We Two: Victoria and Albert (17 page)

Lord Palmerston, the foreign secretary, Melbourne’s old friend and contemporary and a most charming man with women, was also a favorite with the Queen. Victoria happily deferred to Palmerston’s vast diplomatic experience and allowed him not only to dictate her official communications with
other European powers, but also to advise her in her private correspondence with her uncle Leopold.

In the evenings and at weekends when the Queen was, as it were, off duty, Melbourne, Palmerston, Melbourne’s sister, Lady Emily Cowper, Lady Cowper’s daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren, together with various members of the charming and rakish Paget clan, were key members of the Queen’s domestic circle. The Pagets were relative newcomers to the English aristocracy and had risen in society in large part because they were handsome, energetic, and fun, and thus invaluable in relieving the tedium of court life, especially for the sovereign.

Virtually all the members of the Queen’s inner set belonged to the Whig aristocracy, as Tory aristocrats were not slow to notice. Whigs and Tories were the two political parties who stood on each side of the aisle in parliament and had taken it in turns to rule England since the seventeenth century. As the nineteenth century progressed, the Whigs decided to call themselves Liberals and the Tories became known as Conservatives, but in the first years of Queen Victoria’s reign, the difference between the two parties was economic and historical rather than ideological. The Whigs were more urban and cosmopolitan and drew more of their income from commerce and industry. Instrumental in securing the Crown of England for William and Mary in 1688, they had also been supportive of the switch from the Stuart to the Hanoverian dynasty. There was an element in the Whig Party, especially outside of parliament, that was enthusiastic about political and social reforms—expanding the franchise, allowing Catholics, dissenting Protestants, and Jews to take public office and attend the universities, regulating the savage labor practices in the industrial sector, and so on.

The Tories were identified with the interests of the landowners, and they were the party of the political diehards who hated all things foreign, including ideas, and hankered after the good old days when Charles I ruled England by divine right. However, the leaders of both Tory and Whig parties were part of the landed aristocracy, and virtually every member of the House of Commons as well as of the House of Lords was a landowner with a title in his family if not to his name. Together Whigs and Tories formed the small political oligarchy that ruled England, and the policies each government followed when it came to power related more to the exigencies of the moment than to fixed political principles. The parliamentary Whigs and Tories were united by one fundamental conviction: that it was their birthright to rule England.

In the English royal family it was traditional for the King to be a Tory and
the Prince of Wales to be a Whig, but the choice of party was a matter of personal antagonism not political ideology. Of the seven sons of George III, five were Tories but two were Whigs, including Queen Victoria’s dead father, the Duke of Kent. He had become affiliated with and supported by the Whigs in no small part because his brother Cumberland was affiliated with and supported by the Tories. The circle that had formed around the Duchess of Kent at Kensington Palace between her husband’s death in 1819 and her daughter’s accession in 1837 was also composed of Whigs, largely because George IV had turned Tory when he became king and William IV and his brother Cumberland had always been Tories, and the duchess hated her brothers-in-law.

The fact that, at the time Victoria came to the throne, the government was Whig under Lord Melbourne was largely a matter of luck. The Tories had ruled England almost continuously during the previous five decades, and Melbourne was a very reluctant prime minister. But luck, rather than her parents’ affiliation with the Whig Party, proved definitive. The young Queen became a fervent Whig mostly because Lord Melbourne was a Whig, and Lehzen—who may actually have had some political ideas—was a Whig, and they were her closest and most trusted friends.

WHETHER WHIGS OR TORIES
, the people who gathered around Victoria in the first three years of her reign were loyal servants of the English Crown and intensely protective of the young Queen herself. Those who had seen the damage done to English political institutions and English society by the madness of George III, the profligacy of George IV, and the stupidity of William IV knew that the monarchy must start a clean page if it was to survive. Observers at court such as Princess Lieven, wife to the Russian ambassador, and Charles Greville could see that Victoria was a hot-blooded Hanoverian like her father and also a woman who needed a man to lean on, just like her mother. Sensitive to the erotic undercurrents in the Queen’s attachment to him, Lord Melbourne knew that his most important duty to the new monarch was to keep her virginal image intact until she married. His own conduct must be beyond reproach.

But Melbourne and the older members of the Whig set that clustered around Queen Victoria before her marriage were in no way prototypic examples of the sexual values we have come to call “Victorian.” They had lived through the regency and the reign of George IV. Lord Conyngham, Victoria’s first lord Chamberlain, the man who came to tell her that she was queen, was the son of George IV’s last and most rapacious mistress. Conyngham
installed his mistress as housekeeper at Buckingham Palace, and was observed embracing her. Reform was in the air in the English court, the sins of the past were being swept under the rug, but the new standards of housekeeping were still far from rigorous.

William Lamb, second Viscount Melbourne, had for thirty years led a life as tragic as it was dissolute, and his reform barely preceded Victoria’s accession. It was thanks to the talents in salon and boudoir of his mother, Elizabeth Milbanke Lamb, that the Lamb family was raised to an English peerage. As the second Lord Melbourne once remarked, his mother was “a remarkable woman, a devoted mother, an excellent wife—but not chaste, not chaste.” Elizabeth Milbanke Lamb’s four younger children, including the future prime minister, were all considered far too intelligent and handsome to have been sired by her husband. The resemblance between the adult Lord Melbourne and his mother’s intimate friend Lord Egremont was striking, and it was rumored that the Prince of Wales himself could be the father of the younger Lambs.

The young Lambs were brought up in the sexually anarchic set of the fifth Duke of Devonshire, his first wife, Georgiana, and his mistress (later second wife) Lady Elizabeth Foster, and their children and nieces and nephews. William Lamb knew Lady Caroline Ponsonby Duchess Georgiana’s niece, when they were children, fell in love with her, and married her. Both were brilliant, fascinating, neurotic adults who found promiscuity normal. He had a taste for sadomasochism, which she found difficult to satisfy. She liked to dress as a boy and took lovers, most famously Lord Byron. After the poet threw her over, Lady Caroline sent Byron a letter, enclosing a tuft of blood-stained pubic hair she had hacked off with a scissors. She went mad and had to be confined. Throughout his wife’s short and tragic life, Melbourne remained kind and loving, but he took several mistresses, including (or so her husband claimed in court) the famous author and women’s rights activist Lady Caroline Norton. After he reluctantly agreed to become prime minister, Melbourne was twice named in divorce proceedings, but since nothing could be proved against him in court, he managed to survive the scandal.

Lady Emily Lamb, Melbourne’s sister, followed happily in the footsteps of their mother. She too married a rich, dull, complaisant husband, Peter, fifth Earl Cowper, gave him a legitimate heir, and then found her pleasure elsewhere. Lady Emily Cowper was part of the notorious set that surrounded George IV as prince regent. She was rumored to have had a series of lovers, including the prince regent himself (who reportedly had sired one of her brothers), though she was careful to ensure that there were no compromising
documents. Her elder daughter, Minnie, was said to be the fruit of a long liaison with Lord Palmerston.

How much Queen Victoria knew of the past lives of her dear friends Lord Melbourne, Lord Palmerston, and Lady Emily Cowper is not known. Probably a highly sanitized version of their lives was told to her, in dribs and drabs, as needed. Lehzen, who was close to Lord Melbourne and had her ear to the ground for court gossip, probably knew a good deal. What she decided to pass on to her royal mistress in the dead of night as they talked through the hole connecting their bedrooms, we shall never know.

THE FIRST EIGHTEEN
months of her reign were a triumph, but then Victoria began to feel the strain. The novelty of her situation had worn off. The company of men twice her age who were too gouty to dance and snored in concerts was no longer quite so much fun. A line of thousands of men waiting to kiss her hand became an ordeal. She felt exposed at court, the subject of endless gossip and nasty cartoons in the press. Of course, she had Lehzen, her oldest friend, her accomplice, her spy, and her amanuensis. Lehzen was essential. All the same, as a mere Hanoverian baroness with no official position, Lehzen had necessarily to remain in the shadows.

Victoria’s mother should have been her daughter’s protector and adviser but instead subjected the Queen to an unending stream of annoyance and criticism. The duchess would not dismiss Sir John Conroy from her service. She protected him fiercely, refusing point-blank to allow anyone to audit the financial records over which Sir John had long presided. She expected Victoria to pay her debts, which in the end amounted to some eighty thousand pounds, without any inquiry into their nature, and could see no way to manage on an income that Victoria had increased by eight thousand pounds a year.

It was, as Victoria recorded in her diary,
“torture!”
to be obliged to live with her mother. And yet, as an unmarried woman still legally underage, she could not live alone without causing a scandal. Leopold, Stockmar, and Melbourne were for once unanimous in opining that if Victoria moved her mother out of the palace, the monarchy could fall. So the Queen lodged her mother in apartments as far away from her own as possible and saw her only in public. This studied neglect only fueled the duchess’s rage. What can you possibly have against dear Sir John, who is so completely devoted to me? asked the duchess. Take care you do not make Lord Melbourne King of England, warned the duchess.
Oliver Twist
by that vulgar Mr. Dickens is no reading for a young person, much less a queen, opined the duchess. It is
quite unbecoming for a woman to take so much wine at dinner, snapped the duchess. If only you would do your duty by your family and the nation and marry your cousin Albert, sighed the duchess.

In 1839 Victoria made some important mistakes that left her tired and disillusioned. She allowed the rumor to circulate that the unmarried Lady Flora Hastings, whose abdomen was suspiciously swollen, was pregnant— perhaps by Sir John Conroy! Lady Flora had been no friend to the Queen in the Kensington Palace days, but medical examination proved that she was a virgin, and within months she died of liver cancer.

As the false pregnancy scandal was coming to a boil, the Queen also caused a constitutional crisis known as the Bedchamber Affair. Victoria took on the whole English political establishment by intransigently citing her royal prerogative to appoint or retain her ladies of the bedchamber, regardless of their political affiliations. She did so in order to keep Melbourne by her side as prime minister, and she succeeded. The leader of the Tory Party, Sir Robert Peel, a cold, silent, scholarly man the Queen could not bear, felt obliged to stay out of office. Melbourne’s Whig government limped on. The newspapers were merciless in their critique of “Little Vic.” She had grossly insulted Lady Flora, a blameless lady of high birth. She had dared to challenge the balance of power between the two political parties and to assert her right to the same royal power and privilege last enjoyed by George III. People no longer gathered to cheer the Queen in the streets. When she went to the races at Ascot, she was hissed by two ladies of the court, and cries of “Mrs. Melbourne” were heard.