Queen Victoria--Twenty-Four Days That Changed Her Life

by Lucy Worsley

  Over the decade since Julie’s unceremonious departure, Edward had done up his apartment at Kensington in an increasingly grumpy and bumpy process paid for by the Treasury. George III, in his lucid moments, attempted to control his extravagant son’s purse. According to one source, George III ordered that the rooms merely be whitewashed. Edward, though, could not resist embarking on ever more elaborate decorating schemes. He simply did not ask or tell his father, explaining his actions by ‘saying He had once been a bad boy, and would not be so again, or subject himself to a refusal by asking what the King might not approve’.27

  Somehow, through persistence, and by borrowing money, Edward had provided himself and Victoire, and now their daughter, with an interior at Kensington Palace that was elegant and up to date. The baby passed her first weeks in an apartment of exuberant Regency colours: crimson, white, amber, geranium, mint-green, pink. The drawing room of buff and black had furniture including something called a ‘large indulging sofa with scrolled ends’. The suite’s doorcases and cornices were burnished gold.28 Edward, then, was something of a contradiction: as well as an uptight military martinet, he was also a sybarite.

  In the year 1819, true to her own character, Victoire herself managed to spend more than £100 on clothing for her baby, although this probably included a christening robe and bedding for her cot.29 Edward did not mind at all, as there was never a prouder or more indulgent father. He found his daughter decidedly masculine, more of a ‘pocket Hercules, than a pocket Venus’.30 Contrary to custom, Victoire insisted on breastfeeding, which was unusual enough to be reported in The Times.31 ‘Everyone is so astonished,’ she admitted, but ‘I would have been desperate to see my little darling on someone else’s breast.’32 She was besotted, and told anyone who’d listen that her daughter was ‘mon Bonheur, mes delices, mon existence’.33 This was all very unusual. Babies were usually removed from their royal mothers to be brought up by professionals. Breastfeeding would inhibit the next conception, and aristocratic women were expected to get on with providing the spare as well as the heir as soon as possible. The little family at Kensington Palace were acting more like the close-knit, affectionate families of contemporary fiction than the couples joined by convenience more commonly found in the royal palaces of Europe. The Kents also followed the latest scientific advice in having their baby inoculated against smallpox. One suspects the influence of Frau Siebold, who’d become licensed to perform this operation early on in her career.

  Even if his daughter was a mere fifth in the succession, Edward could legitimately brag that he had now pulled ahead in the Baby Race. Two of his brothers also produced children in 1819, one just before, one just three days after him. But these younger Royal Dukes were Edward’s juniors. Their sons lay behind Edward’s daughter in the pecking order.

  However, the eldest of all the brothers, the Prince Regent, did not like to think of Edward as the father of a future queen. After all, the Regent thought, he might himself make a second marriage, and might even have another child of his own. He decided, therefore, that Edward needed putting in his place.

  Edward was anxious that his ‘little Queen’ should be named after a good role model, Queen Elizabeth I.34 But the final decision on her name was to be the Prince Regent’s. He now rejected not only Elizabeth, but also Georgina and Charlotte after the baby’s grandparents. All these names seemed presumptuously royal for such a negligible child. The christening at Kensington Palace was well underway before anyone knew which name the Regent would approve.35 At the moment in the ceremony when it was required, there was a long pause. Everyone knew that the Regent must make the final choice.

  ‘Alexandrina,’ he pronounced. The name would be a compliment to the baby’s godfather, the Tsar of Russia.

  But it was quietly suggested that she needed more than one name.

  ‘Give her the mother’s name also then,’ he conceded, grumpily. He then left, and failed to attend the dinner party that Edward and Victoire hosted at Kensington Palace that evening.

  And so, the baby girl was given the English form of her German mother’s name almost as an afterthought, and certainly with no inkling that it was a name that would come to define an age.36

  3

  Wet Feet: Sidmouth, 23 January 1820

  The January of 1820, in the Devon seaside resort of Sidmouth, was colder than anyone expected. England’s average temperature that month was 0.3 degrees below freezing. Ice floes were spotted in the Humber estuary, and Poole Harbour was frozen.1 At Windsor Castle, George III, dying at long last, ‘suddenly drew himself up in his bedclothes’, and, quoting King Lear, said, ‘Tom’s a cold.’2

  The cold was particularly unwelcome to the genteel visitors who’d been drawn to the seaside resort of Sidmouth, Devon, in the hope of a mild West Country winter. Here the January sun usually shines through the spray of waves crashing onto the muddy red cliffs, or else upon Sidmouth’s shingle beach. You come upon this beach unexpectedly, just a few steps from the main marketplace, almost as if the town did not realise that the sea was so close. In 1820, the beach was the destination of the donkey rides of a visiting family of a boy and two girls. They were the children of a literary lady, a friend of the novelist Frances Burney named Althea Allingham.

  The hottest Sidmouth town gossip that winter was all about the Duke and Duchess of Kent’s decision to bring the Princess Victoria down to Devon for a winter holiday. ‘Little Sidmouth was elated with the honour’ of hosting the princess, Althea observed. Her own little daughters were ‘full of eager anxiety to see the baby Princess, who might perhaps one day be Queen of England’. 3

  Their wish was quickly fulfilled, as the royal baby soon became part of Sidmouth life. The Allingham girls would watch at the gate of Edward and Victoire’s rented temporary home, Woolbrook Cottage, waiting for the eight-month-old baby’s nurse to bring her out for an airing. When the infant appeared, Althea was likewise fascinated. She described the princess as a ‘very fair and lovely baby’ with her large blue eyes and her mouth with its ‘sweet but firm expression’.

  On one day of bright sunshine, the Allingham family ran into the Kent family, who were out together in search of ‘interesting maritime plants’ on the ‘sand at ebb tide’.4 It was a charming picture, Edward and Victoire ‘linked arm-in-arm’, while the baby, in her ‘white swan’s-down hood and pelisse’, reached out for her father. Alethea, who never neglected an opportunity for sentimentality, later recalled the smile on Victoria’s ‘rosy face’ and Edward’s ‘delighted out-stretched arms’. The Allinghams asked permission, which was granted, for all three of their children to give the princess a kiss. (No wonder, with all this indiscriminate smooching with strangers, that Victoria was soon discovered to have caught a cold.)

  The adults talked about the weather, Edward disagreeing with the general view that Sidmouth’s climate was unusually healthy. ‘Yes, yes,’ he had said, in response to the Allinghams’ enthusiasm for Devon, ‘but for all that there is a treacherous wind from inland; it is blowing to-day.’ Approving of this genteel family met by chance, Edward invited them to visit Woolbrook Cottage.

  A few days later, therefore, Althea Allingham and her army-colonel husband received a card suggesting a six o’clock dinner. They were in the very act of climbing into their carriage to drive to Woolbrook Cottage ‘when a groom wearing the Duke’s livery rode up, bearing a second card’. It said that dinner was cancelled because Edward was ill. ‘Little did we, or anyone suppose,’ Althea recalls, ‘that this announcement [of his sickness] was the first note of warning as to what was to come.’5

  By 23 January, two weeks later, Edward was struggling for his life. Woolbrook Cottage was an incongruous setting for a combat with death. It was that Regency dream, a cottage orné, a decorative kind of cottage where aristocrats played at living a simple country life. Before it took on its name of Woolbrook Cottage, it was known as ‘King’s Cottage’, not for any royal reason but because it had been a Mr King of Bath who had transformed i
t from an old farm into a Gothic villa with castellations in the 1770s. Grander than its name suggests, Woolbrook Cottage was really a substantial holiday home for members of the gentry.

  The cottage still exists today, a white-rendered, compact mini-castle at the head of a little valley running down to the beach. Of three storeys, the building in 1820 was ‘covered with climbing plants’ to cast summertime shade over its whimsical curved verandah.6 The valley’s western wall sweeps up to meet the second storey of the house, meaning that you can see the sea through the first-floor windows of the drawing room, but also step out eastwards through French windows onto the verandah ‘entwined with honeysuckle and roses’, and thence onto the sloping lawn.7

  This large, oval-shaped drawing room was the prettiest room in the house, with a carpet patterned with rose wreaths.8 That January of 1820, though, the roses and honeysuckle were little in evidence, and the cottage was musty and distinctly chilly. Victoire in a candid moment described it as a ‘wretched little house, so cramped in space and so impossible to keep warm’.9 However hard her servants tried, the fireplaces simply could not heat the flimsy building. Half castle, half villa, the cottage was slightly gimcrack in construction, and even today draughts whistle violently through the pretty but impractical pointed panes of its Gothic windows.

  Edward’s brothers wondered how ‘he could think during such a dreadful cold season of leaving his comfortable apartments at Kensington’.10 But he didn’t mind the cold. He was hearty and hale. ‘My brothers are not so strong as I am,’ he would declare. ‘I have led a regular life, I shall outlive them all; the crown will come to me and my children.’11

  Edward’s ‘regular’ life was in fact something of a trial to his household. He kept the hours of a clockwork machine. The pernickety side of his personality comes over in his super-neat, slanting handwritten letters, issuing a multitude of instructions that one thing must be done ‘in the strictest literal sense’ and ‘in the strictest conformity’ with another.12 One servant had to stay up all night, in order ‘to call him in the morning, not being allowed to go to bed until he had lit a fire in the dressing-room’. Then, at six, a second servant brought Edward’s cup of coffee, while a third removed the tray. One can see how his living expenses mounted up so quickly. He kept control of all these staff with a system of bells, a different chime sounding for each of the five he summoned most frequently. The system was considered so ingenious that it was adopted by the Treasury.13

  Edward and Victoire had come to Sidmouth for the stated reason of its warm weather and its health-giving saltwater baths.14 In the summer, Sidmouth was a thriving resort, made popular by the ‘fashionable rage for bathing’, as one guidebook put it. It had just short of 3,000 inhabitants, but its population swelled seasonably: you might find an extra 300 visitors of good family in August.15 But Edward’s real reason for choosing Sidmouth was debt. He’d employed an Exeter solicitor to search out a suitable property that he could rent at a low price out of season.16

  As well as being cold, Woolbrook Cottage was also too small to accommodate all the family’s servants, who had to be lodged elsewhere in the town. Sidmouth’s shopkeepers were delighted. In eighteen months of marriage, Edward had showered Victoire with gifts paid for with borrowed money: a piano, jewellery, millinery, muslin, perfume and lace.17 The local tradesmen now queued up to offer their services, and John Taylor, a Sidmouth shoemaker, was selected for the honour of making Victoria’s first pair of shoes. He ended up making three pairs, each four inches long: one for the baby to wear, one to keep for himself and a third that he gave to a potter in the town to be memorialised as ceramic copies for sale. In due course Queen Victoria would become the most merchandised monarch thus far in history, and the process had already begun.

  Despite the cold, Edward believed that his daughter was doing well. She’d been weaned at six months. At eight months, she was already the size of a one-year-old, and had successfully sprouted two milk-teeth ‘without the slightest inconvenience’.18 ‘My little girl,’ Edward wrote, is ‘strong and healthy; too healthy, I fear, in the opinion of some members of my family, by whom she is regarded as an intruder.’19 He was hinting here at the resentful feelings that his younger brothers, losers of the Baby Race, were thought to harbour against her. If Victoria were to die, their own sons would move up the order of succession.

  But Victoire was more familiar than Edward with the ways of children. Observing the little girl more closely, she found her daughter ‘restless’, and suffering from a sore throat. The baby was ‘beginning to show symptoms of wanting to get her own little way’.20 Victoire was finding her ‘pocket Hercules’ more challenging than her first two children. ‘I am over anxious,’ she confessed, ‘in a childish way with the little one, as if she were my first child … my dearest darling has torn me completely out of my normal way of life.’21 For her, Sidmouth was ‘a dreary time’.22

  Then Victoire’s daughter Feodore, now twelve, also fell ill. But having both girls sick was only a prelude for what was to come. On 7 January, Edward had gone out walking in the rain with his friend and advisor John Conroy. Six feet tall like Edward himself, Conroy had been forced to leave the army after a ‘disagreement’ in 1816. He became his former commander’s ‘chief administrator’ instead.23 He was by now so deeply embedded into the Kents’ household that they could not imagine doing without him.

  On returning from the wet walk, legend tells, Edward then failed to change his damp boots and stockings: ‘attracted by the smiles of his daughter, he unfortunately delayed until he was dressed for dinner.’24 Thus his love for his daughter, it’s suggested, caused his subsequent illness. It’s pleasing reasoning, but Edward himself had no time for the wet socks theory. He dated the decline in his health from his very arrival in the West Country. He thought that something in the water of Sidmouth had ‘begun to play the very deuce [with] his bowels’.25 No one yet understood about germs or viruses, and everyone thought that water or air were the means through which sickness travelled and entered the body. The true cause of Edward’s malady was the pneumonia virus, and the result was ‘acute inflammation of the lungs, which soon assumed an alarming aspect’.26

  But Edward refused to take his ‘cold’ very seriously. Determined to ignore the fact that he was ill, he asked Captain Conroy to invite guests to a party.27 He even wanted to take a sea bath in ‘the terribly cold wind’, but his wife would not let him.28 He also refused the medicines of the local physician.29 These included the purgative calomel, highly dangerous because of its mercury content, mixed with ‘Dr James’s Powder for Fevers’, with its active ingredient of another poison, antimony.30 After a few days, though, Edward’s breathing difficulties forced him to take to his bed. On the Wednesday, 12 January, Victoire had his bed moved to a warmer room. On Saturday 15 January, the blistering began.

  Now real anxiety entered the cottage, this ‘badly built house which is quite unfit for anyone who is ill’. ‘Oh!’ Victoire wrote, ‘I was in such desperate anxiety, in spite of the Doctor’s renewed assurances.’31 Feodore in later life remembered how her mother had barely coped. ‘I well remember the dreadful time at Sidmouth,’ she recalled. ‘I recollect praying on my knees.’32 The weather had turned truly nasty – ‘the cold is almost unbearable’ – and there were no trusted local doctors.

  The painful process of blistering involved placing heated cups over slits cut in the patient’s skin, so that as they cooled down the air inside them contracted and sucked out the blood. In reality, draining Edward’s plasma made matters worse. In response to Conroy’s urgent messages to London, the late Queen Charlotte’s doctor, Dr William Maton, came down to Sidmouth. This was an unfortunate choice, as Maton could not speak French or German, and Victoire was still not fluent in English. She could not make him understand that she didn’t want her husband blistered or bled. ‘For four hours they must have tormented him,’ Victoire claimed. ‘It made me nearly sick.’33

  On Wednesday 19 January, Dr Maton ordered six
pints of blood to be removed from his patient, in two separate sessions. When Edward was told about the second session, he wept.

  You can feel nothing but sympathy for Victoire, watching her husband being put through these barbarous treatments, while instinctively knowing that they were doing no good. She had to help him out of bed, and grew terribly frightened when he fainted and vomited. There was ‘hardly a spot on his dear body’, Victoire wrote on 20 January, left untouched ‘by cupping, blisters or bleeding’. ‘I cannot think it can be good for the patient to lose so much blood when he is already so weak,’ she continued, ‘he was terribly exhausted yesterday after all that had been done to him by those cruel doctors.’34

  By Saturday 22 January, the crisis had drawn important people to Sidmouth, Victoire’s brother Leopold and his advisor Baron Stockmar. Stockmar, himself a trained doctor, felt Edward’s pulse and knew at once he could not survive: he ‘rattles in his throat and is despaired of’.35

  Edward did rally briefly, during which time they tried to get him to sign his will. This document would leave Victoire in an unusual, indeed, a startling position. For her husband’s will left everything to her. In effect, this meant she’d get nothing, for, as one of his sisters sighed, ‘Edward had nothing in the World but debts.’36 But the will also left Victoire – a single woman – something intangible but vital: responsibility for bringing up and educating the heir to the throne. ‘I do nominate, constitute, and appoint my beloved wife, Victoire, duchess of Kent,’ he wrote, ‘to be sole guardian of our dear child, to all intents and for all purposes whatever.’37