Sons, Servants and Statesmen (3 page)

The other man
in loco parentis
for much of Victoria’s childhood was Sir John Conroy, the Duchess of Kent’s comptroller. Conroy served his employer faithfully, and she always had the utmost confidence in him. Wagging tongues suggested that they must be lovers. It was said that the Duchess was unsure of her second husband’s fertility and, true to the Coburg sense of ambition, took a lover to ensure that she would have a child who would sit on the English throne,
¹⁵
and that Conroy might just have been the right man in the right place at the right time. Also current at the time was a story that Victoria had once entered her mother’s bedroom and caught them in a compromising position.

All this was almost certainly exaggeration, but it was beyond doubt that the ever-scheming, manipulative Conroy worked hard to keep the princess from outside influences and make sure she was utterly subservient to her mother. Victoria’s dislike of his arrogance soon turned into hatred, especially when he tried to force his will on her. Soon after King Leopold and Queen Louise returned to Belgium, she took to her bed with a fever, possibly a form of typhoid. Taking advantage of her illness, one day Conroy appeared in her bedroom with a document he had drafted, in which she consented to his appointment as her private secretary on her accession to the throne. He tried to force her to sign, but she stubbornly refused. Baroness Louise Lehzen, her devoted governess and the Duchess of Kent’s lady-in-waiting, came stoutly to her defence, and he had to leave the room without her signature. He did so with bad grace, and from then on he was the Princess’s sworn foe.

King Leopold had never trusted Conroy, and when he heard about the incident he was beside himself with anger. Conroy’s influence over the Duchess of Kent, he told his niece some years later, was ‘so strong that it would once have been called witchcraft’.
¹⁶
The comptroller’s conduct ‘was madness and must end in his own ruin, and that, although late, there was still time! – but no, he continued in the same way, as the events of 1837 did show’.
¹⁷
Conroy evidently considered that he was entitled to wield more power than he genuinely did, and his eagerness to take advantage of the Duchess of Kent’s naïveté spurred him on to reckless ambition which, he must have realised, would eventually bring about his downfall.

By 1835 Victoria had been heir apparent for five years. After the deaths of the childless Duke of York in 1827 and King George IV three years later, she was heir to the throne. The kindly, genial King William IV and his warm-hearted consort, Queen Adelaide, were fond of their little niece, but the increasing hostility of the Duchess of Kent and Conroy prevented them from seeing her regularly. It was the ailing King’s dearest wish that he would be spared long enough, until his heiress attained her eighteenth birthday, so that there would be no danger of the Duchess becoming regent – a regency in which ‘King John’ would hold sway.

From Victoria’s earliest years, various members of the older generation were giving constant thought as to who would be her husband, and invitations to come to England were extended to a number of eligible potential candidates. In 1832 the Mensdorff-Pouilly princes, Hugo and Alfonso, sons of the Duchess of Kent’s sister Sophie, had been invited to stay. During the following summer it was the turn of Alexander and Ernest Württemberg, sons of another maternal aunt, Antoinette. Princess Victoria found them handsome and amiable, but no matchmaking plans were ever pursued.

By 1836, as it was increasingly a question of when, and not if, she would be queen regnant, some urgency was applied to the matter. In the spring, two Coburg princes, Ferdinand and Augustus, sons of the Duchess of Kent’s brother Ferdinand, came to stay for several weeks. Victoria liked them both, especially the nineteen-year-old Ferdinand, though he was ineligible, as he had just been married by proxy to Queen Maria Gloria of Portugal and was about to travel there to meet her for the first time. Victoria was very sad when the time came for them to depart, as she enjoyed the companionship of young men, as well as balls and other such entertainments.

In April 1836 King William IV invited the Prince of Orange and his sons William and Alexander to England. This was unwelcome news to King Leopold, especially as Belgium had recently broken away from Holland, and both countries were on distant terms. They arrived in May, and Victoria was invited to a ball at which they were present. Much to King Leopold’s relief, his niece was unimpressed by them: ‘they look heavy, dull and frightened and are not at all prepossessing.’
¹⁸

That same month, on 18 May, she met her Coburg cousins, sons of Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Coburg, for the first time. On 23 May she wrote to tell King Leopold that she found both ‘very amiable, very kind and good, and extremely merry, just as young people should be’. Albert, she continued, was ‘extremely handsome, which Ernest certainly is not, but he has a most good-natured, honest, and intelligent countenance’.
¹⁹

After they had gone, she confided in her uncle again, thanking him ‘for the prospect of great happiness you have contributed to give me, in the person of dear Albert’. She was delighted with him, as he ‘possesses every quality that could be desired to render me perfectly happy’, and she hoped and trusted that ‘all will go on prosperously and well on this subject of so much importance to me’.
²⁰
He could not equal her zest for living, as he hated late nights and rich food, tended to fall asleep in company and found little pleasure in the dances, parties and entertainments on which she throve. For a high-spirited girl who enjoyed good living and could dance until dawn, this was something of a disappointment. Nevertheless, her Coburg cousin had made a lasting impression on her. She greatly admired him, even though she did not know him well enough to be in love with him.

Early in the morning of 20 June 1837, barely four weeks after Victoria’s eighteenth birthday, King William IV passed away and his niece became queen. For the first two years of her reign, Queen Victoria was an isolated, even lonely, figure. Her ageing, worldly-wise Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, provided her with the best company she could possibly want at the time, but as a young unmarried sovereign she was severely limited in her friendships. Perhaps she needed a father more than a consort. King Leopold was prudent enough to stay away from England during this period, as he foresaw that the English might think he was coming merely to ‘enslave’ her.
²¹
Yet it was a source of some concern to him that her letters had become increasingly imperious. When she wrote to him on political matters, they were not the outpourings of an eager young woman ready to learn, so much as the thoughts of the Queen of England.

Although she had never known him, maybe she felt more affection somehow for the father whom she never knew, or at least for his memory, than for the mother who had worked so hard, albeit sometimes misguidedly, on her behalf. For during the first two years or so of her reign, relations were extremely strained between Queen Victoria and the Duchess of Kent, and the influence of Lord Melbourne had obviously superseded that of the kingly sage of Laeken. Moreover, she seemed reluctant to marry, and King Leopold saw that if she was to loosen the connections with her Coburg heritage too much, the chance of bringing about the alliance he had worked for might be lost. It was time to expedite plans for the betrothal. One more meeting between her and her cousin Albert, he was sure, would be enough to make her reconsider. He planned to send the young man and his brother Ernest to visit her again in the autumn of 1839.

This put the Queen in a difficult position. Despite all the favourable reports about her cousin’s character, she informed the King that it must be understood there was no engagement between them, and she was not in a position to make any final promise that year, ‘for, at the
very earliest
, any such event could not take place till
two or three years hence
’. She might ‘like him as a friend, and as a
cousin
, and as a
brother
, but not
more
; and should this be the case (which is not likely), I am
very
anxious that it should be understood that I am
not
guilty of any breach of promise, for
I never gave any
’.
²²

If King Leopold feared his niece’s obstinacy, he was wise enough not to show it. A young virgin queen was bound to relish her independence at first, and then probably change her mind. He agreed that she was under no obligation to give any immediate answer, as long as she would allow the visit to take place. First, though, he relied on a little psychology. A few immediate calls from other Coburg relations first would put her in a more receptive frame of mind. Setting the stage for Albert ‘and a renewal of warm Coburg family life’
²³
would surely help to achieve the object. Her uncle Ferdinand and her cousins Augustus and Leopold, and their sister Victoire, arrived in September 1839, to be followed by another cousin, Alexander Mensdorff-Pouilly, son of Princess Sophie of Saxe-Coburg, soon afterwards. For almost the first time in her life, Queen Victoria could experience something of a happy family existence, with cousins whose jokes, nicknames and friendly teasing she could share as if they were all brothers and sisters. When the time came for their departure, she was as deeply affected as they were.

On 10 October Ernest and Albert reached Windsor Castle after a very rough sea crossing which had left Albert feeling particularly seasick. Nevertheless, the young suitor, who had vowed before leaving Coburg that he intended to win the hand of Queen Victoria or else return with a decision that all must be over between them, made the right impression at once. One sentence from her journal that day will suffice: ‘It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert – who is
beautiful
.’
²⁴

In Albert, Queen Victoria was to find the next father-figure for whom she craved. King Leopold had been less accessible since becoming a sovereign in his own right, and with her new-found self-confidence she was inclined to resent his interference. In December she wrote to Albert of having just received what she thought was ‘an ungracious letter’ from their uncle in Belgium. ‘He appears to me to be nettled because I no longer ask for his advice, but dear Uncle is given to believe that he must rule the roast [
sic
] everywhere. However, that is not a necessity.’
²⁵

The influence of her Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, who had been such a valued mentor ever since her accession, was beginning to diminish. From their engagement later that week to her death some sixty years later, Albert was and would be the most important figure in her life and her most abiding influence.

From the beginning of their relationship, Albert was made well aware that his wife and monarch initially intended to be the senior partner in the marriage. Just before he left Coburg for the last time as a bachelor, he received a letter from his affianced, firmly rejecting his plan for a honeymoon at Windsor. ‘You forget, my dearest Love, that I am the Sovereign and that business can stop and wait for nothing.’
²⁶

A few days later she demonstrated similar single-mindedness, in the face of a united front from Melbourne and the Duchess of Kent, about allowing the bridegroom to sleep under her roof before the wedding. English objections to such an idea, she retorted, were ‘foolish nonsense’. On the night before the ceremony, they spent an hour reading over the Marriage Service and rehearsing with the ring.

The wedding itself took place on 10 February 1840 at the Chapel Royal, St James’s. As she walked up the aisle, it was noticed that she was perfectly composed but unusually pale, her normally red countenance for once a similar colour to that of her satin dress. Moreover, the orange flowers in her wreath were shaking as much as if she was caught in a breeze. Even so, she made her responses firmly, and her promise to ‘obey’ her husband, which was retained at her personal request, rang throughout the chapel.

On the following day, ‘the happiest, happiest Being that ever existed’ poured out her feelings in a letter to King Leopold. Albert, she wrote, ‘is an Angel, and his kindness and affection for me is really touching. To look in those dear eyes, and that dear sunny face, is enough to make me adore him. What I can do to make him happy will be my greatest delight.’
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