Queen's House (19 page)

But the picture of this scene as recorded by Sir David Wilkie was misleading. Queen Victoria was not, as he painted her, floating in a drift of white: in fact, she wore a simple black dress. Nor had she risen, a queen from the foam, at the touch of a wand. She had been prepared for this moment from her birth, and she had readied herself ever since that morning on 11 March 1830 when her governess, Lehzen, had slipped
into the pages of her history book Howlett's ‘Tables of the Kings and Queens of England' and for the first time she realized her destiny, uttering the famous pledge, ‘I will be good.'
²

In those first days Queen Victoria repeated again and again, with some triumph, that she was facing her new life ‘alone, quite quite alone'. But in fact there were advisers behind her who were to give her support for many years to come. Her uncle, King Leopold (who became King of the Belgians in 1830 and was now married again, this time to Louise, daughter of Louis-Philippe, King of France), had a major part to play in the shaping of the Queen. His friend Baron Stockmar was to be her
éminence grise
from the time of her father's death for almost half a century.

Queen Louise became a much loved friend, who gave Queen Victoria the royal companionship she lacked. Queen Louise taught her to play chess, they chatted about clothes, and Queen Victoria tried on the Belgian Queen's Paris dresses. She widened Queen Victoria's horizons and gave her a personal knowledge of France that was to stand her in good stead. Unlike her uncle, William IV, who hated all things French, Queen Victoria was to build new links with France. She later remembered with amusement how William IV had told the boys at Eton College, ‘Always remember to hate the French.'

Although Baron Stockmar had earlier been unsuccessful in his attempt to mend the Queen's relationship with her mother, she was perfectly prepared to accept his advice on constitutional and protocol matters. Some days before the death of the old King she had seen Lord Liverpool, who also hoped to conciliate mother and daughter. She saw him alone and surprised him by the authoritative way she produced a memorandum – with headings – for their discussion. Undoubtedly here was the skilful hand of Baron Stockmar. All his life he had a passion for memoranda with headings. It is significant that on the morning of her succession she saw Stockmar before making her famous statement to her Privy Council, and she saw him twice after dinner on the same day. There would be other
éminences grises
in her life, and some, like Conroy, would be distinctly ‘
noire
'; but the influence of Baron Stockmar, almost until his death, was to be crucial.

Baron Stockmar's secure, loving home background with a shrewd and sensible mother had given him stability and he was always to be grateful for the medical training he had received at Würzburg, Erlangen and Jena. To this he always attributed a gift for assessing people and an understanding of psychology. There is a steadiness, an openness and humour in his early portrait that is still there in his face in old age. That steadiness was to see him through many difficulties to a serene old age. From his early days he had a passionate love of liberty, which inspired him to consider joining in a plot to assassinate the Emperor Napoleon, but common sense had dissuaded him. Kind, competent and reassuring, he sometimes suffered moods of black depression, but to his friends he seemed always equable. Remarkably his passion for producing detailed memoranda and advice, which might have been infuriating in another, rarely offended. Just before Stockmar died he wrote that if he were asked by a young man beginning his career,

What is the chief good for which it behoves a man to strive my only answer would be, ‘Love and Friendship'. Were he to ask me, ‘What is man's most priceless possession' I must answer, ‘The consciousness of having loved and sought the Truth for its own sake.' All else is mere vanity or a sick man's dream.
³

At this crucial time, as in earlier years, the influence of her beloved Uncle Leopold cannot be overestimated: she was to follow much of his counsel throughout her reign.

Leopold advised her never to give an immediate answer to Ministers; Greville heard that she always said, ‘I will think it over', even to Melbourne. Leopold advocated strict business habits such as seeing Ministers between 11am and 1.30 each day; the Queen always saw Lord Melbourne between those hours. Leopold urged her to form her own opinions on all questions and stick to them … people soon noticed that she had a will of her own. Leopold insisted that if people spoke to her uninvited on personal matters she should change the subject ‘and make the individual feel he has made a mistake'.
⁴

When, in the future, Queen Victoria was ‘not amused', strong men wilted.

Stockmar and Uncle Leopold were not only to direct her future: they
also gave her the knowledge of her links with family history – about which she was intensely curious. They had known well her grandmother, Queen Charlotte; Stockmar had studied the medical case of her grand-father, George III, from his contemporaries – Queen Victoria was always sensitive to the possibility of hereditary madness. The two men had watched the careers of her uncles, George IV and William IV, and above all they had known her father the Duke of Kent – that invisible influence in her life – whom she fondly imagined was ‘the best of the lot'. Stockmar had known her mother in Coburg and was with them when her father, the Duke of Kent, died; and Uncle Leopold had known him for many years. Throughout her life she would look for his substitute. For all her independence and powerful will, Queen Victoria always longed for a strong right arm.

No one knew better than King Leopold that other influence in her early life, his sister Victoire, Duchess of Kent. The Duchess was impressionable, easily led, and many thought her ‘the most mediocre person it would be possible to meet'.
⁵
She needed the support of a husband, which is why King Leopold had encouraged her to marry the Duke of Kent after the death of her first husband. Unfortunately her brother had lately been too absorbed in his own affairs as King of the Belgians, so he had not noticed the growing malignant influence of John Conroy.

In bringing up Queen Victoria her mother followed a system recommended by Stockmar. She was excessively strict, as weak people often are, and over-protective, refusing to allow Queen Victoria to meet the family of William IV and Mrs Jordan, since, as she said, her daughter must be taught the difference between right and wrong. Did the Duchess ever attempt to explain Queen Victoria's father's ‘wrong relationship' with Madame de St Laurent, his mistress for twenty-seven years?

Although her mother's influence had been constricting, Queen Victoria owed something to her. In the years before her accession she had been prepared for the throne. The Duchess had taken her on royal progresses throughout the country, giving her some glimpse at least of life in the north and west country. She had taught her how to behave royally, to receive municipal addresses with dignity and to accept salutes
of guns as her right. This had infuriated William IV, who hated the Duchess and her presumption; he publicly upbraided her and forbade the ‘damned popping' of guns. Queen Victoria's self-possession, which so astonished her ministers, was partly the result of her mother's training.

There was one more formative influence on the young Queen. If Uncle Leopold was a substitute for the father she never knew, her governess, Lehzen, took the place of the mother from whom she had become estranged. During the difficult years before her accession, Princess Victoria would have been lonely indeed had it not been for Baroness Louise Lehzen, who should take an honoured place among the unsung teachers of the great. She came from a simple home, the daughter of a German Lutheran pastor in Hanover. Just as Bute had been mocked as an alien Scot, so Lehzen had to endure much anti-German prejudice. But if her own manners were uncourtly, as critics claimed, she certainly taught Queen Victoria grace and poise, and she gave her the warmth and affection that her mother found difficult to show.

In the early days of her reign, when the Queen was learning to stand on her own feet, Lehzen was indispensable. After the ordeals of councils and audiences she could return to the comfort of Lehzen – ‘Daisy' as she called her. In the past she had learned her history from the stories Lehzen had told her while she brushed her hair, and Lehzen was still there to brief her. All those who had to deal with the Queen in these early days were astonished that this diminutive young woman was so well informed. Some of the credit for her education must go to Uncle Leopold, Stockmar and her mother, the Duchess of Kent, but it was Lehzen who made history palatable. She gave her a lifelong love of history, teaching it in the way she would always learn best, as an enthralling study of people.

History has not dealt too kindly with Lehzen but she won the admiration of that cultured old politician, Lord Holland, who was a guest at Windsor Castle on 14–16 September 1837 and was able to observe her at leisure. The Queen had said, he wrote in his journal,

she was never alone in a room with any person, her mother excepted, till within three days of her accession. I think she should also have excepted Mdme Letzen
[sic] to whom I suspect She, and the country are chiefly indebted for the admirable education she has received and the happy fruits that it is likely to produce. Mdme de Letzen [sic] is a woman of sense and information, great judgement and yet greater strength of mind. She had been employed in superintending the education of another daughter
*
of the Duchess of Kent, half sister of Victoria, and she contrived without éclat and without too much subserviency with the Countenance of Leopold to maintain her post at Kensington against the wishes, as it is supposed of both the Duchess of Kent and Sir John Conroy and without furnishing either with any just cause of complaint. I was much struck with the frankness and sagacity of her conversation.
⁶

High praise indeed from a man at whose table learned and witty conversationalists such as Macaulay and Sidney Smith regularly dined.

Where Lehzen and everyone else failed was in curbing the self-will that was Queen Victoria's lifelong failing. It was, however, the other side of that independence of spirit that was her greatest strength.

Lord Holland, however, watching the Queen during the same Windsor visit, found her ‘a pattern of propriety without impairing the least the charm of youthful and lighthearted manners'. The only fault he could find was

the inconsiderate habit of keeping her Ladies standing too long. When the Ladies retire from dinner, she seldom sits down till the Gentlemen follow them, and I hear the Duchess of Kent first remonstrated and has since retired from the drawing room for half an hour every evening to repose herself in her own room, till she can return and
sit
by her daughter or at the Whist table in the Evening. It was droll enough to see the Ladies, young and old, married or unmarried, with all their
rumps
to the wall when we came from the dining to the drawing room and eagerly availing themselves of their release when the Queen took her seat on the Sofa.
⁷

Royal attendants throughout the ages have had to bear with stoicism interminable periods of standing and waiting. Queen Victoria became even stricter as she grew older.

There were many who had helped in the shaping of the young Queen, but none of them, and not even Melbourne and Prince Albert in the future, could fundamentally change her. There is no doubt that Queen Victoria was, from childhood, directed by influences that were mainly German. She was, however, no soft clay in the hands of the Coburg potters. The set of the head and the firm little mouth in the early portraits were the outward signs of a uniquely strong personality. Queen Victoria shaped herself.

For William IV Buckingham Palace had been a burden: for Queen Victoria it was a fitting setting for the Great Queen she hoped to be. She could not wait to take up residence, to make a break with her mother and the past. On 13 July she moved from Kensington Palace, even before Buckingham Palace was ready for her. When, on the next day, Sir John Hobhouse, President of the Board of Control, had his first audience, he found the Palace ‘in great disorder: the apartments were full of housemaids on their knees scrubbing the floors, and attend-ants putting down the carpets'. But Queen Victoria, already at ease, ‘placed herself on a sofa and desired him to take a chair on the opposite side of the room'.
⁸
Later she would allow no such freedom: subjects stood in her presence.

In the magical early days in the Palace, the Queen suddenly realized that she had only to wave her wand and the magnificent State Rooms would echo to the sound of the most exquisite music. Immediately she sent for Sigismund Thalberg, who was said to be the finest pianist in the world, and within days a concert was organized. ‘
J'étais en extase,
' she said. Johann Strauss the Elder composed waltzes for her state balls and on a May evening before her Coronation she danced until four in the morning, finishing with Strauss's specially composed waltz, which began with ‘Rule Britannia' and ended with ‘God Save The Queen'.

In the whole history of Buckingham Palace only George III and Queen Charlotte moved in with such pleasure and excitement. Queen Victoria and George III had much else in common: both were young, idealistic, determined, in Queen Victoria's words, to be ‘good'. Both had tremendous, almost manic, energy with corresponding black troughs. Both were to have huge families – Queen Charlotte had fifteen
children, Queen Victoria was to have nine; both families, after a while, outgrew Buckingham Palace.

Queen Victoria was enchanted with her new home – with its high ceilings, huge mirrors and immense, brilliant chandeliers. Others might mock the bright colours of the mock marble pillars, the brashness of the décor, but for her it was all space and light and colour.