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

  Golden-tasselled Victoire was now thirty-one. Like Adelaide, she was marrying a man much older than herself, but she was relaxed about this. Her Coburg relatives were an ambitious, upwardly mobile bunch, and through marriage they had infiltrated many of the first families of Europe. Victoire’s brother Leopold was the widower of the deceased British princess Charlotte, whose death had been the root cause of the ceremony today. With Charlotte’s death Leopold had lost the chance of becoming consort to the Queen of England. But where one Coburg fell down, another sprang up.

  Victoire’s first husband had always paid rather less attention to his wife than to his hobby of hunting. But the Prince of Leiningen, long since deceased, had at least left her comfortably off. She and her two children, Feodore and Charles, lived in their own palace at Amorbach in Germany. This made her reluctant, at first, to accept Edward’s offer. If she married this second aging suitor, Victoire would be sacrificing a quiet and pleasant life.

  Her friends, though, thought she would be foolish to turn down such a catch as a British prince. She did confess that Edward’s fine figure had made a deep impression when he came wooing. ‘How,’ one of Victoire’s circle asked her, ‘could you reject such an honourable proposal?’51

  But it was still with some misgivings that she eventually accepted him. ‘I am leaving an agreeable, independent position,’ Victoire wrote to Edward, ‘in the hope that your affection will be my reward.’52 Victoire knew all about Julie, and knew that Edward still cared for her. She could only pray that she would find more happiness in her second marriage than her first.53 Her craggy-faced brother Leopold shared her nervousness. His sister was marrying into a messed-up family, ‘whose members hate one another with an inconceivable bitterness’. And then Britain itself had a more commercial, critical, open society than the Coburgs were used to in their deferential German home. ‘Poor Vicky,’ Leopold confessed, ‘is very afraid that she will be somewhat ridiculed’ in England.54

  At face value, today’s ceremony at Kew Palace would be a strangely unlovely wedding, with doubts on all sides and none of the participants marrying for affection. But Edward and Victoire were living at a time when the new art-form of the romantic novel was sneaking its way into libraries. In this still-fresh nineteenth century, people were beginning to think that couples ought to be brought together by the lightning bolt of love, as well as by family duty and economic necessity. This concept was particularly slow to permeate the royal families of Europe, whose position forced them to be utilitarian in their relationships. Yet Edward and Victoire could glimpse the potential for their marriage to be something more than that. Like Jane Austen’s heroine Anne in Persuasion, a book that was also published in 1818, Victoire would come to believe in the possibility of having a second chance of love.

  As she stood before the altar, Victoire had to hand a piece of paper with the words of the Anglican service written out for her upon it in German. When the Archbishop asked Victoire, ‘Wilt thou have this man to thy wedded husband?’ her crib sheet prompted her to respond: ‘Ich will.’55 She did so not in resignation but in hope.

  The Prince Regent now signed the marriage register twice, firstly for the absent king and then for himself.56 Queen Charlotte signed too, then quickly left the room. She had just about managed to avoid being sick, but certainly wasn’t up to the ‘most sumptuous dinner’ to be served up at five. The other wedding guests descended the narrow staircase to the dining room below, there to toast each other’s health. The Prince Regent particularly enjoyed his food, as the 55-inch waist of a pair of his surviving breeches indicates. During a royal dinner the table was spread, twice, with a buffet of dishes from which the diners grazed according to their desire. The first course included a choice of soups, fish and the mixed dishes known as ‘removes’ and entrées, while the second course was roast meat and fancy vegetables. If the pickiest guest even then couldn’t see anything to fancy, there was always cold meat on the sideboard.

  It was quite a business getting your fellow diners to serve you if the dish you wanted was placed on the other side of the table. Communication and conversation did not flow freely, not least because of the language barrier. Victoire had carefully rehearsed a speech, writing out the phonetical sounds of the English that she could not speak:

  ‘Ei hoeve to regrétt, biing aes yiett so littl cônversent in thie Inglisch lênguetsch, uitsch obleitschës – miy, tu seh, in a veri fiú words, theat ei em môhst grêtful for yur congratuleschens end gud uishes.’57

  After the stilted meal, Edward and his new Duchess of Kent drove away by carriage, while William and his new Duchess of Clarence joined the Prince Regent for tea-drinking in a cottage out in the gardens.

  Queen Charlotte was too ill to join the tea-party, and in fact she would never again leave Kew Palace. Four months after her sons’ weddings, and just two rooms away from the scene of the ceremony, she died. The queen’s agonising end left Kew tainted not only by illness but by death, and the funny little palace would now fall from the royal family’s favour. In due course Queen Victoria would use her parents’ wedding venue as a country holiday home for her children, and would eventually give it to the nation and open it up to visitors on her seventy-ninth birthday in 1898. Among the items on display was the very chair in which her grandmother passed away.

  As for Edward and Victoire, two months after their marriage they were off back to Germany, to live cheaply on her estates. As they passed through the Low Countries, they were spotted at a ball for the Allied Army, which was still in occupation after 1815’s Battle of Waterloo. Edward was observed tenderly touching the cheek of his waltzing wife, ‘to feel if she was not too hot’. He was anxious because they suspected that she was already pregnant.58

  This compassionate touch of the cheek, though, was an important sign that something else had begun too. This inauspicious, pragmatic union, with money and succession at its heart, would catch fire, grow passionate and produce a daughter capable of great passion herself.

  2

  Birth: Kensington Palace, 24 May 1819

  In the early hours of 24 May, a light rain was falling. It sprinkled the lime tree avenues and the dull mirror of the Round Pond outside Kensington Palace’s long, low east-facing facade. From where she lay in bed, Victoire could see the coming dawn reflected in the pond. She was wide awake. Although this was the third time she had given birth, she was as edgy as if it were the first: ‘everything is new for me … it is eleven years since I had a child.’1

  Kensington Palace has a sylvan quality, protected by its green gardens against the hubbub of central London. This rambling, red-brick palace was the centre of court life in Georgian times. By 1819, though, it had become a rather run-down retirement home for minor members of the royal family, and was entirely rural in character. To the south lay market gardens. To the north were gravel pits, and the pleasant swell of Campden Hill. Placed practically in the countryside, the palace had originally been built for the asthmatic King William III, who’d struggled to breathe in the smog of riverside Westminster.

  Victoire’s bed was positioned, rather eccentrically, in the first-floor dining room of her husband Edward’s apartment. The space had been converted to a makeshift hospital suite.2 Its walls were papered in blue, it had a ‘handsome’ mirror of silvered glass and there was direct access via a back staircase to the kitchens below. These stairs were usually used for bringing food, but they would now be equally handy for fetching hot water.3

  The dining room had also been chosen for the birth because it was adjacent to a saloon, where members of the Privy Council including the Duke of Wellington, the Home Secretary and the Archbishop of Canterbury could wait and watch in comfort. These luminaries would, by long tradition, gather to observe any royal birth. It was their job to ensure that the child was born alive and well, and to check that no imposter baby could be slipped into the mother’s bed to replace a stillborn child.

  Their presence was demanded by the legacy of the events of 1688, whe
n a replacement baby, concealed inside a warming pan, was said to have been smuggled into Queen Mary of Modena’s bed as a substitute for a stillbirth. It was ‘fake news’, but the ensuing scandal contributed to a successful coup against Mary’s husband, the unpopular Catholic King James II. Scrutiny of the process was supposed to make sure that nothing like this could ever happen again.

  When the wife of Edward’s younger brother the Duke of Cambridge had given birth to a baby in March, just a couple of months earlier, the Duke of Clarence had rushed into the room to ‘determine its sex by actual inspection’ before sending off messengers to announce that the Cambridges had just taken the lead in the Baby Race.4 Victoire’s lying-in was being followed with a similar level of interest. Boys gathered in the courtyard behind the palace, ready to run to the newspaper offices. The line of carriages bringing well-wishers to call reached all the way from Kensington Palace to Hyde Park Corner.5 London was agog to find out if a more senior Kent baby would arrive safely to trump the little Cambridge.

  Present at Victoire’s side in the dining room was her husband, who was turning out to be a surprisingly modern father. Throughout the night just past, Edward had been struck by the ‘patience and sweetness’ with which his wife bore her sharpest pains. ‘I did not leave her from the beginning to the end,’ he would proudly claim afterwards.6

  And these two unlikely candidates for love had discovered in each other, perhaps to their surprise, something each had long sought. There was no more talk of brutality. Confronted with Victoire’s initial doubts, Edward had doubted himself. ‘I want you to know,’ he wrote, ‘my very dear Princess, that I am nothing more than an old soldier of 50 years and after 32 years of service not very fitted to captivate the heart of a young and charming Princess, who is 19 years younger.’7 This kind of self-deprecation, so unexpected in the corpulent prince, was irresistible. He also displayed a touching level of self-knowledge: ‘I would have wished to be able to say all this to you in pretty verses but you know that I am an old soldier who has not this talent.’8 His laboured pleasantries have a note of authenticity. The year of his marriage, Edward told Victoire, ‘saw the birth of my happiness by giving you to me as my guardian angel’. If Heaven preserved his wife’s health, and gave him a child, Edward swore that he would be consoled for all his ‘misfortunes and disappointments’.9

  For her own part, Victoire was naïve, certainly, but the best part of her character was her trusting optimism. Her nature, wrote someone who knew her well, was ‘confiding to a degree that no good heart could withstand or betray’.10 This emotional vulnerability had made her unlovely husband love Victoire, and it was something she would bequeath to her daughter.

  During the early months of the pregnancy, which they’d spent in Germany, Edward enjoyed commissioning extensive (and unaffordable) improvements to Victoire’s first husband’s schloss, the thousand-year-old abbey of Amorbach. The Kents arrived back in England only just in time for their baby to be born. The difficulty he’d faced in borrowing sufficient money for the journey had forced Edward to leave it a little late, in turn compelling his heavily pregnant wife to endure a madcap carriage race across the Continent to reach Kensington Palace before she came to term. One of the postilions who assisted with the driving was killed in an accident along the way, and Edward had to pay a pension to his widow. He was also still paying for Julie’s carriage, china and living expenses.11 Edward was by now so greatly in arrears to Coutts bank that he’d been compelled to place ‘the very last shilling’ he possessed into their hands, forcing him ever deeper into debt.12

  The debts and the scramble were worth it, though, for Edward and Victoire to be able to claim that their child, a possible future monarch, was born on British soil. Edward thought it was essential that his child should be born in ‘the old palace of our ancestors’.13 ‘Say as oft as possible that you are born in England,’ Victoire’s brother Leopold would in due course counsel his young niece. ‘George the III gloried in this, and as none of your cousins are born in England it is your interest.’14

  The medical team in the Kensington Palace dining room included a novelty at a royal lying-in. Plump, matronly, herself childless, Charlotte Heidenreich von Siebold was a German obstetrician. Most unusually for a woman, she was a qualified physician, with a specialism ‘in all Ladies complaints’.15

  Charlotte had begun her career assisting her midwife mother, who, hidden behind a curtain during lectures so as not to distract the male students, had been the very first German woman to win a doctorate in obstetrics. Charlotte followed her mother through medical training at the University of Göttingen. The Siebolds’ motivation had been financial. Before they could call themselves doctors, they’d had difficulty in getting their high-society clients to pay their bills.16 Frau Siebold came warmly recommended as well as highly qualified, and it must have been a relief for Victoire to have a doctor who spoke her native tongue.

  The eminent Welsh doctor David Daniel Davis was also present. He was author of a textbook on obstetrics that advised readers how to use the horrible-sounding instruments he now laid out in case of need: the ‘Blunt Hook’, the ‘long Scissors’ and a variety of tools ‘for the Extraction of the Head, others for that of the Body’.17 Should Frau Siebold fail to bring out the baby naturally, force might become necessary.

  Despite having these experienced staff standing by, Edward was growing ever more anxious as the labour progressed. He no longer even cared about the succession, only about the health of his wife and child. ‘I have no choice between Boy and Girl,’ he wrote, ‘and I shall always feel grateful for whichever of the two is bestowed upon us, so long as the Mother’s health is preserved.’18

  But Victoire at thirty-two was young, still, and very strong. She had a habit of rushing around the palace so fast that one gentleman she overtook in a corridor ‘almost lost [his] wig to the gale’.19 Edward’s prayers were answered. After a short, smooth labour of six hours, it was at 4.15 on the morning of 24 May 1819 that ‘a pretty little princess, plump as a partridge’ was born.20 Edward’s ‘Mayflower’, as he called her, was perfect in his eyes, ‘truly a model of strength and beauty combined’.21

  Once his daughter’s safety was assured, Edward began to think about what her life might hold. Although she was at this point only fifth in line to the throne, he had a peculiar premonition about her future importance. ‘Take care of her,’ he said, for ‘she will be Queen of England.’22

  The throne he wished for his daughter was a prize rather less worth pursuing than it had been in previous centuries. Never had its status or sparkle been lower or duller. This was, in part, the fault of Edward himself, and his other ‘damned millstone’ brothers including the Prince Regent. Before his disappearance from public sight behind the walls of Windsor, George III had won widespread respect, and his subjects celebrated each time his illness seemed to abate. But with his sons it was different. George III had been a curiously inadequate father, by turns too strict and too disengaged. His sons grew up to be lazy, selfish, uninterested in the painful upheavals that their subjects were experiencing as Britain became an industrial nation. Later the same year Percy Bysshe Shelley would write his damning poem ‘England in 1819’ about the dangerously unpopular royal family and its bloodsucking Royal Dukes. ‘Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know’, Shelley thought them, who ‘leech-like to their fainting country cling’.

  Now it was time to tell the world that this ill-starred royal family’s latest member had arrived. In later years, Victoire would claim that there was also someone present at her daughter’s birth who hasn’t been mentioned yet.23 This was Captain, later Sir John, Conroy. Edward’s aide-de-camp from his army days, Conroy was the household’s administrator. Chisel-cheekboned, black-eyed and exactly the same age as Victoire, Conroy was a figure of great importance in the family’s life. Perhaps it was he who now told the Privy Councillors that they could examine the child.

  If Conroy really was present at the birth, no one at the time
mentioned it. It’s also odd that the birth certificate was now signed by ‘D. D. Davis’, the Welsh doctor. He is not singled out for praise or indeed mention by anyone else present, so it looks like he was booked as a fallback, to mitigate the risks of employing a female doctor, while Charlotte Siebold did the work.

  But Dr Davis nevertheless took the credit. The sheer novelty of Frau Siebold’s gender must have led to the numerous false reports circulated afterwards that she had run into difficulties, forcing Davis successfully to intervene.24 However, having managed the royal birth with perfect ease, Frau Siebold was soon on her way back to Germany. Three months later, in Coburg, she would deliver a little son to Victoire’s brother Ernest. This cousin to the new Kensington baby would be named Albert.

  Victoire must have been filled with pride and satisfaction as she recovered over the next few days. She had not only fulfilled the royal family’s demands for an heir; she had also given the man she now truly loved his heart’s desire.

  She had become completely the mistress of this palace of Kensington, even though she lay in the dining room of the suite formerly occupied by her predecessor Julie. (Fully aware of Edward’s previous relationship of nearly three decades, Victoire gave her husband ‘every reason to believe that she respects it’.25) Ten years earlier, George III had insisted that Edward should eject poor Julie from Kensington Palace, where censorious gossip maintained that she’d ‘occupied eighty rooms’.26