Queen Victoria: A Personal History

He was of most regular habits, getting up at five o’clock, even earlier than his father, and eating and drinking sparingly. He had good reason to suppose that, if he found a suitable wife, he would soon be the father of children as healthy as he was himself. Already, before Princess Charlotte’s death, he had begun the search for a wife, in the hope that Parliament would grant him a decent allowance to support one in the same way that his brother, the Regent, had been helped financially upon his disastrous marriage to Princess Caroline of Brunswick. Edward considered that the £25,000 a year settled upon the Duke of York after his marriage ought ‘to be considered the precedent’.7 Having borrowed £1,000 from the Tsar for the cost of his journey, he had travelled to Germany to inspect the Tsarina’s sister, Princess Katherine Amelia of Baden, but he had not liked the look of the ‘old maiden’ of forty-one whom he had found at Darmstadt; and his thoughts had later turned to Princess Victoire – sister of Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, who had married the Regent’s daughter, Princess Charlotte.

The Regent had been against the marriage of his daughter to Prince Leopold at first. He had conceded that Leopold was a good-looking, gifted fellow, charming in a rather solemn kind of way, and that he would probably treat Charlotte well. But there was something in the ingratiating suavity of his manner which was decidedly distasteful, and the ponderousness of his cautious approach to life was rather irritating. Adept at choosing nicknames, the Regent called him ‘le Marquis peu à peu’.8 The less inventive Lord Frederick FitzClarence dismissed him as a ‘damned humbug’;9 and Princess Lieven, the Russian Ambassador’s wife, found him ‘wearing and…with his slow speech and bad reasoning, a jesuit and a bore’.10 He had his supporters and admirers, however. Lady Ilchester, for example, told a friend that he was ‘enchanting as far as appearance and manner’ were concerned. He was ‘like an Englishman in all but the ease, elegance and deference of his manners’.11 Having discouraged the match, the Regent had learned with annoyance that his brother, the Duke of Kent, was promoting it and allowing correspondence between the young couple to pass through his hands.

Princess Charlotte herself had not at first been much taken with her suitor, ‘Prince Humbug’. If she were to marry him, she had said, it would be ‘with the most calm and perfect indifference’.12 But, as she had grown to know him better, she had fallen in love with him. He was, she decided, ‘the only being in the world who would have suited me and who could have made me happy and a good woman’.13 He, in turn, had been devoted to her; their short marriage spent mostly at Claremont Park, the handsome house built in 1771 for the first Lord Clive and bought for them on the outskirts of Esher, had been a very happy one, and Leopold had been distraught by her death, kneeling by her bed and kissing her lifeless hands for over an hour. He had not, however, been too upset to write to his sister at Amorbach, urging her to give an encouraging answer to the proposal of marriage which she had received from the Duke of Kent.

This proposal, conveyed precipitately in an extremely long letter soon after the Duke’s arrival at Amorbach, had not at first been favourably received. Although she was only thirty-one, Princess Victoire had been married before to the grumpy, gouty Prince of Leiningen and had two children by him, Prince Charles, who was eleven years old, and Princess Feodora, aged ten; she was concerned about these children’s future, about her son’s succession, as well as by warnings about the Duke from certain members of her late husband’s court. Besides, she had no wish to give up her independence, having been married at seventeen and not having enjoyed the experience much. But gradually the Dowager Princess was induced to change her mind. She spoke no English and was slow to learn it: later in England she was to have her speeches written out for her phonetically – ‘Ei hoeve tu regrétt, biing aes yiett so littl cônversent in thie Inglisch, lenguetsch, uitsch obleitshes miy tu seh, in averi fiu words, theat ei em möhst grêtful for yor congratuleschen’14 – but she was assured she would be well received in England where her brother, Prince Leopold, had made himself well liked since his wife’s death.

2 THE PARENTS

‘Look at her well, for she will be Queen of England.’

THE DUKE AND THE DOWAGER PRINCESS were married in the Schloss Ehrenburg, Coburg on the evening of 29 May 1818. The Princess’s mother, the Dowager Duchess of Coburg, led them to their bedroom where she saw them the next morning ‘sitting together in friendly intimacy’.1 Soon afterwards they left for their honeymoon at Claremont Park, which had been lent to them by Prince Leopold who continued to hold the house as tenant for life in addition to his enjoyment of the use of Marlborough House in London and the remarkably generous allowance of £50,000 which the Government provided for him.

The marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Kent continued, as it had begun, in harmony. The Duchess was rather stout and no great beauty, but she was warm-hearted and affectionate and, in need of guidance and self-assurance, was ready to depend upon her much older husband in a manner that appealed to him. To the letter which the Princess had written to the Duke accepting his proposal, he had replied that he was ‘nothing more than a soldier, 50 years old and after 32 years service not very fitted to captivate the heart of a young and charming Princess who is years younger’; but that he would care for her with tenderness and affection so that she might forget the difference in their ages. And so he did. ‘She is really happy and contented,’ the Dowager Duchess of Coburg wrote of her daughter in March the following year, ‘and Kent makes an excellent husband.’ ‘She quite adored him,’ his sister, Princess Augusta, confirmed, ‘and they were truly blessed in each other.’

The Duchess of Kent was by then pregnant and expecting her baby in May. Her husband was determined that the child should be born in England, so that there could be no possible grounds for denying its right to succeed to the throne; a fate which, so it was alleged, a gypsy in Gibraltar had predicted for it and of which the Duke himself protested to have no doubt, dismissing the possibility that, although the Duchess of Clarence’s two babies had died, there was no reason to suppose she might not yet give birth to a child who would be nearer to the succession than his own. ‘My brothers are not so strong as I am,’ the Duke declared. ‘I have led a regular life. I shall outlive them all. The crown will come to me and my children.’2

Yet for the moment he lacked the means to return with his wife to England for the birth. One of his friends, Joseph Hume, the radical politician, deepened his fear that the time might come when the child’s legitimacy might be ‘challenged, and challenged with effect, from the circumstance of the birth taking place on foreign soil.’3

In his dilemma the Duke turned to his brother, the Regent, for help. He had already been much disappointed when an ill-disposed House of Commons proved unwilling to increase the allowance paid to the royal dukes on their marriages in the manner they had hoped; a rebuff which the Duke of Wellington considered only too understandable. ‘By God,’ Wellington said, ‘there is a great deal to be said about that. They are the damnedest millstone about the necks of any Government. They have insulted – personally insulted – two thirds of the gentlemen of England, and how can it be wondered at that they take their revenge upon them when they get them in the House of Commons? It is their only opportunity and, I think, by God! they are quite right to use it.’4

The Duke of Kent, who was hoping for a grant of £25,000 a year and a capital sum of £12,000, dismissed his debts with the observation that ‘on the contrary the nation [was] greatly [his] debtor’; and he added in his characteristically long-winded approach to his brother that he would also need a yacht to cross the Channel, the loan of restored and redecorated apartments in Kensington Palace, the provision of meals for the Duchess and himself and their attendants on their arrival in England and, should their physician recommend sea bathing for the Duchess, the use of a house at Brighton or Weymouth.

These demands exasperated the Regent, who had never much cared for his brother and was much annoyed by his improbable friendships with such radicals as Joseph Hume and Robert Owen, the social reformer, and by his attendance at Noncomformist services. He instructed his Private Secretary, after a long delay, to turn down all the Duke’s requests, with the suggestion that it would be much more sensible for the child to be born on the Continent, thus both saving money and relieving Her Royal Highness, the Duchess, from ‘the dangers and fatigues of a long journey at [this] moment’. If the Duke was still bent upon returning, and succeeded in raising the money to do so, he could ‘not expect to meet with a cordial reception’.5

Momentarily downcast, the Duke soon recovered his spirits and set about raising the money elsewhere. By the end of March, with the help of the Duke of Cambridge and of various friends, including Lord Dundas, Earl Fitzwilliam, Lord Darnley and Alderman Matthew Wood (a chemist and hop merchant in a thriving way of business who was an extreme radical Member for the City of London), he had managed to collect over £15,000; and so, on the twenty-eighth of the month, the Duke’s party set off from Amorbach for Calais, with several pet dogs and songbirds, in a strange, unwieldy caravan of carriages. The Duke and Duchess led the way in a phaeton, the Duke himself driving to save the cost of a coachman. They were followed by the Duke’s barouche, containing the Duchess’s lady-in-waiting, Baroness Späth, and Frau Siebold, a skilled obstetrician who had qualified as a surgeon at the University of Göttingen. Then, trundling after them, came a spare, unoccupied post-chaise, followed by a second post-chaise containing the Duchess’s daughter, Princess Feodora, her governess and the English maidservants. Following these were a cabriolet with two cooks, a caravan with an English manservant looking after the royal plate, a second phaeton, two gigs (one containing the Duke’s valet, Mathieu, and the Duchess’s footman; the other, two clerks), and lastly a curricle with the Duke’s personal physician, Dr Wilson.

The weather was fine, the pace slow but steady, and the inns at which the cavalcade stopped were not intolerably uncomfortable. The travellers passed through Cologne on 5 April and a fortnight later they reached Calais where, the Regent having relented, a yacht was waiting for them to take them across the Channel. After a few days’ delay at Calais caused by unfavourable winds, they sailed on the 24th for Dover and were soon installed at Kensington Palace where, after a labour lasting just over six hours, at a quarter past four in the cold morning of 24 May 1819, a baby girl was born. She was ‘as plump as a partridge’,6 and ‘a model of strength and beauty combined’, so her grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Coburg, was informed by the Duke, who had remained with his wife throughout her labour. ‘The dear mother and child are doing marvellously well…It is absolutely impossible for me to do justice to the patience and sweetness with which [the mother] behaved.’7

‘My God, how glad I am to hear of you,’ the Dowager Duchess responded in a letter to her daughter. ‘I cannot find words to express my delight that everything went so smoothly…I cannot write much…dear mouse…for I am much too happy.’ She hoped the mother was not disappointed that the baby was a girl: ‘The English,’ she said, ‘like Queens.’8 As for the child’s father, he was to show her proudly to his friends, telling them to ‘look at her well, for she will be Queen of England’.9

The Duke’s excitement at the arrival of his little ‘pocket Hercules’ at Kensington was not shared by the rest of the family. According to Prince Leopold, the Prince Regent did not trouble to disguise his hope that his brother would soon clear off to Germany again, taking his wife and child with him. Certainly the Regent’s behaviour at the baby’s christening was far from fraternal. He announced that the ceremony must be a strictly private occasion and that it should take place on 24 June at three o’clock in the afternoon. The godparents were to be himself, Tsar Alexander, the child’s grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Coburg, and the baby’s aunt Charlotte, her father’s sister, widow of the King of Württemberg. None of these, apart from the Regent, was to be present and so they were represented by the Duke of York, and two others of the baby’s aunts, the unmarried Princess Augusta and Mary, Duchess of Gloucester. The only other persons to attend, apart from the parents, were the Duke of Kent’s cousin, the Duke of Gloucester, the Duchess of York and Prince Leopold.

As a matter of form, the parents sent a list of names proposed for the child to the Prince Regent – Victoire (her mother’s name), Georgiana (in deference to the Regent), Alexandrina (in deference to the Tsar), and Charlotte and Augusta (the names of her aunts). Nothing was heard from the Regent until the day before the christening when he wrote to say that he could not allow the name of Georgiana to be used as he did not choose to place his name before the Tsar’s, ‘and he could not allow it to follow’.10 He would indicate the other names at the ceremony, disapproving of Charlotte, the name of his dead daughter, and of Augusta as being too majestic.

The ceremony took place in the Cupola Room at Kensington Palace, the walls of which had been draped with crimson velvet for the occasion. In the room stood a splendid silver gilt font which had been ordered by Charles II and first used in 1688 for the christening of his nephew – Prince James Francis Edward Stuart, the ‘Old Pretender’. Waiting beside it stood the Archbishop of Canterbury, Charles Manners-Sutton, a grandson of the Duke of Rutland, and the Bishop of London, William Howley, a scholarly but otherwise (in Charles Greville’s opinion) ‘very ordinary man’ who was to succeed Manners-Sutton as Archbishop in 1828. Neither of them had any idea what the names were to be when the ceremony began and the Archbishop had the child in his arms. He looked towards the parents, then towards the Regent, for enlightenment. The Regent announced ‘Alexandrina’. There was a pause. The father proposed Elizabeth. The Regent dissented, then, looking at the Duchess of Kent who had been reduced to tears, he said sharply, ‘Give her the mother’s name also then, but it cannot precede that of the Emperor.’11 So the child was christened Alexandrina Victoria, and in her early years was generally known by the diminutive of the first name, Drina.

The Regent had not spoken to the Duke of Kent during the ceremony; nor had he seen fit to suggest that his other brother, the Duke of Sussex (with whom he was, as usual, quarrelling), should be asked to attend the ceremony, though he was then living in Kensington Palace in an apartment furnished with 50,000 books and numerous clocks. Nor did the Regent attend the dinner party which was given afterwards; nor yet did he deign to notice the Duke of Kent’s presence a few weeks later at a reception given at the Spanish Embassy where he was seen actually to turn his back on him. That same month at a military review, to which the Duke and Duchess had ill-advisedly taken their baby daughter, the Regent was heard to expostulate, ‘What business has that infant here?’12

There could be no question of the Regent coming to the help of the Duke who was once more deeply in debt, having spent with characteristic extravagance far more than he could afford on furniture and improvements for his apartments in St James’s Palace, including several thousand pounds’ worth of looking-glasses. He had a country house, Castle Hill at Ealing, on which equally lavish sums had been spent and which, with its furniture and land, was estimated to be worth about £70,000; but when he applied for parliamentary consent to sell the property by means of a lottery, the Leader of the House of Commons declined to consider the proposal. He then considered selling the place in lots but was advised by auctioneers to wait until the spring. So the Duke decided to move to the West Country where he and his family and household could live more modestly in a rented house and where the mother of his child might benefit from ‘luke warm sea baths’ and the healthy air of the Devonshire coast.

Accompanied by his equerry, John Conroy, the Duke set off for Devonshire by way of Salisbury where he caught a bad cold. He had been looking round the freezing cathedral and had called on the Bishop, John Fisher, who had been his childhood preceptor and was the uncle of Conroy’s wife, Elizabeth, daughter of Major-General Benjamin Fisher. From Salisbury he sent a letter to his ‘beloved and very dear wife’ to whom he wrote affectionately every day.

In Devonshire the Duke and Conroy looked at various houses along the coast, none of which was satisfactory, until at Sidmouth they chanced upon a pretty house with a partly castellated roof and Gothic windows, Woolbrook Cottage, Woolbrook Glen.

The Duke decided to take it; and on Christmas Day he and his family moved in as snow covered the ground outside. For days it was dreadfully cold and wet. The Duchess and her daughter, Feodora, ventured out to take walks along the coast; but the Duke stayed indoors for most of the day, writing letters. His stomach had been upset when they first arrived and, so he complained, ‘the water had already begun to play the very deuce with [his] bowels’. Then, at the beginning of January 1820 he caught another cold which became so feverish that the Duchess called in his physician, Dr Wilson, who was much concerned by his case. On the evening of the twelfth his patient complained of pains in his chest and was overcome by nausea. Soon he was delirious. The Duchess, distracted, rarely left his side. She sent an urgent request to London for Sir David Dundas, the eminent physician, to come to Sidmouth; but Dundas was in attendance on the dying King George III at Windsor. Dr William Maton, who had been Queen Charlotte’s physician, came instead. His arrival was no comfort to the Duchess: he spoke little French and scarcely any German, and the Duchess’s English, despite her efforts to learn the language, was not yet good enough for her to communicate with him or adequately to protest against the tormenting treatment which he, like Dr Wilson, prescribed their helpless patient.

The Duke was bled and cupped day after day; blisters were applied to his chest; then he was cupped and bled again until, as the Duchess wrote to a friend, there was ‘hardly a spot on his dear body which [had] not been touched by cupping, blisters or bleeding…I cannot think it can be good for the patient to lose so much blood when he is already so weak…He was terribly exhausted yesterday after all that had been done to him by those cruel doctors.’13 Although ‘half delirious’ he was induced to sign a will, appending his signature to the document with the most pathetic determination before sinking back on to his pillow. He died the next morning. The Duchess, who had, she said, ‘adored him’, knelt beside his bed, holding his hand.14

She was now almost destitute and it was left to her brother, Prince Leopold, to come to her aid. Without his help, he later assured her daughter, Victoria, the Duchess could not possibly have remained in the country. The Regent’s ‘great wish was to get you and your mama out of the country,’ he told her emphatically. ‘And I must say without my assistance you could not have remained…I know not what would have come of you and your mama, if I had not then existed.’15

But Prince Leopold not only existed but still had so large an income that he could well afford to take his sister and his little niece into his care. He asked the Regent’s sister, Princess Mary, Duchess of Gloucester, to seek permission from her brother – who was as fond of her as she was of him – to allow the stricken widow and her daughter to return to her late husband’s apartments at Kensington Palace. ‘Her situation is most melancholy,’ Princess Mary wrote, ‘for Edward had nothing in the world but debts & now there are all his old servants without a penny piece to provide for them. She knows what your goodness of heart is & she is sure you will do what you can for them.’16 The Regent immediately gave his consent; and so the Duchess of Kent, assured of an annual allowance from Prince Leopold of £2,000, later increased to £3,000 a year, returned to Kensington Palace where they learned that the poor, blind, demented King had died at last on 29 January 1820 and the Prince Regent was now King George IV.

3 THE CHILD

‘I never had a room to myself. I never had a sofa, nor an easy chair, and there was not a single carpet that was not threadbare.’

THE KING’S LITTLE NIECE, VICTORIA, was now eight months old. She had not been well at Sidmouth, suffering from a heavy cold for most of the time; and she had been ‘very upset by the frightful jolting’ of the carriage that brought her back to Kensington. But she was a strong child, as her father had been pleased to note of his ‘little joy’; and at six months she had, in his opinion, been ‘as advanced as children generally are at eight’. She had been vaccinated without ill effects and having been weaned – her mother having caused some disapproval by indelicately insisting on giving what her husband described as ‘maternal nutriment’ – ‘she did not appear to thrive the less for the change’. The Duchess was delighted with her little ‘Vickelchen’, as she called her, although she had to admit that she was already showing ‘symptoms of wanting to get her own little way’.

This stubbornness and independence of spirit became more pronounced as she grew older. So did her impatience, her wilfulness, outbursts of temper and defiant truthfulness. Frustrated, she would stamp her feet and would burst into tears when told to sit still or to pay closer attention during her reading lessons; and once, in a tantrum, she hurled a pair of scissors at her governess. Before her lessons began one day, her mother was asked if she had been a good girl that morning. ‘Yes,’ the Duchess replied, ‘she has been good this morning but yesterday there was a little storm.’ ‘Two storms,’ corrected the little girl, pertly interrupting her mother’s account, intent as always on speaking and hearing the truth, ‘one at dressing and one at washing.’ She was similarly pert when her mother said to her, after one of her outbursts of temper, that she made them both very unhappy by such behaviour. ‘No, Mama, not me, not myself, but you.’1

The Duchess’s nervous temperament was not well adapted to dealing with such a child. ‘To my shame,’ she admitted, ‘I must confess that I am over anxious in a childish way with the little one, as if she were my first child…She drives me at times into real desperation…Today the little mouse…was so unmanageable that I nearly cried.’

Wilful as she was, however, the little girl, intelligent and lively and with an astonishingly retentive memory, progressed satisfactorily with her lessons when these began to a regular timetable supervised by her Principal Master, the Revd George Davys, a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, later Bishop of Peterborough. Davys came to live in Kensington Palace before the Princess was four years old. He helped to teach her to read by writing short words on cards and, as he put it, ‘making her bring them to me from a distant part of the room as I named them’.2 Admittedly, she was not very good at Latin, and piano lessons were often a trial: once, when told that there was ‘no royal road to success in music’ and that she must practise like everyone else, she banged shut the lid of the instrument with the defiant words, ‘There! You see there is no must about it.’ But she was patient and attentive in her history and geography lessons; she learned to speak French and German – the latter in particular with a ‘correct pronunciation’ – and a little Italian.* She soon became adept at arithmetic; her written English was exemplary and her soprano singing voice, trained by John Sale, the organist at St Margaret’s Westminster, was delightful. She danced with easy grace, she listened dutifully to Mr Davys’s religious instruction, she read poetry ‘extremely well’, he said, and understood what she read ‘as well, as at her age, could reasonably be expected’. She displayed a precocious skill in drawing at which she was given lessons by Richard Westall, the prolific historical painter and book illustrator, and later, by Edwin Landseer, Edward Lear and William Leighton Leitch, the distinguished watercolourist.3