We Two: Victoria and Albert

by Gillian Gill

  22 “I cannot reign over England” Charlotte, in conversation with Madame de Boigne. (Richardson, p. 51). Here Charlotte is echoing the sentiments of Queen Mary Stuart, who in the seventeenth century insisted that her husband William of Orange should be coruler and, in fact, take over all the political power and administrative functions of the monarch. See The History of England by Thomas Babbington Macaulay, Everyman’s Library, Dent, vol. 2, p. 15.

  22 As soon as the princess went Charlotte’s labor was a very public affair. Apart from her husband, Stockmar, various female attendants, and a growing number of doctors who clustered around her bed, the following state officials were stationed in the anteroom: Lord Bathurst, Viscount Sidmouth, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, the chancellor of the exchequer, and the lord chancellor (Richardson, p. 54).

  22 Stockmar recommended Stockmar’s reason for not intervening was, as he later explained in his memoirs, that if something went wrong with the birth, he would be the perfect scapegoat.

  22 The princess’s water broke Soon before she went into labor, Charlotte wrote a heartrending letter to her mother, wishing she had a woman she loved by her side, and almost desiring death. See Monica Charlot, Victoria the Young Queen, London: Blackwell, 1991, p. 7.

  23 Christian Stockmar was holding Charlotte’s hand The consensus in 1817 was that the doctors had bungled the delivery. Napoleon, learning the news while in exile on St. Helena, demanded to know why the English did not stone their accoucheurs. The lowering regime for pregnant women came under attack, and within a year, Sir Richard Croft, Charlotte’s chief doctor, committed suicide when it seemed that another woman under his care would die in labor. As Stockmar later summed things up, “It therefore appears that, weakened by the preceding long-continued and depressing treatment, the princess died of exhaustion from the fifty hours’ labour. Probably she would have been saved if mechanical help had been employed soon enough. The English physicians refused to give it, as it was their principle never to use artificial means when nature alone could effect the delivery … It is impossible to resist the conviction that the princess was sacrificed to professional theories” (Memoirs of Baron Stockmar, ed. Ernest Stockmar, London: Longman’s, Green & Co., 1873, vol. 1, p. 65). Stockmar discussed the death of Princess Charlotte with his cousin Caroline Bauer, who at one point was Prince Leopold’s mistress. Stockmar told Bauer that he could have saved the princess if he had been in charge of the case. Bauer blamed her cousin Christian for not even trying to intervene to save his friend. Both Leopold and Stockmar certainly erred on the side of pusillanimity and self-preservation. Leopold never blamed Stockmar.

  Chapter 2: WANTED, AN HEIR TO THE THRONE, PREFERABLY MALE

  24 At the time of Charlotte’s death For more on this unfortunate king, see King George III by John Brooke (New York: McGraw Hill, 1972), one of the great books on the British royal family. The King did manage to recover from the first critical onset of his disease (probably porphyria), as we see in Alan Bennett’s wonderful play (later a film) The Madness of George III. However, the recovery was only temporary. Several of George III’s sons, including George IV, seem to have suffered from less debilitating forms of the same ailment, and those surrounding Queen Victoria, including her husband, were constantly afraid that she was showing signs of the disease.

  24 George III’s thirteen surviving children Charlotte herself was legitimate only by the peculiar legal standards of English royal marriages. In 1785 George, then Prince of Wales, entered into an act of marriage with Maria Fitzherbert, a rich double widow who was a practicing Roman Catholic. The Act of Settlement of 1701 laid down that no prince who married a Catholic could become King of Great Britain and Ireland. The prince’s wedding ceremony was therefore conducted in great secrecy. However, an ordained Anglican priest presided, and the marriage was duly witnessed by the bride’s uncle and brother, and at tested in a certificate drawn up in the bridegroom’s own hand and given to the bride, who managed to keep possession of it until her death. The document is now in the Royal Archives at Windsor. After this event, any other person in England but a royal prince would have been legally barred from marrying again, but, though the marriage was rumored at the time, no proof of it was brought forward, thanks to the loving forbearance of Maria Fitzherbert. And so in 1795, the prince was able to “marry” his first cousin Caroline of Brunswick and beget Charlotte. Caroline of Brunswick famously remarked: “Well, I have committed adultery with only one man, Mrs. Fitzherbert’s husband.” Had Mrs. Fitzherbert come forward with her marriage certificate in 1820, the new King George IV might have been forced to abdicate, his daughter Charlotte would have been declared illegitimate, and his brother the Duke of York would have succeeded him as, presumably, Frederick I.

  The Royal Marriages Act has never been repealed, and it explains some of the marital arcana of the British royal family even of late. In the 1950s, the present Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, renounced her engagement to the commoner and divorcé Group Captain Peter Townsend, since her father, King George VI, opposed the marriage. The marriage of Charles, Prince of Wales, to Mrs. Camilla Parker-Bowles was delayed for similar reasons.

  25 In the twentieth century Today Japan faces a constitutional crisis since the emperor has a daughter and no sons, and it is currently impossible for a woman to be emperor.

  25 The succession now went down the list The daughters were irrelevant, since there were so many brothers. The daughters of kings matter only when brothers and nephews die, in which case a son or grandson may inherit a throne. This was the case with George I, who owed his claim to the English throne to his grandmother, a daughter of King James I, who married the elector of Hanover. George III, while in sound mind, prevented his daughters from marrying while of reproductive age, in part to simplify the issues of the succession, and in part because he felt he could not afford grandchildren from his daughters. One daughter, Sophia, did have an illegitimate child. Late in life, Charlotte married Frederick I, king of Württemberg. Elizabeth married Frederick, Landgrave of Hesse-Hamburg. Mary married her first cousin the Duke of Gloucester. All three married princesses were childless.

  25 As the young radical poet P. B. Shelley, “Sonnet: England in 1819,” Poetical Works, Oxford University Press, 1970, pp. 574–575.

  28 The seven royal princes The Duke of Devonshire, the richest of all English peers at this time, had an annual income of 150,000 pounds a year, immense country estates, numerous town and country homes, and owned some 119 acres of real estate in central London.

  28 Between 1787 and 1796I use the multiple for British 1796 pounds to American 2004 dollars suggested by Toby Faber in Stradivari’s Genius, New York: Random House, 2004, p. 85.

  28 Odds were also against On the Duke of York, see Roger Fulford, The Wicked Uncles (New York: Loring and Mussey, 1933), and Morris Marples, Wicked Uncles in Love (London: Michael Joseph, 1972). Frederica, Princess of Prussia and Duchess of York, is a very interesting character. She and the duke had no children and probably did not continue marital relations after the first year, but they remained good friends and companions until the duchess’s death. She was eccentric but much loved and respected by her rural neighbors and servants. A fierce opponent of blood sports and supporter of animal rights, the duchess kept dozens of dogs as well as cats, monkeys, parrots, kangaroos, and other animals. The great love of her life was her lady-in-waiting and constant companion, Mrs. Bunbury, next to whom she is buried in Weybridge Church. Frederica would merit a full, modern biography, but a lesbian animal rights activist has so far had no appeal with today’s English historians, whose special scholarly interest seems to be royal heterosexual promiscuity.

  29 Augustus, Duke of Sussex As a young man, the then Prince Augustus married Lady Augusta Murray. In fact, he married her not once but twice, the second time quite publicly in St. George’s Hanover Square, where all the best people got married. Augustus and Augusta produced two children whom they named (what else?) Augustus and Augusta. But th
e prince’s father, George III, when he finally heard of the marriage, had it declared null and void by the ecclesiastical Court of Arches. The prince’s children by Lady Augusta were thus made illegitimate and out of the line of succession to the throne. Prince Augustus did his best by his children, but he soon found it financially necessary to reconcile with his father by separating from Lady Augusta, and was created Duke of Sussex as a reward. Subsequently, Sussex took up a happy and stable relationship with the widowed Lady Cecilia Buggin, with whom he intended to contract a morganatic marriage as soon as his “wife” died. In 1830 the former Lady Augusta, Countess d’Amerlund, died, and the Duke of Sussex again repaired to St. George’s Hanover Square to marry his darling Lady Cecilia. She never received the title of Duchess of Sussex, but the royal family liked her, and she was received in private by King William and Queen Adelaide. In 1840 Queen Victoria recognized her uncle Sussex’s wife officially and gave her the title of Duchess of Inverness. This permitted Cecilia to be seated on state occasions—if not next to her husband, at least at the far end of the table of duchesses. On Augustus, Duke of Sussex, see Roger Fulford, The Wicked Uncles, pp. 253–284, and Morris Marples, Wicked Uncles in Love, pp. 199–226.

  29 However, Clarence’s debts mounted Mrs. Jordan, who also had three children by earlier relationships, did her best to keep the whole family afloat by continuing to earn money in theatrical touring companies. Wags wrote humorous verses wondering whether the duke kept the actress or vice versa. But despite Mrs. Jordan’s noble efforts, the pile of ducal debt mounted inexorably. Following Clarence’s desertion, Dorothy Jordan died abroad, alone, poverty stricken, and neglected by her children as well as by the man she had loved so tenderly and faithfully.

  30 But she was delicate Elizabeth Clarence died at the age of three months. Her effigy is preserved at Windsor.

  31 As soon as the Duchess of Cambridge Fulford, The Wicked Uncles, p. 299.

  31 For twenty-seven years Many legends grew up about Madame Saint Laurent, especially in Canada, where she was credited with noble birth, several illegitimate children, and marriage to a nobleman after her separation from the Duke of Kent. Finally, a Canadian scholar, Mollie Gillen, turned up the documents that proved that the Duke of Kent’s mistresscame from a comfortable bourgeois family in Provence, that she had no children, and that she lived the rest of her life unmarried and in obscurity. See Gillen, The Prince and His Lady, Toronto: Griffin House, 1970.

  32 Prince Leopold had a sister Queen Victoria’s mother was christened Marie Luise Victoire, but was known by family in Germany as “Victoire.” In England, she anglicized her name to Maria Louisa Victoria.

  32 This meant that “they could contract The Letters of Queen Victoria, 1837–1861, ed. Arthur Christopher Benson and Viscount Esher, London: John Murray, 1908, vol. 1, p. 3.

  33 He knew that gentleman Mollie Gillen chastises the standard biographies of the Duke of Kent for claiming that he was a vicious martinet on the parade ground and drove men and officers to mutiny by his sadistic intransigence. Gillen says that she could find no evidence that Kent was any more cruel than most high officers of his time, and her discussion of the Canadian episodes is persuasive. However, there is no getting around the fact that the Duke of Kent, unlike his brothers York and Cumberland, was systematically barred from military command after he returned from Canada, and that there was something about his use of military authority that went against the grain with the military powers that be.

  33 More troubling was the fact Gillen discovered that Kent did have one illegitimate daughter by a Geneva woman before he began his liaison with Saint Laurent.

  33 Vigorously lobbied According to Harald Bachmann, the person who managed to persuade Victoire of Leiningen to accept Edward of Kent was her intimate friend in Amorbach, Polyxena (Pauline) von Tubeuf Wagner. (See Harald Bachmann, pp. 15–16.) Pauline as a young teenager had exchanged passionate letters and embraces with the young Prince Leopold, but their mothers were opposed to their marriage, and Pauline had to settle for marriage with Herr Hofrat Wagner, tutor to Victoire of Leiningen’s son Charles. It is unclear from Bachmann’s account, and so presumably from the archival sources, whether Leopold and Pauline were lovers either before or after her marriage of convenience.

  33 Thus, within six weeks Adelaide, who was quite intelligent, had learned some English before her marriage, but Victoire had not and needed the vows spelled out to her phonetically. All the royal English dukes, whose mother was German, spoke fluent German. This was essential when they were sent over to Hanover for military service and diplomatic work, and when they were alone with their German wives.

  33 Dynastic strategy, not elective affinity After her mother died in 1861, Queen Victoria read with great emotion the letters her parents had exchanged in their brief marriage.

  33 As a little girl, Victoire In her memoirs, Caroline Bauer tells how her mother, Christina Bauer, was able to mend the torn Sunday dress of her playmate, Antoinette of Saxe-Coburg, Victoire’s older sister, and thus avert the wrath of Antoinette’s mother.

  34 The legitimacy of his child The issue of substitute babies was a delicate one in the history of the English royal family. In 1688, after many years of marriage, Mary of Modena, the Catholic second wife of the unpopular King James II, gave birth to a baby son, who became heir apparent to the throne, displacing his Protestant half sisters Mary and Anne. It was widely believed in England that Queen Mary of Modena had had a phantom pregnancy, and that a male baby had been smuggled into the royal bedroom in a warming pan by the Catholic faction, determined to prevent a Protestant succession. The child was almost certainly the King’s, but his birth did seem excessively providential, and radically changed the whole political situation in England. In short order, James II was deposed, and, in what history knows as the Glorious Revolution, his daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, were installed as joint monarchs. James II’s son, known to history as the Old Pretender, made one attempt to take back the throne, as did his more famous and colorful son Charles, Bonnie Prince Charlie.

  36 He allowed the child only two For example, Prince Albert’s mother, a princess of Saxe-Gotha, was baptized Dorothy Louise Pauline Charlotte Frederica Augusta.

  36 Instead she had names so foreign See Benson-Esher, p. 55.

  36 The Duchess of Kent had been allowed As Princess of Leiningen, Victoire breast-fed her first child, Charles, for five months. However, when her second child, a girl, was born, the princess fed the child for only two months. I found this information in a letter from Victoire’s eldest brother, Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Coburg, to his mistress Pauline Panam, advising her to stop suckling their illegitimate child (Pauline Panam, Mémoires d’une jeune Grecque, London: Sherwood Jones and Co., 1823, p. 139).

  37 When the second most senior doctor To the end of his life, this same famous physician would give it as his opinion that the Duke of Kent died because he had not been sufficiently bled. There is a horrid fascination in seeing how little actual clinical outcomes influenced medical practice at the highest professional level during this period.

  Chapter 3: THE WIFE TAKES THE CHILD

  38 If the father died The plots of many nineteenth-century novels, such as Vanity Fair and Little Lord Fauntleroy, center on the legal tragedy of the widow of blameless virtue who must give up her adored child to the nasty old paternal grandfather.

  38 As the Duchess of Kent boasted Quoted in Memoirs of Baron Stockmar, ed. Ernest Stock-mar, London: Longman’s, 1873, vol. 1, p. 375.

  38 As a ward of the Crown When the Princess Charlotte’s parents separated in her infancy she became the ward of her grandfather, King George III, who, according to Caroline Bauer, “was just and kind enough to ordain that the up-bringing of the Princess Charlotte till her eighth year should devolve on the mother” (Caroline Bauer and the Coburgs, London: Vizetelly, 1885, p. 308). At eight, Charlotte was given her own household of governor, governess, tutors, and servants at Lower Lodge in Windsor Park, and visits to h
er mother were rare and carefully supervised.

  39 The Duke of Kent’s will See David Duff, Edward of Kent—The Life Story of Queen Victoria’s Father, London: Stanley Paul, 1938, p. 283; also, Dorothy Margaret Stuart, The Mother of Victoria: A Period Piece, London: Macmillan, 1941, p. 98.

  39 Apprised of the Duke of Kent’s See King Leopold’s letter to Queen Victoria of Jan. 22, 1841, Queen Victoria’s Early Letters, ed. John Raymond, New York: Macmillan, 1907/1963, p. 47.

  39 The trustee named under the will Stuart, p. 98.

  40 The King’s only comfort came For an excellently researched and argued account of the Queen Caroline affair and its political significance, see Rebel Queen by Jane Robins, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.

  40 The Duke of Kent and Strathearn The Duke of Kent went into the red as a boy of sixteen, and by 1807 he already owed 200,000 pounds (40 million in today’s dollars). From then on, things went from bad to worse, and in 1815 he was obliged to flee to Brussels and attempt, quite unsuccessfully, to live on 7,000 pounds a year.

  41 if Edward, Duke of Kent The Duke of Kent wrote from Sidmouth in the winter of 1819–20 to the philanthropist Robert Owen: “I am satisfied that to continue to live in England, even in the quiet way in which we are going on, without splendour, and without show, nothing short of doubling the 7,000 pounds will do REDUCTION BEING IMPOSSIBLE” (David Duff, Edward of Kent, p. 280).

  42 George IV was bent on driving George IV went so far as to refuse the Duchess of Kent the rangership of the Home Park, Hampton Court, a sinecure the Duke of Kent had held that brought in 800 pounds per year. It would have cost the King nothing to allow the Duchess of Kent that income, as he allowed his other sister-in-law, the Duchess of Clarence, to have the income from the rangership of Bushey Park. But, spitefully, George IV gave the ranger-ship of the Home Park to the wife of one of his gentlemen-in-waiting.