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

by Lucy Worsley

  This surprising development was partly to do with the distaste and disinterest of Edward’s elder brother, the Prince Regent, who was dealing with his own demons in this late stage of his life. The Regent did indeed write and request to be made his niece’s guardian in the event of Edward’s death, but the letter arrived too late. And it was also due to Victoire’s aggressive and pragmatic brother, whom she called ‘gut, gut, Leopold’. Present on the spot in Sidmouth, Leopold pressed the claims of his sister’s birth family, the Coburgs, at the expense of those of Edward’s family, the Hanoverians. Disappointed of the British throne himself, Leopold could still use his sister to exert his influence.

  It was probably Baron Stockmar, as Leopold’s right-hand man, who drew up the will.38 Victoire worried that Edward wouldn’t have the strength to sign it, but then, having heard it read aloud twice, he gathered all his vitality. ‘With difficulty,’ Stockmar recalled later, ‘he wrote “Edward” below it, looked attentively at each separate letter, and asked if the signature was clear and legible. Then he sank back exhausted on the pillows.’39

  This will would leave Victoire in a position that was stronger than she could ever have imagined. A monarch had a right, indeed a duty, to control the person and education of his heir. Just a couple of generations previously, George I had removed his granddaughters from the care of their parents after a disagreement. Victoire now had enormous responsibilities. She would have to find untold strength to deliver them, and no one had ever encouraged her to have much confidence in herself.

  When the dark morning of Sunday 23 January finally dawned, Victoria’s father was very near death. An eyewitness who was standing ‘by the curtain of his bed’ in the last hours heard him say, ‘with deep emotion, “May the Almighty protect my wife and child, and forgive all the sins I have committed.”’ Edward’s last recorded words, addressed to Victoire, were ‘Do not forget me.’40 It was at ten o’clock ‘in the dim light of the January morning’ that ‘the tolling bell of the old parish church told a sorrow-stricken village that the Duke was dead’.41

  His hand was still in hers. Victoire had given him all his medicine during his illness, and not changed her clothes for five days, nor slept for five nights except on a little couch at the end of his bed. She had ‘quite adored poor Edward’, wrote someone who knew them both, ‘they were truly blessed in each other.’42 ‘Our dear Mama,’ wrote her elder daughter Feodore, ‘was very deeply afflicted.’

  For the sake of her baby, though, Victoire did her best not to give ‘way too much to her grief’.43 There was work to do. Edward’s spirit had left the cottage, but his body remained. It now had to be embalmed, and laid in state in the rose-wreathed drawing room. Local people trooped into the house to stare, passing between two men at the door each holding a black flag. Anyone well dressed was allowed to enter to pay their respects, and so many people turned up that a one-way system had to be instituted. ‘We all went,’ wrote a young lady from nearby Salcombe, to see the drawing room hung with black cloth, and lit only by candles ‘larger than any you ever saw and placed on very high candlesticks’.44 Trestles held an urn containing Edward’s heart and viscera as well as his huge coffin. Seven and a half feet long to accommodate his great height, it weighed more than a ton beneath its ‘rich velvet pall’.45

  The lying-in-state continued for longer than anyone had expected, and it was two whole weeks later, on 7 February 1820, that a magnificent procession finally formed up to transport his remains to Windsor.46 The reason for the delay was that on 29 January, just a week after Edward, George III had finally passed away. This meant that within seven days, Victoria had taken two steps nearer to the throne. There were now just three lives – George IV, the Duke of Clarence and a late entry to the Baby Race in the form of the Duke of Clarence’s two-month-old baby – between it and her.

  Edward’s will gave Victoire sole control over his daughter. But he also left her a more malign legacy. On his deathbed, he’d begged her not to forget him, and she certainly would not. Yet he’d also recommended she place her trust in his friend and servant, John Conroy. The black-haired, theatrical-looking ex-army captain would now find himself the devoted, trusted servant of the lonely, isolated duchess, with almost unlimited opportunities for power and self-advancement.

  Conroy could be of immediate use to Victoire at this ‘critical time of her life’, and raised a new loan for her at Coutts bank.47 He had wonderful ‘activity and capability’, she thought, while ‘good Leopold is rather slow in the uptake and in making decisions’.48 She had no cash, and wasn’t even certain that the Prince Regent, who was in fact now the brand-new King George IV, would even let her return to Kensington Palace. Conroy and Leopold escorted her back to London in ‘bitter cold and damp weather’, looking ‘very sharp after the poor little baby’.49

  Within eighteen months, Victoire had lost her placid life in Amorbach, her husband and all prospect of security in this foreign land of England. ‘My poor head is so confused, I can hardly think,’ she admitted, finding comfort only in ‘dear, sweet little Vickelchen’.50

  But Edward had also bequeathed his family something more significant than debts and the service of the dubious Captain Conroy. Despite his frustrating, wasted life spent largely in exile, Julie had shown Edward what a functioning romantic relationship looked like, and he had put it into practice with Victoire. Under his lasting influence, Victoire would now fight like a lion to remain close to her daughter, even if the effort was fraught with danger. She could have retired to Amorbach, as the British establishment now wished that she would. She could have left her baby to be brought up by the grudging George IV. And yet she would stay, standing ‘alone, almost friendless and unknown’ in this country where she ‘could not even speak the language’.51

  Victoria, then, would grow up surrounded by people with strong passions, for her, and for her future. From them she would gain a lesson that was doubly hard for a king or queen to learn: how to create a family, and how to love. This lucky chance would ultimately save the monarchy.

  4

  ‘I will be good’: Kensington Palace, 11 March 1830

  Her teacher hands her a book. Folded within its pages is a chart listing Britain’s kings and queens. Victoria, in her white dress and coral necklace, has pretty light brown hair and a chubby lower lip that tends to fall open unless she remembers to keep it closed. She’s just short of eleven years old. The knowledge of her place in the succession has so far been kept from her. Look at the chart, she is told. Her uncle the king George IV is gravely ill. He cannot live long. Who will come next?

  What follows is one of the best-known and most dramatic scenes in Victoria’s life. Sitting at the rosewood table in Kensington Palace where she did her lessons, she studied the chart, thought it through and worked it out. When her oldest uncle George died, her next oldest uncle William would take over. And when he died, she must herself become queen.

  ‘I see I am nearer the throne than I thought,’ Victoria is supposed to have said. ‘I will be good!’

  It would become the most celebrated statement of Victoria’s childhood, rousing words, with a message of responsibility and duty: one must step up to the challenge of ruling one’s country, as well as learning one’s French.

  But did it really happen?

  One detail at least is agreed by all sources: that the setting was Kensington Palace. It was the sleepiest and most sedate of the numerous royal palaces. Kensington was ‘a place to drink tea’, by contrast to Windsor Castle – ‘a place to receive monarchs’ – and Buckingham Palace, where you went ‘to see fashion’. During Victoria’s Kensington childhood, anyone going for a walk ‘quietly along the gardens, fancies no harsher sound to have been heard from the Palace windows, than the “tuning of the tea-things”’, or the playing of a piano.1

  Behind closed doors, though, the atmosphere at Kensington was far from peaceful. Victoria would come to believe it was not so much a palace as a prison. Deep in the gardens, she was growing
up in isolation. Her guardians deliberately kept her well away from both the greedy eyes of her future subjects, and the disreputable, high-society world of George IV. She was comfortable, she was well-fed, she had toys. But she was also under considerable psychological strain. She formed the centre of a small and close-knit circle whose adoration placed her under what was sometimes intolerable pressure.

  In later life, Victoria admitted that as a child she’d been spoiled, and ‘very much indulged by everyone’. ‘Everyone’ included her mother’s devoted lady-in-waiting, Baroness de Späth, who’d been with Victoire since her first marriage, Victoria’s nurse Mrs Brock – ‘dear Boppy’ – and an elderly dresser named Mrs Louis. They all of them ‘worshipped the poor little fatherless child’.2 With Baroness de Späth, it even became ‘a sort of idolatory’, and ‘she used to go on her knees’ before her charge.3

  Looking at Victoria’s little face, with its typically Hanoverian, slightly bulging blue eyes, these ladies discerned ‘a very striking resemblance to her late Royal Father’.4 It was hard to chastise someone who’d lost a parent so young. Victoria was as close as she could be to her half-sister, but Feodore was eleven years older. What she lacked was a playmate on an equal footing, someone to laugh at her. ‘You must always remember,’ said a person who knew her well later in life, that she never had companions her own age to ‘knock any nonsense out of her’.5 Victoria was developing a streak of selfishness that stemmed from the indulgence of Boppy and Späth.

  Into this pressure-cooker of adulation came the bracing influence of Johanna Clara Louise Lehzen. She’d arrived at Kensington in 1819 as Feodore’s governess. Five years later, Victoria was old enough to need a governess of her own. Prince Leopold, still giving financial help to his sister’s household, decided that Lehzen should do the job. Although he did not live at Kensington, his influence was very great. Victoire had £6,000 a year, voted by Parliament at the time of her marriage. Leopold, though, had £50,000 annually, a wildly generous provision made at the time of his short-lived marriage to the late Princess Charlotte. The wider royal family considered that Leopold could easily bear some of the living costs of his sister and niece. Yet leaving Leopold to shoulder the financial responsibility like this meant that the royal family also sacrificed a good deal of their own power over Victoria. Because he paid for things, Victoria would become almost the property, indeed the puppet, of her beloved ‘Uncle Leopold’.

  And Leopold now chose Lehzen. This was partly because he thought she would be a counter-influence against Captain Conroy, who controlled much of what went on at Kensington, and whom Leopold distrusted. ‘Lehzen’, as the household called her, was an intense character, with dark-eyed, dark-haired ‘Italian’ looks, and a disordered digestion.6 She’d say that she ‘did not know the feeling to be hungry’ – something that would later cause trouble with her pupil – and that all she ever ‘fancied were potatoes’.7 She suffered from migraines, which some people misinterpreted as a drinking problem. It was family tragedy that had forced Lehzen to find work as a governess. She was the youngest daughter of a pastor in Hanover; her mother had died when she was young, and three of her sisters had also passed away before reaching twenty. Lehzen was born the wrong side of the scenes to sit down at table with aristocrats and courtiers, and was eventually made a baroness to eliminate the difficulties in etiquette that this caused.8

  Lehzen had the self-discipline, plus the selfless dedication, that her position demanded. But she considered the job offer that Leopold made (via Victoire) very carefully before accepting. ‘After a short silence,’ Lehzen recollected of the interview, ‘I said that I had often thought of the great difficulties which such a person might have to encounter in educating a Princess.’9 As a condition of her service, Lehzen asked that she might always be present when Victoria met third parties, so that her influence would be paramount. Although Victoria met few outsiders, this did not mean that she spent much time alone. Every aspect of her progress through girlhood was kept constantly under watch. ‘I never had a room to myself,’ Victoria claimed in later life, ‘till I was nearly grown up always slept in my Mother’s room.’10 Victoria told one of her own children that she was not even allowed to walk downstairs unaccompanied in case she fell.11 Even when she walked out in Kensington Gardens, the young princess felt, people constantly ‘look at me … to see whether I am a good child’.12

  As she was already living at Kensington Palace, Lehzen must have been aware that her charge would be difficult to manage. The celebrated fiery temper of the Hanoverian dynasty was already visible in the little girl: people called her ‘le roi Georges in petticoats’.13 ‘Did she not feel unhappy when she had done wrong?’ a tutor once asked her. ‘Oh no,’ Victoria replied.14 Her mother Victoire was still finding all this very difficult. Her younger daughter ‘drives me at times to real desperation’, she admitted.15

  But Lehzen, thoughtful but strict, had the strength of character not to let Victoria’s tricks get out of hand. ‘Lehzen takes her gently from her bed,’ we hear of the morning routine, ‘and sits her down on the thick carpet, where she has to put on her stockings.’ ‘Poor Vicky!’ Victoria would say, ‘She is an unhappy child! She just doesn’t know which is the right stocking and which is the left!’16 She usually appeared in the white, pink or pale blue of a nice young girl. She’d been wearing figure-moulding stays – or at least the softer, unboned equivalent thought suitable for children – since the age of six.17

  In later years, Victoria’s memory convinced her that her life at Kensington was bleak and gloomy, and another of its inhabitants did once call the place a ‘hospital for the decayed and poor royalties’.18 While Victoria’s childhood was far distant from the real deprivation of the many truly poor children of London, it was true that the palace did not run smoothly. Her father’s financial problems still dogged the household, and luxuries were carefully controlled. ‘I never had a sofa, nor an easy chair,’ Victoria claimed, and ‘there was not a single carpet that was not threadbare.’19 The very ‘Cribb Bedstead in which Her Majesty first reposed’, purchased from Mr Francis of Bond Street, was never paid for: its maker was still complaining that his invoice was unpaid eighteen years after her birth.20 Still, Victoire’s accounts do show a steady stream of small extravagances flowing into the palace: honey from Fortnum & Mason’s; porcelain from Josiah Wedgewood; a silver muffintoaster.21

  Victoria’s food was an odd mixture of grand and mean. She recalled eating ‘bread and milk out of a small silver basin’, with tea ‘only allowed as a great treat’.22 ‘The Princess only eats plain roast mutton,’ claimed Captain Conroy, wanting praise for running a thrifty and wholesome household.23 If given the opportunity, Victoria would gorge. One of her passions was fresh fruit. When she could get them, she would devour peaches, gooseberries, grapes, cherries, apples, pears.24 In fact, the close control exerted over her diet meant that the seeds of a dysfunctional eating pattern were being planted. In a story written by the young Victoria, the heroine, a ‘naughty girl’, behaves in a way that’s thoroughly ‘naughty greedy and disobedient’ yet somehow manages to escape punishment. Even better, in this tale of wish fulfilment, she gets ‘rewarded’ for her bad behaviour with a profusion of sweetmeats.25

  Victoire watched Victoria so closely and carefully because of the legitimate fear that despite her late husband’s will, George IV might at any time try to remove her daughter from her care. Previous kings had always made their own educational arrangements for their heirs, and precedent was everything in the royal family. George IV’s personal dislike of Victoire meant he was constantly ‘talking of taking her child from her’.26

  The lonely Victoire, with her debts and responsibilities and grief, was scatterbrained, and prone to making poor judgements of character. But she redeems herself with her charm and warmth, and clearly loved her children. ‘Her kindness and softness,’ it was said of her, ‘are very delightful in spite of want of brains.’27 She was gradually learning the language of her adopted coun
try, but still apologised to visitors ‘for not speaking English well enough to talk it’.28 This is one of the reasons she had grown so dependent upon Captain Conroy.

  Victoire never wrote – nor presumably spoke – quite as a native. Did she therefore talk to her daughter in German? The unpopularity of the German Hanoverians in Britain explains Victoria’s own later insistence that she did not. ‘Never spoke German … not allowed to,’ she stoutly claimed.29 Her schoolroom timetable does reveal, however, that she had a formal German lesson twice a week.30 And the German accents of Victoria’s mother, Lehzen and Späth did certainly affect her spoken English. Her tutor Mr Davys, brought in to supplement Lehzen with more formal lessons, recollected that at first ‘she confused the sound of the “v” with that of “w”, and pronounced much as muts.’31

  Despite her account of tarnished silver, threadbare carpets and uncomfortable chairs, Victoria also had plenty of toys, especially dolls. She was ‘quite devoted’ to her dolls, ‘& played with them till she was 14’. She believed that they were her friends in place of real little girls: ‘she was an only child,’ she wrote, ‘& except occasional visits of other children lived always alone, without companions.’32

  As well as her dolls, Victoria had a wonderful doll’s house. For her eighth birthday, her presents included furnishings for it, including ‘a tiny melon-shaped silver tea-pot, with a very short spout’ and marked with a ‘V’.33 This is one among other pieces of evidence that, contrary to common belief, she was usually called ‘Victoria’, her second name, rather than ‘Drina’, the diminutive of her first, even in childhood. The dolls had an educational purpose even beyond the making of their costumes. They also provided a training in the court life that Victoria in seclusion was failing to experience. ‘Upon a long board full of pegs, into which the dolls’ feet fitted,’ we’re told, ‘she rehearsed court receptions, presentations, and held mimic drawing-rooms and levees.’34 Even so, Victoria’s limited social opportunities were making her bashful. For her whole life, she could sometimes lose confidence in a conversation, and allow it to peter out in a ‘shy way she had’.35