Her teacher hands her a book. Folded within its pages is a chart listing Britain’s kings and queens. Victoria, in her white dress and coral necklace, has pretty light brown hair and a chubby lower lip that tends to fall open unless she remembers to keep it closed. She’s just short of eleven years old. The knowledge of her place in the succession has so far been kept from her. Look at the chart, she is told. Her uncle the king George IV is gravely ill. He cannot live long. Who will come next?
What follows is one of the best-known and most dramatic scenes in Victoria’s life. Sitting at the rosewood table in Kensington Palace where she did her lessons, she studied the chart, thought it through and worked it out. When her oldest uncle George died, her next oldest uncle William would take over. And when he died, she must herself become queen.
‘I see I am nearer the throne than I thought,’ Victoria is supposed to have said. ‘I will be good!’
It would become the most celebrated statement of Victoria’s childhood, rousing words, with a message of responsibility and duty: one must step up to the challenge of ruling one’s country, as well as learning one’s French.
But did it really happen?
One detail at least is agreed by all sources: that the setting was Kensington Palace. It was the sleepiest and most sedate of the numerous royal palaces. Kensington was ‘a place to drink tea’, by contrast to Windsor Castle – ‘a place to receive monarchs’ – and Buckingham Palace, where you went ‘to see fashion’. During Victoria’s Kensington childhood, anyone going for a walk ‘quietly along the gardens, fancies no harsher sound to have been heard from the Palace windows, than the “tuning of the tea-things”’, or the playing of a piano.1
Behind closed doors, though, the atmosphere at Kensington was far from peaceful. Victoria would come to believe it was not so much a palace as a prison. Deep in the gardens, she was growing up in isolation. Her guardians deliberately kept her well away from both the greedy eyes of her future subjects, and the disreputable, high-society world of George IV. She was comfortable, she was well-fed, she had toys. But she was also under considerable psychological strain. She formed the centre of a small and close-knit circle whose adoration placed her under what was sometimes intolerable pressure.
In later life, Victoria admitted that as a child she’d been spoiled, and ‘very much indulged by everyone’. ‘Everyone’ included her mother’s devoted lady-in-waiting, Baroness de Späth, who’d been with Victoire since her first marriage, Victoria’s nurse Mrs Brock – ‘dear Boppy’ – and an elderly dresser named Mrs Louis. They all of them ‘worshipped the poor little fatherless child’.2 With Baroness de Späth, it even became ‘a sort of idolatory’, and ‘she used to go on her knees’ before her charge.3
Looking at Victoria’s little face, with its typically Hanoverian, slightly bulging blue eyes, these ladies discerned ‘a very striking resemblance to her late Royal Father’.4 It was hard to chastise someone who’d lost a parent so young. Victoria was as close as she could be to her half-sister, but Feodore was eleven years older. What she lacked was a playmate on an equal footing, someone to laugh at her. ‘You must always remember,’ said a person who knew her well later in life, that she never had companions her own age to ‘knock any nonsense out of her’.5 Victoria was developing a streak of selfishness that stemmed from the indulgence of Boppy and Späth.
Into this pressure-cooker of adulation came the bracing influence of Johanna Clara Louise Lehzen. She’d arrived at Kensington in 1819 as Feodore’s governess. Five years later, Victoria was old enough to need a governess of her own. Prince Leopold, still giving financial help to his sister’s household, decided that Lehzen should do the job. Although he did not live at Kensington, his influence was very great. Victoire had £6,000 a year, voted by Parliament at the time of her marriage. Leopold, though, had £50,000 annually, a wildly generous provision made at the time of his short-lived marriage to the late Princess Charlotte. The wider royal family considered that Leopold could easily bear some of the living costs of his sister and niece. Yet leaving Leopold to shoulder the financial responsibility like this meant that the royal family also sacrificed a good deal of their own power over Victoria. Because he paid for things, Victoria would become almost the property, indeed the puppet, of her beloved ‘Uncle Leopold’.
And Leopold now chose Lehzen. This was partly because he thought she would be a counter-influence against Captain Conroy, who controlled much of what went on at Kensington, and whom Leopold distrusted. ‘Lehzen’, as the household called her, was an intense character, with dark-eyed, dark-haired ‘Italian’ looks, and a disordered digestion.6 She’d say that she ‘did not know the feeling to be hungry’ – something that would later cause trouble with her pupil – and that all she ever ‘fancied were potatoes’.7 She suffered from migraines, which some people misinterpreted as a drinking problem. It was family tragedy that had forced Lehzen to find work as a governess. She was the youngest daughter of a pastor in Hanover; her mother had died when she was young, and three of her sisters had also passed away before reaching twenty. Lehzen was born the wrong side of the scenes to sit down at table with aristocrats and courtiers, and was eventually made a baroness to eliminate the difficulties in etiquette that this caused.8
Lehzen had the self-discipline, plus the selfless dedication, that her position demanded. But she considered the job offer that Leopold made (via Victoire) very carefully before accepting. ‘After a short silence,’ Lehzen recollected of the interview, ‘I said that I had often thought of the great difficulties which such a person might have to encounter in educating a Princess.’9 As a condition of her service, Lehzen asked that she might always be present when Victoria met third parties, so that her influence would be paramount. Although Victoria met few outsiders, this did not mean that she spent much time alone. Every aspect of her progress through girlhood was kept constantly under watch. ‘I never had a room to myself,’ Victoria claimed in later life, ‘till I was nearly grown up always slept in my Mother’s room.’10 Victoria told one of her own children that she was not even allowed to walk downstairs unaccompanied in case she fell.11 Even when she walked out in Kensington Gardens, the young princess felt, people constantly ‘look at me … to see whether I am a good child’.12
As she was already living at Kensington Palace, Lehzen must have been aware that her charge would be difficult to manage. The celebrated fiery temper of the Hanoverian dynasty was already visible in the little girl: people called her ‘le roi Georges in petticoats’.13 ‘Did she not feel unhappy when she had done wrong?’ a tutor once asked her. ‘Oh no,’ Victoria replied.14 Her mother Victoire was still finding all this very difficult. Her younger daughter ‘drives me at times to real desperation’, she admitted.15
But Lehzen, thoughtful but strict, had the strength of character not to let Victoria’s tricks get out of hand. ‘Lehzen takes her gently from her bed,’ we hear of the morning routine, ‘and sits her down on the thick carpet, where she has to put on her stockings.’ ‘Poor Vicky!’ Victoria would say, ‘She is an unhappy child! She just doesn’t know which is the right stocking and which is the left!’16 She usually appeared in the white, pink or pale blue of a nice young girl. She’d been wearing figure-moulding stays – or at least the softer, unboned equivalent thought suitable for children – since the age of six.17
In later years, Victoria’s memory convinced her that her life at Kensington was bleak and gloomy, and another of its inhabitants did once call the place a ‘hospital for the decayed and poor royalties’.18 While Victoria’s childhood was far distant from the real deprivation of the many truly poor children of London, it was true that the palace did not run smoothly. Her father’s financial problems still dogged the household, and luxuries were carefully controlled. ‘I never had a sofa, nor an easy chair,’ Victoria claimed, and ‘there was not a single carpet that was not threadbare.’19 The very ‘Cribb Bedstead in which Her Majesty first reposed’, purchased from Mr Francis of Bond Street, was never paid for: its maker was still complaining that his invoice was unpaid eighteen years after her birth.20 Still, Victoire’s accounts do show a steady stream of small extravagances flowing into the palace: honey from Fortnum & Mason’s; porcelain from Josiah Wedgewood; a silver muffintoaster.21
Victoria’s food was an odd mixture of grand and mean. She recalled eating ‘bread and milk out of a small silver basin’, with tea ‘only allowed as a great treat’.22 ‘The Princess only eats plain roast mutton,’ claimed Captain Conroy, wanting praise for running a thrifty and wholesome household.23 If given the opportunity, Victoria would gorge. One of her passions was fresh fruit. When she could get them, she would devour peaches, gooseberries, grapes, cherries, apples, pears.24 In fact, the close control exerted over her diet meant that the seeds of a dysfunctional eating pattern were being planted. In a story written by the young Victoria, the heroine, a ‘naughty girl’, behaves in a way that’s thoroughly ‘naughty greedy and disobedient’ yet somehow manages to escape punishment. Even better, in this tale of wish fulfilment, she gets ‘rewarded’ for her bad behaviour with a profusion of sweetmeats.25
Victoire watched Victoria so closely and carefully because of the legitimate fear that despite her late husband’s will, George IV might at any time try to remove her daughter from her care. Previous kings had always made their own educational arrangements for their heirs, and precedent was everything in the royal family. George IV’s personal dislike of Victoire meant he was constantly ‘talking of taking her child from her’.26
The lonely Victoire, with her debts and responsibilities and grief, was scatterbrained, and prone to making poor judgements of character. But she redeems herself with her charm and warmth, and clearly loved her children. ‘Her kindness and softness,’ it was said of her, ‘are very delightful in spite of want of brains.’27 She was gradually learning the language of her adopted country, but still apologised to visitors ‘for not speaking English well enough to talk it’.28 This is one of the reasons she had grown so dependent upon Captain Conroy.
Victoire never wrote – nor presumably spoke – quite as a native. Did she therefore talk to her daughter in German? The unpopularity of the German Hanoverians in Britain explains Victoria’s own later insistence that she did not. ‘Never spoke German … not allowed to,’ she stoutly claimed.29 Her schoolroom timetable does reveal, however, that she had a formal German lesson twice a week.30 And the German accents of Victoria’s mother, Lehzen and Späth did certainly affect her spoken English. Her tutor Mr Davys, brought in to supplement Lehzen with more formal lessons, recollected that at first ‘she confused the sound of the “v” with that of “w”, and pronounced much as muts.’31
Despite her account of tarnished silver, threadbare carpets and uncomfortable chairs, Victoria also had plenty of toys, especially dolls. She was ‘quite devoted’ to her dolls, ‘& played with them till she was 14’. She believed that they were her friends in place of real little girls: ‘she was an only child,’ she wrote, ‘& except occasional visits of other children lived always alone, without companions.’32
As well as her dolls, Victoria had a wonderful doll’s house. For her eighth birthday, her presents included furnishings for it, including ‘a tiny melon-shaped silver tea-pot, with a very short spout’ and marked with a ‘V’.33 This is one among other pieces of evidence that, contrary to common belief, she was usually called ‘Victoria’, her second name, rather than ‘Drina’, the diminutive of her first, even in childhood. The dolls had an educational purpose even beyond the making of their costumes. They also provided a training in the court life that Victoria in seclusion was failing to experience. ‘Upon a long board full of pegs, into which the dolls’ feet fitted,’ we’re told, ‘she rehearsed court receptions, presentations, and held mimic drawing-rooms and levees.’34 Even so, Victoria’s limited social opportunities were making her bashful. For her whole life, she could sometimes lose confidence in a conversation, and allow it to peter out in a ‘shy way she had’.35
As well as helping to sew the dolls’ costumes, Lehzen was sacrificing private life and friends for her privilege of training a probable future queen. She even refused to keep a journal, an action that would have been considered indiscreet. In return, Victoria developed ‘great respect and even awe of her’ but also ‘the greatest affection’. Victoria later claimed that for thirteen years her governess ‘never once left her’.36 This wasn’t quite true: Lehzen took a holiday in Paris in May 1831, for example. But she was rewarded for her service with the devotion of her charge.
It must have been hard for Victoire when her own daughter began to talk about ‘my angelic dearest Mother, Lehzen, who I do so love!’37 But a coldness was gradually creeping into Victoire’s relationship with Victoria, not least because Victoria had picked up on her Uncle Leopold and Lehzen’s distrust of Captain Conroy. ‘I have grown up all alone,’ Victoria later declared.38 This was not technically true; it was more that she felt alone. In reality, she was constantly surrounded not only by servants but also, as time went on, by Conroy’s family. His wife was a frequent visitor, and his daughters, Jane and another Victoire, became Victoria’s approved playmates. With them, she played with rudimentary jigsaws called ‘dissected prints’, made cottages out of cards, dressed up as ‘Nuns’ or ‘Turks’ or rode upon a pony called Isabel.39 It doesn’t sound like a lonely life, but the loneliness that she experienced stemmed from the fact that her intimates were chosen for her.
Conroy, for his part, had insinuated himself completely into Victoire’s confidence. It’s clear that he was adept at exploiting her lack of self-belief. ‘So often, so very often,’ she confessed to him, ‘what you said so often and what hurt me, but unhappily is true, I am not fit for my place, no, I am not. – I am just an old stupid goose.’40 Victoire also worried that Conroy had appointed a rather dubious clerk to pay the palace bills. She later admitted that ‘she was afraid of him – he might be dishonest’.41 Victoire’s own vagueness confused and irritated Conroy in return. ‘The Duchess lives in a mist,’ he said, ‘and therefore she is very difficult to deal with.’42
But the ditzy duchess nevertheless drew emotional support from a position she developed for herself within the tightly knit Conroy family unit. The young Queen Elizabeth I, lacking a conventional family life, decided that she didn’t need one. The young Queen Victoria was excluded from, but forced to watch, a happy family life being played out all round her by the hated Conroys. Their enjoyment in each other was easy to see, yet utterly out of reach. In later life, she would seek to replicate such a close family for herself.
Unlike the ‘misty’ Victoire, or the devious Captain Conroy, Lehzen had a crystal-clear idea of right and wrong. ‘I adored her, though I also feared her,’ Victoria remembered.43 Lehzen would say that ‘she could pardon wickedness in a Queen’, but not ‘weakness’.44 With her ‘great judgement and yet greater strength of mind’, it was Lehzen who coached Victoria in something in which she would always excel: in telling people when ‘they were wrong’.45
Victoire and Lehzen went so far as to begin a regime of moral surveillance called the ‘Good Behaviour Book’. Beginning in 1831, it was a journal recording Victoria’s conduct, and it’s a striking record of both submission and rebellion. Victoria would often admit to sins ranging from having been ‘very thoughtless’ or ‘very impertinent’ through to ‘very very very very horribly naughty!!!!!’ This daily task of recording her life became a habit that grew into something quite remarkable: the millions of words eventually embodied in the journals that she would keep lifelong. The project owed something to the contemporary evangelical current within the Church, which required worshippers to confess their sins. Also, Victoria was repeatedly told that she was chosen for a special destiny; that her life deserved memorialising. Later she would take this idea of becoming the historian of her own life through into keeping significant dresses from her wardrobe, and into the compulsive taking and collecting of photographs. In due course, even certain rooms of her palaces would be maintained with their furniture unchanged as shrines to earlier times. Ultimately Kensington Palace itself, where the first words were written in the ‘Good Behaviour Book’, would be thrown open to visitors by Victoria. Her subjects would be allowed to see where she was born, and implicitly to judge if she’d lived life well.
The reading material that Lehzen gave Victoria included Miss Edgeworth’s Moral Tales for Young People. These stories showed the world as good or bad, white or black, a vision of life that Victoria would retain. Edgeworth’s purpose was to produce children who could solve moral dilemmas for themselves. Yet her stories also made it clear that society was hierarchical. In ‘The Bad Governess’, for example, the girlish heroines ‘could not bear to think that a person should be treated with neglect or insolence merely because her situation and rank happened to be inferior’.46 Victoria was brought up by Lehzen to respect servants, but also to believe that they were lesser than herself.
Miss Edgeworth’s was a monochromatic, melodramatic view of the world, but it suited troubling times. While Victoria was safely distanced from it in the garden groves of Kensington, the regime of her uncle George IV was going dangerously adrift. The long-lived George III had been so personally popular that he made the institution of monarchy more palatable too. But there was no such affection for his son. Politicians were beginning to detect a growing feeling that the monarchy could not survive, and that there was a gathering list of arguments ‘in favour of some undefined change in the mode of governing the country’.47 In other words, the unpopularity of Victoria’s uncles, combined with the human cost of industrialisation, might bring about revolution.
This only placed further pressure upon Victoria to ‘save’ the monarchy. One visitor to Kensington Palace found her ‘a born Princess’, lacking in affectation, and representing a welcome fresh start. ‘I look to her to save us from Democracy,’ this lady concluded, ‘for it is impossible she should not be popular when she is older and more seen.’48 But the royal family itself did not think that their salvation lay in a mere girl. ‘Good heavens! A woman on the throne of so great a country – how ridiculous,’ scoffed one of her cousins.49 Victoria’s gender also presented a problem in that Britain and the German state of Hanover had been ruled for the last century by a single king. But the law prevailing in Germany prevented a female from inheriting Hanover’s throne. Under Queen Victoria, Hanover would be divorced from Britain and the monarchy’s possessions split asunder.
In 1823, when Victoria was just short of four, she began a regular course of studies under her academic tutor, a clergyman named George Davys. She was far from swottish. ‘I was not fond of learning,’ she remembered later, ‘and baffled every attempt to teach me my letters up to 5 years old.’50 Victoire apologised in advance to Mr Davys for any bad behaviour: ‘I fear you will find my little girl very headstrong,’ she told him, ‘but the ladies of the household will spoil her.’51 Victoria herself repaid Mr Davys’s efforts with a considerable dislike, thinking him always ‘in a bad temper’.52 He does sound a bit of a bore. His published works included patronising homilies for village folk and an exposition on the importance of thrift. ‘His ambition through life,’ as his obituarist would put it, ‘was rather to be good than great.’53
Dutiful Mr Davys nevertheless instituted a timetable of regular lessons with a roster of visiting tutors. Generally, Victoria studied for two hours in the morning and one in the afternoon. Her schoolroom routine involved an eight o’clock breakfast of bread and milk and fruit with her mother. She then rode her donkey round Kensington Gardens, followed by lessons until a very plain luncheon. After more lessons, she drove out with her mother, dined at seven on more ‘bread and milk’, and at nine ‘went to her little French bed with its pretty Chintz hangings, placed beside that of her mother’.54
On Saturdays, she gave Mr Davys a recap of everything she’d learned that week. His curriculum favoured the arts, rather than the ancient languages that would have been studied by a boy. The majority of the time was spent on music, drawing (where she excelled), dancing, history, poetry, religion, French and German. It was the standard education for a genteel young lady being prepared for a society debut and marriage. Her tutors reported her as ‘indifferent’ in spelling, but ‘good’ at most other subjects, with a ‘very good’ reserved for French.55 It was a lightweight curriculum for a future sovereign, but the household was not intellectually curious. As one of Victoria’s Prime Ministers would later observe, ‘old Davys instilled some Latin into her during his tutorship’ but ‘the rest of her education she owes to her own natural shrewdness and quickness’.56
This meant that there was a basic contradiction in Victoria’s position. She was, as historian Stanley Weintraub notes, clearly born into power, and those about her fought hard for her prerogatives. And yet, at the same time, she was educated ‘by pious spinsters and cautious clergymen’, exhorted to behave demurely, and to live simply.57 ‘It had been very early instilled into her,’ wrote someone who knew the adult queen well, ‘that it was man’s province to be clever, and that it was best for woman not to intrude into it.’58 She was special, and yet she had to pretend to be ordinary. This strange contradiction – I believe – would in due course become the key to her surprisingly successful reign.
By early 1830, when Victoria was ten, it was clear that George IV – blind, obese, addicted to laudanum and hiding away at Windsor – was dying. Lehzen has left a description of her pupil in early adolescence. ‘My Princess,’ as Lehzen calls her, ‘is not tall, but very pretty, has dark blue eyes, and a mouth which, though not tiny, is very good-tempered and pleasant, very fine teeth, a small but graceful figure, and a very small foot.’59 Victoria’s minuscule feet were well displayed in the pretty, flat, ribboned pumps of contemporary fashion. At the age of fifteen, her foot would be 21.3 centimetres long, making her, in modern terms, a British size two.60
It was George IV’s impending death that eventually made it clear that the truth of Victoria’s position must be revealed to her. William, Duke of Clarence, and his wife Adelaide (from the double wedding at Kew) were next in line to reign. But the tragic early deaths of their four children meant that when William took the crown, Victoria would become his heir presumptive. This she needed to know.
There are two rival accounts, Lehzen’s and Mr Davys’s, of how she learned of her future fate, and 11 March 1830 is the most likely date.61 Yet each witness has a self-serving desire to claim the honour of having announced her destiny to the little girl, and their accounts are incompatible.
Mr Davys later told his son that he had been the one to reveal her future to Victoria. During lessons, he says, he had ‘set her to make a chart of the kings and queens. She got as far as “Uncle William”, before coming to a stop.’ Who, Mr Davys asked, was the next heir to the throne? ‘She rather hesitated, and said, “I hardly like to put down myself.”’62
According to Lehzen, though, it was she, not Mr Davys, who slipped a ‘chronological table’ of the kings and queens of England into Victoria’s history book. Possibly this was a well-known teaching aid called ‘Howlett’s Tables’.63 ‘When Mr Davys was gone,’ Lehzen reminisced, years later, ‘Princess Victoria opened, as usual, the book again and seeing the additional paper said: “I never saw that before.”’
‘It was not thought necessary you should, Princess,’ Lehzen answered.
‘I see I am nearer to the Throne than I thought,’ Victoria declared. Lehzen next produces a record of a speech that is quite frankly implausible for a little girl. ‘Many a child would boast,’ Victoria is supposed to have said, ‘but they don’t know the difficulty; there is much splendour, but there is more responsibility!’
In Lehzen’s sentimental – and highly Victorian – version of the scene, Victoria then raised her right forefinger, as if making an oath. She ‘gave me that little hand’, Lehzen continued, saying the words that everyone remembers.
‘I will be good!’ the princess promised.64
It seems too good to be true, a parable told by a fond governess that shows both teacher and pupil in the best possible light. Yet Victoria, reading this account years later, certainly recollected that something along those lines had indeed occurred. She noted her own memory of the day in the margin of Lehzen’s account: ‘I cried much,’ she records, on learning that she would be queen, ‘and ever deplored this contingency.’65
However, there is a third, rival account of what happened, which yet again challenges those of Victoria’s tutor and governess. Unfortunately, it comes from someone who might be considered an unreliable witness, the ‘misty’ Victoire. Far from its being a carefully stage-managed session with Mr Davys, her recollection is that the revelation of Victoria’s destiny to her came about without planning, and she genuinely just discovered it ‘by accident, in pursuing her education’.66
On 13 March 1830, Victoire reported to the Bishop of London that her daughter knew all, and that there had been no stage management by Lehzen or Davys and their family trees and exhortations. ‘What accident has done,’ Victoire wrote, ‘I feel no art could have done half so well … we have everything to hope from this Child!’67
And Victoire gains credibility as a witness if you look at the dates on which the various accounts were written. Lehzen’s and Davys’s were set down years later, deep into Victoria’s reign, when each was eager to claim a legacy in the formation of her character. I think that we have, after all, to trust the daffy duchess’s account from just two days after the event, and accept that one of the most dramatic scenes in Victoria’s life – ‘I will be good!’ – was merely dramatic licence.
The Duchess of Kent’s educational arrangements also had another advantage. Victoria’s curious upbringing, despite the strain it placed upon her, despite her hostility to Captain Conroy, would turn out to be an excellent strategy in terms of public relations. Her childhood seclusion meant that she could, in due course, be presented to her people as a most interesting young lady.
The most interesting young lady, in fact, that the world contained.