Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen

For this post I am indebted to the article on Queen Adelaide in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and to Antonia Fraser, Perilous Question: The Drama of the Great Reform Bill (W&N, 2014).

Portrait of Queen Adelaide
by John  Simpson, 1832
Public domain

The quest for an heir

The death of Princess Charlotte in 1817 caused a crisis in the royal family. The succession was now in doubt and the royal dukes, the brothers of the Prince Regent, hastened to marry. The Regent was already married, and he and his estranged wife, Caroline of Brunswick, were not going to produce any more children.  The next brother, the duke of York, was married but childless. The third son of George III, William duke of Clarence, was unmarried.

In 1791 he had begun to live with the actress Dora (Dorothy, Dorothea) Jordan, and between 1794 and 1807 she bore him five sons and five daughters while continuing to act. But in 1810 their relationship cooled. At the end of that year George III descended into his final illness, and Clarence moved nearer to the throne.  In December 1811 the couple formally separated, and she died in France in 1816. Clarence continued to live at their home, Bushy House, Teddington. 

The choice of a wife

Meanwhile, he was looking for a rich wife, although it was only after Charlotte’s death that he settled on Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meinengen, who had been recommended to him by his mother.  She had been born on 13 August 1792, the eldest child of George Frederick Charles, duke of the tiny state of Saxe-Meiningen and his wife  Louisa Eleanora of Hohenloe-Langenburg. In April 1818 the government proposed that an extra £7,000 per annum should be granted to him if her married, with £3,000 per annum for his wife, but, much to Clarence's fury, his income was reduced by £1,000 after parliamentary protests. 


Adelaide arrived in England on 4 July 1818 and the couple were married in Queen Charlotte’s presence at Kew seven days later. It was a double wedding, as Clarence's younger brother, Edward duke of Kent and Princess Victoire of Saxe-Coburg were married in the same ceremony. As Clarence had turned down the parliamentary offer, the couple lived in Hanover for the first year of their marriage, but in 1820 he accepted the grant and the couple returned to England, though they made further long stays on the continent in the 1820s. In 1827 Clarence was appointed Lord High Admiral, a position revived especially for him.

The marriage of William and Adelaide had begun unromantically, but it turned out well in spite of the disparity in their years – she was twenty-six, he was fifty-three. Adelaide had been strictly brought up by her widowed mother and was deeply religious. She lived a private, domestic life at Bushy and was a model stepmother to her step-daughters, the FitzClarence girls. At her insistence the portraits of their mother remained in place. 

In March 1819 Adelaide gave birth in Hanover to a daughter, Charlotte Augusta Louisa,  who only lived for a few hours. On 20 December 1820, she gave birth to a second daughter, Elizabeth Georgina Adelaide. This child displaced her cousin, Princess Victoria, the daughter of the duke of Kent, in the succession, but she died the following year. She also miscarried in 1819 and 1822, losing twins on the second occasion. Adelaide’s childlessness confirmed the Princess Victoria’s status as the next in line to the throne, following her uncles.

Princess Victoria, by George Hayter
Public domain

Queen

On 26 June 1830 George IV died and her husband became William IV. On hearing of his brother’s death William is reputed to have said ‘I’ve never been to bed with a queen before’.  In November a bill nominated the queen as regent in case a child of hers should survive the king. The coronation of William and Adelaide on 8 September 1830 was as modest as that of George IV had been lavish and critics called it the ‘Half Crownation’. The court was respectable and dull, the only real incidents those created by the hostility of the king and the duchess of Kent. The Clerk to the Privy Council, Charles Greville, wrote that the queen sat around embroidering flowers of an evening while the king dozed, occasionally waking up to say ‘Exactly so, Ma’am’ before going back to sleep.

Adelaide was criticised for being dull and prudish. Charles Greville wrote ‘The Queen is a prude and refuses to have the ladies come décolletées to her parties. George the 4th, who liked ample expanses of that kind, would not let them be covered.'

Unpopularity

Adelaide became very unpopular during the political debates and disturbances surrounding the passing of the 1832 Reform Act. She had grown up in the aftermath of the French Revolution and was hostile to all political change. When at the end of 1830 the Tory prime minister, the duke of Wellington was forced to resign, to be replaced by the Whig Lord Grey, she made no secret of her distress. Her open support of the Tories made her very unpopular with Whigs and Radicals. By January 1832 cartoons of the queen as patroness of the Tories were beginning to appear. She was called ‘Queen Addle-head’ and ‘a nasty German frow’. 

The hostility intensified in May 1832 when on 8 May the king initially refused Grey’s request to create Whig peers in order to get the bill through the Lords. On 9 May Grey resigned and this set off a national crisis, known as the ‘Days of May’.  The Irish MP, Daniel O’Connell reminded his listeners that Charles I was beheaded for listening to a foreign wife. The Times (16 May 1832) reported that at a public meeting in Southwark she was described as

 a woman raised from obscurity to the highest pitch of glory – raised from a state not so respectable or affluent as the lady of an English squire to be consort of the Monarch of the most enlightened kingdom on the earth … It is proper that the nation did know, without disguise or reserve, that the Queen has done more injury to the cause of Reform than any person living. 

 On 19 May a speaker in Newcastle upon Tyne stated that Marie Antoinette had a fairer head then ever graced the shoulders of Adelaide, but that had not saved her from the scaffold. But by then the king had been forced to bring Grey back into the government and accept the creation of Whig peers. On 7 June, much to Adelaide’s disgust, the Reform Bill passed into law.

She continued to resent Lord Grey and was deeply distressed when he insisted on the dismissal of her Tory chamberlain, Lord Howe,  in 1833. She wrote in her diary, ‘I felt myself deeply wounded both as a wife and a queen’. This led to unfounded rumours that she was Lord Howe's mistress. When the king dismissed Grey's successor, the Whig prime minister, Lord Melbourne,  she was blamed again,  though there is no evidence that she had influenced the decision. Placards over London announced ‘The queen has done it all’.

Last years

Queen Adelaide in 1836
by Sir Martin Archer Shee
Public domain

In 1836 the city of Adelaide was founded in south Australia, a planned capital for a freely settled (that is, not a convict) province, and named in her honour.

Her mother died in the spring of 1837 and Adelaide was at her deathbed. She returned to England only to find her husband mortally sick and he died in her arms on 20 June. Against all precedent, she attended the funeral. Many of her last years were spent as an invalid travelling the Mediterranean. At Malta she paid for the construction of the Anglican Collegiate Church of St Paul in Valletta. She died from a ruptured blood vessel at her home at Bentley Priory near Stanmore on 2 December 1849, and was interred at Windsor on 13 December. The newspapers paid tribute to her admirable private character and she was mourned by her niece, Queen Victoria.

Conclusion

1. Adelaide was a deeply religious and kind-hearted woman whose arranged marriage proved a great success.
2. But she squandered her popularity in her opposition to the Reform Bill. She misjudged British politics and failed to understand the constitutional limitation of her position.