Читать книгу Queen Victoria: A Personal History - Christopher Hibbert - Страница 12

‘I never had a room to myself. I never had a sofa, nor an easy chair, and there was not a single carpet that was not threadbare.’

THE KING’S LITTLE NIECE, VICTORIA, was now eight months old. She had not been well at Sidmouth, suffering from a heavy cold for most of the time; and she had been ‘very upset by the frightful jolting’ of the carriage that brought her back to Kensington. But she was a strong child, as her father had been pleased to note of his ‘little joy’; and at six months she had, in his opinion, been ‘as advanced as children generally are at eight’. She had been vaccinated without ill effects and having been weaned – her mother having caused some disapproval by indelicately insisting on giving what her husband described as ‘maternal nutriment’ – ‘she did not appear to thrive the less for the change’. The Duchess was delighted with her little ‘Vickelchen’, as she called her, although she had to admit that she was already showing ‘symptoms of wanting to get her own little way’.

This stubbornness and independence of spirit became more pronounced as she grew older. So did her impatience, her wilfulness, outbursts of temper and defiant truthfulness. Frustrated, she would stamp her feet and would burst into tears when told to sit still or to pay closer attention during her reading lessons; and once, in a tantrum, she hurled a pair of scissors at her governess. Before her lessons began one day, her mother was asked if she had been a good girl that morning. ‘Yes,’ the Duchess replied, ‘she has been good this morning but yesterday there was a little storm.’ ‘Two storms,’ corrected the little girl, pertly interrupting her mother’s account, intent as always on speaking and hearing the truth, ‘one at dressing and one at washing.’ She was similarly pert when her mother said to her, after one of her outbursts of temper, that she made them both very unhappy by such behaviour. ‘No, Mama, not me, not myself, but you.’¹

The Duchess’s nervous temperament was not well adapted to dealing with such a child. ‘To my shame,’ she admitted, ‘I must confess that I am over anxious in a childish way with the little one, as if she were my first child…She drives me at times into real desperation…Today the little mouse…was so unmanageable that I nearly cried.’

Wilful as she was, however, the little girl, intelligent and lively and with an astonishingly retentive memory, progressed satisfactorily with her lessons when these began to a regular timetable supervised by her Principal Master, the Revd George Davys, a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, later Bishop of Peterborough. Davys came to live in Kensington Palace before the Princess was four years old. He helped to teach her to read by writing short words on cards and, as he put it, ‘making her bring them to me from a distant part of the room as I named them’.² Admittedly, she was not very good at Latin, and piano lessons were often a trial: once, when told that there was ‘no royal road to success in music’ and that she must practise like everyone else, she banged shut the lid of the instrument with the defiant words, ‘There! You see there is no must about it.’ But she was patient and attentive in her history and geography lessons; she learned to speak French and German – the latter in particular with a ‘correct pronunciation’ – and a little Italian.^* She soon became adept at arithmetic; her written English was exemplary and her soprano singing voice, trained by John Sale, the organist at St Margaret’s Westminster, was delightful. She danced with easy grace, she listened dutifully to Mr Davys’s religious instruction, she read poetry ‘extremely well’, he said, and understood what she read ‘as well, as at her age, could reasonably be expected’. She displayed a precocious skill in drawing at which she was given lessons by Richard Westall, the prolific historical painter and book illustrator, and later, by Edwin Landseer, Edward Lear and William Leighton Leitch, the distinguished watercolourist.³

In March 1830, when the Princess was ten years old, the Duchess decided that her daughter should be examined to ensure that her education was proceeding along the correct lines. The two invigilators chosen were Charles Blomfield, Bishop of London, described by Richard Porson, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, as a ‘very pretty scholar’, and John Kaye, Bishop of Lincoln, who had been elected Master of Christ’s College, Cambridge at the age of thirty and Regius Professor of Divinity two years later.

Having examined the Princess, these two eminent scholars expressed themselves as being ‘completely satisfied’ with her answers.

In answering a great variety of questions [they reported] the Princess displayed an accurate knowledge of the most important features of Scripture, History and of the leading truths and precepts of the Christian Religion as taught by the Church of England; as well as an acquaintance with the Chronology and principal facts of English History, remarkable in so young a person. To questions of Geography, the use of Globes, Arithmetic and Latin Grammar, the answers which the Princess returned were equally satisfactory; and Her pronunciation both of English and Latin is singularly correct and pleasing. Due attention appears to have been paid to the acquisition of modern languages; and although it was less within the scope of our enquiry, we cannot help observing that the pencil drawings of the Princess are executed with the freedom and correctness of an older child.⁴

In later years she spoke of her childhood as being lonely and ‘rather melancholy’ and Kensington Palace as being bleak in the extreme. ‘I never had a room to myself,’ she complained. ‘I never had a sofa, nor an easy chair, and there was not a single carpet that was not threadbare.’ The food was boring and unappetizing: she promised herself that when she was grown up and could eat as she liked, she would never have mutton for dinner again. Yet the events of her early life as she recorded them were far from being all unhappy ones. Certainly there were recollections of bogeymen: she had ‘a great horror of Bishops’ with their strange wigs and incongruous aprons and of the Duke of Sussex, ‘Uncle Sussex’, who, she was told, would appear from his nearby rooms in the Palace and punish her when she cried and was naughty. She remembered screaming when she saw him.⁵ But she was fond of her father’s old preceptor, the kindly John Fisher, Bishop of Salisbury, who used to kneel down beside her and let her play with the badge he wore as Chancellor of the Order of the Garter; and she was fond, too, of her uncle, the childless Duke of York, who was very fat and very bald and held himself in such a way that it always seemed as though he would tumble over backwards. He was ‘very kind’ to her and gave her ‘beautiful presents’ including a donkey, and once he presided over a memorable party for her at the house of a friend where there was a Punch and Judy show.⁶ As for her uncle, King George IV, he paid little attention to her when she was taken by her mother to see him at Carlton House; but one day while she was staying near Windsor with her aunt, the Duchess of Gloucester, at Cumberland Lodge, she was driven over to see the King at the Royal Lodge and found him in one of his happier moods. ‘Give me your little paw,’ he said, affectionately taking the hand of the seven-year-old child in his, and then pulled her on to his stout knee so that she could kiss him. It was ‘too disgusting’, she recalled more than half a century later, ‘because his face was covered with grease-paint’. But at the time she had responded to his ‘wonderful dignity and charm of manner’: he never lost his way of pleasing young children. ‘He wore the wig which was so much worn in those days,’ she remembered clearly. ‘Then he said he would give me something to wear, and that was his picture set in diamonds, which was worn by the Princesses as an order to a blue ribbon on the left shoulder. I was very proud of this – and Lady Conyngham [the King’s plump and stately intimate friend, supposedly his mistress] pinned it on my shoulder.’⁷

Next day, while she was out walking with her mother, the King, who was driving along in his phaeton with the Duchess of Gloucester, overtook her. As his horses were brought to a halt, the King called out cheerfully, ‘Pop her in!’ So she was lifted up and placed between him and her aunt Mary, who held her round the waist as the horses trotted off. She was ‘greatly pleased’, though her mother appeared ‘much frightened’, fearful that her daughter would either fall out on the road or be kidnapped.

The King drove her ‘round the nicest part of Virginia Water’ and stopped at the Fishing Temple. Here ‘there was a large barge and everyone went on board and fished, while a band played in another!’ Afterwards he had his little niece conducted around his menagerie at Sandpit Gate where she inspected his wapitis, his chamois and his gazelles.

In the evenings, while staying at Cumberland Lodge, Princess Victoria was invited to watch the Tyrolese dancers creating a ‘gay uproar’ or listen to ‘Uncle King’s’ band playing in the conservatory at the Royal Lodge by the light of coloured lamps. He asked her what tune she would like the band to play next. With precocious tact she immediately asked for ‘God save the King!’ ‘Tell me,’ he asked her later, ‘what you enjoyed most of your visit?’ ‘The drive with you,’ she said. He was clearly very much taken with her.⁸

As the Duke of Wellington’s friend, Lady Shelley, said, she paid her court extremely well. When giving the King a bunch of flowers, she said, ‘As I shall not see my dear uncle on his birthday I wish to give him this nosegay now’; and when wishing him goodbye she said with appealing if rather affected gravity, ‘I am coming to bid you adieu, sire, but as I know you do not like fine speeches I shall certainly not trouble you by attempting one.’⁹ Upon her return home she was most anxious that her mother should send ‘her best love and duty to her “dear Uncle King”’.¹⁰

Although she remembered with pleasure her days at Windsor, the Princess enjoyed her visits to her uncle Leopold’s house, Claremont, even more. So much did she enjoy these visits, indeed, that she cried when it was time to go back to Kensington. She remembered being allowed to listen to the music in the hall at Claremont when there were dinner parties there and being petted by Mrs Louis, Princess Charlotte’s devoted former dresser. She was petted, too, by her own nurse, Mrs Brock, ‘dear Boppy’, and by her mother’s lady-in-waiting, Baroness Späth, who had accompanied the Duchess from Germany. Indeed, Baroness Späth, so Princess Feodora said, idolized the child and would actually go on her knees before her.¹¹

Very different was the behaviour of the Princess’s governess, Louise Lehzen, a handsome woman, despite her pointed nose and chin, clever, emotional, humourless and suffering intermittently from a variety of complaints, mostly psychosomatic, including cramp, headaches and migraine. She claimed that she did not know what it was like to feel hungry: all ‘she fancied were potatoes’;¹² but she was forever chewing caraway seeds for indigestion, a habit which some maliciously attributed to a need to hide the alcohol on her breath.

In her mid-thirties at the time of her appointment, she was the youngest child of a Lutheran pastor from a village in Hanover. She was ‘very strict’, her former charge said of her in later years, ‘and the Princess had great respect and even awe of her, but with that the greatest affection…She knew how to amuse and play with the Princess so as to gain her warmest affections. The Princess was her only object and her only thought…She never for the 13 years she was governess to Princess Victoria, once left her.’¹³

At night she stayed in the bedroom which the Princess shared with her mother until the Duchess retired; and in the morning, when the child was being dressed by Mrs Brock, she read to her so that the little girl would not get into the habit of talking indiscreetly to servants.

Yet Louise Lehzen’s influence over Princess Victoria was not entirely beneficial, for the governess had her prejudices and these she implanted in her charge’s mind. She encouraged the child to distrust her mother and her mother’s friends and to tell people when they were wrong and ‘to set them down’.¹⁴

If Princess Victoria’s early childhood was not quite as melancholy as she afterwards decided when looking back upon it, it was – and was encouraged by Lehzen to be – certainly a lonely one. She was brought up in an adult world, rarely seeing children of her own age. ‘Except for occasional visits of other children,’ she said herself in later life, she ‘lived always alone, without companions’. She was devoted to her half-sister, Princess Feodora, but Feodora, a pretty, attractive girl, was twelve years older than herself and longing to escape from Kensington where, so she claimed, her ‘only happy time was driving out’ with Princess Victoria and Louise Lehzen when she could speak and look as she liked. In February 1828, when Princess Victoria was nine, Princess Feodora did escape, her only regret being her separation from her ‘dearest sister’ of whom she so often thought and longed to see again.^{* 15}

Having married the impoverished, 32-year-old Prince Ernest Christian Charles of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Princess Feodora went away with him to the enormous, uncomfortable Schloss Langenburg, leaving Princess Victoria to comfort herself with her dolls (one hundred and thirty-two of them – little wooden, painted mannequins made by herself and Lehzen and dressed as historical personages and characters from the theatre and opera, all of them listed in a copybook).¹⁶

Her mother had been lonely too. Having overcome the first shock of her husband’s death, she had struck the few people with whom she came into close contact as being, in Lady Granville’s words, ‘very pleasing indeed’, friendly and approachable.

But she herself, as she said, felt ‘friendless and alone’ in a country that was not her own, endeavouring to speak a language which she had not yet mastered, being, as she said with not altogether sincere self-denigration, ‘just an old goose’.¹⁷

She was well aware that, as a German, she was not well liked in the country at large and, as the widow of the Duke of Kent and mother of Princess Victoria, much resented by the Duke of Clarence, heir to the throne after the death of his elder brother, the Duke of York, in 1827. Nor did King George IV care for her.

When the Prime Minister had suggested to the King that some provision ought to be made for his sister-in-law’s child, the fatherless Princess Victoria, the King declared that he would not consider it: her uncle Leopold was quite rich enough to take care of her as well as her mother. The Duchess accordingly had to borrow £6,000 from Thomas Coutts, the banker.¹⁸ Later, however, the Government came to her aid by proposing an allowance of £4,000 a year; but, since a grant of £6,000 was at the same time proposed for Princess Victoria’s cousin, Prince George of Cumberland, son of the deeply distrusted and malignant Duke of Cumberland, she refused to consider the proposal. The offer to the Duchess was then raised to £6,000 and she accepted it.

At the same time, Prince Leopold assured her that he would be happy to continue the allowance he made her of £3,000 a year. She was at first reluctant to accept this; but being still heavily in debt she eventually agreed to it, even though she was finding her brother increasingly and tiresomely irritating and, as she put it, ‘rather slow in the uptake and in making decisions’ as well as annoyingly preoccupied.

Prince Leopold had, indeed, other matters on his mind, not to mention sexual desires to gratify. After pursuing a succession of other women, he had fallen in love with a German actress who, looking ‘wondrously like’ his departed Charlotte, was brought over to England and ensconced alternately in a house in Regent’s Park and a ‘lonely desolate and mournful’ little house in the grounds of Claremont Park where he spent his time either gazing at her longingly while she read aloud to him or picking the silver from military epaulettes to make into a soup tureen.¹⁹

He had also become involved in negotiations for his elevation to a European throne. He had been offered the throne of Greece in 1830 after that country had secured its freedom from Turkish rule and, having declined to become King of Greece, he agreed two years later, after typical hesitation, to be crowned King of the Belgians once Belgium had secured its independence from the King of Holland. The next year he married Princess Louise, the daughter of Louis-Philippe, King of the French.

Before leaving for Brussels he volunteered to give up the grant of £50,000 a year he had received upon his marriage to Princess Charlotte but this gesture, gratefully accepted, was less well regarded when he announced that some £20,000 would have to be retained for various expenses, including the upkeep of Claremont.

Princess Victoria was very sad to have to say goodbye to her uncle. He had done his best to take the place of the father she had never known. Ponderous and, on occasions, exasperating as he could be, she loved him and admired him greatly. ‘To hear dear Uncle Leopold speak on any subject,’ she said, ‘is like reading a highly instructive book.’²⁰ He was the first of those several older men upon whom, throughout her life, she was to rely for help and reassurance. But her mother bore her brother’s departure for the Continent far more equably than she would have done at the time of her arrival in England. For the need she had always felt for support, protection and comforting advice had been met by her late husband’s beguiling equerry, John Conroy.