We Two: Victoria and Albert (7 page)

At the inception of his quest for a wife, Kent was helped by his niece Charlotte and nephew-in-law, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Kent was a favorite with the young couple, since he had played a small but vital role in their courtship. Prince Leopold had a sister, Victoire, the Princess of Leiningen, who, though a widow and no longer in the flower of youth, fulfilled all the eligibility requirements for marriage with English royalty. Charlotte urged her uncle Kent to go to Leiningen and propose marriage, and so he did.

Unfortunately, although the Princess of Leiningen found the Duke of Kent quite personable, she declined to marry him. She had been married young to the elderly, ugly, gloomy Prince Emich Charles of Leiningen. He was the widower of her maternal aunt, had lost his kingdom and his only son during the Napoleonic wars, and he married Victoire only to beget another son and heir. Except in the bedroom, the relations between the two remained those of uncle and niece. Emich Charles was forced by the great powers after the war to become a “mediatized”— fourth-rank—prince and to exchange his ancestral lands for the small territory of Amorbach near Darmstadt in central Germany. However, he and his children were still ranked as
ebenbürtig
, a matter of primary importance to all German aristocrats. This meant that “they could contract equal marriages with the Royal Houses, and these marriages were recognized as valid for the transmission of inheritances.”

Victoire refused the Duke of Kent because she found life a good deal merrier as a widow, even though her income was small and her home modest to the point of decrepitude. She had two children, Charles and Feodora, whose interests would best be served by her remaining in Germany. Furthermore, she was strongly encouraged to refuse the duke’s proposal by Herr Schindler, her former husband’s master of the household. Schindler was a man of low birth but forceful personality who had become indispensable to her.

So, rebuffed by the Princess of Leiningen, the Duke of Kent returned to Brussels and the loving arms of Madame Saint Laurent until he was catapulted back into action by reading the announcement of his niece Charlotte’s
death. Kent decided once more to propose marriage to the Princess of Leiningen, this time not in person but through her brother Leopold.

Though still wrapped in a pall of grief and frustration following the deaths of his wife, Charlotte, and their baby, Leopold did all he could to advance the marriage of his sister Victoire to Edward, Duke of Kent. If Victoire married Kent and they produced a child, that child would have a decent shot at ruling England one day. That child would be half Coburg and would owe a lot to Uncle Leopold.

Prince Leopold had no scruples about marrying his favorite sister to the Duke of Kent. He knew that gentleman had a mistress and a mountain of debt, and had committed disciplinary excesses as commander in chief that turned the stomach even of a British army inured to sadism. More troubling was the fact that, in Kent’s twenty-plus years of cohabitation with Madame Saint Laurent, he had sired no children. But Leopold’s sister Victoire was only thirty-one, she was plump and handsome, and she had already produced two healthy children with a very unpromising spouse. Leopold was ready to bet that the union of Victoire and Kent would be fruitful.

Vigorously lobbied not only by Leopold but by her mother, the formidable dowager Duchess Augusta, Victoire agreed to do her sacred duty by the house of Saxe-Coburg and marry the Duke of Kent. Thus, within six weeks of their niece Charlotte’s tragic demise, the dukes of Clarence and Kent were both standing in the chapel at Windsor, listening to their new German brides mangle the words of the Church of England marriage service. Both brothers then repaired to Germany, where their rival brothers Cumberland and Cambridge were already living with
their
German wives, to save money and try to sire an heir to the throne.

Dynastic strategy, not elective affinity, had determined the marriage of Edward, Duke of Kent, and Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, but all the same they were very happy together. The duke was a considerate lover who enjoyed his wife’s company and loved to pamper her—quite unlike the duchess’s late, unlamented uncle-husband, the Prince of Leiningen. The Duchess of Kent adored her new husband in return and savored the experience of living in luxury. As a little girl, Victoire had wept in fear of her mother’s wrath if she so much as tore her good dress. As wartime wife and then widow, she had a threadbare existence. But everything changed when she married the Duke of Kent. As the new duchess discovered on her first visit to England, even her new spinster sisters-in-law lived on a scale that a king of Bavaria or Saxony might envy. Victoire acquired the clothes, the hats, the jewels, the perfumery, the carriages, the diamond-encrusted
miniatures, the thousand charming knickknacks that her new English family took for granted. Where her new husband got the money was not her concern.

When the Kents returned to Amorbach, the duke assumed direction of his new wife’s domestic and financial affairs and followed his usual pattern of borrowing and spending money he had no rational expectation of paying back. Finding the house and stables inadequate, Kent launched an elaborate rebuilding project, borrowing two thousand pounds from gullible German bankers. Dingy Schloss Amorbach was besieged by builders.

Within a few months, the duchess was pregnant, and the duke determined they must both return to England. His brothers’ wives could give birth in Germany. His child should be born in England, at Kensington Palace, before the eyes of royal relatives and government officials. The legitimacy of his child must be unimpeachable.

Unfortunately, travel required cash in hand, and the duke had exhausted his credit in Germany. His brother the prince regent flatly refused to send him money, noting tartly that crossing Germany and France on rutted roads was hardly recommended for a woman heavy with child. But the Duke of Kent was the most prominent royal liberal, and liberal members of parliament were determined to do anything possible to keep the archconservative Duke of Cumberland or his child from the throne. They raised a lump sum of fifteen thousand pounds to pay the Duke of Kent’s way back to England.

Suddenly flush with funds, the duke traveled in style with a party of some twenty-five. His wife brought along from Germany her lady-in-waiting and old friend Baroness Späth; her daughter by her first marriage, Feodora von Leiningen; and Feodora’s governess, Fräulein Louise Lehzen. The teenage Charles von Leiningen, the duchess’s son, remained in Germany at least for the time being, as rapacious relatives were laying claim to the Amorbach estate. But the key person the duchess brought with her was the German obstetrician-midwife, Madame Charlotte Marianne Heidenreich von Siebold. At a time when women were universally barred from the professions, including medicine, this lady had managed to qualify as a doctor at the University of Göttingen, and, in partnership with her doctor husband, she then made obstetrics a lucrative medical specialty. The German aristocracy swore by Madame Siebold.

An excellent whip, Kent himself, his wife up by his side, took the reins of a well-sprung cane phaeton, a fast, light vehicle precariously perched on two high wheels, but there was also a capacious four-wheel
dormeuse
lumbering in the rear in case the duchess felt the need to lie down. Fortunately,
the sun shone steadily, and the party made good time, though accommodations for so many people were hard to find. However, when they finally bowled into London, the Kents were given a cool reception by the royal family. The duke’s mother, brothers, and sisters considered him a tedious hypocrite, and the prince regent loathed him. It was with great difficulty that Kent secured the leaky and dilapidated rooms at Kensington Palace he had vacated years before. He then set about procuring furniture and fittings worthy of the new child and its mother.

It was probably not a bad thing that the Duchess of Kent spent most of her pregnancy beyond the reach of the royal English doctors. The weeks she spent jouncing around Europe in an open phaeton and living on innkeeper food seem to have suited her, and she went into labor on schedule. Mindful, perhaps, of the suicide of Sir Richard Croft, the man who presided over the death of Princess Charlotte, Dr. Wilson, the Duke of Kent’s personal physician, allowed Siebold to officiate at the birth. Under this lady’s care, the duchess had a short labor and a problem-free delivery. Then, to the horror of her own mother and of all her husband’s female relatives, the Duchess of Kent refused the services of a wet nurse.

When the duchess went into labor, the Duke of Wellington and other dignitaries were on hand as witnesses, but the prince regent was conspicuous by his absence. As it turned out, the child was only a girl, but she was still fifth in line of succession, and she was strong—plump as a partridge, as her father boasted. When news of the birth reached them, the duchess’s family in Coburg cheered. Prince Leopold was delighted to see his pawn advance one more square. But to the truculent regent and his sisters and brothers, this baby girl was unwanted and unnecessary. It would be far better for everyone if the successor of the new generation should be a king, not a queen, especially since girls were exempted from inheriting the family’s ancestral domain of Hanover. Wounded in his vanity to learn that his least favorite brother was urging friends to take note of his baby, “for she will be Queen of England,” the prince regent took to turning his back on his brother Kent at public events. When Kent turned up at a military review with his baby in his arms, the regent was coldly furious.

The Duke of Kent intended to make his daughter’s christening a large, public event. In a letter to his friend the Duc d’Orléans (later King Louis Philippe), Kent said that he and the duchess wished to name their daughter Victoire Georgina Alexandrina Charlotte Augusta. When, as was proper, the Kents asked the prince regent to be godfather to their baby, he agreed without enthusiasm but said he would attend in person. However the regent insisted that the ceremony should be private and advised the Kents in
advance by letter that he would not countenance their using the name Georgina. Then, with the small group of family members and the Archbishop of Canterbury gathered about the font, the regent forbade the use of both Charlotte and Augusta. When the duke suggested the name Elizabeth, it too was curtly denied. Finally, with the Duke of Kent fuming in rage and his duchess weeping, the regent grudgingly ordered that the baby be named Alexandrina, after the tsar of Russia, her other male sponsor, and, if a second name was needed, Victoria, after her mother.

The prince regent had aimed to wound his brother Kent and upset his sister-in-law, and he succeeded. He agreed to be the child’s godfather and then pettishly refused to allow her to be named after him even though he had allowed his brother Clarence’s eldest bastard to be given the name George. He allowed the child only two names even though the most insignificant of princesses received a long string of names when they were baptized. The little girl should have been given names that were traditional in the royal house of Hanover: Mary, Elizabeth, Anne, Augusta, Charlotte, Caroline, or Sophia. Instead she had names so foreign to English history that, when it became virtually assured that the Kent girl would become queen, vain efforts were made on two occasions to persuade her to give up the name Victoria.

The Duchess of Kent never forgave her brother-in-law the regent for his insulting behavior at her child’s christening. Henceforward her relations with the members of her husband’s family were charged with suspicion and acrimony. But initially at least the baby girl gained more than she lost from the coldness of her royal English relatives. The Duchess of Kent had been allowed to make her own arrangements for her pregnancy and the care of her child, and, in the first, crucial year of her child’s life, she made good decisions, not only breast-feeding her baby for six months but insisting she be inoculated against smallpox at the age of six weeks.

The Duchess of Kent had been taught by her brother Leopold and Baron Stockmar to beware of English doctors, but in February 1820, when her husband fell ill with a feverish cold, there was little she could do to protect him. The duke had taken his family to a small rented house in the fishing village of Sidmouth, Devon, purportedly so that they could enjoy the benefits of sea air, but in fact to escape his creditors and save money. Kent’s life was important to the Crown, so doctors were dispatched from London and administered the usual enemas, expectorants, stimulants, and purgatives. They drew blood, by lancet, by cupping, by leeches, over and over again, 120 ounces, or 6 pints in all. As the duchess wrote despairingly to her mother in Germany, there was hardly a part of her husband’s body that had
not been lanced, blistered, or scarified. When the second most senior doctor finally arrived from London, he decreed that if the patient were to recover, more blood must be drawn. The duke wept in agony and despair, the duchess and Baroness Späth tried to intervene, but they spoke little English and had no authority. Within days, the Duke of Kent, who had boasted to the world of his iron constitution, was dead.

Victoria was just one day short of eight months old when her father died. She was too young to mourn, but she suffered a grievous loss. As girl and woman, the Queen was always in search of father surrogates to guide and protect her. She found several good ones: Leopold, Melbourne, Stock-mar, her doctor James Clark. But as a child, her high place in the line of succession made Victoria vulnerable to unscrupulous men hungry for power.