husband’s family were charged with suspicion and acrimony. But initially at least the baby girl gained more than she lost from the coldness of her royal English relatives. The Duchess of Kent had been allowed to make her own arrangements for her pregnancy and the care of her child, and, in the first, crucial year of her child’s life, she made good decisions, not only breast-feeding her baby for six months but insisting she be inoculated against smallpox at the age of six weeks.
The Duchess of Kent had been taught by her brother Leopold and Baron Stockmar to beware of English doctors, but in February 1820, when her husband fell ill with a feverish cold, there was little she could do to protect him. The duke had taken his family to a small rented house in the fishing village of Sidmouth, Devon, purportedly so that they could enjoy the benefits of sea air, but in fact to escape his creditors and save money. Kent’s life was important to the Crown, so doctors were dispatched from London and administered the usual enemas, expectorants, stimulants, and purgatives. They drew blood, by lancet, by cupping, by leeches, over and over again, 120 ounces, or 6 pints in all. As the duchess wrote despairingly to her mother in Germany, there was hardly a part of her husband’s body that hadnot been lanced, blistered, or scarified. When the second most senior doctor finally arrived from London, he decreed that if the patient were to recover, more blood must be drawn. The duke wept in agony and despair, the duchess and Baroness Späth tried to intervene, but they spoke little English and had no authority. Within days, the Duke of Kent, who had boasted to the world of his iron constitution, was dead.
Victoria was just one day short of eight months old when her father died. She was too young to mourn, but she suffered a grievous loss. As girl and woman, the Queen was always in search of father surrogates to guide and protect her. She found several good ones: Leopold, Melbourne, Stock-mar, her doctor James Clark. But as a child, her high place in the line of succession made Victoria vulnerable to unscrupulous men hungry for power.
The Wife Takes the Child
…
ITH HIS LAST RESERVES OF STRENGTH, EDWARD KENT MANAGED TO scrawl a signature on his will. Contrary to royal tradition and legal precedent, the will named the testator’s wife, Marie Luise Victoire, to be the sole guardian of their child, the Princess Victoria. That will had enormous consequences, not just for the child and her mother, but, decades later, for the nation over which the child would reign.
For a mother to receive legal custody and control over her child was not very common in 1821. Until almost the end of the nineteenth century, minor children in England were viewed by the law as belonging not to their parents equally but to their fathers alone. If the father died and made no specific testamentary disposition of his children, the father’s nearest male relatives, not their mother, had the right to determine the children’s destiny.
For a royal princess to be placed in the custody and under the legal guardianship of her mother was virtually unprecedented. As the Duchess of Kent boasted in 1837, she was “the only parent since the Restoration [the restoration to the throne of Charles II in 1660 following Cromwell’s Protectorate] who has had uncontrolled power in bringing up the heir to the throne.”
If her father had not made a will, the guardianship and custody of the Princess Victoria would have gone to her eldest male kinsman, the prince regent. As a ward of the Crown, she would have grown up in the household of one of her many female relatives until she was considered an adult and given a household of her own. She would have grown up a Hanoverian, from babyhood an habituée of the English court under the direct influence of her two uncle kings, George IV and his successor, William IV.
A Hanoverian Victoria would have been introduced as a girl to the
The Duchess of Kent had been taught by her brother Leopold and Baron Stockmar to beware of English doctors, but in February 1820, when her husband fell ill with a feverish cold, there was little she could do to protect him. The duke had taken his family to a small rented house in the fishing village of Sidmouth, Devon, purportedly so that they could enjoy the benefits of sea air, but in fact to escape his creditors and save money. Kent’s life was important to the Crown, so doctors were dispatched from London and administered the usual enemas, expectorants, stimulants, and purgatives. They drew blood, by lancet, by cupping, by leeches, over and over again, 120 ounces, or 6 pints in all. As the duchess wrote despairingly to her mother in Germany, there was hardly a part of her husband’s body that hadnot been lanced, blistered, or scarified. When the second most senior doctor finally arrived from London, he decreed that if the patient were to recover, more blood must be drawn. The duke wept in agony and despair, the duchess and Baroness Späth tried to intervene, but they spoke little English and had no authority. Within days, the Duke of Kent, who had boasted to the world of his iron constitution, was dead.
Victoria was just one day short of eight months old when her father died. She was too young to mourn, but she suffered a grievous loss. As girl and woman, the Queen was always in search of father surrogates to guide and protect her. She found several good ones: Leopold, Melbourne, Stock-mar, her doctor James Clark. But as a child, her high place in the line of succession made Victoria vulnerable to unscrupulous men hungry for power.
The Wife Takes the Child
…
ITH HIS LAST RESERVES OF STRENGTH, EDWARD KENT MANAGED TO scrawl a signature on his will. Contrary to royal tradition and legal precedent, the will named the testator’s wife, Marie Luise Victoire, to be the sole guardian of their child, the Princess Victoria. That will had enormous consequences, not just for the child and her mother, but, decades later, for the nation over which the child would reign.
For a mother to receive legal custody and control over her child was not very common in 1821. Until almost the end of the nineteenth century, minor children in England were viewed by the law as belonging not to their parents equally but to their fathers alone. If the father died and made no specific testamentary disposition of his children, the father’s nearest male relatives, not their mother, had the right to determine the children’s destiny.
For a royal princess to be placed in the custody and under the legal guardianship of her mother was virtually unprecedented. As the Duchess of Kent boasted in 1837, she was “the only parent since the Restoration [the restoration to the throne of Charles II in 1660 following Cromwell’s Protectorate] who has had uncontrolled power in bringing up the heir to the throne.”
If her father had not made a will, the guardianship and custody of the Princess Victoria would have gone to her eldest male kinsman, the prince regent. As a ward of the Crown, she would have grown up in the household of one of her many female relatives until she was considered an adult and given a household of her own. She would have grown up a Hanoverian, from babyhood an habituée of the English court under the direct influence of her two uncle kings, George IV and his successor, William IV.
A Hanoverian Victoria would have been introduced as a girl to the
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