| Victoria, Queen of England |
| by James Parton, 1868 |
|
Related topics: • About Queen Victoria |
Edward, Duke of Kent, the fourth of the king's sons, had the reputation, in his lifetime, of being the only one of them who observed the ordinary rules of morality. He is even spoken of as "austerely virtuous;" an accusation which I am inclined to believe was groundless; for, if he was so austerely virtuous, he would hardly have left so many debts behind him for his widow and daughter to pay. Some allowance must be made, however, for those unfortunate princes who held the highest rank in the kingdom, without having the income of a country gentleman. This poor Duke of Kent, although he enjoyed a revenue about as huge as that of the President of the United States, was the feudal superior of men who had ten and twenty times that income. What is wealth in one country is poverty in another. An English prince with four thousand pounds a year is a very poor man, unless he is a very great man.
To economize his slender resources, the Duke of Kent resided, for many years, in Germany. He was living there in 1817, when the sudden death of the Princess Charlotte, and her newly born child, made it apparent that, if he lived to the ordinary age of man, he would one day succeed to the throne. This unexpected change in his prospects, it is supposed, led to his marriage, in the following year, with a German princess, Victoria, the widow of the Prince of Leiningen, and a daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg. We now know enough of this lady to have a right to believe that she was a very sensible as well as exemplary woman.
Ere many months, it became evident that the Duchess of Kent was about to become a mother, and the duke was desirous that the child should be born upon the soil of the country of which it might be the the sovereign. One of the elements in the popularity of George the Third, which none of his errors ever sensibly diminished, was the fact that he had been born in England, -- a circumstance to which he so aptly alluded in a speech at the beginning, of his reign, that it made an indelible impression upon the country. It was natural that the Duke of Kent should desire to secure this advantage for his unborn child.
Strange to say, this prince of the blood royal actually had not money enough for the journey home, and he wrote to his family for a remittance. They refused it, and he was obliged to borrow the requisite sum from friends in humbler life. At Kensington Palace, in London, on the 24th of May, 1819, the Princess Victoria was born. As she saw the light in the pleasant month of May, they named her the May-flower, and so she was called in the family during her infancy. We have the note, recently published, which the mother of the Duchess of Kent dispatched to her daughter, when she heard the joyful intelligence.
"I cannot express," wrote the Duchess of Saxe-Coburg, "how happy I am to know you are, dearest, dearest Vickey, safe in your bed with a little one, and that all went off so happily. May God's best blessings rest on the little stranger and the beloved mother! Again a Charlotte, -- destined, perhaps, to play a great part one day, if a brother is not born to take it out of her hands. The English like queens, and the niece of the ever-lamented, beloved Charlotte will be most dear to them. I need not tell you how delighted everybody is here in hearing of your safe confinement. You know that you are much beloved in this your little home."
Three months after, the Duchess of Saxe-Coburg, sent to her daughter in England the intelligence of the birth of her grandson, -- the Prince Albert of happy memory, whose untimely death the Queen of England still laments.
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