by Gillian Gill
Happy to leave the horrid task of negotiating with Conroy to Stockmar and Melbourne, Queen Victoria did what she could to form her household to her taste. She dismissed Sir John Conroy though the man continued to be part of her mother’s household. She rewarded her faithful friend James Clark by naming him chief physician in ordinary. She decided to move as soon as possible away from Kensington Palace and into Buckingham Palace, the royal residence in the heart of London that had been under construction for two reigns. In the meantime, she ordered a bedroom to be prepared and her things moved out of her mother’s rooms.
She appointed Baroness Lehzen lady attendant on the queen, a new title that the two must have discussed carefully in their few private minutes. “My dear Lehzen will always be with me as my friend, but will take no situation with me, and I think she is right,” Victoria wrote in her journal that night. Sadly, the time would come when Baroness Lehzen would regret that she had not taken a “situation” with the Queen, relying instead on love and loyalty.
Late that night, the Queen kissed her mother’s cheek, walked upstairs unassisted, and went to bed. For the first time in eighteen years, mother and daughter would sleep apart. Upstairs Victoria completed her journal entry for that tremendous day—orderly, precise, cool except for the extravagant underlinings. Here at last we have the authentic, uncensored prose of the Queen, writing now not for her mother but for herself and for the historical record:
“Tuesday, 20th June.—I was awoke at 6 o’clock by Mamma who told me that the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Conyngham were here and wished to see me. I got out of bed and went into my sitting-room (only in my dressing-gown) and alone and saw them. Lord Conyngham (the Lord Chamberlain) then acquainted me that my poor Uncle, the King, was no more, and had expired at 12 minutes p. 2 this morning, and consequently I am Queen … At 9 came Lord Melbourne, whom I saw in my room, and OF COURSE quite ALONE as I shall always do all my Ministers.”
By alone, Queen Victoria meant without her mother, Conroy, the Conroy family, and all the Conroy hangers-on like Lady Flora Hastings. But she spent no more time by herself after her accession than before. Even when the Queen was at her desk, absorbed in doing her business and writing her journal and her endless letters, there was always a maid of honor hovering in the background, a page in the hall, a dresser darning in a corner. Anxious at night, the Queen slept until her marriage with a maid one door away and Baroness Lehzen next door. At Buckingham Palace, the Queen ordered a hole to be made in one wall to allow her free communication at night with Lehzen in the adjoining room. Until the death of her husband, it is doubtful if ever in her life even for an hour Queen Victoria was alone in a room.
But if “alone” meant unique, one of a kind, Victoria was right to underline the word. To be a queen regnant was to be alone, and solitude would prove to be a heavy burden.
Victoria, Virgin Queen
…
HEN VICTORIA CAME TO THE THRONE, SHE CAUSED A SENSATION. Many people had seen her, some had been presented to her, but no one knew the new Queen, least of all those who had lived with her all her life. In public Victoria’s mother and Sir John Conroy had spoken for her, and in private they shouted at her, disparaged her, and refused to listen. In the final days before Victoria’s accession, as part of their campaign to keep the power of the Crown in their own hands, Conroy and the duchess whispered to the world that the heiress presumptive did not have the intelligence to rule alone, and it is possible they actually believed it. After years of abuse, Victoria had learned to keep her thoughts to herself.
Then overnight, without rehearsal, Victoria stepped into the starring role of queen, and amazed everyone by her mastery of script and blocking. The prelates, ministers of the Crown, and court officials who came in the first days to “kiss hands” and swear allegiance were enraptured by the Queen’s poise and her modest yet confident assumption of power. They remarked on her marked physical resemblance to her grandfather George III, the last king in memory to earn the people’s respect. At last Victoria was permitted to speak for herself, and her glorious, bell-like, feminine voice— “a silver stream flowing over golden stones,” in the words of the famous actress Ellen Terry—was accepted immediately as the voice of the nation.
When the Queen drove out in state to open parliament for the first time, ordinary folk lined the streets to catch a glimpse of her. The assembled lords and commons listened reverently as the tiny young woman in her ermine and diamonds, now romantically slender and pale after her long ordeal, gave the speech from the throne without a waver. When the Queen held her first official assemblies for male visitors, called levees, English notables and foreign diplomats attended in droves. In her journal Victoria proudly recorded that in one session three thousand men kissed her hand.
When the Queen announced that she intended to review the Household Cavalry on horseback as the young Queen Elizabeth had done, her mother was appalled, and the Duke of Wellington strongly advised against it. I know horses, pontificated the hero of Talavera and Waterloo, and no horse can be trusted to behave at a military parade with a woman in the saddle. But Victoria was not to be dissuaded. Perched sidesaddle on her great horse Leopold, dressed in a modified version of the Windsor uniform, the Star of the Order of the Garter on her breast, the Queen cantered up the lines and saluted the troops in perfect form. The massed bands played, the pride of England’s army fired and skirmished and dashed feverishly to and fro, but the Queen had her horse under complete control. “I felt for the first time like a man, as if I could fight myself at the head of my troops,” the Queen confided to her diary.
Victoria’s coronation in June 1838 cost only seventy thousand pounds, a fraction of her uncle George IV’s, but it was greeted with general rejoicing. The unprecedented crowds of people massed all along her route to and from Westminster Abbey made the Queen feel both proud and humble. When the crown was placed on her head, the Queen looked up into the gallery where her dearest friend, Baroness Lehzen, was sitting, and the two exchanged a smile. Together they had come through, and the victory was theirs. The Queen also found the presence of Lord Melbourne at her shoulder an immense comfort, although she worried that the ordeal of bearing the massive sword of state aloft during the processions would be too much for him. Suffering from an intestinal disorder, Melbourne had taken opium and brandy.
The coronation was a triumph for the young Queen, though not for the old men in charge of the arrangements. Both the Earl Marshall and the Archbishop of Canterbury had forgotten exactly what order the complicated ceremony should follow, didn’t bother to look it up, and didn’t believe in rehearsals. Rather to the Queen’s surprise, wine and sandwiches were laid out on the altar of a side chapel for the principal performers, but apart from that, nothing much got organized. At the Queen’s insistence, the massive state crown was made smaller and lighter to fit her head. She still got a headache when wearing it, but at least when peers lurched forward to touch the crown in their ritual sign of allegiance, they did not dislodge it from her head. When one old nobleman toppled backward down the stairs leading to the throne, the Queen charmingly came forward to offer him her hand. When the archbishop insisted on jamming onto her fourth finger the coronation ring that had been made for the pinky, she did not shriek or faint. The weighty orb and scepter were put into her hands far too early but she managed not to drop them. She processed into and out of the abbey with grace and dignity despite the eight young lady trainbearers who kept getting their feet caught in their own trains.
When night fell, Victoria repaired to the Duchess of Kent’s rooms at the far side of Buckingham Palace, not because she wished to talk over the events of that extraordinary day with her mother but to get a better view of the fireworks. The Queen assured Lord Melbourne that she was not at all tired, and she wrote in her diary a long, detailed monarch’s-eye view of the coronation that is one of the most delightful documents in Victorian letters.
Charles Greville, the recording secretary to the Privy Council,
who saw a good deal of Victoria in the months after her accession, noted in his diary how very much she was enjoying being Queen. “Everything is new and delightful to her. She is surrounded with the most exciting and interesting enjoyments; her occupations, her pleasures, her business, her Court, all present an unceasing round of gratifications. With all her prudence and discretion she has great animal spirits, and enters into the magnificent novelties of her position with the zest and curiosity of a child.”
Though assailed by new challenges at every turn, Victoria felt happier and healthier than ever in her life before. To her half sister, Feodora, in Germany, she wrote on October 23, 1837: “I am quite another person since I came to the throne. I look and am so well. I have such a pleasant life, just the sort of life I like. I have a great deal of business to do, and all that does me a world of good.” To her uncle King Leopold of the Belgians, she wrote how much she liked and trusted Lord Melbourne, adding: “I have seen almost all of my other Ministers, and do regular, hard, but to me delightful, work with them. It is to me the greatest pleasure to do my duty for my country and my people, and no fatigue, however great, will be burdensome to me if it is for the welfare of the nation.”
Over the years, Leopold and Baron Stockmar had received extravagant expressions of girlish affection from Victoria, and they assumed that she would take her cues from them, especially in foreign policy. They soon learned their mistake. The new Queen was ready to take advice but had no intention of being anyone’s puppet. When she smelled condescension or manipulation even from “Dearest Uncle,” she said no with gracious aplomb. Once Victoria had been lonely and snubbed, but now, with such seasoned and deferential statesmen as Lord Melbourne and Lord Palmerston constantly at her elbow, she felt more than ready to take on the worlds of domestic politics and international diplomacy. The Queen not only held cabinet meetings with her ministers, she rode out in the afternoons with them on twenty-five-mile adventures that took her out of London, chatted vivaciously with them over dinner, and played her favorite parlor games with them.
IN HER PERSONAL finances, Queen Victoria was determined from the beginning not to repeat the mistakes of her uncle George IV. The Queen was not the richest woman in England. That honor belonged to Angela Burdett-Coutts, a multimillionairess who inherited the Coutts banking fortune from her mother. A number of Englishmen—the dukes of Devonshire and Westminster, to name only the most prominent—were many times richer than the Queen. Nonetheless, Victoria was a very wealthy woman, and, having escaped the greedy clutches of Sir John Conroy, she took on the management of her own money.
This was unusual. Law and custom increasingly excluded English women from the world of business. Having no head for figures was considered an asset in the female citizen. But Victoria had inherited some financial acumen from her paternal grandfather, George III, and her maternal grandmother, Duchess Augusta of Coburg. She was good at figures and diligent with paperwork. She had an exceptional memory; she was a shrewd judge of men even as a raw girl; she knew how to delegate; and she had an associate she trusted. Prime Minister Lord Melbourne offered advice to Her Majesty on her personal affairs when he was asked, but Victoria mainly relied on “dearest Daisy”—that is to say her former governess, Baroness Louise Lehzen. The lady in attendance on the Queen served not only as secretary in private correspondence, but also unofficially as the comptroller of Her Majesty’s household.
Queen Victoria riding out between Lord Melbourne and Lord John Russell
In money matters, as in so much else, Louise Lehzen had an admirable influence on the young Victoria. Forced to work for her living since girlhood, paid a miserable wage by her employer, the Duchess of Kent, Lehzen had always been frugal, but she had her own code of honor. She was honest in her dealings, and she did not prize money and possessions for themselves. Even when Victoria became Queen, the baroness made no demands for status or fortune: for her it was enough to be an acknowledged power behind the throne and to live constantly in her darling’s company. Unlike Sir John Conroy and his cronies during Victoria’s minority, Lehzen has never been charged with keeping false accounts or misappropriating funds.
Lehzen understood basic economic precepts: live within one’s income, keep an eye on the servants but pay their wages, check the tradesmen’s bills but settle them quickly, add up the pounds, shillings, and pence every month. These were things Victoria’s profligate German mother and debt-ridden English uncles could not teach her. The princess had a fierce love of honesty and truth and she loved and respected her governess; so the lessons fell on fertile soil.
In the days immediately after her accession, Victoria found herself very uncomfortably placed. Her mother had never allowed her any discretionary money, and the new Queen now found herself with vastly increased expenses, and her income from parliament had yet to be voted through. Coutts the banker obligingly loaned the Queen the money she needed to tide her over, and was both surprised and gratified when she paid it back as soon as her income from the civil list began to flow into her pocket.
Victoria than allocated fifty thousand pounds from her first year’s privy purse to pay the debts that her father had contracted before her birth, which her mother had left outstanding. When the Duchess of Kent told people that she was responsible for the debt repayment, Victoria was privately furious but publicly silent. She sent some welcome money to poor relatives, notably her half sister, Feodora. She paid her personal servants generous wages and was a sympathetic and considerate mistress. She took time out of a busy life to scrutinize her milliner’s bills.
Given their lack of experience in the world of business, and the complexity of the royal financial situation, Victoria and Lehzen together did an honorable and competent job. They had a sense of fiscal responsibility and a horror of debt. This in itself was a revolution in royal affairs.
IN HER SOCIAL LIFE, Queen Victoria kept close to the staid and virtuous model developed by her grandfather George III in his first years on the throne. She found her friends among the high aristocracy, as English kings always had, she took people very much as she found them, and had a strong appetite for fun, but she showed none of George IV’s precocious taste for vice.
During the period between Victoria’s accession and her marriage, Prime Minister Lord Melbourne was indisputably the person closest to the Queen. Such a close rapport between a monarch and a prime minister was not unprecedented, but it was rare. Melbourne saw the Queen almost every day, often several times a day at her urgent request, and there was a room reserved for him at Windsor Castle. Melbourne saw Victoria far more often and more often alone than did the Duchess of Kent, who, when she wished to speak to her daughter in private, was forced to request an appointment.
Melbourne could not have been more different from Sir John Conroy He never shouted; he sought the Queen’s company, encouraged her to talk, treasured her friendship, and was such a font of droll sayings and racy anecdotes that Victoria could hardly wait to commit them to her diary at the end of the evening. Melbourne slid effortlessly into the role of the doting father Victoria had never known. Within weeks of her accession, he was her dearest friend and indispensable companion as well as her chief adviser. King Leopold had fully expected to control his niece, both directly through his visits and letters, and indirectly by putting Baron Stockmar at the Queen’s side. Leopold and Stockmar were great political strategists, but they had failed to appreciate how much influence a handsome, sympathetic man of the world could have over an inexperienced young woman.
Lord Palmerston, the foreign secretary, Melbourne’s old friend and contemporary and a most charming man with women, was also a favorite with the Queen. Victoria happily deferred to Palmerston’s vast diplomatic experience and allowed him not only to dictate her official communications with other European powers, but also to advise her in her private correspondence with her uncle Leopold.
In the evenings and at weekends when the Queen was, as it were, off duty, Melbourne, Palmerston, Melbourne’s sister,
Lady Emily Cowper, Lady Cowper’s daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren, together with various members of the charming and rakish Paget clan, were key members of the Queen’s domestic circle. The Pagets were relative newcomers to the English aristocracy and had risen in society in large part because they were handsome, energetic, and fun, and thus invaluable in relieving the tedium of court life, especially for the sovereign.
Virtually all the members of the Queen’s inner set belonged to the Whig aristocracy, as Tory aristocrats were not slow to notice. Whigs and Tories were the two political parties who stood on each side of the aisle in parliament and had taken it in turns to rule England since the seventeenth century. As the nineteenth century progressed, the Whigs decided to call themselves Liberals and the Tories became known as Conservatives, but in the first years of Queen Victoria’s reign, the difference between the two parties was economic and historical rather than ideological. The Whigs were more urban and cosmopolitan and drew more of their income from commerce and industry. Instrumental in securing the Crown of England for William and Mary in 1688, they had also been supportive of the switch from the Stuart to the Hanoverian dynasty. There was an element in the Whig Party, especially outside of parliament, that was enthusiastic about political and social reforms—expanding the franchise, allowing Catholics, dissenting Protestants, and Jews to take public office and attend the universities, regulating the savage labor practices in the industrial sector, and so on.
