clustered around her uncle George at Carlton House, his opulent London residence. She would have met Lord Melbourne and Lord Palmerston, her future prime ministers, when they were dashing young men about town. She would have matched wits over dinner with some of the great minds of the day. She would have had an education in art, architecture, and design from her uncle George who was in the process of building the Royal Pavilion in Brighton and transforming Windsor Castle into a modern royal residence. She would have grown up with her uncle William’s bastards, the FitzClarences, and enjoyed the rough and tumble of a house filled with children. A Hanoverian Victoria would have been a very different woman, a very different queen. History would have been different.
But those who clustered around the deathbed of Edward, Duke of Kent, were quite determined that Victoria should not be given into the care, or negligence, of her paternal relatives. They wanted her to grow up a Coburg, not a Hanoverian. The proud Hanoverian Kent was weak and fearing death, no match for the men at the bedside who shaped the course of events.
The court at Windsor did keep an eye on events in Sidmouth. Kent’s brothers York and Sussex both came down to Devon to wish him well and assess the situation for the royal family. When Kent’s death seemed imminent, a letter came for him from the prince regent. Expressing deep sorrow and affection, the regent requested the guardianship of Victoria for himself or one of his brothers. But the letter came too late, and the prince regent was not free to go down to Sidmouth for a final reconciliation with his brother Kent. The regent was obliged to remain at Windsor where his father George III was finally dying.
The Duke of Kent’s will was probably drafted by none other than Christian Stockmar. This gentleman providentially found himself in Sidmouth with the Kents when the duke fell ill and was in constant communication with his employer, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. Apprised of the Duke of Kent’s serious illness, the prince himself traveled posthaste back from a shooting party in Berkshire and arrived in Devon in time for the signing of the will. The trustee named under the will was the Duke of Kent’s chief aide-de-camp, Lieutenant General Frederick Augustus Wetherall. The appointed executors were Wetherall and Captain John Conroy.
THE DUKE OF KENT died on January 23, 1820. On January 29, George III died. The new king George IV then fell desperately ill with an inflammation of the lungs, and for a few terrible weeks, it was feared he too would die.
When he regained his strength and replenished the 150 ounces of blood taken by his doctors, George IV became absorbed in two major projects. He would stage the most magnificent coronation England had ever seen, spending the fabulous sum of 243,000 pounds that parliament had voted him and a great deal more. At the same time, he would secure a divorce from his wife, Caroline of Brunswick, the details of whose scandalous conduct and obscene attire in Italy had long been reported to him by spies, German relatives, and traveling Englishmen. The royal divorce proceedings of 1820 brought Queen Caroline to trial in the House of Lords on a charge of “licentious, disgraceful, and adulterous intercourse” with an Italian groom. The trial ended in catastrophic failure for the King and his ministers. No divorce was possible, and George IV’s coronation of July 19, 1821, was marred by Caroline, who hammered at the doors of Westminster Abbey in a vain attempt to take her rightful place as queen. The King’s only comfort came when, a few weeks later, Caroline fell ill and died.
During this frenzied public activity by the King in London, the Duchess of Kent coped with death and debt. With her husband’s embalmed body stretched out in a velvet-shrouded coffin amid ostrich plumes and tall silver candlesticks, the Duchess of Kent discovered that she was virtually destitute. The 15,000 pounds that the duke had received from his liberal political backers just a year earlier was all spent. Even at the exorbitant rates charged to profligate royal dukes, no further credit was available. There was no cash on hand to pay the embalmer’s and undertaker’s fees, to settle with the landlord, get the duke’s body transported to Windsor for burial in St. George’s Chapel, or to pay for the duchess and her household to get away from Devon.
From both her husbands, Marie Luise V
ictoire of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld inherited debt rather than revenue, but at least Leiningen left her a home. Amorbach was an estate rather than a realm, but it had been hers, in trust for her son, Charles. The Duke of Kent and Strathearn, Earl of Dublin, by contrast, owned no domain and no town house—only a country estate near London that was mortgaged to the hilt, up for sale, and attracting no buyers. So the dowager Duchess of Kent found herself in England with the clothes she stood up in, the bedstead, and the little dog she had brought from Germany but very little else.
It was true that as a member of the royal family she could not be thrown into debtor’s prison. It was also true that she would have the six thousand pounds a year in dower income settled upon her by parliament at the time of her marriage, in addition to her own three hundred pounds a year. To any ordinary widow, such an income amounted to a fabulous fortune. However, if Edward, Duke of Kent, had taught his wife anything, it was that royal living in England was impossible on six thousand a year.
In her difficulties, the duchess turned to her eldest brother-in-law, the new King of England, expecting assistance on the magnificent English royal scale. It was not forthcoming. In the midst of all his coronation preparations, the irksome divorce proceedings, and the usual chores of governance, King George IV did not merely forget about his widowed sister-in-law the Duchess of Kent and her child. He actively snubbed and spurned them. Other members of the royal family followed the King’s lead. Edward Kent’s three sisters in England, Mary, Augusta, and Sophia, as well as his sister-in-law Adelaide Clarence, wrote notes, paid visits, and commiserated with the grieving widow in her native German, but paid no bills and offered no loans.
George IV was usually generous toward his female relatives, but he heartily disliked the Kents. From childhood, George IV had found his brother Edward a hypocritical bore, and he never took a fancy to Edward’s wife. She was a Coburg, and since the death of his daughter Charlotte, George IV had developed a strong dislike of Coburgs in general and in particular of Prince Leopold, Charlotte’s widower and Victoire’s youngest brother.
Given the King’s own vast mound of debt, the fabulous architectural projects he was intent on, and the eternal demands on his privy purse from extravagant brothers and needy sisters, George IV did not intend to waste precious resources on a sister-in-law he disliked. Let Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld-Leiningen-Dachburg-Hadenburg-Kent return to Germany where she belonged. In Germany one could live like a king on six thousand English parliamentary pounds.
As for the child Victoria, George IV had barely set eyes on her, and he absolutely refused to countenance the possibility that one day Victoria Kent might rule in England. The whole question of the succession to the throne put the King in a rage. George IV had once been the Prince Charming of all Europe, and his failure to sire an heir rankled. As the King saw it, from the moment of Victoria Kent’s birth, her father, her pushy mother, and her oleaginous uncle had been crowing that this child would be Queen of England. Edward Kent’s will, giving the guardianship of the Princess Victoria to her mother, and thus to her uncle Leopold, was the last straw.
So George IV washed his hands of the whole problem of his niece Victoria. Let the child be a Coburg. Let Leopold, with his fifty thousand from parliament, and the whole pack of German relatives take responsibility for the child and be damned with them. The child would do as well in Germany as in England, and if she didn’t, if she died, it would, in the King’s view, be no tragedy. Victoria already had two healthy male cousins, George Cumberland and George Cambridge, and a king was worth ten of a queen. Even better, the Duke of Clarence’s young wife, Adelaide, was pregnant and set to provide an heir. King George himself, once he had got rid of his wife, Caroline, might marry again and astonish the world by producing a little Prince of Wales.
Just as the King had hoped, in December 1820 the Duchess of Clarence gave birth to a baby girl who became third in line of succession after her uncle York and her father. The King was exultant, the Clarences gloated, and the Kent ménage at Kensington Palace fell into despondency. The King decreed that the new Clarence baby should be christened Elizabeth Georgina Adelaide. This was a further calculated insult to his sister-in-law Kent, since Elizabeth and Georgina were two of the names that the King as prince regent had refused to allow the Kents to give their daughter. But Elizabeth Clarence died of a bowel constriction when she was three months old, and the savage disappointment the King felt when he received the news did nothing to soften his heart toward Victoria Kent.
When in February 1821, Lord Liverpool, the prime minister, begged George IV to make provision for the Princess Victoria, the King refused, saying, “her uncle [Leopold] was rich enough to take care of her.” It was as if the King refused to acknowledge that Victoria was, in fact, as much his niece as Leopold’s. George IV was bent on driving his sister-in-law Kent back to her native Germany.
When Lord Liverpool communicated to the Duchess of Kent and her advisers the unwelcome news that the King absolutely refused to give any financial support to the Princess Victoria, Prince Leopold understood that something significant had occurred. Far from contesting the Duke of Kent’s will, the house of Hanover was handing the child who might be queen over to the house of Coburg. Leopold replied that he was happy to take responsibility for his niece and underlined formally what was involved. “Remember that it was not I who grasped at the management of the princess, but that the princess is by the King in this manner confided to me, and H. Maj. [His Majesty] thereby delegates to me a power which belongs to him.”
Victoire, dowager Duchess of Kent, had no head for finance, but she understood family politics very well. Each of the King’s insults struck home. Enjoying such wealth and power, he had chosen to knock her to the ground when she was already on her knees. She would never forgive him, or his brothers who stood by. Baby Victoria had been rejected by her father’s family. From now on, the Duchess of Kent was prepared to believe the worst of the English royal family, to credit any report of their meanness, their hatred, and their plotting against her.
Fortunately, she was not without protectors. There was her brother Leopold. He and she had been close as children. Even though he had turned into a pedantic bore, forever lecturing her on English history and nagging her about money, Leopold’s brilliance and acumen were legendary in the family. There was Stockmar, a tiresome hypochondriac and inveterate busybody, but the supreme man of business. Last but not least, there was Captain John Conroy (or Major Conroy as he now generally preferred to be known), who was so forceful and manly and so devoted to her interests. Leopold and Stockmar were forever going off on some mysterious political errand, but dear John could be relied upon to stay right by her side.
WITHIN DAYS OF THE DEATH of the Duke of Kent, Prince Leopold assumed the direction of his widowed sister’s affairs. It was clear to him and to Stockmar that the duchess was ill equipped to deal with the problems facing her. It was also clear to them that the chances Leopold’s niece Victoria had of becoming Queen of England one day would be jeopardized if she were brought up abroad. English monarchs were peculiarly at risk. The English parliament had already beheaded Charles I, sent James II into permanent exile, and on two occasions chosen a new king. It was xenophobic enough to refuse a German queen and choose one of her male cousins to rule instead.
To ensure that Victoire did not return to their family in Germany, Leopold settled the rent for the Sidmouth cottage, got the duke’s body off to Windsor for burial, and paid the travel expenses to London for his sister and her household. He prevailed on Mary, the Duchess of Gloucester, George IV’s favorite sister, to intercede with the King and secure for the dowager Duchess of Kent and her household the apartments at Kensington Palace that had been her husband’s. In March 1820, Leopold arranged for Victoire formally to give up all claims on her late husband’s estate for both herself and her child, leaving the creditors to pick those meager bones.
Leopold then arranged to let his sister have an additional three thous
and pounds a year from his personal funds. One thousand was to be earmarked for summer holidays at the sea or in the country, since the duchess had no country residence. He also enabled his sister to take on debt by guaranteeing a loan. In early 1820, the Duchess of Kent, Prince Leopold, and General Wetherall together floated a bond with Coutts the bankers for twelve thousand pounds, which translated into six thousand in cash. The duchess used this money to establish her household at Kensington Palace, buying furniture, linen, plate, a carriage, horses, and so forth. The duchess borrowed a further six thousand pounds in April 1821. This time, since little Princess Elizabeth of Clarence had just died and Princess Victoria was once again third in line of succession after her senior uncles, Victoire was able to find other gentlemen apart from her brother willing to guarantee the loan.
In later years, Leopold often recalled with what tender affection and alacrity he had taken on the role of surrogate father to Queen Victoria. At best this was half the story. During the infancy of his niece Victoria, Prince Leopold was a gloomy hypochondriac known in the British press as His Parsimonious Highness. He lived well but had few outlets for his abilities, energies, and ambitions. Ostracized at the English court, where George IV would barely even acknowledge him, Leopold spent at least half the year traveling in Europe, visiting relatives, taking the waters, cultivating his political connections, and discreetly indulging his sensual appetites. A mistress was essential to Leopold throughout his life, and, whereas he successfully advocated a life of purity and connubial exclusivity to his niece Victoria and his nephew Albert, he did not practice what he preached.
