Queen Victoria: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ and though the celebration was (what was called) private, there were a hundred people at dinner, either belonging to the Court or from the neighbourhood. The Duchess of Kent sat on one side of the King and one of his sisters on the other, the Princess Victoria opposite. Adolphus sat two or three from the Duchess, and heard every word of what passed. After dinner, by the Queen’s desire, ‘His Majesty’s health, and long life to him’ was given, and as soon as it was drunk He made a very long speech, in the course of which he poured forth the following extraordinary and foudroyant tirade: – ‘I trust in God that my life may be spared for nine months longer, after which period, in the event of my death, no Regency would take place. I should then have the satisfaction of leaving the royal authority to the personal exercise of that Young Lady (pointing to the Pss.), the Heiress presumptive of the Crown, and not in the hands of a person now near me, who is surrounded by evil advisers and who is herself incompetent to act with propriety in the station in which She would be placed. I have no hesitation in saying that I have been insulted – grossly and continually insulted – by that person, but I am determined to endure no longer a course of behaviour so disrespectful to me. Amongst many other things I have particularly to complain of the manner in which that young Lady has been kept away from my Court; she has been repeatedly kept from my drawing-rooms, at which She ought always to have been present, but I am fully resolved that this shall not happen again. I would have her know that I am King, and that I am determined to make my authority respected, and for the future I shall insist and command that the Princess do upon all occasions appear at my Court, as it is her duty to do.’ He terminated his speech by an allusion to the Princess and her future reign in a tone of paternal interest and affection, which Adolphus told me was excellent in its way.

      This awful philippick (with a great deal more which I forget) was uttered with a loud voice and excited manner. The Queen looked in deep distress, the Princess burst into tears, and the whole company were aghast. The Duchess of Kent said not a word. Immediately after they rose and retired, and a terrible scene ensued; the Duchess announced her immediate departure and ordered her carriage, but a sort of reconciliation was patched up, and she was prevailed upon to stay till the next day.¹³

      The Duke of Wellington’s comment upon all this was characteristically laconic: ‘Very awkward, by God!’

      

      The Princess’s distress was alleviated by the thought that her beloved Uncle Leopold was coming to England to stay at Claremont in three weeks’ time. Her delight in his company was as profound as ever: ‘He is so clever,’ she recorded in her diary, ‘so mild and so prudent; he alone can give me good advice on every thing.’ She loved Queen Louise, too, she protested, and ‘very much regretted’ that she was unable to come to England with her husband as she was expecting a second child. Louise sent ‘lovely’ presents, however, a silk dress and a satin bonnet, the dress ‘made by Mlle Palmyre, the first dressmaker of Paris’.

      Her uncle’s visit was soon over, however; and thereafter week after week passed at Claremont with ‘the usual society’, including that of Conroy’s daughter, Victoire, whom she increasingly grew to dislike the more she hated the girl’s father, and she longed to return to London for the season, yearning for the opera and the theatre and ‘for some merriment after being so very long in the country’ with such companions as she was obliged to live with there. Yet, when she did return to Kensington, life there was far from gay: Conroy was as detestable as ever and more than ever determined not to lose his influence in the Duchess of Kent’s household when her daughter came of age. The Duchess herself was just as much under Conroy’s influence as she had ever been.

      

      Shortly before her eighteenth birthday Princess Victoria received a letter from the King in which he told her that he proposed applying to Parliament for a grant of £10,000 a year to be entirely at her own disposal. He intended her also to have the right to appoint her own Keeper of the Privy Purse, suggesting Sir Benjamin Stephenson whom the Duchess much disliked, for this post. The Princess was, in addition, to have the right to form her own household. When the Lord Chamberlain brought this letter to Kensington, Sir John Conroy insisted upon its being delivered to the Princess in the Duchess’s presence. Once the Princess had read it she handed it to her mother who was, of course, appalled by its contents. Having satisfied herself that the King had consulted the Cabinet before writing the letter, she wrote an extremely angry reply to Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister, then, having summarily dismissed suggestions by her daughter that her tutor, the Revd George Davys, now Dean of Chester, might be appointed her Keeper of the Privy Purse, and that the Princess might have a private conversation with Lord Melbourne, the Duchess, with Conroy’s help, wrote a letter to the King which the Princess, who had felt ‘very miserable’ the evening before and had refused to go down to dinner, was required to copy. ‘I wish to remain in every respect as I am now in the care of my Mother,’ ran this letter which the Princess had for a time resisted in copying. ‘Upon the subject of money I should wish that whatever may be necessary to add, may be given to my dear Mother for my use, who always does everything I want in pecuniary matters.’¹⁴

      When he read this letter the King commented, before laying it aside, that Victoria had not written it.¹⁵ To a later letter, offering a compromise – £4,000 a year for the Princess and £6,000 for herself – the Duchess replied curtly, rejecting it without even consulting her daughter who by now no longer spoke to her when they were alone together.

      By this time the King was clearly very ill. He had arranged to give a ball on the evening of 24 May when the Princess came of age; but he was not well enough to greet his niece who drove to St James’s through streets crammed with people whose anxiety, so she wrote, ‘to see poor stupid me was very great, and I must say I am quite touched by it, and feel proud, which I always have done of my country and the English nation’.¹⁶ At the Palace she was told that His Majesty had directed that she should occupy his own chair of state. She did not greatly enjoy the ball, though. She felt Sir John Conroy’s eyes on her the whole evening, like those of a disapproving hawk; and when it was over she wrote resignedly in her diary: ‘Today is my eighteenth birthday! How old! And yet how far am I from being what I should be.’¹⁷

      It was a sentiment which both Sir John Conroy and her mother did all they could to endorse. ‘You are still very young,’ the Duchess, with Conroy clearly at her shoulder, wrote to her, ‘and all your success so far has been due to your Mother’s reputation. Do not be too sanguine in your own talents and understanding.’ Conroy himself asserted that Victoria was ‘younger in intellect than in years’ and that she had too flippant a mentality to dispense with the guidance of those who knew her best.

      The day after her birthday her uncle Leopold’s friend and counsellor Baron Stockmar, a Coburger of Swedish descent, arrived in London. Then forty-nine years old, Christian Frederick Stockmar was a qualified physician who had been head of the military hospital in Coburg. Having come across him there, Prince Leopold had been impressed by his honesty and knowledge of the world, and he had asked him to become his personal physician. When Princess Charlotte died, Prince Leopold had begged Stockmar never to leave him. Stockmar had promised never to do so and thereafter he spent more time with Leopold and on various missions for him than he did with his wife and children. Small, rotund, hypochondriacal, trustworthy, sardonic, moody, obsessively moral, and with a rather too high opinion of his understanding of political manoeuvres and psychological insights, he was to become a familiar figure at the English court, where, until his retirement to Coburg in 1857, he was to be seen walking into dinner of an evening without decorations and wearing ordinary trousers instead of the regulation knee-breeches.

      He soon grasped the realities of the imbroglio at Kensington. On previous visits to England he СКАЧАТЬ