Category:

PROLOGUE

THE COBURG MARRIAGE

In May 1816, at the Prince Regent's Carlton House residence in London, an obscure German prince married the most sought-after royal bride in Europe—Princess Charlotte of Wales, second in line to the throne of Great Britain after her father, the Prince Regent. During the ceremony, held in the Crimson Drawing Room at 9 p.m., there had been barely stifled amusement—even to the bride herself—when, at the point when the couple exchanged vows, she heard her fairytale prince solemnly promise to endow her with all his worldly goods. For Charlotte knew full well that her new husband, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, was the scion of a cash-strapped Pumpernickel-Staat,* a younger prince of Coburg [whose] whole income was only £200 sterling'. All Leopold had in reality to offer his bride beyond his seductive good looks and his distinguished military credentials were his guile and ruthless ambition.

Nevertheless, the 'Coburg Marriage'—as it was dismissively referred to by the British aristocracy—was no mean achievement for an unremarkable German principality that in the political scheme of things had long been 'lost on the map of Europe' and on which the press had until then been entirely silent. Leopold's marriage to Britain's favourite princess was an incredible coup for a minor European prince and brought the couple an annual allowance of £60,000 (over £6 million today), which was more than the entire annual revenue of his debt-ridden home country—a tiny, rural principality tucked away in central Germany. Its rulers could claim descent from one of the ancient European dynasties—the Saxon House of Wettin—that had once ruled much of the region, but successive divisions of the territory between the male heirs of the Ernestine branch* had fragmented the region into a complex tapestry of domains subject to periodic reshuffling. Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld in fact comprised two small territories that were geographically separated: Coburg, the dynastic seat, lay in Upper Franconia just south of the Thuringian Forest while Saalfeld, which lay on the other side of the forest in the principality of Schwarzburg,

was added through marriage and purchase in 1699.

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* In his 1848 novel Vanity Fair, Thackeray wickedly parodied the small-state trivialities of this German archetype: a dull little 'comfortable Ducal town' where everybody knew everybody and the highlight of the season was the marriage of the Hereditary Prince of Pumpernickel 'with the lovely Princess Amelia of Humbourg-Schlippensschloppen'.

By 1801 the status and power of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld had atrophied considerably, leaving it shackled by debt and reduced to a combined military strength of only 150 musketeers and grenadiers and a militia of one battalion of 360 men. Much of this debt had been the result of profligate spending and mismanagement of the Coburg coffers by successive dukes, who had ruled the region along old feudal lines.

During the terrible depredations wreaked across Europe in the Napoleonic Wars, Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld was caught in the crosshairs, a perpetual victim of incursions by transient Napoleonic troops; for a while the ducal family had had to flee their capital for the safer location of Saalfeld. Nevertheless, Leopold and his two brothers Ernst and Ferdinand had 'exerted themselves, as far as they were able, for the emancipation of Germany' in the final push against Napoleon during 181314: Ernst with the Prussians in Berlin, Ferdinand with the Austrians in Vienna, and Leopold in service to Emperor Alexander I of Russia in Poland.

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* In 1485 the ruling family of Wettins divided the territory between the eldest son Ernest (Ernestine branch) and his younger brother Albert (Albertine branch).

As the youngest son of a duchy that had adopted the law of primogeniture, and who was thus well down the pecking order below his two older brothers, Leopold needed to seek his fortune abroad and it was Russia that had set him on the ladder. His military record had been exemplary: enrolled as an honorary cadet in the Russian Imperial Guard at the age of five by Catherine the Great, Leopold's advancement thereafter, as the first German prince to join the Russian army, had been meteoric. In 1810 he had resigned under pressure from Napoleon but was reintegrated in the Russian forces by May 1813, after which he led his regiment of Russian cuirassiers in cavalry charges against French forces at the battles of Lützen and Bautzen in Saxony and scored his most significant military success at the battle of Kulm on 30 August. By this time Alexander I and his Prussian and Austrian allies had all acknowledged the merit of Leopold's services, and 'six or eight Orders were conferred on him', including the prestigious order of St Alexander Nevsky and the crosses of St George and Maria Theresa and the Iron Cross of Prussia for his role at Kulm.