Bringing Them Up Royal: How the Royals Raised their Children from 1066 to the Present Day

by David Cohen

  Kensington Palace was a hive of power games. In 1828, Lehzen’s best friend, Baroness Spath, was dismissed on Conroy’s orders. It was rumoured that she had seen ‘familiarities’ between him and the Duchess. As she had known the Duchess for years, she dared warn her of the risks of being too close to Conroy; almost at once, Spath was taken in by Victoria’s half-sister Feodora, now married to a German prince. It is likely that Victoria was upset by these changes.

  In January 1830, William’s wife, Adelaide, decided the family had had enough of Conroy and wrote to the Duchess, saying that it ‘was the general wish’ that she should not allow Conroy ‘too much influence over you but keep him in his place’. Adelaide did not refer to any incident Spath might have witnessed but felt it was enough to point out that Conroy had never lived ‘in court circles’ and so could not be expected to behave properly. Adelaide was relatively tactful and added that, ‘In the family it is noticed that you are cutting yourself off more and more from them with your child.’ She blamed Conroy and said the royal family ‘believe he tried to remove anything which may obstruct his influence so that he may exercise his power alone and alone too one day reap the fruits of his influence’. The Irish upstart hardly had the rank to prevent the royal family from communicating with Victoria. Incensed, the Duchess showed the letter to Conroy. The result was violent hostility between the two of them and William and Adelaide; Victoria was caught in the crossfire.

  Feeling under pressure, the Duchess and Conroy invited the Bishops of London and Lincoln to meet Victoria and examine how well she was being educated. With what seems like mock humility, the Duchess wished to know if ‘the course hitherto pursued in her education has been the best, if not where has it been erroneous’. She reminded the Bishops that, as Victoria was just shy of six months old when her father died, ‘her sole care and charge devolved to me’. The Duchess had been a stranger among the English and had denied herself the comforts of returning to Germany, ‘rejecting all those feelings of home and kindred that divided my heart’. She presented herself as very much the martyr. Victoria passed the examination triumphantly and her fine performance strengthened her mother and Conroy’s position against the court.

  Around this time, Lehzen slipped a copy of the genealogy of the House of Hanover into one of Victoria’s lesson books. It was the first time that Victoria realised she would probably be the next monarch. After a pause, she is reported to have said, ‘I will be good’ before adding that she now understood why Lehzen had ‘urged me to learn so much, even Latin. My cousins, Augustus and Mary, never did, but you told me that Latin is the foundation of the English grammar and of all the elegant expressions.’ The revelation that she might become Queen also prompted Victoria to write in the margin of the book: ‘I cried much on learning it and ever deplored this contingency.’

  Lehzen reminded her that she would not succeed if Adelaide had children. Victoria was not disappointed and said, according to Lehzen: ‘For I know the love Aunt Adelaide bears me and how fond she is of the children.’

  Victoria was controlled, but not always confined to Kensington Palace. Her mother sometimes took her on outings, including one to Ramsgate, where a writer admired the Princess, who was ‘in all the redolence of youth and health’. Victoria was wearing ‘a plain straw bonnet, with a white ribbon round the crown; a coloured muslin frock, looking gay and cheerful, and as pretty a pair of shoes on as pretty a pair of feet as I ever remember to have seen from China to Kamschatka’. The Princess was playing on the beach with her mother and William Wilberforce. For once, Conroy does not seem to have been around.

  Victoria’s mother had ignored Adelaide’s criticisms of Conroy. When William was crowned in 1831, he wanted to punish the Duchess and announced that, although Victoria was his heir, she was not going to walk immediately behind him in the procession, as tradition required. Furious, the Duchess refused to attend the Coronation. Victoria was deeply disappointed.

  Almost as soon as William was crowned, the family quarrelled again. The King was now sixty-five years old and might die, while Victoria was under eighteen and still a minor. Her mother wanted to be named Regent, but William resisted because he feared Conroy would have too much influence. The Duchess and Conroy retaliated by putting intense pressure on Victoria to appoint Conroy as her private secretary and treasurer. Victoria was just ten years old at the time, but she did not sign the paper they put in front of her.

  Victoria’s grandmother learned of these quarrels and wrote to the Duchess when the child celebrated her eleventh birthday: ‘It is only by the blessing of God that all the fine qualities He has put into that young soul can be kept pure and untarnished. How well I can sympathise with the feelings of anxiety that must possess you when that time comes!’

  I was struck by Victoria’s use of the word ‘anxiety’ in a very modern sense when she spoke of Bertie; here, even earlier, we find a similar use. Freud did not invent neurotic anxiety.

  The Duchess had told her mother that she was afraid her daughter would take some revenge when she took up the throne. When she later allowed Parton to publish this exchange, Victoria did not mind the public being reminded of the problems her mother caused her.

  By July 1834, hostilities between the King, Queen Adelaide and Kensington Palace became so raw that the Duchess wrote to Stockmar for help. She suggested he mediate between the warring members of the family. Stockmar’s memoirs show that he thought he could do nothing – ‘How can my words help when nobody wishes to change and nobody wishes to give in?’ The difficulty lay largely in the personality of Conroy: he might be devoted to the Duchess, Stockmar tactfully noted, but he was also ‘vain, ambitious, most sensitive and most hot-tempered’. Stockmar refused to blame Lehzen as the Duchess wanted him to and insisted the problem lay ‘in the innate personality of the Princess, in the inner circumstances at Kensington and in the behaviour of Sir John to the Princess’. He blamed Conroy for making himself ‘the sale regulator of the whole machine’. It was clear that ‘every day the Princess grew up, she became resentful of what must have looked to her as an exercise of undue control over herself’.

  Parliament seems to have been unaware of the family rows. We have seen the intrigues surrounding the appointment of Regents who would take over should the monarch be either a minor or incapacitated. In 1831 Parliament had named the Duchess as Regent, if the King should die before Victoria was eighteen. William was not pleased, especially as the Duchess did not let him see his niece as often as he wished. Now that Parliament had approved her as would-be Regent, the Duchess offended the King by moving into the rooms in Kensington Palace that he had reserved for himself. She also snubbed his illegitimate children and sniped that William was ‘an oversexed oaf’.

  When Victoria was old enough to need a lady-in-waiting, Stockmar suggested the Duchess discuss possible candidates with her daughter. The Duchess was in no mood for compromise, however, and appointed Lady Flora Hastings. Stockmar foresaw trouble, and he was right.

  In 1835, the Duchess again wrote her daughter a stern letter, demanding she have a less intimate relationship with Lehzen. Victoria’s half-sister Feodora was appalled and wrote to Queen Adelaide, asking her and the King to do whatever they could to protect the governess. Though the Duchess and Conroy had day-to-day control of Victoria, the heir was now sixteen years old and, like Elizabeth I three centuries earlier, very determined. Lehzen clung on at the Palace and, when Victoria became seriously ill, it was she and not her mother who nursed her devotedly for five weeks.

  Family tensions boiled over at a formal dinner in 1836 when William IV said he intended to live until Victoria was of age, as her mother and her entourage were not to be trusted. The Duchess was predictably outraged. After the dinner, she scolded Victoria bitterly in the tapestry room at Windsor because the King had drunk his niece’s health, an incident to which we shall return later.

  Leopold could have been a calming influence, but he was now King of Belgium and sided with his sister against the
other King in London. William IV and Queen Adelaide had decided it was time to dangle Victoria in front of possible husbands. They invited the Prince of Orange and his sons to visit as the Oranges were always ready to tie the knot with a future British monarch. Leopold and the Duchess at once suggested to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg that he should visit, too. William IV knew Leopold was keen on Albert marrying Victoria and told the Duchess that he would not receive the young man at court and the Saxe-Coburgs should not stay at Kensington Palace.

  At this, Leopold had an epistolary hissy fit and wrote to the Duchess:

  The relations of the King and Queen therefore are to come in shoals and rule the land when your relations are forbidden. Really and truly I never heard anything like it and I hope that it will a little rouse your spirit now that slavery is abolished in the British Colonies. I do not comprehend why your lot alone should be so kept a white little slavey in England for the pleasure of a Court who never bought you, as I am not aware of their having gone to any expense on that head or the King even having spent a sixpence for your existence.

  He ranted on that he expected that he would not be allowed to visit England and he was sure that the King would be ‘excessively rude to your relations’.

  Victoria was now in the midst of conflict between her mother and Conroy, William and Adelaide, and her beloved uncle Leopold. No wonder she clung to Lehzen. After she attended a ball on 13 May 1836, Victoria gave Leopold a bitchy account of the Oranges. Both the boys were ‘very plain and look heavy, dull, and frightened and are not at all prepossessing. So much for the Oranges, dear Uncle.’

  Victoria’s letters at the age of fifteen show her to be very competent and a credit to Lehzen and her other teachers. In the 1880s, Stockmar’s son edited his father’s memoirs and included a section where Stockmar accused the Duchess and Conroy of spreading rumours that Victoria was ‘mentally undeveloped’. These stories were absurd to anyone who met Victoria or had even received a letter from her, but Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister, was worried she might not be fit for the throne – he had not been able to judge her capabilities for himself. Stockmar’s memoirs claimed the Duchess and Conroy tried to ‘shut up’ Victoria until she signed the long-drafted document guaranteeing Conroy the job of private secretary when she became Queen. Conroy told the Duchess to ‘keep her under duress until she had extorted this engagement from her’. The Duchess, Stockmar claims, was too timid to protest and Victoria too spirited to agree. But the plot was high treason, he added.

  Thirty years later, Charles Fulke Greville, who had been a Clerk of the Council between 1821 and 1852, published an account of this period. Queen Victoria ‘attacked him most savagely’, according to Stockmar’s son. In a letter to Theodore Martin of October 1874, the Queen accused Greville of ‘dreadful indiscretions and disgracefully bad taste’. Stockmar’s son points out, however, that Victoria never claimed Greville lied, only that he was guilty of ‘many derelictions’. The Queen did not behave impeccably herself as she threatened to reveal damaging details about Greville’s own history and character.

  Victoria also added notes to the manuscript of the Kensington System, in which she scribbled ‘Untrue’, for example, at the point where it claimed Conroy had mortgaged his own properties to guarantee her mother’s debts. Though emotionally abusive, her childhood did not cripple Victoria; she seems to have been among those intelligent children who could make some sense of why they were badly treated and so she coped better. In addition, she had two further advantages: Lehzen was a stable presence and the dolls had allowed Victoria to ‘act out’ some of her anxieties.

  The intellectual Prince

  Victoria’s future husband also had a childhood riddled with tensions. Prince Albert was a minor Prince of a minor German duchy. In 1824, when he was just five, his mother was exiled from court. Louise of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg had finally had enough of her husband’s endless affairs and decided that she herself would be unfaithful. She then secretly married her lover, Alexander von Hanstein, the Count of PÖlzig and Beiersdorf. When their marriage was discovered, she never saw her children again and died of cancer at the age of thirty.

  Hoping to give the boy stability as well as a good education, Albert’s father, the Ernst, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, appointed Christoph Florschütz his son’s Prince-instructor. When Albert was ten, Florschütz introduced him to philosophy – it made great demands of him but he coped. At seventeen, Albert and his brother Ernest visited Brussels. Their uncle Leopold had arranged for them to be taught by a remarkable man: Alphonse Quetelet. He had started as an astronomer, but, after a few years, turned his attention from the stars to statistics. Quetelet had the original idea of using probability theory in social science and dreamed of a ‘social physics’ that discovered possible relationships between crime and climate, crime and poverty, education and excessive drinking.

  We still use one of Quetelet’s ideas today, as he devised a simple measure for classifying people’s weight relative to the ideal weight for their height. Many contemporary texts on health refer to the Body Mass Index, or Quetelet Index. Quetelet transformed young Albert into a would-be polymath, who could discuss philosophy, history, architecture and science with the best in those fields. The minor Prince went on to the University of Bonn, where two of his teachers were major intellectuals: the philosopher Fichte and the poet Schlegel. Fichte had what now seems a far-fetched ambition: he wanted to find a philosophical basis for the personality of God. He impressed Albert, however, who remained interested in metaphysics all his life.

  What Albert did not realise was that he himself was being studied. Leopold wanted to know whether the young man would make a good husband for his niece and so he asked his trusted adviser Stockmar to assess Albert. When the plan was first mooted in 1836, Stockmar told Leopold that he needed more time to make a fair judgement.

  When Albert and Victoria were seventeen years old, the Prince came to England with his father and brother. Both teenagers knew that some members of their family wanted them to marry. Albert was a little shocked by the manners of the English court and its tendency to ‘party’, as we would put it now, as frivolity did not come naturally to him. He also tended to fall asleep around nine-thirty in the evening, so when he had to attend a great dinner and ‘then a concert which lasted till one o’clock. You can well imagine I had many hard battles to fight against sleepiness during these late entertainments.’

  Victoria does not seem to have noticed Albert’s habit of dozing off. She recorded her own impressions: ‘The Prince was at that time much shorter than his brother, already very handsome, but very stout. He was most amiable, natural, unaffected, and merry; full of interest in everything, playing on the piano; drawing; in short, constantly occupied. He always paid the greatest attention to all he saw.’

  Her cousin seemed very serious, Victoria wrote, remembering ‘how intently’ Albert listened ‘to the sermon preached in St Paul’s on the occasion of the service attended by the children of the different charity schools. It is indeed rare to see a Prince, not yet seventeen years of age, bestowing such earnest attention on a sermon.’ By the stern standards of Fichte, however, the sermon was candy floss. Albert returned to Germany unsure as to the impression he had made on Victoria, however, and was afraid he would spend his life as a minor German Prince.

  There are many instances of individuals somehow managing to live until a birthday or an anniversary that matters to them. William IV wanted to avoid the Duchess becoming Regent and clung onto life until Victoria turned eighteen. Less than a month later, on 20 June 1837, the King died in the middle of the night. At 6 a.m., as the Archbishop of Canterbury saluted the new monarch, Victoria ‘maintained her self-possession; but on hearing these tremendous words, the realisation of so many hopes and fond imaginings, she threw her arms about her mother’s neck and sobbed,’ Parton wrote. But, in a few moments, the Queen recovered herself and remained composed when her uncle, the Duke of Sussex (who had once terrified her), knelt in front o
f her: ‘Do not kneel, Uncle,’ she said, ‘for I am still Victoria, your niece.’

  Victoria got down to business at once. She held a Privy Council, interviewed a number of ministers and officials, wrote four long letters and, after dinner, appointed Dr James Clark as the first of her physicians. Throughout her life, she had over 200 physicians, though many hardly got to see the Queen, let alone treat her.

  Victoria may have thrown her arms around her mother but she was not about to allow the Duchess, let alone the Kensington System, to rule her life any longer. One of the Queen’s first commands was to have her bed removed from her mother’s room and insist she should be allowed an hour a day by herself. Conroy was banned from her apartments. Victoria’s relations with her mother remained cold and distant for the next twenty-three years. The new Queen knew how to offer reward and obtain revenge. Lehzen now became more powerful; tradesmen needed her signature before their bills could be paid. Conroy was furious.

  As soon as she was Queen, Albert wrote to ‘his dearest cousin’ on 26 June 1837:

  I hope that your reign may be long, happy, and glorious, and that your efforts may be rewarded by the thankfulness and love of your subjects. May I pray you to think likewise sometimes to your cousins in Bonn, and to continue to them that kindness you favored them with till now. Be assured that our minds are always with you.

  Conscious he was just a minor Prince, Albert added humbly: ‘I will not be indiscreet and abuse your time.’ Victoria does not seem to have answered this letter, which worried Albert a good deal. Parton claimed: ‘The only excuse the Queen can make for herself is in the fact that the change from the secluded life at Kensington to the independence of her position as Queen Regnant put all ideas of marriage out of her mind.’