but yours lives and She is mine too.’1
A good-natured, unselfish and religious woman, almost thirty years younger than her husband, she was quite sincere in expressing these sentiments, and upon his accession to the throne she was as kind to her little niece as ever, doing all she could to persuade her guardians at Kensington to allow her to appear at Court. Her husband also strongly expressed his wish to see her there.
On becoming King, William, as good-natured as his wife, ‘began immediately to do good-natured things’. He clearly loved being a king; and, excited by his rank, he strode about the London streets, nodding cheerfully to right and left, relishing his popularity. Expressing a general opinion, Charles Greville said that he was ‘a kind-hearted, well-meaning…bustling old fellow [sixty-five years of age] and, if he doesn’t go mad, may make a very decent King.’ Contrasting his gregarious familiarity with the seclusion in which his predecessor had chosen to spend the last years of his life, the Duke of Wellington, the Prime Minister, told Dorothea Lieven that this was not so much a new reign; it was ‘a new dynasty’.
At Kensington Palace, however, the new reign had no effect whatsoever upon the ‘system’ practised there. Sir John Conroy remained as the Duchess of Kent’s Comptroller, organizing the household and all the particularities of its life, telling the Duchess to report to him upon ‘everything’ that happened to the Princess down to the ‘smallest and insignificant detail’. As soon as he heard of King George IV’s death, Conroy wrote a letter which, signed by the Duchess, was sent to the Duke of Wellington for onward transmission to King William IV. This letter, referring to Princess Victoria as now being ‘more than Heiress Presumptive’ to the throne, required the appointment of the Duchess as Regent ‘without any interference whatsoever’. It also required the appointment of an English lady of rank to be appointed governess to the Princess, superseding Baroness Lehzen, and requested the recognition of the Duchess as Dowager Princess of Wales with an increased allowance for her in her new position in the kingdom.
Dismayed by both the tone and the contents of this importunate letter, Wellington replied that he earnestly entreated her Royal Highness to allow him to consider it as ‘a Private and Confidential Communication; or rather as never having been written’.2 Angered by this rebuff, the Duchess, advised by Conroy, immediately returned a sharp reply, contending that she would find it irksome to be Regent but that she owed it to her conscience for her daughter’s sake to undertake the duty. Wellington answered her letter in a mollifying tone but thought it as well to offer a guarded warning by urging her Royal Highness ‘not to allow any Person’ to persuade her to entertain the idea that there was any ‘Party or Individual of influence in the Country’ who wished to injure the interests of the Duchess and her daughter. Deeply offended by this reference to her Comptroller, the Duchess declined to see the Duke when he proposed to bring her a draft of a Regency Bill, telling him to communicate with Sir John Conroy, and refusing to talk to him for ‘a long time after’.3 The Regency Bill, introduced by the Lord Chancellor in Lord Grey’s government which succeeded Wellington’s in November 1830, did, however, provide for her appointment as sole Regent in the event of King William dying before her daughter reached the age of eighteen, the House of Commons recoiling in horror from the thought that the dreadful Duke of Cumberland might otherwise lay claim to share the appointment with her. When she was told of Parliament’s decision, the Duchess, reduced to tears, said that it gave her more pleasure than anything else had done since the death of her husband.4
Yet the settlement of the Regency question, and the appointment of the Duchess of Northumberland as the Princess’s English Governess, did nothing to improve relations between the Duchess of Kent and the Court which were also soured not only by the Duchess’s attitude towards the King’s illegitimate children but also by political differences; the King and Queen Adelaide both being strong Tories and known to be opposed to the Reform Bill which Lord Grey was endeavouring to push through Parliament; the Duchess of Kent, following her late husband’s example, being as committed a Whig, and welcoming Whigs and reformers to Kensington Palace.
The family quarrel was exacerbated when the King proposed that the Princess’s name of Victoria should be changed for an English one. Since Victoria had been named after herself, the Duchess naturally was upset by this request; but since the two names, Alexandrina and Victoria, her daughter bore had not been chosen by her but had been forced upon her by the late King, and since she was ready to concede that both, being foreign, were ‘not suited to our national feeling’, she agreed that they might be ‘laid aside’. Soon afterwards, however, she changed her mind and much annoyed the King, who, persisting in his objection to Victoria as a name ‘never known heretofore as a Christian name in this country’, proposed Elizabeth instead. The Duchess declined to consider it.5
Then there was trouble over Princess Victoria’s appearances at Court, which the King and Queen wished were more frequent and which the Duchess and Conroy wanted to be ‘as few as possible’.*
One reason which the Duchess persistently gave for keeping her daughter away from Court as much as possible was the presence of the King’s bastard children, the FitzClarences, who moved into Windsor Castle, one after the other, until it was ‘quite full with toute la bâtardise’.6 Queen Adelaide raised no objection at all to this, but not so the Duchess of Kent. She insisted that nothing would induce her to allow her daughter to mix freely with the offspring of such a shameful relationship. ‘I never did, neither will I ever, associate Victoria in any way with the illegitimate members of the Royal Family,’ she told the Duchess of Northumberland. ‘Did I not keep this line, how would it be possible to teach Victoria the difference between vice and virtue?’7
Quarrels over Princess Victoria’s attendances at Court were followed by a dispute over the Princess’s style as Royal Highness, the word Royal having been omitted in a message to Parliament from the King concerning a proposed increased allowance of £6,000 for the Duchess. Then there was trouble over the Princess’s precedence at the coronation, the King declaring that she must follow his brothers in the procession through Westminster Abbey, the Duchess insisting that she follow immediately after the King. When the King stood firm, the Duchess declared that, in that case, the Princess would not attend the coronation at all – maintaining that she could not afford the expense and that, in any case, the child’s health made her attendance out of the question. The Princess, who had not been consulted, cried bitterly. ‘Nothing could console me,’ she said, ‘not even my dolls.’8 She would have loved to go, she said: it would have been a special treat like her rare visits to Windsor, even though, being well aware of how much her mother disapproved of them, she was sometimes so nervous in the King’s presence on these visits that he once complained of her stony stares. ‘I was very much pleased there,’ she wrote of one such visit, ‘as both my Uncle and Aunt are so very kind to me.’ She felt nothing but ‘affectionate gratitude’ to the King whose wish it was that ‘she should be duly prepared for the duties’ which she was destined to perform.9
Kept apart from the King and Queen for months on end, with her uncle Leopold preoccupied with affairs in Belgium and with her half-sister, Feodora, now living in Germany, the Princess was more and more isolated at Kensington where she felt increasingly defenceless against the rule of Conroy so unquestioningly supported by her mother. Baroness Späth, who had presumed to question the ‘Kensington System’ and was believed to indulge the Princess unduly, had been dismissed after having been in the Duchess’s service for a quarter of a century. It was decided that the time would also soon come to get rid of the Duchess of Northumberland who was not sufficiently subservient to Conroy’s rule. At the same time an extra lady-in-waiting was appointed to the Duchess of Kent’s household in the