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

by Lucy Worsley

  As well as helping to sew the dolls’ costumes, Lehzen was sacrificing private life and friends for her privilege of training a probable future queen. She even refused to keep a journal, an action that would have been considered indiscreet. In return, Victoria developed ‘great respect and even awe of her’ but also ‘the greatest affection’. Victoria later claimed that for thirteen years her governess ‘never once left her’.36 This wasn’t quite true: Lehzen took a holiday in Paris in May 1831, for example. But she was rewarded for her service with the devotion of her charge.

  It must have been hard for Victoire when her own daughter began to talk about ‘my angelic dearest Mother, Lehzen, who I do so love!’37 But a coldness was gradually creeping into Victoire’s relationship with Victoria, not least because Victoria had picked up on her Uncle Leopold and Lehzen’s distrust of Captain Conroy. ‘I have grown up all alone,’ Victoria later declared.38 This was not technically true; it was more that she felt alone. In reality, she was constantly surrounded not only by servants but also, as time went on, by Conroy’s family. His wife was a frequent visitor, and his daughters, Jane and another Victoire, became Victoria’s approved playmates. With them, she played with rudimentary jigsaws called ‘dissected prints’, made cottages out of cards, dressed up as ‘Nuns’ or ‘Turks’ or rode upon a pony called Isabel.39 It doesn’t sound like a lonely life, but the loneliness that she experienced stemmed from the fact that her intimates were chosen for her.

  Conroy, for his part, had insinuated himself completely into Victoire’s confidence. It’s clear that he was adept at exploiting her lack of self-belief. ‘So often, so very often,’ she confessed to him, ‘what you said so often and what hurt me, but unhappily is true, I am not fit for my place, no, I am not. – I am just an old stupid goose.’40 Victoire also worried that Conroy had appointed a rather dubious clerk to pay the palace bills. She later admitted that ‘she was afraid of him – he might be dishonest’.41 Victoire’s own vagueness confused and irritated Conroy in return. ‘The Duchess lives in a mist,’ he said, ‘and therefore she is very difficult to deal with.’42

  But the ditzy duchess nevertheless drew emotional support from a position she developed for herself within the tightly knit Conroy family unit. The young Queen Elizabeth I, lacking a conventional family life, decided that she didn’t need one. The young Queen Victoria was excluded from, but forced to watch, a happy family life being played out all round her by the hated Conroys. Their enjoyment in each other was easy to see, yet utterly out of reach. In later life, she would seek to replicate such a close family for herself.

  Unlike the ‘misty’ Victoire, or the devious Captain Conroy, Lehzen had a crystal-clear idea of right and wrong. ‘I adored her, though I also feared her,’ Victoria remembered.43 Lehzen would say that ‘she could pardon wickedness in a Queen’, but not ‘weakness’.44 With her ‘great judgement and yet greater strength of mind’, it was Lehzen who coached Victoria in something in which she would always excel: in telling people when ‘they were wrong’.45

  Victoire and Lehzen went so far as to begin a regime of moral surveillance called the ‘Good Behaviour Book’. Beginning in 1831, it was a journal recording Victoria’s conduct, and it’s a striking record of both submission and rebellion. Victoria would often admit to sins ranging from having been ‘very thoughtless’ or ‘very impertinent’ through to ‘very very very very horribly naughty!!!!!’ This daily task of recording her life became a habit that grew into something quite remarkable: the millions of words eventually embodied in the journals that she would keep lifelong. The project owed something to the contemporary evangelical current within the Church, which required worshippers to confess their sins. Also, Victoria was repeatedly told that she was chosen for a special destiny; that her life deserved memorialising. Later she would take this idea of becoming the historian of her own life through into keeping significant dresses from her wardrobe, and into the compulsive taking and collecting of photographs. In due course, even certain rooms of her palaces would be maintained with their furniture unchanged as shrines to earlier times. Ultimately Kensington Palace itself, where the first words were written in the ‘Good Behaviour Book’, would be thrown open to visitors by Victoria. Her subjects would be allowed to see where she was born, and implicitly to judge if she’d lived life well.

  The reading material that Lehzen gave Victoria included Miss Edgeworth’s Moral Tales for Young People. These stories showed the world as good or bad, white or black, a vision of life that Victoria would retain. Edgeworth’s purpose was to produce children who could solve moral dilemmas for themselves. Yet her stories also made it clear that society was hierarchical. In ‘The Bad Governess’, for example, the girlish heroines ‘could not bear to think that a person should be treated with neglect or insolence merely because her situation and rank happened to be inferior’.46 Victoria was brought up by Lehzen to respect servants, but also to believe that they were lesser than herself.

  Miss Edgeworth’s was a monochromatic, melodramatic view of the world, but it suited troubling times. While Victoria was safely distanced from it in the garden groves of Kensington, the regime of her uncle George IV was going dangerously adrift. The long-lived George III had been so personally popular that he made the institution of monarchy more palatable too. But there was no such affection for his son. Politicians were beginning to detect a growing feeling that the monarchy could not survive, and that there was a gathering list of arguments ‘in favour of some undefined change in the mode of governing the country’.47 In other words, the unpopularity of Victoria’s uncles, combined with the human cost of industrialisation, might bring about revolution.

  This only placed further pressure upon Victoria to ‘save’ the monarchy. One visitor to Kensington Palace found her ‘a born Princess’, lacking in affectation, and representing a welcome fresh start. ‘I look to her to save us from Democracy,’ this lady concluded, ‘for it is impossible she should not be popular when she is older and more seen.’48 But the royal family itself did not think that their salvation lay in a mere girl. ‘Good heavens! A woman on the throne of so great a country – how ridiculous,’ scoffed one of her cousins.49 Victoria’s gender also presented a problem in that Britain and the German state of Hanover had been ruled for the last century by a single king. But the law prevailing in Germany prevented a female from inheriting Hanover’s throne. Under Queen Victoria, Hanover would be divorced from Britain and the monarchy’s possessions split asunder.

  In 1823, when Victoria was just short of four, she began a regular course of studies under her academic tutor, a clergyman named George Davys. She was far from swottish. ‘I was not fond of learning,’ she remembered later, ‘and baffled every attempt to teach me my letters up to 5 years old.’50 Victoire apologised in advance to Mr Davys for any bad behaviour: ‘I fear you will find my little girl very headstrong,’ she told him, ‘but the ladies of the household will spoil her.’51 Victoria herself repaid Mr Davys’s efforts with a considerable dislike, thinking him always ‘in a bad temper’.52 He does sound a bit of a bore. His published works included patronising homilies for village folk and an exposition on the importance of thrift. ‘His ambition through life,’ as his obituarist would put it, ‘was rather to be good than great.’53

  Dutiful Mr Davys nevertheless instituted a timetable of regular lessons with a roster of visiting tutors. Generally, Victoria studied for two hours in the morning and one in the afternoon. Her schoolroom routine involved an eight o’clock breakfast of bread and milk and fruit with her mother. She then rode her donkey round Kensington Gardens, followed by lessons until a very plain luncheon. After more lessons, she drove out with her mother, dined at seven on more ‘bread and milk’, and at nine ‘went to her little French bed with its pretty Chintz hangings, placed beside that of her mother’.54

  On Saturdays, she gave Mr Davys a recap of everything she’d learned that week. His curriculum favoured the arts, rather than the ancient languages that would have been studied by
a boy. The majority of the time was spent on music, drawing (where she excelled), dancing, history, poetry, religion, French and German. It was the standard education for a genteel young lady being prepared for a society debut and marriage. Her tutors reported her as ‘indifferent’ in spelling, but ‘good’ at most other subjects, with a ‘very good’ reserved for French.55 It was a lightweight curriculum for a future sovereign, but the household was not intellectually curious. As one of Victoria’s Prime Ministers would later observe, ‘old Davys instilled some Latin into her during his tutorship’ but ‘the rest of her education she owes to her own natural shrewdness and quickness’.56

  This meant that there was a basic contradiction in Victoria’s position. She was, as historian Stanley Weintraub notes, clearly born into power, and those about her fought hard for her prerogatives. And yet, at the same time, she was educated ‘by pious spinsters and cautious clergymen’, exhorted to behave demurely, and to live simply.57 ‘It had been very early instilled into her,’ wrote someone who knew the adult queen well, ‘that it was man’s province to be clever, and that it was best for woman not to intrude into it.’58 She was special, and yet she had to pretend to be ordinary. This strange contradiction – I believe – would in due course become the key to her surprisingly successful reign.

  By early 1830, when Victoria was ten, it was clear that George IV – blind, obese, addicted to laudanum and hiding away at Windsor – was dying. Lehzen has left a description of her pupil in early adolescence. ‘My Princess,’ as Lehzen calls her, ‘is not tall, but very pretty, has dark blue eyes, and a mouth which, though not tiny, is very good-tempered and pleasant, very fine teeth, a small but graceful figure, and a very small foot.’59 Victoria’s minuscule feet were well displayed in the pretty, flat, ribboned pumps of contemporary fashion. At the age of fifteen, her foot would be 21.3 centimetres long, making her, in modern terms, a British size two.60

  It was George IV’s impending death that eventually made it clear that the truth of Victoria’s position must be revealed to her. William, Duke of Clarence, and his wife Adelaide (from the double wedding at Kew) were next in line to reign. But the tragic early deaths of their four children meant that when William took the crown, Victoria would become his heir presumptive. This she needed to know.

  There are two rival accounts, Lehzen’s and Mr Davys’s, of how she learned of her future fate, and 11 March 1830 is the most likely date.61 Yet each witness has a self-serving desire to claim the honour of having announced her destiny to the little girl, and their accounts are incompatible.

  Mr Davys later told his son that he had been the one to reveal her future to Victoria. During lessons, he says, he had ‘set her to make a chart of the kings and queens. She got as far as “Uncle William”, before coming to a stop.’ Who, Mr Davys asked, was the next heir to the throne? ‘She rather hesitated, and said, “I hardly like to put down myself.”’62

  According to Lehzen, though, it was she, not Mr Davys, who slipped a ‘chronological table’ of the kings and queens of England into Victoria’s history book. Possibly this was a well-known teaching aid called ‘Howlett’s Tables’.63 ‘When Mr Davys was gone,’ Lehzen reminisced, years later, ‘Princess Victoria opened, as usual, the book again and seeing the additional paper said: “I never saw that before.”’

  ‘It was not thought necessary you should, Princess,’ Lehzen answered.

  ‘I see I am nearer to the Throne than I thought,’ Victoria declared. Lehzen next produces a record of a speech that is quite frankly implausible for a little girl. ‘Many a child would boast,’ Victoria is supposed to have said, ‘but they don’t know the difficulty; there is much splendour, but there is more responsibility!’

  In Lehzen’s sentimental – and highly Victorian – version of the scene, Victoria then raised her right forefinger, as if making an oath. She ‘gave me that little hand’, Lehzen continued, saying the words that everyone remembers.

  ‘I will be good!’ the princess promised.64

  It seems too good to be true, a parable told by a fond governess that shows both teacher and pupil in the best possible light. Yet Victoria, reading this account years later, certainly recollected that something along those lines had indeed occurred. She noted her own memory of the day in the margin of Lehzen’s account: ‘I cried much,’ she records, on learning that she would be queen, ‘and ever deplored this contingency.’65

  However, there is a third, rival account of what happened, which yet again challenges those of Victoria’s tutor and governess. Unfortunately, it comes from someone who might be considered an unreliable witness, the ‘misty’ Victoire. Far from its being a carefully stage-managed session with Mr Davys, her recollection is that the revelation of Victoria’s destiny to her came about without planning, and she genuinely just discovered it ‘by accident, in pursuing her education’.66

  On 13 March 1830, Victoire reported to the Bishop of London that her daughter knew all, and that there had been no stage management by Lehzen or Davys and their family trees and exhortations. ‘What accident has done,’ Victoire wrote, ‘I feel no art could have done half so well … we have everything to hope from this Child!’67

  And Victoire gains credibility as a witness if you look at the dates on which the various accounts were written. Lehzen’s and Davys’s were set down years later, deep into Victoria’s reign, when each was eager to claim a legacy in the formation of her character. I think that we have, after all, to trust the daffy duchess’s account from just two days after the event, and accept that one of the most dramatic scenes in Victoria’s life – ‘I will be good!’ – was merely dramatic licence.

  The Duchess of Kent’s educational arrangements also had another advantage. Victoria’s curious upbringing, despite the strain it placed upon her, despite her hostility to Captain Conroy, would turn out to be an excellent strategy in terms of public relations. Her childhood seclusion meant that she could, in due course, be presented to her people as a most interesting young lady.

  The most interesting young lady, in fact, that the world contained.

  5

  The Three Missing Weeks: Ramsgate, October 1835

  In October 1835, Victoria was sixteen, quite old enough to be married. She was taking a seaside holiday in Ramsgate, at Kent’s easternmost tip, to recover her health after an arduous tour. During the previous weeks, she’d been travelling all over England.

  Victoria had been to Ramsgate many times before. Uncle Leopold gave his sister and niece £1,000 annually to spend on a stay by the sea, as a substitute for the country house they did not have, and the resort of Ramsgate was popular with second-rank royals. Albion House, the holiday home that the Duchess of Kent rented on this autumn visit, had been taken the previous year by one of William IV’s many illegitimate sons.

  Victoria and her mother usually made their way to Kent by steam yacht.1 These steamers took seven or eight hours to get from London to Margate. There could be as many as 300 holidaymakers on board, enjoying the bars, restaurants and band.2 The common holiday herd disembarked and stayed put at Margate, but ‘people of quality’ tended, like Victoire and Victoria, to continue by carriage to the slightly classier resort of Ramsgate, where ‘the company is more select’.3

  But this was hardly a low-key, relaxing holiday. As Victoria’s carriage trundled down the streets of Ramsgate towards the harbour that September, the pavements were crowded with spectators, and the town decorated with greenery and bunting.4 ‘Englishmen,’ wrote the journalists, ‘like to see the Royal Family coming frankly among them.’5

  Her Uncle Leopold had told Victoria that ‘high personages are a little like stage actors – they must always make efforts to please their public.’6 But appearing in public sapped her energy. Part of the problem was the conventional model of nineteenth-century feminine behaviour, which emphasised modesty and retirement. She was not supposed to enjoy being a princess, being observed and applauded like this. She was, however, gradually becoming more accustomed to it, thro
ugh a careful strategy devised by her mother and Captain Conroy.

  Over the previous ten years, the two of them had refined and perfected a semi-formal ‘System’ to control and protect not only Victoria’s physical body, but also her public image. The ‘System’, as Conroy named it, with a capital ‘S’, was intended ‘to make the Princess “The Nation’s Hope”.’ ‘The basis of the whole system,’ explains one Kensington insider, was to bolster Victoire’s influence so that in case of need ‘the nation should have to assign her the Regency’.7 If William IV died before Victoria reached her majority, her Regent would otherwise be one of those unpopular and disreputable Royal Dukes. The association would taint and damage her.

  The wider Conroy family, fully dedicated to the ‘System’ their paterfamilias had conceived, convinced themselves that this danger represented by the Royal Dukes was very real. One of them even explained the ‘System’ as a response to a threat upon Victoria’s very life from the most sinister of the Royal Dukes, her uncle, the Duke of Cumberland. The Conroys convinced themselves that Cumberland had spread harmful rumours that Victoria had ‘bad health, could hardly walk, was diseased in her feet and would never grow up’. Cumberland, they believed, was ‘seized with the terrible temptation, to remove the only life, that then stood between him and the throne’. Captain Conroy’s side of the story ran that ‘the life of the Princess was at stake’.8

  But this was lurid scaremongering. If the Duke of Cumberland ever did become Regent, he’d certainly deny Victoire and Conroy the rewards and influence they thought they deserved. Some people discerned a significant element of self-interest in Conroy’s actions. There were murmurings that he was taking his ‘System’ too far, belittling, even bullying Victoria. The household’s doctor, for example, thought Conroy a ‘foolish bad man – whose ambition was to make the D.[uchess] Regent by proclaiming her Daughter an Idiot!’9