Queen Victoria: A Personal History

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There were interesting afternoons at the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park; and evenings when she was brought downstairs by Lehzen to be introduced to distinguished guests, on one occasion to Sir Robert Peel, on another to Lord Palmerston who was ‘so very agreeable, clever, amusing & gentlemanlike’ and with whom, a year or two later, she had ‘much pleasant and amusing conversation’. There were birthday parties and birthday presents including, one year, a print of Marie Taglioni from Lehzen, earrings from the King, a brooch containing a strand of her mother’s hair, a writing-case from Sir John Conroy, a paper-knife from Lady Flora Hastings and a prayer book from ‘a bookseller of the name of Hatchard’. There were occasional balls at Kensington Palace; and above all, there were very occasional visits by German cousins whose departure, as she lamented in her diary, made her ‘quite wretched’, grieved and sad, missing them ‘dreadfully’, feeling that it was ‘like a dream that all our joy, happiness and gaiety should thus suddenly be over’. King Leopold wondered in his cautious way if these bursts of excitement were good for her. Might they not undermine her health? But no; it was the tedium of life at Kensington and the stress of the relationships there that upset her and made her ill. ‘Merriment and mirth’ were a tonic. ‘I can assure you,’ she wrote to him, ‘all this dissipation does me a great deal of good.’

(#litres_trial_promo) So did a change of air at King Leopold’s house at Esher, and a subsequent few days at Buxted Park in Sussex, the family home of her friend, Lady Catherine Jenkinson, daughter of the Earl of Liverpool.

Yet even away from Kensington Palace the tensions of life there followed her about like inescapable shadows. Lady Catherine got on well with Lehzen, so was persona non grata with the Conroy faction, and was soon to leave the Duchess of Kent’s household, ostensibly on the grounds of ill health. The Duchess of Northumberland had also fallen out with Conroy who considered she was undermining his authority, since she had written to Princess Feodora requesting her to approach her uncle, King Leopold, and ask him to do what he could to protect Baroness Lehzen, who was still being treated ‘with contempt and incredible harshness’ in an attempt to get rid of her and replace her with someone of Conroy’s own choosing. At the same time there was no love lost between Princess Victoria and the Conroys’ sharp-tongued friend, Lady Flora Hastings. As for the Duchess of Kent’s relations with the King they went from bad to worse.

There was trouble when the King declined to receive the Duchess’s daughter-in-law, the wife of Charles, Prince of Leiningen, on the grounds that she was not of royal blood and therefore by tradition barred from the Closet at St James’s Palace.

(#litres_trial_promo) Then there was further trouble when the King required the gentlemen of the Duchess of Kent’s household to leave the Throne Room during the course of a drawing room there because, so he said, only gentlemen of the King’s and Queen’s household enjoyed the privilege of attendance at such a reception in such a place, the households of other members of the Royal Family being limited to ladies only.

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These, however, were relatively minor incidents when compared with an outrageous and distressing contretemps at Windsor Castle on 21 August 1836. This was the King’s birthday. He had invited the Duchess of Kent and Princess Victoria to come to Windsor for the Queen’s birthday party on 13 August and then to stay on for his own on the 21st. The Duchess, rudely taking no notice of the invitation to the Queen’s birthday party, replied that she intended to be at Claremont for her own birthday celebrations on 17 August but would bring her daughter to Windsor on the 20th.

This put the King into a fury [Charles Greville was informed by one of the King’s illegitimate sons, Adolphus FitzClarence, who was living in the Castle at the time]. He made, however, no reply, and on the 20th he was in town to prorogue Parliament, having desired that they would not wait dinner for him at Windsor. After the prorogation He went to Kensington Palace to look about it; when He got there He found that the Duchess of Kent had appropriated to her own use a suite of apartments, seventeen in number for which She had applied last year, and which he had refused to let her have. This increased his ill-humour, already excessive. When he arrived at Windsor [suffering from the effects of sleepless nights and asthmatic attacks] and went into the drawing-room (at about ten o’clock at night), where the whole party was assembled, he went up to the Princess Victoria, took hold of both her hands, and expressed his pleasure at seeing her there and his regret that he did not see her oftener. He then turned to the Duchess and made her a low bow, almost immediately after which he said that ‘a most unwarrantable liberty had been taken with one of his Palaces; that He had just come from Kensington, where He found apartments had been taken possession of not only without his consent, but contrary to his commands, and that he neither understood nor would endure conduct so disrespectful to him.’ This was said loudly, publicly, and in a tone of serious displeasure. It was, however, only the muttering of the storm which was to break the next day. Adolphus went into his room on Sunday morning, and found him in a state of great excitement. It was his birthday, and though the celebration was (what was called) private, there were a hundred people at dinner, either belonging to the Court or from the neighbourhood. The Duchess of Kent sat on one side of the King and one of his sisters on the other, the Princess Victoria opposite. Adolphus sat two or three from the Duchess, and heard every word of what passed. After dinner, by the Queen’s desire, ‘His Majesty’s health, and long life to him’ was given, and as soon as it was drunk He made a very long speech, in the course of which he poured forth the following extraordinary and foudroyant tirade: – ‘I trust in God that my life may be spared for nine months longer, after which period, in the event of my death, no Regency would take place. I should then have the satisfaction of leaving the royal authority to the personal exercise of that Young Lady (pointing to the Pss.), the Heiress presumptive of the Crown, and not in the hands of a person now near me, who is surrounded by evil advisers and who is herself incompetent to act with propriety in the station in which She would be placed. I have no hesitation in saying that I have been insulted – grossly and continually insulted – by that person, but I am determined to endure no longer a course of behaviour so disrespectful to me. Amongst many other things I have particularly to complain of the manner in which that young Lady has been kept away from my Court; she has been repeatedly kept from my drawing-rooms, at which She ought always to have been present, but I am fully resolved that this shall not happen again. I would have her know that I am King, and that I am determined to make my authority respected, and for the future I shall insist and command that the Princess do upon all occasions appear at my Court, as it is her duty to do.’ He terminated his speech by an allusion to the Princess and her future reign in a tone of paternal interest and affection, which Adolphus told me was excellent in its way.

This awful philippick (with a great deal more which I forget) was uttered with a loud voice and excited manner. The Queen looked in deep distress, the Princess burst into tears, and the whole company were aghast. The Duchess of Kent said not a word. Immediately after they rose and retired, and a terrible scene ensued; the Duchess announced her immediate departure and ordered her carriage, but a sort of reconciliation was patched up, and she was prevailed upon to stay till the next day.

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The Duke of Wellington’s comment upon all this was characteristically laconic: ‘Very awkward, by God!’

The Princess’s distress was alleviated by the thought that her beloved Uncle Leopold was coming to England to stay at Claremont in three weeks’ time. Her delight in his company was as profound as ever: ‘He is so clever,’ she recorded in her diary, ‘so mild and so prudent; he alone can give me good advice on every thing.’ She loved Queen Louise, too, she protested, and ‘very much regretted’ that she was unable to come to England with her husband as she was expecting a second child. Louise sent ‘lovely’ presents, however, a silk dress and a satin bonnet, the dress ‘made by Mlle Palmyre, the first dressmaker of Paris’.

Her uncle’s visit was soon over, however; and thereafter week after week passed at Claremont with ‘the usual society’, including that of Conroy’s daughter, Victoire, whom she increasingly grew to dislike the more she hated the girl’s father, and she longed to return to London for the season, yearning for the opera and the theatre and ‘for some merriment after being so very long in the country’ with such companions as she was obliged to live with there. Yet, when she did return to Kensington, life there was far from gay: Conroy was as detestable as ever and more than ever determined not to lose his influence in the Duchess of Kent’s household when her daughter came of age. The Duchess herself was just as much under Conroy’s influence as she had ever been.

Shortly before her eighteenth birthday Princess Victoria received a letter from the King in which he told her that he proposed applying to Parliament for a grant of £10,000 a year to be entirely at her own disposal. He intended her also to have the right to appoint her own Keeper of the Privy Purse, suggesting Sir Benjamin Stephenson whom the Duchess much disliked, for this post. The Princess was, in addition, to have the right to form her own household. When the Lord Chamberlain brought this letter to Kensington, Sir John Conroy insisted upon its being delivered to the Princess in the Duchess’s presence. Once the Princess had read it she handed it to her mother who was, of course, appalled by its contents. Having satisfied herself that the King had consulted the Cabinet before writing the letter, she wrote an extremely angry reply to Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister, then, having summarily dismissed suggestions by her daughter that her tutor, the Revd George Davys, now Dean of Chester, might be appointed her Keeper of the Privy Purse, and that the Princess might have a private conversation with Lord Melbourne, the Duchess, with Conroy’s help, wrote a letter to the King which the Princess, who had felt ‘very miserable’ the evening before and had refused to go down to dinner, was required to copy. ‘I wish to remain in every respect as I am now in the care of my Mother,’ ran this letter which the Princess had for a time resisted in copying. ‘Upon the subject of money I should wish that whatever may be necessary to add, may be given to my dear Mother for my use, who always does everything I want in pecuniary matters.’

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When he read this letter the King commented, before laying it aside, that Victoria had not written it.

(#litres_trial_promo) To a later letter, offering a compromise – £4,000 a year for the Princess and £6,000 for herself – the Duchess replied curtly, rejecting it without even consulting her daughter who by now no longer spoke to her when they were alone together.

By this time the King was clearly very ill. He had arranged to give a ball on the evening of 24 May when the Princess came of age; but he was not well enough to greet his niece who drove to St James’s through streets crammed with people whose anxiety, so she wrote, ‘to see poor stupid me was very great, and I must say I am quite touched by it, and feel proud, which I always have done of my country and the English nation’.

(#litres_trial_promo) At the Palace she was told that His Majesty had directed that she should occupy his own chair of state. She did not greatly enjoy the ball, though. She felt Sir John Conroy’s eyes on her the whole evening, like those of a disapproving hawk; and when it was over she wrote resignedly in her diary: ‘Today is my eighteenth birthday! How old! And yet how far am I from being what I should be.’

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It was a sentiment which both Sir John Conroy and her mother did all they could to endorse. ‘You are still very young,’ the Duchess, with Conroy clearly at her shoulder, wrote to her, ‘and all your success so far has been due to your Mother’s reputation. Do not be too sanguine in your own talents and understanding.’ Conroy himself asserted that Victoria was ‘younger in intellect than in years’ and that she had too flippant a mentality to dispense with the guidance of those who knew her best.

The day after her birthday her uncle Leopold’s friend and counsellor Baron Stockmar, a Coburger of Swedish descent, arrived in London. Then forty-nine years old, Christian Frederick Stockmar was a qualified physician who had been head of the military hospital in Coburg. Having come across him there, Prince Leopold had been impressed by his honesty and knowledge of the world, and he had asked him to become his personal physician. When Princess Charlotte died, Prince Leopold had begged Stockmar never to leave him. Stockmar had promised never to do so and thereafter he spent more time with Leopold and on various missions for him than he did with his wife and children. Small, rotund, hypochondriacal, trustworthy, sardonic, moody, obsessively moral, and with a rather too high opinion of his understanding of political manoeuvres and psychological insights, he was to become a familiar figure at the English court, where, until his retirement to Coburg in 1857, he was to be seen walking into dinner of an evening without decorations and wearing ordinary trousers instead of the regulation knee-breeches.

He soon grasped the realities of the imbroglio at Kensington. On previous visits to England he had got on quite well with Sir John Conroy who spoke of him with the ‘greatest respect’; but as he came to understand the extent of the man’s ambition and of his influence over the Duchess of Kent – an influence which King Leopold was later to describe as ‘witchcraft’ – Stockmar began to agree with his master that Conroy’s conduct was ‘madness’ and ‘must end in his own ruin’.

Certainly Conroy’s machinations became almost desperate as King William’s health rapidly deteriorated and the accession of Princess Victoria as Queen grew ever closer.

On 22 May Sir Henry Halford, the King’s doctor, reported that his 72-two-year-old patient was ‘in a very odd state and decidedly had the hay fever and in such a manner as to preclude his going to bed’. Four days later Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, wrote of the King being in ‘a very precarious state’ and, ‘though he would probably rally’, it was not likely he would last long. ‘It is desirable he should wear the crown some time, however,’ Palmerston added, ‘for there would be no advantage in having a totally inexperienced girl of eighteen, just out of strict guardianship, to govern an Empire.’

In the meantime, Conroy was doing all he could to ensure that his guardianship was maintained, while the Princess, supported by Baroness Lehzen and Baron Stockmar, was doing all she could to break free from her guardian’s control. He again proposed to her that he be appointed her Private Secretary, a proposal which she naturally again rejected. After a conversation with her on 9 June, Stockmar reported to King Leopold:

I found the Princess fairly cool and collected, and her answers precise, apt and determined. I had throughout the conversation, the impression that she is extremely jealous of what she considers to be her rights and her future power and is therefore not at all inclined to do anything which would put Conroy into a situation to be able to entrench upon them. Her feelings seem, moreover, to have been deeply wounded by what she calls ‘his impudent and insulting conduct’ towards her. Her affection and esteem for her mother seem likewise to have suffered by Mama having tamely allowed Conroy to insult the Princess in her presence, and by the Princess having been frequently a witness to insults which the poor Duchess tolerated herself in the presence of her daughter…O’Hum [Conroy] continues the system of intimidation with the genius of a madman, and the Duchess carries out all that she is instructed to do with admirable docility and perseverance…The Princess continues to refuse firmly to give her Mama her promise that she will make O’Hum her confidential adviser. Whether she will hold out, Heaven only knows, for they plague her, every hour and every day.

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The Princess also managed to have a private conversation with the moderate Tory, Lord Liverpool, of whom she was so fond. Like Stockmar, Lord Liverpool urged her not to consider for a moment appointing Conroy her Private Secretary, a post for which he was quite unsuited. She must rely on the Ministers at present in office, particularly Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister, to advise her. Of course for the moment she must continue to live with her mother. To all this the Princess agreed. With Lord Liverpool, Baron Stockmar and King Leopold all supporting her, she now felt quite capable of resisting Sir John Conroy’s threats and blandishments. Lord Liverpool suggested that, as a compromise, the Princess might consider appointing Sir John her Privy Purse, provided he did not stray from that department. But, primed by Lehzen, the Princess protested that Lord Liverpool ‘must be aware of many slights & incivilities Sir John has been guilty of towards her, but besides this she knew things of him which rendered it totally impossible for her to place him in any confidential position near her…She knew things which entirely took away her confidence in him, & that she knew this of herself without any other person informing her.’

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Before parting from Lord Liverpool she suggested he spoke to Baron Stockmar who would tell him many things she did not like to talk about herself. Also, Lord Liverpool’s daughter, Lady Catherine, would confirm what she had told him about Sir John Conroy’s intolerably rude behaviour towards herself.

The day after this conversation with Lord Liverpool, Baron Stockmar reported that ‘the struggle between the Mama and daughter’ was still going on and that the Duchess was ‘being pressed by Conroy to bring matters to extremities and to force her Daughter to do her will by unkindness and severity’. Conroy claimed he had been advised by James Abercromby, a former Judge-Advocate-General and the future Lord Dunfermline, that the girl must be ‘coerced’, if she would not listen to reason. But, so he later maintained, he decided not to go to such lengths because he ‘did not credit the Duchess of Kent with enough strength for such a step’.

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The King was now very close to death. When told this on 19 June the Princess ‘turned pale and burst into tears’. The next morning, her mother woke her at six o’clock to tell her that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Conyngham, whose horses had galloped all the way, had come to the Palace and wished to see her. She got out of bed and went downstairs, the Duchess holding her hand and carrying a candle in a silver candlestick, Lehzen following with a bottle of smelling salts. ‘I went into my sitting room (only in my dressing gown) and alone’, she wrote in her diary, ‘and saw them. Lord Conyngham then acquainted me that my poor Uncle, the King, was no more, and had expired at 12 minutes past 2 this morning and consequently that I am Queen.’

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7 THE YOUNG QUEEN (#ulink_45484b4a-8b95-5116-b67a-5a9c9ead06b5)

‘Got such a letter from Mama, oh, oh such a letter.’

‘I CANNOT RESIST TELLING YOU,’ Thomas Creevey wrote to his step-daughter, Elizabeth Ord, ‘that our dear little Queen in every respect is perfection.’

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A few weeks later Creevey gave an example of the little Queen’s good nature by relating a story of her encounter with one of her ladies, Lady Charlemont, well known to be a bluestocking, who had asked Lady Tavistock, the Queen’s Lady of the Bedchamber, if she might take books out of the library at Windsor. ‘“Oh yes, my dear,” said Lady Tavistock, not knowing what reading means, “as many as you like.”’

Upon which Lady Charlemont swept away a whole row, and was carrying them away in her apron. Passing thro’ the gallery in this state, whom should she meet but little Vic! Great was her perturbation, for in the first place a low curtsy was necessary, and what was to come of the books, for they must curtsy too. Then to be found with all this property within the first half hour of her coming and before even she had seen Vic!…But Vic was very much amused with the thing altogether, laughed heartily and was as good humoured as ever she could be.

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Creevey’s good opinion of the Queen was commonly shared. Charles Greville, never a man to pay an idle or ill-considered compliment, had an opportunity to study her closely when, acting in his office as Clerk to the Privy Council, he attended a meeting of the Council in the Red Saloon at Kensington Palace soon after eleven o’clock on the morning of her accession, and was much impressed by her behaviour.

She had already had a conversation with ‘good, faithful’ Baron Stockmar over breakfast, written to her uncle, King Leopold, signing herself for the first time ‘your devoted and attached Niece, Victoria R.’ and to Princess Feodora, assuring her that she would ‘remain for life’ her ‘devoted attached Sister, V.R.’.

(#litres_trial_promo) She had also written a letter of condolence to her aunt, Queen Adelaide, whom she addressed as ‘Her Majesty the Queen, Windsor Castle’ and, when it was intimated to her that she should have written ‘Her Majesty, the Queen Dowager’, she replied, ‘I am quite aware of Her Majesty’s altered status, but I would rather not be the first person to remind her of it.’

(#litres_trial_promo) In her letter she assured her that she must remain at Windsor Castle just as long as she liked.

At nine o’clock she had received the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, talking to him ‘of COURSE quite ALONE’ as she intended ‘always’ to do with all her Ministers, and assuring him, as King Leopold had advised her to do, that she intended to ‘retain him and the rest of the present Ministry at the head of affairs and that it could not be in better hands than his’.

(#litres_trial_promo) She had had another brief conversation with him before entering the Red Saloon for the Council meeting, going into the room by herself ‘quite plainly dressed, and in mourning’.

(#litres_trial_promo) She had been asked if she would like to be accompanied by the Great Officers of State, but she had decided to go in ‘quite alone’.