Royal Babylon (23 page)

Cumberland had his second brush with serious scandal in 1810. In the early hours of May 31, shortly after the Duke returned home to his apartments at St. James's Palace, his servants were disturbed by loud swearing and scuffling from Cumberland's chambers. After a while the Duke was heard to cry out, “Neale, Neale, I am murdered.” His page Neale ran to the Duke's quarters, to find his royal master standing in the middle of the room, covered in blood, and with a sword at his feet. The Duke informed him that he had been attacked and, although he had himself been seriously wounded, had forced the assailant to flee. The Duke sent for the physician Sir Henry Halford, who examined him. The official inquiry would be told later that Cumberland had a gaping head wound which exposed his brain, but Halford found only superficial cuts to both hands. Two hours later, Cumberland instructed Neale to fetch his Corsican valet, Joseph Sellis, from his room. The tiny Sellis was discovered propped upright in his blood-soaked bed, his throat cut from ear to ear. The wound was so deep that his head was almost completely severed from his neck. At the other end of the room, much too far away for Sellis to have dropped it, lay a razor.

At the formal inquiry into Sellis's death, Cumberland claimed that the valet had attempted to murder him in his sleep. According to the Duke, he had fought off his assailant, who then fled and decided to take his own life rather than submit to arrest. Although no motive was ever offered for the original murder attempt by Sellis on his master, this was the version of events accepted at the inquest, and a verdict of suicide was brought against Sellis.

The verdict caused a sensation. According to the overwhelming tide of popular opinion, the jury had been duped and the sinister Duke had literally got away with murder. Most
contemporaries believed that he had butchered his valet to prevent a blackmail attempt: he had slit his manservant's throat with a razor while he was asleep, cut himself with his sword to make it look as though he had been in a struggle, then returned to his own room. One popular motive theory was that Sellis was blackmailing Cumberland because the Duke had made a homosexual pass at him. Another was that Cumberland had been caught in bed with the butler's wife. The most fancied rumor was that Cumberland had raped Sellis's daughter, who committed suicide when she found out she was pregnant.

After the trial, Cumberland became more hated than ever. He was openly booed on the streets of London. On one of his rare public excursions he was dragged from his horse and lynched and was lucky to escape with his life. At the age of forty-six the Duke married a twice-widowed German Princess, Frederica of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. It was quite a match, as she was a lady with a singularly checkered past. At best Frederica was a politically insensitive choice of wife because she had already jilted Cumberland's younger brother Adolphus. Slightly more worrying were the allegations that she had murdered her two previous husbands. The King and Queen refused to receive the new daughter-in-law and she was banned from the British court.

Cumberland continued to inspire hatred for the rest of his days. At the age of sixty-six his brother King William IV died, thus separating the joint rule of Britain and Hanover because German Salic law prevented his niece Victoria from ascending the throne of their ancestral homeland. Cumberland was invited to become King of Hanover, an offer that he gratefully accepted. He asked the Duke of Wellington's advice on how long he
should spend putting his affairs in order in England before taking up his new job. “Go now,” Wellington told him, “before you are pelted out.”

         

In 1817 the death of the Prince Regent's daughter, Princess Charlotte, in childbirth had precipitated a major crisis for the British royal family. Although King George III had fathered fifteen children, he did not have one legitimate grandchild. The Prince Regent was fifty-five years old, impotent, and long since separated from his wife. His six younger brothers had between them produced only a string of bastards. The King's five surviving daughters were all middle-aged and childless spinsters. The House of Hanover faced imminent extinction.

In a belated attempt to secure the succession, one by one the Prince Regent's dissipated and decrepit brothers dumped their assortment of long-standing girlfriends and scrambled to become the first to produce a legitimate heir. Suddenly, ugly princesses from some of the more minor German principalities and Duchies that previously the Dukes wouldn't have touched with a royal mace became highly eligible. Even in the context of royal marriages, it was a desperate situation all round.

Adolphus, the Duke of Cambridge, was the youngest of the seven sons. He was on the face of it an unlikely family man, as for most of his life he had shown little interest in women and wore a blond wig. When the glittering prospects suddenly created by the timely death of his niece dangled before him, he put his bachelor days behind him and proposed within a week
of the funeral to a woman he had never met before. At best Adolphus was highly eccentric; the Duke of Wellington, more bluntly, described him as “as mad as Bedlam” (more bad news, incidentally, for the British royal family gene pool, as Adolphus's granddaughter became Queen Mary, wife of George V).

The Duke had a habit of talking in an excitable, unfathomable, high-pitched babble, and often startled churchgoers by shouting out loud in his heavy German accent during sermons. He was also eccentric in appearance, his most notable feature, apart from his wig, being his strange little beard, known as a Newport Fringe. His new wife, Princess Augusta of Hesse-Cassell, was a severe, beetle-browed, masculine woman with a very limited grasp of English. Conversation with either of them was strained, and consequently it was possible for visitors to the Cambridge household to leave without having understood a single word that either of their hosts had said.

         

As George IV died heirless, the Crown passed sideways to his idiot brother the Duke of Clarence, who ruled as William IV for seven years. The present royal family should have remembered that “William” was certainly an unfortunate name the last time it was used by a British monarch.

George IV's greatest gift to the Hanoverian dynasty was that he lowered popular expectations of the monarchy so much that he made even a bleary-eyed buffoon like his younger brother look acceptable. William IV was easily as big a disaster as his brother: he was a boorish, hard-gambling roué with a
great talent for suicidal drinking and running up debt, a lifestyle which led inexorably to death by cirrhosis of the liver.

King George III sent the young Duke of Clarence to sea at the age of thirteen with little or no formal education, ostensibly to boost public pride in the British navy. Although the Duke captained two ships and spent more than half a century at sea, including the entire duration of the Napoleonic Wars, the “Sailor King,” as he later came to be known, was able to avoid active service. This was not his fault: it was deliberate Admiralty policy as he was considered a blundering idiot and too great a liability to be let loose on a ship in battle. Eventually, nepotism enriched him with the position of Admiral, but only after Napoleon had long since ceased to be a problem and there was little likelihood that the King's son would be called upon to do anything dangerous.

As a philanderer he was more than a match for any male member of the British royal family. He raped one of his mother's maids of honor when he was fourteen years old and never looked back. His father, who had packed him off to sea with the advice “I strongly recommend the habitual reading of the Holy Scriptures,” could not have foreseen that his son would become a minor expert on the brothels of the British colonies. During his visits to the West Indies, the local whorehouses gave him a taste for native black women and several more doses of venereal disease. The young Duke found Jamaica to be “a very gay and lively place full of women, and those of the most obliging kind.” A fellow naval officer, William's friend Horatio Nelson, wrote home to his fiancée, “Only William's departure from the capital of Antigua had protected the ladies of St. John's from total collapse.”

The Duke also showed early promise as an astonishingly
heavy drinker, and his contemporaries were amazed by his seemingly endless capacity for sex and alcohol. In a brothel in Bridgetown, Barbados, in 1786 he and a group of his drunken cronies caused
£
700 worth of damage, and were confronted by the formidable madame Rachel Pringle, who demanded recompense in full. The Duke's ship then moved on to Halifax, Nova Scotia. His shipmates noted that before very long he was familiar with every brothel in the entire province. In Germany he copulated with the streetwalkers of Hanover “against a wall or in the middle of the parade.” He wrote to the Prince of Wales complaining how much he had learned to hate German prostitutes, and how he looked forward to coming home to London and “at least to such as would not clap or pox me every time I fucked.”

When he was in his mid-twenties the Duke of Clarence bought himself a house near the Thames in Richmond and in between his maritime duties settled down to live with a London prostitute. This arrangement came to an abrupt end when William had a backstage encounter with an Irish actress. Dorothea Jordan, although neither highly talented nor a great beauty, was a vivacious girl, and by 1790 she was celebrated as one of the most popular comic actresses of the London stage. William first saw her in a farce called
The Spoil'd Child
. She was five years older than William, and already had four illegitimate children by two previous lovers. At the time she was still living with one of them, a lawyer and prospective member of Parliament named Richard Ford, by whom she had two daughters. At first she had no intention of leaving Ford, and in fact hoped that the appearance of the starry-eyed royal suitor would make Ford jealous and spur him into making an honest woman of her. When the awaited proposal
of marriage failed to materialize, she decided that a prince was a prince after all—even one nicknamed “pineapple head” because of his oddly shaped dome and florid complexion.

Much to the amusement of London society, the charming couple set up home, first at Petersham Lodge, and then from 1797 at the red-bricked Bushey House, near Hampton Court Palace. They lived together as man and wife for the next twenty years, and raised a family of ten illegitimate children, five sons and five daughters. Although the arrangement was frequently ridiculed in the London press, the royal Duke and his mistress were more or less left alone to get on with it. So long as Prinny was alive, he presented such a massive and easy target for the satirists and republicans of the day that the Duke of Clarence went largely unnoticed and was able to live in Bushey Park with his actress friend and their ten bouncing bastards in relative anonymity.

Mrs. Jordan did not relinquish her career and continued to tread the boards in between childbirths. There was a more practical reason for her continued work than her love of greasepaint. In the words of a popular ditty of the day, people wondered whether the Duke of Clarence was keeping a mistress or the mistress was keeping him. In fact the Duke was a hopeless spendthrift who failed dismally to live within his means, and he wasn't too proud to top up his annual allowance with the earnings of his working mistress.

By the time he was in his mid-forties the Duke's profligate spending had left him more or less broke, so he demanded a 60 percent increase on the
£
18,000 annuity he received from Parliament. He was curtly advised that this and any similar requests would be ignored until he found himself a wife, and only a
genuine royal bride who would pass the test of the Royal Marriages Act. After two decades, Dorothea Jordan was dumped. According to a popular story of the day, when William tried to reduce the annual pittance he had promised her to buy her off, she handed him a piece of paper which at the time was attached to all playbills. The note read, “No money refunded after the rising of the curtain.”

The florid and bejowled Duke was so deeply unattractive to the opposite sex that half the titled women in Europe fled from his proposals. Over a period of several months, he made a fool of himself with indiscriminate offers of marriage to the likes of Princess Anne of Denmark, the eldest daughter of the Elector of Hesse-Cassel, the Czar's sister the Duchess of Oldenburg, and several homegrown titled ladies, including Miss Catherine Tilney-Long, the Dowager Lady Elphinstone, the Dowager Lady Downshire, Miss Margaret Mercer Elphinstone and Lady Berkeley, all of them repelled by his odd appearance, his bad manners and his foul language. He did in fact make one successful proposal to a wealthy English heiress called Miss Wyckham, but she was deemed unacceptable by the Prince Regent on the grounds that she was “half-mad.”

After being rejected by eighteen different women, he finally found one who said “
Ja
.” The tiny Princess Adelaide, eldest daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, had fair hair and pale skin showing signs of scurvy, and was described by a contemporary as “frightful .  .  . very ugly with a horrid complexion.” She was younger than William's eldest child. The German Princess arrived in England in July 1818, without ever having met the obese middle-aged man she was to marry, and found
herself pitched into a bizarre and unprecedented dual wedding ceremony. William and his younger brother Edward the Duke of Kent, who had similarly ditched his mistress to cash in on a royally approved marriage, had decided on a double wedding at Kew Palace to save time and money. The chief witness to this weird and indecently hasty arrangement, Queen Charlotte, was near to death and barely conscious. As neither bride knew a word of English the service was printed in German, subtitled with English phonetics.

William IV was a witless debauchee, but mysteriously never quite generated the level of embarrassment achieved by his Hanoverian predecessors. He was welcomed with open arms by a British public repulsed by the fourth George. Upon the death of the unimpressive William, the
Spectator
eulogized: “His late Majesty, though at times a jovial and, for a king, an honest man, was a weak, ignorant, commonplace sort of person.” His former long-standing mistress, Dorothea Jordan, died in France, alone and in obscurity. A biography of King William IV published toward the end of Queen Victoria's reign did not acknowledge her existence.