We Two: Victoria and Albert (78 page)

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 her 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.

42
“Remember that it was not I
Cecil Woodham-Smith,
Queen Victoria from Her Birth to the Death of the Prince Consort
, New York: Knopf, 1972, p. 51.

43
It was xenophobic enough
In the letters he wrote to Queen Victoria in the weeks immediately following her accession in 1837, King Leopold was still worried that the Duke of Cumberland and the extreme faction of the Tory Party of which Cumberland was the leader would challenge Victoria’s right to the throne of Great Britain. Leopold had seen long civil wars break out in both Spain and Portugal when paternal uncles refused to accept the rights to the throne of the two child queens, Isabella and Maria da Glória. Leopold therefore advised Victoria to stress in her public utterances that she—unlike her two male cousins, George Cumberland and George Cambridge—was born in England and had never in her life left its shores.

44
A mistress was essential to Leopold
King Leopold I of the Belgians had a series of liaisons throughout his first widowhood and during and after his second marriage. In 1849 he selected the wife of an officer as his “maitresse en titre,” coldly informing Queen Louise that he was obliged to do so, as illness and religious devotions had led her to neglect her duties as a wife. The queen meekly accepted the rebuke and the mistress. She died in October 1850, probably of consumption, aged thirty-nine. See Richardson, chapter 26.

46
Victoria never bore them a grudge
Prince Albert was characteristically more censorious, blaming his uncle for failing in his duty toward Queen Victoria as a child. “Mama here,” wrote Prince Albert years later, referring to the Duchess of Kent, “would never have fallen into the hands of Conroy if uncle Leopold had taken the trouble to guide her” (Dorothy Margaret Stuart,
The Mother of Victoria
, p. 106).

46
He believed he could trace
The key work on Sir John Conroy is
A Royal Conflict: Sir John Conroy and the Young Victoria
by Katherine Hudson (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1994). Hudson, with John Jones, edited the Conroy Papers for Balliol College, Oxford.

47
Though always happier in German
Elizabeth Longford quotes an 1818 document in the Royal Archives in which someone has spelled out phonetically a little speech for the Duchess of Kent to deliver on her arrival in England. “Ei hoeve tu regrétt, biing
aes yiett
so little conversent in this Inglisch lênguetsch uitsch obleitsches—miy, to seh, in
averi fiu
words, theat ei em môhst gretful for yur congratuleschens end gud uishes” (Elizabeth Longford,
Victoria R.I
., London: Pan Books, 1964, p. 23).

47
She also gave him money
Hudson clarifies Conroy’s extremely murky finances. From the early 1820s on, Conroy lived an increasingly opulent life, even though he drew no salary from the Duchess of Kent and earned only a thousand pounds from his position at the Colonial Audit Office. His chief source of income was the Princess Sophia, though this was kept a close secret. Following John Conroy’s death, his heirs estimated that between 1820 and her death in 1848, Princess Sophia gave Conroy 148,000 pounds, a house in Kensington, and an estate in Wales that included lucrative mines. That sum was almost certainly a low estimate. When Conroy finally was persuaded to leave the service of the Duchess of Kent in 1840, Princess Sophia, now blind and deaf, remained his loyal friend. To salve his wounded pride and keep him in England, she gave him a superb English country estate called Arborfield and 3,000 pounds a year. When Princess Sophia died, she was virtually penniless. From 1837 to his death in 1854, Conroy also received some 51,000 pounds from the Queen’s privy purse and 25,500 from the Duchess of Kent’s parliamentary allowance. Whether Conroy or his shifty underling William Rea also embezzled large sums of money from the Duchess of Kent between 1831 and 1837, when she started to receive generous parliamentary grants, was widely alleged but never proven. Conroy and Rea were careful either to keep no accounts or to lose them. To the rage and astonishment of his heirs, Conroy managed to die deeply in debt. His wife and children, who had lived off the royal largesse all their lives, continued to pester Queen Victoria for financial assistance and did not come away empty handed. If one wonders just how Queen Victoria managed to spend her huge income, it is important to remember that she felt financially responsible even for people like the daughter-in-law of her former archenemy John Conroy.

48
He once mystified Victoria
Hudson, p. 74, quoting Queen Victoria’s unpublished journal entry of January 21, 1839. Hudson’s revelation about Elizabeth Fisher Conroy’s supposed
kinship to the Duke of Kent is based on an entry in a little leather notebook of Conroy’s that was carefully preserved by his descendents.

48
It was only after Victoria became
See Hudson for the various unflattering names that King Leopold in later years was to apply to Sir John Conroy.

48
As Victoria edged closer
Hudson, p. 61.

Chapter 4:
THAT DISMAL EXISTENCE

51
When Uncle York died
Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals
, ed. Christopher Hibbert, New York: Viking, 1984, pp. 9–11.

51
After one stormy episode
Elizabeth Longford,
Victoria R.I
., p. 33.

51
As Victoria moved out of infancy
Queen Victoria’s half sister, the second child of the Duchess of Kent by Emich Charles, Prince of Leiningen-Dachburg-Hadenburg, was christened Feodorowna but was known as Feodora or Feodore.