Victoria's Daughters by Jerrold M. Packard

Author:Jerrold M. Packard [Packard, Jerrold M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, Europe, Great Britain, Historical, History, Non-Fiction, Royalty, Victorian Era (1837-1901), Women
ISBN: 9780312244965
Google: 17pYXgOytCQC
Amazon: B005HY5Z72
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 1999-12-23T00:00:00+00:00

While the lives of her sisters were being agitated by death, displacement, and distress over troublesome offspring, Lenchen’s placid existence generally flowed through the royal family like a languid stream in summer: few eddies, no sharp currents, little chance of flooding. Lenchen and her Christian got along splendidly, perhaps because neither was exciting enough to give the other any kind of trouble; more likely because they were simply well suited to each other.

Since leaving Frogmore House, the couple had made their home at Cumberland Lodge (when in London they economized by staying in Buckingham Palace’s Belgian Suite), a mansion buried in a wooded copse of Windsor Great Park, just beyond the far end of the Long Walk. Historically used as the residence of the Ranger of the Park—the position the queen bestowed on Christian after his entry into the family—the nucleus of the house was already two centuries old when they took it over. One of its occupants had been Sarah Churchill, the first duchess of Marlborough, who was made Ranger by her great and good friend, Queen Anne. Sarah was reputed to have preferred life at the lodge to the luxuries of her far more commodious residence at Blenheim, a preference that may have been based on the proximity to her sovereign. A later resident was King George II’s son, the duke of Cumberland, famous to posterity as the Butcher of Culloden and for having a flower called after him: the Sweet William. James Wyatt, the architect of Windsor under William IV, remodeled the west side of Cumberland Lodge in the Gothic style. Largely rebuilt after a fire in 1869, the mansion was to remain Lenchen’s country home until her death in 1923.3

When misfortune touched the couple in the 1870s, it was in the horror that so many parents had to face in an era in which medicine was still more fallible than not. Prince Frederick Harald, born at the Christians’ home at Cumberland Lodge in 1876, died eight days later; after another year, Lenchen delivered a stillborn infant, a second shock from which she only slowly recovered. To honor these two ill-fated grandchildren, the queen asked Louise to commission a statue created in the monarch’s name. Her daughter chose Aimée-Jules Dalou (it isn’t known why Louise didn’t put herself forward as the sculptor), who designed an angel paired with small children, the princes supervising the work as Dalou brought Lenchen’s babies to sculpted life in his Chelsea studio.

Happily, Lenchen and her husband were blessed with four other growing children to keep them occupied, a matter of importance to the largely unemployed Christian, who had not much else with which to fill his hours. In fact, Victoria was displaying increasing irritation at her inert son-in-law, herself a woman who believed that an idle mind was an idle mind. Writing at her desk while on holiday at Osborne (Victoria kept working wherever she was in residence, holiday or not), she spied Christian through her study window, loitering in the garden and evidently at loose ends.

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