Her Little Majesty Read online

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  TO MY READERS, WITH THANKS

  Chapter 1

  THE KING, SEATED IN HIS elegant painted phaeton, the reins of his fine team of matched horses held in his pudgy, beringed hands, looked out over the gardens of Windsor Great Park and was content. The sun was sparkling on the blue waters of the lake, the mingled scents of roses and honeysuckle and wisteria filled the air and in the distance, the royal band was playing a lilting operatic air. All was in readiness for the afternoon’s entertainment: a royal fishing party, with many of the king’s relatives, his courtiers, his circle of friends and admirers in attendance.

  The year was 1826, and George IV, in his sixty-fourth year, was rapidly aging. He was weak in the knees, his eyesight was going, he had to take laudanum—which made him bilious—to ease the severe pain of a bladder complaint, and a lifetime of gorging himself on rich French food and potent liqueurs had made him so hugely fat that it took his dressers hours to stuff him into his corsets and sew him into his plum-colored silk jackets and enormously wide white pantaloons. His sallow, bulging cheeks had to be smeared with rouge, his full lips artificially reddened and his sparse gray hair covered with a dark wig to disguise his senescence, and even then court gossips whispered to one another about his obvious decline. Before long, they said, he would suffer the fate of his father, George III, who had taken complete leave of his senses and died a feeble lunatic, his mind ravaged by delusions.

  That he might indeed go mad was a thought never far from King George’s mind, even on the sunniest of days devoted, as most of his days were, to pleasure, and any reminder of his increasing incapacity, either mental or physical, filled him with dread. For he would one day die, and then his throne, his wealth, all that he had spent a lifetime accumulating would pass, not to a child of his own body, but to his greedy, ungrateful, unworthy brothers. To Frederick, his oldest brother, handsome but stupid, and quite possibly, since Frederick had no children, to his second brother William, farcical and grotesque, the family joke and disgrace, and then, as William was elderly and childless, to the king’s little niece Alexandrina Victoria.

  King George had had his eye on his young niece for some time. She was the only child of his late brother Edward, Duke of Kent—an odious man, the king thought, debt-ridden, brutish, a boor in society, a bully in the family. Edward was no loss, but his child, now seven years old and living with her mother in a set of shabby apartments in Kensington Palace, was worthy of her royal uncle’s attention. For one thing, she was unique: the only living legitimate grandchild of George III. (There had been others, most notably King George IV’s daughter Charlotte, but they had all died young.) If the king and his siblings continued to be childless, Alexandrina Victoria would one day be queen. For another thing, George’s advisers and spies assured him that she was a sturdy, healthy child, with good strong Hanoverian blood, and that the vicious rumors about her, rumors that spoke of ill health, weak limbs and diseased feet, were unfounded. Then there was the possibility that the king might outlive both Frederick and William and that the crown might pass directly to the young princess on George’s death. In that event, the king thought, he would like to have the chance to mold his successor himself.

  He had been thinking of bringing Alexandrina Victoria to live with him, so that he could begin to shape her tastes and design her education. His Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, had advised against it, and this was causing the king to think twice about his plan. But he had decided to invite the princess, along with her mother and half sister, to visit Windsor so that he could see her for himself. She would attend the fishing party this afternoon, in fact. Entertaining her would be one of the many pleasures he anticipated, to distract him from the gathering pains in his body and the annoying paperwork that had been accumulating on his desk for many months. The nuisance of governing, he decided, he would leave to Wellington; he had enough to worry about without letting the everyday work of ruling burden him too.

  As the king drove his phaeton along the path by the lake, passing the Chinese Pagoda and the tents erected on the grass for the buffet, a pony cart was approaching from the opposite direction, a small vehicle with rock-hard seats and no springs, its cramped passengers jostling uncomfortably against each other with every bump and dip in the uneven surface of the road. In the cart were the princess, a plump, ringleted, rather plain child who looked to be no more than five or six years old, her blooming, pink-cheeked half sister Feodore, who was eighteen and bewitchingly pretty, the princess’s middle-aged governess Louise Lehzen, and the Duchess of Kent, mother of both girls and by far the most prepossessing figure of the four.

  The Kent party had been invited to stay at Cumberland Lodge by the king himself, and this mark of his favor was as welcome to the duchess as it was unexpected. Until very recently, George IV had been no friend to the duchess or her children; indeed he had gone out of his way to demonstrate not only coldness but outright hostility to the family of his late brother Edward. When the young princess was born the king, who was not on speaking terms with her father, behaved ungraciously at her christening and refused to allow her to be named “Georgiana” after him, or Charlotte, after his daughter. And when, eight months later, Edward of Kent was on his deathbed, his royal brother did not come to see him but only sent a curt message of “anxious solicitude.” King George had never shown the slightest concern for the financial well-being of his widowed sister-in-law, even though she had been in a near-desperate state and only the timely generosity of her brother Leopold had saved her from ruin and her children from want. In fact, until very recently King George had let it be known that he wanted the Kents to leave England and go to live in obscurity among the duchess’s German relatives.

  But in the last few months there had been signs that he was having a change of heart. He had written to the duchess about her older daughter Feodore—her child by her first husband, Prince Emich Charles of Leiningen—and had made frequent private inquiries about Alexandrina Victoria. Now he was entertaining the family at Windsor, inviting them to dine with him and his many other guests at the royal lodge, where the food was ambrosial and the plate solid gold. Clearly things were changing, and the change was making the duchess nervous.

  As she reached her fortieth year Victoire, Duchess of Kent was still an uncommonly handsome woman, with chestnut hair, wide brown eyes and a fine high forehead. She carried her head proudly on a long graceful neck, and she dressed to emphasize her importance as mother to the child third in line for the throne, in deep dark velvets, ropes of pearls and very large, wide-brimmed hats with sweeping ostrich plumes. No one who saw the duchess ever forgot her, though cruel observers said behind her back that her conversation was insipid and her intellect mediocre. She knew that nearly all her royal in-laws were contemptuous of her, with the exception of her sister-in-law Adelaide, William’s wife, who was a font of genuine kindness and Christian forbearance, and her sister-in-law Sophia, King George’s youngest sister, who was unstable but friendly and who occupied apartments adjoining those of the Kents in Kensington Palace.

  The duchess was in no doubt that the king’s invitation to join his pleasure party was only incidentally extended to her. No, it was Feodore and Alexandrina Victoria he wanted to see. But why, exactly? Could he possibly have his eye on Feodore as a prospective bride? A fresh young girl who could give him an heir? And could he be planning to take the little Alexandrina Victoria away from her, in order to counteract the duchess’s influence over her and ensure that, if the young princess should come to the throne while still a child, someone other than her mother would be appointed as regent for her until she reached her majority?

  The child herself, caught up in admiring the beauty of the gardens and the splendor of her surroundings, took scant heed of her mother’s misgivings. There was so much to marvel at: the gazelles and goats kept in their special enclosure, the gorgeous rooms at Cumberland Lodge, each with its own character, decorated with carved, polished furniture and sofas upholstered in rich brocade and deep-piled carpets, the cream cakes served on fragile painted china, so thin it was almost translucent, the king’s grooms in their scarlet and blue liveries, the king himself, like a huge, waddling doll, painted and gilded, fragrant with scent and oily with unguents, who talked to her in a friendly way and gave her a diamond pin with his own portrait in miniature.

  Alexandrina Victoria decided that she liked her “Uncle King,” as her mother said she must call him. Not as well as she liked her Uncle Leopold, who was like a father to her, or her Uncle Frederick, the tall, shy old soldier who had always been kind to her and gave her lovely presents, including the donkey she loved to ride with Feodore walking along on one side and her nurse on the other. But far better than her Uncle Sussex, the towering giant of whom she was terrified, or Uncle Cumberland, whose horribly scarred face and malevolent expression sent her running to Lehzen.

  The little girl did not yet understand why this visit to Windsor to see Uncle King was so important, why her mother was more than usually ill at ease, or why Lehzen, ever a
nxious, was tight-faced with strain. She did not know her own significance in the succession. She only knew that, for a few days at least, she was being allowed a glimpse of a wider, more comfortable, and happier life than the one she led at Kensington Palace, where all seemed cramped, dingy, and miserable, and where she was often very lonely and sad.

  The king in his phaeton came up to the pony cart and both vehicles stopped. The king leaned down and addressed the Kents.

  “Pop her in,” he said, meaning Alexandrina Victoria. The duchess hesitated, evidently fearful, then allowed her daughter to be handed across into the phaeton. The king’s sister Mary, who was sitting beside him, grabbed the child around the waist and put her on the seat. The king flicked his whip, and the phaeton moved on.

  Many years later, Alexandrina Victoria recalled that afternoon as one of the happiest of her childhood. The ride with His Majesty, the music floating out over the lake, the crowd of beautifully dressed people gathered at the Fishing Temple to indulge in the idle sport of fishing for carp, the king’s constant attention to herself and her pretty sister, all were to stand out in her memory as part of an enchanted idyll. She was to remember in particular King George’s grave and regal charm, the way he won her over by bending down and addressing her as if she were quite grown up, asking her what tune she would like the band to play. For weeks afterward she enjoyed the happy afterglow of her time with her Uncle King, never suspecting that he, soon bored with the elaborate fishing party, and more than a little disappointed with his homely young niece (who reminded him disturbingly of her hated father), had soon stopped thinking of her at all and let his thoughts drift to his indigestion, his annoyance with his valets, and a mare he had running at Newmarket.

  IT MUST HAVE SEEMED TO Drina that she had always lived in the sprawling old brick mansion known as Kensington Palace. She had no memory of any other house, having been far too young to remember the seaside cottage at Sidmouth where the family had been living in 1820 when her father died. Kensington was her home, its overgrown formal gardens, long straight paths and clipped hedges her playground, its tall old trees and time-blackened statues, cracked and chipped, as familiar to her as the face of her governess Lehzen.

  With Mrs. Brock, her nurse, or one of the palace footmen trailing behind her, she wandered along the endless dim corridors and huge, echoing rooms of the dilapidated house, rooms largely bare of furnishings as the palace had not been lived in by a reigning monarch for well over a century and had fallen into neglect. Everywhere the princess looked she saw evidence of decay—in the stagnant, silent fountains that no longer ran, the frayed, faded hangings that clung to the walls, the broken locks on doors hanging crooked on their hinges. The floors creaked, there were water stains on the once pristine plasterwork ceilings, and even the portraits on the walls, portraits of men and women in the quaint stiff gowns, ruffs and square hats of another era, were indistinct and dark with age.

  No one told Drina that she was a poor relation of the royal family, living on sufferance in a tumbledown house, but as she grew older she must have come to understand that this was so. Years later she recalled how, as a child, she never had a room to herself, nor a sofa nor an easy chair, how all the carpets in the rooms she and her mother lived in were threadbare, and how her mother was forever preoccupied with expenses and bankers and debt. Having seen Windsor Castle when she was seven, and having spent time at her Uncle Leopold’s comfortable house Claremont, she had had a taste of luxury, and knew that Kensington represented its opposite.

  And she must have realized too, as she grew older, that the constant tension and conflict in the household went along with the want of money and comfort, that her mother’s highly variable moods, her irascible temper, resulted in part from her financial uncertainties, and the expedients she was forced to employ to relieve them.

  The duchess was deeply in debt, and each year her debts mounted higher. Her husband’s estate was insolvent, and although, by 1826, she had a parliamentary grant of £6,000 a year to live on, plus an additional £3,000 from her brother Leopold, these sums were barely sufficient to pay the interest on her debts, much less provide the furnishings of an aristocratic household and pay for its upkeep. The duchess felt deprived—and aggrieved. Other members of the royal family received much larger parliamentary grants than she did; her brother Leopold, for example, a widower who had at one time been married to King George IV’s daughter Charlotte, was grandly recompensed at £50,000 a year.

  Economy was essential, but the duchess could not cut back on her expenses. She had to keep up appearances, to pay servants and tutors for the princess and dressmakers and milliners and purveyors of food and drink. Meanwhile the bankers kept demanding more, and the duchess had no means of raising more cash to pay them. She possessed only one thing of real value: young Drina’s birthright. One day, before long, Drina would be queen, with riches unimaginable, and she, the duchess, would be regent. Then all debts could be paid and there would be such an abundance of wealth left over that she could not possibly spend it, not if she tried for a lifetime. On the strength of these hopeful expectations, the duchess applied for more loans.

  But the bankers insisted that she supply more substantive collateral than her daughter’s expectations. There had to be land, houses, concrete valuables to back the debts. Because of this the duchess was drawn into an unholy bargain, one she lived to regret in time.

  In charge of her finances, as controller of her household, was an ambitious, good-looking, extremely hardworking Anglo-Irishman named John Conroy. Conroy had entered the military as a young man in the early years of the century, and had soon shown outstanding ability with horses and money—able to judge the one and attract, juggle and manipulate the other. These talents brought him to the attention of the Duke of Kent, who was perpetually short of money and who needed a steady supply of horses for his large stable. The duke made Conroy his equerry and came to rely on him as a friend. On his deathbed the duke entrusted the well-being of his wife and baby daughter to his equerry—a fact of which Conroy reminded the duchess again and again.

  Captain Conroy offered to put up his own property and possessions to guarantee the duchess’s loans, and was more than willing to help her secure them. For Conroy intended to share in the wealth that would one day be showered on Princess Drina and her mother, and the duchess acquiesced in his ambitions. A bargain was sealed between them, that if Conroy would continue to pledge his collateral, and to handle the duchess’s finances in such a way as to keep her creditors at bay, she would repay him once her daughter ascended the throne.

  Their bargain may or may not have had an erotic dimension—Wellington thought it had—but it locked the duchess and her financial partner in a stormy intimacy marked by frequent quarrels. Both sought power and wealth through influence over the princess; each sought to gain the upper hand over the other. Factions formed, with Conroy winning to his side, among others, the duchess’s son and oldest child, Charles, who had inherited the Principality of Leiningen but came to live in England in 1824. The disputes and disagreements swirled around Drina, clouding her childhood and making her hate Conroy more and more as it became apparent that he was winning the battle for control. The duchess, whether ultimately convinced of the superior wisdom of her financial partner or simply beaten down by his alternate bullying and cajoling, gave way. By the time Drina was eight or nine years old Conroy was firmly in command, making all decisions, both financial and personal, for the household.

  Conroy ruled with an iron hand. Though his orders were delivered by the duchess, who was nominally in charge, in actuality he dictated all—or so Charles of Leiningen told a confidant much later, looking back over the dark years at Kensington Palace. Conroy had a talent beyond those of judging horseflesh and handling money: he knew how to handle and manipulate women, and attain a degree of control over susceptible ones, a control that had something sordid about it. Indeed Conroy was a shady character, not merely an opportunist but a fraud, an exploiter, a weaver of fictions. The Duchess of Kent believed his fictions, as did the eccentric, mentally wayward Princess Sophia, who was also drawn in by him and supplied him with information about her brother the king and the other royals. Sophia turned her ample resources over to Conroy to manage, and even put him in her will. In the year that the Kents visited Windsor, 1826, Conroy came into possession of an estate worth £18,000—a gift from Princess Sophia.