Inheritance: A Psychological History of the Royal Family

by Dennis Friedman

Overview

A psychological study of the British Royal Family and the problems found in any family.

Dennis Friedman's Inheritance traces the marital and emotional problems of the Royal Family back to Queen Victoria's nursery, unveiling a host of psychodramas played out against a privileged background of English palaces and Scottish castles. The book addresses the often turbulent personal relationships of the Royal Family from the time of the young Victoria to the lives of the current generation.

This revised and enlarged edition asks whether Queen Elizabeth and her descendants have learned lessons from the legacy left by Diana. This will have an impact on the future of the young Prince George, the eldest child of William and Kate and latest in line to the throne.

• Explores the dynamics of the Royal Family
• Sheds light on many of the universal problems to be found in any family

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780720618334
Publisher:	Peter Owen Publishers
Publication date:	06/29/2016
Sold by:	INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	330
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Dennis Friedman is a psychiatrist and the author of innovative studies of phobias, sexual problems, and other psychological disorders. His previous works include the biographies Darling Georgie: The Enigma of King George V and Ladies of the Bedchamber, and the novel The Lonely Hearts Club.

Read an Excerpt

Inheritance

A Psychological History of the Royal Family

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By Dennis Friedman

Peter Owen Publishers

Copyright © 2014 Dennis Friedman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7206-1833-4

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CHAPTER 1

QUEEN VICTORIA AND PRINCE ALBERT

'The hand that rocks the cradle ...' – John O'London's Treasure Trove

Queen Victoria and her consort Prince Albert were both psychologically disadvantaged in that neither was brought up by two caring parents. Franz August Karl Albert Emanuel was the younger son of Ernst, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, who later became Duke of Saxe-CoburgGotha. His mother, Duchess Louise, was the daughter of August, Duke of Saxe-Gotha. Queen Victoria's father, the Duke of Kent, died when she was just eight months old, while the four-year-old Albert was deprived of his mother, Duchess Louise of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, when she was banished from the Court following her illicit relationship with an Army officer. As a result, both Victoria and Albert left legacies of emotional damage, handing down through the generations their unresolved conflicts and disturbed behavioural patterns together with the Crown.

Several of Queen Victoria's descendants have been seriously depressed, compulsive gamblers or have had problem with alcohol misuse. Some have had difficulties in making and maintaining commitments and others in bringing up their children. In three out of the five generations, from Queen Victoria to the present Prince of Wales, certain family members seem to have experienced confusion about their sexual orientation, and at least one has turned for solace to illegal drugs. Every generation has experienced marital crises, reflected particularly in certain twentieth-century events that many feel brought the future of the monarchy into question.

Victoria and Albert, two deprived children born within three months of each other, were destined to seek attention and love to compensate for the absence of the parent of the opposite sex. Destiny also played a role in their betrothal and subsequent marriage.

Princess Victoria was born in 1819, the only child of an arranged marriage between Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, and Princess Victoria Mary Louisa of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Prince Edward's parents, George III and Queen Charlotte, had produced thirteen children, yet the succession was a matter of concern. Their eldest son George, the Prince Regent, was unlikely to have further children with Caroline of Brunswick, whom he hated – his only legitimate daughter Charlotte died in childbirth in 1817 – so his younger brothers were encouraged to produce legitimate offspring.

Edward, Duke of Kent, was living in Belgium with a French-woman – Julie, Madame de St Laurent – who was slightly older than he. At the age of forty-eight, and with some initial reluctance, he terminated this long-standing relationship and married the thirty-year-old Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Although the relationship was not, at first, a romantic one, Edward and Victoria later grew fond of one another. At any rate the couple settled into apartments in Kensington Palace, which had been grudgingly offered to them by the Prince Regent, where Victoria, their only child, was born ten months after the marriage. She was delivered by Fräulein Siebold who, coincidentally, also delivered her cousin Albert three months later.

The Princess was christened in June, but several of her parents' chosen names were rejected by the Prince Regent. He did not, however, object to the name Alexandrina, after the Tsar of Russia, Alexander I. Victoria was called by the diminutive Drina until she was twelve. Although the Duke of Kent may have been hoping for a son, he was not displeased by the arrival of his daughter – 'The decrees of Providence are at all times wisest and best,' he wrote – and he had no reason to suppose that Princess Victoria would accede to the throne. He, after all, had brothers who might yet produce sons, and Victoria's mother was still relatively young and fertile.

By the end of the year Victoria's parents were considering returning to Germany where life would be cheaper and the atmosphere warmer. The Prince Regent, who was still distraught over the death in 1817 of his daughter Charlotte, not only regarded Victoria as an intruder but resented the continuing presence at Court of her uncle Prince Leopold, who was also Charlotte's widower and a constant reminder to her grieving father of his beloved daughter's death. Before deciding on their move to Germany, however, the Duke of Kent took his wife and just-weaned daughter to Sidmouth in Devon for Christmas. By the sea he caught a cold that developed into pneumonia. On the advice of Dr Stockmar, a young friend of Prince Leopold, the Duke made his will. Among his executors was his equerry Sir John Conroy.

The Duke died on 23 January 1820, six days before his father George III. Accepting the generosity of a small allowance from her brother Leopold, the Duchess of Kent, together with Princess Victoria, returned to Kensington Palace, where Victoria grew up without a father and with a mother who was not only a poor relation of the Royal Family but a foreigner. The two men in her life were her Uncle Leopold and Sir John Conroy.

King Leopold of the Belgians, brother of the Duke of Kent, was born in 1780, Prince of Leiningen, the son of Francis, Duke of Saxe-Coburg. He had married Charlotte, the cherished daughter of the Prince Regent, in 1816, against her father's wishes. That the Duke of Kent had encouraged the courtship may partially explain Leopold's later fondness for Victoria. He remained on the fringes of the English Court after Charlotte's death and, until accepting the crown of Belgium in 1830, was a frequent and welcome visitor at Kensington Palace, although he was absent for four years following his accession.

Victoria responded warmly to this flamboyant uncle. Elizabeth Longford tells us that he sported a wig, three-inch soles on his shoes and a feather boa. This outward effeminacy may have primed the Princess to feel comfortable with such men, and an attraction to the effeminate, to men dressed as women, was to remain with her for the rest of her life. Leopold displayed consistent kindness and generosity towards Victoria and her mother, and his affection for them both contrasted sharply with the froideur accorded the Duchess by George IV, who appeared to think it was something of an impertinence for her to have given birth to the heir to the throne and associated this, all too painfully, with the death of his own daughter. That he had never liked Leopold made it inevitable that he would feel hostility to those with whom his son-in-law was aligned. On her uncle's departure for Belgium, however, Victoria wrote, 'I look up to him as a Father, with complete confidence, love and affection. He is the best and kindest adviser I have. He has always treated me as his child and I love him more dearly for it.'

By contrast, Captain John Conroy, whose influence over her mother increased after Leopold's departure, seemed a scheming, ambitious intruder. Upon her accession Victoria banished him from Court, and at his death in 1854 she wrote to her mother, 'I will not speak of the past and of the many sufferings he entailed upon us by creating divisions between you and me which could never have existed otherwise.'

An Anglo-Irishman, Conroy was married to Elizabeth Fisher, a relative of the Duke of Kent's former tutor, which connection might have led to his appointment as the Duke's military equerry in 1817. After the Duke's death Conroy took it upon himself to serve his widow with particular diligence. He moved, with his family, into Kensington Palace where he became Comptroller of the Duchess's Household. He was knighted in 1827.

If Conroy had ambitions to establish and wield influence over Victoria, by now clearly destined to be Queen, through her mother, he failed. Victoria referred to his 'personal affronts', 'slights and incivilities' and to her 'hatred' of him. Her dislike of Sir John certainly contributed to her later estrangement from her mother whom she perceived as being overly close to him. Later she was ruefully to refer to the enmity that had existed between the Duchess and herself at the time.

Victoria and her mother had a curious mutually dependent relationship. The Duchess owed her place at Court to the existence of Victoria, and Victoria needed her mother's approval and the reassurance of her presence. They slept in the same bedroom until the daughter was eighteen. The Duchess of Kent's mothering of Victoria alternated between extreme protectiveness – until she had become Queen, Victoria was not allowed to walk downstairs without someone holding her hand – and zealous expectation.

Victoria collected male and female dolls, compensation perhaps for her lack of brothers and sisters. (Fond as she was of her two maternal half-siblings, Charles born 1804 and Feodora 1817, children of Victoire, widow of Prince Erich Charles of Leiningen, they were occasional playmates rather than family.) She quickly learned to respect authority and the importance of duty. Writing in her fifties, Queen Victoria described her earliest memory, that of being admonished as a two-year-old: she had been crawling on a yellow carpet at Kensington Palace and was warned that if she made a noise her Uncle Sussex – Augustus, Duke of Sussex – would punish her. Early memories tend to have a particular significance: memory encapsulates feelings and attitudes that are never forgotten and which current behaviour continues to reflect.

Victoria continued to suppress her own needs and never ceased trying to please authority. She remained for ever dependent on the approval of her ministers and of the public. She was dedicated to duty, and family life inevitably took second place. Her early years were both over-controlled and lacking in childhood pleasures. Later, with little or no experience of happiness, she had little to offer her children.

Victoria, indeed, thought of giving birth with distaste. 'I think, dearest Uncle,' she wrote to Leopold – by now King of the Belgians – with ill-concealed impatience, 'you cannot really wish me to be the "mama d'une nombreuse famille" ... men never think, at least seldom think, what a hard task it is for us women to go through this very often.' Her dislike of pregnancy and babies, whom she thought 'frog-like', was not conducive to a benevolent attitude towards young children. 'Having children is the only thing I dread,' she remarked, soon after her first pregnancy threatened to disturb her newly married idyll with Albert. All but the last of her nine children endured their childhoods while their mother was in that state of pregnancy she found so disagreeable or in its aftermath when she showed little interest in her new baby.

Children learn early on to suppress feelings they sense will be unacceptable, because they fear the loss of parental approval upon which they are entirely dependent. Disapproval, expressed in body language – the warning finger, the stern glance – may come to be as threatening as anything verbally expressed. Victoria's need to please her mother through compliant behaviour was, as with all children, based on fear of being abandoned, a concern strong in Victoria since she had already lost one parent. Victoria's remark 'I will be good' reflects both a precocious sense of duty and a need for the approval of the parent on whom she was still heavily dependent. When parents impress on their children the importance of duty and obedience rather than showing them unconditional love, negative feelings in the child are obliged to be suppressed, often only to reappear inappropriately in adulthood. Such children over-emphasize pleasing at the expense of acquiring self-esteem and self-confidence and adopting assertive behaviour.

If Victoria felt threatened by the attention her mother showed Sir John Conroy, she was happy in the company of Fräulein (later Baroness) Louise Lehzen. The daughter of a Lutheran pastor, Lehzen was brought from Germany when Victoria was five to be her companion and governess and had previously taught Feodora. While Lehzen's presence maintained her charge's familiarity with things German, she was diligent in her efforts to interest Victoria in British history. Victoria had lessons from numerous teachers, but it was her relationship with Lehzen that most shaped her character. Although severe, Lehzen was loyal and protective, and Victoria understood that her reprimands did not imply diminished devotion. One of Lehzen's habits was to pin a sprig of holly to Victoria's collar, so that her small, sloping chin would always be raised. Had Victoria not been fond of her, some complaint about this might have been found in the daily diary that Lehzen herself had encouraged her to keep.

As Victoria grew into womanhood she retained affection and respect for Lehzen. Even as Queen, she wrote in her journal, 'Walked with my angelic, dearest Mother, Lehzen, who I do so love! ... the most estimable and precious treasure I possess and ever shall possess.'

Perhaps, in the light of such freely expressed affection, it is not to be wondered that Prince Albert resented Lehzen's continuing presence in the royal household and, in particular, the influence she had on his wife. In 1842 she finally left the household and returned to live in Germany on a pension of £800 a year. Lehzen's departure was engineered by Albert. He described the governess as 'a crazy, common, stupid intriguer, obsessed with lust of power'. Victoria deferred to him in Lehzen's dismissal, having found her 'other half' in her husband and therefore less in need of a surrogate parent. She continued to correspond with Lehzen, though, and visited her until the Baroness's death in 1870.

For the young Victoria it must have been distressing to have had a mother who bonded with her during breastfeeding but who had probably given this up abruptly on the death of her husband. This would have been her first experience of the pain of separation that reappeared so dramatically on the death of her own husband. A more gradual separation from her mother and breastfeeding would have allowed her to cope better with the losses, forty years later, of her mother and husband. Her confusion would have been compounded by the presence of Fräulein Lehzen, another 'mother' who was not only affectionate but who imbued her with a strong sense of self and impressed on her her place in history. From her biological mother Victoria learned 'negligent mothering', but from her surrogate mother she learned how to be a queen. In the event, because of her remoteness and her melancholy aura during her bereavement she became the mother that her people wanted rather than the one her children needed.

Queen Victoria's grief when her mother died in March 1861 was greater than she might have anticipated. After a period of estrangement shortly after Victoria's accession, mother and daughter had grown closer as Victoria's family increased and mutually enjoyed discussion of her children's progress. It is not surprising that Victoria felt regret that her mother's affection for her had not been acknowledged by the Duchess. Victoria had told Lord Melbourne, 'I don't believe Ma ever really loved me.' After the Duchess's death she was moved to find many fond references to herself among her mother's papers, which could well have caused her to feel both remorseful and guilty about her interpretation of her mother's behaviour. On Albert's birthday in August – normally a day to be celebrated – and four months before his unexpected death, Victoria wrote, 'Alas! so much is different this year, nothing festive ... I am still in such low spirits.' She also wrote to her Aunt Augusta of her 'immeasurable loss and grief', which caused her loss of appetite, headaches, irritability and what Lord Clarendon referred to as a 'morbid melancholy' – or what we would now term depression. Finally Albert heard of reports circulating in Germany that the Queen was being attended by several doctors. He denied the 'horrid, vile rumours' but set about persuading Victoria to end her mourning for her mother and return to some semblance of public life. But shortly afterwards he, too, was dead, from typhoid fever, leaving Victoria a widow at the age of forty-two. In 1861 she experienced one loss too many, and her melancholy demeanour remained for the rest of her life.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Inheritance by Dennis Friedman. Copyright © 2014 Dennis Friedman. Excerpted by permission of Peter Owen Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations,
Prologue,
1 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert,
2 Edward, Prince of Wales: His Childhood and Adolescence,
3 King Edward and Queen Alexandra,
4 Prince George and His Brother the Duke of Clarence,
5 King George V, Queen Mary and Their Children,
6 King Edward VIII,
7 King George VI and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon,
8 Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip,
9 Princess Margaret,
10 Prince Charles,
11 Princess Diana,
12 Princess Anne,
13 Prince Andrew, His Duchess and Prince Edward,
14 The Duke and Duchess of Cornwall,
15 The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge,
16 His Royal Highness Prince George of Cambridge,
Epilogue,
Notes,
Select Bibliography,
Index,