Victoria in the Wings

The Momentous Year

IT HAD BEEN a momentous year. Napoleon had been sent into exile, his power broken. No longer could mothers quieten their children with the threat ‘Boney will get you!’ because Boney was an ineffectual exile whose grandiose dreams had been shown to be nothing more than such, and the smallest child knew it. He was a figure of ridicule, hatred or pity – one could decide according to one’s nature; but all agreed that there was nothing to fear from him. He had been beaten at Waterloo by the invincible Wellington and the bewhiskered Blücher, and Boney’s days of glory were over.

‘Boney was a warrior, Jean François,’ sang the children derisively.

England had never been so rich nor so powerful. Led by the exquisite taste of the Prince Regent the arts flourished; rarely in the history of the country had so much encouragement been given to creative genius. Nowhere in the world – now that French glory had departed – was there a mansion to compare with Carlton House; the Pavilion at Brighton, that oriental extravaganza, was unique though it might owe its conception to Chinese artists.

So much splendour; so much glory. There was no other country in the world so powerful; yet there were people not far from Carlton House, in the hovels of Seven Dials, dying of starvation; the national debt was overwhelming; the weavers of Manchester were in revolt against the installation of machinery and the hungry crowds marched to London, burning hay-ricks as they came, ominously singing the Marseillaise. Never far from the minds of every member of the royal family was the memory of the terrible fate which had befallen their cousins across the Channel: bestial violence, murder, the collapse of a régime and resulting chaos, the most bloody revolution the world had yet known.

The Duke of Clarence had said in one of his fatuous speeches that the people of Europe had a habit of cutting off the heads of their kings and queens and soon there would be many thrones without kings and kings without heads.

Clarence was the fool of the family. He had not been educated as well as his brothers because his father, determined to make a man of him and remove him from his brothers’ demoralizing influence, had sent him to sea when he was thirteen; and although a tutor had accompanied him, the Duke having no inclination for learning and circumstances being understandably not conducive to study, he had become a better sailor than a scholar.

The Prince Regent was dissatisfied with life. He longed for the one thing he lacked; the approbation of his subjects; but no matter what he did he could not win this. They hated him; his faults were exaggerated; his virtues minimized. Prince Charming of his youth had become Prince Ridiculous of his middle age.

Driving to open Parliament on a bitter January day his carriage had been surrounded by a hostile mob who had broken the windows; and someone had taken advantage of the tumult to fire a shot which missed him by an alarmingly few inches.

The Regent was not as physically brave as his father who had faced similar acts of lese-majesty with calm. ‘There is One who disposes of all things and in Him I trust’, George III had commented when a would-be assassin had fired a shot at his carriage; and picking the bullet from his sleeve where it had lodged he had handed it to Lord Onslow, who was sitting with him, and remarked: ‘My Lord, keep this as a memorandum of the civilities we have received this day.’ The Prince Regent lacked his father’s faith; and the only part he failed to act with conviction was that of the man indifferent to death. He was worried about his health; he was not ready to die; and, being more cultured than his father, an unwashed, illiterate, unreasonable mob filled him with greater distaste.

What have I done to make them dislike me so? he asked himself. I have done everything I could to make this country great. I would have stood beside Wellington if it had been permitted; but as this was not to be I have honoured Wellington and made him my friend. I have brought beauty and culture to this country; I have even given them an heir to the throne, though what this cost me they will never understand. And yet they hate me.

His brother Frederick, Duke of York and Commander-in-Chief of the Army, was not hated as he was, although he had given the royal family one of its biggest scandals when his mistress Mary Anne Clarke had been accused of selling commissions, and Frederick’s letters – banal, illspelt, revealing in the extreme – had been read in court. Frederick had necessarily been dismissed from his post in the Army, though he had regained it on his brother’s accession to the Regency. For a time Frederick had been the victim of lampoon writers and the cartoonists, but somehow he had crept back into a certain contemptuous favour.

Why can’t I do the same? wondered the Regent. He was cleverer than Frederick; he was the King in all but name; he had done his repulsive duty in marrying Caroline of Brunswick and had had a daughter by her. All this – and they showed no gratitude. They depicted him in their cartoons as twice the size he was; they wrote disgusting things about him; the writer Leigh Hunt had been fined and imprisoned for libelling him; they called him ‘fat’ – an adjective which made him shudder whenever he heard it; they exaggerated his extravagances; in fact they showed in a hundred ways that the most unpopular man in the kingdom was its ruler.

Often he remembered a long-ago conversation with Lord Malmesbury who had been his friend – although he would never forgive him for not warning him of the vulgarity of Caroline of Brunswick; for Malmesbury, as the King’s ambassador who had gone to Brunswick to make the arrangements for the marriage, had been fully aware of Caroline’s crudeness, her unsuitability and her lack of cleanliness. Whenever he thought of her his slightly retroussé nose which had been so charming in his youth twitched with disgust. If he could have married Maria Fitzherbert openly, all this would not have happened. He would have been a happy man, a monarch beloved of his people; and where could he have found a woman more worthy to be his queen than Maria?

So he remembered Malmesbury’s words when he was trying to persuade him not to commit himself with Maria. ‘You will never hold your subjects’ affections until you marry and have children. That is what they ask of you and that is what they expect.’

But life had been cruel.

The Regent believed that if he could rid himself of that woman, marry again – a woman of his choice this time – he would beget a male heir very quickly. That would be an end of his daughter Charlotte’s hopes of the crown which would please him. Charlotte was popular with the people who gave the impression that they were waiting impatiently for his departure, so that she might become their Queen. The English, it was said, preferred queens to kings. There was a superstition that the country prospered under them because it had under Elizabeth and Anne.

And now they were waiting for Charlotte to be their Queen, cheering her whenever she appeared, and she was well aware of this and did everything she could to encourage it. She was seen in public with her arm lovingly through that of her husband Leopold; the press wrote kindly of her; and now that she was awaiting her confinement at Claremont she was the idol of the public.

The Regent’s mother, Queen Charlotte, had said that the family was more in favour than it had been for a long time and this was entirely due to her granddaughter who was also her namesake. There was nothing the people liked better from their royal family than marriages, unless it was births – in moderation of course; her own happy events had been too frequent; fifteen was after all a large number of children to give to the nation, particularly when each must be endowed with titles and income. Two had died before needing these expensive necessities but thirteen was a goodly number – and seven of them sons!

Life was so perverse. The King and Queen had had fifteen children; and the Regent had but one – and that one a girl.

It was no wonder that all eyes were on Claremont, where the Princess Charlotte, heiress-presumptive to the throne of England, awaited the birth of her child.

And before the end of that memorable year the Princess was brought to bed of a still-born son.

So there was no child to be a future king or queen of England. More calamitous, shortly after the birth, Charlotte herself, only young heiress to the throne, was dead.

It seemed as though the House of Hanover would be extinct if speedy action was not taken.

There must be an heir. The ageing sons of the King – himself living in the retirement his mental aberrations made necessary – must marry without delay.