Queen Victoria's Gene

by D M Potts

  As the commission with which I charged you to find for me a young lady to be my companion and mistress of my house was very detailed, and the talent for music which I wanted her to have was not at all the chief object which I asked you to watch for . . . I confess to you quite plainly that I do not know to what to attribute this way of acting [lodging the woman in another house] on your part, when you have heard from my own lips more than twenty times before you left for Marseilles that under no circumstances would I ever consent to lodge under another roof than mine the person who is to be my companion and friend.

  Edward wrote to the lady:

  I dare flatter myself that in signing your contract you felt it was only a simple form you had to observe purely out of delicacy for Fontiny’s sake: I hope also that from the moment you receive this you will be convinced that your arrival will be welcome with all the respect of which a young man is capable who is consumed with happiness at making your charming acquaintance . . . come as quickly as you can, with just your maid and my confidential servant, who will have the honour of being your guide: it will bring me the happiness of seeing you very soon, and in taking [you] immediately [to] the place I have planned for you, you will give me the best proof of your affection. . . . I will keep the cottage warm and expect from the moment of your arrival our life will begin to be happy and content.

  There was little doubt where she was to give ‘the best proof of her affection’ and when it came to telling her, in the same letter, about his worldly possessions the first thing he mentioned was his bed! Colonel Symes was equally direct in writing to General Grenville in England: ‘With the promise I obtained from the Prince of his ceasing any further importation from England, I now wish France had been included, from whence, a Lady is just arrived whose company here at present would have been very well dispensed with.’

  Edward’s French mistress was to play a key role in his life and her reproductive history is an important piece of circumstantial evidence in our chronicle of Victoria’s gene. We will return to her early life in Chapter 6. In Gibraltar, Thérèse was known as Madame de St Laurent. Apparently, she fulfilled her contract, kept the duke happy in bed, was discreet and accepted his martial ways. When the garrison was transferred to Quebec, The Times of London described the retinue who boarded the ship for Canada as ‘rather domestic than princely; a French Lady, his own man, and a Swiss valet’.

  Even by the harsh standards of the time, Edward was a martinet who collected tall men for his marching troops as other men might collect stamps. He fussed over the details of their uniforms, filled their unhappy days with inspections and marches and treated them more cruelly than cattle. The Governor of Halifax wrote, ‘The Prince cannot resist the temptation of taking a fine man into his Regt., nor a fine horse into his stable at any rate whatsoever.’ His devotion to military affairs was total to the point of obsession. ‘He is wrapped up in his profession, while he studies night and day’, wrote one naval observer, ‘and his maxim is, that nothing is well when it can be done better.’

  Edward was not in Quebec very long before he had a mutiny on his hands. The soldiers were ill-organized and often drunk, and their pathetic plot was easily uncovered. One man was sentenced to death and three were flogged, receiving between 300 and 700 lashes each. The prince was in charge of the execution parade. The condemned man, dressed in grave clothes, was forced to march behind his own coffin before ‘a vast concourse of spectators’, while the band played dirges. At the foot of the gallows Edward addressed the condemned man: ‘Draper – you have now reached the awful moment when a few moments would carry you into the presence of the Supreme Being. As the son of your sovereign whose greatest prerogative is the dispensation of mercy, I feel myself fortunately able to do that which, as your colonel, the indispensable laws of military discipline renders it impossible for me even to think of.’2 The mutineer was pardoned!

  Oddly, this same sadistic man fell into more homely, almost tender ways, with Madame de St Laurent. Unlike his brother, the Prince Regent, Edward drank little, neither gambled nor womanized; and once with Madame de St Laurent, he remained faithful to her. The lovers were separated in 1793 when she visited Britain briefly and he travelled to the Caribbean to fight at the capture of St Lucia from the French. The two were reunited and lived a somewhat drab life for another five years in Quebec and Halifax, before returning closer to the pomp and splendour of the royal Court in London. When he left Canada, Edward left behind eleven more soldiers condemned to death for various acts of perceived indiscipline, at least three of whom are known to have been executed. The Province of Prince Edward Island in the Gulf of St Lawrence commemorates his stay in Canada.

  Tiring of his exile, Edward wrote to his brother, the Duke of York:

  I would take a house for [Madame de St Laurent] in the Country at some little distance off, where her menage would be totally separate from mine. She would, of course, not appear at my house on the days I give public dinners, and when I went to hers, I should consider myself as her guest, and I should avoid being seen with her at any place of public entertainment. . . . I understand it is the intention to make my separation from Madame de St Laurent a term without which I am not to be employed on the other side of the Atlantic, which, however, it is repugnant to my feelings to credit, I must at once declare that it is one which I will not admit to be dictated to me, and to which, were I to subscribe, I should consider myself as meriting every contemptible and opprobrious Epithet to which those expose themselves who commit mean and despicable actions.3

  The prince and his lady were allowed to return to England, and then in 1802 he was transferred back to Gibraltar, this time in full command of the garrison. Again, he made the lives of his men a hell, closing down the taverns, extending parade hours, and fussing over uniforms. Within twenty months of arriving he faced the second mutiny of his career, the men attempting to storm his home. This time eleven men were sentenced to be shot and two received a thousand lashes each. Not all the sentences were carried out as the duke was ordered back to England.

  Here the couple lived quietly, but not cheaply, at Castle Hill Lodge, Ealing. ‘Madame did not rise very early,’ wrote the young son of a long-standing Canadian friend, ‘she is almost always embroidering, writing her book, drawing or reading.’ Driven by debts, they moved to Brussels in 1814, but a legal marriage to a woman acceptable to his brother, who had now become Regent, and to the British parliament, was the only effective way Edward could increase his income. In 1816 he attempted to sell his comfortable residence, Castle Hill Lodge in Ealing, on which he had lavished vast funds and much care. At the same time he paid a brief visit to Leopold’s widowed sister, Victoire, Duchess of Leiningen, at Amorbach and another to the Princess of Baden at Carlsruhe, but was evidently unimpressed with either as he rejoined his mistress in a rented home in Brussels, which he so transformed that its owner could hardly recognize it. He also extended and redesigned the gardens and remodelled the stables. It is said that the Emperor of Russia contributed £2,000 towards the cost of a proposed wedding of Edward and the Princess of Baden. If he did, it proved to be a bad investment, for when the Duke of Kent finally did marry it was to a woman from another court.

  Fearing that his mistress might hear of his visits to prospective brides Edward arranged for the publication of a denial that he had any marriage plans. His letters show that he was deeply concerned that Madame should not be upset and clearly hoped that he would not be required to choose between his loving mistress and a strange aristocratic bride.

  One of Edward’s unexpected virtues seems to have been an easy manner with young people of his own class. He was relatively close to his niece, Princess Charlotte, and from Brussels he handled the ‘delicate correspondence’ she was having with Prince Leopold of Coburg. The duke was ‘the chief promoter of [our] marriage’, claimed Leopold, writing to Queen Victoria thirty years later. After Charlotte finally married, she began a lively exchange of letters with her husband’s widowed sister Victoi
re. Charlotte and Edward now switched roles and she began encouraging Edward to marry. Charlotte’s sudden and untimely death in November 1817, together with the stillbirth of her son, was a double blow to Edward who wrote, ‘Indeed, I recollect no event in my life that has so completely overwhelmed me as the catastrophe at Claremont and I feel it will take time before I regain my usual spirits and composure.’4

  Even as late as 18 December he was hoping that his brother would solve the dynastic problem and remove any need for him to marry. He wrote to his friend Wetherall, ‘I ought to be first sure that the Divorce (of the Prince Regent) and that the Admiral of the Fleet (the Duke of Clarence) is not thinking of marrying’. The newly bereaved Leopold, having just lost his wife and son, saw an opportunity to keep the British crown within his family and wrote to his sister urging the match. Spurred by a sense of duty to the nation and the prospect of an additional £25,000 per annum and the payment of all his outstanding debts, Edward changed his mind. Early in January 1818 Edward wrote to Victoire asking for a decision but seemingly still hoping for a negative answer as he wrote again to Wetherall that in that case ‘the matter would be at an end’. However, Victoire agreed to the marriage on condition that she could spend part of the year at Amorbach to preserve the constitutional position of her son, who as heir was required to reside at Amorbach. Edward never saw Madame de St Laurent again. She read about the courtship of Victoire in her paper over breakfast and was broken hearted. For Edward it was also a painful break and he wrote, ‘As for the payment of my debts, I don’t call them great, the nation, on the contrary, is greatly my debtor’. To a friend he mused before his wedding, ‘I hope I shall have the strength to do my duty’.5

  Victoire, the Dowager Duchess of Leiningen, did not share her brother’s dynastic vision and drive. She lived in an isolated palace at Amorbach, given to her former husband by Napoleon. There, forty miles of rutted roads from the nearest large town, Mannheim, Victoire kept a modest court, acting as regent for her fifteen-year-old son Charles. At the same time she cannot have been blind to the duke’s invitation to join the premier royal family in Europe, especially when combined with the reasonable possibility of bearing an heir to the British throne. She was restrained both by a genuine concern for young Charles and her thirteen-year-old daughter, Feodora. There were several illegitimate pretenders to the Leiningen throne and German law did not allow women to succeed as monarchs, so Charles was under the authority of the Court of Wards. The duke promised she could spend part of the year in Germany and the Prince Regent stepped in and persuaded the Court of Wards to let Charles come to England for the rest of the time. Victoire and Edward were finally betrothed at Coburg on 27 May 1818 and married two days later. After a short honeymoon, the Duke of Kent brought his bride back to London by leisurely stages for a second marriage ceremony, according to the rites of the Church of England, on 11 July. The service was bilingual and the duchess’s official speech in English was written phonetically in German. At the same ceremony the duke’s elder brother William married Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen and the Prince Regent gave both brides away: Hymen’s War Terrific had begun.

  A month later, in order to save money, the duke and his new duchess left for Amorbach, but when the duchess found that she was pregnant they hastily returned to Kensington Palace. The duke felt that an heir to the throne should be British born, and a British birth might strengthen the claim, if, as was likely, there were competitors. As at Charlotte’s labour, many distinguished guests assembled, including the Duke of Wellington and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, no doubt apprehensive with memories of Charlotte’s confinement. Happily the labour was a short one and a healthy baby girl was delivered at 4.15 a.m. on 24 May 1819. She was christened Victoria. Victoire had promised Edward a son, but the duke philosophically decided that ‘the decrees of providence are not all times wisest and best’. The duke’s personal physician, Dr Wilson, was considered to have managed the pregnancy ‘to perfection’, probably because he did little to interfere with the midwife, Madame Siebold.6

  The war was won by a very short margin. In March 1819 Kent’s younger brother’s wife, the Duchess of Cambridge, had given birth to a son and his elder brother, William, had had a daughter, although she only survived seven hours, and the Duchess of Cumberland, the wife of another younger brother, had a son only three days after Victoria was born. Victoria’s christening took place one month later in Kensington Palace in the presence of the Prince Regent. The Cupola Room was decorated with draperies borrowed from St James’ Palace and a font was brought over from the Tower of London. The Archbishop of Canterbury held the child ready for baptism. ‘Name this child?’, he asked. ‘Alexandrina’, replied the duke, naming his daughter after the Emperor Alexander of Russia, a godfather in absentia. The Prince Regent curtly vetoed the choice. Charlotte was offered and also vetoed. ‘Augusta’, suggested the duke, but that was equally unacceptable. By now the duchess was in tears and the duke tentatively suggested Elizabeth but it was also refused. Eventually the Prince Regent said, ‘Give her the mother’s name also, then, but it cannot precede that of the Emperor.’ So the infant was finally christened Alexandrina Victoria. As a child she called herself Drina.

  Unlike every other queen, princess and duchess in Europe, Victoire breast-fed the new baby: ‘Everybody is most astonished’, she wrote to her mother. If she had not made this unexpected break with precedent, then Victoria, growing up in the draughty rooms of Kensington Palace, where the windows ‘constantly let in the rain’, might well have died like Adelaide’s babies. Another wise but equally unusual step occurred when the duchess agreed to have ‘our dear little girl’ vaccinated against smallpox, ten weeks after her birth. Victoria was weaned at six months. She was almost annoyingly fit and did not even trouble her doting parents when she began teething at seven months. For the first three years of her life she heard only German spoken. At the age of three she started to learn English but included German words and phrases in her English for the rest of her life.

  After Victoria’s birth, the ever impecunious Kents decided to return to Germany, but visiting the quiet Devon resort of Sidmouth they fell in love with it and settled there in a small house, Wallbrook Cottage. An incident there showed that the duke had mellowed since his ferocious army days. A youth shooting birds accidentally shattered the window of the princess’s nursery and cut the sleeve of her nightdress. Such carelessness might have filled any father with righteous indignation, but the elderly duke merely released the lad with an admonition and ‘a promise to desist from such culpable pursuits’.

  Plagued by mounting debts in England and worried by ‘unpleasant business letters from Amorbach’ the duke stayed on in Sidmouth in the expectation of ‘a less severe winter, some baths in warm sea water – and to save money’. The winter, unhappily, developed into a series of storms, and however much coal the maids piled on the grates it seemed impossible to heat the rented house, every room was cold, and outside the wind and rain lashed the Devon watering-place unmercifully. One by one the family caught cold. Baby Victoria was the first but recovered quickly. After the duke came in wet and cold on Friday 7 January 1820 after looking at the horses, he rapidly developed a sore throat.

  The good sense surrounding Victoria’s early months is all the more remarkable in the light of the medical treatment meted out to her father. He had probably caught the common cold virus, with some secondary bacterial infection of the throat. Although he felt dreadful he kept up his social engagements and Victoire fussed over her husband with quinine and affection and, with good sense, moved the duke’s bed into the largest warm room in the house.

  Dr Wilson may have held back at the duchess’s delivery, but he began to treat the duke’s illness with the same aggressiveness he had shown as a brutal surgeon in the navy, earlier in his career. On Monday 10 January, he began applying leeches to the duke’s chest and by Wednesday his illness had worsened and he was undoubtedly developing pneumonia with the pain of pleurisy, high fe
ver and episodes of delirium. Yet the duke was only fifty-two and usually enjoyed robust health. He would probably have fought the infection well if Dr Wilson had not embarked on an increasingly desperate course of bleeding, combined with inappropriate nursing. He bled him again on Wednesday and Thursday and, a week after the illness began, he changed from leeches to cupping – incising the skin and placing a vessel filled with hot air over it so that it draws off blood. Blood was drawn from every part of the duke’s body, including the head, to the great distress of the ladies of the household. ‘For hours they tormented him’, commented Victoire’s German companion, Polyxene von Tubeuf. The duchess was suspicious of the treatments, saying, ‘even if he should become weaker, the only remedy for relieving the inflammation was bleeding’. ‘It is too dreadful,’ she wrote, ‘there is hardly a spot on his dear body which has not been touched by cupping, blisters, or bleeding.’ The duke’s father, George III, was also seriously ill 200 miles away in London, but one royal physician, Dr William Manton, was despatched down to Devon when news of the duke’s worsening illness reached London. His brother-in-law, Leopold, set off to Sidmouth and even the Prince Regent, who had snubbed him since the christening, sent his best wishes.

  Prior to Dr Manton’s arrival, the duke had had a total of six pints of blood removed. The normal blood volume is eight pints, but the leeches and blisters had been applied repeatedly, removing a relatively small quantity of blood each time. Therefore, Edward’s body would have rapidly replaced the fluid lost, but the red cells, packed with the haemoglobin needed to carry oxygen, take 120 days to grow in the bone marrow and at the end of twenty such episodes his haemoglobin would have been between 40 and 50 per cent of normal. Such anaemia is compatible with life, although it would have greatly exacerbated the infection and embarrassed the circulation to the heart and lungs. In addition the antibodies and white cells needed to fight the pneumonia were continually being drained into leeches and cups, and Dr Manton’s unhappy therapy rapidly turned a common cold into a mortal infection. Finally, as we will see later, the duke may have also suffered from porphyria, and if this was the case his position would have been even more precarious.