Queen Victoria's Gene Read online

  The House of Coburg. Monarchs and heirs apparent underlined

  Ernst settled for a less distinguished bride, Louise, the sixteen-year-old heiress of the Saxe-Gotha estates. She was described as ‘a dear sweet little person, not exactly pretty but very attractive in her extreme youth and vivacity’. The honeymoon was stormy but fertile and in less than a year a son was born, also called Ernst. He was put to a wet-nurse and his mother conceived again rapidly. Her second son, Albert, was later to be Queen Victoria’s consort. He was born on 27 August 1819, three months after his cousin, Princess Victoria of Kent, had been born in England. They were both delivered by the same midwife, Madame Siebold.

  A few years after Albert’s birth Duke Ernst divorced Louise and she was sent into exile. She was never to talk to or to hug her two children again, although unbeknown to them she would occasionally disguise herself as a peasant woman and creep into the market square of Coburg to watch them from afar. She remarried but did not live to see her sons by her first marriage reach maturity; she is said to have died of uterine cancer at the early age of thirty. It was probably a cancer of the cervix. Cervical cancer behaves in many ways like a sexually transmitted disease and may be caused by a sexually acquired virus. It is a disease associated with the early initiation of sexual intercourse and multiple sexual partners or with marriage to a man who has had many sexual partners. Duke Ernst also remarried after the death of Louise, this time to his 33-year-old niece, a rather solid woman who remained childless.

  Leopold grew to maturity during the turbulent years of the Napoleonic wars. Ernst and Leopold mingled with the many aristocrats who peopled Napoleon’s court in Paris. In 1807 he met the empress, who to his youthful eyes was merely ‘Old Josephine’. Allied by marriage to the Russian royal family and a youthful general in the Russian Army, Leopold found himself on the winning side in 1815 and soon travelled to London with the extraordinary ambition of capturing the heart of the heiress to the British throne. After 1815, and for the next half century, Britain was the world’s greatest power. It had defeated France, the old rival, it had started the Industrial Revolution, it was the world’s most powerful economy and was the possessor of a vast and rapidly expanding empire. Whoever was fortunate enough to marry Charlotte would have unparalleled power and influence. Although he had little seniority among the many visitors in the celebrating capital, he actively pursued Princess Charlotte – then aged nineteen. Once again, the Russian connection may have been helpful. Leopold’s first days in London, however, gave his matrimonial ambitions little encouragement. Princess Charlotte was already engaged to Prince William of Orange but had confided to the tsar’s sister that she did not want to marry such an ugly and drunken man. Although Charlotte did indeed leave her Dutch prince, she did so only to fall in love with a Prussian one. Stubbornly, the 25-year-old Leopold stayed on in London dogging the princess’ footsteps. He wrote not of love but of diplomacy to brother Ernst! ‘I only decide to do so [remain in London] after much hesitation and after certain very singular events made me glimpse the possibility, even the probability, of realising the project we spoke of in Paris.’

  Although Leopold had to return to Coburg when the husband of his youngest sister Victoire died, he had already made some sort of an impression on Charlotte. Her father, the Prince Regent, was strongly opposed to the Prussian marriage and ordered his daughter to Cranborne Lodge in Windsor, forbidding her visitors. Her Prussian Prince Charming did not ride over to rescue her but returned to Prussia and some months later broke off the engagement. In her disillusionment, Charlotte’s thoughts turned to Leopold. She wrote to a friend, like her suitor more in a practical than romantic frame of mind: ‘At all event, I know that the worse off, more unhappy and wretched I cannot be than I am now, and all in all if I end by marrying Prince L., I marry the best of all those I have seen, and that is some satisfaction.’

  Nationally and in the eyes of the Prince Regent, the match was certainly preferable to the Prussian and the Dutch affairs. Leopold was invited back to London in February 1816 and, on 2 May, married Princess Charlotte. The marriage, which had begun as a step in Leopold’s dynastic ambition and as an acknowledged second best for Charlotte, soon developed into one of genuine love. Leopold had self-confidence won on the battlefields of the Napoleonic wars and sophistication gained at the French court. He was sexually experienced and according to rumour had been seduced by the Empress Josephine’s daughter Hortense, who was seven years older than Leopold and herself pregnant with her first son at the time of the affair. The boy in question later reigned as Napoleon III. Leopold’s brother’s mistress Pauline Panam claimed Leopold entered her room at Coburg one night and made sexual advances to her when she was pregnant with Ernst’s child, and there is evidence that he had an affair with his sister-in-law Louise, the mother of Prince Albert. But, whatever the details of Leopold’s earlier life, his personality complemented Charlotte’s disposition and the happiness of the royal couple was very apparent to the British citizens, who had suffered two generations of an unlovable royal family. Leopold and Charlotte were a handsome couple and each had something to give to the other, making the loss, first of their son and second of Charlotte, all the more tragic.

  Leopold was only twenty-seven at the time of Charlotte’s death and had been created Prince of Great Britain on his marriage. The British parliament had voted him £50,000 a year – a truly princely sum at the time – and the income continued after Charlotte’s untimely death. Some of it he sent to Coburg to support his widowed sister Victoire, while he himself travelled widely and enjoyed a number of mistresses. In Vienna, he had the Countess Ficquelmont and in London, Lady Ellenborough, but it was in Germany that he was eventually swept off his feet by an actress, Caroline Bauer, who in age and looks reminded him of Charlotte. At first she was not impressed with Leopold who was now thirty-seven, wore a wig and was cautious to the point of dullness, but a morganatic marriage was arranged and consummated in London in 1829. Leopold was unwilling to give Caroline his family name and make her his heir in case the opportunity should arise to make a more advantageous marriage, and the marriage, in fact, soon ended in divorce. Like his brother’s mistress, Pauline Panam, some years earlier, Caroline also wrote her memoirs and died prematurely, in Caroline’s case by committing suicide.

  Leopold was indeed offered the throne of Greece but overplayed his hand by demanding a vast loan and a French princess to go with it. Many years later he commented that ‘Greece would have satisfied better my imagination and poetic tastes’. In 1830 the Belgians revolted against Protestant Dutch rule. It was perhaps the only revolution that literally began with an impassioned audience in an opera house. The British prime minister, Palmerston, saw political capital in nominating Leopold as king of the new country and he received backing from Russia and Prussia. Leopold, although nominally a Protestant himself, was elastic where religion was concerned and he was formally elected king by the Belgians themselves in 1831. The Dutch, furious with the settlement, invaded and were led by the same Prince of Orange that Leopold’s dead wife Charlotte had rejected as a bridegroom. Once again Leopold had to take to the battlefield and once again he was on the losing side. However, the French armies came to his rescue and defeated the Dutch.

  As usual, the Coburgs turned defeat on the battlefield into victory by marriage and Leopold became betrothed to Princess Louise, the daughter of his rescuer. Leopold was by now forty-two and his bride, as Charlotte had been sixteen years earlier, was only twenty. Nevertheless, Louise invested the politically motivated marriage with a certain youthful romanticism, saying it was impossible to find a husband ‘more delicate, more normal, more religious, more healthy or of such a sweet and equal humour’. She was to bear him four children, although above the royal bed Leopold kept a large painting of his first wife Charlotte and their dead child, ascending into a cloudy sky. His first daughter, later to become the tragic wife of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, was also called Charlotte.

  Leopold ha
d one or two more extra-marital relationships but in the main devoted himself to ruling and to orchestrating the marriage of other Coburgs into the royal families of Europe. It was ‘Uncle Leopold’ who introduced Victoria, the future Queen of England and the daughter of his sister Victoire, to his nephew Albert, the future Prince Consort. Leopold died in 1865 and ‘Charlotte’ was the last word to pass his lips.

  THREE

  VICTOIRE AND VICTORIA

  Twelve of Queen Charlotte’s fifteen children were still alive when Princess Charlotte died in 1817, but once again there was no direct heir to the British throne. The daughters and daughters-in-law were past the menopause but three sons remained unmarried, the Duke of Clarence (later William IV), the Duke of Kent and the Duke of Cambridge. Her granddaughter’s obstetric catastrophe had been the very opposite of the old Queen’s obstetric performance. Queen Charlotte’s labours had been brief and her second son was said to have been delivered after only three labour pains. The queen employed wet-nurses for all her children, so she did not enjoy the contraceptive protective effect lactation offers: for seven consecutive years she had a baby every year. Yet among her descendants only her eldest child, the Prince of Wales, had produced a legitimate heir – and she had just died.

  In what contemporary gossips had called the ‘Hymen’s War Terrific’, the king’s offspring who were able set about trying to father an heir to the throne. The Duke of Wellington called the king’s brothers, ‘the damn’est millstones about the neck of any government that can be imagined’ and the poet Shelley called them ‘the dross of their dull race’. These were exaggerated phrases but not entirely misleading. Most of the royal brothers were middle aged, in debt and several were more in love with their mistresses than with their wives.

  The Prince Regent eventually succeeded to the throne on the death of George III in 1820 and reigned for ten years. His coronation as George IV was a famous pantomime. Prize-fighters were employed to control the guests and to exclude his wife, the hated Queen Caroline, and her supporters. It was an unpopular reign and George IV was abused by parliament, cartoonists and the press. As had been predicted, he never made up the quarrel with his queen. On his death, the obituary in The Times observed, ‘There never was a creature less regretted by his fellow creatures than the deceased King. What eye has wept for him? What heart has heaved one throb of unmercenary sorrow?’

  The family of George III, with dates of birth

  Frederick Duke of York and Albany, the second son of George III, died of heart failure in 1826 while his brother was still on the throne. He had been married for twenty-five years to Frederica, daughter of the King of Prussia, but his real love was his mistress Mary Ann Clark and he had been accused of abusing his post as Commander-in-Chief of the Army by selling commissions on her behalf. Neglected Frederica was childless and led a separate, eccentric existence surrounded by pet parrots and monkeys. She died shortly after her husband and Frederick’s line played no part in the succession stakes.

  King George’s third son, William, Duke of Clarence, was the one least deserving of Shelley’s description. He had served as a midshipman in the navy when only thirteen years old and had seen action at Gibraltar in 1780. He visited North America and was the only member of the British royal family ever to see the Union Jack fly over New York. Washington and his rebel soldiers made plans to capture the young prince, but he did not fall into their trap. William also travelled in Europe and served under Lord Nelson in the West Indies. He was best man at Nelson’s wedding and remained a personal friend until the Admiral’s death at Trafalgar.

  For twenty years William lived with a sparkling and beautiful actress, Dorothea Jordan, by whom he had ten children. She was dubbed as a ‘child of nature whose voice was cordial to the heart . . . whose singing was like the twang of Cupid’s bow’. The children were named Fitz Clarence by William and ‘les bastards’ by his detractors. In most things William was amiable and solid, if occasionally eccentric and, prior to Princess Charlotte’s death, he saw no need to interrupt his happy liaison with Mrs Jordan.

  The one shadow in William’s life was that his father had forced the British parliament to pass a law that none of his children could marry without his permission. Realizing his children could not inherit the throne he parted from Dorothea in 1811. ‘Could you believe, or would the world believe that we never had for twenty years the semblance of a quarrel’, she wrote of her happy years with William. At the time of his niece’s death, William was fifty-two, his hair was almost white and he was portly, although by the standards of the time not grossly overweight. With the end of the Napoleonic wars, a whole new set of Protestant princesses became accessible as potential brides.

  William wrote to his old mother Queen Charlotte, ‘I have ten children totally dependent on myself, I owe £40,000 for which, of course, I pay interest, and I have a floating debt of £16,000’. Marriage would solve his financial problems as well as the inheritance, as he could reasonably expect parliament to vote him an increased royal pension. However, in the midst of hunting for an acceptable bride he fell in love again, this time with Miss Wykeham, who was wealthy but had no royal blood in her veins and was therefore unacceptable as a potential queen.

  William courted Miss Wykeham by announcing that he hadn’t a single farthing but he could make her a duchess and possibly Queen of England. She accepted, but the engagement was vetoed by the Prince Regent, acting head of the family while his father George III was senile. Disappointed in love he laid aside his marriage plans until the death of Charlotte, in 1817, spurred him into action once again. In the spring of 1818, he wrote to his oldest illegitimate son, ‘I have delayed till the last moment writing in hopes of being able to inform you who is to be [my wife]. I can now with truth tho’ not with satisfaction my heart being with Miss Wykeham. It is to be the Duchess of Saxe-Meiningen, whose beauty and character are universally acknowledged. She is deemed poor, dear innocent young woman created to be my wife. I cannot, I will not, I must not ill use her.’ And, added William, ‘What time may produce in my heart I cannot tell, but at present I think and exist only for Miss Wykeham. But enough of your father’s misery.’

  The marriage to Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen took place in the summer of 1818 and the following March she delivered a daughter, but the infant lived for only a few hours. The next conception ended in a miscarriage and the next in a daughter1 who died as an infant in March 1821. There were rumours of later pregnancies including still-born twins, but no legitimate heir of William was to survive: Miss Wykeham had been deserted in vain.

  On the death of George IV in 1830, William, then aged sixty-five, inherited the throne. ‘In the evening’, wrote the Russian ambassador’s wife of the Court, ‘we all sit at the round table. The King snoozes and the Queen does needle-work.’ William died of pneumonia in 1837.

  The Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III, had been Queen Charlotte’s largest infant. Born on 2 November 1767, he was christened Edward Augustus, after an uncle who had died a few days previously. He was a precocious child and grew into a pedantic adult. His mother, ever busy with new pregnancies, denied him even the remote, circumscribed contact most aristocrats gave their children. True to the British tradition of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, he was educated in Spartan and sometimes cruel ways. His sister Augusta recalled seeing Edward’s older brothers pinioned by their arms and thrashed with a long whip. It is not clear whether Edward received this treatment as a child, but he certainly grew into a complex adult, his personality embracing both sadism and tender concern.

  At seventeen, Edward was sent to Hanover, Germany. ‘Every morning in the week’, he wrote back to London, ‘I study 4 hours, 1 in German, 1 in law, 1 in artillery and 1 in history; and also 1 hour every evening, 3 times a week upon religious subjects, and 3 times a week the classics.’ Throughout his life he was an energetic man, who liked to rise early and work hard, yet he was cast in the intrinsically frustrating role of the fourth son of the mon
arch, a prince frequently in the public eye but never required to do any real job.

  As a young man he lived above his means and ran up debts. He was unusually tall and dressed foppishly. In 1790 he came home to England, but was hastily despatched to join the king’s garrison in Gibraltar. Life on the Rock was hot and tedious and the Duke of Kent’s surroundings were sparse. Although in debt, he had prestige and power and found little difficulty discovering women to share his bed. ‘What follies do we see, every day, committed by youth’, wrote his conscientious Colonel, Richard Symes.

  In seeking a long-term relationship, Edward was meticulous and unemotional. He engaged a Mr Fontiny to travel to southern Europe and find him a suitable concubine. An appropriate young lady, Thérèse Bernardine, was recruited from Marseilles and brought by Mr Fontiny to live, along with her maid, in an apartment outside the garrison quarters. This was not what the prince intended: