and undermine her mother’s ambitions for Drina’s ascent to the throne and her own regency should this happen before she was eighteen. It was important to Conroy and the Duchess to control Drina’s dependence on them and resist any attempts by the King to insist that she, as heir to the throne, live with him at court. But in so doing, they turned a little girl’s love into resentment and ultimately hatred.
A daily register of Drina’s upbringing was meticulously recorded. After breakfast she would take exercise in the garden, often riding on her donkey or in a small pony cart until ten. For the next two hours her mother instructed her, assisted by Lehzen (who had originally been Feodora’s governess and was appointed subgoverness to Drina in 1824). ‘Dear Boppy’ – Mrs Brock, her nurse – provided more plain food for lunch at two, followed by lessons until four, after which Drina went outside again for exercise. Another very plain meal of bread and milk came at seven. Promptly at 9 p.m. she was tucked up in the bed next to her mother’s. At all times the child was watched, cosseted and protected from potential harm. She was not even allowed to go up and down stairs without an adult holding her hand.
A young Victoria.
When little Drina’s regular education began, her mother warned her tutor, the Revd. George Davys, ‘I fear you will find my little girl very headstrong, but the ladies of the household will spoil her.’ The Queen herself later freely admitted her early reluctance in the schoolroom, saying that she ‘baffled every attempt to teach me my letters up to five years old – when I consented to learn them by their being written down before me’.
It was Davys’s task to teach Drina her alphabet and elocution, and to try and soften the edges of the pronounced German accent she had assimilated from her mother. Feodora also helped with spelling, including the composition of one of the four-and-a-half-year-old’s first, very forthright, letters – addressed to the Revd. Davys:
MY DEAR SIR, I DO NOT FORGET MY LETTERS NOR WILL I FORGET YOU
~ VICTORIA
Reading was de rigueur – mainly the scriptures and a great deal of devotional literature. Her mother allowed some poetry, but very little fiction. Mr Stewart came over from Westminster School to teach Drina writing and arithmetic; Madame Bourdin arrived twice a week to teach dancing and deportment; Mr Bernard Sale from the Chapel Royal encouraged Drina’s musical talents and her singing; her riding master Mr Fozard ensured that she became a most accomplished horsewoman, while Richard Westall of the Royal Academy nurtured her considerable talent for painting and sketching, and she was also taught French by M. Grandineau and German by the Revd. Henry Barez; Latin and Italian were added later.
Script quote:
Victoria:
There was a time, Mama, when I needed your protection, but instead you allowed Sir John to make you his creature.
MORE IMPORTANTLY PERHAPS in that early training, Drina was taught always to be truthful, punctual and frugal and to take plenty of fresh air and exercise. She went out into Kensington Gardens in all weathers, sometimes on Dickey, her favourite white donkey. Dickey – a present from the Duke of York – its head decorated with blue ribbons, was led by an old soldier who had once served her father. Whenever the little princess emerged from the Palace, often holding hands with Feodora, she was friendly to everyone she met, bidding them ‘Good morning’ with a smile.
By the age of eleven she seemed exceptionally accomplished and forward for her age. ‘A child of great feeling,’ thought the Revd. Davys. She was impulsive and generous – but she could also be wilful, and, as the Behaviour Books recording her every misdemeanour noted, on one occasion she had been ‘very very very horribly naughty’.
Queen Victoria later explained that ‘I was naturally very passionate, but always most contrite afterwards’. She may have been stubborn and impetuous but an abiding quality, from a young age, was her truthfulness, reflected in the often surprisingly candid comments in her journal.
High days and holidays in the protected life of young Drina during the 1820s amounted to summer breaks at Ramsgate and other seaside towns, where she rode her donkey on the sands and was sometimes allowed to play with children of the gentry. Other than this, visits to her mother’s brother, Uncle Leopold, were the thing she most longed for. ‘Claremont remains as the brightest epoch of my otherwise rather melancholy childhood,’ the Queen later wrote, and she and Feodora would often stay at this Palladian mansion near Esher in Surrey for weeks or months at a time, taking great delight in playing in its huge parkland and gardens.
Princess Victoria in Kensington Gardens.
Twenty years later her sister recalled in a letter how much the two sisters had loved Claremont in comparison to Kensington Palace – to which they always returned with heavy hearts:
When I look back upon those years, which ought to have been the happiest in my life, from fourteen to twenty, I cannot help pitying myself. Not to have enjoyed the pleasures of youth is nothing, but to have been deprived of all intercourse, and not one cheerful thought in that dismal existence of ours, was very hard. My only happy time was going or driving out with you and Lehzen; then I could speak and look as I liked.
~ LETTER FROM FEODORA, 1843
During this difficult time, Drina’s German grandmother, Augusta of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, continued to dote on and adore her little May Blossom from a distance. In 1825 the 68-year-old visited for two months. It was a moment that little Drina had longed for:
I recollect the excitement and anxiety I was in, at this event, going down the great flight of steps to meet her when she got out of the carriage, and hearing her say, when she sat down in her room, and fixed her fine clear blue eyes on her little grand-daughter whom she called in her letters: ‘The flower of May’, ‘Ein schönes Kind’ – ‘a fine child’.
~ VICTORIA’S REMINISCENCES OF HER EARLY CHILDHOOD, WRITTEN IN 1872
Princess Augusta, Victoria’s grandmother.
Script quote:
Victoria:
When I was growing up, Mama and Sir John – they kept me under constant supervision. I was allowed no friends, no society, no life of my own.
She was a good deal bent and walked with a stick, and frequently with her hands on her back. She took long drives in an open carriage and I was frequently sent out with her, which I am sorry to confess I did not like, as, like most children of that age, I preferred running about. She was excessively kind to children, but could not bear naughty ones, and I shall never forget her coming into the room when I had been crying and naughty at my lessons – from the next room but one, where she had been with Mamma – and scolding me severely, which had a very salutary effect.
VICTORIA’S REMINISCENCES OF HER EARLY CHILDHOOD, WRITTEN IN 1872
AUGUSTA WAS BESOTTED WITH her beloved granddaughter, enthusing about her in letters home and proclaiming her to be ‘incredibly precocious for her age’. She had never seen ‘a more alert and forthcoming child’.
Little