by Edna Healey
never was there such a specimen of wicked, vulgar profusion. It has cost a million of money, and there is not a fault that has not been committed in it. You may be sure there are rooms enough, and large enough, for the money; but for staircases, passages, etc., I observed that instead of being called Buckingham Palace, it should be the ‘Brunswick Hotel’. The costly ornaments of the state rooms exceed all belief in their bad taste and every species of infirmity. Raspberry coloured pillars without end, that quite turn you sick to look at; but the Queen’s paper for her own apartments far exceed everything else in their ugliness and vulgarity … the marble single arch in front of the Palace cost £100,000 and the gateway in Piccadilly cost £40,000. Can one be surprised at people becoming Radical with such specimens of royal prodigality before their eyes? to say nothing of the characters of such royalties themselves.9
William, Duke of Clarence, and Mrs Jordan
If William IV is remembered, it is usually either as a bluff and somewhat stupid seadog, strolling along the seafront at Brighton, chatting affably to the passers-by, or as one who heartlessly deserted Mrs Jordan, his companion for more than twenty years and the mother of his ten children, and allowed her to die, exiled in poverty. But he was neither stupid nor heartless. He was an affectionate father and took responsibility for all his children; and he never ceased to feel the deepest sense of guilt at his treatment of Dora Jordan.
Dorothea Jordan (known as Dora), born in 1761, was four years older than William, Duke of Clarence. When the Duke fell in love with her she was one of the greatest actresses on the London stage. The essayist William Hazlitt remembered her: ‘Her face, her tears, her manners were irresistible. Her smile had the effect of sunshine and her laugh did one good to hear it … She was all gaiety, openness and good nature.’10 She brought the Duke much happiness; and their steady relationship and her obviously good effect on him persuaded George III to give them Bushey House on the Hampton Court estate. Here they lived happily with their ten children. Although Mrs Jordan was almost continually pregnant she still enchanted her audiences and often paid the Duke’s debts with her considerable earnings from the stage. Their children were to marry into the aristocracy: their daughter Mary, for instance, married the natural son of Lord Holland.
When the Duke’s brother became Regent, the Duke was in such debt that he considered he must marry an heiress or make a royal marriage and beget an heir: then Parliament would provide him with an additional allowance. The death of Princess Charlotte, George IV’s only daughter, made him heir to the throne, and therefore he made haste to take a royal bride. In 1818 he married a German princess, Adelaide of Saxe-Meinengen, who was half his age.
In October 1811 he had parted from Mrs Jordan, making an allowance for her and her children, stipulating that it would be reduced if she went back on the stage. He took care of the children, but she kept in close touch with them all. Swindled by a son-in-law, harassed by creditors, she finally fled to France. She went back on the stage. On 5 July 1816 she died alone and in poverty, in cold, bleak rented rooms in the village of St Cloud.
After his marriage he still kept her portraits. He showed them to friends saying, ‘she was a good woman’. Queen Adelaide had two children by William IV, both of whom died. Surprisingly, she accepted the King’s past with good grace and was fond of his grandchildren.
When he became King, William IV commissioned Sir Francis Chantrey to make a marble statue of Mrs Jordan with two of their children, which he intended to be placed with the wives of kings in Westminster Abbey. However, the Dean of Westminster refused to have the actress in the Abbey, so the statue remained unclaimed. Queen Victoria was interested in the story but did not want this reminder of her uncle’s irregular life. It remained in Chantrey’s studio until after his death in 1841.
The statue’s subsequent history is a curious tale. One of the sons of William IV and Mrs Jordan, Lord Augustus Fitzclarence, became the vicar of St Margaret’s, a little church in Mapledurham. He took the statue and placed it in his church, where it remained for sixty years, unexplained and possibly considered to be a representation of the Madonna with child. The village church was more tolerant than West-minster Abbey. In 1956 and 1972 Mrs Jordan’s statue appeared at exhibitions at the Royal Academy. The 5th Earl of Munster, a descendant of William IV and Mrs Jordan, built a garden pavilion for her at Sandhills, Surrey, where the ‘child of nature’ would have been happy. He was childless and decided to bequeath the statue to Queen Elizabeth II. So finally in May 1980 Mrs Jordan was brought to Buckingham Palace and given a place in the Picture Gallery beneath paintings of kings and queens.
Queen Victoria Takes the Stage
Queen Adelaide and the King were fond of his niece Princess Victoria, now the accepted successor to the throne, but hated her mother. William IV had been furious when, in 1830, the Duchess of Kent had been made by Parliament ‘sole regent’ until Princess Victoria should come of age in May 1837. The King was determined to thwart the Duchess and live until then. Soon after his accession, in a fit of xenophobic prejudice, he decided that his successor should change her names, Alexandrina Victoria. ‘The two … names she bears are unsuitable to our national feeling,’ he declared. The name Victoria ‘is not even German, but of French origin’. In this battle the Duchess won: Princess Victoria kept her name. He had, however, defeated the Duchess at his Coronation. He insisted that Princess Victoria should walk in the Coronation procession behind his brothers, so the Duchess refused to allow the Princess to attend.
The pressure of this hostility on an adolescent girl was intense. It was increased by her own hatred of her mother’s financial adviser, Sir John Conroy. The late Duke of Kent’s equerry had taken control of the Duchess, her purse and, some said, her person. In the last years of the King’s life, Conroy tried to secure Princess Victoria’s promise to make him her Private Secretary when she became Queen. This she adamantly refused to do.
Not surprisingly the general strain made her ill, giving the Duchess the excuse to appropriate better rooms in Kensington Palace (where a number of apartments were used by the royal family), in spite of the King’s express command. The Duchess had been allocated ‘dreadfully dull and gloomy lower rooms’. She now took over ‘lofty and handsome rooms two flights upstairs with a sitting room nicely furnished’ for Princess Victoria, and a large airy bedroom where she slept with her mother until the day she became Queen.
The Duchess could now celebrate Princess Victoria’s seventeenth birthday in style. Encouraged by Leopold, her brother (now King of the Belgians), and her friend Stockmar, who had plans for the future, she invited her brother, the Duke of Coburg, and his sons, Princes Ernest and Albert, to stay for the festivities.
The King gave a birthday ball for Princess Victoria at St James’s Palace, for Buckingham Palace was not yet ready. Neither the King nor Queen Adelaide attended the magnificent ball given by the Duchess in the State Rooms at Kensington Palace. The two German princes and their father were present, but the succession of late-night parties exhausted Prince Albert, who took to his bed for most of the time. King Leopold had chosen Prince Albert as a possible consort; but the cousins parted as friends but without a firm commitment. Prince Albert’s time would come.
The battle between King and Duchess raged on, culminating in a public scene at the King’s birthday dinner at Windsor, when the King accused the Duchess of ‘disrespectful’ behaviour and of ‘attempting to keep Victoria away from my drawing room’.
In May 1837 the King gave a gala ball at St James’s Palace for Princess Victoria’s eighteenth birthday, when cheering crowds filled the Mall and the courtyard. She was now of age to succeed to the throne, but, since she was a minor, Conroy and her mother still attempted to take control. The King had been taken ill in May. As soon as it was clear that William IV was dying Leopold sent Stockmar, now a Baron, to London. His mission was to heal the breach between the Queen-to-be and her mother and to give Princess Victoria constitutional advice. The Duchess had bec
ome dominated by the ruthless and sinister Conroy and hoped, even now, to compel Princess Victoria to promise to give her the powers of a regent; Conroy the control of her money; and Conroy’s daughter a privileged place in her household. The shrewd Baron quietly summed up the situation. When he heard the whole story from Princess Victoria of her personal observation of Conroy’s influence and his relationship with her mother, Stockmar accepted the inevitable. In the past she had accepted guidance, if unwillingly; now she was adamant. She must have decided well in advance that one of her first acts as Queen would be to remove her mother’s bed from her room and from then on to sleep and act alone. On the evening of 19 June 1837, Princess Victoria was warned that the King was dying. He died at Windsor early the next day.
William IV had been a better king than anyone expected. The diarist Charles Greville had thought him a ‘mountebank bidding fair to be a maniac’. Certainly the King’s after-dinner speeches were often alarmingly wild. But Lord Holland, whose son Charles was at the King’s bedside when he died, praised his absence of guile, kindness and sense of duty. The King’s character had been so, Lord Holland added, ‘since his accession to the Crown and he was on the whole the best King of his race and perhaps of any race we have ever had, and the one who has left the greatest name as a Constitutional sovereign and the first magistrate of a free and improving people’.11 A surprising obituary, but considering its author, one that must be taken seriously.
Certainly he had shown sense and judgement, and had sailed through the high seas of the Reform Bill storm without falling overboard or wrecking the ship of state; above all, in his reign the Palace improvements were at last completed.
At six o’clock on the morning of 20 June 1837 Princess Victoria was awakened in her bedroom at Kensington Palace. The Lord Chamberlain, Lord Conyngham, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the King’s doctor had travelled directly from William IV’s death bed at Windsor and wished to see the Queen. At the door of her sitting room, Victoria, wearing a dressing gown over her night dress, put aside her mother’s hand and went in alone, as Queen.
CHAPTER FIVE
Queen Victoria
‘They think I am still a girl,
but I will show them that I am Queen of England.’1
QUEEN VICTORIA
Queen and Empress
The young Queen Victoria’s first appearance at her Privy Council moved even old cynics almost to tears. She seemed so small, so young and vulnerable, yet she was amazingly composed, reading her speech ‘in a clear, distinct, and audible voice without any appearance of fear or embarrassment’. The only sign of emotion was when her two old uncles, the Dukes of Cumberland and Sussex, knelt before her, swearing allegiance. Then, wrote Greville, ‘I saw her blush up to her eyes, as if she felt the contrast between their civil and their natural relations.’ Even the Duke of Wellington was moved – his tribute was typically simple and direct: ‘She filled the room.’ The old men, who remembered the bloated, self-indulgent George IV and bumbling old William IV rambling through his incoherent after-dinner speeches, listened to the clear young voice and saw a new dawn. It was an impressive performance which has been often described, and the Privy Councillors and the public were understandably overwhelmed.
But the picture of this scene as recorded by Sir David Wilkie was misleading. Queen Victoria was not, as he painted her, floating in a drift of white: in fact, she wore a simple black dress. Nor had she risen, a queen from the foam, at the touch of a wand. She had been prepared for this moment from her birth, and she had readied herself ever since that morning on 11 March 1830 when her governess, Lehzen, had slipped into the pages of her history book Howlett’s ‘Tables of the Kings and Queens of England’ and for the first time she realized her destiny, uttering the famous pledge, ‘I will be good.’2
In those first days Queen Victoria repeated again and again, with some triumph, that she was facing her new life ‘alone, quite quite alone’. But in fact there were advisers behind her who were to give her support for many years to come. Her uncle, King Leopold (who became King of the Belgians in 1830 and was now married again, this time to Louise, daughter of Louis-Philippe, King of France), had a major part to play in the shaping of the Queen. His friend Baron Stockmar was to be her éminence grise from the time of her father’s death for almost half a century.
Queen Louise became a much loved friend, who gave Queen Victoria the royal companionship she lacked. Queen Louise taught her to play chess, they chatted about clothes, and Queen Victoria tried on the Belgian Queen’s Paris dresses. She widened Queen Victoria’s horizons and gave her a personal knowledge of France that was to stand her in good stead. Unlike her uncle, William IV, who hated all things French, Queen Victoria was to build new links with France. She later remembered with amusement how William IV had told the boys at Eton College, ‘Always remember to hate the French.’
Although Baron Stockmar had earlier been unsuccessful in his attempt to mend the Queen’s relationship with her mother, she was perfectly prepared to accept his advice on constitutional and protocol matters. Some days before the death of the old King she had seen Lord Liverpool, who also hoped to conciliate mother and daughter. She saw him alone and surprised him by the authoritative way she produced a memorandum – with headings – for their discussion. Undoubtedly here was the skilful hand of Baron Stockmar. All his life he had a passion for memoranda with headings. It is significant that on the morning of her succession she saw Stockmar before making her famous statement to her Privy Council, and she saw him twice after dinner on the same day. There would be other éminences grises in her life, and some, like Conroy, would be distinctly ‘noire’; but the influence of Baron Stockmar, almost until his death, was to be crucial.
Baron Stockmar’s secure, loving home background with a shrewd and sensible mother had given him stability and he was always to be grateful for the medical training he had received at Würzburg, Erlangen and Jena. To this he always attributed a gift for assessing people and an understanding of psychology. There is a steadiness, an openness and humour in his early portrait that is still there in his face in old age. That steadiness was to see him through many difficulties to a serene old age. From his early days he had a passionate love of liberty, which inspired him to consider joining in a plot to assassinate the Emperor Napoleon, but common sense had dissuaded him. Kind, competent and reassuring, he sometimes suffered moods of black depression, but to his friends he seemed always equable. Remarkably his passion for producing detailed memoranda and advice, which might have been infuriating in another, rarely offended. Just before Stockmar died he wrote that if he were asked by a young man beginning his career,
What is the chief good for which it behoves a man to strive my only answer would be, ‘Love and Friendship’. Were he to ask me, ‘What is man’s most priceless possession’ I must answer, ‘The consciousness of having loved and sought the Truth for its own sake.’ All else is mere vanity or a sick man’s dream.3
At this crucial time, as in earlier years, the influence of her beloved Uncle Leopold cannot be overestimated: she was to follow much of his counsel throughout her reign.
Leopold advised her never to give an immediate answer to Ministers; Greville heard that she always said, ‘I will think it over’, even to Melbourne. Leopold advocated strict business habits such as seeing Ministers between 11am and 1.30 each day; the Queen always saw Lord Melbourne between those hours. Leopold urged her to form her own opinions on all questions and stick to them … people soon noticed that she had a will of her own. Leopold insisted that if people spoke to her uninvited on personal matters she should change the subject ‘and make the individual feel he has made a mistake’.4
When, in the future, Queen Victoria was ‘not amused’, strong men wilted.
Stockmar and Uncle Leopold were not only to direct her future: they also gave her the knowledge of her links with family history – about which she was intensely curious. They had known well her grandmother, Queen Charlotte; Stockmar had s
tudied the medical case of her grand-father, George III, from his contemporaries – Queen Victoria was always sensitive to the possibility of hereditary madness. The two men had watched the careers of her uncles, George IV and William IV, and above all they had known her father the Duke of Kent – that invisible influence in her life – whom she fondly imagined was ‘the best of the lot’. Stockmar had known her mother in Coburg and was with them when her father, the Duke of Kent, died; and Uncle Leopold had known him for many years. Throughout her life she would look for his substitute. For all her independence and powerful will, Queen Victoria always longed for a strong right arm.
No one knew better than King Leopold that other influence in her early life, his sister Victoire, Duchess of Kent. The Duchess was impressionable, easily led, and many thought her ‘the most mediocre person it would be possible to meet’.5 She needed the support of a husband, which is why King Leopold had encouraged her to marry the Duke of Kent after the death of her first husband. Unfortunately her brother had lately been too absorbed in his own affairs as King of the Belgians, so he had not noticed the growing malignant influence of John Conroy.
In bringing up Queen Victoria her mother followed a system recommended by Stockmar. She was excessively strict, as weak people often are, and over-protective, refusing to allow Queen Victoria to meet the family of William IV and Mrs Jordan, since, as she said, her daughter must be taught the difference between right and wrong. Did the Duchess ever attempt to explain Queen Victoria’s father’s ‘wrong relationship’ with Madame de St Laurent, his mistress for twenty-seven years?
Although her mother’s influence had been constricting, Queen Victoria owed something to her. In the years before her accession she had been prepared for the throne. The Duchess had taken her on royal progresses throughout the country, giving her some glimpse at least of life in the north and west country. She had taught her how to behave royally, to receive municipal addresses with dignity and to accept salutes of guns as her right. This had infuriated William IV, who hated the Duchess and her presumption; he publicly upbraided her and forbade the ‘damned popping’ of guns. Queen Victoria’s self-possession, which so astonished her ministers, was partly the result of her mother’s training.