By Eric W. Vandenbroeck

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).

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 townhouse, 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 pleasures 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.

For reference Leopold (1790-1865) who became the first King of the Belgians, was probably the biological father of Albert (1819-1861), the British Prince Consort. See Jane Ridley, Bertie: A Life of Edward VII, 2012, p. 498.

 

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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