Victoria: A Life Read online

  The princess’s death therefore triggered a race, among the overweight, late-middle-aged sons of George III, to find a lawful wife who could become the next Queen of England, and the mother of future monarchs. The Duke of Clarence ditched Mrs Jordan and made repeated proposals of marriage to a Ramsgate heiress named Miss Tilney Long. Having been repeatedly refused, he tried a woman in Brighton called Miss Wykeham, and when she turned him down he went down the traditional royal path of seeking a bride among the royal stud farms of Protestant Germany. He selected the plain, evangelical Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, aged twenty-six. The Duke of Cambridge, aged a sprightly forty-three, joined the race by marrying Princess Augusta of Hesse-Cassel, a beautiful girl aged twenty who was a great-granddaughter of King George II of England.

  Princess Charlotte’s desolated widower, Leopold, had lost not only a young wife of whom he was lovingly fond, but also his place on the royal snakes and ladders board. Having been poised to become a king in all but name, he had overnight become a royal nobody. ‘And now my poor son stands alone in a foreign country amid the ruins of his shattered happiness,’ said his mother. Leopold’s instinct, immediately after Princess Charlotte’s lugubrious funeral, was to head for home. His wise counsellor, however, the Coburg doctor Baron Stockmar, had other advice. Leopold should hang around and see what turned up. As would often prove to be the case, Stockmar’s advice was worth heeding.

  In 1876, when she presented new colours to her father’s old regiment, the Royal Scots, at Ballater, Queen Victoria said, ‘He was proud of his profession, and I was always told to consider myself a soldier’s child.’8

  Edward, Duke of Kent, was brought up in Kew. The Old Palace where King George and Queen Charlotte lived was too small for their numerous progeny, so Edward and William (the future William IV) were put into the hands of a governor and brought up, in some comfort, in a house nearby. When William was sent away to sea, it was decided that Edward should become a soldier, a German soldier, and he was sent for his training at Hanover. He had already, in late adolescence, developed habits of wild extravagance, and no one ever taught him the value of money.

  He arrived in Hanover in 1785. The punishing disciplines of German military life – inspired by the successful military genius of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, who was still alive – were a rude shock to the English prince, but he had no choice but to succumb to them. In 1790, he was given command of the Royal Fusiliers (7th Foot), who were posted in Gibraltar. The ‘Royals’, as they were known, had been looking forward to a light duty on the Rock. It was a shock to encounter the duke’s methods, for, as has been rightly said, ‘Germany had made him a good soldier, but it had made him a German soldier, completely inhuman and bestially severe with the troops’.9 Drills and inspections happened with great frequency. The smallest infringement of discipline was met with merciless floggings. The men were on the parade ground for hours at a time. The duke was detested by his men. By the end of the year, it was agreed in London and by his commanding officers – Lieutenant General Sir Robert Boyd and Major General Charles O’Hara – that the best way of avoiding a mutiny was to send the duke to Canada.

  He arrived in Quebec in 1791. Here, he continued to be as cruel to his men as he had been in Gibraltar. The barrack square echoed to the screams of men being flogged on ‘Edward’s orders’. He pursued in person one deserter, a French soldier called La Rose, exploring mountainous country and forests before coming upon La Rose in an inn at Pointe-aux-Trembles. ‘You are fortunate, sire, that I am unarmed,’ said La Rose, ‘for if I had a pistol, by Heaven, I would shoot you where you stand.’ La Rose was brought back to Quebec, and Kent insisted upon the maximum sentence under the Mutiny Act – 999 strokes of the lash. He stood by while this punishment was administered. La Rose did not utter a whimper, and when it was over, he went up to Kent and snapped his fingers in his face: ‘That’s that. It is the bullet that should punish, my lord. No whip can cow a French soldier.’10

  The duke’s Jekyll and Hyde personality became apparent when he met Julie de Saint-Laurent, a beautiful young Frenchwoman with whom he fell passionately in love, and who remained his devoted domestic companion for the next quarter of a century. They became attached while he was still posted in Gibraltar; she seems to have had at least two aristocratic French lovers before she met the Duke of Kent, but no children. If the intransigent King, his father, had not insisted upon bringing in the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, whereby no member of the Royal Family could marry without their father’s permission, there would have been no shortage of heirs after the death of Princess Charlotte!

  As things were, the boys had to choose, either to marry in defiance of their father – as the Duke of Sussex did – and thereby remove themselves from the royal succession; or to live with their chosen companions, without matrimony. So it was that William, Duke of Clarence, had his ten children, and many devoted years, with the actress Mrs Jordan. And the Duke of Kent had his beloved ‘Julie’. Her real name was Thérèse-Bernardine Montgenet, the daughter of a respectable engineer in the highways department at Besançon. The Duke of Kent always insisted that she had never been an actress – so why she adopted another name in the theatrical mode, and was called ‘Madame de Saint-Laurent’ remains a mystery to this day.11 Had Princess Charlotte not died in Claremont in 1817, and had she become the Queen of England upon the death of her father in 1820, there is no reason to suppose that Edward, Duke of Kent, would not have stayed happily with Madame de Saint-Laurent for the rest of his life.

  While the portly dukes of Clarence and Cambridge were doing their bit for the advancement of the English monarchy by discarding their mistresses and pursuing brides of childbearing age, their brother the Duke of Kent was not to be outdone. Satirists did their best to make the situation funny, but it was one of those occasions, of which English history provides so many, when events were more grotesque than satire could ever invent.

  Yoicks! The R—l Sport’s begun

  I’ faith but it is glorious fun

  For hot and hard each R—l pair

  Are at it hunting for an Heir

  sniggered ‘Peter Pindar’. More (unintentionally) amusing was the author of ‘Nature’s Policy for Man and Nations’, which apostrophized,

  O Kent beloved, in thy return the instrumental

  Arm, destined to consummate the awful purpose,

  Of the long dreadful and eventful times, obey

  Thy God’s mysterious will!

  The numerous nuptials of thy illustrious house

  And threatened loss, the intended cause of thy return

  Are Heaven’s mysterious language . . .

  That thou, O Kent, should’st forthwith consummate our good

  In the common bliss of kings, subjects and nations . . . 12

  The Duke of Kent was in Belgium with Julie de Saint-Laurent when Princess Charlotte died. They had recently moved into an old house which they had enjoyed decorating, papering and whitewashing13 – as the duke told his brother’s old mistress, Mrs Fitzherbert.

  On the morning that the news reached Brussels of Princess Charlotte’s death, Thomas Creevey, gossip and diarist, happened to be in town. He rushed to the duke’s house, where he found him in a state of agitation. ‘The country will now look up to me, Mr Creevey, to give them an heir to the crown,’ he said.

  The bombshell had first exploded over the duke’s breakfast table. Julie, opening the weekly bag of letters from England, had fished out the Morning Chronicle. When she had read of ‘the dreadful catastrophe at Claremont’, poor Madame de Saint-Laurent had shrieked and fallen in a faint on the floor. She knew at once that her happy relationship with the duke, which had begun in 1791, would now come to an end. As the duke tactlessly informed Mr Creevey, two possible brides came at once to mind: the Princess of Baden and the Princess of Saxe-Coburg.

  The latter was his choice. Armed with letters of introduction from
the princess’s brother, the bereaved Prince Leopold, the Duke of Kent set out for the Castle of Amorbach.

  She was Marie Luise Victoria, known as Victoire, one of the children of the indefatigable matchmaker, the Duchess Auguste. She was the sister of the widowed Prince Leopold. She was born on 17 August 1786, the day that her great-uncle by marriage, Frederick the Great, died. She was only seventeen when they married her off to Prince Emich Charles of Leiningen, a man old enough to be her father, on 21 December 1803. Since the Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century, the poverty-stricken territory of Amorbach in Lower Franconia had scarcely seen more miserable days. Napoleon’s armies left it desolate. In 1806, the year that Victoire’s father-in-law died and she became the Princess of Leiningen, Napoleon formally brought the Holy Roman Empire to an end. Whatever their political future – whether as a dependency of Austria or Prussia, or as part of a German federation – the people of Lower Franconia were actually starving when Victoire became their duchess. Her husband’s income was tiny. Two children were born to her: Charles in 1804 and Feodore – later the devoted companion of Queen Victoria – in 1807. The marriage was not a happy one, and in 1814, Victoire was left a poverty-stricken widow.

  Queen Victoria’s mother had known the real hazards of the royal snakes and ladders board, and the experience left her with a perpetual sense of insecurity – a sense which the Queen would inherit, and live with until her death. Unlike the prosperous aristocrats and merchants over whom she would rule, Victoria belonged to the class of European monarchy who could be reduced to penury, or killed, at the whims of fate. She always felt the keenest sympathy for those who were in this position – sympathy, and a little horror, for there but for the grace of God might any ruler go. Even those who did not belong to the inner circle of the European stud farm excited Victoria’s keen empathy when they were put down from their thrones, whether they were Bonapartes in exile or Indian maharajahs.

  Her mother, plump, red-cheeked, brightly dressed in silks and satins as she might have been, was all but an indigent when she met the Duke of Kent in 1818. She had no prospects outside the chance of marriage. She was thirty-two years old.

  By now the race for a royal heir to King George IV was on. The Duke of Clarence was still eyeing up Miss Wykeham, a rich heiress. The Duchess of Cumberland, who had lost her first baby at birth in 1817, was pregnant again. The Duke of Cambridge was on the point of marrying Princess Augusta, daughter of the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel. There was no point in delay. In May, Lord Castlereagh told the House of Commons that the Prince Regent had given his consent for the Duke of Kent to marry the widow of the late Prince of Leiningen. Parliament voted him an increase of his income of £6,000. A prodigiously extravagant man, Edward Kent had been hoping for £25,000, which was what Parliament had voted for his brother the Duke of York. But these were hard times, and, moreover, Prince Leopold, who was hanging on to Claremont and all his emoluments as a field marshal and colonel of a cavalry regiment, refused to give up the colossal annual allowance of £50,000 which he had enjoyed as the consort of Princess Charlotte.

  So, by the standards of English royalty, Victoire was marrying a pauper. By the standards of Lower Franconia, she was in clover.

  The pair left Amorbach and went to her native Coburg to be married. The ceremony took place in the superb baroque Schloss Ehrenberg which Duke Ernst I, Victoire’s brother, had only lately refurbished. They were married according to Lutheran rites in the great Hall of Giants, an assembly room embellished with huge white plaster giants.

  Kent took his bride to England, and on 11 July, at Kew, they went through the marriage ceremony again, this time according to the rites of the Church of England. In the same ceremony, his brother William, Duke of Clarence, was married to Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen. The service sheet was printed in German and in English, and, such was Victoire’s uncertainty of the latter tongue, she was given a phonetic version of her speech of thanks at the wedding breakfast: ‘Ei hoeve tu regrétt, biing aes yiett so littl cônversent in thie Inglisch lênguetsch, uitsch obleitschës – miy, tu seh, in averi fiú words, theat ei em môhst grêtful for yur congratuleschens end gud uishes, end heili flatterd, bei yur allucheon, to mei brother.’14

  They returned to Germany shortly after the ceremony, and returned to Amorbach, where her fifteen-year-old son Prince Charles ruled over the impoverished princedom. With his mania for spending money which he did not possess, and his passion for interior decoration, the Duke of Kent borrowed £10,000 and set about beautifying the Schloss, bringing over English workmen to install stoves, to build new stables and to lay out the gardens. Prince Metternich, who visited the newly-weds, recalled that, ‘The Duke regaled me incessantly with his stables, the particular pleasure which his new home affords him.’15

  No one had pretended that the marriage had been anything other than one of convenience and arrangement. But all the indications are that the pair quickly became very fond of one another.

  In November 1818, the duke became aware of an exit and an entrance into the world. On the 17th, he heard that his old mother Queen Charlotte had died. It also became clear that his wife was pregnant. They resolved to spend the winter quietly in Amorbach, but that the accouchement should take place in England.

  Questions of zoology must arise in any dynastic history such as ours. As it happens, a very dramatic zoological puzzle is posed by Queen Victoria’s genetic record. She would have nine children, and through them, she passed haemophilia to her descendants. Of the nine, three children were affected by the condition. Two of her daughters were carriers who passed the gene to some of their sons, who were affected, and to some of their daughters, who in turn became carriers. Prince Leopold was the only one of Queen Victoria’s sons to be a haemophiliac. His son was free of the disease; his daughter became a carrier.

  There were no instances of haemophilia in the British Royal Family before Victoria. We would be unable to work out the puzzle of ‘Queen Victoria’s Gene’ were it not for a Moravian monk, Father Gregor Mendel, who was born three years after her. It was his pioneering work on sweet peas which began the modern science of genetics, leading eventually to Francis Crick and James Watson a century later discovering the structure of DNA. As it happens, the genetic history of Queen Victoria’s mother is well documented. In 1911, William Bullock and Paul Fildes, working for the Eugenics Society in London, produced a paper on haemophilia, and traced the Duchess of Kent’s family back over eight generations. The haemophilia descendants are marked on a chart, in a genealogical table containing over 500 names, kept in the Royal Society of Medicine Library in Wimpole Street, London.16

  Neither of Victoria’s half-siblings carried the gene. The second scroll in the Royal Society of Medicine Library covers Victoria’s ancestry over seventeen generations, and there appears to be no mention of haemophilia in her family. Statisticians have calculated that the individual whose mother is a carrier has a 1 in 2 chance of developing as a haemophiliac himself. There is between a 1 in 25,000 and a 1 in 100,000 chance of developing the disease as the result of a mutation in the mother’s ovary. If the mutation did occur, it would seem likely that it occurred not in the duchess, but in the Duke of Kent.

  In a fascinating book, Queen Victoria’s Gene published in 1995, D. M. Potts and W. T. W. Potts – professors respectively of population and family planning, and biology – set out the facts. They dwell on the fact that the Duke of Kent and Madame de Saint-Laurent had been without issue; they remind us of the high statistical unlikelihood of a cell mutation in either parent; and they point to the enormous advantage which the duchess would enjoy, if only she could become pregnant. ‘If Victoire, keen to produce a child who might well be heir to the British throne, had suspected her husband’s fertility, she might well have tried to improve her chances with another man.’17 Much can hang on those two words, ‘might well’.

  The theory seems powerful18 until you acknowledge three things. First, it is
all argued from a set of negatives: no children were born to Kent and Madame de Saint-Laurent; no previous members of the British Royal Family appear to have been haemophiliac, etc. Negatives are not evidence. Second, the evidence is that, although they scarcely knew one another when they got married, the duke and duchess were to all appearances extremely fond of one another. Finally, the child, when born, bore an extraordinary resemblance to King George III. Moreover, Potts and Potts try to strengthen their case by stating that there are no subsequent cases, in Queen Victoria’s descendants, of George III’s porphyria; but this is not true. For example, the late Prince William of Gloucester, a grandson of King George V, when examined at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, and again by Professor Ishihara of Tokyo, was found by both medics to be suffering from variegate porphyria, by then in remission – the symptoms of which had been fever and a blistering rash. Since Potts and Potts wrote their book, Professor Timothy Peters has, in fact, cast serious doubt on whether George III had porphyria at all. And this would make half their ‘case’ collapse. Whether George III did or did not have the condition, the Potts professors’ belief that there was no porphyria among the descendants certainly convinced me, when I first read their book, that the odds against the Duke of Kent being Victoria’s father were overwhelming. But the fact that they made this mistake made me hesitate. And standing in front of several portraits of George III removed my doubts – for there were the same hooded, protuberant eyes, the same bird-like nose that were so conspicuous in Victoria’s mature face. When, in her grown-up life, her ministers feared that she was going mad, like her grandfather, they were surely right to feel that she was recognizably his descendant. (She had other characteristics redolent of him too, including her detailed knowledge of people, high and low, and her kindliness.)