LITMIR.BIZ

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Augustus and Adolphus, in Shelley’s estimation the ‘dregs of their dull race’. Mired in debt and bawdy, these flaunting adulterers were lethargic in matters of duty, slatternly and discreditable, tarnished to the extent of accusations of incest and murder – a boon to caricaturists: with their wigs, pockmarks, gluttony and gout not even ornamental. With hindsight they would be regarded as a nadir for Britain’s monarchy, ‘a race of small German breast-bestarred wanderers’, as anti-monarchist MP Charles Bradlaugh later described the Hanoverians.¹ For the high-minded if alarmist Prince Albert, they would provide an enduring cautionary tale.

      Of the seven possible progenitors in the aftermath of Charlotte’s death, William, Edward and Adolphus responded to the siren call of a regal vacancy and an anxious Parliament prepared to barter their debts for an heir (Frederick and Ernest were already married). Hastily they allied themselves to a trio of uninspiring Protestant German princesses: all lacked even the misplaced high spirits of the Regent’s estranged wife. In April 1819, it was Adolphus’s wife, Augusta, Duchess of Cambridge, who gave birth to a healthy son. He was christened George. For seven weeks this infant prince of Cambridge was alone eligible in his generation to inherit the throne of England. But Adolphus was the youngest of the married brothers. Senior in precedence were William, Duke of Clarence (later William IV), described after his death as ‘not … a prince of brilliant and commanding talents’;² Edward, Duke of Kent, of martinet stiffness, black-dyed hair, surprising philanthropy and tender-hearted devotion to his bride; and Ernest, Duke of Cumberland: emaciated, charmless and acerbic, but more sensitive than history has allowed to his status as England’s most hated man.

      And so from the outset Alexandrina Victoria of Kent was a person of consequence. Born as dawn broke over the southeast corner of Kensington Palace on 24 May 1819, in a room whose costly refurbishment her fifty-one-year-old father had completed only two days previously, she immediately displaced her Cambridge cousin in the line of succession. Sources disagree on when she herself first learnt it. An aura of consequence – occasionally cultivated, occasionally insisted upon – was an attribute she would never lose.

      She would become one of England’s most vigorous monarchs. As a baby, her father described her as ‘a model of strength’: ‘more of a pocket Hercules, than a pocket Venus’.³ Perhaps something of the urgency and precariousness of that scramble which preceded her birth remained with her life long. It is discernible in her later conviction of her own eminence, her retreat behind that impenetrable shield, ‘Queen of England’: she may not have forgotten that her queenship was so nearly that of her older cousin, Charlotte, or indeed young George. At different levels, hers is the response of the lottery-winning poor relation and, at the same time, simply one manifestation of a remarkably forceful nature. Over time much of her public life, with its parade of accessible virtues, represented a deliberate revision of the indignity of her pre-history and the tattered record of her immediate forebears. Fanciful to claim that she was born to right the record: her selfishness and sense of entitlement were equal to those of any of her father’s siblings. But guided by those nearest to her, and prompted by the memory of uncles and aunts set on lives of eighteenth-century excess, as well as her own impulsive if inconsistent craving to exploit her position for good, she would redefine the face and function of British monarchy. She embraced an outlook some have labelled middle class and did so with wholehearted sincerity, as much a stranger to real middle-class mores as she was to those of the aristocracy she mistrusted or the Highland tenantry she determinedly idealised. Victoria’s reign reasserted – and successfully bequeathed to her successors – what her contemporary Mrs Oliphant described as ‘that tradition of humdrum virtue’ established by her grandfather George III:⁴ in that respect she became in fact as well as appearance, as Lady Granville described her in her infancy, ‘le roi Georges in petticoats’.⁵

      ‘Plump as a partridge’, this child whom J. M. Barrie memorialised in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens as ‘the most celebrated baby of the Gardens’⁶ emerged into a world of confinement. That too would persist life long. Although as queen, Victoria flexed her muscles constitutionally and unconstitutionally and was not averse to threatening abdication when it suited her, she never with any conviction sought to escape her restrictive destiny. Her status as queen defined her in her own eyes: it was she who bandied the title ‘doyenne of sovereigns’, its unnuanced orotundity indicative of her later complacency. Sovereignty was in two senses her legacy from her father, for the Duke of Kent was not only royal but romantic too. He had accepted without question the gypsy prophecy told to him on Malta that his unborn child would become a great queen. History has frequently agreed.

      For all his dreaming, her father was injudicious. His frequent good intentions – his scheme to educate the sons of the military and his support for Catholic emancipation, for example – could not outweigh that half-crazy disciplinarianism which caused gossiping diarist and Clerk to the Privy Council, Charles Greville, to dismiss him as ‘the greatest rascal that ever went unhung’.⁷ His duchess too was not clever. Society labelled her a stupid foreigner, ‘the most mediocre person it would be possible to meet’.⁸ Ditto the woman who in 1824 became Victoria’s governess, a caraway seed-chewing Hanoverian Lutheran of sharp features and sharper self-estimation called Louise Lehzen. Both women were singularly determined, invested in good measure with the instinct for survival, the one spikily conscious of rank, the other given to jaundice, headaches and nervous debilitation; equal in their firmness and jealously exacting. Determination and adamantine self-will became enduring characteristics of their charge, successfully checked by neither. Lehzen at least made Victoria’s wellbeing her lodestar. Her reward was love and, for an interlude, a front row seat in her pupil’s unfolding drama.

      Victoire, Duchess of Kent was a striking-looking widow of assured if showy dress sense, pink-cheeked and garrulous, but slow to master English with confidence. Until his death in 1814, her unappealing first husband, Charles Emich of Leiningen, had ruled without distinction, or the appearance of common sense, a territory in Lower Franconia much depleted by Napoleon. Leiningen’s dark-haired widow, allied to Edward, Duke of Kent in 1818, as England still reeled from Princess Charlotte’s death, quitted Germany with a son and daughter of pleasing aspect, Charles and Feodore; she took with her too the memory of financial hardship and emotional neglect. Her second marriage offered no respite from the former and so acquired a peripatetic character, husband and wife constantly travelling in the interests of economy. Happily the Duke of Kent, whose governorship of Gibraltar in 1802, described as a ‘reign of terror’,⁹ included sentencing a man to a flogging of 900 lashes,¹⁰ regarded his duchess unequivocally as ‘a young and charming Princess’¹¹ and implored her quite sincerely to ‘love me as I love you’.¹² For just this happiness had he set aside his kind and comfortable mistress of three decades, Julie de St Laurent – that and the hope that Parliament would increase his allowance handsomely. (Parliament decided otherwise, happy to act shabbily.) Since the Duke died of pneumonia, reputedly caught from wet boots, on 23 January 1820 – on an extended sojourn to the seaside at Sidmouth, which offered bracing sea breezes at modest rates – Alexandrina Victoria cannot have remembered her parents’ wedded bliss: she was eight months old. Their happiness found reflections in her own spectacularly loving marriage. In the meantime, she grew up to share the sentiments of her aunt, Elizabeth, Landgravine of Hesse-Homburg, that her parents’ ‘domestic comfort … broke up’ was ‘a very sad, sad thing’.¹³

      Infancy prevented her from recognising that atmosphere of petty contentiousness which hung, like the odour of penury, about the large apartment in Kensington Palace. No public rejoicing greeted her birth: like his brothers, her father was not popular. Superstitious and in the throes of a late-in-life infatuation with his much younger wife, the Duke of Kent may have been convinced that his daughter was a sovereign-in-waiting – as Edith Sitwell described her, ‘conceived, born and bred … to mount the summits of greatness’;¹⁴ he was wise enough mostly to disguise that hope. ‘I should deem it the height of presumption to believe it probable that a future heir to the Crown of England would spring from me,’ he asserted with questionable frankness.¹⁵ More sober counsels, the Regent among them, anticipated an heir from the Duke of Clarence

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