The Duchess of Kent and her daughter stayed quietly sometimes at Margate, sometimes at Tunbridge Wells, but their real home was at Kensington. There the Princess’s life was a quiet one; she saw little, too little, of the Court, and still went to bed at nine o’clock. Occasionally the Duchess gave dinner-parties at which Victoria appeared before and after the meal. Thus, in 1833, Her Royal Highness did her best to mollify the King’s resentment against her by giving a large party in his honour; and Croker writes of dining with the Duchess “with a large Conservative party—four Dukes and three Duchesses, and the rest of thirty people in proportion. I was the only untitled and almost the only undecorated guest. The little Princess ceases to be little. She grows tall, is very good-looking, but not, I think, strong; yet she may live to be plain Mrs. Guelph.” A suggestion which, as we have seen, appeared nearing fulfilment some time later.
Two of Victoria’s first cousins came over that year, Princes Alexander and Ernest of Wurtemburg, and even at that date the matchmakers wondered whether there was not some ulterior motive for their coming. As on an earlier occasion, King William gave a juvenile ball at St. James’s Palace. But in spite of the gossip the young men came and went, leaving no tit-bit of news for the talkers to discuss. This marriage of the Princess had occupied some minds almost from the day of her birth; and when she was but nine years old it was said that she must marry either the son of the Duke of Cumberland or the son of the Duke of Cambridge, a proceeding which would have been entirely gratifying to the father of whichever boy was chosen.
One of the Princess’s favourite amusements was studying music, and she must have found it much more entertaining than the pretensions of boy lovers; indeed, she liked it so much that in 1834 Mrs. Brookfield said that her teachers had been obliged to keep her music under the smotherings of less delightful studies, or it would have run away with her; adding that “the Duchess of Northumberland has no sinecure of her governorship, but really fags with her pupil.”[3]
Princess Victoria loved the Italian opera, went often to the theatre, and for her soul’s health she was given every possible opportunity of listening to sacred oratorios, with the result that Handel was anathema to her in later life. Indeed, music occupied so much time and interest that the papers announced the appointment of Mr. George Herbert Rodwell—Director of Music at Covent Garden—as composer to the Duchess of Kent and Princess Victoria. This led to many satirical comments, in which it was suggested that they went through their daily life to an accompaniment of suitable music. A humorous journal gave the following scene as taking place in Victoria’s boudoir:
“A tooth-brush, O.P., upper entrance, looking-glass in flat, toilet-table, P.S., tooth-powder in centre, rouge in the background, pincushions in the distance, combs, hair-brushes, &c., in confusion. A chord—enter the Princess through door in flat. Slow music, during which the Princess opens the top of a chest of drawers, and takes out a frill, which she puts on, and exit through door opposite. Slow music, and enter the Duchess—she advances towards the toilet-table with a start. Hurried music by Rodwell, composer to Her Royal Highness; she sits down. A chord—opens window. Air and chorus of housemaids without. She sits down. Crash—advances towards the rouge-pot. Slow music—she takes it away. Crash—by Rodwell, and exit to hurried music.”
The writer adds to this that the curious in these matters will be enabled to see through the moral of the delightful sketch, which shows the anxiety of the Duchess to prevent the amiable little Princess from applying rouge to her infantile cheeks, “a practice we cannot sufficiently reprobate. The music is admirably adapted to the situations by Rodwell, whose appointment as composer to the royal duo we shall in future be able to appreciate.”
The two Princesses were, in fact, constantly going to concerts, and William Henry Brookfield poked fun at them in a letter written to his friend Venables—he who had broken Thackeray’s nose in a fight in their schoolboy days. A three days’ musical festival was arranged at Westminster, and he thus describes one afternoon:—“We went to town for the fiddling, which it was the pill[4] of the day to cry down. I was much gratified by the show and altogether. I sate by the Duke of Wellington, who was good enough to go out and fetch me a pot of porter. When ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’ was sung in ‘Judas Maccabeus,’ all eyes were turned upon me. I rose and bowed—but did not think the place was suited for any more marked acknowledgment. The King sang the Coronation Anthem exceedingly well, and Princess Victoria whistled ‘The Dead March in Saul’ with rather more than her usual effect. But the chef d’œuvre was confessed by all to be Macaulay in ‘The praise of God and of the second Day.’ I rose a wiser and, I think, a sadder man.”
It was probably at this festival that young Lord Elphinstone first frightened the Royal mother by writing the following acrostic upon the Princess’s name:—
“Propitious Heaven! who, midst this beauteous blaze,
Rapt in the grandeur of the Minstrel scene,