The Queen, Her Lover and the Most Notorious Spy in History

by Roland Perry

  The issue of a suitable partner would have to be raised again. Melbourne pressed her carefully, gently. She responded by telling him how her uncles (Leopold and Ernst) were pushing her to marry Albert. She again made it clear that she was against any official union at this point in her life. She did not see it as necessary for ‘three or four years’. Victoria’s at times low self-esteem caused her to worry that she would be too much for any husband to handle. ‘I dreaded the thought of marrying,’ she told Melbourne. ‘I was [so much] accustomed to having my own way, that I thought I was ten to one that I shouldn’t agree with anybody.’

  Melbourne assured Victoria she should get her way yet she was unconvinced. She worried that she would ‘win’ arguments but only after calamitous scenes with that future husband.Victoria was as ever worried about her depression and ugly temper. She had been working on both but did not feel confident enough to take on a spouse. For this reason, she harboured thoughts of continuing her love affair with Elphinstone. It had been previously all fun with no responsibility for either of them. Their set-up in 1835 was ideal. He hardly ever experienced her temper or depression. When they had their assignations it was all romance and poetry. The debonair Scot was a dominant type, though without a temper like hers. He commanded her. She loved it, while still realising that he would not ever bow to her other than ceremonially. It would annoy her that the kind of man she really desired—an Elphinstone, a Melbourne, a Wellington, even a Napoleon—would never do. It was perhaps the worst contradiction in forming a relationship when queen. She might have to compromise.This would be hard to accept for a royal young woman who had become used to receiving what she wanted. Also, by the middle of 1839 she was enjoying her role without sharing the limelight. Having created the thought of marriage, which she disdained, Melbourne then manipulated her into thinking through all the issues she might encounter. The mention of Albert’s name became almost an incantation.

  ‘How would your mother react to Albert?’ he asked Victoria over lunch at Buckingham Palace.

  ‘She has urged me to marry him more than any other.’

  ‘Might she and Prince Albert side together against you?’

  ‘The duchess would join almost anyone against me. But Albert? He is not a dominant type. I fear him not.’

  ‘Could she not bring the prince to her thinking?’

  ‘Perhaps. But if he is that weak, he will not be my husband anyway.’

  ‘You think you could organise Albert the way you wish?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You have his measure then.’

  ‘Remember, I have met him but once, albeit over three weeks.We have exchanged letters. His writing shows he has matured but not to the point of standing in my way. . .’

  ‘Of course, the prince is a Coburg, like your mother. How do you feel about marrying one?’

  ‘That’s not a problem,’ she said and then laughed. ‘In any case, the men are better!’

  Melbourne chortled and then looked pensive.

  ‘How do you feel about marrying a foreigner?’

  ‘No worse than marrying an Englishman. At least not from my observations and, as you know, I have been forced into quite a bit of observing! Sometimes I feel I am at the zoo.’

  They both laughed again.

  Victoria was wistful for a moment. She was thinking, as ever, of Elphinstone. Melbourne guessed the reason for her sudden silence.

  ‘Have you heard from the lord, majesty?’

  ‘Only in my prayers, prime minister.’

  Melbourne’s expression lightened. ‘I think you know of whom I speak, majesty.’

  ‘As I have told you on another occasion, my private correspondence is no business of yours, prime minister!’ she snapped, delivering her signature cold stare.

  ‘You are correct, your majesty. Pardon me.’

  ‘You are pardoned. But again, please refrain from questions of that nature.’

  Melbourne left the lunch a fraction chastened, a condition he would accept from no-one else. He’d had a little victory in the marriage wars. His method of turning her head towards accepting the previously detested concept of matrimony had worked.Victoria was contemplating it for the first time. Melbourne continued to put mild objections to Albert in a classic use of reverse psychology but Victoria seemed (in her correspondence) to be aware of Melbourne’s ploy. She dismissed further speculation by saying she could not make up her mind about considering Albert until she saw him again. He would be making a visit in September 1839. She had not seen him for more than three years. He had been a boy then. She was curious to assess his development.

  12

  CRISIS OF THE BEDCHAMBER

  Victoria’s dread about losing Melbourne looked like happening in May 1839 when his government lost a vote in the Commons over the implementation of Reform Laws on behalf of sugar workers in Jamaica. On 7 May, the Whig politician Lord Russell, 47, informed her that the government must resign. She cried.Victoria had long listed Tories among the things that gave her the ‘horrors’ along with insects, turtle soup and going blind. Now the conservatives looked likely to take power. Melbourne suggested that she retain her female household, which meant her collection of women married to Whig parliamentarians would stay. She accepted that Whig gentlemen at court, who were also in parliament, would have to go.Wellington declined her offer to form a government. At 70 years of age, he was old and deaf and not up to it, he felt.The conservative statesman Sir Robert Peel, 51, was the next potential Tory prime minister to see her.Victoria was unimpressed with him, mainly because he was a Tory and not physically to her adolescent liking. She did not find his aquiline features appealing. Nevertheless, discussions went smoothly until it came to the question of her female household. She was steadfast. There would be no change to her Whig team. She would not remove any Whig lords either if they did not have seats in parliament. Peel was stunned. The pliant, nineteen-year-old monarch could be a tough old queen. She believed Peel was behind a plot to oust the ladies closest to her with the ultimate aim of removing Lehzen, whom the Tories believed was behind the Lady Flora debacle. And that is where the politics of the Bedchamber Plot, as it became known, lay: Whigs versus Tories brawling in and around the queen’s boudoir, and who should be the inner members of her household, with close and intimate contact to her.

  Victoria had been too quick to dismiss Peel because she didn’t like his unpolished demeanour after dealing with the urbane Melbourne. Peel had erred in pushing Victoria when she was angry instead of giving her time to settle her thoughts. He decided he could not form a government under the circumstances, which left Melbourne in power but in a precarious position. The Bedchamber ‘crisis’ was intertwined with the Lady Flora issue and led to a further fall in public support for Victoria. She ignored this and socialised hard with balls, her twentieth birthday and late nights. High-spirited dances lifted her from the mental malaise brought on by political anxieties, yet even this reverie could not match the excitement generated by the news early in June that John Conroy would leave the Duchess of Kent’s household. It had all been due to the subtle old Duke of Wellington using flattery. First, he invited Conroy, a supreme social climber, to an exclusive party as if he were treating him as an important friend. The duke followed it up with the ultimate letter of manufactured congratulations telling him he was right to depart:‘considering the sacrifices that you make [in leaving the Kent household],’ Wellington wrote, ‘and that it is liable to misrepresentation [meaning he will be seen to have been bought off or bribed to leave] it is an Honourable and a Manly course.’

  Coming from the most famous honourable and manly Englishman of the era, this was a communication to be framed and placed above a study desk. The crafty old duke remarked in private that the letter was a Pont d’Or—a golden bridge—over which Conroy could retire to the Continent. The gold was his £3000 annuity with a baronetcy and the promise of a peerage offered by Melbourne two years previously. Conroy was not to know that Victoria would never all
ow the peerage while she reigned.The title would give him access to the court. She had also a growing documented excuse for blocking him from this honour that Conroy coveted most and this was his financial dealings on behalf of others, including the duchess, which were dubious at best and often fraudulent.

  Conroy’s departure should have thawed relations between the duchess and Victoria, but a chill remained. Neither would speak to the other nor compromise. Not even Wellington’s intervention helped. The divide was increased with the worsening ‘illness’ of Lady Flora. Melbourne,Victoria and others at court still believed she was pregnant. The public was only given brief glimpses into the household battles, and they were unfavourable to Victoria. She was hissed at at Ascot, where she received some verbal abuse from Tory wives, who called out the now familiar refrain,‘Mrs Melbourne! Mrs Melbourne!’ By 26 June 1839 Victoria felt obliged to visit the ailing Lady Flora, and received a shock. She was wasted,Victoria told her diary, ‘literally like a skeleton, but the body very much swollen like a person who is with child . . .she was very grateful for all I had done for her.’ Victoria was holding to the view that she was pregnant while still being relieved that Lady Flora was unlikely now to disclose her (Victoria’s) own secret concerning Elphinstone.

  The duchess persuaded Victoria to postpone a ball. On 4 July 1839, dinner guests were told not to attend the palace. Lady Flora died early the next morning. She and her family requested a post-mortem, as long as Clark did not carry it out. Doctors discovered that she had suffered all year from a tumour on the liver. She had not been pregnant. The furore heightened. Victoria was now seen as the main culprit for not supporting Lady Flora. Melbourne was challenged to a duel by a Tory. He wisely declined. A Tory insulted Victoria and was challenged to a duel by a Whig. They were both poor shots and missed each other. People stopped toasting the queen here and there and she received more abuse when in public. Lord Hastings, still defending his daughter after she died, sent the press Clark’s original prescription for rhubarb and camphor. Clark’s Scottish blood was up. He defended himself in the press and this took some of the heat away from Victoria. He was attacked in the esteemed medical journal The Lancet. Clark’s diagnosis and prescriptions were ridiculed. It implied he was incompetent. The article asked why he had jumped to the conclusion that an increased waistline meant decreased morals.Victoria’s own guilt for the way the affair was handled caused her to snap at Melbourne and her diary revealed a self-loathing over the incident.Victoria had felt the thrill of revenge for the way Lady Flora had treated her in siding with Conroy and her mother in the events of late 1935 at Ramsgate. But this feeling had evaporated.

  The Bedchamber Crisis meant that Victoria was in no mood for romance. She wrote to Leopold on 15 July 1839 dismissing his urgings about marrying young Albert, telling him what she had told Melbourne: she was content with the status quo. It was still too early and the issue could wait two or three years.Victoria now did not want Albert to visit in October. She claimed it was possible she might like him enough to marry him but added: ‘Then again, I might like him as a friend, and as a cousin, and as a brother, but not more. . .’ Victoria knew much about the more, which she had had with Elphinstone and she still longed for it. Leopold spoke with Albert, who had been dreaming about marrying the Queen of England. He was not too happy about being kept dangling. He didn’t mind waiting for three years as long as he knew she would marry him in the end. Being a royal consort for permanent hire was a trying business. If he could not receive guarantees while he waited years, he might miss out on the worthy princesses available. It was a vexing time for the young Coburg prince, whose vision of life—marrying very well as a springboard for achievement—left him a small window of opportunity. Leopold sagely wrote back to Victoria agreeing with everything yet still suggested that Albert be allowed to come to London.Victoria agreed without enthusiasm.Yet as the weeks slipped by the thought of Albert’s coming took her mind off the sordid business surrounding the sad death of Lady Flora.

  13

  VICTORIA’S PROPOSAL; ELPHINSTONE’S COMPENSATION

  Albert’s visit was critical to the twenty years of planning by Leopold and Stockmar, who had groomed him from birth for this chance to control, or at least have profound influence over, the British throne, and therefore an empire that had yet to see its zenith.They believed they were supreme psychologists, who knew how to ‘play’ the young, still impressionable Victoria, despite her resistance to the arranged marriage they had been angling for. They had assessed her in person; they had dissected every thought in her writing; they had noted every utterance and facial expression with regard to Albert and her reactions when he had been pushed in front of her in 1836. They had seen her response to his looks and knew that the young woman would be vulnerable to his physical appeal. They had assessed her reaction to other young suitors. Victoria was easily smitten. Her diaries were replete with descriptions of people’s looks. If a prime minister, such as Melbourne, were handsome with a confident bearing, he was admired. If he were ordinary-looking, like Peel, she would be initially repulsed. She would not settle for someone who was not attractive or her physical ideal. Second was her need to be impressed by a future partner’s mind and strength. The dull and the weak; the pompous and the snobbish; the humourless and the overly earnest; the unambitious and those lacking in drive need not apply for her hand in marriage or anything else. Leopold and Stockmar were uncertain about her sexual precocity, but put it down to her innate Hanoverian nature. Leopold warned Albert that she would not be an easy conquest in terms of her character. She was headstrong and irrational, where he was calm, cogitating and rational.Victoria was given to extreme mood swings; he would have to learn how to walk away or intercede; be solicitous or stand his ground. She was not used to, or comfortable with, ‘ruling’ on her own.Victoria leaned on Melbourne all the time but she was enjoying the attention and focus on her. If she were left for a few years more, she might not be manageable or malleable for Albert.

  Stockmar and Leopold felt that Victoria was not as bright as Albert but he would never dominate her, especially if she was passionate about an issue or subject. She would have to be persuaded, not led. They warned Albert not to let her think that he would usurp her role, even though that was their aim. He had to concentrate on playing the part of her true love and potential consort. Albert had to amuse her, respond to her whims and desires. He had to be close and beside her, not to lead. He would have to bury his distaste for late nights. Victoria loved revelling. He had hated that part of his last visit and still loathed the idea. Albert was an early-to-bed, early-to-rise, disciplined type. Victoria had two outstanding passions apart from those carnal: music and horse-riding. His accomplishment at both would be vital to her appreciation of him. Albert was good at playing the organ; he loved his music. He was just as passionate about horses. He was an outstanding horseman, who rode to the hounds, and enjoyed the outdoors. Albert could more than keep pace with her, which would be important to Victoria.

  Leopold and Stockmar were ready to roll the dice. They believed that the timing was perfect but there was just one chance. If Victoria rejected him, that would be it.

  The removal of Conroy took the pressure off Victoria in how she regarded Albert. She did not have to rush or feel obliged to marry him. She could assess things with her usual cool, or so she thought. Leopold kept in contact, writing about his nephew. As the weeks slipped by, Victoria became intrigued at the prospect of seeing Albert again. She became more excited about a visitor than ever before in the days of the last fortnight before his arrival. Albert, for his part, was less thrilled. He had been distressed about not being given assurances by anyone, least of all Victoria herself, that she would promise marriage. Albert told a friend that he would not be kept ‘vaguely waiting’. He would break the ‘engagement-that-wasn’t’ at once. But when he arrived at Windsor his reception changed his thinking.Victoria was in a different frame of mind, due to Melbourne’s influence. She consulted him at every turn
in the courting dance with Albert. Melbourne was pushing her into it; giving her the confidence to make the move to marriage.

  When Albert drove into the upper quadrangle of Windsor Castle, Victoria’s heart leapt. She thought him ‘beautiful’. The next day they rode together through the glades of Windsor Forest. Victoria wrote: ‘Albert is, in fact, fascinating and looks so handsome; he has such beautiful blue eyes . . .His figure is fine, broad at the shoulder and slender at the waist . . .I have to keep a tight hold on my heart.’