Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  Mr Davys belonged to the evangelical wing of the Church of England, but of the gentler variety – not too much fire or brimstone or dwelling upon eternal punishment, or insistence upon a Calvinistic predestination. All her life Victoria looked for what she called ‘tolerant’ clergy, which tended to mean those who agreed, or pretended to agree, with her own set of eclectic prejudices. As a child, she was unaware of what she would later deplore – the High versus Low squabbles of the National Church. But Mr Davys would have found a relatively pious little girl, who said her prayers. She would always do so, and it would remain part of her life.

  Some human beings change and develop, and that is their strength. For others, strength consists in their incapacity for change. Victoria never ceased to be the child of Kensington Palace, and never ceased to expect her companions to be as constant, and as affectionate, as had been Lehzen. It was for this reason that her best friends were servants, or those prepared, in her presence, to behave as if they were servants. So long as her husband was constant in his attendance upon her, she was able, for some of the time, to offer him the same ‘respect and even awe’ which she had shown to her governess. But at other times, she would be as self-willed as she was with Lehzen. There were furious outbursts in her childhood – tantrums far worse than anything Lehzen had ever seen. She had no experience of the Hanoverians. She had not watched Victoria’s father growing up, nor witnessed his near-murderous rows with his brothers, nor seen, when Duke of Kent, the soldier trying to knock discipline into his troops on Gibraltar and provoking a mutiny by his furies and by the savagery with which he refused his troops drink, and, on 25 December 1802, rewarding three of them with the Christmas present of being shot by a firing squad, and a handful of other mutineers a merciless lashing. (His brother the Duke of Cumberland, who was, if anything, an even harsher disciplinarian, caused a scandal, when he was colonel of the 15th Dragoons, by thrashing not a private, but one of his fellow officers, with his cane.) If Lehzen had been more aware of Victoria’s Hanoverian genes, she would perhaps have been less surprised when the young Victoria hurled a pair of scissors at her. Loving Victoria – which many people were to do – was learning to live with a furious irascibility of temper.

  If her childhood was scarred by the hostility between her mother and the Court, it was also, as she grew older, marred by the divisions within Kensington Palace itself. For Lehzen did not have sole charge of her.

  The other figure in the story, who was to dominate more and more, was John Conroy. When, in 1827, George IV questioned whether Lehzen were really a fit person to be preparing the child for the task of monarchy, Conroy got the Duchess of Kent to suggest making Lehzen a Hanoverian baroness, and, while they were about it, promoting himself as a knight commander of the Hanoverian Order. Neither of the enemies who had Victoria in their charge were possessed of an English Order, and enemies Lehzen and Conroy certainly were. As Lehzen’s influence on her young charge increased, so did Conroy’s hold over the Duchess of Kent. And it was through Conroy that the duchess so unwisely came to accept what he called ‘the Kensington System’.

  This System was to bring up the princess detached from the English Court and from her English uncles, and to be utterly dependent upon the Duchess of Kent and Conroy. But chiefly upon Conroy. The one exception to Conroy’s exclusion of the English Royal Family from his circle was Princess Sophia (1777–1848), Victoria’s unmarried aunt, who had an apartment in Kensington Palace. The Duchess of Kent and Conroy had dinner with Princess Sophia two or three times a week, Conroy managed her finances, and in 1826, with the princess’s money, bought for himself an estate in Montgomeryshire for the sum of £18,000.18

  While it was obvious that Conroy was feathering his own nest with Princess Sophia’s money, the Kensington System was not without its merits. Indeed, both Prince Leopold at Claremont and his old adviser Dr Stockmar agreed that it would be injudicious for the duchess and Victoria to see too much, either of the dissolute and dysfunctional family in Coburg, or the rakish life of George IV, with his overbearing mistress Lady Conyngham and her mari complaisant, Henry, who had been made a peer and Lord Chamberlain as a reward for, in effect, lending his wife to the King. Conroy had no money himself and his wife had produced six children – four sons and two daughters. His mania that she was Victoria’s half-sister does not justify his deviousness, nor the coolness with which he charmed Princess Sophia out of £18,000 (in today’s money, the equivalent of £1.2 million on the retail price index, and over ten times that amount when measured by average earnings19). But his fevered brain believed that the Royal Family were in his debt.

  It was only after Feodore’s marriage, on 18 February 1828, that Victoria’s childhood solitude properly began. Feodore was married to Prince Ernst Christian Charles of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, in the very Cupola Room at Kensington Palace where Alexandrina Victoria had been baptized. The Lutheran rite was followed, and the ceremony was conducted by Dr Kuper of the Royal German Chapel. Victoria was a bridesmaid, ‘dearest little girl as you were’, Feodore recollected in 1843. ‘I escaped some years of imprisonment, which you, my poor dear Sister had to endure after I was married.’

  As she reflected on those years, Feodore added, ‘Thank God they are over!’20 She wrote at a time when, as she put it, ‘God Almighty has changed both our destinies most mercifully, and has made us so happy in our home.’ But fairness would make us concede that she also wrote from Germany, far from the Britain which Victoria had been called to govern; and she wrote from a position of absolute irresponsibility.

  The Duchess of Kent might have been vacillating in her opinions, and Conroy might have been in part a villain; but they carried a heavy load of duty. The country was in a dangerous state. The condition of the poor had not improved since the Peterloo Massacre of a decade earlier. Owen’s pyramid did not look secure. And if it collapsed, what would become of the apex of the model, the monarchy?

  From the Continent came reminders that kings could be made and unmade overnight. The conservative Bourbon restoration of the monarchy in France (Louis XVIII, r. 1815–24, Charles X, r. 1824–30) was cast down and replaced by the liberal ‘July Monarchy’ of Louis-Philippe. In Brussels, the Belgians, who resented their subordination to the Dutch, wanted to be fashioned into an independent kingdom, and they spoke of the Duke of Nemours – Louis-Philippe’s son – as the likely candidate. In the event, the prize was given to Prince Leopold, Victoire’s brother. He had turned down the throne of Greece in May, but in Belgium he would have the chance to put into practice Stockmar’s ideas of modern, constitutional monarchy. He would also, though obliged to leave behind Claremont, and Kensington and his sister and the baby Drina, be sufficiently close to London to maintain an influence.

  It left the Duchess Victoire, and Drina, and Lehzen, and Baroness Späth, and Feodore as a predominantly female household in Kensington Palace. True, there were the masters who came to give the child her lessons. But the only figure of dominance was John Conroy. And this dominance was to grow. On 12 January, Adelaide, Duchess of Clarence, and her fellow German, wrote Victoire a candid letter of warning. It was, she wrote, the ‘general wish’ that the duchess should not allow Conroy ‘too much influence over you, but keep him in his place... He has never lived before in court circles or in society, so naturally he offends sometimes 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.’21

  FOUR

  ‘WHITE LITTLE SLAVEY’

  WHEN IT BECAME clear that George IV was dying, the Marquess of Anglesey, a veteran of the Battle of Waterloo and former Cabinet minister, rushed to Bushy Park with some honest advice for the Duke of Clarence. A king, urged Anglesey, must be seen among his subjects, he must maintain ‘a splendid court’, and perform ‘creditable acts of liberality’ but ‘without preying upon the poc
kets of the people’.1

  William IV, as the Duke of Clarence would become on 26 June 1830, was king during an exceptionally turbulent period of British politics. It did not require a crystal ball to see the perils of a hungry populace, and of an ever-growing middle class who had no political voice. ‘I was most sorry,’ Anglesey noted after that interview with William at Bushy, ‘to find that he was violently anti-Reform, & a bitter enemy to free trade.’2 The first years of the reign would see the rejection and, finally, the acceptance of the Great Reform Bill. Britain was on the way to becoming a fully parliamentary political system, even though it was a very long way from being a democracy. The monarchy, as Lord Esher, adviser to Edward VII and editor of Queen Victoria’s early letters and journals, would later say, was exchanging ‘authority’ for ‘influence’.3 While the question of Reform was being debated, the monarch was clearly seen to be a bastion of conservatism, standing in the way of progress and the freedoms of his subjects. In the early years of the reign especially, there were ugly mob scenes. William and his brother Prince George of Cumberland, for example, were hooted at and pelted with stones and abuse when they went to the theatre in February 1831.4 Likewise, when he went to the races at Fernhill in June 1832, some in the crowd threw stones at him. One hit his head.5

  William IV was rightly perceived by his contemporaries to be a buffoon, albeit sometimes an amiable one. In 1834, Greville confided to his diary, ‘There is a very strong impression abroad that the King is cracked and I dare say there is some truth in it. He gets so very cholerick and is so indecent in his wrath.’6 Yet this was very far from being the whole truth about the Sailor King. He heeded Lord Anglesey’s advice, and his reign was notable for displays of genuine royal benevolence, which went some way towards appeasing the public grievance at the slowness of reform. On his birthday in 1830, he feasted 3,000 poor people at Windsor, an event which was much noted in the press. In 1833, accompanied by Princess Victoria, Queen Adelaide and the Duchess of Kent, the King attended four concerts in Westminster Abbey in aid of various musical charities. The festival raised the huge sum of £7,600. There was scarcely a hospital or a missionary society in the land which had not applied successfully either to the King or to Queen Adelaide for help. William gave £1,000 to house indigent Irish Protestant clergymen in London and £3,000 to rebuild the church at Kew, while Adelaide founded the King William Naval Asylum at Penge for the widows of naval officers, and gave money generously for the foundation of new cathedrals in Adelaide in Australia and Valetta in Malta. It has been calculated that Queen Adelaide was one of the most generous royal benefactors in history, giving away some £40,000 per annum out of an income of some £100,000.7 This more than compensated, in the eyes of a grateful public, for her supposed marital disloyalty to the King. (Her lover was thought to be Earl Howe, in whose seat, Penn House, near Amersham, she spent some of her declining years.) When, in 1835, there was a rumour of her pregnancy – false as it turned out – the wags proposed that the Psalm ‘How great are your works, Lord’ should be sung.8

  Queen Adelaide and her fellow German the Duchess of Kent had a somewhat frosty relationship, though Victoria appears to have liked her plain little aunt by marriage. William IV immediately asked the two Victorias, duchess and princess, to attend court functions, one of the first being the Garter ceremony on 20 July, when Princess Victoria appeared, still in deep mourning for her uncle George, with a black train and veil reaching the ground. On 24 February 1831, she attended her first royal Drawing Room in honour of Queen Adelaide’s birthday. The King complained that the princess had looked at him ‘stonily’ during this occasion.

  It was Lord Howe, on behalf of the new King, who invited the Duchess of Kent and Princess Victoria to the Coronation in Westminster Abbey, asking the duchess who should carry her coronet. She did not reply to the letter. The King then wrote in person, signing his note ‘Wm.R.’. This elicited a response, not from the duchess herself but from Sir John Conroy, who said that if they attended, the duchess’s coronet should be borne by Lord Morpeth.9 But in the event, neither the duchess nor Princess Victoria attended. Victoria wept copiously when told of her mother’s decision. ‘Nothing would console me,’ she would tell her own children in later years, ‘not even my dolls.’10

  When, in August 1831, the duchess took Victoria on holiday to the Isle of Wight, for a hired month at Norris Castle, the ships in Portsmouth Harbour gave them a royal salute. When news of this harmless display of loyal affection reached the ears of the King, William formally requested the duchess to forgo such honours in the future.

  In the interests of the monarchy, the Duchess of Kent and the King might have tried to overlook their mutual antagonism and to concentrate on training Victoria, during her teenage years, for the onerous life awaiting her. Although both made stabs at preparing her for becoming queen, however, they were unable to do so together. And while there was an attempt, largely initiated by Conroy, at following one of Lord Angelsey’s triple requirements for the modern sovereign – being seen among the subjects – there was little or no attempt to explain to the princess the political and constitutional role which she was going to have to play in her country’s history. Lord Esher, in his introduction to her youthful journals, remarked that, ‘There is nothing in her journals or elsewhere to show that before she was eighteen years old she had ever talked seriously and at any length to any man or woman of exceptional gifts. It was only when her uncle King Leopold heard of the illness of William IV, that Stockmar was instructed to speak with due gravity upon important matters to the young girl whose accession to the Throne appeared imminent.’11 This deficiency, this failure to prepare Victoria for her historic role, was something for which Lord Melbourne, when Prime Minister, would attempt to compensate. He did his best, but he came late. Many of her own troubles as Queen, and certainly many of the troubles of her Prime Ministers, particularly Peel and Gladstone, would have been avoided had her mother thought to offer the young Victoria a basic political education.

  Even in a household where both parents are alive and where the atmosphere is harmonious, the rearing of an heir to the throne brings its peculiar tensions and problems. This was certainly to be the case when Victoria had children of her own and when she and her much-adored husband tried to prepare an infant-heir for his future role as a monarch. In Victoria’s case things were much more difficult. Her mother was alone, and not merely foreign, but intensely so, with an imperfect grasp of English and absolutely no experience of English life. With the departure of her brother Leopold to the Continent – first to hesitate about the offer of the throne of Greece, and then to accept the throne of Belgium – and with the death of their mother on 16 November 1831, the Duchess of Kent felt increasingly isolated.

  Victoria entered puberty with the sharpening sense of the bad blood between the Duchess of Kent and the Court of William IV. As the princess grew through youth to maturity, however, the members of her household were inevitably perceived – both at the time, and by posterity – as working for their own self-interest. For she was ‘situated as seldom mortal was’. Those who had influence over this girl had influence over the future Queen of England. The interests and factions could only become more intense as she grew older, and her mother was certainly not in a position to control them.

  A recent biographer of Edward VII has suggested that ‘no Gothic novelist could have invented a villain blacker than [Sir John] Conroy’.12 This could be because Conroy exercised undue, or unscrupulous, influence over the Duchess of Kent. Equally, the truth might be more nuanced in history than it is in Gothic novels. The truth might be that, in the imagination of his royal charge, he became a villain in Gothic fiction, but that in reality he was no worse than ‘an intriguing vulgarian who saw in his position the means to advancement’.13 We know from Victoria’s later life that her likes and dislikes were capricious. Conroy, too, was someone of strong feelings. When he found himself completely ostracized and dismissed from the life of
the Queen, he could meditate upon ‘his past services to the ignorant little child that was called to preside over the destinies of this once great country’.14 Given the depth of his later humiliation and the strength of his feelings, it was perhaps inevitable that Conroy should have nursed the most bitter feelings of hatred towards those who remained at Victoria’s side after she became queen. For the Duchess of Kent, he would retain his affectionate regard and loyalty. But of her brothers, he would not retain memories which were especially fond. Leopold, King of the Belgians, was (in Conroy’s estimation) ‘as great a villain as ever breathed’. Ernst I, Duke of Coburg, was ‘a heavy-headed humbugged German. Immoral’. Baron Stockmar appeared in retrospect to be ‘a double-faced villain’. His harshest words were reserved for ‘that hypocritical and detestable bitch’ Louise Lehzen, the governess. Clearly, there was some element of truth in Conroy’s claim that, from the beginning, he and Lehzen had been rivals for control over the princess. ‘While eating her trusting Mistress’s bread in the Palace, that infamous woman wholly stole the child’s affections and intrigued with King William through a Miss Wilson.’15

  Whether you sided with Lehzen or with Conroy – and there were those in high places who saw merits in Conroy – or whether you considered the constant intrigues and feudings to be unseemly, one fact remained undeniable. It was the fact which was the underlying cause of all the factions and politicking. Her half-brother Prince Charles of Leiningen, deeply anxious about the situation he witnessed whenever he visited Kensington Palace, emphasized this one fact when he wrote to his uncle, King Leopold, that ‘a young lady’ of eighteen was incapable of ruling England by herself. In his view, even if she did live to an age when she had technically reached her majority, she should have a Regent, and in his opinion, Sir John Conroy was indispensable.16