Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  Armed with this infuriating intelligence, the King set off for Windsor, where the Duchess of Kent and Princess Victoria were already awaiting him. He arrived in the drawing room at ten o’clock at night, and took the princess’s two hands in his own. He expressed his regret that he did not see his niece more often. Then he made a low bow to the duchess, and said ‘that a most unwarrantable liberty had been taken with one of his Palaces; that He had just come from Kensington, where He found apartments had been taken possession of not only without his consent, but contrary to his commands and that he neither understood nor would endure conduct so disrespectful to him’32.

  It was scarcely a good omen for the birthday dinner, held at the Castle the next day. After the dinner, at Queen Adelaide’s request, the King’s health was drunk, and he replied in a lengthy, furious speech.

  I trust in God that my life may be spared for nine months longer, after which period, in the event of my death, no Regency would take place. I should then have the satisfaction of leaving the royal authority to the personal exercise of that Young Lady [pointing to the Princess], the Heiress Presumptive of the Crown, and not in the hands of the person now near me, who is surrounded by evil advisers and who is herself incompetent to act with propriety in the station in which She would be placed. I have no hesitation in saying that I have been insulted – grossly and continually insulted – by that person, but I am determined to endure no longer a course of behaviour so disrespectful to me. Amongst many other things I have particularly to complain of the manner in which that young Lady has been kept away from my Court; she has been repeatedly kept from my drawing-rooms, at which she ought always to have been present, but I am fully resolved that this shall not happen again. I would have her know that I am King and that I am determined to make my authority respected.33

  He ended his speech with paternal expressions of affection for the princess, who had burst into tears. Without a word, the Duchess of Kent had risen to leave the table. She later called for her carriage.

  The incident in the Albion Hotel in Ramsgate when Victoria was sixteen had cooked Sir John Conroy’s goose. Victoria’s dogged willpower had been demonstrated. If he had been unable to force her, even when she was so weak and ill, to sign away her powers to him, he would never be able to do so again.

  The hereditary system reminds rulers and governed alike of their place in the natural scheme of things. Aptly was the Victorian age one in which Nature dominated the human imagination so keenly. In 1831, while Victoria was attending her first Drawing Room, Charles Darwin was on board The Beagle, his mind beginning to dwell, not only upon the variety of finches on the Galapagos Islands, but on the processes by which the varieties arrived there. Had he been forced to stay at home and watch the Royal Family instead of the finches, he would have been equally aware of the potency of natural forces. The Duke and Duchess of Kent would never have come together had not the hereditary principle decreed that one Hanoverian baby should succeed, over the rival Hanoverian babies, and come to the English throne. If her very existence began with the Struggle for Life, the start of her reign was, equally, a demonstration of the contention between Nature and the Will. The old King was determined to live long enough to see her reach the age of eighteen. She herself was determined to be of age before she succeeded to the Crown. Her growing hatred of Conroy sustained her as she outgrew adolescence.

  On 24 May 1819, she changed English history merely by being born. On 24 May 1837, she came of age, and thereby determined that Sir John Conroy, rather than being any political danger, was merely a grotesque footnote in the history books. Public excitement was intense. At half past three in the afternoon, with Lehzen and Victoria’s sister-in-law Marie, Countess of Klebelsberg, she drove out for an hour and a half. ‘The parks and streets were thronged and everything looked like a Gala day.’34 In the evening, at half past ten, she attended a ball at St James’s Palace, with her mother’s entourage – Sir John Conroy, Lady Flora Hastings, Lady Conroy and the Duchess of Northumberland. But all eyes were upon the birthday girl. Though the King had been very ill, he appeared revivified by Victoria’s triumphant achievement, of having lived eighteen years.

  Her mother had recognized, even before the ball began, that everything was now going to be different. For the first time in her life, the princess travelled in a carriage with her own attendant, but without the duchess, who followed in another carriage. When Victoria arrived at the Palace, the King placed her on his chair of state, while Conroy and friends dined with the also-rans. Conroy could only hope that the King would disgrace himself by making another outburst. This did not happen. Victoria danced with a succession of swells – with Lord Fitzalan, Prince Nicholas Esterhazy, the Marquis of Granby, the Marquis of Douro and the Earl of Sandwich. ‘I wished to dance with Count Waldstein, who is such an amiable man, but he replied that he could not dance quadrilles, and as in my station I unfortunately cannot valse and gallop, I could not dance with him.’35

  There could be no doubt now that the ballroom had been shown the future Queen of England. The next day, hardly coincidentally, Baron Stockmar arrived in England. There was to be no danger of the Coburgs losing their influence. When Princess Charlotte died in 1817, Providence had snatched from Prince Leopold the chance of dominating British affairs; but Providence was offering the Coburgs a second throw of the dice.

  The old family doctor, and political éminence grise, had hitherto been on reasonably good terms with Conroy, but on this occasion, after a ‘heated’ conversation, they were no longer friends. Presumably, Stockmar saw the way the wind was blowing. He had come to advise the princess about her future role, and it was clear to him that she was in a difficult position. As the King’s health failed, Sir John and the duchess put more and more pressure on Victoria to make the tiresome Conroy her chief adviser when she came to the throne. She found his behaviour and attitude ‘impudent and insulting’.36

  Stockmar, who was anxious for Victoria to be rid of Conroy as easily as possible, did not want to antagonize him to the point where he dug in his heels. The ideal situation would be one in which Conroy could be persuaded, by money or titles, to go quietly when the moment arrived. Meanwhile, Stockmar was anxious for the princess to be clear about two things: the specific matter of her money, and the more generalized matter of her position as a constitutional monarch. He found her to be ill-informed about both.

  Upon the princess reaching the age of eighteen, Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister, had sent a letter via Stockmar to the duchess asking if they would accept a revised offer of money from the King. He was to increase the duchess’s allowance to £6,000 and that of the princess to £4,000. Had the princess been acquainted with this letter, and was the duchess’s refusal of the King’s offer made – as the duchess claimed – with Victoria’s consent?

  Victoria indignantly told Stockmar, ‘Not only have I never seen or heard of this letter, but was never told by my Mother that Lord Melbourne had been here... As I never knew anything of Lord Melbourne’s letter, I am, of course, also totally ignorant of the answer.’ She made clear to Stockmar her strong objections ‘to allowing Sir John any interference in my affairs. Whatever he has done, it has been done by order of my Mother, as I requested in her name, without making me responsible for any of her actions, as Sir John is Her private secretary and neither my Servant nor Adviser, nor ever was.’37

  By Sunday, 4 June, it was clear that the King was dying. Stockmar came to see Victoria in the afternoon, and for half an hour, ‘he had a very pleasant and useful conversation with me; he is one of those few people who tell plain honest truth, don’t flatter, give wholesome necessary advice, and strive to do good and smooth all dissensions. He is Uncle Leopold’s greatest and most confidential attached and disinterested friend, and I hope he is the same to me.’38

  Lessons were now suspended. The princess was on the alert, day by day, for the news from Windsor. On 16 June, a little late perhaps, she began to read
to Lehzen out of Jean-Louis de Lolme’s The Constitution of England. They did not get very far with it, and soon turned to the letters of Madame de Sévigné. Stockmar was now calling at Kensington Palace on a daily basis, as the King’s life sank towards its close at Windsor.

  On 18 June, Waterloo Day, the King said to his medical adviser, ‘Doctor, I know I am going, but I should like to see another anniversary of the battle of Waterloo. Try if you cannot tinker me up to last out that day. I know that I shall never live to see another sunset.’ His lungs were turgid with blood, his heart valve was ossified, his liver was enlarged and his spleen had swollen to twice its normal size.39 In spite of this incapacity, he managed to receive the Sacrament from the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the company of the Queen, who broke down and wept when the blessing was pronounced. ‘Bear up! Bear up!’ the King told her. He died at 2.20 on the morning of Tuesday, 20 June.

  Two men, who had been in attendance on the dying King, were designated to inform the new Queen of her role. One was the Lord Chamberlain – Lord Conyngham (son of the Vice Queen and her tolerant husband). He was forty years old, the son-in-law of that old Marquess of Anglesey who had been bold enough to offer the incoming King William IV advice on how to conduct himself as a monarch. His daughter, Jane, Lady Churchill, would become one of Queen Victoria’s ladies of the bedchamber and a close personal friend.

  The other was William Howley, who, at less than five feet tall, must have been one of the shortest Archbishops of Canterbury since Laud. He was the last holder of that office to wear a wig, that habit which had caused Victoria such fear in her infancy. He was also the last Wykehamist Archbishop. Like Laud, he was High Church, and for that reason, he had been vehemently opposed to the measure of Catholic Emancipation in 1829. He was the only bishop in the Lords to speak against the Reform Bill in 1831.

  When George IV had died, during the small hours of 26 June 1830, Conyngham’s mother, the Vice Queen, had spent the rest of the night hastily packing and had left Windsor at dawn, accompanied by ‘wagonloads’ of plunder.40 (She lived on until the age of ninety-two, dying in 1861.) It was perhaps with a memory of this, not entirely dignified, exit that Lady Conyngham’s son brought to the new Queen a letter from Queen Adelaide, asking permission to stay at Windsor until after the funeral. One of Victoria’s first acts was to write a letter to the Queen Dowager, ‘begging her to consult nothing but her own health and convenience, and to remain at Windsor just as long as she pleases’.41

  What did the two men speak of, as their coach rattled through the night from Windsor towards London? We are not informed, but these two unremarkable men were heralds of a new age.

  The princess had been told, on the previous evening, that her uncle was nearly dead. She had burst into tears ‘and continued very much affected’. The man who told her was her brother-in-law, Prince Ernst Hohenlohe, the husband of Princess Feodore. He concluded that she had been kept in ignorance of the King’s condition, but this cannot have been true, unless (which seems highly improbable) her Girlhood journals were all written up after the event – when would she have had the time? The illness of the King was an intermittent theme of Victoria’s journal for the previous month. Her outburst of emotion, hours before he actually died, was attributable to the whole situation at last becoming real to her.

  That evening, for the last time, she went to bed in the same room as her mother. What happened thereafter passed instantly into history. How could she not have been inwardly preparing for some time how she would meet this moment?

  The Duchess of Kent recollected that she woke her daughter with a kiss, to tell her that the archbishop and Lord Conyngham were awaiting her in her sitting room.

  Victoria wrote in her journal, ‘I got out of bed and went into my sitting-room (only in my dressing-gown) and alone, and saw them.’42

  The two men in wigs, kneeling on the carpet, perhaps for an instant recalled the antics of the Kingfisher, when the Bishop of Salisbury, during her childhood, let her play with his insignia as Chancellor of the Order of the Garter. But if so, the flicker of childhood memory was instantly overwhelmed by the knowledge that she was no longer a child; that she was in control; that these men were on their knees before her because she was the Queen of England. She sent Lord Conyngham back to Windsor at once, to assure the Queen Dowager of her kindly reassurances. The archbishop, scarcely larger than the tiny Queen, informed Victoria that King William ‘had directed his mind to religion, and had died in a perfectly happy, quiet state of mind, and was quite prepared for his death’.

  Then, she was alone. ‘Since it has pleased Providence to place me in this station, 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 desire to do what is fit and right than I have.’43

  She had become Queen Victoria.

  PART TWO

  FIVE

  ‘THE IGNORANT LITTLE CHILD’

  HISTORY BELONGS TO the victorious. The morning after the Queen came to the throne, John Conroy, in the words of his son, ‘finding his enemies and more especially that most hypocritical and detestable bitch Baroness Letzen [sic] were powerful against him, and that the childish monarch was acted upon by the vengeful cavils of his enemies, resolved to make up his book. He consulted with Baron Stockmar (who was Leopold’s agent and who was his friend in part at that time) who proposed certain rewards for his past services to the ignorant little child that was called to preside over the destinies of this once great country.’1

  Realizing that his luck had run out, Conroy wanted to cash in his chips as soon as possible, before the Establishment closed ranks against him. He proposed, and the Queen apparently gave verbal consent, that he should be rewarded with the Ribbon of the Bath, with a pension of £3,000 a year from the Privy Purse and an English peerage. As far as the duchess was concerned, this was only giving Conroy his just deserts. She would later recall that ‘twenty-one of the most valuable and best years of your life have been passed without intermission in my service and that of the Duke of Kent’, and remembered how ‘His Royal Highness counselled me who was about to become his widow and who was the mother of his child, to avail myself of your assistance, and to be guided by your advice’.2

  As soon as the Prime Minister heard what was afoot, however, Conroy’s ambitions hit the buffers. Stockmar called on the Duchess of Kent on 22 June. He found Sir John already in court dress, in his uniform, ready to kiss the new monarch’s hands. He would never be asked to do so. Stockmar had to tell him the bad news. Admission to the Order of the Bath was rejected out of hand. So was the enormous pension. The Prime Minister had no more wish than any other member of the Establishment to see Conroy sitting on the benches of the House of Lords. He cunningly offered an Irish peerage. Only a limited number of Irish peers sat in the Lords, and it would be years before a seat in the Upper House became vacant. Conroy haughtily refused the Irish peerage, and with that, he left the history books. His young friend Lady Flora Hastings – daughter of his late friend the Marquess of Hastings – told him, ‘You have nothing to flinch from – if you are not treasured as you deserve. The shame will recoil upon those who do not fulfil their part.’3 Lord Melbourne’s view of the Hastings family – ‘I don’t think there is an ounce of sense between them all’ – was a judgement which the Queen endorsed with the two words ‘è vero’.4

  The Conroys were no doubt intemperate in their language; but they were right. The eighteen-year-old who had just become the British Head of State was an ‘ignorant little child’. Since Conroy had been so proud to be in charge of her education, much of the responsibility for this ignorance must rest upon his shoulders.

  As is often the case with ignorant people who have a measure of uneducated native wit, the ignorance was patchy. The letters between Victoria and her uncle Leopold for the first half of 1837, for example – and ther
e are many of them – reveal a keen interest in current affairs, both in Britain and in Europe. The King of the Belgians’ replies to her reveal an intense desire to control her, and to intervene in British political affairs. The expulsion of Conroy did not leave Victoria alone, still less independent. It left the ‘ignorant little child’ at the mercy of the major political interest groups: Coburg, represented by King Leopold and Stockmar; the Whigs, represented chiefly by Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister, but also Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary; and the Tory Party.

  The premier who had refused Sir John his reward was William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne. He was a walking example of an English, as opposed to a continental, aristocrat. A mere three generations earlier, Peniston Lamb, a figure of humble origins in Nottinghamshire, made a success as an attorney. His heir, a nephew named Matthew, married an heiress, bought a country estate – Brocket in Hertfordshire – entered the House of Commons and acquired a baronetcy. His son, Sir Peniston Lamb, married into the Whig aristocracy, and with money he got an Irish barony – becoming the first Lord Melbourne. His wife was Elizabeth Milbanke, who numbered many distinguished men among her lovers. Melbourne’s compliance in her affair with the Prince Regent advanced his baronetcy to a viscountcy. The father of the second viscount – Queen Victoria’s ‘Lord M.’ – was generally acknowledged to be another Whig peer, Lord Egremont, an eccentric art collector and patron of Turner, the walls of whose magnificent house in Sussex, Petworth, groaned with great Italian masters.

  The second viscount, who now appears in history as Queen Victoria’s first Prime Minister, and who will be referred to hereafter as Melbourne, was famous in the early part of his life, not for his good looks – which were striking: short, dark hair, thick brows, a straight nose dividing a quizzical pair of glossy brown eyes, and a sardonic, sensual mouth – nor for his undoubted cleverness, nor for his early venture into politics and his seat in the House of Commons, but for his wife. He had married Lady Caroline Ponsonby, a hoydenish tomboy who was the life and soul of the Whig salons. (The Whigs are ‘all cousins’, as Melbourne himself used to say.) They all went in for love affairs, though perhaps not as flagrantly as Melbourne’s mother. Lady Caroline, however, who was mentally unbalanced, had one of the most notorious love affairs in history – with Lord Byron, who had lately shot to fame as the author of Childe Harold. The affair was of short duration, but it obsessed her for the remainder of her days, and its messily protracted ending included Byron’s clumsy but characteristic touch – having an affair not only with Melbourne’s wife but with his mother too.