streets crammed with people whose anxiety, so she wrote, ‘to see poor stupid me was very great, and I must say I am quite touched by it, and feel proud, which I always have done of my country and the English nation’.16 At the Palace she was told that His Majesty had directed that she should occupy his own chair of state. She did not greatly enjoy the ball, though. She felt Sir John Conroy’s eyes on her the whole evening, like those of a disapproving hawk; and when it was over she wrote resignedly in her diary: ‘Today is my eighteenth birthday! How old! And yet how far am I from being what I should be.’17
It was a sentiment which both Sir John Conroy and her mother did all they could to endorse. ‘You are still very young,’ the Duchess, with Conroy clearly at her shoulder, wrote to her, ‘and all your success so far has been due to your Mother’s reputation. Do not be too sanguine in your own talents and understanding.’ Conroy himself asserted that Victoria was ‘younger in intellect than in years’ and that she had too flippant a mentality to dispense with the guidance of those who knew her best.
The day after her birthday her uncle Leopold’s friend and counsellor Baron Stockmar, a Coburger of Swedish descent, arrived in London. Then forty-nine years old, Christian Frederick Stockmar was a qualified physician who had been head of the military hospital in Coburg. Having come across him there, Prince Leopold had been impressed by his honesty and knowledge of the world, and he had asked him to become his personal physician. When Princess Charlotte died, Prince Leopold had begged Stockmar never to leave him. Stockmar had promised never to do so and thereafter he spent more time with Leopold and on various missions for him than he did with his wife and children. Small, rotund, hypochondriacal, trustworthy, sardonic, moody, obsessively moral, and with a rather too high opinion of his understanding of political manoeuvres and psychological insights, he was to become a familiar figure at the English court, where, until his retirement to Coburg in 1857, he was to be seen walking into dinner of an evening without decorations and wearing ordinary trousers instead of the regulation knee-breeches.
He soon grasped the realities of the imbroglio at Kensington. On previous visits to England he had got on quite well with Sir John Conroy who spoke of him with the ‘greatest respect’; but as he came to understand the extent of the man’s ambition and of his influence over the Duchess of Kent – an influence which King Leopold was later to describe as ‘witchcraft’ – Stockmar began to agree with his master that Conroy’s conduct was ‘madness’ and ‘must end in his own ruin’.
Certainly Conroy’s machinations became almost desperate as King William’s health rapidly deteriorated and the accession of Princess Victoria as Queen grew ever closer.
On 22 May Sir Henry Halford, the King’s doctor, reported that his 72-two-year-old patient was ‘in a very odd state and decidedly had the hay fever and in such a manner as to preclude his going to bed’. Four days later Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, wrote of the King being in ‘a very precarious state’ and, ‘though he would probably rally’, it was not likely he would last long. ‘It is desirable he should wear the crown some time, however,’ Palmerston added, ‘for there would be no advantage in having a totally inexperienced girl of eighteen, just out of strict guardianship, to govern an Empire.’
In the meantime, Conroy was doing all he could to ensure that his guardianship was maintained, while the Princess, supported by Baroness Lehzen and Baron Stockmar, was doing all she could to break free from her guardian’s control. He again proposed to her that he be appointed her Private Secretary, a proposal which she naturally again rejected. After a conversation with her on 9 June, Stockmar reported to King Leopold:
I found the Princess fairly cool and collected, and her answers precise, apt and determined. I had throughout the conversation, the impression that she is extremely jealous of what she considers to be her rights and her future power and is therefore not at all inclined to do anything which would put Conroy into a situation to be able to entrench upon them. Her feelings seem, moreover, to have been deeply wounded by what she calls ‘his impudent and insulting conduct’ towards her. Her affection and esteem for her mother seem likewise to have suffered by Mama having tamely allowed Conroy to insult the Princess in her presence, and by the Princess having been frequently a witness to insults which the poor Duchess tolerated herself in the presence of her daughter…O’Hum [Conroy] continues the system of intimidation with the genius of a madman, and the Duchess carries out all that she is instructed to do with admirable docility and perseverance…The Princess continues to refuse firmly to give her Mama her promise that she will make O’Hum her confidential adviser. Whether she will hold out, Heaven only knows, for they plague her, every hour and every day.18
The Princess also managed to have a private conversation with the moderate Tory, Lord Liverpool, of whom she was so fond. Like Stockmar, Lord Liverpool urged her not to consider for a moment appointing Conroy her Private Secretary, a post for which he was quite unsuited. She must rely on the Ministers at present in office, particularly Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister, to advise her. Of course for the moment she must continue to live with her mother. To all this the Princess agreed. With Lord Liverpool, Baron Stockmar and King Leopold all supporting her, she now felt quite capable of resisting Sir John Conroy’s threats and blandishments. Lord Liverpool suggested that, as a compromise, the Princess might consider appointing Sir John her Privy Purse, provided he did not stray from that department. But, primed by Lehzen, the Princess protested that Lord Liverpool ‘must be aware of many slights & incivilities Sir John has been guilty of towards her, but besides this she knew things of him which rendered it totally impossible for her to place him in any confidential position near her…She knew things which entirely took away her confidence in him, & that she knew this of herself without any other person informing her.’19
Before parting from Lord Liverpool she suggested he spoke to Baron Stockmar who would tell him many things she did not like to talk about herself. Also, Lord Liverpool’s daughter, Lady Catherine, would confirm what she had told him about Sir John Conroy’s intolerably rude behaviour towards herself.
The day after this conversation with Lord Liverpool, Baron Stockmar reported that ‘the struggle between the Mama and daughter’ was still going on and that the Duchess was ‘being pressed by Conroy to bring matters to extremities and to force her Daughter to do her will by unkindness and severity’. Conroy claimed he had been advised by James Abercromby, a former Judge-Advocate-General and the future Lord Dunfermline, that the girl must be ‘coerced’, if she would not listen to reason. But, so he later maintained, he decided not to go to such lengths because he ‘did not credit the Duchess of Kent with enough strength for such a step’.20
The King was now very close to death. When told this on 19 June the Princess ‘turned pale and burst into tears’. The next morning, her mother woke her at six o’clock to tell her that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Conyngham, whose horses had galloped all the way, had come to the Palace and wished to see her. She got out of bed and went downstairs, the Duchess holding her hand and carrying a candle in a silver candlestick, Lehzen following with a bottle of smelling salts. ‘I went into my sitting room (only in my dressing gown) and alone’, she wrote in her diary, ‘and saw them. Lord Conyngham then acquainted me that my poor Uncle, the King, was no more, and had expired at 12 minutes past 2 this morning and consequently that I am Queen.’21
‘Got such a letter from Mama, oh, oh such a letter.’
‘I CANNOT RESIST TELLING YOU,’ Thomas Creevey wrote to his step-daughter, Elizabeth Ord, ‘that our dear little Queen in every respect is perfection.’1