I, Victoria Read online

  It was a blissfully happy marriage, but tragically short. Eighteen months later the handsome, intelligent, deeply beloved Heiress of England died, on the 6th of November 1817, after labouring for two days to deliver herself of a large, perfect, but dead baby boy. What her sufferings were every mother can imagine, and no man can know; there must have been some mismanagement in the case, for the doctor who had attended her took his own life three months later. England’s grief was overwhelming. Even the Duke (I mean Wellington, of course – such was his pre-eminence at any time after Waterloo that he was always simply referred to as the Duke, tout court and without qualification) said, ‘Her death is one of the most serious misfortunes the country ever met with’; and he was notoriously unsentimental.

  The fact was that quite apart from her personal qualities, which made her beloved of all who met her, her dynastic importance was unparalleled. England had just emerged, weary and bankrupt, from twenty-two years of European War, to face unemployment, soaring prices, a failed harvest, and the rumblings of revolution amongst the poor. Stability, strong leadership and a popular monarchy were what was needed; but Princess Charlotte was the only legitimate grandchild of the King, the sole heiress to the kingdom, and her loss created a situation of the utmost gravity and uncertainty.

  2nd February 1900

  AT DINNER Sir John McNeill said that he believed the situation in Ladysmith to be hopeless, that they cannot break out and must be overrun by the Boers at last. I was obliged to tell him pretty sharply that I do not like such despondent talk: no-one in this house is downhearted. Dear old General White reports from inside Ladysmith (by heliograph – such a boon!) that they are now reduced to eating their horses (which information is not going to be allowed into the newspapers!). But even so, if they have sufficient ammunition they may hold out for six weeks more. I am disgusted with the Government, they are all delay and bungling; though I don’t at all blame Salisbury, whose hands are pretty well tied. But the rest of them care for nothing but votes, and won’t take my advice or the advice of experts about the Army, and civilians cannot understand military matters. I am furious with the Press, too, who are being very disloyal and unhelpful. I have felt obliged to ban the Morning Post from the house altogether – though I fear there may still be a secret copy smuggled into the equerries’ room, for they all seem to regard it as the oracle. The worst thing is having no reliable news. It is like the Crimean War all over again – one would hardly think half a century had gone by!

  I wrote myself into sleepiness last night, so the ‘medicine’ seems to work! I shall resume now where I left off, and hope that writing can keep my thoughts away from this wretched war.

  I was writing about the death of Princess Charlotte. I never knew her, for she died before I was born – indeed, had she not died, I would not have been born at all. Perhaps for that reason I have always felt strangely attached to her, as if there were some essential connection between us. It may well be that I heard Uncle Leopold and Mamma talking about her when I was a child. Uncle Leopold had adored his young wife. He was with her all through that dreadful labour (just as Albert stayed with me through each of mine – they made tender husbands, those Coburg men!). He held her hand, whispering words of comfort, sometimes lying down on the bed with her; and when she died his heart broke. Now I wonder, was it from him that I learned so early to be afraid of childbirth? Always, even before I could really know the significance of it, I feared that dark side to married life with a deep and instinctive dread. Were there whispered conversations, perhaps, when they thought I was not listening, or too young to understand? Did their words slip into my mind like carelessly dropped seed, and take root? Children do absorb all sorts of things one is not aware of, sometimes remembering them only years later when they have grown old enough to understand ideas that they acquired merely as meaningless sounds.

  Princess Charlotte lives in the back of my mind, like the memory of an older sister, loved in childhood, and lost untimely. There were similarities between us: both of us Hanoverians, both heirs to the Throne of England, both expected to make good the damage done to monarchy’s reputation by our uncles; and we both married Coburg princes, whom we adored. It was almost as if the accident of her death had not been intended by God, so that He had been forced to begin again with me. If that was so, I need never have feared to suffer her fate: mine was her life fulfilled. Is that being too fanciful? I can’t be sure. It is a fanciful time of night, and lamplight always leaves shadows in the corners of rooms, like a speaker’s unexplained hesitations which hint at unrevealed truths. I don’t think it is fanciful to assert that God has a purpose in everything, and that He had to go to a great deal of trouble to bring me to the Throne of England, none of which would have been necessary if Charlotte and her infant son had not died.

  How did it come about, then, that she was the sole heiress? It was not my grandfather’s fault. King George III had done his duty amply by the royal nurseries: fifteen children he had fathered, of whom twelve were still living in 1817. (Fifteen! When I think of my poor grandmother, my heart aches for her! She must have had the constitution of an ox, for she lived into her seventies even so.) But among his daughters, the three who were married were all childless and the two unmarried ones were over forty. As for his seven sons – Papa and my Wicked Uncles – well, the Duke once said they were the veriest millstone ever to hang about the neck of a government, with their extravagance, their political wranglings, and above all their irregular private lives!

  It was the fault, according to Lord Melbourne, of the Royal Marriages Act, which said that any marriage contracted without the King’s consent was invalid. The intention of the Act was to keep the royal line free from unsuitable blood, by preventing the princes from being trapped into marriage by wily adventuresses, or scheming mammas; but in reality its effect was to allow the princes to behave as badly as possible by all manner of young women, without ever having to face the consequences.

  ‘I don’t wonder they ran a little wild,’ Lord M. told me. ‘There they were, princes, all very handsome men, and the women would hang upon their necks, you know –’ (with that little nod of his, as if, indeed, I did know – entrancing suggestion to a girl barely out of the schoolroom!). ‘The Marriage Act may have been a good thing in many ways,’ he went on, ‘but still it sent them out like so many wild beasts into society. In general it is a check on a man, that if he feels too much about a girl he must marry her; but they were, as it were, quite untouchable. They made love where they would, and then said oh, they were very sorry, they couldn’t marry.’ His droll look as he imitated an apologetic prince in that situation made me laugh very much.

  In fact, four of my uncles were married; but the Prince Regent, father of poor dead Charlotte, hated his wife (the strange, unwashed, pipe-smoking Caroline of Brunswick) and had been separated from her for years. He had actually tried to divorce her, but Parliament still remembered the embarrassing saga of Henry VIII’s children and did not want to go through all that again; so he could not remarry, and he would certainly never breed from Caroline again. Uncle York, the second son, had married a perfectly respectable Prussian princess, but they were childless and she was past childbearing now. She had become very eccentric, lived alone in the country surrounded by hundreds of pet animals and birds and, they said, never went to bed; but Uncle York was fond of her, and would not think of divorcing her.

  Wicked, violent-tempered Uncle Cumberland, the fifth son, had married a twice-widowed woman who was rumoured to have murdered her previous spouses and was – fortunately perhaps! – so far childless. Uncle Sussex, the sixth son, had actually married twice, and even had children by his first wife, but as he had done it both times without the King’s permission, neither marriage counted and the children could not succeed.

  So that left the three unmarried princes. There was my uncle William of Clarence, the third son, who had served in the Navy and was Nelson’s friend, and had lived comfortably in extremely domestic sin
for twenty years with an actress, Mrs Jordan, and their ten lusty bastard children, my Fitzclarence cousins. There was my uncle Adolphus of Cambridge, the youngest son, who had lived mostly in Hanover to avoid running up debts; and there was Papa, the Duke of Kent, driven by debt to live in Belgium (horrid fate for any man of taste and intelligence!) with his fond and faithful Madame Julie.

  Poor Julie’s fortunes, however, were already on the wane. Papa hated living in Brussels so much that he had been driven to contemplate a desperate expedient. He could not go home without clearing his debts, and the only possible way left open to him to acquire money was to marry. If he married in accordance with the Royal Marriages Act, Parliament would be forced to increase his allowance, and perhaps give him a capital sum to discharge his debts as well. My uncle York had been given £25,000 on his marriage; surely, Papa reasoned, they could not give him less than that? So without mentioning it to Julie, he began discreetly to look about him for a wife.

  At that time, in 1817, he was still in regular communication with Princess Charlotte, and he confided his problem to her. Since her marriage, Charlotte had struck up an affectionate correspondence with her husband’s sister, the widowed Princess Victoire of Leiningen, who lived in seclusion at Amorbach with her two children, Charles and Feodore. The princess was thirty, said to be pretty, with fine dark eyes and a fresh complexion, and Charlotte assured Papa that she was warm-hearted, honest, affectionate, and of a generous and unselfish nature. What could Papa want more? Armed with a letter of introduction from Charlotte, he travelled to Amorbach in August 1817 (while the unsuspecting Julie was visiting her sister in Paris), met the Dowager Princess, found her charming, proposed – and was refused. Disappointed, he returned to Brussels and his companion and resumed his futile life. Princess Charlotte was with child; the odds at that time must have been heavily against my ever being born, let alone coming to the Throne.

  But three months later Charlotte and her child died, and the constitutional crisis filled all the newspapers. Either Papa, or Uncle Clarence, or Uncle Cambridge must now marry and get an heir: it was not a matter of expedience any more, but of duty. Poor Julie, all unknowing, opened the London paper one Sunday morning and read an editorial urging the three Dukes to marry, and fainted dead away beside the breakfast-table. Papa tried to comfort her, and – being so very fond of her – put off pressing his suit at Amorbach; but when he learned that Uncle Cambridge had already been accepted by Princess Augusta of Hesse-Cassel and was thus a good length in front in what the newspapers called ‘The Succession Stakes’, he dared not delay any further. He wrote again to Amorbach pressing for an immediate answer. This time it was favourable. (Grandmamma Coburg once told me, with her usual frankness, that the case was very different on this second application: before, Papa had been only a balding, penniless, middle-aged duke deep in debt; now he, or at least his son, might be King of England one day. But they were her words, not Mamma’s.)

  Lord Melbourne told me that Papa was very sorry indeed when he was obliged to put Madame Julie away. ‘But it couldn’t be helped, you know.’ I was glad to hear from Lord M. that Papa behaved very properly by her, providing for her retirement to Paris as generously as he was able, treating her with tact and affection, and continuing to oversee her welfare until his death. ‘But in any case, royal mistresses know what they are going in for,’ Lord M. said. ‘They begin with their eyes open.’ I suppose that is true.

  So Papa and Mamma were married by the Lutheran rite at Amorbach on the 29th of May 1818, and then Papa brought Mamma home to England for a second ceremony. It was a double wedding at Kew Palace in the presence of my grandmother (my poor grandfather, of course, was hopelessly mad by then, and was kept shut up at Windsor). The other couple were Uncle Clarence and the Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen – my dear, dearest aunt Adelaide, who was so fond of me, and was as kind to me in my childhood as a Certain Person would allow her to be. The Prince Regent gave the brides away and provided the wedding breakfast at Carlton House, which, considering how much he hated Papa, was probably the most that could be expected.

  After a short honeymoon at Uncle Leopold’s house at Claremont, Mamma and Papa returned to his apartment at Kensington Palace and waited for Parliament to announce the increased pension. It was a deep disappointment. Instead of the £25,000 a year he had hoped for, he was awarded only £6,000, and no capital sum at all. Marrying Mamma had already increased his debts: she was extravagant, and he was generous and fond, and he had spent heavily on hats and gowns, jewellery, horses, perfume, and a pianoforte for his charming new duchess. Creditors began pressing, the Prince Regent was hostile, and my grandmother, perhaps fearing Papa might try to borrow from her, suggested firmly that it would be better for him to leave the country. There seemed no alternative, and so in September, much against his will, he took Mamma back to Amorbach.

  4th February 1900

  WHEN I was grown up and had children of my own, Mamma and I became friends again, and we spent a great deal of time together, talking fondly and without reserve, enjoying the relationship we should have had earlier, if it had not been for a Certain Person. And in those warm, lovely years, she told me about Papa, and her marriage to him, and how I came to be born. I can hear her voice now, if I close my eyes, very German even after thirty-five years in England, interspersed with ‘Zo,’ a sort of articulated sigh, which did service as punctuation, underlining, and a requisition for missing vocabulary. She had always been plump, and in her autumn years she spread comfortably into a grandmotherly shape; but her little beringed fingers never lost their nimbleness, her sweet, good-natured face remained as smooth as an apple and her eyes were as dark and bright as ever. She had always loved hats – all her early portraits show her dark-eyed and smiling under a wide brim and long, drooping feathers – and in old age she transferred the love to her caps, which were always gorgeous confections of lace and knots and ribbons. ‘One wants to eat them,’ Vicky once said, and I knew just what she meant.

  Mamma’s first marriage had been unhappy. The Prince of Leiningen was a great deal older than her, a cold, harsh man who had no interest in her beyond the getting of an heir. He had lived in one palace deep in the heart of the forest where he spent his days hunting, while his young wife lived all alone with the children in another, with nothing to do and no-one to talk to, and without even any control over her own household, for the Prince handled everything, down to the choosing of the servants.

  From this isolation, she was rescued by Papa. ‘I liked him at once,’ Mamma told me. ‘How could I not? He was so charming, and he talked! Such a beautiful, musical voice, and he had a way of choosing exactly the right subject to interest each person. Oh, I could have chatted to him all day long! After such silences, my Victoria, you can’t think how comfortable it was!’

  She had no English and he had no German, so they spoke in French, in which Papa was fluent – not only in the formal language, but in the things one might say to a lady. (No love is ever wasted, you see: twenty-seven years with poor Madame Julie had given him the skills to make Princess Victoire happy.) ‘When he spoke French,’ Mamma told me, ‘it was like singing.’ Papa had a good singing-voice too; they shared a love of music, and of riding. His formal proposal to her, after only two days of acquaintance, was like a poem. She was so charming, he wrote, and her manners and accomplishments were so exactly to his taste, that he would count it the greatest good fortune if she would accept his hand. They would spend the winters in Brussels, where he had an excellent house, the summers in Amorbach, and pay short visits to England; and in each other’s company, with good music and good horses, no day would ever be too long. Finally he assured her that if he should have the happiness of possessing her, he would cherish her dear children as his own.

  ‘How could you refuse?’ I asked her in astonishment. She put her hands to her face. ‘Ach, I was a villain! How could I indeed? But you know, my first husband was so unkind, and I hardly knew Papa then; and I would have lost my pensio
n, which was £5,000 a year of my very own, and Papa had nothing. But love will out, you know. It was meant to be.’

  ‘Were you happy together?’ I asked, not doubting it, but wanting to be told.

  ‘Oh, so happy! He was so very kind, and not at all the sort of husband men usually are. He was a companion to me, you see, not holding himself aloof, but always interested in what I did and said, and how I felt, and whether I was happy. From the day we were married until the day he died we were never parted, and there was never a cross word between us. I adored him, and I felt I was so lucky to win a man so clever and wise, who had seen so much of the world, who could manage things so cleverly; but he said he was the lucky one, being nothing but an old soldier, and most unfit to win the heart of a beautiful young princess nineteen years his junior.’ She drew out her handkerchief and touched away a tear from the corner of her eye, and added earnestly, ‘But I never felt the difference in our ages, you know – except that he took care of me, took all the decisions, and made me feel so safe!’

  So as Duke and Duchess of Kent they arrived back at Amorbach in October 1818. Charles was away at school in Switzerland, but Feo was at home, and Papa soon won her heart too. ‘He was always good with young people,’ Mamma said. ‘It was so pretty to see them together. Feo adored him.’

  And their happiness was crowned in November, when Mamma knew for sure that she was with child. ‘So soon,’ she said to me, with a nod and a blush, and I understood what she meant: that Papa was her lover as well as her husband – anyone who has known the blessing of that will understand the distinction. Some of the tenderness between them is revealed in a letter she showed me, that he wrote to her on New Year’s Eve, 1818. I have it still, and treasure it; some phrases I know by heart now, after reading it so often.