Queen Victoria: A Life of Contradictions

Remove the horses and Greville’s picture is recognisable to the modern reader familiar with London in the grip of royal fervour. The Times attempted to unravel the attitude of Greville’s ‘mob’: ‘They thought of [Victoria] not as an individual to be loved with headlong zeal or played upon by corrupt adulation … they regarded her as in herself an institution.’

Victoria’s success over the course of a long reign was to unite, to the benefit of both, the individual and the institution. In a very personal sense, the monarchy became ‘Victorian’: in the minds of many of Victoria’s subjects, the throne acquired what they understood as her own virtues. This symbiosis invested the British Crown with a tangibly human aspect at the same time as exalting Victoria herself as an archetype and exemplar of all that was laudable in a woman and a ruler. It was partly good fortune, partly born of a sympathetic popular mindset shaped by culture and economics. As we shall see, Victoria’s behaviour did not consistently merit approbation, which, throughout her final decades and beyond, came close to idolatry.

Hers did not begin as a cult of personality: that happened later. From infancy those closest to her schooled her in a course of exemplary behaviour: her mother, her governess, her canny Uncle Leopold. A backlash against the burlesque and buffoonery of her immediate predecessors, their model of rectitude encouraged a suppression of self in the interests of a tarnished Crown. Outwardly, Victoria’s monarchy came to be characterised by probity, continence and earnestness, all ‘Victorianisms’ derided by posterity. Yet this mandate of good behaviour provided an imprimatur of some resilience for a throne that, in political terms, continued to lose ground to an increasingly elected and representative Parliament. If Victoria did not always keep faith with that mandate, she mostly avoided publishing her transgressions. Returning to the fray at the time of her death, The Times was able to assert unblushingly that, if the monarchy stood ‘broad-based upon the people’s will … we owe these results, to a degree which is hardly possible to over-estimate, to the womanly sweetness, the gentle sagacity, the utter disinteredness, and the unassailable rectitude of the Queen’.

Readers of the following account of Victoria’s life will discover that her sweetness, sagacity, disinteredness and rectitude were all variable qualities: she was a woman of dizzying contradictions and myriad inconsistencies, but deeply etched in her makeup was a towering wilfulness that intermittently rendered her foolish, selfish, blinkered, exasperating and apparently self-destructive. In virtually the same breath she was capable of immense charm, humility, compassion, candour, perspicacity, generosity, intrepidity and understanding. ‘How sadly deficient I am, and how over-sensitive and irritable, and how uncontrollable my temper is when annoyed and hurt,’ she confessed to her journal on New Year’s Day 1881.

She was unflinchingly honest throughout her life, especially with herself. Repeatedly that honesty failed to equate with accurate self-knowledge. A surer estimate than that of The Times belongs to her last prime minister, Lord Salisbury, who commended her ‘inflexible conscience’ and ‘unflagging industry’. Neither predisposition shaped her conduct life long.

She did not read Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution, published in 1867. Even without that guidance – staple reading for her successors – she insisted to ministers and prime ministers, clergymen, generals, foreign statesmen and rulers, as well as her own family, on her rights to be consulted, to encourage and to warn, and did so with vehemence and some success. A reluctant showman, she is unlikely to have embraced Bagehot’s definition of public life as akin to theatre: ‘the climax of the play is the Queen’.

By the end of her reign, however, she had convincingly overturned his qualification that ‘nobody supposes that their house is like the court; their life like her life; her orders like their orders’. Not least among Victoria’s achievements was her calculated presentation of herself as an acme of ordinariness. Even as she exulted in the riches and grandeur of empire, she appeared Britain’s first middle-class monarch, her way of life recognisable and, for the most part, comprehensible to the vast mass of her subjects. Moreover she did so on an international stage, so that the woman who was herself so preoccupied with British prestige abroad became in time a chief source of the very prestige she valued so highly.

Victoria believed in commemoration. She cheated death’s sting by celebrating those taken from her in concrete and enduring form. She in turn inspired similar acts of conspicuous memorialising and rightly remains among Britain’s best-known and most visible monarchs. So extensive are surviving primary sources relating to her life and reign that it is possible, as academics and biographers have discovered, to support divergent and conflicting interpretations. The present, deliberately short account of Victoria’s life is necessarily a selective portrait. It encompasses aspects of her private and public worlds, of her internal as well as her external landscapes. None is exhaustive, though the focus is consistently Victoria herself: my aim has not been to offer a vision of the age, of her marriage, her family, her legacy. Rather, in attempting to capture what I consider telling aspects of this enduringly great Briton, I hope the present account arrives at a pithy but illuminating definition of its own, albeit qualified and circumscribed by the restrictions of its format.

1

‘Pocket Hercules’

IN THE SPRING of 1819, Britain’s royal family lacked heirs in the third generation. None denied the fecundity of the geriatric King and his recently deceased queen. George III – mad, irascible, tearful and, to a host of unglimpsed imaginary listeners, still talkative despite his deafness – and red-nosed, snuff-sniffing, cricket-loving Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (plain-featured even in likenesses by Gainsborough and Allan Ramsay) had produced fifteen children and a template of royal domesticity which, with dire consequences, discounted cosiness or intimacy between parents and children. Their vigorous momentum had not been maintained. Too many of those children remained unmarried – or sloppily embroiled in the rouged embrace of middle-aged mistresses, childless or giving birth only to bastards and ill repute; the babble and patter of grandchildren scarcely touched the sovereigns’ dotage. So easily did bad parenting come close to extinguishing a dynasty.

The Prince Regent, future George IV, was the eldest of the fifteen: in his late fifties balloon-faced, extravagant and quick to pique. Married at the wish of his parents and Parliament, he was father to a single daughter. Like the Regent’s mother another Charlotte, she ought in time to have become Queen of England. Instead she died in 1817 giving birth to a stillborn son. Her short life had been one of shoddy rambunctiousness. Her loathsome parents loathed one another. Neither scrupled to shield their daughter from their differences.In the circumstances this apple-cheeked girl of novelettish instincts might have turned out worse – born of the loveless coupling of a prodigal sybarite and a hoydenish German princess slapdash in the cleanliness of her undergarments and afterwards, it was claimed, over-generous with her favours. In retrospect Charlotte appears a quintessentially Regency figure.

The unnecessary death of the King’s granddaughter and only heiress presumptive, attributed to obstetric malpractice, had provoked nationwide grief and a crisis in the monarchy. ‘In the dust/ the fair-haired daughter of the isles is laid,/ the love of millions,’ Byron lamented. Commemorative cups and saucers, cream jugs, even printed handkerchiefs echoed the strain. With incontinent capitalisation, one broadsheet implored the nation to, ‘Reflect upon the Uncertainty of HUMAN LIFE, So strikingly exemplified in THE DEATH Of your amiable and much lamented PRINCESS’, a didactic imperative which anticipates the lugubrious piety of the remainder of the century. Politician Henry Brougham described public reaction ‘as though every household throughout Great Britain had lost a favourite child’. Belatedly remorseful – and too late for Charlotte, of course – the hapless obstetrician Sir Richard Croft shot himself. The princess’s death did not inspire her woebegone father once more unto the breach: at forty-nine, the vilified Princess of Wales would not produce a second heir.

That task fell instead to the Regent’s six surviving younger brothers: Frederick, William, Edward, Ernest, Augustus and Adolphus, in Shelley’s estimation the ‘dregs of their dull race’. Mired in debt and bawdy, these flaunting adulterers were lethargic in matters of duty, slatternly and discreditable, tarnished to the extent of accusations of incest and murder – a boon to caricaturists: with their wigs, pockmarks, gluttony and gout not even ornamental. With hindsight they would be regarded as a nadir for Britain’s monarchy, ‘a race of small German breast-bestarred wanderers’, as anti-monarchist MP Charles Bradlaugh later described the Hanoverians.

For the high-minded if alarmist Prince Albert, they would provide an enduring cautionary tale.

Of the seven possible progenitors in the aftermath of Charlotte’s death, William, Edward and Adolphus responded to the siren call of a regal vacancy and an anxious Parliament prepared to barter their debts for an heir (Frederick and Ernest were already married). Hastily they allied themselves to a trio of uninspiring Protestant German princesses:all lacked even the misplaced high spirits of the Regent’s estranged wife. In April 1819, it was Adolphus’s wife, Augusta, Duchess of Cambridge, who gave birth to a healthy son. He was christened George. For seven weeks this infant prince of Cambridge was alone eligible in his generation to inherit the throne of England. But Adolphus was the youngest of the married brothers. Senior in precedence were William, Duke of Clarence (later William IV), described after his death as ‘not … a prince of brilliant and commanding talents’;

Edward, Duke of Kent, of martinet stiffness, black-dyed hair, surprising philanthropy and tender-hearted devotion to his bride; and Ernest, Duke of Cumberland: emaciated, charmless and acerbic, but more sensitive than history has allowed to his status as England’s most hated man.

And so from the outset Alexandrina Victoria of Kent was a person of consequence. Born as dawn broke over the southeast corner of Kensington Palace on 24 May 1819, in a room whose costly refurbishment her fifty-one-year-old father had completed only two days previously, she immediately displaced her Cambridge cousin in the line of succession. Sources disagree on when she herself first learnt it. An aura of consequence – occasionally cultivated, occasionally insisted upon – was an attribute she would never lose.

She would become one of England’s most vigorous monarchs. As a baby, her father described her as ‘a model of strength’: ‘more of a pocket Hercules, than a pocket Venus’.

Perhaps something of the urgency and precariousness of that scramble which preceded her birth remained with her life long. It is discernible in her later conviction of her own eminence,her retreat behind that impenetrable shield, ‘Queen of England’:she may not have forgotten that her queenship was so nearly that of her older cousin, Charlotte, or indeed young George. At different levels, hers is the response of thelottery-winningpoor relation and, at the same time, simply one manifestation of a remarkably forceful nature.Over time much of her public life, with its parade of accessible virtues, represented a deliberate revision of the indignity of her pre-history and the tattered record of her immediate forebears. Fanciful to claim that she was born to right the record: her selfishness and sense of entitlement were equal to those of any of her father’s siblings. But guided by those nearest to her, and prompted by the memory of uncles and aunts set on lives of eighteenth-century excess, as well as her own impulsive if inconsistent craving to exploit her position for good, she would redefine the face and function of British monarchy. She embraced an outlook some have labelled middle class and did so with wholehearted sincerity, as much a stranger to real middle-class mores as she was to those of the aristocracy she mistrusted or the Highland tenantry she determinedly idealised. Victoria’s reign reasserted – and successfully bequeathed to her successors – what her contemporary Mrs Oliphant described as ‘that tradition of humdrum virtue’ established by her grandfather George III:

in that respect she became in fact as well as appearance, as Lady Granville described her in her infancy, ‘le roi Georges in petticoats’.

‘Plump as a partridge’, this child whom J. M. Barrie memorialised in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens as ‘the most celebrated baby of the Gardens’

emerged into a world of confinement. That too would persist life long. Although as queen,Victoria flexed her muscles constitutionally and unconstitutionally and was not averse to threatening abdication when it suited her, she never with any conviction sought to escape her restrictive destiny. Her status as queen defined her in her own eyes: it was she who bandied the title ‘doyenne of sovereigns’, its unnuanced orotundity indicative of her later complacency. Sovereignty was in two senses her legacy from her father, for the Duke of Kent was not only royal but romantic too. He had accepted without question the gypsy prophecy told to him on Malta that his unborn child would become a great queen. History has frequently agreed.

For all his dreaming, her father was injudicious. His frequent good intentions – his scheme to educate the sons of the military and his support for Catholic emancipation, for example – could not outweigh that half-crazy disciplinarianism which caused gossiping diarist and Clerk to the Privy Council, Charles Greville, to dismiss him as ‘the greatest rascal that ever went unhung’.

His duchess too was not clever. Society labelled her a stupid foreigner, ‘the most mediocre person it would be possible to meet’.

Ditto the woman who in 1824 became Victoria’s governess, a caraway seed-chewing Hanoverian Lutheran of sharp features and sharper self-estimation called Louise Lehzen. Both women were singularly determined, invested in good measure with the instinct for survival, the one spikily conscious of rank, the other given to jaundice, headaches and nervous debilitation; equal in their firmness and jealously exacting. Determination and adamantine self-will became enduring characteristics of their charge, successfully checked by neither. Lehzen at least made Victoria’s wellbeing her lodestar. Her reward was love and, for an interlude, a front row seat in her pupil’s unfolding drama.

Victoire, Duchess of Kent was a striking-looking widow of assured if showy dress sense, pink-cheeked and garrulous, but slow to master English with confidence. Until his death in 1814, her unappealing first husband, Charles Emich of Leiningen, had ruled without distinction, or the appearance of common sense, a territory in Lower Franconia much depleted by Napoleon. Leiningen’s dark-haired widow, allied to Edward, Duke of Kent in 1818, as England still reeled from Princess Charlotte’s death, quitted Germany with a son and daughter of pleasing aspect, Charles and Feodore; she took with her too the memory of financial hardship and emotional neglect. Her second marriage offered no respite from the former and so acquired a peripatetic character, husband and wife constantly travelling in the interests of economy. Happily the Duke of Kent, whose governorship of Gibraltar in 1802, described as a ‘reign of terror’,

included sentencing a man to a flogging of 900 lashes,

regarded his duchess unequivocally as ‘a young and charming Princess’

and implored her quite sincerely to ‘love me as I love you’.

For just this happiness had he set aside his kind and comfortable mistress of three decades, Julie de St Laurent – that and the hope that Parliament would increase his allowance handsomely. (Parliament decided otherwise, happy to act shabbily.) Since the Duke died of pneumonia, reputedly caught from wet boots, on 23 January 1820 – on an extended sojourn to the seaside at Sidmouth, which offered bracing sea breezes at modest rates – Alexandrina Victoria cannot have remembered her parents’ wedded bliss: she was eight months old. Their happiness found reflections in her own spectacularly loving marriage. In the meantime, she grew up to share the sentiments of her aunt, Elizabeth, Landgravine of Hesse-Homburg, that her parents’ ‘domestic comfort … broke up’ was ‘a very sad, sad thing’.

Infancy prevented her from recognising that atmosphere of petty contentiousness which hung, like the odour of penury, about the large apartment in Kensington Palace. No public rejoicing greeted her birth: like his brothers, her father was not popular. Superstitious and in the throes of a late-in-life infatuation with his much younger wife, the Duke of Kent may have been convinced that his daughter was a sovereign-in-waiting – as Edith Sitwell described her, ‘conceived, born and bred … to mount the summits of greatness’;

he was wise enough mostly to disguise that hope. ‘I should deem it the height of presumption to believe it probable that a future heir to the Crown of England would spring from me,’ he asserted with questionable frankness.

More sober counsels, the Regent among them, anticipated an heir from the Duke of Clarence and his whey-faced young bride Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, whose first child had died only two months earlier within hours of her birth (the first of four disappointments for the long-suffering Clarences). Like the Clarences themselves, they would be thwarted in that expectation. The Regent feigned boredom at the princess’s birth, but true to his nature of petulant caprice, the following month roused himself to sufficient rancour to spoil her christening. He changed her parents’ preferred name of Victoire Georgiana Alexandrina Charlotte Augusta to Alexandrina Victoria: the unwieldy, foreign-sounding ‘Alexandrina’ was a tribute to the baby’s most powerful sponsor, Alexander I of Russia, who would play no part in her upbringing. By striking out Charlotte and the feminine form of his own name, the Regent symbolically denied the baby’s connection to himself and any claim to the throne. He also held at arm’s length the niece in whom he took no interest. The Duchess of Clarence, by contrast, wrote to her affectionately on her third birthday as ‘dear little Xandrina Victoria’:

abbreviation came quickly. For much of her childhood she was simply ‘Drina’. On her accession ‘Alexandrina’ would be dropped entirely, although a bill of 1831 to change the child’s name by Act of Parliament to Charlotte Victoria had proved unsuccessful. It was a matter in which the twelve-year-old Victoria had no say: later she was grateful for its outcome, which freed her somewhat from the shadow of her cousin and her grandmother. Victoria assuredly owed her crown to her cousin’s death: an egotist in terms of her royal role (if not in all matters), she sought to cast her reign in no one’s image but her own. Besides, she felt, her mother reported, a ‘great attachment’ to her second name, notwithstanding that unEnglishness and lack of British royal precedent which so troubled her uncle William.

Later she would castigate Charlotte – alongside Elizabeth – as one of ‘the ugliest “housemaids” names I ever knew’.

Foolish she may have been, unfortunate too in the mortality of her husbands: Victoria’s mother possessed another significant attribute. She had been born Princess Marie Louise Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Charlotte’s tragedy thus touched the Duchess of Kent closely for the women were sisters-in-law, Charlotte’s husband Victoire’s younger brother Leopold. Like parvenus in pursuit of ton, the ambitious and good-looking Coburgs were a family eager for greatness, none more so than Leopold. In coming decades Coburgers would colonise the palaces of Europe: their winning formula was a combination of dashing sex appeal, force of will and a self-serving phlegmatism in matters religious and political. Not without reason did Bismarck later vilify them as the ‘stud-farm of Europe’ or a Habsburg archduke complain that ‘the Coburgs gain throne after throne and spread their growing power abroad over the whole earth’.

With Charlotte and her baby dead, and Leopold’s dream of kingship by proxy in shreds, theirsecond bite of the cherry fell to Victoire. It was Leopold who, as early as 1816, had drawn to the Duke of Kent’s attention his lovely, lonely sister; Leopold who afterwards with renewed zeal encouraged Kent’s hopes through a protracted courtship; Leopold who, metaphorically at least, hovered at his sister’s shoulder.Kent’s death was not the disaster Charlotte’s had been, since his daughter survived him. It was Leopold who steadied Victoire’s resolve as she grappled with her second bereavement.

Leopold also assisted his sister financially (though hardly to the top of his considerable means) and inspired her with dreams of glittering prizes and heavy-duty good advice; he insisted that she and the child live in Britain, albeit isolated and virtually friendless. As time would show, her compliance was enthusiastic. As keenly aware of the value of her trump card as any hard-bitten gamester, chary of her prerogatives and fully set upon the exercise of power, Victoire of Kent would prove tenacious in pursuit of the Coburg usurpation. But she played her hand badly. The Coburger who ruled England was neither Leopold nor his sister Victoire, who spent long years at variance with her daughter, but their nephew Albert, a case of third time lucky. In Albert’s case, the Coburg will to power was balanced by a contradictory impulse, the ‘Coburg melancholy’; both would leave their imprint.

Hostage to his own mismanagement, the Duke of Kent bequeathed his wife an impressive list of creditors and a decidedly unimpressive jointure of less than £300 a year. After her five-night vigil at her dying husband’s bedside, the Duchess was unable to meet the costs of transporting his coffin to Windsor or herself and her daughter to London. It sounds a farcical impasse: it was certainly an inauspicious beginning to baby Victoria’s august career. Unavoidably, mother and daughter remained for several weeks in Sidmouth, scene of their unhappiness, awaiting Leopold’s help. Parliament granted the Duchess a royal widow’s pension of £6,000, a modest sum by royal standards. As we will see, the Duke’s own final gift to his wife also ultimately proved inadequate, though the Duchess was slow to recognise it: an egregiously venturesome helpmeet condemned by posterity.

John Conroy (from 1827 Sir John Conroy) was the Duke of Kent’s equerry and one of his executors; following the Duke’s death he became Comptroller of the Duchess’s household. He exercised authority over her finances and her aspirations. For this hook-nosed Anglo-Irish landowner of severely limited means possessed unlimited ambition and a degree of swaggering magnetism. Gossips including no less a figure than the Duke of Wellington branded him the Duchess’s lover: certainly theirs became an egoïsme à deux, which was itself an approach to intimacy. Conroy was a gambler with fate. He pinned his hopes on Victoria becoming queen and himself exercising power through the Duchess. Had he preferred the moonshine of dreams to the hard manipulation of scheming, he might have survived for future generations as a romantic figure. But he conceived of lasting benefits deriving first from the Duke of Kent’s death, afterwards from Victoria’s eminence. Inevitably over the next two decades he overplayed his hand. He earned Victoria’s lasting enmity and, like the majority of the vanquished, forfeited the opportunity of telling his side of the story. Misguidedly he encouraged the Duchess in a course of behaviour towards her daughter which cost her Victoria’s trust, her respect and, most importantly, her love.

Seeds sown by this predatory Irish adventurer were never harvested: Victoire did not steer the ship of state, even as Regent, and Conroy was prevented from basking in reflected glory. Victoria herself dismissed him from her household on her very first day as queen – after some delays pensioned off lucratively if with an ill grace. It was surely the right course of action. But for her father’s death and Conroy’s ambitions, Victoria’s childhood might have been happier. Certainly the series of sketches of her at three years old made by Lady Elizabeth Keith Heathcote during a seaside holiday in Ramsgate suggest a normal toddler happy at normal toddler pursuits.

She was a healthy, active child, successfully inoculated against smallpox at the age of ten weeks. Breast-fed by her mother and cared for by her nurse Mrs Brock, she was contented, plump and wilful with the unyielding egotism of the very young, ‘a greater darling than ever, but … beginning to show symptoms of wanting to get her own little way’ as early as January 1820.

With few intermissions, she would remain plump and wilful. Thanks to her mother’s sense of destiny, her infant world was as English as the German Duchess could make it (save for her German half-sister Feodore, her German governess Lehzen and the German lady-in-waiting, Baroness Späth, in attendance on her mother: a fluttering, unattractive, devoted woman widely written off as negligible and eventually expelled by Conroy). In 1822, mother and daughter sat together for William Beechey. In Beechey’s portrait the exotic good looks belong to Victoria’s German mother. For her part, Victoria is a generic English child, cherubic, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, as novelist Walter Scott remembered her at nine. In one chubby hand she clutches a miniature of her father. The habit of visible mourning, and of defining herself through her relationship to a deceased male, began early.

‘When I think of His poor Miserable Wife, and His innocent, Fatherless Child, it really breaks my heart,’ wrote the Duke of Kent’s eldest unmarried sister Princess Augusta two days after the Duke’s death in 1820.

The following week George III also died. Victoria’s childhood would indeed come to include an element of broken-heartedness; happiness came afterwards. For the rest of her life there would be a series of surrogate father figures, including her uncle Leopold, her first prime minister and her husband. And in her friendships with women, even her own daughters, too often a reserve, occasionally hostility. The origin of both impulses is easy to trace: a childhood environment of querulous femininity and, with the exception of the exceptionable Conroy, male absence.

2

‘Fresh and innocent as the flowers in her own garden’

ROOKS NESTED IN Kensington Gardens during Victoria’s childhood: only in 1880, with the destruction of a grove of 700 elm trees, did they depart.

There were nuthatches among the beeches and horse chestnuts, jays too. To the passer-by it was a sylvan place, site of that ‘country’ palace acquired by William III and enriched by George I, ‘[full] of memories and legends; of notable or fantastic figures of the past’.