by David Cohen
Once he assumed the throne, for which he had been itching for decades, George’s first problem was his wayward wife. He promised Caroline a fortune if she stayed in Italy and only crossed the Channel in her coffin. Caroline, however, had every intention of placing her ample bottom on the throne. She was the first, though hardly the last, embittered Princess of Wales to enjoy public support against an unfeeling husband. Cheering crowds welcomed her back to London. George should have realised that it was unwise to act against her, but common sense was never his forte. He was, as T. H. White noted, ‘a poltroon’, and so he asked Parliament to impeach Caroline for ‘licentious, disgraceful, and adulterous intercourse’.
Proceedings began in the House of Lords in August 1820. The King only received a slim majority, but angry demonstrations in Caroline’s favour made it impossible to put her on trial. In the end, the opium addict survived the slut – she died three weeks after her husband’s Coronation. Technically she was the Queen, but when she tried to attend the Coronation ceremony, she found armed men preventing her from entering Westminster Abbey.
As he grew older, George IV often suffered delusions about what he would have liked to have been and to have done; in his opium-disintegrating mind, he even managed to convince himself he had commanded a division at the Battle of Waterloo. It was pure fantasy, of course.
When George lay dying at the end of May 1830, William went to see his brother. Together, they wept, as they had managed to stay fond of each other. George wittered pieties to his brother: ‘God’s will be done. I have injured no man. It will all rest on you then.’
Perhaps because of his time in the Navy, perhaps because of his long and, for a long time, happy relationship with Mrs Jordan, and perhaps too because of his sensible wife, Adelaide, William was more realistic than his brother had been. He knew that he was unlikely to reign long as he was over sixty years old and his successor would probably be a child. William liked children and meant to do his best, but it would prove very difficult. His eleven-year-old niece was already the victim of what we now call ‘emotional abuse’. Today, any conscientious social worker would have taken Victoria into care and, working with other agencies, placed her mother and her mother’s lover on trial for child abuse.
6
Victoria, Albert and the Dangers of Great Expectations (1821–63)
George III’s fourth son, Edward, the Duke of Kent and Strathearn, played just a small part in the dramas of his father’s reign. The Duke went into the military but he could not even manage half a battalion decently; he infuriated his superiors because he was too violent. He was obsessive about discipline and so brutal to his men that, after a disastrous spell in Gibraltar, he was never given another significant command.
In 1818, the Duke married Marie Luise Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Staalfeld, the sister of Leopold, Charlotte’s widower. It was Victoria’s second marriage. Her first husband, Charles, Prince of Leiningen, married her after losing his first wife, who happened to be Marie Luise Victoria’s aunt. Today, this would lead to intense psycho punditry on what the consequences of marrying your uncle might be. Again, the history of the royals and the Freuds run in strange parallel. The young Freud faced a similar dilemma when an uncle from Odessa wanted to marry his niece. Freud’s mother saw no difficulty but Sigmund pointed out that, when a man of fifty-nine wants to marry a girl of sixteen, he has only one motive. Freud’s will prevailed, as it usually did in his family. Niece-uncle incest seems to have been more common than might be imagined among nineteenth-century Jews and royals, though.
The Duke was determined that his child should be born in England. He too was deeply in debt and had to borrow £5,000 to transport his wife, their servants and much bed linen from Germany to England. A month before the Duchess was due to give birth, they reached London, where the Duke had to meet his creditors. He had the good sense to be polite to them so they did not insist on seizing everything he owned.
At 4.15 a.m. on 24 May 1819, the Duchess gave birth at Kensington Palace to their first and only child. Victoria has been the subject of many fine biographies, including those by Elizabeth Longford, Cecil Woodham Smith and Christopher Hibbert. The Queen also kept a diary, writing up to 2,500 words a day from the age of thirteen. She allowed a biography, Eminent Women of the Age, to be co-written by James Parton and Horace Greeley in 1868. Although often unctuous, James Parton did not just have access to private papers, but also discussed her childhood with the Queen personally. Victoria was also the subject of a chatty contemporary book by Grace Greenwood, the first woman to be hired as a journalist by the New York Times.
At a critical moment in her reign, Victoria also wrote a book herself, followed by a sequel, in a moment when the Queen wanted to let her subjects feel she was not remote. Today, we tend to think of Victoria as a buttoned-up matriarch, who was, as the cliche goes, ‘not amused’. She had a keen sense of image, however, and was the first British monarch to write in a confessional mode and to allow some of those writings to be published. As a result, we sometimes have a surprisingly honest account of some of her ambitions and anxieties, both as a child and as a parent. Victoria’s troubled family history may help to explain why she tried so hard to make the royal family seem respectable and, perhaps even more remarkably, ordinary. Twenty years into her reign, she wrote a letter to her eldest daughter in which she stressed Princes and Princesses should not delude themselves they were made of superior flesh and blood somehow different to that of the poor, the peasants and the working classes.
Victoria’s 132 dolls
Victoria was born into a complex stepfamily. Her mother, Princess Victoria, already had two children, Carl and Feodora, by her first marriage. When Victoria was born, her grandmother wrote to her daughter:
I cannot express how happy I am to know you are, dearest, dearest Vicky, safe in your bed with a little one, and that all went off so happily. May God’s best blessings rest on the little stranger and the beloved mother! Again a Charlotte – destined, perhaps, to play a great part one day, if a brother is not born to take it out of her hands. The English like queens, and the niece of the ever-lamented, beloved Charlotte will be most dear to them. I need not tell you how delighted everybody is here in hearing of your safe confinement.
The constant reminders of Charlotte turned out to be darkly apt, for the infant Victoria soon found herself in a house of mourning. In January 1820, eight months after she was born, her father suddenly died of pneumonia. The Duchess was devastated, as her marriage to Edward had been unexpectedly happy.
Six days after her father died, Victoria’s grandfather, George III, also passed away. The widowed Duchess of Kent had every reason to return to her palace in Coburg, where she could live cheaply on the legacy of her deceased first husband, but she believed her daughter might become Queen of England. George IV wanted the Duchess to leave England, but, when she insisted on staying, he felt obliged to let her live in Kensington Palace. The place was run down and had become a refuge for a number of impoverished nobles who were often visited by bailiffs. Parton put it tactfully: ‘Queen Victoria can doubtless well remember the time when her mother was pestered with duns [bailiffs] and when her own allowance of playthings was limited by her mother’s poverty.’ He also made much of the fact that the Duchess found it hard to live on £6,000 a year. She was fortunate that her brother, Leopold, had become rich after Charlotte died as he had found himself in the improbable situation of being asked to become King both of Belgium and of Greece. Leopold turned down Greece and became King of Belgium. He was relatively generous to his sister.
After Parton’s book was published, Victoria penned some of her own childhood memories. She remembered crawling on a yellow carpet and being told that, if she cried and was naughty, her uncle Sussex (who lived next door) would hear and come to punish her. Victoria was also scared of bishops, who wore frightening wigs and aprons. She liked visiting her uncle Leopold when he was at Claremont because she was allowed to listen to the music in the Great Hall
when there were dinner parties. The family servants, including Baroness Spath, who had served her mother for years, ‘all worshipped the poor fatherless child’ that she was. Spath had a habit of kneeling in front of her, but Princess Feodora, Victoria’s half-sister, recalled the toddler was taught to apologise to the servants if she had been rude to them.
Victoria was brought up in a household where German was spoken. She did not start to use English much until she was three years old. In the 1820s, even likely queens did not receive the sophisticated education they had done three centuries earlier. Victoria was not expected to read Aristotle in the original Greek or to write poems as Elizabeth I had done. Her somewhat traditional grandmother was, in fact, worried the child would come under too much pressure and wrote to her daughter: ‘Do not tease your little puss with learning. She is so young still.’
After the death of her husband, Victoria’s mother appointed John Conroy as head of her household. Conroy became a key figure in Victoria’s childhood, but his whole career depended on one fortunate introduction. Until he was forty, he was just an ordinary officer in the Royal Artillery. Conroy did, however, marry well and his father-in-law introduced him to the Duke of Kent, who appointed him as one of his equerries.
Conroy was a good organiser and became a favourite of the royal couple. When the Duke died, he offered his services to his widow. The Duchess and Conroy became very close and the Duke of Wellington believed they were lovers, as did many others at court. Throughout Victoria’s childhood, the Duchess and Conroy felt vulnerable because the court did not like or approve of them.
After her father died, Victoria became third in line to the throne and so it seemed prudent to ensure that she received good care. In 1824 her nursemaid, Mrs Brock, was dismissed and a German woman – Louise Lehzen, who had looked after Victoria’s half-sister, Feodora – took charge. Feodora was now too old to need a nanny. Lehzen was ‘a handsome woman, despite her pointed noise and chin, clever, emotional, humourless’, according to the historian Christopher Hibbert. Victoria’s mother was confident, as was Conroy, Lehzen would bring the child up according to their wishes; the woman was, after all, only a foreign servant.
When she was four years old, Victoria contracted dysentery. Even the poltroon King was for once concerned, but, after a while, the Duchess reassured him that their little daughter had recovered. A year later, George IV invited her to Windsor – ‘When we arrived at the Royal Lodge the King took me by the hand saying, “Give me your little paw.”’ She recalled: ‘His Majesty was large and gouty and that he wore a periwig.’ He gave his niece a miniature of himself set in diamonds, which his last mistress – Lady Conyngham – pinned on the girl. Victoria remembered feeling very proud. The next day, she and Lehzen met the King as he was driving in his Phaeton. ‘Pop her in,’ said the King and he took her for a drive.
When the Duchess’s son by her first marriage – Prince Charles of Leiningen – came to England, he found Conroy charming and a pleasant companion. Conroy assured him that he had ‘unlimited affection’, both for the Duchess and for her small daughter, adding that, when he was dying, the Duke of Kent had entrusted the care of his wife and child to him. He had even pledged part of his property to guarantee the Duchess’s debts, he boasted. Charles did nothing to discourage his mother from trusting Conroy.
Conroy also told Charles that he hoped to give Victoria ‘an upbringing which would enable her in the future to be equal to her high position’. Charles may have been impressed, but the court regarded Conroy as an ambitious upstart, whose father had been a mere barrister. As we have seen, George I kidnapped his son’s children. George IV had far better reasons for insisting Victoria live with him, but the man who had not exactly been a devoted father to his own daughter was hardly likely to exert himself for his niece.
The Duchess and Conroy both knew their future depended on the young Victoria, but, instead of giving her love and security, their own insecurities led them to try to control the girl. Conroy devised what came to be known as ‘The Kensington System’. The System is too grandiose a name but Conroy obtained some support from Charles Leiningen, who, much later in 1841, dictated a long memorandum justifying it – A Complete History of the Policy Followed at Kensington, Under Sir John Conroy’s Guidance.
The Kensington System
In 1972, the Chinese Foreign Minister and Mao’s friend, Chou en Lai, was asked what the results of the French Revolution of 1789 had been. He replied apparently it was still too early to see. As the story moves from the past to a more recent era, I am reminded of this splendid quip but the results of royal parenting are easier to discern than those of the French Revolution. The way that Albert and Victoria brought up their children – especially their first-born, Victoria, their eldest son, Bertie, and their third child, Alice – had long-lasting effects on the royal family. Queen Elizabeth II is the great-granddaughter of Bertie; Prince Philip is the great-grandson of Princess Alice and this long family case history makes it clear that a pattern of reaction and counter-reaction persists. We can still, nearly 175 years on, see the effects of Victoria and Albert’s attempt to make sure their children were a credit to them.
The details of the Kensington System were obsessive and flouted the finest educational thinking of the period. Rousseau, Froebel and Pestalozzi believed children needed freedom – freedom to play, freedom to think and freedom to grow. Froebel and Pestalozzi were theorists of education, who influenced Maria Montessori in setting up the kindergarten system. The social philosopher Rousseau is most famous for his treatise The Social Contract (1762).
There is no evidence that Conroy studied any writer on childcare and he dreamed up the Kensington system whose main aim was denying Victoria freedom so that he and the Duchess could control every aspect of her life. Victoria was never allowed to be apart from either her mother or her governess. Lehzen could not let the girl out of her sight until the Duchess took over at night-time, when Victoria had to sleep in her mother’s room.
She could never see anyone unless either her mother or Lehzen was present. One detail shows the petty nature of the dependency that the system tried to foster: Victoria was never allowed to walk downstairs without holding either her mother’s hand or Lehzen’s.
Conroy wanted to keep Victoria isolated from other children and her mother complied with this. Somewhat grotesquely, while Victoria did not see much of other children, she was given a collection of dolls. Eventually there were 132 of them, many of which represented characters from books, plays and operas. They lived in boxes. Most historians have suggested that playing with these dolls must have damaged Victoria because they could hardly replace real child companions, but the point is debatable.
Stephen MacKeith, who was at one time chief psychiatrist to the British army, studied children who create imaginary worlds, often using dolls to people them. These ‘paracosms’ were sometimes obsessive and often complicated. The Bronte children had one called ‘Gondal’ and one of MacKeith’s subjects had developed a railway system spanning the globe, with stations even in the middle of the oceans. These ‘paracosrns’ allowed emotionally vulnerable children to create a world they could control and, MacKeith argued, Victoria did not stop playing with these dolls until she was fourteen or even fifteen. It may be that they helped her to cope with the problems caused by the Kensington System. Her only companion of her own age was Victoire, Conroy’s daughter, and she did not like her.
While keeping her under constant surveillance, Conroy and the Duchess wanted the public to be aware of Victoria and to realise that the likely heir was thriving, so the little girl was quite often taken for walks in the gardens of Kensington Palace. Anyone who wanted to could observe the spectacle of the happy child from afar.
A system that required a nanny to be present day and night created dependency but not the dependency the Duchess and Conroy wanted to achieve. Soon ‘dear, good Lehzen’ became more important to Victoria than any other adult, including her own mother. Moreover, far from
being a malleable underling, Lehzen encouraged Victoria to distrust Conroy, her mother and her mother’s friends. Unlike most of the others who surrounded Victoria, Lehzen had no ambitions of her own other than to do the best for her charge.
Victoria took to calling Lehzen ‘Mother’ and ‘dearest Daisy’ in private. Later, the Queen wrote: ‘She knew me from six months old and from my fifth to eighteenth year devoted all her care and energies to me with the most wonderful abnegation of self, not even taking one day’s holiday. I adored though I was greatly in awe of her.’ Indeed, as Victoria’s diary entry notes: Lehzen was ‘the most affectionate, devoted, attached, and disinterested friend I have.’ She was strict, but used no corporal punishment according to the accounts of the royal household. Girls were not flogged, but they were often smacked; Lehzen was exceedingly liberal. Tensions in Kensington Palace grew as Conroy and the Duchess realised the Princess loved Lehzen deeply.
In 1827, Victoria became second in line to the throne. Conroy now complained not very subtly that the Princess should not be surrounded by commoners and so the King agreed to make him a knight commander of the Hanoverian Order. For once, ‘Dear good’ Lehzen became annoyed and even the self-obsessed George IV could see this could be damaging and so, to placate her, he decided to honour Lehzen, too. He was canny enough to make her a Baroness of Hanover, rather than give her an English title. She is the only royal nanny ever to have been ennobled.
Curiously, while Conroy and the Duchess controlled every detail of Victoria’s life, they accepted the King’s right to appoint a tutor. Despite his own frivolities, George IV chose a very traditional character. George Davys had been a student at Oxford and was the vicar of a small parish in Lincolnshire. He taught the Princess French, German (which she hardly needed to be taught since she spoke it every day with Lehzen), some Latin, English, geography, mathematics, politics, art and music. She liked history, especially. Meanwhile, Lehzen taught her dancing and deportment.
