Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld was born on August 17, 1786, in Coburg, then the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Her birth name was Marie Louise Victoire, and she was the fourth daughter and seventh child overall born to Franz Frederick Anton, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, and Countess Augusta of Reuss-Ebersdorf.
On December 21, 1803, the young Victoria became the second wife of Prince Charles of Leiningen. His first wife, who had passed away two years earlier, had been her own maternal aunt, Countess Henrietta Sophie of Reuss-Ebersdorf. Victoria’s marriage to Charles produced two children: Prince Carl, born in 1804, and Princess Feodora of Leiningen, born in 1807.
Prince Charles died in 1814, and Princess Victoria assumed the regency of the Principality of Leiningen during her son’s minority. With the death of Princess Victoria’s sister-in-law, her brother Leopold’s wife, Princess Charlotte of Wales, in 1817, the succession of the UK throne was thrown into turmoil. Parliament offered financial incentives to the three unmarried uncles of Princess Charlotte, sons of George III, if they were prepared to marry. One of them, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, and Strathearn, proposed to Victoria, and she accepted. The couple were married on May 29, 1818, at Amorbach and again on July 11, 1818, at Kew, in a joint ceremony at which Edward’s brother, the Duke of Clarence, later King William IV, married Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen. After the wedding, the Kents moved to Germany, where they were prepared to live. But the new Duchess became pregnant very quickly and determined their child be born in England, they raced back and moved into Kensington Palace, where the Duchess gave birth to their daughter, Princess Alexandrina Victoria of Kent, later Queen Victoria, on May 24, 1819.
The Duke of Kent died suddenly of pneumonia in January 1820, just six days before his father, King George III.
His widow, the Duchess, had little reason to remain in the UK since she did not speak the language and had a palace at home in Coburg where she could live cheaply on the revenues of her first husband. However, the British succession was still partially in crisis, and the Duchess of Kent decided that she would do better by gambling on her daughter’s accession than by living quietly in Coburg. Having inherited the Duke of Kent’s debts, she sought support from the British government. After the deaths of Edward and his father, the young Princess Victoria was still only third in line for the throne, and Parliament was not inclined to support yet more impoverished royalty.
She resided in a suite of rooms in the dilapidated Kensington Palace, along with several other impoverished members of the royal family, and received little financial support from the Civil List since Parliament had vivid memories of the late Duke’s extravagance. Her main source of support was her brother, Leopold, who had a huge income of fifty thousand pounds per annum for life. This annuity had been allotted to him by the British Parliament on his marriage to Princess Charlotte; after her death, Leopold’s annuity was not revoked.
In 1831, with George IV dead and the new king William IV being over 60 without any surviving legitimate issue and whose nearly 40-year-old wife was considered to be at the end of childbearing age, the Duchess’ young daughter was named heir presumptive, and the Duchess’s prospective place as regent led to major increases in British state income for the Kents. A contributing factor was Leopold’s designation as King of the Belgians, upon which he surrendered his British income.
The Duchess of Kent was extremely protective and raised Victoria largely isolated from other children under the so-called “Kensington System”. She was completely reliant on her comptroller and private secretary, Sir John Conroy. Some claim the relationship was more intimate and personal than was revealed at the time. As the Duchess isolated herself with her daughter, Conroy, and a few close members of her household, her relationship with King William IV soured. Both he and his wife, Queen Adelaide, were fond of their niece, but the Duchess kept them away from her daughter as much as possible. Even refusing to let her attend King William’s coronation. Her demand that she be made regent in the possibility of her daughter inheriting the crown before maturity was granted.
When Princess Victoria became Queen after the death of her uncle, she relegated both her mother and Conroy to faraway rooms in the palace. And after her marriage to Prince Albert, the relationship became very distant and cold between mother and daughter.
After the birth of their first child and the exit of Conroy from the Duchess’ life, it is said that Prince Albert encouraged Queen Victoria to reconnect with her mother, the Duchess of Kent. She was, by all accounts, a very doting grandmother, and mother and daughter became closer than they had ever been before.
The Duchess died on March 16, 1861, aged 74, with her daughter Victoria by her side. The Queen was devastated by her mother’s death. Through reading her mother’s papers, Victoria discovered that her mother had loved her deeply. Queen Victoria blamed Conroy and Lehzen for “wickedly” estranging her from her mother. She is buried in the Duchess of Kent’s Mausoleum at Frogmore, Windsor Home Park, near the royal residence of Windsor Castle.
Portrait by George Dawe
Sources:
The Life and Times of Queen Victoria, Dorothy Marshall
Becoming Victoria, Lynne Vallone
Queen Victoria: Her Life and Times 1819–1861, Cecil Woodham-Smith
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