home.1
Yet the Princess was still feeling unwell; and when she returned to Ramsgate from Dover, where she had said goodbye to King Leopold and Queen Louise, she found life ‘terribly fade & dull without them’ and tired herself out with crying. She was, indeed, really ‘very ill’. The Duchess’s doctor, James Clark, was called but did not stay long. The Duchess considered that her daughter’s indisposition could largely be attributed to the girl’s ‘childish whims’ and Baroness Lehzen’s imagination.2 Conroy hinted that it was all brought about by the Princess’s childishness and he hinted that it was a mere maladie imaginaire, further evidence of the fanciful girl’s inability to reign without her mother’s constant guidance. One day he took advantage of her indisposition to endeavour to induce her to sign a paper authorizing his appointment as her Private Secretary. ‘They (Mama and John Conroy) attempted (for I was still very ill) to make me promise [to do so],’ she later said. ‘I resisted in spite of my illness and their harshness, my beloved Lehzen supporting me alone.’3
When Dr Clark had returned to London, it was clear that his patient was now seriously ill, suffering perhaps from severe tonsillitis or typhoid fever exacerbated by mental stress: she was feverish with a racing pulse. Lehzen proposed that Dr Clark should be sent for again; but the Duchess accused her of making an unnecessary fuss. ‘How can you think I would do such a thing?’ she said. ‘What a noise that would make in town; in short we differ so much about this indisposition that we had better not speak of it at all.’4
When the Princess grew worse, however, both Conroy and the Duchess agreed that Dr Clark must be summoned immediately; and when he replied to the effect that he could not come until late that night, a local doctor was called in. But by now the patient was recovering. Even so, after his return, Dr Clark thought it as well to remain in Ramsgate for over a month, while Lehzen, the ‘most affectionate, devoted, attached friend’ the Princess had ever had, nursed her ‘as attentively as ever’.
On 3 November 1835 Princess Victoria felt strong enough to report to King Leopold that she was ‘much better’, but she had to admit that she had grown ‘very thin’ and her hair was falling out ‘frightfully’; she was ‘litterally now getting bald’.5 Dr Clark advised a new regime for her at Kensington: she should be moved to apartments on a higher floor; she should go for regular walks, not sit too long at her lessons, exercise her arms with Indian clubs, and chew her food thoroughly, curbing her inclination – reproved by Baroness Lehzen as well as King Leopold and Princess Feodora – to eat too fast, even though of late she had not been eating much at all: a dose of quinine had been followed by potato soup for luncheon, and a thin slice or two of mutton with rice and orange jelly for dinner.6
By the end of January 1836 she had settled once more into the tedious routine of life at Kensington Palace, longing ‘sadly’, as she put it, ‘for some gaiety’, but for days on end seeing no one of her own age from the outside world and having to endure the company of ‘the usual party’ including Sir John Conroy, now more detested than ever, the boring Lady Conroy, the ‘2 Miss Conroys’, Victoire and Jane, and the friend of the Conroys, the clever and incompatible Lady Flora Hastings. She was still convalescent, living on a spare diet which now included bread and butter, performing exercises to strengthen her legs and arms and taking drives to the villages north of Kensington, Hampstead, Finchley and Harrow, and to places she was taken to on her mother’s charitable rounds. She went one August evening to St George’s Chapel at Windsor and stood looking mournfully at the tombs, one of which was her ‘poor dear Father’s’, sadly reflecting how cruel it was to lose those whom we loved and to be ‘encumbered’ by those we disliked.
There were, of course, breaks in this boring and frustrating existence: there was her first drive down the course at Ascot during race week; there were rare visits to Windsor Castle for dinners and dances, and even rarer appearances at St James’s on drawing-room days; there were walks on Hampstead Heath with Dash, ‘DEAR SWEET LITTLE DASH’, whom not so long ago she had been in the habit of dressing up like one of her dolls. There were singing lessons with the amusing, good-humoured and wholly delightful bass, Luigi Lablache, of whom she was so much in awe at first that no sound came out, though she later grew so fond of him that she would have liked to have had lessons every day instead of once a week. She eagerly discussed music with him in French and could not agree with his high estimation of Mozart. ‘I am a terribly modern person,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘and I must say I prefer Bellini, Rossini, Donizetti, etc., to anything else; but Lablache who understands music thoroughly said, “C’est le Papa de tous.”’7
‘Oh!’ she wrote in her diary of Lablache’s birthplace, ‘could I but once behold bella Napoli with its sunny blue sky and turquoise bay dotted with islands!’8
There were, above all, exciting evenings at the theatre and the opera, where she delighted in the performances of the half-Italian, half-Swedish ballerina, Marie Taglioni, who ‘danced quite exquisitely’, of Taglioni’s brother, Paul, ‘the most splendid man-dancer [she] ever saw’, of the tenor Rubini, the baritone Tamburini, her hero, Luigi Lablache, and the lovely soprano Giulia Grisi, ‘a most beautiful singer and actress’ whom she saw in her favourite opera, Bellini’s Puritani, and in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena by which she was ‘VERY MUCH AMUSED INDEED’.9
There were interesting afternoons at the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park; and evenings when she was brought downstairs by Lehzen to be introduced to distinguished guests, on one occasion to Sir Robert Peel, on another to Lord Palmerston who was ‘so very agreeable, clever, amusing & gentlemanlike’ and with whom, a year or two later, she had ‘much pleasant and amusing conversation’. There were birthday parties and birthday presents including, one year, a print of Marie Taglioni from Lehzen, earrings from the King, a brooch containing a strand of her mother’s hair, a writing-case from Sir John Conroy, a paper-knife from Lady Flora Hastings and a prayer book from ‘a bookseller of the name of Hatchard’. There were occasional balls at Kensington Palace; and above all, there were very occasional visits by German cousins whose departure, as she lamented in her diary, made her ‘quite wretched’, grieved and sad, missing them ‘dreadfully’, feeling that it was ‘like a dream that all our joy, happiness and gaiety should thus suddenly be over’. King Leopold wondered in his cautious way if these bursts of excitement were good for her. Might they not undermine her health? But no; it was the tedium of life at Kensington and the stress of the relationships there that upset her and made her ill. ‘Merriment and mirth’ were a tonic. ‘I can assure you,’ she wrote to him, ‘all this dissipation does me a great deal of good.’10 So did a change of air at King Leopold’s house at Esher, and a subsequent few days at Buxted Park in Sussex, the family home of her friend, Lady Catherine Jenkinson, daughter of the Earl of Liverpool.
Yet even away from Kensington Palace the tensions of life there followed her about like inescapable shadows. Lady Catherine got on well with Lehzen, so was persona non grata with the Conroy faction, and was soon to leave the Duchess of Kent’s household, ostensibly on the grounds of ill health. The Duchess of Northumberland had also fallen out with Conroy who considered she was undermining his authority, since she had written to Princess Feodora requesting her to approach her uncle, King Leopold, and ask him to do what he could to protect Baroness Lehzen, who was still being treated ‘with contempt and incredible harshness’ in an attempt to get rid of her and replace her with someone of Conroy’s own choosing. At the same time there was no love lost between Princess Victoria and the Conroys’ sharp-tongued friend, Lady Flora Hastings. As for the Duchess of Kent’s relations with the King they