Shooting Victoria (3 page)

In order to realize his dream of power, however, Conroy needed to monitor, manipulate, and control Victoria, rendering her wholly dependent upon her mother. He created, to this end, a carefully-thought-out plan for the sensitive child's upbringing that was nothing less than an oppressive internment. The Duchess would have complete control over Victoria's acquaintances, her finances, her whereabouts, and her course of study. Moreover, Victoria would be presented to the public as a complete contrast to her royal uncles: as young and virtuous in comparison to them, who with their mistresses and their excesses epitomized aging vice, the moral darkness of an earlier age. The contrast was a political as well as a moral one: Victoria's uncles were, for the most part, uncompromising Tories, while the Duchess sympathized with the Whigs. Conroy devised to present Victoria as the embodiment of a new hope and a new age.

This system under which Victoria suffered became known as the “Kensington System.” Conroy and the Duchess hand-picked Victoria's teachers, companions, and observers. Their choice for Victoria's governess turned out to be a grievous disappointment to them: the Hanoverian Baroness Lehzen. As Victoria grew, she and Lehzen formed an emotional bond that triumphed over Conroy's colder manipulation: Lehzen became totally devoted to the child—at times, it seemed to Victoria, her sole ally in her struggle against her mother and Conroy. For companions, Conroy imposed his two daughters upon her; Victoria despised them. A later companion forced upon her was the Duchess's Lady-in-Waiting, Lady Flora Hastings, thirteen years older than the Princess. Victoria was never allowed to be alone; she slept in a small bed in her mother's room, and could not walk down a flight of stairs without taking the hand of another. Victoria would have no money of her own; when, as Victoria approached her eighteenth birthday, the King attempted to put £10,000 a year “entirely in her power and disposal,” the Duchess responded with rage, on Conroy's advice drafting a letter
rejecting the offer, which she forced Victoria to copy and send to the king. (“Victoria has not written that letter,” William realized.)

When Victoria was thirteen, Conroy began to build Victoria's image—in part, at the expense of her uncles'—in a new way: he sent her out on a number of “journeys” throughout the country. Conroy proposed to have her interact with the British public on all levels. Victoria visited towns and traveled throughout England, with all the trappings of royal visits—crowds of well-wishers, welcoming bands, floral decorations, addresses to and from the Princess and the Duchess—and in one case a royal salute by cannon, a practice King William quickly put a stop to. Conroy hoped to provide a connection between Victoria and the people—a connection between public and monarch that had largely been severed over the past few decades, with the madness and isolation of George III and the notorious disdain to the public shown by George IV as Regent and as King. Her predecessor, William IV, began his reign by resisting this seclusion, habitually strolling through the streets of London and mingling with passersby. The tension between monarch and public over the passing of the Reform Bill of 1832, however, encouraged William, too, to isolate himself from the public for the rest of his reign.

These journeys taught Victoria much more about her country and its people than she could learn in the isolation of her Kensington Palace classroom. She was able to experience first-hand the wide social range of the 1830s, from the foxhunting and country-house world of the gentry in whose homes she stayed, to the middle-class ceremonial of the towns, to the hard social reality of the poor tossed in the tempest of industrial upheaval. Victoria began her lifelong journaling during the first of these journeys, and, in one of her earliest entries, she writes of the mining district outside of Birmingham:

We just passed through a town where all coal mines are and you see the fire glimmer at a distance in the engines in many places. The men, women, children, country and
houses are all black.… The country is very desolate every where; there are coals about, and the grass is quite blasted and black. I just now see an extraordinary building flaming with fire. The country continues black, engines flaming, coals, in abundance, every where, smoking and burning coal heaps, intermingled with wretched huts and carts and little ragged children.

A perceptive observer, Victoria as Queen always demonstrated her greatest empathy for her subjects when she could be among them.

Victoria did not like the journeys; she suffered from bad health for much of these years, and found them extremely fatiguing. Though she was affectionate and inquisitive, her sensitivity and shyness rendered the progressions painful. It certainly did not help that Conroy maintained an oppressive control over her every movement. However selfish and despicable Conroy was in thrusting the young girl before the public, however, he taught her the key lesson for creating and preserving popularity for the tainted monarchy she would inherit: a regular, open, and completely trusting interaction with every level of her public. Encouraging her daughter to embark on a tour in 1835, the Duchess of Kent revealed more, perhaps, than she realized: “it is of the greatest consequence that you should be seen, that you should know your country, and be acquainted with, and be known by all classes.”

Victoria's uncle William resented the journeys immensely, knowing very well that their object was to separate in the public eye the young child from the old man. He resented as well Conroy's and the Duchess's removing the child from Court whenever possible: William and his wife Adelaide had a great deal of affection for Victoria (and she for them), but Conroy intended his Kensington System to strain the relationship between present and future monarch—and it did. Matters came to a head at the King's seventy-fifth birthday party, at which the seventeen-year-old
Victoria and her mother were guests, along with Lord Adolphus Fitzclarence, one of William's many bastard sons, who recorded the scene. William turned venomously upon the Duchess, chastising her publicly for isolating the Princess from him—and vowing to ruin the Duchess's and Conroy's plans:

I trust in God that my life may be spared for nine months longer, after which period, in the event of my death, no Regency would take place. I should then have the satisfaction of leaving the royal authority to the personal exercise of that Young Lady (pointing to the P[rince]ss), the Heiress presumptive of the Crown, and not in the hands of a person now near me, who is surrounded by evil advisers and who is herself incompetent to act with propriety in the station in which She would be placed.

The King was as good as his word: he lived for a month after Victoria's eighteenth birthday. As it became clear to Conroy that there would be no regency, he attempted desperately to maintain his hold over the Princess beyond her majority by forcing her to take him on as her confidential private secretary. Both Conroy and the Duchess browbeat Victoria, their efforts growing in intensity as William grew more and more ill in the weeks after Victoria's birthday. Victoria, supported by her staunch ally Lehzen, as well as by another supporter sent her by her uncle Leopold—Baron Stockmar—stood her ground.

On 20 June 1837, William died, and with him died the oppressive Kensington System. When, that morning, the Lord Chamberlain and Archbishop of Canterbury came to Victoria with the announcement of her accession—when, soon after, she met the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne—when she then saw the Privy Council, she did all, as she pointedly notes in her journal, “
alone
.” By the end of her first day as Queen, she had removed her bed from her mother's room and had dismissed Conroy from her household.

With her mother (and her mother's comptroller) relegated to a distant suite in Buckingham Palace, the young Victoria reigned according to her own will and her own whims. Her beloved Lehzen, whose loyalty to the Queen's interests was beyond question, now occupied her mother's former position: Lehzen and the Queen had adjoining bedrooms. And in political and social matters, the Queen very quickly developed a very close bond with her prime minister, Lord Melbourne, who succeeded where Conroy failed because his personality was antithetical to Conroy's: warm and affectionate, rather than cold and overbearing; a considerate and thoughtful adviser, not an impulsive tyrant. When Victoria took the throne, Melbourne was everything the politically inexperienced Queen could want in her most trusted advisor: a canny political operative with a wealth of political wisdom, able to guide her through the confusions of political etiquette and party strife. She depended upon him from the first day, when, meeting with the Privy Council for the first time, she looked over to him for cues about her behavior. Her dependence grew in the first years of her monarchy, and her affection for him grew apace—as did his for her. Melbourne spent much of his time over the next few years as a fixture of her domestic world: dining regularly at the Palace, playing chess and cards with the Queen's ladies during the evenings; riding with the Queen in Hyde Park in the afternoons. All this time, he contributed to her political education and, as their friendship developed, so Victoria developed a political outlook that reflected her mentor's: Melbourne was a Whig, of course. Victoria, the daughter of one of the few Whigs among the royal Dukes, and who grew up in a Whig atmosphere—the Duchess of Kent being at the center of the Whig opposition of the past few years—had always seen herself a Whig. But Melbourne's Whiggism was a distinct variety: Melbourne was hardly a reformer, and his government sought no major changes, indeed seeing resistance to change, and to any parliamentary struggle, as a positive end in itself. Moreover, Melbourne demonstrated to the Queen an
innate cynicism in their everyday conversation that she found charming, recording in her journal with approval his cutting comments about women, about the poor, about the Irish. She drank in his adherence to
laissez-faire
economics, any violation of which—say, to improve the dire lot of the overworked factory child—was anathema. Surrounded by her Whig ladies in waiting, and in constant communication with her Prime Minister, Victoria became a thorough political partisan in her first years: a Whig, or more accurately a Melbournian.

Her first year, from ascension to coronation, had been a giddy one, in which the nation seemed to share her joy in emerging into a new world—free of the old uncles, the unsullied reign of a young woman. Her eldest surviving uncle, Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, had left Britain to take up the throne of Hanover, which, as a woman, Victoria was denied by Salic Law. Good riddance to him; he was the most reactionary of all her uncles: one of his first acts at Hanover was to abolish its constitution. The fact that he was Victoria's heir only served to cause the overwhelming majority of her subjects to wish her a long life, and a fruitful one in every respect. Her popularity during this time was unparalleled, and Parliament testified in its own way to this royal excitement by voting the Queen £200,000 for her coronation, fully four times what had been spent on the coronation of William IV. It was very much a public affair, designed to represent her physical contact with her people, foregoing a closed coronation banquet (as had been the tradition before William IV) for a state procession through the streets of London. The procession echoed Princess Victoria's journeys on a much larger scale, and once again brought home to Victoria the fundamental role that simply being among her subjects would play in the success of her reign:

It was a fine day, and the crowds of people exceeded what I have ever seen; many as there were on the day I went to the City, it was nothing, nothing to the multitudes, the millions of my loyal subjects, who were assembled
in every spot to witness the Procession. Their good humour and excessive loyalty was beyond everything, and I really cannot say how proud I feel to be the Queen of such a Nation.

That idyllic relationship could not last forever, of course; and in 1839, in the second year of Victoria's reign, she was personally and politically disturbed by two interrelated scandals at court, as her adamant partisanship and her innate stubbornness together worked to diminish her popularity.

From the start, Victoria preferred to surround herself with sympathetic and loyal ladies—which, in her mind, meant Whig ladies. With Melbourne's encouragement and in the face of Tory protests, she kept her household free of Tories. One exception to this—one that Victoria had little control over—was the Duchess of Kent's Tory lady-in-waiting, the now 32-year-old Lady Flora Hastings, whom Conroy had attempted to impose upon the Princess as a companion years before. Though the Duchess was relegated to a distant part of the Palace, and Conroy effectively banished from the royal presence, Lady Flora Hastings was by her position a part of Court life—and therefore a living reminder to the Queen of the despised Kensington System. Moreover, there were rumors at court that Hastings and Conroy were romantically involved. In January 1839, Lady Flora returned to Court from home (sharing a carriage on the way with Conroy) with a protuberance of her stomach that clearly suggested to Victoria, Lehzen, and the ladies of the bedchamber that she was pregnant. Who exactly started this rumor is unknown, but Victoria was certainly one of the first to think so, recording in her journal her (and Lehzen's) certainty not only that Hastings was “
with child!
!” but that “the horrid cause of all this is the Monster & Demon Incarnate”—Conroy.

Lady Flora was not pregnant. She was ill, with a growth on her liver that would, in a few months, kill her. She had the Duchess of
Kent's (and the Queen's) physician, Sir James Clark, examine her, fully clothed; he prescribed rhubarb pills and a liniment, and was himself suspicious that she was pregnant. As suspicions grew, and as the moral welfare of the younger ladies in waiting was apparently being challenged in such a brazen fashion, the senior ladies in waiting—with the encouragement of Baroness Lehzen—took steps to force Lady Flora to prove her innocence, informing the Duchess that Lady Flora was no longer welcome at court unless she did so. The next day, Lady Flora consented to be examined under her clothes by Sir James Clark and another physician, Sir Charles Clark. The Doctors Clark examined her and issued a vindication: Lady Flora, they declared, was a virgin. Victoria immediately wrote her a note of apology.