in all the danger’.17
That summer the Princess went to Portsmouth where she inspected Nelson’s flagship, the Victory, and tasted some ‘excellent’ beef, potatoes and grog as a sample of the sailors’ rations.18 The Emerald anchored off Plymouth so that she could present new colours to the 89th Regimeñt; she was taken over the Eddystone lighthouse; she visited Torquay and Weymouth and Exeter; and she was driven in an open carriage, escorted by the Dorsetshire Yeomanry, to stay at Melbury House, Lord Ilchester’s house near Dorchester.
No sooner had the disagreement about naval salutes been settled than there was further trouble over the provision of a country house for the Duchess of Kent and her daughter. The Duchess wrote to the Prime Minister asking for one. The King offered her Kew Palace for that summer. The Duchess did not want a house just for that summer but a permanent country residence; besides she had made arrangements to go to Tunbridge Wells in the summer. Well then, she might have Kew Palace on a more permanent basis. The Duchess went to see it. She did not like it: it was ‘very inadequate in accommodation and almost destitute of furniture’.19 The King replied that Kew had been considered perfectly satisfactory by his ‘royal father and mother’. He had nothing else to offer.20
Disgruntled though she was by her brother-in-law’s response, the Duchess seems to have enjoyed her autumn holiday at Tunbridge Wells in 1834. The Princess certainly did so, all the more so because she had been confined by illness to her room for over three weeks earlier that year, dutifully writing of her ‘dear Mama’s’ anxiety throughout her indisposition and ‘dear Lehzen’s unceasing’ care. She described her rides in the lovely countryside around the town and the public dinners which were held for them, at one of which Sir John Conroy surprised his fellow-guests by singing a song called ‘The Wolf’. The Princess left ‘dear’
Meanwhile another tour of England, this time in the northern and eastern counties, was being planned to start at the beginning of August 1835. There were to be excursions to some of the principal towns in Yorkshire, to Stamford and Grantham in Lincolnshire, to Newark in Nottinghamshire, to Belvoir Castle, home of the Duke of Rutland, and to the Marquess of Exeter’s Burghley House, near Stamford.
The King made it known that he was firmly opposed to yet another ‘progress’; and he wrote to say that he strongly disapproved of his niece being taken ‘flying about the kingdom as she had been for the past three years’.23 But the Duchess demanded to know from Lord Melbourne, who had succeeded Lord Grey as Prime Minister in 1834, ‘on what grounds’ she could be prevented from making these visits; and when Princess Victoria protested that she did not want to be taken on another one since the King did not approve of them, her mother wrote to remonstrate with her: the King was merely jealous of the reception accorded her; of course she must go; it was her duty to go: ‘Will you not see that it is the greatest consequence that you should be seen, that you should know your country, and be acquainted with, and be known by all classes…I must tell you dearest Love, if your conversation with me could be known, that you had not the energy to undertake the journey or that your views were not enlarged enough to grasp the benefits arising from it, then you would fall in the estimation of the people of this country. Can you be dead to the calls your position demands? Impossible…Turn your thoughts and views to your future station, its duties, and the claims that exist on you.’24
They left the next morning. They attended the York Musical Festival and a performance in the Minster of Messiah which she acknowledged was considered ‘very fine’, but personally she thought the music ‘heavy and tiresome’, not sharing her grandfather George III’s passion for Handel. She liked ‘the present Italian school…much better’. They were entertained by her grandfather’s friend, the elderly, benevolent Archbishop Harcourt;* they went to Doncaster Races; they passed through Leeds and Wakefield and Barnsley; they inspected the Duke of Rutland’s family mausoleum at Belvoir. Passing into East Anglia, they visited the Earl and Countess of Leicester at Holkham Hall where the Princess was so tired she nearly fell asleep at dinner; and they went to the Duke of Grafton’s house, a rather decrepit Euston Hall. At Burghley House, after opening a ball with her host, the Marquess of Exeter, she had such a ‘dreadful headache’ that she went to bed after that one dance.25
‘It is an end to our journey, I am happy to say,’ the Princess wrote in her diary when it was all over. ‘Though I liked some of the places very well, I was much tired by the long journey & the great crowds we had to encounter. We cannot travel like other people, quietly and pleasantly.’26
For most of the time on this tour she had been feeling unwell and had quite lost her appetite. There was no need now for those warnings occasionally despatched to her by her uncle Leopold who, in one of his arch letters, had written to say that he had heard that ‘a certain little princess…eats a little too much, and almost always a little too fast’.27 Her ‘dearest Sister’ Feodora had also warned her that she ate too fast, and that in addition she helped herself to far too much salt with her meat.
Now the very thought of food sometimes made her feel sick. She was also suffering from intermittent headaches, back ache, sore throats, insomnia, and dreadful lassitude. ‘When one arrives at any nobleman’s seat,’ she wrote, ‘one must instantly dress for dinner and consequently I could never rest properly.’28
‘There would be no advantage in having a totally inexperienced girl of eighteen, just out of strict guardianship to govern an Empire.’
THE PROSPECT OF an autumn holiday at Ramsgate did little to raise the Princess’s spirits, even though her uncle Leopold, whom she had not seen for over four years, was also to be staying in the town at the Albion Hotel.* ‘What happiness it was for me to throw myself in the arms of that dearest of Uncles, who has always been to me like a father, and whom I love so very dearly,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘I look up to him as a Father with confidence, love and affection. He is the best and kindest adviser I have…I have such great love for him and such great confidence in him.’ ‘I love him so very much,’ she added later. ‘Oh, my love for him approaches to a sort of adoration. He is indeed “il mio secondo padre”, or rather “solo padre”, for he is indeed like my real father, as I have none.’ His young wife, Queen Louise, daughter of Louis-Philippe, King of the French, whom he had married when she was twenty a bare three years before, was also ‘quite delightful’, ‘an Angel’ who behaved towards her in the most friendly manner, playing games with her in the evenings, praising her drawings, sending