We Two: Victoria and Albert (15 page)

The battle lines were now drawn between Windsor and Kensington, and for the next nine months, Victoria was kept under virtual house arrest. “The Monster and Demon Incarnate,” as Victoria later referred to Conroy still held sway at Kensington Palace, and the princess’s life continued to be one of “great misery and oppression.” Efforts made by the dying King and his ministers to intervene on her behalf were indignantly repelled by the duchess and Conroy. When a letter carrying the King’s sign manual or seal came from William IV with orders that it be placed in the princess’s hands alone, the duchess received the messenger with her daughter and took the letter from her. When the King received an answer, refusing his offers of a separate income and household, he declared, “Victoria has not written this.” The King was right. The duchess and Conroy were now not only sequestering the princess but corresponding in her name and keeping crucial documents from her.

In the spring of 1837, as her eighteenth birthday approached and the state of the King’s health declined, it was clear that Victoria would be queen within months. Consequently, the duchess and Conroy had to change their goals while adopting increasingly severe means. Victoria was subjected to remorseless pressure to agree to accept a regency until she was twenty-one and to appoint Sir John Conroy as her confidential private secretary. That position, which had been created to serve kings who were incapacitated, would allow Conroy to run the new queen’s domestic life, control her revenues, and conduct the affairs of state for three years. The Duchess of Kent went about saying that her daughter lacked the intellectual capacity to reign alone. She claimed that Victoria herself was anxious for a regency to be appointed until she was twenty-one.

By this time, Baron Stockmar was in London at the behest of King Leopold and the Coburg family, talking to English ministers and the people surrounding the dying King as well as to the Kensington Palace set, and sending regular reports back to Germany and Belgium. Stockmar was the supreme diplomat and had long conducted the key business transactions of the Coburg family all over Europe. It was Stockmar in no small measure
who had secured the kingdom of Belgium for Leopold and the Portuguese queen as a bride for Leopold’s nephew, Ferdinand of Coburg-Kohary. Even the Duchess of Kent was not prepared to show this man the door, and so, hoping perhaps that he could resolve the impasse between Conroy and her daughter, she allowed Stockmar to speak to the Princess Victoria alone for the first time.

He was impressed by Victoria’s self-possession and her fierce determination to keep the rights and privileges that would be hers as queen in her own hands. “Her feelings seem … to have been deeply wounded by what she calls ‘his [Conroy’s] impudent and insulting conduct’ towards her,” wrote Stockmar to King Leopold. “Her affection and esteem for her mother seem likewise to have suffered from Mama having tamely allowed Conroy to insult the Princess in her presence … O’Hum [Conroy] continues the system of intimidation with the genius of a madman, and the Duchess carries out all that she is instructed to do with admirable docility and perseverance … The Princess continues to refuse firmly to give her Mama her promise that she will make O’Hum her confidential advisor. Whether she will hold out, Heaven knows, for they plague her, every hour and every day.”

Stockmar was unable to prevail on the duchess to change her course of action, and he and Conroy, who for years had maintained a facade of friendly relations, had a falling out. However, before he too was banished from Kensington Palace, Stockmar had succeeded in procuring Victoria a private interview with Lord Liverpool, a former Tory prime minister. This respected independent witness was able to inform the Melbourne government that the heir to the throne was not an imbecile. Despite everything her mother claimed on her behalf, she neither needed nor wanted a regency.

The duchess summoned from Germany her son, Charles Leiningen, to play the heavy brother and bring Victoria to heel. Charles Leiningen was dependent on his mother for money and status, and for some weeks he was firmly in the Conroy camp. However, Leiningen, who was neither stupid nor mean, balked when he heard Conroy say, “If the Princess Victoria will not listen to reason, she must be coerced.” Charles Leiningen told his mother in German to do no such thing.

EARLY IN THE MORNING
of Tuesday June 20, 1837, the doorbell rang out repeatedly for admittance to Kensington Palace. When a porter finally appeared, he discovered that the insistent visitors were the Archbishop of
Canterbury and the Lord Chamberlain, who had ridden over as fast as they could from Windsor Castle. They demanded to see the Princess Victoria at once.

There was no doubt why the two men had come. The death of William IV had been expected for some days. All the same, the Duchess of Kent stalled for time, insisting her daughter could not be woken. Probably she wanted to send a messenger for Conroy whose house was nearby. But the two men persisted, and the duchess was forced to give way. She went upstairs, woke Victoria, and bade her come down at once. The princess put on her dressing gown and, for the last time, held her mother’s hand as she came down the staircase. Baroness Lehzen followed behind with smelling salts. At the door to the room where the two men were waiting, both the duchess and Lehzen fell back. Victoria went in and shut the door. Smelling salts would not be needed.

The first day of Queen Victoria’s reign set a pattern. Having spent the last weeks locked in her room, taking her meals alone, she was suddenly the center of a whirlwind of activity and conducting business of every kind. She loved every minute of it. After the archbishop and the Lord Chamberlain had left, the Queen had her hair done and put on a black dress. She had breakfast and wrote letters—one to her uncle Leopold; one to her sister, Feodora, signed “your devoted and attached sister VR.” At nine the prime minister came for the first meeting. The rapport was immediate. In Lord Melbourne Victoria knew at once that she had found a friend and protector.

At a quarter after eleven there was a meeting of the Privy Council, an advisory body chosen by the sovereign from among the princes of the blood (that is, the senior royal men), court officials, and current and former ministers of state. Then followed another meeting with the prime minister, then more meetings with officials and with relatives. The Queen lunched and wrote another letter, this time to her widowed aunt Adelaide, expressing her deep sorrow at the King’s death and assuring the Queen dowager that she could remain at Windsor for as long as was convenient to her.

The Queen had several meetings with Stockmar that first day. Conroy was the subject of numerous discussions, and Victoria, though she refused to see either her mother or Sir John, was besieged by letters and notes from them. Conroy gave Stockmar a list of his demands to pass on to Melbourne: “a pension of 3,000 pounds a year, the Grand Cross of the Bath, a peerage and a seat on the Privy Council.” Amazingly, Melbourne acceded to most of the demands. The Coburg family, as represented by Baron Stockmar, and the English government were, it seems, so anxious to avoid any scandal that they were willing to promise almost anything to the duchess’s impudent
and overbearing majordomo. Conroy would remain a thorn in Queen Victoria’s flesh for many years to come.

Happy to leave the horrid task of negotiating with Conroy to Stockmar and Melbourne, Queen Victoria did what she could to form her household to her taste. She dismissed Sir John Conroy though the man continued to be part of her mother’s household. She rewarded her faithful friend James Clark by naming him chief physician in ordinary. She decided to move as soon as possible away from Kensington Palace and into Buckingham Palace, the royal residence in the heart of London that had been under construction for two reigns. In the meantime, she ordered a bedroom to be prepared and her things moved out of her mother’s rooms.

She appointed Baroness Lehzen lady attendant on the queen, a new title that the two must have discussed carefully in their few private minutes. “My dear Lehzen will always be with me as my friend, but will take no situation with me, and I think she is right,” Victoria wrote in her journal that night. Sadly, the time would come when Baroness Lehzen would regret that she had not taken a “situation” with the Queen, relying instead on love and loyalty.

Late that night, the Queen kissed her mother’s cheek, walked upstairs unassisted, and went to bed. For the first time in eighteen years, mother and daughter would sleep apart. Upstairs Victoria completed her journal entry for that tremendous day—orderly, precise, cool except for the extravagant underlinings. Here at last we have the authentic, uncensored prose of the Queen, writing now not for her mother but for herself and for the historical record:

“Tuesday, 20th June.—I was awoke at 6 o’clock by Mamma who told me that the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Conyngham were here and wished to see me. I got out of bed and went into my sitting-room (only in my dressing-gown) and alone and saw them. Lord Conyngham (the Lord Chamberlain) then acquainted me that my poor Uncle, the King, was no more, and had expired at 12 minutes p. 2 this morning, and consequently I am Queen … At 9 came Lord Melbourne, whom I saw in my room, and OF COURSE quite ALONE as I shall always do all my Ministers.”

By alone, Queen Victoria meant without her mother, Conroy, the Conroy family, and all the Conroy hangers-on like Lady Flora Hastings. But she spent no more time by herself after her accession than before. Even when the Queen was at her desk, absorbed in doing her business and writing her journal and her endless letters, there was always a maid of honor hovering in the background, a page in the hall, a dresser darning in a corner. Anxious at night, the Queen slept until her marriage with a maid one door away
and Baroness Lehzen next door. At Buckingham Palace, the Queen ordered a hole to be made in one wall to allow her free communication at night with Lehzen in the adjoining room. Until the death of her husband, it is doubtful if ever in her life even for an hour Queen Victoria was alone in a room.

But if “alone” meant unique, one of a kind, Victoria was right to underline the word. To be a queen regnant was to be alone, and solitude would prove to be a heavy burden.

…

HEN VICTORIA CAME TO THE THRONE, SHE CAUSED A SENSATION
. Many people had seen her, some had been presented to her, but no one knew the new Queen, least of all those who had lived with her all her life. In public Victoria’s mother and Sir John Conroy had spoken for her, and in private they shouted at her, disparaged her, and refused to listen. In the final days before Victoria’s accession, as part of their campaign to keep the power of the Crown in their own hands, Conroy and the duchess whispered to the world that the heiress presumptive did not have the intelligence to rule alone, and it is possible they actually believed it. After years of abuse, Victoria had learned to keep her thoughts to herself.

Then overnight, without rehearsal, Victoria stepped into the starring role of queen, and amazed everyone by her mastery of script and blocking. The prelates, ministers of the Crown, and court officials who came in the first days to “kiss hands” and swear allegiance were enraptured by the Queen’s poise and her modest yet confident assumption of power. They remarked on her marked physical resemblance to her grandfather George III, the last king in memory to earn the people’s respect. At last Victoria was permitted to speak for herself, and her glorious, bell-like, feminine voice— “a silver stream flowing over golden stones,” in the words of the famous actress Ellen Terry—was accepted immediately as the voice of the nation.