Queen Victoria: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ too much on display there, she grew to be less censorious of the place. Her sitting room was ‘pretty & cheerful’ and from her bedroom she had ‘a nice little peep of the sea’.⁹

      To begin with she was not much taken with Windsor Castle either. She had first arrived there as Queen towards the end of August 1837 on a rainy day when the great stone towers and terraces, haunted by the cawing of rooks, looked particularly gloomy. She had felt that she did not belong there, that she was not mistress of the place, that at any moment she might ‘see the poor King and Queen’.¹⁰ Memories of the King’s quarrels with her mother, and of herself being ‘terribly scolded’ by her mother in the Tapestry Room in the Lancaster Tower because of her wish to be on good terms with her uncle, had come back to depress her. It was not long, however, before the atmosphere of the place captured her imagination. She even grew to like the tolling of the bells and the striking of her grandfather’s numerous clocks. She enjoyed the games of battledore and shuttlecock she played with her Ladies in the immensely long Great Corridor beneath the Canalettos and the family portraits. Ministers whose company she enjoyed came to stay. So, to her ‘inexpressible happiness’, did King Leopold and Queen Louise; and when they had gone she wrote to Queen Louise to say that the late summer she had spent at Windsor was the ‘pleasantest summer she had EVER passed in her life’.^11*

      Back in London she settled down to the routine of her life with perfect contentment, much enjoying, indeed ‘delighting’ in her work. She had been advised to be methodical about this by King Leopold who told her ‘the best plan is to devote certain hours to [business]; if you do that, you will get through it with great ease. I think you would do well to tell your Ministers that for the present you would be ready to receive those who should wish to see you between the hours of eleven and half-past one.’ He went on to suggest that ‘whenever a question of some importance’ arose with these Ministers ‘it should not be decided on the day it [was] submitted’.¹²

      Although her obedience to this advice sometimes annoyed her Ministers, none of them could deny that she was extremely conscientious in her consideration of the matters put to her; and when King Leopold suggested that she ought to spend more time at Claremont and less in London she retorted that she could not possibly do so: she had to see her Ministers ‘every day’. She did ‘regular, hard but delightful work with them’ and ‘never felt tired or annoyed’ by the hours she had to devote to it.¹³

      She got up promptly at eight o’clock and dealt with papers until it was time for breakfast at which her mother usually joined her, but not until she had received a formal invitation. At eleven o’clock she saw Lord Melbourne, not only as her Prime Minister but also as a kind of private secretary and confidential adviser. After luncheon she went out riding with various ladies and gentlemen of her Household, Melbourne on one side, an equerry on the other. She was usually dressed in a black velvet riding habit, sometimes galloping ahead of the others on her lively horse, displaying her skill and grace as a horsewoman. ‘She has a small, active, safe but very fleet horse,’ Lady Holland told her son, ‘nor does she undervalue the last quality, or allow it to rust for want of using: the pace at which she returns is tremendous…I am startled by the thinness of Lord Melbourne. It is too much; but it may be partly ascribed to the hard riding of those who are attendants of the Queen.’¹⁴

      Before dinner at eight, the Queen took up her sketchbook or her music; and, after dinner, there were those dutiful, stilted conversations with her guests which Charles Greville had described, followed by more intimate talk with a few friends, games of chess and draughts, jigsaw puzzles and spillikins. Or she might look into books of prints, Lord Melbourne at her side, making comments pertinent or wry, paradoxical, funny or facetious, occasionally reducing both her and himself to helpless laughter, the loud hoots of Melbourne’s laugh, like those of the Duke of Wellington, being heard all over the room. He told her, for instance, when talking of cannibalism, of the old woman ill in bed who was asked if there was anything she would like to have and who replied, ‘I think I could eat a little piece of the small bone of a boy’s head.’ He defended Henry VIII’s treatment of his wives by declaring, ‘Oh, those women bothered him so.’ He recommended the employment of Dissenters as gardeners because they wouldn’t take time off to go hunting or to the races. He read out ‘so funnily’ a printed paper which he had come across in a packet of Assam tea and which contained a commendation of the product by one Dr Lun Qua, a name that ‘put him into paroxysms of laughter, from which he couldn’t recover for some time, and did one good to hear’. She herself, she said, would sometimes almost ‘die with laughing’ in his company.¹⁵

      The Duke of Wellington, while admitting that he liked Melbourne and thought that he was ‘the best Minister’ the Queen could have, was ‘afraid he joked too much with her, and made her treat things too lightly which are very serious’.¹⁶ When Melbourne told the Queen of this criticism, which he had heard about through Lord Clarendon, he conceded that there was some truth in it. She protested, however, that it was not so. Nor would she have agreed with the earnest and upright Lord Ashley, later Lord Shaftesbury, who, while recognizing that the Prime Minister had ‘a sincere and even ardent affection for the Queen’, suggested that he did not possess the ‘courage to act and advise her according to her real interests’. ‘His society and conversation are pernicious to a young mind,’ Ashley believed. ‘His sentiments and manner blunt the moral sense…[His cynicism] and ‘reckless language’ were a ‘perpetual source of poison to her mind’.¹⁷

      The Queen would have none of this. As for the confidence of the Crown, she insisted, ‘God knows, No Minister, no friend EVER possessed it so entirely, as this truly excellent Lord Melbourne possesses mine!’

      It was noticed that when Lord Melbourne was not by her side after dinner, she glanced repeatedly in his direction; Lord Hatherton observed that ‘she could not bear that he should be out of her sight…if Melbourne even left the room her eyes followed him, and…she sighed when he was gone’;¹⁸ and when he was not at Court she was jealous of the hostess who had attracted his presence elsewhere. More often than she liked this was Lady Holland; and once, when she knew he had gone to Holland House, she lamented in her diary, ‘I WISH he dined with me.’ She told him that Lady Holland, who was old enough to be her grandmother, did ‘not care for him half as much as she did, which made him laugh’. Indeed, she said, ‘I am sure none of your friends are as fond of you as I am.’¹⁹

       12 ‘A HEADSTRONG GIRL’

      ‘They wished to treat me like a girl, but I will show them that I am Queen of England.’

      

      HE WAS, SAID THE QUEEN, capable of ‘every villainy’. She and Lord Melbourne were once again, on 21 January 1839, talking about Sir John Conroy. Melbourne had remarked, apropos of the man’s intimacy with the Duchess of Kent, Princess Sophia and Lady Flora Hastings, not to mention his wife, ‘What an amazing scape of a man he must have been to have kept three ladies at once in good humour.’¹

      Conroy, that ‘Devil incarnate’, had been СКАЧАТЬ