Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum. Kathryn Hughes
around déshabillée to prove the point. She spoiled Victoria’s nineteenth birthday that May by slyly presenting her with a copy of King Lear, and then sulked all the way through the anniversary ball. She believed John Conroy when he told her there was a plot to get rid of her, but couldn’t understand why Victoria continued to be so hostile to the man who was dragging the royal household through the courts. There had never, concurred Lord M, been a more foolish woman, not to mention a more untruthful one. Mind you, he added with a knowing look, the Duchess was fifty-two, which everyone knew was an ‘awkward’ age for a woman.
Nineteen was turning out to be tricky too. Victoria had danced through her first weeks on the throne as if this were the ‘happy ever after’ stage of a fairy tale, the proper reward for all those years as a Princess in the Tower (and there actually had been a tower in the grimy suite at Kensington Palace into which the Kent household had been crammed). Twenty-seven years earlier, in 1812, Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm had published their Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales). In these wildly popular stories, a copy of which was lodged on the bookshelves of the Kensington nursery, wicked stepmothers (actually mothers in the original version, before the Grimms felt obliged to soften the sting) were routinely vanquished, old crones turned out to be fairy godmothers, and missing fathers were restored to hearth and home.
Which is pretty much what had happened to Victoria during those magical first months on the throne: her estranged mother had been banished to a suite of rooms on another floor of the palace, Sir John Conroy and Lady Flora had been all but exiled from her court, and Lehzen had been given the keys to the household and installed in the next-door bedroom, as befitted her position as Victoria’s ‘dearest Mother’. Victoria herself had danced and dined and rode from dawn to dusk on her favourite horse with her adoring new father, Lord Melbourne, exactly as lucky young people in fairy tales are supposed to. Charles Greville, who combined a forensic eye with real psychological acuity, gave the best account of Victoria’s launch into pleasure:
Everything is new and delightful to her. She is surrounded with the most exciting and interesting enjoyments; her occupations, her pleasures, her business, her Court, all present an increasing round of gratifications … She has great animal spirits, and enters into the magnificent novelties of her position with the zest and curiosity of a child.
But now, a year into Victoria’s reign, it was becoming apparent that her life was not in fact culled from the pages of a fairy tale collected from the timeless forests of Westphalia. It was, rather, part of the grinding bureaucratic machine that was modern monarchical government. The despatch boxes arrived relentlessly several times a day, and however much Lord Melbourne put a hopeful gloss on things, the news did not always sound good. That May a violent uprising of farm labourers in Kent had gone further than anyone predicted. Canada was restless, split between the upper Protestant and lower Catholic territories. In Afghanistan the lives of British soldiers were at risk. Closer to home, Europe was threatening to break apart, despite everyone’s best intentions to keep faith with the geopolitical arrangements that had been hammered out at the Congress of Vienna twenty-three years earlier. Belgium was fighting to withstand the territorial bullying of the thuggish Netherlands, and Uncle Leopold was dropping crude hints that his niece should intervene to help the smaller country, over which he had ruled for the past seven years. Finally, and most worrying of all, Lord Melbourne was barely clinging to power. There had been crises in the autumn of 1837 and again in February 1838. At any moment, Lord M, Lord Palmerston, Lord John Russell and all the other kind Whig statesmen who took such a fatherly interest in Victoria might be out. And then she would be left alone. Even worse, she would be left alone with the detestable Tory Sir Robert Peel, that ‘cold odd man’ who, sniggered the Whig toffs, had all the camp charm of a provincial dancing master.
Even the delightful domestic routine that had buoyed Victoria through that first giddy year of being her own mistress was beginning to pall. The most ‘magnificent novelties’ could start to drag when repeated for the hundredth time. She had taken to snapping at everyone – not just Mama but even her ‘Angel’ Lehzen, ‘who I’m often cross to, when I’m ill-tempered, as I fear I often am!’ She was terrified that a maid she had recently dismissed would start spreading stories about just how awful her temper had become. With Lord Melbourne, too, Victoria was apt to sulk whenever he showed an inclination to spend the occasional evening away from her. But then, when he came scuttling back the next morning, she dropped hurtful hints about how boring it was to spend so much time with old people.
Victoria registered her unhappiness as she always did, through her body. Strictly speaking, she had two: public and personal. At the coronation in Westminster Abbey on 28 June 1838, it was Victoria’s public ceremonial body that had been symbolically rebirthed when the Archbishop of Canterbury consecrated her to her new life as monarch. The grandeur of this transformed existence had been captured by George Hayter, whose coronation portrait shows the young Queen sitting high on her massive gold throne (see plate 5). On her head rests the Imperial State Crown, while her right hand gravely grasps the stem of the Ceremonial Sceptre. The crosses on top of the sceptre and crown symbolise the sovereign’s temporal power under the Cross, while her feet rest on a bolster of English roses and lions. Victoria’s visible flesh, meanwhile, appears to have hardened into marble, so that she has, in effect, been turned into a metaphor made out of stone.
Every British monarch from the Middle Ages onwards had been obliged to negotiate the discrepancies between their public bodies and their ordinary mortal selves. Mostly they did this by employing portrait painters who slimmed down paunches, straightened out noses and festooned frail flesh with a lavish splatter of jewels and military decorations. When obliged to appear in person before the general public, they relied on extravagant artifice: at his coronation in 1821 the portly, middle-aged George IV (formerly Prince Regent) had been pulled in with corsets, puffed out with padding and wrenched into a shape that might just pass for a plausible king. In Victoria’s case, the gap between these two modes of existence was even more abrupt: set against the pomp and circumstance of the monarch’s public body, her biological femaleness and extreme youth felt like a glaring mistake. For every approving spectator who gushed that ‘the smallness of her person is quite forgotten in the majesty and gracefulness of her demeanour’ there was another who believed that the person who should really be occupying the throne was Victoria’s sixty-seven-year-old uncle Ernest, Duke of Cumberland and King of Hanover, a man who cut a handsome dash in full regalia (see plate 4). Indeed, it had been so as to see off the unpopular Ernest’s claims to be the most convincing – that is, male – heir to William IV that John Conroy had insisted on bustling Princess Victoria around the country in the years prior to the old King’s death. In a series of staged public appearances at factories, charity schools and regattas – ‘progresses’, an annoyed King William called them – the Princess had been presented to her future subjects as their next monarch, this insistence on her constitutional status as the first in line to the throne intended to blot out any lingering anxiety about that small, female body.
There was a further complication. It wasn’t simply that Victoria didn’t look like a Prince, it was that she didn’t look much like a Princess either. Her long torso and stumpy legs were a world away from the tall, slender, high-waisted aristocratic female ideal modelled by the 130 costume dolls that had been her constant companions during her later childhood and adolescence. Having reached menarche early, at twelve and a half, she had stopped growing before she was quite five feet tall. What’s more, her menstrual cramps and exhaustion, coded in her journal as ‘billiousness’ and ‘weakness’, had woven their way into her difficult life at Kensington, so that low, dragging belly pain became the recurring accompaniment to all the tension, all the shouting and the tears. And like any young woman who has been schooled not to express her emotions (Lehzen had always been very strict about that), Victoria had fallen into the habit of managing her feelings through food. Over the past few years she had swung between being fat and slim, according to whether she felt she was winning or losing the war against Mama, Conroy and Lady Flora.
All of which explains why, at the time of her succession, Victoria was looking her slenderest best, with a handspan waist of just twenty-two inches. No wonder that returning from his first meeting