Victoria: A Life Read online

  So, although I initially found Potts and Potts very persuasive, with the passing of time my mind has altered. The present book is written with the confidence that Victoria was indeed the daughter of Edward, Duke of Kent, and his wife Victoire.

  Despite their ambition that she should be born in England, Queen Victoria’s parents left it nail-bitingly late before they returned from Germany. They set out for England on 28 March, when the duchess was nearly eight months pregnant. It was a journey of over 430 miles, at a time when there were no tarmacadamed roads in Europe. Not much had changed in the state of European highways since Laurence Sterne wrote A Sentimental Journey, and that whimsical author would no doubt have enjoyed describing the scene as they left Amorbach. The duke drove the duchess himself in a cane phaeton – money was again tight, and he could not find the ready cash to tip a coachman. But he also felt a tender solicitude for her comfort. Then came a carriage containing Victoire’s favourite caged birds, cats and dogs. There were English maids, two cooks, Dr Wilson, a retired naval surgeon, and a remarkable obstetrician, Frau Charlotte Siebold. She was a qualified doctor as well as a skilled midwife. (Given the crucial role she played in bringing the future Queen of England into this world – and, a little later, the expertise with which she oversaw the birth of Prince Albert – it is remarkable that Queen Victoria so forcefully disapproved of women training as doctors.) As personal attendants, they brought not only maids and a valet, but also the faithful Baroness Späth, who had been Victoire’s lady-in-waiting since her first marriage.

  The Duke of Kent’s personal equerry, who accompanied them on this journey, was a notably handsome staff officer in the Royal Horse Artillery, John Conroy. He was an Irishman, and his wife, Elizabeth, was the daughter of the duke’s aide de camp, Major General George Fisher. Conroy was to play the role of demon-king or pantomime villain in Queen Victoria’s childhood mythology, and this story will unfold as we follow her through the years of infancy and youth. At the outset, however, it is worth getting something clear about Conroy, which was almost certainly unknown to any of the players in the melodrama in which he played the villain. During the time of his ascendant role in the Royal Household, it was believed by the gossips that he had become the lover of Victoire, the Duchess of Kent. It was even believed by some that he was the father of Queen Victoria. No evidence for this exists at all, and the more one examines the story, the less probable either supposition appears.

  Conroy’s demon status remained unimpaired, not least because he was considered beneath mention. In the Dictionary of National Biography, for example, published in multi-volume form from 1917 onwards, the editors Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sidney Lee omitted Conroy altogether. Lee was a fine biographer of Victoria and of Edward VII and a royal friend. He believed that by concealment of Conroy he would make him less interesting to posterity. The reverse occurred, leading to the inevitable question, what did the guardians of the royal shrine wish to conceal?

  For many years, the nature of Conroy’s obsession with the Royal Family remained mysterious, even though it was clear from the outset that he saw himself in a role which was quite other than servile to them. His grandson, a science don at Oxford, left the family papers to the college of which he was a fellow – Balliol – and these were unearthed and catalogued by two patient scholars, John Jones, the college archivist, and Katherine Hudson. In 1994, Hudson published a definitive life of Conroy – A Royal Conflict – which established beyond question what had been buzzing in Conroy’s head even before Queen Victoria’s birth. Conroy believed that his wife, Elizabeth, whom he had married in 1808, was the Duke of Kent’s daughter. In a purple leather diary, belonging to Conroy’s grandson, and preserved at Balliol, there is written, in code – ‘Lady Conroy was the only child of General Fisher . . . Lady Conroy is said to be the daughter of the Duke of Kent who had been sent to Canada to keep him out of mischief.’

  Beliefs do not need to be substantiated by evidence in order to be held fervently. It was, in fact, impossible for Elizabeth Fisher to have been the daughter of the Duke of Kent. She was baptized in Quebec on 28 November 1790, when the Duke of Kent was still in Gibraltar, one of the most detested officers in the British Army, meting out terrible punishments to his troops. The relationship between the Fishers and Kent was close. General Fisher was his aide de camp. The general’s brother had been the duke’s tutor in youth. Some rumours did exist about Elizabeth’s legitimacy, with Algernon Seymour, Duke of Somerset and Earl of Hertford, as a far likelier candidate than any. It is not clear how Conroy formed the obsession, nor even whether Elizabeth Fisher, who bore him six children, was aware of it. But the point is that, as his children were born, Conroy was unable to avoid thinking that they were cousins of the royal line; and, as with all thoughts about royal bastardy, whether or not based on fantasy, there was the thought that, had things been only a very little different, and had carnal knowledge been accompanied by a marriage certificate, the supposed royal bastard might be wearing the crown. Had Mrs Fisher been the daughter of Edward, Duke of Kent (which she wasn’t), and had the duke married her mother (which he didn’t), John Conroy would one day have been Prince Consort to the Queen of England.

  The diligence of researchers in the Balliol archive provides us with a vital missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle. Ludicrous as Conroy’s misconception was, it explains, even if it does not justify, some of his later behaviour.

  When the strange caravan reached Frankfurt, the duke was thinking of his ex-mistress. He wrote an anxious letter to the Baron de Mallet asking after Julie’s health, ‘for I fear what she has read recently in the papers has had again a very sensible effect on her nerves, which I gather, from her last letter, written, although with her usual affection, evidently under great agitation.’19

  His heart was sad for Julie, but his duty was now with Victoire, and the next day the entourage rumbled over the cobblestones of Frankfurt am Main, past the house where Goethe was born, and on to the French road. They reached Calais on 18 April, but the gusty weather made it unthinkable that a heavily pregnant woman should cross the Channel. Even after they had waited a week, the sea was still choppy, and the three-hour voyage was uncomfortable. As soon as possible, they made the journey to Kensington, at that time still a village detached from Westminster, set in the rolling fields and lawns of a glorious English spring. At the northern end of London, in the equally leafy village of Hampstead, John Keats was writing his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.

  The Kents had been allowed the vacant apartments of the Princess of Wales, Caroline of Brunswick. In one of his vindictive acts against his wife, the Prince Regent had stripped the apartments of their furniture, and they had been neither aired nor heated when the Kents arrived. The larder was unusable because water constantly dripped from its ceiling. Kent, however, had a mania for house-improvement. £2,000 was borrowed from somewhere, and in the next weeks, the rooms were repainted and papered, furniture had been purchased, shelves and a desk adorned his library, and in the duchess’s bedroom, the windows were decorated with white curtains and the bed with white cambric. A mahogany crib was in waiting on the new carpet as, on 23 May, at 10.30 in the evening, the Duchess of Kent went into labour. It was her third child, and it was an easy birth after six hours. At 4.15 the following morning, on 24 May 1819, the child was born: ‘a pretty little Princess, plump as a partridge’, as her mother described her.

  In Coburg, when she heard the news, the baby’s grandmother Auguste said, ‘Another Charlotte! The English like Queens, and the niece of the ever-lamented beloved Charlotte will be very dear to them.’20

  The christening took place a month later in the Cupola Room at Kensington Palace on 24 June. The gold font, part of the regalia of the kingdom, was brought from the Tower of London, and crimson velvet curtains from the chapel of St James’s. There was no question that this was to be a royal baptism. The original name chosen was Georgiana. It was an English name, an eighteenth-century coinage, combi
ning the names of Queen Anne and the Georges. It was originally pronounced ‘George-Anna’, but later the usual pronunciation was ‘George-Ayner’; the most celebrated holder of the name was the Duchess of Devonshire (1757–1806), the radical wife of the fifth duke, and friend of Charles James Fox. There then arose the opportunity to name the infant after the Emperor of Russia, and to have Tsar Alexander as a sponsor. George IV insisted that, if this were to be the case – and the name Alexandrina were to be chosen – the British royal names, compacted into ‘Georgiana’, could not be secondary to the Russian. If the child were to be Alexandrina, then she must have no other name. So the King appeared to maintain until the day of the christening itself, which was conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Manners-Sutton, assisted by William Howley, Bishop of London. The mother’s name, Victoria, was given almost as an after thought. The other two sponsors were the widowed Queen of Württemburg (George III’s eldest daughter and the Princess Royal of England) and her maternal grandmother, the Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. None of the three godparents were present in person, and they were represented by the child’s uncle, the Duke of York, and his sisters Princess Augusta and the Duchess of Gloucester.

  When Drina, as the infant was called for short, was a month old, her parents went to live in Prince Leopold’s residence at Claremont. In August, the princess was vaccinated, the first royal personage to undergo such treatment, against smallpox. By the end of the month, news had reached Claremont, via the princess’s old German grandmother, that the family had been blessed by another birth. Madame Siebold, the German accoucheuse and doctor who had assisted Drina into the world, had gone back to Germany. In the summer palace of Rosenau, four miles outside Coburg, the present Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Luise, had given birth to a son, whose name was Albert.

  England was in a bad way. When the old King died, in the following year, Byron would write in ‘The Vision of Judgment’,

  A better farmer ne’er brushed dew from lawn,

  A worse king never left a realm undone.

  When Victoria was less than three months old, industrial unrest swept the North of England. At one stage as many as 20,000 Manchester factory workers were on strike. On 16 August, groups of factory workers, with their wives and children, gathered at St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, to listen to the radical Henry Hunt making a speech. It was not an angry assembly: it had more the atmosphere of a carnival, with people holding up banners with legends such as ‘Unity and Strength’ or ‘Liberty and Fraternity’. But, terrified by the prospects of a riot, the local magistrates summoned the militia, and as Hunt arrived to speak, forty of the local yeomen cavalry rode into the crowd with sabres drawn. Thousands of people tried to escape, but over 400 were wounded, and 11 were killed. It became known as the Peterloo Massacre.

  The working classes and the Establishment were now at war. There were riots in Macclesfield and in other parts of the North. Meetings were called all over the country.

  A modern reader who knew of the Duke of Kent’s ‘form’ as an exceptionally fierce army officer might guess that he would have sided with those who perpetrated the massacre. But one of the fascinating things about Kent was that he was interested in the new ideas. In 1815, he had been sent a pamphlet called New View of Society by the radical Lanarkshire factory owner Robert Owen. Owen was a socialist who believed in sharing the ownership of his factory with the workers. Kent and his brother the Duke of Sussex attended a lecture by Owen at 49 Bedford Square in London in which Owen demonstrated the class system by means of a pyramid. The apex of the pyramid was the monarch; the sturdy base was the working class. A peer remarked to Kent at this time that he thought that socialism’s levelling tendencies were dangerous. Kent replied, ‘I foresee the results. I know that there will be a much more just equality of our race and an equality which will give much more security and happiness to all than the present system. It is for this reason I so much approve and give it my support.’

  Two years later, addressing the St Patrick’s Society in 1817, he said, ‘My politics are no secret nor am I ashamed to avow them. With some experience of the function which I am now executing I am not at a loss for witnesses to refer to – whether in this or in any other charity meeting I ever introduced a single sentence of a political tendency . . . True charity is of no particular party but is the cause of all parties.’21

  At a meeting held in the Freemasons’ Hall on 26 June 1819, a month after Queen Victoria’s birth, the Duke of Kent took the chair for the purpose of appointing a committee to investigate and report on Mr Owen’s plan for providing for the poor and ameliorating the condition of the working classes. The duke commented on ‘the anomalous condition of the country arising from the deficiency of productive employment for those who without it must be poor, in consequence of the excess to which manufactures had been extended by the late increase of machinery’.22

  In the course of the autumn, Kent made plans to visit Owen in Lanarkshire, perhaps after Christmas, and see practical socialism in action. Fate had different ideas.

  Kent had been accumulating large debts in the short time he had been back in England, and it was decided to winter beside the seaside in Devon, living modestly and avoiding society. At the end of October, the duke inspected a house at Sidmouth called Woolbrook Cottage and decided that it would suit their purposes. In early December, they set out, breaking the journey at Salisbury where the bishop, Dr Fisher, was none other than the duke’s old tutor and the uncle of Mrs John Conroy. They reached Woolbrook Cottage on Christmas Eve.

  ‘My little girl thrives under the influence of a Devonshire climate, and is, I am delighted to say, strong and healthy,’ he was able to write to a friend a few days after the festival. He occupied his days in writing to Robert Owen, who had managed to become notorious. As if it were not sufficiently shocking to propose an improvement in the lives of the working classes, Owen had tactlessly blurted out that socialism could never work until all the ‘erroneous religious notions’ of Christianity be discarded. ‘We must act with prudence and foresight,’ the duke warned Owen, while assuring him that he was ‘fully satisfied with the principles’.23

  There was no danger of the Duke of Kent having to part with a fortune in the event of a socialist revolution; in fact, things were quite the other way about, and when strapped for cash, Kent borrowed money from Owen. Life passed quietly in these philosophical reflections in the cottage; and the most dramatic incident occurred when some local boys, taking pot shots at birds, accidentally shot through little Drina’s bedroom. The shattered pane fell on the floor, as the child’s head was lightly dusted with splintered glass.

  One disconcerting episode was when Kent encountered a fortune teller in Sidmouth, who told him, ‘This year two members of the Royal Family will die.’

  Kent had caught a cold while staying with the Fishers in Salisbury, and in the weeks after Christmas his chill became worse. Young Dr Stockmar, the Coburg medic, came down for a visit and was prevented from returning to Esher by a heavy fall of snow. Kent and Conroy went for a long walk on the cliffs, during which the duke got wet. Stockmar saw no cause for alarm. It was 15 January.

  The next day, however, when Sir David Dundas visited Princess Augusta (one of the duke’s sisters) in Windsor, he remarked that the Duchess of Kent had written of her worry concerning her husband’s health. By 18 January, his condition had worsened, and on the 20th, he had taken to his bed, and was being treated by Dr Wilson and Dr Stockmar. His fever rose and delirium set in. The ineffectual and gruesome medical procedures of the day – blisters, bleeding, cupping and leeches – were gone through, to no avail. The duchess sat at his side for hours at a time. On 22 January, the duke’s mind cleared and he realized that he was dying. Stockmar advised him to make his will, and this he hurriedly did, making sure that his child Drina be entrusted to the care of her mother. By evening, a group had gathered around the bed – Dr Maton, Queen Charlotte’s personal physic
ian, Dr Wilson, Prince Leopold, who had arrived from Esher, Stockmar, his staff adjutants Generals Moore and Wetherall, and John Conroy.

  The duke looked up and said to them all, ‘May the Almighty protect my wife and child and forgive all the sins I have committed.’ Then, turning to his wife, he said, ‘Do not forget me,’ and he sank into delirium. On the morning of Sunday, 23 January, his wife having spent five sleepless nights at his side, Edward, Duke of Kent, gave up the struggle.

  By slow progress, the desolated duchess, with her brother Prince Leopold, brought the child back to Kensington. Before the month was out, the fortune teller of Sidmouth was proved correct. During the Christmas holiday, the blind old King had a recurrence of his madness, and had spoken for fifty-eight consecutive hours without drawing breath. On 29 January, six days after his son, he breathed his last.

  They buried him in the Royal Vault at Windsor. His fatherless granddaughter was even (for a while) deprived of her chance of one day becoming the Queen of England, for the Duchess of Clarence succeeded in having a second child – a daughter – who would be before her in the line of succession. The child was called Princess Elizabeth. She lived just three months. Thereafter, Victoria’s position as a would-be heir to the throne looked more secure as year succeeded to year.

  ‘I was friendless and alone,’ said the Duchess of Kent, when she looked back on those dreadful times. But she did not remember with total accuracy. Though she had lost her husband, she still had her brother, Prince Leopold. General Wetherall had been appointed by the terms of Kent’s will as one of the executors, to protect Victoire and to advise her. There were also her German friends, her lady-in-waiting the Baroness Späth, Feodore’s governess Louise Lehzen, and the wise Dr Stockmar. And, from now onwards an unbridgeable presence in the life of both the Duchess of Kent and of little Drina, there was the loyal Irish officer who privately believed that his wife was the late Duke of Kent’s daughter: that is to say, there was John Conroy.