by Julia Baird
As the golden royal carriage made its way slowly past the Thames, the king remembered a time when you could catch salmon swimming upstream, when the river was a dull green, not dark with sewage. Soon it would be as black as the River Irwell in Manchester, where corpses were regularly found. He wiped his nose with the back of his forefinger, as was his habit, and stared out at the street chaos: an organ grinder making a racket, a man wearing a sandwich board advertising soap, little boys selling matches, street vendors hawking pies, an Indian beggar with a syphilis-ravaged nose playing the drums. The horses clacked noisily along the cobblestones, past piles of manure that splattered hemlines and turned streets to muck.
They pulled up in the driveway of Kensington Palace, which the king owned, even though the Duchess of Kent, Victoria, his younger brother the Duke of Sussex, and his sister, Princess Sophia, all lived there. A few months ago, the duchess had asked to move upstairs, farther away from the damp of the underground sewers, where mushrooms grew on the ceilings and workers found corks, cats, dead seals, false teeth, and even corpses. The doctor had recommended airier rooms after Victoria’s sickness at Ramsgate—but the king refused the request.
He walked up the stairs, into the King’s Gallery with its large windows overlooking the park, and stopped short. In direct defiance of his orders, it had been renovated. He counted: the duchess was now occupying seventeen rooms. During the three-hour drive to Windsor, the usually good-humored William IV thought about every slight the duchess had inflicted on him and his family. He had never liked his brother Edward anyway—and he was somehow now beholden to his ungrateful widow.
At ten o’clock that night, the king strode into his birthday party at Windsor. He walked over to Victoria, took her hands, and told her he wished he saw more of her. Then he said loudly to the Duchess of Kent that he knew she had taken apartments at Kensington “not only without his consent, but contrary to his commands” and that he “neither understood nor would endure conduct so disrespectful to him.” He walked away from her, vowing to stymie her vulgar grasping for power.
The next night, August 21, one hundred palace guests sat in a row at the table for a birthday dinner, their faces shadowed with candlelight. The Duchess of Kent sat on the king’s right, and one of his sisters sat on the left. William IV drained his goblet of wine and stood to speak, his rouged cheeks flaming, his large stomach straining against his corset:
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, heiress presumptive of the Crown, and not in the hands of a person near me, who is surrounded by evil advisers, and is herself incompetent to act with propriety in the situation in which she would be placed. I have no hesitation in saying that I have been insulted—grossly and continuously insulted—by that person, but I am determined to endure no longer a course of behavior 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….I am King, and I am determined to make my authority respected, and for the future I shall insist and command that the Princess do upon all occasions appear at my Court, as it is her duty to do.
Victoria burst into tears. The servants cast furtive glances at the flushed face of the Duchess of Kent, who was composing retorts she would never utter. Piles of strawberry jelly, sponge cakes, and trifle were left untouched as the company quickly retired. The duchess fled to Claremont the next day.
By 1837, the atmosphere in Kensington Palace was suffocating as the rows grew fiercer, uglier, and more frequent. A miserable Victoria complained of headaches, strange pains, and weariness, and the duchess summoned her son—and Victoria’s half brother—Charles of Leiningen to act as a mediator. Charles was shocked at Conroy’s “terrible hatred” for, and harsh treatment of, Lehzen, but he had always liked Conroy and quickly took his side. He decided Victoria was being irrational and dismissed her loathing for Conroy as a “childish whim” spurred by Lehzen. His attempts at brokering peace failed: he was not able to persuade Conroy to apologize, Victoria to trust Conroy, or Leopold to tell Victoria to extend the regency until she was twenty-one. Victoria was crushed; even her brother had betrayed her.
In late May, Leopold, who was in Belgium, decided to send his trusted adviser Stockmar to England to assess the situation. The astute Stockmar decided the causes of the conflict were the “innate personality of the Princess,” and “the behavior of Sir John towards the Princess herself.” Sir John’s problem, he said, was his abruptness, sense of entitlement, and the way that he acted as if he were “the regulator of the whole machine.”
Yet Victoria held the trump card. Every day, she grew more aware of herself “and more conscious of her own strength,” but the relentless harassment depressed her: “They plague her, every hour and every day,” Stockmar told Leopold. Her mother openly chastised Victoria, reminding her of her youth and telling her that she owed all her success to her mother’s good reputation. The woman who had insisted on breastfeeding her child and delighted in her fat cheeks had grown hard with anxious hunger for power, seduced by her own victim narrative of the long-suffering mother. She pointed out repeatedly that she had given up her life in another country to devote herself to raising a girl into a queen. Victoria soon stopped speaking to her.
In May 1837, King William IV decided to intervene. He wrote to Victoria a few days before she turned eighteen, telling her he would secure her independence on her birthday: he would apply to Parliament for £10,000 a year for her own use and allow her to appoint her own Privy Purse, or financial manager, who would answer only to her, and he would give her the power to create her own establishment. The king instructed his courier, the Lord Chamberlain, to ensure the letter was placed in Victoria’s hands. Both Conroy and the duchess tried to grab the letter, but Victoria took it and read it carefully before passing it to her mother. The duchess was enraged, most of all because she thought the king showed no respect for her work as a mother. She knew her chance of securing a regency would expire in less than a week. She decided to reject the offer in Victoria’s name without telling her.
After listening to her mother’s tirade, Victoria went to her room. She wrote in her diary: “Felt very miserable & agitated. Did not go down to dinner.” She would have loved to accept the king’s offer but knew her mother would not allow it, and she still lived under her authority. Ignorant of any other option, Victoria had obediently copied out a letter her mother had written on Sir John Conroy’s advice and sent it as her formal answer. She referred to her youth and inexperience and said she wished to remain in the care of her mother, who should have all her money. The king was not fooled: “Victoria has not written that letter.”
—
On the morning of May 24, 1837, a bright flag bearing one word flapped against the gray, cloudy sky above Kensington Palace: VICTORIA. She had turned eighteen at last. The shop windows were shuttered as musicians played and minstrels danced along the flower-strewn streets of Kensington. At 7 A.M., a band of wind instruments and harps performed on the terrace under Victoria’s window: “Here’s a nation’s grateful tears / For the fairest flower of May.” Victoria, looking down from her window, asked if they could play it again.
She was relieved, writing in her journal:
Today is my 18th birthday! How old! And yet how far am I from being what I should be. I shall from this day take the firm resolution to study with renewed assiduity, to keep my attention always well fixed on whatever I am about, and to strive to become every day less trifling and more fit for what, if Heaven wills it, I’m some day to be!
The young princess had grown more excited about her destiny as she had wrangled with her mother and ached for another life, one that she could control and in which her mother woul
d be forced to answer to her.
When Victoria rode through the parks that afternoon with her mother and brother, she was greeted with a roar of affection. The mass of upturned faces on the sidewalks moved her: “The anxiety of the people to see poor stupid me was very great, and I must say I am quite touched by it, and feel proud which I always have done of my country and of the English Nation.” But the public cheer only highlighted how grim her home life was by comparison, and Victoria grew despondent as the celebrations continued. Even a spectacular birthday ball, and her pale yellow dress covered in flower blossoms, could not lift her mood.
—
Lord Liverpool climbed out of his carriage at Kensington Palace on June 15, 1837, under blue summer skies. He was wearing a gray suit and a top hat—the top hat was now considered the mark of a gentleman, even though the first man to sport one in public, forty years earlier, was arrested on the grounds that it had “a shiny luster calculated to alarm timid people.” (Four women had fainted upon seeing it, and pedestrians had booed.) Lord Liverpool, a Tory like nearly everyone in the royal family and the younger half brother of the former prime minister, was one of very few people trusted by both the duchess and her daughter. His task was to break the impasse.
Liverpool began by meeting with Conroy, who explained, as one man to another, that Victoria and Lehzen had taken an irrational dislike to him. First, he said, Lehzen had to go. Second, Victoria’s “insurmountable objection to his being appointed to the situation of secretary or private political adviser” was ridiculous, as she would be unable to function without his guidance. She was totally unfit to consider matters of state, and while she was now eighteen, she was “younger in intellect than in years.” Conroy explained that the princess was frivolous and “easily caught by fashion and appearances.” Would Lord Liverpool make her see sense? Of course, all Conroy had in mind was her own welfare.
Lord Liverpool flatly rejected Conroy’s request for an official position with the queen, telling him that he was very unpopular. As a concession, Liverpool said he might be appointed Keeper of the Privy Purse, who looked after the monarch’s financial affairs, and receive a pension, if he did not interfere in politics and make his views “obvious to all.” After “some reflection,” Conroy agreed. The men shook hands.
Next was the recalcitrant princess. Victoria was waiting for Lord Liverpool, alone and prepared with a neat list of agenda items. She agreed that she would not have a private secretary and would entrust herself instead to the prime minister, Lord Melbourne. Working with Conroy, though, was out of the question. Surely Lord Liverpool was aware, she said, “of many slights & incivilities Sir John had been guilty of towards her,” but beyond that “she knew things of him which rendered it totally impossible for her to place him in any confidential situation near her.” She would not tolerate Conroy’s occupying the position of Privy Purse. Lord Liverpool pushed for more information. What things did she know? Victoria would only say that she knew things about Sir John that “entirely took away her confidence in him, & that she knew of this herself without any other person informing her.” Victoria had with her a letter that Lehzen had dictated, in which she refused to be bound by any promise. Finally, the teenager asked the former PM to open her tormentor’s eyes “as to the difficulty of the situation in which they place me.” She was firmly in command.
Lord Liverpool told the duchess that he could not change her daughter’s mind. Conroy swore foully when he heard this. For the next few days, Victoria stayed in her room and spoke only to Lehzen. Conroy decided it was time for his final, desperate plan: locking Victoria up and forcing her to agree. His ally James Abercromby—a barrister who was then Speaker of the House of Commons—had told him that since Victoria would not listen to common sense, he should now use force. Conroy went to the duchess and declared that “she must be coerced.”
As Victoria stared down relatives and bullies, in Parliament men were debating whether women should be allowed to observe parliamentary debates from the public gallery. On the day of Lord Liverpool’s visit, June 15, a Mr. Grantley Berkeley had asked the House of Commons: “As to the presence of ladies…when they had a bouquet of flowers in their chamber, did they not find the air sweeter?” The honorable gentlemen did not, and voted against it.
—
When Victoria saw a band of Gypsies camped on the road near Leopold’s English residence, Claremont House, she was captivated by their warmth. She visited them several times in January 1837, sketched pictures of them, sent them soup, and tried to arrange to have their children educated. When one of the young Gypsy women gave birth, Victoria had food and blankets delivered. She decided that if she was asked to sponsor the fatherless child, she would call him Leopold. The warm-hearted young Victoria did not show a shred of prejudice toward this illegitimate child. She envied and was fascinated by the cozy happiness in the Gypsies’ homes:
As we were walking along the road near to the tents, the woman who said she was called Cooper, who is generally the spokeswoman of the party, stepped across the road from the tents, & as we turned & stopped, came up to us with a whole swarm of children, six I think. It was a singular, & yet a pretty & picturesc [sic] sight. She herself with nothing on her head, her raven hair hanging untidily about her shoulders, while the set of little brats swarming round her, with dark disheveled hair & dark dresses, all little things and all beautiful children….The gipsies are a curious, peculiar & very hardy race, unlike any other!
At the time, Gypsies were maligned as lazy, uncouth, unwashed heathens, outcasts who drifted across Europe and filled the wards of workhouses. But Victoria thought them “falsely accused, cruelly wronged, and greatly ill-treated.” Together she and Lehzen read a book called Gipsies Advocate by a Mr. Crabbe, which convinced them that poor people would respond to kindness. Conroy did not agree.
—
By 1837, King William IV was deaf and doubled over. Victoria rarely mentioned him in her journal, though when he fell seriously ill in May 1837, she felt sorry for him: “He was always personally kind to me.” By mid-June, it was clear he was dying. The pressure on Victoria was enormous, and according to Stockmar, who visited on June 16, her mother had become extremely severe with her. If anyone outside the palace were aware that Victoria was an “oppressed Person,” he wrote, everybody “would fly to her assistance.” But no one did. Instead, Victoria learned, in the words of Stockmar, to “live on outwardly submissive and affectionate terms with people she distrusted and disliked.”
Lehzen became a lightning rod for the discontent of the Conroy camp. By steeling Victoria’s nerve, she was thwarting their plans. Conroy and his allies glared at her, mocked her, and spoke to her rudely. After Victoria’s illness at Ramsgate, her half sister Feodora had been so worried Lehzen would be sacked that she wrote to the Duchess of Northumberland—then Victoria’s governess—asking her to use her influence to help. When Conroy noticed that the Duchess of Northumberland had befriended Lehzen, she was “treated accordingly”: the governess never saw Victoria alone, or came to know her, and she resigned in disgust. Victoria later wrote of what her singular ally Lehzen had “endured”: at times she had feared her life was at stake during the “awful scenes in the house.”
At night, lying under her eiderdown quilt in her cot, listening to the tick of her father’s old tortoiseshell clock, Victoria fantasized about revenge: she would make her mother sorry for having mistreated her; she would banish Conroy; she would host balls, invite the handsomest men she knew, dance and flirt all night, and feast on delicacies. The girl who had wept upon discovering her destiny had by that point become a determined teenager on the cusp of power. She wrote firmly to her uncle Leopold: “I look forward to the event which it seems is likely to occur soon, with calmness and quietness. I am not alarmed at it, and yet I do not suppose myself quite equal to it all; I trust, however, that with good will, honesty, and courage I shall not, at all events, fail.” Those words would become her mantra: “I shall not fail.”
CHAPTER 6
Becoming Queen: “I Am Very Young”
I was never happy until I was eighteen.
—QUEEN VICTORIA
It will touch every sailor’s heart to have a girl Queen to fight for. They’ll be tattooing her face on their arms.
—WILLIAM IV
At 2 A.M. on June 20, 1837, King William IV died with a sudden cry. Shortly afterward, his chamberlain, Lord Conyngham, and the Archbishop of Canterbury scrambled into a waiting coach and sped the twenty-one miles to Kensington Palace. They rocketed past milkmaids swinging pails and stableboys sweeping stable yards, washing carriages, and combing horses as the sky lightened. The men spoke curiously of Victoria, and of how little they, or anyone, really knew about her, so closely had her mother protected her. They arrived at the palace at five only to find the gates locked and the snoring porter deaf to their calls. Victoria lay dreaming as the men rang the bell repeatedly until the porter woke and ushered them into one of the lower rooms. They soon wondered if they had been forgotten. Twice they rang, and twice they were asked to wait. The Duchess of Kent finally woke Victoria at six.
When Victoria looked up into her mother’s face, her stomach turned. She stood up, smoothed her long, loose hair, slid her feet into slippers, and threw a cotton dressing robe over her simple white nightgown. Her mother clasped her hand and escorted her down the dark, narrow stairs for the last time. Behind them walked Lehzen bearing smelling salts. When she walked into the room where the two men were waiting, Victoria closed the door behind her—shutting her mother and her governess out. The archbishop and lord dropped to their knees. Lord Conyngham told her that her uncle had died, kissed her hand, and gave her the certificate of the king’s death. The archbishop told her God would be with her. She excused them, walked out, and closed the door. She then placed her head on her mother’s shoulder and cried—for the king who had died, the uncle she had barely known, and the thrill of an emotion she barely recognized: release.
