Shooting Victoria Read online

  Oxford found his mother Hannah at home and lost no time showing her his pistols. While she knew nothing of his locked box of secrets, she did know of his childhood obsession with gunpowder and weaponry, remembering his fascination with toy cannons and remembering the arm injury he suffered as a boy, nearly blowing himself up while playing with fire and gunpowder, burning his eyebrows off and keeping him up for two nights screaming with pain. She knew, as well, that her child ached to be somebody. He had often spun out for her grandiose plans to rise in the world. A favorite dream of his came straight out of Captain Marryat’s then-popular novels—the very sort of fiction Oxford loved to read. He would join the Royal Navy and move quickly up the ranks. “He said he would allow me half his pay,” Hannah would later say in court, “and how proud I should be of my son when I saw his name in the papers, Admiral Sir Edward Oxford!” All he needed to realize that ambition, he told her, would be a midshipman’s place, which he could obtain for £50. He had begged her to return to her family in Birmingham to get it for him. On this day, he proudly showed her his pistols as a sign of his higher stature and a promise of his coming renown.

  She was not pleased. Her son had just given up his job as a barman at the Hog in the Pound, a popular public house on Oxford Street across the river. Hannah had been exhorting him to find a job since he moved in, but he made it clear to her that he was in no hurry to do that: “He said nothing was stirring, and he should rather wait till a good place offered itself than answer advertisements.” And now he had wasted a huge portion of his £5—a full quarter’s pay for a barman—on these pistols. “How could you think of laying your money out in such folly!” she cried out, exasperated. Oxford, humiliated, lied to her. He had not paid for these new pistols, he explained; he was simply holding them for a friend.

  And then, as often happened, the shame and inadequacy he felt turned to a blind rage, the sort of rage that had previously manifested itself in his breaking anything that he could grab hold of. His mother simply could not understand how important these pistols were to him, could not understand that he was not just a barman and was not destined to live a barman’s life. He was not a servant; he was Oxonian, Captain of Young England!

  He raised one of the pistols and pointed it, cocked, at his mother’s face.

  That same day—4 May 1840—a diminutive young woman sat quietly a mile and a half across the River Thames in her home in the very greenest part of London, while an artist sketched her face. Queen Victoria was only two years older than Edward Oxford, a few weeks away from her twenty-first birthday. For the last three years she had sat on the British throne. The artist was her current favorite, George Hayter, who, as her official portrait painter, had depicted many of the important events in her short life. He had, at the request of her Uncle Leopold, painted her when she was a thirteen-year-old princess and heir apparent. He had painted her with her court in full pomp at her 1838 coronation. And, most famously, he had in 1838 depicted her as every inch a queen, yet very much an innocent, in her state portrait: she sits, enthroned and crowned, in a flowing, virginal white dress bedecked with the heavy robes of state, gazing to the side and upwards beyond her scepter with a hint of a wide-eyed surprise interrupting her placidity, as if she contemplated the many coming years of her reign with wonder and confidence.

  And now, Hayter was sketching her for another commemoration of an important event in her reign—indeed, a turning point: Victoria’s marriage to Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, which had taken place just three months before. Hayter was this time intent on capturing a very different Victoria than he had in the state portrait. In the finished wedding portrait, Victoria and Albert stand together, surrounded by and yet apart from the crowd. Victoria is dressed in white satin, a circlet of white flowers in her hair; Albert is dressed in the brilliant red uniform of a British field marshal. To Victoria’s other side stands her beaming uncle, the Duke of Sussex, who gave her away, and to Albert’s side stands Victoria’s mother (and his aunt), the Duchess of Kent, staring intently forward. The rest of the guests form a semicircle around the wedding party, the men generally in red uniforms and the women in white, imperfectly reflecting the colors of the royal couple: Victoria and Albert literally shine in the spotlight created by the rays of the sun as they pour through an upper window of the Chapel Royal of the Palace of St. James. Victoria’s expression is very much as it was in the state portrait, gazing upward in surprise and wonder. But the object of her gaze has changed completely: instead of contemplating an unseen and solitary future, it is Albert alone who is the object of her attention.

  Victoria was in love with Albert, deeply and wholly, and she had no doubt whatsoever that the marriage to him was good, and right, not only for herself but for the nation as well, elevating her and it into something greater. The day after her wedding, she wrote from Windsor to her (and Albert’s) Uncle Leopold, to proclaim as much:

  I write to you from here the happiest, happiest Being that ever existed. Really, I do not think it possible for any one in the world to be happier, or as happy as I am. He is an Angel, and his kindness and affection for me is really touching. To look in those dear eyes, and that dear sunny face, is enough to make me adore him. What I can do to make him happy will be my greatest delight. Independent of my great personal happiness, the reception we both met with yesterday was the most gratifying and enthusiastic I ever experienced; there was no end of the crowds in London, and all along the road.

  Her new attachment, however, did not come without its confusions and potential problems. Albert was her husband and, by the domestic ideals of the time, her master, but she was Queen, with a powerful and jealous sense of her royal prerogative, as well as the firm resolve of her royal uncles and her grandfather, George III. Albert, too, could be inflexible about principle. How much authority would he have over her? What authority would he bring to the monarchy? Could he rule the household while she ruled the nation? These were questions that the young couple was to wrestle with, at times with great tension, over the coming years.

  On this day, Albert was away, at the Royal Dockyard at Woolwich, reviewing the Royal Artillery, leaving Victoria alone with Hayter. The subject for which she was posing offered the perfect occasion to consider how much things had changed over the past three years—and how much she had changed since she became Queen. Now, Albert was everything to her; but on the day she came to the throne, Victoria finally knew what it was to be alone, and she relished the feeling. Victoria’s childhood had been an unceasing struggle for personal autonomy and, with the death of her uncle King William IV, she had finally achieved it. Her childhood experience had instilled within her a hardened resolve that she would keep the monarchy entirely to herself.

  She had been locked in that bitter battle for autonomy since before she could remember, and it had rendered her privileged childhood utterly miserable. Her father, the Duke of Kent, had died when she was eight months old, leaving her in a direct line of succession to the throne. If her three uncles George IV, Frederick Duke of York, and William Duke of Clarence did not bear any legitimate children, she would become Queen. Victoria’s widowed mother, Victoria of Saxe-Coburg, Duchess of Kent, inherited her husband’s debts along with the general disdain her royal brothers-in-law had shown him: she was a foreigner and an outsider, and very much wished to return to Saxe-Coburg. Her brother Leopold persuaded her not to for her daughter’s sake. She stayed, and found much needed support in the man the Duke of Kent called “my very intelligent factotum,” Sir John Conroy, late captain of His Majesty’s army. Before long, Conroy, wildly ambitious, deeply unscrupulous, and with the tongue of an Iago, had rendered the Duchess wholly dependent upon him. As time passed, the likelihood of Victoria’s becoming queen grew. George IV would never have another child with his estranged wife, Caroline, and was unlikely to remarry. The Duke of York resolved to remain unmarried and, in any case, died in 1828. The Duke of Clarence—who had ten illegitimate children—rested all of his hopes of an heir in his wife,
Adelaide, who seemed unable to produce anything but stillbirths or sickly infants who soon died. George and William were by now old men, quite likely to die before Victoria had attained her majority. To Conroy, then, a glittering political prospect became more and more likely: he could rule Britain through the Duchess, who would almost certainly become Regent. That prospect became even more likely when, soon after the Duke of Clarence became King William IV in 1830, the Duchess of Kent was legally designated Regent in the event that William died before Victoria’s majority.

  In order to realize his dream of power, however, Conroy needed to monitor, manipulate, and control Victoria, rendering her wholly dependent upon her mother. He created, to this end, a carefully-thought-out plan for the sensitive child’s upbringing that was nothing less than an oppressive internment. The Duchess would have complete control over Victoria’s acquaintances, her finances, her whereabouts, and her course of study. Moreover, Victoria would be presented to the public as a complete contrast to her royal uncles: as young and virtuous in comparison to them, who with their mistresses and their excesses epitomized aging vice, the moral darkness of an earlier age. The contrast was a political as well as a moral one: Victoria’s uncles were, for the most part, uncompromising Tories, while the Duchess sympathized with the Whigs. Conroy devised to present Victoria as the embodiment of a new hope and a new age.

  This system under which Victoria suffered became known as the “Kensington System.” Conroy and the Duchess hand-picked Victoria’s teachers, companions, and observers. Their choice for Victoria’s governess turned out to be a grievous disappointment to them: the Hanoverian Baroness Lehzen. As Victoria grew, she and Lehzen formed an emotional bond that triumphed over Conroy’s colder manipulation: Lehzen became totally devoted to the child—at times, it seemed to Victoria, her sole ally in her struggle against her mother and Conroy. For companions, Conroy imposed his two daughters upon her; Victoria despised them. A later companion forced upon her was the Duchess’s Lady-in-Waiting, Lady Flora Hastings, thirteen years older than the Princess. Victoria was never allowed to be alone; she slept in a small bed in her mother’s room, and could not walk down a flight of stairs without taking the hand of another. Victoria would have no money of her own; when, as Victoria approached her eighteenth birthday, the King attempted to put £10,000 a year “entirely in her power and disposal,” the Duchess responded with rage, on Conroy’s advice drafting a letter rejecting the offer, which she forced Victoria to copy and send to the king. (“Victoria has not written that letter,” William realized.)

  When Victoria was thirteen, Conroy began to build Victoria’s image—in part, at the expense of her uncles’—in a new way: he sent her out on a number of “journeys” throughout the country. Conroy proposed to have her interact with the British public on all levels. Victoria visited towns and traveled throughout England, with all the trappings of royal visits—crowds of well-wishers, welcoming bands, floral decorations, addresses to and from the Princess and the Duchess—and in one case a royal salute by cannon, a practice King William quickly put a stop to. Conroy hoped to provide a connection between Victoria and the people—a connection between public and monarch that had largely been severed over the past few decades, with the madness and isolation of George III and the notorious disdain to the public shown by George IV as Regent and as King. Her predecessor, William IV, began his reign by resisting this seclusion, habitually strolling through the streets of London and mingling with passersby. The tension between monarch and public over the passing of the Reform Bill of 1832, however, encouraged William, too, to isolate himself from the public for the rest of his reign.

  These journeys taught Victoria much more about her country and its people than she could learn in the isolation of her Kensington Palace classroom. She was able to experience first-hand the wide social range of the 1830s, from the foxhunting and country-house world of the gentry in whose homes she stayed, to the middle-class ceremonial of the towns, to the hard social reality of the poor tossed in the tempest of industrial upheaval. Victoria began her lifelong journaling during the first of these journeys, and, in one of her earliest entries, she writes of the mining district outside of Birmingham:

  We just passed through a town where all coal mines are and you see the fire glimmer at a distance in the engines in many places. The men, women, children, country and houses are all black.… The country is very desolate every where; there are coals about, and the grass is quite blasted and black. I just now see an extraordinary building flaming with fire. The country continues black, engines flaming, coals, in abundance, every where, smoking and burning coal heaps, intermingled with wretched huts and carts and little ragged children.

  A perceptive observer, Victoria as Queen always demonstrated her greatest empathy for her subjects when she could be among them.

  Victoria did not like the journeys; she suffered from bad health for much of these years, and found them extremely fatiguing. Though she was affectionate and inquisitive, her sensitivity and shyness rendered the progressions painful. It certainly did not help that Conroy maintained an oppressive control over her every movement. However selfish and despicable Conroy was in thrusting the young girl before the public, however, he taught her the key lesson for creating and preserving popularity for the tainted monarchy she would inherit: a regular, open, and completely trusting interaction with every level of her public. Encouraging her daughter to embark on a tour in 1835, the Duchess of Kent revealed more, perhaps, than she realized: “it is of the greatest consequence that you should be seen, that you should know your country, and be acquainted with, and be known by all classes.”

  Victoria’s uncle William resented the journeys immensely, knowing very well that their object was to separate in the public eye the young child from the old man. He resented as well Conroy’s and the Duchess’s removing the child from Court whenever possible: William and his wife Adelaide had a great deal of affection for Victoria (and she for them), but Conroy intended his Kensington System to strain the relationship between present and future monarch—and it did. Matters came to a head at the King’s seventy-fifth birthday party, at which the seventeen-year-old Victoria and her mother were guests, along with Lord Adolphus Fitzclarence, one of William’s many bastard sons, who recorded the scene. William turned venomously upon the Duchess, chastising her publicly for isolating the Princess from him—and vowing to ruin the Duchess’s and Conroy’s plans:

  I trust in God that my life may be spared for nine months longer, after which period, in the event of my death, no Regency would take place. I should then have the satisfaction of leaving the royal authority to the personal exercise of that Young Lady (pointing to the P[rince]ss), the Heiress presumptive of the Crown, and not in the hands of a person now near me, who is surrounded by evil advisers and who is herself incompetent to act with propriety in the station in which She would be placed.

  The King was as good as his word: he lived for a month after Victoria’s eighteenth birthday. As it became clear to Conroy that there would be no regency, he attempted desperately to maintain his hold over the Princess beyond her majority by forcing her to take him on as her confidential private secretary. Both Conroy and the Duchess browbeat Victoria, their efforts growing in intensity as William grew more and more ill in the weeks after Victoria’s birthday. Victoria, supported by her staunch ally Lehzen, as well as by another supporter sent her by her uncle Leopold—Baron Stockmar—stood her ground.

  On 20 June 1837, William died, and with him died the oppressive Kensington System. When, that morning, the Lord Chamberlain and Archbishop of Canterbury came to Victoria with the announcement of her accession—when, soon after, she met the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne—when she then saw the Privy Council, she did all, as she pointedly notes in her journal, “alone.” By the end of her first day as Queen, she had removed her bed from her mother’s room and had dismissed Conroy from her household.

  With her mother (and her mother’s comptroller) relegated to a dista
nt suite in Buckingham Palace, the young Victoria reigned according to her own will and her own whims. Her beloved Lehzen, whose loyalty to the Queen’s interests was beyond question, now occupied her mother’s former position: Lehzen and the Queen had adjoining bedrooms. And in political and social matters, the Queen very quickly developed a very close bond with her prime minister, Lord Melbourne, who succeeded where Conroy failed because his personality was antithetical to Conroy’s: warm and affectionate, rather than cold and overbearing; a considerate and thoughtful adviser, not an impulsive tyrant. When Victoria took the throne, Melbourne was everything the politically inexperienced Queen could want in her most trusted advisor: a canny political operative with a wealth of political wisdom, able to guide her through the confusions of political etiquette and party strife. She depended upon him from the first day, when, meeting with the Privy Council for the first time, she looked over to him for cues about her behavior. Her dependence grew in the first years of her monarchy, and her affection for him grew apace—as did his for her. Melbourne spent much of his time over the next few years as a fixture of her domestic world: dining regularly at the Palace, playing chess and cards with the Queen’s ladies during the evenings; riding with the Queen in Hyde Park in the afternoons. All this time, he contributed to her political education and, as their friendship developed, so Victoria developed a political outlook that reflected her mentor’s: Melbourne was a Whig, of course. Victoria, the daughter of one of the few Whigs among the royal Dukes, and who grew up in a Whig atmosphere—the Duchess of Kent being at the center of the Whig opposition of the past few years—had always seen herself a Whig. But Melbourne’s Whiggism was a distinct variety: Melbourne was hardly a reformer, and his government sought no major changes, indeed seeing resistance to change, and to any parliamentary struggle, as a positive end in itself. Moreover, Melbourne demonstrated to the Queen an innate cynicism in their everyday conversation that she found charming, recording in her journal with approval his cutting comments about women, about the poor, about the Irish. She drank in his adherence to laissez-faire economics, any violation of which—say, to improve the dire lot of the overworked factory child—was anathema. Surrounded by her Whig ladies in waiting, and in constant communication with her Prime Minister, Victoria became a thorough political partisan in her first years: a Whig, or more accurately a Melbournian.