Queen Victoria: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘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’. If the Duke was still bent upon returning, and succeeded in raising the money to do so, he could ‘not expect to meet with a cordial reception’.⁵

      Momentarily downcast, the Duke soon recovered his spirits and set about raising the money elsewhere. By the end of March, with the help of the Duke of Cambridge and of various friends, including Lord Dundas, Earl Fitzwilliam, Lord Darnley and Alderman Matthew Wood (a chemist and hop merchant in a thriving way of business who was an extreme radical Member for the City of London), he had managed to collect over £15,000; and so, on the twenty-eighth of the month, the Duke’s party set off from Amorbach for Calais, with several pet dogs and songbirds, in a strange, unwieldy caravan of carriages. The Duke and Duchess led the way in a phaeton, the Duke himself driving to save the cost of a coachman. They were followed by the Duke’s barouche, containing the Duchess’s lady-in-waiting, Baroness Späth, and Frau Siebold, a skilled obstetrician who had qualified as a surgeon at the University of Göttingen. Then, trundling after them, came a spare, unoccupied post-chaise, followed by a second post-chaise containing the Duchess’s daughter, Princess Feodora, her governess and the English maidservants. Following these were a cabriolet with two cooks, a caravan with an English manservant looking after the royal plate, a second phaeton, two gigs (one containing the Duke’s valet, Mathieu, and the Duchess’s footman; the other, two clerks), and lastly a curricle with the Duke’s personal physician, Dr Wilson.

      The weather was fine, the pace slow but steady, and the inns at which the cavalcade stopped were not intolerably uncomfortable. The travellers passed through Cologne on 5 April and a fortnight later they reached Calais where, the Regent having relented, a yacht was waiting for them to take them across the Channel. After a few days’ delay at Calais caused by unfavourable winds, they sailed on the 24th for Dover and were soon installed at Kensington Palace where, after a labour lasting just over six hours, at a quarter past four in the cold morning of 24 May 1819, a baby girl was born. She was ‘as plump as a partridge’,⁶ and ‘a model of strength and beauty combined’, so her grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Coburg, was informed by the Duke, who had remained with his wife throughout her labour. ‘The dear mother and child are doing marvellously well…It is absolutely impossible for me to do justice to the patience and sweetness with which [the mother] behaved.’⁷

      ‘My God, how glad I am to hear of you,’ the Dowager Duchess responded in a letter to her daughter. ‘I cannot find words to express my delight that everything went so smoothly…I cannot write much…dear mouse…for I am much too happy.’ She hoped the mother was not disappointed that the baby was a girl: ‘The English,’ she said, ‘like Queens.’⁸ As for the child’s father, he was to show her proudly to his friends, telling them to ‘look at her well, for she will be Queen of England’.⁹

      The Duke’s excitement at the arrival of his little ‘pocket Hercules’ at Kensington was not shared by the rest of the family. According to Prince Leopold, the Prince Regent did not trouble to disguise his hope that his brother would soon clear off to Germany again, taking his wife and child with him. Certainly the Regent’s behaviour at the baby’s christening was far from fraternal. He announced that the ceremony must be a strictly private occasion and that it should take place on 24 June at three o’clock in the afternoon. The godparents were to be himself, Tsar Alexander, the child’s grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Coburg, and the baby’s aunt Charlotte, her father’s sister, widow of the King of Württemberg. None of these, apart from the Regent, was to be present and so they were represented by the Duke of York, and two others of the baby’s aunts, the unmarried Princess Augusta and Mary, Duchess of Gloucester. The only other persons to attend, apart from the parents, were the Duke of Kent’s cousin, the Duke of Gloucester, the Duchess of York and Prince Leopold.

      As a matter of form, the parents sent a list of names proposed for the child to the Prince Regent – Victoire (her mother’s name), Georgiana (in deference to the Regent), Alexandrina (in deference to the Tsar), and Charlotte and Augusta (the names of her aunts). Nothing was heard from the Regent until the day before the christening when he wrote to say that he could not allow the name of Georgiana to be used as he did not choose to place his name before the Tsar’s, ‘and he could not allow it to follow’.¹⁰ He would indicate the other names at the ceremony, disapproving of Charlotte, the name of his dead daughter, and of Augusta as being too majestic.

      The ceremony took place in the Cupola Room at Kensington Palace, the walls of which had been draped with crimson velvet for the occasion. In the room stood a splendid silver gilt font which had been ordered by Charles II and first used in 1688 for the christening of his nephew – Prince James Francis Edward СКАЧАТЬ