the Duchess pointedly presented her with a copy of King Lear.11
It was all the more galling to the Duchess because her daughter was, by contrast, especially respectful and affectionate in her dealings with Queen Adelaide, the Queen Dowager, and generous towards the late King’s bastard children whose existence her mother continued to ignore as completely as she could.
The antipathy between mother and daughter was also exacerbated by the Duchess’s insistence that Sir John Conroy and his family should be received at Court and the Queen’s determination that they should certainly not.
I thought you would not expect me to invite Sir John Conroy after his conduct towards me for some years past [she told her mother in one characteristic letter], and still more so after the unaccountable manner in which he behaved towards me, a short while before I came to the Throne.12
The Queen also declined to grant permission for the Duchess to take Sir John and their friend, Lady Flora Hastings, to the proclamation ceremony, on the advice, so she said, of Lord Melbourne; a refusal which provoked an angry protest from her mother: ‘Take care, Victoria, you know your prerogative! Take care that Lord Melbourne is not King.’13
Yet another angry letter from the Duchess was prompted when Conroy was refused an invitation to a banquet at the Guildhall. In this ‘extraordinary’ letter the Duchess maintained that not to invite him would ‘look like the greatest persecution’. ‘The Queen should forget what displeased the Princess,’ her mother added. ‘Recollect that I have the greatest regard for Sir John, I cannot forget what he has done for me and for you, although he had the misfortune to displease you.’14
The Queen, however, was not to be moved: she could not, she said, depart from the line of conduct she had adopted, upset though she was by the scenes her mother made and the letters she received from her. She was soon to decide that her mother never had been very fond of her.
There was also trouble over the Duchess’s debts which by the end of 1837 were to amount to well over £50,000. Prompted by Conroy, she had asked her daughter to contribute £30,000 towards the repayment of this sum. She herself would find the rest of the money, provided her income was suitably increased. After the matter had been considered by the Cabinet, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Thomas Spring-Rice, was authorized to say that they were prepared to recommend to Parliament the payment of those debts which had been incurred before the Queen came to the throne. This offer the Duchess promptly and indignantly rejected, declaring at the same time that she would not in any case negotiate with her Majesty’s servants: she would rather state her case directly to Parliament.
Ministers then proposed increasing the Duchess’s income from £22,000 to £30,000 a year, and this was accepted. At the same time the Queen’s income was settled at £385,000 a year, including £60,000 for her Privy Purse and £303,760 for the salaries and expenses of her Household. In addition she enjoyed the revenues of the duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall at that time worth about £30,000 a year.
The Queen, who had been taught to be careful with her pocket money as a girl, had frugal instincts; but, now that she was so well provided for, she was generous with her new-found wealth, continuing pensions to those who had received them in her predecessor’s time and offering, for instance, £300 to her relatively poor half-sister, Feodora, for her expenses whenever she was able to come over to England to visit her. She also settled her father’s debts as she had long had in mind to do; but finally settling her mother’s was a much more difficult and vexatious problem and led to the Queen’s receiving further angry letters from the Duchess who had soon overspent the increase in her allowance, even though she had been most generously helped by Coutts & Co., the bankers, both before and after her daughter’s accession.14
‘Got such a letter from Mama, oh, oh such a letter,’ the Queen was later to write in her diary on 15 January 1838.15 She and Conroy really ought to remember, she added, ‘what incalculable falsehoods they have told about these debts. During the King’s [William IV’s] life they said there were no debts and that it was all a calumny of the King’s – which is really infamous’. She was ‘much shocked’ by it all, and even more so when she heard that her mother’s debts had appreciably increased despite the additional income she was receiving. She was likely to get into ‘a dreadful scrape’, Lord Melbourne observed. The Queen said that she really ought to be able to manage on the handsome income now allowed her. ‘Yes, if her income really were well managed,’ Melbourne said, ‘but not if he makes money by it.’16
‘It has become his province to educate, instruct and form the most interesting mind and character in the world.’
AS THE DAYS PASSED people spoke of the new Queen with mounting enthusiasm. A large crowd stood in the courtyard of St James’s Palace and cheered her loudly as she stood by an open window to hear the heralds proclaim her Queen and it was ‘most touching’ to see the colour drain from her cheeks and the tears well up in her eyes. She was cheered again quite as vociferously when she drove to the House of Lords for the dissolution of Parliament for the first time on 17 July 1837 and, later, when she went to the Lord Mayor’s dinner in Guildhall. It really was ‘most gratifying’, she told Princess Feodora, ‘to have met with such a reception in the greatest capital in the World and from thousands and thousands of people. I really do not deserve all this kindness for what I have yet done.’1
Charles Greville said that at her second Privy Council meeting she presided ‘with as much ease as if She had been doing nothing else all her life.’ ‘She looked very well, and though so small in stature, and without any pretension to beauty, the gracefulness of her manner and the good expression of her countenance give her on the whole a very agreeable appearance, and with her youth inspire an excessive interest in all who approach her.’2
Princess Lieven, not the most indulgent of critics, was much impressed by the contrast between her childish face and sometimes rather diffident smile and the dignity of her queenly manner. Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, said that ‘any Ministers who had to deal with her would soon find that she was no ordinary person’.
Many of those who saw her now for the first time were surprised to see how very small she was, surely no more than five feet in height if that. She herself told Lord Melbourne that the ‘worry and torment’ of the ‘Kensington System’ had stunted her growth. She said as much to King Leopold whose letters frequently referred to her diminutive size and who wrote to her teasingly as though she could do something about it if she put her mind to it: in one letter he told her that he had heard reports that she was growing at last and expressed the hope that she would ‘persist in so laudable a measure’. He had, however, he later regretted, ‘not been able to ascertain that she had really grown taller lately’; he felt he ‘must recommend it strongly’. In a subsequent letter, thanking her for sending him a portrait of her, he commented that ‘she shone more by her virtues than by her tallness’.
It was generally agreed that, as well as being very short, she was a little too plump and really, it had to be admitted, rather plain with the protuberant blue eyes and receding chin of her Hanoverian grandfather, George III. Within a few weeks of Victoria’s accession, the wife of Andrew Stevenson, the American Minister in London, watched her at a dinner. ‘Her bust, like most English women’s is very good,’ Mrs Stevenson wrote, ‘hands and feet are small and very pretty…Her eyes are blue, large and full; her mouth, which is