A ROYAL EDUCATION
The writer of the TV drama Victoria describes how she drew racy inspiration from the young Queen’s diaries
Although I was born during the reign of Elizabeth II, growing up, it was her great-great-grandmother Victoria who had the more substantial presence. I lived in a Victorian house; rainy Sunday afternoons were spent in the Victoria and Albert Museum; I cycled past the great marble wedding cake of a memorial to her outside Buckingham Palace every morning on my way to school; and before decimalisation there was still the chance of finding her profile in my change. But even though I played regularly outside Kensington Palace by the same round pond that Victoria had gazed at as a child, it never occurred to me that the old lady glowering from busts and portraits could ever have been young. ‘Victorian’ meant dark wood, antimacassars and scarlet women being cast out into the snow.
Then I went to university and found myself reading the Queen’s diaries as part of a course on the media and the monarchy. I sat in the hush of the library, surrounded by red morocco-bound volumes (Victoria wrote 62 million words in her lifetime), and opened one at random. Here she is on 1 November 1839, just after her engagement to her cousin Albert: ‘It was piercingly cold, and I sat in my cape, which dearest Albert settled comfortably for me. He was so cold, dear Angel, being in grande tenue with tight white cazimere pantaloons (nothing under them) and high boots. We cantered home again.’ It was an epiphany, the boot-faced Queen transformed into an effervescent teenager admiring the manly attributes of her fiancé.
She was, I have to say, a girl after my own heart: opinionated, stubborn and guilt-free. There is a particularly revealing diary entry she writes on the day of her accession: ‘I spent an hour, quite alone.’ It sounds unremarkable, until you realise that up until that point, the young Victoria was never, ever alone: at night she slept on a truckle bed in her mother’s room in Kensington Palace, and by day she was in the care of her governess, Baroness Lehzen. She wasn’t even allowed to walk down the stairs unaided – nobody wanted the heir to the throne to slip and break her neck. When she received her Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, for an audience, it was the first time she had ever been by herself with a man. Another teenager might have been daunted, but she didn’t flinch. As the parent of a similarly diminutive 18-year-old (Victoria was barely five foot), I marvel at the way she took her overnight transformation from overprotected teenager to the most powerful woman in the world in her stride. Of course, I also have a shred of sympathy for the young Queen’s mother, who was effectively discarded by her daughter.
The teenage Victoria’s greatest pleasure was going to the theatre; she loved ballet and bel canto operas such as Lucia di Lammermoor. I wonder if it was while watching one of her favourite divas singing in the theatre that she formed her idea of queenship? We are used to a royal matriarchy, but in the 1830s there had been no queen regnant in living memory – it was a society run by and for the convenience of men. Covent Garden was probably the only place where she would have seen a woman centre-stage. No wonder, then, that she took a theatrical approach to her own presentation. The late, great Deirdre Murphy – the world expert on Victoria’s wardrobe – told a story about how she went to Scotland and decided to have a tartan ball. All the guests went in their ancestral tartans, except for the Queen, who wore a simple pale-pink dress. This was a woman who knew how to be noticed.
Victoria understood the power of suggestion, too. She had been christened Alexandrina and, growing up, was always called Drina, but when she came to the throne, instead of adopting a suitably regal appellation such as Elizabeth or Anne, the young Queen decided to call herself by her second name, Victoria. I am sure she picked it because she knew that she was going to win – and she did. Historians can argue about how much power she really had, but no one can dispute that she gave her name to the age. Victoria was the first teenager to turn herself into a global brand. ‘Victoria: A Royal Childhood’, a new tour, and ‘Victoria: Woman and Crown’, a new exhibition, both celebrating the bicentary of Queen Victoria’s birth, open at Kensington Palace (www. hrp.org.uk)on 24 May.