A History of Britain, Volume 3 (20 page)

Decades later, in the 1880s, emerging, just a peek, from her widow’s shrouds, Victoria too would also interest herself in the housing of the poor. Shocked by published reports on the slums of London, and doubtless moved by a conviction that it was what Albert the Good would have wanted, she wrote to Gladstone’s government urging them to turn their attention to the problem, and her benevolent nagging resulted in a royal
commission.
The issue was important to the queen because she subscribed to the contemporary liberal commonplace that if industrial Britain had proved uniquely stable in a world of war and revolution, it was due not just to the political, but also to the social, constitution with which the country was blessed. That constitution rested on the moral bedrock of family life of which the queen was the chief exemplar, as wife, then bereft widow and, always, mother. She was, in fact, the first British sovereign–mother; although often, in her 64-year reign, the paradox gave her no joy – she fretted that her duty to be a good woman ‘amiable and domestic’ was at odds with both her character and her duty to reign, especially in an empire where so much emphasis was placed on the ideal of Christian manliness.

But then Victoria believed that this dilemma was, to some extent or other, also the lot of her sex. She felt that all over Britain there must have been countless good daughters, wives and mothers, torn between their obligation to be the ‘angel at the hearth’ (in the poet Coventry Patmore’s famously sentimental poem ‘The Angel in the House’, 1854) and the unforgiving necessities of daily life: children to be nursed; work to be done; tables to be laid; prayers to be said. And the mother–queen flattered herself, even when she was immured at Windsor or Osborne or wrapped up in the bracing world of Highland ‘Balmorality’, that she understood the condition of Britain’s women; the burden of their duty and the weight of their fortitude.

But did she?

In the autumn of 1832 the 13-year-old Princess Victoria,
en route
to Wales, had her first glimpse of industrial Britain. The visits to a cotton mill at Belper and a school at Bangor, where she laid the foundation stone, were carefully orchestrated to disarm the hostility of the ‘labouring classes’ and symbolize the union between the future sovereign and the ordinary people. Who could hate a rosebud? But somewhere near Birmingham, Victoria’s coach rolled through coal country and she saw something deeply un-English: black grass. She wrote in her journal:

The men, women, children, country and houses are all black. But I can not by any description give an idea of its strange and extraordinary appearance. The country is very desolate every where; there are coals about and the grass is quite blasted and black. I just now see an extraordinary building flaming with fire. The country continues black, engines, flaming coals, in abundance every where, smoking and burning coal heaps, intermingled with wretched huts and little ragged children.

The naivety of this wide-eyed picture of a British inferno is hardly surprising. The whole purpose of Victoria’s upbringing to this point had been isolation. After her father, the Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III, had died on 23 January 1820, eight months after her birth on 24 May 1819, she was brought up almost entirely in the company of women: a small, stuffy world dominated by her mother the duchess (in whose room she slept) and her governess Baroness Lehzen, and riddled with petty court and family intrigues. At Kensington Palace, Victoria was to be fenced off from squalor and wickedness, otherwise known as King George IV and his successor King William IV, her uncles. In an age in which Evangelical fervour had taken hold, not just of the middle classes but of a significant part of the aristocracy too, the purity and piety of the heiress presumptive were touted as a desperately needed correction for a monarchy badly compromised by scandal. The queen–saviour was intended to have been George IV’s daughter, Princess Charlotte Augusta, whose virtue and liberal intelligence were supposed to give the raddled monarchy a fresh start. But, to genuine and unforced national grief, she had died in childbirth. Her widower (who was also Victoria’s mother’s brother and thus her uncle twice over), Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, later king of the Belgians, obviously saw the little princess as Charlotte’s natural successor; he passed on advice books, and began to tutor her as he would have done his wife. ‘Our times are hard for royalty,’ he wrote to her when she was just 13, ‘never was there a period when the existence of real qualities in persons of high station has been more imperiously called for.’

It was the truth. When George III had died in 1820, his passing had been marked by genuine sorrow for an endearingly simple man. Although in later years he was blind and behaved as if mad, he was always thought to have understood the hardships of the humble as well as, if not better than, the pomp of the mighty. But when George IV was lowered into the vault at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in 1830 (by undertakers who were drunk), while his successor, his brother King William, made a scene of himself by chatting noisily throughout the funeral service, it was a demise conspicuous for its lack of regret, much less grief. Massively bloated and terminally debauched, George IV and his excesses had seemed to moral critics like Hazlitt and Cobbett especially offensive at a time when so many, in both the countryside and industrial towns, were in dire want. When, at the time of his coronation, he had had the doors of Westminster Abbey locked against his wife, the estranged Queen Caroline, and then had her tried for adulterous treason, violent rioters had shouted support for her cause.

William IV’s contribution to the monarchy’s public standing was not much more auspicious. In contrast to his elder brother, the famous bluff
simplicity
of the sailor king – he had served for decades in the Royal Navy – went down well. But the new king squandered much of that popularity by his entrenched and publicly declared opposition to parliamentary reform. It did not, moreover, go unnoticed that, while he had no surviving legitimate children, he had no fewer than 15 illegitimate ones – a record for the British monarchy. Perhaps it was because she was scandalized by the king’s insistence on keeping company with his current mistress, the actress Mrs Jordan, that the Duchess of Kent went out of her way to forbid Victoria his company (although the girl seems to have been personally quite fond of her uncle). The duchess was certainly concerned to keep the priceless political capital of Victoria’s moral, as well as physical, virginity intact. But she also bitterly resented what she thought the king’s niggardly refusal to grant her what she thought her proper share of the civil list.

Necessity, however, can be the mother of politics. And, much as the duchess hated it, a virtue was made of the frugality imposed by financial stringency, so severe at one point that mother, daughter and governess had to move out of Kensington Palace to more ordinary, even suburban, residences at Ramsgate and Sidmouth. Compared with the distasteful luxury of the court, the Kent household could be made to seem a model of austere self-denial. Victoria’s childhood suppers, she recalled, were very simple (up to a point) – bread and milk from a little silver basin. Wherever she was, Victoria was subjected to the full Evangelical regime of constant prayers and self-inspection for the blemish of the day. She inherited the forbidding guidance manual written for Princess Charlotte by the arch-evangelical Hannah More,
Hints Towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess
(1805). And she kept (or was made to keep) a Behaviour Book, in which all these failings, as well as a strict accounting of how she had spent her time, were mercilessly recorded. One much-underlined, self-chastising entry, that for 21 August 1832, reads, ‘Very very very TERRIBLY naughty!’

It may have been that the duchess and Baroness Lehzen schooled the girl in Christian correctness and domestic propriety only too well. For as she grew, and became more solemnly conscious of the destiny awaiting her, Victoria also became deeply unsettled by what seemed to be her mother’s craven dependence on the Irish adventurer Sir John Conroy, ostensibly her household secretary but, even to a young girl, quite evidently something more. Although she still slept in the duchess’s bedchamber, she was beginning to keep her own company and commune with the past. ‘I am very fond of making tables of the Kings and Queens,’ she wrote to Leopold, ‘… and I have lately finished one of the English Sovereigns and their Consorts as, of course, the history of my own country,
is
one of my first duties.’ Anne Boleyn was ‘extremely beautiful, but inconsiderate’; Elizabeth I ‘a great Queen but a
bad
woman’.

And as her trim figure filled out, so Victoria became awkwardly aware that she was the most desirable catch in Europe. Like any mother trawling for a suitable match, the duchess threw banquets and balls to show her off, the invitation list prominently featuring eligible bachelor princes – Dutch, Portuguese and German. As a Saxe-Coburg-Gotha himself, Leopold of the Belgians was keen to promote the cause of the princes of his own family, Ernest and Albert; but a first encounter with the latter at Victoria’s 17th birthday ball was not promising. Although undeniably good looking in a grave, erect kind of way, Albert seemed silent and prim, and turned so ashen white during the dancing that he needed to leave in haste lest, it was thought, he should faint. Victoria was also growing more curious about the public world beyond the court and society; she read the newspapers, and became initiated into the rituals of royal philanthropy that would become one of the mainstays of the modern monarchy. In 1836 she visited an asylum for ‘vagrant girls’ and, closer to home, all but adopted a distressed gypsy family, the ‘Coopers’, whom she had discovered camping near the gates of her childhood home, Claremont House, but whose family virtue in adversity she pronounced so exemplary as to make it clear that these gypsies, at any rate, were good English Christians. ‘Their conjugal, filial and paternal affection is
very great
as also their kindness and attention to their sick, old and infirm.’

As she moved out a little into the wider world, Victoria became more reluctant to do her mother’s bidding so meekly. She was becoming painfully aware that the duchess and the adhesive Conroy were shamelessly exploiting her prospects in order to feather their own nests. Should she become queen while still a minor, they could establish a kind of regency. But when William IV died, on the night of 20 June 1837, Victoria had already turned 18. The duchess was put on notice what this would mean when one of the first acts of the new queen was to move her bed out of her mother’s room and insist on dining alone. She was, henceforth, to be very much her own mistress.

William IV’s extended decline into fatal sickness (punctuated by startling revivals of good cheer when he would summon ministers to dine, stipulating that they each consume two bottles of wine) had given Victoria ample time to contemplate her impending translation. She faced her situation with striking self-possession. To Leopold she wrote, with a winning combination of modesty and courage, ‘I look forward to the event, which, it seems, is likely to occur soon, with calmness and quietness; I am not alarmed at it, and yet, I do not suppose myself equal to all;
I
trust, however, that with
good will
, honesty and courage, I shall not, at all
events fail
:’ The astonishing tone of clear purpose continued on the famous night itself, when she was woken (first by her mother) to find the Lord Chamberlain and the Archbishop of Canterbury sinking to their creaking knees: ‘Since it has pleased Providence to place me in this station, I shall do my utmost to fulfil my duty toward my country; I am very young and perhaps in many, though not in all things inexperienced, but I am sure that very few have more real good will and desire to do what is fit and right than I have.’

Breakfast was taken with the prime minister, William Lamb, Baron Melbourne, in whom Victoria was lucky enough to find a supremely skilled and almost tearfully dedicated guardian; the next in succession, after her uncle Leopold, in her line of surrogate fathers. From their first meeting the relationship was one of mutual devotion, which bordered, almost, on compulsive love. The age difference was not a barrier; it was, in fact, the permitting condition of the reciprocal adoration. Lord Melbourne was a Whig grandee who had lived the kind of life from which Victoria might have been expected to recoil. But as far as she was concerned he had been more sinned against than sinning, and this was not entirely untrue. When his wife Caroline had been jilted by her lover, Lord Byron, Melbourne’s instinct was to care for her as best he could. When he was named in a divorce suit by Lady Caroline Norton’s husband, he accepted the role even though it seems more likely the relationship had been platonic. A year before he met Victoria his only son, Augustus, had died. So he came to the queen with an allure of battered gallantry, more than ready for his avuncular role.

Romanticized in the newspapers as ‘England’s Rose’, Victoria needed a tutor who could help develop a public persona, gently build her confidence and launch her on the vast and terrifying stage of British history. Rose she may have looked, with that pink complexion, those round cheeks and blue eyes; but Melbourne understood very quickly that she also came with her fair complement of thorns. In the 4-foot-11 doll, he already saw the formidable woman – impetuous and headstrong. So he never made the mistake of talking down to Victoria, or of treating her as a child in need of basic schooling. Instead, he spoke to her as someone sophisticated enough to appreciate his shrewd political information and his droll, elliptical humour; even his waggish take on English history. (Henry VIII? ‘Those women bothered him so.’) Victoria’s journal entries describing their meetings are full of complicit laughter.

Those meetings were a constant feature of the young queen’s life. Reporting on politics – the state of the economy and international affairs;
playing
chess with Victoria; accompanying her riding; dining with her (seated always on her left); poring together over the royal collection of prints and drawings – Melbourne spent on average four or five hours with her each day. She watched the faded peacock preen himself and strut, in a tottery sort of way, for her benefit; lean over at dinner to impart a sly titbit of intelligence; or just tuck in (‘He has eaten three chops and a grouse – for breakfast!’). And she carefully noted down his pearls of wisdom even when they scarcely amounted to dazzling insight (‘People who talk much of railways and bridges are generally Liberals’). Their intimacy was not without costs – the occasional jeering shout of ‘Lady Melbourne’ came the queen’s way at Ascot. But such costs were more than compensated for by the benefits. Victoria now had a pseudo-father who was not always disappearing back to Belgium and, with Melbourne’s encouragement, she decisively liberated herself from the tentacles of the unfortunate duchess and Conroy. Two months after her accession, in September 1837, the queen inspected her guardsmen and lancers in Windsor Great Park and carried the event off with extraordinary dash and confidence. Her account is strikingly reminiscent of that ‘great’ queen but ‘bad woman’ Elizabeth I. ‘I cantered up to the Lines with all the gentlemen and rode along them. Leopold [the horse, not the king] behaved most beautifully, so quietly, the Bands really playing in his face. I then cantered back to my first position and there remained while the Troops marched by in slow and quick time. … The whole went off beautifully and I felt for the first time like a man, as if I could fight myself at the head of troops.’