Queen Victoria: A Life of Contradictions

Victoria would continue to regard sovereignty as a lonely business. In the beginning she fought to keep it so – first from her mother and that ‘Arch-Fiend’, the ‘Monster and demon Incarnate’, John Conroy, who would never now escape the intense hatred Victoria had conceived for him when he tried to force her to appoint him her private secretary in the autumn of 1835 as she battled typhoid fever; subsequently, in the early years of marriage, from her husband. Later she prevented her eldest son, Bertie, from sharing her burden, apparently untroubled by the piquant contrariness which permitted her to castigate Bertie for futility even as she denied him any alternative.

Earliest commentators focused on Victoria’s diminutive height: she was ‘the little queen’, ‘her little majesty’. The adjective suggests infantilisation and, mistakenly, a quality akin to negligibility, neutering the threat of the first female sovereign since the dropsical Queen Anne of chequered record: the subversive re-envisioned as simply small. Physically the new Queen was little: most accounts agree on a height of four feet eleven inches. Moreover the Kensington system had deliberately stunted her experience. But her thoughts began to soar even before her accession. ‘I do not suppose myself quite equal to all,’ she had written to Leopold with fine equivocation during William IV’s last illness; ‘I trust, however, that with good-will, honesty, and courage, I shall not at all events, fail.’

Leopold’s response had been to dispatch to London Baron Christian Stockmar, liberal-minded éminence grise of the Coburg dynasty, physician and Leopold’s confidential adviser, ‘the most discreet man, the most well-judging, and most cool man’; he attended Victoria at breakfast on the morning of her accession and remained on call for the next twenty years.

A political polymath of chilly wisdom committed to the spread of constitutional monarchy and, in Leopold’s words, ‘a living dictionary of all matters scientific and political that happened these thirty years’,

Stockmar too played his part in the evolution of ‘Victorian’ Victoria. In July, Mary, Duchess of Gloucester, indiscreet, once beautiful tell-tale daughter of George III, wrote to her brother Ernest, ‘I really pity the Queen, for she has no soul about her to tell her what she ought to do.’ That had never been the case and would not be so until 1861. Thanks to Stockmar, and to Leopold’s assiduousness as correspondent, it was not so now. Mary’s assertion that, ‘I really think that she is disposed to what is right if put in the right way’ came closer to the mark.

In 1837, Victoria’s ‘littleness’ did not proscribe her good intentions; pettiness came later. Unabashed in her eminence, she vowed in the beginning to exert herself in pursuit of a greater good: ‘I shall do my utmost to fulfil my duty towards my country; I am very young and perhaps in many, though not in all things, inexperienced, but I am sure, that very few have more real good will and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have.’

It is a rebuttal of sorts of Carlyle’s poxy dismissal.

Through the mid-1830s, as Victoria’s accession advanced from possibility to likelihood, the princess had been revealed to her future subjects in a series of stately ‘progresses’ around England and Wales organised, to the intense irritation of the King, by Conroy and the Duchess of Kent. Engravings of her portraits also circulated. In those images – by Henry Collen and George Hayter – Victoria dressed her hair not in the current style of the day, made fashionable by Queen Adelaide, but like deceased cousin Charlotte, a plaited coronet symbolically on the crown of her head. This iconographic kinship was an expression of continuity and of the younger heiress presumptive’s right to rule. With the throne hers, Victoria’s thoughts abandoned Charlotte: henceforth the cousins shared only a passion for music and their affection for Leopold. Charlotte had been ‘forward, dogmatical on all subjects, buckish about horses, and full of exclamations very like swearing’, a perfect compound of her disreputably unprissy parents.

Determined to be ‘good’, Victoria would emulate her cousin only in being ‘dogmatical’.

The new Queen described ‘the good humour and excessive loyalty’ of the large crowds who turned out to witness her lavish but comically under-rehearsed coronation on 28 June 1838 as ‘beyond everything, and I really cannot say how proud I feel to be the Queen of such a Nation’.

Queen and country were united in mutual admiration, demand for coronation newspapers so high that the Post Office was forced to organise extra carriages to transport them to the provinces.

It looked as though the prophecy of Barrett’s ‘The Young Queen’, published in The Athenaeum on 1 July 1837, had been fulfilled: ‘the grateful isles/ Shall give thee back their smiles’. Throughout that first year, smiles pursued Victoria’s progress, friendly crowds ‘thronging, bustling, gaping, and gazing at everything, at anything, or at nothing’, as Greville recorded; afterwards Victoria described 1837 as ‘the pleasantest summer I EVER passed in my life’. She was acclaimed as ‘the Queen of Hearts’: ‘loved soon as seen’.

Flattered, naive and willing to please, Victoria formulated resolutions with dizzying zeal: ‘It is to me the greatest pleasure to do my duty for my country and my people, and no fatigue, however great, will be burdensome to me if it is for the welfare of the nation.’

She did not recognise that the country responded to her youth and her Lilliputian femininity: their reaction was not to her personally.

Instead, in the aftermath of the Reform Act of 1832, with its symbolic extension of the franchise, the numberless watchers glimpsed in her the promise of a new start. ‘The accession of our young queen is a circumstance full of hope and promise,’ asserted the Manchester Guardian. Victoria was the sovereign created in the climate of reform; the newspaper claimed on her behalf sympathy with reformers’ aims: ‘As the first sovereign who has acceded to the throne since the time of our great political regeneration, her feelings, it seems to us, must be much identified with that important measure, and her principles inclined to the furtherance of those objects which were looked to as its natural results.’

In the month of Victoria’s accession, an unnamed poetaster in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine offered: ‘With glowing hopes our bosoms burn,/ Our hearts with eager fondness yearn;/ Millions in thee an interest claim –’

Victoria herself apparently told Lady Cowper, ‘that sometimes when she wakes of a morning she is quite afraid that it should be all a dream’.

It was indeed a moment for optimism.

Since 1760, court and government had existed in a virtual stranglehold of Toryism: from the throne George III and his two eldest sons had all supported the Tory party. Imprecisely if unconcernedly political at this stage, Victoria was by upbringing a Whig, warmly sympathetic to that aristocratic party which, opposing the Tories, upheld the supremacy of Parliament over monarchy and advanced, with unsteady conviction, an agenda for reform; the Duke of Kent had favoured intermittent liberal-mindedness, his duchess too. The general election necessitated by Victoria’s accession – the last of its sort in British history – returned a Whig government with a small majority. At its head was a man of few political convictions ideally suited to becoming Victoria’s mentor.

William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, was above all externally insouciant. Wry and charmingly disdainful, he was urbane, patrician and ironical, dilettantish even in his philandering: a cynic along Leopold’s lines but without the latter’s affectation of rectitude. He struggled to interest himself fully in politics. Averse to dogma, responsible but without the impulse to pontificate, he was persuaded only of the rightness of aristocratic government and the folly of tinkering, a Regency figure whose weary glamour seduced a Victoria unused to men and still happy to be amused. By 1837, more than a decade had passed since the death of Melbourne’s impossible and unstable wife, Lady Caroline Lamb; the couple’s epileptic only son was also dead. The relationship that Melbourne established so swiftly with his royal mistress, a rapport so absorbing that rumours described them as considering marriage, is testament to personal chemistry, his own astuteness and the neediness of both – in Victoria’s case for guidance and a father figure, in Melbourne’s for diversion and an emotional outlet. Forty years separated them. Beneath the Queen’s veneer of youth was a steeliness born of protracted struggles with Conroy and her mother. It was balanced by a lack of confidence and a degree of immaturity which, as he later confessed to Albert, initially unsettled the older man. Melbourne became for Victoria a tragic-romantic figure whom she sketched over and over again: still handsome with his grey eyes and sonorous voice, bearing with such lightness the imprint of an emotional life that was at the same time rackety and affecting. To modern eyes they appear an unlikely couple to have inspired in editors of a northern newspaper any certainty of civic-mindedness. Their personal honeymoon period, in which ‘Lord M’ was almost constantly at Victoria’s beck and call, shaping her understanding of politics and the government process, was also that of the new reign. It would not last. Not until the decade of jubilees did Victoria regain the giddily unquestioning adulation granted her in the summer of 1837.

For all her good intentions she did not mean to reform her wilfulness. She addressed the problem of her mother with childish heavy-handedness, banishing the Duchess to quarters remote from her own in Buckingham Palace; communication took the form of hastily scribbled notes. ‘Neither a particle of affection nor of respect’ remained in Victoria’s feelings towards her mother, according to the Duke of Wellington.

Lehzen by contrast, retained her cherished status as ‘precious Lehzen … my “best and truest” friend I have had’, and was permitted largely unfettered access to Victoria. If the atmosphere at court was markedly better than that formerly at Kensington Palace, grounds for acrimony between mother and daughter persisted. For her birthday in 1838, the Duchess of Kent presented Victoria with a copy of King Lear, Shakespeare’s tragedy of ingratitude; Melbourne did nothing to counter Victoria’s opinion of the Duchess as a ‘liar and a hypocrite’. Victoria was peremptory and obstinate on all occasions, quick to consult her own desires and inclinations: her courtiers’ language of deference included few words of caution. On state occasions mother and daughter enacted loving kindness. To the intelligent, or malicious, observer the tensions were palpable. Such an atmosphere partly explains those instances of misguided behaviour – the Flora Hastings Affair and the Bedchamber Crisis – which soon convinced politicians and courtiers alike that the time for Victoria’s marriage was approaching. Even Victoria herself was shortly reconciled to overcoming her ‘great reluctance’ to change her state.

Five years previously Leopold had written to his niece on the importance of good behaviour: ‘By the dispensation of providence you are destined to fill a most eminent station, and to fill it well, must now become your study. A good heart and a truly honourable character are amongst the most indispensable qualifications for that position.’

The young Victoria came close to ignoring both.

Pride and prejudice more than honour or a good heart shaped the Queen’s conduct in the Flora Hastings Affair and the Bedchamber Crisis. Both debacles tarnished Victoria’s reputation and spoilt her early pleasure in her queenship. In government circles they emphasised the dangers of any overlap of the personal and the political in the court life of a young and inexperienced sovereign, and undermined Victoria’s perceived fitness to exercise her remaining constitutional powers.

Flora Hastings, daughter of a Tory grandee, was an appointment of Sir John Conroy’s to the household of the Duchess of Kent. Her sympathies lay with her employer and her sponsor. Willowy in her spinsterhood, religious too, she nevertheless possessed a forked tongue: frequently in her conversation malice and wit merged. To Victoria, who lacked confidence in her own intellectual abilities, it was an unappealing trait exacerbated by her suspicion that Lady Flora spied on her. This wholly negative assessment is what made possible her treatment of the hapless lady-in-waiting in a manner that was both cruel and deadly in its flippancy.

Lady Flora’s misfortune consisted of a coincidence and medical bungling. On her return from Scotland to London in the New Year of 1839, she shared a post-chaisewith Conroy. Innocent it may have been: it was certainly unwise not to conceal so incendiary an indiscretion. That journey, however, cannot have inspired the tumour of the liver which, on 5 July, killed her.

Within days of Lady Flora’s return, Victoria’s court interpreted her swollen abdomen as evidence of pregnancy. Apprised of her journey with Conroy, assumptions were made – including by Victoria – and afterwards confirmed by inept royal doctor Sir James Clark, who did not trouble himself to examine the patient. Speculation mounted. To maintain the new court’s reputation for moral probity, Lady Flora was forced to submit to a full examination, which found her without child and still a virgin. It ought to have been an end to the matter.

But Victoria’s hatred for Conroy admitted no moderation. By neither word nor action did she move to clear Lady Flora’s name. Clark himself further muddied the waters with his startling suggestion that the appearance of virginity did not preclude pregnancy. Melbourne too was sceptical. No surprise that the Hastings family became incensed and, against advice, made their grievances public. Once the witch-hunt was exposed in the pages of The Times, there was little credit for Victoria in belatedly granting to Lady Flora that audience in which monarch and dying woman embraced and agreed to a truce for the sake of the Duchess. Neither the Hastings family nor the public was mollified. Reluctantly Victoria agreed to a further meeting. Days away from death, prostrate and skeletal bar her grotesquely swollen stomach, the wronged spinster clasped Victoria’s hand. Even so pitiful a sight, which forced Victoria’s compassion, did not move her to apologise. Rather the proximity of this ‘nasty woman’ dying under her own roof troubled and indeed irked her. Small consolation for Lady Flora that she died ‘the victim of a depraved court’, her own the heroine’s part.

While the press disgorged this unedifying hullabaloo from which neither Victoria nor Melbourne emerged with credit, the Prime Minister was wrestling with problems of a different variety. Within Parliament his government faced defeat. For Victoria the prospect of losing Lord M was not one she could regard with equanimity. Her very strong feelings on the matter had little to do with politics or the good of the country. It was her own convenience, her own happiness, her own benefit that she considered. ‘The simple truth,’ according to Greville, ‘[was] that the Queen could not endure the thought of parting with Melbourne who [was] everything to her.’

Melbourne’s resignation, on 7 May 1839, plunged her into despair: she cried, she panicked, she felt it like a physical blow. Unsettled if unrepentant as the scandal surrounding Lady Flora ground relentlessly on, she needed Lord M.

Or did she? If Victoria wanted allies against the Hastings family, surrounded as she was by courtiers and companions, she did not have far to look. Her formal entourage consisted of her mistress of the robes, eight ladies of the bedchamber, eight women of the bedchamber and eight maids of honour, a substantial support network given the women’s overwhelmingly Whig sympathies. With Lord M at her side they constituted Victoria’s second line of defence. Without him, they became an essential bulwark between Victoria and her conscience.

While the Whigs floundered, Sir Robert Peel was called upon to form a government. Oxford-educated son of a textiles manufacturer, tall but diffident, sporadically gauche, limp-haired but stiff in his manner, Peel correctly doubted Victoria’s sympathy. He required a token endorsement of his ministry: some Tory ladies among the royal attendants. It was a tinderbox request. Victoria would not yield. If she could not have Lord M, she would not be surrounded by Peel’s creatures crowing her defeat, not even one of them. She determined to stand her ground. Had not King Leopold once told her, ‘as a fundamental rule … be courageous, firm and honest’? Melbourne himself had echoed that advice: she must overcome personal inclination, treat the new ministry with fairness and a show of amiability – and make it clear that she hoped her household would not be subject to a cull. So recently Peel had observed Victoria’s firmness and her conviction of her own position. He could match her intransigence.Politely, fixedly, sovereign and minister engaged in a contest for mastery, a loveless pas de deux. Victoria continued to take advice from Melbourne, although he flouted constitutional propriety with every word he wrote to her, lessening with every instance of her persisting dependency her chances of political impartiality. Inevitably his advice strengthened her resolve. She refused to surrender a single lady.

Once before, a man of slipshod manners whom she disliked had tried to force Victoria’s hand. She had not yielded to Sir John Conroy and shewould not give way to Sir Robert Peel. She observed his discomfort in her presence, bolstered by Melbourne’s disdainful verdict that Sir Robert, though ‘a very gifted and able man’, was ‘an underbred fellow … not accustomed to talk to Kings and Princes’.

Undoubtedly the anguish of the Flora Hastings Affair influenced Victoria’s judgement. In her response to Peel’s request were suggestions of amateur dramatics run riot: ‘I was calm but very decided,’ she wrote to Melbourne of the critical interview. ‘I think you would have been pleased to see my composure and great firmness. The Queen of England will not submit to such trickery.’

The soldier’s daughter had tasted the scent of blood: she embraced the rhetoric of triumphalism. This vigorous note would return – in her Boudicca-like response to the Crimean and Boer Wars and her imperturbability in the face of eight assassination attempts. Less attractively it coloured her personal relationships too: with her children and with other prime ministers she could not like, Palmerston and Gladstone. ‘They wished to treat me like a girl,’ Victoria told Lord M, ‘but I will show them that I am Queen of England.’ Such airy bluster was an inevitable legacy of the Duchess’s and Conroy’s mistreatment of the young Victoria; for the rest of her life she blotted out girlish vulnerability by asserting her impregnability as Queen of England.

In May 1839, her differences with Peel became truly a battle royal: Victoria’s part, had she but known it, anticipated the empty bravado of Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen – rank without reason. Her refusal to compromise was met by a similar refusal on Peel’s part, who declined to form a government on Victoria’s terms. The Whigs returned to power by default. Victoria once again had her Lord M. That night, buoyant with victory, she danced until quarter past three in the morning in the company of Tsarevitch Alexander of Russia, uncomprehending both of the battle she had fought and the significance of its outcome. In her exhilaration she even imagined herself ‘(talking jokingly) … a little in love’ with her distinguished foreign guest: he was ‘a dear, delightful young man’.