by Gillian Gill
For the first eighteen years of her life, Queen Victoria was never alone in a room by herself. Someone was with her not only when she ate and did her lessons and took her exercise but when she slept, washed, and used the chamber pot. When Victoria was a small child, her mother, the Duchess of Kent, rarely went away overnight, and if she did, the nurse, Mrs. Brock, was with the child. After 1824, Louise Lehzen never left Victoria’s side during the day. She was required always to be within earshot when the princess was in the company of visitors. Victoria had a bevy of servants and teachers, and she lived in a palace, but she had no day nursery to play in or night nursery to sleep in, and hence no private place where she could keep her things.
Until the day of her accession, Victoria slept in her mother’s bedroom on a small bed next to her mother’s four-poster. Lehzen stayed with her until the duchess came to bed and dismissed the governess for the night. Victoria did her lessons in her mother’s sitting room until she was sixteen, when she at last acquired a sitting room of her own. She never went outside unaccompanied, and as she got older, the group accompanying her got larger, so there was no chance of her ever slipping away. Queen Victoria once told her daughters that until the day of her accession, she was forbidden to go down a staircase unless someone held her hand.
Everything Victoria said or did was monitored. If a friend or relative came to call, if a tutor came to give a lesson, if a child came to play, if a footman came in to mend the fire, Victoria’s mother, Lehzen, John Conroy himself, or one of his seven family members was always present to supervise the event and overhear the conversation. When Victoria was having her hair done, either she read aloud or Lehzen read aloud to her from some educational book. That way the princess had no chance to chat with the maid. All of Victoria’s letters were looked over before they were posted, especially if they were written to her relatives.
At thirteen the princess was given a journal by her mother and instructed to record the events of her day, writing first in pencil, then copying over in ink. The journal was not the child’s private possession, a place where she could freely lay out her thoughts and emotions. Both her mother and Lehzen read the diary regularly. Victoria’s early journal tells us little about what she was thinking and feeling and makes no mention of the difficulties she faced as a late teenager. Nothing in the journals could be used against the duchess and Conroy.
Conroy built a wall between Victoria and everyone in the world except her mother, himself, and his family, but the wall was made of glass so that the princess could be constantly on view to the world. This combination of isolation and exposure, of constraint and performance, placed enormous stress on Victoria’s youthful mind and body.
When resident at Kensington Palace, Victoria was taken out each day for exercise in the gardens, which were open to the public. Londoners spotted the princess on her outings, first pushed by her nurse in a baby carriage; then walking hand in hand with her older sister and escorted by a huge footman; then riding, first a donkey, then a pony, then a horse. In the summer, as a tiny creature, she could be viewed just outside her mother’s ground-floor apartments, bowling her hoop or gravely watering her feet along with the flowers. On her seaside holidays, she could be observed playing on the sands. Visitors allowed inside Kensington Palace were enchanted to see the princess at the far end of her mother’s sitting room, playing quietly with her large collection of dolls. These were small, plain, inexpensive creatures, 132 in all, for which Victoria and Lehzen created identities, composed dramas, and sewed costumes. The dolls were the friends Victoria was not allowed to have, and she played with them until she was fourteen.
WHILE KEEPING AN increasingly tight grip at home, Conroy worked to promote the political and financial interests of the Duchess of Kent in the outside world. The man was a blackguard, as many gentlemen in England asserted in private, but he was a brilliant and resourceful agent with a preternaturally modern understanding of public relations.
Conroy was middle class despite his fanciful family tree. Unlike the aristocratic sycophants who haunted the Court of St. James’s, he had a sense of the rapidly growing power of the middle classes in England and of the Protestant evangelical values they espoused. Change was in the air. The excesses of the French Revolution had led to a grassroots rejection of the freethinking, free-loving, atheistic, liberal society of the late eighteenth century. Conroy understood that in England king and government had less unchallenged authority than in any other monarchy and could not risk flouting public opinion. He saw that the English people hated George IV because he was corrupt, promiscuous, and profligate, and that none of George’s brothers was capable of raising the reputation of the house of Hanover in England.
So, in preparation for the reign of the virgin Queen Victoria, over which he intended to preside, Conroy built an image of purity, modesty, and decorum around the Duchess of Kent. It had little basis in the lady’s Coburg past, but it worked because it was so in tune with the spirit of the age. Victoria as princess was formed in the image dreamed up by Conroy. As queen she patented, registered, and made it her trademark. Victoria hated Conroy, but still she learned from him.
In 1825 Conroy successfully lobbied parliament to increase the Duchess of Kent’s allowance by six thousand pounds a year. To Kensington Palace’s vast satisfaction, the Princess Victoria was referred to in the House of Commons as the heir presumptive even though her uncles York and Clarence were both alive. One of Conroy’s allies, Lord Darnley complimented the Duchess of Kent upon the “propriety, domestic affection, and moral purity” with which she was rearing her child. Darnley called her “unexampled in prudence, discretion, and every amiable quality that could exalt and dignify the female character.”
When the Duke of Clarence came to the throne as William IV in 1830, the childless royal couple tried to take custody of their little Kent niece, for whom they felt great affection. Conroy moved swiftly and effectively to prevent this. He insisted that Victoria could not be subjected to the tainted moral atmosphere at court where the new King’s ten bastard children were welcomed. Cleverly throwing a wedge between the new King and parliament, Conroy assured ministers that William IV had not long to live, that Queen Adelaide was barren, and that therefore immediate provision must be made for the minority of Queen Victoria. Unsurprisingly, the King was outraged and Queen Adelaide wounded by this salvo, and the chasm widened between Windsor and Kensington.
Conroy also launched a public relations campaign on behalf of the Duchess of Kent. His goal was, first, to make it impossible to separate Victoria from her mother or indeed to question the propriety of that lady’s custody of her child. Second, to establish that the duchess was the right and proper person to be appointed regent in the event of the Queen’s minority. Conroy succeeded brilliantly, and he and the duchess began to feel that they held all the trump cards.
In 1831 a panel of clerical dignitaries was invited to Kensington Palace to interview the Princess Victoria and evaluate her scholarly and spiritual progress. In their subsequent report, the bishops professed themselves de lighted with the princess. Her Highness’s command of Scripture, religious history, geography, French, German, Latin grammar, arithmetic, and the history of England far surpassed that of other young persons of her age, they noted, and she was also very adept at drawing.
The Archbishop of Canterbury was also summoned to Kensington Palace for a private interview with the duchess. His Grace was charmed when Victoria’s mother confided in him how much she idolized her daughter and how often she doubted her own worthiness to educate such a precious child. She sent to the archbishop the glowing reports prepared by his ecclesiastical brethren. These were then consigned to the safety of the archives of Lambeth Palace, the archbishop’s official residence, as further documentary evidence of the excellence of the Kensington System. In due course, parliament decreed that, in the event of a minority, the Duchess of Kent should be sole regent for her daughter Victoria.
On only one point did his Grace the Ar
chbishop of Canterbury in 1830 question the Duchess of Kent’s education of her daughter. Had the Princess Victoria been told of her lofty destiny, the archbishop asked the duchess. With the King, George IV, visibly failing, surely this was now necessary. The duchess replied that the Princess Victoria had hitherto been carefully shielded from knowledge of her position in the line of succession, but that indeed she was now perhaps old enough to be told the truth.
And so, two months before her eleventh birthday, at the end of her usual lesson in English history, the Princess Victoria reopened her book to find inserted in it a newly updated genealogy of the English royal family. It showed that only her dying uncle George IV and her uncle William, Duke of Clarence, stood between her and the throne. The conversation went as follows:
VICTORIA: I never saw that before.
LEHZEN: It was not thought necessary that you should, Princess.
VICTORIA: I see I am nearer to the throne than I thought.
LEHZEN: So it is, Madam.
VICTORIA (after some moments): Now, many a child would boast but they don’t know the difficulty; there is much splendour, but there is more responsibility! (Holding up the forefinger of her right hand and then putting her hand in Lehzen’s) I will be good!
For generations in England, the image of the young princess, suddenly and solemnly apprised of her illustrious destiny, raising what is always called her tiny finger and saying twice over “I will be good,” was a kind of folk legend.
Fighting Back
…
Y 1831, THE PRINCESS VICTORIA OF KENT WAS HEIR PRESUMPTIVE to her uncle William IV. All attempts by the King and Queen to produce a healthy child had failed, and, though the Queen was still quite young, the King was in declining health. It was now clear to William IV that he must make an effort to reach out to his niece Victoria and bring her back into the fold of the English royal family. He had some small initial successes, but, to his anger and sorrow, proved incapable of breaking Sir John Conroy’s hold over the Duchess of Kent and the duchess’s hold over her daughter.
Protocol demanded that a lady of the highest nobility should become Victoria’s governess, and the King appointed his friend the Duchess of Northumberland. The King also appointed James Clark as Victoria’s personal physician, and the earnest young Scottish doctor quickly earned the princess’s trust and friendship. Seconded by King Leopold, William IV was able to prevent Sir John Conroy from getting rid of Baroness Lehzen. Sir John now recognized Lehzen as hostile to the duchess’s interests.
Despite this change of personnel at the palace, the Kensington System remained intact and became increasingly rigid as Conroy and the duchess felt themselves under attack. The two made sure that the princess was never able to speak privately with her new governess or any of her tutors. When the Duchess of Northumberland attempted to take an active part in Victoria’s education, Victoria’s mother had the temerity to dismiss her. The King was reduced to fuming impotently.
In 1834, to combat the influence of Lehzen, Conroy brought an ally into Kensington Palace. Lady Flora Hastings, an unmarried lady from an aristocratic Tory family some twelve years older than the princess, became Victoria’s lady-in-waiting. Lady Flora had fallen under Conroy’s spell, and she was happy to act as Conroy’s spy. Victoria detested her from the outset but was powerless to block the appointment. As she stoically recorded in her diary Lady Flora or Miss Victoire Conroy Sir John’s oldest daughter, or both were with her every minute of the day, at home or away.
Life at Kensington Palace was not all gloom for the teenaged princess. Riding, music, drawing, and painting watercolors were sanctioned activities, and she enjoyed them all. Victoria loved her horses, extolling the merits of each in her journal, and her equestrian prowess was admired when she rode out with her party in Hyde Park. Her greatest moments of freedom came when she was galloping her horse and outdistanced her escort.
Music was an important part of Victoria’s heritage from the Hanoverian as well as the Coburg side, and she was an accomplished amateur pianist and singer. Opera was a passion with her, and in her sixteenth year, she was overjoyed to begin singing lessons with the world-renowned bass Luigi Lablache. He was an exuberant Neapolitan who was funny and treated the princess like a fellow musician. She wished she could have a singing lesson every day. The Duchess of Kent had a fondness for drama, so her daughter was often to be seen at London theaters, leaning eagerly out from her box to follow the action. When she returned home from a play or an opera, Victoria, who had been taught to draw by competent professionals, would try to capture the moments of delight by sketching the performers from memory.
Victoria’s mother’s most thoughtful birthday present came on May 19, 1835. A private concert was arranged for the princess’s sixteenth birthday at which four of the greatest singers of the day—Lablache, Antonio Tamburini, Giulia Grisi, and Maria Malibran—sang selections from various operas. Victoria had learned much of the vocal material and was already a connoisseur of operatic singing. She knew what an immense treat she had been given. Her diary entry for the day ends with the exuberant: “I was most exceedingly delighted.”
But such moments of delight were rare. The invisible net around the Princess Victoria tightened as she grew older, while relations between her mother and the King and Queen deteriorated. As Queen Victoria recalled in an 1859 letter to her eldest daughter, she was “always on pins and needles, with the whole family hardly on speaking terms. I (a mere child) between two fires—trying to be civil and then scolded at home! Oh! It was dreadful and that has given me such a horror of Windsor which I can’t get over.”
From the summer of 1831, Victoria was taken by her mother and Conroy on royal progresses through the provinces, exposing her for the first time to the view of large crowds. She visited the country homes of the aristocracy, attended balls and dinner parties, received the keys of cities, and listened to speeches of welcome by municipal worthies. As many remarked, Conroy acted like the princess’s prime minister.
These progresses infuriated the King. William IV felt that his sister-in-law Kent was acting as if he were already dead and she was regent of England. Victoria herself hated the trips more with each year. She loved to see new things and meet new people and had boundless energy when she was happy, but Conroy made her feel like a circus attraction.
But Conroy had a genius for public relations, and the new versions of medieval progresses he developed were an important innovation. George IV had been too unpopular to risk much travel within his own realm. William IV was marginally more popular in the nation than his brother, but poor health kept him close to London. Conroy saw that by forming bonds with distinguished people outside London society and making an impression, however fleeting, on ordinary folk, the princess would forge links with the British people that went over the heads of the court and the government and thus secured her position.
Conroy’s insistence that the royal family needed to move outside court circles was a lesson Victoria was primed to learn. As queen, she continued to make forays into the provinces, especially Scotland, and these helped shape public opinion. In the nineteenth century, European monarchies came increasingly under attack, but Victoria was secure on her throne. As she understood very well, this was because the people felt that they knew her and gave her their love and loyalty.
In the 1830s, contact with royalty was an exceptionally rare commodity, even for the greatest of England’s families, and Victoria was a huge success wherever she went. The princess always seemed delighted to meet people and interested in everything shown to her. With her small frame, red-blond ringlets, and blue saucer eyes, she was not perhaps pretty, but she was courteous and polished, unaffected and modest.
Her voice was her greatest beauty, and people were thrilled by it. It was warm, clear, ringing, and quintessentially English—Dr. Davys had worked hard on her as a child to eliminate every trace of German accent and intonation. During these lengthy tours, the Princess Victoria met a great many people and
learned a little about the country she was destined to rule. When she visited the industrial Midlands for the first time, the gloomy mills, flaming smokestacks, and sooty, emaciated citizens shocked her.
Though tiring, the progresses also offered the princess some welcome adventures. On two occasions, she was in real danger and had the chance to show her mettle. Once, she was aboard a sailing yacht that lost its way and crashed into a hulk in the harbor, destroying its mainmast. The princess’s mother cowered belowdecks, but Victoria, who loved life at sea, remained up top. As the sailors worked frantically to save the vessel, she calmly looked on, chewing on a mutton chop.
On another occasion, the princess’s lead carriage horse caught its leg in the traces, and in the resulting struggle, the carriage turned over. Victoria managed to extract herself, help her mother out, and grab her darling spaniel Dash from the luggage compartment. She then pulled her mother behind a stone wall as the crazed horses, who had regained their feet, stampeded down the road.
TRADITIONALLY IN PROTESTANT royal families, a child’s confirmation marked his or her coming of age. Though it suited the duchess and Conroy to keep Victoria a child as long as possible, when Victoria turned fifteen, they were unable to delay her confirmation any longer. King William IV announced that he wished to give his niece and heir her own income and her own household, but once again the Duchess of Kent played the motherhood card. She insisted that Victoria’s fervent wish was to remain under her mother’s care. Since she never let the girl out of her sight or allowed her to speak privately, it was impossible to contradict the duchess. So the princess remained at Kensington Palace.
The duchess did exploit the confirmation to try once again to dismiss Lehzen, arguing that Victoria no longer needed a governess and Lehzen was an improper person to be a member of the heir presumptive’s household. Fortunately, both King William and King Leopold were fully aware of how important Lehzen was to Victoria’s health and happiness, and on this issue they were able to prevail. Nonetheless, in one of the many hectoring and pious letters she addressed in these years to her increasingly mulish daughter, the Duchess of Kent begged Victoria to remember her position and treat Lehzen as a servant, not a friend.
