both of English and Latin is singularly correct and pleasing. Due attention appears to have been paid to the acquisition of modern languages; and although it was less within the scope of our enquiry, we cannot help observing that the pencil drawings of the Princess are executed with the freedom and correctness of an older child.4
In later years she spoke of her childhood as being lonely and ‘rather melancholy’ and Kensington Palace as being bleak in the extreme. ‘I never had a room to myself,’ she complained. ‘I never had a sofa, nor an easy chair, and there was not a single carpet that was not threadbare.’ The food was boring and unappetizing: she promised herself that when she was grown up and could eat as she liked, she would never have mutton for dinner again. Yet the events of her early life as she recorded them were far from being all unhappy ones. Certainly there were recollections of bogeymen: she had ‘a great horror of Bishops’ with their strange wigs and incongruous aprons and of the Duke of Sussex, ‘Uncle Sussex’, who, she was told, would appear from his nearby rooms in the Palace and punish her when she cried and was naughty. She remembered screaming when she saw him.5 But she was fond of her father’s old preceptor, the kindly John Fisher, Bishop of Salisbury, who used to kneel down beside her and let her play with the badge he wore as Chancellor of the Order of the Garter; and she was fond, too, of her uncle, the childless Duke of York, who was very fat and very bald and held himself in such a way that it always seemed as though he would tumble over backwards. He was ‘very kind’ to her and gave her ‘beautiful presents’ including a donkey, and once he presided over a memorable party for her at the house of a friend where there was a Punch and Judy show.6 As for her uncle, King George IV, he paid little attention to her when she was taken by her mother to see him at Carlton House; but one day while she was staying near Windsor with her aunt, the Duchess of Gloucester, at Cumberland Lodge, she was driven over to see the King at the Royal Lodge and found him in one of his happier moods. ‘Give me your little paw,’ he said, affectionately taking the hand of the seven-year-old child in his, and then pulled her on to his stout knee so that she could kiss him. It was ‘too disgusting’, she recalled more than half a century later, ‘because his face was covered with grease-paint’. But at the time she had responded to his ‘wonderful dignity and charm of manner’: he never lost his way of pleasing young children. ‘He wore the wig which was so much worn in those days,’ she remembered clearly. ‘Then he said he would give me something to wear, and that was his picture set in diamonds, which was worn by the Princesses as an order to a blue ribbon on the left shoulder. I was very proud of this – and Lady Conyngham [the King’s plump and stately intimate friend, supposedly his mistress] pinned it on my shoulder.’7
Next day, while she was out walking with her mother, the King, who was driving along in his phaeton with the Duchess of Gloucester, overtook her. As his horses were brought to a halt, the King called out cheerfully, ‘Pop her in!’ So she was lifted up and placed between him and her aunt Mary, who held her round the waist as the horses trotted off. She was ‘greatly pleased’, though her mother appeared ‘much frightened’, fearful that her daughter would either fall out on the road or be kidnapped.
The King drove her ‘round the nicest part of Virginia Water’ and stopped at the Fishing Temple. Here ‘there was a large barge and everyone went on board and fished, while a band played in another!’ Afterwards he had his little niece conducted around his menagerie at Sandpit Gate where she inspected his wapitis, his chamois and his gazelles.
In the evenings, while staying at Cumberland Lodge, Princess Victoria was invited to watch the Tyrolese dancers creating a ‘gay uproar’ or listen to ‘Uncle King’s’ band playing in the conservatory at the Royal Lodge by the light of coloured lamps. He asked her what tune she would like the band to play next. With precocious tact she immediately asked for ‘God save the King!’ ‘Tell me,’ he asked her later, ‘what you enjoyed most of your visit?’ ‘The drive with you,’ she said. He was clearly very much taken with her.8
As the Duke of Wellington’s friend, Lady Shelley, said, she paid her court extremely well. When giving the King a bunch of flowers, she said, ‘As I shall not see my dear uncle on his birthday I wish to give him this nosegay now’; and when wishing him goodbye she said with appealing if rather affected gravity, ‘I am coming to bid you adieu, sire, but as I know you do not like fine speeches I shall certainly not trouble you by attempting one.’9 Upon her return home she was most anxious that her mother should send ‘her best love and duty to her “dear Uncle King”’.10
Although she remembered with pleasure her days at Windsor, the Princess enjoyed her visits to her uncle Leopold’s house, Claremont, even more. So much did she enjoy these visits, indeed, that she cried when it was time to go back to Kensington. She remembered being allowed to listen to the music in the hall at Claremont when there were dinner parties there and being petted by Mrs Louis, Princess Charlotte’s devoted former dresser. She was petted, too, by her own nurse, Mrs Brock, ‘dear Boppy’, and by her mother’s lady-in-waiting, Baroness Späth, who had accompanied the Duchess from Germany. Indeed, Baroness Späth, so Princess Feodora said, idolized the child and would actually go on her knees before her.11
Very different was the behaviour of the Princess’s governess, Louise Lehzen, a handsome woman, despite her pointed nose and chin, clever, emotional, humourless and suffering intermittently from a variety of complaints, mostly psychosomatic, including cramp, headaches and migraine. She claimed that she did not know what it was like to feel hungry: all ‘she fancied were potatoes’;12 but she was forever chewing caraway seeds for indigestion, a habit which some maliciously attributed to a need to hide the alcohol on her breath.
In her mid-thirties at the time of her appointment, she was the youngest child of a Lutheran pastor from a village in Hanover. She was ‘very strict’, her former charge said of her in later years, ‘and the Princess had great respect and even awe of her, but with that the greatest affection…She knew how to amuse and play with the Princess so as to gain her warmest affections. The Princess was her only object and her only thought…She never for the 13 years she was governess to Princess Victoria, once left her.’13
At night she stayed in the bedroom which the Princess shared with her mother until the Duchess retired; and in the morning, when the child was being dressed by Mrs Brock, she read to her so that the little girl would not get into the habit of talking indiscreetly to servants.
Yet Louise Lehzen’s influence over Princess Victoria was not entirely beneficial, for the governess had her prejudices and these she implanted in her charge’s mind. She encouraged the child to distrust her mother and her mother’s friends and to tell people when they were wrong and ‘to set them down’.14
If Princess Victoria’s early childhood was not quite as melancholy as she afterwards decided when looking back upon it, it was – and was encouraged by Lehzen to be – certainly a lonely one. She was brought up in an adult world, rarely seeing children of her own age. ‘Except for occasional visits of other children,’ she said herself in later life, she ‘lived always alone, without companions’. She was devoted to her half-sister, Princess Feodora, but Feodora, a pretty, attractive girl, was twelve years older than herself and longing to escape from Kensington where, so she claimed, her ‘only happy time was driving out’ with Princess Victoria and Louise Lehzen when she could speak and look as she liked. In February 1828, when Princess Victoria was nine, Princess Feodora did escape, her only regret being her separation from her ‘dearest sister’ of whom she so often thought and longed to see again.*