Queen Victoria: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ at her governess. Before her lessons began one day, her mother was asked if she had been a good girl that morning. ‘Yes,’ the Duchess replied, ‘she has been good this morning but yesterday there was a little storm.’ ‘Two storms,’ corrected the little girl, pertly interrupting her mother’s account, intent as always on speaking and hearing the truth, ‘one at dressing and one at washing.’ She was similarly pert when her mother said to her, after one of her outbursts of temper, that she made them both very unhappy by such behaviour. ‘No, Mama, not me, not myself, but you.’¹

      The Duchess’s nervous temperament was not well adapted to dealing with such a child. ‘To my shame,’ she admitted, ‘I must confess that I am over anxious in a childish way with the little one, as if she were my first child…She drives me at times into real desperation…Today the little mouse…was so unmanageable that I nearly cried.’

      Wilful as she was, however, the little girl, intelligent and lively and with an astonishingly retentive memory, progressed satisfactorily with her lessons when these began to a regular timetable supervised by her Principal Master, the Revd George Davys, a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, later Bishop of Peterborough. Davys came to live in Kensington Palace before the Princess was four years old. He helped to teach her to read by writing short words on cards and, as he put it, ‘making her bring them to me from a distant part of the room as I named them’.² Admittedly, she was not very good at Latin, and piano lessons were often a trial: once, when told that there was ‘no royal road to success in music’ and that she must practise like everyone else, she banged shut the lid of the instrument with the defiant words, ‘There! You see there is no must about it.’ But she was patient and attentive in her history and geography lessons; she learned to speak French and German – the latter in particular with a ‘correct pronunciation’ – and a little Italian.^* She soon became adept at arithmetic; her written English was exemplary and her soprano singing voice, trained by John Sale, the organist at St Margaret’s Westminster, was delightful. She danced with easy grace, she listened dutifully to Mr Davys’s religious instruction, she read poetry ‘extremely well’, he said, and understood what she read ‘as well, as at her age, could reasonably be expected’. She displayed a precocious skill in drawing at which she was given lessons by Richard Westall, the prolific historical painter and book illustrator, and later, by Edwin Landseer, Edward Lear and William Leighton Leitch, the distinguished watercolourist.³

      In March 1830, when the Princess was ten years old, the Duchess decided that her daughter should be examined to ensure that her education was proceeding along the correct lines. The two invigilators chosen were Charles Blomfield, Bishop of London, described by Richard Porson, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, as a ‘very pretty scholar’, and John Kaye, Bishop of Lincoln, who had been elected Master of Christ’s College, Cambridge at the age of thirty and Regius Professor of Divinity two years later.

      Having examined the Princess, these two eminent scholars expressed themselves as being ‘completely satisfied’ with her answers.

      In answering a great variety of questions [they reported] the Princess displayed an accurate knowledge of the most important features of Scripture, History and of the leading truths and precepts of the Christian Religion as taught by the Church of England; as well as an acquaintance with the Chronology and principal facts of English History, remarkable in so young a person. To questions of Geography, the use of Globes, Arithmetic and Latin Grammar, the answers which the Princess returned were equally satisfactory; and Her pronunciation both of English and Latin is singularly correct and pleasing. Due attention appears to have been paid to the acquisition of modern languages; and although it was less within the scope of our enquiry, we cannot help observing that the pencil drawings of the Princess are executed with the freedom and correctness of an older child.⁴

      In later years she spoke of her childhood as being lonely and ‘rather melancholy’ and Kensington Palace as being bleak in the extreme. ‘I never had a room to myself,’ she complained. ‘I never had a sofa, nor an easy chair, and there was not a single carpet that was not threadbare.’ The food was boring and unappetizing: she promised herself that when she was grown up and could eat as she liked, she would never have mutton for dinner again. Yet the events of her early life as she recorded them were far from being all unhappy ones. Certainly there were recollections of bogeymen: she had ‘a great horror of Bishops’ with their strange wigs and incongruous aprons and of the Duke of Sussex, ‘Uncle Sussex’, who, she was told, would appear from his nearby rooms in the Palace and punish her when she cried and was naughty. She remembered screaming when she saw him.⁵ But she was fond of her father’s old preceptor, the kindly John Fisher, Bishop of Salisbury, who used to kneel down beside her and let her play with the badge he wore as Chancellor of the Order of the Garter; and she was fond, too, of her uncle, the childless Duke of York, who was very fat and very bald and held himself in such a way that it always seemed as though he would tumble over backwards. He was ‘very kind’ to her and gave her ‘beautiful presents’ including a donkey, and once he presided over a memorable party for her at the house of a friend where there was a Punch and Judy show.⁶ As for her uncle, King George IV, he paid little attention to her when she was taken by her mother to see him at Carlton House; but one day while she was staying near Windsor with her aunt, the Duchess of Gloucester, at Cumberland Lodge, she was driven over to see the King at the Royal Lodge and found him in one of his happier moods. ‘Give me your little paw,’ he said, affectionately taking the hand of the seven-year-old child in his, and then pulled her on to his stout knee so that she could kiss him. It was ‘too disgusting’, she recalled more than half a century later, ‘because his face was covered with grease-paint’. But at the time she had responded to his ‘wonderful dignity and charm of manner’: he never lost his way of pleasing young children. ‘He wore the wig which was so much worn in those days,’ she remembered clearly. ‘Then he said he would give me something to wear, and that was his picture set in diamonds, which was worn by the Princesses as an order to a blue ribbon on the left shoulder. I was very proud of this – and Lady Conyngham [the King’s plump and stately intimate friend, supposedly his mistress] pinned it on my shoulder.’⁷

      Next day, while she was out walking with her mother, the King, who was driving along in his phaeton with the Duchess of Gloucester, overtook her. As his horses were brought to a halt, the King called out cheerfully, ‘Pop her in!’ So she was lifted up and placed between him and her aunt Mary, who held her round the waist as the horses trotted off. She was ‘greatly pleased’, though her mother appeared ‘much frightened’, fearful that her daughter would either fall out on the road or be kidnapped.

      The King drove her ‘round the nicest part of Virginia Water’ and stopped at the Fishing Temple. Here ‘there was a large barge and everyone went on board and fished, while a band played in another!’ Afterwards he had his little niece conducted around his menagerie at Sandpit Gate where she inspected his wapitis, his chamois and his gazelles.

      In the evenings, while staying at Cumberland Lodge, Princess Victoria was invited to watch the Tyrolese dancers creating a ‘gay uproar’ or listen to ‘Uncle King’s’ band playing in the conservatory at the Royal Lodge by the light of coloured lamps. He asked her what tune she would like the band to play next. With precocious tact she immediately asked for ‘God save the King!’ ‘Tell me,’ he asked her later, ‘what you enjoyed most of your visit?’ ‘The drive with you,’ she said. He was clearly very much taken with her.⁸

      As the Duke of Wellington’s friend, Lady Shelley, said, she paid her court extremely СКАЧАТЬ