Queen Victoria: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

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       1 THE FAMILY

      ‘God damme! D’ye know what his sisters call him? By God! They call him Joseph Surface!’

      SITTING AT HIS BREAKFAST TABLE in his rented house in Brussels in December 1817, Edward, Duke of Kent, fourth son of King George III, carelessly threw across the Morning Chronicle to his attractive mistress, Julie de St Laurent, and began to open his letters. ‘I had not done so but a very short time,’ he told Thomas Creevey, the witty, gossipy politician who was then also living in Brussels for reasons of economy, ‘when my attention was called to an extraordinary noise and a strong convulsive movement in Madame St Laurent’s throat. For a short time I entertained serious apprehensions for her safety; and when, upon her recovery, I enquired into the occasion of this attack, she pointed to [an] article in the Morning Chronicle.’¹

      This article – adverting to the death in childbirth of Princess Charlotte, the only legitimate child of his eldest brother, the Prince Regent – called upon the Duke of Kent and the other bachelor royal dukes to marry for the sake of the family succession. For, although it was later calculated that King George III had no fewer than fifty-six grandchildren, at this time not one of these grandchildren was legitimate.

      The Prince Regent, who was to become King George IV on his father’s death in 1820, was now fifty-five years old, separated from a detested wife and living languorously in sumptuous grandeur at Carlton House in London and the exotic Marine Pavilion at Brighton. The King’s second son, the 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 СКАЧАТЬ