We Two: Victoria and Albert (10 page)

By the time Leopold was installed in Belgium, Conroy and his family, though maintaining an agreeable suburban London residence, lived to all intents and purposes at nearby Kensington Palace, and traveled with the duchess as part of her household. Conroy served as the duchess’s comptroller, but he was also her secretary and interpreter, her public relations officer, her counselor, her confidant, and her political agent in dealings with King, court, and parliament.

Cynical men of the world like the Duke of Wellington were sure that Conroy was the duchess’s lover. They were probably wrong, but Conroy had a familiar way of dealing with her that the Court of St. James’s observed with shock and distaste, so violently did it flout every rule of royal etiquette. According to Conroy’s biographer Katherine Hudson, Conroy lived in a convenient fantasy world in which he and his family were royal too. Against all the evidence, Conroy believed that his wife, Elizabeth Fisher Conroy, was
an illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Kent. He was thus Princess Victoria’s brother-in-law, and his children were her nieces and nephews. He once mystified Victoria by saying that his daughters were as high as she.

Leopold underestimated Conroy Busy and blinded by aristocratic disdain, he saw Conroy as his English agent and believed what Conroy told him. He failed to see how effectively Conroy was controlling the flow of information in and out of Kensington Palace, how thoroughly Conroy had taken control of the duchess’s affairs. Only gradually was it borne in upon the king of the Belgians that the lowly Conroy had ambitions that paralleled and might frustrate his own.

Both exceptionally ambitious men who saw the child Victoria as a tool in their own advancement, Conroy and Leopold had much in common, but only Conroy understood this. As a result, Sir John was able to exploit the blind spot of a king who prided himself on his astuteness. It was only after Victoria became queen that King Leopold started referring to Conroy as a “Mephistopheles” and comparing his influence over the Duchess of Kent to “witchcraft.”

People in England had no trouble figuring out Sir John Conroy. Great men like the Duke of Wellington, Lord Charles Greville, and Lord Melbourne wondered to each other how the Duchess of Kent could be deceived by such an obvious blackguard. But the duchess connived in her own deception. Victoire of Kent was a traditional man’s woman: sociable, pliant, not very bright, but convinced of her own importance. When she was put down, when her needs were not met, like a spoiled lapdog she showed her teeth. The more Conroy annoyed her English relatives, the more she liked him.

The duchess had no desire to see her brother Leopold regent in England. She had enjoyed being regent in Germany in her first husband’s tiny realm, and she intended to be regent in England in the happy event that her daughter succeeded to the throne as a minor. As the years went by, as the dynastic odds for Victoria improved, as her own social and financial situations rose, the duchess became increasingly imperious. After her brother-in-law William came to the throne, she was livid when Prime Minister Wellington refused her demand for the status (and the income) of a dowager Princess of Wales. As Victoria edged closer to the throne, the duchess also became more and more envious, reminding her daughter that if the Duke of Kent had lived, she, not Victoria, would have been Queen of England after William IV’s death.

The duchess liked Conroy, she was comfortable with him, and she viewed business, especially financial business, as a male preserve. Conroy
seemed all efficiency to her, and, since he was her man, she assumed that his interests and ambitions dovetailed with her own. She tolerated Conroy’s presumption and paid no attention to his financial dealings. She and Conroy were, for at least eight years, an effective team.

It is one of the oddities of history that Victoria Regina et Imperatrix (Queen and Empress), the woman who launched a dozen dynasties and put fear into the hearts of courtiers and children alike, spent her youth in thrall to a man who had no legal authority over her, a man who was neither nobleman nor kinsman—a man she loathed.

…

HE FIRST YEARS AFTER THE DEATH OF THE DUKE OF KENT WERE VERY
difficult for his widow, but his child, Victoria, was happy. Cold, dirty, drafty vermin-ridden Kensington Palace was the only home she had ever known, and, since she was rarely taken to her uncle’s court, she had no sense of being a royal poor relation. The ups and downs in her dynastic status affected her mainly because they made her mother unhappy and Sir John Conroy cross.

Victoria as a little girl did not know that she was likely to inherit the throne of her uncle George IV. She was always addressed as “Princess” and certainly understood that she was part of the royal family of England, but the possibility that she might one day be queen was carefully kept from her. This unawareness shaped her sense of self in crucial ways. Unlike George IV, who became Prince of Wales virtually at birth, Queen Victoria did not move out of the cradle convinced of her own supreme importance. As princesses go, she was not especially vain, self-absorbed, and inconsiderate.

At first baby Victoria was nestled in a cocoon of love and attention spun by her mother, her nurse Mrs. Brock, her mother’s lady-in-waiting Baroness Späth, and old Louise Louis at Claremont. For the most part, the child was allowed very little contact with her father’s kin. However, two of her uncles, the dukes of York and Sussex, used Kensington Palace as their business address, so they did manage to see something of their Kent niece.

Uncle Sussex, Queen Victoria recalled in some reminiscences she set down in 1872, was a very tall man with a loud voice, a weird toupee, and a room full of clocks. Though he was kind, she found him rather alarming. Uncle York was shy, and he won her affection by buying her a donkey and
treating her once to a Punch-and-Judy show. When Uncle York died in early 1827, she was very sad.

Victoria was often naughty and temperamental, but so frank and clear-sighted that she disarmed her elders. After one stormy episode, the Duchess of Kent admonished her daughter, “When you are naughty, you make me and yourself very unhappy.” “No, Mama,” retorted the feisty tot, “not me, not myself, but you.”

As Victoria moved out of infancy, her constant companion and best friend was her half sister, Princess Feodora von Leiningen. Twelve years separated the two, but they still had much in common. Like Victoria, Feodora had lost her father when she was very young. Her early years in the small German town of Amorbach had few luxuries, but she and her older brother Charles were the center of their mother’s life. Then the widowed Victoire von Leiningen married the Duke of Kent and became pregnant with her third child. When the Duke of Kent decided his baby must be born in England, Feodora was separated from her brother and her home, carried off to a new country, and immersed in a new language. As a teenager, she was forced to adapt as best she could to the bewildering reversals of fortune her mother endured.

Beautiful and talented but poor and unimportant, the big sister watched as her mother, her old friend Baroness Späth, even her governess Lehzen, all became engrossed in the little sister. It is a tribute to both sisters that they became friends and not enemies. Feodora must have often felt envy and resentment, but she had a generous nature as well as a lovely face. She became her little sister’s ally and best friend as well as her shadow. Though the two were parted young and were rarely together as adults, their friendship was never broken. One of Victoria’s first acts as queen was to send much needed money to her sister in Germany. Over the years, Victoria amply repaid the love, protection, and sympathy that Feodora gave her when she was little.

From Feodora, in a sense, Victoria inherited the most important person in her life as a child: her governess, Fräulein Louise Lehzen. When Victoria turned five, her grumpy but devoted nurse, Mrs. Brock, was dismissed, and Lehzen (as she was always known in the duchess’s household) took over the little girl’s care. Victoria found it “a sad ordeal” to lose Brock, and at first she feared her new governess, a severe, buttoned-up, intelligent woman who could put the fear of God into little girls as ably as any nun.

A German pastor’s daughter, Lehzen came to England in 1817 with the Duchess of Kent as the Princess Feodora’s governess. In 1824 she was in her midthirties. Even for a nineteenth-century governess, the terms of
Lehzen’s employment were severe. She had no regular time off, and there is no record that she had any friends or interests outside the ducal household. The duchess even forbade the governess to keep a diary since in the past such documents had proved damaging to royal employers. Lehzen obeyed. In the eighteen years she was with the Duchess of Kent’s household in England, Louise Lehzen reportedly never took a day off.

A foreigner of humble origins without personal resources, Lehzen was wholly dependent upon her employer. The Duchess of Kent confidently assumed that she could buy the governess’s gratitude and loyalty for a few pounds a year and the privilege of living in a palace. She expected Lehzen to give unselfish devotion to her temperamental child.

What she did not expect was that Lehzen would love Victoria as her own, care for her passionately and intelligently, and thereby win Victoria’s love in return. Louise Lehzen became Victoria’s mother in all but name, and by the time of the princess’s accession, Victoria had taken to calling Lehzen “Mother” in private. Whereas the Duchess of Kent became increasingly greedy for money and power, the governess was both principled and disinterested. Her ambitions were for Victoria, not for herself. Sensing this, the child gave respect, affection, and trust in return.

Lehzen took secret strength and satisfaction from the fact that she was educating a Queen of England. Her idea of what that queen should do and think was very different from her employer’s. Where the duchess and Conroy envisaged Victoria as a meek little maiden, obedient to their wishes, Lehzen wanted a strong, informed woman, a second Queen Elizabeth. Beneath her dowdy black clothes, Louise Lehzen was a fiery soul, nourished on the literary masterpieces of the Sturm und Drang movement. At Amorbach Castle, her recent home, Goethe had written
Hermann und Dorothea
, and Schiller had written
Wallenstein
. Lehzen once told a member of Conroy’s extended family that she “could pardon wickedness in a queen, but not weakness.”

When forced to choose between the interests of her employer and of her tutee, at first secretly, then overtly, and at last defiantly, Lehzen chose the child.

BEGINNING IN 1824
, Louise Lehzen set out to curb the child Victoria’s temper and improve her manners. More controversially, since society rather prized ignorance in a woman, she tried, with the collaboration of the principal tutor, Dr. Davys, to interest the little princess in learning. She succeeded. Though Queen Victoria had neither the intellect nor the scholarship of her
great predecessor Queen Elizabeth I, she was intelligent and disciplined, fluent in three languages, and an impassioned student of history.