Some hints of Leopold’s character may be given in his own words—words which betray at once his pedantry and his absolute lack of humour. In a letter to the young Queen, in which he tried to explain the character of Princess Charlotte, he said: “The most difficult task I had was to change her manners; she had something too brusque and too rash in her movements, which made the Regent quite unhappy, and which sometimes was occasioned by a struggle between shyness and the necessity of exerting herself. I had, I may say so without seeming to boast, the manners of the best society of Europe, having early moved in it, and been what is called in French de la fleur des pois. A good judge I therefore was, but Charlotte found it rather hard to be so scrutinised, and grumbled occasionally how I could so often find fault with her.”

Leopold could not understand a joke; chaffing or quizzing always raised his displeasure; and indeed he seems somewhat to have merited, by his manner alone, some of the severe criticisms lavished upon him. How much of the feeling against him was prompted by insular prejudice, how much was jealousy, and how much personal dislike, it is difficult to say, but there was probably something of all three to account for it.

As far as the Royal Dukes’ feelings went, there was some justification for jealousy. Leopold, a foreign Prince, was being allowed from the Civil List an annual £50,000, having been for only about a year the husband of the Heir-Apparent. The Royal Dukes of England were receiving only £18,000 and £24,000 each, and they were the sons and brothers of Kings of England. However, the sharp-tongued Creevy, who could not have been personally affected, spoke of him always as Humbug Leopold, and one of the Fitzclarences said in 1824 that the Duchess of Clarence was the best and most charming woman in the world, that Prince Leopold was a damned humbug, and that he (Fitzclarence) disliked the Duchess of Kent.

But whatever the popular opinion concerning him, Leopold, when his sister became a widow, was a shield between her and the world. The Duke of Kent was taken ill in Sidmouth, and two days before he died Prince Leopold went thither to do what he could for his sister. One cannot help wondering how it was that the Duke struggled on so long with the burden of worries that he had to bear. After his marriage he lived in Germany until the prospect of an heir brought him and his wife to England. His income was then little or nothing, for he had been obliged to make an assignment of his property to his creditors, to work off debts contracted partly when, as a young man, he had been allowed by his tutor, Baron Wangenheim, the princely income of thirty shillings a week as pocket-money, the remainder of £6,000 a year being used by the Baron, who was astute enough to intercept the Prince’s letters home. The Duchess of Kent had a jointure of £6,000 a year, and upon this they lived. From his youth to his death the Duke was worried by the lack of money and by creditors, through no extravagance of his own, as well as by the enmity of his brother, the Regent.

When the Duke of Kent died, Leopold was the only friend the Duchess had in England, and he went through the affairs of his late brother-in-law, finding to his consternation that there was not enough money left even to carry the family back to London, or to pay for the necessary winding up of affairs at Sidmouth. George IV. would give no help of any sort; he hated the Duchess, as he did most of his brothers’ wives, and his one idea was to cause her to take her child back to Germany and relieve him and the country entirely of any obligation towards them. However, the Duchess and her brother came to the conclusion that they should resist this desire with all their strength, and to make things easier Leopold added to his sister’s six thousand a year an annual amount of £3,000. For decency’s sake the King had to give them a roof over their heads, and he assigned to the Duchess some rooms in Kensington Palace. I have come across fatuous biographies of Queen Victoria in which Leopold has been extolled for his liberality to his sister, as a noble brother, &c., but when the position is regarded in a detached way the absurdity and injustice of the whole arrangement is patent. The alien Leopold was drawing, as has already been said, £50,000 a year from the English Exchequer, having no obligations upon him of any sort, no Royal position to keep up, while his sister, the wife of the King’s brother, and mother of the probable Queen of England, had less than an eighth of that amount, was allowed nothing more from the Government, and was expected to be very grateful to Leopold in that he handed over to her a little of the money that he received. Six years later a sum of six thousand was annually allowed the Duchess by the Government for the education of her daughter, and in 1831, when the Princess Victoria was needing yet more in the way of instruction, training, and social necessities, another £10,000 brought her income up to £22,000 a year, more than her poor husband had ever owned.

Until 1831 Leopold lived at Claremont, cultivated its gardens to the utmost, and provoked much criticism for the business-like way in which he sent the produce up to London. Claremont became also a country-house residence for the Duchess of Kent and her little daughter, Victoria looking back upon the comparative freedom she enjoyed there as helping to make those visits the happiest events of her early life. Then came the demand for a King for Greece, and Leopold had the chance of securing the position, George, however, remarking that if he did go to Greece he should leave his income behind him. There is no doubt that an affluent, objectless life in England had its charms, and that a man might pay too dearly for wearing the crown of a small unsettled kingdom surrounded by enemies. So Leopold vacillated, always leaning with each swing a little nearer the crown, yet wishing to retain the money. The newspapers of the day were full of the money part of the transaction. First, would the country buy of him the land he had purchased here, valued at fifty thousand or thereabouts? would England guarantee him a loan of £1,500,000? would England give him for seven years an annual £70,000 instead of £50,000? From month to month negotiations dragged on, until at last it was announced that Leopold had got the promise of all he desired, and by that time George IV. was very ill. So the Prince, with new ideas in his mind, waited for nearly two months more before even then making his decision, raising many a laugh and many a scoffing hint in society as to his real reason. “Ingoldsby” Barham crystallised some of the sayings in his verses upon “The Mad Dog,” as follows:—

“The Dog hath bitten—Oh, woe is me—

A Market Gardener of high degree;

Imperial Peas

No longer please,