Victoria’s Secret: How a Teenage Girl Became the Queen of England

In late May 1837 the British foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, informed Britain’s ambassador to France that their seventy-one-year-old sovereign, King William IV, was in “a very precarious state.” His asthma and respiratory problems had become so serious that it was unlikely he could live long, though Palmerston trusted the king would stave off death for a few months yet. The foreign secretary did not welcome the prospect of dealing with the king’s successor, seeing “no advantage in having a totally inexperienced girl of eighteen just out of strict guardianship to govern an Empire.”

The girl in question was King William’s niece, Princess Victoria. The fact that she had celebrated her eighteenth birthday on 24 May 1837 was significant because at eighteen a sovereign was deemed of age to rule without a regency.

Yet, as Palmerston remarked, it was “scarcely in the nature of things that…the nation will look with the same deference to the will of a person of eighteen as to that of one of mature age,” and it was for this reason the foreign secretary had hoped that the king’s life would be spared for some time to come.

Palmerston’s wish was not granted, for King William’s health grew steadily worse. At ten past two on the morning of 20 June, he died, and his niece Victoria was “transferred at once from the nursery to the throne.”

The princess was fluent in French and German and had seen the study of English history as “one of my first duties,” but at least one observer believed she had not received “the proper education for one who was to wear the Crown of England.” On the other hand, in her first declaration to her Privy Council, she would state: “I have learnt from my infancy to respect and love the constitution of my native country.” Furthermore, while painfully conscious of her youth and inexperience, she felt “sure that very few have more real good will and more real desire to do what is fit and right.”

Notwithstanding his qualms about Victoria’s age, Palmerston was “inclined to think she will turn out to be a remarkable person and gifted with a great deal of strength of character.” In this he would be proved correct, in some ways rather more so than he might have wished.

At just under five feet tall, the new queen was physically diminutive, but it soon became apparent she had “a very decided will of her own.” No one—including herself—considered Victoria a beauty, and she may have had “not a very good figure,” but her appearance had much about it that was appealing. A government minister assured a friend: “she is really in person & in face, & especially in eyes & complexion a very nice girl, & quite such as might tempt.”

Another gentleman said he would have called her pretty were it not for her mouth: when she laughed—which she often did in the early stages of her reign—she opened it too wide, showing rather too much of her gums. Nonetheless, her beautiful voice and natural poise ensured “the smallness of her stature is quite forgotten in the majesty and gracefulness of her demeanor.”

Victoria’s was an immense inheritance. Britain’s overseas possessions included much of India, Australia, Canada, Ceylon, several West Indian islands and the southern tip of Africa. This empire had been acquired with the aid of the world’s mightiest navy, which remained crucial to the maintenance of Britain’s global power.

The British Isles themselves—which bore the official title the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, although often misleadingly referred to simply as “England”—were geographically compact but populous and extremely wealthy. At the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 Britain was already the richest and most industrialized nation in the world.

Until the mid-nineteenth-century agriculture still provided a livelihood for more people than any other occupation, but by 1837 the country’s landscape and economy had been transformed by massive new towns that housed an urban proletariat. These metropolises were often grim places with virtually no sanitation, whose poorer inhabitants lived in squalor and had shockingly low life expectancy. Nevertheless, the ability to draw on a large workforce enabled capitalist entrepreneurs to harness technological change and revolutionize productivity.

Britain had a constitutional or “limited” monarchy: the sovereign was served by ministers answerable to the legislature and who submitted advice after deliberating in Cabinet. To survive in power, ministries had to command the support of Parliament, and particularly of the House of Commons, composed of elected members rather than the hereditary peers who sat in the House of Lords.

There were two main parties, known as Whigs and Tories, who espoused different political philosophies but shared many assumptions. Of the two, the Tories were the defenders of traditional values, and upheld the power of Church and Crown, while the Whigs were rather more progressive.

Although many leading Whigs were immensely wealthy landed aristocrats, they saw themselves as natural guardians of the nation’s civil liberties, who would work through Parliament to safeguard what they conceived to be the interests of the people. If the Whigs remained nervous of “democracy”—term often used in a pejorative sense at this time—the Tories (who recently had started to refer to themselves as “Conservatives”) were far more fearful that any tampering with Britain’s political system and structures could unleash destructive forces.

Being himself of a conservative frame of mind, King William IV had been apprehensive when, less than a year after his accession to the throne in June 1830, a Whig government headed by Earl Grey had introduced a political Reform Bill. Repeated attempts by the House of Lords to block it had resulted in riots and fears of revolution, but it finally received the royal assent in June 1832.

Yet despite the major changes effected by the bill, the British political system remained riddled with anomalies and flaws. Even after the electorate had virtually doubled so that it numbered some 800,000 voters, only about one in seven of the United Kingdom’s adult male population had the franchise.

Numerous so-called “rotten boroughs,” with minuscule populations, had lost the right to return Members of Parliament, and some newly populous manufacturing towns could now send men to Westminster, but many large centers of population remained unrepresented. By making it more difficult for individuals to control constituencies, the bill had reduced the power of the Crown and aristocracy, but Parliament remained largely the province of a propertied elite.

In July 1834 Earl Grey had resigned. To the amazement of many in the political world he was succeeded as prime minister by his home secretary, Viscount Melbourne, an urbane man of immense charm whom few had expected to achieve such eminence. A Whig more out of family tradition than reforming conviction, Melbourne was chosen to lead the party simply because, as one colleague recalled, he was “the only one of whom none of us would be jealous.”

The story that Melbourne had pronounced it “a damned bore” to be offered the post of prime minister was probably apocryphal, but when William IV had dismissed him and his Whig colleagues in the autumn of 1834, he had not appeared to mind overmuch.

The king had replaced the Whigs with a Tory administration headed by Sir Robert Peel, only to find himself obliged to take back his discarded ministers when Peel failed to win a majority at a general election held in January 1835. William had to promise that he would not prevent the Whigs from pursuing their legislative program, an undertaking that illustrated how the Reform Bill had permanently undermined the influence of the Crown.

Although for the remainder of the reign William’s relations with a ministry that had been imposed on him against his will were sometimes less than cordial, in May 1836 he stood by Lord Melbourne when the latter was cited in a divorce case. Eight years earlier the widowed Melbourne had managed to pay off another aggrieved husband, but George Norton tenaciously pursued a claim that Melbourne was guilty of “criminal conversation” with Norton’s wife, Caroline.

When the case came to court, the prime minister robustly denied the allegations, and since Norton could not produce convincing witnesses, Melbourne emerged vindicated.

The prime minister had survived a potentially ruinous scandal, but his government was not in a strong position. Every by-election eroded Whig numbers in the House of Commons, and the Whigs lacked a majority in the House of Lords.

Yet though the parliamentary arithmetic was tilting slightly in their favor, the Conservatives were still in no position to take power themselves. Having burnt his fingers trying to have a government in tune with his own sympathies rather than one reflecting the political balance in Parliament, the ailing King William did not want his niece to start her reign by making the same mistake.

“The King from his deathbed conveyed very secretly but very earnestly to her his advice not to think of changing her ministry, that Melbourne was a good man and a change…a fearful experiment.” As it happened, this coincided with advice the princess had received from other quarters, and she was happy to follow it.

Accordingly on 20 June 1837, three hours after having been woken at six in the morning to be told of the king’s passing, the new Queen had her first meeting with her prime minister at Kensington Palace. Until this point Victoria had been permitted only the most limited intercourse with society and a few politicians, and all such encounters had taken place under the watchful eye of her mother.

Now the Queen eagerly dispensed with any kind of maternal supervision, noting in her journal she had received Melbourne “of course quite alone, as I shall always do all my Ministers.” From the first, she instinctively took to Melbourne. Aged fifty-eight, he remained a handsome figure, but what struck the Queen most was that he was “very kind in his manner,” and this allowed the establishment of an almost instantaneous rapport.

She at once informed him she had resolved to “retain him and the rest of the present ministry at the head of affairs,” believing “it could not be in better hands than his.” By the end of the meeting she had decided, “I like him very much and feel confidence in him. He is a very straightforward, honest, clever and good man.”

Her favorable impression was confirmed when she saw him again a little later the same day and had “a very comfortable conversation with him.” Five days later she recorded: “I like to talk to him,” and within a fortnight of her accession felt sure ‘there are not many like him in this world of deceit.”

As this comment suggests, despite the sheltered life she had led hitherto, Victoria’s existence had not been without a darker side. When she described herself as “very young and perhaps in many, though not in all things, inexperienced,” she was thinking of the malign shadow cast by a sinister figure who had made her teenaged years quite miserable, and who had cherished ambitions of controlling Victoria when she came to the throne. Had William IV died just a few weeks earlier, Victoria might have found herself powerless to resist this man’s plans.

Victoria’s father, Edward Duke of Kent, had been the fourth son of King George III. King George had fathered fifteen children in all, but this sizable brood had been remarkably ineffective when it came to providing the monarch with legitimate grandchildren.

The king’s eldest son, also named George, did sire a daughter, Charlotte, who had been expected to ascend the throne in due course, but in November 1817 the princess had died in childbirth, eighteen months after marrying Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. The tragedy made it imperative that all of George III’s sons who were free to marry took wives in order to carry on the royal line.

In July 1818 the Duke of Kent married Princess Victoire of Saxe-Coburg, sister of Princess Charlotte’s widower, Leopold. Victoire was herself a widow of thirty-one, who had had two children by her marriage to the Prince of Leiningen. Very soon after marrying the Duke of Kent she conceived again, and on 24 May 1819 gave birth to Victoria.

But though the Duke of Kent had filled the dynastic void that had threatened to engulf the monarchy, he had little time to savor his triumph. On 23 January 1820 he died of pneumonia, leaving his eight-month-old daughter fatherless.

Widowed for a second time, the Duchess of Kent not only found herself friendless in a strange land, but in embarrassed circumstances because her husband had bequeathed little but debts. Feeling in urgent want of a protector, she had turned to Captain John Conroy, an Irish army officer who had served her late husband as an equerry.

The duchess and Conroy both claimed that on his deathbed, the Duke of Kent had entrusted his wife and daughter to Conroy’s care, urging his spouse always to follow his guidance. The duchess maintained that ever since her husband’s death, Conroy had served her devotedly, although he may have actually compounded her financial difficulties by embezzling money from her.

Some people came to suspect that Conroy, who was a married man with children of his own, became the duchess’s lover. What is beyond dispute is that the duchess was slavishly devoted, acquiescing in the “dreadful system of tyranny exercised” by Conroy over her Kensington Palace establishment.

Once Conroy began asserting himself, Victoria’s life became “one of great misery & oppression.” Together he and her mother devised what they called the “Kensington system,” placing Victoria entirely under their own control and limiting her contacts with the royal family.

Intent on promoting the princess as a future “People’s Queen,” they arranged for her to make annual regional tours of England, during which she was introduced to the public and visited factories and ironworks. King William understandably disliked this parading of his niece but could not persuade his sister-in-law to discontinue it.

After a particularly exhausting tour, in late September 1835 the duchess and Conroy took an ailing Victoria to Ramsgate, intent on forcing from her a pledge to make Conroy her private secretary. Conroy had cherished this ambition for some time, believing the post would afford opportunities for enrichment as well as the wielding of political power.

Even after Victoria became seriously unwell, the duchess and Conroy went on subjecting her to what she later described as “dreadful and inconceivable torments.” Although weak and debilitated Victoria would proudly recall how “I resisted, in spite of my illness and their harshness.”

Despite this setback, Conroy believed the situation was retrievable, for provided Victoria came to the throne while still a minor, he would have his “just reward” once the Duchess of Kent was named regent. When Victoria turned eighteen on 24 May 1837, “all his calculations” were negated.

Desperate that the prize looked set to be snatched from him, he and the duchess redoubled their efforts to browbeat Victoria. The princess did not have to fight the pair completely unaided, for just before her birthday her Uncle Leopold despatched to her side Baron Stockmar.

Stockmar was a German doctor who had accompanied Leopold to England when the latter had married Princess Charlotte in 1816, and who had ever since acted as his adviser. Stockmar arrived at Kensington on 25 May and found Conroy and the duchess engaged in unremitting efforts to subjugate Victoria to their will. The princess was defiant, showing herself “extremely jealous of…her rights and her future power.”

Even so, Stockmar feared that if Conroy kept up his “system of intimidation,” Victoria could hardly withstand it. Looking back on this agonizing time, Victoria herself believed she “couldn’t have borne any longer” the pressure inflicted on her, and that only the king’s timely death saved her.

The frustrated Conroy took the view that if Victoria would “not listen to reason she must be coerced,” but when William IV died, Conroy had to face the fact that he would never be given employment by the new queen. Although he continued to lurk at the Duchess of Kent’s side, after being awarded a pension and baronetcy, he found himself debarred from the Queen’s presence.

Victoria had emerged triumphant from an ordeal so traumatic she later speculated it had stunted her growth, but which she posited, “perhaps…did me good in another way, by forming my mind.”

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Queen Victoria and Her Prime Ministers by Anne Somerset is available via Knopf.