Jean Plaidy - Victoria in the Wings

Ah Maria, he thought, what are you thinking on this day?

He could not know. And did it matter?

He was tired; he wished to rest. He would send for them to get him to bed.

It had been an exhausting day.

The King decided a few days after his coronation that he would visit different parts of his realm so that he might have the experience of speaking personally with his subjects. His intention was to go first to Ireland, and preparations were immediately begun.

People continued to discuss the coronation, the splendour of which would be talked of for months to come; those who had not witnessed it listened to accounts of it in the taverns and wherever people congregated. The manager of Drury Lane decided that instead of a new play he would put on the Pageant of the Coronation which should be like the real thing in every detail.

It seemed to be an excellent idea and when the curtain rose on the Abbey scene there was a hushed silence in the house and everyone joined in the ceremony, cheering and calling God Save the King.

No play could succeed as this spectacle did, and the theatre was crowded night after night.

The Queen heard of what was going on and thought that if she attended no one would be able to ignore her this time.

So she dressed herself in odd vulgar clothes – too short in the skirt, too low in the neck, with the feather and diamond headdress waving over her wig – and appeared in the royal box.

She had been ill for some time, refusing to be treated by doctors and successfully hiding her affliction, dosing herself with laudanum which brought her the solace of sleep; but as the time had gone on she had found it necessary to increase the doses and thus caused alarm to some of her ladies. They had found it useless to dissuade her. She had to give herself relief from pain; she had to be able to feel alive – and mischievous again; she had to paint her face more brightly with rouge and plaster it with white lead to get the startling contrast.

She would laugh as she did so and say to her most intimate lady-in-waiting, ‘Now my love, what would they think of me if they saw me without my warpaint, eh? They’d think I’d come from the grave instead of from Brandenburg House. We don’t want to give the good people a shock or His High and Mighty Majesty so much pleasure, do we?’

They, who knew how ill she was, were anxious for her. In her way she had been a good mistress. Kind, friendly – in fact over-familiar calling them ‘my love’ and ‘my dear’ in front of the lower servants. But if they were in trouble she would be the first to help; and in spite of her eccentricities, which at times seemed to border on insanity, they were fond of her.

Painted and glittering with jewels, the plumes waving in her hair, she set out for Drury Lane.

She was going to win back the popularity she had lost. The King had won the battle of the coronation; it was after all his coronation, though she ought to have shared it with him; but he was their King and she but the Queen Consort. She granted that. It was for this reason that the people had been lukewarm to her; it was because he was after all the King that they had not forced an entrance for her into the Abbey.

Never mind. The coronation was over. Now they would be sorry for her. The first skirmish would be in the Drury Lane where they would cheer her and feel it was a shame that a queen had to witness a mock coronation from a box in a theatre when she had been excluded from her own in the Abbey.

When she entered the theatre the people rose and cheered her. Grinning wildly, bowing so vigorously that the feathers were in danger of being dislodged, she responded to the greeting and the pageant began. Before it was half way through, the effects of the mild dose of laudanum she had taken to enable her to visit the theatre began to decline, and her lady-in-waiting looked at her in some alarm.

‘I think … I should leave the box … for a moment,’ she said faintly.

She sent one of her attendants to tell the manager not to interrupt the show simply because she wished to slip out for a few moments.

So she left the box while the stage coronation continued; and after more sips of the laudanum she was able to return. But not all the artificial colour on her face could disguise the fact that she was ill.

As the audience sang the national anthem, glancing up at her box, she bowed but was forced to grip the front of the box as she did so.

Wildly they cheered her, and she tried to respond; but she could only murmur: ‘Get me to the carriage.’

‘The Queen is ill,’ it was whispered. ‘The trouble has been too much for her.’

She was led out to her carriage and was swiftly driven home. Her ladies took off the clothes that were always too tight for her gross body; they lifted off her wig; they removed the rouge and lead from her face and revealed a tired old woman with the marks of a ravaging disease clearly defined.

Lying in her bed she said in an almost jaunty way: ‘Something tells me I shall never get up again.’

The King on his way to Ireland for the first State visit of his reign was aboard the royal yacht at Holyhead when the news was brought to him.

The Queen had died less than a fortnight after that visit to the theatre.

Free! he thought. At last! For twenty-six years he had been bound to that loathsome creature and now he was free! Never again would she have the power to plague him. Never again need he wonder what she would do next.

He stood on the deck of the Royal Sovereign and savoured the breezes from the sea.

For years he had been in the thrall of his father and almost immediately he had been tied to that woman. This was his first real taste of freedom. He was King, the ruler of his country, and best of all he was a free man. No longer need he be tormented by the most vulgar woman in the world to whom ironically he, the most exquisite gentleman, had been married.

Free … at fifty-nine. It would soon be his sixtieth birthday.

Too late, he thought sadly. Ah, too late.

But was it? He had overcome his melancholy. I’m free, he kept telling himself. She can plague me no longer. There was no need to look for evidence for divorce. Fate had stepped in with the most final of all separations, the most conclusive of all divorces.

‘Your Majesty will wish there to be a period of mourning?’ he was asked.

He was not going to pretend. Some might have expected him to play the part of bereaved husband but he was too good an actor for that. It would be a part which no one would believe in. So since it would be ridiculous to play the mournful widower, he would be the widower who was too honest to pretend to anything but the relief Caroline’s death had brought him.

The Court might have six weeks mourning. That would be expected; but it would be foolish to make it longer; as for him, he was on a State voyage; he was going to visit his Irish subjects; he wanted them to like him. They would not care for a miserable man.

He remembered how he had always loved the Irish. He hoped they would remember it now. His greatest friend had been Richard Brinsley Sheridan who had died some four or five years ago – a witty Irishman if ever there was one. Why even his present dearest friends the Conynghams were Irish. He anticipated a happy time.

And how could it be otherwise? If he exerted all his prodigious charm they could not fail to succumb; he was already rehearsing what he would say to them. ‘I feel I have come among my own people,’ he murmured.

He dressed with the utmost care in blue – blue neckcloth, blue breeches, blue coat – all of course of the most exquisite cut, and blue was the colour which suited him perhaps best of all. The only contrasting colour was the yellow of his coat buttons – quite dashing while they detracted not in the least from his general air of elegance.

He would speak to them from the heart as though the words came naturally. They would never guess what careful thought he had given to them. If his English subjects rejected him, that should not be the case with his Irish ones.

He was not disappointed. His emotional approach, his sentimental words were exactly what fitted the occasion best. Crowds had come to cheer him and escort his carriage to the Lodge in Phoenix Park.

There he addressed the multitude – a grand, imposing and decidedly regal figure.

‘This is one of the happiest days I have ever known. My heart has always been Irish. I have always loved Ireland and now I know that my Irish subjects love me.’

He was going to drink their health, he told them, as he hoped they would drink his. It would be in Irish whiskey punch.

How they cheered! How they loved him! He had the gift of words. He must have kissed the blarney stone. He knew exactly how to win their hearts.

A real fellow of a King, they said.

And so began his first State visit. Nothing could have been more successful. They loved their King; he loved his subjects. It was so long since he had heard such cheers.

A beloved monarch. A free man. If he had been twenty years younger how happy he would have been! But even in the midst of his triumphs a voice within him kept reminding him, ‘Too late. It has come too late.’

VICTORIA WAS GROWING up. She was almost three. She chattered constantly, mostly in German; but as Uncle Leopold said, it was essential that she speak English equally well.

Victoria was intelligent and was already aware that she was important not because of her charm and beauty but because of Another Reason, which was most intriguing. Mamma did not speak of this Other Reason. It was something she must not know of yet because she might in a moment of indiscretion betray that she knew to someone like Uncle Frederick, Uncle William or Aunt Adelaide, which would make them very cross – although she could not believe that Aunt Adelaide could ever be cross; and Uncles Frederick and William were most benevolent whenever she saw them.

There was another uncle – the most important of all: Uncle King. She saw very little of him, although sometimes she had been held up to see him pass by in his carriage. He was an enormous, glittering being who thrilled Victoria merely to look at him. She respected Uncle Leopold, of course; she adored Aunt Adelaide and she loved Mamma, Sissi and Charles dearly, but for Uncle King she had a feeling of reverence. It would be a glorious day when he joined the band of Victoria worshippers. But he never came to Kensington Palace, nor was she invited to Carlton House. The oddest thing about Uncle King – in Victoria’s opinion – was that he seemed unaware of Victoria.

Sometimes she forgot him when she was playing with her dolls. She loved her dolls. People knew this and were constantly giving them to her. Sissi helped her dress them and knew all their names. Aunt Adelaide, dear gentle Aunt Adelaide, had just sent her a beautiful big one – the biggest she had ever seen, almost as big as Victoria herself and dressed in a blue silk dress with a sash, like Victoria’s.

‘She could be called Victoria,’ she had told Sissi, ‘but then who would know whether she was being called or I was.’

Sissi covered her with kisses and said she was the cleverest little girl in the world and thought of the most sensible things.

Of course she must be sensible because of That Reason; and there could not be three Victorias in the family; there were already Mamma and herself.

As it was a Wednesday afternoon Uncle Leopold left his beautiful house at Esher – Claremont which Victoria and her Mamma visited now and then – to come to Kensington Palace where he spent a long time talking to Mamma; and Victoria could not help knowing that she was often the subject of their conversation. She would be brought in to stand before Uncle Leopold and answer his questions while Mamma looked on, never missing any little lapse of good conduct, of which Victoria would be told afterwards. She must always be careful to behave as one in her position should. One in her position! It was a phrase she was constantly hearing; and she did not fully understand it except that it was involved with That Reason.

Uncle Leopold was asking her questions – in English, which he spoke differently from the people of the household, and she answered in English, now and then bringing in a German word, which made him frown.

‘She has not started lessons yet?’ he asked Mamma.