Queen Victoria--Twenty-Four Days That Changed Her Life Read online

  Anyone watching from below as Charlotte peered through the panes would have noticed her striking hair, teased high and powdered white. Contemporaries often commented on her ‘true Mulatto’ or mixed-race appearance, and the cast of her features in her portraits does seem to hint at the African heritage she possessed via her Portuguese ancestors.5 Her cheeks, though, were also deathly pale, and her health today was in a perilous state. She had paused here at Kew merely as a staging post on a journey to Windsor and her husband, before being taken too ill to continue. Today’s events were unfolding after a postponement during which she had desperately tried to regain her strength.

  One of the causes of Charlotte’s malady was her heart, now beating ‘most unequally & irregularly’.6 It had taken many ‘exertions of the doctors’ to make her ready for the ‘rather lugubrious’ ceremony, and to administer painkillers strong enough to get her out of bed and into her wheelchair.7 Her condition was physical, but also partly mental. ‘My Mind & feelings,’ she wrote, thinking of her husband’s illness and her unsatisfactory children, ‘have been very much harassed … my Strength and Spirits are not equal to Trials.’8 She was served now by just a few long-standing, intimate members of her formerly vast staff, including her wardrobe maid and her ‘Necessary Woman to the Private Apartments’. This last character was Charlotte’s fellow German Mrs Papendick, whose job it was to empty the queen’s ‘necessary’, or commode.9

  Charlotte’s chair upon ‘rollers’ had been a gift from her eldest son, who now watched and waited by her side. The Prince of Wales, a ‘very stout’ man of fifty-five, had often been at odds with his parents in his youth.10 In more recent years, though, he had become a thoughtful, regretful son, frequently visiting his mother, and making contrivances for her comfort. He was now designated as the Prince Regent, his sick and absent father’s official stand-in.

  Despite having her plump, punctilious son to hand, Charlotte was lonely, and heartsick for her husband. ‘I wish I was with the king,’ she would say. Charlotte had married her George at seventeen, the very same night of her arrival in London from her native Mecklenburg in Germany. It was an arranged match, but nevertheless became notable for its fidelity and felicity. Charlotte understood that she was now dying. She’d wanted to get to ‘dear, dear Windsor’ not only to say goodbye to her husband, but also to destroy certain private papers.11 Instead, though, she was stuck here at Kew.

  On the floor above the queen’s suite, her daughters Princesses Augusta and Sophia were also preparing for the wedding. Like their brothers the grooms, they were also unmarried, middle-aged and disgruntled. At events like this, they were expected to dress in striped gowns of matching design to demonstrate their membership of the joyous band. Charlotte insisted that everyone at court still act according to the habits of earlier, luckier times.

  In reality, Augusta and Sophia would rather have been almost anywhere else than Kew. Charlotte believed that it was improper for her daughters to take part in society while their father was ill. It would be the ‘highest mark of indecency’, she claimed, for them to appear in public.12 But the king’s illness had by now lasted for years, placing the princesses in a terrible limbo. If they ever emerged from their seclusion, it would be taken as an admission that the king’s family had lost hope that he would ever recover. And this Charlotte would not tolerate.

  Trapped at Kew, Augusta and Sophia had grown to hate its quiet, and called it ‘the nunnery’. This was a dangerous joke for princesses to make, as a ‘nunnery’ was also a contemporary word for a brothel. And indeed, Sophia had provided one of her mother’s many illegitimate grandchildren, giving birth to a child out of wedlock. The father was one of the king’s valets, a gentleman described as ‘a hideous old Devil, old enough to be her father, and with a great claret mark on his face’.13 And so the princesses lived their lonely lives, ‘secluded from the world, mixing with few people, their passions boiling over’.14 When warned that her life was nearing its end, Charlotte had wept, and said to Augusta: ‘I had hoped to see you all happy, and now I fear I shall not arrive at that wish of my Heart’.15

  For Augusta and Sophia, their brothers’ weddings were at least a diversion from the usual dull routine. There was an unfamiliar bustle within the building as the first-floor drawing room was furnished with an altar for the ceremony, and four red velvet cushions were brought in to receive eight royal knees. The ‘ancient silver plate’ from the Chapels Royal had been conveyed specially to Kew.16 The cramped drawing room of an invalid was a somewhat makeshift venue for a royal wedding, but the conventions would be observed as far as possible.

  Just before four, the family began to assemble, the Prince Regent leading his mother to her seat near the altar. The smallish room, with its walls of pale panelling, wobbly floor and ancient fireplace, soon grew crowded. The guests were a select group including the Prime Minister and the Lord Chancellor, while the Archbishop of Canterbury was to officiate. The Prince Regent was ready to give away the brides, and the stage was set for the grooms.

  The two couples were William, Duke of Clarence, who was to marry Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, and his younger brother Edward, Duke of Kent, whose spouse-to-be was Princess Victoire of Saxe-Coburg.

  The names, the titles, sparkle like diamonds on a necklace, but behind them lay very different characters and hopes. William, the future King William IV, stepped up to the altar first. Aged fifty-two, he was widely known as ‘Coconut Head’ for his pointed skull. He was the unfortunate victim of the spurious ‘science’ of phrenology, which decreed that the shape of one’s head determined one’s character. His cranium was thought to indicate mental instability. ‘What can you expect,’ commented someone who knew him, ‘from a man with a head like a pineapple?’17 Little, in fact, had been expected of William. By 1818, he had two careers behind him: one in the Royal Navy, the other as the lover of the actress Mrs Dorothy Jordan. As profligate as the rest of his Royal Duke brothers, William had lived off Mrs Jordan’s earnings until reaching the conclusion that a wealthy heiress might suit him better. At that point he unceremoniously abandoned her.

  William’s bride-to-be was twenty-five, less than half his age. Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen must have fully understood that she’d been chosen in desperation. Even after marriage had been ‘pressed upon’ William ‘as an act of public duty’ in the light of the succession crisis, he’d struggled to find a bride who’d accept him.18 Adelaide was, in fact, the eleventh young lady he’d asked.19

  The Prince Regent now escorted Adelaide into the drawing room upon one arm, while Victoire clung to the other. Adelaide was of a perfectly average height, but because she never made a strong personal impression she has left behind her the idea that she was unusually small. ‘A small, well-bred, excellent little woman’, was a favourable judgement from a British courtier; ‘a poor little bad-ish concern’ was one that went the other way.20 Even today she looked far from impressive, despite her dress of silver tissue and the ‘superb wreath of diamonds’ upon her head.21 She’d arrived from Germany just a week earlier, and had been staying at Grillion’s Hotel in Albemarle Street. As it would turn out, there were distinct advantages to Adelaide’s lack of colour. She would become a calming presence in the royal family, conciliatory, loving and beloved. Knowing no English and having no intimates in this foreign country, Adelaide and Victoire had already become allies. They were at least able to ‘talk the same mother tongue together, it makes them such real friends’.22

  At the altar, William watched Adelaide approach with serious misgivings. She was only just older than his own illegitimate daughters. His elder brother had made a terrible hash of his own marriage, and had separated from his wife. Feeling guilty about his similarly shabby treatment of his actress-mistress Mrs Jordan, William promised himself that he would now make a fresh start. ‘I cannot, I will not, I must not ill use her,’ he vowed.23 It wasn’t an auspicious beginning.

  The second couple, Edward Duke of Kent and Princess Victoire of Saxe-
Coburg, had already been married once, in May, using the Lutheran version of the ceremony. This had taken place in the Hall of Giants at Victoire’s family’s castle, Ehrenburg, in her native state of Coburg, Germany. They were now making a second marriage under the rules of the Church of England. When the royal succession might well flow through a match, it was just as well to make doubly sure it was legal.

  Towering over his short, pointy-headed brother, Edward, Duke of Kent, was a tall man, of ‘soldierlike bearing’ despite his ‘great corpulency’. He’d lost most of his hair. Despite the unconvincing dye job he’d had done upon the remaining tufts, he was physically impressive, and ‘might still be considered’ handsome.24

  Born in 1767, the man who would become Queen Victoria’s father had been much the largest of Queen Charlotte’s fifteen babies.25 He grew up to be calmer and quieter than his brothers, speaking ‘slowly and deliberately’ in a manner both ‘kind and courteous’.26 Edward had spent his youth at a military academy in Hanover, before moving to Geneva. There he’d acquired debts, various actress lovers and then, more seriously, a mistress who was a musician named Adelaide Dubus.

  This other Adelaide gave Edward a baby daughter, named Adelaide Victoire, an illegitimate shadowy half-sister to the future queen. But Adelaide Dubus died in childbirth, and little Adelaide Victoire did not survive much longer herself.27 Edward couldn’t cope. Bereaved, indebted and distraught, he returned to London. Unfortunately, he did so without his father’s permission. George III, angry at the breach in protocol, immediately shipped Edward off to Gibraltar, presumably in the hope that there he would cause less embarrassment.

  Edward’s job in Gibraltar was to lead the Royal Fusiliers, who were commonly called the ‘Elegant Extracts’ (after the popular anthology of prose) for their recruitment practice of poaching the best-looking men from other regiments.28 Their new colonel was well-intentioned but ineffective. He loved to interfere in everyone else’s business, maintaining a correspondence so vast that ‘his name was never uttered without a sigh by the functionaries of every public office’.29

  Edward and his brothers were once described by the Duke of Wellington as ‘the damndest millstone around the necks of any government that can be imagined’. When Parliament failed to vote the Royal Dukes the financial allowances they believed that they deserved, Wellington had a ready explanation. The profligate and arrogant Royal Dukes, he explained, had ‘insulted – personally insulted – two thirds of the gentlemen of England,’ so ‘how can it be wondered at that they take their revenge?’30

  Edward’s wedding was in fact to be the last in a series of similarly undignified couplings between Royal Dukes and German princesses, made for the sake of the succession, but also in the hope of getting Parliament to award each duke a bigger allowance as a married man. His younger brother the Duke of Cumberland had married his Princess Frederica three years ago, and the Duke of Cambridge his Princess Augusta just six weeks before today’s ceremony. ‘With a noble spirit of patriotism,’ wrote one strait-laced Victorian historian, the Royal Dukes ‘set about their arduous duties of procuring heirs to strengthen the succession’.31 Well, that was one way of putting it. A less unctuous contemporary satirical poet claimed instead that:

  Hot and hard each royal pair

  are at it, hunting for the heir.32

  This semi-ridiculous rush to reproduce became known as the Baby Race. Of course, with hindsight, we know that Victoria will win it. But at the time, it was very far from certain.

  Edward decided to whip the garrison of Gibraltar into shape with the ferocious severity he’d experienced himself as an army cadet in Hanover. He was no stranger to corporal punishment. One of his sisters remembered seeing the Royal Dukes in their youth being ‘held by their tutors to be flogged like dogs with a long whip’.33

  Unfortunately, when it came to discipline, Edward tried too hard. Accusations of brutality – deserved or not – would haunt him for the length of his army career. He also had great difficulty in knowing how or when to relax, and his household servants found him a trying master. They complained of his ‘strictness’, it was said, ‘and his extraordinary love of order’.34 This was something he would bequeath to his daughter Victoria, who would likewise prove herself to be detail-orientated, and dedicated to the task in hand.

  Another of the problems Edward experienced in Gibraltar was the climate, which he thought bad for his health; a third was his loneliness. Adelaide Dubus had taught him what love looked like, and having lost both her and his child, he found himself longing for female company. He felt himself to be above merely sensual pleasure, and looked, in short, ‘for a companion, not a whore’.35

  It was time for the entrance of Thérèse-Bernardine Mongenet (1760–1830), known as Madame Julie de Saint-Laurent, Edward’s long-term companion and mistress, who would stick with him for the next twenty-eight years.36 A friend of Edward’s had scouted out Julie, previously the mistress of a French aristocrat, in Marseilles in accordance with Edward’s detailed brief. He’d said that he wanted ‘une Jeune Demoiselle’ who was also a talented singer.37 Julie’s arrival was a great relief to Edward’s staff in Gibraltar, who believed that the appointment of an official mistress would save him – and them – from other liaisons that might prove ‘dangerous as well as disgraceful’.38

  Despite Edward’s reputation for cruelty, there is something cruelly sad about his life. His father forced him to live in exile from Britain for many decades. His financial problems depressed him. They were the inevitable consequence of an upbringing that gave all the Royal Dukes a strong notion of their status and the style in which they ought to live, alongside a weak notion of the value of money.

  Edward did not last long in Gibraltar, and was next posted to Canada. ‘I am left to vegetate,’ he wrote, ‘in this most dreary and gloomy spot on the face of the earth.’ Years went by. He was now nearly thirty, Edward complained, ‘and the only one of the Brothers, kept abroad’.39 He was missing all the excitement of the Napoleonic Wars, and the chance to prove himself in action. After much pleading, he was allowed to return to London, but then caused scandal by going about with Julie. ‘This may be done abroad,’ cautioned one of his younger brothers, ‘but you may depend upon it, that it cannot be done at home.’40 Edward was becoming a misfit, unwelcome even among his own family. Perhaps because he’d come to feel like an outcast, Edward was among the more liberal of the extremely conservative Royal Dukes, and spoke at various times in favour of education, the ending of slavery and Catholic emancipation. He even became interested, unlikely though it sounds, in ‘socialistic theories’.41

  Victoria’s father, then, was a tortured man, unsure of his life’s purpose. Duty had taken him to Germany, Switzerland, Spain and Canada, but he really longed for home, security and romantic happiness. He tried to make himself feel better with absurdly spendthrift behaviour, particularly in the matter of houses and interior decoration. He ran up such huge debts that in 1816 a committee was formed to run his finances for him. The committee awarded him just £11,000 out of £27,000 a year for his annual living expenses, reserving £16,000 a year for his creditors. Dealing with the consequences of her father’s debts would later help shape his daughter’s much more stringent attitude towards money.

  Having eventually left the army, Edward took Julie to live in Brussels because of its low cost of living.42 Yet, like his brothers, he could see one way out of the financial wilderness: marriage. ‘I shall marry,’ he claimed in one grandiose statement, ‘for the succession.’ But then he revealed another motive: ‘I shall expect the Duke of York’s marriage to be considered the precedent. That was a marriage for the succession, and £25,000 was settled … I shall be contented with the same.’43

  And so, Edward began quietly to look around for a suitable spouse. His hunting ground was Germany, then still a patchwork of small principalities rather than a single united country. In these small courts, bloodline was highly prized, and the German states had a thriving export business
in thoroughbred Protestant princesses. Edward was cowardly enough to neglect to mention his new mission to Julie. It is not pleasant to read of how, from the day of his decision, he found himself ‘in the practice of daily dissimulation’ with her. Eventually poor Julie read in the Morning Chronicle that Edward had been looking for a wife. Finishing the article, she made such an ‘extraordinary noise’ and such a ‘strong convulsive movement’ that people thought she was ill. The press had told her what her live-in lover had not: that their relationship was over.44

  Edward’s chosen bride – Queen Victoria’s mother – was Marie Luise Victoire, then generally known as Victoire, Dowager Princess of Leiningen (1786–1861). She was tall and well-built, ‘rather large, but with a good figure’, and she had ‘a very white skin, black eyes and black hair’.45 According to one fashion journalist, her high colouring was ‘compounded of ravens’ plumes, blood and snow’. People thought Victoire lucky not to have inherited her Coburg birth family’s distinctive hooked nose.46 Victoire was not only a fine physical specimen but also a showy dresser. Her wardrobe included her white silk with a low neck, ‘trimmed with a deep turnover of lace and tartan ribbon’, and her ‘mauve flowered-satin’.47 She was capable of spending more than £100 on a single, spectacular hat.48

  As she now entered the drawing room on the Prince Regent’s other arm, Victoire by far outshone Adelaide. Pale Adelaide wore silver, but Victoire’s naturally dramatic colouring was complemented by a dress of ‘rich gold trimmings’ and Brussels lace, ‘tastefully ornamented with gold tassels’.49 Queen Charlotte herself had ordered this wedding gown, which cost £97, the equivalent of four years’ salary for a well-paid governess.50 It was a dress of dreams, and would be described in detail in The Times. Victoire liked, and looked good in, the new, super-tight muslin gowns that made the wearer look like a classical Grecian column. The body-hugging fit of these gowns required the wearing of a novel form of underwear – ankle-length drawers – so that modesty was preserved under the flimsy white fabric. A pair of Victoire’s own drawers still survives at the Victoria and Albert Museum.