I, Victoria

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  Instead of the dear South of France I am to go to Ireland next month, on the 4th of April, for a short visit – the first in many years. This was entirely my own idea, and is intended to thank the Irish people for all their wonderful service in South Africa. I hope it will do much good and give satisfaction. I hope also to enjoy myself very much!

  With all the excitement, I am quite unable to sleep, so I will go on with my story. I had just got up to speaking of Conroy.

  John Conroy was my father’s equerry. He was the same age as Mamma; a tall man, not ill-favoured, but with the sly, slippery, self-satisfied look of a bad dog who has been in the larder and now comes to fawn over you and make believe he has not eaten in days. He had wits, in short, but no scruples. He was a man of superficial charm, but his mind was vulgar through and through, and though he could play the gentleman when it suited him, his manners were over-familiar, especially towards women (for whom he had a deep, if largely hidden, contempt).

  His family came from Ireland, and he had chosen a military career, as so many of them did. He acquired a commission in the Horse Artillery, and advanced, I believe, more because he was good with horses than because he was a good officer; but by luck and the exercise of his tongue he made an advantageous marriage to the daughter of Major General Fisher, who happened to be an old friend of Papa’s. Fisher and Papa had served together in Canada, and because of this connection, Conroy looked to my father for patronage when Fisher died in 1814. Out of respect for his old friend, Papa tried to get Conroy a preferment somewhere, and when he failed, he good-naturedly took Conroy into his own household as equerry in 1817. Fatal decision! If Papa had known what was to come of it, he would have run the man through rather than employ him.

  Conroy was a greedy, ambitious, self-seeking man, but also an impoverished one, with six children to maintain, and his private income from his Irish estate amounting to no more than £100 a year. When Papa died in 1820, Conroy must have believed his hopes of fame and fortune had died too; but more than that, it left him desperately short of the very necessaries of life. He was at Sidmouth with us when Papa died, and lost no time in offering his services to Mamma in order to secure himself and his family some kind of a home. I believe he meant Mamma to be no more than a stop-gap, but when Mamma, desperate in her bereavement for a man’s arm to lean on, asked him to be her Comptroller, he began to think more carefully about what opportunities might be offering right under his nose. Mamma was all alone, ignorant of business and out of favour with her late husband’s family. She was of a timid and confiding nature, always doubting her own powers, which made her easy for him to dominate; and intensely loyal where she had once given her trust, which made her easy to bamboozle. She was also – her most attractive attribute as far as Conroy was concerned – the sole guardian of a child who might one day be Queen of England.

  Conroy soon managed to make himself indispensable: he made all the decisions and told Mamma not to worry about anything, advice she was only too glad to take as long as it was presented by a man, and with an air of assurance. ‘I don’t know what I should do without him. His energy and capability are wonderful,’ she wrote to my grandmamma in Coburg.

  Once they were settled at Kensington, Conroy also managed to ingratiate himself with my aunt Princess Sophia, who lived in the next set of rooms to us. Princess Sophia and Conroy were soon thick as thieves; she liked him so much that she made him her Comptroller too and in 1827 begged my uncle King for an honour for him. The King was very fond of Sophia, and also had a weak spot for adventurers and ‘likeable rogues’, so he made Conroy a Knight Commander of the Hanoverian Order. It was not much of an honour, but it was twice ten times what he deserved, and it also gave him, as Sir John Conroy, a superficial and completely spurious respectability.

  Conroy’s plan was to have complete control over Mamma, by running her affairs, holding her purse-strings, and keeping her isolated from the rest of the royal family. Through her, of course, he meant to have complete control over me. Sovereigns come of age early, at the age of eighteen; but my uncles were elderly and not of sound health, and as it grew apparent that I would eventually succeed to the Throne, it also seemed likely that I would succeed as a minor, which would mean a regency. If that were the case, Sir John meant to ensure that Mamma would be made sole Regent, so that, through her, he would virtually be King of England. Contemplation of the power and riches that would then be his must sometimes have made him almost sick with excitement!

  If anyone were to scotch Conroy’s plans, it should have been Uncle Leopold, my mother’s own brother, and her paymaster into the bargain. He took a brotherly interest in her and a fatherly interest in me, and his visits to us at Kensington every Wednesday afternoon were the high moments of my week. How kind he was to me, how affectionate! I used to wait with my nose pressed to the window for the first possible hint of his arrival, and run into his arms to be embraced! He brightened our drab apartments like an exotic bird of paradise – for I have to admit he was eccentric in appearance, bewigged and painted and perfumed, with his coloured silk clothes, high-heeled shoes, and long, trailing feather boas. He used to invite us to stay at his country house, Claremont, near Esher, where I tasted a little of luxury and felt free as I never did at home. There was amusement there and no lessons, Mamma was always in a good humour, and Conroy was banished to the outer sphere of servants where he could not trouble us. Those visits to dear Claremont, for Feo and me, were the happiest memories of our childhood. ‘I always left Claremont for Kensington in tears,’ Feo said later. We both did.

  Uncle Leopold was a man of intelligence and great abilities, but unfortunately Mamma did not get on with him, grateful though she was for his money and protection. The death of Princess Charlotte had made him rather ‘dour’, as the Scotch say. He was clever, but talked very slow and solemn, and took a long time to make up his mind, which Mamma found tiresome. (Princess Sophia called him Monsieur Peu à Peu.) His advice was always sensible, and therefore unpalatable to Mamma. Conroy, on the other hand, filled with the optimism of fecklessness, offered her extravagant hopes and rosy fool’s apples, much sweeter to the taste of one who had never had the slightest notion of economy.

  Conroy missed no opportunity of poisoning Mamma’s mind against Uncle Leopold, so that from finding him rather glum and tiresome, she soon started to regard him with suspicion. Unfortunately, just at the time that Conroy was beginning to put his plan into action, of isolating us from all influence but his, Uncle Leopold disappeared from the scene. He had long tired of living a life of idleness as a private gentleman, the pensioner of the British Government (which made no secret of its resentment at having to keep him). He wanted a situation where he could exercise his considerable abilities, and in 1829 he was offered the throne of Greece, which had just separated from Turkey. He was tempted by the offer, but Parliament and the King were much against it, so he declined; but in 1830 the Belgians, having won their independence from Holland, asked Uncle Leopold to be their king, and this offer he accepted. He left England for Brussels in July 1831 and went out of my life for four years.

  He made an excellent king for the Belgians, capable, liberal and just, and they never had cause to regret their choice; but the effect on me was disastrous. Mamma would never have fallen so completely under Conroy’s spell if Uncle Leopold had been at hand to guide her; and I should not have been subjected to so many years of misery. Deprived by accident of a father’s love at birth, I was further denied a mother’s love by the actions of that wicked man, Conroy – and for that I could never, never forgive him.

  Conroy’s plan was to isolate us from all influences but himself, to make a separate court at Kensington (the Conroyal Court, as Wellington’s friend Mrs Arbuthnot described it), where he alone would choose the courtiers. To that end he must, of course, cut us off from the real Court, and this became especially necessary as my uncle King began to show an interest in me. Conroy worked on my mother’s fears by telling her that Uncle King meant to t
ake me away from her. There was probably a grain of truth in it: Uncle King wanted me to gain experience of Court life, and to get to know my paternal relations better. But Conroy convinced my mother that there was a plot afoot to murder me.

  His story was that the King had hated Papa, and therefore hated me, and wanted my uncle Cumberland (who now had a son, George, to follow him) to have the Throne. Mamma was in any case afraid of Uncle Cumberland, who combined a fearsome temper with a sinister appearance (owing to a scar across his face, got quite honourably in battle) and a reputation for extraordinary wickedness (most of it probably undeserved). Naturally Mamma believed everything Conroy told her. He said that Uncle Cumberland meant first of all to weaken me over a long period by bribing a servant to put small doses of poison in my bread-and-milk, so that it would get about that I was a naturally sickly child. Uncle Cumberland would feed those rumours, and then at the right moment Uncle King would take me away from Mamma to live at Court, where after a few weeks no-one would be at all surprised to learn I had died.

  Poor trembling Mamma believed all this, and was only too willing to follow Conroy’s advice. She cut me off from any contact with my relations, refused all invitations to Court, and kept away all visitors but those Conroy approved. To guard against assassination I was never to be left alone, day or night, but must always have either Mamma, Lehzen, or some other trusted person with me. My food was tasted to guard against poisoning; and to prevent murder à la Amy Robsart, I was never allowed to walk down a flight of stairs without someone holding my hand. I was never to be in company with a third person without supervision; and I was not to meet or play with any other children, except for Conroy’s own daughter Victoire. She was a girl just my own age and was brought to play with me once or twice a week, but I disliked her intensely. She was her father’s puppet, gave herself his airs, and by reporting to him everything I said, made trouble for me with him and Mamma.

  This, then, was my existence – my dreary, unnatural existence! No fun and no visitors; no companions of my own age, no play, no romping and laughing, no simple childish jollity. I was so much with adults, I often forgot that I was young. That was hard enough; but yet never to be left in peace to read or daydream and know oneself quite private and unwatched – free to think and feel as one pleased – that was still harder. It was the bitter irony of my fate, to be always lonely, and yet never alone. And how often I longed to be alone, to be safe from the intrusions of That Man!

  How can I describe the slights and humiliations he heaped on me? He was a natural bully, a short-tempered, self-satisfied, swaggering man with a harsh, hectoring voice; the sort of man who finds out a person’s weakest or most vulnerable point and makes cruel remarks about it – and then derides his victim for being upset. ‘What, can’t take a joke? Tears again, you ninny? What a simpleton you are!’ He was like the little boy who enjoys pulling the wings off flies and laughs to see them crawling about helpless. To him, power was the power to torment and humiliate, to aggrandise himself at others’ expense. The idea that power might be used to the good of the helpless would have been quite foreign to him.

  Oh, how miserable he made me! I was a proud child, and he trampled that pride mercilessly. He laughed at my appearance, always a sensitive point with me: he abused my short stature, my lack of chin, my uncompromising nose. He sneered at my carefulness with money (so different from his own attitude!) and called me ‘old snuffy’, a reference to my grandmother, Queen Charlotte, who was supposed to have been extremely mean. I had always comforted myself secretly that although I was not pretty, it was because of my royal blood, because I strongly resembled my father’s side of the family. Conroy somehow found that out, and claimed that the relative I was most like was my uncle Gloucester, the least prepossessing and also the slowest-witted (known in the family as Silly Billy). Conroy worked up the joke about my supposed stupidity, until many people believed on his authority that I was mentally retarded and incapable even of looking after myself, much less ruling the country.

  But it was he who was stupid. His aim was to rule England through me, but he could not see that whenever he bullied or insulted me, or indulged his ill-judged witticisms at my expense, he was knocking another nail into his own coffin. One day I would be Queen, and did he think I would then keep him at my right hand in love and gratitude? He saw me as a helpless child; and since he controlled my physical self, he assumed that he controlled me. But I was born with a strong will, a Hanoverian will, and every slight and cruelty I suffered at his hands only strengthened it. I could never endure to be ruled, and thwarting me only makes me more determined. However miserable he made me, even if he had had the most ingenious imagination in existence, there is nothing he could have done to me to break my spirit.

  He took my apparent submission at face value. If I had had anyone to turn to, I would not even have appeared submissive; but there was no-one. Mamma was completely under his thumb, and the more I saw that she acquiesced in his treatment of me, the more I was convinced that she did not, could not love me. Though she could not have been in any doubt as to how much I hated Conroy, she never doubted that he was right and that my hatred was unreasonable and the fault of my temper. She became so identified with him in my mind I thought of them as ‘they’; and as I hated him, so I hated her.

  Oh, that is a bitter thing to have to say! But it is true. My world was divided quite simply into those who belonged to him, and those who did not: ‘them’ and ‘us’. ‘They’ included my mother, of course; my brother Charles, who, himself a rake, was deeply admiring of Conroy’s panache; and Princess Sophia, who was so taken with Conroy that she called him her cher ami and willingly ‘spied’ for him on the King and the Clarences.

  The ‘us’ camp, once Feo had left, was reduced to Lehzen, and my mother’s woman Baroness Späth; and was soon to be reduced still further. Conroy, though not a sensitive man, could be observant where his own advantage was concerned. Späth and Lehzen loved me, and did not admire him; therefore Späth and Lehzen must go.

  His first success came in the autumn of 1829, when Mamma dismissed Baroness Späth from her service. How Conroy worked on her to do it I can’t imagine, for Späth had been with her for twenty-five years, all through the miserable years of her first marriage, through her first widowhood, and the happy revival of fortunes of her second marriage. Späth had crossed the Channel with Mamma, suffering tortures of seasickness, had attended her in childbirth at Kensington, had watched beside her at Sidmouth through Papa’s last illness. And afterwards she had not hesitated to stay with Mamma, often without wages, bravely sharing her exile in a foreign land, whatever hardships it might bring. Späth was not a woman of great intelligence, but was a dear, good, kind, and utterly loyal servant and friend.

  This good person was now to be dismissed because, it was announced, she was too German, and the Duchess of Kent wished to be surrounded by high-ranking English ladies. The very shallowness of the excuse reveals its origin. Conroy had never loved anyone in his life, so he could not imagine that such a pronouncement would seem anything out of the ordinary!

  It was received at Court with surprise and considerable speculation – so much so that Conroy, taken aback, went on to provide a string of further unconvincing reasons: Späth’s manners were not suitable to English society; her behaviour was not acceptable in a lady-in-waiting; she received too many visitors; she talked too much; she spoiled Princess Victoria by too much uncritical adoration; she had criticised the Duchess of Kent’s method of bringing up the child.

  Of these only the last had any truth to it. Späth had made the mistake of allowing her dislike of Conroy to show, of openly resenting his treatment of me, of objecting to the airs he put on – he talked insolently of her, and insisted on his wife taking precedence over Späth and Lehzen, who were both baronesses. Finally Späth had committed the crime of scolding Victoire Conroy for some pertness or other. In short, she had shown too clearly that she was not in Conroy’s camp – that was her real sin.


  Her dismissal caused a scandal. No-one could believe Mamma would put away her intimate companion for the reasons given, and so the rumour grew up that Späth had been dismissed because she had witnessed ‘familiarities’ between Mamma and Conroy. Society at that time was so loose in the haft that members of the ton could not believe a man and woman could live under the same roof without bedding each other, so Mamma and Conroy must be lovers. It was a wicked lie, of course, and must have hurt Mamma’s feelings dreadfully, for she was a woman of the strictest propriety, and though she was undoubtedly fond of Conroy, and was probably injudicious in her familiarity with him, she would never, never have behaved improperly with him.

  But I have to say she did wrong by Späth; and no doubt would have allowed Conroy to deprive me of Lehzen too, had not Lehzen been too clever for him. Conroy wanted to be rid of Lehzen because she was so friendly with Späth that he could not trust her; but she had seen long before how things were, and had been careful to give no cause for offence, concealing her hatred of Conroy and securing the approval of my uncle King and Uncle Clarence. When it was announced, obliquely, that Mamma intended to send Lehzen away as well, the King obliquely but very firmly responded that it was not to be.

  Poor Späth departed, red-eyed and bewildered, to find a home with kind Feo at Langenburg, where she remained for many years as her lady-in-waiting, and probably never understood why she had been so callously dismissed after such long, faithful service. Lehzen and I drew closer, like birds huddling together in winter, intent on surviving. The events were not discussed between us – Lehzen would not have thought it proper – but I knew well enough what was going on, and I was very frightened. Now that Feo and Uncle Leopold had gone, and Mamma had sided against me, Lehzen was the only person in the world I had to depend on, and despite my fear, my heart swelled with rage and indignation at the attempt to deprive me of my only refuge.