from earliest infancy, she was attended out of doors by a liveried footman and her donkey rides in the palace gardens attracted the curiosity of passing crowds; she noticed the greater degree of respect accorded to her than to her twelve-years senior half-sister Feodore. ‘There was no doubt that every care was taken to avoid premature disclosures,’ her son-in-law Lord Lorne wrote in VRI: Her Life and Empire. ‘But Queen Victoria used to say that she had a vague idea of the state of affairs from her earliest years.’12
She was encouraged to be good to please her mother: the Duchess considered exemplary behaviour a requirement of her rank. Unshakeably honest, the young Victoria was candid about her own lapses, describing herself on one occasion in Lehzen’s Behaviour Book as ‘very very very very horribly naughty!!!!!’:13 evidence does not suggest that as an adult she always continued to acknowledge such shortcomings. In 1884, in his Celebrated Englishwomen of the Victorian Era, William Henry Davenport Adams acclaimed Victoria’s girlhood as displaying ‘a character which all English girls may well do their best to imitate’.14 It was typical of encomia offered to the ageing monarch. But the truthfulness, frankness and candour of Victoria’s younger self, alongside a prematurely earnest avowal of good behaviour, did indeed make her a model of sorts, exactly as her mother intended: in 1831 the Duchess made clear that she wished her child ‘to be a pattern of female decorum’.15 It was a template which, in later years, the inflexible and authoritarian Victoria was apt to modify.
If to modern eyes her education lacked rigour, it was regular and programmatic. Weekly reports were submitted to the Duchess, and every lesson was appraised. By the time of her ninth birthday, the princess’s timetable began at eleven in the morning: under the guidance of a number of tutors she worked until four o’clock. A report for the week ending 3 July 1828 shows Victoria studying history, geography, natural history, general knowledge, poetry, religion and orthography with Davys, all, bar ‘indifferent’ orthography, to a ‘good’ standard. Mr Westall offered a drawing lesson on Tuesdays, there were writing and arithmetic twice a week, while German and French occupied Victoria for two and three hours a week respectively (French earning an unusual commendation of ‘very good’ from Monsieur Grandineau). Lessons ended on Thursday with dancing under the instruction of Madame Bourdin.16
Victoria’s enjoyment was mixed. Throughout her life she was an intellectual pragmatist, mistrusting excessive learning, especially in women, and rightly suspicious that she herself knew less than she ought. She retained a flair for languages and skill in arithmetic. Sketching, drawing and painting were favourite diversions until her sight failed. The Royal Collection owns more than fifty sketchbooks and albums of her watercolours: she sketched whatever pleased her, people and places. ‘The dominant quality in the Queen’s character,’ according to Prince Albert’s official biographer Theodore Martin, ‘was her strong common-sense.’17 It is an attribute valued by the British in their constitutional monarchs but one distinct from intellectualism. The lesson Victoria took most to heart was learnt at her mother’s, or Lehzen’s, knee: the cause-and-effect morality of the children’s stories of Maria Edgeworth and evangelical didact Mrs Trimmer, rewards for the good, punishments for the bad, resourcefulness and initiative traits close to godliness. That concept of idealised behaviour, closely related to duty, would remain with Victoria, moulding her intentions if not always her actions: she never successfully separated her sense of herself from that of her position. In preparation for queenship, as William IV’s health spiralled ever downward, in March 1837, she re-read Edgeworth’s stories, steeping herself in their black-and-white world of sowing and reaping. It was an ambiguous preliminary to a life which must necessarily include many shades of grey.
Her education had been shaped by precepts which would become a mania as the century advanced: the importance of ‘regulating the passions, securing morality and establishing a sound religion’ extolled by Miss Elizabeth Appleton in a manual on early education published in 1821 and dedicated to the Duchess.18 As it happened, only Albert ever persuaded Victoria to regulate her passionate temper, in lessons that were painful to teacher and pupil. After his death, there would be signs of backsliding.
Occasionally, the results of the Duchess’s system were displayed to key individuals. After one encounter with Victoria, Harriet Arbuthnot, discreet but sharp-tongued confidante of the Duke of Wellington, noted, ‘The Duchess of Kent is a very sensible person & educates her remarkably well.’19 If that were the case, Victoria herself was not the only intended beneficiary. Pressed by Conroy, the Duchess meant the world to acknowledge her fitness to direct the future monarch. She cherished a particular ambition: to be appointed Regent in the event that Victoria succeeded to the throne before her eighteenth birthday. In that aim she was successful, after appointing the Duchess of Northumberland Victoria’s governess in 1830 and, in the same year, submitting Victoria (and by extension herself) to examination by the bishops of London and Lincoln. On 2 April, two months short of George IV’s death, the Archbishop of Canterbury stated that, ‘Her Highness’s education in regard to cultivation of intellect, improvement of talent, and religious and moral principle is conducted with so much success as to render any alteration of the system undesirable.’20 It was a measure of the Duchess’s astuteness in pursuit of her goal. The Regency Act received royal assent on 23 December, in the first year of William IV’s reign. Parliament also voted an increase in the household’s income.
In 1831, Victoria’s uncle Leopold became King of the Belgians. He left behind a sister with whom his relations had cooled and his Esher estate of Claremont, where Victoria had briefly escaped the mutton and mistrust of ‘Conroyal’ life at Kensington. He married a French princess, the graceful, heavily ringletted Louise d’Orléans, in an arranged marriage which forced the devoutly Catholic Louise to place worldly duty above the claims of her faith: it was a sacrifice of a sort that would not be demanded of Victoria. Leopold’s henceforth epistolary relationship with his niece became explicitly paternal, bypassing Victoria’s mother, Leopold himself ‘that dearest of Uncles, who has always been to me like a father’;21 ‘“il mio secondo padre” or rather “solo padre” for he is indeed like my own father, as I have none’.22 In the same year, by the Duchess’s contrivance, Victoria learnt the nature of her royal destiny: Lehzen slipped inside a history book a genealogical table which made clear the princess’s closeness to the throne. Her apocryphal-sounding response, ‘I will be good’, was unqualified and sincere, although it may as easily have referred to her attitude towards her lessons as any future strategy for sovereignty.
As the years passed, and the atmosphere within Kensington Palace increased in bitterness, Leopold’s letters set out a dialogue between monarch and monarch-in-waiting. His advice was torrential – generosity to balance his habitual parsimony. He was not without motive: Britain was a powerful ally for an untested new kingdom like Belgium. Leopold’s letters embraced everything from foreign policy to diet and deportment. Their influence on Victoria, as he intended, was profound. In the power struggle which poisoned Kensington life, Leopold, like Lehzen, supported his niece against his sister and her cicisbeo. It made sense in the long term.
Leopold understood monarchy as a masquerade, as in time would Victoria’s son Edward VII, the sovereign the principal strutting player; his vision of royalty combined charlatanism with something prim and his goal was survival. If Leopold’s view was cynical, it was practical too for a milieu which could not ignore the spectre of revolution. Like Victoria’s mother, he enjoined model good behaviour. ‘Our times, as I have frequently told you, are hard times for Royalty,’ he wrote on 18 October 1833. ‘Never was there a period, when the existence of real qualities in persons in high stations has been more imperiously called for. It seems that in proportion as sovereign power is abridged, the pretensions and expectations of the public are raised.’23 Also like his sister, Leopold had mastered the rhetoric of ‘Victorianism’ before Victoria’s accession. His propensity for pious maxims and emphatic belief in the importance of the appearance of virtue foreshadow the mindset of the coming reign even before the advent of Albert, who has traditionally been viewed as the architect of Victoria’s monarchy. That Victoria would prove a sympathetic and receptive listener is shown in her response to Lehzen’s disclosure and that unexpected family tree: ‘Now – many a child would