Meanwhile, Parliament addressed the urgent question of what should happen if the King died before Victoria reached her majority, and decreed that her mother should become Regent, until completion of Victoria’s eighteenth year, and in recognition of this the Duchess was granted an extra £10,000 a year, for Victoria’s household and education. Although her preposterous demand to be titled ‘Dowager Princess of Wales’ was thrown out, she was duly grateful: ‘This is the first really happy day I have spent since I lost the Duke of Kent,’ she said. She was proud of her daughter’s progress:
She evinces much talent in whatever she undertakes […] The dear girl is extremely fond of music, she already fingers the piano with some skill, and has an excellent voice.
~ DUCHESS OF KENT
With Victoria now established as heir apparent, the Duchess of Kent, eager to acquire as much prestige for her as possible, orchestrated a series of ‘royal progresses’ (as King William rather sarcastically called them) to market the Princess to her adoring and curious public. Building on the isolating Kensington System that they had forced Victoria to endure, these excursions were also intended to do the same for the Duchess and Conroy, who harboured ambitions to be regents until Victoria reached the age of 21. A regency would provide them both with considerable wealth, power and status, something they both craved.
Script quote:
Conroy:
Do you really imagine that you can step from the schoolroom straight to the throne without guidance?
WHEN VICTORIA REACHED thirteen Leopold decided the time was right to prime her for her important future role. She was no longer a little princess, he wrote:
This will make you feel, my dear Love, that you must give your attention more and more to graver matters. By the dispensation of Providence you are destined to fill a most eminent station; to fill it well must now become your study. A good heart and a trusty and honourable character are amongst them of indispensable qualifications for that post.
You will always find in your Uncle that faithful friend which he has proved to you from your earliest infancy, and whenever you feel yourself in want of support or advice, call on him with perfect confidence.
~ LETTER FROM LEOPOLD TO VICTORIA, 22 MAY 1832
In 1834 at the end of another tour, first in Kent round the stately homes at Knole and Penshurst and then to the north to visit York, Belvoir Castle and attend the races at Doncaster, Victoria wrote a warm letter to Uncle Leopold, who in 1832 had finally remarried:
My dearest Uncle – Allow me to write you a few words, to express how thankful I am for the very kind letter you wrote me. It made me, though, very sad to think that all our hopes of seeing you, which we cherished so long, this year, were over. I had so hoped and wished to have seen you again, my beloved Uncle, and to have made dearest Aunt Louisa’s acquaintance. I am delighted to hear that dear Aunt has benefited from the sea air and bathing. We had a very pretty party to Hever Castle yesterday, which perhaps you remember, where Anne Boleyn used to live, before she lost her head. We drove there, and rode home. It was a most beautiful day. We have very good accounts from dear Feodore, who will, by this time, be at Langenburg.
Believe me always, my dearest Uncle, your very affectionate and dutiful Niece, Victoria.
LETTER FROM VICTORIA TO LEOPOLD, 14 SEPTEMBER 1834
Character Feature:
SIR JOHN CONROY
- Controller of the Duchess’s Household -
‘The monster and demon incarnate’
– Victoria –
SIR JOHN CONROY, BORN IN 1786, was to dominate Princess Victoria’s early life. A handsome Irishman, he was appointed equerry to the Duke of Kent in 1818, and rapidly ingratiated himself with the Duchess after the Duke’s death, taking control of her affairs. King William despised his blatant ambition and referred to him as ‘King John’, for Conroy had long nursed delusions of his own, unproven, royal connections. He spent his life aspiring to elevation into the British aristocracy: promotion to a Knight Commander of the Hanoverian Order by George IV had done little to satisfy those ambitions. With the Duchess under his control, he had a major influence over the creation of the Kensington System that isolated Princess Victoria from any unwanted external influences. Power went to his head and he strutted around Kensington Palace as though it were his own private fiefdom.
Conroy’s manner towards the Duchess was frequently overbearing and at times openly and worryingly seductive. It crossed the bounds of propriety and set tongues wagging, to the point where some even alleged that Victoria was his child and not the Duke’s. There is nothing to support this claim, but Conroy certainly took advantage of the Duchess’s weakness and vulnerability, exerting a pernicious influence over her that the young Victoria absolutely despised.
Paul Rhys Plays Sir John Conroy:
‘He was a self-made, ambitious man. To have got to that position of power in that time, coming from his background, was remarkable and speaks volumes for the intelligence of the man.
He was very loyal to the Duchess, who was constantly being marginalised, and he wanted her to have more power and title so he fought really hard for her. He was a fighter, a proper scrapper, and if it had been in a different direction it could have been for the greater good.’
ON 31 JULY 1832, on the eve of a three-month trip to Wales, Victoria excitedly contemplated the clean white pages of the brand new journal that her mother had given her. On the following day, she dutifully noted that ‘we had left K.P. At 6 minutes past 7’ and marked down the precise times and places where they had changed horses along the way: Barnet, St Alban’s, Dunstable, Stony Stratford. The road was dusty and it started to rain but she enjoyed every minute of this new adventure and the fact that the carriage went ‘at a tremendous rate’.
Throughout her journey Victoria painstakingly entered the details of their itinerary, the visits to Powis and Beaumaris Castles and the return home via Anglesey and the Midlands. Wolverhampton, she noted, was ‘a large and dirty town’, where she was nevertheless received ‘with great friendliness and pleasure’. A pause in heavy rain at Birmingham to change horses provided her with her first sight of the grim conditions in the manufacturing districts:
We just passed through a town where all coal mines are and you see the fire glimmer at a distance in the engines in many places. 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 everywhere; there are coals about, and the grass is quite blasted and black […] every where, smoking and burning coal heaps, intermingled with wretched huts and carts and little ragged children.
~ VICTORIA’S JOURNAL, 2 AUGUST 1832
Soon, however, she was entranced by the more prepossessing splendours of the great country houses: Chatsworth – ‘It would take me days, were I to describe minutely the whole’ – Hardwick Hall, Shugborough Hall, Alton Towers and Wytham Abbey.
By 1835 the exhausting annual tours had taken a toll on Victoria, bringing her to the brink of physical collapse. Hours and hours of being jolted mercilessly along country lanes and potholed roads gave her headaches and backache. She suffered from