Read We Two: Victoria and Albert for Free Online

scorn—mud from a muddy spring

Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know
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But leechlike to their fainting country cling
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    A king’s children all had to be supported out of the nation’s pocket, and the thirteen children of George III imposed a huge financial burden. The King and Queen were famous for their care with money and their preferencefor a modest, even frugal lifestyle, and their daughters were obliged to follow the parental example. The sons were the real problem. They were, in the Duke of Wellington’s famous phrase, “the damnedest millstones about the necks of any government that can be imagined.” The seven royal princes resented the fact that so many young English aristocrats had incomes far exceeding their own. No income was ever large enough to satisfy them, and if a royal duke managed to raise a lump sum of, say, 6,000 pounds from parliament or private lenders, he would promptly go out and spend double or more.

     

     

     
    NOTE :
Charlotte, Augusta, Elizabeth, Sophia, Amelia, and Mary, the six daughters of George III, were of no relevance to the royal succession, which gives precedence and inheritance rights to males, regardless of birth order
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    The royal dukes’ combination of egotism, vulgarity, idleness, promiscuity, and fiscal improvidence bred hatred and resentment on every level of English society. Even today it is staggering to consider the size of the debt they piled up. George, the Prince of Wales, as befitted the eldest son with the largest income, was the most extravagant. At the age of twenty-one, already 30,000 pounds in debt, George was given an annual income of 50,000 pounds to add to his existing 12,000 pounds a year, plus a flat sum of 60,000. In 1786 he was forty-four and now in debt to the tune of 269,878 pounds, 6 shillings, and 7 pence farthing. Between 1787 and 1796, the Prince of Wales ran up debts of 630,000 pounds—approximately 40 million in American dollars. When he agreed to get married, parliament paid off his debts and raised his income, but his spending continued unabated during his regency.
    With Princess Charlotte dead, one of the seven royal princes would have to produce a legitimate child who could inherit the throne after the demise of one or more of his or her uncles. Of the seven brothers, three (George, Frederick, and Augustus, numbers one, two, and six, respectively) were extreme long shots in the dynastic steeplechase, since all three were, in one way or another, married but without legitimate offspring as legitimacy was defined by the Royal Marriages Act. Should any of the senior royal princes lose his wife and remarry, the handicapping of the race to an heir would, of course, change overnight.
    After his wife Queen Caroline’s death in 1826, George IV, at fifty-five, at first was full of plans to find himself a new wife, but, in fact, he did nothing. He was too ill, too immobile, too full of opium and brandy, and too completely under the thumb of his mistress, Lady Conyngham. He died in 1830.
    Odds were also against the next brother, Frederick, Duke of York. When Frederick was a young man, his older brother George, then Prince of Wales, asked him to take on the tedious job of supplying heirs to the throne. Happy to oblige his favorite brother and not, incidentally, to ingratiate himself with their father the King and with parliament, Frederick speedily contractedto marry Frederica, second daughter of the King of Prussia, a not unattractive sixteen-year-old he had once seen in Berlin. Unfortunately the Yorks, Fred and Freda, like the Waleses, George and Caroline, separated within a year of marriage and failed to produce even one child. Given the diplomatic susceptibilities of Prussia, divorce for the Yorks was impossible. In 1820 Frederica, Duchess of York, died, and George once again begged Fred to bite the dynastic bullet and marry for an heir; but Fred, enamored of the Duchess of Rutland, could not be tempted. The Duke of York died, virtually