In the Queen’s early childhood the knowledge that she was the probable heir to the throne was carefully kept from her. In Lockhart’s “Life of Scott” the following entry is given from Scott’s Journal, May 19th, 1828: “Dined with the Duchess of Kent. I was very kindly received by Prince Leopold, and presented to the Princess Victoria, the Heir Apparent to the crown, as things now stand.... This little lady is educating with much care, and watched so closely that no busy maid has a moment to whisper, ‘You are heir of England.’ I suspect if we could dissect the little heart we should find some pigeon or other bird of the heir had carried the matter.” The Queen has given her own authority for saying that this very natural surmise was mistaken, and has allowed the publication of the following letter from Her Majesty’s governess, Baroness Lehzen, which contains one of the most interesting anecdotes of the Queen’s childhood.
The Regency Bill, which made the Duchess of Kent Regent in the event of the death of William IV. without direct heirs while the Princess was still a minor, was passing through Parliament in 1830, and the occasion suggested to the governess that the time had come when her little charge should be made aware of her prospect of succeeding to the throne. Baroness Lehzen wrote in a letter to the Queen, dated 2nd December, 1867:—
“I then said to the Duchess of Kent that now, for the first time, your Majesty ought to know your place in the succession. Her Royal Highness agreed with me, and I put the genealogical table into the historical book. When Mr. Davys [the Queen’s instructor, afterwards Bishop of Peterborough] was gone, the Princess Victoria opened the book again as usual, and, seeing the additional paper, said, ‘I never saw that before.’ ‘It was not thought necessary you should, Princess,’ I answered. ‘I see I am nearer the throne than I thought.’ ‘So it is, madam,’ I said. After some moments the Princess answered, ‘Now, many a child would boast; but they don’t know the difficulty. There is much splendor, but there is more responsibility.’ The Princess, having lifted up the forefinger of her right hand while she spoke, gave me that little hand, saying, ‘I will be good. I understand why you urged me so much to learn, even Latin. My aunts Augusta and Mary never did, but you told me that Latin is the foundation of English grammar and of all the elegant expressions, and I learned it as you wished it; but I understand all better now.’ And the Princess gave me her hand, repeating, ‘I will be good.’”
This anecdote gives the key-note to the Queen’s character. Her childish resolve, I will be good, has been the secret of her strength throughout her reign. She has never shrunk from anything which has presented itself to her in the light of a duty. When she became Queen she did not go through her business in a perfunctory way, giving her signature without question to whatever documents were placed before her. She required all the State business explained to her to such a degree that Lord Melbourne, her first Prime Minister, said laughingly that he would rather manage ten kings than one queen. On one occasion, in the early years of her reign, the Minister urged her to sign some document on the grounds of “expediency.” She looked up quietly, and said, “I have been taught to judge between what is right and what is wrong, but ‘expediency’ is a word I neither wish to hear nor to understand.” Another word which she objected to was “trouble.” Mrs. Jameson relates that one of the Ministers told her that he once carried the Queen some papers to sign, and said something about managing so as to give Her Majesty “less trouble.” She looked up from her papers, and said, “Pray never let me hear those words again; never mention the word ‘trouble.’ Only tell me how the thing is to be done and done rightly, and I will do it if I can.” This has been her principle throughout her reign: to do her work as well as she knew how to do it, without sparing herself either trouble or responsibility.
It is not only the larger questions of State policy that she follows now, after more than fifty years of sovereignty, with all the knowledge which long experience gives, but she bestows close attention to the details of organization in the different departments of the Government. If any change is proposed of which she does not see the bearing or the necessity, she requires to have the reasons which prompted it laid before her, and would withhold her sanction unless her judgment were convinced. She is a constant and indefatigable worker, and those in attendance upon her have frequently expressed their surprise at her continuing at her work late into the night, and yet being almost unfailingly at her post again in the early morning. The child raising her little hand, and saying, “I will be good,” has been in this and in many other ways the mother to the woman. The solemn words of the Coronation Service have not been profaned by her as so many monarchs have profaned them. The Archbishop, delivering the Sword of State into the Sovereign’s hand at the Coronation, says: “Receive this kingly sword, brought now from the altar of God, and delivered to you by the hands of us, the servants and bishops of God, though unworthy. With this sword do justice, stop the growth of iniquity, protect the holy Church of God, help and defend widows and orphans, restore the things that are gone to decay, maintain the things that are restored, punish and reform what is amiss, and confirm what is in good order; that doing these things you may be glorious in all virtue, and so faithfully serve our Lord Jesus Christ in this life that you may reign forever with Him in the life which is to come.” All through the Queen’s reign these words have been turned into actions; they have inspired her to do her duty faithfully and courageously and with unfailing self-sacrifice of her own inclinations and wishes. By so living she has revived the feeling of personal affection and loyalty to the throne on the part of her subjects which her immediate predecessors had done much to destroy. When we reflect upon the contrast which the pure-minded, pure-hearted girl presented to them we shall be able to understand something of the keen emotion of joyful loyalty which was evoked at her accession. But this will be the subject of the next chapter.
[5] Life of the Prince Consort, vi. 280, 281.
CHAPTER III.
ACCESSION TO THE THRONE.
It is not easy to realize that in the lifetime of our own fathers and mothers there was in England a plot to change the succession and secure the crown for the “wicked uncle,” to the exclusion of the rightful heir. The whole story savors of romance, or at any rate of a much earlier period in our history, when John Lackland or Richard the Hunchback cheated their young nephews of crown and life. Yet the evidence of history on this point is unmistakable. In 1835 a plot was discovered and laid bare in Parliament, mainly by Joseph Hume, which had for its aim to secure the crown for the Duke of Cumberland and set aside the claims of Princess Victoria. The Duke, to do him justice, does not seem to have supposed that his personal merits and attractions would cause him to be made king by acclamation. But he appears to have thought he could ride in on the top of a wave of fanaticism got up over a No-popery cry. The passing of Catholic Emancipation in 1829 by the Tory Government of the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel was not accomplished without a great deal of real terror and misgiving that this act of plain justice to their Roman Catholic fellow-subjects was a breaking down of the barriers against Papal aggression, and that it was merely a step towards undoing the work of the Reformation. Orange Lodges, which up to that time had little vigorous existence out of Ireland, spread all over England, and were formed even in the army. The Duke of Cumberland, a precious champion for any sort of religion, was their grand master. But he was not inconsistent: he had his own personal aggrandizement in view, and appealed to fanaticism, bigotry, and ignorance to help him to attain it. If he was acting a part, he understood his own character, and was not acting out of it. But he and the Orange Lodges too completely misunderstood the nation they were living in. The saying of Charles II. to his brother, afterwards James II., might have shown them their mistake: “They will never kill me to make you king.” When hard pressed by political necessity, the English people have not shrunk from revolutionary changes in their constitution; but they would never have embarked on a revolution with the object of placing Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, on the throne. The ridiculous plot was rendered still more ridiculous by the assertion made by the conspirators that they feared the Duke of Wellington intended to seize the crown for himself;[6] that the Iron Duke, the most sternly upright and devotedly loyal of subjects, meant to depose William IV., set aside the little Princess Victoria, and become Emperor of the English, as Bonaparte had become Emperor of the French. The assertion had only to be made, and made publicly, to be drowned in the ridicule it excited. However, the plot of the Orange Lodges, the Duke of Cumberland’s association with it, the unveiling of the scheme in the House of Commons by Joseph Hume, and Lord John Russell’s masterly dealing with the whole matter, was a nine days’ wonder in 1835. An address to the King was unanimously agreed to, praying him to dissolve the Orange Lodges; even the Orangemen in the House assented to this, and Greville says Lord John’s dignified eloquence melted them to tears. The Duke of Cumberland, seeing which way his cat had jumped, hastened to assure the Home Secretary that the dissolution of the societies of which he was Grand Master had his entire approval and acquiescence, and the whole of the foolish business appeared at an end.
But this was not so. The elements of disturbance were quite genuine, and had not been removed even by a resolution of the House of Commons: these were the Duke of Cumberland’s treachery and his No-popery nightmare. The original scheme had been to depose William IV. on the pretext that his giving the Royal Assent to the Reform Bill of 1832 was a symptom of insanity; the next step, the setting aside of the claims of Princess Victoria, was rendered attractive to the Duke of Cumberland by the fact that she was a girl, and young; when, therefore, in 1837, William IV. was removed by death, another futile attempt was made to raise the No-popery cry against the accession of the Queen. Her uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians, had recently married Louise, daughter of Louis Philippe, a Roman Catholic Princess. Another member of the Coburg family, Prince Ferdinand, cousin of Prince Albert, had also, quite recently, made a Roman Catholic marriage with Maria, Queen of Portugal. This at any rate showed that the Coburg family, who were known to have great influence with Princess Victoria, were not so exclusively Protestant as the Royal Family of England. But high as party feeling ran at the time, the bare suspicion that any treachery was intended to the young Queen caused a popular outburst of passionate loyalty such as had not been seen since the House of Brunswick had reigned in England. The warmth of this feeling in the curious warp and woof of human affairs was increased by the fact that to be ardently devoted to the young Queen was to be ardently opposed to all the works and ways of the Duke of Cumberland, to be in favor of religious liberty and toleration, to support the Reform Bill and the abolition of slavery. It was Whig to be loyal to the Queen, Tory to be, if not disloyal, full of doubts and fears, imagining that with a young girl at the helm, known to be in sympathy with Whig principles, the ship of State was bound to split on anarchy and popery. These fears very soon disappeared as the Queen showed she had a mind and will of her own, and was no mere puppet in the hands of her Ministers. If at the outset of her reign she showed strong Whig tendencies, she was not long in grasping the fact that, as Sovereign, she was Queen of the whole people, and not the mere head of a party.