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

by Lucy Worsley

  Conroy’s biographer Katherine Hudson notes the connection between the histrionic tone of events at Albion House and the melodramas so popular in contemporary theatres and novels. Victoria herself loved reading tales of vulnerable female victims in desperate danger from cruel men. The first novel she was allowed to consume, The Bride of Lammermoor by Sir Walter Scott, opens with the striking image of a bride gone mad, sitting in a corner wearing nothing but a shift ‘dabbled in gore’.66 Victoria adored this sort of thing. She was also particularly enamoured, for example, of the moment in a Donizetti opera when a diva ‘stares wildly about her, her hand raised to her head, and giving a frantic scream falls prostrate and lifeless to the ground’.67

  Conroy likewise enjoyed secrets, plots and intrigue. He chose to believe (quite without evidence) that his own wife was another illegitimate daughter of Victoria’s father Edward, but nevertheless kept it quiet, thinking it ‘indelicate’.68 He encouraged the spies and informants who helped him to implement the ‘System’ always to tell him ‘the blackest stuff’.69 Conroy writes as if he, not Victoria, were the sixteen-year-old girl. Even Uncle Leopold took an unhelpfully melodramatic view of events in Ramsgate. ‘Had I not had the courage,’ he claimed, ‘to tear apart the whole web of intrigue … God knows what would have become of the Princess.’70

  Here Victoria’s own lifelong enjoyment of scenes of high emotional intensity is prefigured. She saw herself as the heroine of her own melodrama. In some ways, she enjoyed it. But in more reflective moments, she understood that histrionics were bad for her. She later compared a dangerous episode of postnatal depression to what had happened at Albion House, claiming that the earlier illness was mental, and that it had arisen ‘at once suddenly on reading … a very foolish story about death’. Dr Clark himself believed that the stresses of the ‘System’ had warped Victoria’s character, bringing out ‘all her bad passions’.71

  The terrible holiday in Ramsgate also had other consequences from which Victoria would never fully recover. She was confirmed in her violent distrust of Conroy, but she now also definitively turned against her mother. ‘I never knew what it was to live as mother & daughter ought to,’ she wrote later, for her own mother ‘did nothing without Conroy’s advice & whatever was told him’.72 How could she respect a mama who ‘tamely allowed Conroy to insult her’?73 Victoire herself was deeply unhappy, and ‘hardly ever sleeps’ because of ‘her constant anxiety to the future’.74

  Perhaps this was Victoire’s bitterest legacy to her daughter. She’d taught Victoria all about affection, and she often spoke or wrote to her daughter to express her love. Through her actions, though, Victoire presented a role model of a woman who had lost her self in the more powerful personality of a man. It was a lesson that even the self-willed Victoria would learn all too well.

  6

  Albert: Kensington Palace, 18 May 1836

  Wednesday 18 May 1836 started out just like so many other quiet days at Kensington Palace, with no indication that it would mark a pivot point in Victoria’s life.

  She got up at half past eight. She walked in the gardens with Lehzen, wrote in her journal and read scripture for forty-five minutes. She played the piano and sang, as was her daily habit, practising her accomplishments like any other young lady. And then, at a quarter to two that afternoon, her journal tells us,

  we went down into the Hall, to receive my Uncle Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Cobourg Gotha, & my Cousins Ernest & Albert, his sons.1

  Thus, without fanfare, the love of Victoria’s life enters the scene.

  After the distressing events in Ramsgate, an uneasy truce settled over the household. Back at Kensington Palace, Victoire and Conroy continued to prepare Victoria for her entrance into the world. The setting was a grander, more palatial apartment at Kensington Palace, fit for the princess whom they intended to become ‘The People’s Queen’.

  On their return from Ramsgate, Victoria and her mother moved upstairs to the magnificent second floor of the building. A lofty new suite had been created for them out of reception rooms completed 100 years previously for George I. The Long Gallery, for example, was partitioned off to make Victoria a sitting room, and her bed was moved into the very chamber used by former kings. These improvements were carried out in defiance of William IV’s instructions. He’d said his sister-in-law and niece might make use of the rooms, but also commanded that the painted Georgian interiors should be left intact in character and appearance.2 When William IV discovered what had happened, a huge row broke out.

  The changes, as the angry king eventually discovered, were numerous. In the Grand Saloon, beneath William Kent’s painted ceiling, the walls were divided up by false columns and hung with enormous looking glasses, while the windows were adorned with ‘rich draperies of pink’. Victoire now began to use the room for entertaining, sometimes on a gigantic scale. She invited 200 people, for example, to a concert held there for her daughter’s birthday.3 Victoire hosted a ball once a week. She was networking, making connections with important people, preparing her daughter for queenship. It was all part of the ‘System.’

  Victoria, for her part, found that constantly having to be polite to all these grown-up strangers bored her dreadfully. ‘I am very fond of pleasant society,’ she told Uncle Leopold, ‘and we have been for the last 3 weeks immured within our old Palace. I longed sadly for some gaiety.’4 Kensington Palace now thrummed with social activity, but none of it involved people Victoria’s own age, nor qualified as ‘gaiety’ in her eyes.

  At nearly seventeen, she had become a little ‘taller’, with a ‘pretty figure’.5 After Ramsgate, Dr Clark had instructed that she must lead a healthier life than the ‘System’ had previously allowed. She should swing Indian clubs to build up her muscles, and use her exercise machine with ‘pullies & Weights on Chains’.6 Most importantly, for the sake of her troubled digestion, she was to pay attention to the ‘perfect and deliberate mastication’ of her food.7 Victoria’s preferred forms of exercise were riding and dancing, although she regretted being forbidden from trying the newfangled and energetic ‘valze’ or waltz. This involved the man entwining the woman in his arms and spinning her round.8 But Conroy insisted that a future queen should display instead a ‘very dignified demeanour’.9

  Dr Clark also stipulated that Victoria was to be outdoors as often as possible, and in ‘healthy, bracing air’ at that. He’d made a particular study of tuberculosis, and had written a student thesis on the curative effect of cold air on the human body. His patients were sometimes surprised to find him checking their lungs with a medical novelty: the stethoscope. In reality, Clark’s theories about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ air, resulting from the belief that illness was caused by a ‘miasma’ travelling through the ether, would soon be discredited. But because he had ‘saved’ Victoria at Ramsgate, he had enormous influence, and instilled in her a lifelong passion for fresh air and chilly temperatures.

  Victoria’s physical appearance was beginning to signal that she was ready to be married. Although she remained short, she had blossomed into ‘a very charming young lady’, and visitors to Kensington Palace noticed that ‘her bust … is remarkably fine’.10 The people around her began to draw up lists of potential princely husbands from all round Europe. William IV was in favour of a prince from the Dutch House of Orange. In the influential eyes of Uncle Leopold, though, the front-runners for his niece’s hand lay, of course, among her Coburg cousins.

  And so, in the run-up to Victoria’s seventeenth birthday, the current head of the Coburg family, Duke Ernest, brought his sons, another Ernest, and Albert, to Kensington for a visit of inspection. The time was ripe for a match to be made.

  What did Victoria look like, now, as she stood at the top of the Stone Stairs, while her Uncle Ernest and the two young men walked in from the courtyard below? Someone who described her particularly attentively was the American artist Thomas Sully, creator of one the most attractive portraits there is of the young Victoria. You can tell from it that he found
her charming.

  Even if Sully was smitten, he was clear-eyed enough to give us some solid information about her height and build. ‘She is short,’ he admitted, ‘5 feet 1 & ¼ of an inch.’ He made, and kept, a tape measure to prove it.11 All her life Victoria’s lack of stature would be an issue thought worthy of comment. ‘It is a pity she is so small,’ wrote another person who’d also met her in the flesh, ‘I am told she regrets it very much herself.’12

  Although Sully’s tape measure proves that she was 5 feet 1¼ inches, Victoria’s height was always stated in public to be 5 feet 2. That imaginary extra three-quarters of an inch was important because height was much more affected by nurture, rather than nature, than it is in modern times. Diets for the very poorest in 1830s society had recently been declining in quality, and with this, the adult height of working people and paupers had shrunk. There was as much as a 4-inch difference, in some areas, between middle- and working-class children of thirteen.13 If Victoria was short, argues food historian Annie Gray, it looked like she had not been properly fed. This reflected badly on Conroy and Victoire. They made both their princess and themselves look a little bit better by adding a little bit on.

  Sully found his sitter’s face young for her years, slightly ‘infantine in the contour’. He conceded that her large, light-blue eyes were ‘a little prominent’, but he liked her nose, which reminded him of those he’d ‘frequently seen in persons of wit and intellect’. Her mouth particularly attracted him: ‘a lovely, artless mouth when at rest – and when so, it is a little open, showing her teeth’.14

  This pursed little mouth of Victoria’s divided opinion. Another observer thought it ‘her worst feature … generally a little open, her teeth small and short, and she shows her gums when she laughs, which is rather disfiguring’. Whenever Victoria sat for her likeness, Feodore would say, ‘Do, Victoria, shut your mouth!’15

  But the most attractive thing about Victoria wasn’t a physical feature. It was her laugh. ‘So full of girlish glee and gladness,’ people noticed; she ‘laughs in real earnest, opening her mouth as wide as it can go’.16 In the right company, she could be exuberant, cordial, eager to please. The actor Fanny Kemble was not alone in admiring the bell-like quality of Victoria’s voice. ‘The enunciation as perfect as the intonation was melodious,’ she gushed, ‘it is impossible to hear a more excellent utterance than that of the Queen’s English by the English Queen.’17

  But had she not been a future queen, her cousins now arriving at Kensington Palace would have beheld a rather ordinary, dumpy, giggly teenager – ‘nothing to criticise, nothing particularly to admire’ – with an unfulfilled desire for parties.18 She looked nice, but not special, with ‘a pleasing countenance … though nature has certainly not stamped the seal of “Majesty” upon it’.19 Neither had she yet learned to be ‘independent and unembarrassed’ in manner. Still stuck in the coils of the ‘System’, Victoria kept her lovely laugh for Feodore alone. She described her social manner during this period as ‘extremely crushed and kept under … hardly dared say a word’.20

  On this particular day that Albert first set eyes upon her, there’s also cause to suspect that we can identify the very gown Victoria was wearing. The reason is that she was a great hoarder of the clothes worn on significant occasions, and the Royal Collection today still contains a high-waisted, dark-coloured, tartan velvet dress. With short puffed sleeves worn just off the shoulder, its style dates it to exactly the right period.21

  The tartan was important, for despite the fact she had never been there Victoria had fallen passionately in love with the country of Scotland. This had happened four months previously when she’d devoured Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor. In it, a fearsome Scottish lord feasts upon the human flesh of his tenants, shocking observers when he throws back ‘the tartan plaid with which he had screened his grim and ferocious visage’.22 ‘Oh!’ Victoria panted in her journal, ‘Walter Scott is my beau ideal of a Poet; I do so admire him both in Poetry and Prose!’23 ‘Grim and ferocious’ does not sound like a particularly winsome look. Yet Victoria, at odds with the authority figures in her life, wanted to demonstrate independence and maturity through her dark, tartan gown. Casting aside the white or pink muslin dresses that had previously dominated her wardrobe, she was going through a phase and adopting a look that in our own times we might call goth.

  And what did Victoria herself see as the Duke of Coburg and his sons began to climb the Stone Stairs towards her? She did not know it, but one of the young men down below loved Sir Walter Scott as much as she did herself. Yet she did not notice him. Her eye was first taken by Albert’s eighteen-year-old brother Ernest with his ‘dark hair, & fine dark eyes & eye-brows’ and his ‘very good figure’.

  Only after sucking in every detail of the toothsome Ernest did Victoria’s eyes move on to Albert. Now she noticed that the younger brother, sixteen like herself, was ‘extremely handsome’, more handsome even than Ernest. Albert’s hair, she observed, ‘is about the same colour as mine … he has a beautiful nose, & a very sweet mouth with fine teeth; but the charm of his countenance is his expression … full of goodness & sweetness, & very clever & intelligent’.24

  Albert did not lack the poise required to stand up to this considerable feminine scrutiny. His mother Louise, Duchess of Coburg, had abandoned him and his brother when he was five, but even before then she had managed to instil in him a strong sense of his own self-worth. Louise ‘made no attempt’, claimed Albert’s tutor, ‘to conceal that Prince Albert was her favourite child. He was handsome and bore a strong resemblance to herself.’

  This same gentleman thought that Louise was ‘wanting in the essential qualifications for a mother’, but a closer look at the circumstances suggests that ‘abandon’ is not quite the right word for her action in leaving her sons behind.25 She had come to the small, wooded, hilly state of Coburg, in modern-day Bavaria, upon her marriage to its Duke. She was sixteen; he was seventeen years older. Her new husband loved to dress up as a knight, and staged a medieval-style tournament to celebrate their wedding. It was a fairytale start, but Albert’s parents’ marriage soon floundered. The Duke’s affairs were legion, but when Louise indulged in one of her own, it was unforgivable. Her husband forced Louise to leave Coburg, to give up her claims upon it and never to see her sons again. She died unhappily at thirty, in Paris with her lover. ‘Parting from my children,’ she wrote, ‘was the worst thing of all.’26 As for Albert, he ‘could not bear to think about his childhood, he had been so unhappy and miserable, and had many a time wished himself out of this world’.27

  A beautiful, dreamy boy, Albert in his childhood home of Rosenau Castle could at least find comfort in books. There were no fewer than twenty-three novels by Victoria’s own favourite, Sir Walter Scott, in the castle’s turreted, neo-Gothic library.28 During the course of this visit to Kensington Palace, Victoria and Albert would be rather shy together, but they would bond over books, and something else they both loved: music. Later that first afternoon, her cousins asked Victoria to sing to them, which she did, and she was delighted to find them ‘excessively fond of music, like me’.29

  This was definitely a step towards falling in love. The piano stool, a well-known hotspot in the romantic geography of any drawing room, forces singer and accompanist, or two duet players, into physical proximity. And in many ways Victoria and Albert seemed destined for each other. When Frau Siebold delivered Albert just three months after delivering Victoria at Kensington Palace, the newborn baby had looked all around him, alert and inquisitive as ‘a little squirrel’. with the ‘large blue eyes’ that were just like Victoria’s own.30 Victoria and Albert’s common grandmother, Duchess Augusta, matriarch of the Coburg clan, described him at once as the ‘pendant’ to his ‘pretty cousin’.31 Albert’s older brother Ernest would have to stay in Coburg to be Duke after his father’s death. But Albert, the younger son, could be sent abroad. From birth, he had the duty and destiny of extending the Coburg family’s influence
in Britain.

  Judging from what she wrote in her journal, though, Victoria seems to be telling us that she was charmed, but far from infatuated. There is no doubt that she liked her cousins’ company: ‘they speak English very well, & I speak it with them.’ In the entry for the day of their arrival, though, she also mentions that her uncle the Duke gave her a gift of a scarlet-and-blue exotic bird. It was the type of parrot called a ‘lory’ or ‘lorikeet’, and it was impressively big, even ‘larger than Mamma’s Grey Parrot’. The lory was wonderfully tame, so much so that ‘it remains on your hand, & you may put your finger into its beak, or do any thing with it without its ever attempting to bite’. This bird makes at least as much impact in Victoria’s journal as the man who turned out to be the love of her life. And that evening Albert was left behind when she went out to a grand dinner.32

  During the course of the next few days, Albert gave the impression that he was a little too young, and a lot too naïve, to know exactly what a prince was supposed to do when he met a princess. He had a strong sense of pride, but lacked savoir faire. He failed to join in properly, remaining detached from and uncommitted to the programme his aunt had arranged. ‘The different way of living, and the late hours, do not agree with me,’ he admitted to his stepmother. He found the long evenings – one social gathering ending at 1 a.m. – particularly challenging. There was no time for reading, and he had ‘many hard battles to fight against sleepiness’. As for Victoria herself, he damned her with faint praise. All he had to say was that she was ‘very amiable’.33

  Two days later, there was a lengthy reception and dinner at St James’s Palace. The day after that, Albert had to meet 3,800 people for William IV’s birthday. On 23 May, during what was supposed to be another crowded reception at Kensington Palace, he ‘was not quite well & went soon to bed’.34 On 24 May, Victoria’s birthday, what was meant to be the centrepiece of the stay, Albert finally collapsed. He remained only ‘a short while in the ball-room’ and then, ‘having only danced twice’, he ‘turned as pale as ashes’ and had to go to bed.35 It wasn’t just Albert. Ernest too was left thinking ‘old England’ and Victoria’s life of relentless royal socialising were extremely ‘peculiar’.36