Victoire, Duchess of Kent was a striking-looking widow of assured if showy dress sense, pink-cheeked and garrulous, but slow to master English with confidence. Until his death in 1814, her unappealing first husband, Charles Emich of Leiningen, had ruled without distinction, or the appearance of common sense, a territory in Lower Franconia much depleted by Napoleon. Leiningen’s dark-haired widow, allied to Edward, Duke of Kent in 1818, as England still reeled from Princess Charlotte’s death, quitted Germany with a son and daughter of pleasing aspect, Charles and Feodore; she took with her too the memory of financial hardship and emotional neglect. Her second marriage offered no respite from the former and so acquired a peripatetic character, husband and wife constantly travelling in the interests of economy. Happily the Duke of Kent, whose governorship of Gibraltar in 1802, described as a ‘reign of terror’,9 included sentencing a man to a flogging of 900 lashes,10 regarded his duchess unequivocally as ‘a young and charming Princess’11 and implored her quite sincerely to ‘love me as I love you’.12 For just this happiness had he set aside his kind and comfortable mistress of three decades, Julie de St Laurent – that and the hope that Parliament would increase his allowance handsomely. (Parliament decided otherwise, happy to act shabbily.) Since the Duke died of pneumonia, reputedly caught from wet boots, on 23 January 1820 – on an extended sojourn to the seaside at Sidmouth, which offered bracing sea breezes at modest rates – Alexandrina Victoria cannot have remembered her parents’ wedded bliss: she was eight months old. Their happiness found reflections in her own spectacularly loving marriage. In the meantime, she grew up to share the sentiments of her aunt, Elizabeth, Landgravine of Hesse-Homburg, that her parents’ ‘domestic comfort … broke up’ was ‘a very sad, sad thing’.13
Infancy prevented her from recognising that atmosphere of petty contentiousness which hung, like the odour of penury, about the large apartment in Kensington Palace. No public rejoicing greeted her birth: like his brothers, her father was not popular. Superstitious and in the throes of a late-in-life infatuation with his much younger wife, the Duke of Kent may have been convinced that his daughter was a sovereign-in-waiting – as Edith Sitwell described her, ‘conceived, born and bred … to mount the summits of greatness’;14 he was wise enough mostly to disguise that hope. ‘I should deem it the height of presumption to believe it probable that a future heir to the Crown of England would spring from me,’ he asserted with questionable frankness.15 More sober counsels, the Regent among them, anticipated an heir from the Duke of Clarence and his whey-faced young bride Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, whose first child had died only two months earlier within hours of her birth (the first of four disappointments for the long-suffering Clarences). Like the Clarences themselves, they would be thwarted in that expectation. The Regent feigned boredom at the princess’s birth, but true to his nature of petulant caprice, the following month roused himself to sufficient rancour to spoil her christening. He changed her parents’ preferred name of Victoire Georgiana Alexandrina Charlotte Augusta to Alexandrina Victoria: the unwieldy, foreign-sounding ‘Alexandrina’ was a tribute to the baby’s most powerful sponsor, Alexander I of Russia, who would play no part in her upbringing. By striking out Charlotte and the feminine form of his own name, the Regent symbolically denied the baby’s connection to himself and any claim to the throne. He also held at arm’s length the niece in whom he took no interest. The Duchess of Clarence, by contrast, wrote to her affectionately on her third birthday as ‘dear little Xandrina Victoria’:16 abbreviation came quickly. For much of her childhood she was simply ‘Drina’. On her accession ‘Alexandrina’ would be dropped entirely, although a bill of 1831 to change the child’s name by Act of Parliament to Charlotte Victoria had proved unsuccessful. It was a matter in which the twelve-year-old Victoria had no say: later she was grateful for its outcome, which freed her somewhat from the shadow of her cousin and her grandmother. Victoria assuredly owed her crown to her cousin’s death: an egotist in terms of her royal role (if not in all matters), she sought to cast her reign in no one’s image but her own. Besides, she felt, her mother reported, a ‘great attachment’ to her second name, notwithstanding that unEnglishness and lack of British royal precedent which so troubled her uncle William.17 Later she would castigate Charlotte – alongside Elizabeth – as one of ‘the ugliest “housemaids” names I ever knew’.18
Foolish she may have been, unfortunate too in the mortality of her husbands: Victoria’s mother possessed another significant attribute. She had been born Princess Marie Louise Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Charlotte’s tragedy thus touched the Duchess of Kent closely for the women were sisters-in-law, Charlotte’s husband Victoire’s younger brother Leopold. Like parvenus in pursuit of ton, the ambitious and good-looking Coburgs were a family eager for greatness, none more so than Leopold. In coming decades Coburgers would colonise the palaces of Europe: their winning formula was a combination of dashing sex appeal, force of will and a self-serving phlegmatism in matters religious and political. Not without reason did Bismarck later vilify them as the ‘stud-farm of Europe’ or a Habsburg archduke complain that ‘the Coburgs gain throne after throne and spread their growing power abroad over the whole earth’.19 With Charlotte and her baby dead, and Leopold’s dream of kingship by proxy in shreds, their second bite of the cherry fell to Victoire. It was Leopold who, as early as 1816, had drawn to the Duke of Kent’s attention his lovely, lonely sister; Leopold who afterwards with renewed zeal encouraged Kent’s hopes through a protracted courtship; Leopold who, metaphorically at least, hovered at his sister’s shoulder. Kent’s death was not the disaster Charlotte’s had been, since his daughter survived him. It was Leopold who steadied Victoire’s resolve as she grappled with her second bereavement.
Leopold also assisted his sister financially (though hardly to the top of his considerable means) and inspired her with dreams of glittering prizes and heavy-duty good advice; he insisted that she and the child live in Britain, albeit isolated and virtually friendless. As time would show, her compliance was enthusiastic. As keenly aware of the value of her trump card as any hard-bitten gamester, chary of her prerogatives and fully set upon the exercise of power, Victoire of Kent would prove tenacious in pursuit of the Coburg usurpation. But she played her hand badly. The Coburger who ruled England was neither Leopold nor his sister Victoire, who spent long years at variance with her daughter, but their nephew Albert, a case of third time lucky. In Albert’s case, the Coburg will to power was balanced by a contradictory impulse, the ‘Coburg melancholy’; both would leave their imprint.
Hostage to his own mismanagement, the Duke of Kent bequeathed his wife an impressive list of creditors and a decidedly unimpressive jointure of less than £300 a year. After her five-night vigil at her dying husband’s bedside, the Duchess was unable to meet the costs of transporting his coffin to Windsor or herself and her daughter to London. It sounds a farcical impasse: it was certainly an inauspicious beginning to baby Victoria’s august career. Unavoidably, mother and daughter remained for several weeks in Sidmouth, scene of their unhappiness, awaiting Leopold’s help. Parliament granted the Duchess a royal widow’s pension of £6,000, a modest sum by royal standards. As we will see, the Duke’s own final gift to his wife also ultimately proved inadequate, though the Duchess was slow to recognise it: an egregiously venturesome helpmeet condemned by posterity.
John Conroy (from 1827 Sir John Conroy) was the Duke of Kent’s equerry and one of his executors; following the Duke’s death he became Comptroller of the Duchess’s household. He exercised authority over her finances and her aspirations. For this hook-nosed Anglo-Irish landowner of severely limited means possessed unlimited ambition and a degree of swaggering magnetism. Gossips including no less a figure than the Duke of Wellington branded him the Duchess’s lover: certainly theirs became an egoïsme à deux, which was itself an approach to intimacy. Conroy was a gambler with fate. He pinned his hopes on Victoria becoming queen and himself exercising power through the Duchess. Had
he preferred the moonshine of dreams to the hard manipulation of scheming, he might have survived for future generations as a romantic figure. But he conceived of lasting benefits deriving first from the Duke of Kent’s death, afterwards from Victoria’s eminence. Inevitably over the next two decades he overplayed his hand. He earned Victoria’s lasting enmity and, like the majority of the vanquished, forfeited the opportunity of telling his side of the story. Misguidedly he encouraged the Duchess in a course of behaviour towards her daughter which cost her Victoria’s trust, her respect and, most importantly, her love.
Seeds sown by this predatory Irish adventurer were never harvested: Victoire did not steer the ship of state, even as Regent, and Conroy was prevented from basking in reflected glory. Victoria herself dismissed him from her household on her very first day as queen – after some delays pensioned off lucratively if with an ill grace. It was surely the right course of action. But for her father’s death and Conroy’s ambitions, Victoria’s childhood might have been happier. Certainly the series of sketches of her at three years old made by Lady Elizabeth Keith Heathcote during a seaside holiday in Ramsgate suggest a normal toddler happy at normal toddler pursuits.20 She was a healthy, active child, successfully inoculated against smallpox at the age of ten weeks. Breast-fed by her mother and cared for by her nurse Mrs Brock, she was contented, plump and wilful with the unyielding egotism of the very young, ‘a greater darling than ever, but … beginning to show symptoms of wanting to get her own little way’ as early as January 1820.21 With few intermissions, she would remain plump and wilful. Thanks to her mother’s sense of destiny, her infant world was as English as the German Duchess could make it (save for her German half-sister Feodore, her German governess Lehzen and the German lady-in-waiting, Baroness Späth, in attendance on her mother: a fluttering, unattractive, devoted woman widely written off as negligible and eventually expelled by Conroy). In 1822, mother and daughter sat together for William Beechey. In Beechey’s portrait the exotic good looks belong to Victoria’s German mother. For her part, Victoria is a generic English child, cherubic, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, as novelist Walter Scott remembered her at nine. In one chubby hand she clutches a miniature of her father. The habit of visible mourning, and of defining herself through her relationship to a deceased male, began early.
‘When I think of His poor Miserable Wife, and His innocent, Fatherless Child, it really breaks my heart,’ wrote the Duke of Kent’s eldest unmarried sister Princess Augusta two days after the Duke’s death in 1820.22 The following week George III also died. Victoria’s childhood would indeed come to include an element of broken-heartedness; happiness came afterwards. For the rest of her life there would be a series of surrogate father figures, including her uncle Leopold, her first prime minister and her husband. And in her friendships with women, even her own daughters, too often a reserve, occasionally hostility. The origin of both impulses is easy to trace: a childhood environment of querulous femininity and, with the exception of the exceptionable Conroy, male absence.
2
‘Fresh and innocent as the flowers in her own garden’
ROOKS NESTED IN Kensington Gardens during Victoria’s childhood: only in 1880, with the destruction of a grove of 700 elm trees, did they depart.1 There were nuthatches among the beeches and horse chestnuts, jays too. To the passer-by it was a sylvan place, site of that ‘country’ palace acquired by William III and enriched by George I, ‘[full] of memories and legends; of notable or fantastic figures of the past’.2 Two centuries ago, Kensington Palace was recognisably that ‘pleasant place, surrounded by beautiful gardens, [in which] a little girl was brought up by her loving mother’, imagined with a heavy dollop of syrup by children’s author E. Nesbit in 1897.3 ‘Her teachers instructed her in music and languages, in history and all the things that children learn at school,’ Nesbit told readers of Royal Children of English History. ‘Her mother taught her goodness and her duty. There she grew up fresh and innocent as the flowers in her own garden, living a secluded life, like a princess in an enchanted palace.’
In Victoria’s own version of her childhood, in which memories of the struggle against Conroy and the Duchess tinctured her picture of the whole, her secluded life included little enchantment. ‘I led a very unhappy life as a child,’ she would write to her eldest daughter in 1858:4 her current state, as queen, wife and mother, quick to command, reluctant to be instructed, was infinitely preferable to those years of conflict. Not for her the poet’s claim on her behalf that, ‘She only knew her childhood’s flowers/ Were happier pageantries!’5 Nearly forty years on, careful to avoid excessive censure of her mother, she attributed that unhappiness to loneliness. She described herself as ‘[having] no scope for my very violent feelings of affection – [I] had no brothers and sisters to live with – never had had a father – from my unfortunate circumstances was not on a comfortable or at all intimate or confidential feeling with my mother … and did not know what a happy domestic life was!’ Free from the shackles of filial piety, the historian need apportion blame less sparingly. And yet the Duchess of Kent was not deliberately the villainess she can all too easily be made to appear. She later attributed her erroneous ways to thoughtlessness, ‘believing blindly, … [and] acting without reflexion’.6
Her position was not conducive to confidence. Beyond the spangled purlieus of the court of George IV, there was a ramshackle bravado to London in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Barrack-room bawdy and lusty xenophobia found vigorous expression in a popular culture of splenetic irreverence. Caricaturists targeted the royal family: their sex lives, their gargantuan appetites, their overspending, their all-pervasive folly. Short of money, friends and affection, dependent on the good will and handouts of her brother Leopold, and the tolerance of the new King, which was grudging in the extreme, the Duchess of Kent lacked a champion. She did not look far to fill the vacancy.
Conroy was an accomplished flirt. An indifferent soldier, he owed something of his military advancement to assiduous courtship of commanding officers’ wives. His relationship with the plaintive royal widow is unlikely to have extended to a full-scale sexual liaison: from the outset the Duchess rated too highly her probable future as queen mother. Conroy’s approach to the mistress whose experience of happy marriage had been so fleeting was at best manipulative, at worst bullying: she apologised to him on one occasion for being ‘just an old stupid goose’.7 A foxy sort of sexiness undoubtedly leavened his tough love, as did the same line in dark-hued melodrama which also won him the affection of the Duke of Kent’s youngest surviving sister Princess Sophia, a neighbour at Kensington Palace: Conroy exploited the unmarried princess of failing eyesight without scruple as an easy source of ready cash and delved deep into her purse. But while he delighted Sophia with gossip,8 he kept the Duchess on tenterhooks by stoking that paranoia to which the uncertainty of her position so easily tended. Her response was equally myopic. Victoria herself claimed later that Conroy had unnerved her mother with conspiracy theories centred on the wickedest of her wicked uncles, Ernest, Duke of Cumberland. Since Victoria stood between the throne and Cumberland, the Duke must be hellbent on her removal. It was strong meat, to rational minds perhaps too strong, as luridly coloured as contemporary lampoons, credible only within the context of what Leopold had described as ‘a family whose members hate one another with an inconceivable bitterness’.9 Like all Conroy’s schemes, it aimed at isolating the Duchess and her daughter from their royal relatives. While the steely Irishman with the cleft chin and, in his portraiture, a suggestion of sardonic disdain in those hooded dark eyes, prevented anyone else from usurping his own position of influence, he appeared in the guise of protector. As if to confirm Conroy’s whisperings, George IV stonily ignored the fledgling household in Kensington.
The Duchess’s dread of her husband’s family grew. When George IV did invite mother and daughter to Windsor, in 1826, she was convinced that the ageing monarch – corseted, enamelled, bewigged and panting – in
tended to kidnap Victoria. Stubbornly she defended the princess’s seclusion. Over time she justified her line as shielding Victoria from her uncles’ moral degeneracy. If her policy were immoderate – surely, in preventing Victoria from attending the coronation of William IV and ‘poor wishy-washy’ Queen Adelaide, as the latter’s doctor described her, she overreached herself – we understand something of her anxiety. She forbade the company of cousins too, including George of Cambridge and George of Cumberland, contemporaries of equal rank; only Sir John’s daughters, Victoire and Jane Conroy, were sanctioned as playmates. Unsurprisingly Victoria learnt to hate them. Instead she drew emotional sustenance from Lehzen. Companionship proved more elusive. Long hours she beguiled with an extensive collection of elaborately dressed wooden dolls. Velvet- and satin-primped ciphers of an imaginary world in which she existed autonomously and among friends, they represented an alternative reality – inspired by history lessons and those performances of bel canto opera at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, which became a sole legitimate outlet for all her pent-up Hanoverian emotionalism: the young Victoria was stage-struck, in love with dancers and singers. Easy to discern a symbolic dimension to the Duchess’s grey parrot: sharp-beaked, dingy-hued and prone to repeating confidences. More satisfactory a playmate was the spaniel Dash with whom Sir George Hayter painted Victoria in 1835: until Victoria adopted him, he too had belonged to the Duchess, a present from Conroy.
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