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‘A Resolute Little Tit’

Kensington Palace, London, 20 June 1837. At 6 a.m. the eighteen-year-old Princess Victoria is woken by her mother, in whose bedroom she sleeps, and told that the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chamberlain wish to see her. She goes to them (as she writes in her diary) ‘alone’. They tell her that her uncle, King William IV, has died in the night, and ‘consequently that I am Queen’. At 9 she sees the prime minister Lord Melbourne in her room, ‘and of course quite alone as I shall always do all my Ministers’. At 11.30, wearing a black silk dress, she walks downstairs and holds a Privy Council – her Accession Council – ‘of course quite alone’.¹

The young queen, with her precocious self-possession and fresh-skinned innocence, touched the hearts of the crusty political grandees assembled in the council at Kensington Palace. For an eighteen-year-old it was a performance of astonishing bravura, but she behaved in a way that we might consider tough and ruthless. When she wrote ‘alone’, she meant without her mother, the Duchess of Kent. Still a teenager, she broke off relations with her mother and refused to speak to her, even though the duchess had until a few weeks previously expected to become regent. As the diarist Thomas Creevey observed, the new queen was ‘a resolute little tit’.²

What was the source of Victoria’s steeliness?

Queen Victoria owed her very existence to the dynastic crisis that engulfed the Hanoverian monarchy after 1817. She was the daughter of the fourth son of George III, Prince Edward Duke of Kent. George III had seven sons, but though they fathered over twenty illegitimate children between them, there was only one legitimate child: Princess Charlotte, the daughter of George IV. When the twenty-one-year-old Charlotte died in childbirth in 1817, the Hanoverians faced extinction. As Shelley railed in ‘England in 1819’: ‘An old, mad, blind despised, and dying King/ Princes, the dregs of their dull race …’.

The men whom Victoria later called her wicked uncles – middle-aged roués, living in sin with their mistresses – were forced to set about begetting an heir. The Prince Regent (soon to become George IV) was locked into a broken marriage to Caroline of Brunswick, and the Duke of York (brother number two) was married without children. This created an opening for four younger sons – the Duke of Clarence (number three), later King William IV, the Duke of Kent (number four), the Duke of Cumberland (number five) and the Duke of Cambridge (number seven).*

Victoria was the result of an arranged marriage between the Duke of Kent and a German princess. In 1817 the duke was fifty – tall and bald with dyed brown whiskers. Victoria liked to boast that she was a soldier’s daughter, but her father could not be said to have been successful in that career. He served through the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, but he only saw action once, in the West Indies. Most of the time he was safely away from the fighting in British North America (today Canada). He was a liability because of his brutality towards his men. On the parade ground he was a fiend. Posted to Gibraltar in 1802, his attempts to restore discipline in the drunken garrison provoked a near-mutiny, and he was ordered to leave.³ In private life, however, the stubborn martinet was a decent man. He lived openly with his mistress, Madame de Saint-Laurent, but the relationship was domestic and uxorious. His chief failing was his debts, which were a public scandal. In the crisis created by Charlotte’s death, the Duke of Kent did not hesitate to do his duty. He ditched his mistress of twenty-seven years and married Victoire of Saxe-Coburg, the thirty-year-old widow of a minor German ruler, the Prince of Leiningen.

The dynastic calculation behind this marriage is crucially important. Victoire was the sister of Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, who was the husband of Princess Charlotte. It was Leopold who persuaded his sister to give up her independence as regent of the tiny German state of Amorbach and marry the Duke of Kent in a bid for the British throne. Leopold was a handsome, ambitious adventurer, the younger son of the Duke of Coburg. Cheated in his personal bid for the British throne by Charlotte’s death, he engineered a second line of attack by marrying his sister to Charlotte’s uncle. Thanks to the madness of George III and his dysfunctional children, the Hanoverians were a dynasty in meltdown, ripe for takeover.

When Victoire became pregnant, the Duke of Kent determined to stamp his child’s claim to the British crown. The Kents were living in Amorbach, deep in the middle of Germany, and the duke insisted that the baby should be born in England. Short of money as ever, he drove the coach himself, sitting on the box as it trundled along rutted roads for 430 miles with his heavily pregnant wife bumping about inside. Victoria was born at Kensington Palace on 24 May 1819, and the birth was witnessed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the political grandees whose presence was then considered necessary for a child in direct line of succession.

The Duke of Kent’s pushiness about his daughter’s claims irritated his spoilt and tricky older brother, the Prince Regent. He revenged himself by ruining the christening. The name Victoria seems to us indelibly printed on the age, but it came about as the result of a spat. The Kents had chosen a string of royal names – Georgiana, Charlotte, Augusta. These were all vetoed by the Regent; Charlotte, the name of his dead daughter, he considered too presumptuous and Augusta too majestic, while he would not allow the child to be baptized Georgiana after him. On the day of the christening in Buckingham Palace, the archbishop stood holding the baby at the font, and waited for the Regent to pronounce. He declared that she should be baptized Alexandrina, after Tsar Alexander I, her sponsor, and Victoria, an anglicized version of her mother’s name.⁴ This foreign-sounding invented name was intended to distance the child from the British throne. Later, William IV thought it so unsuitable for a British queen that he tried to persuade Victoria to change it. Victoria was a name, he grumbled, ‘which is not English, had never been known heretofore as a Christian name in this country, not even German but of French origin’.⁵ The princess, who was then twelve, refused, and so did her mother. When she became queen she insisted on being proclaimed Victoria and dropped the Alexandrina.

The Duke of Kent died suddenly of pneumonia when Victoria was only eight months old. Victoire found herself a widow once more – she ‘kills all her husbands’, remarked Princess Lieven, the formidable wife of the Russian ambassador.⁶ Six days later, on 29 January 1820, King George III died and the Regent succeeded as George IV. At this point Leopold made one more crucial intervention. Victoire had no money, having inherited nothing but debts from her husband. But rather than allow her to return to Amorbach with her baby, as she desired and George IV wished, Leopold paid for her to remain in London, giving her an allowance which enabled her (just) to live at Kensington Palace.

It was thus thanks to Leopold that Victoria was brought up in England by her mother. The duchess was ‘tall and big, very pale with black eyes and black hair’.⁷ (Why the child of two tall parents grew up to be so short is a mystery.) Victoire was gorgeously dressed in silks and bright velvets, and some portraits show a swarthy face. Princess Lieven thought her ‘the most mediocre person it would be possible to meet’.⁸ She never mastered the English language, but she insisted that her daughter – who was three-quarters German – learned English not German as her first language. ‘Never spoke German until 1839,’ wrote Victoria. ‘Not allowed to.’⁹

As a small child at Kensington Palace, Victoria was spoilt, as she herself admitted.¹⁰ She was effectively an only child – her half-sister Feodore was twelve years older – adored by a doting single parent. Her mother showered her with cloyingly affectionate notes, written in broken English on pink paper. And the little girl who resembled George III in petticoats was addressed as Your Royal Highness, followed wherever she went by a scarlet-liveried footman, waited upon and knelt before. When a visiting child tried to play with her toys, the six-year-old princess remarked: ‘You must not touch those, they are mine; and I may call you Jane, but you must not call me Victoria.’¹¹ In adult life, Victoria sometimes displayed a wilfulness, stubbornness and lack of empathy which reminded perceptive observers of a spoilt child.

From about the age of eleven, however, her regime at Kensington changed. Victoria told her daughter Vicky in 1858:

I had a very unhappy life as a child – had no scope for my very violent feelings of affection – had no brothers or sisters to live with – never had a father – from my unfortunate circumstances was not on comfortable or at all intimate or confidential footing with my mother … and did not know what a happy domestic life was!¹²

Ramsgate, October–November 1835. Victoria, now sixteen, has come here for a holiday and fallen dangerously ill. For five weeks she is confined to her room with a high fever. She is devotedly nursed by her governess, the Hanoverian Baroness Lehzen. Her mother, however, crossly dismisses her symptoms as exaggerated, and refuses to call a doctor. Only when Victoria becomes delirious does the reluctant duchess agree to send for the royal physician, Dr James Clark. He diagnoses typhoid.

While she is still very weak, her mother’s friend and factotum Sir John Conroy comes to her room. A dishonest, handsome rogue, Conroy has been busily spreading rumours that Victoria is backward and incapable. Abetted by the duchess, he presents her with a document to sign, pledging to appoint him her private secretary when she becomes queen. As Victoria later told Lord Melbourne: ‘I resisted in spite of my illness, and their harshness – my beloved Lehzen supporting me alone.’¹³

This was a life-changing experience. Victoria never forgot how ill she had been at Ramsgate. Nor did she forgive her mother for her hard-hearted lack of sympathy. Worse still, she came to see that Conroy and her mother were in league and plotting to rob her of her power.

For the past five years or so Conroy and the duchess had subjected Victoria to a controlling regime which Conroy later dubbed the Kensington system. After the death of her uncle George IV in 1830, Victoria stood next in line to the throne, and she was generally accepted as heiress presumptive.* Her uncle William IV was an asthmatic sixty-four-year-old, and it seemed probable that she would succeed before she reached eighteen, the moment when royal persons came of age. The purpose of the Kensington system was to ensure that the Duchess of Kent became regent – with Conroy at her elbow – if Victoria inherited as a minor. To this end, ‘every effort must be made to keep the education of the daughter completely in the hands of her mother … nothing and no one should be able to tear the daughter away from her.’¹⁴ Victoria was cut off from the court of William IV, who loathed the duchess, and wished to remove Victoria from her care.

From 1832, the duchess embarked on a programme of semi-royal progresses, dragging the teenage Victoria round the great Whig houses (William IV was a Tory, so the duchess identified with his opponents) and showing her to the people. Victoria detested these tours and complained of feeling ill. The training was remorseless. At Plymouth in 1833 she was required to jump from a ship, and though she meekly did as she was told, close observers noticed that she was weeping with fright. At a luncheon, she could be seen looking intently first at one person and then another. She was learning her lesson, said Conroy: afterwards the duchess would question her about all the guests. The names can be seen carefully listed in her journal.¹⁵

Conroy was an ambitious schemer and a charlatan. He embezzled money from Victoria’s aunt, the blind Princess Sophia, and, acting as the Duchess of Kent’s comptroller, he defrauded her of large sums over many years.¹⁶ Whether Conroy was the dictator at Kensington Palace, however, is debatable. In later years, it suited the family to believe that the duchess was an innocent victim who had been manipulated by Conroy. They blamed King Leopold for failing to intervene. ‘Mama here would never have fallen into the hands of Conroy, if Uncle Leopold had taken the trouble to guide her,’ wrote Albert.¹⁷ In the 1907 edition of the Letters of Queen Victoria, the harsh treatment and bullying that Victoria endured at Kensington Palace in the years before her accession was suppressed.

The duchess was a tough survivor, battle-hardened by the Borgia-like plotting of small German courts. The Kensington system was not forced upon her. At the very least she was complicit, and it seems far more likely that she was Conroy’s accomplice than his puppet. He was rumoured (probably wrongly) to be her lover, though some said that Victoria had witnessed ‘familiarities’ between them. And it was true that the duchess had form in this regard. In her days as a young widow at Amorbach, she had enjoyed an intimate relationship with her Master of the Horse, a James Hewitt-type officer named Captain Schindler, whom she promoted Master of the Household, allowing him to share her powers as regent.

The Kensington system meant that Victoria grew up with her mother as her jailer. In adolescence, when parental control might have been relaxed, it was tightened. Victoria slept every night in a bed in her mother’s room. She was not allowed to walk downstairs without holding someone’s hand. She was kept in isolation and under constant surveillance, and she was forbidden to meet anyone without a third party being present. Though treated as a prisoner, she was like a spoilt child in one important sense – she was never allowed to be on equal terms with friends of her own age.

Her closest friend was her much older half-sister, Feodore Leiningen. The duchess worried that Feodore was a bad influence, and when Victoria was eight Feodore was banished – married off to an impoverished German prince. This was harsh, for (as Victoria later wrote) one of the penalties of being royal was that ‘we cannot form intimate friendships except among our nearest relations’.¹⁸ By nature an extrovert, she made her dolls act as substitutes for friends. Rather than pretend they were babies, the princess dressed her collection of 132 small dolls (all but two were female) as adults, wearing the costumes of characters from plays and operas. Throughout her life Victoria dreaded being alone; but childhood loneliness perhaps taught her how to cope with solitude.

The Kensington system had some strengths. For one thing, Victoria received a reasonable education. To prove her fitness for bringing up her daughter, the duchess needed to demonstrate that she was providing an appropriate education for the heir to the throne. Aged eleven, Victoria was formally examined by two bishops who – predictably perhaps – gave her a glowing report. Her curriculum was designed to teach the necessary accomplishments without compromising female decorum. By the standards of aristocratic girls she was well schooled. She spoke and wrote French fluently, she spoke good German and she learned some Latin, though no Greek. But the rooms at Kensington Palace were not lined with books to stimulate her intellectual curiosity. Nor did the duchess’s dull and inward-looking court sharpen Victoria’s wits with the cut and thrust of clever salon talk. As Lord Melbourne later remarked: ‘The rest of her education she owes to her own natural shrewdness and quickness, and this perhaps has not been a proper education for one who was to wear the Crown of England.’¹⁹

When Victoria was eleven, her mother judged the moment right to tell her she would be queen. ‘I will be good’, she is reported (probably apocryphally) to have vowed.²⁰ More to the point, knowledge of her vocation made the regime at Kensington bearable, and gave her a strong sense of self-worth. In retrospect, it was no bad thing that Victoria was distanced from the court of William IV, and so untarnished by the dissolute gerontocracy of her Hanoverian uncles.

The threats at Kensington were considerable, however. Victoria was bullied by Conroy and her mother. They taunted her with being ugly and stupid – too childish to reign, even when she reached the age of eighteen. Today we would call this emotional abuse. (There is no suggestion that Conroy abused Victoria physically, though her horror and hatred of him does make one wonder.) As Feodore wrote in 1836, ‘she has suffered a good deal’ and ‘her caracter [sic] might be completely spoiled by this continual warfare’.²¹ Feodore was perceptive: Victoria was indeed scarred.

Victoria’s eighteenth birthday on 24 May 1837 triggered rows that were more furious and hysterical than ever. Not only were Conroy and the duchess cheated of their hopes of a regency: when King William offered Victoria an establishment of her own, they became frantic. Enraged at this attempt to break her control over her daughter, the duchess unwisely refused the king’s offer without consulting Victoria. As King William lay on his deathbed, Conroy demanded once more that Victoria appoint him her private secretary and threatened to coerce her. At length her uncle Leopold, who since 1831 had been King of the Belgians, intervened, though far too late to stop the damage. He sent Baron Stockmar, the physician who acted as his political adviser, to London.

If the Kensington system threatened Victoria, however, it also taught her how to survive. Stockmar was impressed by her toughness. He found her ‘extremely jealous of what she considers to be her rights and her future power’.²² It was at Kensington that Victoria developed the ‘vein of iron’ that was central to her character. And it was this steeliness that enabled her to break the stranglehold of her mother and Conroy. Paradoxically, the Kensington system made Victoria so strong that she was able to defeat its entire object. She dumped her mother, banished Conroy and ruled ‘alone’.