Childhood at Court, 1819-1914 (3 page)

Her best friends were her dolls, substitutes for the girl companions she was never allowed. She did not care for babies, and her dolls were not the small children that little girls of the day liked to play with and act as mother to. They were miniature adult dolls, mostly representing characters from plays and operas that she had seen. She and Lehzen dressed them and kept them in a box. A list of 132 was kept, mentioning the name of each, and the characters they represented. Among them were Amy Brocard (the Countess of Leicester) and Zoe Beaupré (Queen Elizabeth). They were quite ordinary, varying in height from three to nine inches, with the ‘Dutch doll’* type of face, easy to pack away. Collecting them was the chief outlet for her affection and imagination, and she played at ‘teaching’ them the manners she had been taught herself. This remained a favourite amusement until she was nearly fourteen years old.

She could be extremely possessive about them. When Lady Radnor came to call on the Duchess of Kent, she brought her granddaughter Jane to play with the Princess. ‘The young Princess quickly and warningly told me, referring to toys scattered around “You must not touch those, they are mine; and I may call you Jane, but you must not call me Victoria.”’
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Firmly supervised by her elders, the Princess led a lonely childhood, isolated from her contemporaries most of the time. Until her accession to the throne she slept in her mother’s room. When she had been put to bed in the evening, Lehzen sat in the room until the Duchess came to retire. She was never allowed to see anyone, young or old, unless a third person was present. For several years she was not allowed to walk downstairs without someone holding her hand.

This heavily cocooned existence was for long taken as an example of excessive parental control and an attempt to make her psychologically over-dependent on her mother and staff. It has also, more charitably, been put down to the Duchess of Kent’s sense of insecurity, her hostility to her brothers-in-law and mistrust of what she saw as their conspiratorial motives. This insecurity, it is alleged, also resulted in her ‘obsessive treasuring of everything associated with her child’.
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After the Duchess of Kent’s death in 1861, this daughter was overcome at discovering that not a scrap of her writing or hair had ever been thrown away, in addition to a book containing ‘such touching notes about her babyhood’.

For the first few years she had the companionship of her half-sister, Princess Feodora (‘Fidi’). The latter was sent off to Germany to stay with her grandmother when she was nineteen, possibly to escape the unwelcome attention of King George IV who, as gossips suggested, was even considering a royal remarriage at this late stage in his life, in order to produce an heir to the throne. The thought of this ailing recluse of a monarch marrying a Princess some forty-five years his junior seems far-fetched, but at any rate Feodora was despatched out of harm’s way back to the land of her birth, and in 1827 her betrothal to Prince Ernest of Hohenlohe-Langenburg was announced.

The departure of her one close contemporary increased Princess Victoria’s isolation, and threw her increasingly onto her dolls for company. Her only occasional playmate was John Conroy’s daughter Victoire, who was only a few months older than the Princess. Victoire was treated coldly, as the daughter of a man whom the Princess hated and despised, and there was never any closeness between the two.

In the last few years of her life, an exhibition of the Queen’s dolls was staged. She recalled her devotion to them, as ‘
she
was an
only
child and except occasional visits of other children lived always
alone
, without companions. Once a week one child came.’
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Apart from her dolls, the other great playthings at her disposal were mechanical toys made in Nuremburg. One was a hand-loom, twenty-two inches long, on which jute could be woven into coarse cloth. Another, less didactic but surely more fun, was a miniature clockwork roadway with an avenue of little trees, on which a doll, two and a half inches high, moved along grooved lines. Two lines ran parallel; small pagoda-shaped buildings at either end partly concealed the action of the puppet as it turned into the path parallel with the one just traversed.

The Princess’s favourite was a miniature stage, eight inches long and three inches wide. The curtain drew back to reveal three figures, brilliantly dressed in silks and satins, dancing and pirouetting animatedly to the tinkling of a musical box concealed underneath. It was enclosed in a neat rosewood box shaped like an upright piano. A leather strap for suspension went round the neck of the owner, when she was ‘playing at being showman’.

Among other toys which doubtless found their way into Kensington Palace were simple jigsaws, or ‘dissected puzzles’. These hand-coloured engravings, mounted on wood, were already well established as recreational favourites for young children. Their educational role was taken seriously; the subjects of such puzzles were usually themes such as the kings and queens, or counties, of England, or the countries of Europe. A variation on these was the ‘race game’, an early nineteenth-century forerunner of Snakes & Ladders and other board games. ‘Virtue Rewarded and Vice Punished’ was a popular example. The players had to compete to see who would be the first to reach The Cottage of Content, by landing on steps such as Patience Pond, Lucky Lane or Forethought Road en route, and avoiding Laughing Stock Lane (Pay 2 for laughing) and Frog Island (Pay 1 for frightening the frogs). These games of chance might be played with counters and dice. If parents and guardians wished to avoid introducing impressionable young minds to dice, a harmful influence as they were gambling tools which would lead the children into bad ways, the use of a teetotum, or multi-sided spinning top, was recommended as an alternative.

Every summer Princess Victoria would be taken to Ramsgate, Tunbridge Wells, or somewhere similar on or near the coast. It made a pleasant change from Kensington Palace, and the return home each autumn ‘was generally a day of tears’. Ramsgate was always remembered with affection. Living next to the house the Duchess rented was the philanthropist Moses Montefiore, who had retired from his banking career at the age of forty to devote the rest of his life to good causes. He presented the Princess with a small gold key to his garden gate, with an open invitation to use it whenever she wished.

To outside observers the little girl seemed happy enough. Lord Albemarle, at that time a servant of the Princess’s uncle the Duke of Sussex, would recall in later years watching from his window the movements of a vivacious, attractive little girl, seven years of age, wearing a large straw hat, and a suit of white cotton. ‘It was amusing to see how impartially she divided the contents of the watering pot between the flowers and her own little feet.’
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After dining one day with the Duchess, the diarist Harriet Arbuthnot, wife of a Cabinet official, wrote that Princess Victoria was the most charming child she had ever seen, with high spirits, but civil and well bred. The Duchess was ‘a very sensible person & educates her remarkably well’.

As a grown woman Queen Victoria never glossed over the misery of her early years. Writing to her eldest daughter Victoria on 9 June 1858, five months after her marriage to Prince Frederick William of Prussia, she recalled: ‘I had led a very unhappy life as a child – had no scope for my very violent feelings of affection – had no brothers and sisters to live with – never had had a father – from my unfortunate circumstances was not on a comfortable or at all intimate footing with my mother (so different from you to me) – much as I love her now – and did not know what a happy domestic life was!’
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Princess Feodora sympathized with her plight more than anyone. ‘I escaped some years of imprisonment, which you, my poor darling sister, had to endure after I was married,’
¹⁷
she wrote in 1843.

The Duchess of Kent was, and always remained, a stranger in a strange land. It was only natural for her to lean increasingly on the man whom her second husband had appointed to the household so soon after their marriage. Unfortunately, this particular man drove a wedge between mother and daughter, and the effects lasted for some years after he had gone from their lives for ever.

John Conroy was in effect the ruler of all that went on at Kensington Palace. An ambitious, unscrupulous, scheming man, he saw that as chief unofficial counsellor to the Duchess of Kent, he could surely exert similar control over the future Queen of England, and if he was patient would doubtless reap what he considered his just reward for years of royal service. When the Duke of York, King George IV’s heir to the throne, died in January 1827, only two lives stood between the crown and the seven-year-old Princess – the King himself, who could not be expected to survive long in his wretched state of health, and the eccentric, excitable Duke of Clarence. The latter still had no legitimate children to succeed him, despite the Duchess’s tragic history of miscarriages, still births, and babies who lived for only a few weeks. He was aged sixty-one, and if gossips were to be believed, he was becoming subject to the same lack of mental stability that had blighted the last years of King George III’s life. If Princess Victoria ascended the throne before the age of eighteen, a regency would be necessary. The Duchess of Kent would be nominally Regent, but Conroy would be the power behind the throne.

With this in mind, he devised the ‘Kensington System’, designed to make the Princess utterly dependent on her mother. He had already played his part in separating the half-sisters by helping to bring about the betrothal of Princess Feodora, who married less for love than to escape from Kensington Palace. With her departure, Conroy – now Sir John, newly created a Knight Commander of the Hanoverian Order by King George IV in his capacity as King of Hanover – and the Duchess now had the Princess to themselves. Lehzen, now Baroness Lehzen, would doubtless remember that she owed her well-being entirely to her employers, and do exactly as she was required. The Princess was accordingly to be kept isolated within the Kensington circle, and no risk could be taken of anybody from outside winning her affections and undermining her mother’s authority. Conroy was fiercely ambitious, notoriously short-tempered and totally insensitive. He was also too stupid, or too impatient, to make any effort to gain the Princess’s affection or respect.

In the autumn of 1829 Baroness Späth, the Duchess of Kent’s devoted lady-in-waiting, was dismissed. Years of selfless service to the Duchess and then her daughter counted for nothing against her one crime – to stand up to Conroy. She and Lehzen had resented his high-handed behaviour and his insistence on giving Lady Conroy precedence at court over them; she had also tried to put Victoire Conroy, very much her father’s daughter, in her place.* Späth was banished on the grounds that it was necessary to surround the Princess with ladies of English rank, rather than Germans; that she expressed ‘adverse opinions’ about the Kensington system; and that she spoiled Princess Victoria by too much adulation.

The Princess had been very fond of Späth, and doted on Lehzen. Conroy attempted to dismiss the latter as well, but King George IV and the Duke of Clarence were warned what was happening, and they insisted that she should stay where she was, on the grounds that her departure would be harmful to the Princess.

On 10 March 1830 the Bishop of London asked the Duchess of Kent if the Princess knew what was likely to be her future station in the country, and would her education be planned to put her in possession of this knowledge? The Duchess said that she had not yet made up her mind to tell the Princess she would be Queen, hoping she would come across the knowledge ‘by accident, in pursuing her education’.

Possibly by coincidence, or more probably by design, all was revealed the following day. Though it sounds apocryphal, the truth of the ‘I will be good’ episode was confirmed some thirty-seven years later in written recollections by Baroness Lehzen, and endorsed, for the most part, by Queen Victoria. The ten-year-old Princess opened a book, Howlett’s
Tables of the Kings and Queens of England
, to begin her history lesson with Lehzen. She found with some surprise that an extra page had been slipped into the book. It was a genealogical table showing recent heirs to the throne, all descended from her grandfather King George III, with the date of death where applicable written after each name. She studied it carefully, coming to the names of her uncles King George IV and William, Duke of Clarence – followed by her own. After some thought, she said solemnly, ‘I see I am nearer to the throne than I thought,’ and burst into tears. After recovering her composure, she said to Lehzen, ‘Now – many a child would boast but they don’t know the difficulty; there is much splendour, but there is more responsibility!’ Lifting up the forefinger of her right hand, she uttered the famous words, ‘I will be good.’
¹⁸

The story sounds too much like legend, and in her old age Lehzen undoubtedly added her own touch of drama to the recollections. Such phrases sound rather beyond all but the most precocious infant of ten. As her biographer Monica Charlot has suggested, the language seems stilted and unchildlike, and from other accounts the young princess did not seem such a prig as this story makes out. Moreover, the veracity of the account is open to question, as it is in effect a reconstruction long after the event.
¹⁹
Nevertheless Queen Victoria, whose powers of recall remained remarkably sharp well into her later years, and who was always eager to dismiss sugary stories about her childhood, never rejected this one. On the margin of Lehzen’s memoirs, she wrote, ‘I cried much on learning it and ever deplored this contingency.’

In June 1830 King George IV died at Windsor, and the Duke of Clarence ascended the throne as King William IV. It was now obvious to all but the most optimistic that his consort, now Queen Adelaide, would never produce a healthy heir to the throne, and increasingly inevitable that Princess Victoria of Kent would succeed him.