Category:

Leopold arrived at Dover by packet boat from the Continent on 19 February 1816 for his wedding to Charlotte. Until the ceremony on 2 May he stayed at the Clarendon Hotel in New Bond Street, a respectable venue for 'single gentlemen'. Public curiosity had been 'wound up to the highest pitch' by the time Leopold, dressed in his splendid general's 'regimentals'—having been newly elevated to that rank by the Prince Regent—gratified the eager throngs waiting outside Clarence House by making his appearance to the sound of their 'stentorian huzzas'. But the congregation for the wedding at nearby Carlton House was small by royal standards. Only fifty hand-picked dignitaries—foreign ambassadors, cabinet ministers and members of the British royal family and nobility—were in attendance. No foreign royalty were there, nor even the bride's mother—from whom the Regent was estranged. Travel in the days before the railways was slow and difficult; Prince Leopold's scattered family was represented by the Saxon minister in London, who signed the marriage certificate, for nobody from Leopold's home country was present to witness this moment of triumph for the House of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld.

Not least among the absentees was Leopold's older sister Julie, for she it was who, through her own politically strategic marriage to Catherine the Great's grandson Grand Duke Konstantin in 1796, had made all this possible. For that union had brought exceptional honours and preferment not just to Leopold but to the whole family; more importantly, it had brought Saxe-Coburg under the protective wing of the Russian Empire. Julie, the beloved sister, sacrificed on the altar of dynastic expediency in a strange, foreign land at the age of only fourteen, had given a huge boost to the military careers of all three of her brothers, and with it the family's favour with the Romanovs. She had been the first of the seven Saxe-Coburg siblings—the surviving children of Duke Franz and Duchess Auguste— to wed; between 1796 and 1818 they achieved a spectacular succession of marriages that turned this obscure family into the king—and queenmakers of post-Napoleonic Europe, placing their progeny 'upon thrones, next to thrones, or behind thrones'.

By the time of his marriage Leopold was already on the high road to international power and influence. Coburg, that insignificant 'archipelago of princes', as Catherine the Great's lover Prince Grigory Potemkin had once scornfully referred to it, achieved yet more dynastic success that same year, when Leopold's brother Ferdinand married the daughter and sole heir of the wealthiest man in the Austrian Empire. A sister, Antoinette, was installed in the Russian court not long after Julie as the wife of Duke Alexander of Württemberg, brother of the German-born dowager empress. But it was the youngest sister, Victoire, who in 1818 scored the ultimate triumph by marrying Princess Charlotte's uncle and a son of King George III, the Duke of Kent. A year later she gave birth to a future monarch—Queen Victoria—who would bring the Saxe-Coburg story full circle in 1840 by marrying her first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

It is not surprising therefore that few were aware then, as is the case even today, of the existence of the lost Saxe-coburg sister, Princess Juliane Henriette Ulrike, who set in train the inexorable rise of the Coburgs. By 1854 Julie's story, such of it as was known even then, had reached the levels of myth: 'Who was this modern Iphigenia?—this Ariadne given up to the Minotaur?—this Andromeda whom no Perseus came to rescue?' thundered the Dublin Weekly Nation in an excess of indignant hyperbole. 'You'll search for her in vain in any list of the Russian royal family. For Heaven's sake, who was she?' For the world knew nothing of this 'poor doomed rosebud' who had been 'torn from the nursery' to further the Saxe-Coburg cause; nor of the high personal price she had had to pay in the cause of her mother Auguste's overweening ambitions in securing her marriage into the Russian imperial family. As historian Johann Heinrich Schnitzler observed: 'Such was the attraction of an imperial crown, that it overbalanced love of country, attachment to religious faith, and the apprehension which the state of things in Russia might then well cause.'

Uprooted from her quiet and uneventful life in Coburg and abandoned unceremoniously, alone and friendless, in Catherine the Great's St Petersburg, Julie was stripped of her German birth name, which was supplanted by the alien, talismanic title of Grand Duchess Anna Feodorovna of Russia, or the even more anonymising Grand Duchess Konstantin. But among her family she was always known as Jülchen—'little Julie'—and the affectionate form of her name extended even to Queen Victoria, who spoke very fondly, and often, of her dear aunt 'Julia' and never referred to her by her Russian name. We shall use 'Julie' throughout this narrative, which charts the span of her difficult, elusive and often tragic life, much of it lived effectively as an exile, in avoidance of gossip and scandal.