~ VICTORIA’S SPEECH TO THE PRIVY COUNCIL, 20 JUNE 1837
Britain seemed, overnight, transformed by the arrival on the throne of a young, untainted queen after a century of Hanoverian males. ‘Now everyone is run mad with loyalty to the young Queen,’ wrote Sallie Stevenson, wife of the American Ambassador. ‘She seems to have turned the heads of the young & old, & it is amazing to hear those grave & dignified ministers of state talking of her as a thing not only to be admired but to be adored.’
From his home in Saxe-Coburg, Victoria’s young cousin Albert sent his congratulations:
Now you are queen of the mightiest land in Europe; in your hand lies the happiness of millions. May Heaven assist you and strengthen you with its strength in that high but difficult task.
~ LETTER FROM ALBERT TO VICTORIA, 26 JUNE 1837
Script quote:
Victoria:
I intend to see all my ministers alone.
Conroy:
This is not a game. In future you must be accompanied by your mother or me.
Duchess:
Yes, Drina, you are just a little girl, you must have advisers
Victoria:
Oh, don’t worry, Mamma, I won’t be completely alone I have Dash.
I dressed dear little sweet Dash for the second time after dinner in a scarlet jacket and blue trousers.
VICTORIA’S JOURNAL, 23 APRIL 1833
Feature:
DASH
VICTORIA’S SPANIEL
‘Little Dash is perfection’
– Victoria –
IN JANUARY 1833 SIR JOHN CONROY presented the Duchess of Kent with a little tricolour Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Dash. Although the dog initially seemed very attached to her mother, Victoria quickly commandeered it. Within a month it was accepted that he was her dog, supplanting both the dolls and Lehzen as her dearest companion.
‘Dear little Dash is a most amusing, playful, attached and sweet little dog. He is so clever also,’ she wrote in her journal. She dressed him in a scarlet jacket and blue trousers and at Christmas that year gave him gingerbread and three rubber balls as presents. When she became Queen, Victoria worried about how Dash would settle in at Buckingham Palace but soon recorded in her journal that he ‘seemed quite happy in the garden’.
Once word got out that the Queen had a pet dog, many other dogs were offered as gifts. ‘You’ll be smothered with dogs,’ her favourite prime minister, Lord Melbourne, told her. And indeed Victoria was later to own a number of pet dogs: Waldman the dachshund, Islay the terrier, Sharp the collie, and there was, of course, Albert’s beloved greyhound Eos. But Dash was the Queen’s first and best-loved dog.
It was Albert who broke the news of his death to a heartbroken Victoria: ‘I was so fond of the poor little fellow, & he was so attached to me.’ She had him buried on the slopes of Windsor Castle near her summer house, and wrote a most touching epitaph:
Here lies Dash, the favourite spaniel of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, by whose command this memorial was erected. He died on the 20th December 1840 in his ninth year. His attachment was without selfishness, his playfulness without malice, his fidelity without deceit. Reader, if you would live beloved and die regretted, profit by the example of Dash.
VICTORIA’S FIRST ACT AS QUEEN was to give her assent to 40 new Bills. On a more personal level, that very first day, she had her bed removed from her mother’s room. She ordered the transfer of her household to Buckingham House – which she later renamed Palace, even though it was only half furnished and the carpets not down. Workmen were still busy day and night, and even the bronze entrance gates had not yet been fixed in position. She would miss Kensington Palace, writing:
Though I rejoice to go into B.P. for many reasons, it is not without feelings of regret that I shall bid adieu for ever (that is to say, for ever as a dwelling), to this my birth-place, where I have been born and bred, and to which I am really attached!
I have seen my dear sister married here, I have seen many of my dear relations here, I have had pleasant balls and delicious concerts here, my present rooms upstairs are really very pleasant, comfortable and pretty … I have gone through painful and disagreeable scenes here, ’tis true, but still I am fond of the poor old Palace.
~ VICTORIA’S JOURNAL, 13 JULY 1837
But for Victoria it was an important moment of transition. Propriety may have demanded that her mother stay with her until she married, but the needy, lonely Little Drina was no more. On 13 July 1837 the Queen left Kensington for what was referred to as ‘the New Palace at Pimlico’. She was Queen Victoria now, and in future the Duchess would not enter her rooms unless specifically invited.
Script quote:
Victoria:
But I don’t understand why this is called a House and not a Palace.
Melbourne:
You can call it whatever you want, Ma’am.
‘How proud I felt to be the Queen of such a nation’
– Victoria –
ON THURSDAY, 28 JUNE 1838, the whole of London was buzzing with excitement. From seven o’clock that morning a distinguished array of 10,000 lords and ladies, VIPs and diplomats began taking up their places in the specially constructed temporary galleries inside Westminster Abbey, weighed down in their ceremonial robes, plumes and coronets, and bristling with diamonds.
The city hummed with excitement and expectation, as the diarist Lord Greville recorded:
The uproar, the confusion, the crowd, the noise are indescribable. Horsemen, footmen, carriages. Squeezed, jammed,