We Two: Victoria and Albert (20 page)

The Wettin family of Saxony in central Germany was also well placed to produce royal brides. During the Protestant Reformation in the fifteenth century, the Wettins had split into two unequal branches. To its eternal humiliation, the senior, or Ernestine, branch had been forced by fortunes of war to accept the minor territory of Thuringia, while the junior, or Albertine, branch retained the ancestral Saxony, with its capital of Dresden and the title of elector (after 1815, king). In the course of two centuries, little Thuringia split further into five duchies: Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, Saxe-Meiningen, Saxe-Hildburghausen, Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, and Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. The total population in the Ernestine duchies was about three hundred thousand, and the five ducal families were constantly intermarrying and sparring with one another for territory.

Over several generations, the Wettin dukes of Thuringia married into the English royal family. The Duke of Saxe-Gotha managed to marry his
daughter Augusta to Frederick, the eldest son of King George II of England. Frederick died young, but Augusta had at least the satisfaction of seeing her eldest son succeed his grandfather as George III. In 1817 the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen married his eldest daughter Adelaide to the Duke of Clarence, later King William IV.

However, by the late eighteenth century, it was becoming apparent to all the Wettins that the ducal family to beat was the Saxe-Coburgs. Coburg was perhaps the smallest and poorest of the duchies, but, with his second wife, Augusta of Reuss-Ebersdorff, the unremarkable Duke Francis produced seven remarkable children. The four girls, Sophie, Antoinette, Juliana, and Victoire, were attractive, biddable, and, as it proved, fertile. The three boys, Ernest, Ferdinand, and Leopold, were Adonises, and the two younger ones had inherited their mother’s brains as well as their father’s looks.

The Coburg children grew up in the hard days of the Napoleonic wars. For more than twenty years, Coburg stood in the path of armies from France, Austria, Russia, and Prussia. Coburg men were pressed into service in one army or another, and rural Coburg was ruined by double taxation and the insatiable demands of the military for food, shelter, and forage. Members of the ruling family were forced to flee for their lives on more than one occasion, and survival mattered more than pride. Duke Francis died in 1806, and from this point, the fate of the Coburg family rested in the hands of the formidable dowager Duchess Augusta, the vain and vacillating new Duke Ernest, and Ernest’s youngest brother, the brilliant and resourceful Prince Leopold.

War for a poor German peasant has usually meant death and destitution, as Bertolt Brecht shows in his play
Mother Courage and Her Children
. But for a man of the ruling class, war was a time of opportunity. The army was the only career option open to poor young men of the high German Protestant aristocracy, and for centuries Germany had trained Europe’s officers and supplied mercenaries to the world. The three Coburg brothers, Ernest, Ferdinand, and Leopold, understood that the Napoleonic conflict could be their chance to find fame, status, and money if they could only gain the ear of those in power. Thanks to their elder sisters, Sophie, Juliana, and Antoinette, they did.

In 1795 Empress Catherine of Russia, formerly Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, summoned to Saint Petersburg the three elder Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld daughters and their mother. The empress intended to choose one of the three girls as bride for her sixteen-year-old grandson, Grand Duke Constantine. He was already making a strong bid to become the Caligula of his generation, and, as the owner of many serfs and the commander of a regiment,
had opportunities to inflict pain that would have aroused the envy of his contemporary the Marquis de Sade. None of this mattered to the Coburg family fighting for survival in a war zone.

The Coburg girls were beautiful, but their shabby dresses and pathetic jewelry raised titters at the magnificent Russian court. Constantine dismissed all three girls as apes. But Catherine was determined to get her dissipated young grandson married, and one day she was watching from a window as the three Coburg girls alighted from a coach. Encumbered by her long court train, the eldest girl, Sophie, tripped and fell out headfirst. The second girl, Antoinette, sprawled on the dirt next to her sister, but the third, little Juliana, fourteen, hopped down nimbly. “That’s the one,” said Catherine, and Constantine and Juliana were married.

Following Juliana’s success in Russia, Duchess Augusta was able to secure the Duke of Württemberg as a husband for her daughter Antoinette. He was a repulsively ugly glutton, but he was connected by marriage with both the English and Russian royal families and so a great catch. Antoinette and her family spent the turn of the nineteenth century at the Russian court and were in high favor with the tsar. As a result, when the German states were reorganized in 1815, Württemberg, along with Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, and Hanover, became a kingdom.

Juliana’s marriage to Grand Duke Constantine was short and hellish. Caroline Bauer, who was close to the ducal family in Coburg throughout her life, recorded in her memoirs: “The brutal Constantine treated his consort like a slave. So far did he forget all good manners and decency that, in the presence of his rough officers, he made demands on her, as his property, which will hardly bear being hinted of.” After some eight years, Juliana fled Russia and took up residence in Switzerland, on the margins of polite society.

But Juliana’s brothers Ernest and Leopold, as well as her Württemberg brother-in-law, did not find it difficult to get along with Grand Duke Constantine. For them Juliana’s marriage was a fabulous success. Intimate and lasting connections with members of the Russian imperial family were formed and yielded golden rewards for the Coburg family.

Thanks to the good offices of his brother-in-law Grand Duke Constantine, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg was made a captain in an infantry regiment at the age of six, a colonel at seven, and, after transfer to the more prestigious Horse Guards, a general at twelve. In his late teens he made an important career in the Russian cavalry. Duke Ernest, Juliana’s eldest brother, was also intermittently associated with the Russian army and fought on the losing side at the battle of Austerlitz. When the fate of Germany was negotiated in Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic wars, tiny Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld managed,
thanks to the close ties forged between the ducal family and the imperial family of Russia, to retain its status as one of the thirty-nine sovereign states in the new German federation.

Sophie Coburg, the eldest sister, was instrumental in the rapid rise of Ferdinand, her middle brother. Sophie held off from marriage until her twenties and then married a French émigré soldier, Emmanuel de Pouilly (later Mensdorff-Pouilly). This was apparently a love match, but it too proved to be dynastic magic. Emmanuel de Pouilly was an extraordinary man, a great soldier, and the implacable enemy of Republican France. He placed his sword at the service of the Austrian emperor and proved to be a great war commander. De Pouilly was largely responsible for convincing the Coburg family to finally take a stand on its aristocratic feudal principles and take arms against Napoleon. Prince Ferdinand of Coburg followed his brother-in-law into the Austrian army, where both won military glory. After the war, de Pouilly was raised in rank, and he and his sons became pillars of the Austrian army and diplomatic corps.

Prince Ferdinand and Prince Leopold, if not their braggart older brother, Duke Ernest, proved to be good at war. They were personally brave and good leaders of men. But military success was not enough, since army officers spent far more money than they earned. Marriage to an heiress, not war, was the road to advancement for the sons of a minor duchy. All three Coburg brothers needed to translate their prowess on the battlefield into success in the ballroom. Ladies could not resist a uniform, and, once the battle was won, medals for bravery and royal orders of Emperor This and Saint That were the essential decorations for a perfectly tailored, waist-hugging red jacket worn over skin-tight breeches and shining leather boots.

Having moved to the Russian court and lobbied vigorously, Duke Ernest was for a time betrothed to the youngest sister of his friend Grand Duke Constantine and thus of the new Tsar Alexander I. That marriage fell through, for reasons explored below. Prince Ferdinand was smarter or at least luckier. Well regarded at the Austrian court, he won the hand of perhaps the richest heiress in Hungary, Princess Antoinette Kohary With her he founded a new dynasty that ruled for generations in Portugal and established numerous close links with the Orléans family of France. Prince Leopold was the most successful of all. As we have seen, as part of the Russian delegation, he brought his medals to London for the Waterloo celebrations, won the hand of the Princess Charlotte, second in line to the throne of Great Britain, and eventually became king of the Belgians.

The Napoleonic armies brought revolution and democratic ideas to Germany, and these had great influence upon the German commercial and
professional classes. However, once the wars were over, and the reorganization of the German states had been enforced by the victorious Great Powers, the surviving German rulers were determined above all to set the clock back and regain their grip on power. It was in this reactionary atmosphere that Prince Albert grew up.

FOR GENERATIONS THE
Coburg men married for money, status, and power. For lasting dynastic success, they had to be prolific sires, and they were careful of the company their wives kept. However, only in the case of Prince Albert did the Coburg family consider it important for its males to be chaste. Quite the contrary. The tall, handsome Coburg dynasts believed that, when it came to the family business of sex and reproduction, practice makes perfect. They had strong libidos and took full advantage of the droit du seigneur at home and of their sexual opportunities when abroad. Duke Francis of Saxe-Coburg, Albert’s paternal grandfather, was a notorious womanizer, and his successors, Duke Ernest I, Albert’s father, and Duke Ernest II, Albert’s brother, followed closely in his footsteps.

The sexual mores that prevailed in the Saxe-Coburg family during Prince Albert’s childhood were vividly described by two discarded mistresses, Pauline Panam and Caroline Bauer. To get a sense of the ducal court in which Prince Albert was raised and how extraordinarily it differed from the court he established in England after his marriage to Queen Victoria, one needs to read the sensational memoirs of Panam and Bauer.

Pauline Panam was a fatherless French girl of Greek mercantile extraction and exotic beauty. By her account, Duke Ernest seduced her in Paris when she was fourteen. In 1808, at her lover’s urgent behest, Panam made the journey from Paris to Coburg. She was told that she would be a lady-in-waiting to the duke’s mother. Panam’s only companion on her long and arduous journey into southern Germany was her little niece. In obedience to instructions given by the duke, who did not want to pay for a male escort, the two young girls were dressed as boys. When Panam’s hat fell off en route, loosing her glossy black hair, the male travelers became importunate, and the girls became very anxious to reach their destination. But as Panam finally drove through the dingy, silent streets of Coburg at night, her relief turned to shock and dismay. Schloss Ehrenburg, Duke Ernest’s medieval town residence, looked like some grotesque, smoke-blackened stable yard to the young Parisian who had seen Versailles and the Louvre. As the girls stood gazing disconsolately up at the palace’s arrow slits, two fat rats came scuttling out of the building and ran between their legs.

Panam was not allowed into the palace but was whisked off to a secluded farm by one of the duke’s loutish henchmen. There for some weeks she remained, still disguised as a boy. She cut a gallant figure and, to her amusement and the duke’s titillation, attracted the amorous advances of several peasant girls. Even after Panam insisted on putting on women’s dress and making herself known in Coburg as the duke’s mistress, she was still forced to live in hiding. Panam was never privileged to enter the fabulous Hall of Giants inside the palace or see the fairy-tale glory of Schloss Ehrenburg when it was lit up with thousands of lamps and candles for a ducal celebration. On one occasion, she was summoned for a night rendezvous with her lover at Schloss Rosenau, his favorite retreat. After a long walk in a violent rainstorm that soaked her to the skin, Panam waited outside the house alone for hours. Finally she was obliged to climb up a ladder to the duke’s window and, when this proved too short, to scramble onto a chair he lowered for her from his bedroom.