meantime steps were being taken to bring about the removal, or at least to lessen the influence, of Baroness Lehzen who was treated so rudely that it was hoped she would resign. This merely resulted in Princess Victoria becoming more attached than ever to Lehzen. ‘I can never sufficiently repay her for all she has borne and done for me,’ she wrote. ‘She is the most affectionate, devoted, attached and disinterested friend that I have.’ She was, the Princess added later, ‘my ANGELIC dearest mother Lehzen, who I do so love’. It could not but give grim satisfaction to the Princess, as well as embarrass her, when the King, who warmly supported Lehzen, dismissed Conroy from the Chapel Royal – where his niece, looking so demure in a white lace dress and rose-trimmed bonnet, was about to be confirmed – on the grounds that the Duchess’s retinue was too large. Upon her return to the Palace, upset as much by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s admonitory sermon as by the stuffiness of the Chapel on that hot July day and by her mother’s anger at the King’s behaviour, she burst into tears.
On this day, 30 July 1835, Princess Victoria received a firm letter from her mother telling her that her relationship with Lehzen must now change: the Baroness was to be treated with more formality, less intimate affection. Dignity and friendly manners were ‘quite compatible’. ‘Until you are at the age of 18 or 21 years,’ the Duchess added, ‘you are still confided to the guidance of your affectionate mother and friend.’10
Nothing about the Duchess of Kent’s behaviour exasperated King William more than what he termed the ‘Royal Progresses’ upon which she and Conroy took Princess Victoria so as to make her better known to the people over whom she was destined to rule and to introduce her to the leading families in the counties through which she passed.
The first of these journeys was undertaken in the summer and autumn of 1830 when the Duchess and Sir John Conroy and, as an unwanted companion for the Princess, Conroy’s daughter Victoire, drove to Hollymount in the Malvern hills, calling on the way at Stratford-on-Avon, Kenilworth and Warwick, and paying a visit to the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough at Blenheim Palace. They also went to Earl Beauchamp’s house, Madresfield Court, Malvern and to the Duke of Beaufort’s Badminton House. They visited Hereford, Gloucester and Stonehenge; at Bath on 23 October the Princess opened the Royal Victoria Park; at Worcester she was taken round the porcelain works.
There was another tour two years later when, in the summer of 1832, the Princess and her incompatible entourage set off for north Wales by way of the Midland counties. With the utmost annoyance, the King read of these ‘disgusting parades’, of the vociferous welcome accorded to his niece, of the bands and choirs, of the loyal addresses delivered and graciously accepted, the decorated triumphal arches, the salutes of cannon from the walls of castles, the flags and flowers, the cheering crowds, the escorts of regiments of yeomanry, the presentation of medals. Drawn by grey horses, caparisoned with ribbons and artificial flowers, the post-boys wearing conspicuous pink silk jackets and black hats, the royal party – ‘the Conroyal party’ as the disapproving called it – passed through Welshpool to Powis Castle and Caernarvon, then on to Pla?s Newydd on the island of Anglesey, home of the first Marquess of Anglesey, the one-legged cavalry commander, who had offered them the use of it. They returned by way of Eaton Hall in Cheshire, home of Lord Grosvenor, calling at Chester, where the Princess opened the Victoria Bridge spanning the river Dee, on their way to the Devonshires at Chatsworth where the Princess played her first game of charades and enjoyed her first tableaux vivants.
From Chatsworth they drove to the Earl of Shrewsbury at Alton Towers and then to Pitchford in Lancashire, seat of the Earl of Liverpool, half-brother of the former Prime Minister, whose daughter, Lady Catherine Jenkinson, a young woman of whom the Princess was fond, had been appointed lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Kent two years before.
In November the royal party reached Oxford where, in the Sheldonian Theatre, to which they were escorted by a troop of yeomanry commanded by Lord Churchill, the Princess was obliged to watch the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law being awarded to Sir John Conroy and to listen to the speech of the Regius Professor of Civil Law who, having referred to the ‘singular prudence’ and ‘much industry’ with which Sir John had carried out his duties for the Duke of Kent, declared, ‘Can you wonder that he who had gained the esteem of the Husband, should also have pleased His surviving Consort.’11
Despite the presence of Sir John and his daughter, the Princess had enjoyed the tour, the drives in the carriage, the rides at ‘dear Plâs Newydd’ where her horse, Rosa, had taken her across the fields at an ‘enormous rate. She literally flew.’12
The Princess had kept a journal of their travels as her mother had told her to do. The earlier entries were most precisely dated and, since both the Duchess and Lehzen read them, rather stilted in style and matter of fact in content, not to say boring:
Wednesday, August 1st 1832. We left Kensington Palace at 6 minutes past 7 and went through the lower-field gate to the right. We went on and turned to the left by the new road to Regent’s Park. The road and scenery is beautiful. 20 minutes to 9. We have just changed horses at Barnet, a very pretty little town. 5 minutes past half past nine. We have just changed horses at St Albans…13
It was not until she was free to do so that she wrote from the heart and made full use of her powers of acute observation and a Boswellian ability to recall a conversation, the details of a man’s appearance, a woman’s dress. Even now, however, her writing was graphic when her imagination was aroused as it was, for instance, in her description of the mining districts of the Midlands, her first experience of such sights, such pitiable poverty which, in later years, she was rarely to witness again:
The men, women, children, country and houses are all black [she wrote]…The country is very desolate Every Where…The grass is quite blasted and black. Just now I saw an extraordinary building flaming with fire. The country continues black, engines flaming, coals, in abundance, everywhere smoking and burning coal heaps, intermingled with wretched huts and carts and little ragged children.14
What a contrast these dark scenes were with country towns, with her reception elsewhere, in other places where, as at Oxford, her party ‘were most WARMLY and ENTHUSIASTICALLY received!’15
The King read the reports of his niece’s enthusiastic welcome with mounting annoyance and serious concern: the Princess was being presented, not so much as his rightful successor, as his rival, a friend of the people who, as the daughter of committed Whigs, was presumed to be in favour of the Reform Bill to which the Tory King and Queen were opposed.
So, when in 1833 the Princess was taken on another tour, this time to the south and west of England, the King decided to curb so far as he could the ‘disgusting’ excesses of these ‘Royal Progresses’ by putting an end to what he called the ‘pop pop’ of naval salutes whenever the Duchess, her daughter and their entourage sailed by one of His Majesty’s vessels.
The Duchess was informed that since she was sailing for her own pleasure she must no longer expect to be saluted by any of the King’s ships. Sir John Conroy replied that ‘as H.R.H.’s confidential adviser’ he could not recommend her to give way on this point.16 So the King called a meeting of the Privy Council and issued an order requiring salutes to be given only for ships in which the King or Queen happened to be sailing.
Yet while the King was able to silence the naval ‘pop pops’, he could do little to prevent the unseemly excitement of the welcome accorded to his sister-in-law and niece on land; and reports of the ‘progress’ of 1833 were quite as irritating as those of previous years. On this occasion the royal party went to stay at Norris Castle on the Isle of Wight and at the beginning of August were sailing in the Emerald, tender of the royal yacht, the Royal George, when the ship ran foul of a hulk and broke her mast. The Princess was full of praise for the sailor