Free We Two: Victoria and Albert by Gillian Gill Page B

OF THE DUKE OF KENT WERE VERY difficult for his widow, but his child, Victoria, was happy. Cold, dirty, drafty vermin-ridden Kensington Palace was the only home she had ever known, and, since she was rarely taken to her uncle’s court, she had no sense of being a royal poor relation. The ups and downs in her dynastic status affected her mainly because they made her mother unhappy and Sir John Conroy cross.
    Victoria as a little girl did not know that she was likely to inherit the throne of her uncle George IV. She was always addressed as “Princess” and certainly understood that she was part of the royal family of England, but the possibility that she might one day be queen was carefully kept from her. This unawareness shaped her sense of self in crucial ways. Unlike George IV, who became Prince of Wales virtually at birth, Queen Victoria did not move out of the cradle convinced of her own supreme importance. As princesses go, she was not especially vain, self-absorbed, and inconsiderate.
    At first baby Victoria was nestled in a cocoon of love and attention spun by her mother, her nurse Mrs. Brock, her mother’s lady-in-waiting Baroness Späth, and old Louise Louis at Claremont. For the most part, the child was allowed very little contact with her father’s kin. However, two of her uncles, the dukes of York and Sussex, used Kensington Palace as their business address, so they did manage to see something of their Kent niece.
    Uncle Sussex, Queen Victoria recalled in some reminiscences she set down in 1872, was a very tall man with a loud voice, a weird toupee, and a room full of clocks. Though he was kind, she found him rather alarming. Uncle York was shy, and he won her affection by buying her a donkey andtreating her once to a Punch-and-Judy show. When Uncle York died in early 1827, she was very sad.
    Victoria was often naughty and temperamental, but so frank and clear-sighted that she disarmed her elders. After one stormy episode, the Duchess of Kent admonished her daughter, “When you are naughty, you make me and yourself very unhappy.” “No, Mama,” retorted the feisty tot, “not me, not myself, but you.”
    As Victoria moved out of infancy, her constant companion and best friend was her half sister, Princess Feodora von Leiningen. Twelve years separated the two, but they still had much in common. Like Victoria, Feodora had lost her father when she was very young. Her early years in the small German town of Amorbach had few luxuries, but she and her older brother Charles were the center of their mother’s life. Then the widowed Victoire von Leiningen married the Duke of Kent and became pregnant with her third child. When the Duke of Kent decided his baby must be born in England, Feodora was separated from her brother and her home, carried off to a new country, and immersed in a new language. As a teenager, she was forced to adapt as best she could to the bewildering reversals of fortune her mother endured.
    Beautiful and talented but poor and unimportant, the big sister watched as her mother, her old friend Baroness Späth, even her governess Lehzen, all became engrossed in the little sister. It is a tribute to both sisters that they became friends and not enemies. Feodora must have often felt envy and resentment, but she had a generous nature as well as a lovely face. She became her little sister’s ally and best friend as well as her shadow. Though the two were parted young and were rarely together as adults, their friendship was never broken. One of Victoria’s first acts as queen was to send much needed money to her sister in Germany. Over the years, Victoria amply repaid the love, protection, and sympathy that Feodora gave her when she was little.
    From Feodora, in a sense, Victoria inherited the most important person in her life as a child: her governess, Fräulein Louise Lehzen. When Victoria turned five, her grumpy but devoted nurse, Mrs. Brock, was dismissed, and Lehzen (as she was always known in