We Two: Victoria and Albert

by Gillian Gill

  Now that she had officially “come out,” the Princess Victoria was more frequently at court, and her life was enlivened by the steady stream of princely suitors who turned up in London. On the subject of Victoria’s prospective husband, as on everything else, the Duchess of Kent and Conroy were at loggerheads with King William and his brothers.

  During the summer after her sixteenth birthday, anticipating an even more exacting round of public duties, Victoria lost weight, had trouble sleeping, and suffered from sick headaches and back pain. She pleaded with her mother to be afforded more leisure and privacy. She wished to forego the next royal progress through England that Conroy had mapped out for her and which she knew offended her uncle the King. William IV had found it necessary to stipulate that when she ventured offshore, the Duchess of Kent had no authority to order the twenty-one-gun salute traditionally reserved for the sovereign.

  Victoria’s request to spend a quiet summer was denied, and she was called a foolish, undutiful girl. She completed the tour, a notable success in all her private visits and public appearances. But her vitality, which had so impressed people when she was a little girl, was now at low ebb, and her menstrual cycle became irregular. Amenorrhea is a common symptom in teenage girls under extreme stress, but it complicated the various schemes afoot to marry Victoria off.

  Alarmed by her daughter’s increasing intransigence, the Duchess of Kent summoned Baron Stockmar to investigate and give his advice. Stock-mar was his usual forthright self, and he advised the duchess, in essence, that it was in her interest to dismiss Conroy and make peace with her daughter. Conroy had no difficulty in persuading the duchess to ignore Stockmar’s advice.

  But Stockmar rang loud warning bells in Brussels, and King Leopold decided that he himself must now take a hand. In September 1835, Leopold and his wife, Louise, came to meet the Kensington Palace party at Rams-gate, a seaside resort in Kent, not far from Dover, that had long been a favorite with the Coburgs. Victoria was ecstatic, since it was over four years since she had last seen her uncle Leopold, and she knew her aunt Louise only from letters. The queen of the Belgians was only seven years older than Victoria and immensely chic, if frail and retiring, especially in the presence of her husband.

  King Leopold was one person whom John Conroy could not prevent from speaking alone and in confidence to the princess. On two separate occasions, her uncle talked to Victoria at length. She underlined in her journal that her uncle had given her “very good and valuable advice,” but prudently refrained from specifying what that advice was. Leopold also took a long walk alone on the sands with Sir John Conroy, but made no headway with him at all.

  Throughout the visit of the Belgian royal couple, Victoria was, as she liked to write, very merry, but she was struggling against illness and felt extremely unwell. Fever and pain, joined with the sorrow and panic of seeing her most important ally once again sailing across the channel, laid the princess low once King Leopold had left.

  Victoria had grown to love and trust her personal physician, Dr. James Clark, but when the princess took to her bed, Conroy sent Clark back to London with the Belgian minister. When Clark returned, he was permitted to examine the princess only cursorily. Lehzen, nursing Victoria night and day and driven almost frantic with anxiety, tried to describe the princess’s condition to Clark but was told by the duchess to shut her mouth. Then Lehzen was not allowed to know what Clark had diagnosed and prescribed.

  At this point, the Duchess of Kent and Sir John Conroy were becoming desperate and willing to take risks. King William was a very sick man, and more and more people in government and court circles had begun to suspect that the Princess Victoria was living under duress. The English royal family and the extended Coburg family were now solidly lined up in opposition to Conroy. Some bold and decisive act was needed to protect Sir John’s situation and prospects.

  So, while the Princess Victoria was weak, feverish, and confined to bed, Conroy and the duchess tried to browbeat her into signing a document appointing Conroy as her personal private secretary in the event of her accession to the throne. Supported by Lehzen, Victoria found the strength to refuse. As she later told Lord Melbourne, “They [Mama and Conroy] attempted (for I was still very ill) to make me promise beforehand, which I resisted in spite of my illness, my beloved Lehzen supporting me alone.”

  After three days, when the princess was delirious with a very high fever and a racing pulse, it finally occurred to the duchess that Victoria might be in danger of dying. To risk killing the goose that laid the golden eggs was in no one’s interests, so a local doctor was called in as discreetly as possible. He pronounced the princess’s condition to be very grave, and Dr. Clark was recalled. Under his fatherly care, the princess slowly regained her health, remaining at Ramsgate for over five weeks.

  Exactly what was wrong with the Princess Victoria in the fall of 1835 has been much discussed. It is possible that there was an element of youthful neuroticism in the illness, as Sir John and the duchess argued. However, Queen Victoria herself was told that she had typhoid, a life-threatening disease. Whatever the diagnosis, Victoria was clearly very ill, and Sir John Conroy and the Duchess of Kent were unprincipled to try to exploit her illness for political gain.

  They had also badly miscalculated. Lehzen and Victoria were now openly united in opposition to the Kensington System, and they had found an ally in Clark. The princess knew that she was supported from afar by King Leopold and that, though increasingly debilitated, her uncle king was looking for ways to help her.

  King Leopold and Baroness Lehzen were now in secret correspondence. Fearing for his niece’s safety at the hands of the increasingly reckless Conroy and convinced that his sister Victoire was under some kind of diabolical spell, Leopold had decided that the solution was to get his niece married as soon as possible. He had his candidate picked out: Albert, younger son of his elder brother, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. He wanted Lehzen to urge Victoria to become engaged immediately, even if marriage must wait until both partners were more mature.

  “I talk to you at length and through you speak to Victoria,” wrote King Leopold to Baroness Lehzen on May 1, 1836. “For years Victoria has unfortunately been treated as a mere matter for speculation … her youth as well as her future gave ample opportunities for a thousand avaricious schemes … Only two people cared for her for her own sake, that is, you, dear Lehzen and I … and because this was so we were systematically persecuted, for it was particularly feared that the child might grow fond of us, and find in us friends apart … The chief plan has been, since 1828, to drive you away. Had I not stood firm … you would have followed Späth … Had I not come to England last year, and had I not had the courage, in Ramsgate, to tear apart the whole web of intrigue, Clark would never have learned the true state of affairs, and God knows what would have become of the Princess … The Princess’s 17th birthday marks an important stage in her life; only one more year and the possibility of a Regency vanishes like an evil cloud. This is the perfect time for us, who are loyal, to take thought for the future of the dear child.”

  King Leopold explained to Baroness Lehzen that Prince Albert, though very young, was the best royal marital prospect that Germany had to offer at that moment. Furthermore, he could personally attest that his nephew had the intelligence and education to serve as Victoria’s adviser once she became Queen. Furthermore, Albert’s “youth was the guarantee for his pure unspoilt nature.”

  If Leopold had hoped to find an easy tool for his purpose in Baroness Lehzen, he was wrong. Lehzen was no doubt dazzled by becoming suddenly the confidante of a king, but she too had her ambitions and her plans, and they did not coincide with Leopold’s. On the issue of Victoria’s imminent marriage, Lehzen for once was on the side of the duchess and Conroy She saw Victoria as a second Queen Elizabeth, virgin and independent of male influence. She had no wish to see her darling princess married to a bossy young Coburg protégé of King Leopold and Baron Stockmar.

  In any
event, the Princess Victoria was charming to her cousin Albert when he came to England at the time of her seventeenth birthday. She thanked her uncle “for the prospect of great happiness you give me in the person of Dear Albert.” But she offered no immediate prospect of an engagement. Victoria did not believe that she needed a husband to protect her from her mother and Conroy. In a year, she would be eighteen and in a position to protect herself.

  The Princess Victoria was still young, but she was not weak. As a small child, she had received a treasure of love and care, and somehow, through ten years of isolation and emotional deprivation, she made the store last. She watched the mother who had loved and protected her as a young child metamorphose into a wicked stepmother, intent on wealth, status, and power, but she did not stop loving and trusting.

  At Conroy’s hands she suffered, bowing her head and holding her tongue, but she translated the tyrant’s lessons into survival tactics. When she heard the man who in private treated her like an imbecile proclaiming his devotion to her before large crowds, she silently but irrevocably condemned him as a hypocrite and a villain. Soon it would be her turn to speak and Conroy’s to listen. Soon she would have power.

  AFTER HER RETURN from Ramsgate, Victoria found life at Kensington Palace exceptionally dull and lugubrious. At least she occupied new, airy rooms that the duchess had commandeered against the King’s strict instructions, and she had been prescribed lots of fresh air and few lessons by the amiable Clark.

  Her mother was now in open combat with the King, as their dispute over the new suite of rooms at Kensington Palace indicated. In August the Duchess of Kent went further, refusing to accept the invitation to Queen Adelaide’s birthday banquet. The duchess said she would come a few days later if she found it convenient. This act of breathtaking rudeness showed that Victoire Kent believed she could snub the King and Queen of England with impunity, since she herself would soon hold the reins of power.

  The duchess did, however, go to Windsor on August 21, 1836, for the feast to celebrate the King’s birthday, and she brought her daughter Victoria with her. When William IV rose to acknowledge the toast to his health, he turned to the Duchess of Kent, who was seated next to him, and launched into a furious diatribe that each of the hundred guests could hear.

  “I trust in God that my life may be spared for nine months longer,” the King roared, “after which period, in the event of my death, no Regency would take place. I should then have the satisfaction of leaving the royal authority to the personal exercise of that Young Lady, the Heiress Presumptive of the Crown, and not in the hands of the person now near me, who is surrounded by evil advisors and who is herself incompetent to act with propriety in the station in which she would be placed! I have no hesitation in saying that I have been insulted—grossly and continually insulted—by that person, but I am determined to endure no longer a course of behavior so disrespectful to me. Amongst many other things, I have particularly to complain of the manner in which that Young Lady has been kept away from my court.”

  The battle lines were now drawn between Windsor and Kensington, and for the next nine months, Victoria was kept under virtual house arrest. “The Monster and Demon Incarnate,” as Victoria later referred to Conroy still held sway at Kensington Palace, and the princess’s life continued to be one of “great misery and oppression.” Efforts made by the dying King and his ministers to intervene on her behalf were indignantly repelled by the duchess and Conroy. When a letter carrying the King’s sign manual or seal came from William IV with orders that it be placed in the princess’s hands alone, the duchess received the messenger with her daughter and took the letter from her. When the King received an answer, refusing his offers of a separate income and household, he declared, “Victoria has not written this.” The King was right. The duchess and Conroy were now not only sequestering the princess but corresponding in her name and keeping crucial documents from her.

  In the spring of 1837, as her eighteenth birthday approached and the state of the King’s health declined, it was clear that Victoria would be queen within months. Consequently, the duchess and Conroy had to change their goals while adopting increasingly severe means. Victoria was subjected to remorseless pressure to agree to accept a regency until she was twenty-one and to appoint Sir John Conroy as her confidential private secretary. That position, which had been created to serve kings who were incapacitated, would allow Conroy to run the new queen’s domestic life, control her revenues, and conduct the affairs of state for three years. The Duchess of Kent went about saying that her daughter lacked the intellectual capacity to reign alone. She claimed that Victoria herself was anxious for a regency to be appointed until she was twenty-one.

  By this time, Baron Stockmar was in London at the behest of King Leopold and the Coburg family, talking to English ministers and the people surrounding the dying King as well as to the Kensington Palace set, and sending regular reports back to Germany and Belgium. Stockmar was the supreme diplomat and had long conducted the key business transactions of the Coburg family all over Europe. It was Stockmar in no small measure who had secured the kingdom of Belgium for Leopold and the Portuguese queen as a bride for Leopold’s nephew, Ferdinand of Coburg-Kohary. Even the Duchess of Kent was not prepared to show this man the door, and so, hoping perhaps that he could resolve the impasse between Conroy and her daughter, she allowed Stockmar to speak to the Princess Victoria alone for the first time.

  He was impressed by Victoria’s self-possession and her fierce determination to keep the rights and privileges that would be hers as queen in her own hands. “Her feelings seem … to have been deeply wounded by what she calls ‘his [Conroy’s] impudent and insulting conduct’ towards her,” wrote Stockmar to King Leopold. “Her affection and esteem for her mother seem likewise to have suffered from Mama having tamely allowed Conroy to insult the Princess in her presence … O’Hum [Conroy] continues the system of intimidation with the genius of a madman, and the Duchess carries out all that she is instructed to do with admirable docility and perseverance … The Princess continues to refuse firmly to give her Mama her promise that she will make O’Hum her confidential advisor. Whether she will hold out, Heaven knows, for they plague her, every hour and every day.”

  Stockmar was unable to prevail on the duchess to change her course of action, and he and Conroy, who for years had maintained a facade of friendly relations, had a falling out. However, before he too was banished from Kensington Palace, Stockmar had succeeded in procuring Victoria a private interview with Lord Liverpool, a former Tory prime minister. This respected independent witness was able to inform the Melbourne government that the heir to the throne was not an imbecile. Despite everything her mother claimed on her behalf, she neither needed nor wanted a regency.

  The duchess summoned from Germany her son, Charles Leiningen, to play the heavy brother and bring Victoria to heel. Charles Leiningen was dependent on his mother for money and status, and for some weeks he was firmly in the Conroy camp. However, Leiningen, who was neither stupid nor mean, balked when he heard Conroy say, “If the Princess Victoria will not listen to reason, she must be coerced.” Charles Leiningen told his mother in German to do no such thing.

  EARLY IN THE MORNING of Tuesday June 20, 1837, the doorbell rang out repeatedly for admittance to Kensington Palace. When a porter finally appeared, he discovered that the insistent visitors were the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chamberlain, who had ridden over as fast as they could from Windsor Castle. They demanded to see the Princess Victoria at once.

  There was no doubt why the two men had come. The death of William IV had been expected for some days. All the same, the Duchess of Kent stalled for time, insisting her daughter could not be woken. Probably she wanted to send a messenger for Conroy whose house was nearby. But the two men persisted, and the duchess was forced to give way. She went upstairs, woke Victoria, and bade her come down at once. The princess put on her dressing gown and, for the last time, held her mother’s hand as she came
down the staircase. Baroness Lehzen followed behind with smelling salts. At the door to the room where the two men were waiting, both the duchess and Lehzen fell back. Victoria went in and shut the door. Smelling salts would not be needed.

  The first day of Queen Victoria’s reign set a pattern. Having spent the last weeks locked in her room, taking her meals alone, she was suddenly the center of a whirlwind of activity and conducting business of every kind. She loved every minute of it. After the archbishop and the Lord Chamberlain had left, the Queen had her hair done and put on a black dress. She had breakfast and wrote letters—one to her uncle Leopold; one to her sister, Feodora, signed “your devoted and attached sister VR.” At nine the prime minister came for the first meeting. The rapport was immediate. In Lord Melbourne Victoria knew at once that she had found a friend and protector.

  At a quarter after eleven there was a meeting of the Privy Council, an advisory body chosen by the sovereign from among the princes of the blood (that is, the senior royal men), court officials, and current and former ministers of state. Then followed another meeting with the prime minister, then more meetings with officials and with relatives. The Queen lunched and wrote another letter, this time to her widowed aunt Adelaide, expressing her deep sorrow at the King’s death and assuring the Queen dowager that she could remain at Windsor for as long as was convenient to her.

  The Queen had several meetings with Stockmar that first day. Conroy was the subject of numerous discussions, and Victoria, though she refused to see either her mother or Sir John, was besieged by letters and notes from them. Conroy gave Stockmar a list of his demands to pass on to Melbourne: “a pension of 3,000 pounds a year, the Grand Cross of the Bath, a peerage and a seat on the Privy Council.” Amazingly, Melbourne acceded to most of the demands. The Coburg family, as represented by Baron Stockmar, and the English government were, it seems, so anxious to avoid any scandal that they were willing to promise almost anything to the duchess’s impudent and overbearing majordomo. Conroy would remain a thorn in Queen Victoria’s flesh for many years to come.