“That woman is a nuisance!” No one can wonder that the Duchess hated him; it is only possible to feel what a pity it was that things had been allowed to come to such a pass.
From that time history gives no account of meetings between St. James’s and Kensington.
It was during her last year at Kensington Palace that Victoria was troubled by the first of the mad suitors who for three years were recurrent factors in her life. This was a Mr. Hunnings, a man of about forty, who was the owner of considerable property near Tunbridge Wells, where he first saw Victoria. He may have been sane enough in other ways, but he was certainly mad in his regard for the heiress to the Throne. He spoke of her as his “little Princess,” and lamented the fact that her cruel guardians kept her from him. He haunted Kensington Gardens, and the Duchess and her daughter scarcely left the Palace but they found this man stationed near the door, bowing most gracefully with his hand on his heart. He would follow the two at a distance until they turned some corner out of his sight, and then at a smart run would either overtake them or by a short cut get ahead, so that they would find him again and again facing them and making most respectful salutes. He regularly attended the services in the Chapel Royal attached to Kensington Palace, sitting where he could obtain a full view of the Royal pew, and would generally put half a sovereign in the plate.
Of course, this matter soon became public property, and was too good a subject for joke to be ignored. Wags would do their best to encourage the hopeful lover by writing him letters, and he once showed a policeman such a missive purporting to be signed by the Princess, expressing a deep love for him, and asking him to write to her, placing his answer under a certain tree, as she would have no chance of speaking to him. The police had, of course, to be on the alert in case he did anything more than usually extravagant, and he complained bitterly of their surveillance, saying that he felt it to be most degrading.
He was for ever trying some new way of keeping the Princess Victoria under his observation, and at last hit upon the idea of having a barouche exactly like that of the Duchess of Kent, his servant being dressed in Royal undress livery, a dark pepper-and-salt coat and glazed hat with broad purple velvet band, and in this he would follow his “little Princess” when she drove out. On Victoria’s eighteenth birthday he licensed a cab to which he gave her name, decorated it with ribbons, and persuaded the proprietor to allow it to be illuminated with lamps at night. His own house was illuminated from top to bottom, and during the day he invited everyone who passed to stop and drink the health of the Princess. By evening a dense crowd had gathered before his door, most of those who composed it being ready to drink again and again to their future Queen, and already in such a state of intoxication that the police interfered and put a stop to his liberality. The whole affair would have been nipped in the bud had it occurred at the present time, but eighty years years ago the police were few and given but scanty powers.
On the accession of Victoria to the Throne this annoying lover was somehow pushed into the background, and we hear no more of him, excepting that at a fancy bazaar at Lincoln he eagerly purchased some things worked by Her Majesty and was eventually locked up for assaulting the Mayor.
As Princess Victoria neared her majority all the newspapers showed unrest; they devoted daily leaders and paragraphs to their hopes and fears; there were hints of plots and schemings, of arrangements made at Kensington, of members chosen to form the new Royal Household as soon as William was dead. The names of everyone around the Duchess were paraded in print, to their praise or detriment. The Newcastle Chronicle got frightened over a scheme which, it said, had been fixed up between Sir John Conroy and Lord Durham, who was then Ambassador Extraordinary at St. Petersburg.
When the Princess came of age, they said, she would, of course, be given an establishment of her own. Lord Durham would return from Russia before that, so as to be ready to put himself at the head of Victoria’s household, his ambition being, however, to make that position but a step to the Premiership. Meanwhile, he would be keeping the post warm for Sir John Conroy, who coveted the headship of the household for himself. This—the paper pointed out—would only need a little management. Lord Durham was a personal friend of Leopold’s, so he would arrange the Coburg marriage, and both men would gain their promotion through the gratitude of the Duchess and her brother.
Poor Victoria! she evidently did not count in this matter at all; she was but a peg on which two ambitious men were supposed to hang their schemes for advancement. Yet this note was sounded in all the diatribes upon her suggested marriage. What the King wished, what the Duchess and her brother wished, what this or that party wished, all these were discussed to the full, but what the Princess herself wished was thought scarcely worthy of any attention.
So in the spring of 1837 the Princess’s future husband was as fertile a subject of interest as it had been in the spring of the year before. In Brussels her marriage with Prince Albert was talked of as an assured thing, for he and his brother were residing there, “in a hired house of no very distinguished class, and obtaining their dinners from the Restaurateur Dubois for themselves and tutors and servants at twenty-five francs a day,” said one bad-tempered article, adding, “We mention this to show the extent of their income and the princely generosity of their uncle, the King of the Belgians, in not giving them an attic in his palace.”