Leopold (1790-1865)
who became the first King of the Belgians in 1831, was a prince from Coburg, a
sleepy town in the middle of Germany. Rumor alleges
that he was probably also the biological father of Albert (1819-1861), the
British Prince Consort, who in 1840 married Queen Victoria (1819-1901). (See
Jane Ridley, Bertie: A Life of Edward VII,2012, p. 498.) Leopold, whom
his family used to call Poldi, was as German as could be, without a trace of
non-German blood in his veins. His father, Prince Francis of Saxe-Coburg, was
the son and heir of Ernst Friedrich, the reigning duke of Coburg-Saalfeld, one
of the smaller independent German states. It consisted of two unconnected pieces
and some minor exclaves, in all barely 400 square miles (one-and-a-half times
the Isle of Wight), with a population of barely 50,000, of which 6,000 in the
town of Coburg itself.
Coburg is a little
town in Upper-Franconia, the northern part of the present German state of
Bavaria. It lies 548 feet below the Veste Coburg, an
impressive bulwark built by the counts of Henneberg
in the 13th century on the southern edge of the dark Thuringian forests. In the
late 16th century the lords of Coburg built a new residence within the city
walls, on the site of a Franciscan monastery that had been dissolved in the
Reformation. By the time of Leopold's birth in 1790, this residence, the
Ehrenburg Palace, had become so dilapidated and the reigning ducal family so
poor that they lived in a town house, directly behind the palace. In 1772 the
duchy was declared bankrupt. With over 1 million thalers in debts, and an
annual income of only 70,000 thalers, complete ruin with famine and
foreclosures threatened the entire state. Fortunately, the Emperor came to the
rescue by installing a Debt Commission that took over the administration of the
duchy, assigning the reigning duke a meager 12,000
thalers to run his household.
Poldi's father was a
simple man, content with being an unambitious artist. Prince Francis loved to
sing and play music and was good at drawing.
A tourist visiting
Coburg today can only wonder how its ruling family escaped from this rustic
backwater. This was, however, the achievement of two women. Unambitious
Francis, content with collecting his etchings, plants and minerals, was a
placid man. The ambition he lacked, his mother and his wife had in abundance.
Francis' wife, Augusta von Reuss, the daughter of the Count of Reuss-Ebersdorff, has been described, by her granddaughter, Queen
Victoria of Great Britain, as a woman “with a most powerful, energetic, almost
masculine mind.”(1)
The children of
Francis and Augusta came from a relatively modest family, but such was not the
case for Francis' mother, Sophie of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel.
Poldi's paternal grandmother was the Duchess of tiny Coburg-Saalfeld through
her marriage, but she was also a sister of queens, an aunt of kings, a cousin
of one Russian Tsar and the aunt of another. Indeed, while Sophie had married
the penniless princeling from Coburg, far better matches had been made for her
sisters. Sophie's eldest sister Elisabeth had married Friedrich the Great, King
of Prussia. Another elder sister, Louise, had married the Crown Prince of
Prussia, Friedrich's brother, and became the mother of the mother of the
Prussian king. And her youngest sister Julia was the wife of King Fredrik V of
Denmark. Via his mother unambitious Francis was a first cousin of the kings of
Prussia and Denmark.
For the future career
of Francis' children, however, the Russian connections of grand mama’s family
proved far more important. In 1711 Sophie's aunt, Charlotte of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel, had married Alexis Romanov, only son of Tsar
Peter I. Aunt Charlotte's son, Tsar Peter II, ruled for only three years, dying
of smallpox at the age of 15 i.e. 1730. The boy was the last male descendant of
the Romanovs. After Peter II's death, the tsarist crown was grabbed by Anna
Romanov, daughter of Peter I's brother. Anna had no children, but in 1739 she
arranged for her sister's daughter to be married to Anton Ulrich of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel, the brother of Duchess Sophie of
Coburg-Saalfeld. His son Ivan was born in August 1740 and was proclaimed Crown
Prince of Russia. Two months later, when the Tsarina Anna died, the baby
proceeded to the Russian throne as Tsar Ivan VI.
It is generally not a
good thing for a baby to hold a throne. In November 1741, little Ivan was
deposed by Elizabeth Romanov, daughter of Tsar Peter I. The child was locked up
in a dungeon on the fortress island of Schluesselburg,
with no sunlight, nor people to talk to. Dressed in rags, he never matured and
became a human vegetable. Many years passed. The House of Holstein-Gottorp succeeded to the Russian throne, Tsar Peter III was
murdered by his wife, and in 1764 the new tsarina, Catherine the Great, visited
Schluesselburg. There she discovered poor Ivan VI,
now 24 years old, still alive in his dungeon. She concluded that apart from his
painful and almost unintelligible stammering, he was bereft of understanding
and human intelligence, and had him murdered.
In the summer of
1806, the Corsican invaded Germany. On 14 October 1806, Napoleon crushed the
Prussian army at [ena, near Saalfeld. The
fifteen-year-old Poldi, nominally a Russian artillery general, but one who had
never seen a Russian canon, hid himself in an attic when the French arrived in
town. His father, unambitious Francis, only 56 years old, died on 9 December,
shortly after the French confiscated all his property and terminated his
duchy's independence. On 15 December, his lands were integrated into the
Confederation of the Rhine, a French vassal state. The Coburg heir, Leopold's
eldest brother Ernst, suffered a nervous breakdown and spent several months in
a Bohemian spa to recover. Fortunately, their mother Augusta knew what to do.
She contacted her son-in-law, the Grand-Duke Constantine, and his brother, the
Tsar.
After his victorious
march through Germany, Napoleon was planning to invade England. To have his
hands free in the East, he was eager for peace with Russia. Augusta convinced
the Russians to make Coburg part of their deal with the Corsican. On 25 June
1807, Napoleon and Tsar Alexander met at Tilsit. Napoleon got his peace with
the Russians, and the Saxe-Coburgs got their duchy
back.
At Tilsit Napoleon
had also promised to enlarge Ernst's duchy with parts of the adjacent
principality of Bayreuth. Though he had not fulfilled his promise yet, Ernst
and Leopold considered that the interests of the House of Saxe-Coburg were best
served through collaboration with France. The Saxe-Coburg family motto was Treue und Fest (Loyal and Constant), and, as the most
advantageous thing to be loyal to was the dominating force of the day, they
decided to go to Paris, ask Napoleon to grant Leopold the privilege of serving
at the Imperial Court and remind the French Emperor of his promise.
On 14 October,
exactly one year after the Prussian defeat at Jena, the two brothers arrived in
the French capital. It proved more difficult than expected to gain access to
the Corsican. Nevertheless, the brothers had a good time. Ernst, who at 23 had
already had plenty of experience with the fair sex, introduced his younger
brother to the F:easures of life. Soon Ernst fell in love with Pauline Panam, an 18 year-old Greek girl who was a dancer in Paris,
where she was known as la belle Grecque. Ernst decided that he had found in
Paris all that there was to be found and returned home to govern his duchy,
taking la belle Grecque along. Poldi regretted this, because, if one may
believe Pauline's autobiography, he had got into the habit of enjoying her
himself.
In the summer of
1809, Leopold visited his sister Victoria, who in 1803 had married Prince Emich
Karl of Leiningen, 23 years her elder, to do her mother a favor.
Leiningen was the widower of Augusta's youngest sister. Victoria gave him a
son, Karl, and a daughter, Feodora.
Between 1809 and
1812, while his brother started extensive restoration of Coburg's Ehrenburg
Palace, Leopold led an idle life. He resigned from the Russian army in 1810. He
travelled around, visited Switzerland, Austria and Italy, and made several
trips to Paris to safeguard the Saxe-Coburg interests. Napoleon's efforts to
subdue England had failed and his eyes turned East. On 24 June 1812, the
Grande Armee invaded Russia. Nearly 500 conscripts
from Coburg were sent along. The Corsican, however, was not prepared for what
awaited him. Thousands of young men perished in the Russian winter. Of the
600,000 men that Napoleon had forced to follow him into Russia, fewer than
50,000 survived. Of the 476 soldiers from Coburg, only 13 returned home. As
soon as the news of the French defeat in Russia reached them, the Saxe-Coburgs changed sides and turned against the French. In
March 1813 Leopold was the first German prince to present himself to Tsar
Alexander at his headquarters in Poland. He was promptly reinstated to his
former rank and became a General of the Russian Cuirassiers. This time he was
not a 15-year-old boy with only a general's uniform, but a 22-year-old man with
real Russian soldiers around him.
Leopold was absent at
the battle of Leipzig, because the Tsar had needed him for family matter and
persuade his sister to return to her husband. She refused.
Leopold rejoined the Tsar at Vesoul on 19 January. The invasion of
France had begun. On 31 March 1814, the Russian army marched into Paris, with
Leopold in its ranks. “I cannot remember a more beautiful moment than when, as
a conqueror, I marched into the town where I had led such a miserable
existence,” he wrote to his sister Victoria.(2)
In May 1814,
Alexander summoned Leopold for a private and personal conversation. Leopold was
worried. He thought this could only mean that the Tsar wanted to see him about
Coburg - and that news would certainly not be good. To Leopold's surprise, the
Tsar had a totally different message: “We will soon leave for England,” he
said. “I intend for you to marry Princess Charlotte, the future Queen of
England.” Leopold was stunned. “She is betrothed to someone else,” he objected.
“But you are so beautiful, no woman can resist you,” the Tsar replied. Leopold
also learned that the Emperor of Austria favored the
idea and that the Habsburgs would grant him the wealthy lordship of Holzkirchen near Wurzburg in Lower-Franconia if he
succeeded. And he learned that the Tsar had already sent ahead his own sister,
Catherine, the widow of the Duke of Oldenburg, to befriend Charlotte and to
speak to her of the attractive prince from Coburg.
The whole situation
surrounding Charlotte's engagement to Orange came to a crisis on 16 June.
Exactly one week after the Russian delegation had arrived in town, Charlotte
unilaterally broke off her engagement in a short letter to Prince Willem. Her
father was furious. As a punishment, he kept her locked up for most of the
time. But Charlotte remained determined. “No threats shall ever bend me to
marry this detested Dutchman,” she wrote.
Meanwhile, Leopold
had become very active. He had written the Prince Regent a polite letter fully
explaining his conduct. The Regent had graciously accepted Leopold's apologies
and had even come to consider him a most honorable
young man. Leopold had also been trying to catch Charlotte's attention. When
she drove out in the Park he would ride up to her and endeavor
to be noticed. He had called at her house, but she had not invited him in to
drink tea with her. Charlotte was still in love with F and hoped that the
latter, to whom she wrote ardent love letters, would return to England for her.
As it happened,
Leopold spent barely a month in London. He cut short his stay because on 4 July
1814, the Prince of Leiningen, the husband of Leopold's sister Victoria, died.
He returned home as soon as he heard the news. Although Leopold and Charlotte
had hardly seen each other and had scarcely spoken, by early 1815 he had
succeeded in becoming Charlotte's favorite. The
reason why Charlotte picked 'the Leo' (as she called him) was a very prosaic
one. She needed another man, as an alternative to Willem of Orange, to confront
her father with. Since her first choice, F, had “betrayed” her, the dashing Rusian general from Coburg simply was the first one that
came to mind. She wrote that she would still think of her Prussian Prince
often, but with Leopold she would be less unhappy than if she were to remain
alone.(3)
For the Saxe-Coburg
family 1816 was a year of glory. The triumph of Augusta, the Dowager-Duchess of
Coburg-Saalfeld. In Vienna, on 2 January, Leopold's brother Ferdinand had married
Antonia von Kohary, the only daughter of the rich
Hungarian Prince Kohary the richest heiress of the
Austrian Empire. Never before had Vienna seen such a wedding. The festivities,
where an orchestra of 790 gypsies played Hungarian songs, lasted for nine whole
days. And an even more glorious match was going to take place in London,
between Poldi and the heiress of the Prince Regent. After the debacle in
Russia, where her daughter had botched it, at last Augusta was sure that one of
her grandchildren would someday wear a royal crown. This time nothing could go
wrong, could it?
Leopold and
Charlotte's engagement was announced in February. Leopold acquired British
nationality and the rank of Field Marshal in the British army.
Leopold's marriage
took place on 2 May. The couple went to live at Marlborough House near St.
James's Park in London and at Claremont House near Esher in Surrey. The latter
was a huge Palladian mansion built in the late 1760s by the landscape gardener
Lancelot “Capability” Brown; a rare example of his work as an architect. The
Prince Regent donated it as a personal gift to Leopold.
In the spring of
1817, the whole of England rejoiced in the news everyone had been waiting for:
Princess Charlotte was pregnant. On 5 November, however, tragedy struck.
Charlotte gave birth to a stillborn boy, after 52 hours of labor.
The next day she died, only 21 years old. Leopold was shattered. 'It is true
that I loved her for her physical beauty, but I can vow that what I loved more
and came to appreciate more every day was her noble heart,' he wrote to his
sister Sophie.(4)
Though officially
Leopold remained in England until 1831, he spent most of his time on the
continent. In 1819 he bought the castle of Niederfuellbach
near Coburg. He often attended meetings of European freemasons and had a busy
love life. He is said to have had children in Niederfuellbach
and Coburg. His affairs with Countess Dorothee
(Dolly) de Ficquelmont and with Jane Digby, Lady
Ellenborough, did not go unnoticed; his relatives even thought that he was
about to get married. Dolly he had to share with her husband, however, and Jane
Digby, who was a nymphomaniac, with the whole of London. In Coburg, where
Leopold had his own apartment in the Ehrenburg Palace, he frequently stood in
for his brother Ernst, the reigning duke, when the latter went abroad for
business or pleasure.
Duke Ernst had
finally married in 1817. The bride was a relative, 16-year-old Louise of
Saxe-Gotha. It was a marriage for dynastic purposes. She was the only child of
Prince Augustus, the reigning Duke of Gotha-Altenburg. Her father's younger
brother, Friedrich, was a childless homosexual, which made her the ultimate
heir to Gotha-Altenburg. Louise, whose mother had died when she was but two
weeks old, was a small, vivacious and intelligent girl. “With long thick
chestnut hair, and large blue eyes, though severely cross-eyed,” one of her
nieces wrote, “but when she smiles and talks, one assumes it to be a freshness
in her expression, which suits her rather well.”( Mary of Wurtternberg
to Grand-Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna of Russia, 7 Oct. 1819, in Bachmann 2, p.
28.) Because of her pleasant character, Louise was dearly loved by the people
of Coburg. But the marriage was an unhappy one, owing to Ernst's continuing
extramarital affairs. In the very year of his marriage, Ernst became the father
of an illegitimate daughter by his 19-year-old Parisian mistress Sophie Fermepin. His reputation was further harmed by the
publication, in 1823, of the saucy memoirs of la belle Grecque, his former
mistress Pauline Panam, the mother of another of his
many bastards. Out of revenge or out of loneliness, Louise soon started to take
lovers of her own.
Leopold was given no
official functions in Britain and led an idle life. When he was not on one of
his frequent travels to the continent, he occasionally attended parties of the
English aristocracy, where he was generally despised. “The shabbiest ass,” Lady
Cowper called him. “His pomposity fatigues, and his avarice disgusts,” Lord Greville said. The Duke of Wellington, a member of the Tory
cabinet, sometimes felt constrained to invite the shifty German prince. “We are
here with a crowd of bores,” Princess de Lieven, the wife of the Russian
ambassador, reported to Metternich in January 1821 about one of Wellington's
parties. “Leopold,” she said, “was wearying me with his slow speech and his bad
reasoning.” “He is a Jesuit and a bore.”(5) Even Wellington confessed that he
was often “bored to death.”
At home, in his
mansion at Claremont, Leopold's company consisted of his servants, “four dogs
and two parrots, one of which can sing the overture to Weber's opera Der Freischutz,”( Leopold to Marie-Amelie, Duchess of Orleans,
21 Apr. 1828, in Sabbe, p. 67. ) and his secretary,
Christian Stockmar, whom Leopold had raised to the
rank of a Baron in 1821. Stockmar not only promoted
the interests of the Saxe- Co burgs, but also those of his own family. He knew
that his master was leading a restless sexual life. Leopold had mistresses in London
and abroad. In his capacity as personal surgeon, Stockrnar,
fearing that his master's promiscuous life would 'ruin body and soul,' advised
the prince to marry. He told him that he had a cousin who strikingly resembled
the late Princess Charlotte. In September 1828, Leopold departed for Prussia to
meet this 20-year-old cousin of Stockrnars.
Leopold was
infatuated from the moment he saw Karoline in the theatre of the Neues Palast in Potsdam. He surprised the actress with a
visit and proposed that she should come and live with him in England. At first
Karoline was not enthusiastic, but Leopold courted her insistently. “It is very
hard for me to give up my career as an actress, but my heart asks me to make
this sad, afflicted man happy again,” she wrote to Stockmar.
“Always, when I have decided not to give in, I see his dark melancholic eyes
begging me. I will have to renounce my beloved job in Berlin for the only
possible future that he can offer me: to join him in his loneliness in
England.”(6) She finally gave in when during a visit to his castle in Niederfullbach he promised to marry her.
In May 1829, Karoline
and her mama moved to London. Leopold rented them a place near Regent's Park. Stockmar explained that the marriage had to be kept a
secret, because Leopold might otherwise lose his British stipend. On 2 July,
there was a small wedding party in Claremont House. But Leopold's infatuation
with Karoline was over as soon as he had conquered her. She became a burden to
him. He was extremely angry when she spent too much money to his liking on a
trip to Paris. Politically, too, she was a liability.
Since 1821, the people
of Greece had been fighting a guerrilla war against their Turkish Ottoman
overlords. In September 1829, the Turkish Sultan accepted the independence of
Greece. The Greeks wanted a republic and had already chosen one of their
leaders, Count Ioannis Kapodistrias,
as president. The Great Powers had decided, however, that Greece should become
a kingdom. Hence, a kingdom it had to be. But who should be king? France
supported Prince Johann of Saxony, while the candidate of King George IV of
Britain was Prince Frederik of Orange, a younger brother of Prince Willem, who
in 1814 had lost his fiancée to Leopold. Leopold decided to put himself forward
as a better candidate. He knew he would easily get the backing of Russia. He
visited France and persuaded Paris to accept him as second choice if Prince
Johann was rejected. He went to Naples to meet Greek representatives. He sent
the banker Karl Stockmar, the brother of his
secretary, to Greece to meet Kapodistrias, who
declared himself in favor of Leopold. He lobbied at
the Foreign Office in London, where Lord Aberdeen was in charge, and he
succeeded in obtaining the support of the Duke of Wellington, the British Prime
Minister.
Their support for
Leopold brought Aberdeen and Wellington into conflict with George IV. How could
the Government be “such fools as to think Prince Leopold could be any use?” the
King exclaimed. George vetoed Leopold. This led to a government crisis.
Wellington threatened to resign if Leopold was not accepted. The King
“grumpily” gave in. But having won his prize, Leopold was no longer interested
and renounced the Greek crown. On thinking the matter over, he had begun to
have doubts about the future stability of the Greek throne. “It is a throne
with only three legs,” Stockmar said, “not fit for a
King, but for an equilibrist.” His sister, too, wanted Leopold to remain in
England. The Dowager-Duchess of Kent wished to have him nearby, so that he
could remain the protector of the interests of the House of Saxe-Coburg, as
they were embodied in her daughter. Then, the 67-year-old King George IV became
seriously ill. It was clear that he was soon to die (he died on 26 June). The
Duke of Clarence was next in line for the throne, and immediately after him the
11-year-old Victoria. Was Leopold tempted by a possible glorious career in
England, perhaps as the Regent for his little niece?
Leopold went to see
the British Foreign Secretary. He told him that his acceptance of the Greek
throne had only been conditional. The territory of Greece should be enlarged
with the province of Candia (Crete). Aberdeen became angry. “Notwithstanding
all that has been arranged already, you are free to withdraw, but your decision
cannot be explained by the case of Candia alone,” he said.( Aberdeen to
Leopold, 31 Jan. 1830, in Bauer, Karoline 1, vol. III, p. 200.) Nevertheless,
on 21 May, Leopold officially declared that he would not accept the throne of
Greece after all. Wellington and Aberdeen felt personally affronted. Lieven,
the Russian Ambassador, called Leopold's behaviour 'downright scandalous,'
because he renounced all the responsibilities he had previously accepted. Even
the Prussian Baron von Stein, a friend of Leopold, wrote to the Archbishop of
Cologne: “It is all in the style of Prince peu Ii peu, as King George calls him.
In cowardly fashion he lets go of the plough even before he has drawn the first
furrow, and is already calculating his chances upon the death of the King. A
man of such small stature is not worthy of a high position.”(7) Leopold denied
that his real ambition was to become Regent of Great Britain, but many years
later in a letter to Archduke Johann of Austria he would confess: “If I had
taken over power in England in 1830, things would have been different.”(8)
The Greek episode
convinced Leopold of the urgency of discarding himself of his wife. If he had
become King of Greece, his marriage to a commoner would have been a severe
handicap. The children born within such a morganatic marriage would be unable
to inherit their father's rank. If he had become king - or if he wanted to
become a king in future and establish a respectable dynasty - he would either
have to divorce Karoline Bauer or simply declare his marriage non-existent, as
if she had only been his mistress. Leopold opted for the second solution. He
told her that he no longer considered himself married. It is striking to see
how he used the same argument towards his wife as he used towards the European
Powers with regard to the Greek throne. He claimed that his marriage had only
been conditional and that he could renounce it whenever this pleased him.
The deceived woman
left England at the end of May 1830, only a few days after Leopold had
officially rejected the throne of Greece. Karoline never met Leopold again. She
committed suicide after writing her memoirs, in which she depicted the Coburg
prince as a pedantic hypochondriac egotist. Ernst Stockmar,
the son of Leopold's secretary, in a reaction to the publication of the
memoirs, did not deny the fact that his relative had been wronged. However, he
considered the marriage of the prince to his father's cousin no more than ”a
small mistake, which was soon mended.” The whole episode, he said, “does not
even deserve to be mentioned.”(9) The official line is that the woman made
everything up. Otherwise, one would have to concede that the founder of the
royal dynasty of Belgium was a bigamist.
Indeed, within less
than a year after Leopold renounced the crown of Greece, he accepted another:
the crown of a country that did not exist at the moment of the Greek episode
and that had never existed before - Belgium.
1) Pieter Geyl, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Stem, 6 volumes. Amsterdam/
Antwerpen: Wereldbibliotheek, 1961-1962, p.16.
2) Leopold to Victoria,
11 Apr. 1814, in Baron Camille Buffin, La Jeunesse de Leopold I, roi des
Belges. Brussels: Henri Lamertin,
1914, p. 83.
3) Charlotte to
Mercer Elphinstone. 11 Nov. 1814, in Charlotte [Princess of Great Britain and
Hanover]. Letters of Princess Charlotte 1811-1817. Ed. A. Aspinall. London:
Home and Van Thal, 1949, p. 165.
4) Leopold to Sophie,
22 December 1817, in Leopold I , Leopold I [King of the Belgians], Les Letlres de Leopold In it sa SrEur la princesse Sophie, it son
beau-frere Emmanuel, comte de Mensdorjf-Pouilly,
et it son neveu Alphonse, comte
de Mensdorf-Pouilly 1804-1864, Eds. Jean Puraye and Hans-Otto Lang, Liege: Vaillant-Carrnanne, 1973, p. 169.
5) Lieven to
Metternich, 12 Jan. and 4 Feb. 1821, in Princess Lieven, The Private Letters of
Princess Lieven to Prince Metlernich 1820-1826, Ed,
Peter Quennell, London: John Murray, 1937, pp. 103
and 111.
6) Bauer to Stockmar, Jan. 1829, in Rita von Wangenheim, Baron
Stockmar: Eine coburgisch-englische Geschichie, Coburg: Hirsch Verlag, 1996, p. 76.
7) Quoted
in Piet Vermeir, Leopold I: Mens, vorst,
diplomaai, 2 volumes. Dendermonde: Vermeir,
1965-1967,vol. I, p. 46.
8) Quoted
in Carlo Bronne, Leopold I et son
temps. Brussels: Goemaere, 1942, p. 49.
9) Quoted in Jaques de Launay, Leopold Ie,1982, p. 32.
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