Duke of York, was also married and also separated from a wife who, childless, lived an eccentric life at Oatlands House in Surrey where, surrounded by numerous pet dogs, monkeys and parrots, she was to die in 1820. The Regent’s next brother, the Duke of Clarence, who, following the Duke of York’s death, was to succeed to the throne as William IV in 1830, had lived contentedly for several years with the actress Dora Jordan, who had given birth to ten little FitzClarences, before dying the year before the death of Princess Charlotte. To be sure, the Duke of Clarence might marry now; and, indeed, after unsuccessfully pursuing various heiresses, both foreign and domestic, in the hope of paying off debts amounting to £56,000, he at last did find a bride in Princess Adelaide, the home-loving, good-natured but far from prepossessing eldest daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg Meiningen. But she was not to prove so successful a mother as Mrs Jordan had been: her two daughters both died as babies.
Of the Duke of Kent’s three younger brothers only one as yet had children. This was the asthmatic Duke of Sussex, a man whom Thomas Creevey described as ‘civil and obliging’ but about whom ‘there was a nothingness that was to the last degree fatiguing’. He had been married in Rome in 1793 to a rather bossy lady some years older than himself, Lady Augusta Murray, daughter of the Earl of Dunmore, by whom he had had two children; but since the marriage had been contracted in breach of the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, which made it illegal for any member of the Royal Family to marry without the previous consent of the Crown, the King had declared the marriage void and the Sussex children were accordingly illegitimate. The Duke of Sussex’s elder brother, the sardonic, much feared, widely disliked, reactionary and fiercely Protestant Duke of Cumberland, whose face had been given an alarmingly ugly cast by a head wound suffered while he was serving with the Hanoverian cavalry in the Low Countries, had managed to obtain permission to marry Princess Frederica of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the niece of his mother, Queen Charlotte. But the marriage had not been easy to arrange since Queen Charlotte was bitterly opposed to it, having heard scandalous reports of the past behaviour of the Princess who had been married twice before and was widely rumoured to have murdered one of, if not both, her former husbands. She and the Duke had had a child but she was stillborn.
The youngest duke, the Duke of Cambridge, a man more respectable and financially responsible than his brothers, was not yet married; and when he did marry Princess Augusta of Hesse-Cassel in August 1818 the children of this marriage were so far down the line of succession that they could be dismissed by the Duke of Kent in his determined efforts to become the father of the future King or Queen of England.
The Duke of Kent was a disappointed man. Trained for a military career in Germany, he had not achieved the distinction or recognition which he believed he deserved. He had served in Gibraltar, in Canada and in the West Indies, and in all these places he had gained a reputation both for wild extravagance and the most strict and severe attention to military discipline: he would insist that the men under his command be roused at dawn and appear on the parade ground in impeccable condition and would punish infringements of his draconian rules by occasional executions and regular floggings of hundreds of lashes, as many as 400 being given for ‘trifling faults in dress’ and 999, the maximum permitted, for desertion. He left Canada accused of ‘bestial severity’; and, upon his recall from Gibraltar in disgrace, he was accused by his elder brother the Duke of York – who had been appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Army – of provoking a mutiny by his conduct which ‘from first to last was marked by cruelty and oppression’. He was given to understand that there would be no more military commands for him.2
Charles Greville, the diarist and Clerk to the Privy Council, contended that the Duke of Kent was ‘the greatest rascal that ever went unhung’,3 while the Duke of Wellington, to whom Thomas Creevey related the story of the contretemps at Kent’s breakfast table, regarded him as a figure of fun. At a ball in Brussels, where Wellington was serving as commander of the allied forces on the Continent after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, Creevey was approached by the great Duke who said to him, ‘Well Creevey, what has passed between you and the Corporal since you have met this time?’ Creevey then told Wellington of a conversation he had recently had with the Duke of Kent ‘Upon which,’ so Creevey recorded, ‘the Duke of Wellington laid hold of my button and said: “God damme! D’ye know what his sisters call him? By God! They call him Joseph Surface [the shameless hypocrite in Sheridan’s School for Scandal]!” and then sent out one of his hearty laughs, that made every one turn about to the right and left to see what was the matter.’4
Yet the Duke of Kent had his good points as well as his bad, as Wellington conceded: he was a good and intelligent, if rather garrulous, conversationalist with a gift for mimicry, and an even better after-dinner speaker; he was also a conscientious correspondent, keeping three or four secretaries busy at their desks. He was fond of music and, when in funds, employed the services of a large band.
However, like all his brothers except the Duke of Cambridge, he was more or less constantly entangled in debt. The several charities to which he lent his name were supported by money which, as often as not, had been borrowed from men who were not always repaid. It was a perennial grievance with him that he was not provided with an allowance adequate to his high position as a prince of the blood.
Yet for all his faults, the Duke was capable of affection and this affection had been returned not only by Mme de St Laurent but also by Princess Charlotte, whose favourite uncle he had been, and by Mrs Maria Fitzherbert, the Roman Catholic widow whom the Prince Regent had illegally married and with whom the Duke conducted a correspondence of easy and intimate friendship. For nearly thirty years the Duke had lived contentedly with Mme de St Laurent, and he did what he could to soften the blow when he declared that duty to his family forced him to send her away to live in Paris with her sister. ‘You may well imagine, Mr Creevey, the pang it will occasion me to part with her,’ he said to the Whig politician. ‘I protest I don’t know what is to become of her…But before anything is proceeded with in this matter, I shall hope and expect to see justice done to her by the Nation and the Ministers…Her disinterestedness has been equal to her fidelity.’5 He saw to it that she was provided with a generous allowance – which before long was much reduced – and he asked friends to go and see her to ensure that she was comfortable in Paris where she lived as the Comtesse de Montgenet, a courtesy title granted to her by King Louis XVIII. ‘Our unexpected separation arose from the imperative duty I owed to obey the call of my family and Country to marry,’ the Duke explained, ‘and not from the least diminution in an attachment which had stood the test of 28 years and which, but for that circumstance’ would have been kept up until one or other of them died.6 He later thanked Creevey and his wife for their kind attentions to the ‘dear Countess’ and earnestly asked him to give him his ‘opinion of her health, her looks and her spirits very particularly’.
The Duke at this time was forty-nine years old. He was tall and fat and stately in a ponderous way, with luxuriant whiskers dyed dark brown and a head without much hair. His breath smelled of garlic and his clothes of tobacco. He was attentive to women and very polite. He had the fleshy lips and rather protuberant eyes of the Hanoverians but he was handsome enough and carried himself like the soldier he was proud to have been.
He was of most regular habits, getting up at five o’clock, even earlier than his father, and eating and drinking sparingly. He had good reason to suppose that, if he found a suitable wife, he would soon be the father of children as healthy as he was himself. Already, before Princess Charlotte’s death, he had begun the search for a wife, in the hope that Parliament would grant him a decent allowance to support one in the same way that his brother, the Regent, had been helped financially upon his disastrous marriage to Princess Caroline of Brunswick. Edward considered that the £25,000 a year settled upon the Duke of York after his marriage ought ‘to be considered the precedent’.7 Having borrowed £1,000 from the Tsar for the cost of his journey, he had travelled to Germany to inspect the Tsarina’s sister, Princess Katherine Amelia