Charlotte & Leopold (21 page)

E
PILOGUE

King of the Belgians

A
FEW WEEKS
after the death of King George IV there was another revolution in France. The totalitarian King Charles X had appointed a reactionary Cabinet, dissolved the Chamber of Deputies and imposed censorship on the press. In response, the citizens of Paris took to the streets. After overwhelming the inadequate garrison, they drove the King into exile in Scotland and replaced him on the throne with his distant cousin the Duke of Orleans, who was crowned as King Louis-Philippe.

When the news spread across the northern border, into the province that had until recently been known as the Austrian Netherlands, the people of Brussels poured out onto their own streets and gleefully followed the French example.

Their province had been conquered by the French in 1795, just before Charlotte’s mother set out for England, and in 1815, at the suggestion of the British government, it had been incorporated into the United Kingdom of the Netherlands by the Treaty of Vienna. Since then, however, the new Dutch King, William I, the father of Charlotte’s first fiancé, had been almost as repressive as the King of
France. Although the French-speaking, Roman Catholic Belgians in his new province outnumbered the Protestant Dutch by almost two to one, he had not given them even equal representation in the upper house of their parliament: he had subjected them to the rule of Dutch civil servants, he had forced them to speak Dutch in the law courts and he had imposed heavy taxes in order to pay off the Dutch national debt. But he had not occupied the province with enough soldiers to hold down a rebellion. On 4 October 1830, the Belgians declared their independence.

King William appealed for help to the Russians, Austrians and Prussians. But the Russian army was busy putting down a rebellion in Poland, and the Austrians and Prussians would not fight without the Russians. Instead, all three sent representatives to a conference in London, where the incomparable British and French representatives, Lord Palmerston and Prince Talleyrand, persuaded them to recognise an independent Belgium and even guarantee its neutrality.

The constitution of the new nation was modelled on the constitutional monarchy of Great Britain, and at first it was suggested that the throne should be offered to the Prince of Orange. But when the Belgians, not surprisingly, rejected Slender Billy, it was offered to Leopold. Leopold said yes, and the Belgians said yes to Leopold.

Before leaving England, Leopold gave up his house in London and his annuity of £50,000, although he persuaded the government to go on paying the donations which he and Charlotte had made to various charities. But he could not bear to part with Claremont, and it was agreed that the house should be his for the rest of his life.

Leopold left for his new kingdom at the end of June 1831. Almost immediately he was involved in a war. On 2 August Belgium was invaded by a large Dutch army under the command of the Prince of Orange. The Belgian army was no match for it. It was small, ill-equipped and barely trained. Defeat was inevitable. But Leopold had powerful allies. When a French army marched into Belgium and a British fleet appeared off the coast, the Dutch invaders fell back.

Yet, despite the unassailable strength of Leopold’s supporters, it was not until 19 April 1839, almost eight years later, that the Dutch at last recognised an independent Belgium; at the same time the five Great Powers formalised their London agreement, in the treaty that was to be dismissed so famously by the German Kaiser in 1914 as nothing more than ‘a scrap of paper’. The Prince of Orange, who had hoped that at least his Russian brother-in-law would continue to support him, was bitterly disappointed. Soon afterwards he said of Leopold, ‘There is a man who has taken my wife and my kingdom.’

Since a king must have a queen, if only to bear him heirs, Leopold looked round for the most useful candidate and chose twenty-year-old Princess Louise-Marie, eldest daughter of his most powerful neighbour, King Louis-Philippe of France. They were married in a combined Roman Catholic and Lutheran service on 9 August 1832.

Queen Louise-Marie soon lost her youthful exuberance and became a dull, dutiful and dignified wife. She bore four children – three sons, the first of whom died within a year, and one daughter, whom she allowed without argument to be christened Charlotte. Although her husband was more than twice her age, she always adored him. But she was under no illusions. She knew that his English Princess was the only woman he had ever loved, just as her children always knew that their father cared more for his niece Victoria than he ever did for any of them.

Leopold wrote regularly to Victoria, advising her on every aspect of her conduct and education while she was a princess, and on every aspect of statecraft while she was a queen.

When she was still a princess he once composed a long essay for her on the reign of the irresolute and impressionable Queen Anne. In reply Victoria thanked him for telling her ‘what a Queen ought not to be’ and hoped that he would soon tell her ‘what a Queen ought to be’.

If Leopold sent a second essay, it has not survived, but throughout
his life, in many of his letters, he often turned to the same example of how a princess ought to be. In 1845, on Queen Victoria’s twenty-sixth birthday, he sent her as her present a portrait of this ‘noble-minded and highly gifted’ example. At the end of the letter that went with it he wrote, ‘Grant always to that good and generous Charlotte – who sleeps already with her beautiful little boy so long – an affectionate remembrance, and believe me, she deserves it.’

By then Uncle Leopold’s influence with the Queen was even greater than it had been when she was a princess. In the spring of 1837, when it seemed likely that King William IV was dying, Leopold sent Stockmar to live at Claremont and instructed him to help and advise his niece in every way he could. On 20 June, one month to the day after Stockmar landed, the King died. Next day, the Queen wrote in her journal, ‘Saw Stockmar.’ Within two years, rooms had been set aside permanently for Stockmar’s use in Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle.

After his influence over the English court, Leopold’s greatest family interest lay in arranging influential marriages. He was so successful at it that the Prussian Chancellor Bismarck described the House of Coburg as ‘the stud farm of Europe’. By the time his own children came of age he had already arranged marriages for five nephews and, of course, a niece.

In 1836, shortly after he married his nephew Ferdinand to the Queen of Portugal, Leopold told his eldest brother, the dissolute Duke Ernest, to take his two sons, Ernest and Albert, to London to visit his sister in Kensington Palace and introduce them to their cousin Victoria. At the time Victoria was not much impressed by either of them. But when she met Albert three years later at Windsor she wrote to her uncle, ‘Albert’s beauty is most striking, and he is so amiable and unaffected.’

Leopold’s niece and nephew Victoria and Albert were married on 10 February 1840. It was the most influential of all the marriages that he arranged. But just over eight years later, his own marriage
suddenly ceased to be influential, or even useful. There was another revolution in Paris. On 24 February 1848 his father-in-law Louis-Philippe abdicated. Unconvincingly, but somehow successfully, the French King and his Queen disguised themselves as Mr and Mrs Smith and escaped to England, where Leopold had arranged for them to live at Claremont.

By the end of the year Louis-Napoleon, the son of Queen Hortense and her husband King Louis of Holland, had been elected President of France. Four years later, after a coup d’état, he was enthroned as the Emperor Napoleon III.

If Leopold ever wondered whether the Emperor knew about his relationship with his mother, he was left in no doubt a few years later, in 1854, when he went to visit him in Calais, in a vain attempt to prevent the French and the British from attacking the Russians in the Crimea. The Emperor received him on a ship called
La Reine Hortense,
and as soon as he had greeted him he thanked him pointedly for being so kind to his mother when the allies occupied Paris in 1814.

Louis-Philippe did not live long enough to see himself replaced by another Emperor. He died at Claremont on 26 August 1850. Two weeks later his daughter Queen Louise-Marie died of a broken heart in Ostend.

Leopold took easily to being a widower. He went on living very much as he had lived before. He had had mistresses before his wife died, and he went on having them, even though he was in his sixties and wore a black wig. He had worn the wig for some time, not to hide a bald patch, and not to hide any grey hair, which, like many of his contemporaries, he could have done more easily with dye, but because, so he said, it kept his head warm. Over the years his vanity and his hypochondria had grown in equal proportions together.

As he had done before, he went on arranging marriages, and when the time came he arranged them for his children. His son and
heir, Leopold, Duke of Brabant, was married to Marie-Henriette, the daughter of the Archduke Joseph of Austria. It was not a happy marriage. Within four weeks of her wedding she wrote, ‘If God hears my prayers, I shall not go on living much longer.’ But she did live, and she bore her brutal husband two daughters – Stephanie, who married the Austrian Crown Prince Rudolf, who shot himself and a mistress at Mayerling, and Louise, who spent seven years in a lunatic asylum and then vanished.

Charlotte was married happily to the Austrian Emperor’s brother, the Archduke Maximilian, and her younger brother Philippe was eventually married to Princess Marie of Hohenzollern.

But the superficial success of these marriages was overshadowed for Leopold by tragedy in another. On 9 December 1861 Albert died of typhoid fever. Leopold wrote long consoling letters to Victoria, some of them alluding, he thought helpfully, to how he felt when he lost Charlotte; the Queen wrote back, sometimes addressing her uncle tellingly as ‘My dear father’.

Leopold went over to London for the funeral, at which the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, inadvertently embarrassed him by introducing him to the French Ambassador and his wife – the Count and Countess Flahault.

He was accompanied by his latest mistress, Frau Meyer von Eppinghoven. Although it fooled no one, the beautiful lady pretended to be his nurse, but as it turned out this was the only part that she was called upon to play. Leopold spent most of his time in bed suffering from pleurisy and gall-stones.

When he went home, a fortnight later than he intended, he knew that he only had a few more years to live, and only a year and a half after that his sense of doom was magnified by the news that Stockmar had gone before him. But there was still time for one more adventure, although, if he had been in better health, he might have thought twice about it, and if Albert or Stockmar had still been alive they might well have advised against it.

In 1861, in one of the last brash examples of ‘gunboat diplomacy’, France, Spain and Great Britain seized the port of Vera Cruz in Mexico and refused to return it until the Republican government of Benito Juarez paid all the interest on its national debt that was due to French, Spanish and British bondholders. But the French Emperor’s real plan was to conquer Mexico, turn it into an empire and put the Austrian Emperor’s brother Maximilian on the throne. When Palmerston found out what he was up to, he refused to have anything to do with it and withdrew the British forces. But Napoleon told the Austrians that he had agreed, and by the time they learned the truth it was too late.

Maximilian and Charlotte went out to Mexico, where she became known as Carlotta, and Leopold rejoiced in the knowledge that his daughter was an empress. But they were not wanted, and they did not have enough soldiers to impose their rule. Indeed it was only the famous gallantry of the French Foreign Legion that prevented them from being captured or expelled.

In 1865, at the end of the American Civil War, the government of the United States brought pressure to bear on the French, and it became clear that Napoleon was about to give in and withdraw his soldiers. In the following year, in desperation, Carlotta came back to Europe and travelled from court to court pleading for help. She even went to the Vatican. When the Pope told her that, like everyone else, he could do nothing, she refused to leave and spent the night in a small room watched over by two nuns, claiming that Napoleon was trying to poison her. Next day, when they brought her out, she was totally mad.

Meanwhile, in Mexico, Napoleon withdrew his troops, and Maximilian was captured and shot by the Juaristas.

Carlotta never recovered. She lived out the rest of her long life in the castle of Bouchout in Belgium, where she went on calling herself an empress and talking about her handsome husband as though he was still alive. She died at the age of eighty-six, in 1927.

During the First World War, when the German Kaiser’s soldiers invaded Belgium, in contravention of the treaty that created it, a large notice was hung on the gates of the drive that led up to Carlotta’s castle. ‘This Castle is occupied by Her Majesty the Empress of Mexico, sister-in-law of our revered ally the Emperor of Austria. German soldiers are ordered to pass by without singing, and to leave the place untouched.’