It was to be the first of many such. The eighteen-year-old Queen needed someone to instruct her as to how to conduct herself in her new and difficult role. In the ordinary way this would have been done by some responsible and experienced person appointed as confidential secretary for the purpose. It was not easy, however, to find the right man; for if he were intelligent enough for the work, he was likely to have ideas of his own about political affairs which might well conflict with those of the Government. The last thing Melbourne wanted was an independent power behind the Throne. Nor did he intend, if he could help it, that the new monarch should be as hostile to the Government as the old had been. All these considerations made him decide to take on the secretary’s work himself. This meant that he saw the Queen constantly. He visited her at least twice a day: she saw him alone in her own private sitting-room where she received no other visitor. They also communicated by letter, he wrote to her and she wrote to him sometimes as often as three times a day. Three or four times a week at least he dined. Whoever the guests might be, Melbourne sat on the Queen’s left, and after dinner she spent most of her time talking to him. A month or two later she went to take up residence at Windsor. But this change did not mean any break in their association. Melbourne wrote as often as ever and at greater length. He also went down to stay. There, in addition to the daily conference and evening relaxation with each other, he would accompany her out riding. Altogether it can be calculated that in these first years of her reign Melbourne spent four or five hours of every day talking or writing to his royal mistress. No doubt he felt it his duty to do so; but he was not the man to carry out a duty so rigorously, if it went against his inclinations. As a matter of fact, all his inclinations were in its favour; what had begun as a duty very soon turned into an intense pleasure. These months saw the birth and quick maturing of the most precious personal relationship that he had known since the first happy days of his marriage with Caroline thirty-two years before.
It was a very different sort of relationship. For apart from their unlikeness in age and situation, the two women involved were so different. The young Queen’s personality, however, was just as compelling as Caroline’s and, in its own way, as exceptional. Not that she was complex or eccentric. On the contrary, her simple and formidable character was compounded of a few basic and universal elements. By nature she was almost all the things that the typical woman is alleged to be by those who have the temerity to generalize on the subject; instinctive, personal, unintellectual, partizan, interested in detail, viewing things in the concrete rather than the abstract, and with a profound natural reverence for the secure and the respectable. With these common qualities of her sex, the Queen possessed also those of her age. Like most of the eighteen-year-old girls who were her subjects, she was innocent and enthusiastic, enjoyed dancing and dress, set store by anniversaries and mementoes and celebrations, blushed and burst out laughing, bubbled over with sentiment for her pet dog and her old home. And not in any particularly refined or rarefied way; though regal, she was not aristocratic as the English understand the term. The healthy, homely German blood which coursed through her veins had imparted a commonplace, even a bourgeois tinge to her taste. But if her nature was normal, her character was not. It was too abnormally high-powered for one thing. Her enjoyments were more rapturous than the average girl’s, her sentimentality more unbridled, her interest in detail more inexhaustible, her partizanship more violent, her innocence more dewy. Some strain in her—once again it may have come from Germany—had endowed her with an extravagant force of temperament; so that the ordinary in her was magnified to a degree where it became extraordinary.
To this startling fervour of feeling she added a startling simplicity of vision. Through her childlike eyes she saw the world as naively, literally and absolutely as a child. All facts came fresh to her. “To hear the people speaking German and to see the German soldiers, etc. seemed to me so singular,” she notes a year or two later, on her first visit to Germany. Her judgments were as simple as her vision. They were often shrewd, but never subtle and never tentative. Her mind was incapable of entertaining a doubt or a half shade. Things were frivolous or serious, sad or cheerful, right or wrong. Particularly right or wrong: childish vision went along with a child’s ruthless unsleeping moralism. And its ruthless candour, too: as a little girl, it was noticed that though rebellious and passionate, the Princess could always be trusted to be rigidly truthful. At eighteen she was just as incapable of simulating a feeling or telling a lie. As she spoke, so she acted. The most formidably extreme of all her extreme qualities was her strength of character. Here she was not childish, nor feminine—if indeed weakness be a feminine characteristic. No one was ever less the creature of whim or vacillating impulse. Once she had made up her mind what she ought to do, she adhered inflexibly to it, however hard it might be for her and whether other people liked it or not. It was not in her to compromise. If other people were wrong, it would be wrong of her to give in to them.
The peculiarities of her nature had been sharpened by the circumstances of her upbringing. Her mother, the Duchess of Kent, suspicious and jealous of her royal in-laws, was determined that her daughter should not fall under their influence. The result was that the Princess spent her childhood in a strange, conventual seclusion, almost entirely in the company of women—notably her mother and her governess, Baroness Lehzen, who regulated and supervised every hour of her day. She was never allowed to be alone; she slept in her mother’s room: never did she see anyone by herself except her mother and governess: if she kept a diary it had always to be shown to Lehzen. Very few grown-up visitors came to the house; and except for the daughter of her mother’s secretary, or on the rare occasions when her German cousins came to stay, she did not have the chance of playing with other children. No window on the ordinary humdrum world was ever opened to let a whiff of fresh air into the soft, stifling atmosphere of meticulous feminine triviality and gushing feminine emotion which pervaded Kensington Palace.
But if her childhood was secluded, it was not obscure. As the future Queen of England, the Princess realized she was a personage of unequalled importance; and, as such, treated differently from other children. People did not bow and curtsey to other children: other children were not taught singing and dancing, as she was, by the most famous public performers in the world: other children were not prepared for Confirmation by the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. And with the glory of great position she was early introduced to its troubles. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, says the poet; and the head destined for a crown is hardly more comfortable. The four years before her accession, the Princess was the centre of a continuous turmoil of intrigue and conflict. There was the conflict between the King and her mother. The Duchess of Kent, a short, stout, foolish woman, rustling self-importantly about in velvet and ostrich plumes, was intoxicated by the idea of herself as mother to a future monarch; all the more because she considered she had never been treated by the English Royal Family with the respect due to her. Accordingly, at the same time that she strove to keep her daughter from them, she was always making efforts to bring her into prominence on her own; demanded that the Fleet should fire a salute in her daughter’s honour when she was at the seaside, and paraded her round the country on official visits without getting the King’s permission. She also intrigued with disaffected politicians, notably Durham, with the vague idea of creating a sort of Princess’s Party in Parliament. The irascible William IV reacted violently against these proceedings of his sister-in-law. He forbade the Navy to fire a salute and incessantly abused the Duchess to his Ministers. On one of the rare occasions when she paid him a visit, he suddenly rose at the end of dinner and denounced her to the company in unmeasured and naval terms for deliberately keeping his beloved niece from him. The poor little Princess burst into tears of embarrassment. Thus early was she aware of herself as a bone of contention.
The King was not the only person trying to get control over her.
Her uncle, Leopold, King of the Belgians, was a far-sighted statesman well aware of the political advantages of having a niece on the throne of powerful England. At his visits, therefore, and in a series of letters in which political advice, pious aspirations and demonstrations of highflown affection were artfully blended, he sought to get her under his influence. The Princess did not resent this, for Uncle Leopold was always tactful; but she realized that his views were not always the same as her mother’s or her Uncle William’s, and that she must be careful how far she committed herself to them. This added another complication to the already complex situation in which she found herself.
There was a more disturbing complication to face nearer home. Life at Kensington Palace, to outward appearance so tranquil, was in reality a scene of strife. On the one side stood the Duchess and her confidential secretary, Sir John Conroy, an intriguing vulgarian who saw in his position the means to advancement. He had found the friendless Duchess an easy prey and she soon became completely dominated by him. It was he who instigated her progresses and political démarches. Opposed to him was Baroness Lehzen, who rightly thought that his activities were not in the best interest of her royal charge. Her hostility was sharpened by the fact that Conroy together with the Duchess’s maid of honour, Lady Flora Hastings, made fun of her German passion for caraway seeds. Friction between the two factions cooped up together in the segregated Palace was continuous and, though the occasions of dispute were trifling enough, they were the symptoms of a bitter animosity which poisoned the whole atmosphere which the young Princess breathed.
Such an upbringing, at once so strictly regulated and emotionally so disturbed, would have crushed an ordinary girl. It served to reveal that the Princess was very far from ordinary: for her character only gained strength from the ordeal. All the same, it profoundly affected her. On the one hand, the fact that she was so cut off from the world increased her naiveté. On the other, consciousness of her royal position increased her innate self-confidence. She took for granted that it was her natural right to be obeyed. So far, education had served to intensify the qualities with which she was born. But it also curiously modified them. The quarrels and hidden plots of which she found herself the centre undermined her sense of security; so that the spontaneous candour of her nature was checked and she became cautious and distrustful. Distrustful, too, of the person with whom a child should feel safest—of her own mother! For the Princess did not take the Duchess of Kent’s side in her endless quarrels. William IV had been kind to her; now and again she complained violently that she was not allowed to see more of her uncle. About Conroy she felt even more strongly. Indeed, she actually hated him: and her hatred chilled any affection which she may have had for her mother. What made her feel so strongly on the subject is mysterious. Scandal had it that Conroy and the Duchess were lovers, and that the Princess had discovered them in each other’s arms. There is no reliable evidence for this sensational story. What is more sure is that the Duchess and Conroy did plot to have the Princess’s time for coming of age delayed so that, should William IV die while she was still in her ’teens, the Duchess might become Regent with Conroy as the power behind the throne. If the Princess found this out, it was quite enough to put her into a passion of righteous wrath. Anyway, whatever the cause, for two or three years she had been forced to live on outwardly submissive and affectionate terms with people she distrusted and disliked. The consequence was that, continually on her guard and unable to give voice to the angry emotions that boiled within her, she had employed all her extraordinary power of will in teaching herself to be precociously self-controlled, precociously prudent and precociously secretive. Since she was incapable of saying what she did not think, she learned to say nothing at all; and to bide her time. Altogether, nature and circumstances had combined to make the eighteen-year-old girl who ascended to the Throne of England in July, 1837, an extraordinary and paradoxical mixture: blending a child’s simplicity and a child’s uninhibited violence of feeling with the self-command of a mature woman and the unhesitating authority of a born monarch.
This last quality showed itself at once, and alarmingly. “Since it has pleased providence to place me in this situation,” runs the entry in her diary on the day of her accession, “I shall do my utmost to fulfill my duty towards my country; I am very young and perhaps in many, though not all things, inexperienced. But I am sure that very few have more real good will and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have.” There was no doubt in her mind that one particular course of action was fit and right. It was all over for the Duchess of Kent and her schemes. Already, when William IV lay dying, the Princess had taken the opportunity to have a blazing row about Conroy with her mother; with the result that the Duchess, so rumour ran, asserted her parental rights and locked her daughter up in her room. It was foolish of her, she always was foolish. On her accession the Queen took action. Conroy was given a annuity but banished from her presence, and the Duchess put firmly in her place. She asked, so the story runs, if there was anything she could do for her daughter. “I should like to be left alone,” replied the Queen. Not only did she order that her bed should be removed out of the Duchess’s room at once, but she also had dinner by herself. However, she did not attempt to rely completely on her own resources. Instinctively she looked about for someone to guide her steps through the unknown world in which she found herself. This came partly from consciousness of her own inexperience, but still more from her extreme femininity, a femininity which made her, for all her strength of will, the reverse of independent-minded in coming to a judgment on general and impersonal matters. The fact that she was a woman also meant she sought for her guide among the male sex. For the time being indeed, sex in its extreme manifestations was latent in her. She was emotionally at the schoolgirl stage, looking less for a lover than for a hero, for some wise, benignant, fatherly figure on whom she could pour out all her youthful capacity for admiration. Other girls find such a man in some sympathetic schoolmaster or kindly clergyman: Queen Victoria found it in her Prime Minister.
Indeed, no one could have filled the role better. For in addition to being wise and benignant, he was also extremely handsome, an accomplished master in the art of pleasing women, and one of the most fascinating talkers in Europe. As a matter of fact the Queen does not seem to have wholly realized how much of his attraction for her was due to these less serious qualities. In her diary she harps on his moral virtues; “a most truly honest, straightforward and noble-minded man,” she notes, “there are not many like him in this world of deceit.” Above all, not Sir John Conroy she implies! And certainly, after Conroy it must have been pleasant to deal with someone who was a gentleman in the highest sense of that old-fashioned word. But all Melbourne’s virtues could not have made the impression on her that they did, had they not been enhanced by his dark, charming eyes, his virile elegance and his light ironic sweetness. After all, it was soon to appear that she much preferred him to the praiseworthy Sir Robert Peel, as in later years she was to prefer Disraeli to Gladstone. These are not the sentiments of one who, whatever her avowed principles, does in fact set solemn conscientious virtue above the charms and the graces. Perhaps, like many of the professionally respectable, Queen Victoria felt unexpectedly exhilarated by the company of those who looked on the moral law in a more light-hearted spirit than she was able to do herself. Whatever the reason, Melbourne did exactly satisfy the Queen’s emotional needs at this phase in her development. He became the object of her schoolgirl hero-worship; and this, like everything else about her, was more single-mindedly extreme than an ordinary schoolgirl could feel. People noticed that her eyes followed him wherever he went and that, if he left the room, an involuntary sigh escaped her lips.
He was equally drawn to her. Now that he was cut off from Mrs. Norton there was no woman in his life: and he could not do without one. No longer, however, did he wish to take on the role of lover, even in the most platonic sense of the word: he was too old.
On the other hand, with age, his frustrated paternal instinct more and more felt the need of an outlet. He had reached the stage in life when a man of his type tends to turn for emotional satisfaction to a daughter; to someone to whom he can be a mentor—Melbourne had always liked being a mentor—and on whom he can lavish a tenderness that involves none of the ardours and tempests inseparable from most love affairs. The Queen supplied his requirements. Artless youth had always appealed to him; and in this instance its attraction was enhanced by worldly position. A young Queen is in herself a romantic personage, especially to a man with Melbourne’s imaginative sense of the poetry of history. Exquisitely he appreciated the incongruous contrast provided by the childish figure and the august, venerable role it was called upon to play. Moreover, apart from her age and her situation, the Queen’s character was one in itself to attract him. In most ways, no doubt, she was wonderfully unlike Caroline Lamb and Caroline Norton. But she did share with them the distinctive temperamental quality which had always appealed to him in women; the vitality, the positiveness, the high-hearted unhesitating response to life which were at once an entertainment to his own subtle melancholy scepticism and also its needed antidote. She added to them also an innocent straightforwardness which the other women in his life had not provided and which was infinitely refreshing to a spirit wearied and disillusioned by over fifty years’ experience of the great world. “She is the honestest person I have ever known,” he once said. “The only difficulty is to make her see that you cannot always go straight forward, that you must go round about sometimes.” Finally, he responded to her charm. For the Queen had charm; especially at eighteen years old before the soft contours of her immature character had been hardened by care and power; the charm of her ingenuousness and her dignity, her literalness and her enthusiasm, her composure and her unselfconsciousness, her childish gravity and her childlike sense of fun, all mingling together in a comical, delicious Alice in Wonderland-like blend. Melbourne had the trained taste to savour its quality to the full. The Queen amused him and touched him and stirred his admiration and won his heart. For though his feeling for her was not so rapturous and unbridled as was hers for him, yet it went far deeper. He had been born with an intense gift for affection, but it had been starved of its proper fulfilment during a life-time; so that now, with a reckless completeness, he poured it all out on her. At once his sovereign, his daughter and the last love of his life, Queen Victoria inspired Melbourne with a sentiment tenderer if not more vehement than he had ever felt before.
The Young Melbourne & Lord M Page 32
