Queen Victoria: A Life of Contradictions. Matthew Dennison

first of four disappointments for the long-suffering Clarences). Like the Clarences themselves, they would be thwarted in that expectation. The Regent feigned boredom at the princess’s birth, but true to his nature of petulant caprice, the following month roused himself to sufficient rancour to spoil her christening. He changed her parents’ preferred name of Victoire Georgiana Alexandrina Charlotte Augusta to Alexandrina Victoria: the unwieldy, foreign-sounding ‘Alexandrina’ was a tribute to the baby’s most powerful sponsor, Alexander I of Russia, who would play no part in her upbringing. By striking out Charlotte and the feminine form of his own name, the Regent symbolically denied the baby’s connection to himself and any claim to the throne. He also held at arm’s length the niece in whom he took no interest. The Duchess of Clarence, by contrast, wrote to her affectionately on her third birthday as ‘dear little Xandrina Victoria’:¹⁶ abbreviation came quickly. For much of her childhood she was simply ‘Drina’. On her accession ‘Alexandrina’ would be dropped entirely, although a bill of 1831 to change the child’s name by Act of Parliament to Charlotte Victoria had proved unsuccessful. It was a matter in which the twelve-year-old Victoria had no say: later she was grateful for its outcome, which freed her somewhat from the shadow of her cousin and her grandmother. Victoria assuredly owed her crown to her cousin’s death: an egotist in terms of her royal role (if not in all matters), she sought to cast her reign in no one’s image but her own. Besides, she felt, her mother reported, a ‘great attachment’ to her second name, notwithstanding that unEnglishness and lack of British royal precedent which so troubled her uncle William.¹⁷ Later she would castigate Charlotte – alongside Elizabeth – as one of ‘the ugliest “housemaids” names I ever knew’.¹⁸

      Foolish she may have been, unfortunate too in the mortality of her husbands: Victoria’s mother possessed another significant attribute. She had been born Princess Marie Louise Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Charlotte’s tragedy thus touched the Duchess of Kent closely for the women were sisters-in-law, Charlotte’s husband Victoire’s younger brother Leopold. Like parvenus in pursuit of ton, the ambitious and good-looking Coburgs were a family eager for greatness, none more so than Leopold. In coming decades Coburgers would colonise the palaces of Europe: their winning formula was a combination of dashing sex appeal, force of will and a self-serving phlegmatism in matters religious and political. Not without reason did Bismarck later vilify them as the ‘stud-farm of Europe’ or a Habsburg archduke complain that ‘the Coburgs gain throne after throne and spread their growing power abroad over the whole earth’.¹⁹ With Charlotte and her baby dead, and Leopold’s dream of kingship by proxy in shreds, their second bite of the cherry fell to Victoire. It was Leopold who, as early as 1816, had drawn to the Duke of Kent’s attention his lovely, lonely sister; Leopold who afterwards with renewed zeal encouraged Kent’s hopes through a protracted courtship; Leopold who, metaphorically at least, hovered at his sister’s shoulder. Kent’s death was not the disaster Charlotte’s had been, since his daughter survived him. It was Leopold who steadied Victoire’s resolve as she grappled with her second bereavement.

      Leopold also assisted his sister financially (though hardly to the top of his considerable means) and inspired her with dreams of glittering prizes and heavy-duty good advice; he insisted that she and the child live in Britain, albeit isolated and virtually friendless. As time would show, her compliance was enthusiastic. As keenly aware of the value of her trump card as any hard-bitten gamester, chary of her prerogatives and fully set upon the exercise of power, Victoire of Kent would prove tenacious in pursuit of the Coburg usurpation. But she played her hand badly. The Coburger who ruled England was neither Leopold nor his sister Victoire, who spent long years at variance with her daughter, but their nephew Albert, a case of third time lucky. In Albert’s case, the Coburg will to power was balanced by a contradictory impulse, the ‘Coburg melancholy’; both would leave their imprint.

      Hostage to his own mismanagement, the Duke of Kent bequeathed his wife an impressive list of creditors and a decidedly unimpressive jointure of less than £300 a year. After her five-night vigil at her dying husband’s bedside, the Duchess was unable to meet the costs of transporting his coffin to Windsor or herself and her daughter to London. It sounds a farcical impasse: it was certainly an inauspicious beginning to baby Victoria’s august career. Unavoidably, mother and daughter remained for several weeks in Sidmouth, scene of their unhappiness, awaiting Leopold’s help. Parliament granted the Duchess a royal widow’s pension of £6,000, a modest sum by royal standards. As we will see, the Duke’s own final gift to his wife also ultimately proved inadequate, though the Duchess was slow to recognise it: an egregiously venturesome helpmeet condemned by posterity.

      John Conroy (from 1827 Sir John Conroy) was the Duke of Kent’s equerry and one of his executors; following the Duke’s death he became Comptroller of the Duchess’s household. He exercised authority over her finances and her aspirations. For this hook-nosed Anglo-Irish landowner of severely limited means possessed unlimited ambition and a degree of swaggering magnetism. Gossips including no less a figure than the Duke of Wellington branded him the Duchess’s lover: certainly theirs became an egoïsme à deux, which was itself an approach to intimacy. Conroy was a gambler with fate. He pinned his hopes on Victoria becoming queen and himself exercising power through the Duchess. Had he preferred the moonshine of dreams to the hard manipulation of scheming, he might have survived for future generations as a romantic figure. But he conceived of lasting benefits deriving first from the Duke of Kent’s death, afterwards from Victoria’s eminence. Inevitably over the next two decades he overplayed his hand. He earned Victoria’s lasting enmity and, like the majority of the vanquished, forfeited the opportunity of telling his side of the story. Misguidedly he encouraged the Duchess in a course of behaviour towards her daughter which cost her Victoria’s trust, her respect and, most importantly, her love.

      Seeds sown by this predatory Irish adventurer were never harvested: Victoire did not steer the ship of state, even as Regent, and Conroy was prevented from basking in reflected glory. Victoria herself dismissed him from her household on her very first day as queen – after some delays pensioned off lucratively if with an ill grace. It was surely the right course of action. But for her father’s death and Conroy’s ambitions, Victoria’s childhood might have been happier. Certainly the series of sketches of her at three years old made by Lady Elizabeth Keith Heathcote during a seaside holiday in Ramsgate suggest a normal toddler happy at normal toddler pursuits.²⁰ She was a healthy, active child, successfully inoculated against smallpox at the age of ten weeks. Breast-fed by her mother and cared for by her nurse Mrs Brock, she was contented, plump and wilful with the unyielding egotism of the very young, ‘a greater darling than ever, but … beginning to show symptoms of wanting to get her own little way’ as early as January 1820.²¹ With few intermissions, she would remain plump and wilful. Thanks to her mother’s sense of destiny, her infant world was as English as the German Duchess could make it (save for her German half-sister Feodore, her German governess Lehzen and the German lady-in-waiting, Baroness Späth, in attendance on her mother: a fluttering, unattractive, devoted woman widely written off as negligible and eventually expelled by Conroy). In 1822, mother and daughter sat together for William Beechey. In Beechey’s portrait the exotic good looks belong to Victoria’s German mother. For her part, Victoria is a generic English child, cherubic, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, as novelist Walter Scott remembered her at nine. In one chubby hand she clutches a miniature of her father. The habit of visible mourning, and of defining herself through her relationship to a deceased male, began early.

      ‘When I think of His poor Miserable Wife, and His innocent, Fatherless Child, it really breaks my heart,’ wrote the Duke of Kent’s eldest unmarried sister Princess Augusta two days after the Duke’s death in 1820.²² The following week George III also died. Victoria’s childhood would indeed come to include an element of broken-heartedness; happiness came afterwards. For the rest of her life there would be a series of surrogate father figures, including her uncle Leopold, her first prime minister and her husband. And in her friendships with women, even her own daughters, too often a reserve, occasionally hostility. The origin of both impulses is easy to trace: a childhood environment of querulous femininity and, with the exception of the exceptionable Conroy, male absence.

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