Queen Victoria: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ well as King Leopold and Princess Feodora – to eat too fast, even though of late she had not been eating much at all: a dose of quinine had been followed by potato soup for luncheon, and a thin slice or two of mutton with rice and orange jelly for dinner.⁶

      By the end of January 1836 she had settled once more into the tedious routine of life at Kensington Palace, longing ‘sadly’, as she put it, ‘for some gaiety’, but for days on end seeing no one of her own age from the outside world and having to endure the company of ‘the usual party’ including Sir John Conroy, now more detested than ever, the boring Lady Conroy, the ‘2 Miss Conroys’, Victoire and Jane, and the friend of the Conroys, the clever and incompatible Lady Flora Hastings. She was still convalescent, living on a spare diet which now included bread and butter, performing exercises to strengthen her legs and arms and taking drives to the villages north of Kensington, Hampstead, Finchley and Harrow, and to places she was taken to on her mother’s charitable rounds. She went one August evening to St George’s Chapel at Windsor and stood looking mournfully at the tombs, one of which was her ‘poor dear Father’s’, sadly reflecting how cruel it was to lose those whom we loved and to be ‘encumbered’ by those we disliked.

      

      There were, of course, breaks in this boring and frustrating existence: there was her first drive down the course at Ascot during race week; there were rare visits to Windsor Castle for dinners and dances, and even rarer appearances at St James’s on drawing-room days; there were walks on Hampstead Heath with Dash, ‘DEAR SWEET LITTLE DASH’, whom not so long ago she had been in the habit of dressing up like one of her dolls. There were singing lessons with the amusing, good-humoured and wholly delightful bass, Luigi Lablache, of whom she was so much in awe at first that no sound came out, though she later grew so fond of him that she would have liked to have had lessons every day instead of once a week. She eagerly discussed music with him in French and could not agree with his high estimation of Mozart. ‘I am a terribly modern person,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘and I must say I prefer Bellini, Rossini, Donizetti, etc., to anything else; but Lablache who understands music thoroughly said, “C’est le Papa de tous.”’⁷

      ‘Oh!’ she wrote in her diary of Lablache’s birthplace, ‘could I but once behold bella Napoli with its sunny blue sky and turquoise bay dotted with islands!’⁸

      There were, above all, exciting evenings at the theatre and the opera, where she delighted in the performances of the half-Italian, half-Swedish ballerina, Marie Taglioni, who ‘danced quite exquisitely’, of Taglioni’s brother, Paul, ‘the most splendid man-dancer [she] ever saw’, of the tenor Rubini, the baritone Tamburini, her hero, Luigi Lablache, and the lovely soprano Giulia Grisi, ‘a most beautiful singer and actress’ whom she saw in her favourite opera, Bellini’s Puritani, and in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena by which she was ‘VERY MUCH AMUSED INDEED’.⁹

      There were interesting afternoons at the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park; and evenings when she was brought downstairs by Lehzen to be introduced to distinguished guests, on one occasion to Sir Robert Peel, on another to Lord Palmerston who was ‘so very agreeable, clever, amusing & gentlemanlike’ and with whom, a year or two later, she had ‘much pleasant and amusing conversation’. There were birthday parties and birthday presents including, one year, a print of Marie Taglioni from Lehzen, earrings from the King, a brooch containing a strand of her mother’s hair, a writing-case from Sir John Conroy, a paper-knife from Lady Flora Hastings and a prayer book from ‘a bookseller of the name of Hatchard’. There were occasional balls at Kensington Palace; and above all, there were very occasional visits by German cousins whose departure, as she lamented in her diary, made her ‘quite wretched’, grieved and sad, missing them ‘dreadfully’, feeling that it was ‘like a dream that all our joy, happiness and gaiety should thus suddenly be over’. King Leopold wondered in his cautious way if these bursts of excitement were good for her. Might they not undermine her health? But no; it was the tedium of life at Kensington and the stress of the relationships there that upset her and made her ill. ‘Merriment and mirth’ were a tonic. ‘I can assure you,’ she wrote to him, ‘all this dissipation does me a great deal of good.’¹⁰ So did a change of air at King Leopold’s house at Esher, and a subsequent few days at Buxted Park in Sussex, the family home of her friend, Lady Catherine Jenkinson, daughter of the Earl of Liverpool.

      Yet even away from Kensington Palace the tensions of life there followed her about like inescapable shadows. Lady Catherine got on well with Lehzen, so was persona non grata with the Conroy faction, and was soon to leave the Duchess of Kent’s household, ostensibly on the grounds of ill health. The Duchess of Northumberland had also fallen out with Conroy who considered she was undermining his authority, since she had written to Princess Feodora requesting her to approach her uncle, King Leopold, and ask him to do what he could to protect Baroness Lehzen, who was still being treated ‘with contempt and incredible harshness’ in an attempt to get rid of her and replace her with someone of Conroy’s own choosing. At the same time there was no love lost between Princess Victoria and the Conroys’ sharp-tongued friend, Lady Flora Hastings. As for the Duchess of Kent’s relations with the King they went from bad to worse.

      There was trouble when the King declined to receive the Duchess’s daughter-in-law, the wife of Charles, Prince of Leiningen, on the grounds that she was not of royal blood and therefore by tradition barred from the Closet at St James’s Palace.¹¹ Then there was further trouble when the King required the gentlemen of the Duchess of Kent’s household to leave the Throne Room during the course of a drawing room there because, so he said, only gentlemen of the King’s and Queen’s household enjoyed the privilege of attendance at such a reception in such a place, the households of other members of the Royal Family being limited to ladies only.¹²

      These, however, were relatively minor incidents when compared with an outrageous and distressing contretemps at Windsor Castle on 21 August 1836. This was the King’s birthday. He had invited the Duchess of Kent and Princess Victoria to come to Windsor for the Queen’s birthday party on 13 August and then to stay on for his own on the 21st. The Duchess, rudely taking no notice of the invitation to the Queen’s birthday party, replied that she intended to be at Claremont for her own birthday celebrations on 17 August but would bring her daughter to Windsor on the 20th.

      This put the King into a fury [Charles Greville was informed by one of the King’s illegitimate sons, Adolphus FitzClarence, who was living in the Castle at the time]. He made, however, no reply, and on the 20th he was in town to prorogue Parliament, having desired that they would not wait dinner for him at Windsor. After the prorogation He went to Kensington Palace to look about it; when He got there He found that the Duchess of Kent had appropriated to her own use a suite of apartments, seventeen in number for which She had applied last year, and which he had refused to let her have. This increased his ill-humour, already excessive. When he arrived at Windsor [suffering from the effects of sleepless nights and asthmatic attacks] and went into the drawing-room (at about ten o’clock at night), where the whole party was assembled, he went up to the Princess Victoria, took hold of both her hands, and expressed his pleasure at seeing her there and his regret that he did not see her oftener. He then turned to the Duchess and made her a low bow, almost immediately after which he said that ‘a most unwarrantable liberty had been taken with one of his Palaces; that He had just come from Kensington, where He found apartments had been taken possession of not only without his consent, but contrary to his commands, and that he neither understood nor would endure conduct so disrespectful to him.’ This was said loudly, publicly, and in a tone of serious displeasure. It was, however, only the muttering of the storm which was to break the next СКАЧАТЬ