by Gillian Gill
When forced to choose between the interests of her employer and of her tutee, at first secretly, then overtly, and at last defiantly, Lehzen chose the child.
BEGINNING IN 1824, Louise Lehzen set out to curb the child Victoria’s temper and improve her manners. More controversially, since society rather prized ignorance in a woman, she tried, with the collaboration of the principal tutor, Dr. Davys, to interest the little princess in learning. She succeeded. Though Queen Victoria had neither the intellect nor the scholarship of her great predecessor Queen Elizabeth I, she was intelligent and disciplined, fluent in three languages, and an impassioned student of history.
Lehzen was severe but, by the standards of her day, an enlightened educator. Even privileged children of Victoria’s generation were routinely smacked, shaken, caned, and whipped, locked up in dark closets, or sent to bed without supper. However, in the documentation on Victoria’s youth, we do not find the references to corporal punishment that crop up frequently, for example, in the accounts of the youth of the Queen’s own children. When the little Princess Victoria was naughty, she was reproved, reasoned with, and sent to stand in the corner, not beaten.
Victoria’s early childhood was quite spartan but, unlike a surprising number of royal children before her, she never suffered from want. She was fed small, regular quantities of simple foods like bread soaked in milk, then considered wholesome for children. A cup of tea was a huge treat. She was warmly clothed and firmly corseted. Corsets were considered necessary to support the weak backs of little children, and they became second nature to women well into the twentieth century. However, the rooms the Princess Victoria lived in, even as an infant, were extremely cold by modern standards. The apartments at Kensington Palace occupied by the Duchess of Kent from 1820 to 1836 were, as Victoria later reminded her sister Feodora, “dreadfully dull, dark, and gloomy.” Victoria ignored the rats and the black beetles, became impervious to the cold, and developed immunities that served her well in later years.
Though her daily routine was quiet and tedious, her food plain, Victoria had occasional splendid treats and marvelous presents befitting a princess. On May 24, 1826, Prince Leopold arranged a celebration of his niece’s seventh birthday. Among her birthday presents was a matched pair of diminutive Shetland ponies and a tiny phaeton—the gift not of her uncle but of the Marchioness of Huntley a family friend. To her rapturous pleasure, the princess drove Lehzen around the huge park at Claremont in this carriage, with a boy postilion in green and gold livery on one pony and an outrider going before.
Later in the summer of 1826, there came an unexpected overture from King George IV. The Duchess of Kent and her two daughters were invited to come to Windsor for several days. Victoria had met her uncle king on at least one previous occasion, but this was the first time she was his guest. Enormous of girth, heavily powdered and rouged, bewigged and corseted, George IV was a grotesque figure, but little Victoria was unafraid, and the two hit it off at once. When they met, the King said, “Give me your little paw,” and Victoria promptly complied, and even kissed his appalling cheek. She went pink with delight when the King pinned to her dress a diamond-encrusted miniature of himself, an ornament that only the closest members of his family and set were permitted to wear.
At Windsor, John Conroy faded into the background, and Victoria could enjoy herself. Fifty years later, she vividly remembered what fun it had been to see the wapitis, gazelles, and chamois in the royal menagerie at Windsor, and to fish from a barge on Virginia Water. One day she was snatched up and taken for a drive in the royal phaeton, with the King himself at the reins. The King’s sister, Aunt Mary Gloucester, held on to her tightly so she did not fall out as the fast, high carriage bowled through the park. Victoria’s mother was terrified, but Victoria loved every minute.
Like her uncle George and most of the English royal family, Victoria passionately loved music, and she was enchanted by the band concert that was held at Windsor each evening. The King asked his niece what tune she would like his band to play. Natural courtier that she was, the seven-year-old princess replied, “Oh uncle King, I should like ‘God Save the King’ better than any other tune.” When asked at the end of her visit what she had most enjoyed, she replied, “Driving out with you, uncle King.” Victoria also noticed that her uncle King paid a good deal of attention to her beautiful stepsister, Feodora, and she picked up on the thrilling fact that marriage between the two was under discussion at court.
The English royal family was now enamored of the little Victoria Kent. With her fat cheeks, blue saucer eyes, and receding chin, the princess looked every inch a Hanoverian—“l’image du feu roi” (the image of the old King, George III), as her mother boasted to the Countess of Granville. The visit to Windsor seemed to herald a rapprochement between Windsor and Kensington, but, in fact, Victoria saw her uncle George only once again, at a large state occasion.
The visit to Windsor of 1826 raised warning bells in John Conroy’s mind. George IV was showing an interest in Princess Victoria, and the child had taken to court life like a duck to water. Conroy’s interests depended on the growing power and wealth of the Duchess of Kent, and the duchess’s fortunes, in turn, hinged on her retaining control over her daughter Victoria. Under no circumstances must the child be taken into the care of her royal English uncles and given her own household and her own staff, like the eight-year-old Princess Charlotte one generation earlier.
Conroy wasted no time in reminding the Duchess of Kent how extremely damaging it would be if she allowed relationships with the English court to become more friendly and frequent. He flattered the duchess’s amour propre by framing the issue in moral and maternal terms. The King, Conroy told the duchess, was angling to take control of Victoria, and if he succeeded, the princess would be in moral danger. The King’s household was a cesspool, and he was hated and despised in England. Even worse, behind George IV loomed the sinister figure of his brother and chief adviser, the Duke of Cumberland. This man harbored the ambition to be king after his childless older brothers and to place his son George on the united throne of England and Hanover. Who knew, whispered Conroy, whether little innocent Victoria would survive if committed to the custody of those wicked uncles.
Victoire of Kent chose to believe Conroy. She went rarely to court, was not a great reader, and still had trouble following English conversation. Conroy and his devoted ally Princess Sophia were her main sources of information. Thanks to Conroy and no thanks at all to her royal in-laws, the duchess now circulated comfortably in English society, held court at Kensington Palace, and dined out with her own coterie of friends and political allies from the Whig Party.
The duchess was ignorant but not naive, and Conroy’s interpretation of English society appealed to her prejudices. Her own sister had experienced eight years of orgies and sadistic excesses at the court of the Russian tsar. At Amorbach, Victoire had personally superintended the lying-in of her brother Ernest’s mistress, Pauline Panam. Her first husband’s Leiningen relatives had done all they could to steal the family estate from her and her son, Charles. Why should the English royals, who had always been so openly hostile to her, be any different?
Foreseeing a threat to his growing authority from Prince Leopold, Conroy also worked to detach the duchess from her own family. Conroy reminded the duchess that Prince Leopold and her eldest brother, Ernest, the present Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, led the kind of droit du seigneur life that was no longer tolerated by respectable people in England. The duchess herself had fortunately arrived in the nick of time to prevent the little princess from speaking to one of Leopold’s mistresses, who was boldly walking the sacred ground at Claremont. Such incidents could not be tolerated. Purity of thought, word, and deed must be the watchword at Kensington Palace, where a tender young girl was being educated to be queen.
The Duchess of Kent saw golden prospects ahead once her hated brothers-in-law were all dead. She therefore accepted that her daughter Victoria should be carefully sh
ielded from the dubious moral atmosphere that prevailed at Coburg and Claremont as well as Windsor. She was willing to sacrifice people she claimed to love on the altar of her own ambition to be regent and rule England in Victoria’s name.
THE FIRST PERSON sacrificed was her elder daughter. In the Princess Feodora, Conroy saw a danger to himself and his employer. At home Feodora was increasingly discontented and rebellious, and her little sister, Victoria, adored her and tried to be like her. Conroy observed Feodora’s personal triumph at Windsor. The girl was now in her late teens, exceptionally beautiful and with perfect manners—no wonder that old roué the King had noticed her. Two rich and powerful elderly men, the Duke of Nassau and the Duke of Schomberg (the Austrian ambassador in London), had shown a willingness to marry Feodora even though she had no personal fortune. Either of these men, however personally distasteful to a young girl, would have been a brilliant match. Feodora would have a home in England and, as a married woman, could be expected to exert some influence over her mother. Conroy decided that the time had come to marry Feodora off to some harmless German and get her out of the country.
“I must unequivocally state to you,” Conroy wrote to the duchess, “that it is not only essential to the interest and happiness of the Pss. Feodora that she should marry soon, but it is necessary for your and the Pss. Victoria’s interest that it should take place—the influence you ought to have over her [Princess Victoria] will be endangered if she sees her elder sister not so alive to it as she should be—and recollect, once your authority is lost over the Princess V you will never regain it.”
For Feodora, too, marriage seemed the only option. She was frustrated and unhappy at Kensington Palace. She felt her mother neglected her. She had no friends. She hated Conroy and deeply resented his tyrannical hold on her mother’s household. As Feodora recalled in a private letter to Victoria in 1843: “When I look back upon those years which ought to have been the happiest in my life [her years at Kensington Palace], I cannot help pitying myself. Not to have enjoyed the pleasures of youth is nothing, but to have been deprived of all intercourse and not one cheerful thought in that dismal existence of ours, was very hard. My only happy time was going or driving out with you and Lehzen; then I could speak and look as I liked.”
In 1827 Augusta of Saxe-Coburg and Saalfeld, the mother of the Duchess of Kent, came for a visit to Kensington Palace. On her return to Germany, she took her granddaughter Feodora with her, and, at the end of the year, the princess’s engagement to Prince Ernest of Hohenlohe-Langenburg was announced. He was a fourth-rank prince with a postage-stamp kingdom. He had no money. But he was only thirty-two and a nice man, so Feodora eagerly agreed to her mother’s choice of husband. The couple were married in England in February 1828 and then returned to Germany to take up residence at the notoriously cold, cavelike Schloss Langenburg. For many years, the penurious Hohenlohes lived on the charity of relatives, but their marriage was long and successful.
With Princess Feodora out of the way for good, John Conroy did another piece of house cleaning. He persuaded the Duchess of Kent to dismiss her lady-in-waiting, Baroness Späth, on the specious grounds that the lady was too extravagant in adoration of the Princess Victoria. Späth had been with the duchess for twenty-five years and thought she was her friend as well as her lady-in-waiting. She was without personal resources, and escaped destitution after leaving England only because she was taken into the household of the warm-hearted Princess Feodora.
Späth’s sudden dismissal was a sharp shock to Princess Victoria, who had known the baroness all her life, and even more to Louise Lehzen. Späth had been Lehzen’s only real friend in England. The dismissal also caused a sensation at the Court of St. James’s, eternally starved for information about life at Kensington Palace. The Duke of Wellington hypothesized that the Princess Victoria had observed some “familiarities” between her mother and Conroy, had told Späth, who in turn, remonstrated with her employer and was promptly dismissed. Lehzen, too, it was reported at George IV’s court, would soon be shown the door. But Lehzen managed to keep her mouth shut and cling to her position.
In January 1830, Adelaide, Duchess of Clarence, Victoire’s sister-in-law and closest friend at court, a woman whom it was hard to dislike, wrote to the Duchess of Kent to express her grave misgivings about Conroy. “He [Conroy] has never lived before in court circles or in society, so naturally he offends against the traditional ways, for he does not know them … In the family it is noticed that you are cutting yourself off more and more from them with your child … this they attribute to Conroy, whether rightly or wrongly I cannot judge; they believe he tries to remove everything that might obstruct his influence, so that he may exercise his power alone, and alone, too, one day reap the fruits of his influence. He cannot be blamed for cherishing dreams of future greatness and wanting to achieve a brilliant position for his family; no one can take this amiss in him, but everyone recognizes these aspirations, towards which his every action is directed … only he must not be allowed to forbid access to you to all but his family, who in any case are not of so high a rank that they alone should be the entourage and companions of the future Queen of England.”
Victoire Kent was mortally offended by this attempt to interfere in her affairs. Conroy was thoroughly alarmed by the letter and determined more than ever to prevent the English royal family from having access to Victoria.
IN 1830, WHEN WILLIAM, Duke of Clarence, came to the throne as William IV, Conroy felt extremely confident. Through the auspices of his “chère amie” Princess Sophia, he had been created a baronet of the Hanoverian order and so was now Sir John. At Kensington Palace, his hold over the household was undisputed. Of all the loving and loyal people who had clustered around the Princess Victoria and tried to protect her interests—her sister, Feodora; Baroness Späth; her uncle Leopold; Baron Stockmar; her uncle York; Baroness Lehzen—all but her governess Lehzen had died, moved far away, or been dismissed by the duchess at Conroy’s behest.
Tall, handsome, confident, and wily, John Conroy was used to getting his way. Throughout his career, he had successfully used women as tools for his own advancement—first his wife, then Princess Sophia, then the Duchess of Kent. But Princess Victoria was a bigger opportunity than Conroy had dared to dream of as an aspiring army officer with no enthusiasm for combat. The child who might one day be queen offered prospects not only of wealth and status but power, especially if she came to the throne as a minor. Conroy viewed Princess Victoria as a puny, insignificant gosling that someday would lay golden eggs.
But the newly minted Sir John made the misogynist’s mistake. He saw Victoria as a key to be turned, not a mind to be won. With the duchess’s acquiescence, all the power of the father was vested in him. The possibility that the curly-haired little creature growing up before his eyes might one day pose a threat to his ambitions seemed ridiculous. Unlike “Dearest Uncle” Leopold, who, on his rare visits to England, went out of his way to earn Victoria’s trust and affection, Conroy worked to break her will. Day in and day out, he snubbed and sneered at her, aiming to destroy her spirit.
From 1830 to 1837, the famous Kensington System for educating the Princess Victoria came into full effect.
The Kensington System
…
HE KENSINGTON SYSTEM, AS IT LATER CAME TO BE KNOWN, WAS DEVISED and implemented by Sir John Conroy with the full cooperation of the Duchess of Kent. It had two interlocking parts: the first, domestic and covert; the second, political and public. Internally the Kensington System was designed to limit the Princess Victoria’s freedom and mold her to Conroy’s will. Externally it was a public relations campaign that presented the Duchess of Kent as an ideal mother and made it impossible for family members in England or in Europe to challenge the duchess’s guardianship and seek custody of the princess.
The Kensington System became more oppressive as Victoria grew older and nearer to the throne. Its effects on her were serious. At four, Vickelchen, as she was then known
to her mainly German-speaking family, was a small, fat, curly, voluble bundle of energy who “set all the world at defiance.” At seven, Victoria Kent, as her English cousins called her, was a disciplined and mannerly child in shining good health, who held out her hand with royal aplomb to be kissed but could still be bossy when a child was brought in to play with her. At eleven, the Princess Victoria of Kent was like an exotic animal in a circus, going through her paces for an admiring public under the watchful gaze of her trainers, and then returning obediently to her cage. At sixteen, with a dozen royal suitors panting at her heels, she was amenorrheic and suffered from headaches and back pain. At seventeen, as her uncle king tottered on the edge of death, Victoria was virtually a prisoner in her own home.
She suffered not from neglect or physical abuse but from surveillance and stress. She lacked basic freedoms. She was not free to choose her friends and spend time with them. She was prevented from forming close relationships with members of her extended family, especially those who loved and took an interest in her. She was not allowed to gossip with servants or to play with other children without adult supervision. She could not freely express her thoughts and feelings, since her letters and journal were routinely censored, and any private conversation she did have was subject to report and reproof. Above all, she lacked a freedom that most of us take for granted—the freedom to be alone and unobserved.
