Victoria

by Julia Baird

  It was a wonderfully happy summer. Victoria spent it outside London, at Windsor, where she dined, danced, and did mostly as she pleased. On July 19, she held a reception at which her hand was kissed three thousand times. She loved the company, the attention, the praise. After a military review at Windsor Great Park, where she saluted the men as the officers did, she was thrilled: “The whole thing went off beautifully; and I felt for the first time like a man, as if I could fight myself as the head of my troops.” On August 15, Victoria mounted a horse for the first time in two years; she had refused to ride for a long time because her mother had always insisted Conroy accompany her. She loved to assemble large groups of riders and gallop for hours, and she always thought she looked most alluring—and taller—when sitting on a horse.

  When Victoria journeyed out in a carriage on the way to a banquet held by the Lord Mayor of London at the Guildhall in November, she was overwhelmed with applause. After years of being called selfish, stupid, and vain, it was enormously gratifying to be loved by so many. Finally Victoria was starting to believe that Feodora might be right to say, “You have it in your power to make thousands happy.” It might soon be millions.

  —

  Two people, however, were distinctly unhappy. The duchess and the Machiavellian Conroy felt the icy winds of the queen’s contempt. There were repeated scenes. Victoria had immediately announced that she would not change her mother’s rank, and she did not even consider Conroy for private secretary or Privy Purse. They both knew that they would have little influence on the queen, if any. It was obvious to those in court circles too. Melbourne was now fully aware of the rift, even though the duchess had begged Victoria not to tell him, but did nothing to bridge it. Victoria started to pity her depressed mother.

  It was a fool’s mission, but the loyal duchess continued to try to rehabilitate Conroy. In November, she asked Victoria to allow him to come to the Guildhall banquet. If Victoria did not like him, then she asked her to “at least forgive, and do not exclude and mark him and his family.” She continued: “The Queen should forget what displeased the Princess. Recollect I have the greatest regard for Sir John, I cannot forget what he has done for me and for you, although he had the misfortune to displease you.” The duchess was miffed at what she believed to be her daughter’s ingratitude. Pointedly, she gave Victoria a copy of King Lear for her nineteenth birthday.

  With the additional income she earned as queen, Victoria began to pay off her father’s debts, receiving formal thanks for having done so in October 1839. The duchess, however, continued to overspend, and she wrote cranky letters to Victoria asking for more money, despite her own allowance increase. In January 1838, Victoria wrote, “Got such a letter from Mama, oh! Oh! Such a letter.” Her mother, she told Melbourne when she received another, was “plaguing” her. (All the letters between Victoria and her mother in 1837 were “eliminated” from official selections of her letters published shortly after her death.)

  The bitter mother-daughter feud was now the talk of London, though observers were largely ignorant of the cause. Perhaps, guessed Greville, she had not only been “ill-used” by both of them in the past, but Victoria “secretly suspects the nature of her mother’s connection” with Conroy. The duchess confided in Princess Lieven, who as the wife of the Russian ambassador was the eyes and ears of Europe, that she was hurt by “her own insignificance.”

  Conroy was now a lost and bitter man who by early 1841 was “pining to death for want of occupation.” In a surprising career twist, he went to the countryside and studied the science of agriculture with his usual zeal, becoming a prominent advocate for a new style of farming. In 1852, he won a medal for the “Breeder and Exhibitor of the best pen of Fat pigs” from the Royal Agricultural Society of England. Victoria continued to honor her obligations to his family. She was still paying the pension for Conroy’s daughter-in-law almost thirty years after he died.

  —

  Victoria’s success as a new queen was almost too effortless at times, the praise too unqualified. As the men of state bawled into their handkerchiefs when she simply read aloud a statement someone else had written, it is clear that their expectations were extremely low because she was young and female. The members of the Privy Council were not just surprised but overwhelmed by the sight of the sheltered teenage girl maintaining her composure in public. As Lady Cowper (who was Lord Melbourne’s sister) wrote, “I have never heard anyone speak a single word in dispraise of her, or find fault with her—this is indeed a rare happiness.” Unfortunately, it was also to be a short-lived happiness. The sharp-eyed London footman William Tayler was cynical about Victoria’s popularity in 1837: “The Queen is a new thing and please[s] the people very well at present, but I fear it won’t last long as the people are to [sic] fickleminded to be satisfied with any one individual, King, Queen or subject.” He was right.

  * * *

  * Even the public noticed that the girl who had been tightly controlled for years now delighted in exercising her will. When her mother and Melbourne told her it would be proper to go to a Hyde Park review in a carriage, she decided to ride in on a horse. Her decision inspired a ballad:

  If there is to be a review.

  No horse, no review, my Lord Melbourne, that’s flat,

  In spite of Mama and you.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Coronation: “A Dream out of The Arabian Nights”

  I shall ever remember this day as the proudest of my life.

  —QUEEN VICTORIA, 1838

  Poor little Queen, she is at an age at which a girl can hardly be trusted to choose a bonnet for herself; yet a task is laid upon her from which an archangel might shrink.

  —THOMAS CARLYLE, 1838

  At midnight on the twenty-seventh of June, 1838—a little over a year since the death of William IV—London was humming with the sounds of saws, hammers, and planes. It was, happily for those still working, a cool night, with light winds. In Hyde Park, dwarves, giants, albinos, and obese boys in flimsy canvas tents were trying to get some rest before their day of performing; booth owners were pinning flags and banners to their tents; bakers were piling sweet goods into large baskets; and donkeys were braying as monkeys strained at leashes tied to carts, carriages, and poles. The bells of St. Margaret’s Church, near Westminster Abbey, pealed until one o’clock in the morning, much to the annoyance of local residents. Shortly afterward, under a deep black sky, crowds of people began to wind through the streets toward the old, gray Abbey, trying to get the best seats for the coronation of Queen Victoria, which was to begin in just a few hours.

  At five in the morning the Abbey doors opened to a great throng. Many revelers, leaving coronation parties and balls, had decided not to go to bed, wandering the streets half drunk before the sharp-elbowed scramble for viewing positions began. “The coronation day will in verity pass off like a dream to those folks,” wrote one reporter. In the poorer parts of London, urchins in rags danced barefoot in the open streets and squares, laughing, screaming, and singing “God Save the Queen” until the pale dawn light blurred the sky.

  Wide awake in bed at Buckingham Palace, Victoria was fighting a feeling that something “very awful” was going to happen to her that day. She tried to bury her head under her pillows during the twenty-one-gun salute as the sun rose just before four. It was impossible to get back to sleep because of the noise outside. She had already been queen for a year—coronations are usually held months after the death of a monarch so that they can be times of celebration, not mourning, and to allow sufficient time to prepare—but she was still nervous. Victoria had not been to a coronation before, had little idea of what to do, and was terrified of making a mistake. As Lord Melbourne was to tell her later, her own performance was “a thing that you can’t give a person advice upon, it must be left to a person.” Victoria’s mother was no use either; her main concern was for Conroy, who would have been invited to the Abbey that day only if he were able to step over Victoria’s corpse on the way.<
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  Victoria could not bring herself to look outside until 7 A.M., when she peered out her window at the “curious spectacle” in the Green Park: throngs climbed the hill, the carriages of nobility and gentry rolled down toward the Abbey, ladies climbed into the specially erected seats in front of their clubs, soldiers marched, and the crowd jostled to get the best vantage point from which to see the queen. It had been raining heavily, and the crowd cheered when the sun finally came out that morning. Along the procession route, houses were decorated gaily with flags and flowers, and seats were lined with carpets and colored hangings, all the more brilliant as the beautifully dressed women sitting on top of them wore white or pale, summery colors.

  Charles Dickens, who wrote a piece on the event for the Examiner, said that the world was “alive with men” waiting to see the queen. About four hundred thousand people had slept in the streets of London the night before. Greville wrote:

  It is as if the population had been on a sudden quintupled. Not a mob here or there, but the town all mob, thronging, bustling, gaping, and gazing at everything, at anything, or at nothing; the Park one vast encampment, with banners floating on the tops of the tents, and still the roads are covered, the railroads loaded with arriving multitudes.

  —

  Victoria was standing in front of the mirror, watching her dresser adjust the circlet of diamonds on her head, as Feodora walked into her room. The queen embraced her sister, then turned to her reflection and stared again, anxiety mixed with pride. Her petite, curvaceous frame had been tightly corseted into a white satin petticoat and red velvet dress. She was ready. When she finally stepped into her carriage at ten o’clock, her stomach clenching with nerves, the sun pierced the clouds and sailors hoisted the royal banner on top of the triumphal arch at the entrance to Buckingham Palace. When the first gun thundered, announcing her departure, those waiting miles away in Westminster Abbey, her destination, stood up. Theater owner Nelson Lee struck a gong in Hyde Park, and all the showmen of the fair unfurled their cloths, in rolls of flashing color, while the owners of booths and stalls pulled up canvas fronts and started hawking their wares. The show was beginning.

  The three-mile drive to Westminster Abbey, up Constitution Hill to Hyde Park Corner, past the crowds at Piccadilly, St. James’s, and Pall Mall to Trafalgar Square and Whitehall, took an hour and a half. The composer Felix Mendelssohn, who was holidaying in England, described Victoria’s coach as “golden and fairy-like, supported by Tritons with their tridents, and surmounted by the great crown of England.” Victoria was overcome by the sight of her subjects, jammed on specially erected benches, on roofs clutching chimney pots, on parapets, in trees, and perched on one another’s shoulders. As the eight gray horses pulled her magnificent carriage forward, Victoria looked in all directions, hoping to catch as many eyes as possible, beaming and waving. She wrote later:

  Many as there were the day I went to the City, it was nothing—nothing, to the multitudes, the millions, of my loyal subjects who were assembled in every spot to witness the Procession. Their good humor and excessive loyalty was beyond everything, and I really cannot say how proud I feel to be the Queen of such a Nation.

  When the queen’s carriage stalled in Whitehall, she saw some policemen “making more use of their truncheons than the circumstances seemed to require,” and she made her displeasure known. She was forced to intervene several times, and repeatedly insisted that no harsh measures be used to clear the way for her. Felix Mendelssohn similarly could not understand why the police had resorted to violence that day. He spied some trying to restrain a drunken woman with bare shoulders and loose hair from dancing; each time they tried to stop her, she would shout the word “Coronation!” A member of the crowd calmed her by telling jokes and boxing her on the ear. Mendelssohn decided, “There are more drunken women here than drunken men: it is incredible how much whisky they can swallow.” The yells of the crowd were deafening. “Their hearts,” wrote Dickens, were “in their voices.”

  —

  The new queen arrived at the Abbey just before noon, in the middle of a vast sea of waving handkerchiefs, gun salutes, and trumpet blasts. “One had to pinch oneself to make sure it was not all a dream out of The Arabian Nights,” said the awestruck Mendelssohn. Reporters exhausted superlatives when writing about the vision that greeted Victoria when she walked into the Abbey, a diminutive figure under the Gothic arches. The Abbey was festooned in crimson and gold tapestries, with pews lined with peers and peeresses dressed in velvet, long rows of bishops’ copes, a chancel and altar surrounded by purple drapes embroidered with gold, and brilliant oriental rugs on the floors. The women’s elaborate diamond jewelry sparkled against pale skin. Even the author Harriet Martineau, who was no fan of religion, abbeys, or queens, was impressed, writing, “I have never before seen the full effect of diamonds. As the light travelled, each peeress shone like a rainbow. The brightness, vastness, and dreamy magnificence of the scene produced a strange effect of exhaustion and sleepiness.” High up in the Abbey, Martineau ate a sandwich, read a book, and rested against a pillar while she waited.

  As Victoria got dressed in the robing room in a red, ermine-lined mantle, with a very long train of crimson velvet, the ambassadors had entered the Abbey, to much excitement and admiration. There was a special cheer for England’s old foe, the French general Marshal Soult. He was followed by the Duchess of Kent and the Duke of Sussex, then the Duke, Duchess, and Princess Augusta of Cambridge. The ambassadors’ procession was particularly fancy and well received, for the sumptuousness of their carriages and, in some cases, for their flamboyant attire. The Russian ambassador was clothed in white fur. Austria’s Prince Esterhazy was dressed in a suit made entirely of pearls and diamonds—even his boots were crusted with diamonds, which blazed as he walked across a bar of sunshine entering the Abbey. His spangly hat “cast a dancing radiance all round.” When the sun was on him, Dickens wrote, he “glistened like a galaxy.”

  Then Victoria entered. The crowd stood as the anthem “I Was Glad” played. Behind her, eight trainbearers, all unmarried girls, wore silver and white, with pink roses in their hair. The Lord Chamberlain carried the end of her train. Ahead of her, Prime Minister Lord Melbourne carried the Sword of State. He had taken a very heavy dose of laudanum and brandy to counter the effects of an upset stomach, was emotional and, in Victoria’s words, “completely overcome.” In his intoxicated state, he told Victoria that she appeared as though she were floating in a silver cloud. The recently elected Tory member of Parliament, and future prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli said Melbourne looked “very awkward and uncouth, with his great coronet cocked over his nose, his robes under his feet, and holding the great sword of state like a butcher.”

  Five hours of pageantry began. The Archbishop of Canterbury declared Victoria the “undoubted queen of this realm” as she turned to face the north, south, and west. She promised to uphold Protestantism before going to St. Edward’s Chapel behind the altar, where she took off her robes and tiara and put on a linen shift and gold tunic, as was the custom. She then returned to the altar, sat in St. Edward’s Chair, and was anointed under a gold canopy held aloft by knights of the garter. Not everything ran smoothly, due to lack of rehearsal and the fact that the Dean of Westminster was too sick to attend. Victoria whispered to Lord John Thynne: “Pray tell me what I am to do, for they [the ministers] don’t know.” She had to ask the Bishop of Durham what to do with the heavy orb. He told her to carry it, along with the scepter, as the robe made of gold and lined with ermine was placed around her shoulders. Unfortunately, the ruby coronation ring, which had been specially made for her little finger, was painfully forced onto her fourth finger.

  London erupted with sound when the splendid new crown was placed on Victoria’s head: forty-one Tower cannons thundered, drums beat, trumpets blared again. The peers and peeresses put on their coronets, the bishops their caps, the kings of arms their crowns. Those inside the Abbey shouted with abandon, shaking the vaulte
d roof. The crowd outside bellowed approval. Lord Melbourne gave Victoria “such a kind,” “fatherly” look when she glanced at him. She also caught the eye of her “dearly beloved Lehzen” sitting directly above the royal box, and they smiled at each other. At the same time, two hot-air balloons rose over the city. Down below in Hyde Park, actors impersonating the queen and her entourage tried to enact the scene exactly the same way at the same time, as the beer-swilling audience shouted encouragement. The joy felt universal.

  Seven-year-old Lord Salisbury—then known as Lord Robert Cecil—who was there as his father’s page had been bored watching the woman who would appoint him prime minister several decades later perform her rounds of rituals. But once a neighbor swung him up on his shoulders to see the new queen wearing the crown, he was transfixed by what he later described as “an abiding vision of gorgeous color and light centered upon one slight lonely figure.”

  Sitting upright on a throne draped in gold, Victoria was still overwhelmed. Her mother burst into tears. Martineau said Victoria looked “so small as to appear puny.” Her specially made Imperial State Crown was valued at £112,760, around $12.5 million in today’s dollars, and had a Maltese cross on the top. A long trail of peers climbed the steps to the throne, one by one touching the crown and kissing her hand—not her cheek, though it was the usual custom, as it was decided that for a young girl, having six hundred older men kiss her cheek was an “appalling prospect.” When her frail uncle Sussex struggled to climb the steps, the young Victoria threw her arms around his neck. There was a collective gasp when Lord Rolle, a large elderly man who was being supported by two men, fell and rolled down to the bottom of the steps, lying tangled in his robes. He was helped up and tried once more to ascend to the waiting queen, bolstered by shouts of encouragement, but Victoria instead stood up, walked toward him, kindly whispered that she hoped he was not hurt, and stretched out her hand so he could kiss it, endearing herself to all who saw and heard of the incident.