I, Victoria Read online

  ‘There was a dreadful silence,’ Mamma told me. ‘Edward looked at me and I at him, both of us very much wounded by the announcement, and by the manner of it. Everyone else avoided each other’s eyes in embarrassment, for it was quite plainly just spite and jealousy – he did not want you to have any name that was at all royal.’

  After a moment, the Archbishop, feeling things ought to proceed before he dropped me on my head, gently enquired in what name he was to baptize the child after all.

  ‘Call her Alexandrina,’ the Regent snapped. ‘After the Emperor, her godfather.’

  (This may have been spoken in tones of bitter sarcasm. Lord Melbourne told me that Papa had chosen the Tsar as my godfather on purpose to annoy the Regent, who hated him. The thing was that the Regent hated Uncle Leopold and illogically but understandably blamed him for the death of Princess Charlotte; and the Tsar was Uncle Leopold’s friend and patron.)

  Alexandrina was all very well, but a single name – and not an English, royal name at that – was hardly enough for such an illustrious baby. ‘But a second name,’ Papa protested. ‘May she not have a second name? What does Your Royal Highness say to Elizabeth? Might I urge Your Royal Highness to consider the name Elizabeth for the infant?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ the Regent barked (I wonder, were his legs particularly painful that day?). ‘That is a name for queens. She shall not have that.’

  By this time Mamma was in floods of tears under her large, feathered hat. Uncle Leopold was glaring daggers, and the Princesses Sophia and Augusta were staring hard at the carpet as if they hoped the floor might open and admit them. Still Papa, his face very red as he struggled to keep his temper, urged for a second name. ‘She cannot be called Alexandrina only.’

  At last the Regent said, rudely, ‘Oh, very well, call her after the mother, then.’ (The mother, you notice, not her mother: I was just a disagreeable object to him.)

  But Papa brightened, glad to have taken one point at least. ‘Victoire, then?’ he said. It had been his first choice after all.

  ‘Victoria,’ the Regent corrected triumphantly; ‘but the name cannot precede that of the Emperor.’

  And so it was that I was christened Alexandrina Victoria; and that evening Papa and Mamma gave a dinner-party at Kensington Palace by way of celebration, to which the Regent pointedly refused to come. Three months later he publicly snubbed Papa at the Spanish Ambassador’s reception, and the junior members of the family, dependent on his whims, followed suit. Thereafter, it was open season on the Kent family at Kensington. For anyone who wanted the Regent’s favour, we were The Untouchables.

  But in spite of that, the summer of 1819 was a happy time for my father, probably the happiest time of his life. He and Mamma loved each other more every day, and the pleasant domesticity he had enjoyed with poor Madame de St Laurent was heightened with Mamma by the addition of a pretty and affectionate step-daughter (Feo often told me how much she loved Papa – ‘He was always so kind to me!’), and a fat and lusty baby who would very soon, he was sure, be openly acknowledged as the Heiress of England. The royal family might ignore and insult him, but there was nothing they could do about that.

  Only my poor aunt Adelaide could prevent it; and that summer she discovered she was again with child. Uncle Clarence, following Papa’s example, decided to bring her home from Hanover to have the baby in England, but poor Aunt Adelaide was not as robust as Mamma: she miscarried on the journey. So Papa was safe again, and he and Mamma entertained at Kensington Palace in high good humour, gave dinners and musical evenings, went together to reviews and the theatre, and took us children to visit Uncle Leopold at Claremont.

  The only cloud on the horizon was Papa’s permanent problem of finance; his income would barely have been enough for a careful and single man, and Papa was neither. He bought with a lavish hand: new furniture and drapes for the apartments, carpets, looking-glasses and pictures; a new carriage, clothes and endless hats for Mamma; fine wines, books and horses for himself – and all without any idea how they were to be paid for. By the autumn his long-suffering creditors were pressing again, and it became clear that both for economy’s sake, and to avoid unpleasant encounters, our little family would have to leave London.

  It would have been shameful to Papa publicly to admit that he, a royal duke, could not support his family in the style he felt was appropriate; and so to save face, he gave out that he was taking us to the seaside so that Mamma could enjoy warm sea-baths for her rheumatism.

  ‘Which I did have,’ Mamma assured me, ‘so it was not wholly a falsehood, which he hated; but my aches were more disagreeable than alarming.’

  Papa and his equerry went off in October to look for a suitable house. Devon – fatal Devon! – was what they picked on, too remote for creditors to follow them, yet blessed with a temperate climate. After a long search they fixed on Sidmouth, where they found Woolbrook Cottage, a ‘cottage orné’ only a hundred and fifty yards from the beach, which had a bathing-house for taking warm salt baths. So it was that we left London at last in December, and arrived on Christmas Day 1819, in the middle of a snowstorm, at Woolbrook Cottage.

  ‘Ach, it was a dreadful house!’ Mamma told me, growing agitated even at the memory. ‘So dark and musty – impossible to keep warm!’

  A gimcrack place, I imagine it – a cramped thing of low ceilings, inconvenient passages and damp plaster walls; nothing more than a primitive cot with rickety bays and balconies added on after the School of the Picturesque. It was usually let as a summer cottage, but it had been empty for some months at that time, and showed it. The situation would have been delightful in summer – a wooded valley, secluded, green and smiling – but in winter such places become sullen, grey and dripping, cut off from the world by fathoms of mud, and infinitely depressing.

  ‘That was a schreckliches winter, so many storms, such piercing winds! Even when the sun shone, the air was so sharp it hurt one’s chest; and, oh, the nights were bitter! Papa called them “rather Canadian”,’ Mamma added with a faint, sad smile.

  To add further to the unpleasantness, something disagreed with Papa and he suffered a severe gastric attack, which pulled him down dreadfully. ‘The water here plays the very deuce with my bowels,’ he wrote to Uncle Leopold. Added to his worries about the future, it did not reconcile Papa to this new sentence of exile. Mamma occupied herself indoors with her English lessons (with which she was not making much progress), obediently took her warm salt bath every day, and took Feo for long walks on the seashore. Papa spent the days writing letters in the hope of bettering his situation, and playing with me in front of the fire (oh, I wish I could remember that!).

  ‘You were his whole consolation, my Victoria. You were so strong and healthy – as well grown as a child of a year, though you were only seven months old. You cut your first two teeth without the slightest trouble, and Papa used to love to make you laugh, so that he could see them. Such a sunny baby, you were! But wilful, too. Even at that tender age you showed signs of wanting your own little way – and knowing how to get it!’

  Papa was reluctantly coming to the conclusion that there was nothing for it but to go back to Amorbach, which at least would be better than a hovel in Devon; but first there was the Christmas season to survive. We all had colds, and Papa’s was the worst, but in spite of it he insisted on going out in the blustery rain on the 7th of January to see to the horses, and came back chilled to the bone and with wet feet. The next day he was feverish.

  ‘Still, it was only a cold, you know,’ Mamma told me. ‘People had colds every day, and Papa was always so strong, so healthy.’ Her eyes grew dark with remembered pain. ‘It was the doctors who killed him.’

  Dr Wilson, who had accompanied us to Devon, first dosed Papa with the usual remedies of calomel and James’s Powder, but they proved ineffective; and when the fever mounted, and Papa developed pains in the chest, he prescribed bleeding. In those dreadful, primitive days, bleeding – either by leech or by knife – was con
sidered the sovereign cure for any fever or inflammation. Indeed, in the eyes of some physicians, it was the specific for every ailment! How far we have advanced since then in medical science – oh, but too late, too late for Papa!

  Wilson bled him again the following day, but he was still no better, and now Mamma, beginning to be frightened, sent to London for Sir David Dundas, the royal physician who had known Papa from childhood. Meanwhile she stayed with Papa day and night, nursing him with tender devotion. The house was bitterly cold – that raw, clammy cold which is by far the hardest to bear. No fire seemed to have any effect on the dank atmosphere, and the windows leaked like sieves. Feo had a chill, and I had succumbed to a sneezing cold which gave Mamma some concern, but she could spare little attention for us from her worries over Papa. He now had dreadful pains in his head, as well as in his chest and side, and had difficulty breathing. Dr Wilson applied blisters to Papa’s chest; and when that did not help he cupped him all over – an agonising process – even on his poor head, in the hope that it would relieve the headaches; but all to no avail.

  ‘For four hours he tormented my poor Edward,’ Mamma said, ‘and it nearly made me sick. I could hardly bear to watch, but whatever happened, I would not leave him for a moment.’ When the cupping failed to relieve, Wilson bled Papa again.

  At last on the 17th the doctor arrived from London; but it was not Sir David Dundas. ‘It seemed the old King was very ill and Sir David could not leave him,’ Mamma told me, ‘so he sent Dr Matet instead, which put me in despair because Matet had little French and I had little English, so we could not talk together.’

  Worse than Matet’s lack of French, however, was his firm belief in bleeding. Despite the fact that Papa had been relieved already of six pints of blood, Matet applied the leeches once more.

  ‘I protested – Papa was so weak, I said surely it could not be right to drain him further – but Matet said on the contrary, he had not been bled enough, and that as he was of a full habit and high constitution he could bear much more.’

  And so it went on like a mediaeval torture, the cupping and bleeding, until there was no part of Papa’s body which did not bear the marks.

  ‘He bore it all so patiently, but he was so white he was almost blue, and getting weaker and weaker, having such pain just to draw his breath.’

  ‘But why did you let them?’ I cried in agony when she told me this story.

  She spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘What could I do? One must believe in the doctors, nicht wahr? You call them because you think they know best, so to resist them would be a nonsense. And suppose you stopped them from doing something, and then the person died, you would always think that perhaps they might not have died if the doctors had been allowed a free hand. It was an agony just to stand and watch. I wished with all my heart I could suffer for him.’ Yes, I know that feeling now, though I did not then. And I can understand her terrible dilemma; still I think I would have stopped Matet with his bleeding and cupping after the first day. I think I would.

  But he went on draining away Papa’s life blood. At last Mamma, in terror, wrote to Uncle Leopold, begging him to come; and a family friend, General Wetherall, who was staying nearby, came to see Papa, and shook his head, and advised Mamma to inform the Regent, as head of the family, of Papa’s condition. ‘It was like hearing his death sentence,’ Mamma told me. ‘And yet still I did not believe he could die. He was only fifty-two, and he was the strong one of the family. Strong people do not die of little, trifling colds.’

  Uncle Leopold rushed down to Devon as soon as he got the letter, and arrived on the 22nd, accompanied by his secretary, the good Dr Stockmar. By then Papa was wandering in and out of consciousness, and his pulse was so weak that Stockmar (who was a trained physician) shook his head and told Mamma gently that he did not think Papa could last the night. They held vigil with Mamma through that long night – oh, alas, I know now what she suffered and how she felt!

  ‘When the clock struck ten the next morning, I was kneeling beside the bed holding his hand in mine,’ Mamma said, ‘and he squeezed it, as if he wanted to call my attention. I stood up and bent over him and kissed his poor, cold forehead, and he opened his eyes and looked at me, and whispered, “Don’t forget me.” Oh, as if I ever, ever could! And a moment later I felt him slip away from me; gone for ever! Oh, Victoria, I felt so lost! The partner of my life, the love of my heart! He had cared for me, cherished me – I leaned on him. What would I do without him?’

  What indeed? Papa had named Mamma in his Will as my sole guardian, but he had left her nothing but debts. She did not have enough money even to pay the reckoning at the cottage or for the journey back to London; and if she went to London, where would she go? The apartments at Kensington had been allowed to them at the Regent’s pleasure, and there was no saying he would let Mamma continue there. The foreign wife of his most hated brother, and sister of his most hated son-in-law? Now would be his chance to get rid of her for ever, to send her back to Germany, with her usurping brat.

  But Uncle Leopold came to the rescue. He could not take Mamma back to Claremont, as it was full of measles, but he paid the immediate bills and persuaded Aunt Mary Gloucester, the Regent’s favourite sister, to intercede for Mamma. And at last reluctant permission to use the Kensington apartment came back from my uncle. ‘I suppose he realised that in decency he could not quite throw us on to the street. At least,’ Mamma added with a sigh, ‘me he might have, and my poor Feo, but you he could not, his own niece, with his poor brother not yet buried.’

  On a January day as raw as sorrow we set off from Devon to London, and a cold and miserable journey we had of it, the weather as bad as it could be, and the roads correspondingly frightful, my mother sick at heart and lonely for the husband from whom she had never been parted since their marriage. On the 29th January 1820 the party arrived at Kensington Palace. The apartment had been almost stripped by Papa’s creditors; Mamma had no money, no friends apart from Uncle Leopold, and was hated by all her husband’s relatives except for Uncle William and Aunt Adelaide. She was in a foreign country of which she did not even speak the language; and not knowing the language, law or customs, she was terribly afraid that my father’s family might have the power to take me away from her. Things could hardly have been worse.

  It was on our arrival in London that Mamma heard the news that the old King, my grandfather George III, had survived my father by only six days. The Ghost of Windsor had suddenly refused to eat, and in those six days had starved himself to death. He had died, poor mad King, that very morning; and in consequence my uncle the Regent was now King George IV.

  21st February 1900, at Windsor

  I WAS thinking about Kensington Palace all afternoon. It was a crumbling, rambling warren of interconnecting rooms and dark staircases, old-fashioned and inconvenient, and situated far enough away from St James’s for its inmates to be conveniently forgotten. My feelings about the place were tainted so much with the unhappiness of my last years there, that having left it when I became Queen, I neglected it for many years, and it almost fell down. But I visited it last year when the restoration work was finished, and had to admit that it was a very pretty building after all – though for me still haunted. I could not look at it without painful recollections.

  Yet I had happy times there too – the first six or seven years of my life were almost entirely happy, I suppose. Our apartments were on the ground floor, which meant damp and black beetles and mice. In winter the rooms had that mushroomy, cellary smell, and sometimes we would find mould growing on clothes which had been hung up and not worn for some time. I didn’t mind the mice particularly – I am not squeamish like some women – but they sometimes ate our shoes and books, and we were never wealthy enough for that not to matter. But being on the ground floor gave us the advantage of the gardens beyond the long windows, which, seeming to belong peculiarly to us, became like extra rooms in the summer. I remember lush lawns, gravel walks, handsome trees, and
of course the pond, called The Basin, where Feo and I used to feed the ducks. Adult life, I suppose, has few pleasures which come close to the childhood delight of throwing bread to ducks. God might have created a more absurd and endearing creature, but it’s very sure He never did!

  When I was a child Kensington was still a country place, rich in orchards and market gardens providing food for London, and very quiet except for the mail coaches passing on the turnpike to Uxbridge and points west. Hyde Park in those days marked the western edge of London. North of the Uxbridge turnpike was open country and farmland; south of the Kensington road, where now the Albert Hall and dear Albert’s museums and institutions stand, were large country residences of noblemen; and beyond them small, neat fields dotted with villages – Earl’s Court, Old Brompton, Little Chelsea, Walham Green – linked by muddy country lanes.

  Strange to think that there was a time when there was no street, square, house or memorial anywhere in the country named Albert, no single little English boy named Albert (for it was a strange, foreign, German name then) – and no little English girl named Victoria, either, except for me. England was a very different country then, only just beginning to be industrial, and London was more like a county town than the centre of an empire. Strange as it seems now, sheep, cattle and huge flocks of geese were driven along the roads to London and herded through the crowded streets to market. There was no electricity, no telephone, no modern conveniences; there were no railway trains (and no horrid motorcars!) – only carts, carriages and dashing, dragonfly post-chaises; and everywhere the noble, the beautiful horse.

  I loved horses, always, and so much enjoyed riding! When I first became Queen my delight was to ride out with Lord Melbourne and one or two gentlemen, to taste the freedom of going right out into the country – I would have spent all day in the saddle if I could. The countryside, of course, came right up to our door in those days: we had only to cross the road to be in open fields. Now they are all gone under rows and rows of identical terraced houses, packed tight like herrings in a box. In my Journal I recorded one day that we rode over the fields right out as far as Acton; today that would be impossible. The streets of houses stretch unbroken all the way to Ealing, where once Papa bought a secluded country villa!