by Gillian Gill
The seventh child and third son of a bankrupt German princeling, Leopold, ambitious, talented, and handsome, was a youngest son right out of a fairy tale. In 1815 he came to London in the tsar’s entourage. Officially he was celebrating the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. Unofficially he was wooing the King of England’s only granddaughter. It was a bold move, supremely confident and coldly calculated by a man who had nothing to lose by aiming high. With the war over, Leopold was living from hand to mouth, since his private fortune amounted to some two hundred pounds a year. Sponsored by his imperial Russian friends, Leopold had uniforms made on credit, borrowed his brother-in-law Mensdorff’s dashing carriage, and set off for London. He was obliged to take rooms over a tradesman’s shop and still had trouble paying the rent. But he had an entrée to all the magnificent festivities organized by the prince regent and his brothers to celebrate the peace. Just as he had hoped, Princess Charlotte noticed him.
Now Leopold played a waiting game. He returned to the Continent and corresponded with Charlotte behind her father’s back. This correspondence was made possible through the good offices of Charlotte’s uncle the Duke of Kent, who was everlastingly at odds with his eldest brother, the regent. There followed a year of negotiations at a distance, during which Leopold aroused the princess’s passions by refusing to return to England. At last, wearied by his daughter’s intransigence, the prince regent agreed to accept Leopold as a son-in-law. Receiving this fabulous news from Lord Castlereagh, the English foreign secretary, Leopold wrapped himself in a long coat, a feather boa, and a fur muff, and posted full tilt across Europe. In the kind of proof of passion women find hard to resist, he arrived in London from Berlin, exhausted and ill, in the staggering time of three and a half weeks.
The wedding of Charlotte and Leopold was a fairy-tale affair for the whole nation, rather like the marriage of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981, but with an interesting reversal of gender roles. Charlotte at nineteen, tall, gawky, and inclined to fat, played the part of Prince Charming, heir to the kingdom and untold wealth, while Leopold was a ravishing rags-to-riches Cinderella. The bride’s elaborate trousseau was the subject of long, reverent columns in the fashion press, and for her wedding she wore a gown of lace-trimmed silver lama and white satin designed by Mrs. Triaud of Bond Street. But at their wedding, the bride was eclipsed by the glory of the bridegroom. Leopold was reputed to be one of the handsomest men in Europe, and he now wore the scarlet wool uniform of a British general, decorated with his own orders and medals. His belt and sword blazed with diamonds, a gift from his bride’s grandmother and namesake, the Queen.
Reportedly the bride giggled when the bridegroom was asked to endow her with all his worldly goods. As everyone knew, Prince Leopold was heir to little and owned less. However, the members of parliament, in rapturous appreciation of their princess and salivating at the prospect of a new, shining line of kings, granted Leopold personally the magnificent annuity of fifty thousand pounds—about two million in today’s dollars.
Charlotte was not at all in love with Prince Leopold when she agreed to marry him. As she confided in a letter: “I have perfectly decided & made up my own mind to marry, & the person I have decidedly fixed on is Prince Leopold … I know that worse off, more unhappy and wretched I cannot be than I am now, & after all if I end by marrying Prince L., … I marry the best of all those I have seen, & that is some satisfaction.” Leopold was not in love either. He was already a world-class Lothario and had enjoyed mistresses far more seductive than Charlotte. But if he did not love his bride for her looks and charm, he passionately adored her status as second in line of succession to the English throne. Hence, from the moment he arrived back in England, Leopold set out single-mindedly to win Charlotte’s love and become her indispensable counselor and helpmate. Twenty years later, he would train his handsome nephew Albert in the same strategies for the day when Albert would marry Victoria.
Leopold played the part of lover-husband to perfection. During the days of their brief engagement, to her surprise and delight, Charlotte found Leopold extremely beguiling, as indeed did London society. Within months of their marriage, she was ready to tell the world that he was the perfect husband and that she idolized him. Charlotte also quickly warmed to Leopold’s aide-de-camp and general factotum, the young German physician Christian Stockmar. The three were soon inseparable friends. Charlotte and Leopold settled down to married bliss at Claremont, a secluded house in magnificent grounds given to them by the nation at the time of their marriage. As its owners were well aware, Claremont, with its simple furnishings and healthy, happy, modest way of life, could not have posed a stronger contrast to the Royal Pavilion in the heart of the town of Brighton—the prince regent’s most expensive and unpopular architectural extravaganza to date.
When, after two miscarriages, Charlotte embarked upon what boded well to be a successful pregnancy, the Claremont idyll seemed complete. As he awaited the birth of his child, Leopold looked eagerly to the future. He was now rich, popular with the English nation, and adored at home, but all this was as nothing to the power, wealth, and status he foresaw for himself in the near future. Only the lives of mad old George III and the disease-raddled regent stood between Charlotte and the throne of England. And so passionately did Charlotte now adore him that she was ready to say: “I cannot reign over England except upon the condition that he [Leopold] shall reign over England and myself … Yes, he shall be King, or I will never be Queen.” Once a healthy child was born, Leopold saw his future assured, if not as king, then at least as prince consort and the sire of a new race of kings. Even were Charlotte to die young, as long as she left children, Leopold would be regent and rule in England.
Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold at the theater, circa 1816
As soon as the princess went into labor in the early evening of November 3, the Privy Councillors were summoned in haste from London to attend the birth, as protocol demanded. The regent and his mother, apprised of the situation at Claremont, went about their everyday lives quite unconcerned. The old queen, who in her time had given birth to fifteen babies with remarkable efficiency and speed, did not think it necessary to leave Bath, where she was taking a cure.
Prince Leopold sat by his wife’s side, holding her hand, murmuring love and encouragement, and Stockmar hovered anxiously in the background. From the beginning of the princess’s pregnancy, Stockmar had warned Prince Leopold that the approach taken by doctors attending his wife was ill advised. The English royal doctors subscribed to the doctrine that strong, choleric young women should follow a “lowering” regime when pregnant. Charlotte had been fed a liquid diet low in meat and vegetables, forbidden to exercise, and subjected to regular bloodlettings, which probably led to severe anemia. Stockmar recommended that Prince Leopold intervene in his wife’s care, but in the end both the prince and his adviser left Charlotte completely in the hands of English medical men.
The princess’s water broke over two weeks after her due date, so she went into labor tired and dispirited, fearing the worst. She continued in heavy labor through the night and the following day, and the baby did not come. Before her marriage, Charlotte had been a strong, athletic young woman, but the miscarriages and now the pregnancy had sapped her strength. Hence, though her cervix dilated, she did not have the strength to push the child out, and her doctors, though they had brought a set of the newly invented obstetrical forceps, did not dare to use them. At last, after some fifty hours of labor, a large and perfectly formed male child was born, dead and resisting all attempts at resuscitation.
The princess received the news of her child’s death with resignation. She had still to suffer the agony of having the doctor manually remove the placenta, which had failed to detach. Her abdomen was then wrapped tightly, and she took some light food. Leopold, sad and exhausted but assuming the worst was over, took an opiate and went to bed.
Suddenly the princess complained of terrible pain, went deathly cold, became c
onfused, and had difficulty breathing. She was probably suffering a massive internal hemorrhage, caused by the tearing away of the placenta and concealed by the swaddling of her abdomen. Her doctors administered brandy and hot wine. Warm flannels and hot water bottles were pressed to her stomach. The patient became visibly worse. Horrified by the turn of events, the doctors finally invited Stockmar to examine the princess. He took Charlotte’s wrist to feel the pulse, and she murmured, “They have made me drunk, Stocky.” He said, quite correctly, that the heat being administered to the patient was counter-indicated. The doctors refused to take Stockmar’s advice, but in any case it came too late. Christian Stockmar was holding Charlotte’s hand when at two-thirty on the morning of November 6, she died in paroxysms.
It was left to Stockmar to wake Prince Leopold and tell him the news. Overcome with shock and despair, the prince begged Stockmar never to leave him. From this time on, Christian Stockmar became Leopold’s indispensable friend, confidant, political adviser, and agent. Their powerful partnership was to arouse the envy and fear of statesmen all over Europe and would be the subject of rumor and gossip for more than forty years. Stockmar was one of the many important things Leopold would pass on to his nephew Albert and his niece Victoria.
The death of Charlotte was a tragedy for the whole nation, not just for her young husband. For the people of Great Britain, the Princess Charlotte had a fairy-tale quality, especially after her marriage. She represented youth, purity, integrity, fidelity, and hope in a royal family that for twenty years had been wallowing in gilded squalor. When the princess died with her baby boy, the whole kingdom, dukes and commoners, stopped to mourn.
Prayers were offered in churches, speeches made in parliament, poems written, and letters and articles printed. The regent had never loved Charlotte, but she was his only child and his claim on the future. Hearing of her death, he was so shocked that he fell ill and almost died. In 1824 an elaborate marble monument to Charlotte was erected in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, paid for by contributions that, the organizers stipulated, could not exceed one shilling. The outpouring of national grief was on a scale not seen in England until 1997 when Diana, Princess of Wales, was killed in Paris.
Wanted, an Heir to the Throne,
Preferably Male
…
T THE BEGINNING OF 1818, ONE ISSUE WAS DISCUSSED endlessly in Great Britain and all the courts of Europe. Where was the next generation of English kings to come from?
At the time of Charlotte’s death, her grandfather George III had long been a demented prisoner at Windsor Castle. George III’s thirteen surviving children had given him some twenty grandchildren, but there was only one, Charlotte, who satisfied the requirements of the Royal Marriages Act of 1772. This curious act was drawn up and pushed through parliament by George III, who was determined to prevent his numerous children from marrying anyone he considered unsavory or unsuitable. It forbade any member of the English royal family under twenty-five to marry without the previous consent of the sovereign. No English person even of the highest rank could expect the royal approval. Once over twenty-five, the prince or princess could forego the King’s consent by applying to parliament for permission to marry, and then, if parliament consented, wait a year before doing so. But, as Prince Augustus (later Duke of Sussex) discovered to his cost, an adult prince married to a consenting adult Englishwoman according to the rites of the Church of England and in full public view could see his marriage annulled and his children declared illegitimate if his father the King did not approve his choice of spouse.
To understand the royal succession in early nineteenth-century England—or indeed today, since the laws have not changed—several key points must be kept in mind. First, male children always have precedence over female children, regardless of birth order. Second, the eldest son has precedence over the second son, the second over the third, and so on. Third, a royal child inherits its father’s position in the line of succession and an English king is succeeded by his eldest son, not by his brother. However, if a king has no child, his heir presumptive is his next oldest brother. If brother number two predeceases brother number one but leaves a son, that son inherits the throne of his uncle.
In its fierce commitment to passing property and titles from father to son and to male primogeniture, England was typical of European countries. Where English law differed from, say, that of Germany and France was in its grudging willingness to accept that, for lack of a son or a brother, a man could pass his estate to his sister or his daughter rather than to a distant male relative. This estate could even be a throne, and the English liked to have the choice of prolonging a dynasty by including women in the line of succession. The Tudor kings Henry VII and Henry VIII had united the kingdom after the long period of civil strife known as the War of the Roses, and they proved competent rulers. Therefore, when Henry VIII’s only male child, King Edward VI, died childless, his sister Mary Tudor was allowed to succeed him; and when Mary also died childless, her sister, Elizabeth Tudor, succeeded her. In the twentieth century, when George VI had no sons, the crown passed to the elder of his two daughters, Elizabeth.
Princess Charlotte’s death and the stillbirth of her baby son wiped out two complete generations in the English royal family. The succession now went down the list of George III’s middle-aged sons by birth order: the prince regent (George, aged fifty-five), the Duke of York (Frederick, fifty-four), the Duke of Clarence (William, fifty-two), the Duke of Kent (Edward, fifty), the Duke of Cumberland (Ernest, forty-six), the Duke of Sussex (Augustus, forty-four), and the Duke of Cambridge (Adolphus, forty-three). The idea of a succession of these gentlemen on the throne cast deep gloom over the whole nation. As the young radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley put it:
An old, mad, blind, despised and dying King,
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn—mud from a muddy spring
Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling.
A king’s children all had to be supported out of the nation’s pocket, and the thirteen children of George III imposed a huge financial burden. The King and Queen were famous for their care with money and their preference for a modest, even frugal lifestyle, and their daughters were obliged to follow the parental example. The sons were the real problem. They were, in the Duke of Wellington’s famous phrase, “the damnedest millstones about the necks of any government that can be imagined.” The seven royal princes resented the fact that so many young English aristocrats had incomes far exceeding their own. No income was ever large enough to satisfy them, and if a royal duke managed to raise a lump sum of, say, 6,000 pounds from parliament or private lenders, he would promptly go out and spend double or more.
NOTE: Charlotte, Augusta, Elizabeth, Sophia, Amelia, and Mary, the six daughters of George III, were of no relevance to the royal succession, which gives precedence and inheritance rights to males, regardless of birth order.
The royal dukes’ combination of egotism, vulgarity, idleness, promiscuity, and fiscal improvidence bred hatred and resentment on every level of English society. Even today it is staggering to consider the size of the debt they piled up. George, the Prince of Wales, as befitted the eldest son with the largest income, was the most extravagant. At the age of twenty-one, already 30,000 pounds in debt, George was given an annual income of 50,000 pounds to add to his existing 12,000 pounds a year, plus a flat sum of 60,000. In 1786 he was forty-four and now in debt to the tune of 269,878 pounds, 6 shillings, and 7 pence farthing. Between 1787 and 1796, the Prince of Wales ran up debts of 630,000 pounds—approximately 40 million in American dollars. When he agreed to get married, parliament paid off his debts and raised his income, but his spending continued unabated during his regency.
With Princess Charlotte dead, one of the seven royal princes would have to produce a legitimate child who could inherit the throne after the demise of one or more of his or her uncl
es. Of the seven brothers, three (George, Frederick, and Augustus, numbers one, two, and six, respectively) were extreme long shots in the dynastic steeplechase, since all three were, in one way or another, married but without legitimate offspring as legitimacy was defined by the Royal Marriages Act. Should any of the senior royal princes lose his wife and remarry, the handicapping of the race to an heir would, of course, change overnight.
After his wife Queen Caroline’s death in 1826, George IV, at fifty-five, at first was full of plans to find himself a new wife, but, in fact, he did nothing. He was too ill, too immobile, too full of opium and brandy, and too completely under the thumb of his mistress, Lady Conyngham. He died in 1830.
Odds were also against the next brother, Frederick, Duke of York. When Frederick was a young man, his older brother George, then Prince of Wales, asked him to take on the tedious job of supplying heirs to the throne. Happy to oblige his favorite brother and not, incidentally, to ingratiate himself with their father the King and with parliament, Frederick speedily contracted to marry Frederica, second daughter of the King of Prussia, a not unattractive sixteen-year-old he had once seen in Berlin. Unfortunately the Yorks, Fred and Freda, like the Waleses, George and Caroline, separated within a year of marriage and failed to produce even one child. Given the diplomatic susceptibilities of Prussia, divorce for the Yorks was impossible. In 1820 Frederica, Duchess of York, died, and George once again begged Fred to bite the dynastic bullet and marry for an heir; but Fred, enamored of the Duchess of Rutland, could not be tempted. The Duke of York died, virtually penniless, in 1827.