Plowden The Young Victoria: Classic Histories Series

1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7524-6722-1
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

Reihe: Classic Histories Series

'I delight in this work', wrote the young Victoria shortly after she became Queen. She was an engaging creature, high-spirited and eager to be 'amused'. But her early years were difficult ones. Fatherless from the age of eight months, she was brought up at Kensington Palace in an atmosphere thick with family feuds, backbiting and jealousy - the focus of conflicting ambitions. Though her uncle William IV was anxious to bring her into Court circles, her German mother and the calculating John Conroy were equally determined that she should remain under their control. The 'little Queen', who succeeded to the throne a month after her eighteenth birthday, was greeted by a unanimous chorus of praise and admiration. She embraced the independence of her position and often forced her will on those around her. She met and married Albert, marking the end of her childhood and the beginning of a glorious legend. Alison Plowden was one of the most successful and popular historians of British history. Her bestselling books include: The House of Tudor, The Young Elizabeth, Lady Jane Grey and Danger to Elizabeth, all of which are available from The History Press.

The late ALISON PLOWDEN worked at the BBC as a script editor in Features and Drama, before leaving to work as a full-time writer. She specialised in the Tudor and Stuart periods and had numerous books published including Henrietta Maria, The House of Tudor, Two Queens in One Isle and Elizabeth I.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Plowden, Alison

Leseproben

PROLOGUE

A Nation Bleeds

It is with the most poignant grief we announce that H.R.H. the Princess Charlotte is NO MORE. This melancholy intelligence was at 7 o’clock this morning communicated to the Lord Mayor by Lord Sidmouth.

The Times, 6 November 1817

At Claremont House everything was ready for the happy event. The baby linen, chosen ‘in the plainest style and the finest quality’ had been carefully laid out by the monthly nurse Mrs Griffiths, ‘a respectable woman in the habit of attending the first families in the country on similar occasions for the past thirty years’. Sir Richard Croft, the accoucheur, was already in residence, Dr Baillie, the family physician, and Dr Sims were standing by, while a bevy of important personages – Earl Bathurst, Secretary for War, Viscount Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, Mr Vansittart, Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London – had made their preparations to set out at a moment’s notice in response to a summons from Claremont.

Outside these exalted circles, the people of England waited in eager anticipation of an announcement that the heiress presumptive to the throne had presented them with a much needed addition to the royal family – preferably a boy, whose arrival would, it was estimated, send the stock market up by at least six points. Princess Charlotte of Wales was only twenty-one. She looked to be a fine, healthy young woman, if a trifle on the stout side, and she would, of course, be getting the best available medical attention at her lying in. To the uninitiated there seemed no reason why anything should go wrong. So the nation waited hopefully, and went on waiting.

The Princess’s doctors had calculated that she could expect to be confined at any time after 19 October, but it was not until the evening of Monday, 3 November that a message was sent round to the stables and the grooms were able to mount their ready-saddled horses and set out with the news that Her Royal Highness’s labour had begun at last. During the early hours of Tuesday the distinguished gentlemen whose presence was required to attest the birth were being set down at the pillared and porticoed entrance of Claremont House and Dr Baillie came hurrying over from Virginia Water. But there was, apparently, no urgent need for haste even now. At midday Sir Richard Croft announced that matters were ‘in every way in as much forwardness as he would desire it’, but the Princess had still not been put to bed and was walking about her room on her husband’s arm. At three o’clock another confident bulletin was issued, but that night Dr Sims, an expert in the use of instruments, was summoned from London, although he was not admitted to see the patient.

At 8.15 a.m. on Wednesday, 5 November, when Charlotte had been in labour for more than thirty-six hours, the bishops and Cabinet ministers keeping their weary vigil in the breakfast-room at Claremont were informed that considerable though very gradual progress had been made during the night, and the doctors hoped that the child would be born without artificial assistance. There was a strong prejudice against the use of forceps among the medical profession and, while in this case their use might have saved both mother and child, there was, at a time when antiseptic precautions were unknown, admittedly always a high mortality rate when instruments were used.

Wednesday dragged by interminably. The village of Esher, which lay on the edge of the Claremont estate, had filled up with journalists and sightseers and the Bear Inn was doing a roaring trade. At Claremont itself, the Princess, supported by her devoted husband, seemed to be bearing up well under her long, exhausting ordeal. Leopold of Saxe-Coburg had scarcely left her, holding her hand and sometimes lying down on the bed beside her. At nine o’clock that night the child was born. It was a boy, well-formed and unusually large, but it showed no signs of life. Hastily plunged into a bath of hot water, shaken and slapped and rubbed with salt and mustard, it stubbornly resisted all attempts to persuade it to take an interest in its surroundings. But the mother was still ‘doing extremely well’. She had accepted the loss of her baby with stoicism, almost with indifference, and now, her amazing vitality and high spirits apparently unimpaired, she was chatting away to her attendants and sitting up eating toast and chicken broth. The witnesses dispersed thankfully to their homes and Prince Leopold went away to get some sleep. Even Richard Croft thought it safe to leave his patient to rest.

Soon after midnight Charlotte began to complain of nausea and ringing in her ears. Her pulse became rapid and although she had so far been able to keep her promise to Mrs Griffiths not to ‘bawl or shriek’, she was now obviously in great pain. Croft, hurriedly recalled by the nurse, found her very restless, breathing with difficulty and ‘cold as any stone’. Frantically the doctors tried to warm her, plying her with hot wine and brandy until the unfortunate girl protested that they were making her tipsy, and placing hot water bottles and hot flannel on the abdomen – this despite the fact that the recognized method of arresting post partum haemorrhage was to use cold water. Presently ‘terrible spasms’ set in and at two-thirty in the morning of 6 November 1817 the Daughter of England, on whom so many hopes had rested, was dead, almost certainly as the result of a pulmonary embolism.

For Richard Croft, Charlotte’s death marked the end of his professional career; he committed suicide three months later. For her husband, the penniless younger son of a small German duchy, it was a personal disaster from which he never fully recovered. Her father, the Prince Regent, was said to be prostrated, while the nation, stunned by the double tragedy at Claremont, reacted with an unprecedented demonstration of public mourning.

‘It is but little to say’, remarked The Times in a leading article on 7 November, ‘that we never recollect so strong and general an expression and indication of sorrow.’ In his autobiography Henry Brougham, the Whig politician who had known Charlotte well, was to remember vividly the feelings of deepest sorrow and most bitter disappointment which ‘this most melancholy event produced throughout the kingdom’. ‘It is scarcely possible to exaggerate’, he wrote, ‘and it is difficult for persons not living at the time to believe, how universal and how genuine those feelings were. It was really as if every household throughout Great Britain had lost a favourite child.’ Countess Granville, in a letter to her sister Lady Georgiana Morpeth, felt ‘quite unable to write upon any subject but one. We are all heart-sick at this terrible event. Poor Princess Charlotte …’ Dorothea Lieven, wife of the Russian ambassador, told her brother that the charming Princess Charlotte, ‘so richly endowed with happiness, beauty, and splendid hopes’, had been cut off from the love of a whole people. ‘It is impossible to find in the history of nations or families an event which had evoked such heartfelt mourning’, she went on. ‘One met in the streets people of every class in tears, the churches full at all hours, the shops shut for a fortnight (an eloquent testimony from a shop-keeping community), and everyone, from the highest to the lowest, in a state of despair which it is impossible to describe.’

… Forth from the abyss a voice proceeds,

A long, low, distant murmur of dread sound,

Such as arises when a nation bleeds

With some deep and immedicable wound …

Up and down the country, in cathedrals, in parish churches, chapels and synagogues, memorial services were held and memorial sermons preached, while every public building wore a suit of black drapery. ‘It certainly does not belong to us to repine at the visitations of Providence …,’ boomed The Times; ‘but as the Almighty sometimes, for the most benevolent purposes, deals severe chastisements on mankind, there is nothing impious in grieving for that as a calamity, which appears and is felt to be such.’

On the day of the funeral, Sunday, 19 November, Mr Sutton, Solicitor General to the Prince Regent, wrote to his friend Lord Colchester:

This day has been the most extraordinary I ever witnessed in London. The crowds of attendants at morning service, if I may judge of other services by St Margaret’s … the body of the church so full that there was not even standing room left unoccupied. The whole congregation, as far as I could see, in mourning. In the streets all the shops shut; even those ordinarily left open on Sundays, such as pastrycooks. And yet, with this cessation of all trade and business, the streets very thin of passengers. Altogether this melancholy event has produced an effect on this metropolis such as I believe none could have foreseen … I wish it may not be pushed to an extreme to become offensive, because artificial … The public press seems to me to have run raving mad upon the subject.

The Duke of Wellington’s verdict on the ‘melancholy event’ was characteristically terse and to the point. ‘I think it probable’, he told his niece Priscilla Burghersh, ‘that she [Princess Charlotte] would have behaved well, and her death is one of the most serious misfortunes the country has ever met with.’ Up in Yorkshire, the Reverend Benjamin Newton, rector of the parish of Wath on the edge of the North Riding, noted in his diary that ‘the loss of any other branch of the Royal Family would have cost less regret’. And Lady Charlotte Bury, formerly a lady-in-waiting to the...