Bringing Them Up Royal: How the Royals Raised their Children from 1066 to the Present Day by Cohen David

Author:Cohen, David [Cohen, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: prince william, henry VIII, bringing them up royal, the king's speech, prince harry, the interpretation of dreams, George V, freud, kate middleton, r. d. laing, royal parenting, prince charles, david cohen
ISBN: 9781780361604
Publisher: Peach Publishing
Published: 2014-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

6

Victoria, Albert and the Dangers of Great Expectations (1821–63)

George III’s fourth son, Edward, the Duke of Kent and Strathearn, played just a small part in the dramas of his father’s reign. The Duke went into the military but he could not even manage half a battalion decently; he infuriated his superiors because he was too violent. He was obsessive about discipline and so brutal to his men that, after a disastrous spell in Gibraltar, he was never given another significant command.

In 1818, the Duke married Marie Luise Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Staalfeld, the sister of Leopold, Charlotte’s widower. It was Victoria’s second marriage. Her first husband, Charles, Prince of Leiningen, married her after losing his first wife, who happened to be Marie Luise Victoria’s aunt. Today, this would lead to intense psycho punditry on what the consequences of marrying your uncle might be. Again, the history of the royals and the Freuds run in strange parallel. The young Freud faced a similar dilemma when an uncle from Odessa wanted to marry his niece. Freud’s mother saw no difficulty but Sigmund pointed out that, when a man of fifty-nine wants to marry a girl of sixteen, he has only one motive. Freud’s will prevailed, as it usually did in his family. Niece-uncle incest seems to have been more common than might be imagined among nineteenth-century Jews and royals, though.

The Duke was determined that his child should be born in England. He too was deeply in debt and had to borrow £5,000 to transport his wife, their servants and much bed linen from Germany to England. A month before the Duchess was due to give birth, they reached London, where the Duke had to meet his creditors. He had the good sense to be polite to them so they did not insist on seizing everything he owned.

At 4.15 a.m. on 24 May 1819, the Duchess gave birth at Kensington Palace to their first and only child. Victoria has been the subject of many fine biographies, including those by Elizabeth Longford, Cecil Woodham Smith and Christopher Hibbert. The Queen also kept a diary, writing up to 2,500 words a day from the age of thirteen. She allowed a biography, Eminent Women of the Age, to be co-written by James Parton and Horace Greeley in 1868. Although often unctuous, James Parton did not just have access to private papers, but also discussed her childhood with the Queen personally. Victoria was also the subject of a chatty contemporary book by Grace Greenwood, the first woman to be hired as a journalist by the New York Times.

At a critical moment in her reign, Victoria also wrote a book herself, followed by a sequel, in a moment when the Queen wanted to let her subjects feel she was not remote. Today, we tend to think of Victoria as a buttoned-up matriarch, who was, as the cliche goes, ‘not amused’. She had a keen sense of image, however, and was the first British monarch to write in a confessional mode and to allow some of those writings to be published.

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