Queen Victoria--Twenty-Four Days That Changed Her Life

by Lucy Worsley

  The result was enormous tension within the household. On the one hand, Victoire and Conroy were intent upon winning power and regencies. Meanwhile Lehzen, agent of the absent Uncle Leopold, encouraged Victoria to resist. Because of Lehzen’s lack of loyalty to the ‘System’, Victoire decided that the governess must go. As mother and daughter were no longer on speaking terms, Victoire had to employ a written letter to tell Victoria that Lehzen would soon be getting the sack.10

  Yet Victoria would not accept this, nor give up her beloved governess, without the fight that now unfolded beside the English Channel.

  To the outside observer, the ‘System’ looked like a smart strategy. Most genteel young ladies of Victoria’s age would be launched upon the marriage market. Yet Victoria’s debut was being made before the whole country. She had spent the summer of 1835 travelling and making a carefully stage-managed series of public appearances, intended to introduce ‘the Princess to the affections of the English people’.11 And ‘the English people’ liked what they saw. In September, when Victoria attended the music festival in York, for example, ‘an expression of enthusiastic feeling broke forth’ as she was conducted to her seat.12

  But there was an emotional cost involved in coming to maturity in public like this. Historian Lynn Vallone noticed that Victoria’s journals in these teenage years reveal complaints of malaise in the third week of each month, of tiredness and discomfort probably connected to menstruation.13 The record suggests that Victoria began her periods at what was then the unusually early age of thirteen. It could be one reason for her lack of height, for girls generally stop growing within a couple of years of starting to menstruate.14 Victoria found it hard to cope with both hormones and all this scrutiny of her manner and person. At Norwich, for example, she described herself as ‘well-nigh dead by the heat of this long and tiresome day’.15 She complained of headaches, and backache, and said she ‘could never rest properly’ while she was travelling. She was exhausted by ‘the long journeys and the great crowds’ she’d endured throughout the tour.16 She told her mother that she found it all fatiguing and ‘disagreeable’.17

  On display, on duty, never left alone, being forced to fit into the distasteful ‘Conroyal Family’ (as it was named by its detractors) was creating a cauldron in which the young princess was being slowly boiled. She was low and irritable. One of the doctors who treated her for mental problems as an adult detected their cause in this period of her adolescence. She’d been ‘reared midst fears and quarrels’, he wrote, and had ‘never known what was true repose’.18 Yet Victoria’s mother piled on further pressure, in the false assumption that her daughter was malingering. ‘Can you be dead to the Calls your position demands?’ she wrote to her. ‘Impossible! … Turn your thoughts and views to your future station, its duties, and the claims that exist on you.’19

  Victoria’s thinking herself ill, and her mother’s denial of it, explains the background to the strangely negligent, almost inhuman, treatment she’d now receive in Ramsgate.

  Their home for September and October 1835 was Albion House, number 27 at the end of Albion Place, perched close to the edge of a chalk cliff. The boundless ocean, Victoria wrote, ‘looked very refreshing … there is nothing between us and France but the sea’.20 Ramsgate’s sea views were much admired. ‘Truly picturesque’, the guidebooks said, they must appeal to ‘every admirer of the sublime and beautiful’.21 Visitors in this Romantic age thought the place looked exceptionally fine during a storm. Ladies would watch ‘tempestuous weather’ with highly enjoyable ‘emotions of terror’.22

  But in calmer seasons before their relationship had broken down, Victoria and her mother had spent many happy holidays here. Ramsgate’s new-ish pier had caused a magnificent sandy beach to gather in its lea. Down upon these sands, ‘the finest in Kent’, numerous bathing machines ‘may be seen crossing each other’s path, busily engaged, conveying their inmates to the briny ocean’.23 During Victoria’s first visit when she was four, tourists spotted her on ‘the noble sands … she wore a plain straw bonnet … she was allowed to play with other children and used to have donkey rides’.24 Victoria and her mother went shopping at Lewis’s ‘Temple of Fancy’, borrowed books from Burgess’s Library and ate potted shrimps provided by Mr Cramp.25 Charles Fisher on the High Street, Ramsgate’s chemist, also claimed them as his customers, and added a royal coat of arms to the front of his shop.26 Ramsgate welcomed its royal visitors by naming Kent Place, Royal Kent Terrace, Kent Baths and Victoria Baths in their honour.27 Autumn was considered a particularly good time to visit. ‘Rain, as a rule, fights shy of Ramsgate,’ it was said, and ‘the nights, too, are lovely in October … it is a calm delight to sit at the window and watch the moonlight effects on the sea.’28

  Victoria could see this sight for herself from her first-floor bedroom, where she slept in her ‘own little bed which travells always with me’.29 She described Albion House as ‘small’, and complained about having to do her lessons in Lehzen’s cramped bedroom.30 Both Feodore and Victoria would rather have been on the beach. ‘You used to torment Lehzen and myself during my French lessons at Ramsgate,’ Feodore reminisced to Victoria in later years.31

  Most people today would not find Albion House, with its three principal floors, its garrets and basements, as ‘small’ as Victoria claimed. Twice as wide as the similar terraced houses all around, it was part of a new residential area rushed up after the successful conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Britain’s victory was reflected in the names of the surrounding streets: Wellington Crescent, the ‘Plains of Waterloo’ and La Belle Alliance Square. Ramsgate was on the up. In 1824, an Act was passed to supply the town with gas; in 1826 it gained a licensed theatre and in 1827 a new church.32

  This was a very modern type of holiday, but in 1835 Victoria was not enjoying it. ‘Even before the journey to York,’ Lehzen noticed, she had been ‘markedly unwell in body and soul’.33 While Lehzen was apparently on Victoria’s side, she did in fact represent another source of subtle pressure, the influence of Uncle Leopold, who was paying for everything.

  Among Victoria’s complaints was an absence of hunger: ‘I forced a cup of cocoa down.’34 Like many other teenage girls feeling impotent, Victoria noticed that when she refused food it caused the adults anxiety and distress. It was the one little piece of power that she did possess. Her doctors understood that something was wrong. One of them, asked to treat Victoria’s constipation, gave her rhubarb pills, and believed her condition was caused by ‘irregularity of the diet’.35

  It was a new experience for Victoire to have to try to persuade Victoria to eat, because her daughter had always had such a good appetite. She’d been considered chubby ever since she was a baby ‘so fat it can scarcely waddle’.36 ‘She eats heartily,’ wrote one observer, ‘I think I may say she gobbles’, and she copied Lehzen in having a ‘great weakness for potatoes’.37 Her Uncle Leopold reproved his niece for eating ‘a little too much, and almost always a little too fast’.38 Even Feodore, who was unconditionally on Victoria’s ‘side’, tried to intervene: ‘pray think of your older sister when you look at the salt cellar with the intention of mixing so much of its contents with your knife in the gravy, you have a peculiar quick and expert way of doing it.’ Food historian Annie Gray notes that even if it was well meant, ‘there was no escape from the criticism’.39

  But once she was settled into her seaside home, something happened to cheer Victoria up. Uncle Leopold came to visit. Because of his responsibilities abroad, Victoria hadn’t seen him for four years, and was filled with ‘a state of excitement’ and joy.40 Albion House was too small to accommodate Leopold and his French wife Louise, so he stayed at the Albion Hotel, a short walk away by the harbourside. Mr Bear, its proprietor, was ‘very attentive to the accommodation of the nobility and gentry’.41

  Victoria spent as much time as possible walking and dining with her uncle. ‘I look up to him as a Father,’ she wrote, in a clear snub to Conroy, ‘with complete confidence
, love and affection. He is the best and kindest adviser I have.’42

  An experienced politician, Leopold explained to his niece that Conroy’s unpleasant ‘System’ had nevertheless been working well in terms of public relations. It was distancing her from the unpopular Royal Dukes. ‘Your immediate successor, with the mustaches,’ he claimed, meaning the Duke of Cumberland, ‘is enough to frighten them into the most violent attachment for you.’43 Victoria was beginning to emerge from the ‘System’ just as Conroy – to give him credit – had intended, as ‘The Nation’s Hope’ and ‘The People’s Queen’.44

  Leopold soothed Victoria’s spirit. But soon he had to leave, and she waved his steamer off from Dover dock on 7 October. Once again, Victoria felt abandoned, beleaguered, alone. Her response was to fall sick. Immediately after Leopold’s boat had sailed, recorded Lehzen, Victoria got into the carriage to drive back to Ramsgate, where she ‘collapsed, and was apparently very ill’.45 Returning to Albion House, she ‘felt so ill and wretched’ that she went up to her room and stayed there.46 At this point, the entries in Victoria’s daily journal abruptly come to an end.

  Victoire decided the situation was serious enough to send for her daughter’s new medical advisor, Dr James Clark. The Scottish Dr Clark was considered something of a maverick by the medical establishment.47 But he possessed the great qualification, in Victoria’s eyes, of having nothing to do with Conroy. He’d been recommended by her Uncle Leopold.48

  Conroy, however, believed that summoning Dr Clark was unnecessary, and insisted that there was nothing wrong with Victoria apart from teenage temper. He was eventually forced to admit that Dr Clark wasn’t even close to hand in Ramsgate; Conroy had sent him back to London, believing that Clark’s services were surplus to requirements. Victoire, half-persuaded that there was nothing wrong with her sulky daughter anyway, was too timid to defy him.

  Meanwhile Victoria, believing herself ‘very unwell’, was too sick to leave her sitting room and bedroom. Nevertheless, two whole days had to pass after Leopold’s departure before Conroy admitted that Victoria might truly be ill. She begged that Dr Clark be sent for, and eventually he agreed.

  After Dr Clark arrived from London but before he saw his patient, he was given a briefing. Lehzen was called in to meet the doctor in Albion House’s drawing room. ‘I was required to give him,’ she recorded, ‘in the presence of the Duchess, an account of the Princess’s state of health.’ But just when Lehzen was ‘about to describe to him the dangerous symptoms of the illness’, she was brusquely ‘ordered to be silent’. ‘Nothing but Victoria’s whims, and your making believe,’ Victoire said, sharply. Clark himself was then permitted to take only a cursory look at the patient before he set off back to London, ‘convinced that everything was exaggerated’.49

  Conroy, meanwhile, was engaged upon damage control. The local press noticed that Victoria hadn’t been seen for some days. When they made a ‘special enquiry’ to find out why, they were fobbed off with the excuse that one of the servants was ill, and that Victoria herself had only ‘a slight cold’. As pressure increased, though, Conroy began to have to issue public denials. ‘All the stories you will have read of the Princess’s illness were not true,’ he wrote, ‘she was never confined to Her bed, or to Her bedroom. She was never carried up or down stairs, or shaded with screens, never having had any beatings in her limbs.’50

  Victoria’s and Lehzen’s testimony shows this up as a manifest falsehood. After the quick inspection by Dr Clark on 9 October, she grew too weak to leave her bed. Her condition grew desperately serious. The fever ‘rose dreadfully’, recorded Lehzen, ‘and delirium set in’.51 All the evidence suggests that Victoria was suffering from typhoid fever, a horrible, twitching state of violent illness. A victim turns deathly pale, vomits blood and has vicious diarrhoea. In the severest cases, a stretch of the bowel may split open, and internal bleeding and death can follow.

  But the typhoid wasn’t even the worst of it. Conroy and her mother now tried to take advantage of Victoria’s weakness to bully her into consolidating their position. Although she was ‘very ill’, Victoria wrote, they now attempted to force her to promise that she would make Conroy her Private Secretary and chief advisor.52 He wanted to be the power behind her throne. There were ‘awful scenes in the house’, Conroy threatening to lock Victoria up if she didn’t do what he wanted. These would become terrible memories for Victoria, which she could hardly bear to think about in later years, and which ‘she hoped were buried for ever’.53

  Yet still she ‘resisted’. This was ‘in spite of my illness, and their harshness’, she explains, ‘my beloved Lehzen supporting me alone’.54 Years of resentment against Conroy had come to a head at this moment, and Victoria sensed that this was the ultimate test. She simply refused to submit.

  It’s possible that there could be an even more visceral explanation for Victoria’s defiance and her hatred of Conroy. Some contemporaries believed that she detested him because she had seen him and her mother engaged in ‘familiarities’.55 Certainly Uncle Leopold thought that the influence Conroy had gained over Victoire had ‘a degree of power which in times of old one would have thought to proceed from witchcraft’.56 The evidence for a physical relationship is exceedingly flimsy. Yet Victoire’s friend and fellow-bride Adelaide attempted to warn her that to outsiders, at least, it all looked very bad. Conroy was clearly trying ‘to remove everything that might obstruct his influence’, Adelaide told her sister-in-law, ‘so that he may exercise his power alone’.57

  As Victoria’s illness continued into its second week, Lehzen perceived that Victoire was gradually changing her mind and becoming convinced that her daughter was truly in danger. ‘Now I saw the Duchess’s anxiety mounting,’ Lehzen wrote, although she ‘tried to hide it from me. A long, fearful day and a bad night passed, the signs of an inflammation were unmistakable … the Duchess could contain her terror no longer.’58

  Lehzen went to confront Conroy, and even he conceded that Dr Clark must be brought back. But there was no chance that Clark could arrive in Ramsgate until late that night. Lehzen demanded that a local doctor should be summoned. At this, Conroy was ‘visibly upset’. Yet he could not stop Victoire and Lehzen ordering Dr Plenderleath from across the harbour to arrive within half an hour.

  Conroy fretted about how this would play in public opinion, and how badly his charge’s illness would reflect upon her mother and himself as her guardians. ‘He warned me,’ Lehzen records, ‘against how dangerous such a step could be from a political point of view.’ Lehzen, though, could stand up to Conroy where Victoire could not. No, she told him. She would not ‘gamble with the life of the Princess’.59 It was a spirited confrontation, which helps to explain Victoria’s deep devotion to the governess who loved her.

  And so Conroy was overruled, and Dr Plenderleath arrived at Albion House and was rushed up the stairs. A single man of forty-four, and a fixture on the Ramsgate medical and charitable scene, he lived with his cook and footman in a house in Nelson Crescent.60 Everyone in Ramsgate knew Dr Plenderleath, and now everyone would know that the princess had become his patient. Plenderleath ‘was very grave’ on seeing how ill she was. But after his visit, and perhaps simply as a result of having been taken seriously, Victoria’s condition at last stabilised.

  The next day Dr Clark returned. During his time in the navy, Clark had won the distinction of twice being shipwrecked. Despite his career as a man of action, though, his special skill as a doctor lay less in deeds than in words. He was particularly good at talking a patient into feeling better, a skill not to be underestimated in an age when many drugs were inefficacious, or indeed made things worse.

  He and Dr Plenderleath began to treat Victoria with quinine, a muscle relaxant. It might have eased her fever, but it can have had no effect on the salmonella bacteria that had poisoned her digestive system. Only good hygiene and the strength of Victoria’s constitution could save her, and the latter had already been undermined by stress.

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bsp; And now Dr Clark’s contribution as a psychologist was just as important as his quinine draughts. Lehzen couldn’t thank him enough for restoring to Victoria ‘the necessary peace of mind’.61 Clark has often been slated as a useless doctor on the evidence of his habit of claiming that a dying patient was on the mend, but a doctor’s optimism could sometimes be a vital means of encouraging a sick person to believe in the possibility of recovery. His calm confidence was just what Victoria needed. Lehzen herself, and her love, were also important for Victoria’s return to health. ‘My dearest best Lehzen has been … most unceasing and indefatigable in her great care of me,’ Victoria wrote afterwards. ‘I am still very weak and am grown very thin. I can walk but very little and very badly. I have not yet left my room.’62 There was no more talk of Lehzen leaving. ‘They had tried to keep me from Lehzen, thinking it would weaken my love for her,’ Victoria wrote, ‘whereas it only increased it.’63

  Three weeks later, on 31 October, Victoria resumed her journal. She was recovering, though her hair had fallen out and she’d lost muscle and mobility. ‘Lay down on my couch,’ she wrote. ‘Played with Mamma on the piano till 12. Took my luncheon at 12 which consisted of some potato-soup. Looked at some things, walked a little weakly.’ Victoire, feeling guilty, showered her daughter with gifts of flower jars, books and Dresden china figures.64

  During November, Victoria regained her strength with the help of soup, boiled rice, orange jelly, biscuits and draughts of quinine. Although she was on ‘a strict regime in terms of diet’, she was allowed ‘the pleasure of eating two’ cakes every day.65 It seemed that life was returning to normal, but with all the participants somewhat chastened by the experience.