Prince Albert

by Robert Rhodes James

  It was a lively, individualistic, and unruly society, but although often turbulent – and especially in the period of immediate distress after 1815 – the development of wealth and employment, and the emergence of a prosperous middle class gave a ballast to the nation at a time of genuine and serious difficulty which was infinitely more crucial than the use of military force to curb disturbances or the negative reaction of politicians to the discordant calls for social and electoral reform. Historians have tended to devote more attention to the obvious evils of the process of rapid industrialisation and urbanization than to the substantial benefits of an unprecedented prosperity that gradually converted any movement towards revolution into demands for reasonable reform and change. The new wealth may have been poorly distributed, and the conditions of employment and housing often horrific, but Britain was developing with startling rapidity into the most advanced and rich nation in the world.

  Stockmar rejoiced that Princess Charlotte was now detached from the evil influences of her family, and particularly that her marriage to Leopold was in such total contrast with that of her parents and the blatant womanising and extravagance of so many of her close relatives. He saw that it was this fact, above all others, that gave the Princess her increasing popularity. ‘In this house’, he wrote contentedly, ‘reign harmony, peace and love – in short, everything that can promote domestic happiness. My master is the best of all husbands in all the five quarters of the globe; and his wife bears him an amount of love, the greatness of which can only be compared with the English national debt’. In August 1817 he wrote: ‘The married life of this couple affords a rare picture of love and fidelity, and never fails to impress all spectators who have managed to preserve a particle of feeling’.

  Princess Charlotte herself was endearingly aware of her volatility. To Sophie Mensdorff she wrote: ‘Don’t think that one is necessarily changeable or unsteady, when one is quick and even a little carried away at times. The enchanting voice of Leopold and, above all, its sweetness, always unfailingly brings me back and recalls me. It is quite certain that he is the only being in the world who would have suited me and who could have made me happy and a good woman. It is his celestial character, his patience, his kindness, and nothing else would have succeeded . . . In fact, he has all my confidence, he is master of all my thoughts, of everything that I do’.

  But what would the role of her husband be? To Mme de Poigne Charlotte was characteristically extreme, but significantly so:

  She [Charlotte] spoke of the great gratitude which she owed to Prince Leopold for his willingness to marry the heiress to a kingdom. She drew with much gaiety, archness, and wit a picture of the ‘Queen’s husband’, but she added with emphasis:

  ‘My Leopold shall not be exposed to such humiliation, or my name is not Charlotte . . . Should they wish to cross my will, I would rather renounce the throne and find a cottage where I can live according to the laws of nature, in submission to my husband. I will and cannot reign over England except upon the condition that he shall reign over England and myself . . . Yes, he shall be King or I will never be Queen. Do not forget what I am now telling you’.

  Stockmar’s chief concern was less with the Princess than with Leopold, he having already discerned the obvious weaknesses of the British Monarchy. It was markedly, and publicly, dissolute and not respected, heedless of Parliamentary and popular reaction to its excesses, public quarrels, and coarseness of language and behaviour. But it was also unaware of the even greater perils of behaving as though it were still a virtually absolute monarchy, free to involve itself in partisan politics, and always intervening on the side of reaction and delay. Stockmar very quickly detected the strong stirrings of public disaffection, which could easily develop into a genuinely revolutionary mood that would imperil not only the Monarchy but all other established institutions. Stockmar was in many senses a radical, and he was blessedly possessed of a strong social conscience, but was never a revolutionary.

  Already, Stockmar had begun to develop his remarkably sophisticated and clear concept of a subtly yet substantially changed version of the British Constitution. It is not clear when this began to formulate in his mind, although it is plain that it had done so before he came to England. His view was a remarkable admixture of an idealistic view of the role of the Constitutional Monarch with a wide application, and with a thoroughly practical under-standing of the peculiarly English difficulties.

  Leopold proved to be a very receptive pupil and listener. As he wrote:

  Our life is arranged on principles of great moderation. Amongst other things, we do not visit Society in the capital and we have announced that we have nothing to do with [political] parties . . . The father, and especially the Queen, began to meddle in all sorts of domestic affairs, but I very courteously and respectfully declined to have it.

  He had learned prudence the hard way in his relatively short life, and the fact that he had secured the eventual approval of the Regent to his engagement and marriage demonstrated his personal negotiating skills. A pragmatist, not at all devoid of ambition, he shared Stockmar’s bleak assessment of the current position of the British Monarchy, and the fact that Stockmar rose so rapidly in his estimation – and that of Princess Charlotte – is a notable tribute to each of them. Stockmar was often alone, with his books and thoughts, and sometimes unhappy, but his intellectual power, combined with his common sense, warmth of personality, and political shrewdness quickly made him far more than a functionary at the small Court at Claremont. Charlotte, also, understood the strength of Stockmar’s advice. ‘Believe me, at a moment like this, when the country is far from being in a quiet state’, she wrote to a close friend, ‘a good example of morality is not only very necessary, but highly important’. Charlotte was, in the words of a con-temporary observer, ‘a singular Princess, but a most interesting creature’. Advised and influenced by two such remarkable and shrewd confidants, she might have become a most interesting Queen.

  The news in February 1817 that the Princess was pregnant – after two rumoured but unconfirmed miscarriages5 – excited such an extent of political and public interest that it is only explicable in the context of a blind and insane King and a widely loathed heir. Princess Charlotte may have been – and was – a headstrong and opinionated young woman, but the circumstances of her childhood, and the obvious happiness and respectability of her marriage, combined to stir hopes for the future that are difficult to quantify today, but which were very substantial. Stockmar noted sardonically on August 26th 1817 that there was heavy betting on the sex of the child, that the Stock Exchange had calculated that the birth of a son would raise the funds by 6%, whereas a daughter would only increase them by 2½%, and that ‘the ambassadors of the highest Powers have paid me, the poor doctor, the most friendly and obliging visits’.

  Unhappily, Stockmar was not the doctor. That he was not so was largely his own decision, as he felt that a foreigner should not be the personal physician of the future Queen of England. Subsequently, he bitterly regretted his decision, while standing by his political assessment, which would have blamed any misjudgement upon ‘the incapacity of the German doctor. And in my hypochondriacal state I should perhaps have myself believed in the accusations of others, and self-reproaches from within would have raised the burden of sorrow pressing upon me from without to an unbearable degree’.

  The English doctors were Dr. Matthew Baillie and Dr. John Sims, with Sir Richard Croft as accoucheur. Croft and Baillie believed firmly in the current doctrine of treating pregnant women by low diets and some bleeding, which inevitably greatly weakened the Princess in her final weeks of pregnancy.6 There were no appre-hensions of an unfortunate result. Princess Charlotte experienced her first pains at seven in the evening of November 3rd 1817, yet they ceased at two in the following morning. Labour progressed very slowly throughout the next day and night, and it was not until nine o’clock on the evening of November 5th that, in Stockmar’s own wo
rds, ‘the Princess was delivered of a fine large dead boy’. She had been in labour for over fifty hours.

  Stockmar’s poignant account in the Royal Archives of subsequent events deserves to be recorded in full.

  Immediately after the birth the Princess appeared quite well. The news of the death of her child had apparently not affected her. This state of apparent well-being only lasted until midnight.

  Then Croft came to my bedside, took my hand, and said the Princess was dangerously ill, the Prince alone, I must go and inform him of the state of things.

  The Prince had not for three days left his wife’s room for an instant, and had now, after the birth of the child, retired to rest.

  I found him resigned to the death of the child, and he did not appear to understand that the state of the Princess was very serious.

  In about a quarter of an hour Baillie sent to say that he wished I would see the Princess. I hesitated, but at last I went with him.

  She was in a state of great suffering and disquiet from spasms in the chest and difficulty in breathing, tossed about incessantly from one side to the other, speaking now to Baillie, now to Croft.

  Baillie said, ‘Here comes an old friend of yours’. She stretched out her left hand eagerly to me, and pressed mine twice vehemently. I felt her pulse, which was very quick; the beats now full, now weak, now intermittent. Baillie kept giving her wine constantly. She said to me, ‘They have made me tipsy’.

  For about a quarter of an hour I went in and out of the room, then the rattle in the throat began. I had just left the room when she called out loudly, ‘Stocky! Stocky!’ I went back; she was quieter, but the rattle continued.

  She turned more than once over on her face, drew her legs up, and her hands grew cold. At two o’clock in the morning of November 6th 1817 – therefore about five hours after the birth of the child – she was no more.

  Leopold had not been present at his wife’s death, as he had been totally exhausted by his vigil, and had not appreciated how desperate the situation really was. Now, Stockmar had to gently waken him, but Leopold still did not realise that his wife had died, and it was some time before the reality came to him. Stockmar’s account describes Leopold’s reaction:

  He thought it must be a dream; he could not believe it. He sent me once more to see about her; I came back and told him it was all over. Then he went to the chamber of death; kneeling by the bed, he kissed her cold hands, and then raising himself up, he pressed me to him and said, ‘I am now quite desolate. Promise never to leave me’.

  ‘As long as his grief found no expression, I was much alarmed for his health [but] now he is relieved by frequent tears and moans’, Stockmar wrote on November 7th of his master. On November 19th he recorded of Leopold that ‘he is too good, too resolute, too devout to give himself over to despair, though life seems already to have lost all value for him, and he is convinced that no feeling of happiness can ever again enter his heart’. When he was seventy-two, Leopold wrote that he had ‘never recovered the feeling of happiness which had blessed his short married life’.

  The death of Princess Charlotte and her son immediately transformed the succession situation, but for Leopold and Stockmar the tragedy meant the end of a brief chapter of their lives. The unhappy Croft, consumed by remorse, committed suicide three months later, and Leopold was only narrowly dissuaded by Stockmar from returning immediately to Coburg. As Stockmar pointed out, he had established a position of influence, and the fact that Parliament had settled upon him £50,000 a year for life required that he should remain in England, at least for a while.

  Princess Charlotte’s parents were stricken by the death of their only child, and for a while Leopold was in high favour with the Regent. He moved to a house near Dorchester, and then to Weymouth ‘because the poor Princess liked it’. Stockmar wrote of him that ‘he possesses in the activity of his innate, early-developed scientific taste an admirable preservative from a dreamy absorption in his sorrow. He studies English history most perseveringly in its original sources’. Foolishly, at the height of the embittered trial for adultery of his mother-in-law Caroline in 1820 he tried to see her and enraged her husband – now King George IV – and also found that his popularity had waned considerably. He was regarded by some as a bore, by others as too ambitious. His annual Parliamentary allowance now roused criticism and his style was censured. His fall from fame and grace appeared to be complete.

  Stockmar sardonically wrote that ‘The death of Princess Charlotte, in opening up the prospect of succession to the throne to the younger sons of George III, had inspired them with the desire to marry’.

  As the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, publicly put it: ‘The great and general question which everyone asks himself and asks his neighbour is how will this event operate of the succession to the throne?’ This was a rhetorical exaggeration, but for everyone involved in politics the death of Charlotte opened up dismal prospects. Brougham recorded that Charlotte’s death had stunned the nation ‘as if by an earthquake at dead of night’. ‘I never looked into a blacker political horizon than is now around us’, J. W. Croker reported to Sir Robert Peel immediately after Charlotte’s death. The highly unpopular Regent was fifty-five, separated but not divorced from Queen Caroline, and his ‘marriage’ with Mrs. Fitzherbert was illegal: of his three married brothers the Dukes of York and Cumberland had no children while the two marriages of the Duke of Sussex – the first of which had produced a son and a daughter – had not received the sovereign’s permission and, under the Royal Marriages Act, were void so far as the succession was concerned. This left the unmarried Dukes of Clarence, Kent, and Cambridge. The unpopularity of the Regent and his brothers was such that Wellington described them to Creevey as ‘the damnedest millstone’.

  Clarence, fifty-two, had produced ten illegitimate children by the actress Mrs. Jordan, but his attempts at contracting a financially advantageous marriage had been unsuccessful. Cambridge was the only one without severe financial problems, was mildly agreeable, had only demonstrated a fleeting interest in matrimony – when he had proposed to the lady who married his brother Cumberland – and was a more familiar, and certainly far more popular, figure in Hanover than in London.

  Kent was fifty and had had a mistress for twenty-seven years, but was regarded as by far the most intelligent of George III’s sons after the Regent, whose very real qualities of mind and artistic sensitivities and flair were fatally obscured by his lamentable defects of character. Kent was Charlotte’s ‘favourite and beloved uncle’, but he was grievously in debt and his military reputation was that of a hard and often merciless martinet, which brought his career to an abrupt end in 1804 when he commanded the Gibraltar garrison with such ferocity that it was regarded as intolerable even in that harsh age. But Kent’s financial situation was so desperate that matrimony approved under the Royal Marriages Act, and which would at least provide him with an increased Parliamentary grant, was the only solution, and by the time of Charlotte’s death he had been engaged on that quest for two years, and had proposed to – but had been rejected by – the widowed sister of Leopold, Victoire, who was thirty-one and had a son, Charles, aged twelve, and a daughter, Feodora, who was ten. ‘Nature had endowed her with warm feelings’, Stockmar wrote approvingly of his master’s sister, ‘and she was naturally truthful, affectionate, and friendly, unselfish, full of sympathy, and generous’.

  After Charlotte’s death, opining that if the Duke of Clarence did ‘nothing as to marrying’ it would be his duty ‘to take some measures’ himself, Kent again mentioned Victoire’s name in December 1817 to the diarist, Creevey, in Brussels ‘from the circumstances of Prince Leopold being so popular with the nation’. It is not clear whether the grieving Leopold or the concerned Stockmar were deeply involved in the subsequent hurried engagement and marriage. Although Leopold strongly favoured it, little scheming from outside was in fact required. Charlotte and Leopold’s gratitude a
nd affection for the Duke of Kent were well known to Victoire; he had a very high opinion of Leopold; and although she had rejected his first proposal he had made a good impression; but there were difficulties over the guardianship of Victoire’s children, and there was no formal engagement by the time Charlotte died.

  Princess Charlotte was buried with her son at Windsor on November 16th 1817; the Prince Regent made it known that he strongly favoured his brother’s marriage to Victoire, although the couple had only met once; all difficulties were swiftly resolved, and the Duke of Kent married Princess Victoire on May 27th 1818 at Coburg. On July 13th there was a second ceremony at Kew Palace, in which the Kents were joined by Clarence, who married Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen; this was a loveless, organised affair, yet was to prove a happy marriage, but with no surviving children. There were miscarriages – one of twins – a daughter who lived only a few hours, and another who died at four months. ‘My children are dead’, Princess Adelaide wrote to the Duchess of Kent, ‘but your child lives, and she is mine, too’.

  On May 24th 1819 the Duchess of Kent gave birth to a daughter, Princess Victoria. In the following January the Duke died, and her brother Leopold’s fortunes had suddenly changed. Although he wrote, and believed, that ‘My fate is bound up with that of England’, new and severe tensions arose with his former father-in-law – now the King – and it seemed expedient for him to travel widely in Europe, to buy a house in Vienna, and to revisit Coburg, where Louise, the wife of his brother, Ernest, Duke of Coburg, had given birth to a second son shortly after the birth of Princess Victoria, the Duchess having the same accoucheuse as the Duchess of Kent. He was Princess Victoria’s first cousin, and the subject of this biography.