Queen Victoria: A Life of Contradictions. Matthew Dennison

during the 1860s she overlooked the splendour entirely and defined the responsibility to suit herself). Her refutation of her Hanoverian forebears consisted of that single sentence. No more was needed.

      In the meantime the household at Kensington Palace was engaged in a waiting game. In Coming Events, the first playlet in his ‘dramatic biography’ of Queen Victoria, Happy and Glorious, Laurence Housman has Victoria read aloud from the Book of Proverbs: ‘Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh it is a tree of life.’²⁵ Victoria, the Duchess, Conroy, Lehzen and, in Belgium, Leopold all awaited the coming of the same desire, the death of William IV without issue. So too, Baroness Späth’s replacement, Lady of the Bedchamber Lady Flora Hastings, an ill-omened acolyte of Conroy’s, commended for her elegant manners and ‘vivacity’ if not for her ability to combine extreme piety with witticisms of coruscating spite. In several cases, their motives differed. So too the benefits they would separately derive from the new reign.

      ‘Eccentric and singular’, given to choleric spluttering and in questionable health, of ‘very confined understanding and very defective education’,²⁶ William himself was nevertheless aware of the furious tussles that soured the Duchess’s establishment, their origin and intent. Only Victoria escaped the King’s animosity. At Windsor Castle on 21 August 1836, at his seventy-first birthday dinner, William IV stated his determination to outlive his niece’s minority: ‘I trust to God that my life may be spared for nine months longer, after which period, in the event of my death, no Regency would take place. I should then have the satisfaction of leaving the royal authority to the personal exercise of that Young Lady, the Heiress Presumptive of the Crown, and not in the hands of a person now near me, who is surrounded by evil advisers and who is herself incompetent to act with propriety in the situation in which she would be placed.’²⁷ A dutiful (if disillusioned) daughter, at her uncle’s conniption, Victoria burst into tears.

      The King’s prayer was answered. He died less than a month after Victoria’s eighteenth birthday, on 20 June 1837. The following week Victoria received a letter offering her ‘sincerest felicitations on that great change which [has] taken place in your life’. The writer was Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a romantic-looking Teuton on the cusp of what proved to be timely physical perfection: long-limbed, delicate in his features, bristling with the gloss of untainted virility. He addressed the new sovereign twice over – as ‘Queen of the mightiest land in Europe’ and ‘dearest cousin’ – and, with a mixture of coyness and conniving that would prove invaluable in expediting future relations, ended, ‘May I pray you to think … sometimes of your cousins in Bonn.’²⁸

      His prayer too would be answered.

      3

      ‘Constant amusements, flattery, excitements and mere politics’

      VICTORIA RECEIVED NEWS of her accession in her nightclothes. At six o’clock in the morning, as dawn gilded a sleeping city, the Lord Chamberlain and the Archbishop of Canterbury conveyed their tidings. In what would become for Victorians a favourite set-piece of the Queen’s personal mythology, described by Mrs Oliphant as certain to form ‘a dazzling point in the narrative of the next Macaulay’,¹ Victoria emerged from confinement into shafts of sunlight, no longer Nesbit’s ‘princess in an enchanted palace’, henceforth on penny prints and popular engravings ‘the Rose of England’, a national symbol, a bloom of hope. Thomas Carlyle observed that she was ‘at an age when a girl can hardly be trusted to choose a bonnet for herself’. She was young but not too young, this Sleeping Beauty awoken to new life within weeks of attaining her majority.

      The life she inherited was a compound of duty, deskwork and exaltation. As imagined by artist H. T. Wells in 1887, Victoria stands centre stage, bathed in the light of a new day, ethereal in her shimmering whiteness, doe eyes resolute but feeling. The composition suggests earlier images of the Annunciation: the Virgin learning of her choice by God. (In this case, Victoria occupied the place of the angel.) It was not an accident. Over time Victoria’s role would incorporate elements matriarchal and quasi-divine. In 1839, she became the first woman on the throne to combine the roles of monarch and mother; in 1897, at her Diamond Jubilee, she attained tabloid apotheosis when the Daily Mail extolled her as surpassed in majesty by God alone.

      Later on that first morning, Victoria attended a meeting of the Privy Council. She wore black for her uncle’s death. In David Wilkie’s painting of the scene, black gave way to white. Future Tory premier Sir Robert Peel expressed amazement at ‘her manner …, at her apparent deep sense of her situation, and at her firmness’.² All too soon he would have cause to remember that first impression, as would those throughout her reign who found themselves in opposition to Victoria’s will, members of her own family included. Victoria for her part was at pains to deny her nervousness. Looking back in 1886, she claimed, ‘The Queen was not overwhelmed on her accession – rather full of courage, she may say. She took things as they came, as she knew they must be.’³ Official business aside, she ordered that a bed be made up for her in a room of her own at Kensington Palace. The Duchess rightly interpreted the shift as symbolic. Ditto the new Queen’s refusal of her mother’s request that Conroy and Lady Flora Hastings attend the Duchess at the proclamation of her accession: it was too soon for clemency. On three occasions at the outset of Victoria’s reign, the poet Elizabeth Barrett attempted to imagine her feelings. ‘Victoria’s Tears’ presents one version of the proclamation ceremony. But Barrett underestimated her heroine. The poet’s refrain, ‘She wept, to wear a crown!’ was not Victoria’s. In the latter’s journal for the first day of her reign, a single word dominated: alone. It was a statement of exultation.

      Victoria would continue to regard sovereignty as a lonely business. In the beginning she fought to keep it so – first from her mother and that ‘Arch-Fiend’, the ‘Monster and demon Incarnate’, John Conroy, who would never now escape the intense hatred Victoria had conceived for him when he tried to force her to appoint him her private secretary in the autumn of 1835 as she battled typhoid fever; subsequently, in the early years of marriage, from her husband. Later she prevented her eldest son, Bertie, from sharing her burden, apparently untroubled by the piquant contrariness which permitted her to castigate Bertie for futility even as she denied him any alternative.

      Earliest commentators focused on Victoria’s diminutive height: she was ‘the little queen’, ‘her little majesty’. The adjective suggests infantilisation and, mistakenly, a quality akin to negligibility, neutering the threat of the first female sovereign since the dropsical Queen Anne of chequered record: the subversive re-envisioned as simply small. Physically the new Queen was little: most accounts agree on a height of four feet eleven inches. Moreover the Kensington system had deliberately stunted her experience. But her thoughts began to soar even before her accession. ‘I do not suppose myself quite equal to all,’ she had written to Leopold with fine equivocation during William IV’s last illness; ‘I trust, however, that with good-will, honesty, and courage, I shall not at all events, fail.’⁴ Leopold’s response had been to dispatch to London Baron Christian Stockmar, liberal-minded éminence grise of the Coburg dynasty, physician and Leopold’s confidential adviser, ‘the most discreet man, the most well-judging, and most cool man’; he attended Victoria at breakfast on the morning of her accession and remained on call for the next twenty years.⁵ A political polymath of chilly wisdom committed to the spread of constitutional monarchy and, in Leopold’s words, ‘a living dictionary of all matters scientific and political that happened these thirty years’,⁶ Stockmar too played his part in the evolution of ‘Victorian’ Victoria. In July, Mary, Duchess of Gloucester, indiscreet, once beautiful tell-tale daughter of George III, wrote to her brother Ernest, ‘I really pity the Queen, for she has no soul about her to tell her what she ought to do.’ That had never been the case and would not be so until 1861. Thanks to Stockmar, and to Leopold’s assiduousness as correspondent, it was not so now. Mary’s