The Heir Apparent (3 page)

Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, was the fourth son of George III. Neither dissolute nor vicious, he was large and talkative with a certain sly cunning. He smelled of garlic and tobacco, and he was always in debt. In the army he was a stickler for uniforms and a harsh disciplinarian, heartily disliked by the rank and file. He had lived contentedly for twenty-eight years with his bourgeois French mistress, the childless Julie de St. Laurent. When the death of Princess Charlotte gave him the opportunity to supplicate Parliament to pay off his debts in exchange for trading in his bachelor status, the duke did not hesitate to discard Julie and marry a German princess. His choice was Victoire, the thirty-year-old widow of the minor German prince of Leiningen and the mother of two young children. She was also the sister of Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, the widower of Princess Charlotte.

The Kents shared a double marriage ceremony in 1818 with William, Duke of Clarence, the third son of George III, who married another German princess, Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen. Two weeks earlier, the seventh brother, Adolphus, the virtuous Duke of Cambridge, his mother’s favorite, had married yet another German princess, Augusta of Hesse-Cassel. Ernest, the Duke of Cumberland, who
had married a German princess four years before, and had as yet produced no children, was now hard at it. The race was on.
^†

Kent won. On 24 May 1819, the duchess gave birth to a daughter, Victoria. This baby was fifth in line to the throne, coming after the Regent and his three younger brothers.
^‡

No one questioned Victoria’s legitimacy at the time, but the rogue gene for hemophilia that she carried throws doubt on her paternity. Two of her daughters were carriers of the gene for the condition, which impairs blood clotting, and one of her sons, Leopold, was a bleeder.
^§
Victoria’s gene was either inherited or the result of a spontaneous mutation. Hemophilia cannot be traced in either the Hanoverian or the Saxe-Coburg family; and as the odds of spontaneous mutation are 25,000:1, Victoria’s gene has prompted speculation that the Duke of Kent was not her biological father. According to one scenario, the Duchess of Kent, despairing of her husband’s fertility, and desperate to win the race for the succession, decided to take corrective action and sleep with another man. Unfortunately, this lover happened to be hemophiliac.
¹²

This melodramatic hypothesis is entirely speculative, and there is not a scrap of historical evidence to support it. The Duke of Kent was not infertile; on the contrary, he is credited with at least two well-attested illegitimate children.
¹³
Victoria, along with her eldest son, inherited unmistakably Hanoverian features, such as a receding chin and protruding nose (her profile in old age is remarkably similar to that of her grandfather, George III), as well as a tendency toward obesity and
explosive rages. Courts are hotbeds of gossip, but there was no whisper at the time that Victoria was illegitimate. Scientists believe that the faulty gene was a new mutation. At least one in four incidences of hemophilia are the result of new mutations, and this is especially likely in the case of older fathers; the Duke of Kent was fifty-one when Victoria was conceived. So the odds are that the gene, which was later to wreak havoc with both the Spanish and the Russian royal families via marriages to Victoria’s granddaughters, originated in the testicles of the Duke of Kent in 1818. The genetic time bomb of hemophilia was the tragic price paid by his descendants when Kent won the race that the wits dubbed Hymen’s War Terrific.
¹⁴

Victoria’s doctors and family worried not that she was illegitimate, but, on the contrary, that she had inherited the Hanoverian insanity. Mention of the madness of George III was suppressed in the nineteenth century, largely because Victoria herself was sensitive on the subject, but the royal doctors were well aware of it. It blighted the lives of the daughters of George III, who, prevented from marrying, were confined to the so-called nunnery at Windsor. In the 1960s, the mother-and-son medical historians Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter made the diagnosis of the genetic disease porphyria. Symptoms include severe rheumatic pain, skin rashes, light sensitivity, and attacks of acute illness, but the diagnostic clincher for this rare metabolic disorder is red-stained urine. The disease had apparently bedeviled the royal family since Mary, Queen of Scots, and James I, but only caused madness in extreme cases.
¹⁵
A recent analysis of the hair of George III shows abnormal levels of arsenic. This was prescribed by his doctors, but the medication may have been counterproductive and made his illness worse.
¹⁶

Building on the work of Macalpine and Hunter, researchers have conjectured that most of the children of George III were afflicted by some of the symptoms of porphyria. The Prince Regent was laid low by bouts of acute illness and episodes of mental confusion, and he complained of a range of porphyria symptoms, which he self-medicated with alarmingly large doses of laudanum. He and his brothers were all convinced that they suffered from a peculiar family disease.
¹⁷
The medical history of Victoria’s father includes attacks of
abdominal pain, “rheumatism,” and acute sensitivity to sunlight, all symptoms of porphyria. Earlier biographers insisted that Victoria was completely unaffected, but the picture is not quite so straightforward.
¹⁸
One of her granddaughters, Princess Charlotte of Prussia, whose distressing medical history is fully documented, seems to have suffered from the disease. She may have inherited it through Victoria, though Victoria herself was asymptomatic, or at worst a mild sufferer.
^‖

Much of this is speculative. The porphyria theory is known to be shaky and incapable of real proof, and it has come under attack from other medical historians. No one knows for certain what was wrong with the unfortunate George III. It is conceivable that contemporaries were right after all, and he really was mad. The latest theory is that he was afflicted by bipolar disorder.
¹⁹

Victoria’s father, the Duke of Kent, died unexpectedly of pneumonia when she was eight months old. Six days later, her grandfather, George III, also died, and she advanced from fifth to third in the line of succession.

Victoria was brought up in seclusion and (by royal standards) reduced circumstances by her mother, the Duchess of Kent, in an apartment in Kensington Palace. Her mother quarreled with George IV, “whose great wish,” as her uncle Leopold told Victoria, “was to get you and your Mama out of the country.”
²⁰
Had Victoria lived in Germany, as the King desired, she would have been perceived as just another German princess. The duchess, however, was an ambitious woman, and she took great care to ensure that her daughter was brought up as heir to the English throne.

The rift between the Duchess of Kent and George IV meant that her mother kept the young Victoria under constant surveillance. She was never alone without a servant. She was not allowed to walk downstairs without someone holding her hand. At night she slept in a bed in her mother’s room. She was allowed no friends. Even her half sister, Feodora, twelve years her senior, was banished, married off to the minor German prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, where she lived in a freezing palace in a dull court. Louise Lehzen, Victoria’s governess, was appointed because she was German and knew no one of influence in England. Victoria was effectively a prisoner, with her mother acting as jailer.

In 1830, George IV died and was succeeded by his brother, the Duke of Clarence, now William IV. The Duchess of Kent became paranoid about the new King, whom she suspected of plotting to cut her out and promote Victoria as his heir. Determined to ensure that she should be regent, the duchess kept her daughter away from court. She refused to allow Victoria to attend the Coronation, and she enraged the new King by taking her around the country on quasi-official royal progresses. She was aided and abetted by Sir John Conroy, her comptroller, a scheming Irish officer who was widely believed to be her lover. No Gothic novelist could have invented a villain blacker than Conroy. He terrified Victoria with tales of plans to poison her and promote the claims to the throne of her younger uncles. When, aged sixteen, she fell seriously ill with typhoid fever, he presented her with a letter appointing him as her private secretary, and stood over her sickbed demanding that she sign it. With precocious strength of will, Victoria refused.

Victoria’s isolated upbringing meant that her mother was entirely responsible for her education. Victoria spoke and wrote fluent French and German, and she excelled at arithmetic and drawing. She had lessons in history, geography, religion, music, and Latin (reluctantly).
²¹
She learned more than most aristocratic girls, but she did not receive the instruction in subjects such as constitutional history considered necessary for princes. As Lord Melbourne remarked: “The rest of her education she owes to her own shrewdness and quickness, and this
perhaps has not been the proper education for one who was to wear the Crown of England.”
²²

Victoria grew up hating and distrusting her mother. She yearned for a father figure to fill the place of the father she had barely known. But she was not lacking in self-worth. On the contrary, knowing that she was so close to the succession gave her a rare sense of entitlement. She never learned to accept authority figures; she
was
authority. Self-reliant, with a steely confidence in her own judgment, she was impulsive and volatile. No one taught her to control her temper.

At six a.m. on 20 June 1837, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chamberlain arrived at Kensington Palace with the news that King William IV had died at midnight. Victoria insisted on seeing them by herself. Later that day, the tiny eighteen-year-old monarch addressed the Privy Council alone.

That night, Victoria moved out of her mother’s bedroom.

She had escaped the duchess’s plan for a regency, but only by a whisker (her eighteenth birthday had been a few weeks earlier), thanks to her own strength of character and coolness under pressure—qualities that were precisely the opposite of the demure submissiveness expected of women in what was now the Victorian era.

The dramatic events of her accession left the young Queen very isolated. She moved into Buckingham Palace, the still unfinished London residence, reviled for its vulgar raspberry-colored pillars and Queen Adelaide’s sickly wallpapers; but her apartments were far apart from those of her mother, with whom she was barely on speaking terms. She found a father figure in the prime minister, Lord Melbourne. His bluff Whig worldliness gave her a much-needed political education, but her court was babyish and philistine.

Into this girlie court of late-night dancing, schoolgirl gossip, and immature politics walked Albert.

Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was Victoria’s first cousin. The two babies had been delivered within months of each other by the same midwife, but the cousins had met only once before. Albert’s first visit to the English court had not been a success. He had fallen asleep after dinner and had suffered from bilious attacks.

When a second visit was arranged in 1839, Victoria warned her relations to expect no engagement, “for, independent of my youth, and my
great
repugnance to change my present position, there is
no anxiety
evinced in
this country
for such an event.”
²³
But when Albert arrived at Windsor, late and travel-stained from a bad crossing, and Victoria stood at the head of the staircase to receive him, it was a
coup de foudre.
She wrote in her journal: “It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert—who is
beautiful
.”
²⁴

Throughout her life, Victoria was strongly attracted by male beauty, though she had few claims to beauty herself. She was short and fat, with protruding teeth. But she was the most eligible woman in the world—willful, spoiled, and twenty years old.

Five days later, she summoned Albert and proposed to him on the sofa. “We embraced each other over and over again, and he was so kind, so affectionate. Oh! to feel I was and am, loved by such an Angel as Albert was too great delight to describe! He is perfection: perfection in every way—in beauty—in everything!”
²⁵

Not everyone agreed. Lytton Strachey wrote of Albert’s distressingly un-English looks: “His features were regular, no doubt, but there was something smooth and smug about them; he was tall but he was clumsily put together, and he walked with a slight slouch.… More like some kind of foreign tenor.”
²⁶

Albert was very much a poor relation. He was born in Coburg, the second son of Duke Ernest, the ruler of the two minor German states of Coburg and Gotha, whose combined population totaled no more than 150,000. Duke Ernest ranked only twelfth in the thirty-nine states of the German Confederation. Albert’s mother, Princess Louise of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, married the womanizing duke at the age of seventeen. Her first child, Ernest, was recognizably his father’s son—dark and swarthy, he grew up a philanderer and syphilitic. But Albert,
her favorite, born a year later, was different: gentle, even feminine, and intellectually precocious. He was so unlike his brother that it was rumored that he was, in fact, the son of the court chamberlain, the Jewish Baron Ferdinand von Meyern.

Years later, Albert liked to say that it was, in fact, “a blessing when there was a little imperfection in the pure royal descent and … some fresh blood was infused.”

“We must have some strong dark blood,” he would say, to correct the constant fair hair, blue eyes, and “lymphatic” blood of the Protestant German royal families who intermarried again and again.
²⁷

Whether there was, in fact, a little imperfection in the case of Albert himself is debatable.
²⁸
But his personality was so different from those of his relations—he was an art lover, a scholar, and a workaholic in a family of lusty philistines—that it is tempting to speculate about his Jewish paternity. Supposing Meyern really was Albert’s father and Conroy was Victoria’s, this would mean, as A. N. Wilson has mischievously pointed out, that the royal families of Europe are descended from a German Jew and an Irish soldier. “Given this,” comments Wilson, “it is surprising that these families manifested so few of the talents stereotypically attributed to the Irish and the Jews: such as wit or good looks.”
²⁹