by Jean Plaidy
Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Jean Plaidy
Title Page
Dedication
Family Tree
The Momentous Year
The Queen and the Regent
York
Clarence
Kent
Cumberland
Victoria, the Widow
Adelaide
‘The Humbugs’
Double Wedding at Kew
Royal Death and Royal Birth
Christening at Kensington
Adelaide’s Disappointment
Fulfilment of a Prophecy
She Shall be Victoria
A Visit to St James’s
Coronation – and Freedom
Other People’s Children
One Step Nearer
Victoria and Uncle King
Lord High Admiral of England
Menace at Kensington Palace
The King is Dead
And then – Victoria
Bibliography
Copyright
About the Book
With King George III under lock and key suffering from perceived insanity and the Prince Regent in ill health, all eyes are on the Regent’s pregnant daughter. Unfortunately, the unthinkable happens and both Charlotte and her baby die in childbirth, leaving the age old problem of succession. For though King George III has many children, all are middle-aged and none have legitimate heirs to secure the Hanoverian dynasty.
The death of Charlotte causes a sudden enthusiasm for marriage among the sons of George III, as they compete to have children and secure their line of succession. William marries Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen while Edward marries Victoria Mary Louisa of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Another son, Ernest, is already married and he too hopes to be the one to provide necessary children. King George dies, to be replaced by an ailing George IV, and Edward and Victoria succeed in having a daughter, also named Victoria. She waits patiently to become Queen, avoiding the plots, intrigue and danger that threaten to prevent her reaching maturity.
About the Author
Jean Plaidy, one of the preeminent authors of historical fiction for most of the twentieth century, is the pen name of the prolific English author Eleanor Hibbert, also known as Victoria Holt. Jean Plaidy’s novels had sold more than 14 million copies worldwide by the time of her death in 1993.
Also by Jean Plaidy
THE TUDOR SAGA
Uneasy Lies the Head
Katharine, the Virgin Widow
The Shadow of the Pomegranate
The King’s Secret Matter
Murder Most Royal
St Thomas’s Eve
The Sixth Wife
The Thistle and the Rose
Mary, Queen of France
Lord Robert
Royal Road to Fotheringay
The Captive Queen of Scots
The Spanish Bridegroom
THE CATHERINE DE MEDICI TRILOGY
Madame Serpent
The Italian Woman
Queen Jezebel
THE STUART SAGA
The Murder in the Tower
The Wandering Prince
A Health Unto His Majesty
Here Lies Our Sovereign Lord
The Three Crowns
The Haunted Sisters
The Queen’s Favourites
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION SERIES
Louis the Well-Beloved
The Road to Compiègne
Flaunting, Extravagant Queen
The Battle of the Queens
THE LUCREZIA BORGIA SERIES
Madonna of the Seven Hills
Light on Lucrezia
ISABELLA AND FERDINAND TRILOGY
Castile for Isabella
Spain for the Sovereigns
Daughters of Spain
THE GEORGIAN SAGA
The Princess of Celle
Queen in Waiting
Caroline, the Queen
The Prince and the Quakeress
The Third George
Perdita’s Prince
Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill
Indiscretions of the Queen
The Regent’s Daughter
Goddess of the Green Room
THE QUEEN VICTORIA SERIES
The Captive of Kensington
The Queen and Lord M
The Queen’s Husband
The Widow of Windsor
THE NORMAN TRILOGY
The Bastard King
The Lion of Justice
The Passionate Enemies
THE PLANTAGENET SAGA
The Plantagenet Prelude
The Revolt of the Eaglets
The Heart of the Lion
The Prince of Darkness
The Battle of the Queens
The Queen from Provence
The Hammer of the Scots
The Follies of the King
The Vow of the Heron
Passage to Pontefract
The Star of Lancaster
Epitaph for Three Women
Red Rose of Anjou
The Sun in Splendour
QUEEN OF ENGLAND SERIES
Myself, My Enemy
Queen of this Realm: The Story of Elizabeth I
Victoria, Victorious
The Lady in the Tower
The Goldsmith’s Wife
The Queen’s Secret
The Rose without a Thorn
OTHER TITLES
The Queen of Diamonds
Daughter of Satan
The Scarlet Cloak
Victoria in the Wings
The first book in the Victorian Saga
Jean Plaidy
for Mary Barron
The Momentous Year
IT HAD BEEN a momentous year. Napoleon had been sent into exile, his power broken. No longer could mothers quieten their children with the threat ‘Boney will get you!’ because Boney was an ineffectual exile whose grandiose dreams had been shown to be nothing more than such, and the smallest child knew it. He was a figure of ridicule, hatred or pity – one could decide according to one’s nature; but all agreed that there was nothing to fear from him. He had been beaten at Waterloo by the invincible Wellington and the bewhiskered Blücher, and Boney’s days of glory were over.
‘Boney was a warrior, Jean François,’ sang the children derisively.
England had never been so rich nor so powerful. Led by the exquisite taste of the Prince Regent the arts flourished; rarely in the history of the country had so much encouragement been given to creative genius. Nowhere in the world – now that French glory had departed – was there a mansion to compare with Carlton House; the Pavilion at Brighton, that oriental extravaganza, was unique though it might owe its conception to Chinese artists.
So much splendour; so much glory. There was no other country in the world so powerful; yet there were people not far from Carlton House, in the hovels of Seven Dials, dying of starvation; the national debt was overwhelming; the weavers of Manchester were in revolt against the installation of machinery and the hungry crowds marched to London, burning hay-ricks as they came, ominously singing the Marseillaise. Never far from the minds of every member of the royal family was the memory of the terrible fate which had befallen their cousins across the Channel: bestial violence, murder, the collapse of a régime and resulting chaos, the most bloody revolution the world had yet known.
The Duke of Clarence had said in one of his fatuous speeches that the people of Europe had a habit of cutting off the heads of their kings and queens and soon there would be many thrones without kings and kings without heads.
Clarence was the fool of the
family. He had not been educated as well as his brothers because his father, determined to make a man of him and remove him from his brothers’ demoralizing influence, had sent him to sea when he was thirteen; and although a tutor had accompanied him, the Duke having no inclination for learning and circumstances being understandably not conducive to study, he had become a better sailor than a scholar.
The Prince Regent was dissatisfied with life. He longed for the one thing he lacked; the approbation of his subjects; but no matter what he did he could not win this. They hated him; his faults were exaggerated; his virtues minimized. Prince Charming of his youth had become Prince Ridiculous of his middle age.
Driving to open Parliament on a bitter January day his carriage had been surrounded by a hostile mob who had broken the windows; and someone had taken advantage of the tumult to fire a shot which missed him by an alarmingly few inches.
The Regent was not as physically brave as his father who had faced similar acts of lese-majesty with calm. ‘There is One who disposes of all things and in Him I trust’, George III had commented when a would-be assassin had fired a shot at his carriage; and picking the bullet from his sleeve where it had lodged he had handed it to Lord Onslow, who was sitting with him, and remarked: ‘My Lord, keep this as a memorandum of the civilities we have received this day.’ The Prince Regent lacked his father’s faith; and the only part he failed to act with conviction was that of the man indifferent to death. He was worried about his health; he was not ready to die; and, being more cultured than his father, an unwashed, illiterate, unreasonable mob filled him with greater distaste.
What have I done to make them dislike me so? he asked himself. I have done everything I could to make this country great. I would have stood beside Wellington if it had been permitted; but as this was not to be I have honoured Wellington and made him my friend. I have brought beauty and culture to this country; I have even given them an heir to the throne, though what this cost me they will never understand. And yet they hate me.
His brother Frederick, Duke of York and Commander-in-Chief of the Army, was not hated as he was, although he had given the royal family one of its biggest scandals when his mistress Mary Anne Clarke had been accused of selling commissions, and Frederick’s letters – banal, illspelt, revealing in the extreme – had been read in court. Frederick had necessarily been dismissed from his post in the Army, though he had regained it on his brother’s accession to the Regency. For a time Frederick had been the victim of lampoon writers and the cartoonists, but somehow he had crept back into a certain contemptuous favour.
Why can’t I do the same? wondered the Regent. He was cleverer than Frederick; he was the King in all but name; he had done his repulsive duty in marrying Caroline of Brunswick and had had a daughter by her. All this – and they showed no gratitude. They depicted him in their cartoons as twice the size he was; they wrote disgusting things about him; the writer Leigh Hunt had been fined and imprisoned for libelling him; they called him ‘fat’ – an adjective which made him shudder whenever he heard it; they exaggerated his extravagances; in fact they showed in a hundred ways that the most unpopular man in the kingdom was its ruler.
Often he remembered a long-ago conversation with Lord Malmesbury who had been his friend – although he would never forgive him for not warning him of the vulgarity of Caroline of Brunswick; for Malmesbury, as the King’s ambassador who had gone to Brunswick to make the arrangements for the marriage, had been fully aware of Caroline’s crudeness, her unsuitability and her lack of cleanliness. Whenever he thought of her his slightly retroussé nose which had been so charming in his youth twitched with disgust. If he could have married Maria Fitzherbert openly, all this would not have happened. He would have been a happy man, a monarch beloved of his people; and where could he have found a woman more worthy to be his queen than Maria?
So he remembered Malmesbury’s words when he was trying to persuade him not to commit himself with Maria. ‘You will never hold your subjects’ affections until you marry and have children. That is what they ask of you and that is what they expect.’
But life had been cruel.
The Regent believed that if he could rid himself of that woman, marry again – a woman of his choice this time – he would beget a male heir very quickly. That would be an end of his daughter Charlotte’s hopes of the crown which would please him. Charlotte was popular with the people who gave the impression that they were waiting impatiently for his departure, so that she might become their Queen. The English, it was said, preferred queens to kings. There was a superstition that the country prospered under them because it had under Elizabeth and Anne.
And now they were waiting for Charlotte to be their Queen, cheering her whenever she appeared, and she was well aware of this and did everything she could to encourage it. She was seen in public with her arm lovingly through that of her husband Leopold; the press wrote kindly of her; and now that she was awaiting her confinement at Claremont she was the idol of the public.
The Regent’s mother, Queen Charlotte, had said that the family was more in favour than it had been for a long time and this was entirely due to her granddaughter who was also her namesake. There was nothing the people liked better from their royal family than marriages, unless it was births – in moderation of course; her own happy events had been too frequent; fifteen was after all a large number of children to give to the nation, particularly when each must be endowed with titles and income. Two had died before needing these expensive necessities but thirteen was a goodly number – and seven of them sons!
Life was so perverse. The King and Queen had had fifteen children; and the Regent had but one – and that one a girl.
It was no wonder that all eyes were on Claremont, where the Princess Charlotte, heiress-presumptive to the throne of England, awaited the birth of her child.
And before the end of that memorable year the Princess was brought to bed of a still-born son.
So there was no child to be a future king or queen of England. More calamitous, shortly after the birth, Charlotte herself, only young heiress to the throne, was dead.
It seemed as though the House of Hanover would be extinct if speedy action was not taken.
There must be an heir. The ageing sons of the King – himself living in the retirement his mental aberrations made necessary – must marry without delay.
The Queen and the Regent
QUEEN CHARLOTTE WAS at Bath where she had gone to take the waters when the news of her granddaughter’s death was brought to her. She fainted when she heard it. Her women took her to her bed and when she had recovered a little she lay there thinking of what this calamity would mean to the family.
‘Who would have thought it,’ she murmured to her daughter Elizabeth, who sat dutifully at her bedside. ‘I had no notion that anything could go wrong. Charlotte was so young.’
‘It was a long pregnancy, Mamma,’ Elizabeth reminded her. I think the doctors were beginning to get a little anxious.’
‘Poor George! His grief must be overwhelming. We must return at once. It will be necessary for us to make plans.’
‘Mamma, you should rest awhile.’
The Queen looked surprised that her forty-seven-year-old daughter, even in such circumstances, should presume to tell her what she should do; but because of these circumstances she decided to ignore the lapse. Elizabeth, conscious of her indiscretion, added quickly: ‘Your physician advises it.’
The Queen closed her eyes. I’m an old woman, she thought. There is not much time left to me and something will have to be done very quickly. So many of them and none of them has given us a legitimate heir. They are no longer young. It is almost like a blight on the family. Who would have believed it possible that with seven sons there should not be one legitimate child of the young generation!
George was the only one who had done his duty. Poor dear George, fastidious and elegant in the extreme, who had been obliged to marry That Woman. Of course he could have had her niec
e, Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, instead of the King’s niece, Caroline of Brunswick; and that was where George had made the biggest mistake of his life. But she condoled with him; she loved him, and no one else in the world had ever touched her cold nature as he did, her first-born, her clever, beautiful George, whom she had had modelled when an infant; and she still kept that delightful baby form on her dressing-table. She must see George without delay.
He would be prostrate with grief. He and Charlotte had always been in conflict, but then – though not wishing to think ill of one so recently dead one must be truthful – Charlotte had been difficult. A hoyden, no less; no true sense of royalty, too ready to mix with the common people and somewhat disrespectful to her aunts referring to them as the Old Girls and to her grandmother as The Begum. Once she had bracketed the Queen with apple tart – or was it boiled mutton? – as the only two things she really disliked in the world. Then there had been all that trouble with her mother, running away to join her and causing a most unpleasant contretemps, arousing public opinion against the Regent and sympathy for his wicked wife. And then refusing to marry the Prince of Orange when her father had made it expressly clear that he wished her to, and breaking off her engagement as though she were some ordinary young girl to be permitted wild fancies, instead of a Princess and heiress to the throne.
But she had shown signs of improvement when she married Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, the man of her choice; she had been in love with him and Charlotte never did anything in moderation. They had lived at Claremont together quite modestly and the Princess had often been seen walking in the neighbourhood clinging to her husband’s arm. It really was most un-royal; but the people liked it; and heaven knew the family needed public approbation badly. Charlotte the hoyden had done more to bring popularity to the family than any other member of it; so that was something to be grateful for. One had charming reports from Claremont of the harmony of the royal pair; how Prince Leopold sang to her, read to her and wisely impressed on her the need for dignified behaviour; and how she listened to him as she had never listened to anyone else; and declared that she adored him and that the magnitude of her love could only be compared in its enormity with the national debt.