turned to Princess Victoire – sister of Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, who had married the Regent’s daughter, Princess Charlotte.
The Regent had been against the marriage of his daughter to Prince Leopold at first. He had conceded that Leopold was a good-looking, gifted fellow, charming in a rather solemn kind of way, and that he would probably treat Charlotte well. But there was something in the ingratiating suavity of his manner which was decidedly distasteful, and the ponderousness of his cautious approach to life was rather irritating. Adept at choosing nicknames, the Regent called him ‘le Marquis peu à peu’.8 The less inventive Lord Frederick FitzClarence dismissed him as a ‘damned humbug’;9 and Princess Lieven, the Russian Ambassador’s wife, found him ‘wearing and…with his slow speech and bad reasoning, a jesuit and a bore’.10 He had his supporters and admirers, however. Lady Ilchester, for example, told a friend that he was ‘enchanting as far as appearance and manner’ were concerned. He was ‘like an Englishman in all but the ease, elegance and deference of his manners’.11 Having discouraged the match, the Regent had learned with annoyance that his brother, the Duke of Kent, was promoting it and allowing correspondence between the young couple to pass through his hands.
Princess Charlotte herself had not at first been much taken with her suitor, ‘Prince Humbug’. If she were to marry him, she had said, it would be ‘with the most calm and perfect indifference’.12 But, as she had grown to know him better, she had fallen in love with him. He was, she decided, ‘the only being in the world who would have suited me and who could have made me happy and a good woman’.13 He, in turn, had been devoted to her; their short marriage spent mostly at Claremont Park, the handsome house built in 1771 for the first Lord Clive and bought for them on the outskirts of Esher, had been a very happy one, and Leopold had been distraught by her death, kneeling by her bed and kissing her lifeless hands for over an hour. He had not, however, been too upset to write to his sister at Amorbach, urging her to give an encouraging answer to the proposal of marriage which she had received from the Duke of Kent.
This proposal, conveyed precipitately in an extremely long letter soon after the Duke’s arrival at Amorbach, had not at first been favourably received. Although she was only thirty-one, Princess Victoire had been married before to the grumpy, gouty Prince of Leiningen and had two children by him, Prince Charles, who was eleven years old, and Princess Feodora, aged ten; she was concerned about these children’s future, about her son’s succession, as well as by warnings about the Duke from certain members of her late husband’s court. Besides, she had no wish to give up her independence, having been married at seventeen and not having enjoyed the experience much. But gradually the Dowager Princess was induced to change her mind. She spoke no English and was slow to learn it: later in England she was to have her speeches written out for her phonetically – ‘Ei hoeve tu regrétt, biing aes yiett so littl cônversent in thie Inglisch, lenguetsch, uitsch obleitshes miy tu seh, in averi fiu words, theat ei em möhst grêtful for yor congratuleschen’14 – but she was assured she would be well received in England where her brother, Prince Leopold, had made himself well liked since his wife’s death.
‘Look at her well, for she will be Queen of England.’
THE DUKE AND THE DOWAGER PRINCESS were married in the Schloss Ehrenburg, Coburg on the evening of 29 May 1818. The Princess’s mother, the Dowager Duchess of Coburg, led them to their bedroom where she saw them the next morning ‘sitting together in friendly intimacy’.1 Soon afterwards they left for their honeymoon at Claremont Park, which had been lent to them by Prince Leopold who continued to hold the house as tenant for life in addition to his enjoyment of the use of Marlborough House in London and the remarkably generous allowance of £50,000 which the Government provided for him.
The marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Kent continued, as it had begun, in harmony. The Duchess was rather stout and no great beauty, but she was warm-hearted and affectionate and, in need of guidance and self-assurance, was ready to depend upon her much older husband in a manner that appealed to him. To the letter which the Princess had written to the Duke accepting his proposal, he had replied that he was ‘nothing more than a soldier, 50 years old and after 32 years service not very fitted to captivate the heart of a young and charming Princess who is years younger’; but that he would care for her with tenderness and affection so that she might forget the difference in their ages. And so he did. ‘She is really happy and contented,’ the Dowager Duchess of Coburg wrote of her daughter in March the following year, ‘and Kent makes an excellent husband.’ ‘She quite adored him,’ his sister, Princess Augusta, confirmed, ‘and they were truly blessed in each other.’
The Duchess of Kent was by then pregnant and expecting her baby in May. Her husband was determined that the child should be born in England, so that there could be no possible grounds for denying its right to succeed to the throne; a fate which, so it was alleged, a gypsy in Gibraltar had predicted for it and of which the Duke himself protested to have no doubt, dismissing the possibility that, although the Duchess of Clarence’s two babies had died, there was no reason to suppose she might not yet give birth to a child who would be nearer to the succession than his own. ‘My brothers are not so strong as I am,’ the Duke declared. ‘I have led a regular life. I shall outlive them all. The crown will come to me and my children.’2
Yet for the moment he lacked the means to return with his wife to England for the birth. One of his friends, Joseph Hume, the radical politician, deepened his fear that the time might come when the child’s legitimacy might be ‘challenged, and challenged with effect, from the circumstance of the birth taking place on foreign soil.’3
In his dilemma the Duke turned to his brother, the Regent, for help. He had already been much disappointed when an ill-disposed House of Commons proved unwilling to increase the allowance paid to the royal dukes on their marriages in the manner they had hoped; a rebuff which the Duke of Wellington considered only too understandable. ‘By God,’ Wellington said, ‘there is a great deal to be said about that. They are the damnedest millstone about the necks of any Government. They have insulted – personally insulted – two thirds of the gentlemen of England, and how can it be wondered at that they take their revenge upon them when they get them in the House of Commons? It is their only opportunity and, I think, by God! they are quite right to use it.’4
The Duke of Kent, who was hoping for a grant of £25,000 a year and a capital sum of £12,000, dismissed his debts with the observation that ‘on the contrary the nation [was] greatly [his] debtor’; and he added in his characteristically long-winded approach to his brother that he would also need a yacht to cross the Channel, the loan of restored and redecorated apartments in Kensington Palace, the provision of meals for the Duchess and himself and their attendants on their arrival in England and, should their physician recommend sea bathing for the Duchess, the use of a house at Brighton or Weymouth.
These demands exasperated the Regent, who had never much cared for his brother and was much annoyed by his improbable friendships with such radicals as Joseph Hume and Robert Owen, the social reformer, and by his attendance at Noncomformist services. He instructed his Private Secretary, after a long delay, to turn down all the Duke’s requests, with the suggestion that it would be much more sensible for the child to be born on the Continent, thus both saving money and relieving Her Royal Highness, the Duchess, from ‘the dangers and fatigues of a long journey at [this] moment’.