We Two: Victoria and Albert (12 page)

IN 1830, WHEN WILLIAM
, Duke of Clarence, came to the throne as William IV, Conroy felt extremely confident. Through the auspices of his “chère amie” Princess Sophia, he had been created a baronet of the Hanoverian order and so was now Sir John. At Kensington Palace, his hold over the household was undisputed. Of all the loving and loyal people who had clustered around the Princess Victoria and tried to protect her interests—her sister, Feodora; Baroness Späth; her uncle Leopold; Baron Stockmar; her uncle York; Baroness Lehzen—all but her governess Lehzen had died, moved far away, or been dismissed by the duchess at Conroy’s behest.

Tall, handsome, confident, and wily, John Conroy was used to getting his way. Throughout his career, he had successfully used women as tools for his own advancement—first his wife, then Princess Sophia, then the Duchess of Kent. But Princess Victoria was a bigger opportunity than Conroy had dared to dream of as an aspiring army officer with no enthusiasm for combat. The child who might one day be queen offered prospects not only of wealth and status but power, especially if she came to the throne as a minor. Conroy viewed Princess Victoria as a puny, insignificant gosling that someday would lay golden eggs.

But the newly minted Sir John made the misogynist’s mistake. He saw Victoria as a key to be turned, not a mind to be won. With the duchess’s acquiescence, all the power of the father was vested in him. The possibility that the curly-haired little creature growing up before his eyes might one day pose a threat to his ambitions seemed ridiculous. Unlike “Dearest Uncle” Leopold, who, on his rare visits to England, went out of his way to earn Victoria’s trust and affection, Conroy worked to break her will. Day in and day out, he snubbed and sneered at her, aiming to destroy her spirit.

From 1830 to 1837, the famous Kensington System for educating the Princess Victoria came into full effect.

…

HE KENSINGTON SYSTEM, AS IT LATER CAME TO BE KNOWN, WAS DEVISED
and implemented by Sir John Conroy with the full cooperation of the Duchess of Kent. It had two interlocking parts: the first, domestic and covert; the second, political and public. Internally the Kensington System was designed to limit the Princess Victoria’s freedom and mold her to Conroy’s will. Externally it was a public relations campaign that presented the Duchess of Kent as an ideal mother and made it impossible for family members in England or in Europe to challenge the duchess’s guardianship and seek custody of the princess.

The Kensington System became more oppressive as Victoria grew older and nearer to the throne. Its effects on her were serious. At four, Vickelchen, as she was then known to her mainly German-speaking family, was a small, fat, curly, voluble bundle of energy who “set all the world at defiance.” At seven, Victoria Kent, as her English cousins called her, was a disciplined and mannerly child in shining good health, who held out her hand with royal aplomb to be kissed but could still be bossy when a child was brought in to play with her. At eleven, the Princess Victoria of Kent was like an exotic animal in a circus, going through her paces for an admiring public under the watchful gaze of her trainers, and then returning obediently to her cage. At sixteen, with a dozen royal suitors panting at her heels, she was amenorrheic and suffered from headaches and back pain. At seventeen, as her uncle king tottered on the edge of death, Victoria was virtually a prisoner in her own home.

She suffered not from neglect or physical abuse but from surveillance and stress. She lacked basic freedoms. She was not free to choose her friends
and spend time with them. She was prevented from forming close relationships with members of her extended family, especially those who loved and took an interest in her. She was not allowed to gossip with servants or to play with other children without adult supervision. She could not freely express her thoughts and feelings, since her letters and journal were routinely censored, and any private conversation she did have was subject to report and reproof. Above all, she lacked a freedom that most of us take for granted—the freedom to be alone and unobserved.

For the first eighteen years of her life, Queen Victoria was never alone in a room by herself. Someone was with her not only when she ate and did her lessons and took her exercise but when she slept, washed, and used the chamber pot. When Victoria was a small child, her mother, the Duchess of Kent, rarely went away overnight, and if she did, the nurse, Mrs. Brock, was with the child. After 1824, Louise Lehzen never left Victoria’s side during the day. She was required always to be within earshot when the princess was in the company of visitors. Victoria had a bevy of servants and teachers, and she lived in a palace, but she had no day nursery to play in or night nursery to sleep in, and hence no private place where she could keep her things.

Until the day of her accession, Victoria slept in her mother’s bedroom on a small bed next to her mother’s four-poster. Lehzen stayed with her until the duchess came to bed and dismissed the governess for the night. Victoria did her lessons in her mother’s sitting room until she was sixteen, when she at last acquired a sitting room of her own. She never went outside unaccompanied, and as she got older, the group accompanying her got larger, so there was no chance of her ever slipping away. Queen Victoria once told her daughters that until the day of her accession, she was forbidden to go down a staircase unless someone held her hand.

Everything Victoria said or did was monitored. If a friend or relative came to call, if a tutor came to give a lesson, if a child came to play, if a footman came in to mend the fire, Victoria’s mother, Lehzen, John Conroy himself, or one of his seven family members was always present to supervise the event and overhear the conversation. When Victoria was having her hair done, either she read aloud or Lehzen read aloud to her from some educational book. That way the princess had no chance to chat with the maid. All of Victoria’s letters were looked over before they were posted, especially if they were written to her relatives.

At thirteen the princess was given a journal by her mother and instructed to record the events of her day, writing first in pencil, then copying over in ink. The journal was not the child’s private possession, a place where
she could freely lay out her thoughts and emotions. Both her mother and Lehzen read the diary regularly. Victoria’s early journal tells us little about what she was thinking and feeling and makes no mention of the difficulties she faced as a late teenager. Nothing in the journals could be used against the duchess and Conroy.

Conroy built a wall between Victoria and everyone in the world except her mother, himself, and his family, but the wall was made of glass so that the princess could be constantly on view to the world. This combination of isolation and exposure, of constraint and performance, placed enormous stress on Victoria’s youthful mind and body.

When resident at Kensington Palace, Victoria was taken out each day for exercise in the gardens, which were open to the public. Londoners spotted the princess on her outings, first pushed by her nurse in a baby carriage; then walking hand in hand with her older sister and escorted by a huge footman; then riding, first a donkey, then a pony, then a horse. In the summer, as a tiny creature, she could be viewed just outside her mother’s ground-floor apartments, bowling her hoop or gravely watering her feet along with the flowers. On her seaside holidays, she could be observed playing on the sands. Visitors allowed inside Kensington Palace were enchanted to see the princess at the far end of her mother’s sitting room, playing quietly with her large collection of dolls. These were small, plain, inexpensive creatures, 132 in all, for which Victoria and Lehzen created identities, composed dramas, and sewed costumes. The dolls were the friends Victoria was not allowed to have, and she played with them until she was fourteen.

WHILE KEEPING AN
increasingly tight grip at home, Conroy worked to promote the political and financial interests of the Duchess of Kent in the outside world. The man was a blackguard, as many gentlemen in England asserted in private, but he was a brilliant and resourceful agent with a preternaturally modern understanding of public relations.

Conroy was middle class despite his fanciful family tree. Unlike the aristocratic sycophants who haunted the Court of St. James’s, he had a sense of the rapidly growing power of the middle classes in England and of the Protestant evangelical values they espoused. Change was in the air. The excesses of the French Revolution had led to a grassroots rejection of the freethinking, free-loving, atheistic, liberal society of the late eighteenth century. Conroy understood that in England king and government had less unchallenged authority than in any other monarchy and could not risk flouting public opinion. He saw that the English people hated George IV because
he was corrupt, promiscuous, and profligate, and that none of George’s brothers was capable of raising the reputation of the house of Hanover in England.

So, in preparation for the reign of the virgin Queen Victoria, over which he intended to preside, Conroy built an image of purity, modesty, and decorum around the Duchess of Kent. It had little basis in the lady’s Coburg past, but it worked because it was so in tune with the spirit of the age. Victoria as princess was formed in the image dreamed up by Conroy. As queen she patented, registered, and made it her trademark. Victoria hated Conroy, but still she learned from him.

In 1825 Conroy successfully lobbied parliament to increase the Duchess of Kent’s allowance by six thousand pounds a year. To Kensington Palace’s vast satisfaction, the Princess Victoria was referred to in the House of Commons as the heir presumptive even though her uncles York and Clarence were both alive. One of Conroy’s allies, Lord Darnley complimented the Duchess of Kent upon the “propriety, domestic affection, and moral purity” with which she was rearing her child. Darnley called her “unexampled in prudence, discretion, and every amiable quality that could exalt and dignify the female character.”