We Two: Victoria and Albert (14 page)

TRADITIONALLY IN PROTESTANT
royal families, a child’s confirmation marked his or her coming of age. Though it suited the duchess and Conroy to keep Victoria a child as long as possible, when Victoria turned fifteen, they were unable to delay her confirmation any longer. King William IV announced that he wished to give his niece and heir her own income and her own household, but once again the Duchess of Kent played the motherhood card. She insisted that Victoria’s fervent wish was to remain under her mother’s care. Since she never let the girl out of her sight or allowed her to speak privately, it was impossible to contradict the duchess. So the princess remained at Kensington Palace.

The duchess did exploit the confirmation to try once again to dismiss Lehzen, arguing that Victoria no longer needed a governess and Lehzen was an improper person to be a member of the heir presumptive’s household. Fortunately, both King William and King Leopold were fully aware of how important Lehzen was to Victoria’s health and happiness, and on this issue they were able to prevail. Nonetheless, in one of the many hectoring and pious letters she addressed in these years to her increasingly mulish daughter, the Duchess of Kent begged Victoria to remember her position and treat Lehzen as a servant, not a friend.

Now that she had officially “come out,” the Princess Victoria was more frequently at court, and her life was enlivened by the steady stream of princely suitors who turned up in London. On the subject of Victoria’s prospective husband, as on everything else, the Duchess of Kent and Conroy were at loggerheads with King William and his brothers.

During the summer after her sixteenth birthday, anticipating an even more exacting round of public duties, Victoria lost weight, had trouble sleeping, and suffered from sick headaches and back pain. She pleaded with her mother to be afforded more leisure and privacy. She wished to forego the
next royal progress through England that Conroy had mapped out for her and which she knew offended her uncle the King. William IV had found it necessary to stipulate that when she ventured offshore, the Duchess of Kent had no authority to order the twenty-one-gun salute traditionally reserved for the sovereign.

Victoria’s request to spend a quiet summer was denied, and she was called a foolish, undutiful girl. She completed the tour, a notable success in all her private visits and public appearances. But her vitality, which had so impressed people when she was a little girl, was now at low ebb, and her menstrual cycle became irregular. Amenorrhea is a common symptom in teenage girls under extreme stress, but it complicated the various schemes afoot to marry Victoria off.

Alarmed by her daughter’s increasing intransigence, the Duchess of Kent summoned Baron Stockmar to investigate and give his advice. Stock-mar was his usual forthright self, and he advised the duchess, in essence, that it was in her interest to dismiss Conroy and make peace with her daughter. Conroy had no difficulty in persuading the duchess to ignore Stockmar’s advice.

But Stockmar rang loud warning bells in Brussels, and King Leopold decided that he himself must now take a hand. In September 1835, Leopold and his wife, Louise, came to meet the Kensington Palace party at Rams-gate, a seaside resort in Kent, not far from Dover, that had long been a favorite with the Coburgs. Victoria was ecstatic, since it was over four years since she had last seen her uncle Leopold, and she knew her aunt Louise only from letters. The queen of the Belgians was only seven years older than Victoria and immensely chic, if frail and retiring, especially in the presence of her husband.

King Leopold was one person whom John Conroy could not prevent from speaking alone and in confidence to the princess. On two separate occasions, her uncle talked to Victoria at length. She underlined in her journal that her uncle had given her “very good and valuable advice,” but prudently refrained from specifying what that advice was. Leopold also took a long walk alone on the sands with Sir John Conroy, but made no headway with him at all.

Throughout the visit of the Belgian royal couple, Victoria was, as she liked to write, very merry, but she was struggling against illness and felt extremely unwell. Fever and pain, joined with the sorrow and panic of seeing her most important ally once again sailing across the channel, laid the princess low once King Leopold had left.

Victoria had grown to love and trust her personal physician, Dr. James
Clark, but when the princess took to her bed, Conroy sent Clark back to London with the Belgian minister. When Clark returned, he was permitted to examine the princess only cursorily. Lehzen, nursing Victoria night and day and driven almost frantic with anxiety, tried to describe the princess’s condition to Clark but was told by the duchess to shut her mouth. Then Lehzen was not allowed to know what Clark had diagnosed and prescribed.

At this point, the Duchess of Kent and Sir John Conroy were becoming desperate and willing to take risks. King William was a very sick man, and more and more people in government and court circles had begun to suspect that the Princess Victoria was living under duress. The English royal family and the extended Coburg family were now solidly lined up in opposition to Conroy. Some bold and decisive act was needed to protect Sir John’s situation and prospects.

So, while the Princess Victoria was weak, feverish, and confined to bed, Conroy and the duchess tried to browbeat her into signing a document appointing Conroy as her personal private secretary in the event of her accession to the throne. Supported by Lehzen, Victoria found the strength to refuse. As she later told Lord Melbourne, “They [Mama and Conroy] attempted (for I was still very ill) to make me promise beforehand, which I resisted in spite of my illness, my beloved Lehzen supporting me alone.”

After three days, when the princess was delirious with a very high fever and a racing pulse, it finally occurred to the duchess that Victoria might be in danger of dying. To risk killing the goose that laid the golden eggs was in no one’s interests, so a local doctor was called in as discreetly as possible. He pronounced the princess’s condition to be very grave, and Dr. Clark was recalled. Under his fatherly care, the princess slowly regained her health, remaining at Ramsgate for over five weeks.

Exactly what was wrong with the Princess Victoria in the fall of 1835 has been much discussed. It is possible that there was an element of youthful neuroticism in the illness, as Sir John and the duchess argued. However, Queen Victoria herself was told that she had typhoid, a life-threatening disease. Whatever the diagnosis, Victoria was clearly very ill, and Sir John Conroy and the Duchess of Kent were unprincipled to try to exploit her illness for political gain.

They had also badly miscalculated. Lehzen and Victoria were now openly united in opposition to the Kensington System, and they had found an ally in Clark. The princess knew that she was supported from afar by King Leopold and that, though increasingly debilitated, her uncle king was looking for ways to help her.

King Leopold and Baroness Lehzen were now in secret correspondence.
Fearing for his niece’s safety at the hands of the increasingly reckless Conroy and convinced that his sister Victoire was under some kind of diabolical spell, Leopold had decided that the solution was to get his niece married as soon as possible. He had his candidate picked out: Albert, younger son of his elder brother, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. He wanted Lehzen to urge Victoria to become engaged immediately, even if marriage must wait until both partners were more mature.

“I talk to you at length and through you speak to Victoria,” wrote King Leopold to Baroness Lehzen on May 1, 1836. “For years Victoria has unfortunately been treated as a mere matter for speculation … her youth as well as her future gave ample opportunities for a thousand avaricious schemes … Only two people cared for her for her own sake, that is, you, dear Lehzen and I … and because this was so we were systematically persecuted, for it was particularly feared that the child might grow fond of us, and find in us friends apart … The chief plan has been, since 1828, to drive you away. Had I not stood firm … you would have followed Späth … Had I not come to England last year, and had I not had the courage, in Ramsgate, to tear apart the whole web of intrigue, Clark would never have learned the true state of affairs, and God knows what would have become of the Princess … The Princess’s 17th birthday marks an important stage in her life; only one more year and the possibility of a Regency vanishes like an evil cloud. This is the perfect time for us, who are loyal, to take thought for the future of the dear child.”

King Leopold explained to Baroness Lehzen that Prince Albert, though very young, was the best royal marital prospect that Germany had to offer at that moment. Furthermore, he could personally attest that his nephew had the intelligence and education to serve as Victoria’s adviser once she became Queen. Furthermore, Albert’s “youth was the guarantee for his pure unspoilt nature.”

If Leopold had hoped to find an easy tool for his purpose in Baroness Lehzen, he was wrong. Lehzen was no doubt dazzled by becoming suddenly the confidante of a king, but she too had her ambitions and her plans, and they did not coincide with Leopold’s. On the issue of Victoria’s imminent marriage, Lehzen for once was on the side of the duchess and Conroy She saw Victoria as a second Queen Elizabeth, virgin and independent of male influence. She had no wish to see her darling princess married to a bossy young Coburg protégé of King Leopold and Baron Stockmar.

In any event, the Princess Victoria was charming to her cousin Albert when he came to England at the time of her seventeenth birthday. She thanked her uncle “for the prospect of great happiness you give me in the
person of Dear Albert.” But she offered no immediate prospect of an engagement. Victoria did not believe that she needed a husband to protect her from her mother and Conroy. In a year, she would be eighteen and in a position to protect herself.

The Princess Victoria was still young, but she was not weak. As a small child, she had received a treasure of love and care, and somehow, through ten years of isolation and emotional deprivation, she made the store last. She watched the mother who had loved and protected her as a young child metamorphose into a wicked stepmother, intent on wealth, status, and power, but she did not stop loving and trusting.

At Conroy’s hands she suffered, bowing her head and holding her tongue, but she translated the tyrant’s lessons into survival tactics. When she heard the man who in private treated her like an imbecile proclaiming his devotion to her before large crowds, she silently but irrevocably condemned him as a hypocrite and a villain. Soon it would be her turn to speak and Conroy’s to listen. Soon she would have power.

AFTER HER RETURN
from Ramsgate, Victoria found life at Kensington Palace exceptionally dull and lugubrious. At least she occupied new, airy rooms that the duchess had commandeered against the King’s strict instructions, and she had been prescribed lots of fresh air and few lessons by the amiable Clark.

Her mother was now in open combat with the King, as their dispute over the new suite of rooms at Kensington Palace indicated. In August the Duchess of Kent went further, refusing to accept the invitation to Queen Adelaide’s birthday banquet. The duchess said she would come a few days later if she found it convenient. This act of breathtaking rudeness showed that Victoire Kent believed she could snub the King and Queen of England with impunity, since she herself would soon hold the reins of power.

The duchess did, however, go to Windsor on August 21, 1836, for the feast to celebrate the King’s birthday, and she brought her daughter Victoria with her. When William IV rose to acknowledge the toast to his health, he turned to the Duchess of Kent, who was seated next to him, and launched into a furious diatribe that each of the hundred guests could hear.

“I trust in God that my life may be spared for nine months longer,” the King roared, “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, the Heiress Presumptive of the Crown, and not in the hands of the person now near me, who is surrounded
by evil advisors and who is herself incompetent to act with propriety in the station in which she would be placed! I have no hesitation in saying that I have been insulted—grossly and continually insulted—by that person, but I am determined to endure no longer a course of behavior so disrespectful to me. Amongst many other things, I have particularly to complain of the manner in which that Young Lady has been kept away from my court.”