Alice, The Enigma - A Biography of Queen Victoria's Daughter

by Christina Croft

  Queen Victoria’s favourite uncle, Augustus, Duke of Sussex, married three times (twice to the same lady) but, since he repeatedly failed to obtain the King’s approval, his marriages contravened the Royal Marriages Act and were deemed invalid. They did, however, lead to his most memorable achievement: the popularising of municipal cemeteries. Knowing that his wife would not be permitted to rest beside him in the hallowed Royal Vaults, Augustus requested that they should be buried together in Kensal Green Cemetery, thereby starting a new fashion in interments.

  With so much scandal in the family, it was unsurprising that, by the time Queen Victoria ascended the throne, the monarchy was viewed with contempt, and, were it not for the wise and calming influence of Prince Albert, that tawdry image might well have continued to deteriorate.

  Following the death of the Duke of Kent, his widow, a foreigner in a strange land, turned for support to her late husband’s equerry, John Conroy, whom she appointed as her chief advisor and the comptroller of her household. An ambitious and self-seeking man, Conroy soon ruled every aspect of her life, including the upbringing of her daughter, Victoria. Such was the Duchess’s dependence upon him that it was rumoured that they were lovers. Whether or not the stories had any foundation, Conroy recognised the possibility of Victoria coming to the throne before her eighteenth birthday, in which case a regent would be required. The most obvious candidate for the role was her mother, and Conroy realised that by controlling the Duchess he would, in effect, control the Queen and the country. He therefore devised the ‘Kensington System’, ostensibly to prepare Victoria for her future role, but in reality to break her spirit and make her malleable to his wishes.

  The system involved isolating the young princess and imposing a series of stringent rules to protect her from any outside influence, including that of her extended family. With only her dolls and her dogs as playmates, her days were governed by such a minutia of rules that, even as she approached her eighteenth birthday, she was not permitted to mix with her contemporaries, to be alone or even to sleep in her own bedroom. Unsurprisingly, Victoria grew to despise Conroy and resented her mother for allowing him such authority. This resentment was fuelled by her possessive governess, Louise Lehzen, who also despised Conroy and attempted to protect her young charge from some of his more excessive demands.

  Ultimately, Conroy’s scheming came to nothing. His plans were scuppered when Victoria reached her eighteenth birthday just one month before the death of her uncle and predecessor, William IV. Now, requiring no regent, and free to make her own decisions, she took her revenge, dismissing Conroy from her service and allocating her mother a separate household in a few remote rooms in Buckingham Palace. As the Duchess refused to be parted from Conroy, Victoria maintained minimum contact with her.

  Throughout her life, Queen Victoria was fiercely loyal to those whom she loved, and Lehzen was no exception. At the time of her accession, the former governess was her closest confidante but the young Queen recognised, too, the need for a strong male advisor to guide her through the early years of her reign. Within days of her accession, she found such a man in the fifty-two-year-old Whig Prime Minister, William Lamb, Lord Melbourne.

  Melbourne’s life had been dogged by scandal. His wife, the histrionic Lady Caroline Lamb, is best remembered for her widely publicised affair with the poet, Lord Byron, while Melbourne himself had been the victim of blackmail following a purported liaison with the married poetess, Caroline Norton. Renowned for his numerous affairs with aristocratic ladies, he was even alleged to have enticed orphan girls into his home with the promise of improving their lot while actually engaging them in his sado-masochistic pleasures.

  Notwithstanding his sexual proclivities, to eighteen-year-old Victoria, Melbourne was something of a cross between a father figure and a mythical knight dedicated to her service and protection. Such was her devotion to him that they spent up to five or six hours a day together until rumours began to circulate that she intended to marry him. Matters came to a head when Melbourne was voted out of office. The Queen refused to abide by the customary practice of replacing the outgoing politicians’ wives and daughters, who served as Ladies of the Bedchamber, with the wives and daughters of the incoming government ministers. Her intransigence demonstrated such a lack of political impartiality that the Tory leader, Robert Peel, declared he was unable to form a government under such circumstance, and to Victoria’s delight, Melbourne was reinstated. While the Queen rejoiced, her reputation had been seriously compromised and her popularity plummeted still further when a second scandal compounded the ‘Bedchamber Affair’.

  In 1839, it came to the Queen Victoria’s attention that her mother’s lady-in-waiting, Flora Hastings, was suffering from a painful abdominal swelling but refused to be examined by the royal physician. Rumours spread that the unmarried lady must be pregnant, and the Queen, encouraged by Lehzen and Melbourne, soon deduced that the detested Conroy must be the child’s father. As the gossip spread, the unfortunate Lady Flora was coerced into permitting a medical examination as the only means of clearing her name. When she eventually consented to the humiliating procedure it was discovered that, far from being pregnant, she was suffering from a cancerous and ultimately fatal tumour of the liver. Her death two months later provoked outrage, as her mother, brother and Conroy united in creating a press campaign to discredit the Queen and her physician for attempting to destroy the innocent woman’s reputation. The effect was startling. When the Queen attended Ascot that year, she was openly hissed and booed amid cries of ‘Mrs Melbourne,’ and for a while it appeared that her reputation had sunk even lower than that of her predecessors.

  Fortunately, both for Britain and for the Queen, her uncle, King Leopold of the Belgians, had a plan to take his petulant niece in hand. What better means could there be of distracting the passionate young woman from the aging roué, Melbourne, than presenting her with a younger, more handsome and eminently more suitable man?

  In fact, King Leopold and his mother, the Dowager Duchess of Coburg, had an ideal suitor in mind – the Queen’s first cousin, King Leopold’s nephew, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Since Albert’s early childhood, King Leopold and his comptroller, Baron Stockmar, had been carefully grooming him for such a role:

  “…the Prince used to relate that when he was a child of three years old, his nurse always told him that he should marry the Queen, and that when he first thought of marrying at all, he always thought of her.”[3]

  Prior to the Queen’s accession, Albert and his elder brother had been dispatched to England in the hope that he would attract Victoria’s attention and, though the initial meeting gave little inkling of the romance which was to follow, Albert created a good impression:

  “He was most amiable, natural, unaffected, and merry – full of interest in everything – playing on the piano with the princess, his cousin; drawing; in short, constantly occupied. He always paid the greatest attention to all he saw, and the Queen remembers well how intently he listened to the sermon preached in St. Paul’s…on the occasion of the service attended by the children of the different charity schools. It is indeed rare to see a prince, not yet seventeen years of age, bestowing such earnest attention on a sermon.”[4]

  Shortly after Queen Victoria’s coronation, Albert was sent again to further his cause, but by now Victoria was under Melbourne’s sway and had no intention of sacrificing her new-found freedom to anyone, least of all a rather studious and serious-minded husband. Although the meeting appeared to be inauspicious, the Queen agreed to correspond with Albert, and three years later when he returned to England, his persistence paid off. This time Victoria was struck by the improvement in his appearance, his handsomeness, his ‘sweet’ smile and the intelligent expression in his warm, blue eyes. Now there were no excuses or doubts and the Queen acted with the impulsiveness that would characterise so much of her life. As protocol demanded, she proposed, and Albert dutifully accepted.

  The wedding took place on February
10th 1840 in the Chapel Royal of St James’ Palace, and the following morning the Queen recorded in her diary that her wedding night had brought her ‘bliss beyond belief.’ To Melbourne, too, she wrote in uninhibited detail of what had passed between her and Albert, informing him of the ‘bewildering and gratifying experience.’

  Her delight in married life, however, did not extend to a willingness to share her authority. The novelty of queenship had not yet waned and she was reluctant to permit her husband even the slightest participation in affairs of state. As she worked through her papers, the highly-intelligent Albert was reduced to standing beside her desk and blotting her signature. His life wasn’t made any easier by the ubiquitous former governess, Lehzen, who, reluctant to share her charge’s confidence, had opposed the marriage and, resenting Albert’s presence, sought every opportunity to discredit him and to drive a wedge between him and Victoria.

  Notwithstanding Victoria’s stubbornness and Lehzen’s meddling, Albert’s brilliant intellect could not remain inactive for long. Denied any meaningful role in official business, he set about reorganising the running of the extremely disorderly palaces and creating order out of the chaos of the numerous departments responsible for their upkeep. At the same time, his tact and diplomacy not only helped heal the rift between Victoria and her mother, but also, as Melbourne’s influence declined, eased the animosity between the Queen and Robert Peel’s Tories.

  It was not, though, until the birth of his children that Albert’s talents truly began to shine. Much as Queen Victoria took pleasure in the physicality of her marriage, the ‘unecstatic’ consequences annoyed and revolted her, making her increasingly dependent upon Albert as her pregnancies progressed.

  Nine months after the wedding, on 21st November 1840, Princess Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa (Vicky) was born. The Queen, relieved to have survived the ordeal, cheerfully announced that, ‘the next one will be a prince’, and, despite Albert’s distress at the pain his wife had suffered, mother and child at once became the chief object of his devotion. Throughout the Queen’s convalescence, he carried her to and from her bed, waited upon her and read aloud from her favourite novels. With even greater solicitude, he cared for the baby, maintaining frequent correspondence with Uncle Leopold’s advisor, the physician, Baron Stockmar, to seek his advice in all matters relating to her health and wellbeing.

  This concern for his daughter soon led Prince Albert into an even more virulent conflict with the former governess. In her typically presumptive manner, Lehzen had taken it upon herself to appoint staff and oversee the running of the nursery, where she spent an inordinate amount of time gossiping and, to Albert’s intense annoyance, dandling the baby.

  “The nursery gives me more trouble than the government of a kingdom would do,” Albert wrote in exasperation to Stockmar, but, far from supporting him, Queen Victoria sided with Lehzen and responded so petulantly to his complaints that he frequently locked himself in his room, refusing to respond to her frantic hammering on the door until she ceased her imperious tantrums.

  The simmering antipathy between Prince Albert and Lehzen reached a climax when Vicky fell ill. As days passed with no improvement, the Prince became convinced that the unhealthy heat of a constantly blazing fire was contributing to her failure to thrive. Both Lehzen and James Clark – the doctor whom she had appointed – refused to accept the seriousness of her condition and, when the Queen failed to heed Albert’s warnings, an angry argument ensued, culminating in Albert’s declaration that, if the child died, it would be Victoria’s fault. At last, the Queen gave way. Vicky recovered and Lehzen was gently relieved of her duties and packed off to Germany with a generous pension. Although she and the Queen maintained a correspondence to the end of her life, Lehzen’s hold over Victoria had finally been broken; relations between the Queen and her mother improved and Albert’s genius could finally shine.

  Now, with undivided loyalties, Queen Victoria came to realise the extent of her husband’s abilities. A gifted musician and painter, whose compositions were admired by Felix Mendelssohn, and whose paintings were so impressive that members of the Royal Academy declared he could have made a career as an artist, his appetite for learning was insatiable. Eager to understand the latest technological advances, he invited the foremost scientists and engineers to give lectures at the palace and made a point of studying the workings of industrial machinery.

  His political acumen was so astute that when Queen Victoria gave him a golden key to her despatch boxes, allowing him access to official papers, his advice became crucial to her, and even the most unsympathetic ministers couldn’t fail to recognise his wisdom.

  “Lord Melbourne has formed the highest opinion of the judgement, the temper, and the discretion of His Royal Highness,” the former Prime Minister wrote to the Queen, shortly before his retirement, “and it gives him the greatest comfort and satisfaction to know that Your Majesty is in a position in which she enjoys the inestimable advantage of such counsel and assistance. Lord Melbourne is convinced that Your Majesty cannot do better than to have recourse to this when it is needed, and to rest on it with confidence.”[5]

  A man of great social conscience, Prince Albert was passionately concerned about working and housing conditions. He regularly visited factories and mines, and wrote numerous epistles and memoranda to parliament, offering suggestions for improving the lot of the poor. No subject touching the lives of the Queen’s subjects was beyond his consideration: one moment he was writing to Robert Peel pressing him to ban duelling in the army, the next he was speaking as Chancellor of Oxford University, urging greater tolerance towards the re-establishment of Roman Catholic dioceses in England.

  So dependent was the Queen upon his judgement that she had no qualms in urging her ministers have him declared king – a request which, much to her annoyance, was refused, due partly to the xenophobes in parliament who viewed the Prince simply as ‘a German’. Eventually, after fifteen years of marriage, the Queen had to settle for bestowing upon him the title ‘Prince Consort’.

  To her chagrin, not everyone shared the Queen’s high regard for Prince Albert. From the moment he arrived in England, he had been subjected to harsh and unjust criticism from politicians, ‘society’, the press, and consequently a large section of the public who considered him as a mere foreigner who did not fit their image of an English prince.

  “That he did not dress in quite the orthodox English fashion; that he did not sit on horseback in the orthodox English way; that he did not shake hands in the orthodox English manner etc. etc. all this even those…who knew and esteemed him could not quite get over. One heard them say, “He is an excellent, clever, able fellow but look at the cut of his coat, or look at the way he shakes hands.’”[6]

  Officials objected to his suggestions for the reorganisation of many disorderly institutions; politicians objected to his voicing an opinion; and the press objected to his Germanic influence over the Queen. The perceived interference of ‘a German’ was so irksome that any assistance he offered was viewed as meddling; his willingness to speak out again injustice was viewed as dictatorial; his lack of interest in pleasure-seeking was seen as dull; and his marital fidelity was viewed as prudery.

  Even to this day, the myth is perpetuated that he was an arrogant and humourless ‘German’, with megalomaniac tendencies. Those who actually knew him – his family, servants, tenants and the local people of Balmoral and Osborne – saw an entirely different image, as indeed did several ministers whose prejudices were deflated when they met him.

  Lord Greville wrote that he had not met the Prince prior to a visit to Balmoral but from the moment of their first meeting, he was:

  “…struck with him. I saw at once…that he is very intelligent and highly-cultivated, and moreover he has a thoughtful mind and thinks about subjects that are worth thinking about. He seemed very much at his ease, very gay, pleasant, without the least stiffness or air of dignity.”[7]

  Such relentless criticism was deeply wo
unding to the Prince, and, unsurprisingly, the more he was lampooned, libelled and criticised, the more determined the Queen became to publicise and extol his qualities. Throughout her life she appeared to be constantly battling to ensure that posterity would remember him and hold him in the same high esteem in which she venerated him.

  Disregarding the hostility, Prince Albert continued to apply himself to numerous projects from the Chancellorship of universities to the Presidency of the Society of Arts, and from supporting the Royal Horticultural Society to encouraging qualifications for tradesmen, but, effective as he was in the social and political arena, he did not allow his many commitments to distract from the care of his children. As Queen Victoria had predicted, ‘the next one’ was a prince: Albert Edward, known in the family as Bertie, and, from the moment he was born, his young parents were faced with the daunting task of raising a future king.

  Having little personal experience of small children, they sought advice from Albert’s trusted mentor, Baron Stockmar, who, insisting that ‘a man’s education begins the first day of his life’, immediately set to work devising a ‘thoroughly moral and thoroughly English’ plan for the education and formation of the royal offspring. Stockmar’s overriding principle was the necessity of preserving the children’s innocence by preventing them from being tainted by the outside world. This, to Albert and Victoria, seemed particularly important in Bertie’s case to ensure that he did not err along the path of the wayward Hanoverian uncles. The Royal Family must present an ideal of domestic harmony, and the children must be paradigms of morality to set a fine example to the rest of the country. For this reason, Albert decided that his children should be educated at home and, though tutors would be carefully selected to instruct them in various wide-ranging subjects, he would take overall charge of their education.