Under this galaxy of stars, some slowly sinking below the horizon, and others just rising above it, Princess Victoria was born.
In the year following, King George III. died. Historians, mostly partisans of the Whig party, have not done this King justice. Of all Sovereigns who have ever reigned in England, none so completely represented the average man among his subjects. The King’s blameless morals, his regular habits, his conservative instincts and narrow obstinacy, were characteristics which he shared with the people he ruled. Of the House of Hanover he was the first King born in England, and he spoke his native tongue without a foreign accent. If he could have reconciled it to the family tradition, he would have married an English wife. He was essentially British in character and sentiment. Had he not been overborne by his Ministers, he would have fought out to a finish the war with America, and peace with Washington would not have been concluded. He never for a moment contemplated abandoning the struggle against Napoleon. No party whip could have taken more trouble to keep his chief in office than did George III. to support Mr. Pitt throughout that Minister’s first administration. He has been called despotic, but that adjective can only be used, in speaking of him, in the sense that he wished to see his views prevail. He was a good partisan fighter, and this, in the main, his subjects never disliked. A close and impartial examination of the character of George III. discloses a temperament strongly resembling that which her Ministers were destined in the middle and later years of her reign to find in his granddaughter. Strong tenacity of view and of purpose, a vivid sense of duty, a firm though unrevealed belief in the transcendental right of the Sovereign to rule, a curious mingling of etiquette and domestic simplicity, and a high standard of domestic virtue were marked characteristics of George III. and of Queen Victoria. Both these descendants of Princess Sophia had little in common with the Stewarts, but, like Elizabeth and the Tudors, they had intense pride in England, and they showed a firm resolve to cherish and keep intact their mighty inheritance.
When George III. died at Windsor in 1820, and during the ten following years, Princess Victoria’s uncle, George IV., reigned as King. For the previous ten years he had reigned as Prince Regent. If his father has been misjudged, this Sovereign too has been misrepresented by those who have made it their business to write the political history of our country. He is generally described as being wholly bad, and devoid of any decent quality as a man and as a Sovereign. Decency perhaps was not his strong point; but though it is not possible to esteem him as a man, George IV. was not a bad King. In his youth, as Prince of Wales, in spite of glaring follies and many vices, he possessed a certain charm. When a boy he had broken loose from the over-strict and over-judicious watchfulness of his parents. Kept in monotonous seclusion, cloistered within the narrow confines of a Palace, fettered by an Oriental system of domestic spies, cut off from intercourse with the intellectual movement of the outer world, the royal children, warm-blooded and of rebellious spirit, ran secret riot after a fashion which modern memoirs have revealed in Borgian colours. It was a natural reaction of young animal life against unnatural and unhealthy restraint. The Prince of Wales, when he was eighteen years old, was unwillingly and perforce liberated. It followed, simply enough, that he became a source of constant grief and annoyance to his royal father. Not only were the canons of morality violated by him with little regard for the outward decorum due to his great position, but the young Prince plunged into a turgid sea of politics, and it was not long before he stood forth as the nominal head of a faction bitterly opposed to the King’s Ministers, and the head and front of personal offence to the King himself.
In the eyes of high society he was a Prince Charming, vicious if you will, a spendthrift and a rake, the embodiment of a reactionary spirit against the dulness and monotonous respectability of the Court. He was known to appreciate beautiful objects as well as beautiful faces. He was not altogether without literary culture. He appeared to be instinctively drawn to the arts and sciences with a full sense of the joy of patronage, and he made it clear to every one that he welcomed the free intercourse of men of all ranks, provided that they possessed some originality of character or some distinction of mind. In Mr. Fox he found a willing mentor and an irresistible boon companion. Among that little group of Whigs, of whom Sheridan was the ornament and the disgrace, he found precisely the atmosphere which suited him, so completely was it the antithesis of that in which his boyhood had been spent. As he grew older, the rose-tinted vices of his youth became grey and unlovely, while the shortcomings of his mind and his heart were more readily discerned; but much of his personal charm remained. In his most degenerate days, in the years of his regency and kingship, when he dragged into the public eye the indecencies of his domestic misfortunes and paraded his mistresses before the world, he still managed to retain a curious and genuine hold upon the affections of his Ministers. Although he possessed none of their regard, he was not altogether without some following among the people.
George IV.’s merits were a certain epicurean kindness of heart and a not ungenerous desire to give pleasure, coupled with a true sense of his constitutional position and a firm-drawn resolve to distinguish between his private predilections and his public duty. The nation owes him very little, but in any case it owes him this, that he was the first Sovereign since Charles I. who showed a blundering reverence for beautiful things. He enlarged and consolidated the artistic wealth of the nation. A life-long patron of artists, he fostered the growth of national art. He added largely to the splendid collections which now adorn Windsor and the metropolis. Whatever the final judgment passed upon him may be, both as a man and as a Sovereign, he must in strict justice be spared the unqualified contempt with which superior spirits, taking their cue from Thackeray, have treated him. It should weigh with every man who reads The Four Georges that King George IV. was certainly liked, and was certainly not despised, by Sir Walter Scott. In his later years the old King displayed some little kindness to his niece, the young Princess Victoria, who had succeeded his own daughter as prospective heiress of England. If he saw her but rarely, he now and again betrayed knowledge of her existence, and once took her for a drive in his pony-carriage. There are still extant some short letters which she wrote to him in a large baby hand. In 1830 he died, and was succeeded by his brother the Duke of Clarence.
William IV. was the most fortunate of the children of George III. Thanks to his profession as a sea-officer, he escaped early from the stifling atmosphere of the Court, and had the glorious privilege of serving under the command of Hood and of Nelson. His sea service ended when he was only twenty-five years old. It left the usual dominant sea-mark upon his character. Like so many gallant sailors, his mind was untrained and ill-disciplined. His sense of duty was strong, though undiscerning. He was courageous and truthful. He had ten children by Mrs. Jordan born out of wedlock, but they were all well cared for and never disowned. He realised his constitutional duty sufficiently to see that he must yield to the expressed will of the nation, but he yielded so clumsily that all men believed him to be coerced. Wisely anxious to be well known and popular among his subjects, he chose the curious method of walking down St. James’s Street dressed in long boots and spurs during the most crowded hour of the afternoon. His predecessor had lived the last years of his life in seclusion and silence; he determined therefore to give full scope to his naturally garrulous disposition. He talked in season and out of season with an irresponsibility which savoured of the quarter-deck, but wholly without the salt of the sea. By his Ministers he was regarded with kindliness, although it cannot be said, in spite of Lord Grey’s panegyric, that they held him in much respect. By the middle classes he was looked upon with amused and not unfriendly amazement. In the eyes of the masses he was “Billy,” their sailor-King, and among monarchical safeguards there are few stronger than a nickname and the aureole of the Navy.
William IV. married late in life Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Coburg-Meiningen, but the fates left him with no surviving children when he ascended the Throne in 1830. During his reign of seven years the King showed much kindness to the little niece who was clearly designated as his successor. Her mother, however, contrived to irritate him by giving too much prominence to the obvious fact of her daughter’s heirship to the Throne. By “progresses” made on different occasions and undertaken with considerable ceremonial, the Duchess of Kent excited the wrath of the King, who made no attempt to conceal his annoyance, and took evident pleasure in the display of it at embarrassing moments in public. It was partly owing to the friction between her mother and King William and to the unpleasant atmosphere created in consequence of these quarrels, and partly to the presence in her mother’s household of Sir John Conroy and his family—persons very distasteful to the young Princess—that Queen Victoria was in the habit of saying that her childhood had been a sad one. These Journals, begun in her fourteenth year, betray no sense of childish sorrow, and no reader can glean from them any confirmation of her statement that her early life was unhappy. It must be remembered, however, that this Journal was not a sealed book. It was not privately put away under lock and key and reserved only for the eye of the writer. The young Princess’s Journals were commenced in a volume given to her by her mother for the express purpose that she should record the facts of her daily life, and that this record of facts and impressions should be open to the inspection of the child’s governess as well as of her mother. It is natural, therefore, that the earlier volumes should contain very little beyond the obvious and simple things which any girl would be likely to write down if she were attempting to describe her life from day to day. When the Princess ascended the Throne and assumed her queenly independence, the tone of the Journals changes at once. It becomes immediately clear to the reader that while the Princess’s Journal was written for her mother, the Queen’s Journal was written for herself. One of her earliest entries after her succession was to state her intention of invariably seeing her Ministers alone; and she might have added, had she thought it worth stating, that her Journal also would in future be seen by her alone.
Journals are often said to be useful to the historian. This theory is based on the assumption, hardly borne out by experience, that he who writes a journal writes what is true. A journal is supposed to record events, great or small, which are happening at the moment, and to convey impressions about personages with whom the writer comes in contact, or who loom sufficiently large to justify their being mentioned. When, however, it is remembered how inaccurate our information generally is, and how mistaken we often are about the character and motives even of those we know intimately, it is not surprising that the most brilliant diarist should frequently state facts which cannot be verified from other sources, and colour the personality of his contemporaries in a manner quite unjustifiable unless truth be deliberately sacrificed to the picturesque. The Journal of Charles Greville, perhaps the most famous of English modern journals, is full of gross inaccuracies in matters of fact and still grosser distortions of character. It is, nevertheless, a striking picture of the political and social world haunted by that persistent eavesdropper, and, like any well-written journal, throws a vivid and interesting light upon the character of the writer.
Similar criticisms apply to most famous memoirs, like Saint-Simon’s or Lord Hervey’s, written with a view to serving the historian of the future, and with the distinct purpose of giving bias to history.
They do not apply to these diaries of Queen Victoria. The Queen makes no attempt to analyse character or the meaning of events. She never strives after effect. Her statements are just homely descriptions of everyday life and plain references to the people she meets at Kensington or at Windsor. If the young Princess sees a play that pleases her or hears a song that touches her, she says so. If the Queen hears something said that strikes her as original or quaint, the saying is put on record. She is not writing for the historian. She writes for her own pleasure and amusement, although there is always present to her mind a vague idea, common enough at the time, that to “keep a journal” is in some undefined way an act of grace.