Victoria
Page 6
Lehzen’s greatest concern was that Victoria be protected, well educated, and shaped into a strong-minded queen. She was often blamed for Victoria’s defiance and independence, but she was strict; she had simply recognized Victoria’s innate pluck and nurtured it. She told Victoire, “I have to be sure not created, but nourished in the Princess, one quality which is to test, consider and to stand firmly by that which the Princess finds right and good.” It was provocative then even to suggest that girls’ minds were worth cultivating and that strength was an important quality in a young woman. While Victoria thought Elizabeth I a good ruler but a harsh and immodest woman, Lehzen told a member of Conroy’s family that Elizabeth was the “model of perfection,” adding that she would “pardon wickedness in a Queen, but not weakness.” While not without her faults, Victoria was never weak. She was a quick, intelligent pupil who liked alchemy and hated Latin and anatomy. But her greatest passions were more dramatic than academic: dancing, singing, drawing, theater, opera, and ballet. Victoria was a girl who spoke and dreamed in emphatic italics.
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It was often said that Victoria resembled the men in her family more than the women. This was in some ways unfortunate, given the male Hanoverian tendency toward thick builds and rounded faces, with weak chins, strong noses, and protruding eyes. It is true she would never be a great beauty, and always wrestled with her weight, though at times—especially as a child, when in love, or when laughing—she was certainly charming. Portraits show her lovely neck, delicate cheekbones, neatly arched eyebrows, and rosebud mouth. She seemed a sweet toddler: fair-haired, with a friendly face and wide blue trusting eyes. Lord Albemarle described her at age seven as a “bright pretty girl” who tended to flowers under his window in a large straw hat; he was amused to watch her water her little feet as liberally as the blooms. As she grew older, she grew slender, her hair darkened, and her expression grew more serious, imperious, and shy. The solemn paintings do not capture the lightness of her voice, or the grace and ease of her movement. Harriet Arbuthnot, a close friend of the Duke of Wellington, said Victoria at age nine was “the most charming child” she had seen: “a fine, beautifully made, handsome creature, quite playful & childish.”
What was most unusual about Victoria’s education was that her fiery spirit was not quenched—or that all early attempts to curb it failed spectacularly. Other girls then were taught to be meek and demure. The influential author Hannah More wrote earlier in the nineteenth century that, while boys were praised for having a “bold, independent, enterprising spirit,” girls were not, and any such spirit should be suppressed when discovered. “Girls should be taught to give up their opinions betimes,” More wrote, “and not pertinaciously carry on a dispute, even if they should know themselves to be in the right….It is of the greatest importance to their future happiness, that they should acquire a submissive temper and a forbearing spirit.” Victoria could not have been more different.
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The young princess longed for what she called “mirth.” She had a good sense of humor with great gifts of mimicry and repartee. Her grandmother described her as a comical, precocious clown. Victoria also loved dressing in costume. Her disguises included an old Turkish lawyer, with a large green shawl turban, a white beard, and a green cloak, a nun, a lady with a turban, and a bandit’s wife with colored shawl and gold chains. Leopold frequently reminded her there was more to life than fun—exercise, for example, or learning—which was scant solace for a restless teenager. She retorted, “pleasure does more good than a hundred walks and rides.” She told him that she “longed sadly for some gaiety.”
Victoria was happiest when hosting visitors, and unhappiest when they left. When her cousins Princes Alexander and Ernest of Württemberg arrived in 1833, she was delighted, writing: “They are both extremely tall, Alexander is very handsome and Ernst has a very kind expression. They are both extremely amiable.” They told her fascinating stories about Europe, and military campaigns, and she was bereft when they left: “We shall miss them at breakfast, at luncheon, at dinner, riding, sailing, driving, walking, in fact everywhere.” In the summer of 1833, the charming Feodora and her two children, Eliza and Charles, came to stay at Kensington Palace. When they left, Victoria drew a picture of Eliza in her traveling dress to give to her young niece, and in a rambling fourteen-page diary entry, wrote:
It is such a VERY VERY GREAT HAPPINESS for me to have my DEAREST most DEARLY BELOVED sister with me in my room….How I love her I cannot say….It is TOO DREADFUL for me to think that in an hour I shall not see Dearest Feodora’s dear kind sweet face, and the little beauty Eliza jumping about, and good honest Charles running about the room, any more. I was so dreadfully affected with grief at thinking of parting, that I fell round her [Feodora’s] neck and we both cried bitterly and pressed each other in our arms most tenderly….When I came home I was in such a state of grief that I knew not what to do with myself. I sobbed and cried most violently the whole morning….
Just an hour and a half after Leopold left her place at Claremont, on September 21, 1836, after a six-day visit, Victoria wrote to tell him “how very, very sad I am that you have left us, and to repeat, what I think you know pretty well, how much I love you.” The thought that he was leaving, and she might not see him for a year, she wrote, “makes me cry….It is dreadful in this life, that one is destined, and particularly unhappy me, to be almost always separated from those one loves most dearly.” She signed off as his “ever devoted and most affectionately attached Niece and Child.”
In the absence of friends, the little princess grew deeply attached to her pets. With the exception of some unfortunate canaries in the Kensington Palace menageries, whom she tortured, Victoria loved animals. Her favorite dog was a Cavalier King Charles spaniel called Dash, whom she played with for hours, dressing him up in red jackets and blue trousers and spoiling him with gingerbread and rubber balls at Christmas. Dash slept by her side when she was ill, and swam after her yacht when she was sailing. The young princess also spent many hours playing with her dolls. When she was nine, Victoria sent reports of her baby dolls to Feodora; sometimes they even wrote letters themselves. After one favorite baby had an unfortunate accident and lost its head, Feodora wrote, “I hope [baby] is almost recovered and that this serious bruise has no influence on its general health, and that it is not the less in favor for having been beheaded for a short while.” But Victoria had found a better doll, writing, “Lehzen mended the baby, and I put her by, as a relick; but not withstanding this, I have got a lovely baby, which is called Clara.”
By the time she was ten, Victoria was bored with her crowd of toy infants. By then she was engrossed in making a series of 132 sophisticated wooden dolls. She and Lehzen spent hundreds of hours carefully sewing clothes and copying figures from characters in the court, ballet, or opera. They painted them painstakingly, sewed their clothes, and listed them all in a book. Victoria took them traveling with her sometimes, and would carefully “arrange them” on beautifully upholstered chairs in each new environment, their somber little faces peering at her, all in a row.
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In the absence of a father or any meaningful contact with her paternal uncles, Uncle Leopold became a crucial and adored figure. Some of the happiest moments of her childhood were spent at Claremont, his house in Surrey, to London’s south. On seaside holidays, Leopold, Victoria, and Victoria’s mother would be seen walking along the shore as children splashed and women wearing ankle-length bathing suits laughed in the shallows. Victoria sobbed when she had to return to Kensington.
Leopold’s letters to Victoria show the warm side of the future king of the Belgians, who had been deeply wounded by the loss of his young bride, Charlotte. He was urbane, handsome, and elegant, but some, like his father-in-law, King George IV, thought him slick and ponderous. He became increasingly eccentric as he grew older. He often sported three-inch heels and a feather boa, wore a wig to prevent catching a cold, and propped his mouth open with we
dges of gold as he slept, for reasons nobody could fathom. He also had a reportedly enormous sexual appetite, but he treated some of his lovers with contempt. In 1829–30, when Victoria was ten, he lured the beautiful Prussian actress Caroline Bauer to England on the pretense of marrying her, put her in a country estate, and visited her daily. Unfortunately for Caroline, he was very taken with the then popular pursuit of “drizzling”: gold and silver tassels were taken from epaulettes and inserted into a machine, out of which came powder that could be melted into metal. Leopold occupied himself with drizzling for hours as Caroline sat so bored that she claimed she had “nearly unlearned laughing.” In the months before Caroline’s brother came over from Germany and demanded her return, Leopold drizzled enough thread to make a silver soup tureen. He gave it to Victoria.
Leopold took great interest in the welfare of the niece he called “dear little chicken.” He regularly imparted moral lessons. First, he told her constantly to examine her own flaws and work hard. “A good heart and truly honorable character” were, he said when she turned thirteen, the “most indispensable qualifications for her future position.” When she had her fourteenth birthday, he warned her not to be “intoxicated by greatness and success nor cast down by misfortune.” Second, he taught her to be impartial, a lesson she would defy throughout her life. Third, he instructed her to be firm and decisive—but to wait before deciding. Fourth, study history and learn from it, and fifth, be watchful for hypocrisy. He also strongly advised the teenager whose ancestors had a tendency to plumpness to exercise and to refrain from her habit of eating too much or too quickly. When Victoria was fifteen, she urged Leopold to visit, if only just to be “an eye-witness of my extreme prudence in eating, which would astonish you.”
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King George IV was not a popular ruler. The Duke of Wellington considered him the worst man he had ever met, without a single redeeming quality. A reactionary Tory, the king fought the ongoing reform movement and had to be forced to assent to a bill allowing Catholics to stand for Parliament in 1829. William Makepeace Thackeray dismissed him as “nothing but a coat, and a wig, and a mask smiling below it.” The extravagant king had also become a symbol of the gross excess of Britain’s rich, as he drained public funds when the country was crippled by the cost of a war with France that had ended in 1815. When he became king at age fifty-eight, he weighed 245 pounds, had a fifty-inch waist, and was addicted to opium. His belly hung to his knees. (When Victoria was a small child, so chubby she could barely walk, Lady Granville had called her “le roi Georges in petticoats.”)
Yet Victoria was delighted when, in 1826, she received an invitation to visit her uncle the king at the Royal Lodge in Windsor, where he was living with his mistress. The corpulent king, whose face was covered in greasepaint and topped with a wig, and whose large body glittered with imitation jewelry, presented Victoria with a miniature of himself. The sharp-eyed Russian ambassador’s wife, Princess Lieven, said in spite of the “caresses the King lavished on her” she could see that “he did not like dandling on his sixty-four-year-old knee this little bit of the future, aged 7.” But Victoria later described her “large and gouty” uncle as having “a wonderful dignity and charm of manner.” By 1828, he had become a recluse who spent most days sleeping in his bed at Windsor Castle. The biographer Roger Fulford described George IV as a man who spent his final years “fondling an unpopular mistress, hoarding every garment he had ever worn, [and] clearing the streets before he went out for a drive that no one might see how the years had ravaged his appearance.”
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As the king grew weaker, the intrigue in Victoria’s inner circle grew more intense, largely due to a man Victoria would come to hate. The manipulative, charming Captain John Conroy was a former soldier of Irish descent who had been her father’s equerry and was now her mother’s closest adviser. He had promised Victoire protection when her husband died, and he inveigled his way into her affections. He was occasionally kind to Victoria, but he also cruelly teased her, telling her once that she resembled the ugly Duke of Gloucester—an awful taunt for a young girl, and one that haunted her for decades. Victoria’s chief playmate was Victoire, one of Conroy’s six children, with whom she spent many hours riding, playing dress-up, and building cottages made of cards. But Victoria never really liked or trusted her. Mostly, though, she loathed Conroy, whom she believed had somehow hypnotized her mother. She took offense at his “impudent and insulting conduct,” as well as the presumption that he could tell her what to do. He monitored her every move, and hungered for an official position—such as private secretary to the queen—that would enable him to control her.
Conroy was paranoid about members of the royal family wanting to kidnap or corrupt Victoria, so he and the duchess almost completely cut her off from them. He also fired Baroness Späth, the duchess’s lady-in-waiting—whom Victoria loved and had known since her birth—because he believed that not only was she spoiling Victoria, she was spying for the king. The royal household was stunned by this sudden act—the baroness had been loyally serving the duchess for more than two decades. Victoria grew extremely worried that next, she would lose Lehzen—“the most affectionate, devoted, attached and disinterested friend I have.”
The royal family grew angry at, and puzzled by, Conroy’s disproportionate influence. In 1830, Victoria’s aunt the Duchess of Clarence (later Queen Adelaide) wrote expressing concern that Victoire was becoming more isolated. The duchess conveyed the “general wish” of the royal family that she not allow Conroy “too much influence” over her. Conroy’s family was, after all, not of high enough rank to be the only entourage of the future queen of England. The letter only fueled the shared paranoia of Conroy and the duchess. They spoke of little but the health of the king, and the air in the palace was thick with scheming.
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At 3:30 A.M. on June 26, 1830, after a violent coughing fit, George IV suddenly cried out: “Good God, what is this?” He gripped the hand of his page boy, and reportedly answered himself: “My boy, this is death.” Mourning was muted. It was decided that he had died of “obesity of the heart,” though a great consumption of laudanum added to his decline. His brother William was thrilled. Now in his sixties, he had been preparing to be king for years, going on long, vigorous walks and drinking a medicinal tonic of lemon-flavored barley water. He had not accomplished much, apart from siring ten illegitimate children, and he was itching to wear the crown.
But the eleven-year-old Victoria heard the news with dismay. The next day, she woke hours before dawn in the cozy bed she took with her on all her travels, her chest tight with anxiety. At breakfast, complaining of a headache, she asked if she could go for a ride. She brandished her whip and held tight; she could have galloped for hours—pressing into the wind, her eyes stinging, the sun on her back. The throne could too soon be hers, but she didn’t want it. She knew ambition was curdling her mother’s heart, just as apprehension was gripping hers. It was now, when still a child who played with dolls, that Victoria’s seven-year battle with her mother began, one that would deeply scar her. But her prayers would change once she realized her mother was seeking to snatch away her crown before it could be placed on her head.
CHAPTER 4
An Impossible, Strange Madness
The most formidably extreme of all [the eighteen-year-old Victoria’s] extreme qualities was her strength of character….No one was ever less the creature of whim or vacillating impulse. Once she had made up her mind what she ought to do, she adhered inflexibly to it. It was not in her to compromise.
—DAVID CECIL
Victoria was lying on her bed, furious. She had never felt sicker. Her head was pounding, she felt faint and nauseous, her fever had been high for days, and her cheeks had grown so hollow she barely recognized her own reflection. Standing next to her was Baroness Lehzen, chewing steadily on caraway seeds. Opposite was an overwrought Duchess of Kent, who was dressed in bright silk and clenching her fists with frustration. Victori
a’s mother stood still, staring out of one of the hotel windows that overlooked the harbor shore at Ramsgate, which was bright with parasols and faces pink with the afternoon sun.
Conroy and the duchess wanted two things. First, for Conroy to be appointed Victoria’s private secretary when she was queen (a peerage—and a place in the House of Lords—would have followed this, which was his greatest ambition). Second, for the duchess to become the regent and rule in Victoria’s stead if the king died before Victoria turned eighteen—or twenty-one. Victoria was of such tender age, the duchess said, and they all lived together so closely. Would she not desire, and need, Conroy’s wise counsel? But Conroy had needled and bullied Victoria for years; rather than have him run her future queendom, she wanted to banish him from her future queendom altogether. Victoria stared at her mother coldly: “No.”