LITMIR.BIZ

      ‘Fresh and innocent as the flowers in her own garden’

      ROOKS NESTED IN Kensington Gardens during Victoria’s childhood: only in 1880, with the destruction of a grove of 700 elm trees, did they depart.¹ There were nuthatches among the beeches and horse chestnuts, jays too. To the passer-by it was a sylvan place, site of that ‘country’ palace acquired by William III and enriched by George I, ‘[full] of memories and legends; of notable or fantastic figures of the past’.² Two centuries ago, Kensington Palace was recognisably that ‘pleasant place, surrounded by beautiful gardens, [in which] a little girl was brought up by her loving mother’, imagined with a heavy dollop of syrup by children’s author E. Nesbit in 1897.³ ‘Her teachers instructed her in music and languages, in history and all the things that children learn at school,’ Nesbit told readers of Royal Children of English History. ‘Her mother taught her goodness and her duty. There she grew up fresh and innocent as the flowers in her own garden, living a secluded life, like a princess in an enchanted palace.’

      In Victoria’s own version of her childhood, in which memories of the struggle against Conroy and the Duchess tinctured her picture of the whole, her secluded life included little enchantment. ‘I led a very unhappy life as a child,’ she would write to her eldest daughter in 1858:⁴ her current state, as queen, wife and mother, quick to command, reluctant to be instructed, was infinitely preferable to those years of conflict. Not for her the poet’s claim on her behalf that, ‘She only knew her childhood’s flowers/ Were happier pageantries!’⁵ Nearly forty years on, careful to avoid excessive censure of her mother, she attributed that unhappiness to loneliness. She described herself as ‘[having] no scope for my very violent feelings of affection – [I] 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 or confidential feeling with my mother … and did not know what a happy domestic life was!’ Free from the shackles of filial piety, the historian need apportion blame less sparingly. And yet the Duchess of Kent was not deliberately the villainess she can all too easily be made to appear. She later attributed her erroneous ways to thoughtlessness, ‘believing blindly, … [and] acting without reflexion’.⁶

      Her position was not conducive to confidence. Beyond the spangled purlieus of the court of George IV, there was a ramshackle bravado to London in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Barrack-room bawdy and lusty xenophobia found vigorous expression in a popular culture of splenetic irreverence. Caricaturists targeted the royal family: their sex lives, their gargantuan appetites, their overspending, their all-pervasive folly. Short of money, friends and affection, dependent on the good will and handouts of her brother Leopold, and the tolerance of the new King, which was grudging in the extreme, the Duchess of Kent lacked a champion. She did not look far to fill the vacancy.

      Conroy was an accomplished flirt. An indifferent soldier, he owed something of his military advancement to assiduous courtship of commanding officers’ wives. His relationship with the plaintive royal widow is unlikely to have extended to a full-scale sexual liaison: from the outset the Duchess rated too highly her probable future as queen mother. Conroy’s approach to the mistress whose experience of happy marriage had been so fleeting was at best manipulative, at worst bullying: she apologised to him on one occasion for being ‘just an old stupid goose’.⁷ A foxy sort of sexiness undoubtedly leavened his tough love, as did the same line in dark-hued melodrama which also won him the affection of the Duke of Kent’s youngest surviving sister Princess Sophia, a neighbour at Kensington Palace: Conroy exploited the unmarried princess of failing eyesight without scruple as an easy source of ready cash and delved deep into her purse. But while he delighted Sophia with gossip,⁸ he kept the Duchess on tenterhooks by stoking that paranoia to which the uncertainty of her position so easily tended. Her response was equally myopic. Victoria herself claimed later that Conroy had unnerved her mother with conspiracy theories centred on the wickedest of her wicked uncles, Ernest, Duke of Cumberland. Since Victoria stood between the throne and Cumberland, the Duke must be hellbent on her removal. It was strong meat, to rational minds perhaps too strong, as luridly coloured as contemporary lampoons, credible only within the context of what Leopold had described as ‘a family whose members hate one another with an inconceivable bitterness’.⁹ Like all Conroy’s schemes, it aimed at isolating the Duchess and her daughter from their royal relatives. While the steely Irishman with the cleft chin and, in his portraiture, a suggestion of sardonic disdain in those hooded dark eyes, prevented anyone else from usurping his own position of influence, he appeared in the guise of protector. As if to confirm Conroy’s whisperings, George IV stonily ignored the fledgling household in Kensington.

      The Duchess’s dread of her husband’s family grew. When George IV did invite mother and daughter to Windsor, in 1826, she was convinced that the ageing monarch – corseted, enamelled, bewigged and panting – intended to kidnap Victoria. Stubbornly she defended the princess’s seclusion. Over time she justified her line as shielding Victoria from her uncles’ moral degeneracy. If her policy were immoderate – surely, in preventing Victoria from attending the coronation of William IV and ‘poor wishy-washy’ Queen Adelaide, as the latter’s doctor described her, she overreached herself – we understand something of her anxiety. She forbade the company of cousins too, including George of Cambridge and George of Cumberland, contemporaries of equal rank; only Sir John’s daughters, Victoire and Jane Conroy, were sanctioned as playmates. Unsurprisingly Victoria learnt to hate them. Instead she drew emotional sustenance from Lehzen. Companionship proved more elusive. Long hours she beguiled with an extensive collection of elaborately dressed wooden dolls. Velvet- and satin-primped ciphers of an imaginary world in which she existed autonomously and among friends, they represented an alternative reality – inspired by history lessons and those performances of bel canto opera at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, which became a sole legitimate outlet for all her pent-up Hanoverian emotionalism: the young Victoria was stage-struck, in love with dancers and singers. Easy to discern a symbolic dimension to the Duchess’s grey parrot: sharp-beaked, dingy-hued and prone to repeating confidences. More satisfactory a playmate was the spaniel Dash with whom Sir George Hayter painted Victoria in 1835: until Victoria adopted him, he too had belonged to the Duchess, a present from Conroy.

      In truth she was never alone. Central to what Leopold deplored as ‘the Kensington system’ devised by Conroy were constant shadowing and surveillance. The princess was not permitted to walk downstairs without someone holding her hand; the diary she began in 1832 was submitted to her mother’s inspection (and correction); her public appearances were minutely directed and restricted to the extent that even The Times questioned her physical fitness, repeating rumours of disability; at night she slept in her mother’s bedroom. Little wonder that Feodore, who in 1828 escaped to marry a landless princeling she had met twice, remembered these as ‘years of imprisonment’. (For Victoria, further isolation and even cruelty would follow Feodore’s departure.) Notable among the long-term effects of the Duchess’s cocooning was ‘Vickelchen’s’ need always to be the person of first consequence and an ever more determined self-will. Happily for her, both were outcomes her future role assured, though neither ought to be considered prerequisites. By the time Victoria in her turn sought to entrap her own daughters at her side, her motive personal convenience, Feodore was dead, unable to point out the irony.

      Before queenship, an education. In April 1823, one month short of her fourth birthday, Victoria received her first instruction from the Reverend George Davys, a Lincolnshire clergyman of low-key Toryism and unassertive evangelism: basic skills of literacy and numeracy and the discreet but firm erasure of that trace of a German accent which the child had inevitably acquired.¹⁰ ‘I was not fond of learning as a little child,’ she remembered later, ‘and baffled every attempt to teach me my letters up to 5 years old – when I consented to learn them by their being written down before me.’¹¹ Victoria’s reluctance notwithstanding, Davys’s advent spelt the beginning of a programme of learning which would become a source of pride for the Duchess, and for her daughter the means by which, with careful stage-management, she discovered her splendid destiny.

      Although the Duchess’s

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