rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">3 The laugh itself, however, Mrs Stevenson decided on a later occasion, was ‘particularly delightful’, ‘so full of girlish glee and gladness’. Others also spoke of this pleasing, uninhibited laugh and a voice which was, and remained, exceptionally clear and melodious. Her smile, too, was described as enchanting, and her deportment at once graceful and impressive.
Thomas Creevey, who was invited to dine at Brighton Pavilion in October, said that ‘a more homely little being you never beheld, when she is at her ease, and she is evidently dying to be always more so. She laughs in real earnest, opening her mouth as wide as it can go, showing not very pretty gums…She eats quite as heartily as she laughs, I think I may say she gobbles…She blushes and laughs every instant in so natural a way as to disarm anybody. Her voice is perfect, and so is the expression of her face, when she means to say or do a pretty thing.’4
After a conversation with her, Lord Holland, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, came away ‘quite a courtier’ and ‘a bit of a lover’. ‘Like the rest of the world’, he later decided, he was both ‘captivated and surprised’.*5
Although shy and often uncertain of herself in the presence of people whom she took to be intellectually superior to herself, she was already capable of assuming an alarming hauteur and fixing those who had offended her in a glare of disapproval from faintly hooded eyes, the disconcerting gaze of the basilisk. She had not been Queen for long when her Mistress of the Robes, the grand, young and beautiful Duchess of Sutherland, was half an hour late for dinner. She did not hesitate to give her ‘a very proper snub’, telling her she ‘hoped it might not happen another time’. She had occasion to reprimand her Maids-of-Honour also. She did not like doing this, she told Lord Melbourne; but, he said, she must start as she meant to go on, otherwise they would take advantage of her. She was determined not to let them do that.
As Charles Greville observed, the young Queen had already begun to exhibit ‘signs of a peremptory disposition, and it is impossible not to suspect that, as she gains confidence, and as her character begins to develop, she will evince a strong will of her own’.
She could also be self-centred, apparently quite unaware of the difficulties and discomforts she was imposing upon others. In September that year she was riding in her carriage at Windsor when, feeling the cold, she had got out to walk. ‘Of course, all her ladies had to do the same,’ Lady Tavistock told Thomas Creevey, ‘and the group being very wet, their feet soon got into the same state. Poor dear Lady Tavistock, when she got back to the Castle, could get no dry stockings, her maid being out and her cloathes all locked up…I am sure [she] thinks the Queen a resolute little tit.’6
So did some of her other ladies who were inconsiderately required to stand in the drawing room until the gentlemen came up after dinner, which they were required to do soon after the ladies had withdrawn. ‘I hear the Duchess of Kent first remonstrated and has since retired from the drawing-room for half an hour every evening to repose herself in her own room, till she can return and sit by her daughter or at the Whist table in the Evening,’ Lord Holland related. ‘It was droll enough to see the Ladies, young and old, married or unmarried with all their rumps to the wall when we came from the dining room and eagerly availing themselves of their release when the Queen took her seat on the sofa.’7
Nor did most guests find the evenings very lively thereafter. Charles Greville, invited to dine one day in March 1838, described a characteristic large dinner party attended by, amongst others, Lord Rosebery and his wife, Lord and Lady Grey, Lord Ossulston and the Hanoverian Minister, Baron Münchhausen. Just before dinner was announced the Queen entered the room with the Duchess of Kent, preceded by the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Conyngham, and followed by her six ladies.*
She shook hands with the women, and made a sweeping bow to the men, and directly went in to dinner, conducted by Münchhausen, who sat next to her, and Conyngham on the other side…After the eating was over the Queen’s health was given by [her Chief Equerry] who sat at one end of the table: a vile, vulgar custom, and, however proper it may be to drink her health elsewhere, it is bad taste to have it given by her Officer at her own table…However it has been customary in the last two reigns…8
When we went into the drawing-room, and huddled about the door in the sort of half-shy, half-awkward way people do, the Queen advanced, and spoke to everybody in succession…As the words of Kings and Queens are precious, and as a fair sample of a royal after-dinner colloquy, I shall record my dialogue with accurate fidelity.
Q. ‘Have you been riding to-day Mr Greville?’
G. ‘No, Madam, I have not.’
Q. ‘It was a fine day.’
G. ‘Yes, Ma’am, a very fine day.’
Q. ‘It was rather cold though.’
G. (like Polonius). ‘It was rather cold, Madam.’
Q. ‘Your sister, Ly. Francis Egerton, rides I think, does not She?’
G. ‘She does ride sometimes, Madam.’ (A pause, when I took the lead through adhering to the same topic.)
G. ‘Has your Majesty been riding to-day?’
Q. (with animation). ‘O yes, a very long ride.’
G. ‘Has your Majesty got a nice horse?’
Q. ‘O, a very nice horse.’
– gracious smile and inclination of head on part of Queen, profound bow on mine, and then She turned again to Lord Grey. Directly after I was deposited at the whist table to make up the Duchess of Kent’s party, and all the rest of the company were arranged about a large round table (the Queen on the sofa by it), where they passed about an hour and a half in what was probably the smallest possible talk, interrupted and enlivened, however, by some songs which Ossulston sang. We had plenty of instrumental music during and after dinner.
Nobody expects from her any clever, amusing, or interesting talk, above all no stranger can expect it. She is very civil to everybody, and there is more of frankness, cordiality, and good-humour in her manner than of dignity. She looks and speaks cheerfully: there was nothing to criticise, nothing particularly to admire. The whole thing seemed to be dull, perhaps unavoidably so, but still so dull that it is a marvel how anybody can like such a life. This was an unusually large party, and therefore more than usually dull and formal; but it is much the same sort of thing every day. Melbourne was not there, which I regretted, as I had some curiosity to see Her Majesty and her Minister together.9
Had Melbourne been of the company that evening, Greville would have seen the Queen in a far more lively mood.
The Queen’s relationship with Melbourne was of the closest and most trusting kind. He was fifty-eight when she came to the throne, still attractive though rather portly now, sophisticated and urbane. She delighted in his conversation, rejoiced in his celebrated epigrams, aphorisms and paradoxes, his well-told reminiscences, his brilliant table-talk and anecdotes which were full of irreverent, heterodoxical and sometimes flippant asides but usually contained information ‘of the most interesting kind’. It became ‘a source of great amusement’ to her to ‘collect his “sayings”’. ‘He has such stores of knowledge,’ she wrote; ‘such a wonderful memory; he knows about everybody and everything; who they were and what they did.’ He remembered things ‘from thirteen months old!’ and his days at Eton in great detail.