The Victoria Letters: The official companion to the ITV Victoria series

Victoria:

There was a time, Mama, when I needed your protection, but instead you allowed Sir John to make you his creature.

MORE IMPORTANTLY PERHAPS in that early training, Drina was taught always to be truthful, punctual and frugal and to take plenty of fresh air and exercise. She went out into Kensington Gardens in all weathers, sometimes on Dickey, her favourite white donkey. Dickey – a present from the Duke of York – its head decorated with blue ribbons, was led by an old soldier who had once served her father. Whenever the little princess emerged from the Palace, often holding hands with Feodora, she was friendly to everyone she met, bidding them ‘Good morning’ with a smile.

By the age of eleven she seemed exceptionally accomplished and forward for her age. ‘A child of great feeling,’ thought the Revd. Davys. She was impulsive and generous – but she could also be wilful, and, as the Behaviour Books recording her every misdemeanour noted, on one occasion she had been ‘very very very horribly naughty’.

Queen Victoria later explained that ‘I was naturally very passionate, but always most contrite afterwards’. She may have been stubborn and impetuous but an abiding quality, from a young age, was her truthfulness, reflected in the often surprisingly candid comments in her journal.

High days and holidays in the protected life of young Drina during the 1820s amounted to summer breaks at Ramsgate and other seaside towns, where she rode her donkey on the sands and was sometimes allowed to play with children of the gentry. Other than this, visits to her mother’s brother, Uncle Leopold, were the thing she most longed for. ‘Claremont remains as the brightest epoch of my otherwise rather melancholy childhood,’ the Queen later wrote, and she and Feodora would often stay at this Palladian mansion near Esher in Surrey for weeks or months at a time, taking great delight in playing in its huge parkland and gardens.

Princess Victoria in Kensington Gardens.

Twenty years later her sister recalled in a letter how much the two sisters had loved Claremont in comparison to Kensington Palace – to which they always returned with heavy hearts:

When I look back upon those years, which ought to have been the happiest in my life, from fourteen to twenty, I cannot help pitying myself. Not to have enjoyed the pleasures of youth is nothing, but to have been deprived of all intercourse, and not one cheerful thought in that dismal existence of ours, was very hard. My only happy time was going or driving out with you and Lehzen; then I could speak and look as I liked.

~ LETTER FROM FEODORA, 1843

During this difficult time, Drina’s German grandmother, Augusta of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, continued to dote on and adore her little May Blossom from a distance. In 1825 the 68-year-old visited for two months. It was a moment that little Drina had longed for:

I recollect the excitement and anxiety I was in, at this event, going down the great flight of steps to meet her when she got out of the carriage, and hearing her say, when she sat down in her room, and fixed her fine clear blue eyes on her little grand-daughter whom she called in her letters: ‘The flower of May’, ‘Ein schönes Kind’ – ‘a fine child’.

~ VICTORIA’S REMINISCENCES OF HER EARLY CHILDHOOD, WRITTEN IN 1872

Princess Augusta, Victoria’s grandmother.

Script quote:

Victoria:

When I was growing up, Mama and Sir John – they kept me under constant supervision. I was allowed no friends, no society, no life of my own.

She was a good deal bent and walked with a stick, and frequently with her hands on her back. She took long drives in an open carriage and I was frequently sent out with her, which I am sorry to confess I did not like, as, like most children of that age, I preferred running about. She was excessively kind to children, but could not bear naughty ones, and I shall never forget her coming into the room when I had been crying and naughty at my lessons – from the next room but one, where she had been with Mamma – and scolding me severely, which had a very salutary effect.

VICTORIA’S REMINISCENCES OF HER EARLY CHILDHOOD, WRITTEN IN 1872

AUGUSTA WAS BESOTTED WITH her beloved granddaughter, enthusing about her in letters home and proclaiming her to be ‘incredibly precocious for her age’. She had never seen ‘a more alert and forthcoming child’.

Little Mouse is charming: her face is just like her father’s, the same artful blue eyes, the same roguish expression when she laughs. She is big and strong as good health itself, friendly and cuddlesome – I would even say obliging – agile, poised, graceful in all her movements. […] When I speak incorrectly, she says quite softly, ‘Grandmama must say …’ and then tells me how it should be said. Such natural politeness and attentiveness as that child shows has never come my way before.

~ LETTER FROM AUGUSTA, 6 AUGUST 1825

Augusta did, however, worry that Drina ‘eats a little too much, and almost always a little too fast’, and noted that she was also rather short for her age. But she was already displaying other far more important qualities. Grandmama Augusta was one of the first to observe an enduring trait of the future Queen: ‘when she enters a room, and greets you by inclining her head, according to the English custom, there is staggering majesty’.

In February 1828 came a terrible wrench for Drina when Feodora, now aged eighteen, left England to marry Ernst, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg – a man much older than herself, whom she hardly knew. From her new home she wrote endless letters to her half-sister in England, filled with love and sorrow at their separation.

If I had wings and could fly like a bird, I should fly in at your window like the little robin to-day, and wish you many very happy returns of the 24th, and tell you how I love you, dearest sister, and how often I think of you and long to see you. I think if I were once with you again I could not leave you so soon. I should wish to stay with you, and what would poor Ernst say if I were to leave him so long? He would perhaps try to fly after me, but I fear he would not get far; he is rather tall and heavy for flying. So you see I have nothing left to do but to write to you, and wish you in this way all possible happiness and joy for this and many, many years to come. I hope you will spend a very merry birthday. How I wish to be with you, dearest Victoire, on that day!

LETTER FROM FEODORA TO VICTORIA, MAY 1829

George I, first Hanoverian king.

Feature:

THE HANOVERIANS

‘I am far more proud of my Stuart than of my Hanoverian ancestors’

– Victoria –

BY BECOMING QUEEN, Victoria ended an uninterrupted line of Hanoverian kings from 1714 when George I, Elector of Hanover, assumed the British throne after Queen Anne died childless. To have a young, virginal queen on the throne after a long line of disreputable males was a refreshing change: the Hanoverians had not endeared themselves to the British public. Collectively the four Georges and William preceding Victoria were looked upon, along with their mistresses and scores of illegitimate children, as rogues, blackguards and fools from a petty provincial German kingdom. The public baulked at having to support the vast entourage of dependents (including two mistresses) accompanying George I to England.

His son, George II, provoked a deep, abiding hatred in the Scots when he ordered the brutal suppression of the Jacobite Rebellion (1745–46).

George III’s tumultuous 60-year reign was punctuated by scandal, political disaster and madness. A devoted husband and father at home, producing fifteen children with his long-suffering wife Caroline, George lost the American colonies in 1783 and quarrelled endlessly with his heir, who assumed the Regency in 1811 upon George’s last, most crippling descent into madness.

George IV, a man of considerable aesthetic taste and a patron of the arts, was nevertheless a lazy spendthrift who abandoned his wife Caroline of Brunswick and squandered a fortune on his lavish coronation. Despite lingering gossip about the ‘bad blood’ of the Hanoverians, Drina had taken a liking to her ‘Uncle King’, as she referred to George IV on a visit to Windsor (1826), remembering him as ‘large and gouty but with a wonderful dignity and charm of manner’. ‘Give me your little paw,’ he said, lifting her into his carriage – a jaunt that had greatly pleased the young princess.

In contrast, she found the last Hanoverian king, her uncle William IV, ‘very odd and singular’, but appreciated his kindness and determination that she be properly prepared for a monarch’s onerous duties. Although the new Queen’s reign would depart dramatically from the path laid by her royal predecessors, Victoria would carry one heritage with her: the slightly bulging blue eyes, round face prone to chubbiness and receding chin were all inherited by her children – unmistakable markers of Victoria’s Hanoverian line of descent.

AS THE 1820S PROCEEDED, Little Drina’s own path to the throne became ever more inevitable. Her uncle, the Duke of York, died in 1827, and in June 1830 King George IV died, making Drina now heir presumptive to the throne after her uncle, the new king William IV. It provided Grandmama Augusta with a moment’s pause for thought:

God bless old England, where my beloved children live, and where the sweet blossom of May may one day reign! May God yet, for many years, keep the weight of a crown from her young head, and let the intelligent, clever child grow up to girlhood before this dangerous grandeur devolves upon her!

~ LETTER FROM AUGUSTA TO THE DUCHESS OF KENT, MAY 1830

In the seven years that followed, Little Drina proved to be more than equal to the challenge that lay before her.

FROM KENSINGTON PALACE TO BUCKINGHAM PALACE (#ulink_2df7db45-12c9-5b2e-af26-07b71b33119e)

‘She evinces much talent in whatever she undertakes’

– Duchess of Kent –

WHEN PRINCESS VICTORIA was eleven, by now a rather more diligent and conscientious pupil, she is said to have finally discovered that she was in direct line to the throne. Leafing through the pages of a court almanac with her governess Lehzen, she came across a genealogical table of the British succession. Lehzen, writing to Victoria many years later, recalled that the Princess had remarked, ‘I never saw that before.’

‘It was not thought necessary you should, Princess,’ I answered. – ‘I see, I am nearer to the Throne, than I thought.’ – ‘So it is, Madam,’ I said. – After some moments the Princess resumed, ‘Now, many a child would boast, but they don’t know the difficulty; there is much splendour, but there is more responsibility!’ The Princess having lifted up the forefinger of Her right hand, while she spoke, gave me that little hand saying, ‘I will be good!’

~ LETTER FROM LEHZEN TO VICTORIA, 2 DECEMBER 1867

BY THE EARLY 1830S, Victoria was being schooled well beyond her years; training fit for the throne that now, in all likelihood, awaited her. Upon learning of her position as heir presumptive, she is said to have told Lehzen, ‘I understand now, why you urged me so much to learn, even Latin.’ She was indeed a good Latin scholar – tackling Virgil and Horace – and a fluent linguist.

Undoubtedly one of Victoria’s greatest joys in the schoolroom came in 1835, when the Irish-Italian bass baritone Luigi Lablache was appointed to give her singing lessons, in so doing nurturing a lifelong love of Italian opera.

She was still very small for her age – which she worried about – and the Duke of Wellington still found her German accent troubling. Some of Victoria’s ‘mangled phrases’ were, he said, ‘particularly unpleasant, coming from the lips of an English princess’. Victoria dissolved into floods of tears when she heard this. Uncle Leopold was also concerned that her love of food was causing her to put on weight. Victoria reassured him, writing from the seaside in 1834: ‘I wish you could come here, for many reasons, but also to be an eye-witness of my extreme prudence in eating, which would astonish you.’

I like Lablache very much, he is such a nice, good-natured, good-humoured man, and a very patient and excellent master, he is so merry too (…) I liked my lesson extremely; I only wish I had one every day instead of one every week.