Queen Victoria: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ to give him this nosegay now’; and when wishing him goodbye she said with appealing if rather affected gravity, ‘I am coming to bid you adieu, sire, but as I know you do not like fine speeches I shall certainly not trouble you by attempting one.’⁹ Upon her return home she was most anxious that her mother should send ‘her best love and duty to her “dear Uncle King”’.¹⁰

      Although she remembered with pleasure her days at Windsor, the Princess enjoyed her visits to her uncle Leopold’s house, Claremont, even more. So much did she enjoy these visits, indeed, that she cried when it was time to go back to Kensington. She remembered being allowed to listen to the music in the hall at Claremont when there were dinner parties there and being petted by Mrs Louis, Princess Charlotte’s devoted former dresser. She was petted, too, by her own nurse, Mrs Brock, ‘dear Boppy’, and by her mother’s lady-in-waiting, Baroness Späth, who had accompanied the Duchess from Germany. Indeed, Baroness Späth, so Princess Feodora said, idolized the child and would actually go on her knees before her.¹¹

      Very different was the behaviour of the Princess’s governess, Louise Lehzen, a handsome woman, despite her pointed nose and chin, clever, emotional, humourless and suffering intermittently from a variety of complaints, mostly psychosomatic, including cramp, headaches and migraine. She claimed that she did not know what it was like to feel hungry: all ‘she fancied were potatoes’;¹² but she was forever chewing caraway seeds for indigestion, a habit which some maliciously attributed to a need to hide the alcohol on her breath.

      In her mid-thirties at the time of her appointment, she was the youngest child of a Lutheran pastor from a village in Hanover. She was ‘very strict’, her former charge said of her in later years, ‘and the Princess had great respect and even awe of her, but with that the greatest affection…She knew how to amuse and play with the Princess so as to gain her warmest affections. The Princess was her only object and her only thought…She never for the 13 years she was governess to Princess Victoria, once left her.’¹³

      At night she stayed in the bedroom which the Princess shared with her mother until the Duchess retired; and in the morning, when the child was being dressed by Mrs Brock, she read to her so that the little girl would not get into the habit of talking indiscreetly to servants.

      Yet Louise Lehzen’s influence over Princess Victoria was not entirely beneficial, for the governess had her prejudices and these she implanted in her charge’s mind. She encouraged the child to distrust her mother and her mother’s friends and to tell people when they were wrong and ‘to set them down’.¹⁴

      If Princess Victoria’s early childhood was not quite as melancholy as she afterwards decided when looking back upon it, it was – and was encouraged by Lehzen to be – certainly a lonely one. She was brought up in an adult world, rarely seeing children of her own age. ‘Except for occasional visits of other children,’ she said herself in later life, she ‘lived always alone, without companions’. She was devoted to her half-sister, Princess Feodora, but Feodora, a pretty, attractive girl, was twelve years older than herself and longing to escape from Kensington where, so she claimed, her ‘only happy time was driving out’ with Princess Victoria and Louise Lehzen when she could speak and look as she liked. In February 1828, when Princess Victoria was nine, Princess Feodora did escape, her only regret being her separation from her ‘dearest sister’ of whom she so often thought and longed to see again.^{* 15}

      Having married the impoverished, 32-year-old Prince Ernest Christian Charles of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Princess Feodora went away with him to the enormous, uncomfortable Schloss Langenburg, leaving Princess Victoria to comfort herself with her dolls (one hundred and thirty-two of them – little wooden, painted mannequins made by herself and Lehzen and dressed as historical personages and characters from the theatre and opera, all of them listed in a copybook).¹⁶

      Her mother had been lonely too. Having overcome the first shock of her husband’s death, she had struck the few people with whom she came into close contact as being, in Lady Granville’s words, ‘very pleasing indeed’, friendly and approachable.

      But she herself, as she said, felt ‘friendless and alone’ in a country that was not her own, endeavouring to speak a language which she had not yet mastered, being, as she said with not altogether sincere self-denigration, ‘just an old goose’.¹⁷

      She was well aware that, as a German, she was not well liked in the country at large and, as the widow of the Duke of Kent and mother of Princess Victoria, much resented by the Duke of Clarence, heir to the throne after the death of his elder brother, the Duke of York, in 1827. Nor did King George IV care for her.

      When the Prime Minister had suggested to the King that some provision ought to be made for his sister-in-law’s child, the fatherless Princess Victoria, the King declared that he would not consider it: her uncle Leopold was quite rich enough to take care of her as well as her mother. The Duchess accordingly had to borrow £6,000 from Thomas Coutts, the banker.¹⁸ Later, however, the Government came to her aid by proposing an allowance of £4,000 a year; but, since a grant of £6,000 was at the same time proposed for Princess Victoria’s cousin, Prince George of Cumberland, son of the deeply distrusted and malignant Duke of Cumberland, she refused to consider the proposal. The offer to the Duchess was then raised to £6,000 and she accepted it.

      At the same time, Prince Leopold assured her that he would be happy to continue the allowance he made her of £3,000 a year. She was at first reluctant to accept this; but being still heavily in debt she eventually agreed to it, even though she was finding her brother increasingly and tiresomely irritating and, as she put it, ‘rather slow in the uptake and in making decisions’ as well as annoyingly preoccupied.

      Prince Leopold had, indeed, other matters on his mind, not to mention sexual desires to gratify. After pursuing a succession of other women, he had fallen in love with a German actress who, looking ‘wondrously like’ his departed Charlotte, was brought over to England and ensconced alternately in a house in Regent’s Park and a ‘lonely desolate and mournful’ little house in the grounds of Claremont Park where he spent his time either gazing at her longingly while she read aloud to him or picking the silver from military epaulettes to make into a soup tureen.¹⁹

      He had also become involved in negotiations for his elevation to a European throne. He had been offered the throne of Greece in 1830 after that country had secured its freedom from Turkish rule and, having declined to become King of Greece, he agreed two years later, after typical hesitation, to be crowned King of the Belgians once Belgium had secured its independence from the King of Holland. The next year he married Princess Louise, the daughter of Louis-Philippe, King of the French.

      Before leaving for Brussels he volunteered to give up the grant of £50,000 a year he had received upon his marriage to Princess Charlotte but this gesture, gratefully accepted, was less well regarded when he announced that some £20,000 would have to be retained for various expenses, including the upkeep of Claremont.

      Princess Victoria was very sad to have to say goodbye to her uncle. He had done his best to take the place of the father she had never known. Ponderous and, on occasions, exasperating as he could be, she loved him and admired him greatly. ‘To hear dear Uncle СКАЧАТЬ