The January of 1820, in the Devon seaside resort of Sidmouth, was colder than anyone expected. England’s average temperature that month was 0.3 degrees below freezing. Ice floes were spotted in the Humber estuary, and Poole Harbour was frozen.1 At Windsor Castle, George III, dying at long last, ‘suddenly drew himself up in his bedclothes’, and, quoting King Lear, said, ‘Tom’s a cold.’2
The cold was particularly unwelcome to the genteel visitors who’d been drawn to the seaside resort of Sidmouth, Devon, in the hope of a mild West Country winter. Here the January sun usually shines through the spray of waves crashing onto the muddy red cliffs, or else upon Sidmouth’s shingle beach. You come upon this beach unexpectedly, just a few steps from the main marketplace, almost as if the town did not realise that the sea was so close. In 1820, the beach was the destination of the donkey rides of a visiting family of a boy and two girls. They were the children of a literary lady, a friend of the novelist Frances Burney named Althea Allingham.
The hottest Sidmouth town gossip that winter was all about the Duke and Duchess of Kent’s decision to bring the Princess Victoria down to Devon for a winter holiday. ‘Little Sidmouth was elated with the honour’ of hosting the princess, Althea observed. Her own little daughters were ‘full of eager anxiety to see the baby Princess, who might perhaps one day be Queen of England’. 3
Their wish was quickly fulfilled, as the royal baby soon became part of Sidmouth life. The Allingham girls would watch at the gate of Edward and Victoire’s rented temporary home, Woolbrook Cottage, waiting for the eight-month-old baby’s nurse to bring her out for an airing. When the infant appeared, Althea was likewise fascinated. She described the princess as a ‘very fair and lovely baby’ with her large blue eyes and her mouth with its ‘sweet but firm expression’.
On one day of bright sunshine, the Allingham family ran into the Kent family, who were out together in search of ‘interesting maritime plants’ on the ‘sand at ebb tide’.4 It was a charming picture, Edward and Victoire ‘linked arm-in-arm’, while the baby, in her ‘white swan’s-down hood and pelisse’, reached out for her father. Alethea, who never neglected an opportunity for sentimentality, later recalled the smile on Victoria’s ‘rosy face’ and Edward’s ‘delighted out-stretched arms’. The Allinghams asked permission, which was granted, for all three of their children to give the princess a kiss. (No wonder, with all this indiscriminate smooching with strangers, that Victoria was soon discovered to have caught a cold.)
The adults talked about the weather, Edward disagreeing with the general view that Sidmouth’s climate was unusually healthy. ‘Yes, yes,’ he had said, in response to the Allinghams’ enthusiasm for Devon, ‘but for all that there is a treacherous wind from inland; it is blowing to-day.’ Approving of this genteel family met by chance, Edward invited them to visit Woolbrook Cottage.
A few days later, therefore, Althea Allingham and her army-colonel husband received a card suggesting a six o’clock dinner. They were in the very act of climbing into their carriage to drive to Woolbrook Cottage ‘when a groom wearing the Duke’s livery rode up, bearing a second card’. It said that dinner was cancelled because Edward was ill. ‘Little did we, or anyone suppose,’ Althea recalls, ‘that this announcement [of his sickness] was the first note of warning as to what was to come.’5
By 23 January, two weeks later, Edward was struggling for his life. Woolbrook Cottage was an incongruous setting for a combat with death. It was that Regency dream, a cottage orné, a decorative kind of cottage where aristocrats played at living a simple country life. Before it took on its name of Woolbrook Cottage, it was known as ‘King’s Cottage’, not for any royal reason but because it had been a Mr King of Bath who had transformed it from an old farm into a Gothic villa with castellations in the 1770s. Grander than its name suggests, Woolbrook Cottage was really a substantial holiday home for members of the gentry.
The cottage still exists today, a white-rendered, compact mini-castle at the head of a little valley running down to the beach. Of three storeys, the building in 1820 was ‘covered with climbing plants’ to cast summertime shade over its whimsical curved verandah.6 The valley’s western wall sweeps up to meet the second storey of the house, meaning that you can see the sea through the first-floor windows of the drawing room, but also step out eastwards through French windows onto the verandah ‘entwined with honeysuckle and roses’, and thence onto the sloping lawn.7
This large, oval-shaped drawing room was the prettiest room in the house, with a carpet patterned with rose wreaths.8 That January of 1820, though, the roses and honeysuckle were little in evidence, and the cottage was musty and distinctly chilly. Victoire in a candid moment described it as a ‘wretched little house, so cramped in space and so impossible to keep warm’.9 However hard her servants tried, the fireplaces simply could not heat the flimsy building. Half castle, half villa, the cottage was slightly gimcrack in construction, and even today draughts whistle violently through the pretty but impractical pointed panes of its Gothic windows.
Edward’s brothers wondered how ‘he could think during such a dreadful cold season of leaving his comfortable apartments at Kensington’.10 But he didn’t mind the cold. He was hearty and hale. ‘My brothers are not so strong as I am,’ he would declare. ‘I have led a regular life, I shall outlive them all; the crown will come to me and my children.’11
Edward’s ‘regular’ life was in fact something of a trial to his household. He kept the hours of a clockwork machine. The pernickety side of his personality comes over in his super-neat, slanting handwritten letters, issuing a multitude of instructions that one thing must be done ‘in the strictest literal sense’ and ‘in the strictest conformity’ with another.12 One servant had to stay up all night, in order ‘to call him in the morning, not being allowed to go to bed until he had lit a fire in the dressing-room’. Then, at six, a second servant brought Edward’s cup of coffee, while a third removed the tray. One can see how his living expenses mounted up so quickly. He kept control of all these staff with a system of bells, a different chime sounding for each of the five he summoned most frequently. The system was considered so ingenious that it was adopted by the Treasury.13
Edward and Victoire had come to Sidmouth for the stated reason of its warm weather and its health-giving saltwater baths.14 In the summer, Sidmouth was a thriving resort, made popular by the ‘fashionable rage for bathing’, as one guidebook put it. It had just short of 3,000 inhabitants, but its population swelled seasonably: you might find an extra 300 visitors of good family in August.15 But Edward’s real reason for choosing Sidmouth was debt. He’d employed an Exeter solicitor to search out a suitable property that he could rent at a low price out of season.16
As well as being cold, Woolbrook Cottage was also too small to accommodate all the family’s servants, who had to be lodged elsewhere in the town. Sidmouth’s shopkeepers were delighted. In eighteen months of marriage, Edward had showered Victoire with gifts paid for with borrowed money: a piano, jewellery, millinery, muslin, perfume and lace.17 The local tradesmen now queued up to offer their services, and John Taylor, a Sidmouth shoemaker, was selected for the honour of making Victoria’s first pair of shoes. He ended up making three pairs, each four inches long: one for the baby to wear, one to keep for himself and a third that he gave to a potter in the town to be memorialised as ceramic copies for sale. In due course Queen Victoria would become the most merchandised monarch thus far in history, and the process had already begun.
Despite the cold, Edward believed that his daughter was doing well. She’d been weaned at six months. At eight months, she was already the size of a one-year-old, and had successfully sprouted two milk-teeth ‘without the slightest inconvenience’.18 ‘My little girl,’ Edward wrote, is ‘strong and healthy; too healthy, I fear, in the opinion of some members of my family, by whom she is regarded as an intruder.’19 He was hinting here at the resentful feelings that his younger brothers, losers of the Baby Race, were thought to harbour against her. If Victoria were to die, their own sons would move up the order of succession.
But Victoire was more familiar than Edward with the ways of children. Observing the little girl more closely, she found her daughter ‘restless’, and suffering from a sore throat. The baby was ‘beginning to show symptoms of wanting to get her own little way’.20 Victoire was finding her ‘pocket Hercules’ more challenging than her first two children. ‘I am over anxious,’ she confessed, ‘in a childish way with the little one, as if she were my first child … my dearest darling has torn me completely out of my normal way of life.’21 For her, Sidmouth was ‘a dreary time’.22
Then Victoire’s daughter Feodore, now twelve, also fell ill. But having both girls sick was only a prelude for what was to come. On 7 January, Edward had gone out walking in the rain with his friend and advisor John Conroy. Six feet tall like Edward himself, Conroy had been forced to leave the army after a ‘disagreement’ in 1816. He became his former commander’s ‘chief administrator’ instead.23 He was by now so deeply embedded into the Kents’ household that they could not imagine doing without him.
On returning from the wet walk, legend tells, Edward then failed to change his damp boots and stockings: ‘attracted by the smiles of his daughter, he unfortunately delayed until he was dressed for dinner.’24 Thus his love for his daughter, it’s suggested, caused his subsequent illness. It’s pleasing reasoning, but Edward himself had no time for the wet socks theory. He dated the decline in his health from his very arrival in the West Country. He thought that something in the water of Sidmouth had ‘begun to play the very deuce [with] his bowels’.25 No one yet understood about germs or viruses, and everyone thought that water or air were the means through which sickness travelled and entered the body. The true cause of Edward’s malady was the pneumonia virus, and the result was ‘acute inflammation of the lungs, which soon assumed an alarming aspect’.26
But Edward refused to take his ‘cold’ very seriously. Determined to ignore the fact that he was ill, he asked Captain Conroy to invite guests to a party.27 He even wanted to take a sea bath in ‘the terribly cold wind’, but his wife would not let him.28 He also refused the medicines of the local physician.29 These included the purgative calomel, highly dangerous because of its mercury content, mixed with ‘Dr James’s Powder for Fevers’, with its active ingredient of another poison, antimony.30 After a few days, though, Edward’s breathing difficulties forced him to take to his bed. On the Wednesday, 12 January, Victoire had his bed moved to a warmer room. On Saturday 15 January, the blistering began.
Now real anxiety entered the cottage, this ‘badly built house which is quite unfit for anyone who is ill’. ‘Oh!’ Victoire wrote, ‘I was in such desperate anxiety, in spite of the Doctor’s renewed assurances.’31 Feodore in later life remembered how her mother had barely coped. ‘I well remember the dreadful time at Sidmouth,’ she recalled. ‘I recollect praying on my knees.’32 The weather had turned truly nasty – ‘the cold is almost unbearable’ – and there were no trusted local doctors.
The painful process of blistering involved placing heated cups over slits cut in the patient’s skin, so that as they cooled down the air inside them contracted and sucked out the blood. In reality, draining Edward’s plasma made matters worse. In response to Conroy’s urgent messages to London, the late Queen Charlotte’s doctor, Dr William Maton, came down to Sidmouth. This was an unfortunate choice, as Maton could not speak French or German, and Victoire was still not fluent in English. She could not make him understand that she didn’t want her husband blistered or bled. ‘For four hours they must have tormented him,’ Victoire claimed. ‘It made me nearly sick.’33
On Wednesday 19 January, Dr Maton ordered six pints of blood to be removed from his patient, in two separate sessions. When Edward was told about the second session, he wept.
You can feel nothing but sympathy for Victoire, watching her husband being put through these barbarous treatments, while instinctively knowing that they were doing no good. She had to help him out of bed, and grew terribly frightened when he fainted and vomited. There was ‘hardly a spot on his dear body’, Victoire wrote on 20 January, left untouched ‘by cupping, blisters or bleeding’. ‘I cannot think it can be good for the patient to lose so much blood when he is already so weak,’ she continued, ‘he was terribly exhausted yesterday after all that had been done to him by those cruel doctors.’34
By Saturday 22 January, the crisis had drawn important people to Sidmouth, Victoire’s brother Leopold and his advisor Baron Stockmar. Stockmar, himself a trained doctor, felt Edward’s pulse and knew at once he could not survive: he ‘rattles in his throat and is despaired of’.35
Edward did rally briefly, during which time they tried to get him to sign his will. This document would leave Victoire in an unusual, indeed, a startling position. For her husband’s will left everything to her. In effect, this meant she’d get nothing, for, as one of his sisters sighed, ‘Edward had nothing in the World but debts.’36 But the will also left Victoire – a single woman – something intangible but vital: responsibility for bringing up and educating the heir to the throne. ‘I do nominate, constitute, and appoint my beloved wife, Victoire, duchess of Kent,’ he wrote, ‘to be sole guardian of our dear child, to all intents and for all purposes whatever.’37
This surprising development was partly to do with the distaste and disinterest of Edward’s elder brother, the Prince Regent, who was dealing with his own demons in this late stage of his life. The Regent did indeed write and request to be made his niece’s guardian in the event of Edward’s death, but the letter arrived too late. And it was also due to Victoire’s aggressive and pragmatic brother, whom she called ‘gut, gut, Leopold’. Present on the spot in Sidmouth, Leopold pressed the claims of his sister’s birth family, the Coburgs, at the expense of those of Edward’s family, the Hanoverians. Disappointed of the British throne himself, Leopold could still use his sister to exert his influence.
It was probably Baron Stockmar, as Leopold’s right-hand man, who drew up the will.38 Victoire worried that Edward wouldn’t have the strength to sign it, but then, having heard it read aloud twice, he gathered all his vitality. ‘With difficulty,’ Stockmar recalled later, ‘he wrote “Edward” below it, looked attentively at each separate letter, and asked if the signature was clear and legible. Then he sank back exhausted on the pillows.’39
This will would leave Victoire in a position that was stronger than she could ever have imagined. A monarch had a right, indeed a duty, to control the person and education of his heir. Just a couple of generations previously, George I had removed his granddaughters from the care of their parents after a disagreement. Victoire now had enormous responsibilities. She would have to find untold strength to deliver them, and no one had ever encouraged her to have much confidence in herself.
When the dark morning of Sunday 23 January finally dawned, Victoria’s father was very near death. An eyewitness who was standing ‘by the curtain of his bed’ in the last hours heard him say, ‘with deep emotion, “May the Almighty protect my wife and child, and forgive all the sins I have committed.”’ Edward’s last recorded words, addressed to Victoire, were ‘Do not forget me.’40 It was at ten o’clock ‘in the dim light of the January morning’ that ‘the tolling bell of the old parish church told a sorrow-stricken village that the Duke was dead’.41
His hand was still in hers. Victoire had given him all his medicine during his illness, and not changed her clothes for five days, nor slept for five nights except on a little couch at the end of his bed. She had ‘quite adored poor Edward’, wrote someone who knew them both, ‘they were truly blessed in each other.’42 ‘Our dear Mama,’ wrote her elder daughter Feodore, ‘was very deeply afflicted.’
For the sake of her baby, though, Victoire did her best not to give ‘way too much to her grief’.43 There was work to do. Edward’s spirit had left the cottage, but his body remained. It now had to be embalmed, and laid in state in the rose-wreathed drawing room. Local people trooped into the house to stare, passing between two men at the door each holding a black flag. Anyone well dressed was allowed to enter to pay their respects, and so many people turned up that a one-way system had to be instituted. ‘We all went,’ wrote a young lady from nearby Salcombe, to see the drawing room hung with black cloth, and lit only by candles ‘larger than any you ever saw and placed on very high candlesticks’.44 Trestles held an urn containing Edward’s heart and viscera as well as his huge coffin. Seven and a half feet long to accommodate his great height, it weighed more than a ton beneath its ‘rich velvet pall’.45
The lying-in-state continued for longer than anyone had expected, and it was two whole weeks later, on 7 February 1820, that a magnificent procession finally formed up to transport his remains to Windsor.46 The reason for the delay was that on 29 January, just a week after Edward, George III had finally passed away. This meant that within seven days, Victoria had taken two steps nearer to the throne. There were now just three lives – George IV, the Duke of Clarence and a late entry to the Baby Race in the form of the Duke of Clarence’s two-month-old baby – between it and her.
Edward’s will gave Victoire sole control over his daughter. But he also left her a more malign legacy. On his deathbed, he’d begged her not to forget him, and she certainly would not. Yet he’d also recommended she place her trust in his friend and servant, John Conroy. The black-haired, theatrical-looking ex-army captain would now find himself the devoted, trusted servant of the lonely, isolated duchess, with almost unlimited opportunities for power and self-advancement.
Conroy could be of immediate use to Victoire at this ‘critical time of her life’, and raised a new loan for her at Coutts bank.47 He had wonderful ‘activity and capability’, she thought, while ‘good Leopold is rather slow in the uptake and in making decisions’.48 She had no cash, and wasn’t even certain that the Prince Regent, who was in fact now the brand-new King George IV, would even let her return to Kensington Palace. Conroy and Leopold escorted her back to London in ‘bitter cold and damp weather’, looking ‘very sharp after the poor little baby’.49
Within eighteen months, Victoire had lost her placid life in Amorbach, her husband and all prospect of security in this foreign land of England. ‘My poor head is so confused, I can hardly think,’ she admitted, finding comfort only in ‘dear, sweet little Vickelchen’.50
But Edward had also bequeathed his family something more significant than debts and the service of the dubious Captain Conroy. Despite his frustrating, wasted life spent largely in exile, Julie had shown Edward what a functioning romantic relationship looked like, and he had put it into practice with Victoire. Under his lasting influence, Victoire would now fight like a lion to remain close to her daughter, even if the effort was fraught with danger. She could have retired to Amorbach, as the British establishment now wished that she would. She could have left her baby to be brought up by the grudging George IV. And yet she would stay, standing ‘alone, almost friendless and unknown’ in this country where she ‘could not even speak the language’.51
Victoria, then, would grow up surrounded by people with strong passions, for her, and for her future. From them she would gain a lesson that was doubly hard for a king or queen to learn: how to create a family, and how to love. This lucky chance would ultimately save the monarchy.