by A. N. Wilson
Without being blind to Sir John Conroy’s faults, it is surely not necessary to paint him as the villain of a Gothic novel. That he was ambitious for power can scarcely be doubted. On the other hand, he had been in the service of the Duke and Duchess of Kent by now for many decades. He had proved himself a good friend to the duchess. He possessed certain elements of common sense which she appeared utterly to lack. And it would be purely sentimental to overlook the fact that Victoria herself was a very difficult person, self-willed and in many ways foolish, ‘younger in intellect than in years’, as Conroy said.17
Conroy used the arrival of a new King as a pretext for strengthening his own power base, and on the Duchess of Kent’s behalf he dictated a long letter to the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington. ‘The weight of my Maternal Station’ – a favourite phrase of Conroy’s which he often employed in such petitions – made the duchess ask for an increase in her Civil List grant. She also requested Wellington to guarantee her position as Regent, in the event of King William’s death. She wanted, with immediate effect, to be placed on the footing of a dowager Princess of Wales. Wellington was scarcely minded to accede to Conroy and the duchess’s request. And, besides, there were other things on the Establishment’s mind in the opening years of the reign. England was in the grip of the Reform Bill crisis.
The burgeoning middle classes, many of them richer than the small landed gentry, were still unrepresented in Parliament. They simply did not have the vote at all. This was quite apart from the fact that the great majority of the population had no representation in Parliament. The Chartists, who believed in a universal franchise, were regarded as dangerous extremists. In every department of government – at Court, in the Church, in the colonial establishments, in the municipal corporations, in the judiciary – nepotism and bribery were rife. It was calculated that out of the 658 Members of Parliament in the House of Commons, 487 were returned by nomination – that is, there was scarcely even a pretence at an ‘election’. Even in constituencies where an election took place, the electors often did not number in triple figures.18 Before 1832, a borough freeholder, in order to be eligible to exercise a country vote, had to be assessed for the land tax; this requirement was removed by the Reform Act. For years to come, one of the differences between Tories and their opponents was that the Tories wished to restrict the votes of borough freeholders (i.e. the unlanded, those whose property was worth between £10 and £40) to boroughs, not allowing them a vote in county elections. In these improbable circumstances, William IV, and most of his peerage including his bishops, vigorously opposed Reform. If a Reform movement developed a republican colouring, it would not be the first time in British history. The monarchy was therefore deeply connected with the political life of the times. And if the King were seen to be opposed to change of any kind, where would this leave the sovereign after the inevitable change had come? These were questions which William IV was too old, and too stupid, to need to face. But the answers to the questions would dominate the reign of his successor. And his successor was a little girl, living a secluded life in Kensington Palace and being kept in total ignorance of the colossal changes which would be required of the monarchy, and of the political system as a whole.
It is important to bear in mind that democracy, as it is popularly understood today, formed no part of the ideology either of the Whigs, who proposed Reform, nor of the more liberal-minded Tories. If Lord Palmerston (1784–1865) was one of the dominant, if not the dominant, political personalities of the early years of Victoria’s grown-up life and reign, then we should look to his student days in Edinburgh for the roots of his political thinking.
In that city which saw the origin of Adam Smith’s definitions of Free Trade and economic liberalism, Palmerston studied under Smith’s successor, Dugald Stewart. Indeed, he not merely studied under Stewart, he lodged in his house. In one of his celebrated lectures on moral and political philosophy, Stewart, quoting Montesquieu, said, ‘It was one great fault in most ancient Republics, that the people had a right to influence immediately the public resolutions; – a thing of which they are absolutely incapable. They ought to have no hand in the government but for the choosing of representatives.’19
This fundamental idea must always be borne in mind if we are to understand the early-nineteenth-century liberal paternalist mindset – and if we are to understand the unfolding nineteenth-century political debate about the extension of the franchise. In this system of representative paternalism, the monarchy clearly had its vital role to play, and it was not until she allowed herself to be schooled by her husband, her uncle Leopold and Baron Stockmar (and to a smaller extent by Melbourne) that Victoria came to grips with the political realities. As well as recognizing the principle of representative government, however, it was also necessary, as Dugald Stewart had taught Palmerston, to be aware of the mysterious movements of public opinion, to recognize when the public could no longer be imposed upon, and when its own view, however mysteriously arrived at, must be allowed to influence government. (Canning, one of Palmerston’s political masters, opined that the State was no longer oligarchical but rested on public opinion which was ‘Protestant, patriotic and liberty-loving’.20 Canning was not a Whig, but a liberal-leaning Tory. This is what Palmerston, that populist of genius, was so good at recognizing. Prince Albert became good at such recognition. Victoria’s populist political instincts were, at first, non-existent – in spite of Conroy’s attempts to instil them by means of the ‘royal progresses’ during her teens; then, little by little, thanks to her husband’s dislike of Palmerston, they were positively anti-populist; and then, little by little, as she got into her late stride, under the premierships of Disraeli and Salisbury, she triumphantly conformed to Dugald Stewart’s guidelines for successful modern political leadership.
Evidently, when compared with alternative political systems abroad, the British system was successful: that is, there were no political revolutions or civil wars during Victoria’s reign; no toppling of Metternich, no 1848 revolutions, nothing to resemble the violence and horror of the Paris Communes of 1870. (This is not to say that the system which allowed, or produced, the Irish famine, the workhouses, transportation of criminals, etc., was an ideal; merely that the system of constitutional monarchy and a bicameral parliamentary system seemed to have some, comparatively benign, efficacy.) But Victoria’s story is not simply one of an eighteen-year-old ingénue growing into a wise old bird who mastered the British political game. Central to her life story is the extent to which the liberal principles espoused in Britain since 1832 could realistically be exported into the Continent from which she and Albert came and over whose destinies so many of her children and grandchildren would reign. It is worth saying these things now, in their chronological place – 1832 – even though at the time, the national drama of Reform either did not interest the young Victoria, or it was withheld from her knowledge. She began her journals, when aged thirteen, in the momentous year of the Reform Bill becoming law; she makes no allusion to it, any more than Jane Austen, in her novels, alluded to the Napoleonic Wars.
Yet the journals do depict a Britain of astonishing contrasts. Having changed horses at Birmingham, which she visited for the second time in 1832, she noted, ‘we have just passed through a town where all coal mines are and you see the fire glimmer at a distance in the engines in many places. The men, women, children, country and houses are all black. But I can not by any description give an idea of its strange and extraordinary appearance.’21
If this was the New World, her mother and Sir John made sure that she also had plenty of opportunity to acquaint herself with the old. Perhaps no figure more triumphantly embodied the old order than the Archbishop of York, Edward Vernon Harcourt, with whom she stayed when she was sixteen. This great prince of the Church, son of Lord Vernon, but taking the name of Harcourt having inherited the estates of his mother’s family at Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire, maintained a style which Victoria had neve
r seen before. The father of sixteen children, Harcourt had matriculated at Christ Church College, Oxford, when the Thirteen Colonies still acknowledged allegiance to King George III. He was one of the privy councillors who had charge of King George in his madness. He would live beyond his ninetieth birthday to see Newman a Catholic, and railways trundling through Yorkshire.
Victoria’s diary entries for her time at Bishopthorpe have some of the astonishment, some of the eye for social nicety, of a Jane Austen innocent. ‘Miss Harcourt is a very nice person. She ought by rights to be called Miss Georgiana Harcourt, the Archbishop’s eldest daughter being unmarried, but as she never goes out and does not make the honneurs in the house, Miss Georgiana is always called Miss Harcourt. The Archbishop has 10 sons, 5 of whom were at Bishopthorpe.’22 The concerts and Oratorio performances at York Minster give us the chance to hear more of Victoria’s very distinct musical tastes: she much preferred Rossini and Donizetti to Handel, and found ‘The Messiah... with the exception of a few Choruses . . . very heavy and tiresome’.23
Although memory told her that her childhood and youth were miserable, the journals tell a different story. Partly, no doubt, this was because they were written to be read by her mother, and she did not use her diary – as she would do in later years – as a repository of sorrows. Yet, surely, the truth is that until her later teens, Victoria did not find Sir John Conroy intolerable; was not made to suffer unduly by the conflict between the King and her mother; had no reason to question the general consensus that Sir John and her mother were making a good fist of her upbringing.
In Oxford, in the year of Reform, Sir John, accompanied by Princess Victoria and the duchess, entered the Sheldonian Theatre, where he was given an honorary doctorate in Civil Law. At the same time, he was given the Freedom of the City of Oxford. The Regius Professor of Civil Law, Dr Joseph Phillimore, in a Latin speech, commended Sir John’s military career, and his loyalty to the memory of the late Duke of Kent. ‘Thus having been received into His Household and family, and certain duties being entrusted to his charge, he performed the important trust with singular prudence (which is a great talent) and also with much industry. Can you wonder that he who had gained the esteem of the Husband, should also have pleased His surviving Consort?’ The Sheldonian Theatre was packed to capacity and the crowds cheered the Duchess of Kent, and Sir John, and the princess, as they did wherever they went on these royal tours.
Clearly – as on the first occasion that their boat received the salute of the fleet as they crossed the Solent – the extreme popularity of the Duchess of Kent and Conroy rankled with the King. Both the Duke of Wellington and Melbourne were to say in later days that William IV wanted to take Victoria away from her mother and to bring her up at Windsor.24
The actual pattern of the princess’s days was, for the most part, uneventful and happy. She was not a great reader, but she was developing her talent as a journal writer. She was an above-average watercolourist and there are literally hundreds of highly accomplished watercolour sketches of the many scenes she visited in these years. The boring Conroy girls were her unwished-for companions. Her royal cousins, and in particular the FitzClarences (William IV’s ten children), were her mother’s bêtes noires, and if one of them entered the room, the Duchess of Kent would leave.
Adolescence was the unfolding discovery that she was growing up in a snakepit of mutual hatred and slander. Lehzen had formed an alliance with Miss Martha Wilson, Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Adelaide. Through this conduit, damaging anti-Conroy and anti-duchess intelligence was passed to the Court.
The final tour of the North – the one during which she stayed with the illustrious Harcourts at Bishopthorpe – exhausted her. At the end of September, they went down to Ramsgate to welcome ‘dear Uncle Leopold’ who was paying a visit from his new kingdom of Belgium. Victoria was already suffering from a heavy cold, and this worsened into ‘an ulcerated sore throat’.
They were staying in the Albion Hotel. Conroy believed that her cold was trivial, but he was anxious ‘from a political point of view’ that too much might be made of the girl’s illness. King Leopold walked Sir John along the sands, berating him. Leopold had watched one English princess – his wife – die; and if Victoria were to do the same, and the hated Duke of Cumberland succeed William IV, the prospects for the English monarchy did not look strong. ‘If in consequence of your folly anything happens to the princess, there is of course an end of all your prospects, if the princess lives and succeeds the King, she will abhor you. Though late in the day, still things may be placed on a tolerable footing for you.’25
Within a few days, the princess appeared to be fighting for her life. At some point during this illness, Conroy clumsily entered her bedroom and attempted to make her promise to ensure his position, and her mother’s as Regent. She refused. It would seem that Sir John was all but violent with her.26 When the crisis in the illness had passed, his fate was sealed. Henceforward, her hatred of him was out in the open and, together with Lehzen and the King, she was merely waiting for the moment when she reached eighteen in order to be rid of Sir John and his influence.
Conroy tried to force her to make him her official private secretary. She refused. ‘And therein,’ commented Baron Stockmar, ‘lies the whole affair. With every day that she grew older the princess naturally became more aware of her self, more conscious of her own strength, and hence became jealous of what she must have seen as an exercise of undue control over herself’.27
In 1836, when Victoria was seventeen, the gruesome warfare over her future took ‘zoological’ form: the conflicting parties began to select rival marriage partners for her. The King had ‘a violent passion’ for the princes of Orange – but it was thought the passion was fuelled by the knowledge that there was bad blood between the Dutch Royal Family and the Coburgs. He invited Prince Alexander – grandson of the King of the Netherlands – to London at the very moment when the Duchess of Kent had asked her two young nephews, Ernst and Albert, to come on a visit from Coburg. She had not even told the King that she had invited the nephews, and so angry was William IV when he heard of their visit that he instructed Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, to forbid it. The duchess was instructed to tell the boys, who had already set out on their journey to England, to turn back while still in Germany.
Palmerston saw that this farce could only make the King seem ridiculous. ‘Really and truly I never heard anything like it,’ wrote Uncle Leopold to Victoria, ‘and I hope 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 to be kept, a white little slavey in England.’28
At the very moment when the shy young Coburg princes arrived in London, William IV was throwing a lavish ball for the princes of Orange in Windsor. They were lumpen and boring. ‘So much for the Oranges, dear Uncle,’29 Victoria wrote to Leopold.
It was the Duchess of Kent’s wish that Victoria should marry her cousin Ernst of Coburg. Had she done so, her life would have continued much as before – in the Houses of Coburg and Hanover. For Ernst, like his father before him, and like Victoria’s Hanoverian uncles, was a lecher and a roué. No one would seriously look at the married life of Duke Ernst I of Coburg, or the domestic life of George IV and William IV, and find in it a role model for family virtue. No one would look at these dynasties, as royalty lost its last shreds of political authority, and find in them a moral or spiritual figurehead.
Cousin Ernst brought with him his sixteen-year-old brother Albert, a boy of almost shocking beauty, and of almost equally stunning seriousness and shyness. The first time Victoria set eyes upon him was at the bottom of the staircase in Kensington Palace. It was not love at first sight, but there was an immediate attraction of kinship.
Five years had passed since ‘Uncle Ernst’s’ last visit to England, and neither Albert nor young Ernst had been to the country before. For the first time, Victoria knew what i
t would have been like to grow up in a family, and to have brothers. ‘I sat between my dear Cousins on the sofa and we looked at drawings. They both draw very well, particularly Albert, and are both exceedingly fond of music; they play very nicely on the piano. The more I see them, the more I am delighted with them, and the more I love them. They are so natural, so kind, so very good and well instructed and informed; they are so well bred, so truly merry and quite like children.’30 They were with her on her seventeenth birthday. ‘A very old person I am indeed!’ The Coburg cousins stayed a few more weeks and left on 10 June. ‘I cried bitterly, very bitterly’,31 but they were not the tears of a lover. They were the tears of a child who had never experienced the spontaneity of family life. She now saw, in all its absurdity, how fantastical it had been to be made to treat ‘Jane and Victoire’ as her sisters, as they played together in Campden Hill. She had only a year to live through, and the tyranny of Sir John would have no further power over her.
Things came to a head a few weeks later, that summer in 1836, when the King asked the duchess and Princess Victoria to come to Windsor Castle to celebrate the Queen’s birthday on 13 August. He wanted them to stay over until the 21st, which was his own birthday. The duchess replied that she would like to celebrate her own birthday at Claremont on the 15th – a tactless response which put the King in a fury.
On 20 August, he was in London to prorogue Parliament, and took the opportunity to go to inspect Kensington Palace. The previous year, the duchess had applied for his permission to occupy a grand suite, which William was keeping for his own use – seventeen rooms in all – and he had refused. Upon his arrival at Kensington Palace, he found that the duchess had defied his orders and was indeed in occupation of the grander royal apartments.
