26
ON 24 JUNE 1819, at three o’clock, a christening ceremony took place in the Cupola Room at Kensington Palace. A gilded font stood in the centre and the walls had been specially hung with crimson velvet. A christening is usually a solemn, yet joyous occasion, but at this one the tension was palpable. The Prince Regent did not like his brother, the father of the baby, and perhaps he resented the fact that she was in some sense replacing his own dead daughter, Charlotte. The Duke and Duchess of Kent had chosen the names for their infant – Victoire Georgiana Alexandrina Charlotte Augusta – and out of courtesy had informed the Prince Regent of their intention. Only the night before, they were surprised to receive a messenger with the Regent’s objections. The name Georgiana could not be used, since he did not choose to place his name before that of the Emperor Alexander of Russia – one of the godparents – and he could not allow it to follow. As for the other names, he would indicate his wishes at the christening.
So now when it came to pronouncing the child’s name, the Archbishop of Canterbury turned expectantly to the parents, who looked helplessly at the bloated, perfumed figure of the Prince Regent. Eventually, he spoke. Charlotte – the name of his mother and the child’s grandmother, Queen Charlotte, but also of the dead Princess his daughter – would not do. Nor did he approve of Augusta, after the child’s maternal grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. It was too magisterial. ‘Alexandrina,’ he ventured, for the Tsar.
The Duke of Kent urged a second name: Elizabeth, perhaps?
The suggestion was too audacious. Ever prickly with his brother and knowing now that no child of his would inherit the throne, the Regent bridled at the thought of Kent’s brat bearing the name of England’s great queen. ‘Give her her mother’s name also then, but it cannot precede that of the Emperor.’ But the Duchess of Kent’s name, Victoire, was French. It must be anglicized to Victoria, a name hitherto unknown in England. Little Alexandrina Victoria spent the first years of her life as ‘Drina’ and her first language, imbibed from her mother who spoke very little English, was German.
Drina, or Victoria as she would later be known, was born at Kensington Palace on 24 May 1819, ‘a pretty little Princess, as plump as a partridge’. That she was born in England at all was purely fortuitous. Her parents’ marriage had been the result of an unseemly rush on the part of three of the seven surviving sons of the still living but mentally incapacitated King George III to marry and produce a legitimate heir to the throne after the death of Princess Charlotte.
Of the remaining sons, the bigamous Prince Regent – he had married Mrs Maria Fitzherbert, a Catholic, in secret, so the marriage was considered invalid – had little hope of divorcing his estranged wife, Caroline of Brunswick, no matter how many lovers she took in exile. The philandering Frederick, Duke of York, was married to an eccentric Prussian princess who was unlikely to bear him a child. The universally loathed Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, was married and living in his father’s kingdom of Hanover, and so far childless. Augustus, Duke of Sussex, had fallen foul of the Royal Marriages Act by marrying a commoner, Lady Augusta Murray, without the King’s permission, so that their children were excluded from the succession. That left the Dukes of Clarence, Kent and Cambridge to do the deed. The betting fraternity had its money on Cambridge, who had already found a suitable bride, to win the royal sweepstakes.
Licentious, scandalous, gluttonous, idle and spendthrift, the sons of George III had brought the monarchy into dangerous disrepute, just at a time when a massive groundswell of agitation for electoral reform was gathering force. Republicanism was in the air. Public sympathy was with the women: the rejected Caroline, unkempt, even smelly, so that the fastidious Regent could not bear her, but wronged and all the more tragic for that. Above all, it was with their daughter. Charlotte, young, gracious and feminine – the antithesis of the corrupt old wicked uncles – and married to a respectable and sensible prince, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, had offered hope for the monarchy. But she had died after a forty-six-hour labour and the birth of a stillborn son in November 1817; the doctor subsequently committed suicide. With her death, hope for the British monarchy seemed to be extinguished. It was not until the advent of another young woman as heir to the throne that it revived. Public sympathy for Charlotte carried over to the next royal female, Victoria, who benefited from her popularity.
Lured more by the incentive of parliamentary funds than the glory of having his progeny sit on the British throne, William, Duke of Clarence, trawled the pool of plain and homely German princesses – virtually the only royal brides in Europe who, as Protestants, would satisfy the criteria of the Act of Settlement – and eventually found one willing to accept him. The kindly Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen was half his age and likely to bear children. The actress Dora Jordan, his devoted companion of twenty years and the mother of his ten bastards, was pensioned off, but died in debt shortly afterwards.
Encouraged by Princess Charlotte and Leopold, Edward, Duke of Kent, had already begun his suit to Leopold’s sister, Victoire, Dowager Princess of Leiningen, an attractive thirty-year-old widow with two children. She was initially reluctant to give up her independence for the impecunious Duke, but the death of Charlotte and the prospect of a child of theirs being heir to the British throne seems to have increased the Duke’s ardour and changed her opinion. It was only when she read of the likely match in the newspaper that Edward’s loyal companion of twenty-seven years, Mme Julie de St Laurent, discovered that she was about to be discarded by her royal lover.
On 11 July 1818, in the presence of Queen Charlotte and the Prince Regent at Kew Palace, Clarence and Kent married their German princesses in a double wedding. Before the end of the year, the Duchesses of Clarence, Kent, Cumberland and Cambridge were pregnant. It looked as if the royal succession would be secured. Marriage had hardly improved the Duke of Kent’s finances, in spite of the £6,000 annual allowance Parliament voted him now that he was doing his duty. Kent accepted it as no less than his due after the great sacrifice he was making: ‘As for the payment of my debts, I don’t call them great. The nation, on the contrary, is greatly my debtor.’
He seemed perennially incapable of living within his means. He had lavished sumptuous wedding presents on his bride which was all very commendable, but even when he returned to live at her home at Amorbach near Darmstadt to save on living expenses, he needlessly frittered money away aggrandizing the old castle. Before long, the Duchess was pregnant. Convinced that his child would inherit the throne, Kent was determined that the birth should take place in England. Ignoring the fact that Clarence’s child would take precedence over his, he invited the most prominent men of the kingdom – the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, the Duke of Wellington, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and others – to be present as witnesses.
Once more he was broke – too broke to afford the journey. He set down his requirements to the Regent – money for the journey, a yacht to cross the Channel, an apartment at Kensington Palace, and perhaps a seaside house for after the confinement – confidently expecting them to be met. The Regent flatly refused. Kent’s friends then clubbed together for the Duke and Duchess to return to England, although in much reduced style. To save the expense of a coachman, the Duke drove his own phaeton across several hundred miles of bumpy roads to Calais, with the seven months’ pregnant Duchess travelling beside him, followed by a shabby procession of assorted vehicles carrying the Duchess’s daughter – her son staying behind in Germany – her lady-in-waiting, her midwife, the governess, servants and baggage. The Regent had been shamed into providing a yacht to bring the party across the Channel and one month before the birth the Kents were installed in rooms at Kensington Palace.
Kent never expressed any doubt that his daughter would inherit the throne, despite the fact that when she was born she was only fifth in the line of succession and there was every possibility that the Clarences would produce an heir and, indeed, her own parents might yet have a son. ‘Look at her well,’ he would tell his friends, as he showed her off, ‘for she will be Queen of England.’
He did not have long to enjoy the child, or the connubial happiness he had found with Victoire. Christmas 1819 found the Kents in a rented house at Sidmouth on the Devon coast, ostensibly for the baby’s health, but in reality because it was cheaper to live in obscurity. Tall, sturdy, although with the Hanoverian proclivity for being overweight, a former serving officer in the army – he had been forcibly retired from his command ‘on a charge of disciplinary fanaticism amounting to brutality’ – Kent had always prided himself on his robust physique, predicting that he would outlive his dissolute brothers. The house was cold and no doubt damp and the weather was foul. Little Drina was suffering from a sore throat and the Duke caught a cold which turned to pneumonia. Proper nursing would probably have saved his life, but, in the fashion of the day, the doctors killed him with their bleeding and cupping of an already weakened constitution.
He died on 23 January 1820, only one week after his father, old King George III. So now the Prince Regent was King George IV and Victoria took her place as third in line of succession. The Clarences had lost their baby – a girl named Charlotte Augusta – and they were to lose two more, but at the time everyone confidently expected them to produce the heir. Consequently, little account was taken of the eight-month-old Princess at Sidmouth who had just lost her father. In a will hurriedly signed by the dying man, his widow had been appointed sole guardian of their child. The Duchess of Kent, a foreigner who spoke little English, was left stranded without funds. She was also homeless, as rooms at Kensington Palace depended on the new King’s favour. It was not readily forthcoming, no doubt because he hoped that she would disappear with her child abroad. Her brother Leopold, Princess Charlotte’s widower, came to the rescue.
He dissuaded his sister from her first instinct, to return home to Amorbach, taking Victoria away from England and perhaps her destiny, and he urged the King’s favourite sister to persuade him to allow the Duchess to live in his late brother’s apartment at Kensington. Leopold had been voted £50,000 a year for life on his marriage to Princess Charlotte; it had not been envisaged that she would die, and there was a certain amount of resentment that the parliamentary grant had failed to include a get-out clause and that Leopold continued to accept these funds when he no longer had any reason to stay in England. Certainly, George IV’s opinion was that his former son-in-law should dip into his own pocket to support his sister and her offspring.
Leopold offered to pay Victoire an allowance of £3,000 a year, which, added to the late Duke’s allowance of £6,000, which reverted to his widow, would be sufficient for the Duchess and her child to live in genteel, if not royal, comfort; later, Parliament voted an increase in the allowance for the Princess’s education and upbringing. As Queen Victoria later told Disraeli, she was brought up very simply: ‘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.’ Regular, simple mealtimes when the small child sat beside her mother at table and ate her bread and milk out of a silver basin were punctuated by play, lessons, fresh air and outdoor exercise.
Leopold’s contribution was hardly generous and he could have afforded far more, but it was enough to give him enormous leverage. With Charlotte’s death, he had been disappointed of his ambition to rule England, or at least wield influence over the monarchy. But now he saw his chance to mould the mind of a new heir to the throne, his niece, who looked on him as a father figure. The impact of the Duke of Kent’s premature death on Victoria cannot be underestimated. Years later, writing to her eldest daughter, she referred to herself as the poor fatherless child of eight months. The naturally passionate Victoria had not found a focus for her love in childhood, nor had she felt the benefit of a father’s love. ‘I had led a very unhappy life as a child,’ she wrote, ‘had no scope for my very violent feelings of affection – had no brothers and sisters to live with – never had had a father – was not on a comfortable or at all intimate or confidential footing with my mother … and did not know what a happy domestic life was!’
She thought of her father as a soldier and had an exaggerated notion of male strength. All her life she looked for a father figure, a strong man to lean on. Brought up in an almost exclusively female environment, she imagined that men were somehow superior and she always sought male approbation. Dependence on male mentors became a habit. First, Leopold, of whom she confided in her journal: ‘I love him so very very much. He is Il mio secondo padre or rather sole padre! for he is indeed my real father, as I have none!’ Then her first Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, an elderly, benevolent, fatherly figure, for whom she conceived a possessive love; her husband Prince Albert – ‘he was my father, my protector, my guide and adviser in all and everything, my mother (I might almost say) as well as my husband’ – and after his death, her Highland servant, the rough, dependable, ever loyal John Brown.
The Duchess of Kent was a good mother, if not a very wise woman. Unusually, she breastfed her child, a practice Queen Victoria herself thought disgusting. She strongly discouraged it in her own daughters. ‘No lady, and still less a Princess, is fit for her husband or her position, if she does that,’ she was to warn her eldest, Vicky. It was not long before Victoria’s strong character, wilfulness and stubbornness were manifest. At only a few months, her mother fondly admitted that she was showing ‘symptoms of wanting to get her own little way’. She was soon displaying the violent outbursts of temper so characteristic of the Hanoverians – a trait that she would never manage to control, and which would later send her grown-up sons and officials running for cover – but offsetting this was a transparent honesty, a directness and strict adherence to the truth. When her mother admonished her for a fit of temper, saying she made them both unhappy by such behaviour, Victoria typically replied, ‘No Mama, not me, not myself, but you.’
Victoria’s childhood, spent mainly at Kensington Palace, was solitary. Her first memory is of crawling on a yellow carpet and being told that if she cried and was naughty her ‘Uncle Sussex’, who lived below, would hear her and punish her. On the other hand, another of her ‘wicked uncles’, the Duke of York, was always very kind to his little niece and gave her ‘beautiful presents’. Her aunt, the Duchess of Clarence, who must have grieved for her own dead infants, adored her. ‘My dear little heart,’ she wrote to the three-year-old, ‘I hope you are well and don’t forget Aunt Adelaide, who loves you fondly.’ Instead of building bridges with the royal family, the Duchess of Kent kept them all at bay, increasing her daughter’s loneliness and isolation. Visits to her Uncle Leopold at Claremont, his country seat near Esher, were the high points in her existence.
Apart from her half-sister Feodore, to whom she was close, there were no childhood companions. She was kept well away from her cousins, the sons of her father’s younger brothers, Princes George of Cumberland and George of Cambridge, and increasingly disliked the daughters of her mother’s adviser, Sir John Conroy, whose company was forced upon her. Instead, she lived in a world of dolls, dozens of them, all beautifully dressed. Later, a King Charles spaniel, Dash, would become a beloved companion. Always very proprietary about her possessions – ranging from childhood toys to an empire in later life – the Princess once told a child who was brought to play with her in her clear, piping voice, ‘You must not touch those, they are mine; and I may call you Jane, but you must not call me Victoria.’ It was a hint of the imperious, autocratic tone that she would make peculiarly her own. Lord Albemarle remembered glancing out of a window at Kensington Palace and seeing a small, fair girl wearing a big straw hat to protect her from the sun tending her garden with intense concentration, impartially sharing the contents of the water-pot between the flowers and her little feet. It was a sunny picture, but belied the reality of what she later came to call a melancholy childhood. There was certainly a darker undertone.
Cold-shouldered by her brother-in-law the King, the Duchess of Kent made a virtue out of necessity, living in semi-isolation from the royal family, ensuring that Victoria would not be tarnished with the same brush as the unpopular Hanoverians. It was not until 1826 that George IV deigned to take notice of his fatherless niece, inviting the Duchess and her daughters to Windsor. The visit and her first sight of the King obviously made a great impression on the child. ‘When we arrived at the Royal Lodge the King took me by the hand, saying: “Give me your little paw.” He was large and gouty but with a wonderful dignity and charm of manner,’ she wrote. He presented her with ‘his picture set in diamonds, which was worn by the princesses as an order’. The King’s mistress, Lady Conyningham, pinned the blue ribbon holding the picture on to her shoulder. ‘I was very proud of this,’ she recalled.
She was taken on a drive and met the King with his sister Mary in a phaeton. ‘Pop her in!’ he ordered, before speeding away. The Duchess of Kent’s terror may be imagined, because she had a real fear that the King would try to kidnap Victoria to bring her up under his own unsavoury influence. Whatever her mother thought of her uncles, Victoria at seven was willing to please. When the King told her that the orchestra would play any tune she liked, she tactfully requested ‘God Save the King’, and she was quite prepared to sit on the royal knee and kiss the flabby face coated with cosmetics.
Victoria’s education began when she was not quite four. Lessons were taken with the Reverend Davys, later Bishop of Peterborough. He recalled teaching her to read by writing some short words on cards and having her bring them to him from a distant part of the room as he named them. By the age of six she had grasped the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic – she would always have a good head for figures – and Davys also gave her religious instruction. When she was five, she came under the care of her sister’s governess. The strong-minded Louisa Lehzen, whom George IV made a Hanoverian baroness, was the daughter of a Lutheran pastor from Hanover and was to be one of the most important formative influences on the young Princess. Every minute of her day was prescribed in her educational timetable for six days a week. Idleness was not an option. Lehzen would read to her while she was having her hair brushed morning and evening. In this way, she instilled in her pupil the keen sense of duty and rigid work discipline which served the Queen well throughout her life, compensating for her lack of imagination.
The Princess received the sort of education that would have been thought admirable for an upper-class girl of the time, but was hardly good enough for a future ruler. Unlike the Tudor queens regnant and despite her future destiny, she was not given the classical education that was the shared intellectual heritage of the men of the political classes. As an adult, she felt her intellectual inferiority, but was smart enough to keep silent when she knew she was out of her depth in a conversation. Perhaps if she had been an intellectual, she would have been less successful as a monarch. Certainly her devoted subjects among the expanding middle class were to find the very ordinariness of their Queen both appealing and oddly reassuring.
Davys had managed to eradicate her German accent. Now she proved a good linguist, studying French and German; later, her love of opera prompted her to learn Italian. With Lehzen and Davys she also studied history, geography, natural history and some Latin. She had to learn poetry by heart and the art of letter writing; as a result, she displayed a formidable memory as queen and was a fluent and prodigious writer – so much so, in fact, that she would only communicate with her private secretary by memoranda and in the third person.
She loved history, encouraged by Leopold to read widely and learn from the past. ‘I am much obliged to you, dear Uncle, for the extract about Queen Anne,’ she wrote, ‘but must beg you, as you have sent me to show what a Queen ought not to be, that you will send me what a Queen ought to be.’ It was supposedly while perusing a history book, with a genealogical table which had been temporarily removed re-inserted, that the eleven-year-old Victoria realized for the first time that she would be Queen. ‘I see I am nearer the throne than I thought,’ she commented. ‘I will be good.’ It is a pretty story, but we only have Lehzen’s word for it.
In 1830, when Victoria was almost eleven, the Duchess called in the Bishops of London and Lincoln to test her daughter’s progress. They reported that she displayed ‘an accurate knowledge of the most important features of Scripture, History and the leading truths and precepts of the Christian Religion as taught by the Church of England’, as well as ‘an acquaintance with the chronology and principal facts of English History remarkable in so young a person’.
The emphasis of Victoria’s education was on the feminine accomplishments. Dancing, music and drawing were important parts of the curriculum. In spite of her short stature and tendency to plumpness, she was a graceful and tireless dancer. She made her court debut when she was ten, dancing at the Juvenile Ball given by the King in honour of her contemporary, the Queen of Portugal. Charles Greville, the Clerk to the Privy Council, sighed at the plainness of the English Princess. It might have been at this time, too, that her cousin George of Cambridge, disgusted to discover that Victoria was to inherit the throne – ‘Good heavens!’ he exclaimed. ‘A woman on the throne of so great a country, how ridiculous!’ – described her as ‘a fat, ugly, wilful and stupid child’. It is true that she had inherited the protruding dark blue eyes, arched nose, receding chin and heavy jowls of the Hanoverians – she was very like her grandfather, George III – and a habit of keeping her mouth open, but she had a natural dignity, almost an aura, which impressed more discerning observers.
She was an excellent horsewoman, rejoicing when she was able to gallop off and escape the surveillance that she was constantly subjected to at home. So over-protective was her mother that Victoria slept in the same bedroom as her until the day of her accession and someone always sat with her in the evening until her mother was ready to go to bed, so that the child was never alone. She was not even allowed to descend the stairs without someone holding her hand. The constraints must have been oppressive for a girl with such natural energy and zest for life.
When Victoria was eleven her life suddenly became more fraught. Her Uncle Leopold became King of the Belgians and left England and although the two began a steady correspondence, she missed him sorely. King George IV died, to be succeeded by the Duke of Clarence as William IV. Although there was still no guarantee that Queen Adelaide would not have a child of her own, Victoria was now second in line to the throne. Thinking that William would be more malleable than his brother, the Duchess of Kent now started making loud demands to be placed on the same footing as a Dowager Princess of Wales; she also wanted Victoria to receive an allowance befitting the heiress presumptive – an allowance to be controlled by her mother. Above all, she wanted to be appointed regent in the event of Victoria succeeding before her majority at eighteen.
Both William and Adelaide were fond of their niece and wanted to see her take her proper place at court and, indeed, nearly all the Duchess’s demands were met. Instead of taking the olive branch, however, the Duchess set herself up in opposition, restricting Victoria’s visits to the King and Queen and being as difficult and quarrelsome as possible. To Victoria’s intense disappointment, her mother decided at the last minute that neither she nor Victoria would attend the coronation. Ambitious, possessive, and ill advised, she was determined to keep Victoria isolated from influences other than her own.
The Duchess not only misjudged William IV, but also her daughter, who was already far too strong a character to manipulate. The Duchess’s poor judgement was matched only by that of her éminence grise, Captain Conroy. Sir John Conroy had been equerry to the Duke of Kent and continued in the Duchess’s service after his death. Anglo-Irish, with the gift of the gab and a way with women, the married Conroy had assumed such ascendancy over the Duchess that the assumption was that they were lovers. The Duke of Wellington attributed Victoria’s loathing of Conroy to her witnessing ‘familiarities’ between him and her mother, but this is too facile an explanation.
Conroy was supposed to be managing the Duchess’s financial affairs – in due course it emerged that she was desperately in debt, which suggests that Conroy was siphoning off funds for himself – but was consumed with the ambition to rule the future queen through her mother. There is no reason to think that the Duchess was not fully in accord with his ambition to rule through her daughter, but she was driven more by stupidity than anything else. Together, they devised the ‘Kensington system’, the aim being to ensure that Victoria would be totally dependent on them when she came to the throne and subject to no other influences. It was hopelessly naïve.
While keeping Victoria in isolation from the court, the plan also involved promoting her publicly. In 1830 the Duchess underwent the first in a series of summer ‘progresses’, to show Victoria to the people; in fact, the tall Duchess with her large hats took centre stage and the diminutive Princess was relegated to the back. Over succeeding summers, visits were paid to the great country houses of the nobility, but Victoria also caught her first glimpses of industrial Britain, the dark satanic mills in which so many of her future subjects now slaved for a bare subsistence. Everywhere the young Princess was received with great enthusiasm.
Although the Duchess maintained that her only purpose was to show Victoria her country with its historic sites, the King rightly took exception to the tours, especially when the Duchess refused to accede to his request that the Royal Navy desist from giving her a royal salute. In 1835 the King wrote to Victoria personally asking her not to undertake a summer progress that year. She was fully in sympathy with his request, but after a showdown with her mother, she had to concede defeat. The Duchess was never slow to employ emotional blackmail: ‘I must tell you dearest love, if your conversation with me could be known, that you had not the energy to undertake the journeys or that your views were not enlarged enough to grasp the benefits arising from it, then you would fall in the estimation of the people of this country.’ It was a blatant flouting of the King’s wishes – lèse-majesté. And what did the Duchess – regarded by many as ‘a stupid foreigner’ – understand of ‘the people of this country’?
All this quarrelling within the family caused Victoria emotional distress. As she later told her eldest daughter, she spent her childhood ‘always on pins and needles, with the whole family hardly on speaking terms. I (a mere child) between the two fires – trying to be civil and then scolded at home! Oh! It was dreadful.’ Her confirmation service had been marred by the King’s angrily ordering Conroy out of the Chapel Royal. Now, on the progress of 1835, Victoria’s state of mind manifested itself in tiredness, lethargy, headaches and backache. By October she was very ill indeed. Whether it was a case of typhoid or simply collapse from nervous strain cannot be determined.
With the full agreement of her mother, Sir John Conroy took the opportunity of Victoria’s debility to attempt to force her to agree to make him her private secretary when she became Queen. It is to her credit that the sixteen-year-old Princess resisted the pressure. Her resolve stiffened by her dear Lehzen, her only support in the household, she stubbornly refused. How different her response might have been had Conroy and her mother treated her with respect. A show of deference and a touch of flattery went a long way with Victoria and she was always loyal and generous to those who served her well.
Matters came to a head in August 1836 when the King and Queen invited the Duchess and her daughter to Windsor for a week to celebrate their birthdays. William IV remained kindly and genial towards Victoria, despite all the provocation he received from her mother, and she in turn was fond of her uncle. ‘I know the interest which the public feel about her,’ he told the guests when toasting her at the wedding of one of his illegitimate daughters, ‘and although I have not seen so much of her as I could have wished, I take no less interest in her, and the more I do see of her, both in public and in private, the greater pleasure it will give me.’ Now the Duchess replied to his kind invitation with studied insolence. Ignoring the Queen’s birthday on the 13th altogether, the Duchess wrote that she would spend her own birthday on the 15th at Claremont, but would come to Windsor on the 20th.
At his birthday dinner on the 21st, the King rose and once and for all repaid the Duchess, who was placed next to him, for her insulting behaviour and disrespect.
I trust God that my life may be spared for nine months longer, 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 (pointing to the Princess), the heiress presumptive of the Crown, and not in the hands of a person now near me, who is surrounded by evil advisers and who is herself incompetent to act with propriety in the station in which she would be placed.
The Queen looked embarrassed, the company of one hundred guests were aghast, and Victoria burst into tears. The Duchess immediately called for her carriage, but was persuaded to delay her departure until morning.
Through sheer willpower, the ailing William IV managed to cling to life long enough to see Victoria reach her majority. A week before her birthday, he wrote her a letter to be placed in her hands alone. First Conroy, then the Duchess tried to take the letter, but the Lord Chamberlain, Conyngham, insisted on handing it directly to Victoria. The King told her that he intended to ask Parliament for an allowance of £10,000 a year for her, so that she would be independent. It was a generous and thoughtful gesture. The Duchess and Conroy dictated Victoria’s reply. She was ordered to write that she accepted the allowance but, because of her youth, asked that it be paid directly to her mother – who claimed the bulk of it for herself – who would administer it. That evening, she recorded in her journal that she was too upset to go down to dinner. ‘Victoria has not written this letter,’ the King concluded.
On 24 May Victoria celebrated her eighteenth birthday and attained her legal majority, according to royal rules, although her mother was pressing for her majority to be augmented to twenty-one, which was the legal milestone for the rest of the population. Conroy might also have been responsible for a scurrilous rumour that Victoria was backward and unfit to rule, which was far from the case. Awed but not daunted by the prospect before her, Victoria made a vow, in her journal, to study with renewed assiduity and prepare herself for the task ahead. That night she attended a ball in St James’s, before returning to Kensington Palace. ‘The courtyards and the street were crammed when we went to the ball,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘and the anxiety of the people to see poor stupid me was very great, and I must say I am very touched by it, and feel proud, which I always have done of my country and the English nation.’
Less than one month later she became Queen.