Saxe-Coburg. The duchy was seized by the French, and the ducal family
were reduced to beggary, almost to starvation. At the same time the
little principality of Amorbach was devastated by the French, Russian,
and Austrian armies, marching and counter-marching across it. For years
there was hardly a cow in the country, nor enough grass to feed a
flock of geese. Such was the desperate plight of the family which, a
generation later, was to have gained a foothold in half the reigning
Houses of Europe. The Napoleonic harrow had indeed done its work, the
seed was planted; and the crop would have surprised Napoleon. Prince
Leopold, thrown upon his own resources at fifteen, made a career for
himself and married the heiress of England. The Princess of Leiningen,
struggling at Amorbach with poverty, military requisitions, and a
futile husband, developed an independence of character and a tenacity of
purpose which were to prove useful in very different circumstances. In
1814, her husband died, leaving her with two children and the regency
of the principality. After her brother's marriage with the Princess
Charlotte, it was proposed that she should marry the Duke of Kent; but
she declined, on the ground that the guardianship of her children and
the management of her domains made other ties undesirable. The Princess
Charlotte's death, however, altered the case; and when the Duke of Kent
renewed his offer, she accepted it. She was thirty-two years old--short,
stout, with brown eyes and hair, and rosy cheeks, cheerful and voluble,
and gorgeously attired in rustling silks and bright velvets.

She was certainly fortunate in her contented disposition; for she was
fated, all through her life, to have much to put up with. Her second
marriage, with its dubious prospects, seemed at first to be chiefly a
source of difficulties and discomforts. The Duke, declaring that he was
still too poor to live in England, moved about with uneasy precision
through Belgium and Germany, attending parades and inspecting barracks