I, Victoria

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘I think you are tall enough,’ he said judiciously. ‘Your lack of inches will not prove a disadvantage. As it is, everyone notices your dignity and queenly presence, whereas if you were a tall woman, they might dismiss them as being a part of your tallness.’

  ‘Do you mean it?’ I asked.

  ‘Certainly, ma’am. You know I never flatter.’

  I regarded him carefully. ‘I have often wished I had better features, though. My nose, for instance –’

  He did not try to tell me it was beautiful. ‘It is very like your royal father’s nose.’

  ‘I know, but it’s too big for my face.’

  He smiled and shook his head. ‘I have often noticed, you know, ma’am, that people with small features and little squeeny noses never seem to accomplish anything.’ And he turned his head sideways and ran his finger down his own nose, which though extremely handsome in my opinion was certainly not small.

  I returned to the engraving. ‘Do you like the name Josephine? I think it is rather masculine and hard.’

  ‘It sounds better when one says it in French.’

  ‘Like Victoire?’ I said slyly, but he was not caught.

  ‘No, I don’t like the name Victoire.’

  ‘What name do you like?’ I asked. ‘What is your favourite?’

  He thought for a moment. ‘Alice,’ he said at last. ‘Alice is a pretty name for a girl.’

  I felt a pang for a moment, that he did not say Victoria; but then it was not my favourite name either. I longed to ask him about his own child, as I longed to ask him about his marriage, but though we talked quite freely to each other, I knew they were subjects too sensitive to be broached. His wife was dead – the infamous Caroline Lamb who was really half crazy and had made such shocking scenes over Lord Byron – and even while she was alive she had driven him to distraction by her mad and wicked behaviour. In the end he had had to lock her up, and she had died of complications of drink and laudanum. I learned all this from Lord Palmerston, for I could never have asked Lord M., who had loved her dearly and borne with her excesses with extraordinary patience and tenderness, and had even hurried back from Ireland to be at her deathbed. Caroline had given him one child, a son who turned out to be feeble-minded, suffered from fits, and had died just the year before, in 1836. I could see how lonely Lord M. had been. He had always had a great many friends, of course, including many female friends, often the wittiest and most sophisticated women in society, but that was not enough for a man with a talent for loving and no-one to love. He wanted one special person to devote himself to, and pour out all his affection on – and that was just exactly what I wanted, too.

  We talked instead about his days at Eton (where he had known ‘Beau’ Brummell) and the best way to educate a child. Lord M. was not an advocate for overmuch education: he said it could not change a person’s basic character; and besides, he said, look at the Pagets – none of them could read or write and they did very well. We discussed whether large families were better than small (‘Where there are a great many in a family, they seldom have anything the matter with them; too much attention brings on ailments’) and doctors (‘English physicians kill their patients; the French just let them die’) and thence to teeth. Teeth were a plague, we both agreed; but it was important to look after them, he said. Poor teeth meant poor digestion, and that could cause global reverberations.

  ‘Bonaparte suffered from bad teeth; so did Queen Mary Tudor; and look at all the trouble they caused. One tried to make us all French, and the other tried to make us all Papists.’ And then he reminded me of Mrs Sheridan’s Four Commandments to her children: ‘Fear God. Honour the King. Obey your parents. Brush your teeth.’

  I laughed very much at that, and said, ‘I shall teach them to my children. And if I have a daughter,’ I added generously, ‘I shall call her Alice.’

  ‘If you have a daughter, ma’am, I suspect you may be obliged to consult your husband about her name,’ he said.

  ‘I am the Queen. I shall not be obliged to do anything,’ I said grandly.

  ‘But you will not marry a man you do not love,’ he said, ‘and if you love him, you will wish to consult him.’

  ‘I suppose I shall,’ I said, and for a moment our eyes met, and I felt a warm, fluttering sensation in the pit of my stomach which made me feel quite disturbed – and yet delightfully so. ‘But I do not wish to marry yet,’ I added quickly. ‘There is no need, not for a long time.’

  ‘No need at all, ma’am,’ he agreed warmly.

  It was my first experience of being in love – and yes, from my present distance I can see that that is what it was, though I could never have admitted it to anyone before now. Of course, it was only the foretaste, the rehearsal for what was to come; and after my marriage to Albert I found myself ashamed of the enthusiasm with which I wrote about Lord M. in my Journal. I loved Albert so much I did not want anything to detract from it: I wanted him to be the only creature I had ever loved or ever would love. The nakedness of my recorded passion for Lord M. embarrassed me, and I repudiated it, for fear that it would upset Albert – and Albert was jealous, not least because my dear Lord M. was not the sort of man Albert could ever approve of: too sophisticated, too cynical, too much a man of the world. The qualities Albert valued were serious and weighty, and he would never have believed that my former Prime Minister had those too. When he told me that my feelings for Lord Melbourne had been overdrawn and foolish, I agreed with him, and wrote a note to that effect in the margin of my Journal. I even went so far as to destroy a great deal of my correspondence from those three years before my marriage, feeling that I had been a very unsatisfactory person to make such a fool of myself.

  So I repudiated my first love in memory just as I did in fact. My dear Lord M. warmed my poor chilled heart and prepared me for the great love to come, and when that love arrived, when Albert came, he stepped back and let me go with all the generosity of his true, good heart. It was he who advised me to put myself henceforward under the Prince’s guidance because Albert ‘understood everything so well and had a clever, able head’; and I followed his advice, gave my whole self to Albert, and let Lord Melbourne go.

  Lord M. was my first love, but I was his last; and when I forgot him, it broke his heart, and he died.

  30th March 1900 – near midnight

  UNABLE TO sleep again, so I shall go on with my account. On the 13th of July 1837, I left the poor old Palace at Kensington, and moved into Buckingham Palace. I was the first reigning monarch to live there. It had been bought as a dower house for my grandmother, Queen Charlotte, and was then a simple, red-brick mansion house; but in 1825 my uncle King had set Mr Nash on to it to rebuild it in grand style as a royal palace. The scheme was too ambitious and the money ran out, and when Uncle King died it was still unfinished and stood empty, a reproach to the Crown on account of all the money that had been spent on it. Uncle William, when he succeeded, engaged another architect to finish it, or at least to make it habitable; but the critics never thought much of the architectural style, and Uncle William guessed, shrewdly, that it would not be gemütlich. He refused to move out of St James’s, and when the Palace of Westminster burned down in 1834, he even went so far as to offer the building as a new and permanent home for both Houses of Parliament. ‘It would be the greatest thing of its kind in the world,’ he said temptingly. But it seemed that the Lords concurred with his opinion of the place, and the offer was hastily and rather rudely refused.

  Uncle William was quite right. Uncomfortable and inconvenient it did turn out to be. The chimneys were so ill-designed, for instance, that it was often impossible to light fires in many of the rooms (and quite impossible to clean the flues without using climbing-boys, which made things very awkward when the legislation was passed). More seriously, the palace was a veritable sink of typhoid, built over the most inadequate drains, badly ventilated and full of dreadful smells; and the worst slums in London crawled right up to its walls, providing an endless supply
of urchins and madmen to break in and roam its labyrinthine corridors. But at eighteen I cared nothing for any of this – and having been brought up at Kensington, my standards of comfort were not high. It had all been hastily redecorated for me, and the rooms looked to me lofty, pleasant and cheerful. The gardens seemed attractive too, and Dashy plainly felt quite at home in them, rushing about and barking at the ducks and butterflies, so I was content.

  In making the move, I scraped off my poor mother like a barnacle on a rock. Though my dear Lehzen had a room adjoining mine with a communicating door, I deposited Mamma in a suite as far as possible from my own, which she soon complained bitterly was too small to hold all her belongings. I should have liked to banish her altogether for refusing to dismiss Conroy from her household, but Lord M. advised against it. Though he agreed with me that Mamma was foolish, deceitful and hypocritical (how I enjoyed hearing him say those reprehensible things!) he warned me against an open breach with her.

  ‘The people will expect you to be chaperoned by her while you are so young, and unmarried. It would cause a very unpleasant scandal if you were to part company with her.’

  ‘But I need not see her, need I?’ I begged.

  ‘You must have her accompany you in public sometimes, for form’s sake, but you need not see her privately. I suggest you tell her that she must request audience with you whenever she wants to see you. That way she will not burst in on you when you are not prepared.’

  The thought of Mamma having to ask to see me pleased me. ‘Well, but I shall not be nice to her,’ I declared. ‘She has behaved abominably by me.’

  Lord M. shook his head. ‘The more credit to you, then, ma’am, if you are seen to be gracious and attentive towards her. I would not have you do anything that might expose you to the reproach of littleness. Let it always be said that the Queen’s behaviour to her mother is impeccable.’ And when I still looked rebellious he added delicately, ‘To snub her entirely, Your Majesty, might bear the appearance of ill-breeding.’ After that I had no more to say; and following what I conceived to be his plan, I amused myself by behaving in public with the prettiest civility towards that poor woman, while banishing her from every corner of my private life and feelings.

  Mamma, though, was not guiltless by any means, and in the first years of my reign behaved as badly as she could, nagging and complaining and making scenes, reproaching me for my coldness and – infatuated woman! – for my ‘ingratitude’ to Sir John for ‘all he had done for me’. Conroy himself, with a slightly better grasp of reality, was ready to acknowledge defeat. On that very first day of my reign (after I had dismissed him from my Household) he waylaid Baron Stockmar and gave him a letter for Lord Melbourne, containing his demands. The good Baron trotted off like the obedient go-between he was; but when my poor Lord M. read the demands he was so outraged he dropped the paper several times in his agitation. A peerage, the Grand Cross of the Bath, a pension of £3,000 a year, and a seat on the Privy Council: that was Conroy’s price for going away and leaving me alone. Did I say Mamma was infatuated? ‘No, really, this is too bad!’ Lord M. exclaimed. ‘Have you ever heard such impudence?’

  Lord M. was for an indignant refusal, but Stockmar persuaded him that there would never be peace at the palace until Conroy left, and so on the 26th of June he offered, with my approval, the pension, a baronetcy, and the promise of an Irish peerage should a vacancy occur while Lord M. was Prime Minister. Here is the mark of That Man: he accepted the offer, but did not resign from Mamma’s Household. When Lord M. via Stockmar demanded to know why, Conroy replied that he had not yet got his peerage, and until I had fulfilled all parts of my bargain, he did not feel obliged to fulfil his. (When eventually an Irish peerage fell vacant, my dear Lord M. was out of office, and the then Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, felt justified in refusing to give it to Conroy. Conroy was very bitter about it and accused us of sharp practice, but still he died at last no more than a baronet, which was more than he deserved; but that was a long way ahead. Meanwhile he hung around the palace like an evil spirit, making trouble and causing misery as was his nature.)

  Mamma, pressed by Conroy, continued to importune me on his behalf: to give him a peerage, to invite him to Court functions, to receive his family and to give his daughters positions. ‘I have the greatest regard for Sir John,’ Mamma wrote. ‘I cannot forget all he has done for me and for you – although he had the misfortune to displease you at last. The Queen should forget what displeased the Princess.’

  I wrote back, ‘I am astonished that you should ask me to receive him, considering his conduct towards me for some years past, and still more the unaccountable manner in which he behaved towards me a short time before I came to the Throne. I imagined you would have been amply satisfied with what I have done for him, by giving him a pension of £3,000 which normally only Ministers receive, and a baronetcy. I should have thought you would not expect more.’

  She replied, ‘Sir John has his faults, he may have made mistakes, but his intentions were always the best. You do not know the world, Victoria. This affair is much tattled about and makes me very unhappy. I appeal to your love for me. For the sake of your mother, relent in your line of conduct towards Sir John and his family.’

  And thus it went on, the nagging letters freely interspersed with horrible scenes whenever she could get access to me. Sometimes when she wrote requesting to see me, I would simply send back a note saying ‘Busy’; at other times, when a more than usually emotional demand was sent to me, Lord M. advised me to let him reply to it formally (though that did not always work: once Mamma responded to one of Lord M.’s letters by writing again to me saying, ‘My appeal was to you as my Child, not to the Queen.’). The scenes were exhausting, and sometimes Mamma’s language could be immoderate. There were times when I was forced to the horrible necessity of reminding her Who I was.

  There were other subjects besides Sir John on which she was unreasonable. She wrote to the Speaker demanding to be given the rank and precedence of Queen Mother (reminding me of her previous demands to be called Dowager Princess of Wales, another title to which she had no right). The Speaker, polite but puzzled, referred the request to me, and I refused it, saying that it would do her no good and annoy my aunts. She also complained about the precedence given her at State functions, and went into minute details about the relationship of every person placed near me and why they should not have been put where they were. And she demanded that I pay off her debts, amounting to more than £55,000 – first that I should pay them all, and then that I should make myself personally responsible for more than half of them, leaving Mamma to pay the smaller proportion, which she said she would undertake to do provided her income were suitably increased.

  I did not need anyone to help me detect Conroy’s hand in this, nor did I need the Chancellor’s indignant advice to refuse. Lord Melbourne suggested that I ask Parliament to increase Mamma’s pension by £8,000, bringing it up to £30,000, so that she could gradually pay off her debts herself. This was done, and Parliament, Lord Melbourne told me afterwards, voted it through solely out of respect and consideration for me. It was not two months, however, before I was receiving dreadful letters from Mamma revealing that the increase in her allowance had already been swallowed up, without any of the debts being discharged. Indeed, the sum of them was now revealed to be more than £70,000, and since the tradesmen’s bills were as enormous as ever, it was plain that the extra money granted by Parliament was going ‘elsewhere’ which made me very angry. I see no reason why honest tradesmen should suffer on account of greedy and profligate people who should be their betters. It made me especially furious because during my uncle William’s lifetime she and Conroy had sworn they had no debts and that accusations that they owed money were malicious lies put about by the King.

  Lord Melbourne said that it was deplorable that I should be subjected to such annoyance and importunity from one who ought to be giving me only help and affection; and the quarrels and Mamma’s indeb
tedness cast shadows on the happiness of my first two years, and did nothing to improve my temper. All my life I have been of a passionate nature, and the inclination to fly into rages has been very hard for me to control. Control it I must, said Lord M., and I did try, but sometimes I even lost my temper with him, kind and patient as he was. It does no good to remember that some of my storms were provoked by jealousy: I hated him to be away from me, even for one evening, and when he dined with Lady Holland I would demand to know whether he liked her better than me, and accuse him of disloyalty. I suppose I feared that spending so many evenings with me bored him, although when I asked him the question, he replied with tears in his eyes, ‘Oh no! No!’

  But Mamma made me so angry that sometimes I would even snap at the servants, which made me very ashamed, for they were not in a position to defend themselves. I always apologised afterwards, and I think they did not mind it as much as I did, but I knew at whose door to lay the blame. If Conroy had been trustworthy with money, I might have forgiven him much, for waste and disorder in financial matters was something I could not endure. But then if he had been an honest man where money was concerned, he must have been a different person altogether.

  I should mention here that though I would not give Mamma–Conroy a penny from my Privy Purse, I did use it to discharge Papa’s debts, which I regarded as a matter of honour, since as his heir I stood in the position of his son. I had always been careful with money, and before I came to the Throne managed very nicely on an allowance of £10 per month, so the economies were not hard to sustain and out of the £60,000 granted to my Privy Purse for the first year, I discharged £50,000 of Papa’s debts. The rest I paid off by October 1839, and at that time I received formal thanks from his creditors for my actions, which pleased me very much.

  During this period, Conroy put it about that the reason Mamma was in financial difficulties was that she had been obliged to pay off Papa’s debts. I hadn’t told Mamma what I was doing, so she had no way of knowing that I knew that was a lie; but all the same she let Conroy say it, and didn’t refute the story. Is it any wonder that I hated her at that period?