TANTRUMS & TIARAS
Wedding lace, silver dancing boots, a governess’ scrapbook… Two centuries after her birth, a new exhibition at Kensington Palace reveals the tempestuous youth of Queen Victoria. By Lydia Slater
Through dresses, dolls and diaries, a new exhibition at Kensington Palace sheds light on the little-known early years of the passionate young Queen Victoria
Draped over a mannequin in one of Kensington Palace’s grand, gilded state-rooms, the petticoat looks tiny and forlorn, like the ghost of a child. It’s not just the diminutive size and hand-span waist that give this impression, but the modesty and simplicity of the design. Made from fine cotton lawn, it’s adorned only by a narrow band of handmade lace running along the gently curved neckline. When you look closer, though, you notice the exceptional quality of the hand-stitching – ‘as if done by fairies’, says the Palace curator Claudia Williams – and the pin-tucks around the waistline, which has been let out, perhaps to accommodate the early stages of a pregnancy…
This plain undergarment once belonged to Queen Victoria – it might, indeed, have been what she wore on her wedding day, for the measurements, dates and style all align – and it is one of the star pieces in a new exhibition, opening at the Palace exactly 200 years after she was born here. Alongside other rare pieces from her wardrobe, it will be on display for the first time as part of an exploration of the private woman behind the public monarch; simultaneously, a new visitor route focusing on her childhood opens in the suite of rooms where she grew up.
The Victoria you meet within these walls is not the doublechinned matriarch who gazes with fishy-eyed disapproval from her monumental marble throne in front of Buckingham Palace. Instead of the monarch as an abstract symbol of Imperial power, you are presented with a hot-tempered yet endearingly self-aware little girl; a creative 11-year-old who, deprived of autonomy by her overprotective parent, surrounded herself with a court of 132 dolls in exquisite outfits that she had sewn herself; a wildly romantic teenager who revelled in novels, operas and dressing-up, and whose best friend of all was her spaniel, Dash. And it brings into sharp relief how tenuous initially was Victoria’s claim to the throne, both as a mere girl, and as the child of the fourth, rather than the eldest, son of the King.
A couple of months before the opening, the former Royal apartments are buzzing with teams of decorators and electricians. Facing south over the shaven lawns, with white walls and floor-to-ceiling windows, the rooms have an airy, pared-down elegance; but this is only a temporary state of affairs, for the aim is to restore them as closely as possible to the way they looked in Victoria’s youth, using Palace inventories and analysis of paint samples taken from the walls. No expense has been spared by Historic Royal Palaces to return them to their former claustrophobic formality; the Red Saloon – where Victoria held her first council meeting as monarch – has a crimson floor and salmon-pink walls offset with blue detail, while the ballroom will be adorned with red-and-gold curtains and a red carpet.
The obvious place to start the tour would seem to be in Victoria’s nursery, but there is a logistical difficulty. After
all, Kensington Palace is not only a tourist destination but an official Royal residence (one might almost describe it as a very grand commune) that currently houses Prince William and his family, Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, various dukes and duchesses, and Princess Eugenie and her husband Jack Brooksbank; while Prince Harry and his new wife have just moved out, seeking more space at Windsor… Naturally, it is not always easy to reconcile the residents’ need for privacy and security with the access requirements of a popular visitor attraction, and in this particular instance, Victoria’s earliest bedroom has been ruled out of bounds. ‘Really frustratingly, it’s the first room of Apartment 1A, which is the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s,’ says Williams, gesturing towards the party wall (this is why the windows here have been covered with a special film that allows you to look out straight over the gardens, but not to peer sideways…)
In any case, Williams points out that Victoria’s story properly begins in the dining-room, where she was born on 24 May 1819, after her father, the Duke of Kent, drove his heavily pregnant German bride home across the Continent, the better to establish their baby’s claim to the throne.
Arriving with two weeks to spare, the couple chose the dining-room as a suitable birthing chamber, for not only did it offer easy access to the kitchen’s hot water, but it stood next-door to a grand reception-room, where the members of the Privy Council were obliged to wait in order to witness the birth of a potential heir to the monarchy. (This tradition, undignified for all concerned, dated back to the ‘warming pan scandal’ of 1688, when rumours were spread that James II’S wife, Mary of Modena, had given birth to a stillborn baby that had been swapped for a live boy, smuggled in a warming pan. His legitimacy thus cast into question, James Francis Edward Stuart, known as ‘the Old Pretender’, was never to ascend the British throne. The practice was maintained right up until our Queen’s birth in 1926, when the Home Secretary was present.)
The Duke was a fond and surprisingly modern father, who insisted on remaining with his wife during her labour, and was delighted with his sturdy little daughter, despite the disadvantage of her sex. ‘He wasn’t at all worried that she was a girl, and he was really hands-on in the first few months,’ says Williams. Indeed, his affection for the baby may have led to his own downfall. Eight months after Victoria’s birth, the Duke had moved his family to Sidmouth in Devon as part of an economy drive. ‘The story is that he didn’t change out of his wet clothes, because he sat on the carpet with his “Little Mayflower” to play with her,’ says Williams. He caught a cold and was dead within a fortnight; six days later, his father, George III, also passed away, and the young Princess was propelled to third in line to the throne, behind her uncles George and William.
Alone and in a hostile environment, it is no wonder that the Duchess became overprotective of her daughter, who
she feared might be poisoned by one of her rivals in this real-life game of thrones. So she, together with her confidant John Conroy, her husband’s former equerry, designed the ‘Kensington System’ to keep the Princess safe, as well as malleable and dependent enough for them to control her after the accession. Victoria was kept away from other children and suffocatingly close to her mother, with whom she had to share a bedroom until she was 18.
Details of the System (which, as we know, signally failed in its intention to turn Victoria into a pliant cipher) are explained in the schoolroom, where you can also see examples of the ‘conduct books’, instituted by her governess and confidante Baroness Lehzen, in which Victoria reflected with often brutal honesty on her own behaviour and occasional tantrums – once describing herself as ‘very very very very horribly naughty !!!!! ’ The Princess’ creative side is also in evidence; not just in the beautiful gowns she made for her retinue of dolls, copied from ballet and opera productions, but in her skilful watercolours.
Another room will display a new acquisition – the portable travelling bed Victoria took with her on her tours of Britain, organised by her mother to show her off to her future populace. Extracts from her diaries will also be on view, for it was on one of these Royal tours, to Wales, that Victoria first began writing a journal. She continued the practice throughout her life, eventually filling 122 volumes with her often trenchant observations, alas expurgated after her death by her daughter Princess Beatrice…
Meanwhile the ballroom, which was the location for a series of lavish balls celebrating Victoria’s 16th birthday, has been decorated with waltzing figurines of her various suitors, including, of course, Prince Albert, on whom she first set eyes at Kensington Palace.
Perhaps the most poignant exhibit of all is Baroness Lehzen’s own scrapbook of mementoes, which was bought by Historic Royal Palaces at auction and is now on display for the first time. Containing locks of Victoria’s hair taken throughout her childhood, snippets of her wedding lace and bouquet, and personal letters, the album was bound by the Windsor library just a year before Lehzen was dismissed at Prince Albert’s insistence. Perhaps Lehzen already knew that her long tenure was drawing to a close? At any rate, she and Victoria were never to meet again, though they continued to correspond with great affection.
The tour ends in the Red Saloon, where Victoria’s clothof-gold coronation dalmatica will be on display. Having been woken in the small hours of 20 June 1837 to be told she was Britain’s new Queen, the sheltered teenager descended to this room, accompanied only by her faithful Dash, to give her first audience to 97 of the most important men in her kingdom – including the Prime Minister and the Duke of Wellington – and to accept their oaths of loyalty. She delivered a faultless and confident speech, then skipped gleefully out. Hanging on the wall is a copy of the famous painting of this event by Sir David Wilkie, who clothed Victoria in white (although she was in fact wearing mourning for her uncle), the better to emphasise her youthful purity and symbolic status as the nation’s fresh hope. According to Williams, Victoria was outraged by the artist’s inaccuracy, describing it as ‘one of the worst pictures I have ever seen, both as to painting & likeness’, yet she herself was acutely aware of the power of clothes, as the follow-on exhibition in the Pigott Gallery demonstrates.
Here, alongside the petticoat, are further delights, ranging from a jazzy pair of silvery-mauve satin ‘adelaides’ – laced dancing boots – that would not have looked out of place on David Bowie, and a beautifully made straw bonnet that would originally have been entirely covered in tiny flowers, to the mourning attire that the Queen adopted following Prince Albert’s death, which continues to shape the way that we see her today. ‘It is very much a political tool, a deliberate choice in her image-making,’ says Williams of the latter. ‘It becomes her uniform, her public identity as a grieving widow; and it’s one of the most potent ways in which she makes a deliberate stand for how she wants to brand herself. Victoria’s history has often been written by men, and there has been very little acknowledgment of her force of will in creating her own public image.’ As well as demonstrating her sorrow for her husband’s early demise, these widow’s weeds allowed Victoria to escape the Royal duties she found tiresome. ‘It was a useful method to control access to herself. She was still going through her despatch boxes and working on the international-relations side of things, which she was very interested in – it was like playing chess with her children, grandchildren and relatives across Europe. But she didn’t like public life as much.’ Ostentatiously mourning her spouse was, says Williams, ‘a lifelong excuse to limit her exposure; and it created one iconic image so she didn’t need to constantly redefine herself. I think it was very strategic.’
Countless words have been written on the subject of Queen Victoria – some 60 million, indeed, by the woman herself – and yet the personality of the Empress who ushered in the modern age remains frustratingly elusive. By presenting us with her own, intimate possessions, in her original surroundings, these fascinating new exhibitions allows us a glimpse of the real, capricious, stubborn, talented, contradictory woman who wore the crown. ‘Victoria: A Royal Childhood’ is a permanent visitor route opening on 24 May; the exhibition ‘Victoria: Woman and Crown’ opens on the same day and runs until 6 January 2020, both at Kensington Palace (www.hrp.org.uk).
YOU ARE PRESENTED WITH A HOTTEMPERED YET ENDEARINGLY SELF-AWARE LITTLE GIRL