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

by Lucy Worsley

  Albert’s upbringing – his missing mother was replaced by a male tutor – had left him overly serious and no good at small talk. ‘He will always have more success with men’ was Baron Stockmar’s way of putting it. At Uncle Leopold’s request, Stockmar had involved himself in Albert’s education, and pronounced his pupil ‘too indifferent and too reserved’ when it came to women.37 Stockmar was a self-effacing man who nevertheless had a steely commitment to the ideal of constitutional monarchy. As Leopold’s advisor, he involved himself behind the scenes in many European affairs. Feodore was quite clear about which brother she preferred, and it wasn’t Albert. ‘Although Albert is much handsomer and cleverer’, Ernest was the better company, Feodore thought, as he was so ‘good natured’.38 ‘Good natured’ was ladylike code for saying that Ernest was a flirt. In due course, Ernest would go on to reveal that he had a dishonest and manipulative side to his character.

  Victoria agreed that Albert was ‘the more reflecting of the two’.39 Yet there could also be an additional reason for Albert’s reserve with her during this first meeting. Given his preternatural cleverness, he must have known that he was being inspected as a potential future member of Britain’s royal family. However, he had no guarantee that he would meet the required standard, and this was damaging to his pride. He must have been all too aware that the Coburgs, including his father, his Uncle Leopold and his Aunt Victoire, wanted him to marry his cousin. But he might also have picked up on the fact that William IV had other plans for his niece. The king had not wanted the Coburg boys to come to Kensington Palace at all, and Lord Palmerston reported that he was ‘vexed and annoyed’ by their presence.40 Albert admitted later that he was fully ‘aware at the time of our visit in 1836 of the difficulties attending it’.41 By this, he can only have meant the unseemly jostling between Victoria’s paternal uncle William IV and her maternal uncle Leopold to be the one to choose her mate.

  Victoria, then, at sixteen, was generically excited about boys, but showed no sign of falling in love. She was soon gushing in her journal that she adored Ernest and Albert ‘so very very dearly’ but equally: ‘much more dearly than any other Cousins in the world’. To her they remained a pair, ‘dearest Ernst and dearest Albert’, both of them equally ‘grown up in their manners … sensible and reasonable, and so really and truly good, and kind-hearted’. The only thing that distinguished Albert from Ernest in her mind was his superior intelligence.42 Albert, likewise, claimed that there was nothing but cousinly feeling in the visit. ‘We stayed from 3 to 4 weeks at Kensington, Princess Victoria & myself … & were much pleased with each other, but not a word in allusion to the future passed.’43

  And yet, underneath this delicate dance of compliments, Victoria did fully understand her Coburg family’s intentions. Her journal was not a private place in which to admit her feelings. The ‘System’ obliged others – Lehzen, her mother – to read it, and other sources directly undermine its credibility as a true record. Victoria’s half-brother, Charles, for example, understood that despite the king’s views a Coburg marriage was practically a done deal. ‘The connection,’ he claimed, ‘was regarded as the one aim to which all energies should be directed.’44

  Outside the semi-public pages of her journal, Victoria acknowledged her place in all this. She understood deep down that she would do what her Uncle Leopold wanted, even if maidenly modesty required her to be coy about it. ‘I must thank you my beloved Uncle,’ she wrote to him in a private letter, ‘for the prospect of great happiness you have contributed [sic] to give me in the person of Dear Albert. Allow me then … to tell you how delighted I am with him, and how much I like him in every way. He possesses every quality that could be desired to make me perfectly happy.’45

  The compensation for not being allowed to choose her own husband was that Albert really was almost faultless, definitely clever and seemingly kind. In addition, he was much more physically attractive than she was. In fact, he had ‘the most pleasing and delightful exterior and appearance you can possibly see’, Victoria judged. ‘I have only now to beg you, my dearest Uncle,’ she wrote to Leopold, ‘to take care of the health of one, now so dear to me.’46

  History likes to think of Victoria’s marriage to Albert as a great love match. It both was and yet wasn’t. The example set by her parents, the romantic novels she devoured and the expectations of the wider world ensured that Victoria would noisily insist upon finding love within her marriage. But this was clearly an arranged match, and Victoria understood that even at sixteen. Two years later, in 1838, she’s found writing to Uncle Leopold again, saying that it was her ‘firm resolution’ not to marry her cousin until she was twenty, at the ‘very earliest’. She wasn’t, she thought, ‘yet quite grown up’, or ‘strong enough in health’ to bear children. But she reassures her uncle that she won’t be ‘faithless to my promise and change my mind’. She just wants, Victoria explains, ‘to enjoy two or three years more of my present young girlish life before I enter upon the duties and cares of a wife’. Besides, Albert still needed to improve his English.47

  And it wasn’t just the prospect of the ‘duties and cares of a wife’ that daunted her. It was also the prospect of becoming a queen.

  7

  Accession: Kensington Palace, 20 June 1837

  At five o’clock on the fine morning of Tuesday 20 June 1837, a mere quarter-hour after sunrise, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chamberlain ‘knocked and rang and thumped’ on the door of Kensington Palace.1

  This unlikely-looking pair, ‘toil-worn and dust-stained with their night ride’, had travelled post-haste from Windsor Castle.2 The two messengers had come on a mission vital to the monarchy: to let William IV’s successor know that he had died at two o’clock that morning. Victoria, still sleeping upstairs, had been queen for the last four hours.

  The Archbishop and the Lord Chamberlain kept thumping away, but it was a long time before they could get anyone to let them in. Then, once again, Conroy insinuates himself into the story. A footman eventually fetched him, he received the visitors, and only then sent a maid to tell the Duchess of Kent.3

  Unaware of the tumult below, Victoria was pretty much the last person in the palace to learn what had happened. Her struggle to free herself from the ‘System’ was clearly not quite over yet.

  Victoria was asleep in the cavernous bedchamber formerly used by Kings George I and II that her mother had commandeered for their joint use. This room was ‘very large and lofty’, gloomy most of the day, yet ‘very nicely furnished’ by Victoire for her daughter.4 Flowered papered walls looked incongruously feminine in such a large, high space. Its windows faced east towards the sun now rising over the Round Pond in the gardens below.

  Not only had Victoria (unknowingly) reached the throne, she’d also reached her majority. Just three weeks earlier, she’d celebrated her eighteenth birthday at last. ‘How old!’ she confided to her journal, ‘and yet how far am I from being what I should be.’5 Conroy must have been gnashing his teeth. There would now be no need for a Regency by his pawn Victoire. When Victoria became queen, she would rule in her own right.

  But it had been a dangerously close-run thing. It was a mere two days after Victoria’s birthday that William IV fell seriously ill. He developed pneumonia on top of an existing heart condition. ‘Our King is in a very precarious state,’ wrote Lord Palmerston, ‘it is not likely he can last long.’6 William IV did surprise everyone by clinging onto life for a couple of weeks, ‘like an old lion’, as people said.7 He asked his doctor to ‘tinker [him] up to last out’ until the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, the great annual celebration on 18 June that he’d always particularly enjoyed. He was determined to stay alive until then, despite the lungs full of blood, distended heart and double-sized spleen that his post-mortem revealed.8

  In these final days of her royal uncle’s life, the tension ratcheted up for Victoria at Kensington Palace. Even if the position of Regent was no longer in play, there was the question of the ap
pointments she would make as queen, and the issue of reward for those who had brought her up. Uncle Leopold dispatched Baron Stockmar as an agent to maintain his own influence. Stockmar reported back that at Kensington Conroy continued ‘the system of intimidation with the genius of a mad-man, and the Duchess carries out all that she is instructed to do with admirable docility’. Victoria had so far firmly refused ‘to give her Mama her promise that she will make [Conroy] her confidential advisor’. But, Stockmar admitted, ‘whether she will hold out, Heaven only knows, for they plague her, every hour and every day’.9

  This struggle had taken place behind closed doors. On 6 June, Victoria stopped going out in public, out of respect for her dying uncle, and the following day her lessons came to an end, for ever, as it turned out.10 On 16 June, Stockmar reported that Victoire was being ‘pressed by Conroy to bring matters to extremities, & to force her daughter to do her will by unkindness & severity’.11 Conroy, beginning to lose control over himself as well as the situation, was even heard saying that ‘if Princess Victoria will not listen to reason, she must be coerced’.12

  For her part, Victoire had convinced herself that if Victoria failed to appoint Conroy as advisor she would be condemned for the omission. ‘Ach, she has much, much to learn,’ Victoire complained. Victoria’s mother thought her far too ‘young and inexperienced’, blithely ignorant of just how challenging it would be to sit on the throne. The self-doubting duchess simply could not comprehend her daughter’s faith that she was going to manage. Victoria was certainly anxious, but she had confidence that she was just about ‘mature enough to undertake the heavy duties’. Or at least, she felt confident enough to try.13

  Outside the palace, it was true that many other people were worried too. ‘There would be no advantage,’ thought Lord Palmerston, for example, in having ‘a totally inexperienced Girl of 18 just out of a strict Guardianship to govern an Empire’.14 But even Conroy could only coax the dippy duchess to go a certain distance towards supporting him against her daughter. While he himself thought that Victoria should be ‘coerced’ into cooperation, he ‘did not credit the Duchess of Kent with enough strength’ for carrying through ‘such a step’.15

  Victoria also drew strength from the knowledge that the endgame was in sight. ‘Avoid quarrels,’ her Uncle Leopold advised her. ‘You must keep up your usual cool spirit, whatever may be tried in the House to teaze you out of it.’ He also warned her to ‘be not alarmed at the prospect’ of coming to the throne ‘perhaps sooner than you expected’.16

  And despite her calm manner in public, Victoria was indeed alarmed. ‘The poor King was so ill,’ she told her diary on 19 June, ‘he could hardly live through the day.’17 That night, she had stayed up until 10.15, reading Sir Walter Scott while her maids took down her hair. Some suspected, but no one knew for sure, that this was her last evening as a princess.

  Victoire had been complicit in the ‘System’ and had placed too much trust in Conroy. Yet she now becomes a truly pitiful figure, when, at the very first dawn of Victoria’s reign, she returns softly to the bedchamber where she and her daughter had slept the night side by side. Victoire looks down at the still-sleeping girl. She has given up so much for her younger daughter, but in return Victoria seems so ungrateful and unaware. ‘What is to become of my beloved Child, so young?’ now Victoire asks herself. ‘My greatest of fears was that I loved her too much.’18

  Eventually Victoire broke off brooding, and she tells us that she ‘awoke the dear child with a kiss!’19 But in Victoria’s own journal account of the day, penned that evening, she does not mention this at all.20 She was by then cutting every interaction with her mother out of her mind.

  Rising from the little bed next to her mother’s ‘with much quickness’, Victoria put on a white dressing gown. She passed through the maid’s room adjoining the bedroom, and into her sitting room.21 She went entirely by herself. Victoire, who had once hoped as Regent to accompany her daughter throughout the first day of her reign, did not even attempt to go with her.22

  There in the sitting room, Victoria saw a remarkable sight. Two men, one elderly, one middle-aged, were kneeling before her on the carpet. Archbishop William Howley and Lord Chamberlain Francis Conyngham were telling her that the life of King William IV had flickered out at twelve minutes past two that morning.23 Conyngham, the dead king’s senior household officer, was the first person to call Victoria ‘Your Majesty’. He handed her the certificate of her uncle’s death.24

  The man on his knees was typical of the complicated, louche aristocrats who’d circled around the Royal Dukes and thereby helped to tarnish the image of the monarchy. Conyngham’s mother had been the last, and most impressively buxom, of George IV’s string of bosomy mistresses. A celebrated description of Lady Conyngham claimed she had ‘not an idea in her head; not a word to say for herself; nothing but a hand to accept pearls and diamonds with, and an enormous balcony to wear them on’.25 She got her son Francis a job as a page to her lover, George IV, and then as Lord Chamberlain to William IV. Francis Conyngham is chiefly remembered today as one of the hated absentee landlords whose tenants were to suffer so badly in Ireland’s Great Famine. Was this someone that Victoria should retain in post? From now on, she would have to judge the status, character and qualities of everyone with whom she came into contact, for thus she would create the moral tone of her court.

  According to one Victorian historian, the new queen now burst into tears, ‘turned to the Primate, and said, “I ask your Grace to pray for me.”’ ‘And so was begun,’ this sentimental account continues, ‘with the tears and prayers of a pure young girl, the glorious reign of Victoria.’26 This was certainly a tearful age, in which men as well as women felt it was a sign of good breeding to cry frequently. Until the 1850s, even judges sobbed at affecting cases.27 Victoria should have cried, according to contemporary understandings of what a young lady might do. But she did not.

  She later spoke of her calmness and self-possession at that moment, and her absolute lack of tears. ‘The Queen was not overwhelmed,’ Victoria claimed, and was ‘rather full of courage, she may say. She took things as they came, as she knew they must be.’28

  Even her grief for her uncle had to be kept measured. ‘Poor old man,’ she thought, ‘I feel sorry for him, he was always personally kind to me.’29 Yet there was no time to mourn. Victoria quickly returned to her maid’s room to be dressed. She already had a black mourning gown just waiting to be put on. Still remaining at Kensington Palace to this day, this dress is a tiny garment, with an extraordinarily small waist and cuffs. With it, she wore a white collar and, as usual, ‘her light hair’ was ‘simply parted over the forehead’.30 Her girlish appearance explains quite a lot of the indulgence and romance with which her reign was greeted. It also meant that she would consistently be underestimated.

  Victoria knew exactly what to do next. ‘The moment you get official communication,’ Uncle Leopold had counselled her, ‘you will entrust Lord Melbourne with the office of retaining the present Administration as your Ministers.’31 Stockmar was on hand to reinforce his master’s words, and William Lamb, second Viscount Melbourne, was already making his way to the palace while Victoria ate breakfast. Leopold, Victoire, indeed Victoria’s whole circle, all supported the Whigs who currently dominated Parliament, not the excluded Tories.

  At half past eight, Victoria wrote to her Uncle Leopold. She also penned a kind letter to her bereaved Aunt Adelaide, telling her that she need not leave Windsor Castle just yet. And she wrote to Feodore: ‘two words only to tell you, that my poor King died this morning … that I am well, and that I remain for your life your devoted attached sister V.R.’32 Her first thoughts were of her uncle, her aunt and her sister: the people who had supported her from outside the ‘System’.

  At nine, Victoria’s Prime Minister came in to see her. This would be the very first of many such meetings. An indecorous farce had been in progress for the last few days, a whispering campaign to brief Melbourne against t
he new queen. Conroy was anxious to pass on to the Prime Minister his belief in Victoria’s possible mental subnormality. But her faithful Dr Clark wrote as soon as he could to verify the opposite.33

  Melbourne, stooping to kiss Victoria’s hand, was by then sixty-one years old. A serial monogamist who enjoyed intense romantic relationships, he had loved then lost first a mentally unstable wife followed by two successive serious mistresses. A rather late bloomer as a politician, he spent a good deal of effort maintaining an air of languid insouciance (‘I generally find that nothing that is asserted is ever true, especially if it is on the very best authority’).34 He was disarmingly candid about his poor health (he drank too much) and his lost looks (he once had three hairdressers spend three hours pulling all the greys out of his opulent, formerly auburn, hair).35 ‘I like him very much,’ Victoria decided, ‘and feel confidence in him.’ She told him that he and his government were to stay in office.36

  Melbourne also briefed her about what would happen next: her first public appearance in her new role at a meeting called the Accession Council. Members of the Privy Council had already been summoned for the purpose to Kensington Palace. The job of the councillors, mainly seasoned statesmen, was to protect and advise the monarch. Clerics in black coats, gentlemen in gold-braided court dress and even the surviving Royal Dukes in their old-fashioned breeches all started to arrive soon after eleven.37 Those invited to attend included Cabinet ministers, the great officers of state and officials of the old royal household. They numbered some 220, and every single one of them who’d received the message in time to make the journey to Kensington Palace turned up. ‘Her extreme youth and inexperience,’ recorded the Privy Council’s clerk, ‘and the ignorance of the world concerning her’ had piqued their curiosity as well as their sense of duty.38 The councillors were uneasy, and ready to disparage this little girl who now had the power – as Walter Bagehot put it in his work The English Constitution – to ‘declare war, make peace, negotiate treaties, disband the army, dismiss all sailors, sell off all warships, make every parish a university and pardon all offenders’.39