Formal education took place at home. In 1824, when Victoria was five years old, her mother appointed a German governess, Louise Lehzen, the clever, well-educated daughter of a German Lutheran pastor, as her tutor. Lehzen quickly established a firm yet loving relationship with her young charge. As well as being responsible for her education, Lehzen gave the young Princess the unconditional love she desired, helped her control her moods and tantrums and encouraged her to grow up.9 Lehzen also consolidated the Germanic sentiments already prevailing in the royal household.
At the time, it was expected that girls of all social classes would get married and raise a family. Education was not considered so important. Upper-class and aristocratic young ladies were expected to be able to play a few tunes on the piano, to sing, to dance the minuet, to draw a simple sketch, to sew a delicate sampler and sometimes to speak a little French. These accomplishments helped them achieve the ideal of the perfect educated woman: a decorative, poised and empty-headed companion for a future husband. Victoria, as a young female, learned the traditional female accomplishments. Dancing teachers, drawing masters, singing and music coaches and riding instructors were appointed to teach her how to dance elegantly, paint a pretty picture, sing in tune, play the piano and ride with confidence. One of the best-known opera singers, Luigu Lablache, gave her singing lessons. On 19 April 1836, aged 15, when she had her first lesson with him, Victoria was nervous and sang Mozart’s ‘Or che in cielo’ ‘in fear and trembling’.10 Fortunately Lablache praised her and so she was ‘very much pleased’ with her lesson. A few months later, Victoria no longer sang in ‘fear and trembling. . . I cared not now what I sing before him’.11 She clearly enjoyed her lessons and continued to employ Lablache for the next 20 years.
In the spring of 1830, when it became clear that George IV was dying and leaving no heir and that the next king, William IV, had still not fathered any legitimate children, Victoria’s mother re-focused her 11-year-old daughter’s education. Victoria learned to be disciplined and diligent. Every day was structured. Each morning she was woken at 7am, ate breakfast at 8:30am and went to bed at 8:30pm most nights. As well as traditional skills, the young Princess studied economics, geography, history, astronomy, mathematics and politics. Victoria, already fluent in English and German, became adept in Latin, Italian and French too. In addition, elocution lessons taught Victoria to speak clearly: her voice was thought to be one of her greatest assets.
In June 1831, Victoria’s Uncle Leopold left England to become King of Belgium, leaving no influential figure to challenge her mother’s authority. Victoria was devastated. She not only missed her confidante but also it left the 12-year-old Princess under the sole control of her mother and Sir John Conroy, a British army officer appointed to take charge of her mother’s affairs. Victoria grew to hate Conroy, partly because he tried to play the role of husband and step-father rather than secretary or servant and partly because she was jealous of the close relationship Conroy enjoyed with her mother. The Duchess, encouraged by Conroy, hoped that her daughter would ascend the throne before she was 18, thus allowing herself to become Regent of Britain. In this way, the Duchess would rule Britain, making her wealthy, formidably powerful and no longer dependent on her relatives for their goodwill and financial help. Together the Duchess and Conroy invented the ‘Kensington System’, a strict system designed to make Victoria dependent on the two of them. She was secluded from other children, effectively barred from seeing her other relatives and placed under close surveillance. Her only youthful companions were Conroy’s daughters but Victoria was never left alone. She was not allowed to see anyone – child or adult – without a third person being present. She even slept in her mother’s bedroom, guarded by her governess until her mother retired for the night.
Victoria was taught to be an exemplary, morally upright young woman. The Duchess carefully shielded her daughter’s charming innocence from the potentially malign influence of her British male relatives and from any intimacy with her Fitzclarence cousins. 12 Victoria’s mother disapproved of King William IV’s illegitimate offspring and objected to them living openly in the Palace with their father rather than hidden away in a private villa. Nonetheless, King William and Queen Adelaide were both very fond of their niece and wanted to introduce her to court life in preparation for her future life as a monarch. Victoria’s mother conversely wanted to ensure that her daughter remained morally uncontaminated, so steadfastly kept her away from court functions and prevented her from visiting the King and Queen. There were dangers in this approach as well as benefits: in future, Victoria would be intimidated by formal courtly manners and be awkward and diffident in initiating conversation at Palace functions.
For her part, the Duchess created her own ‘courtly’ training regime and implemented it. In order to make Victoria hold herself erect, a bunch of holly was placed directly under her chin – naturally, the young Princess hated what she called the ‘holly days’. In later years Victoria maintained that she had ‘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 a father – from my unfortunate circumstances was not on a comfortable or at all intimate or confidential footing with my mother’.13 The relationship between Victoria and her mother was problematic during the teenage years: girls like Victoria want their mothers to love them unconditionally, and mothers like the Duchess want to help their daughters grow into reasonable and effective adults. Conflict was largely inevitable, especially as Victoria, like many teenagers, had strong emotions, was over-sensitive and often moody, angry and irritable. The Duchess, because she was accessible and because Victoria felt secure and safe with her mother, found herself the target of teenage resentment. Rows between Victoria and her mother were common. Not until she reached her mid-twenties, when Victoria was safely married and had had some of her own children, did she begin to value and respect her mother.
A royal progress
The Duchess, who refused to let her daughter visit the court, still wanted to let the British people know about her daughter and her place in the royal hierarchy. On 1 August 1832, the 13-year-old Victoria was taken on an expedition across the middle of England to Wales. On that day Victoria wrote her first entry into a journal she would keep for the rest of her life. ‘This book, Mamma gave me, that I might write the journal of my journey to Wales.’14 Her early entries, probably read by both her mother and her governess, rarely include negative comments. The world, according to Victoria’s journal, was very rosy indeed.
The tour lasted over three months. On the second day of her tour, Victoria visited the Black Country in the West Midlands. In her journal, possibly guided by Lehzen, the 13-year-old Victoria wrote that the ‘country is very desolate everywhere; . . . the grass is quite blasted and black. I just now see an extraordinary building flaming with fire. The country continues black, engines flaming, coals in abundance, everywhere, smoking and burning coal heaps, intermingled with wretched huts and little ragged children.’ 15 Lehzen encouraged her young charge to read the evangelical texts of Hannah More and Maria Edgworth and urged Victoria to understand the ‘real world’ of working people. Such journeys of course helped the Princess gain a more realistic impression of the country over which she would reign.
Victoria’s mother, influenced by John Conroy, had less elevated reasons for the journeys. The Duchess wanted to show off the young Princess to the British public. Each time the party visited a place, they were greeted majestically: troops of Yeomanry paid their respects; guns saluted; sometimes bands played; and flags, flowers and bunting festooned buildings. At Conway, charity children ‘strewed the paths with flowers and walked two by two before us’.16 In addition, many adults came out to see the young Princess Victoria and her entourage. The Caernarfon Herald reported that ‘at 4 o’clock the Royal cavalcade arrived in five carriages and with some horses and were welcomed by hundreds assembled before, in intense anxiety, with hearty and enthusiastic h
uzzas, which made the welkin reverberate to their loyal and unfeigned vociferations of devotedness and respect’.17 ‘Nothing’, according to The Times, could exceed the ‘enthusiasm of the inhabitants in their endeavours to give all possible éclat to the visit of the Duchess of Kent and the Princess Victoria. The shops were closed. The houses, windows, and even the posts were tastefully decorated with laurel and garlands of flowers, interspersed with flags.’18 Here Victoria laid her first stone – for a school for boys. She was given a ‘small trowel with mortar with which I smeared the stone which was there, then I beat the stone thrice with a wooden hammer.’19 These trips were preparation for a public role in later life: as queen, Victoria would be expected to lay stones, unveil statues, open buildings and appear regularly in public.
Fortunately for the lively high-spirited teenager, the journey was sometimes more fun. On 29 September 1832, Victoria went to the Rural Sports at Plas Newydd where she saw competitors ‘donkey racing, climbing up a greasy pole for a live duck at the top, jumping in sacks, running with wheel-barrows blindfolded, and chasing after a pig with its tail soaped, the right hand tied behind’.20 Nothing, she noted in her journal, could be ‘more ridiculous or amusing’. Victoria took no part in such activities. These kinds of games, common to country fairs, were thought inappropriate for a young royal so the spirited and lively Princess could only watch. Victoria loved horse riding – fast. At Plas Newydd she ‘galloped over a green field . . . Rosa went an enormous rate; she literally flew’.21 At Pitchford, Shropshire she walked out to see the hunt and saw them off. She was excited by the hunt and completely unperturbed by the bloodshed, writing that:
it was an immense field of horsemen, who in their red jackets and black hats looked lively and gave an animating appearance to the whole. They had a large pack of hounds. . . we saw the fox dash past and all the people and hounds after him, the hounds in full cry. The hounds killed him in a wood close by. The huntsman . . . cutting off the brush . . . brought it to me. Then the huntsman cut off for themselves the ears and 4 paws, and lastly they threw it to the dogs, who tore it from side to side until there was nothing left.22
Victoria became a good horsewoman, an attribute which was much-admired when she later addressed her troops on horseback. The teenager enjoyed spectacle too. When the group visited Chatsworth there were fireworks: rockets, wheels, windmills and red and blue lights; Victoria enjoyed seeing ‘a temple and my name in stars and a crown’.23
The trip had been a huge success: Princess Victoria had made a good impression on the British public. As a result, in summer 1833, another royal tour took place to the south and west of England: Portsmouth, Plymouth, Torquay, Exeter, Weymouth, Dorset and the Isle of Wight. On 1 August they arrived at Torquay, which Victoria thought ‘a beautiful place; it looks more like some Italian town than an English port’.24 The inhabitants of Torquay were ‘honoured with a Visit. . . immediately the Royal Standard was hoisted and a royal salute was fired’.25 At Plymouth, they reviewed the regiments; at Dartmouth, Victoria ‘was most enthusiastically received by the assembled inhabitants. . . . As she passed salutes were fired. . . Boats, to the number of several hundreds, thronged with inhabitants, floated on the tide, and bands of music and deafening cheers welcomed the approach of the royal visitors.’26
In 1835, Princess Victoria, her mother and their entourage all journeyed north. The royal company visited the York Music Festival. At York Minster, the ‘assembled thousands rose. . . and such was the enthusiasm of the moment that the sanctity of the temple was forgotten, and a simultaneous burst of applause escaped from the audience as their Royal Highnesses entered’.27 At Leeds, a town with a radical heritage which rarely took notice of royal visits, huge crowds arrived to see Victoria and the royal party. Early in the day roads leading to Chapel Allerton were crowded with spectators, some roads were impassable and the windows of houses were full of people eager for a glimpse of the young Princess.28 In Lynn, Norfolk, a vast crowd unyoked the horses and pulled the coach containing the Princess and her mother through the town. Victoria later commented that ‘the people, of whom there was a dense mass, insisted on dragging us through the town and in spite of every effort which was tried to prevent them from so doing, they obstinately persisted. . . . I could see nothing of the town; I only saw one living dense mass of human beings!’29 The horses were eventually reattached to their carriage but by this time Victoria was ‘well-nigh dead by the heat of this long and tiresome day’. At each town, Victoria and mother had to listen to speeches by the various dignitaries. Victoria thought them all very kind and well meant but confided that truly ‘these addresses are really ein wenig, sehr langweilig [a little too boring]’.30 In a later letter to Lord John Russell, Victoria described her loathing of being a ‘spectacle’ to be gazed at.31 These parades and pageants were increasingly seen as an essential part of monarchical duty, but in later life Victoria would do her best to avoid such events.
William IV disapproved of these journeys. In his opinion, they were too much like royal progresses, where crowned sovereigns showed themselves off to their subjects, rather than a trip around Britain. The journeys of Victoria and the Duchess, the King believed, undermined his authority by portraying Victoria as having more power than she possessed. Arguably, Victoria’s carriage drawn by grey horses with post boys in ‘pink silk jackets, with black hats, and the horses have pink silk reigns with bunches of artificial flowers’ 32 represented more of a royal procession than a family outing. Victoria too disliked these journeys and wanted them to stop, citing the King’s objections to them. She suffered from sickness, stomach upsets and headaches as well as an intense loathing of Conroy – she called him ‘a monster and devil incarnate’. However, her mother took no notice and insisted that Victoria continue the tours: she was after all destined to be queen.
After this latest journey, Victoria, her mother, Conroy and Lehzen went to the popular resort of Ramsgate for a holiday, just as they had since the Princess was four years old. On 6 October 1835, Victoria became ill. The doctors initially thought her illness psychosomatic and ignored her symptoms. Later, typhoid – a bacterial disease transmitted by infected food or water and often fatal – was diagnosed. When she was dangerously ill in bed and thought to be much too weak to resist, Conroy and her mother tried to force her to sign a document making Conroy her private secretary when she came to the throne. Her mother, Conroy and his daughters, and her mother’s lady-in-waiting Lady Flora Hastings threatened and pleaded for Victoria to sign the document. Fortunately, Lehzen protected her young charge from this psychological warfare and Conroy left humiliated. Five weeks later, after having lost much of her hair, the much diminished Victoria began to recover. She never referred to the event in her daily journal but a few months later wrote:
I quite forgot to mention that after my illness at Ramsgate I lost my hair frightfully, so that I was literally now getting bald; the comb-tray was full every morning with my hair; as a last and desperate refuge Lehzen, with Mama’s and my consent, cut off half and even more of my back hair, once so thick. . . . there is just enough left to be able to tie it and made a small puff; I wear a false plait of course.33
Undoubtedly, the young Princess had been very seriously ill yet even at her weakest she refused to be bullied, showing an obstinacy that many of her future ministers would find exasperating. Moreover, Victoria never forgot, or forgave, the attempts of her mother, Conroy and Lady Flora to coerce her into signing away her rights. As queen, Victoria would fight equally untiringly to defend and retain what she considered her royal prerogatives – her monarchical rights – whenever they were threatened.
As she got older, Victoria, in common with other aristocratic and upper-class girls, was expected to be involved in charitable work. In August 1836, now aged 17, Victoria visited the Victoria Asylum set up by one of her future maids of honour for poor homeless girls under the age of 15. When they have ‘become quite good, and can read, write and do work of all kinds necessary for a house, they a
re sent abroad, mostly to the Cape of Good Hope where they are apprentices and become excellent servants’. Victoria was told the story of one little girl:
a pretty black-eyed girl, 11 years old, called Ellen Ford, who was received two month ago, from Newgate, and who boasted she could steal and tell lies better than anybody. She had been but two or three days in the school, and she got over 3 high walls, and stole a sheet; she was caught and brought back again. . . the girl was put in solitary confinement for that night and taken out the next morning; and ever since she has been a perfectly good girl.34
One senses that the young Princess enjoyed the waywardness of Ellen Ford more than she did the punishment and transformation of the rebellious young girl. She might have even remembered her own confession in her Good Behaviour Book as a mischievous 13 year old when she had been ‘VERY VERY VERY VERY HORRIBLY NAUGHTY!!!!’, which she had underlined four times.35 Until she was widowed, Victoria’s natural temperament was always being quashed by one adult or another.
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