Queen Victoria: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

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      From Chatsworth they drove to the Earl of Shrewsbury at Alton Towers and then to Pitchford in Lancashire, seat of the Earl of Liverpool, half-brother of the former Prime Minister, whose daughter, Lady Catherine Jenkinson, a young woman of whom the Princess was fond, had been appointed lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Kent two years before.

      In November the royal party reached Oxford where, in the Sheldonian Theatre, to which they were escorted by a troop of yeomanry commanded by Lord Churchill, the Princess was obliged to watch the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law being awarded to Sir John Conroy and to listen to the speech of the Regius Professor of Civil Law who, having referred to the ‘singular prudence’ and ‘much industry’ with which Sir John had carried out his duties for the Duke of Kent, declared, ‘Can you wonder that he who had gained the esteem of the Husband, should also have pleased His surviving Consort.’¹¹

      Despite the presence of Sir John and his daughter, the Princess had enjoyed the tour, the drives in the carriage, the rides at ‘dear Plâs Newydd’ where her horse, Rosa, had taken her across the fields at an ‘enormous rate. She literally flew.’¹²

      The Princess had kept a journal of their travels as her mother had told her to do. The earlier entries were most precisely dated and, since both the Duchess and Lehzen read them, rather stilted in style and matter of fact in content, not to say boring:

      Wednesday, August 1st 1832. We left Kensington Palace at 6 minutes past 7 and went through the lower-field gate to the right. We went on and turned to the left by the new road to Regent’s Park. The road and scenery is beautiful. 20 minutes to 9. We have just changed horses at Barnet, a very pretty little town. 5 minutes past half past nine. We have just changed horses at St Albans…¹³

      It was not until she was free to do so that she wrote from the heart and made full use of her powers of acute observation and a Boswellian ability to recall a conversation, the details of a man’s appearance, a woman’s dress. Even now, however, her writing was graphic when her imagination was aroused as it was, for instance, in her description of the mining districts of the Midlands, her first experience of such sights, such pitiable poverty which, in later years, she was rarely to witness again:

      The men, women, children, country and houses are all black [she wrote]…The country is very desolate Every Where…The grass is quite blasted and black. Just now I saw an extraordinary building flaming with fire. The country continues black, engines flaming, coals, in abundance, everywhere smoking and burning coal heaps, intermingled with wretched huts and carts and little ragged children.¹⁴

      What a contrast these dark scenes were with country towns, with her reception elsewhere, in other places where, as at Oxford, her party ‘were most WARMLY and ENTHUSIASTICALLY received!’¹⁵

      The King read the reports of his niece’s enthusiastic welcome with mounting annoyance and serious concern: the Princess was being presented, not so much as his rightful successor, as his rival, a friend of the people who, as the daughter of committed Whigs, was presumed to be in favour of the Reform Bill to which the Tory King and Queen were opposed.

      So, when in 1833 the Princess was taken on another tour, this time to the south and west of England, the King decided to curb so far as he could the ‘disgusting’ excesses of these ‘Royal Progresses’ by putting an end to what he called the ‘pop pop’ of naval salutes whenever the Duchess, her daughter and their entourage sailed by one of His Majesty’s vessels.

      The Duchess was informed that since she was sailing for her own pleasure she must no longer expect to be saluted by any of the King’s ships. Sir John Conroy replied that ‘as H.R.H.’s confidential adviser’ he could not recommend her to give way on this point.¹⁶ So the King called a meeting of the Privy Council and issued an order requiring salutes to be given only for ships in which the King or Queen happened to be sailing.

      Yet while the King was able to silence the naval ‘pop pops’, he could do little to prevent the unseemly excitement of the welcome accorded to his sister-in-law and niece on land; and reports of the ‘progress’ of 1833 were quite as irritating as those of previous years. On this occasion the royal party went to stay at Norris Castle on the Isle of Wight and at the beginning of August were sailing in the Emerald, tender of the royal yacht, the Royal George, when the ship ran foul of a hulk and broke her mast. The Princess was full of praise for the sailor in command of the Emerald who picked up her precious King Charles Spaniel, ‘dear sweet, little Dash’, and kept him ‘under his arm the whole time, but never let him drop in all the danger’.¹⁷

      That summer the Princess went to Portsmouth where she inspected Nelson’s flagship, the Victory, and tasted some ‘excellent’ beef, potatoes and grog as a sample of the sailors’ rations.¹⁸ The Emerald anchored off Plymouth so that she could present new colours to the 89th Regimeñt; she was taken over the Eddystone lighthouse; she visited Torquay and Weymouth and Exeter; and she was driven in an open carriage, escorted by the Dorsetshire Yeomanry, to stay at Melbury House, Lord Ilchester’s house near Dorchester.

      No sooner had the disagreement about naval salutes been settled than there was further trouble over the provision of a country house for the Duchess of Kent and her daughter. The Duchess wrote to the Prime Minister asking for one. The King offered her Kew Palace for that summer. The Duchess did not want a house just for that summer but a permanent country residence; besides she had made arrangements to go to Tunbridge Wells in the summer. Well then, she might have Kew Palace on a more permanent basis. The Duchess went to see it. She did not like it: it was ‘very inadequate in accommodation and almost destitute of furniture’.¹⁹ The King replied that Kew had been considered perfectly satisfactory by his ‘royal father and mother’. He had nothing else to offer.²⁰

      Disgruntled though she was by her brother-in-law’s response, the Duchess seems to have enjoyed her autumn holiday at Tunbridge Wells in 1834. The Princess certainly did so, all the more so because she had been confined by illness to her room for over three weeks earlier that year, dutifully writing of her ‘dear Mama’s’ anxiety throughout her indisposition and ‘dear Lehzen’s unceasing’ care. She described her rides in the lovely countryside around the town and the public dinners which were held for them, at one of which Sir John Conroy surprised his fellow-guests by singing a song called ‘The Wolf’. The Princess left ‘dear’

unbridge Wells for St Leonard’s-on-Sea and Hastings on 4 November with ‘GREAT REGRET’.²¹ At St Leonards, where she was given ‘a most splendid reception’, she showed her resourcefulness when the carriage in which she, her mother, Lehzen and Lady Flora Hastings were riding overturned, bringing the horses down with it. She called for her dog, Dash, to be rescued, then ‘ran on with him in my arms calling Mama to follow’, and then, when one of the horses broke loose and started chasing them down the road, she told them to take cover behind a wall.^*22

      Meanwhile another tour of England, this time in the northern and eastern counties, СКАЧАТЬ