Queen Victoria: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ Duke of Rutland, and the Bishop of London, William Howley, a scholarly but otherwise (in Charles Greville’s opinion) ‘very ordinary man’ who was to succeed Manners-Sutton as Archbishop in 1828. Neither of them had any idea what the names were to be when the ceremony began and the Archbishop had the child in his arms. He looked towards the parents, then towards the Regent, for enlightenment. The Regent announced ‘Alexandrina’. There was a pause. The father proposed Elizabeth. The Regent dissented, then, looking at the Duchess of Kent who had been reduced to tears, he said sharply, ‘Give her the mother’s name also then, but it cannot precede that of the Emperor.’¹¹ So the child was christened Alexandrina Victoria, and in her early years was generally known by the diminutive of the first name, Drina.

      The Regent had not spoken to the Duke of Kent during the ceremony; nor had he seen fit to suggest that his other brother, the Duke of Sussex (with whom he was, as usual, quarrelling), should be asked to attend the ceremony, though he was then living in Kensington Palace in an apartment furnished with 50,000 books and numerous clocks. Nor did the Regent attend the dinner party which was given afterwards; nor yet did he deign to notice the Duke of Kent’s presence a few weeks later at a reception given at the Spanish Embassy where he was seen actually to turn his back on him. That same month at a military review, to which the Duke and Duchess had ill-advisedly taken their baby daughter, the Regent was heard to expostulate, ‘What business has that infant here?’¹²

      There could be no question of the Regent coming to the help of the Duke who was once more deeply in debt, having spent with characteristic extravagance far more than he could afford on furniture and improvements for his apartments in St James’s Palace, including several thousand pounds’ worth of looking-glasses. He had a country house, Castle Hill at Ealing, on which equally lavish sums had been spent and which, with its furniture and land, was estimated to be worth about £70,000; but when he applied for parliamentary consent to sell the property by means of a lottery, the Leader of the House of Commons declined to consider the proposal. He then considered selling the place in lots but was advised by auctioneers to wait until the spring. So the Duke decided to move to the West Country where he and his family and household could live more modestly in a rented house and where the mother of his child might benefit from ‘luke warm sea baths’ and the healthy air of the Devonshire coast.

      

      Accompanied by his equerry, John Conroy, the Duke set off for Devonshire by way of Salisbury where he caught a bad cold. He had been looking round the freezing cathedral and had called on the Bishop, John Fisher, who had been his childhood preceptor and was the uncle of Conroy’s wife, Elizabeth, daughter of Major-General Benjamin Fisher. From Salisbury he sent a letter to his ‘beloved and very dear wife’ to whom he wrote affectionately every day.

      In Devonshire the Duke and Conroy looked at various houses along the coast, none of which was satisfactory, until at Sidmouth they chanced upon a pretty house with a partly castellated roof and Gothic windows, Woolbrook Cottage, Woolbrook Glen.

      The Duke decided to take it; and on Christmas Day he and his family moved in as snow covered the ground outside. For days it was dreadfully cold and wet. The Duchess and her daughter, Feodora, ventured out to take walks along the coast; but the Duke stayed indoors for most of the day, writing letters. His stomach had been upset when they first arrived and, so he complained, ‘the water had already begun to play the very deuce with [his] bowels’. Then, at the beginning of January 1820 he caught another cold which became so feverish that the Duchess called in his physician, Dr Wilson, who was much concerned by his case. On the evening of the twelfth his patient complained of pains in his chest and was overcome by nausea. Soon he was delirious. The Duchess, distracted, rarely left his side. She sent an urgent request to London for Sir David Dundas, the eminent physician, to come to Sidmouth; but Dundas was in attendance on the dying King George III at Windsor. Dr William Maton, who had been Queen Charlotte’s physician, came instead. His arrival was no comfort to the Duchess: he spoke little French and scarcely any German, and the Duchess’s English, despite her efforts to learn the language, was not yet good enough for her to communicate with him or adequately to protest against the tormenting treatment which he, like Dr Wilson, prescribed their helpless patient.

      The Duke was bled and cupped day after day; blisters were applied to his chest; then he was cupped and bled again until, as the Duchess wrote to a friend, there was ‘hardly a spot on his dear body which [had] not been touched by cupping, blisters or bleeding…I cannot think it can be good for the patient to lose so much blood when he is already so weak…He was terribly exhausted yesterday after all that had been done to him by those cruel doctors.’¹³ Although ‘half delirious’ he was induced to sign a will, appending his signature to the document with the most pathetic determination before sinking back on to his pillow. He died the next morning. The Duchess, who had, she said, ‘adored him’, knelt beside his bed, holding his hand.¹⁴

      She was now almost destitute and it was left to her brother, Prince Leopold, to come to her aid. Without his help, he later assured her daughter, Victoria, the Duchess could not possibly have remained in the country. The Regent’s ‘great wish was to get you and your mama out of the country,’ he told her emphatically. ‘And I must say without my assistance you could not have remained…I know not what would have come of you and your mama, if I had not then existed.’¹⁵

      But Prince Leopold not only existed but still had so large an income that he could well afford to take his sister and his little niece into his care. He asked the Regent’s sister, Princess Mary, Duchess of Gloucester, to seek permission from her brother – who was as fond of her as she was of him – to allow the stricken widow and her daughter to return to her late husband’s apartments at Kensington Palace. ‘Her situation is most melancholy,’ Princess Mary wrote, ‘for Edward had nothing in the world but debts & now there are all his old servants without a penny piece to provide for them. She knows what your goodness of heart is & she is sure you will do what you can for them.’¹⁶ The Regent immediately gave his consent; and so the Duchess of Kent, assured of an annual allowance from Prince Leopold of £2,000, later increased to £3,000 a year, returned to Kensington Palace where they learned that the poor, blind, demented King had died at last on 29 January 1820 and the Prince Regent was now King George IV.

       3 THE CHILD

      ‘I never had a room to myself. I never had a sofa, nor an easy chair, and there was not a single carpet that was not threadbare.’

      

      THE KING’S LITTLE NIECE, VICTORIA, was now eight months old. She had not been well at Sidmouth, suffering from a heavy cold for most of the time; and she had been ‘very upset by the frightful jolting’ of the carriage that brought her back to Kensington. But she was a strong child, as her father had been pleased to note of his ‘little joy’; and at six months she had, in his opinion, been ‘as advanced as children generally are at eight’. She had been vaccinated without ill effects and having been weaned – her mother having caused some disapproval by indelicately insisting on giving what her husband described as ‘maternal nutriment’ – ‘she did not appear to thrive the less for the change’. The Duchess was delighted with her little ‘Vickelchen’, as she called her, although she had to admit that she was already showing ‘symptoms of wanting to get her own little way’.

      This stubbornness and independence of spirit became more pronounced as she grew older. So did her impatience, her wilfulness, outbursts of temper and defiant truthfulness. Frustrated, СКАЧАТЬ