QUEEN VICTORIA A Personal History Read online

  In March 1830, when the Princess was ten years old, the Duchess decided that her daughter should be examined to ensure that her education was proceeding along the correct lines. The two invigilators chosen were Charles Blomfield, Bishop of London, described by Richard Porson, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, as a 'very pretty scholar', and John Kaye, Bishop of Lincoln, who had been elected Master of Christ's College, Cambridge at the age of thirty and Regius Professor of Divinity two years later.

  Having examined the Princess, these two eminent scholars expressed themselves as being 'completely satisfied' with her answers.

  In answering a great variety of questions [they reported] the Princess displayed an accurate knowledge of the most important features of Scripture, History and of the leading truths and precepts of the Christian Religion as taught by the Church of England; as well as an acquaintance with the Chronology and principal facts of English History, remarkable in so young a person. To questions of Geography, the use of Globes, Arithmetic and Latin Grammar, the answers which the Princess returned were equally satisfactory, and Her pronunciation both of English and Latin is singularly correct and pleasing. Due attention appears to have been paid to the acquisition of modern languages; and although it was less within the scope of our enquiry, we cannot help observing that the pencil drawings of the Princess are executed with the freedom and correctness of an older child.4

  In later years she spoke of her childhood as being lonely and 'rather melancholy' and Kensington Palace as being bleak in the extreme. 'I never had a room to myself,' she complained. 'I never had a sofa, nor an easy chair, and there was not a single carpet that was not threadbare.' The food was boring and unappetizing: she promised herself that when she was grown up and could eat as she liked, she would never have mutton for dinner again. Yet the events of her early life as she recorded them were far from being all unhappy ones. Certainly there were recollections of bogeymen: she had 'a great horror of Bishops' with their strange wigs and incongruous aprons and of the Duke of Sussex, 'Uncle Sussex', who, she was told, would appear from his nearby rooms in the Palace and punish her when she cried and was naughty. She remembered screaming when she saw him.5 But she was fond of her father's old preceptor, the kindly John Fisher, Bishop of Salisbury, who used to kneel down beside her and let her play with the badge he wore as Chancellor of the Order of the Garter; and she was fond, too, of her uncle, the childless Duke of York, who was very fat and very bald and held himself in such a way that it always seemed as though he would tumble over backwards. He was 'very kind' to her and gave her 'beautiful presents' including a donkey, and once he presided over a memorable party for her at the house of a friend where there was a Punch and Judy show.6 As for her uncle, King George IV, he paid little attention to her when she was taken by her mother to see him at Carlton House; but one day while she was staying near Windsor with her aunt, the Duchess of Gloucester, at Cumberland Lodge, she was driven over to see the King at the Royal Lodge and found him in one of his happier moods. 'Give me your little paw,' he said, affectionately taking the hand of the seven-year-old child in his, and then pulled her on to his stout knee so that she could kiss him. It was 'too disgusting', she recalled more than half a century later, 'because his face was covered with grease-paint'. But at the time she had responded to his 'wonderful dignity and charm of manner': he never lost his way of pleasing young children. 'He wore the wig which was so much worn in those days,' she remembered clearly. 'Then he said he would give me something to wear, and that was his picture set in diamonds, which was worn by the Princesses as an order to a blue ribbon on the left shoulder. I was very proud of this - and Lady Conyngham [the King's plump and stately intimate friend, supposedly his mistress] pinned it on my shoulder.'7

  Next day, while she was out walking with her mother, the King, who was driving along in his phaeton with the Duchess of Gloucester, overtook her. As his horses were brought to a halt, the King called out cheerfully, 'Pop her in!' So she was lifted up and placed between him and her aunt Mary, who held her round the waist as the horses trotted off. She was 'greatly pleased', though her mother appeared 'much frightened', fearful that her daughter would either fall out on the road or be kidnapped.

  The King drove her 'round the nicest part of Virginia Water' and stopped at the Fishing Temple. Here 'there was a large barge and everyone went on board and fished, while a band played in another!' Afterwards he had his little niece conducted around his menagerie at Sandpit Gate where she inspected his wapitis, his chamois and his gazelles.

  In the evenings, while staying at Cumberland Lodge, Princess Victoria was invited to watch the Tyrolese dancers creating a 'gay uproar' or listen to 'Uncle King's' band playing in the conservatory at the Royal Lodge by the light of coloured lamps. He asked her what tune she would like the band to play next. With precocious tact she immediately asked for 'God save the King!' 'Tell me,' he asked her later, 'what you enjoyed most of your visit?' 'The drive with you,' she said. He was clearly very much taken with her.8

  As the Duke of Wellington's friend, Lady Shelley, said, she paid her court extremely well. When giving the King a bunch of flowers, she said, 'As I shall not see my dear uncle on his birthday I wish to give him this nosegay now'; and when wishing him goodbye she said with appealing if rather affected gravity, 'I am coming to bid you adieu, sire, but as I know you do not like fine speeches I shall certainly not trouble you by attempting one.'9 Upon her return home she was most anxious that her mother should send 'her best love and duty to her "dear Uncle King"'.10

  Although she remembered with pleasure her days at Windsor, the Princess enjoyed her visits to her uncle Leopold's house, Claremont, even more. So much did she enjoy these visits, indeed, that she cried when it was time to go back to Kensington. She remembered being allowed to listen to the music in the hall at Claremont when there were dinner parties there and being petted by Mrs Louis, Princess Charlotte's devoted former dresser. She was petted, too, by her own nurse, Mrs Brock, 'dear Boppy', and by her mother's lady-in-waiting, Baroness Spath, who had accompanied the Duchess from Germany. Indeed, Baroness Spath, so Princess Feodora said, idolized the child and would actually go on her knees before her.11

  Very different was the behaviour of the Princess's governess, Louise Lehzen, a handsome woman, despite her pointed nose and chin, clever, emotional, humourless and suffering intermittently from a variety of complaints, mostly psychosomatic, including cramp, headaches and migraine. She claimed that she did not know what it was like to feel hungry: all 'she fancied were potatoes';12 but she was forever chewing caraway seeds for indigestion, a habit which some maliciously attributed to a need to hide the alcohol on her breath.

  In her mid-thirties at the time of her appointment, she was the youngest child of a Lutheran pastor from a village in Hanover. She was 'very strict', her former charge said of her in later years, 'and the Princess had great respect and even awe of her, but with that the greatest affection ... She knew how to amuse and play with the Princess so as to gain her warmest affections. The Princess was her only object and her only thought... She never for the 13 years she was governess to Princess Victoria, once left her.'13

  At night she stayed in the bedroom which the Princess shared with her mother until the Duchess retired; and in the morning, when the child was being dressed by Mrs Brock, she read to her so that the little girl would not get into the habit of talking indiscreetly to servants.

  Yet Louise Lehzen's influence over Princess Victoria was not entirely beneficial, for the governess had her prejudices and these she implanted in her charge's mind. She encouraged the child to distrust her mother and her mother's friends and to tell people when they were wrong and 'to set them down'.14

  If Princess Victoria's early childhood was not quite as melancholy as she afterwards decided when looking back upon it, it was - and was encouraged by Lehzen to be - certainly a lonely one. She was brought up in an adult world, rarely seeing children of her own age. 'Except for occasional visits of other childr
en,' she said herself in later life, she 'lived always alone, without companions'. She was devoted to her half-sister, Princess Feodora, but Feodora, a pretty, attractive girl, was twelve years older than herself and longing to escape from Kensington where, so she claimed, her 'only happy time was driving out' with Princess Victoria and Louise Lehzen when she could speak and look as she liked. In February 1828, when Princess Victoria was nine, Princess Feodora did escape, her only regret being her separation from her 'dearest sister' of whom she so often thought and longed to see again.[ii]15

  Having married the impoverished, 32-year-old Prince Ernest Christian Charles of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Princess Feodora went away with him to the enormous, uncomfortable Schloss Langenburg, leaving Princess Victoria to comfort herself with her dolls (one hundred and thirty-two of them - little wooden, painted mannequins made by herself and Lehzen and dressed as historical personages and characters from the theatre and opera, all of them listed in a copybook).16

  * * *

  Her mother had been lonely too. Having overcome the first shock of her husband's death, she had struck the few people with whom she came into close contact as being, in Lady Granville's words, 'very pleasing indeed', friendly and approachable.

  But she herself, as she said, felt 'friendless and alone' in a country that was not her own, endeavouring to speak a language which she had not yet mastered, being, as she said with not altogether sincere self-denigration, 'just an old goose'.17

  She was well aware that, as a German, she was not well liked in the country at large and, as the widow of the Duke of Kent and mother of Princess Victoria, much resented by the Duke of Clarence, heir to the throne after the death of his elder brother, the Duke of York, in 1827. Nor did King George IV care for her.

  When the Prime Minister had suggested to the King that some provision ought to be made for his sister-in-law's child, the fatherless Princess Victoria, the King declared that he would not consider it: her uncle Leopold was quite rich enough to take care of her as well as her mother. The Duchess accordingly had to borrow £6,000 from Thomas Coutts, the banker.18 Later, however, the Government came to her aid by proposing an allowance of £4,000 a year; but, since a grant of £6,000 was at the same time proposed for Princess Victoria's cousin, Prince George of Cumberland, son of the deeply distrusted and malignant Duke of Cumberland, she refused to consider the proposal. The offer to the Duchess was then raised to £6,000 and she accepted it.

  At the same time, Prince Leopold assured her that he would be happy to continue the allowance he made her of £3,000 a year. She was at first reluctant to accept this; but being still heavily in debt she eventually agreed to it, even though she was finding her brother increasingly and tiresomely irritating and, as she put it, 'rather slow in the uptake and in making decisions' as well as annoyingly preoccupied.

  Prince Leopold had, indeed, other matters on his mind, not to mention sexual desires to gratify. After pursuing a succession of other women, he had fallen in love with a German actress who, looking 'wondrously like' his departed Charlotte, was brought over to England and ensconced alternately in a house in Regent's Park and a 'lonely desolate and mournful' little house in the grounds of Claremont Park where he spent his time either gazing at her longingly while she read aloud to him or picking the silver from military epaulettes to make into a soup tureen.19

  He had also become involved in negotiations for his elevation to a European throne. He had been offered the throne of Greece in 1830 after that country had secured its freedom from Turkish rule and, having declined to become King of Greece, he agreed two years later, after typical hesitation, to be crowned King of the Belgians once Belgium had secured its independence from the King of Holland. The next year he married Princess Louise, the daughter of Louis-Philippe, King of the French.

  Before leaving for Brussels he volunteered to give up the grant of £50,000 a year he had received upon his marriage to Princess Charlotte but this gesture, gratefully accepted, was less well regarded when he announced that some £20,000 would have to be retained for various expenses, including the upkeep of Claremont.

  Princess Victoria was very sad to have to say goodbye to her uncle. He had done his best to take the place of the father she had never known. Ponderous and, on occasions, exasperating as he could be, she loved him and admired him greatly. 'To hear dear Uncle Leopold speak on any subject,' she said, 'is like reading a highly instructive book.'20 He was the first of those several older men upon whom, throughout her life, she was to rely for help and reassurance. But her mother bore her brother's departure for the Continent far more equably than she would have done at the time of her arrival in England. For the need she had always felt for support, protection and comforting advice had been met by her late husband's beguiling equerry, John Conroy.

  Chapter 4

  CONROY

  'I may call you Jane but you must not call me Victoria.'

  Prince Leopold described John Conroy as a 'Mephistopheles'; but the Prince's sister, the Duchess of Kent, did not know what she would do without him. He had been a 'dear devoted friend' of the Duke, she said, and he had not deserted the widow, doing all he could to help her by dealing with her affairs, financial and otherwise. Whereas Leopold was cautious and deliberate, inclined to see difficulties before advantages, Conroy exuded a confidence which the Duchess, comforted by positive men, found reassuring.

  Although of Irish descent, with forbears who were proud to trace their lineage back to a royal chieftain of the early fifth century, Conroy had been born in Wales in 1786. He had obtained a commission in the Royal Artillery when he was seventeen and had been transferred to the Horse Artillery two years later. But thereafter he had not progressed as well in the Army as he considered his talents deserved, despite his marriage to a General's daughter, the rather nondescript, indolent niece of the Duke of Kent's friend, Bishop Fisher, by whom he was to have six children. He had not served in either the Peninsular War or the Waterloo campaign; and the Duke of Kent's attempts to find him a suitable staff appointment had not been successful. He had entered the Duke's household as equerry in 1817; and the death of the Duke three years later had given him the opportunity to worm his way into a position far more rewarding and influential than he could have hoped for in the Army.

  The same age as the Duchess, he was a good-looking man of insinuating charm, tall, imposing, vain, clever, unscrupulous, plausible and of limitless ambition. Overbearing with those whom he sought to dominate, he was both short-tempered and devious. Charles Greville, the diarist and Clerk of the Privy Council, dismissed him as 'a ridiculous fellow'.1 Conroy immediately recognized that by exerting a compelling influence over the susceptible and self-doubting Duchess of Kent, by isolating her household at Kensington from outside contacts and interference, he might be able to exercise unbounded control over her bright, spirited, affectionate and popular but obstinate and 'naturally passionate' child.

  At the same time, Conroy made up his mind to win the confidence of King George IV's sister, Princess Sophia, who had apartments at Kensington Palace. She was nine years older than himself. Cloistered at Windsor in her father's lifetime, in what she and her sisters referred to as 'the nunnery', she had fallen in love with one of her father's equerries, General Garth, and had secretly borne him a child. Conroy had little difficulty in charming the impressionable and mentally rather unstable woman whose considerable finances he controlled, and with the help of whose liberality he was able to acquire a house in Kensington for £4,000 as well as a country house near Reading, Aborfield Hall, and an estate in Wales for £18,ooo.2 Princess Sophia - whose generosity was said to be at least partly owing to Conroy's skill in dealing with the 'bullying importunities' of her illegitimate son, Captain Garth3 - having appointed Conroy her unofficial Comptroller, was induced to apply to her brother, the King, for suitable ranks to be bestowed upon the Duchess of Kent's household. The King, who was fond of his adoring sisters, responded promptly: Louise Lehzen was created a Hanoverian baroness by His Maje
sty in his right as King of Hanover, while Conroy was created a Knight Commander of the Hanoverian Order.

  Sir John Conroy, while so successfully beguiling both the Duchess of Kent and Princess Sophia, failed lamentably in his efforts to win the confidence of Princess Victoria whom he treated with that kind of bullying jocularity which children find so offensive. He told her she reminded him of the Duke of Gloucester, one of the least well-favoured members of her family; he said her economical habits, including the saving of her pocket money, must have been inherited from her parsimonious grandmother, Queen Charlotte; he teased her in the naive belief that she would be amused by his facetiousness rather than offended by what she described as 'personal affronts'. She grew to hate him. The Duke of Wellington believed that this hatred sprang from her having witnessed 'some familiarities' between her mother and Conroy; and when Charles Creevey remarked to the Duke that he 'concluded he was her lover', the Duke replied that he also 'supposed so'.4 In later life Victoria strongly denied that her mother and Conroy could have been lovers, and she was no doubt right to disbelieve that they were; but her detestation of Conroy was nonetheless virulent and the Duchess's fond feelings for her Comptroller soured the feelings between mother and daughter. So too did they sour the friendly feelings which the Princess had earlier felt for Conroy's daughter, Victoire, a rather dull girl, and one of the few children of her own age with whom Victoria was allowed to associate.

  Having established his position at Kensington, Sir John Conroy -who did not now trouble to conceal his occasional irritation with the Duchess who, so he said, lived 'in a mist' - set about what became known as 'the Kensington System', a process by which, in Conroy's words, Princess Victoria would become the 'Nation's Hope', the 'People's Queen'.5 This entailed ensuring that the child became completely dependent upon her mother who - should the girl's uncle, the Duke of Clarence, die before she came of age at eighteen - would become Regent. In the meantime, there must be no risk of anyone beyond the Kensington household gaining any influence over the Princess. She must continue to sleep in her mother's room; she must never be left alone in any other room; when going downstairs she must be accompanied by an adult to hold her hand; she must never have the opportunity of talking to a visitor unless a third person were present. She must be strictly shielded from anyone who might endeavour to gain her confidence; furthermore, she must be separated from other members of the Royal Family, in particular from her uncle, the wicked Duke of Cumberland, who, so Conroy liked it to be supposed, as an additional reason for keeping her isolated, was quite capable of having her poisoned or otherwise disposed of so that he could succeed to his brother's throne.