by A. N. Wilson
THREE
‘IT IS ONE STEP’
THE FIRST RECOLLECTION was a yellow carpet. She was crawling upon it, but she must not make a noise. If she screamed or was naughty, then her uncle Sussex would hear it, and punish her. The extraordinary old duke, who resided in the apartment below, became a figure of dread to her. One frightening thing was his wig. The other strange old men who wore wigs were called bishops: these too induced in her feelings of disgusted panic – a feeling which would last through her lifetime, even when the days were long past when the bishops, like the judges, were bewigged.
The era, which had begun in the second half of the seventeenth century, when men covered their natural hair with a wig was about to be supplanted by the modern age. One bishop of the old school who managed to calm her fears was My Lord of Salisbury, who went down on all fours and allowed her to play with his badge, which was that of Chancellor of the Order of the Garter. This was Bishop Fisher, known as the ‘Kingfisher’ because of his penchant for royalty. Going down on all fours before royalty came naturally to him. (It was his niece who was Lady Conroy, and his great-nieces who were the royal infant’s playmates and constant companions.)
It is very vivid, the account, written down by Queen Victoria in 1872, of her childhood. It possesses the vividness of fiction, and also fiction’s arbitrariness.
Claremont remains as the brightest epoch of my otherwise rather melancholy childhood – where to be under the roof of that beloved Uncle [Leopold] – to listen to some music in the Hall when there were dinner-parties – and to go and see dear old Louis! – the former faithful and devoted Dresser of Princess Charlotte – beloved and respected by all who knew her – and who doted on the little Princess who was too much an idol in the House . . . 1
Claremont was where Victoria first stood upright. Her proud, doting mother noted it down on 21 May 1821 – ‘Heute Morgen ist meine geliebstes Kind Victoria allein gegangen.’ (‘This morning my much-loved little child Victoria walked on her own.’) In her imperfect English many years later, recalling the event, the still-doting mother said, ‘It is one step to be independent.’2 Independent Victoria always was. One senses that, even if she had not been destined for royal greatness, Victoria was one of those rather alarming only children to whose beck and call parents grovel.
The ‘melancholy’ of her childhood was a fixed part of Queen Victoria’s personal mythology. When we speak of unhappy childhoods, however, we can mean one, or both, of two things. We can speak of the outward circumstances of childhood having been marred by poverty, illness, or the unkindness of those who hold the infant in their charge; and we can mean that childhood is an unhappy memory. Queen Victoria’s was of the latter kind of ‘unhappy’ childhood, but despite her almost unbounded capacity for self-dramatization and self-pity, her childhood, at least her early childhood, could not be described as ‘unhappy’. She was well fed and housed; she had devoted nurses and an adoring mother. She was abundantly supplied with toys and entertainments. And by the standards of the age, she was treated with pure indulgence. True, her governess, Fräulein Lehzen, was a strict woman, but she never used corporal chastisement (surely a very unusual thing in those days); and although the prospect of old men in wigs was able to terrify the infant, she was in fact much cosseted, not only by the German women in her immediate circle, but also in the wider family of her late father.
Although as a very small infant she had been known as Drina, she gradually came to be known as Victoria. Perhaps the insistence of so many wiseacres that the name was ‘un-English’, and that she should change it to Elizabeth accounted for her violent antipathy to Queen Elizabeth I. As Sidney Lee reminds us, she ‘always deprecated any association with her’.3 If Victoria and her mother felt like foreigners, and poor relations, this was because the duchess was a foreigner, and they were – by royal standards – poor relations. It requires no psychiatric genius to see why the relationship between monarchs and their successors is usually tense. The very existence of the heir, so necessary for the functioning of the system, is for the current occupant of the throne an incarnate memento mori.
Victoria, however, remembered something worse than this:
I... led a very unhappy life as a child – had no scope for my very violent feelings of affection – had no brothers and sisters to live with – never had had a father – from my unfortunate circumstances was not on comfortable or at all intimate or confidential footing with my mother... – much as I love her now [June 1858] – and did not know what a happy domestic life was!4
All the written evidence made at the time of her early childhood contradicts this ‘memory’. Indeed, the stark contrast between her ‘memory’ in adult life and the reality of her mother’s love during her actual childhood was only borne in upon Victoria when her mother died. When the Queen was confronted by the extent of her mother’s besotted, passionate devotion, grief and remorse turned into a major crisis, amounting to a breakdown. When she had her first lessons, there was a little note (in English) awaiting the princess on her schoolroom table: ‘My dear little Girl, I hope you will be very attentive in your repetition and think with what great pleasure it gives to Mamma to witness your progress in learning and good behaviour. God bless you, dearest child. Ever your very affectionate Mother, Victoria.’5
On the last day of 1827, when she went to bed, the seven-year-old princess found a tiny pink envelope on her pillow. Inside was a letter, urging, ‘Before you shut your dear little eyes, Pray to and thank the Almighty God, for all the good you have experienced in this year.’6 The next New Year’s Eve, there was a letter on even pinker paper, containing another love letter: ‘Before you shut your dear little eyes: In some hours this year is closed!... Believe me, my most beloved child, that nobody in this world can love you better than, your true and affectionate Mother. God bless you!!!’7
The recipient of these messages could hardly be described as emotionally deprived. This did not mean that her family relationships were uncomplicated. As a child, she lived and breathed the unassuaged hostility between her mother’s entourage and the Court. Nor was it true, as she ‘remembered’, that Victoria ‘had no brothers and sisters to live with’. You would never guess, from reading David Copperfield, that Charles Dickens had two sisters and a brother, just as you would never guess from reading À la Recherche du Temps Perdu that Proust had a brother. Similarly, from reading Queen Victoria’s recollections of a solitary childhood, you could be forgiven for overlooking her half-brother and half-sister, Prince Charles and Princess Feodore, Victoire’s children by Prince Emich Charles of Leiningen.
Born in 1804 and 1807, these children were old enough to remember all the excitement which burst out in Germany upon the defeat of Napoleon, though the bells of the great baroque church at Amorbach, pealing the victory over the French, were so soon tolling the death of their father. They could remember the celebrations at Coburg when their uncle Leopold married Princess Charlotte, and as a clever thirteen-year-old and a pretty ten-year-old, they had seen their mother marry the Duke of Kent. (In so far as they saw much of the duke, they appeared to have liked him, and he them.)
As Victoria grew up, in Claremont and Kensington, she frequently shared a room, not only with her mother but with her half-sister. Feodore was Victoria’s constant companion for the first nine years of her childhood.The half-sisters were to be part of one another’s lives, on and off, until death.
With her English relations, Victoria had a necessarily more distant relationship. The frightening old Duke of Sussex was downstairs at Kensington, with his vast collection of books. The Duke of York, his brother, was fifty-six by the time Victoria was born. Of all her ‘wicked uncles’, he was perhaps the most popular with the country at large, in part at least because of his vociferous opposition to Roman Catholic Emancipation. He publicly declared that he would go to the scaffold rather than change his mind about the matter; after all, the Hanoverian line of succession would h
ave no legitimacy if the Stewarts had remained, and if Catholics were allowed a part in the legislature, so how could the Hanoverians logically support giving Catholics seats in Parliament or allowing them to go to the University? So much were the British public at one with the dear old duke in this matter that they were prepared to overlook his grosser indiscretions – such as attending the House of Lords to make partisan speeches in support of the Whigs. The public even took a forgiving view of the duke’s turning a blind eye, while Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in wartime, to his mistress, Mrs Clarke, openly selling army commissions. (£2,600 for a full-pay majority; £1,500 for a company; £550 for a lieutenancy; and £400 for an ensigncy.8) His infant niece was oblivious to these matters.
For the childless duke, his little niece was a ray of light. He bought her a donkey to ride upon. Her visits to him were frequent in his new-built palace Stafford (now Lancaster) House. Lest she find his company too dull, he arranged Punch and Judy shows for her in his garden, and when, in 1826, he was sent for his health down to Brighton, the seven-year-old wrote to him:
MY DEAR UNCLE,
I offer you many affectionate congratulations on your birthday – very many with my best love – for all your kindness to me – and it has been a great pleasure to me to be able to write this year to my Uncle, the King, and to you.
We hope to hear that Brighton does you a great deal of good...9
Her uncle the King – George IV – was also beguiled by the plump little blue-eyed girl. He entertained her at Carlton House with her cousins, the Cambridges – George and Augusta – who, though not as close as siblings, would remain very close family for their whole lives. And that same year, 1826, in which the little princess wrote a charming birthday letter to the Duke of York in Brighton, Victoria’s aunt the Queen of Würrtemberg (the Princess Royal) made a visit, and George IV invited Victoria, her mother and her half-sister Feodore to Windsor. ‘He had been on bad terms with my poor father when he died – and took hardly any notice of the poor widow and the little fatherless girl, who were so poor at the time of his (the Duke of Kent’s) death that they could not have travelled back to Kensington Palace without the kind assistance of my dear Uncle, Prince Leopold.’10
She recollected going to stay with her aunt the Duchess of Gloucester, and going over to Royal Lodge in Windsor to visit the King. ‘The King took me by the hand, saying, “Give me your little paw”. He was large and gouty but with a wonderful dignity and charm of manner. He wore the wig which was so much worn in those days.’11
This encounter took place in August 1826, when Drina was a little under seven years old. It speaks volumes about the isolation of the Duchess of Kent from the English Court that this was the first formal invitation she had received from the King since the death of her husband six years before. The Duke of Wellington, who was of the party, thought that George IV was involved in an infidelity with Madame de Lieven (wife of the Russian Ambassador); but the duke was inclined to infer romantic liaisons which did not exist; and he had missed something which did not escape the notice of George’s existing maîtresse en titre, Lady Conyngham, whose nickname was the ‘Vice Queen’.12 The King was much taken with Princess Feodore. The Duchess of Kent had been flustered by Feodore having been included in the invitation to Windsor, and, as Victoria later recalled, ‘The King paid great attention to my Sister, and some people fancied he might marry her!’
It was a gruesome possibility as far as the very pretty eighteen-year-old was concerned – to be chosen to carry the child of this obese, sixty-four-year-old, bewigged, pomaded figure. Lady Conyngham made sure that she brought the flirtation to an end, sending the Duchess of Kent and Feodore home in ‘the Large Carriage’ while she accompanied the King in the smaller. When Victoria looked back on these matters, half a century later, the visit to Windsor in 1826 would have shimmered with ironies. Had the King decided to re-enter the stakes to provide an heir, he could have married Feodore and had a baby by 1828. Victoria, instead of becoming the Queen of England eleven years after her encounter with George IV, would have been a footnote in history – and probably in German history at that, since, had Feodore married the King, the Duchess of Kent would almost certainly have retired to Coburg to lick her wounds, and Victoria would have been married off to some duke or elector, her English royal childhood becoming nothing but a series of sharply focused memories.
Given the fondness Victoria was to develop for the novels of Sir Walter Scott, and her passion for his native land, it is not unmoving to think of the great novelist meeting her at Kensington Palace when she was nine.
Not the least impressive political achievement of George IV had been the reconciliation he had effected between the British Crown and that hitherto semi-detached British nation, Scotland. Since the 1745 Rising, when the Scottish Highlanders had supported the claims of the Young Pretender (Bonnie Prince Charlie) to the throne, no Hanoverian monarch had gone north of the border. George IV changed all that, and in a celebrated visit to Edinburgh, he allowed himself to be arrayed in Highland dress. (He was so fat that his belly dangled beneath the hem of his kilt.) The visit had been stage-managed by that celebrant, or creator, of Scottishness, Sir Walter Scott. Four years after the Edinburgh visit, when Sir Walter was in London, he was invited by the Duchess of Kent to call at Kensington Palace. He was accompanied by Prince Leopold, who presented him to Princess Victoria. ‘This little lady is educating with much care,’ Sir Walter observed, ‘and watched so closely, that no busy mind has a moment to whisper, “You are heir of England.” I suspect that if we could dissect the little heart, we should find that some pigeon or other bird of the air had carried the matter. She is fair, like the Royal Family – the duchess herself very pleasing and affable in her manners.’13
Scott was not alone in expressing the hope (though in the privacy of his journal) that ‘they will change her name’. Two years later, two Members of Parliament, even more dyed-in-the-wool Tories than Sir Walter, urged that the princess ‘should as Queen assume the style of Elizabeth II’ and repeated the old complaint that the name Victoria did not accord with the feelings of the English people.14
Scott’s view that Victoria was ‘educating with much care’ was a sanguine one. When the duchess brought her twelve-year-old daughter Feodore from Germany, she also brought the governess, Louise Lehzen. She was the daughter of a village clergyman from Lagenhagen, near Hanover, thirty-five years older than Victoria, and with experience as a governess to the three daughters of the von Marenholz family.
While the child was a baby, a Mrs Brock was employed as her nursemaid, and Lehzen would read to her. By the time Victoria was five, Lehzen was placed in charge. ‘She never for the thirteen years she was governess to Pss. Victoria once left her,’ Queen Victoria recalled. ‘The Princess was her only object and her only thought. She was very strict and the Pss. had great respect and even awe of her but that with the greatest affection.’15
Lehzen did not make much progress with teaching the child to read – she preferred to be read to – nor with teaching her to write. ‘I was not fond of learning as a little child – and baffled every attempt to teach me my letters up to five years old – when I consented to learn them by their being written down before me.’16
It was when she was eight that a tutor was engaged. This was the Reverend George Davys, a fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, and Vicar of Willoughby-on-the-Wolds in Leicestershire. Two years after taking up his position at Kensington, Mr Davys was given the London living of All-Hallows-on-the-Wall, in London, a living he retained even after becoming Dean of Chester in 1831; he only forsook All-Hallows when his grateful pupil raised him to the episcopacy and made him Bishop of Peterborough in 1839, where he lived until the age of eighty-four. The first duty of Davys was to make sure that the young Victoria could speak English perfectly; and this he did. She had a beautiful, bell-like voice, and spoke English without accent, though with the German habit of punctuatin
g sentences, and silences, with a sigh and the exclamation ‘So!’ – pronounced ‘Zo!’ This was her only Germanism. Her mother had poor English, but had done her best to speak to her in that language.
Mr Davys was not alone responsible for her education. She had a German tutor, a Lutheran clergyman called Henry Barez, a writing-master, Mr Seward, who also taught her arithmetic, at which she excelled, while Mr Davys took charge of her historical and geographical studies.
Her religious views were her own, and always would be. One should never forget, when contemplating Victoria, the church of St Moritz in Coburg, where, in a splendid altarpiece, the worshippers at the Lutheran service can see the kneeling alabaster figures of her and Prince Albert’s ancestors – Duke Johann Friedrich II and his wife Elisabeth, the first generation to uphold and guarantee the Reformation in Germany. Victoria’s Protestantism was in the blood. Her mother was fervently pious. In one of the little letters she placed on Victoria’s pillow each birthday, she wrote:
May 23th [sic]. Oh my beloved Child; Never forget for a moment, that all comes from Him. He has watched over you these twelve years: compare your lot with that of many others: As you advance in years more is naturally expected of you. If you would give me real proves [sic] of your attachment and gratitude: you can but show it by conquering those faults which would certainly make you and those who love you unhappy. You will find Mamma always ready to give you all the pleasure she can, and which belongs to your youth: But I would neither love, or fulfil my duty towards you, if I did not tell you the truth, and warn you against all that could hurt your soul and body.17