BY 1819, THE DUKE OF KENT WAS 50. Determined to marry and beget an heir, the previous year he’d discarded his long-term French mistress, Madame St Laurent – giving her a pension for going without making a fuss – and set about finding a wife. As a son of King George III, he knew that his marriage to Victoire of Saxe-Coburg was far from ideal. She was considerably inferior in royal dynastic terms and was a widow with two children. But the Duke needed to legitimise his claim to the throne in the eyes of the public by marrying and becoming a respectable family man.
Announcement of the Royal birth in The London Gazette.
Despite the draining 427-mile journey from the Continent, at 4.15 a.m. on 24 May, the Duchess of Kent, who seemed to have suffered no adverse effects, gave birth to a pretty, fair and fat baby girl. She was very like her father, having the unmistakably large blue eyes of the Hanoverians. The birth prompted the entire British nation to heave a sigh of relief, for it came during one of the old King George III’s bouts of madness and the Regency of his eldest, unpopular son George.
‘Fair and fat’ – baby Victoria.
Script quote:
Duchess of Kent:
Driving in a coach from Amorbach, across France, so that you could be born in England – I was so worried that you would come early and your wicked uncles would say you were not English.
THE DUCHESS OF KENT HAD RESISTED the services of a male physician to deliver her child and had instead brought with her the family’s own German obstetrician, Marianne Siebold – one of the first women in Europe to obtain a medical degree. Siebold announced the birth to the dignitaries who had gathered in an ante-room to bear witness to the legitimacy of the birth, among them the Duke of Wellington. ‘Boy or girl?’ he asked her.
‘Girl,’ answered the doctor, then added in her thick German accent, ‘Ver nice beebee. No big, but full. You know, leetle bone, moosh fat.’
Just three months later, Marianne Siebold would deliver another baby, at the Castle Rosenau near Coburg – the son of the Duchess of Kent’s brother, Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg, and a cousin to the little Princess. From the outset, the grandmother of the two infants, the dowager Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, was determined that her dear grandson Albert and her adored new granddaughter should one day marry. From her home in Ebersdorf she wrote adoringly of little baby Albert. ‘What a charming pendant he would be to the pretty cousin,’ she remarked, setting the matchmaking wheels in motion.
Young Prince Albert, Victoria’s cousin and young suitor.
Feature:
PRINCESS CHARLOTTE
‘She might have been saved if she had not been so much weakened’
– Victoria –
CHARLOTTE (BORN 1796), only child of George, Prince Regent by his wife Caroline of Brunswick, was until her death George III’s only legitimate grandchild. Warm-hearted and engagingly impulsive, she was under pressure to secure an advantageous dynastic union through marriage to Prince William of Orange. She was desperate to find an alternative, and after meeting Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, pleaded with her father to be allowed to marry him instead. Alexander I of Russia saved the situation by offering his sister Anna to the Prince of Orange, and the Prince Regent allowed Charlotte and Leopold to be married in 1816. It seemed a happy union and was popular with the British public, who were overjoyed at the news of their much-loved princess’s pregnancy in 1817.
Charlotte, though robust and healthy, was put on a strict diet and bled mercilessly during pregnancy. After an agonising, protracted two days of labour, made worse by incompetent doctors, on 5 November 1817 she gave birth to a stillborn son but shortly afterwards suffered a haemorrhage, and died of shock and exhaustion. Her death provoked unprecedented public grief: regarded as a national disaster, the simultaneous deaths of two heirs to the British throne presented a potential crisis in the monarchy. There was now a race to see who, among George III’s surviving sons, could produce a legitimate heir to replace Charlotte. Adelaide, wife of the Duke of Clarence (the future William IV), hoped to give birth to an heir, but between 1819 and 1822 lost all four of her babies.
Having lost his wife and child, Leopold made it his life’s mission to prepare Victoria for the throne that Charlotte should have occupied.
VICTORIA’S DELIGHTED FATHER PRONOUNCED his new baby daughter ‘as plump as a partridge’ and was ridiculously proud and protective of her.
‘Don’t drop her! Don’t drop her! You might spoil a queen!’ he had told the Bishop of Salisbury when he visited soon after and took the baby awkwardly in his arms. Mindful of his daughter’s royal prospects, the Duke announced that he wished her to be named Elizabeth after the great Tudor monarch, but at her christening the Prince Regent instead chose the name Alexandrina, after the baby’s godparent Tsar Alexander I of Russia, who had recently been Britain’s ally in the war against Napoleon. Then, after some prevarication, and with everyone gathered expectantly around the font, he allowed a second name, Victoire, after her mother. Fondly nicknamed Mai-blühme, or May Blossom, by her German mother and grandmother throughout her early childhood, the princess who would become Queen in 1837 was generally known as Drina.
The first happy months of Drina’s life were, however, brought to a sudden end when, in January 1820 while staying by the sea at Sidmouth in Devon, her father caught a chill and died of pneumonia. His last words were to beg God to protect his wife and child.
Although she would never have more than the most distant recall of her father, Victoria later remarked, ‘I was always taught to consider myself a soldier’s child.’ She nursed a somewhat rosy view of her father’s long and not altogether distinguished military career, which was to give her a lifelong admiration for the army. But she missed his presence and throughout her life, as if to compensate, she would latch on to a succession of strong father figures.
Six days after the Duke’s death, his father King George III also died. In less than a week little baby Drina was propelled a great deal closer to the throne.
The Duke of Kent, Victoria’s father and fourth son of George III.
Kensington Palace, Victoria’s childhood home.
Feature:
KENSINGTON PALACE
‘My dear old home’
– Victoria –
THE ORIGINAL KENSINGTON PALACE, built on the western edge of Hyde Park in 1661, was a red-brick Jacobean mansion situated in what was then a beautiful, tranquil park of chestnut and beech trees. It was bought by the royal family in