Read We Two: Victoria and Albert for Free Online Page A

penniless, in 1827.
    Augustus, Duke of Sussex, the sixth son of George III, had to be eliminated at the outset, since he too was married (sort of) and had no legitimate offspring (as defined by the Royal Marriages Act).
    Thus there were four royal dukes in a position to supply an heir to the throne: Clarence, Kent, Cumberland, and Cambridge, by order of birth and precedence.
    William, Duke of Clarence, was third in the fraternal hierarchy, and thus the front-runner with numbers one and two scratched. He was as improvident and fond of luxury as his older brothers, on a much smaller income. Unlike them, he was a proven sire, boasting ten boisterous children by his charming actress mistress, Mrs. Dorothy Jordan. These children were known as the FitzClarences, “Fitz” being a standard marker for illegitimacy in English genealogy. The FitzClarences were accepted at court, though their mother, of course, was not, and all ten would ultimately, by royal patronage or marriage, become members of the English aristocracy. However, Clarence’s debts mounted inexorably, and in 1811 he decided, with regret but without warning, to find himself a wealthy and amiable young wife.
    For six years his efforts at courtship went for nothing. Miss Tilney Long, Miss Elphinstone, and Lady Berkeley decided they could not afford the Duke of Clarence. Miss Wykeham accepted the Duke’s proposal of marriage, but, since she was, like the other four, ineligible under the Royal Marriages Act, the prince regent refused to accept her as a sister-in-law. The tsar’s sister found the fat, bumbling, vulgar, pineapple-headed Clarence too ridiculous to even consider as a husband.
    But when his niece Charlotte died, Clarence knew what he needed: a German princess of child-bearing age who would satisfy the requirements of the Royal Marriages Act and get him a raise in his parliamentary allowance. With the help of his brother the Duke of Cambridge, viceroy in Hanover, Clarence settled, sight unseen, on Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen. She was a rather sickly, unattractive young woman of twenty-five, as poor as a church mouse. She was also intelligent, cultured, and pious, but theseassets rather counted against her with a fiancé who had gone to sea as a midshipman at fourteen.
    The marriage between William and Adelaide proved to be a happy one. Trained by Dorothy Jordan, William was a profoundly uxorious creature, and Adelaide made him feel comfortable. But she was delicate, and though she conceived again and again, only one child, named Elizabeth, lived more than a few days.
    The fifth royal brother, Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, was the most energetic, the most intelligent, and the most ambitious of the seven. He was also perhaps the most feared and hated man in England. Cumberland was widely believed to have murdered a valet who had been his homosexual partner and to have sired a bastard with his sister Sophia. These accusations were probably unfounded, but Cumberland was indubitably a violent, rapacious, unfeeling man. He was also head of the ultraconservative wing of the Tory Party and used his influence over his brother George IV to block political and economic reform.
    Cumberland, though only brother number five, took an early lead over the other three, since they were bachelors when Charlotte died, and he had providentially thought to acquire a German princess wife in 1815. Cumberland proved his indifference to public opinion and lack of family feeling by choosing to marry Frederica of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. She was once engaged to Cumberland’s younger brother the Duke of Cambridge but then eloped with the Prince of Solms, a German nonentity whom she was later suspected of murdering. Queen Charlotte, the wife of George III, also born a princess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, was Frederica Cumberland’s aunt but refused to receive her at court. Nonetheless, the Cumberland marriage satisfied all the provisions of the Royal Marriages Act, and any child born to the couple