manners.

was any personal liking between the young pair. The Prince of Orange disgusted her by his coarse and vulgar tastes and He lodged at his tailor's. He came home tipsy on the box of a stage-coach from some races. He appeared at the Court entertainments when the Princess was not there, and it was said of him by one of his own countrymen,' Il n'y avait 'dans cette pauvre tête ni instruction ni idée arrêtée sur quoi que ce fût.' Her firm resistance to the proposal that she should live abroad very nearly broke off the negotiation: but in this respect she carried her point, for it was expressly provided by the articles of agreement signed on June 10, 1814, that she was not to leave England without the written approval of the King or Regent, or without her own consent. But within a week she raised fresh objections, and the marriage was broken off. It was about three weeks later that the Prince Regent made a descent on Warwick House and threatened to send her to Cranbourne Lodge, whereupon the Princess fled, threw herself into a hackney-coach, and drove off to her mother's residence in Connaught Place. To these well-known circumstances it must be added that in June 1814, the very crisis of the Orange negotiation, Charlotte saw Leopold for the first time, when he came to England in the suite of the Emperor of Russia, in whose service he then was. It is evident that she fell in love with him. Miss Mercer Elphinstone told Stockmar that in order to gratify the Princess's wish to see more of him, the Duchess of York gave a ball, at which the young people seem very soon to have come to an understanding. Two years elapsed before the marriage, for there were many difficulties to be surmounted; but these were overcome by the tact of Leopold and the assistance of the English Royal Family, who were more favourable to it than the Regent himself was, and, as we have said, in the spring of 1816 the marriage was solemnised.

In the retirement of Claremont, where the young married pair resided, Stockmar made daily progress in the good graces of his master, to whom he was ardently attached. The Prin cess took a fancy to him, and he indulged his own caustic and satirical disposition by drawing in his journal no flattering picture of the Royal Family. Queen Charlotte was small, twisted awry, with the face of a mulatto; the Regent very fat with a peruke à la cacadou which did not become him; the Royal Dukes stout and sensual, all talking, as the phrase is, thirteen to the dozen.' Even down to the appetite of the guests at table, nothing escaped him, but the anecdotes he picked up are hardly worth repeating. Of Lord Castlereagh

6

he observes that he was remarkable for a lighthearted indifference, which was sometimes reckoned to him for deep statesmanship-an observation still more applicable to one of Lord Castlereagh's most eminent successors. The Grand Duke Nicholas (afterwards Emperor of Russia) paid a visit to England in this year and dined at Claremont, where his magnificent presence caused Mrs. Campbell, the Princess's bedchamber woman, to exclaim: What an amiable creature! he is 'devilish handsome! he will be the handsomest man in Europe!' Stockmar does not seem to be aware that Court ladies are not in the habit of using such energetic adjectives.

The married life of the Princess Charlotte was entirely happy. Without education, without self-restraint, tossed to and fro by her worthless parents, and of a highly excitable temperament, she would have continued to be in all probability miserable and mischievous had she not fallen into the arms of a man of rare judgment and tact, to whom she was passionately attached. Leopold had throughout his life the uncommon gift of exercising an influence over women greater than the influence they exercised over him. Had Charlotte lived he would have become the real sovereign of this country, for though she was described at the time of her marriage as a tomboy in petticoats, Leopold had found the secret to master her character and her heart. But this life of promise was doomed to be blasted. The declared pregnancy of the Princess had, of course, given rise to the liveliest hopes of an heir to the Crown, and no one seems to have had a presentiment of the fatal result. Stockmar, however, with characteristic caution steadily refused to act as the medical adviser of the Princess, foreseeing the responsibility he would incur, as an unknown foreign practitioner, if anything went wrong. He was not in fact called in till two hours and a half before her death, when she was already in great danger. But he was of opinion (and he said so to the Prince) that the treatment of the Princess had been too lowering. However, after a tedious labour of fifty-two hours by Stockmar's computation, the Princess gave birth to a fine and full-grown boy-but the infant was no longer alive. For the three hours which succeeded the birth the mother seemed to be doing well. But what followed must be related in Stockmar's own words.

'At midnight Croft came to the side of my bed, took my hand and said that the Princess was dangerously ill and the Prince alone-that I must go to him and inform him how things were going on. The Prince had never left his wife for three days for one instant, and had only retired to rest after the birth. I found him composed as to the

death of the child and not very uneasy about the Princess. A quarter of an hour later Baillie sent to me to say he wished me to see the Princess: I objected, but at length complied. I found her in great suffering and restlessness with spasms of the chest and difficulty of breathing; she tossed herself from one side to the other, speaking alternately to Dr. Baillie and to Sir Richard Croft. She put out her left hand to me and squeezed mine twice vehemently. I felt her pulse, which was very swift and irregular. Baillie kept giving her wine: she said to me, "They have made me tipsy." Thus it continued for about a quarter of an hour more, when her breathing became a death-rattle. I was out of the room at the moment, when she called out loudly, "Stocky, Stocky!" When I came back she was quieter, but still with rattling in the throat; the limbs were drawn up, the hands grew cold, and at two o'clock in the morning of November 6, 1817, about five hours after the child was born, she was no more.'

There seems to have been no other cause for her death than extreme exhaustion caused by her previous low condition and the unusual length of the labour. It then became the painful duty of Stockmar to announce the fatal result to the Prince, who was not, as is commonly supposed, present.

'I did it in no fixed expressions. He would not believe she was dead; and in attempting to go to her, he fell back upon a chair. I knelt beside him. He said it was a dream; a thing he could not believe. He sent me again to her: I came back saying it was all over. We then went together to the chamber of death he kissed her cold hands kneeling by the bed-side; then rising, he embraced me and said: "Now indeed I am quite deserted: promise me to remain with me always.' I gave the promise! "But," says Stockmar in a letter written a few days later to his sister, "I gave a promise he may either hold me to for ever, or which he may care very little for next year."' (P. 105.)

In justice to Leopold it must be added that the promise of perpetual friendship was in this instance kept with equal fidelity by himself and by his loyal attendant. It was indeed a friendship sealed by an event so tragical, that the recollection of that night could never be effaced from either mind. I 'feel,' said Stockmar, that my part in life consists in unex'pected turns of events, and so it will be till it is over. I appear to be here to take care of others more than of myself, and am well contented with this function.'

The next twelve years were marked by no events of much importance to Stockmar or his royal patron. He was promoted to the post of Private Secretary and Comptroller of the Household of Prince Leopold, which he held till 1831. Saxon letters of nobility had been conferred upon him in 1821; his rank as a Bavarian baron was dated ten years

later. This interval of time was, however, marked by one occurrence of great importance to the House of Coburg, and, as it afterwards turned out, to this country. After the death of Princess Charlotte the absence of a youthful heir to the Crown induced the Dukes of Clarence, Kent, Cumberland, and Cambridge to marry; and the choice of the Duke of Kent fell on the widowed Princess of Leiningen, sister of Leopold. The Duke of Kent, who was then just fifty years old, was persuaded that he should survive his brothers, live to wear the crown, and transmit it to his descendants. The pregnancy of the Duchess soon appeared to realise these expectations. With some difficulty the Duke scraped together the means to come to England in the spring of 1819, from the place he had been residing at in Bavaria, and in May at Kensington the young Princess who was destined to fulfil all her father's desires was born. But here his good fortune ended. It had been predicted to him that in the year 1820 two members of the Royal Family would die. His father George III. was the first of the two. He little thought that he himself would be the second. He had gone to Sidmouth with his family, as he expressed it, to 'cheat the winter;' but having caught cold from a wetting, inflammation of the lungs came on. Stockmar, who was there, was asked whether he thought the Duke was in a state to sign his will. The document was read over to him twice. He signed the word 'Edward' with an expiring effort. A few hours later the Duchess of Kent was again a widow, and the Princess Victoria, then an infant of little more than a year old, the fatherless presumptive heiress of the British Crown. The Duchess was in straitened circumstances and overwhelmed with her husband's debts. Her brother Leopold assisted her and enabled her to live at Kensington, where the young Princess was brought up. Her father's debts

were eventually paid by the Queen, as is well known, after her accession to the throne.

The first event which introduced Leopold to active political life was the negotiation to place him on the throne of Greece. It had been decided by the Protocol of March 22, 1829, that Greece was to be governed by an hereditary Christian sovereign, to be selected by the Three Powers, but under the suzerainty of the Porte, to which tribute was to be paid. The northern frontier of Greece was to extend from the Gulf of Vola to the Gulf of Arta, including Euboea and the Cyclades. Prince Leopold was the candidate most approved by the Three Powers. It seems, however, that George IV. was not of the same opinion, for he had not much affection

for his son-in-law, and the Duke of Cumberland had predisposed the King in favour of a Duke of Mecklemburg, a brother of the Duchess. The British Government was also less favourable to Leopold than the governments of Russia and France. Party-spirit ran very high, and Leopold was suspected of Whiggism, from his intimacy with the leading Whig statesmen of the day, and especially with Lord Durham. The Prince himself was strongly affected by the romantic attachment to the Greek cause, which had seized all the generous minds in Europe between 1823 and 1830-which had sent Byron to die at Missolonghi-and seemed to promise a revival of glory to the Hellenic race. To be the first sovereign of the Greek people seemed a splendid gift of fortune, even though he sacrificed to it his chance (somewhat remote) of being for a time the Regent of England in the event of the accession of his infant niece. But this laudable ambition did not blind him to the terms he thought it necessary to ask. It appeared to him essential that the islands of Crete and Samos should form part of the new kingdom, and that the northern frontier should be extended; but these terms were refused. Capodistria (perhaps from interested motives) sent the Prince a true but most discouraging picture of the state of affairs in Greece, and of the dissatisfaction of the Greeks themselves with the proposed arrangements. Leopold had always made their approval one of the conditions of his assent, and declared that he would not be forced upon the people. A few days after the receipt of this communication, he withdrew his acceptance altogether. He was resolved, as he wrote to Baron Stein on June 10, not to undertake the task without adequate means to insure its success. However wise this decision of the Prince must now be thought, it damaged his character at the time for constancy and courage. The Russians accused him of bad faith and pusillanimity, and openly attributed his refusal to the secret hope of obtaining hereafter the Regency of England. Stein contrasted his conduct with the manly resolution of the Emperor Alexander in 1812. George IV. called him the Marquis Peu à peu; he was denounced all over Europe as an irresolute intriguer. Stockmar, who was with him all the time, positively denies that the chance of the English Regency had anything to do with his decision. Stockmar claims to have seen all along that his master had been led away by the manœuvres of the diplomatists and by his own enthusiasm. He certainly was not of opinion (as another writer said) that Leopold was bound to take the crown of Greece, because it was