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

by Lucy Worsley

  The meeting, held down below in the Red Saloon, started at 11.30, half an hour late. Victoria’s own recollection, though, placed it at 2 p.m. So much had happened since she had woken up that morning that she could scarcely believe that only five hours had passed.40 To reach the Red Saloon, she had to descend a steep and curving staircase. She’d previously always been forbidden from using it without someone holding her hand.41 The sudden swing of this precipitous stair, once you have seen it in real life, makes such a precaution understandable for a young child. In addition, Victoria had one slightly weak knee that twinged when she climbed.42 But today – significantly – she negotiated the difficult stair all alone.

  And now she had to make her entrance. Surprising everyone waiting within, Victoria came into the Saloon entirely unaccompanied, ‘a small, slight, fair-complexioned young lady, apparently fifteen years of age’, her dress black, her hair simply dressed close to her head, and her whole appearance ‘glossy and clean-looking’.43 There was no sign of her mother or Conroy. Composedly, she ‘took her seat on a throne’.44

  Under Melbourne’s adroit stage management, a remarkable transformation had just occurred. It was considered to be difficult for a young lady simply to appear before a room full of men without blushing or simpering or shedding tears. When the news got out of what she’d done, the Examiner newspaper thought it most remarkable and novel that the queen had appeared ‘without any female attendants in the midst of a large assemblage of men’.45 The Duke of Wellington believed she showed exceptional courage in coming in ‘unattended by any other Lady’, and then by running the meeting ‘as if she had been performing the part for years’.46 She ‘read her speech in a clear, distinct and audible voice, and without an appearance of fear or embarrassment’.47

  And once this gathering of powerful old men had seen her, they began to believe in her. ‘Only those who lived in that time can understand,’ wrote Alethea Allingham, from Sidmouth days, ‘how the hearts of the people were moved as the heart of one man, when this fair young girl was called upon to fill the throne of this realm.’48 This process, which would eventually sweep the whole of Britain, began here and now in the Red Saloon. ‘There never was anything like the first impression she produced,’ admitted even Charles Greville, the gossipy, grumpy clerk of the Privy Council known in his circle as ‘The Gruncher’. He himself found it ‘very extraordinary, and something far beyond what was looked for’.49 ‘She not merely filled her chair,’ agreed Wellington, ‘she filled the room.’50

  Victoria made her oath to govern the kingdom according to its laws and customs, then each of her ministers approached in turn and, kneeling, took his own oath of allegiance.51 Each then kissed her hand. Throughout the ceremony, more and more Privy Councillors kept arriving. The kneeling and kissing took place in complete silence, which added ‘to the impressive solemnity of the scene’.52

  When called upon to sign her name, the new queen put just plain ‘Victoria’.53 This wasn’t her own idea. Her mother and Conroy had some time ago agreed that the ‘Alexandrina’ from her christening should be dropped. People had become ‘accustomed to Victoria – and do not dislike it – it being a high sounding name’.54

  After the Privy Council, she met the Lord Mayor and a deputation from the City of London, with ‘all the decision, thought, and self-possession, of a queen of older years’.55 But then, just as soon as the audience was all over, Victoria was seen to ‘run off like the girl she is’, with all the ‘high spirits’ people expected of her youth.56

  There was just one sour note in the day’s triumphant harmony. During the Privy Council meeting, Conroy and Stockmar were walking in the garden, and Conroy was making some proposals about his future. He had a list of requirements, in return for which he would retire from court life and be no further trouble to anyone. He wanted a peerage, the Order of the Bath, membership of the Privy Council and a pension of £3,000 a year.57

  As soon as Melbourne emerged from the Privy Council meeting, he was handed this list of demands. The Prime Minister was astonished. ‘This is really too bad!’ he fumed, ‘have you ever heard such impudence?’58 His hand shook so much with rage that he dropped the paper.

  Stockmar was not quite so quick to condemn. He was anxious, now, that Victoria should not turn too far or too fast against her mother and Conroy. If she appeared ungrateful, or disrespectful of parental authority, she would ‘never be able to retrieve her reputation’.59 Perhaps Stockmar could see, too, that in some ways Conroy had done a good job. He had safely delivered Victoria to the throne, her public image not only intact but glowing. Even the emotional trauma Conroy had administered had only toughened Victoria’s will. Part of the venom that Conroy aroused may be explained by snobbery. Despite having to do business with aristocrats, Conroy was a meritocrat. His dedication to his duty wasn’t at fault.

  And so, two days later, it was agreed that John Conroy should be offered an Irish peerage. This, though, would involve a long wait. In the meantime he could, and did, become a baronet. Regrettably, this situation gave Conroy permission to continue hanging around Queen Victoria’s court causing mischief.

  That first evening of her reign, overwhelmed by her day, Victoria ate her dinner alone.60 Victoire was elsewhere in the palace, having experienced the ‘most distressing day of [her] whole life’.61 Her heart was aching. ‘If my beloved Victoria should ever read these leaves,’ she wrote in her private diary, ‘I beg her to believe, that I never did anything to hurt her.’62 Yet Victoria would shortly announce that not even her mother could come into her room without permission. ‘I was obliged to remind her who I was,’ she would confide in Melbourne. ‘Quite right,’ he agreed.63

  So Victoria – calm, confident and callous – simply booted her mother out, and appointed Melbourne to the paternal role that Uncle Leopold had previously filled. ‘My poor Mother,’ she wrote with cruel complacency, ‘views Lord Melbourne with great jealousy.’64 She had another long, ‘very important and a very comfortable’ talk with him that evening, until ten o’clock, after which she said a quick goodnight to Victoire. This was a formal ceremony of dismissal, for they would no longer share a bedchamber, and Victoire was expelled to the old suite on the lower floor.

  Then Victoria cast her mother from her mind. Sitting alone, recording the day in her journal, she ruminated. ‘I shall do my utmost to fulfil my duty towards my country,’ she promised herself. ‘I am very young and perhaps in many, though not in all things, inexperienced, but I am sure, that very few have more real good will and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have.’65

  The words are humble, and heartfelt. Victoria was all too well aware that she was not particularly blessed with either looks or brains. She really was quite astonishingly ordinary. Her touching little declamation even parroted the clichés of many a nineteenth-century heroine: duty, inadequacy and piety. They were just the kind of thoughts reproduced in fiction (by Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch) and in real life (by Florence Nightingale and so many others). What Victoria had, which these other women did not, was a socially approved stage upon which to perform her intentions.66 The blind luck of such a commonplace girl’s winning the Baby Race would be one of the most significant things about her reign. She would prove that even ordinary girls could do extraordinary things.

  In the coming days, Victoria placed herself even further from her mother’s reach. Soon she moved out of Kensington Palace altogether, taking her household to a new home at Buckingham Palace. People were impressed by her decisiveness. ‘In all trifling matters connected with her Court and her palace,’ they said, ‘she already enacts the part of Queen and mistress as if it had long been familiar to her.’ Once freed from the glooms of Kensington, Victoria began to behave a little more like the forceful woman that she would one day become.

  Their first glimpse of the new queen in the Red Saloon may have encouraged her ministers and courtiers to believe that her diminutive figure and slender years would make her malleable. But the cle
rk of her Council could already see otherwise. ‘As she gains confidence,’ he thought, ‘and as her character begins to develop, she will evince a strong will of her own.’67

  And Conroy, who knew this already, would come to learn it better than ever.

  8

  Coronation: Buckingham Palace, 28 June 1838

  ‘Thursday, June 28!’ she wrote, underlining the date. It was a day to live long in the memory. ‘I was awoke at four o’clock,’ continues Victoria’s journal for her coronation, ‘by the guns in the Park, and could not get much sleep afterwards on account of the noise of the people, bands, &c.’1 She’d passed her broken night at Buckingham Palace, George IV’s grand and elegant mansion of tawny stone. It was then a much more graceful building than it is today, for later in her reign Victoria would add the clumsy east-facing wing that the palace now presents towards London. All over the capital, other people were waking up early too, ready for one of the greatest shows the city had yet seen.

  Victoria got out of bed at seven, and braced herself for the long day by eating two breakfasts, one before and one after getting dressed. At half past nine, she came out of her own suite to see the people who mattered most to her: her Uncle Ernest, Duke of Coburg, and her half-siblings Charles and Feodore. She does not mention her mother. Despite Victoria’s lack of sleep, they thought she looked ‘perfectly composed’.

  For her journey to Westminster Abbey, Victoria was wearing red robes over a stiff white satin dress with gold embroidery. She had a ‘circlet of splendid diamonds’ on her head. Her long crimson velvet cloak, with its gold lace and ermine, flowed out so far behind her little figure that it became a ‘very ponderous appendage’.2 Harriet, the beautiful and statuesque Duchess of Sutherland, Mistress of the Robes, was responsible for Victoria’s appearance. This ‘ponderous’ mantle must have made her anxious, and indeed it would get in the way and cause kerfuffle all day long. The stately duchess rather dwarfed the queen when they stood side by side, and Victoria was slightly jealous of Harriet’s habit of flirting with Melbourne. But she did trust her surer dress sense. Onto Victoria’s little feet went flat white satin slippers fastened with ribbons.3

  At ten o’clock, Victoria was ready to go. She clambered into the golden state coach made for her grandfather George III, guarded at its four corners by gilded Tritons brandishing tridents. Britannia had ruled the waves since the naval victories of the eighteenth century, and her monarch as she travelled was therefore rightly guarded by sea creatures. Eight white horses strained to jerk the coach into motion, creating its characteristically unpleasant ‘perpetually swinging movement’.4

  It lumbered its cumbrous way out of Buckingham Palace, beneath the Marble Arch that then stood right outside the building. The most stunning and novel coronation procession in history had begun.

  Victoria had sailed triumphantly through the first year of her reign, hardly putting a foot wrong. ‘John Bull’ – that imaginary personification of an Englishman – ‘was so pleased at the idea of being governed by a girl,’ claimed one newspaper, that ‘he would cut off his ears if her little Majesty required them.’5 The Caledonian Mercury thought the virgin queen ‘the rainbow of a blessed promise’.6

  These had been the best months of Victoria’s life. ‘I prorogued Parliament yesterday,’ she’d written in July 1837, ‘and am not at all tired to-day, but quite frisky.’7 ‘I had a very brilliant Levee again yesterday,’ she boasts a little later.8 ‘I have been dancing till past four o’clock this morning; we have had a charming ball,’ she wrote the day after her nineteenth birthday. It was so agreeable to be able to dance, to choose her own companions and to be free from the disapproving scrutiny of the now ‘Sir’ John Conroy and her mother. ‘Oh, how different to last year!’ she wrote. ‘Everybody was so kind and so friendly to me.’9

  When Britain was at peace, and when a new monarch was young and in good health, it wasn’t unusual for a whole year to pass between accession and coronation, to allow the planning of a magnificent ceremony. In March 1838, a whole nine months into her reign, Victoria’s Cabinet began to discuss the subject. Dispute at once broke out. London’s traders banded together to ask for an August date, to give them more time to order merchandising. Others were horrified that the traditional, exclusive banquet in Westminster Hall for the great and the good was to be cut from the proceedings, and replaced by a crowd-pleasing public procession through the streets.10 The Cabinet eventually decided that the coronation should be at the end of the parliamentary session in June. On 7 April, the order was given, and a huge machine moved into motion.11

  The final plans for Victoria’s coronation, as they emerged from the fog of discussion, were carefully calibrated to appeal to a broader range of people than any preceding ceremony. Budgeted at £70,000, it was to be cheap, but not cut-price like the previous coronation, which had been staged for Victoria’s uncle William IV. Costing just £30,000, this one had caused disappointment, and subsequently became known as the ‘Half-Crown-ation’. Yet Victoria’s would nowhere near approach the £240,000 cost of the one before that, her uncle George IV’s, which was considered over the top.

  Victoria’s coronation, poised as it was between parsimony and panache, was also a clever blend of old and new. The ceremony inside Westminster Abbey would appeal to society’s elite. Members of the peerage would be invited to attend, but even non-peers could buy the expensive tickets for entry. From their seats in specially – and precariously – constructed stands, they’d be able to look down upon a small, virginal figure taking part in the ancient ritual below. Eyeing her slight figure with approval, the new queen’s aristocracy would be able to reassure themselves that this little girl wasn’t going to give them any trouble.

  However, this coronation was to be witnessed not only by the peerage but also by some 500 members of the House of Commons. It was the first coronation since the passing of the Great Reform Act of 1832, and the extension of the franchise to people whom we would in modern times think of as middle-class. So, Victoria now had also to sign invitations to be sent to Britain’s Members of Parliament, requesting them to make their ‘personal attendance’ at ‘the Solemnity of Our Royal Coronation’.12 And then, to please the great mass of John Bulls who couldn’t physically squeeze into the abbey, there was to be that great procession through the streets.

  This was a revival of an idea that was centuries old. Coronation processions had once run from the monarchy’s ancient fortress of the Tower of London to Westminster, but there hadn’t been as lengthy a route as that now planned for Victoria since 1660. Victoria’s procession would also recognise the fact that the monarchical HQ had moved, abandoning the stronghold of the Tower in favour of chic Buckingham Palace in the classy West End. Victoria’s would be the first procession to start from Buckingham Palace, thus initiating the route so familiar from televised royal weddings and ceremonies in modern times. Finally, in the most crowd-pleasing touch of all, there was to be a huge fair in Hyde Park. It was initially planned to last two days, but popular demand ensured that it was extended to four.

  ‘The great merit about this coronation,’ thought ‘The Gruncher’ Greville, was ‘that so much has been done for the people.’13 He meant the people then called ‘the lower orders’, the manual workers who constituted 75 per cent of the population. The official estimate was that 400,000 of them had come to London specially to see the royal show.14 In the week beforehand, these floods of incomers brought the city to a standstill. Victoria’s own private carriage got stuck in Piccadilly for forty-five minutes because of the carts taking the fair goods into Hyde Park. The traffic was so solid that nobody could move.15 There was ‘not a fly or cab to be had for love or money’, it was said, and the drivers of hackney carriages were charging ‘double to foreigners!’16

  All along the route of the procession, seating was constructed for the spectators. ‘There was scarcely a house,’ ran one report, ‘or a vacant spot along the whole line from Hyde-park corner to the abbey, that was unoccupi
ed with galleries or scaffolding.’17

  On the morning of 28 June, as Victoria prepared to leave Buckingham Palace, these stands were already filled with humanity, and the squash at street level was so great that the crowds had to be held back by soldiers with rifles. ‘I was alarmed at times,’ Victoria admitted, ‘for fear that the people would be crushed and squeazed on account of the tremendous rush and pressure.’18 It was not entirely safe, or comfortable. This was still an age of mobs, and public disorder, as the Duke of Wellington had discovered only a few years previously when a London crowd had attacked his house at Hyde Park Corner for his opposition to the Great Reform Act.

  At ten o’clock, Victoria’s procession began with a bang. Following a ground-shaking gun salute, an enormous royal standard, 30 feet broad, was slowly hoisted up above the Marble Arch (which in 1838 stood in front of Buckingham Palace) to indicate that she was on the move. The early part of her cavalcade included foreign ambassadors, the Household Cavalry, the carriages of many members of the royal family and forty-eight members of the Queen’s Watermen marching along on foot.19 It was a gorgeous sight. The ‘liveries were so fanciful and such a mass of gold’, wrote one happy onlooker.20 The carriage occupied by the Russian envoy, Alexander Stroganov, was particularly pleasing, with ‘crowns all over the top’, although disappointingly not ‘of a proper czarrish shape’. Prince Esterházy’s vehicle was likewise thought very fine, even though the prince himself ‘wriggled about therein like an imprisoned worm’. Then there was the Mexican ambassador’s carriage, sporting admirable ‘nobs of leather’.21