by Julia Baird
The group fell silent. Outside, they could hear the sounds of laughter and children at play. Suddenly Conroy swept into the room, lips thin with anger. He shouted at Victoria, accusing her of being a stupid, selfish, unreasonable fool. Her head was so full of rubbish, he said, with all her silly dolls and love of opera, that it was obvious that she could not rule on her own. And she owed him. After all, think of what he—and her mother—had done for her.
Conroy then forced a pen and paper into Victoria’s hand, gripping it painfully, urging her to sign the document that would have appointed him private secretary. Victoria shook her head, grimaced, and pulled her beloved dog Dash closer. She saw the way her mother looked at Conroy, beseechingly, almost coy, and it made her sick.
Victoria did not write about this incident. Her diary was, unusually, blank for three weeks as she wrestled with illness and Conroy’s bullying. It was only later that she revealed her trauma to Lord Melbourne: “All I underwent there; their (Ma’s and JC) attempt (when I was still very ill) to make me promise before hand, which I resisted in spite of my illness, and their harshness—my beloved Lehzen supporting me alone.” Part of Victoria’s trauma came from distress that her mother was not taking her illness seriously; only Lehzen did. The duchess and Conroy shrugged off Victoria’s cries for a doctor for days. Conroy did not want people to know Victoria was ill for fear she might be considered unfit to rule. (The local press was told one of the servants had been ill, and that Victoria only had a “slight cold.”) When finally summoned, Dr. Clark said she had “bilious fever,” but it is more likely to have been tonsillitis, or even typhoid. It was clearly grave; she had been confined to bed for five weeks, at the end of which she could walk only a few steps at a time and her hair had fallen out in clumps. By the time she emerged from her room, limping and thin, she was incensed by her mother’s lack of care. In contrast, her governess was dramatically praised: “My dearest best Lehzen has been & still is (for I require a great deal of care still) MOST UNCEASING & INDEFATIGABLE in her great care of me. I am still VERY weak and am grown VERY thin.” She studiously followed her doctor’s advice, leaving her windows open, chewing food slowly, and lifting small clubs to build up her muscles. Slowly she recovered.
Had Conroy been a more astute observer, Victoria’s refusal to hand over her power would not have come as a surprise. Warmth and persuasion would have been far more effective. As Leopold wrote to her, “He imagined he might get you into a sort of captivity which myself being near you, at your commands, was impossible, strange madness.” Victoria had a quiet steeliness that stymied those who underestimated her. She would never forgive Conroy for the decade he spent bullying her. In 1833, the year she turned fourteen, she drew a picture titled “Amazons at War.” In it, women with long streaming hair are riding into battle, their horses trampling men underfoot; one fires an arrow directly into the face of a male soldier, killing him.
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The elaborate, strict regime concocted to spin a queen from a volatile teenager was called the “Kensington System.” From the age of five, Victoria was not allowed to be alone, to walk downstairs without holding the hand of an adult, or to play with other children without a guardian. Much of the system was well intentioned, as a way of raising a proper queen. The duchess and Conroy also wanted to produce a progressive queen, a Whig like Conroy, instead of a Tory like the rest of the royal family. (In the early part of the nineteenth century, Whigs stood for abolition of slavery, equality for Catholics, expansion of the vote, and free trade, as well as a constitutional monarchy, where the king or queen acts as a head of state and the ability to make laws rests with Parliament.)
But the Kensington System was not solely, or even primarily, for the benefit of Victoria. Her half brother Charles of Leiningen defined the goals as (1) winning Victoria popularity by cutting her off from the royal court’s bad morals and politics, (2) gaining regency (due to the need “to assure a pleasant and honorable future for the Duchess of Kent as well”), and (3) making Conroy private secretary. The monitoring carried out to achieve this, he wrote, was exhaustive, of even “the smallest and most insignificant detail.”
Another, more sinister specter drove the scheme: the prospect of murder. The duchess and Conroy claimed to believe that Ernest, the Duke of Cumberland, was planning to kill his niece so he could become king; he was next in line for the throne after her. Conroy told the duchess that Uncle Ernest would poison Victoria’s milk, kidnap her when she was weak, and let her die. Victoria scoffed at this idea, calling it “all Sir John’s invention,” but her mother was genuinely frightened. She made sure someone tasted Victoria’s breakfast each morning.
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At sixty-four, William IV was the oldest person ever to be crowned England’s sovereign. After the French revolution of 1830, in which Charles X was overthrown, William IV tried to stem local republicanism by being more frugal than his opulent older brother and involving himself in politics. But his conservatism and coolness toward reform quickly alienated his increasingly restless subjects. In 1830, only 13 percent of men in England and Wales—those with property—could vote. Some small “rotten boroughs” still existed, where the local aristocratic landowner could effectively choose the local MP, and many manufacturing cities were entirely unrepresented. The half a million people living in Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, and Sheffield, for example, had no representative in Parliament.
In 1830, impetus for change came when the progressive Whig Party swept into power. In 1831, when the Reform Bill failed to pass for the second time, the country erupted. Castles were burned down, homes were torched, and several hundred were killed or wounded in uprisings in Derby, mostly by the military. Four rioters were hanged. Politicians grew extremely nervous about the possibility of revolution if eligibility for the vote was not expanded. The next year, one million men gained the vote after the Reform Act was passed on the third attempt. Now 18 percent of the adult male population could vote. New cities that had boomed during the Industrial Revolution were given seats, and the most corrupt of the rotten boroughs were eradicated. The elected House of Commons grew in stature, while the House of Lords shrank. This decade marked the zenith of Whig efficiency: in 1833, slavery was finally abolished in almost all of the British Empire, three decades earlier than it was in America.
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In November 1830, the Duchess of Kent wept with joy after the House of Commons passed a bill that provided an additional £10,000 for Victoria’s household and education and made the duchess regent if William IV passed away without leaving an heir. (The next alternative—the Duke of Cumberland—was unimaginable.) “This is the first really happy day,” she said, “I have spent since I lost the Duke of Kent.”
From this point, the bitter hostility between the households of the king and the duchess seeped into public view. On one occasion, when the duchess was visiting Queen Adelaide and one of the king’s (illegitimate) children came into the room, she froze and left immediately. She also took every opportunity to remind the king that her daughter was the next in line, deliberately provoking him by running up the royal standard to indicate when Victoria was at Ramsgate, and encouraging military salutes to “Her Royal Highness” when at sea. She and Conroy paraded Victoria across the country in what became the first of the royal tours, aimed at drumming up favorable publicity and exposing the princess to her future subjects. Victoria’s diary entry of July 31, 1832, described such a trip, to Wales. She was astonished at the impact of coal mining in the country near Birmingham:
The men, women, children, country and houses are all black. The country is very desolate everywhere; there is coal about, and 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 carts and little ragged children.
It was a world Victoria passed through for only a brief moment, slack-jawed. Her characteristi
c candor was later edited out of official selections from her journals—complaints about ugly scenery, dense, demanding crowds, drunken townsfolk and an unfortunate episode when her carriage drove over a man on foot. She fought fiercely with her mother about the need to go on these exhausting trips at all. But her great popularity became evident as she traveled the country; Conroy’s chutzpah aggravated the king.
The rift between the two families soon became a public soap opera. The duchess refused to attend William IV’s coronation, believing he had snubbed Victoria by not allowing her to walk behind him in the procession. She sent the king a note saying Victoria had grazed her knee in a fall and they would not be able to attend. They went instead to the chalky, gray beaches of the Isle of Wight, ignoring the widespread condemnation of her impertinence that ensued. The Times wrote scathingly about the duchess’s snub, attributing it to a “systematic, determined opposition” to anything the king wanted. In November 1833, the diarist Thomas Creevey described the duchess as “the most restless, persevering, troublesome devil possible.”
In turn, William IV publicly humiliated Conroy at every opportunity. In the middle of a drawing room session, he told the Duchess of Kent’s gentlemen—including Conroy—to leave on the grounds that only gentlemen of the king and queen were allowed to be there. When Conroy was ordered out of Victoria’s confirmation ceremony in 1835, Victoria was furious. Her confirmation had been “one of the most solemn and important events and acts in her life” and she had gone with “the firm determination to become a true Christian.” She walked out fuming, humiliated to be suffering on such a day, and on behalf of a man she despised, and to have such an important day ruined.
By her sixteenth birthday, Victoria had bloomed. Much to her annoyance, she was still just four feet eleven and also “unhappily very fat.” Leopold wrote that he heard “a certain little princess…eats a little too much, and almost always a little too fast.” She had terrible table manners, gobbling her food, picking bones, and doing “unmentionable things with her asparagus” (which probably meant eating it with her fingers). Still, as she grew older, she grew slender and people admired her skin and dramatically large blue eyes, her long, thick hair and robust health. At this age, the reins were slackened a little; she was allowed to read some novels, style her own hair, take Italian and singing lessons, and attend more of her mother’s parties, where she would gaze with delight at the good-looking young men and dance with them as long as she was allowed. She adored music and opera; her teen idols were ballet dancers and singers—one of whom, the great Luigi Lablache, was hired to teach Victoria how to sing.
It was “generally known,” writes Dulcie Ashdown, “that Victoria crossed the threshold into womanhood” at this age, although, thankfully, Victoria’s “first menstrual period was never announced officially.” Doubtless she was baffled by what was then called “the monthlies,” “the turn,” or “poorliness.” Menstruation was not generally discussed, and most people believed women were incapacitated by it. Doctors advised girls to avoid dancing in heated rooms, stay out of the cold and rain, and try not to think too much. The writer James McGrigor Allan told the Anthropological Society of London in 1869:
At such times, women are unfit for any great mental or physical labour. They suffer under a languor and depression which disqualify them for thought or action, and render it extremely doubtful how far they can be considered responsible beings while the crisis lasts….In intellectual labour, man has surpassed, does now, and always will surpass woman, for the obvious reason that nature does not periodically interrupt his thought and application.
What is most striking about Victoria is that apart from wanting to be taller and thinner, she cared little about her appearance. She knew she was no beauty and did not dwell on it. She joked about her looks with her half sister, writing that she was “very happy to hear that the portrait of my ugly face pleased you.” Yet she genuinely took pleasure from the aesthetic appearance of others—both male and female. Her second cousin Charles, the Duke of Brunswick, particularly fascinated her, with his dark mustache and the fur-trimmed coat he wore riding. She greatly admired the way he did his hair, which hung “wildly about his face.”
Victoria was considered a great catch. Many men became obsessed with her, and a long list of potential matches was discussed in several newspapers. Robert Browning wrote that when Victoria was ill, she was “bent on marrying nobody but Lord Elphinstone,” a dashing man two years her senior. In February 1836, after she had recovered and her doctor finally allowed her to go to St. James’s Palace, Lord Elphinstone sketched her portrait, watching her across the pews. She sat self-consciously, dressed in a fancy gray coat from Paris, with the weight of his gaze upon her. The Duchess of Kent made sure Elphinstone, an army captain and lord-in-waiting to William IV, was sent to India. It was rumored that he and Victoria had fallen in love, and the gossip alone was enough to see him banished. Other rumored suitors included the Orange brothers, George Cumberland, the Duke of Orleans, the Duke of Nemours, one of the Württembergs, King Otto of Greece, and even, rather oddly, Uncle Leopold.
But Leopold had already selected a mate for his niece—her first cousin Albert—and openly tried to orchestrate their union. In May 1836, Albert and his brother Ernest made their first visit to Victoria for her seventeenth birthday. Victoria adored her cousins, “so very very merry and gay and happy, like young people ought to be.” The athletic Albert she found “extremely handsome.” “His eyes are large and blue,” she wrote, “and he has a beautiful nose and a very sweet mouth with fine teeth.” But Albert was also frail, had a tendency to faint, and could not keep pace with his cousin. At her birthday ball at St. James’s, Albert retired early; he had “turned as pale as ashes, & we all feared he might faint; he therefore went home.” The next day, he stayed in his room all day without eating, due to a “bilious attack,” before emerging looking “pale and delicate.” Victoria wrote to Leopold, with a tinge of frustration, “I am sorry to say that we have an invalid in the house in the person of Albert.”
At the end, Victoria politely thanked Leopold: “[Albert] is so sensible, so kind, and so good, and so amiable too,” she wrote, adding that he had, “besides, the most pleasing and delightful exterior and appearance you can possibly see.” But Victoria was not at all interested in marriage. She invited Albert’s father to her coronation, but not his sons. They would not see each other again for three years.
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Throughout this period, Conroy’s behavior was genuinely puzzling. Where did his sense of entitlement come from? How could he presume to have a place at the royal table? Why would he tell Victoria, she wondered, that “his daughters were as high as me”? Years later, she was still mystified: “Why he outraged & insulted me, I really never cd understand.” The answer lies in a tiny old church at Oxford, where the Conroy archives are kept in Balliol College. In a faded maroon journal, with a broken clasp and marbled pages, John Conroy’s grandson recorded a secret message dated December 1868. It was written in code that seems to have drawn on Sir Thomas More’s Utopian alphabet. It spells out: “Lady Conroy is said to be the daughter of the Duke of Kent.” In other words, John Conroy believed that his wife, Elizabeth Fisher, was the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Kent, Victoria’s father, conceived while he was living in Canada, which would have made her Victoria’s half sister. And this, of course, would have made Conroy Victoria’s brother-in-law—an equal, not a subordinate. On his deathbed, John Conroy’s eldest son, Edward, also confessed to this belief. It was technically impossible, self-serving, and untrue, but it explains Conroy’s sense of familiarity and control. It was clear that Conroy did not want to advise the queen, he wanted to rule in her stead, with the duchess.
There can be little doubt there were erotic undertones to Conroy’s relationship with the duchess, a woman who was alone for so many years. Victoria worried that they were lovers. The loathsome Duke of Cumberland had said so in front of her when she was just a little girl. The Duke
of Wellington told Greville that Victoria had witnessed some “familiarities” between her mother and John Conroy, and that after she told Späth of this, Späth chastised the duchess. Victoria denied in her later years that her mother had ever taken Conroy as a lover, although that very suspicion weighed on her as a child. It is probable that the widowed duchess had developed an intense affection for a man known for an uncanny ability to bewitch women. It would certainly have explained his hold on her. King Leopold called Conroy “a real Mephisto” and told a nineteen-year-old Victoria that he ruled over the duchess with “a degree of power which in times of old one would have thought to proceed from witchcraft.” Even in old age, the formidable queen shuddered at the thought of the man she called a “monster.”
Conroy devised new strategies hourly: while combing his thinning hair, while flattering members of Parliament over bottles of wine, while enduring endless games of whist with the duchess. The more despairing he became, the more firmly Victoria stood her ground. She had learned control and patience in the face of persecution. It was her uncle King William IV who would finally, spectacularly, erupt over the overt, poisonous scheming. His rage would cause a scandal.
CHAPTER 5
“Awful Scenes in the House”
They plague her, every hour and every day.
—BARON STOCKMAR
King William IV was riding through the streets of London staring out his carriage window. It was a cool, windy day in August 1836, and he had just given a speech to mark the end of the session of Parliament.
He had waited years to be king, but now he could barely enjoy it. The endless calls for parliamentary reform were irritating. At first he supported reform, and was pleased to be liked for it. But then they became so greedy. He had not wanted to pass that reform bill, even though the lower classes had threatened rebellion. He told the prime minister that he would defend London, raise the royal standard at the military depot at Weedon, and fight to the death. Victoria could have joined him. But eventually he gave in and the bill passed. Even that didn’t seem to satisfy the malcontents for long.