‘I WILL BE GOOD’ – VICTORIA

BECOMES QUEEN

1837

PREPARING ONE DAY IN 1830 FOR A HISTORY lesson in her solitary schoolroom at Kensington Palace, the eleven-year-old Princess Victoria opened her exercise book to be confronted by a family tree. Her governess had put it there for her to study. The table of descent explained the relationships inside the House of Hanover – Victoria’s own family – and as the Princess started tracing her personal connection with her grandfather King George III, she worked out something that had been concealed from her until that point in her life.

‘I see I am nearer the throne than I thought,’ she said – in fact, she was almost certain to become Queen. As the impact of this awe-inspiring prospect sank in, the little girl burst into tears. Yet even in her most emotional moments there was always a part of Victoria that remained detached: ‘I will be good,’ she said.

The family table showed that, by 1819, George III’s seven surviving adult sons had, astonishingly, failed to produce a single legitimate living heir between them. The men – most of them portly, all of them spoilt, and all degenerate or defective in different, ingenious ways – had fathered bastards aplenty. Their mistresses and messy love lives had prompted scandal and widespread contempt for the royal family. Only with the birth of Victoria in May 1819 had the direct succession become reasonably safe – though the sudden death of her father Edward, Duke of Kent (the old King’s fourth son), eight months later, demonstrated the perils of becoming ill in an age of poor health care. He had caught a chill at the seaside.

Victoria’s mother, the widowed Duchess, was determined to keep her daughter safe and close to her in every way. The girl was not allowed to go downstairs without holding someone’s hand. She had to sleep in the same bedroom as her mother, and she was shielded from ‘unsuitable’ personal influences by a cocoon of rules and protocol known as the ‘Kensington System’. The Princess scarcely ever met children of her own age – for amusement and simple affection her solitary playmate was her beloved dog Dash, a King Charles spaniel.

Critics suspected that the main purpose of the Kensington System was to secure the position of Sir John Conroy, a handsome but slippery Irish adventurer who had become the confidant of the Duchess – and sure enough, when Victoria fell seriously ill on a visit to Ramsgate in 1835, Conroy tried to force the weakened Princess to sign a document that would make him her private secretary when she became Queen. The Duchess joined in, with a crude mix of threats and emotional blackmail, but the ailing sixteen-year-old withstood their pressure.

Two years later, in the quiet dawn hours of 20 June 1837, the Lord Chamberlain and the Archbishop of Canterbury came hurrying through the trees to knock on the door of Kensington Palace. Roused from her sleep, the eighteen-year-old Victoria received them in her dressing-gown – to see the venerable old gentlemen fall on their knees in front of her. Her uncle William IV had died in the night, and she was now Queen.

That night, for the first time in her life, Victoria slept on her own. She ordered her things to be moved to her own quarters – and in the weeks that followed she firmly detached herself from her mother. When the Duchess sent requests to see her daughter she would often receive notes containing just one word, ‘Busy’. Sir John Conroy was forbidden access to the new Queen’s apartments at Buckingham Palace.

Victoria was displaying all the fortitude that would characterise her sixty-three years on the throne – the longest reign to date in the history of the British monarchy. The adjective ‘Victorian’, meaning stern and dutiful, derived directly from her character. But the little Queen (she was less than five feet tall) had a playful and deeply sentimental side. When she got back to Buckingham Palace on 28 June 1838 at the end of her solemn and arduous coronation ceremonies, Her Majesty rushed straight upstairs to give a bath to her best friend Dash.