We Two: Victoria and Albert (8 page)

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ITH HIS LAST RESERVES OF STRENGTH, EDWARD KENT MANAGED TO
scrawl a signature on his will. Contrary to royal tradition and legal precedent, the will named the testator’s wife, Marie Luise Victoire, to be the sole guardian of their child, the Princess Victoria. That will had enormous consequences, not just for the child and her mother, but, decades later, for the nation over which the child would reign.

For a mother to receive legal custody and control over her child was not very common in 1821. Until almost the end of the nineteenth century, minor children in England were viewed by the law as belonging not to their parents equally but to their fathers alone. If the father died and made no specific testamentary disposition of his children, the father’s nearest male relatives, not their mother, had the right to determine the children’s destiny.

For a royal princess to be placed in the custody and under the legal guardianship of her mother was virtually unprecedented. As the Duchess of Kent boasted in 1837, she was “the only parent since the Restoration [the restoration to the throne of Charles II in 1660 following Cromwell’s Protectorate] who has had uncontrolled power in bringing up the heir to the throne.”

If her father had not made a will, the guardianship and custody of the Princess Victoria would have gone to her eldest male kinsman, the prince regent. As a ward of the Crown, she would have grown up in the household of one of her many female relatives until she was considered an adult and given a household of her own. She would have grown up a Hanoverian, from babyhood an habituée of the English court under the direct influence of her two uncle kings, George IV and his successor, William IV.

A Hanoverian Victoria would have been introduced as a girl to the notorious set that clustered around her uncle George at Carlton House, his opulent London residence. She would have met Lord Melbourne and Lord Palmerston, her future prime ministers, when they were dashing young men about town. She would have matched wits over dinner with some of the great minds of the day. She would have had an education in art, architecture, and design from her uncle George who was in the process of building the Royal Pavilion in Brighton and transforming Windsor Castle into a modern royal residence. She would have grown up with her uncle William’s bastards, the FitzClarences, and enjoyed the rough and tumble of a house filled with children. A Hanoverian Victoria would have been a very different woman, a very different queen. History would have been different.

But those who clustered around the deathbed of Edward, Duke of Kent, were quite determined that Victoria should not be given into the care, or negligence, of her paternal relatives. They wanted her to grow up a Coburg, not a Hanoverian. The proud Hanoverian Kent was weak and fearing death, no match for the men at the bedside who shaped the course of events.

The court at Windsor did keep an eye on events in Sidmouth. Kent’s brothers York and Sussex both came down to Devon to wish him well and assess the situation for the royal family. When Kent’s death seemed imminent, a letter came for him from the prince regent. Expressing deep sorrow and affection, the regent requested the guardianship of Victoria for himself or one of his brothers. But the letter came too late, and the prince regent was not free to go down to Sidmouth for a final reconciliation with his brother Kent. The regent was obliged to remain at Windsor where his father George III was finally dying.

The Duke of Kent’s will was probably drafted by none other than Christian Stockmar. This gentleman providentially found himself in Sidmouth with the Kents when the duke fell ill and was in constant communication with his employer, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. Apprised of the Duke of Kent’s serious illness, the prince himself traveled posthaste back from a shooting party in Berkshire and arrived in Devon in time for the signing of the will. The trustee named under the will was the Duke of Kent’s chief aide-de-camp, Lieutenant General Frederick Augustus Wetherall. The appointed executors were Wetherall and Captain John Conroy.

THE DUKE OF KENT
died on January 23, 1820. On January 29, George III died. The new king George IV then fell desperately ill with an inflammation of the lungs, and for a few terrible weeks, it was feared he too would die.

When he regained his strength and replenished the 150 ounces of blood taken by his doctors, George IV became absorbed in two major projects. He would stage the most magnificent coronation England had ever seen, spending the fabulous sum of 243,000 pounds that parliament had voted him and a great deal more. At the same time, he would secure a divorce from his wife, Caroline of Brunswick, the details of whose scandalous conduct and obscene attire in Italy had long been reported to him by spies, German relatives, and traveling Englishmen. The royal divorce proceedings of 1820 brought Queen Caroline to trial in the House of Lords on a charge of “licentious, disgraceful, and adulterous intercourse” with an Italian groom. The trial ended in catastrophic failure for the King and his ministers. No divorce was possible, and George IV’s coronation of July 19, 1821, was marred by Caroline, who hammered at the doors of Westminster Abbey in a vain attempt to take her rightful place as queen. The King’s only comfort came when, a few weeks later, Caroline fell ill and died.

During this frenzied public activity by the King in London, the Duchess of Kent coped with death and debt. With her husband’s embalmed body stretched out in a velvet-shrouded coffin amid ostrich plumes and tall silver candlesticks, the Duchess of Kent discovered that she was virtually destitute. The 15,000 pounds that the duke had received from his liberal political backers just a year earlier was all spent. Even at the exorbitant rates charged to profligate royal dukes, no further credit was available. There was no cash on hand to pay the embalmer’s and undertaker’s fees, to settle with the landlord, get the duke’s body transported to Windsor for burial in St. George’s Chapel, or to pay for the duchess and her household to get away from Devon.

From both her husbands, Marie Luise Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld inherited debt rather than revenue, but at least Leiningen left her a home. Amorbach was an estate rather than a realm, but it had been hers, in trust for her son, Charles. The Duke of Kent and Strathearn, Earl of Dublin, by contrast, owned no domain and no town house—only a country estate near London that was mortgaged to the hilt, up for sale, and attracting no buyers. So the dowager Duchess of Kent found herself in England with the clothes she stood up in, the bedstead, and the little dog she had brought from Germany but very little else.

It was true that as a member of the royal family she could not be thrown into debtor’s prison. It was also true that she would have the six thousand pounds a year in dower income settled upon her by parliament at the time of her marriage, in addition to her own three hundred pounds a year. To any ordinary widow, such an income amounted to a fabulous fortune.
However, if Edward, Duke of Kent, had taught his wife anything, it was that royal living in England was impossible on six thousand a year.

In her difficulties, the duchess turned to her eldest brother-in-law, the new King of England, expecting assistance on the magnificent English royal scale. It was not forthcoming. In the midst of all his coronation preparations, the irksome divorce proceedings, and the usual chores of governance, King George IV did not merely forget about his widowed sister-in-law the Duchess of Kent and her child. He actively snubbed and spurned them. Other members of the royal family followed the King’s lead. Edward Kent’s three sisters in England, Mary, Augusta, and Sophia, as well as his sister-in-law Adelaide Clarence, wrote notes, paid visits, and commiserated with the grieving widow in her native German, but paid no bills and offered no loans.

George IV was usually generous toward his female relatives, but he heartily disliked the Kents. From childhood, George IV had found his brother Edward a hypocritical bore, and he never took a fancy to Edward’s wife. She was a Coburg, and since the death of his daughter Charlotte, George IV had developed a strong dislike of Coburgs in general and in particular of Prince Leopold, Charlotte’s widower and Victoire’s youngest brother.

Given the King’s own vast mound of debt, the fabulous architectural projects he was intent on, and the eternal demands on his privy purse from extravagant brothers and needy sisters, George IV did not intend to waste precious resources on a sister-in-law he disliked. Let Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld-Leiningen-Dachburg-Hadenburg-Kent return to Germany where she belonged. In Germany one could live like a king on six thousand English parliamentary pounds.

As for the child Victoria, George IV had barely set eyes on her, and he absolutely refused to countenance the possibility that one day Victoria Kent might rule in England. The whole question of the succession to the throne put the King in a rage. George IV had once been the Prince Charming of all Europe, and his failure to sire an heir rankled. As the King saw it, from the moment of Victoria Kent’s birth, her father, her pushy mother, and her oleaginous uncle had been crowing that this child would be Queen of England. Edward Kent’s will, giving the guardianship of the Princess Victoria to her mother, and thus to her uncle Leopold, was the last straw.

So George IV washed his hands of the whole problem of his niece Victoria. Let the child be a Coburg. Let Leopold, with his fifty thousand from parliament, and the whole pack of German relatives take responsibility for the child and be damned with them. The child would do as well in Germany as in England, and if she didn’t, if she died, it would, in the King’s view, be no
tragedy. Victoria already had two healthy male cousins, George Cumberland and George Cambridge, and a king was worth ten of a queen. Even better, the Duke of Clarence’s young wife, Adelaide, was pregnant and set to provide an heir. King George himself, once he had got rid of his wife, Caroline, might marry again and astonish the world by producing a little Prince of Wales.

Just as the King had hoped, in December 1820 the Duchess of Clarence gave birth to a baby girl who became third in line of succession after her uncle York and her father. The King was exultant, the Clarences gloated, and the Kent ménage at Kensington Palace fell into despondency. The King decreed that the new Clarence baby should be christened Elizabeth Georgina Adelaide. This was a further calculated insult to his sister-in-law Kent, since Elizabeth and Georgina were two of the names that the King as prince regent had refused to allow the Kents to give their daughter. But Elizabeth Clarence died of a bowel constriction when she was three months old, and the savage disappointment the King felt when he received the news did nothing to soften his heart toward Victoria Kent.

When in February 1821, Lord Liverpool, the prime minister, begged George IV to make provision for the Princess Victoria, the King refused, saying,
“her
uncle [Leopold] was rich enough to take care of her.” It was as if the King refused to acknowledge that Victoria was, in fact, as much his niece as Leopold’s. George IV was bent on driving his sister-in-law Kent back to her native Germany.

When Lord Liverpool communicated to the Duchess of Kent and her advisers the unwelcome news that the King absolutely refused to give any financial support to the Princess Victoria, Prince Leopold understood that something significant had occurred. Far from contesting the Duke of Kent’s will, the house of Hanover was handing the child who might be queen over to the house of Coburg. Leopold replied that he was happy to take responsibility for his niece and underlined formally what was involved. “Remember that it was not I who grasped at the management of the princess, but that the princess is by the King in this manner confided to me, and H. Maj. [His Majesty] thereby delegates to me a power which belongs to him.”

Victoire, dowager Duchess of Kent, had no head for finance, but she understood family politics very well. Each of the King’s insults struck home. Enjoying such wealth and power, he had chosen to knock her to the ground when she was already on her knees. She would never forgive him, or his brothers who stood by. Baby Victoria had been rejected by her father’s family. From now on, the Duchess of Kent was prepared to believe the worst of
the English royal family, to credit any report of their meanness, their hatred, and their plotting against her.