Childhood at Court, 1819-1914 (6 page)

The inner circle at court who saw the Princess Royal could testify that she was thriving. Outside, people were less certain. The Queen’s Lady of the Bedchamber, Sarah, Lady Lyttelton, was alarmed at (and partly convinced by) the spate of rumours sweeping London – that the baby heir to the throne was blind, deaf, dumb, an imbecile, or deformed. As nobody outside the family and household ever saw her, public imagination was bound to run riot. Not until she strolled through the grounds of Windsor Castle one summer day did she come across a baby being taken out in her pram. The little blue-eyed girl, ‘absurdly like the Queen’, was evidently a fine child in every way. Lady Lyttelton suggested that she should be seen by the public. She was therefore taken for regular rides in the carriage, clapping her tiny hands and chuckling as the crowds pressed close, captivated by the chubby figure in white muslin dress and Quaker bonnet. Lady Lyttelton remarked with amusement that before long she would have seen every pair of teeth in the kingdom.

Unfortunately, after a few months the Princess was not so well. By late summer she was unable to digest her food, lost weight, cut her teeth with difficulty, and cried a great deal. The blame was largely laid at the door of Mrs Southey, a hypochondriac who was rather too fond of cheese and beer. Dr Clark’s remedy for the baby was ‘soothing medicine’, a solution containing laudanum, which made her pale and lethargic.

At that time drugs, medicines and restoratives were prescribed for children to an extent which seems to have bordered on the reckless. Doctors frequently recommended wine, and nurses were liberal in making their young charges take pills or powder, a dose of brimstone and treacle, castor oil, liquorice, or a spoonful of Godfrey’s cordial. The latter was a mixture of laudanum and syrup, easily purchased from any chemist over the counter, and an effective tranquillizer, reducing children to stupefaction for hours on end. Sometimes the hours were, literally, endless. According to a report of 1844, ‘great numbers of children perish, either suddenly from an overdose, or, as more commonly happens, slowly, painfully and insidiously.’
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A few households had the sense to ban ‘Godfrey’s cordial’, but less wisely mixed large quantities of gin with their children’s milk.

The Queen’s second pregnancy was more difficult than her first, and her state of depression was exacerbated by Pussy’s problems. ‘Till the end of August she was such a magnificent, strong fat child,’ she noted with concern, ‘that it is a great grief to see her so thin, pale and changed.’
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Dr Clark suggested various changes to her diet to make her put on weight; asses’ milk and chicken broth, cream in her cereal, and butter on her rusks, were all tried. The resulting mixture was so rich for her that she became more sick than ever, and still lost weight.

By this time the Queen’s confinement was approaching. Twice during October the doctors thought she might give birth prematurely. On 9 November, at 10.50 p.m., ‘a fine large boy’ was born. The Queen admitted in her journal (2 December) that ‘my sufferings were really very severe, and I don’t know what I should have done, but for the great comfort and support my beloved Albert was to me.’
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Pussy was ‘terrified & not at all pleased with her little brother’.
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The new heir to the throne was created Prince of Wales on 4 December 1841, and christened Albert Edward in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, on 25 January 1842. Handel’s
Hallelujah Chorus
was played on the organ, and the Duke of Wellington carried the Sword of State. Lord Melbourne, writing on 1 December, approved the choice of his maternal grandfather’s name; ‘
Edward
is a good English appellation, and has a certain degree of popularity attached to it from ancient recollections.’
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The Queen was delighted with her eldest son; ‘our little boy is a wonderfully strong and large child, with very large dark blue eyes, a finely formed but somewhat large nose, and a pretty little mouth; I
hope
and
pray
he may be like his dearest Papa.’
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From the first, he enjoyed perfect health and ‘crowing spirits’, with none of his sister’s digestive problems.

Prince Albert was sure that slackness and ignorance among the nursery staff were almost entirely responsible for his daughter’s ill-health; and Lehzen, he maintained, was the chief culprit. He resented her for her possessive attitude towards the Queen, and though no admirer of the Conroy, who had long since been ‘persuaded to retire’, never forgave her for coming between the Queen and the Duchess of Kent, who had long since become reconciled. He had no faith either in Dr Clark, who he knew only told the Queen what she wanted to hear and – Albert suspected – supplemented his salary with secret payments from the firms which supplied the expensive medicines and diets he prescribed. Baron Christian von Stockmar, a physician from Coburg who also served as confidential adviser and father figure to the sovereign and her husband, had warned them of Clark’s incompetence.

The room was kept too hot because Mrs Southey, the Lady Superintendent, was anaemic, suffered from poor circulation, and would accept no contradiction from Mrs Roberts, the more enlightened nurse. Lehzen had no official place in the nursery, although her friendship with Queen Victoria allowed her to do virtually as she pleased. Albert frequently found her there, holding Pussy in her arms and breathing caraway seeds over her, gossiping with Mrs Southey who sat wrapped in shawls, warming her feet in front of a roaring fire, with all the windows shut. This was contrary to the recommendations of Stockmar, who had insisted that temperatures in the nursery should be kept down in order to discourage germs and sickness.

Lehzen had an ardent defender in King Leopold, who had tried to get her naturalized as a British subject so she could attend Privy Council meetings and become the Queen’s public adviser, an ill-considered plan only thwarted by Stockmar’s intervention. Stockmar could see all too clearly that Lehzen was outstaying her welcome and coming between husband and wife. He and Lord Melbourne both advised Albert in August 1841 to use the change of government as an excuse for demanding her resignation, but Albert did not have the heart to do so, partly as he feared an ‘exciting scene’ from his heavily pregnant wife, and partly as King Leopold was staying at Windsor at the time.

Shortly after Christmas, Albert took the Queen to Claremont for a few days. She was suffering from post-natal depression and needed a change of scene. They were recalled to Buckingham Palace in mid-January by an urgent message from Stockmar: Pussy was worse. Her parents rushed up to the nursery to see her, and found her looking very thin and white.

Albert dreaded the worst. Was his daughter fatally stricken with consumption, or some similar illness? A difference of opinion between him and Mrs Roberts made the Queen lose her temper. She snapped at him, defending the nurse and telling her husband that he wanted to drive her out of the nursery while he as good as murdered their child. He turned ashen with horror, shouted, ‘I must have patience!’ and walked out of the room, slamming the door. Later there was a violent row between husband and wife, which ended in the distraught Queen telling him angrily that she wished she had never married him.

Verbal communication being impossible, Albert retired to his study to regain his composure, then picked up his pen and wrote the Queen a message telling her bluntly that Dr Clark had ‘mismanaged’ their daughter and poisoned her with calomel, and her mother had starved her; ‘I shall have nothing more to do with it; take the child away and do as you like and if she dies you will have it on your conscience.’
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In desperation the Queen turned towards Stockmar, acting as devil’s advocate. She begged him to tell Lehzen that there had been ‘a little misunderstanding’. Albert saw that the time had come to resolve the festering situation once and for all. Lehzen, he told Stockmar in terms which were positively vitriolic for one of his restrained nature, was ‘a crazy, common, stupid intriguer, obsessed with lust of power, who regards herself as a demigod, and anyone who refuses to acknowledge her as such, as a criminal.’
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The Queen, he went on, was a fine character ‘but warped in many respects by wrong upbringing’.

Written messages continued between husband and wife, whose tempers were at such a pitch that they dared not see each other for a few days, with Stockmar acting as peace envoy. At length the Queen gave in. The nursery management should be reformed, she agreed, and Lehzen – with whom, the Queen admitted, she discussed very little now – was to be given her notice.

In July Albert told the Queen that the Baroness wished to leave in two months’ time and retire for the sake of her health. Accepting a pension, much of which she spent on establishing her brothers’ children in careers, she slipped away in September without saying goodbye, so as not to cause a scene, and settled with her sister in Bückeburg. Queen and Baroness continued to correspond regularly, and the Queen met her briefly on subsequent visits to Germany.*

Mrs Southey left the royal nursery soon afterwards by mutual agreement. On 26 December 1841 she offered her resignation to take effect as soon as somebody else could be found. She did not feel ‘equal’ to her duties, was frequently homesick and wanted more time to visit her friends. The Queen and Albert agreed that she had been plainly inadequate, and were not sorry to see her go.

In March 1842 the Queen complained to Lord Melbourne that the children were being left to ‘low people’, and surrounded by a quarrelsome atmosphere. Melbourne agreed that a lady of high rank would be more suitable: she would have greater authority, and be less likely to have her head turned by such a position than somebody from the middle class. The following month Lady Lyttelton was appointed as new governess, in charge of the royal nursery. Born Lady Sarah Spencer, she had married William Henry Lyttelton in March 1813. He succeeded to the title of Baron Lyttelton in 1828, and died in 1837, leaving her with five children. The following year she became Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Victoria.

Old-fashioned in dress and outlook, she was very tolerant of and patient with children. She did not believe in punishments, on the grounds that ‘one is never
sure
they are fully understood by the child as belonging to the naughtiness’.
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The Queen disapproved of her High Church views, and would never permit discussion of ecclesiastical subjects; and Lady Lyttelton’s views on Albert’s games of chess on Sundays tended towards the Puritanical. Otherwise there were no major disagreements between the royal employers and their new employee.

Her first encounter with the children was not encouraging. At first sight of her, Pussy screamed so loudly, that nothing would pacify her short of Lady Lyttelton leaving the room. Though the little girl remained ‘very grave and distant’ towards her for a while, she soon rewarded the governess with her affection and respect, and the nickname ‘Laddle’. Much of the trouble, Lady Lyttelton was convinced, was as a result of the Princess being ‘over-watched and over-doctored’.

That the Princess Royal was a regular subject of attention gave the governess grounds for some irritation, as she noted in a letter written a few months after her appointment:

I wish there were no portraits being done of the Princess Royal, and that all her fattest and biggest and most forbidding looking relations, some with bald heads, some with great moustaches, some with black bushy eyebrows, some with staring, distorted, short-sighted eyes, did not always come to see her at once and make her naughty and her governess cross. Poor little body! She is always expected to be good, civil and sensible.
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Almost every visiting dignitary to Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace had to come and admire this delightful child with fair curly hair and bright blue eyes, her parents being only too pleased to show her off. The Duke of Wellington, ever the courtier, pretended to treat her like an adult, bowing low and kissing her hand. Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, with his rolling eyes and loud, harsh laugh, fascinated her, and let her sit on his knee while she sucked a huge bloodstone hanging from his watch chain. She learnt to speak fluently very quickly, and distracted her doting mother when she was trying to concentrate on state papers. Ministers would find her crawling under their feet or pulling herself up on their trouser-legs.

The year 1842 was one of ‘respite’. The Queen became pregnant later that summer, but was relieved that the year would pass without her having another child; and with Lehzen gone, personal relations improved rapidly. In later years she would tell her family that as babies her two eldest ‘difficult’ children caused her more trouble than the other seven put together. Child psychologists of the time, had they existed, would have certainly attributed the trouble to the power struggles in the nursery which were now thankfully over. With Lady Lyttelton in charge, and the motherly Mrs Sly in place of Mrs Roberts, who had barely been on speaking terms with Prince Albert, harmony reigned.

On 25 April 1843 the Queen had a second daughter, named Alice. The Princess Royal, she noted, was ‘very tender with her little sister, who is a pretty and large baby and we think will be the beauty of the family’.
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‘Fat Alice’ was nicknamed Fatima by the parents. The Queen recovered rapidly, became bored with lying-in, and got up a few days later. Albert, the household noticed, spent less time playing the part of the adoring husband than formerly. At Christmas the previous year, he had not been so eager to push his wife’s ice-chair round the frozen lake, had less time to spare for card games or charades in the evenings, and was impatient to get back to his study so he could catch up with working on state papers.

Nevertheless he could always make time to spend with his children. Like his wife, he had suffered from a lonely, difficult childhood. The younger of two boys, his early days had been scarred by the banishment of his adored mother for adultery, and the hurtful sarcasm of his even less faithful father. The elder son, Ernest, was a happy-go-lucky young man who had much in common with his namesake father, not least a taste for dissipation and the morals of an alley cat. With his introspective nature, Albert bore the psychological scars for life. Later he told his eldest daughter that he ‘could not bear to think of his childhood, he had been so unhappy and miserable, and had many a time wished himself out of this world’.
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