by Julia Baird
The unpopular Regent was a miserable creature. He had lost his daughter, Charlotte, and his only grandchild on the same day, and he hated his wife. He was rather fat and was dependent upon laudanum to ease the pain in his swollen legs. Aspirin was not patented as a medicine until 1899, and there were few painkiller alternatives. Laudanum—also known as tincture of opium—was legal in Victorian times. Laudanum was a concoction of herbs, opium, distilled water, and alcohol that was widely used as a general remedy to aid sleep, ease pain, stop diarrhea (commonly brought on by cholera or dysentery), curb menstrual cramps and flatulence, dull labor pains, and soothe earache, toothache, and sore throats. It was also used to treat hysteria and insanity and help with the “fatigue and depression” then common in the working class. It was a key ingredient in most patent medicines, and it was extremely potent and addictive. Those addicted to laudanum’s soporific, transporting qualities included Mary Todd Lincoln, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Florence Nightingale took opium after she returned from the Crimean War, claiming that it helped her aching back. She wrote in 1866, “Nothing did me any good, but a curious little new fangled operation of putting opium under the skin which relieves one for twenty-four hours—but does not improve the vivacity or serenity of one’s intellect.” Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife died from an overdose of laudanum. Many members of the royal family grew reliant on it, especially those with chronic conditions like gout.
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The Duke of Kent thought a far better tonic than opium was the ocean. While most went to the seaside in summer, he decided to go in a bitterly cold winter in 1819 to provide some rest for Victoire, who had rheumatism. Doctors had recently discovered what they thought were the healing powers of the sea—it was claimed to cure weak chests, apoplexy, and even postnatal depression, or exhaustion as it was then called. Saltwater baths were highly recommended for nursing mothers. So the duke went to scout the Devonshire coast first to find a place for them all to stay. When he was there, he went to visit a fortune-teller. She told him that in the following year two members of the royal family would die. “Curious,” he mused, “I wonder which ones?” One of them was to be his mad father, King George III; the second, he would not have guessed.
A few weeks later, he brought his family to a cottage nestled in a little glen not far from the shore. (On the way, they stayed with Bishop Fisher, an old tutor of the duke’s. Little Victoria pulled his wig off—an early sign of the irreverence for episcopal authority that would continue throughout her life.) They moved in during a snowstorm on Christmas Day. It had been a harsh winter, and the house was exposed to vicious winds, but the duke was most content. He wrote a letter to a friend about how strong his baby girl was: “too healthy, I fear, in the opinion of some members of my family, by whom she is regarded as an intruder.” Victoria was just eight months old but was the size of a one-year-old—and her father was convinced she had inherited the steel in his soul. Her first two teeth had cut through her gums “without the slightest inconvenience”; she barely flinched. When she was sleeping in her nursery at the cottage, a local boy hunting birds accidentally shot a pellet through her window. The duke said she stood fire just like a soldier’s daughter.
On January 7, the Duke of Kent went for a long walk along the cliffs in a gale with his equerry, John Conroy. He walked back in the front door complaining the cold was making his bones ache. After he developed a fever, he was moved to a warmer room and bled twice, but he did not improve. The only doctor they could summon at such short notice, William Maton, spoke no German. Dr. Maton again bled, then cupped and leeched the duke. Cupping was at the time a common practice, wherein a cut was made in the skin and a heated cup placed over it. As the cup cooled, blood flowed into the vacuum. By the end of the duke’s treatment, he had lost about three liters of blood. The duchess was mortified and angry, yet was unable to question the doctor’s wisdom. She wrote that there was “hardly a spot on his dear body which [had] not been touched by cupping, blisters or bleeding….He was terribly exhausted…by those cruel doctors.” When the duke was told that night that the doctor wanted to bleed him again, he wept.
The duchess paced as her husband lay in pain, coughing and hiccuping. She refused to rest. Soon friends began to arrive at the cottage, including the duchess’s brother, Prince Leopold, who came with his companion, the doctor and lawyer Christian Stockmar, who would have such a pivotal role in the court in years to come. As the duchess waited, Stockmar took the duke’s pulse. He turned and said quietly, “Human help can no longer avail.” The duchess stared at him, then walked back to her husband’s side and took his hand. She had not changed her clothes or slept for several days. As the baby Victoria—whom she called by the diminutive “Vickelchen”—lay sleeping in her crib, the Duchess of Kent’s older daughter, Feodora, was on her knees, praying. Dawn broke, and the duke was feverish and restless. He pressed his wife’s hand, pulled her toward him, and whispered, “Do not forget me.”
The Duke of Kent died at ten o’clock in the morning on Sunday, January 23, 1820. His death came as a great shock, given his usual rude health. “That Hercules of a man is no more,” wrote Princess Lieven, the wife of the Russian diplomat to London. Poor Victoire was now a widow for the second time. She was widely disliked, almost penniless, and had few allies. She did not understand the language, the customs, or the people of the country whose tiny child, perhaps the future sovereign, she bore in her arms. There was some affection for her in the royal family, especially among the women, but this was soon quashed by her lack of tact as well as her competitiveness with those who might produce rivals for Victoria.
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Even in death, the Duke of Kent was imposing. His coffin weighed more than a ton and was seven feet long—the pallbearers struggled to get it through doorways. He was buried at night in the family vault at Windsor on February 12 as his wife wept in her rooms (women were not allowed at funerals, ostensibly due to the belief they would lose control of their emotions). Theirs had been a happy union. Now she was alone and she would make the protection, instruction, and control of Victoria her life’s greatest mission. But first she needed to learn how to survive.
It would not be easy. The duke had signed a will entrusting his child to his wife. He bequeathed everything to Victoire, though customarily men of this era left property to their male relatives (women were usually allowed only the interest on money in their estates). But his substantial debts forced his wife to rely on her brother Leopold’s financial assistance and the hospitality of the Regent, her brother-in-law. The Regent agreed to let them stay at Kensington Palace. The sad crew traveled back to the palace in the cold London winter, with the eight-month-old Victoria distressed by the jerking of the carriage. She stood, crying on her sturdy legs, on her mother’s knees and banged her fists on the closed windows of the coach, which was draped in black. With the death of her father, the twin recurring strains in the life of the girl who would become queen emerged: loss and endurance.
Six days after Edward passed away, his father, George III, died at Windsor Castle, and the Regent became King George IV. This meant that by January 29, 1820, Victoria had moved from fifth to third in line to the throne. As the stakes grew higher, her once-tender mother grew increasingly ambitious and obsessed with power. Victoria would need to learn to resist the woman who had only just weaned her when her father died. Victoria’s mother said she was already showing “symptoms of wanting to get her own way” even as an infant. She would need to draw on this stubbornness as she grew. For it was in learning to defy the woman who gave birth to her that Victoria learned how to be a queen.
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* At the time, as now, the drug use of the working class was of more concern than that of the upper and middle classes, and it drew attention away from the real issues: the long hours and onerous conditions the working class endured, let alone the lack of protections for women such as child care or maternity leave. Women were the mules of the V
ictorian world; they produced babies, cared for children, maintained the home, and, increasingly, labored in factories, but they had few rights and little recognition. Until late in the century, they remained the legal property of the men they married.
CHAPTER 3
The Lonely, Naughty Princess
[Victoria] is watched so closely that no busy maid has a moment to whisper “You are heir of England.” I suspect, if we could dissect the little heart, we should find some pigeon or other bird of the air had carried the matter.
—SIR WALTER SCOTT, 1828
Victoria was a short-tempered and defiant girl. She hated sitting still, hated taking medicine, and hated being told what to do. When her piano teacher, Mr. Sale, told her she must practice just like everyone else, she banged the lid shut and yelled, “There! You see there is no must about it.” The fact that there were many musts in her life just made her more rebellious. In 1830, her governess, Baroness Louise Lehzen, forced Victoria to document her outbursts in “Conduct Books.” She sometimes recorded three tantrums a day, writing, “very ill behaved and impertinent to Lehzen.” On August 21, 1832, she was “very very very terribly NAUGHTY” (the “verys” are underlined three times and the “naughty” four). On the afternoon of September 24, 1832, Victoria writes that she was “VERY VERY VERY VERY HORRIBLY NAUGHTY!!!!!”—all underlined four times—but in her journal she simply reported, “The heat was intollerable [sic].” When she made up stories for creative writing compositions, they were about children who were spoiled and disobedient and who needed to repent or be punished.
The young princess’s stories also revealed how she wrestled with the need to be well behaved, and how she fantasized about being indulged and not corrected. In one story, written when she was seven, she described a “naughty girl” named An. She wrote (with spelling mistakes included):
Little An was pretty naughty greedy and disobedient. Nobody like to be near her for she was so unpleasant.
One day her Father gave a party and many fine people came; and little [A]n was allowed to come into the room. As soon as somebody adresd her she turned her back and gave no answer. As her dear Father wished to please her, so she was allowed to dine with her Papa; her Mother (who was her favorite) gave her whatever she asked for and gave her seetmeats in provusion. Ane sat between Lady D— and her Mamma; poor Old Lay D— was so plagued by An that she said to her Mother ‘Mam your daughter is very ill behaving and troublesome.’ Mrs G— who was the Mother of An flushed for anger. Indeed Mam I must beg your leave to go with my darling little Ane dear. She goes and leaves the room with An with a plate full of sweet-meats in her hand.
These are the words of a girl who was aware of both the appeal and the perils of being spoiled. Victoria was continually testing not just Lehzen but her tutor, the Reverend George Davys. When her mother offered four-year-old Victoria a reward if she behaved herself during Davys’s first visit, she tried to negotiate, asking to have the reward first. When Davys suggested they study the letter o, she would say she preferred h.
Yet despite her temper, Victoria had a good heart, and was truthful. One day the duchess told Victoria’s tutor, “She has been good this morning but yesterday there was a storm.” Victoria piped up: “Two storms, one at dressing and one at washing.” Some of her willfulness was fed by the fawning palace staff, as well as the great men who visited regularly. She became very conscious of her station. She once told a young visitor, Lady Ellice, who was trying to play with some of her toys, including a white satin doll’s sofa and three dancing figures, “You must not touch those, they are mine. And I may call you Jane but you may not call me Victoria.” It was as though she was actively encouraged to be superior, and so much sycophancy led to arrogance. Her half sister, Feodora, who was twelve years older, wrote to Victoria later about their mother’s lady-in-waiting, Baroness Späth: “It was a sort of idolatry, when she used to go on her knees before you when you were a child.” Bishops crawled on the carpets to play with her, and aristocrats sat in on her school lessons. She later confessed she knew she was the “idol of the house,” and she sometimes dared people to defy her. Once, after being told that if she cried, her uncle the Duke of Sussex, who also lived in Kensington Palace, would punish her, she proceeded to scream herself hoarse whenever he walked past.
Perhaps surprisingly for a girl who lacked for nothing, had horses to ride, regular trips to the seaside, and attendants who doted on her, Victoria described her childhood as rather melancholy. She later complained that Kensington Palace was uncomfortable, dirty, and infested with beetles. Once, when asked what she would like for her birthday, she said she wanted the windows cleaned. But for all her toys, exquisite clothes, pets, and donkey rides, what she was truly lacking was friends. She later told her eldest daughter: “I had 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…and did not know what a happy domestic life was!” This was not just the grimness of hindsight—her sister, Feodora, later painted a similarly drab tale:
To have been deprived of all intercourse, and not one cheerful thought in that dismal existence of ours, was very hard. My only happy time was going or driving out with you and Lehzen; then I could speak and look, as I like. I escaped some years of imprisonment, which you, my poor darling sister, had to endure after I was married.
Victoria was only nine when Feodora married and moved to Germany in 1828; she was devastated. From that time, she had only the crushing, constant surveillance of adults. She slept in her mother’s room every night, with someone watching her until her mother came to bed, and even when she was watering flowers, a footman in scarlet livery hovered over her.
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Victoria was ten years old when she discovered she was third in line to the throne. It was March 11, 1830, and she was at her little desk, trying to concentrate on her books. A sprig of holly was pinned to the front of her lace-trimmed velvet dress, to keep her chin up and her back straight. Outside, the sun was thawing the ground after a deep cold that had frozen parts of the Thames, and she was itching to be out on her horse, galloping sidesaddle across Kensington Gardens. Riding was the closest she got to solitude. She started leafing through Howlett’s Tables of the Kings and Queens of England, then frowned as she came upon a page she had never seen before: a map of the British royal family tree that showed a line leading to the throne. Her uncle, the ill, reclusive King George IV, was the current king. Next was his brother, her uncle William. After that was her name. Victoria burst into tears: “I am nearer to the throne than I thought.”
Thirty years later, Baroness Lehzen, who had initially been hired to teach Feodora but was appointed governess to Victoria when she was five, composed a glorified account of this moment. According to her, Victoria solemnly said, “Now, many a child would boast, but they don’t know the difficulty. There is much splendor, but there is more responsibility.” She then, Lehzen reported, put her forefinger in the air and declared, “I will be good!” These widely recounted remarks—far too formal and self-conscious for a child of ten—made a myth out of a daunting, distressing moment. And although many mothers may have preferred to tell their daughters such important news themselves, the Duchess of Kent was happy to have made Victoria aware of her situation as though by accident. (She had been recently prodded to by two bishops who came to assess Victoria’s education; they told her she must tell her daughter.) Of course Victoria had a strong suspicion of her significance before this day—why else would so many bow and scrape to such a young girl? Especially while ignoring her half sister? But the confirmation was distressing. Decades later, Prince Albert revealed that the discovery of her nearness to the throne made Victoria “very unhappy.” She had “cried much on learning it—& even deplored this contingency.” Three months later her uncle, King George IV, died.
On the day that
Victoria discovered her likely destiny, March 11, 1830, several children who would grow to be great figures of the Victorian age were also hunched over their books. Florence Nightingale, who was a year younger than Victoria, was constructing a pretend home in a playhouse in Winchester with her cousin, covering a sofa with heather and trying to get the damp out of the mossy beds. (Demonstrating a natural flair for organization, young Florence drew up a table headed “Vegetables” and “Fruits,” which showed the cones, acorns, and various objects she and her cousin used to represent peaches, cucumbers, peas, and potatoes in her pretend pantry.) George Eliot—then Mary Ann Evans—was ten, and crafting immaculate compositions at her boarding school in Nuneaton. (Evans had an unusual upbringing: most mothers educated their daughters at home or in schools that focused on obedience, sewing, drawing, and music.) The future influential art critic John Ruskin was eleven and being educated at home by his parents in Surrey. Charles Dickens had just turned eighteen and was spending most days working in the British Museum Reading Room, where he was learning shorthand so he could start his career as a journalist. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who was a little older than Dickens, was unhappily studying at Cambridge. All would be titans of their age, but forever dwarfed by the woman who was once the teary ten-year-old in Kensington Palace.
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Victoria trusted only one person: her governess. Baroness Lehzen, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor from Coburg, was an eccentric, single-minded, clever woman who dedicated her life to ensuring that Victoria would be a forceful, intelligent queen. Victoria, who became a prolific artist, drew affectionate portraits of her, with dark hair, thoughtful eyes, and pointed nose and chin, looking serious, patient, and kind. The one food she liked to eat was potatoes, and she had a habit of chewing caraway seeds constantly to improve her digestion. Lehzen was often criticized by those who resented her influence over the young princess, but she was the only person who had solely Victoria’s interests at heart. Because of this, she earned the young royal’s trust and affection, and she never betrayed it. When Victoria was ill, Lehzen stayed by her side, quietly stitching doll clothes, as Victoria’s mother continued to visit friends and travel. If Lehzen fell ill, Victoria missed her. She wrote later, “The Princess was her only object and her only thought….She never for the thirteen years she was governess to Princess Victoria once left her.” As princess and later as queen, Victoria craved singular devotion.