Queen Victoria Read Online Free

permanently in the land of her adoption. After she lost her second Princess, the future Queen Adelaide wrote to the Duchess of Kent: “My children are dead; but yours lives, and she is mine too,” and throughout the remainder of her life she treated her niece with an affection which was truly maternal. In addition to her other troubles, the royal widow was left in very straitened circumstances, and though for some time helped by the generosity of her brother, it was many years before any adequate provision was made for her maintenance.
    Particular attention has been drawn in the previous chapter to the female members of the ancestry of the Queen in the male line. Here it is equally important to mention the great influence which the Queen’s grandmother in the female line had upon her character and her life. She was, as is mentioned above, a Princess of the ancient house of Reuss-Ebersdorf. Her mother was of the house of Erbach-Schoenberg, which family has again, in recent years, been allied to the royal family of Great Britain by the marriage of the Count of Erbach-Schoenberg with the sister of the lamented Prince Henry of Battenberg. The Duchess of Coburg is described by her third and favourite son, the King of the Belgians, as being in every way “a most distinguished person,” and the Queen, speaking of her many years later, thus records her recollections: “The Queen remembers her dear grandmother perfectly well. She was a most remarkable woman, with a most powerful, energetic, almost masculine mind, accompanied with great tenderness of heart and extreme love for nature. The Prince (Consort) told the Queen that she had wished earnestly that he should marry the Queen, and as she died when her grandchildren (the Prince and Queen) were only twelve years old, she could have little guessed what a blessing she was preparing, not only for this country but for the world at large. She was adored by her children, particularly by her sons; King Leopold being her great favourite. She had fine and most expressive blue eyes, with the marked features and long nose inherited by most of her children and grandchildren.” This note by the Queen, with several letters of this gifted lady, is printed in General Grey’s “Early Years of the Prince Consort.” The Dowager Duchess of Coburg died in 1831. The Queen believes that whatever powers of mind and talents she may possess are principally inherited from her maternal grandmother, of whom a characteristic portrait, from a miniature, is given opposite page 14.
    The sisters of the Duchess of Kent, and aunts to the Queen, were Sophia, Antoinette, and Julie. Sophia, the eldest, after refusing many eligible proposals of marriage from suitors of her own rank, married in 1804 Count Mensdorff-Pouilly, whose acquaintance she had made when visiting her sister, Antoinette, at Fantaisie, near Baireuth, at that time the resort of many Bavarian families, as well as of French emigrants. The second daughter of the Duchess of Saxe-Coburg, Antoinette, married in 1798 Duke Alexander of Wurtemberg, whose sister, the Empress of Russia, was mother to the Emperors Alexander and Nicholas. The Duke Alexander held a very influential position in that country, where he resided many years. His wife is described by her brother, King
    Leopold, as clever, amiable, and possessed of a great
esprit
de
conduite
. They had two sons, both of whom served with distinction in the Russian Army; the elder married Princess Marie of Orleans, daughter of Louis Philippe, and their son, Duke Philip, is heir-presumptive to the throne of Wurtemberg. The third sister, Julie, was married at fifteen to the Grand Duke Constantine of Russia. The marriage was not happy, and in 1802 she left Russia, fixing her residence finally at Elfenau, near Berne in Switzerland, where she was visited in 1837 by her nephew, Prince Albert, a visit repeated on more than one occasion afterwards.

Chapter Three

The Queen’s Early Years (1819 —