Queen Victoria: A Life of Contradictions

Two centuries ago, Kensington Palace was recognisably that ‘pleasant place, surrounded by beautiful gardens, [in which] a little girl was brought up by her loving mother’, imagined with a heavy dollop of syrup by children’s author E. Nesbit in 1897.

‘Her teachers instructed her in music and languages, in history and all the things that children learn at school,’ Nesbit told readers of Royal Children of English History. ‘Her mother taught her goodness and her duty. There she grew up fresh and innocent as the flowers in her own garden, living a secluded life, like a princess in an enchanted palace.’

In Victoria’s own version of her childhood, in which memories of the struggle against Conroy and the Duchess tinctured her picture of the whole, her secluded life included little enchantment. ‘I led a very unhappy life as a child,’ she would write to her eldest daughter in 1858:

her current state, as queen, wife and mother, quick to command, reluctant to be instructed, was infinitely preferable to those years of conflict. Not for her the poet’s claim on her behalf that, ‘She only knew her childhood’s flowers/ Were happier pageantries!’

Nearly forty years on, careful to avoid excessive censure of her mother, she attributed that unhappiness to loneliness. She described herself as ‘[having] no scope for my very violent feelings of affection – [I] had no brothers and sisters to live with – never had had a father – from my unfortunate circumstances was not on a comfortable or at all intimate or confidential feeling with my mother … and did not know what a happy domestic life was!’ Free from the shackles of filial piety, the historian need apportion blame less sparingly. And yet the Duchess of Kent was not deliberately the villainess she can all too easily be made to appear. She later attributed her erroneous ways to thoughtlessness, ‘believing blindly, … [and] acting without reflexion’.

Her position was not conducive to confidence. Beyond the spangled purlieus of the court of George IV, there was a ramshackle bravado to London in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Barrack-room bawdy and lusty xenophobia found vigorous expression in a popular culture of splenetic irreverence. Caricaturists targeted the royal family: their sex lives, their gargantuan appetites, their overspending, their all-pervasive folly. Short of money, friends and affection, dependent on the good will and handouts of her brother Leopold, and the tolerance of the new King, which was grudging in the extreme, the Duchess of Kent lacked a champion. She did not look far to fill the vacancy.

Conroy was an accomplished flirt. An indifferent soldier, he owed something of his military advancement to assiduous courtship of commanding officers’ wives. His relationship with the plaintive royal widow is unlikely to have extended to a full-scale sexual liaison: from the outset the Duchess rated too highly her probable future as queen mother. Conroy’s approach to the mistress whose experience of happy marriage had been so fleeting was at best manipulative, at worst bullying: she apologised to him on one occasion for being ‘just an old stupid goose’.

A foxy sort of sexiness undoubtedly leavened his tough love, as did the same line in dark-hued melodrama which also won him the affection of the Duke of Kent’s youngest surviving sister Princess Sophia, a neighbour at Kensington Palace: Conroy exploited the unmarried princess of failing eyesight without scruple as an easy source of ready cash and delved deep into her purse. But while he delighted Sophia with gossip,

he kept the Duchess on tenterhooks by stoking that paranoia to which the uncertainty of her position so easily tended. Her response was equally myopic. Victoria herself claimed later that Conroy had unnerved her mother with conspiracy theories centred on the wickedest of her wicked uncles, Ernest, Duke of Cumberland. Since Victoria stood between the throne and Cumberland, the Duke must be hellbent on her removal. It was strong meat, to rational minds perhaps too strong, as luridly coloured as contemporary lampoons, credible only within the context of what Leopold had described as ‘a family whose members hate one another with an inconceivable bitterness’.

Like all Conroy’s schemes, it aimed at isolating the Duchess and her daughter from their royal relatives. While the steely Irishman with the cleft chin and, in his portraiture, a suggestion of sardonic disdain in those hooded dark eyes, prevented anyone else from usurping his own position of influence, he appeared in the guise of protector. As if to confirm Conroy’s whisperings, George IV stonily ignored the fledgling household in Kensington.

The Duchess’s dread of her husband’s family grew. When George IV did invite mother and daughter to Windsor, in 1826, she was convinced that the ageing monarch – corseted, enamelled, bewigged and panting – intended to kidnap Victoria. Stubbornly she defended the princess’s seclusion. Over time she justified her line as shielding Victoria from her uncles’ moral degeneracy. If her policy were immoderate – surely, in preventing Victoria from attending the coronation of William IV and ‘poor wishy-washy’ Queen Adelaide, as the latter’s doctor described her, she overreached herself – we understand something of her anxiety. She forbade the company of cousins too, including George of Cambridge and George of Cumberland, contemporaries of equal rank; only Sir John’s daughters, Victoire and Jane Conroy, were sanctioned as playmates. Unsurprisingly Victoria learnt to hate them. Instead she drew emotional sustenance from Lehzen. Companionship proved more elusive. Long hours she beguiled with an extensive collection of elaborately dressed wooden dolls. Velvet- and satin-primped ciphers of an imaginary world in which she existed autonomously and among friends, they represented an alternative reality – inspired by history lessons and those performances of bel canto opera at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, which became a sole legitimate outlet for all her pent-up Hanoverian emotionalism: the young Victoria was stage-struck, in love with dancers and singers. Easy to discern a symbolic dimension to the Duchess’s grey parrot: sharp-beaked, dingy-hued and prone to repeating confidences. More satisfactory a playmate was the spaniel Dash with whom Sir George Hayter painted Victoria in 1835: until Victoria adopted him, he too had belonged to the Duchess, a present from Conroy.

In truth she was never alone. Central to what Leopold deplored as ‘the Kensington system’ devised by Conroy were constant shadowing and surveillance. The princess was not permitted to walk downstairs without someone holding her hand; the diary she began in 1832 was submitted to her mother’s inspection (and correction); her public appearances were minutely directed and restricted to the extent that even The Times questioned her physical fitness, repeating rumours of disability; at night she slept in her mother’s bedroom. Little wonder that Feodore, who in 1828 escaped to marry a landless princeling she had met twice, remembered these as ‘years of imprisonment’. (For Victoria, further isolation and even cruelty would follow Feodore’s departure.) Notable among the long-term effects of the Duchess’s cocooning was ‘Vickelchen’s’ need always to be the person of first consequence and an ever more determined self-will. Happily for her, both were outcomes her future role assured, though neither ought to be considered prerequisites. By the time Victoria in her turn sought to entrap her own daughters at her side, her motive personal convenience, Feodore was dead, unable to point out the irony.

Before queenship, an education. In April 1823, one month short of her fourth birthday, Victoria received her first instruction from the Reverend George Davys, a Lincolnshire clergyman of low-key Toryism and unassertive evangelism: basic skills of literacy and numeracy and the discreet but firm erasure of that trace of a German accent which the child had inevitably acquired.

‘I was not fond of learning as a little child,’ she remembered later, ‘and baffled every attempt to teach me my letters up to 5 years old – when I consented to learn them by their being written down before me.’

Victoria’s reluctance notwithstanding, Davys’s advent spelt the beginning of a programme of learning which would become a source of pride for the Duchess, and for her daughter the means by which, with careful stage-management, she discovered her splendid destiny.

Although the Duchess’s household was sworn to silence concerning Vickelchen’s future role, she could never have doubted that hers was a lofty station. Addressed as ‘Your Royal Highness’ from earliest infancy, she was attended out of doors by a liveried footman and her donkey rides in the palace gardens attracted the curiosity of passing crowds; she noticed the greater degree of respect accorded to her than to her twelve-years senior half-sister Feodore. ‘There was no doubt that every care was taken to avoid premature disclosures,’ her son-in-law Lord Lorne wrote in VRI: Her Life and Empire. ‘But Queen Victoria used to say that she had a vague idea of the state of affairs from her earliest years.’

She was encouraged to be good to please her mother: the Duchess considered exemplary behaviour a requirement of her rank. Unshakeably honest, the young Victoria was candid about her own lapses, describing herself on one occasion in Lehzen’s Behaviour Book as ‘very very very very horribly naughty!!!!!’:

evidence does not suggest that as an adult she always continued to acknowledge such shortcomings. In 1884, in his Celebrated Englishwomen of the Victorian Era, William Henry Davenport Adams acclaimed Victoria’s girlhood as displaying ‘a character which all English girls may well do their best to imitate’.

It was typical of encomia offered to the ageing monarch. But the truthfulness, frankness and candour of Victoria’s younger self, alongside a prematurely earnest avowal of good behaviour, did indeed make her a model of sorts, exactly as her mother intended: in 1831 the Duchess made clear that she wished her child ‘to be a pattern of female decorum’.

It was a template which, in later years, the inflexible and authoritarian Victoria was apt to modify.

If to modern eyes her education lacked rigour, it was regular and programmatic. Weekly reports were submitted to the Duchess, and every lesson was appraised. By the time of her ninth birthday, the princess’s timetable began at eleven in the morning: under the guidance of a number of tutors she worked until four o’clock. A report for the week ending 3 July 1828 shows Victoria studying history, geography, natural history, general knowledge, poetry, religion and orthography with Davys, all, bar ‘indifferent’ orthography, to a ‘good’ standard. Mr Westall offered a drawing lesson on Tuesdays, there were writing and arithmetic twice a week, while German and French occupied Victoria for two and three hours a week respectively (French earning an unusual commendation of ‘very good’ from Monsieur Grandineau). Lessons ended on Thursday with dancing under the instruction of Madame Bourdin.

Victoria’s enjoyment was mixed. Throughout her life she was an intellectual pragmatist, mistrusting excessive learning, especially in women, and rightly suspicious that she herself knew less than she ought. She retained a flair for languages and skill in arithmetic. Sketching, drawing and painting were favourite diversions until her sight failed. The Royal Collection owns more than fifty sketchbooks and albums of her watercolours: she sketched whatever pleased her, people and places. ‘The dominant quality in the Queen’s character,’ according to Prince Albert’s official biographer Theodore Martin, ‘was her strong common-sense.’

It is an attribute valued by the British in their constitutional monarchs but one distinct from intellectualism. The lesson Victoria took most to heart was learnt at her mother’s, or Lehzen’s, knee: the cause-and-effect morality of the children’s stories of Maria Edgeworth and evangelical didact Mrs Trimmer, rewards for the good, punishments for the bad, resourcefulness and initiative traits close to godliness. That concept of idealised behaviour, closely related to duty, would remain with Victoria, moulding her intentions if not always her actions: she never successfully separated her sense of herself from that of her position. In preparation for queenship, as William IV’s health spiralled ever downward, in March 1837, she re-read Edgeworth’s stories, steeping herself in their black-and-white world of sowing and reaping. It was an ambiguous preliminary to a life which must necessarily include many shades of grey.

Her education had been shaped by precepts which would become a mania as the century advanced: the importance of ‘regulating the passions, securing morality and establishing a sound religion’ extolled by Miss Elizabeth Appleton in a manual on early education published in 1821 and dedicated to the Duchess.

As it happened, only Albert ever persuaded Victoria to regulate her passionate temper, in lessons that were painful to teacher and pupil. After his death, there would be signs of backsliding.

Occasionally, the results of the Duchess’s system were displayed to key individuals. After one encounter with Victoria, Harriet Arbuthnot, discreet but sharp-tongued confidante of the Duke of Wellington, noted, ‘The Duchess of Kent is a very sensible person & educates her remarkably well.’

If that were the case, Victoria herself was not the only intended beneficiary. Pressed by Conroy, the Duchess meant the world to acknowledge her fitness to direct the future monarch. She cherished a particular ambition: to be appointed Regent in the event that Victoria succeeded to the throne before her eighteenth birthday. In that aim she was successful, after appointing the Duchess of Northumberland Victoria’s governess in 1830 and, in the same year, submitting Victoria (and by extension herself) to examination by the bishops of London and Lincoln. On 2 April, two months short of George IV’s death, the Archbishop of Canterbury stated that, ‘Her Highness’s education in regard to cultivation of intellect, improvement of talent, and religious and moral principle is conducted with so much success as to render any alteration of the system undesirable.’

It was a measure of the Duchess’s astuteness in pursuit of her goal. The Regency Act received royal assent on 23 December, in the first year of William IV’s reign. Parliament also voted an increase in the household’s income.

In 1831, Victoria’s uncle Leopold became King of the Belgians. He left behind a sister with whom his relations had cooled and his Esher estate of Claremont, where Victoria had briefly escaped the mutton and mistrust of ‘Conroyal’ life at Kensington. He married a French princess, the graceful, heavily ringletted Louise d’Orléans, in an arranged marriage which forced the devoutly Catholic Louise to place worldly duty above the claims of her faith: it was a sacrifice of a sort that would not be demanded of Victoria. Leopold’s henceforth epistolary relationship with his niece became explicitly paternal, bypassing Victoria’s mother, Leopold himself ‘that dearest of Uncles, who has always been to me like a father’;

‘“il mio secondo padre” or rather “solo padre” for he is indeed like my own father, as I have none’.

In the same year, by the Duchess’s contrivance, Victoria learnt the nature of her royal destiny: Lehzen slipped inside a history book a genealogical table which made clear the princess’s closeness to the throne. Her apocryphal-sounding response, ‘I will be good’, was unqualified and sincere, although it may as easily have referred to her attitude towards her lessons as any future strategy for sovereignty.

As the years passed, and the atmosphere within Kensington Palace increased in bitterness, Leopold’s letters set out a dialogue between monarch and monarch-in-waiting. His advice was torrential – generosity to balance his habitual parsimony. He was not without motive: Britain was a powerful ally for an untested new kingdom like Belgium. Leopold’s letters embraced everything from foreign policy to diet and deportment. Their influence on Victoria, as he intended, was profound. In the power struggle which poisoned Kensington life, Leopold, like Lehzen, supported his niece against his sister and her cicisbeo. It made sense in the long term.

Leopold understood monarchy as a masquerade, as in time would Victoria’s son Edward VII, the sovereign the principal strutting player; his vision of royalty combined charlatanism with something prim and his goal was survival. If Leopold’s view was cynical, it was practical too for a milieu which could not ignore the spectre of revolution. Like Victoria’s mother, he enjoined model good behaviour. ‘Our times, as I have frequently told you, are hard times for Royalty,’ he wrote on 18 October 1833. ‘Never was there a period, when the existence of real qualities in persons in high stations has been more imperiously called for. It seems that in proportion as sovereign power is abridged, the pretensions and expectations of the public are raised.’

Also like his sister, Leopold had mastered the rhetoric of ‘Victorianism’ before Victoria’s accession. His propensity for pious maxims and emphatic belief in the importance of the appearance of virtue foreshadow the mindset of the coming reign even before the advent of Albert, who has traditionally been viewed as the architect of Victoria’s monarchy. That Victoria would prove a sympathetic and receptive listener is shown in her response to Lehzen’s disclosure and that unexpected family tree: ‘Now – many a child would boast, but they don’t know the difficulty; there is much splendour, but there is more responsibility!’

For seventy years Victoria would sing from the same song sheet (for a period during the 1860s she overlooked the splendour entirely and defined the responsibility to suit herself). Her refutation of her Hanoverian forebears consisted of that single sentence. No more was needed.

In the meantime the household at Kensington Palace was engaged in a waiting game. In Coming Events, the first playlet in his ‘dramatic biography’ of Queen Victoria, Happy and Glorious, Laurence Housman has Victoria read aloud from the Book of Proverbs: ‘Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh it is a tree of life.’

Victoria, the Duchess, Conroy, Lehzen and, in Belgium, Leopold all awaited the coming of the same desire, the death of William IV without issue. So too, Baroness Späth’s replacement, Lady of the Bedchamber Lady Flora Hastings, an ill-omened acolyte of Conroy’s, commended for her elegant manners and ‘vivacity’ if not for her ability to combine extreme piety with witticisms of coruscating spite. In several cases, their motives differed. So too the benefits they would separately derive from the new reign.

‘Eccentric and singular’, given to choleric spluttering and in questionable health, of ‘very confined understanding and very defective education’,

William himself was nevertheless aware of the furious tussles that soured the Duchess’s establishment, their origin and intent. Only Victoria escaped the King’s animosity. At Windsor Castle on 21 August 1836, at his seventy-first birthday dinner, William IV stated his determination to outlive his niece’s minority: ‘I trust to 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, 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 situation in which she would be placed.’

A dutiful (if disillusioned) daughter, at her uncle’s conniption, Victoria burst into tears.

The King’s prayer was answered. He died less than a month after Victoria’s eighteenth birthday, on 20 June 1837. The following week Victoria received a letter offering her ‘sincerest felicitations on that great change which [has] taken place in your life’. The writer was Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a romantic-looking Teuton on the cusp of what proved to be timely physical perfection: long-limbed, delicate in his features, bristling with the gloss of untainted virility. He addressed the new sovereign twice over – as ‘Queen of the mightiest land in Europe’ and ‘dearest cousin’ – and, with a mixture of coyness and conniving that would prove invaluable in expediting future relations, ended, ‘May I pray you to think … sometimes of your cousins in Bonn.’

His prayer too would be answered.

3

‘Constant amusements, flattery, excitements and mere politics’

VICTORIA RECEIVED NEWS of her accession in her nightclothes. At six o’clock in the morning, as dawn gilded a sleeping city, the Lord Chamberlain and the Archbishop of Canterbury conveyed their tidings. In what would become for Victorians a favourite set-piece of the Queen’s personal mythology, described by Mrs Oliphant as certain to form ‘a dazzling point in the narrative of the next Macaulay’,

Victoria emerged from confinement into shafts of sunlight, no longer Nesbit’s ‘princess in an enchanted palace’, henceforth on penny prints and popular engravings ‘the Rose of England’, a national symbol, a bloom of hope. Thomas Carlyle observed that she was ‘at an age when a girl can hardly be trusted to choose a bonnet for herself’. She was young but not too young, this Sleeping Beauty awoken to new life within weeks of attaining her majority.

The life she inherited was a compound of duty, deskwork and exaltation. As imagined by artist H. T. Wells in 1887, Victoria stands centre stage, bathed in the light of a new day, ethereal in her shimmering whiteness, doe eyes resolute but feeling. The composition suggests earlier images of the Annunciation: the Virgin learning of her choice by God. (In this case, Victoria occupied the place of the angel.) It was not an accident. Over time Victoria’s role would incorporate elements matriarchal and quasi-divine. In 1839, she became the first woman on the throne to combine the roles of monarch and mother; in 1897, at her Diamond Jubilee, she attained tabloid apotheosis when the Daily Mail extolled her as surpassed in majesty by God alone.

Later on that first morning, Victoria attended a meeting of the Privy Council. She wore black for her uncle’s death. In David Wilkie’s painting of the scene, black gave way to white. Future Tory premier Sir Robert Peel expressed amazement at ‘her manner …, at her apparent deep sense of her situation, and at her firmness’.

All too soon he would have cause to remember that first impression, as would those throughout her reign who found themselves in opposition to Victoria’swill, members of her own family included. Victoria for her part was at pains to deny her nervousness. Looking back in 1886, she claimed, ‘The Queen was not overwhelmed on her accession – rather full of courage, she may say. She took things as they came, as she knew they must be.’

Official business aside, she ordered that a bed be made up for her in a room of her own at Kensington Palace. The Duchess rightly interpreted the shift as symbolic. Ditto the new Queen’s refusal of her mother’s request that Conroy and Lady Flora Hastings attend the Duchess at the proclamation of her accession: it was too soon for clemency. On three occasions at the outset of Victoria’s reign, the poet Elizabeth Barrett attempted to imagine her feelings. ‘Victoria’s Tears’ presents one version of the proclamation ceremony. But Barrett underestimated her heroine. The poet’s refrain, ‘She wept, to wear a crown!’ was not Victoria’s. In the latter’s journal for the first day of her reign, a single word dominated: alone. It was a statement of exultation.