On 17 July 1837 Mary Davys left her family home for this ‘dream of grandeur’, gusted along by a handsome salary of £400 a year. But although she was now hobnobbing with ‘the rank and fashion of London’, Mary soon discovered that the life of a courtier was no less mundane than life in a sedate vicarage. On receiving your ‘daily orders’ each morning, you might find yourself called upon to accompany the Queen on a walk, to church or on a visit to blind, elderly Princess Sophia, still mouldering away at Kensington Palace. Alternatively, there might be some kind of official business: a factory inspection, perhaps, or a visit to an orphanage, or one of the quarterly ‘Drawing Rooms’. But whatever the setting, the rules remained the same. You were required to walk far enough behind her little Majesty so as not to throw her into shadow (she wasn’t even five feet tall, although she insisted that she was still growing), but near enough to be useful if she needed to hand you something: a limp posy that had been offered by a none-too-clean fist perhaps, or a shawl that was now surplus to requirements. Indeed, ‘shawling’ was the name one wearied veteran gave to the whole fiddle-faddle of spending your days as a glorified lady’s maid, one who didn’t even get cast-offs and tips to compensate for all those hours lost to blank-eyed tedium and aching calves.
The evenings, too, could be numbing. Being placed next to the very deaf Duke of Wellington meant spending hours either shouting or being shouted at. Having Lord Palmerston – aka ‘Cupid’ – as your neighbour required you to shuffle your knees under the table to avoid his hopeful pokes and squeezes. And sitting next to one of Her Majesty’s more leaden cousins – Prince Augustus, say – involved racking your brains until you found a subject on which the young man from Saxe-Coburg would venture more than a single syllable. Dinner over, you might find yourself corralled into interminable games of ‘schilling’ whist with the Duchess of Kent, whose impenetrably Germanic English required you to strain to catch her drift. Finally, the teenage Queen, able for the first time in her life to determine her own bedtime, insisted on everyone staying up until past midnight, which meant that the larks in the company spent two hours stifling yawns and trying not to glance too obviously at the clock.
‘You must accustom yourself,’ Lady Ravensworth advised her daughter on her appointment as maid of honour in 1841, ‘to sit or stand for hours without any amusement save the resources of your own thoughts.’ But it was your own thoughts that were often the problem. As Mary Davys quickly discovered, the vacancy at the heart of court life quickly filled up with gossip, intrigue and petty drama from which it was impossible to remain aloof. The fact that the senior ladies were mustered on a rota, coming into waiting for only several months of the year, should have allowed for a regular freshening of the atmosphere. But in reality it never felt like that. Life at court was rather like attending a select girls’ boarding school where lessons had been temporarily suspended and some of the older pupils were breasting the menopause.
Take the business of nicknames. The habit of giving people aliases had begun during the last years at Kensington. John Conroy was known behind his back as ‘O’Hum’, and stage-whispered comments were made about his origins in ‘the bogs of Ireland’. O’Hum in turn had flung back remarks about Louise Lehzen’s table manners, making reference to ‘the hogs from Low Germany’. Other tags were ostensibly more benign, although you could never be quite sure, especially in a bilingual court where meanings and intentions quickly skidded. Flora Hastings had long been known as ‘Scotty’. Another of the Duchess’s attendants, Lady Mary Stopford, was ‘Stoppy’. Miss Spring Rice was ‘Springy’. Newcomer Mary found herself called ‘Humphry’ after the inventor of Davy’s safety lamp, designed to protect workers in enclosed spaces from suffocation and sudden combustion. Given Mary’s role as the royal household’s peacemaker and go-between, this sounds about right.
Yet despite her determination to resist the ‘too attractive, too fascinating’ lures of court life, Mary Davys found herself dragged into the household’s increasingly toxic churn. During the interminable drawing-room sessions after dinner the Duchess of Kent made a point of trying to pump her former chaplain’s daughter for information about what the Queen was thinking and doing. (Where once the Duchess had slept in the same room as her daughter and monitored her every waking moment, now she was crammed into pointedly poor accommodation at the other end of the palace, and only got to see her when there were other people present.) And although Mary resisted the Duchess’s fishing expeditions as tactfully as she knew how by keeping the conversation fixed firmly on such neutral topics as the novels of Sir Walter Scott, she could not help feeling sorry for the middle-aged woman in the too-bright silks who complained that she was now treated ‘as nothing’. Banished to the far end of the long dining table with Lady Flora Hastings, the Duchess could be heard sighing theatrically about how horrible it was to see Victoria’s ‘pretty young face’ next to Lord Melbourne’s old one, night after night.
Actually, the Duchess had a point. Spending up to six hours a day with her Prime Minister, including dinner most evenings, Victoria had started to hang on Melbourne’s every word, gulping down his thoughts on such pressing matters as how to spell ‘despatches’ and why women pack more for a short trip than men. More delightful still was the retrospective sympathy he offered over her struggles with the trifecta of Mama, Conroy and Lady Flora. The girl who had been brought up by her governess to give nothing away was, within a few weeks, telling Melbourne all about ‘very important and even to me painful things’, including what she insisted on describing as the ‘torments’ of her Kensington ‘imprisonment’. And he in turn, a middle-aged widower who had recently lost his only child, found himself enchanted with his confiding little mistress.
Lord Melbourne, c.1839
The political diarist Charles Greville, watching the new reign from his vantage point as Clerk of the Council, reckoned that the young Queen’s feelings for her Prime Minister were ‘sexual, though She does not know it’. What struck Greville was the greed with which Victoria lapped up Melbourne – not just his jokes and his thirty years of political knowledge and his remnant good looks, but his thrilling romantic history. For not only was Lord Melbourne the widower of the doomed Lady Caroline Lamb, who had gone mad with love for Lord Byron, but just the previous year he had been accused of ‘criminal conversation’ in the divorce trial of the notorious Mrs Caroline Norton. One of the founding intentions of the Kensington System had been to insulate the Princess from exactly this sort of dirty talk, which had been the lingua franca of her uncles George IV and William IV’s courts. A cordon sanitaire had been thrown around the girl, and no man was allowed to approach, unless he happened to be a cousin from the Continent. Indeed, one aristocratic lady visitor, arriving at Kensington Palace to take tea with the Duchess and the Princess, had been taken aback to be told that her six-year-old son would have to wait outside in the carriage.
‘Susannah and the Elders’ (1837), by John Doyle, shows Victoria flanked by Lords Melbourne and Palmerston
All of which made this sudden access to men, and stories about men, quite thrilling. It wasn’t just Lord Melbourne, although he remained the sun of Victoria’s solar system. It was also the gentlemen in her household, each dedicated to anticipating her needs before she had registered them as the merest flicker. There was Mr Charles Murray, who was master of the household; Colonel Cavendish, the equerry; and Sir Robert Otway, the groom-in-waiting. One young man, pretty Lord Alfred Paget, had taken chivalry to the most elaborate heights. The gallant young equerry kept a picture of the Queen in a locket around his throat, and made sure that his golden retriever, Mrs Bumps, was similarly attired. During the court’s periodic residences at Windsor all the gentlemen, including Lord Melbourne, wore ‘the Windsor Uniform’, an olden-days rig of breeches, buckles and cutaway coat with scarlet facings. It was like a fairy tale. It was a fairy tale.
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