By George! It's the Tale of an Unwanted Duke

George IV’s daughter, Charlotte, suffered horribly from her father’s mismanagement. He tried to stiff arm her into marriage with an unattractive lout. She finally married the man of her dreams only to die in child birth. And where did this leave England?

And now dear readers, I find myself having to backtrack a bit. My sincerest apologies, but I goofed. There actually were some dukes who married before Charlotte, and one princess. Had Charlotte lived, these marriages would have been of little interest to anyone except serious historians. As it was, only one plays a significant role in events that followed Charlotte’s passing.

But they do have entertainment value. The first is the marriage of the Duke of Cumberland. You may recall the “assassination” attempt on the Duke that made him an unwanted fixture at Carlton House. When one reads about the Duke of Cumberland what is surprising is not that the one attempt on his life failed, but that there were not more people willing to take up the challenge.

The man was universally hated. Charlotte found him creepy in the extreme,and, like all the women in the family, never ever wanted to be alone with him. The fact that some of his brothers, including the Prince Regent, believed that he harbored carnal desires toward his sisters really put him in a class of his own when it came to royal mischief.

I must point out that no hard evidence was ever produced to prove he had ever done anything of that sort. Though he was widely believed to be the father of Princess Sofia’s illegitimate child, that was actually an equerry in His Majesties household. Something Sofia admitted to after the boy had grown and joined the army. Also after mom and dad were long dead.

But the fact that so many, including family members,believed otherwise speaks volumes about the Dukes reputation. And now the Duke had found a wife. Not surprisingly, she wasn’t English. Also,not too surprisingly, she was a relative. Her name was Princess Frederica of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. She was a woman with a bit of a reputation of her own. She was also the Queen’s niece.

The Prince Regent was not happy with the situation. It wasn’t so much brother Ernest’s choice for a bride, it was the fact that he had been receiving reports through the inter-family grapevine that the Duke had been trash talking him from one end of Germany to the other.

The Duke had an opinion on everyone. Always ill-formed and always nasty. Prinny chose to show the Duke his place by appointing their younger brother, the Duke of Cambridge, to the office of Governor of Hanover. Cumberland dearly wanted that office for himself and when he didn’t get it he was “reduced to tears.”

The Prince Regent, with an already full plate of family troubles, decided to extend an olive branch in the form of helping the Duke marry Princess Frederica. Hopefully it would not only quiet him down, but keep him out of England as well.

The Princess was not unknown to the English branch of the family. She had actually been engaged to the Duke of Cambridge. That came to a screeching halt when she discovered she was pregnant. Unfortunately, the father was Prince Frederick of Solms-Braunfels. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how one chooses to look at these things, Prince Frederick died and his widow was up for grabs again.

The Queen was less than thrilled. The House of Commons was equally under-whelmed and refused to increase the Duke’s allowance from 18,000 pounds an year to 24,000. They got married anyway, in Strelitz, in the summer of 1815. Naturally, he expected to be welcomed with open arms when he brought his bride to England to meet the family.

The Queen, learning of his intentions, planned to slam the door in his face if he was stupid enough to darken her doorstep. The Duke and his wife arrived in England in August of 1815. They married again, Church of England rites, at Carlton House. Princess Frederica found the Prince Regent at his charming best. He “embraced her warmly and gave her an enameled miniature portrait set with beautiful large stones.”

Both bride and groom were grateful that the Prince Regent was behaving so nobly toward them. No one else was. The Queen, already smarting from the Duke’s ignoring her wishes and coming to England got another nasty surprise in the form of a letter from Frederica’s brother.

It was a letter “couched in terms so offensive and so insulting that she could not with any regard to decency shew it to any individual.” She wrote to the Prince Regent. She went on to say that although he had shown her every kindness and consideration in the past, his support of the Duke’s marriage, and by extension, the Princesses brother, had changed everything. She closed the letter by saying; “I cannot deny that I have felt most acutely the want of support which I might have expected.”

In his response, Prinny tried to defend himself and at the same time get mom to reconsider receiving Cumberland and his wife. “When pigs fly.” was the Queens answer. Well, actually, that was my answer, but she said something like that.

So upset did Her Majesty become that she fell ill again. Lord Bathurst, representing the government, came up with a solution. Why didn’t the Duke and his wife go back where they came from? Should the Queen die, “Mischievous persons would then be able so to work on the public feelings as to expose her Royal Highness most unmeritedly to personal insult or reproach.”

Leave England, because if the Queen dies, the mob will take it out on your wife. The Duke was unmoved. He was a Duke, dammit! Mom owed him and his wife an audience and he wasn’t going to leave England till he got it! Besides, where, oh where would he get the money to travel? It wasn’t just himself and his wife, there were servants, and supplies to buy and porters to tip and hotel accommodations to be made. Everybody wants him out of the country, but no one wants to help him leave.

The Prince Regent told him to drop by Carlton House. He had some pin money tucked away in an old sugar bowl that aught to cover everything. Once there, he turned up the pressure on the Duke to clear out ASAP. The Duke didn’t like his brothers tone and dug in his heels. “Sorry, I’ve changed my mind. Mom owes us an audience and that’s what I want. Besides, the Duchess isn’t feeling well. We can’t go bobbing across the Channel while Freddy is so out of sorts.”

The Prince reconsidered. Okay, your wife can stay until she feels better, but you have to go. Now. That really twisted the Dukes cravat. He held his ground against the Prince. “A departure would be held forth as proof of conscious guilt and fear of shewing ourselves.”

What the Duke had not considered was the Queens natural advantage over him. She was The Queen. There was no way to pressure her to do anything she didn’t want to do. He, on the other hand, was widely disliked, if not actively hated. Everyone, mom, his brothers and sisters, the government, wanted him out of England, with or without his wife.

It was a battle of wills that the Queen had won from the outset. All she had to do was wait for the Duke to acknowledge it. He finally did, nearly two years later, when he left England on July 1818. More disliked than ever and more bitter toward his family than he had been two years previously.

– Mr Al