Category: Royalty

Happy Birthday to Prince Albert

Prince Francis Albert Augustus Charles Emmanuel of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was born August 26, 1819. His wife, Queen Victoria, was born on the 24th of May in that year. They were first cousins.

Right: Prince Albert by Charles Brocky, 1841

The exhibition Victoria and Albert in Love can be seen in the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London, until October 31, 2010.

The jewelry, musical compositions, drawings, paintings and furniture exchanged by the royal couple make an interesting statement about the depth of their love and commitment. Many of the items were birthday gifts given to the Prince by the Queen.

Rupert Friend (right) as Prince Albert in the film The Young Victoria. The costumes and settings were sumptuous, but the story left a bit to be desired by those of us who paid attention to the details! 

John Lucas painted Prince Albert in 1841, left. 

Prince Albert, right, by Winterhalter, in 1842.  Albert had an excellent private education. With his older brother Ernest, he was tutored at home and later attended the University of Bonn. He excelled in fencing and riding, and traveled in Italy.  Almost from birth, many considered the possibility of uniting the cousins, and King Leopold encouraged the marriage.  Victoria and Albert met several times and she was eventually quite taken with him, but after she took the throne at age 18 in 1837, she was in no hurry to wed.
After her coronation, however, she wrote to Uncle Leopold: “Albert’s beauty is most striking, and he so amiable and unaffected — in short very fascinating.” Louis Auchincloss in his Persons of Consequence: Queen Victoria and Her Circle (1979) observes: “A principal industry of the German States in the nineteenth century was the production of marriageable princes and princesses.”
The wedding took place on February 10, 1840.  Albert’s role in the realm was unclear, and it changed, evolving over the next few years until he became very influential and quite popular (though only after his death was his popularity recognized by most in the government).  Albert and Victoria became the parents of nine children.

At right is a family portrait, also by Winterhalter, of the family in 1846.

One of Albert’s greatest achievements was the Great Exhibition of 1851.  As a supporter of science and technology, he was particularly influential upon industrial advancements of the day. In addition, he single-handedly modernized and revamped the running of the royal palaces and the financial administration of the monarchy.  

Prince Albert died of typhoid fever at 10:50 p.m. on 14 December 1861 in the Blue Room at Windsor Castle, in the presence of the Queen and five of their nine children, leaving the Queen devastated. Though she lived on until 1901, Victoria never shed her widow’s weeds.

Happy Birthday, George IV

On 12 August 1762, England rejoiced in the birth of a son to King George III and his Queen.  Later known as George IV, he was the King of Hanover and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland until his death on 26 June, 1830.

Volumes have been written on the life of George, The Prince of Wales, known as Prinny.

Above, how the caricaturist George Cruikshank (1792-1878) celebrated the Prince Regent’s 50th Birthday in 1812; The Prince dances while outside the people suffer.
George Augustus Frederick was the eldest child of George III and Sophie Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, usually referred to as Queen Charlotte.
In this family portrait by Johann Zoffany (1733-1810) from about 1765, Prince George is on the right, his brother Frederick (Duke of York, 1763-1827) on the other side of their mother. They were the first of 15 children.

By 1770 when Johann Zoffany painted the family again, George (in red) and Frederick (in gold) had been joined by four more siblings: left, William (with parrot), Edward (center with dog), Charlotte and baby Augusta.
According to his biographers, young George was a good student, fluent in several languages and “very promising.” However, in the tradition of the Hanoverian kings, his father was disappointed in him, worried about his lack of obedience to the scriptures and his loose ways with the truth.

The miniature of George, right, was painted by the famed Richard Cosway about 1780 when George was nearing his majority.

John Hoppner (1758 – 1810) painted the Prince of Wales in 1792. The portrait hangs in the Wallace Collection in London.

 The portrait below also hangs in the Wallace Collection.

By the time he turned 21 in 1783, the Prince had already experienced several passionate love affairs, most notoriously with the beautiful actress Mary Robinson* who performed at the Drury Lane Theatre as Perdita in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. The Prince was smitten and wrote to her, signing his name as Florizel, and the affair was soon known to the general public. The King was very angry and their relationship never improved vastly.  But we shall leave the story of the Prince of Wales —  “First Gentleman of Europe,” collector of houses, furniture, paintings et. al., bigamist and serial adulterer, gambler and spendthrift, and father least likely to succeed — until a later blog.

For now we offer our felicitations on the 248th birthday of George IV, Prince, Regent and King.
* Mary Robinson’s life (1757-1800) was short and sad.  She retired from the stage after various afflictions and became a well-known poetess and novelist. For more details on the life of Mary Robinson, we recommend Hester Davenport’s biography published in 2006: The Prince’s Mistress Perdita: A Life of Mary Robinson.

The Young Victoria – My two Cents Worth

And here I thought that spending an inordinate amount of time researching the Duke of Wellington and Queen Victoria was a good thing . . . it seems not, since all that I’ve learned gets in the way of my enjoying films like Young Victoria. It was a visual delight – the sets, the costumes, the interiors – but I felt that the story itself was disjointed. I followed it with no problem, but I can see that anyone who doesn’t know the full story of Victoria’s early life would be lost. Here are just a few points that grated on my nerves:

We see Victoria with her doll collection, it’s referenced in a conversation between Princes Albert and Ernst, but there’s no explanation of what it means. Why insert it into the film if you’re not going to make a point?

Why show King Leopold getting all pissy over Albert’s neglecting to correspond with him if you’re not going tell the film goer the importance of this?

We see a somber, dark clad woman in attendance on Victoria in a few scenes – then we see her being sent away in a carriage and Victoria telling Albert, “I needed her so much at one time.” Needed who? Do you think the average viewer would have cottoned on to the fact that this Lehzen, Victoria’s nurse and rock through most of her life?

Albert takes a bullet . . . . . I won’t comment.

As I said, these are just a few points. Imagine how my head was spinning while I actually watched the film. I’m surprised it wasn’t more historically accurate, or cohesive, what with Sarah Ferguson being one of the producers. As she is quick to remind us, she’s an authority on Queen Victoria.

I thought the casting was spot on in some places and way off the mark in others. Baron Stockmar, Prince Leopold and Sir John Conroy were excellently cast, as were the Duchess of Kent and Queen Adelaide. Rupert Friend could have been the young Albert reincarnated. On the downside, Emily Blunt did a fine acting job but was too dark, IMHO, to play Victoria. And where was the slight Germanic accent? And Julian Glover as the Duke of Wellington? The fake hookey nose was good, but his body type was miles away from that of the real Duke and I just wanted to scream every time he was on screen.
So, after venting I shall now put my money where my mouth is. Were I to cast the part of the Duke of Wellington in a film, I would choose either Adrian Brody, Daniel Day Lewis or Pierce Brosnan (with prosthetic nose) to play the Duke. Do you agree? Which would be your choice? Or do you have another suggestion? I’m looking forward to your comments . . . . .

The Forgotten Queen


This is the birthday of Caroline of Brunswick (17 May 1768 – 7 August 1821), Princess of Wales, Queen Consort of King George IV, one of the saddest characters in the last 200 years of British royal history.  Many have pointed out the parallels between Caroline’s life and the more recent sad Princess of Wales, Diana.

 
 Both married men who loved another woman (or women, in the case of George), both were loved by the public, both engaged in questionable romantic relationships outside of their royal marriages, and both died well before their husbands.

 George, Prince of Wales, later Prince Regent and then King George IV, already had a wife when he found himself out of funds again, and had to appeal to his father, George III, and governmental leaders in Parliament for an increase in his allowance.

Some probably knew of the marriage ceremony in which Prince George had illegally wed Mrs. Maria Fitzherbert. But since the wedding of a royal heir required the permission of the king, the marriage did not exist officially.  So in return for an increase in his allowance, Prince George agreed to wed Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, his cousin from a German principality. The wedding took place April 8,1795.

The marriage was a disaster from the beginning. Prince George did not care for the appearance or the hygiene of his bride.  She thought he was much fatter than his pictures and a drunkard. Worse, he flaunted one of his mistresses, Lady Jersey, by making her Caroline’s lady-of-the-bedchamber, which Caroline did not appreciate. (See Kristine’s post on the Two Lady Jerseys posted April 2, 2010). George and Caroline separated almost immediately and lived in distant households for the rest of their lives.

However, nine months later, Princess Charlotte was born on January 7, 1796, and became the heir to the throne after her father and grandfather. To the right, Caroline and Princess Charlotte of Wales by Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1802.

We will tell Charlotte’s sad story another day, but it suffices to say that both Caroline and Charlotte led unhappy lives because Prince George tried to ignore their very existence. Eventually, Charlotte married and later died in childbirth in 1817.

By then, Princess Caroline, her mother, was living in Italy at the Villa d’Este on Lake Como. (Victoria will post about this the Villa, now a hotel, soon.)
Caroline was living the high life, it was said, and had a very close friendship with a certain Signor Bartolmeo Pergami, which was widely caricatured.

After George III died in 1820, George IV had Caroline tried for adultery in the House of Lords. Though many believed she was guilty, it was not proved, to the King’s great irritation. He refused to allow Caroline to enter Westminster Abbey for his coronation in July of 1821.  She died just a few weeks later on August 7, 1821.  To the left, a detail of the Trial of Queen Caroline by Sir George Hayter.

There were inquiries into the cause of Caroline’s death, but again, nothing could be proven. She was buried in Brunswick.

To the left, a portrait of Queen Caroline by James Lonsdale. Caroline always had a popularity with many of the people who despised her husband for his profligate ways, overspending and general excesses in everything.  Jane Austen famously wrote, “I will always support her as long as I can, because she is a woman, and because I hate her husband…I am resolved at least always to think that she would have been respectable, if the Prince had behaved only tolerably by her at first.” (From letter of 16 February 1813 to Martha Lloyd)

Flora Fraser published her excellent book The Unruly Queen: the Life of Queen Caroline in 1996. It tells most of the story in detail with many more pictures. But, of course, the questions remain, nearly 200 years later. Was her behavior as bad as George IV’s was? Probably not. He was the penultimate spoiled child, self indulgent to the extreme.  But no one probably will ever know the full story of Caroline, the forgotten queen.

London and Waterloo Tour – Kensington Palace

Kensington Palace has been home to the royal court, on and off, since William and Mary took up residence at Kensington House, as it was then known, shortly before Christmas 1689. The accession of George I was celebrated at Kensington with a bonfire in the gardens, where the household servants and courtiers toasted their new king with six barrels of strong beer and over three hundred bottles of claret. It was George I who set about making extensive renovations to the property, though he didn’t spend much time at the Palace. George II, on the other hand, loved the Palace, but didn’t entertain lavishly. After his sudden death at Kensington on 25 October 1760, the Palace would never again serve as the seat of a reigning monarch.
Now the story heats up – George III’s fourth son, Edward, Duke of Kent, was given two floors of rooms in the south-east corner of the Palace in 1798, below the State Apartments. The Duke undertook extensive renovations of the main rooms of the Palace with Wyatt as his architect before hastily moving to Brussels to escape his debts. In 1817, Princess Charlotte, who was the only legitimate heir to the throne, died in childbirth. The Duke of Kent (and all of the other unmarried royals) realized that it would behoove him to find himself a bride and set about the business of begetting a legitimate heir. In 1818 the Duke married Victoire, Dowager Princess of Leiningen, the sister of Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg – the late Princess Charlotte’s husband. Kent was cleverer than most of his brothers when he chose a wife. Victoire of Leiningen was a widow and already had proved her fertility by having had two healthy children.
Victoire, Duchess of Kent
The Duke of Kent and his bride moved into Kensington Palace and Princess Victoria was born there on 24 May 1819 and christened the following month in a private ceremony in the Cupola Room. Unfortunately, the Duke lived only nine months after the birth of his daughter but the Duchess of Kent and her daughter continued to live at Kensington until the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837. On 20 June 1837, very early in the morning, Princess Victoria was awakened and told that her uncle William IV had died and that she was queen.  Throughout the 19th century, the Palace was slightly neglected, its rooms doled out as grace and favour homes for minor royals or loyal retainers. A bit of glamour was restored to the Palace when Princess Margaret took up residence there, and of course the Palace will forever more be linked to its most glamorous resident, Diana, Princess of Wales.
An installation called “Enchanted Palace” is on now and running through January 2011. It’s a combination of fashion, performance, storytelling and film that runs throughout the palace and tells the story of its former residents. Installations in the state apartments are by designers including Vivienne Westwood, William Tempest and Stephen Jones and illustrator/set designer Echo Morgan who, working alongside Wildworks Theatre Company, take inspiration from the palace and the royals who have lived there. Contemporary designs are displayed alongside historic items from the collection, including dresses worn by Princess Diana. Each room tells a story about a former resident.  A somewhat maudalin tone is set by the Room of Royal Sorrows, focused on the emotional torment of Queen Mary II as she tried in vain a produce an heir. It is set in her bedchamber, giving the display an unsettling authenticity. The focus of the room is a ‘dress of tears’ created by Aminaka Wilmont, while on the bed is a figure of the queen, dressed in blue, face hidden. “The first time you walk into the room, it has an aura of sadness, but also incredible beauty,” said designer Marcus Wilmont, part of the team that decorated the room and came up with the outfit worn by the mannequin representing Queen Mary. “She tried really hard, but she had many miscarriages. She was a very loved queen, and we wanted to try to capture her spirit.” There are dozens of antique glass bottles known as “tear catchers” in the room, once used during times of mourning. It was thought that bottling the tears would catch and contain sorrow. Visitors are encouraged to leave a handwritten note about the last time they cried.

Wildworks’ interactive ‘wishing throne’ is the centrepiece of the King’s Presence Chamber, while the theme of dance is reflected in the Council Chamber, where dresses belonging to Princess Margaret and Princess Diana are displayed within a silver birch forest installation. The Independent calls the installation “so
peculiar it is as if you’ve stepped into Tim Burton’s ‘Alice in Wonderland.” Read the entire article here.

One can only wonder what Queen Victoria would have thought of these avant garde goings on in her childhood home. . . . . Would she be amused?

After touring the interior of the Palace and the gardens, Victoria and I will be taking tea in the Orangery. In addition to the Royal Champagne Tea, the Orangery is featuring an Enchanted Palace Tea featuring chocolate ganache and raspberry shortbread. To see all of the Orangery’s menues, click here.

Kristine