THE EARLY
COURT OF QUEEN VICTORIA

Photo.

Emery Walker.

Queen Victoria.

From the painting by W. C. Ross, A.R.A.

THE EARLY COURT
OF
QUEEN VICTORIA

BY

CLARE JERROLD

AUTHOR OF
“The Fair Ladies of Hampton Court,” Etc.

NEW YORK

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

1912

PREFACE

No apology need be made for this book, though perhaps a reason for publishing it may be given. In these pages I have endeavoured to show Queen Victoria in her natural setting during her youth, hoping thereby to present her as a really human person. For twenty-five years at least the tendency among those who write has been so to overwhelm the late Queen with adulation that the ordinary reader turns from the subject in disgust. We are not fit for perfection; we believe that perfection is only an ideal—one which would probably become insufferable were it to degenerate into actuality—and when biographers, whose line, it is true, has been more or less laid down for them, depict Queen Victoria without fault and possessing almost preternatural wisdom and virtue, then there must be danger of unpopularity for the great Queen.

As a child my loyalty was upset by the “I will be good” story, and in my childish heart I despised the childish utterer of that sentence. The fault of this lay not in the fact that the little Princess made an impulsive resolution, but in the further fact that that story has been used as an example for other children by all adults who know it. When, at the second Jubilee, I wrote an anecdotal life of the Queen, I was amused at the literature through which I had to wade for my facts. Taken in the mass, it became a pæan of praise with every trace of real human lovableness erased. Of course, the person really to blame for this in the last resort was the Queen herself. For her one great fault was an exaggerated, indeed a morbid, belief in the infallibility, not of herself as a person, but of the Crown. Nothing angered her more than dissent from, or criticism of, the Crown. It was a curious position, for she practically was the Crown, and therefore the criticism of any public acts of hers, was doubly displeasing to her, as she considered that it was the highest dignity of the State, and not a mere person, which was belittled. Under such pressure—even though it was unspoken its influence was felt—writers wrote naturally that which would please, certainly that which would give no offence; and they were not so much untrue to fact as vigilant that all adverse matter and circumstance should remain unchronicled.

But those who talk of the late Queen do so in an increasing spirit of criticism, and this prompted me to endeavour to show the young Monarch as she really was, surrounded by the somewhat cruel limitations of her time—a girl frank, loving, truthful, and admirable in many ways, yet one in whom the seeds of an undue pride had been planted and most earnestly fostered by those responsible—in spite of which fact, however, a person much more lovable than any counsel of perfection could possibly have produced.

My materials have been gathered largely from contemporary journals and newspapers, and among the books to which I am indebted I must mention Lady Bloomfield’s “Reminiscences” for some delightful pictures of Queen Victoria’s life at the beginning of her reign. Mr. Sidney Lee’s admirable “Life” has also been of use; while the correspondence of Her Majesty was more helpful in amplifying or supporting information already gained than in really supplying fresh facts. The trenchant remarks of Charles Greville and the terse, lively, and often amusing criticisms of Thomas Creevy also could not be ignored by any writer about public people in the ’thirties who wished to get a personal impression.

Hampton-on-Thames,

November, 1911.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

N.B.—The illustrations marked with an asterisk (*) are from the collection of Mr. A. M. Broadley.

THE EARLY COURT OF QUEEN VICTORIA

CHAPTER I
PRINCESS VICTORIA’S RELATIVES

“We are going presently to write our names for the Duchess of Kent, who has produced a daughter.”—The Hon. Mrs. Calvert. 1819.

The Duchess of Kent was not a very popular woman with the Guelph family. George IV. hated her, and made her less welcome than he had made her husband, his brother, to whom he intimated early in 1819 that he would no longer be received at Court; William IV. did not like her when he was the Duke of Clarence, but his wife was so sorry for her sister-in-law’s misfortunes that she showed her much kindness and affection until, holding the position of Queen herself, she was obliged to resent the hauteur with which she was treated. The Fitzclarences, who surrounded William IV., had little reason to admire her, and the Tory Ministers found themselves treated by her with only spasmodic politeness. The people in general cared nothing one way or another until the Duchess displayed marked Whig tendencies, and then the Tory Press made a custom of criticising all that she did, and displaying a wonderfully intimate knowledge of her affairs, private and public.

For nearly a quarter of a century the life of the Duchess in England was one of stress; indeed, one might repeat of her the oft-repeated words, she “was ever a fighter,” for she seemed always at variance with the reigning monarch. She owed the very rare appearance of herself and her daughter in the Court of George IV. to the kind heart of Lady Conyngham, the King’s mistress, who thereby earned Victoria’s affectionate regard, in spite of her position. Of this lady, by the way, who was coarse, fair, dull, and by no means fascinating, and who succeeded Lady Hertford in the King’s household, some wit said that in taking her George had exchanged St. James for St. Giles.

By the time of William IV. the Duchess had become not simply a passive resister but an active agitator, and many scenes of anger took place between her and the King. Both George and William often renewed the threat of taking her child from her that the young Princess might be placed in the hands of someone more complacent to the Royal will. George would really have done this, but that the Duke of Wellington, who was his adviser, always temporised and put off the execution of the threat. When the Duchess became mother to the Queen of England, though things changed they were no better; but the details of the relationship between these two prominent people needs more than a paragraph in explanation.

Yet we have much for which to thank the Duchess of Kent, in that she brought up her daughter in business habits, in purity of thought, and in all those virtues which make a good woman. Domestically she was a kind tyrant, necessarily an injudicious one, for tyranny is always injudicious. In following the life of the young Princess one wonders how much the mother, imposing a very restrictive rule upon the child, knew of that child’s character. Obedient, dutiful, submissive, troubled openly only by occasional fits of rebellion and self-will, did Victoria in her early days ever foreshadow the revulsion against the maternal authority which seized upon her later? One would imagine not, or the Duchess would have become wiser in her treatment. As the girl grew towards womanhood, did she ever betray the growth of resistance, did she show that beneath all the quiet of the exterior lay an autocratic character which was only biding its opportunity?—and did her mother have any suspicion of what might happen between the years 1837 and 1841, which were to be the most anguished of her life, when she would be forced to realise that her too scrupulous care had brought her, not power and honour, but a determined and sustained indifference?

When this girl of eighteen was proclaimed Queen of England no one knew whether to be glad or sorry. She was said to be shy, young for her age, and entirely subservient to her mother; indeed, as a person she was practically non-existent. It was the Duchess who counted, and absurd reports had been circulated in the papers as to the Camerilla at Kensington Palace, which aimed at securing Ministerial power on the death of King William. As Victoria went to her Proclamation at St. James’s Palace there was much curiosity shown, and but little cheering done on the way. In the courtyard of the Palace stood a great, observant crowd, silent until given the signal to cheer, and then its voice was led by the roar of Daniel O’Connell, the Liberator, for he considered that the chances, with a Radical faction at Kensington, were now in his favour.

As for the Ministers, they knew no more of the fair Alexandrina Victoria than anyone else, and a contemporary tells us that none of her acquaintances—friends she had scarcely any—none of her attendants at Kensington, had any idea of what lay beneath the quiet, placid exterior, or could prophesy as to what she was capable of doing. Even the Duchess of Northumberland, who had directed her studies for some years, was no better informed; for never during those years had she seen the child alone; there had always been a third person present, either the Duchess or the Baroness Lehzen. Thus while some people regretted the death of a King who, in spite of his peculiarities, was a good man and a great improvement on those who had gone before him, the universal emotion concerning his successor was neither joy nor sorrow, but that of a vivid curiosity.

Victoria was like an enchanted princess, around whom had been drawn a magic circle which rendered her invisible to all eyes. But she could see beyond its range, could watch the forces which made up the world she was about to enter, and learn more of her subjects than they had learned of her. From time to time, while imprisoned in her circle, disturbances from outside had affected her; she had felt some things keenly and despairingly, but with an imperturbable face she had let them pass by; she had been in hot rebellion often, but no one but herself, and perhaps her half-sister, Féodore of Leiningen, knew of it; she had longed for friends and companionship, and had engrossed herself in her studies, those futile studies thought the right thing for the girls of that day. Of these hidden things she did not speak, and she did not cry over them, for in her mother’s house there had been no spot in which she could shed tears unseen.

From the day of her birth to her accession she had scarcely ever been alone for ten minutes at a time! And doting biographers purr over this and say, “What an excellent mother!” Here is a quotation in slipshod style from one such: “The exemplary mother had not allowed her daughter to be scarcely ten minutes together either by night or day out of her sight, except in her infant years during her daily airing and on the very rare occasions of her Royal Highness dining away from home.”

The biographers and gossipers about Victoria agree in speaking of the unremitting surveillance which was exercised over the young Princess. She was imprisoned in a close atmosphere of love and tuition, and was never free to write a letter, to see a friend, or to think her own thoughts without the presence of her mother or the Baroness. It is very probable that for a long time she was unconscious that there was anything unusual in this, but it must have grown terribly burdensome to her, so much so that her first request as a Queen to her mother concerned this very point. She received the oaths of allegiance the day after King William died, and when this trying and tumultuous ceremony was over she sought her mother, allowing her overwrought nerves to find relief in tears, or, in the language of the day, “she flung herself upon her mother’s bosom to weep.” Being soothed into calmness, she said:

“I can scarcely believe that I am Queen of England, but I suppose it is really true.”

On being reassured, she continued:

“In time I shall become accustomed to my change of station; meanwhile, since it is really so, and you see in your little daughter the Sovereign of this great country, will you grant her the first request she has had occasion in her regal capacity to put to you? I wish, my dear mamma, to be left alone for two hours.”

The early writer who gives this incident sees no youthful tragedy in it, but goes off into pæans of praise for the careful and diligent mother. But it is scarcely to be marvelled at that the Queen in later days wrote of “her sad and unhappy childhood.” Nor can we wonder that from the day of her first regal request to her mother she availed herself of the luxury of one or two quiet hours in each twenty-four to herself in her own room, with a locked door between herself and all the world. For years she clung to this privilege, which every ordinary girl would regard as a right.

A letter written by Princess Féodore in 1843 to Queen Victoria shows how unremitting was the surveillance upon and how deep was the loneliness of the girl up to the time of her accession. Victoria had written from Claremont, and her half-sister answered:—“Claremont is a dear quiet place; to me also the recollection of the few pleasant days spent during my youth. I always left Claremont with tears for Kensington Palace. When I look back upon those years, which ought to have been the happiest in my life, from fourteen to twenty, I cannot help pitying myself. Not to have enjoyed the pleasures of youth is nothing, but to have been deprived of all intercourse, and not one cheerful thought in that dismal existence of ours, was very hard. My only happy time was going out driving with you and Lehzen; then I could speak and look as I liked. I escaped some years of imprisonment, which you, my poor darling sister, had to endure, after I was married. But God Almighty has changed both our destinies most mercifully, and has made us so happy in our homes—which is the only real happiness in this life; and those years of trial were, I am sure, very useful to us both, though certainly not pleasant. Thank God, they are over!”

What would any mother of to-day feel if one of her children, when grown up, could write to another in this way of their childhood? It was a tragedy both for mother and children, only the mother perhaps never realised it, and she did not feel the results of it until the children had escaped her thraldom. “Poor little Victory!” as Carlyle called her, looking back upon this, it is possible to forgive her for her subsequent hardness to her mother, for she could not help it; the hardness had been forced upon her by example and practice in her childish days.

But to understand the life of our late Queen in its youth it is necessary to know its surroundings and background, and for this purpose an account of the Royal family which then existed seems desirable.

King William IV. had, when comparatively young, married a pretty and delightful actress, who was known as Mrs. Jordan. He was a man of clean domestic life, and he persisted in regarding this lady as his lawful wife, and the children she bore to him—nine in all—as his lawful children. When Princess Charlotte died, however, he sacrificed himself—and his wife—upon the altar of expediency, and married Amelia Adelaide Louise Therese Caroline Wilhelmina of Saxe-Meiningen. She was twenty-six, plain, thin, sedate, reserved, and had been brought up in all the useless branches of “polite and useful learning,” thought the correct thing for a lady of her position. She had no leaning towards gaiety, frivolity, or dress, and hated immorality and irreligion. She was, in fact, an “excellent selection,” but she was also one of those people who are invariably described in negatives. Another woman might have had just the same appearance and thoroughly good character, and by adding to it a pleasant manner have been a favourite with everyone. But Adelaide’s manner was bad, and she was generally disliked. William, however, found a good wife in her—though there are some sly allusions to his being hen-pecked—and little Victoria could always depend on kindly affection from Queen Adelaide.

The Duchess of Clarence gave birth to two daughters, both of whom died in infancy, and she seems to have shown no jealousy of the little girl who would take the place which should have belonged to her own child had it lived. She was also always kind to her husband’s exacting and loud-mannered children, the Fitzclarences, receiving them all as constant visitors at Windsor or St. James’s, and making pets of their children. Thus at one time she had Lady Augusta Kennedy and four children staying at Windsor, while Lady Sophia Sydney and three children lived there; there was also a boy of Lady Falkland’s with her. These eight grandchildren of the King’s would play with the King and Queen in the corridor after lunch, and as a visitor to Adelaide once remarked, “It is so pretty to hear them lisp ‘dear Queeny,’ ‘dear King.’”

Yet the conduct of the Fitzclarences to Adelaide was abominable, and Lord Errol—the husband of the third daughter, Lady Elizabeth—who had been appointed Lord Marischal of Scotland, was heard one day speaking in such an unpardonable way of the Queen in a public coffee-house that he was interrupted by cries of “Shame!” from a gentleman present. Colonel Fox, who married Lady Mary, received the appointment of Surveyor General of the Ordnance, and was made Aide-de-Camp to the King. Of the four sons, Lord Munster held several military appointments, received an annual allowance from the Privy Purse, and was given a property by his father-in-law, Lord Egremont. Lord Frederick was a Colonel, and Equerry and Aide-de-Camp to his father. Lord Adolphus was a Captain in the Navy, Groom of the Robes, and Deputy-Ranger of Bushey Park; while Lord Augustus was Chaplain to the King, and held a valuable living at Mapledurham. This family was by no means popular, and was being constantly criticised by the newspapers. Said Figaro in London, in 1832:—“The brutal conduct of the Fitzclarences towards their poor weak old father has gained for them the name unnatural, instead of natural, children.”

It seems to have been agreed generally that the Fitzclarences felt that the time of their harvest must be short, and that therefore it behoved them to make as much hay as possible. They badgered William for honours and promotions, and the King did what he could; he was once heard complaining to one of his admirals of this persecution, adding, “I had at last to make him a Guelphic Knight” (a Hanoverian honour). “And serve him right, your Majesty,” replied the seaman, imagining that some disgrace was implied.

Once when George Fitzclarence demanded to be made a peer and to have a pension, and the King said he could not do it, all the sons struck work, or their pretence of work, thus in high life foreshadowing the doings of the workers of a later time. George actually resigned his office of Deputy-Adjutant-General, and wrote the King a furious letter. This was awkward, because so long as these gentlemen drew their money through sinecures the public was willing to accept them fairly good-temperedly, but as avowed pensioners the outcry against them would have been overwhelming. The matter seems to have been smoothed over by the young man being made Earl of Munster.

The Duke of Sussex had also an unrecognised family of two, Augustus and Ellen D’Este, who gave the King much trouble, and in revenge for their disappointment about places and honours published the Duke’s letters to their mother, which caused considerable scandal.

Of Princess Victoria’s uncles those who survived at her accession were the Duke of Cumberland, the Duke of Cambridge, and the Duke of Sussex. The Duke of Cambridge was Viceroy of Hanover during William’s reign, and had one son, something of a weakling in his youth.

It is necessary to refer at some length to the Duke of Cumberland, as he remained a thorn in the side of the Sovereign of England as long as he lived. He was a man of a violent temper and of a coarse, overbearing disposition, his great desire being to work his way to the Throne of England. He had hung about George IV., guarding his own interests, keeping away from his Royal brother any person whom he thought might weaken his own influence, and strengthening, as far as he could, the idea, which arose from what were considered the eccentricities of Clarence, that the latter was afflicted by periods of insanity.

Yet from contemporary sources there is evidence that King George had no love for Cumberland. Lord Ellenborough, in his “Political Diary,” notes in 1829, “The King, our master, is the weakest man in England. He hates the Duke of Cumberland. He wishes his death. He is relieved when he is away; but he is afraid of him, and crouches to him.” Again, when the Catholic Emancipation Bill was being fought, Cumberland insisted upon coming back to England for it. Attempts were made to stop him, but he either missed or passed the messengers. Of this Ellenborough writes, “The King is afraid of him, and God knows what mischief he may do. However, there is no possibility of forming an anti-Catholic Government, and that the King must feel.” Poor George! Thenceforth he had his Government at one ear and Cumberland at the other, drawing from the diarist the remark: “In fact, the excitement he is in may lead to insanity, and nothing but the removal of the Duke of Cumberland will restore him to peace.” In his last illness George IV. refused to see his brother.

When William ascended the Throne there was little for Prince Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, to do but to make the best of it. But beyond that, however, he made various attempts to be disagreeable. Thus Lord Ellenborough mentions that the Duke of Wellington intended to go down to Windsor on the morrow, as the Duke of Cumberland meditated making a raid on the late King’s papers. Cumberland was probably remembering the example of his eldest brother, who, many years earlier, when George III. was ill, took it upon himself to examine his father’s private papers, and thus brought about a right royal row.

During George IV.’s reign, Cumberland had kept his horses in the Queen’s disused stables, which, when Adelaide was translated to the kingly palace, were needed for her use. So King William requested his brother to remove his horses to make room for the Queen’s; to which the Duke answered politely that “he would be damned if they should go.” However, on being told that unless he moved them the King’s grooms had orders to turn them out the next day, he sulkily succumbed. He had, in fact, hoped to retain in the new reign all the privileges he had secured during the former, and could not take his disappointment manfully; thus he had arrogated to himself the sole dignity of Gold Stick, an honour that had always been divided among the three Colonels of the Guards; and when William restored things to their former position it entailed opposition on the part of Cumberland, who countermanded the King’s orders about the Guards at his Coronation, which, of course, was followed by further humiliation for the Duke.

But Cumberland’s chief exploit was his leadership of the Orange Lodges, which aimed at protecting Protestantism from all Popery. As the Duke’s ambition grew, he began to see in this organisation the help it might be to him, and he taught various lessons to the emissaries who were sent over the country to form new Lodges. One of the cries towards the end of George’s reign was that the members should “rally round the Throne,” and then it was asserted that the Duke of Clarence was insane, and that the Duke of Wellington was aiming at the Crown. This was spoken of at first vaguely as “a wild design in embryo,” and “a wild ambition” by Lieutenant-Colonel Fairburn, Cumberland’s accredited agent. This gentleman was afraid of naming names, and classed the Iron Duke among the “grovelling worms who dare to vie with the omnipotence of Heaven.” In another letter he said:

“One moreover of whom it might ill become me to speak but in terms of reverence, has nevertheless been weak enough to ape the coarseness of a Cromwell, thus recalling the recollection to what would have been far better left in oblivion, his seizure of the diadem with his placing it upon his brow, was a precocious sort of self inauguration.” This alluded to the widespread opposition to the raising of Wellington to the Peerage.

Several newspapers became infected by the Orangemen, members of whose organisation were to be found in the Army, the Church, and among the rank and file of the Members of Parliament. A daily journal in 1830 declared first that George the Fourth was not as ill as he was said to be, and was amusing himself by writing the bulletins about his health, secondly that the next in succession (the Duke of Clarence) would be incapable of reigning “for reasons which occasioned his removal from the office of Lord High Admiral,” and that a military chief of most unbounded ambition would disapprove of a maritime Government, thirdly that the second heir-presumptive, was “not alone a female but a minor,” and that therefore a bold effort should be made to frustrate any attempt “at a vicarious form of government.”

However, in spite of Cumberland’s ambition, and of the public recognition of that ambition, William the Fourth came to the throne, but his brother did not for at least twelve or thirteen years more give up all hope of reigning in England. He still fostered the Orange Lodges, and when it was seen that William would be obliged to assent to the Reform Bill, the Orange speakers sounded their audiences as to whether, if William were deposed, they would support Cumberland in an attempt to become his successor.

This scheme not coming off, the Duke went on building up his power until Joseph Hume brought the whole thing before Parliament in 1836, when the startling disclosures then made caused the suppression of the Orange Lodges. It was asserted that the Duke of Cumberland, as Grand Master of the whole association, was a dangerous man. The Lodges all regarded him as their political leader; he was called the Supreme Head of the Grand Orange Lodge of Great Britain and Ireland; it was laid down that his pleasure was law, and that the Orangemen were bound to obey his summons and do his will for whatever purpose he desired. There were 15,000 Lodges in Ireland, with a membership of 200,000 arm-bearing men; and 1,500 Lodges in England, besides some in the Colonies. Thus the Duke had the unquestioning obedience of 300,000 men—40,000 in London alone. Meetings were called in Ireland of ten, twenty, and even thirty thousand men. From all this Joseph Hume not unwisely inferred that it was time to consider whether the Duke of Cumberland was King or subject.

The whole matter made a tremendous public impression, and there were rumours that the Princess Victoria was in danger of her life from these secret enemies. At a public dinner in Nottingham the chairman, a Mr. Wakefield, said that the hope of the English people “was founded on the way in which the illustrious Princess was educated, which gave them every reason to believe that her attachment to this country was such that her reign—provided she lived—would be a blessing at large. The toast he would propose was—The Princess Victoria, and may the machinations against her suffer the same fate as the Orange conspiracy.”

One of the newspapers of the day endeavoured to comfort her for any fears she might have had by the following lines:—

“Oh, fear not, fair lily, our country’s just pride,

The hypocrite’s schemes or the traitor’s foul band;

The firm knights of Britain will range by thy side

And proclaim thee hereafter the Queen of our land.

By virtues illustrious, the gem of our isle—

Around thee will range in the time of alarm,

Those friends whose attachment no fiend shall beguile,

For the isle that has reared thee shall shield thee from harm.”

Other papers were much more emphatic, not so much in expressing a desire to save the Princess from harm as in an attempt to accuse Cumberland of evil intentions. The Satirist, for instance, published a cartoon showing Cumberland smothering someone in bed, with Queen Adelaide looking on from the doorway. On the bed hangings is embroidered a crown above a large “V,” and beneath the picture are the following lines:

“Can such man live to crush the nation’s choice,

Which after years of blood would now rejoice?

Will a fond people yield their mighty throne

To that base heartless prince, whom all disown?

Blest day, when their loud voices shall decree

This land from such a monster shall be free.”

Elsewhere the Duke is represented in the company of the Bishop of Salisbury, Sir Charles Wetherell, and Billy Holmes,[1] among whom the following scrap of conversation passes:

“Cum. A brother’s brat between me and the Crown!

Bish. Yet there are means!

Holmes. Poison, for instance.

Weth. Or a razor.

Cum. (with a fiendish laugh). Ay, a razor, if nothing better serve.”

With such open condemnation as this from any paper, even though it were one which from its very name existed to draw attention to irregularities and unpopular people, there was nothing for the Duke to do but to dissociate himself from all suspicious connections. Whether he was a most horribly libelled man or whether he had been intriguing as affirmed, it is a matter of history that in March, 1836, he in the name of the Orange Lodges signified his submission to the Royal will that those Lodges should be dissolved.

Like all the Guelphs, the Duke was curiously outspoken. For instance, he would take into his confidence someone near his person and tell how he longed to be King, adding that he was much more fit to be King than his brother, who might be a good sailor, but who was kingly neither in looks nor manners.

The writer of a delightful book of gossip, published some years ago, entitled “Tales of my Father,” gives a very definite form to this absorbing ambition. The Duke and William IV. were dining alone together at Windsor, the Queen being ill, and the suite dining in an adjoining room. The sound of loud voices reached those without, for both brothers had drunk too much; then the Duke ordered the doors to be opened and proposed “The King’s Health. God save the King!” at which the suite dutifully entered and drank. Then the Duke asked permission to propose another toast.

“Name it, your Grace,” answered the King.

“The King’s heir, and God bless him!” proudly responded the Duke.

These audacious words were followed by a dead silence, the two brothers staring at each other, after which William rose, held his glass high, and cried, “The King’s heir! God bless her!” Then throwing the glass over his shoulder, he turned to his brother and exclaimed, “My crown came with a lass, and my crown will go to a lass.”

The Duke did not drink the toast, but left the room abruptly, scarcely bowing to his brother as he passed.

The verses and allusions quoted speak plainly to the extraordinary dislike which was felt for the Duke; he was suspected of horrible crimes, and though publicly pronounced innocent, was still suspected. The allusion in the verses to blood and a razor referred to an alleged attempt made upon the Duke’s life in 1810 by one of his valets. In the summer of that year Cumberland was found in his apartments in St. James’ Palace wounded in six different places, and the valet was found in his bed with his throat cut. The decision upon this was that for some unknown reason the servant had attacked his master and had then gone back to his room and cut his throat in bed. The evidence was just shaky enough to leave doubt, for there were peculiar features, blood being found all about the man’s room, even in the wash basin, but the judge’s decision was, of course, a foregone conclusion. Popular opinion decided, however, that the Duke had met with his injuries while his man fought for his life, but naturally any hardy editor who allowed such an idea to be published received punishment.

In 1829 Cumberland’s reputation suffered a worse shock in the revelations made by a certain Captain Garth, who found a box of letters hidden in the house of his putative father, General Garth. These letters threw an amazing light on his own birth, showing that he was the son of the Duke of Cumberland and of Princess Sophia. Captain Garth appointed a Mr. Westmacott, while the Duke or George IV. appointed Sir Herbert Taylor, the King’s private secretary, to arrange matters, and in spite of the fact that the Duke and the Royal Family denied everything, an agreement was come to by which Garth was to receive £2,400 a year as annuity, and a sum of £8,000 down to pay his debts, on condition that he should forget the box and its contents. The matter was almost forgotten when Garth filed a bill in Chancery to prevent Westmacott from disposing of the box, because he had only received £3,000 on account and had been refused the rest. So the sordid affair was once again dragged through the columns of every paper. Sir Herbert Taylor explained that the failure to keep the arrangement was caused by the fact that Garth had told the secrets in the box to other people, and had kept copies of the letters. All the dailies and weeklies had their varying articles upon this, and then—publicly—the matter died out. Garth was probably squared. Whether his tale was true or false it had this justification, that General Garth was believed—according to the “Annual Register”—to have had a son by a lady of very illustrious birth, and it was further said that George III. had induced the General to accept the paternity of the boy. Earl Grey notes, however, in a letter to Princess Lieven, that “the renewed attack on the subject of Garth looks like a renewed apprehension of the effects of Cumberland’s influence on the King.”

Quite apart from this charge, Cumberland was unscrupulous in his amours, and one is constantly coming across references to this vice; thus Lord Ellenborough notes, in 1830: “The suicide of —— on account of his wife’s seduction by the Duke of Cumberland, will drive the Duke of Cumberland out of the field.”

Cumberland had one legitimate son, Prince George, who is described as a beautiful boy, tall, slim, upright, with fair hair and fresh complexion, his eyes always partly shut, for, poor lad, he was blind. He knew little of his cousin Victoria, though he often wished to know her better, but the Duchess was from the first afraid of any matrimonial entanglement with her husband’s family, and would not let the young people meet oftener than she could help.

The Duke of Sussex was very different from his brother, being a kindly, amiable man, and the most popular of the Princes. He was a lover of books and of philosophy; but Creevy said of him that “he never says anything that makes you think him foolish, yet there is a nothingness in him which is to the last degree fatiguing.” He married Lady Augusta Murray, daughter of the fourth Earl of Dunmore, in 1793, the marriage being dissolved in the following year as contrary to the Royal Marriage Act—a fact which did not trouble the Duke much until his inclination led him to break with Lady Augusta. Their son Augustus was born in 1794, and their daughter in 1801. Long before Augusta’s death in 1830 the Duke of Sussex had taken as a second partner in life Lady Cecilia, daughter of the Earl of Arran, and widow of an attorney knight of the unromantic name of Buggin. It seems a pity that Lady Augusta, who was of Royal blood, should have had to give place to one owning such a name! However, Lady Cecilia took her mother’s name of Underwood, and was known by it until, in 1840, the Duke went through the long-delayed form of marriage with her, and Queen Victoria created her Duchess of Inverness.

The Princess Victoria had a real affection for her uncles, King William and the Duke of Sussex, but Cumberland she always abhorred, probably not for his immorality—they were all immoral—but on account of the hatred he felt for her and her mother, and for the brutality of his nature, which made him subject to paroxysms of passion, during which everyone, even his wife, feared him.

It is curious to realise that Queen Victoria, who laid such stress upon the purity of her Court, and who did much to revolutionise society in this regard, was surrounded by people who openly defied the laws, written and unwritten. In later life she would not allow near her Throne a woman against whom there had been a breath of scandal, but in the early days of her reign she was surrounded by men who were smirched and dishonoured by loose living. To her, indeed, there was one law for men and another for women, and in spite of the terrible lesson she received in 1839—to be dealt with in a later chapter—she held to that attitude throughout her life.

One other person who, besides her mother, dominated the Princess’s daily existence was her uncle, Prince Leopold, her mother’s brother. As the husband of Princess Charlotte he drew an income of £50,000 from this country, and had been given Claremont as a dwelling. These he retained after the death of his wife in 1816, living partly in London and partly at Claremont. He led a quieter, more sedate life than did the Guelphs, was precise in his ways, prided himself highly on his fine manners, and was cordially detested by the English Princes and Peers. The fact that he did not drink angered both George IV. and William IV., while his affectation of superiority annoyed his associates, and his reputation for meanness brought him sneers from everyone.

George IV. showed him almost from the first what a gulf in manners there was between them, and did not trouble about the fact that he himself was the one that lacked them. At a Levée which he held in 1821 he deliberately turned his back upon his son-in-law. The Prince did his best to carry off the matter in a dignified way; he is said not to have altered a muscle of his face, but to have approached the Duke of York, saying to him in a loud tone, “The King has thought proper to take his line, and I shall take mine.” He then left the assembly.

Some hints of Leopold’s character may be given in his own words—words which betray at once his pedantry and his absolute lack of humour. In a letter to the young Queen, in which he tried to explain the character of Princess Charlotte, he said: “The most difficult task I had was to change her manners; she had something too brusque and too rash in her movements, which made the Regent quite unhappy, and which sometimes was occasioned by a struggle between shyness and the necessity of exerting herself. I had, I may say so without seeming to boast, the manners of the best society of Europe, having early moved in it, and been what is called in French de la fleur des pois. A good judge I therefore was, but Charlotte found it rather hard to be so scrutinised, and grumbled occasionally how I could so often find fault with her.”

Leopold could not understand a joke; chaffing or quizzing always raised his displeasure; and indeed he seems somewhat to have merited, by his manner alone, some of the severe criticisms lavished upon him. How much of the feeling against him was prompted by insular prejudice, how much was jealousy, and how much personal dislike, it is difficult to say, but there was probably something of all three to account for it.

As far as the Royal Dukes’ feelings went, there was some justification for jealousy. Leopold, a foreign Prince, was being allowed from the Civil List an annual £50,000, having been for only about a year the husband of the Heir-Apparent. The Royal Dukes of England were receiving only £18,000 and £24,000 each, and they were the sons and brothers of Kings of England. However, the sharp-tongued Creevy, who could not have been personally affected, spoke of him always as Humbug Leopold, and one of the Fitzclarences said in 1824 that the Duchess of Clarence was the best and most charming woman in the world, that Prince Leopold was a damned humbug, and that he (Fitzclarence) disliked the Duchess of Kent.

But whatever the popular opinion concerning him, Leopold, when his sister became a widow, was a shield between her and the world. The Duke of Kent was taken ill in Sidmouth, and two days before he died Prince Leopold went thither to do what he could for his sister. One cannot help wondering how it was that the Duke struggled on so long with the burden of worries that he had to bear. After his marriage he lived in Germany until the prospect of an heir brought him and his wife to England. His income was then little or nothing, for he had been obliged to make an assignment of his property to his creditors, to work off debts contracted partly when, as a young man, he had been allowed by his tutor, Baron Wangenheim, the princely income of thirty shillings a week as pocket-money, the remainder of £6,000 a year being used by the Baron, who was astute enough to intercept the Prince’s letters home. The Duchess of Kent had a jointure of £6,000 a year, and upon this they lived. From his youth to his death the Duke was worried by the lack of money and by creditors, through no extravagance of his own, as well as by the enmity of his brother, the Regent.

When the Duke of Kent died, Leopold was the only friend the Duchess had in England, and he went through the affairs of his late brother-in-law, finding to his consternation that there was not enough money left even to carry the family back to London, or to pay for the necessary winding up of affairs at Sidmouth. George IV. would give no help of any sort; he hated the Duchess, as he did most of his brothers’ wives, and his one idea was to cause her to take her child back to Germany and relieve him and the country entirely of any obligation towards them. However, the Duchess and her brother came to the conclusion that they should resist this desire with all their strength, and to make things easier Leopold added to his sister’s six thousand a year an annual amount of £3,000. For decency’s sake the King had to give them a roof over their heads, and he assigned to the Duchess some rooms in Kensington Palace. I have come across fatuous biographies of Queen Victoria in which Leopold has been extolled for his liberality to his sister, as a noble brother, &c., but when the position is regarded in a detached way the absurdity and injustice of the whole arrangement is patent. The alien Leopold was drawing, as has already been said, £50,000 a year from the English Exchequer, having no obligations upon him of any sort, no Royal position to keep up, while his sister, the wife of the King’s brother, and mother of the probable Queen of England, had less than an eighth of that amount, was allowed nothing more from the Government, and was expected to be very grateful to Leopold in that he handed over to her a little of the money that he received. Six years later a sum of six thousand was annually allowed the Duchess by the Government for the education of her daughter, and in 1831, when the Princess Victoria was needing yet more in the way of instruction, training, and social necessities, another £10,000 brought her income up to £22,000 a year, more than her poor husband had ever owned.

Until 1831 Leopold lived at Claremont, cultivated its gardens to the utmost, and provoked much criticism for the business-like way in which he sent the produce up to London. Claremont became also a country-house residence for the Duchess of Kent and her little daughter, Victoria looking back upon the comparative freedom she enjoyed there as helping to make those visits the happiest events of her early life. Then came the demand for a King for Greece, and Leopold had the chance of securing the position, George, however, remarking that if he did go to Greece he should leave his income behind him. There is no doubt that an affluent, objectless life in England had its charms, and that a man might pay too dearly for wearing the crown of a small unsettled kingdom surrounded by enemies. So Leopold vacillated, always leaning with each swing a little nearer the crown, yet wishing to retain the money. The newspapers of the day were full of the money part of the transaction. First, would the country buy of him the land he had purchased here, valued at fifty thousand or thereabouts? would England guarantee him a loan of £1,500,000? would England give him for seven years an annual £70,000 instead of £50,000? From month to month negotiations dragged on, until at last it was announced that Leopold had got the promise of all he desired, and by that time George IV. was very ill. So the Prince, with new ideas in his mind, waited for nearly two months more before even then making his decision, raising many a laugh and many a scoffing hint in society as to his real reason. “Ingoldsby” Barham crystallised some of the sayings in his verses upon “The Mad Dog,” as follows:—

“The Dog hath bitten—Oh, woe is me—

A Market Gardener of high degree;

Imperial Peas

No longer please,

An Imperial Crown he burneth to seize!

Early Cucumbers, Windsor Beans,

Cabbages, Cauliflowers, Broccoli, Greens,

Girkins to pickle, Apples to munch,

Radishes fine, five farthings a bunch,

Carrots red and Turnips white,

Parsnips yellow no more delight,

He spurneth Lettuces, Onions, Leeks,

He would be Sovereign King of the Greeks.

No more in a row

A goodly show.

His Highness’s carts to market go!

Yet still I heard Sam Rogers hint,

He hath no distaste for celery or mint.

A different whim

Now seizeth him,

And Greece for his part may sink or swim.

For they cry that he

Would Regent be,

And Rule fair England from sea to sea.

Oh, never was mortal man so mad,—

Alack! alack, for the Gardener lad.”

When it was certain that George IV. could not recover, Leopold declined the honour of being King of Greece, upon which Barham wrote the following verse:—

“A King for Greece!—a King for Greece!

Wanted a Sovereign Prince for Greece!

For the recreant Knight

Hath broken his plight,

Some say from policy, some from fright,

Some say in hope to rule for his niece,

He hath refused to be King over Greece.”

Thomas Creevy wrote concerning this decision in one of his letters, “I suppose Mrs. Kent thinks her daughter’s reign is coming on apace, and that her brother may be of use to her as versus Cumberland.”

In 1831 Leopold became King of the Belgians, and then, attention having been so thoroughly drawn to his pension, a determined demand was made that it should cease when he left England. Matters were not settled quite so simply. Leopold retained Claremont, stipulated that his debts of £83,000 should be paid for him, and that he should return four-fifths of the annuity. When the Duke of Kent had died crushed with debt, not so much more than this sober gentleman owed, that debt was left to hang round the necks of his widow and child. The Duke of Kent was popular, Leopold was not; yet the former was neglected and the latter was honoured. Really there seems little advantage in being popular!

When Leopold announced with some solemnity that he was called to reign over four million noble Belgians, Coleridge, referring to that country’s discontented state, remarked that it would have been more appropriate if he had said that he was called to rein in four million restive asses.

CHAPTER II
PRINCESS VICTORIA’S MOTHER AND UNCLE

“A country gentleman going to the theatre when William IV. was there would not believe the King was King because he was not wearing his crown; being almost persuaded, he looked more closely and then was quite sure that William was not the King, for the Lion and the Unicorn did not hang down on each side of him, and he had always been taught—and implicitly believed—that the King of England had never had any other arms than these.”—Contemporary Gossip.

From what has been said of the treatment given to the Duchess of Kent it can hardly be wondered at that she turned from the whole Royal family, though she could not always resist the kindness of the Duchess of Clarence, who came to weep with her and to admire the fat, good baby. The Duke of Sussex, too, did his best to show by his visits and advice that she might rely upon his friendship, but on the whole the resentment felt by the widowed mother was so keen that she would do nothing to conciliate the people among whom she thought it wise to live. Thus until the death of William IV. in 1837 there were constant royal disputes, which increased in bitterness as Victoria neared her majority.

The Duke of Wellington sometimes took an active part in trying to make things run smoothly for the Duchess, even against her will. For instance, he knew not only the Duke of Cumberland’s sentiments about her, but he knew also that Cumberland was an ugly hater. He had married in 1815 and his wife was not received by his mother, Queen Charlotte, so the Duchess of Kent, following her lead, took no notice of the Duchess of Cumberland when she came to take up her residence in England. Upon this, the Duke of Wellington told Leopold to advise his sister to write regretting that she was unable to welcome her on her arrival, and so was prevented from calling. When the lady of Kent got the message she wanted to know why she should do this thing, and Wellington replied that he should not tell her why, that he knew what was going on better than she did, and advised her for her own sake to do as he suggested. The Duchess returned that she would give him credit for counselling her well, and did as he suggested. For this act of politeness she reaped her reward in remaining untroubled for a long time by any active show of enmity from the Duke of Cumberland.

As a matter of fact, the Duchess of Kent had her share of the Teutonic quality of self-complacence; she was a strong woman who knew her own mind and who had very definite aims in life, and she did not think it worth while to placate anyone. Either anger against the Royal Family made her continually show haughtiness to them, or she was obsessed by a sense of the very important position she held as mother of a possible Sovereign of England. A weaker person, possessing a greater charm and tact, and imbued with less determination to secure her own rights, would have sailed serenely and almost unconsciously through troubles which the Duchess always met more than half-way, if she did not actually cause them. Perhaps had she insisted less definitely upon recognition for herself, that recognition would have been more freely accorded.

It was even more difficult for her to meet William IV. cordially than George IV. for the reason that they not only met more often, but that, while William readily recognised the child as his probable successor, George had for years refused to see her. It was not until Victoria was seven that she and her mother received an invitation to go to Windsor, and there is recorded an incident of that visit which, though amusing, is somewhat provocative of cynicism. George told this infant to choose a tune for the band to play, and she gave the diplomatic answer that she wanted them to play “God save the King.” One wonders whether she had run to an astute mother for advice, whether it was her favourite tune in actual fact, or whether the unwonted delights of her visit, and the kindness of George, the hitherto unknown uncle, made her spontaneously think of the air which would best please him. Whatever the motive had been, it was a clever reply.

When William IV. became King in 1830 he desired that the Princess Victoria should attend the Court functions, and we are given a ludicrous picture of this child of eleven, dressed in a long Court train and a veil reaching to the ground, following Queen Adelaide at a chapter of the Order of the Garter held at St. James’ Palace. She was also present at the prorogation of Parliament, and attended her first Drawing Room in February, 1831, in honour of the Queen’s birthday. Royalties of the time were inconsistent with regard to their birthdays. Thus on this occasion Adelaide’s natal day was honoured in February, while in 1836 it was kept in August. In that latter year, too, according to the papers, the King’s birthday was celebrated both in May and August! But the Duchess did not willingly allow her child to go to Court. She may have feared the influence of the coarse manners and uncontrolled tempers shown by the Princes, but this could not have been an excuse for slighting Queen Adelaide. However, there is no record from her own pen of the reason which induced her to keep Princess Victoria at home.

As soon as King George was dead, the Duchess made the first false move in her relations with William. She was too anxious for recognition, too eager to secure what she thought was due to her, and she did not give the new King the chance of showing his appreciation of her change of circumstances. She wrote to the Duke of Wellington, then Prime Minister, asking that a suitable income should be bestowed upon her and her daughter, over which allowance she should have full control, and that the Princess should be put on the footing of Heir-Apparent. It is hard to imagine a more injudicious course for her to have taken. There had just been elevated to the Throne a man who had been comparatively poor all his life, and who was looking forward to the luxury of exercising a great power; one who had a quick temper, to which he gave uncontrolled expression. His wife had borne two children, both of whom had died, and there was still the possibility that she might give birth to more. Yet here, before he had had time to realise his position, was a woman whom he disliked dictating to him what her place should be near the Throne, and demanding that her daughter at once should be recognised as next in succession.

To the demands of the Duchess the Duke of Wellington replied that nothing could even be proposed for her until the Civil List was settled, but that nothing should be considered without her knowledge. This reply is said to have much offended the Duchess, and for a long time she ignored the gallant old man when she met him.

This incident probably left its stamp upon the future intercourse of the King and the Duchess; it certainly affected William’s attitude at the Coronation in 1831; for he insisted upon being immediately followed in the procession, not by the little Victoria, but by his brothers. Everyone expected to see the child taking part in the festivities of that day, but when the morning arrived, and the most wonderful and gorgeous carriages rolled up to the Abbey, none of them held the Princess. All the world wondered where were mother and child, and then The Times published an article upon the matter, accusing the Duchess of staying away through pique, and commenting strongly upon the “systematic opposition” which Her Royal Highness showed “to all the wishes and all the feelings of the present King.” Some newspapers had got into the facetious habit of alluding to The Times as Grandmamma, but on this occasion the Morning Post insulted its great relative by accusing it of “grossness and scurrility,” and affirming that a place had been allotted to the Princess which was derogatory to her rank; which after all was scarcely a refutation of the charge against the Duchess. When questions on this matter of absence were asked in Parliament, it was vaguely asserted that sufficient reasons had existed with which the King was perfectly satisfied. The Globe—among others—announced that the Princess had been kept away through illness, and this was the impression which it seemed most politic to accept. It appeared that Lord de Ros, whose sister was Maid-of-Honour to the Queen, had written the offending article in The Times, and it is quite likely, not only that he believed what he wrote, but that it was true, in spite of the reports that the Duchess “was in the greatest distress and vexation over the matter.” For though the indisposition of the Princess was said to have “rendered her removal from the Isle of Wight to town to take part in so exciting a pageant much too hazardous to be attempted,” the little lady was the centre of a crowd two or three days later when she laid the foundation stone of a new church at East Cowes. It is also quite certain that the Princess anticipated going, for in later life she often, when speaking of that time to her children, mentioned how bitterly she cried at her mother’s decision, and her disappointment when she was kept at home. “Nothing could console me, not even my dolls,” she said.

Both King and country showed confidence in the Duchess when the Regency Bill was under discussion—an important Bill, for if the King died, a minor would become the Sovereign. It was decided that if Queen Adelaide bore another child she should hold the post of Regent, but otherwise, during the minority of the Princess Victoria, the Duchess of Kent should be Regent. When this Bill was framed, the Duke of Wellington, mindful of his promise, asked the King’s leave to wait upon the Duchess with it. The King agreed, and the Duke wrote to Her Royal Highness saying that he had a communication to make to her on the part of His Majesty, and therefore proposed to wait upon her at Kensington Palace. The Duchess was, however, at Claremont, and from there she sent the following reply:—

“My Lord Duke,

I have just received your letter of this date. As it is not convenient for me to receive Your Grace at Kensington, I prefer having in writing, addressed to me here, the communication you state the King has commanded you to make to me.

“Victoria.”

Photo

Emery Walker.

QUEEN ADELAIDE.

From the Painting by Sir William Beechey, in the National Portrait Gallery.

It would seem as though the Duchess not only distrusted the King’s word, but had not yet forgiven the Duke for not being able to accede to her earlier request. Had she sent her general adviser, Sir John Conroy, to negotiate with the Duke, or had she invited the latter to Claremont, she would have kept within the limits of politeness; as it was, the only thing left for the Duke to do was to send the Bill to her to study, as he could not in writing give all the explanations he had intended. In the meanwhile Lord Lyndhurst had brought up the measure in the House of Lords, and the Duchess of Kent had sent Conroy up to hear him.

Sir John Conroy was very much in the confidence of the Duchess. He had been equerry to the Duke of Kent for ten years, and had been greatly trusted by His Royal Highness, so much so that he was appointed co-executor of the Duke’s will, with General Wetherall as colleague. After his master’s death Conroy became major-domo to the Duchess, and was consulted by her in all things. There are some indications that he fostered the desire for greater importance, and it is possible that some of the troubles that made so indelible an impression upon the mind of the Princess were due to his influence. It was a great pity, for the Duchess could quite safely have left her dignity in the hands of the King’s Ministers. Such men as Wellington or Lyndhurst, or even those of the Opposition, Melbourne and Brougham, would have seen that so important a person as the mother of the heiress to the Throne received her due. She could not be sure of the King, for, when he disliked a person, were it man or woman, his manners were atrocious. But as one cynical subject once asked in reference to him, “What can you expect of a man with a head like a pineapple?” Greville made the further complimentary remark concerning something that the King had said, “If he were not such an ass that nobody does anything but laugh at what he says, this would be very important.”

However, William was by no means always an ass. He alternately aroused laughter and admiration, and sometimes, among individuals, fierce anger. When in good health he was lively and appreciated a joke, and, unlike his predecessor, he was conscientious in seeing to business matters and keeping his engagements. Even Greville, who, in spite of his sweeping judgments, was an honest critic, not often allowing mere prejudice to warp his opinion, said of William on another occasion, “The fact is he turns out to be an incomparable King, and deserves all the encomiums lavished upon him.” William horrified people at first by prying into every concern; he actually, to the stupefaction of some, reviewed the Guards, both horse and foot, and spent some energy in “blowing up” the people at the Court, actions which were regarded as symptoms of a disordered mind. Later, when suffering from illness, he did not hesitate to “blow up” his Prime Minister, or the Commander-in-Chief, or the guest at his table—and all in public! During the first year of his reign people thought and spoke of nothing but the King, how he slept in a cot, how he dismissed his brother’s cooks, how he insisted upon sitting backwards when in a carriage, refusing to allow anyone to occupy the seat facing him. One day he went to inspect the Tower of London, and a contemporary writer gives this picture of the Royal party:—

“The King is a little, old, red-nosed, weather-beaten, jolly-looking person, with an ungraceful air and carriage; and as to the Duke of Sussex, what with his stiff collar and cocked hat bobbing over his face, nothing could be seen of him but his nose. He seemed quite overcome with heat, and went along puffing and panting with the great, fat Duchess of Cumberland leaning on his arm. The Queen is even worse than I thought—a little insignificant person as ever I saw. She was dressed, as perhaps you will see by the papers, ‘exceeding plain,’ in bombazine with a little shabby muslin collar, dyed Leghorn hat, and leather shoes.”

Creevy went to the opera on a Royal night, and his impressions, related in his own peculiarly flippant way, were as follows:—“Billy 4th at the Opera was everything one could wish: a more Wapping air I defy a King to have—his hair five times as full of poudre as mine, and his seaman’s gold lace cock-and-pinch hat was charming. He slept most of the Opera—never spoke to anyone, or took the slightest interest in the concern.... I was sorry not to see more of Victoria: she was in a box with the Duchess of Kent, opposite, and, of course, rather under us. When she looked over the box I saw her, and she looked a very nice little girl indeed.”

He adds a little later that when the question of proroguing Parliament by commission arose, and Lord Grey said to William that it was, of course, quite out of the question to ask him to prorogue in person, the King replied: “My Lord, I’ll go, if I go in a hackney coach,” which showed at least the true kingly spirit, even if it was perturbing to his Minister. William meant it, too, and Lord Durham had to borrow the Chancellor’s carriage and dash off to the Master of the Horse, whom he found at breakfast. On the demand being made that he should at once have the King’s equipage sent round, the latter asked:

“What, is there a revolution?”

“No,” was the answer, “but there will be if you stop to finish that meal first.”

In 1834 Oliver Wendell Holmes was in England, and he also went to the Opera one night when the King was present. His impressions are to the full as uncomplimentary and as outspoken as those of the jovial Creevy.

“I went last night to the Royal Opera, where they were to be in state. I had to give more than two dollars for a pit ticket,[2] and had hardly room to stand up, almost crowded to death. The Duchess of Kent and the Princess Victoria—a girl of fifteen—came in first on the side opposite the King’s box. The audience applauded somewhat, not ferociously.... The Princess is a nice, fresh-looking girl, blonde, and rather pretty. The King looks like a retired butcher. The Queen is much such a person as the wife of the late William Frost, of Cambridge, an exemplary milkman, now probably immortal on a slab of slatestone as a father, a husband, and a brother. The King blew his nose twice, and wiped the royal perspiration repeatedly from a face which is probably the largest uncivilised spot in England.” The critic adds, in excuse for his plain speaking, “I have a disposition to tartness and levity which tells to the disadvantage of the Royal living and advantage of the plebeian defunct, but it is accidental and must be forgiven.”

But to return to the reasons for the animosity between the King and the Duchess of Kent. There was another person besides Conroy about the Duchess’s household who was generally regarded as injudicious, and whose name was speedily written in the King’s bad books. This was John George Lambton, created Earl of Durham in 1833, a man of whom Lord Brougham said that he had many good and some great qualities, but all were much obscured, and even perverted, by his temper, which was greatly affected by the painful liver disease from which he suffered. Creevy speaks of him, soon after the death of his first wife, as an excellent host, as full of good qualities, and possessing remarkable talents, adding that “his three little babies are his great resource.” Durham once said that he thought £40,000 a year a moderate income—one which a man might just jog on with; and the phrase was never forgotten, he being called “Old Jog” or “King Jog” by some of his friends ever after.

Before his elevation to the peerage Durham had been very friendly with the Duke of Kent, for they thought alike in politics, both being Whigs. Thus from the start Durham was associated with the Kent household; and as he was arrogant and tactless, with tremendous ideas about money, he must have been one of the worst advisers that the Duchess could have secured. He seems to have been particularly active in small matters before the commencement of William’s reign, becoming Leopold’s right-hand man when he thought of accepting the position of King of Greece, drawing up all his papers for him, and being “his bottle-holder ever since.” Greville styles him the Duchess of Kent’s “magnus Apollo.” When Leopold left England, Durham became more useful still to the Duchess, and is heard of constantly in connection with the affairs at Kensington. In 1831 the Duchess hired Norris Castle, in the Isle of Wight, for the autumn, and Lord Durham is mentioned as being there as a guest; one malicious commentary upon the matter being that “Lord Durham was acting the part of Prime Minister to the Duchess of Kent and Queen Victoria, who were all together making their arrangements for a new reign”; and it was a general opinion that when the Princess ascended the throne Durham would be first favourite with her and her mother. On his return from an Extraordinary Embassy to St. Petersburg the King gave him an audience, which, says Greville, “must have been very agreeable to him (the King), as he hates him and the Duchess of Kent.”

There are many little stories told of this man’s pettishness; his second wife was the daughter of Lord Grey, and it is said that he harassed the life out of his father-in-law during the Reform agitation. Once when Lord Grey was speaking he rudely interrupted him. Grey paused, and said, “My dear Lambton, only hear what I am going to say,” whereupon the other jumped up, replying, “Oh, if I am not to be allowed to speak, I may as well go away”; so, ordering his carriage, he departed.

In a bad mood he once said evil things about Lady Jersey, accusing her of defaming his wife to the Queen, and declaring that Lady Durham should demand an audience of Her Majesty to contradict these scandals. For once he had met his peer in bad temper, for Lady Jersey, at the Drawing Room which was the cause of little Victoria’s first appearance at William’s Court, saw him standing at the opposite side of the room. She went close to him, and said loudly:

“Lord Durham, I hear that you have said things about me which are not true, and I desire that you will call upon me to-morrow with a witness to hear my denial.”

She was in a fury, and put Lord Durham into the same state. He, turning white, muttered that he would never go into her house again, but she had flounced back to her seat, and did not hear him.

Durham naturally made an enemy of a man like Brougham, who was too extreme himself to like the same quality in another, and when Durham resigned office a popular couplet ran:

“Bore Durham fell—(ye Whigs his loss deplore)—

Pierced by the tusks of Brougham—greater Bore.”

There seems to be no record of the Duchess of Kent asking advice, consulting the King, or even telling him her plans; she marked out her own path and took it composedly, leaving the consequences to follow. She probably reasoned that the Princess was her child, and she was the recognised guardian, therefore she could act independently. That she brought her up well is evident, though in these days so often called degenerate, and yet so full of happiness for children, most mothers would be sorry for a babe of six years old who had to carry home on Sunday morning the text of the sermon with the heads of the discourse. I have read somewhere that the child would fix her eyes upon the clergyman’s face as soon as he began his sermon, and never move them while he continued to speak, seeming to give a preternatural attention to all that he said; the reason being explained by the fact that her mother desired to test her appreciation of his address by putting that strain upon her memory and understanding. Well, many mothers did the same thing in those days, but, fortunately for the children, we have a better sense of what is fitting to-day.

When the extra allowance of £10,000 was made to the Duchess in 1831, the Duchess of Northumberland was appointed governess to Victoria, and went to Kensington each day to superintend the studies. The Court Journal, in commenting upon this, spoke of the Princess as the Duchess’s “great charge,” upon which Figaro in London made the remark that it was scarcely according to fact to call the child a great charge to her governess, though it might with propriety be admitted that “her little Royal Highness was a great charge to the country,” a weak pun based upon insufficient cause, as the family income was, all things considered, by no means large.

Those who had so far helped in the Princess’s education deserve a word. The person who earliest exercised her authority was Louise Lehzen, the daughter of a Lutheran clergyman in Hanover, who had been governess to Princess Féodore, the Duchess’s elder daughter by the Prince of Leiningen. In 1824, by the command of George IV., this lady transferred her attentions to Princess Victoria, and from that time until 1842 was her constant companion. The fact that she came from a small German State was sufficient to make her unpopular in England, but she won the child’s confidence, and helped in teaching her the usual accomplishments of the day. That she was a governess in reality may be doubted; she talked much but knew little, and had no respect for progressive ideas in education, though she was shrewd in judgment. The Princess both loved and feared her, saying after her death in 1870: “She knew me from six months old, and from my fifth to my eighteenth years devoted all her care and energies to me with most wonderful abnegation of self, never even taking one day’s holiday. I adored, though I was greatly in awe of her. She really seemed to have no thought but for me.”

Among the close friends of Baroness Lehzen—she was created, by the suggestion of Princess Sophia, a Hanoverian Baroness in 1826, when Dr. Davys was appointed as tutor to the Princess—was the Baroness Späth, who had for a long time been Lady-in-Waiting to the Duchess, and might have continued to hold the post had not Sir John Conroy quarrelled with her and secured her dismissal. For this maybe he, in later years, failed to reach the honours to which he aspired, for Lehzen never forgave him, and remained his enemy to the end. Who can say that her dislike of the Duchess’s counsellor did not influence the Princess’s feelings towards him? Baroness Späth perhaps annoyed the Duchess as well as Conroy by her exuberant love for the Princess. It is mentioned in a letter from Princess Féodore to the Queen: “There certainly never was such devotedness as hers to all our family, although it sometimes showed itself rather foolishly—with you it was always a sort of idolatry, when she used to go upon her knees before you when you were a child. She and poor old Louis did all they could to spoil you.”

Louis had been an attendant and dresser to Princess Charlotte, and she remained until her death, in 1838, in the service of Victoria, who felt much affection for her.

Baroness Lehzen was only responsible for the child’s training for three years, for when the Princess was about eight years old, as has been said, a grant of six thousand a year—in addition to the six thousand then forming the Duchess’s income—was allowed “for the purpose of making an adequate provision for the honourable support and education of Her Highness Princess Alexandrina Victoria of Kent.” It was really felt that the child needed to be under English tuition, and a country clergyman, the Rev. George Davys, became her tutor. No sooner had the Duchess chosen him than King William asserted that it was a bad choice, and that no one under the rank of a prelate should have been offered the work, whereupon the Duchess intimated that it would be quite easy to give Mr. Davys a bishopric; and this was eventually done, though at first the Crown living of St. Hallows-on-the-Wall in the City was the preferment bestowed. Mr. Davys gathered various masters to teach the Princess different subjects, but from many sources it is seen that Baroness Lehzen still did much of the elementary teaching, though her labours in this respect stopped when the Duchess of Northumberland took charge. Mr. Davys’s daughter, a girl a little older than the Princess, shared the tuition, and, as far as can be told, represented most of what the Princess knew of child companionship. When Victoria became Queen this early friend was made permanent Woman of the Bedchamber.

The strained relations between the King and his sister-in-law took active form over what were known as the Duchess’s progresses. On looking at the matter from this long distance of time, it is impossible not to agree with the Duchess that it was well that the child should see England, should know the different districts of the country, should visit the manufacturing towns, the seats of learning, and the beautiful hills in the north and west. The grievance lay, first and foremost, in the fact that the King would have liked to introduce his successor to his people through Court functions and constant companionship, but was debarred almost entirely from seeing her; and, secondly, that the Duchess planned all her journeys quite independently of the King, and demanded Royal honours wherever she went. Thus for some years from 1832 an annual series of visits was projected, taking place generally in the autumn. The first of which we have any definite account was made in 1832, and shows an extraordinary activity. The Duchess and her suite went to Chatsworth, Hardwicke Hall, Chesterfield, Matlock; to the Earl of Shrewsbury’s at Alton Towers, and to the Earl of Liverpool’s at Shrewsbury, where they knew they would have a warm welcome, as Lady Catherine Jenkinson, Lord Liverpool’s daughter, was one of the Ladies in Waiting upon the Duchess. This was followed by visits to Oakley Park, Howell Grange, and Oxford, where the degree of Doctor was conferred upon Conroy. Powis Castle, the early home of the Duchess of Northumberland, was also visited, and a house rented at Beaumaris, on the Isle of Anglesey, for a month, whence they had to flee, because of an epidemic of cholera, to Plâs Newydd, the home of the Marquis of Anglesey, on the Menai Straits, which the Marquis gladly put at their disposal.

In Wales, Victoria, a child of thirteen, presented prizes at the Eisteddfod, laid the foundation of a boys’ school, and, on her way back through Chester, opened a new bridge over the Dee.

Year after year tours of this sort were carried out, the arrangements being in the hands of Sir John Conroy—“a ridiculous fellow,” says Greville—who seemed to have given every opening that he could for loyal speeches, which, in the peculiar circumstances, could not avoid touching upon dangerous topics.

On the whole, the laudatory biographies of Queen Victoria have shown great injustice to William IV. The writers of those biographies, painfully anxious to please living people, have not allowed themselves to exercise either sound criticism or sound judgment. They have made the King a vulgar, brutal monster, always ready to insult “defenceless women,” and have extolled the Duchess of Kent as a miracle of propriety and wisdom. As a matter of fact, both of them, in different ways, were wanting in self-control; both were people of passionate temperament, the King hotly so, the Duchess in a more reserved but equally intractable way. At that time William still had a faint hope that his wife might bear children—a fact that is shown in the negotiations concerning the Regency, and in various little significant events. For that reason he insisted upon Princess Victoria being regarded as Heir Presumptive, which was keenly resented by the Duchess, who thought that the right title should be Heir Apparent. Thus when all the papers detailed the events of the Duchess’s tours through the country, and gave in full many loyal speeches and their acknowledgments, or if they did not give them in full were particular to pick out the most striking passages, it is scarcely to be wondered at that the soul of the King was shaken with rage, for these speeches were sometimes a little too anticipatory to be pleasant to him. “The Princess who will rule over us,” was a common phrase, to which the Duchess responded freely with “your future Queen,” softening the expression, however, with the pious wish, “I trust at a very distant date.”

These progresses, lasting sometimes for a couple of months or even longer, gave the young Princess much information, and showed her something of England; she probably liked the novelty at first, and all through enjoyed some incidents and the kindness offered her. She is said to have displayed wonderfully precocious powers of shrewdness (a cheap bit of praise!), and to have written long letters to her governess, describing, “with an accuracy, minuteness, and spirit quite extraordinary,” her impressions of the manners, customs, and peculiarities of the people in the various towns she visited. But there were times when she was bored to death. The absurd triumphal meanderings through this town and that, bowing here, bowing there, surrounded by crowds sometimes so dense that the carriage could not move, cheered, gazed at, addressed by mayors and popular speakers—all this became dull and tedious to her. A young thing who should have been playing at ball and learning French verbs had to sit for hours playing, instead, at being grown up, and when she entered a house as a guest had to retain a dignified manner, had to lead off the dance with a middle-aged host instead of romping with his young people, and for dreary weeks had to assume a mock royalty. There must have been also moments of acute pain; for a girl of that age, at least in the present day, will turn scarlet with anger if she and her qualities are discussed before her face, without perhaps quite comprehending why she feels that such a course is a dire and undignified offence, by inference depriving her of her sensibility and relegating her to the position of the unthinking creatures who cannot understand what is said.

Yet little Victoria had to listen daily to the speeches made by her mother, in which her education, her tendencies, and the desires concerning her were fully described to the “great unwashed.” Such instances as the following were of common occurrence. When, in 1833, mother and child attended the ceremony of opening the pier at Southampton, the Mayor offered a loyal address, to which the Duchess replied, among other things, that it was a great advantage to the Princess to be thus early taught the importance of being attached to works of utility, adding that it was her anxious desire to impress upon her daughter the value of everything recommended by its practical utility to all classes of the community.

On another occasion she said to the public crowd,“I cannot better allude to your good feeling towards the Princess than by joining fervently in the wish that she may set an example in her conduct of that piety towards God and charity towards men which is the only sure foundation either of individual happiness or national prosperity.”

Again she would say that “it was the object of her life to render her daughter deserving of the affectionate solicitude she so universally inspired, and to make her worthy of the attachment and respect of a free and loyal people.” These sentiments were quite natural and laudable, the only thing wrong about them being that they were expressed publicly and with considerable ceremony before the child of whom they were spoken. For these responses were generally written, and when the moment came for their delivery, John Conroy, standing by the Duchess’s side, would hand up her answer, “just as the Prime Minister hands the King the copy of his speech when opening Parliament.” This habit was specially noticed when, in 1835, the royal pair went through the north-east of England, to York, Wentworth House, Doncaster (where they witnessed the races), Belvoir Castle, Burghley, Lynn, Holkham, and Euston Hall. At Burghley the loyal address spoke of the Princess as one “destined to mount the throne of these realms,” and most splendid preparations were made by Burghley’s master, the Marquis of Exeter, for the lodgment of his guests. The dinner was a great function and all went well until a clumsy or nervous servant slipped and turned the contents of an ice-pail into the Duchess’s lap, “which made a great bustle.” The Princess opened the ball with Lord Exeter, and then, like a good child, went off to bed.

At Holkham a crowd of people were waiting in the brilliantly illuminated Egyptian Hall while the Princess was dragged for miles in her carriage by navvies, making her two hours late. At last a carriage arrived at the Hall containing three ladies, and Mr. Coke, with a lighted candle in each hand, made a profound bow. When he resumed the perpendicular the visitors had vanished, and the host was told that he had been making his obeisance to the dressers! Soon after this, their Royal Highnesses appeared, and the Princess won all by her pleasant courtesy.

It is more than probable that among those who were personally affected by these journeys they were popular, but on the whole they were harshly criticised, not only by those who surrounded the King, but by the diarists of that time, and among those who guided the tone of the newspapers; and these we must suppose gave voice to the general sentiment. It was an age which preferred the retirement of women, and many people were shocked at the publicity of it all. The Duchess went, they affirmed, “to fish up loyalty in the provinces, and to prepare her daughter for the business of sovereignty, which, however, in this free and high-spirited country is merely to be hooted at, cheered, gazed at, dragged in triumph and addressed by the populace.” On one occasion they dined at Plymouth, the blinds up to show the illuminated room to the dense crowd which filled the area of the hotel, “a vulgar process which appears to have excited fresh enthusiasm among the herd of minions who accompanied with adulatory yelps the course of the visitors.”

Apart from the spiteful tone of all this, the charge was true; but the Duchess was right. She was following a certain system of education; she was bringing up a Queen, teaching her the social duties of her station and training her in those habits of self-control and savoir faire which made Victoria astonish England at her accession by her coolness and dignity. Without her mother’s training the Princess would have been far more like the Georges in outward manners than she was; with it she became perhaps too conscious of what was due from others to herself, too ready to be offended if all did not bow to the wishes of “the Crown”; but the gain was the country’s, and the country has largely to thank the Duchess of Kent for a revolution in the character and moral position of the English Sovereign.

It was during the second visit to Norris Castle, in the Isle of Wight, in 1833, that another quarrel took place between the King and his sister-in-law. At Osborne Lodge—the site of the later Osborne Cottage built by Victoria—Sir John Conroy had his residence, where he entertained the two Princesses. They also went to East Cowes, to Whippingham, and crossed over at different times to Portsmouth, to Weymouth, and to Plymouth. They inspected the dockyards, made a cruise to Eddystone Lighthouse, went to Torquay, Exeter and Swanage; the Princess presented new colours to the Royal Irish Fusiliers stationed at Devonport, during which ceremony the Duchess told the troops that “her daughter’s study of English history had inspired her with martial ardour.” Day after day they were crossing and recrossing the Sound, and every time they appeared salutes were fired. It is true that William could not hear the guns at Windsor or at St. James’s, but the knowledge of the daily, and more than daily, recurrence annoyed him. To be saluted on arrival and on departure was one thing, but to have a “continual popping” going on was quite another. So William called a Council, and dignified statesmen had to go to Court to discuss the matter. Greville’s account runs as follows:—

“The King has been (not unnaturally) disgusted at the Duchess of Kent’s progresses with her daughter through the kingdom, and amongst the rest with her sailings at the Isle of Wight, and the continual popping in the shape of salutes to Her Royal Highness. He did not choose that the latter practice should go on, and he signified his pleasure to Sir James Graham and Lord Hill, for salutes are matters of general order, both to Army and Navy.”

It was thought better to make no order on the subject, but that the two gentlemen, with Lord Grey, should open a negotiation with the Duchess, and ask her of her own accord to waive the salutes, and should send word when returning to the Isle of Wight that, as she was sailing about for her amusement, she preferred that she should not be saluted whenever she appeared. However, the Duchess was too childishly fond of the importance of the noise to be a party to its discontinuance, and took council of Conroy, who is reported to have replied, “that, as Her Royal Highness’s confidential adviser, he could not recommend her to give way on this point.” The King would not give way either, so by an Order in Council the regulations were altered under the King’s directions, and the Royal Standard was for the future only to be saluted when the King or Queen was on board.

It was a stupid wrangle on a silly subject, but even in so small a matter as this, in the modern desire to justify everything that the mother of Victoria did, writers of royal “Lives” always affirm that the King was bad-tempered enough to object to the salute being offered to the Duchess on her arrival at the commencement of her holiday.

That the Duchess should resent such happenings as this was natural, but it was rather sad that she included her old friend Queen Adelaide in her resentful feelings.

In contemporary writings I find many comments upon the change of manner which she gradually showed towards Adelaide after the former had become Queen. Before that the two ladies had been good friends, but there seems to have arisen such a jealousy on the part of the Duchess that she began to treat the Queen with studied rudeness, and to make absurd demands as to her own treatment. Thus, if she were under the obligation of calling upon the Queen, she would name her own hour, and, if that did not suit Adelaide, would make that an excuse for considering the call paid. In earlier and more friendly times, if one of these ladies went to see the other, she would feel at liberty to go from room to room until she found her. By 1833, however, though the Duchess still followed this custom at the Palace, she would not allow it to the Queen at Kensington, but gave orders that she must await her in this or that room.

In that same year the Duchess had two nephews on a visit at the time when Donna Maria da Gloria of Portugal was staying with the King. The Queen gave a ball for the young people, and between the dances was quite glad to see that little Victoria seemed to care for her as much as ever and constantly came to sit by her side. During the evening Adelaide, wishing to know something of the two young German princelets, asked the Duchess to have them brought to her that she might have a talk with them. But for some hidden reason the Duchess refused, and added to the snub by taking her whole party away long before the ball was over, saying that the Princes had been to a review and were tired. Lady Bedingfield, who tells this story, adds: “Note that they are six feet high and stout for their age!” It is difficult to think that anything but ill-humour was responsible for this, that or the idea that she must show her importance by leaving early, for the Duchess would sometimes keep her daughter at the Opera until a very late hour.

However, gentle-minded Adelaide passed this by and invited the young men down to Windsor, upon which the Duchess wrote one of her characteristic notes, saying that she could not come with them and could not spare them, and as they had paid their respects to the King at the Drawing Room, she did not think the visit to Windsor necessary. There was some discussion between the royal pair as to how this letter should be answered, and the King preferred that a bare acknowledgment should be made. Adelaide had the curiosity to look in the paper to see what these boys were so busy about on the day she had hoped to have them with her, and found that they had spent it at the Zoological Gardens!

CHAPTER III
PRINCESS VICTORIA’S TUITION IN POLITICS

“Confound their politics.”—National Anthem.

Queen Adelaide, being in a high place, had many detractors, though she was certainly a kind and gentle woman. Her two faults in the eyes of the English people were that she was drawn from a poor German family, and that she exercised, or was said, perhaps erroneously, to exercise a strong political influence in great matters over the King. It was the time of the fight over the Reform Bill, when the whole country was in a ferment, and everyone, down to the children, took sides, whether they understood the question or not. When it became known that the Queen was opposed to the passage of the Bill, the papers published skits and cartoons against her, accusing her of plotting against the people and even against the Crown, so that the populace did not hesitate to show its animus. Thus on one occasion when an election was exciting the passions of all, the King arranged to pay a State visit to the City, and the Lord Mayor, somewhat foolishly, illuminated the streets the day before. The glare and light seem to have been the one thing too much for the inflamed minds of the mob, which showed its joy by breaking windows and creating a general uproar. The Queen had, unfortunately, gone that evening to a concert without guards, and as she was returning she was recognised, her carriage being surrounded by a roaring crowd, some of whom tried to thrust their heads into the windows. The footmen used their canes freely to beat them off, and the coachman managed to reach the Palace safely; but the poor lady was much alarmed and thought herself in danger of her life. The King, worried at her late return, paced from room to room waiting her, and when at last she arrived he caught hold of Lord Howe, her Chamberlain, who preceded her, asking in agitated voice:

“How is the Queen?”

Howe, being an eager anti-reformer, replied that she was much frightened and proceeded to make the very worst of the occurrence, with the result that the King, in a fury, determined to cancel his proposed visit to the City, much to the chagrin of his Ministers.

WILLIAM IV.

As for William himself, he blew hot and cold over the Bill, as everyone knows, and it became a duel between Lord Grey and Queen Adelaide, so it was said, as to which should gain the greatest power over the King, and William began to get the reputation of being a hen-pecked husband. At one point Grey desired to go to the country that he might prove that the Lords were the impediment in the way of the Bill, and the King consented to a dissolution, actually taking leave of his Minister. The next day, however, actuated by some hidden motive, he absolutely and flatly refused to countenance the change, thus forcing Lord Grey to persevere in what seemed a hopeless attempt to get the Bill passed through the House of Lords. The Whig press was furious, and published such outspoken opinions as the following:—

“Hail, thou conundrum of our age,

Britannia’s great first fiddle,

By turns a fool, by turns a sage,

A puzzling royal riddle.

By turns you make us weep or smile,

Your country’s curse or glory,

The Billy Black of Britain’s Isle,

By turns a Whig or Tory.”

While the Bill was pressing its turbulent passage through the Commons, and during the subsequent troubles, the idea took stronger hold upon the people that the Queen was the motive of the King’s continued vacillations. They went further still, and said that she was influenced by Lord Howe, who was believed to entertain a romantic attachment for her. Indeed, letters of hers are in existence more or less proving that there was truth in the idea of the influence. Her desire was to dismiss the Whigs and form a Tory Government, and in one letter to Lord Howe she notes that “the King’s eyes are open, and he sees the great difficulties in which he is placed, that he really sees everything in the right light,” adding that he thought the Tories not strong enough to form an administration.

Lord Howe voted against the measure, and Lord Grey, seeing how the Government was being defeated by members of the Royal household, forced the King to dismiss him. This the Queen regarded as an outrage. She refused to allow another chamberlain to be appointed, and Howe attended the Queen as assiduously as ever, the two working unceasingly against the Government. This led to something like popular hatred of Adelaide, and to the universal spread of the horrid reports which were being circulated about her and her late Chamberlain, proofs of which animosity were forthcoming every time she appeared in public. The Court Journal deplored the fact that when she drove out the Queen experienced almost daily insult from the populace, being hissed as she passed. Raikes tells us that he saw the King and Queen at the Duke of Wellington’s fête at Apsley House, that His Majesty looked tired, and Queen Adelaide was out of spirits. “She had attended a review in Hyde Park in the morning, when the sovereign mob thought proper to greet her with much incivility and rudeness.” The King himself by no means escaped the hostility of the people, for he no sooner showed himself on the stand at Ascot than a stone hit him full in the forehead. Fortunately it did him no serious injury, and the ruffian who threw it was found to be half-witted.

Socially the affair with Lord Howe assumed serious proportions. The Queen was so angry at his dismissal that, to placate her, it was suggested that he should be reinstated, a condition being made that, though he should not be asked to vote against his conscience, he should undertake not to vote against the Bill. This condition he indignantly refused, and the Queen was not conciliated.

Greville, who much disliked Queen Adelaide, notes of the Court held at Brighton at Christmas, 1832:—“The Court is very active, vulgar, and hospitable. King, Queen, Princes, Princesses, bastards, and attendants constantly trotting about in every direction.... Lord Howe is devoted to the Queen, and is never away from her. She receives his attentions, but demonstrates nothing in return; he is like a boy in love with this frightful spotted Majesty, while his delightful wife is laid up with a sprained ankle and dislocated joint on the sofa.” Indeed, everyone looked upon him as an ardent lover, and noted that he was dining every day at the Pavilion, riding with the Queen, and never quitting her side, keeping his eyes always fixed on her face. Adelaide herself was very careful; she was surrounded by the Fitzclarences, who would have been delighted to prove her in the wrong, and even they could not find fault with her attitude to her quasi-Chamberlain.

Lady Howe, when again able to go to Court, was vexed to death about it, and induced Greville to warn her husband of the scandalous stories afloat. Greville did this, but it only annoyed Lord Howe, who, however, by his manner convinced that worldly man that there was nothing in the matter but folly and the vanity of being confidential adviser to the Queen. As a result of this conversation, Howe suggested to Her Majesty that she should appoint a new Chamberlain, and that he should wait upon the King to inform him of the fact. This, however, the Queen absolutely forbade, and Howe stayed on, with the result that a year or two later Queen Adelaide’s name was in every mouth in a very discreditable way.

Greville was horribly prejudiced against the Queen, and very much taken with Lady Howe, but the latter seems to have been a curiously irresponsible person. Once, when she and her husband were driving with the Queen, she, being tired, coolly put her feet up on to her husband’s knee, and then rested them on the window-ledge, saying innocently to his distressed lordship, “What do you mean by shaking your head?”

On another occasion the Howes were assisting Adelaide to ticket things for a bazaar, and Lady Howe fell in love with some shoes; so, fitting one on, she put her foot on the table to show how well it set. Can anyone imagine a woman behaving like that before Queen Victoria? The autocratic manners of the Duchess of Kent are but a tale to us now, but her training of her daughter in modesty and decorous ways was a reality of which we still feel the benefit.

Queen Adelaide was the most confiding and rash of women; her theory of life was so simple that when one of her ladies tried to suggest caution to her in relation to Lord Howe, saying that the newspapers had been very ill-natured about her friendship for him, she replied that she knew that, but truth would always find its way. It did in her case, but she had personally to run the gauntlet of scandal. Lady Bedingfield remarked of her, “The Queen is so good and virtuous that she has no idea people could fancy that she likes him (Howe) too much.”

In 1834 the Queen went on an extended tour to her home in Saxe-Meiningen, taking with her presents of no less than eleven carriages and many other things, much to the anger of the people, who were then in a starving condition. On her return in September she was ill, being quite knocked up with the festivities in Germany, and a report was started—being first whispered at the Lord Mayor’s banquet—that the Queen was with child. This was confirmed by her ladies, and in February the medical men, though still uncertain, leaned to the decision that such was the case. The Court Journal went so far as to announce that her Majesty was said to have derived peculiar benefit from drinking at a spring in Germany known as Child’s Well; so the papers all debated the facts, and the Royal hangers-on were in a state of great commotion.

Lord Howe’s name was on everyone’s lips, and the less dignified papers did not hesitate openly to hint what society people were whispering. Alvanley, the wit of the time, suggested that the psalm, “Lord, how wonderful are Thy works,” should be generally sung, and cartoons and ribald verses appeared everywhere. One of the latter ran:

“How(e) wondrous are thy works, my lord,

How(e) glorious are thy ways!

How(e) shall we sing thy song, my lord?

How(e) celebrate thy praise?”

Another such rhyme tells us how

“Poor little Vicky, in a fright

Disjointed feels her royal nose.”

and goes on to explain that

“Her Grace, the Duchess-Mother pouts,

And General Conroy’s in the dumps,

He dreams no more of Ins-and-Outs,

His suit is now no longer trumps.

The little Princes in a flutter,

Throw all their whips and tops away,

And quarrel with their bread and butter,

And mope and sulk the live-long day.

The whiskered Ernest rubs his eyes,

Poor Georgie Cumberland loudly groans,

While little Cambridge yells and cries,

That such new cousins he disowns.”

However many people may have believed it to be true that Adelaide expected another child, there were not many about the Court who could have credited the scandalous part of the story. As Greville said, “Of course, there will be plenty of scandal. It so happens, however, that Howe had not been with the Court for a considerable time.” In May, newspapers that had given many inches to spreading the belief, announced in two lines that the report that an heir was expected to the Throne was untrue, and so vanished the last of William’s hopes that he might be succeeded in the direct line.

I think it was Lady Cardigan who said that Lord Howe had named his three daughters after three of his former loves, Lady Georgina Fane, Queen Adelaide, and Emily Bagot.

When William IV. first came to the throne he was imbued with a determination to rule justly and irrespective of party, but he was in the midst of Tory influence while the Government was Whig. His Ministers became exhausted by the long effort they had to make to keep him consistent on the question of Reform, and the passing of the Bill may be said to have begun his outwardly expressed leaning towards Toryism. This increased as time went on, and in 1834 one of the most remarkable political events took place.

The leadership of the House of Commons was vacant owing to the death of Earl Spencer, by which his son, Lord Althorp, took his seat in the higher chamber. The Whigs were in a majority of a third of the House, but were obliged to fight the Lords for the passage of their Bills. Lord Melbourne went to consult the King as to the new leader, and William, with vague grumblings and irritable manner, seemed to agree with Melbourne’s plans; however, in the morning before he left Windsor a letter was handed to the Minister from the King dismissing the Government. This letter was anything but dignified, as it indulged in personal reflections upon Lord John Russell and Mr. Spring-Rice.

“But conceive our poor friend’s desperation

When, in answer to this application,

Turning coolly about,

Said the Sovereign, ‘You’re out!

And I’ll form a new Administration.’”

Melbourne spent the day in inducing his Monarch to alter his letter so that it should cause no more heart-burnings than could be avoided, and he talked the matter over with Palmerston that night. Lord Brougham came in late, and, under a promise not to divulge until the next day what had happened, he also heard the story. Brougham kept his promise in a way, for he waited until after midnight and then communicated the whole matter to the Times. So the next morning the keepers of this grave secret found a flourishing announcement in the leading Tory paper. “The King has taken the opportunity of Lord Spencer’s death to turn out the Ministry, and there is every reason to believe that the Duke of Wellington has been sent for. The Queen has done it all.”

This caused a series of convulsions in every stratum of society. The King accused Melbourne of having published a matter which should have been kept secret until correctly announced at the correct moment; the Government blamed Melbourne all round. Everyone believed that the whole thing had been preconcerted, but of them all the consequences fell heaviest upon Queen Adelaide. The sentence, “The Queen has done it all,” was placarded all over London, and the people believed that now there was no doubt but that they had a real grievance against the Queen, and they hated her bitterly. Yet it is fairly certain that the Queen was as astonished as everyone else; no one but the King knew what the King had planned, and it is probable that he did not know until he suddenly made up his mind after seeing Melbourne that evening. He appointed the Duke of Wellington First Lord of the Treasury and Secretary of State, and he had to send someone off in a hurry to Italy to find Sir Robert Peel; but the new Government only lived until April of the following year, when it was defeated, and Melbourne came back to office.

William took this as well as he could, but he grew to hate the Whigs. There were times when he would neither see nor speak to one of them, when he treated his Ministers with open insult. Over and over again in the last two years of his reign one reads of the way in which he refused to acknowledge them. At the Queen’s birthday dinner-party in 1836 not one of the Ministry nor a Whig of any sort was invited; and at his own birthday party no one at all connected with the Government, except the members in his household, was asked to be present. He was evidently resolved that, if he had to see them in London, the gates of Windsor should be closed to them. On the other hand, he chose his guests deliberately from the Tories, the men he liked best being Lord Winchilsea and Lord Wharncliffe, both holding violent views, and the Duke of Dorset, who was an extreme Tory. It was said that for the Tories stood the King, the House of Lords, the Church, the Bar and all the law, a large minority in the House of Commons, the agricultural interest, and the monied interest generally; while for the Whigs stood a small majority in the Commons, the manufacturing towns, and a portion of the rabble. Of course, those who triumphantly asserted this blinked the fact that the majority of the whole country stood for the Whigs, as the Tories could not, with all their interest, form a Government which would be acceptable.

Greville notes in 1836: “To-day we had a Council, when His Most Gracious Majesty behaved most ungraciously to his confidential servants, whom he certainly does not delight to honour.”

Sometimes the King made a very special effort to hurt his Ministers. Lord Aylmer had been recalled from Canada by the Whig Government for some irregularities, and he was introduced at the reception of the Bath in 1837. As he approached the throne William called up Palmerston, Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and Lord Minto, First Lord of the Admiralty, making them stand one on either side of Aylmer, that they might hear every word that was said. He then announced that he wished to take that, the most public opportunity, of telling him that he approved most entirely of his conduct in Canada, that he had acted like a true and loyal subject towards a set of traitors and conspirators, and behaved as it became a British officer to do in such circumstances. In fact, he mortified his Ministers as much as he could, and gratified Aylmer to the same extent.

It is not to be supposed that the Ministers liked to be treated with such rudeness, nor to be ignored, but they took it quietly, made no public grumble, went on with their work, and left such insults to be forgotten; only the King’s attitude made this difference, they began to look upon themselves as Ministers to the House of Commons rather than to the Crown, which tended to lessen the kingly power. A little later, when Victoria sat on the throne, and, being a Whig, paid honour to her Ministers, but showed dislike to the Opposition and indifference to the nobles of Tory tendencies, the outcry was loud and deep. Her inexperience, her sex, her age, were blamed as the reasons; open disloyalty was shown her, and sometimes marked rudeness. Yet she was but following the ways of her predecessor in somewhat milder fashion. She was one of a family which never hid its preferences, and she had learned the lesson—bad as it was—at the Royal board of a man whom she loved.

Victoria had been bred a Whig. Her father and mother were Whigs, and all her mother’s counsellors and friends held the same views; Lord Durham went further even, being regarded as the leader of the Radicals. Lord Ashley once gave it as his opinion that from her earliest years the Princess had been taught to regard the Tories as her personal enemies. “I am told that the language at Kensington was calculated to inspire her with fear and hatred of them.”

Through the years of King William’s reign, when he, poor man, was in a constant state of ebullition with his Ministers, his people, or members of his family, the Princess Victoria changed from a child to a woman. She listened quietly, as children did listen in those days, to the politics talked in her mother’s circle, and became imbued with very strong views; she visited, and played at Royalty like a well-made automaton; she studied music, French, English, singing, and dancing under various tutors, and thought a great deal about the time when she would be England’s Sovereign.

Leopold, who, it is said, was soon deadly sick of his Belgian crown and wishful to abdicate, thinking it better to be an English Prince with fifty thousand a year and uncle to the Queen, than to be monarch of a troublesome little kingdom which all its neighbours regarded with an evil or a covetous eye, still kept Claremont in good order, having given the mastership of the house over to Sir John Conroy. And there Victoria was taken when she seemed to flag. She loved the place, for were not the happiest moments of her girlish life spent there? It was there that she met her grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who, on seeing her, made the first suggestion that she might do worse than marry into the Saxe-Coburg family, and she had definitely in her mind her grandson Albert. The gardens at Claremont were well cultivated, and all that the Duchess of Kent did not use was sent to Leopold, a thing which caused many a joke at his expense.

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,

Is that young Innocent, on whom all gaze?

Nor conscious they the while of choral strain;

Could I command a Guido’s magic power,

Enthusiast grown, I’d catch thy vivid glow—

Serene, unsullied child of sun and shower!

Still on the parent stem allowed to blow.

Vain, worse than vain, the Bard who’d boldly try,

In his most brilliant page or loftiest lay,

Choice how he may be, to depict the eye,

The lovely eye, of that sweet smiling fay!

Oh,’tis the Maid, who wakes to plaudits loud,

Rich in the treasure of an angel face,

In every gift that makes a nation proud—

A mother’s joy—an honoured Monarch’s grace.”

Elphinstone did not dream that with these lines he was putting the first nail in the coffin of his hopes of a career at Court or in England.

In 1835 the Princess came more to the front, and probably this was caused by the fact that she suffered early in the year from a serious attack of typhoid, striking many people with consternation, and making King William, who was feeling his age, yet more keenly desirous of securing her company. So in June she went to Ascot in the same carriage with the King and Queen. It is amusing to note that, in spite of the simplicity of dress for which she is supposed to have been so conspicuous, and for which everyone has so much praised the Duchess of Kent, the Princess wore on this occasion a large pink bonnet, a rose-coloured satin dress broché, and a pélerine cape trimmed with black. The description, at least, is a little painful. But N. P. Willis, the American literary man, speaks of her that day as being quite unnecessarily pretty and interesting, and deplores the probability that the heir to the English Crown would be sold in marriage for political purposes without regard to her personal character and wishes.

One writer described the Duchess of Kent on the same occasion in the sentimental and fulsome way so much beloved by women writers about Royalty. “Her brow seemed as if it would well become an imperial diadem; such lofty and commanding intellect was there, united with feminine softness and matronly grace. She looked fit to be the mother of the Queen. The expression of maternal pride and delight with which on this occasion she surveyed her child at every fresh burst of the people’s affection is not to be forgotten by those who witnessed it.”

In August, Victoria was confirmed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London at the Chapel Royal, St. James’s. There is much that is solemn at a confirmation, there should be much that is joyous and brave as well; the girl should feel her responsibility, she also ought to be glad at becoming really a member of God’s Church, and in outward show, at least, a Child of God. But at this confirmation the Archbishop made so solemn, so pathetic, so “parental” an exhortation that the whole company wept. The Duchess of Kent sobbed audibly, the Queen and her ladies also wept aloud, tears ran down the King’s rubicund face, and the poor little Princess was not only drowned in tears, but frightened to death. The whole tone of the affair seems to have suited the spirit of the age, for one lady who was present described it afterwards as a “beautifully touching scene.”

Through this part of the year there seems to have been something like peace between William and his sister-in-law, though at his birthday party there was thrown across the dinner-table a shadow of the storm which later was to descend upon “the duo” from Kensington. William never neglected the opportunity of making a speech; if he had anything to say he said it, whether the moment was propitious or otherwise; if he had nothing to say, he still got on to his feet and talked, probably without any relevance to what was going on, and his matter was often personal. After one dinner he talked disconnectedly about the Turf and his wife, saying that the Queen was an excellent woman as everyone knew. At this birthday party, in 1835, William said, among other things:—

“I cannot expect to live very long, but I hope that my successor may be of full age when she mounts the throne. I have a great respect for the person upon whom, in the event of my death, the Regency would devolve, but I have great distrust of the persons by whom she is surrounded. I know that everything which falls from my lips is reported again, and I say this thus candidly and publicly because it is my desire and intention that these my sentiments should be made known.”