to play the very deuce with [his] bowels’. Then, at the beginning of January 1820 he caught another cold which became so feverish that the Duchess called in his physician, Dr Wilson, who was much concerned by his case. On the evening of the twelfth his patient complained of pains in his chest and was overcome by nausea. Soon he was delirious. The Duchess, distracted, rarely left his side. She sent an urgent request to London for Sir David Dundas, the eminent physician, to come to Sidmouth; but Dundas was in attendance on the dying King George III at Windsor. Dr William Maton, who had been Queen Charlotte’s physician, came instead. His arrival was no comfort to the Duchess: he spoke little French and scarcely any German, and the Duchess’s English, despite her efforts to learn the language, was not yet good enough for her to communicate with him or adequately to protest against the tormenting treatment which he, like Dr Wilson, prescribed their helpless patient.
The Duke was bled and cupped day after day; blisters were applied to his chest; then he was cupped and bled again until, as the Duchess wrote to a friend, there was ‘hardly a spot on his dear body which [had] not been touched by cupping, blisters or bleeding…I cannot think it can be good for the patient to lose so much blood when he is already so weak…He was terribly exhausted yesterday after all that had been done to him by those cruel doctors.’13 Although ‘half delirious’ he was induced to sign a will, appending his signature to the document with the most pathetic determination before sinking back on to his pillow. He died the next morning. The Duchess, who had, she said, ‘adored him’, knelt beside his bed, holding his hand.14
She was now almost destitute and it was left to her brother, Prince Leopold, to come to her aid. Without his help, he later assured her daughter, Victoria, the Duchess could not possibly have remained in the country. The Regent’s ‘great wish was to get you and your mama out of the country,’ he told her emphatically. ‘And I must say without my assistance you could not have remained…I know not what would have come of you and your mama, if I had not then existed.’15
But Prince Leopold not only existed but still had so large an income that he could well afford to take his sister and his little niece into his care. He asked the Regent’s sister, Princess Mary, Duchess of Gloucester, to seek permission from her brother – who was as fond of her as she was of him – to allow the stricken widow and her daughter to return to her late husband’s apartments at Kensington Palace. ‘Her situation is most melancholy,’ Princess Mary wrote, ‘for Edward had nothing in the world but debts & now there are all his old servants without a penny piece to provide for them. She knows what your goodness of heart is & she is sure you will do what you can for them.’16 The Regent immediately gave his consent; and so the Duchess of Kent, assured of an annual allowance from Prince Leopold of £2,000, later increased to £3,000 a year, returned to Kensington Palace where they learned that the poor, blind, demented King had died at last on 29 January 1820 and the Prince Regent was now King George IV.
‘I never had a room to myself. I never had a sofa, nor an easy chair, and there was not a single carpet that was not threadbare.’
THE KING’S LITTLE NIECE, VICTORIA, was now eight months old. She had not been well at Sidmouth, suffering from a heavy cold for most of the time; and she had been ‘very upset by the frightful jolting’ of the carriage that brought her back to Kensington. But she was a strong child, as her father had been pleased to note of his ‘little joy’; and at six months she had, in his opinion, been ‘as advanced as children generally are at eight’. She had been vaccinated without ill effects and having been weaned – her mother having caused some disapproval by indelicately insisting on giving what her husband described as ‘maternal nutriment’ – ‘she did not appear to thrive the less for the change’. The Duchess was delighted with her little ‘Vickelchen’, as she called her, although she had to admit that she was already showing ‘symptoms of wanting to get her own little way’.
This stubbornness and independence of spirit became more pronounced as she grew older. So did her impatience, her wilfulness, outbursts of temper and defiant truthfulness. Frustrated, she would stamp her feet and would burst into tears when told to sit still or to pay closer attention during her reading lessons; and once, in a tantrum, she hurled a pair of scissors at her governess. Before her lessons began one day, her mother was asked if she had been a good girl that morning. ‘Yes,’ the Duchess replied, ‘she has been good this morning but yesterday there was a little storm.’ ‘Two storms,’ corrected the little girl, pertly interrupting her mother’s account, intent as always on speaking and hearing the truth, ‘one at dressing and one at washing.’ She was similarly pert when her mother said to her, after one of her outbursts of temper, that she made them both very unhappy by such behaviour. ‘No, Mama, not me, not myself, but you.’1
The Duchess’s nervous temperament was not well adapted to dealing with such a child. ‘To my shame,’ she admitted, ‘I must confess that I am over anxious in a childish way with the little one, as if she were my first child…She drives me at times into real desperation…Today the little mouse…was so unmanageable that I nearly cried.’
Wilful as she was, however, the little girl, intelligent and lively and with an astonishingly retentive memory, progressed satisfactorily with her lessons when these began to a regular timetable supervised by her Principal Master, the Revd George Davys, a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, later Bishop of Peterborough. Davys came to live in Kensington Palace before the Princess was four years old. He helped to teach her to read by writing short words on cards and, as he put it, ‘making her bring them to me from a distant part of the room as I named them’.2 Admittedly, she was not very good at Latin, and piano lessons were often a trial: once, when told that there was ‘no royal road to success in music’ and that she must practise like everyone else, she banged shut the lid of the instrument with the defiant words, ‘There! You see there is no must about it.’ But she was patient and attentive in her history and geography lessons; she learned to speak French and German – the latter in particular with a ‘correct pronunciation’ – and a little Italian.* She soon became adept at arithmetic; her written English was exemplary and her soprano singing voice, trained by John Sale, the organist at St Margaret’s Westminster, was delightful. She danced with easy grace, she listened dutifully to Mr Davys’s religious instruction, she read poetry ‘extremely well’, he said, and understood what she read ‘as well, as at her age, could reasonably be expected’. She displayed a precocious skill in drawing at which she was given lessons by Richard Westall, the prolific historical painter and book illustrator, and later, by Edwin Landseer, Edward Lear and William Leighton Leitch, the distinguished watercolourist.3
In March 1830, when the Princess was ten years old, the Duchess decided that her daughter should be examined to ensure that her education was proceeding along the correct lines. The two invigilators chosen were Charles Blomfield, Bishop of London, described by Richard Porson, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, as a ‘very pretty scholar’, and John Kaye, Bishop of Lincoln, who had been elected Master of Christ’s College, Cambridge at the age of thirty and Regius Professor of Divinity two years later.
Having examined the Princess, these two eminent scholars expressed themselves as being ‘completely satisfied’ with her answers.
In answering a great variety of questions [they reported] the Princess displayed an accurate knowledge of the most important features of Scripture, History and of the leading truths and precepts of the Christian Religion as taught by the Church of England; as well as an acquaintance with the Chronology and principal facts of English History, remarkable