Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
DASH, THE DOG WHO BROKE HER HEART
The moment she returns to Buckingham Palace from her coronation, the teenage Queen Victoria shows how much of a little girl she still is by rushing to the thing she loves most in the world – her dog Dash. Still in her ceremonial robes, she sweeps him off in her arms for his bath.
This is true to life. Dash, a little tri-colour Cavalier King Charles spaniel, was originally given to Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent, as a present but Victoria quickly commandeered him and he became her dog. She dressed him in a scarlet jacket and gave him gingerbread and rubber balls as presents at Christmas.
When she became queen, she worried about how he would settle in at Buckingham Palace but soon recorded that he ‘seemed quite happy in the garden’. Later she owned other dogs – Waldman the dachshund, Islay the terrier, Sharp the collie and Albert’s beloved greyhound Eos – but Dash remained her first and best-loved. She was heartbroken when he died.
On his grave at Windsor she left her tribute to the dog: ‘His attachment was without selfishness, his playfulness without malice, his fidelity without deceit. Reader, if you would live beloved and die regretted, profit by the example of Dash.’
As well as dogs, Victoria loved horses too, and riding was one of her favourite activities when young.
She showed great natural skill and was ‘exhilarated with pleasure’ when out riding at breakneck speed in her velvet, Lincoln-green riding habit and top hat with veil draped round the brim.
She thought nothing of going for a 20-mile gallop around the Great Park at Windsor or riding from Buckingham Palace out to places like Harrow and back, accompanied by an entourage of 30 courtiers, some of them struggling to keep up with her. Scarlet- coated outriders rode ahead to clear their way.
Her riding instructor was James Fozard, based in the Royal Mews, for whom she invented the official title of ‘Her Majesty’s Stirrupholder’. How long he stayed in the post is unclear but once she became pregnant with her first child in 1840, she eased up and the excited accounts of riding disappear from her journal.