Queen's House (18 page)

In 1835 the King decided that he would like to live in the Palace after all; Queen Adelaide had probably been overwhelmed by its splendour.

The King wanted to take over the Palace as soon as possible. Blore, in desperation, asked for an additional grant, since he could not possibly complete the work in two or three months without employing extra workers. Duncannon therefore told the King's secretary, Sir Herbert Taylor, that he could not hand the building over unfinished. There was a further delay after it was decided to light the forecourt and some of the interior with gas.

It was not until May 1837 that Duncannon was able to hand over the
building to the King, requesting the appointment of a Clerk of the Works. In fact, William IV and Queen Adelaide were never to occupy Buckingham Palace.

Duncannon's organizing ability had been exceptional. He kept his eye on every detail of the work at Buckingham Palace, yet never became bogged down. The diarist, Creevey, who stayed with him at Bessborough, his country home in Ireland, gives a revealing description of Lord and Lady Duncannon sitting at home at Bessborough, choosing the chintz for Queen Adelaide's sitting room at Buckingham Palace. Duncannon rejected those chosen by his wife, Mary, and Creevey, preferring the cheapest.

… as … Duncannon manages all the palaces, so yesterday brought him a collection of patterns for
him
to choose out (such manufacture!) for the furniture of the Queen's apartment at Buckingham House. Lady Duncannon and I were quite agreed about which she should have, but Duncannon would not hear of it as being much too dear; he would not go beyond six shillings a yard.

Queen Adelaide has received the credit for choosing silks woven in Ireland for Buckingham Palace in order to help the deprived population. In fact that decision sounds much more like Duncannon's. His devotion to Ireland was passionate; he even remained on friendly terms with the firebrand, Daniel O'Connell, whereas Queen Adelaide was quite convinced that he and his comrades would soon be bundling her into the tumbrel on the way to guillotine. In spite of Duncannon's cost-cutting exercise, there was still much anger at the expense of the ‘Palace at Pimlico'.

When the Palace was almost finished, Creevey visited it and was furious. ‘As for our Buckingham Palace,' he spat,

never was there such a specimen of wicked, vulgar profusion. It has cost a million of money, and there is not a fault that has not been committed in it. You may be sure there are rooms enough, and large enough, for the money; but for staircases, passages, etc., I observed that instead of being called Buckingham Palace, it should be the ‘Brunswick Hotel'. The costly ornaments of the state rooms exceed all belief in their bad taste and every species of infirmity. Raspberry
coloured pillars without end, that quite turn you sick to look at; but the Queen's paper for her own apartments far exceed everything else in their ugliness and vulgarity … the marble single arch in front of the Palace cost £100,000 and the gateway in Piccadilly cost £40,000. Can one be surprised at people becoming Radical with such specimens of royal prodigality before their eyes? to say nothing of the characters of such royalties themselves.
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William, Duke of Clarence, and Mrs Jordan

If William IV is remembered, it is usually either as a bluff and somewhat stupid seadog, strolling along the seafront at Brighton, chatting affably to the passers-by, or as one who heartlessly deserted Mrs Jordan, his companion for more than twenty years and the mother of his ten children, and allowed her to die, exiled in poverty. But he was neither stupid nor heartless. He was an affectionate father and took responsibility for all his children; and he never ceased to feel the deepest sense of guilt at his treatment of Dora Jordan.

Dorothea Jordan (known as Dora), born in 1761, was four years older than William, Duke of Clarence. When the Duke fell in love with her she was one of the greatest actresses on the London stage. The essayist William Hazlitt remembered her: ‘Her face, her tears, her manners were irresistible. Her smile had the effect of sunshine and her laugh did one good to hear it … She was all gaiety, openness and good nature.'
¹⁰
She brought the Duke much happiness; and their steady relationship and her obviously good effect on him persuaded George III to give them Bushey House on the Hampton Court estate. Here they lived happily with their ten children. Although Mrs Jordan was almost continually pregnant she still enchanted her audiences and often paid the Duke's debts with her considerable earnings from the stage. Their children were to marry into the aristocracy: their daughter Mary, for instance, married the natural son of Lord Holland.

When the Duke's brother became Regent, the Duke was in such debt that he considered he must marry an heiress or make a royal marriage
and beget an heir: then Parliament would provide him with an additional allowance. The death of Princess Charlotte, George IV's only daughter, made him heir to the throne, and therefore he made haste to take a royal bride. In 1818 he married a German princess, Adelaide of Saxe-Meinengen, who was half his age.

In October 1811 he had parted from Mrs Jordan, making an allowance for her and her children, stipulating that it would be reduced if she went back on the stage. He took care of the children, but she kept in close touch with them all. Swindled by a son-in-law, harassed by creditors, she finally fled to France. She went back on the stage. On 5 July 1816 she died alone and in poverty, in cold, bleak rented rooms in the village of St Cloud.

After his marriage he still kept her portraits. He showed them to friends saying, ‘she was a good woman'. Queen Adelaide had two children by William IV, both of whom died. Surprisingly, she accepted the King's past with good grace and was fond of his grandchildren.

When he became King, William IV commissioned Sir Francis Chantrey to make a marble statue of Mrs Jordan with two of their children, which he intended to be placed with the wives of kings in Westminster Abbey. However, the Dean of Westminster refused to have the actress in the Abbey, so the statue remained unclaimed. Queen Victoria was interested in the story but did not want this reminder of her uncle's irregular life. It remained in Chantrey's studio until after his death in 1841.

The statue's subsequent history is a curious tale. One of the sons of William IV and Mrs Jordan, Lord Augustus Fitzclarence, became the vicar of St Margaret's, a little church in Mapledurham. He took the statue and placed it in his church, where it remained for sixty years, unexplained and possibly considered to be a representation of the Madonna with child. The village church was more tolerant than West-minster Abbey. In 1956 and 1972 Mrs Jordan's statue appeared at exhibitions at the Royal Academy. The 5th Earl of Munster, a descendant of William IV and Mrs Jordan, built a garden pavilion for her at Sandhills, Surrey, where the ‘child of nature' would have been happy. He was childless and decided to bequeath the statue to Queen Elizabeth II. So finally in
May 1980 Mrs Jordan was brought to Buckingham Palace and given a place in the Picture Gallery beneath paintings of kings and queens.

Queen Victoria Takes the Stage

Queen Adelaide and the King were fond of his niece Princess Victoria, now the accepted successor to the throne, but hated her mother. William IV had been furious when, in 1830, the Duchess of Kent had been made by Parliament ‘sole regent' until Princess Victoria should come of age in May 1837. The King was determined to thwart the Duchess and live until then. Soon after his accession, in a fit of xenophobic prejudice, he decided that his successor should change her names, Alexandrina Victoria. ‘The two … names she bears are unsuitable to our national feeling,' he declared. The name Victoria ‘is not even German, but of French origin'. In this battle the Duchess won: Princess Victoria kept her name. He had, however, defeated the Duchess at his Coronation. He insisted that Princess Victoria should walk in the Coronation procession behind his brothers, so the Duchess refused to allow the Princess to attend.

The pressure of this hostility on an adolescent girl was intense. It was increased by her own hatred of her mother's financial adviser, Sir John Conroy. The late Duke of Kent's equerry had taken control of the Duchess, her purse and, some said, her person. In the last years of the King's life, Conroy tried to secure Princess Victoria's promise to make him her Private Secretary when she became Queen. This she adamantly refused to do.

Not surprisingly the general strain made her ill, giving the Duchess the excuse to appropriate better rooms in Kensington Palace (where a number of apartments were used by the royal family), in spite of the King's express command. The Duchess had been allocated ‘dreadfully dull and gloomy lower rooms'. She now took over ‘lofty and handsome rooms two flights upstairs with a sitting room nicely furnished' for
Princess Victoria, and a large airy bedroom where she slept with her mother until the day she became Queen.

The Duchess could now celebrate Princess Victoria's seventeenth birthday in style. Encouraged by Leopold, her brother (now King of the Belgians), and her friend Stockmar, who had plans for the future, she invited her brother, the Duke of Coburg, and his sons, Princes Ernest and Albert, to stay for the festivities.

The King gave a birthday ball for Princess Victoria at St James's Palace, for Buckingham Palace was not yet ready. Neither the King nor Queen Adelaide attended the magnificent ball given by the Duchess in the State Rooms at Kensington Palace. The two German princes and their father were present, but the succession of late-night parties exhausted Prince Albert, who took to his bed for most of the time. King Leopold had chosen Prince Albert as a possible consort; but the cousins parted as friends but without a firm commitment. Prince Albert's time would come.

The battle between King and Duchess raged on, culminating in a public scene at the King's birthday dinner at Windsor, when the King accused the Duchess of ‘disrespectful' behaviour and of ‘attempting to keep Victoria away from my drawing room'.

In May 1837 the King gave a gala ball at St James's Palace for Princess Victoria's eighteenth birthday, when cheering crowds filled the Mall and the courtyard. She was now of age to succeed to the throne, but, since she was a minor, Conroy and her mother still attempted to take control. The King had been taken ill in May. As soon as it was clear that William IV was dying Leopold sent Stockmar, now a Baron, to London. His mission was to heal the breach between the Queen-to-be and her mother and to give Princess Victoria constitutional advice. The Duchess had become dominated by the ruthless and sinister Conroy and hoped, even now, to compel Princess Victoria to promise to give her the powers of a regent; Conroy the control of her money; and Conroy's daughter a privileged place in her household. The shrewd Baron quietly summed up the situation. When he heard the whole story from Princess Victoria of her personal observation of Conroy's influence and his relationship with her mother, Stockmar accepted the inevitable.
In the past she had accepted guidance, if unwillingly; now she was adamant. She must have decided well in advance that one of her first acts as Queen would be to remove her mother's bed from her room and from then on to sleep and act alone. On the evening of 19 June 1837, Princess Victoria was warned that the King was dying. He died at Windsor early the next day.

William IV had been a better king than anyone expected. The diarist Charles Greville had thought him a ‘mountebank bidding fair to be a maniac'. Certainly the King's after-dinner speeches were often alarmingly wild. But Lord Holland, whose son Charles was at the King's bedside when he died, praised his absence of guile, kindness and sense of duty. The King's character had been so, Lord Holland added, ‘since his accession to the Crown and he was on the whole the best King of his race and perhaps of any race we have ever had, and the one who has left the greatest name as a Constitutional sovereign and the first magistrate of a free and improving people'.
¹¹
A surprising obituary, but considering its author, one that must be taken seriously.

Certainly he had shown sense and judgement, and had sailed through the high seas of the Reform Bill storm without falling overboard or wrecking the ship of state; above all, in his reign the Palace improvements were at last completed.

At six o'clock on the morning of 20 June 1837 Princess Victoria was awakened in her bedroom at Kensington Palace. The Lord Chamberlain, Lord Conyngham, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the King's doctor had travelled directly from William IV's death bed at Windsor and wished to see the Queen. At the door of her sitting room, Victoria, wearing a dressing gown over her night dress, put aside her mother's hand and went in alone, as Queen.

CHAPTER FIVE

Queen Victoria

‘
They think I am still a girl,
but I will show them that I am Queen of England
.'
¹

QUEEN VICTORIA

Queen and Empress

The young Queen Victoria's first appearance at her Privy Council moved even old cynics almost to tears. She seemed so small, so young and vulnerable, yet she was amazingly composed, reading her speech ‘in a clear, distinct, and audible voice without any appearance of fear or embarrassment'. The only sign of emotion was when her two old uncles, the Dukes of Cumberland and Sussex, knelt before her, swearing allegiance. Then, wrote Greville, ‘I saw her blush up to her eyes, as if she felt the contrast between their civil and their natural relations.' Even the Duke of Wellington was moved – his tribute was typically simple and direct: ‘She filled the room.' The old men, who remembered the bloated, self-indulgent George IV and bumbling old William IV rambling through his incoherent after-dinner speeches, listened to the clear young voice and saw a new dawn. It was an impressive performance which has been often described, and the Privy Councillors and the public were understandably overwhelmed.