| Victoria, Queen of England |
| by James Parton, 1868 |
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Related topics: • About Queen Victoria |
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| Victoria's Coronation, from a painting by Sir George Hayter Portrait from www.arttoday.com Used with permission |
She was queen, then, at length. She was the central figure of a fiction as splendid as the Kenilworth of Sir Walter Scott, and all the world looked with interest upon its gorgeous illusions. In those years of her blooming youth she seemed to the imaginations of men the most brilliant and most enviable of human beings. Nevertheless, she has recently told us, that she was far from happy at that time. She could not, at first, quite reconcile her mind to be a fiction. Inheriting something of the obstinacy of her race, she desired to have her own way in some matters in which a constitutional monarch must be submissive. She had a particular prejudice against the tories, -- not merely against their principles, but against their persons, -- and this prejudice an unhackneyed girl of nineteen was not likely to conceal. On the other hand, she was .excessively fond of the whigs, and particularly of the good-natured premier, Lord Melbourne, who had advised and guided her during the first anxious moments of her reign. She carried these prejudices so far, that Lord Wilbour, he himself, although at the head of the favored party, remonstrated with her upon the subject, and advised her to forgive and conciliate the tories. Then again, being warm in her friendships, she could not endure the idea of parting with some of the ladies about her person, when the tories came into power. She was very restive in this affair, and it was long before she could bend her will to the hard necessity of losing the society of her friends for reasons purely political, over which she had no control.
The strangest part of her conduct was that, as soon as she became her own mistress, she ceased to correspond with her handsome cousin in Germany. With reference to this subject the queen has written: --
"The only excuse the queen can make for herself is in the fact that the change from the secluded life at Kensington to the independence of her position as Queen Regnant, at the age of eighteen, put all ideas of marriage out of her mind, which she now most bitterly repents. A worse school for a young girl, or one more detrimental to all natural feelings and affections, cannot well be imagined than the position of a queen at eighteen, without experience and without a husband to guide and support her. This the queen can state from painful experience, and she thanks God that none of her dear daughters are exposed to such danger."
Prince Albert was naturally uneasy at her silence. A young man of twenty-one must not long delay to choose a career. So far, his life had been shaped by a secret but confident expectation that he would one day be the consort of his cousin Victoria, and if this was not to be his destiny, it was necessary to seek another. Impatient to know his fate, he came to England in October, 1839, resolved to bring the matter to a conclusion. Three years had passed since the cousins had seen one another.
When last they had met, she was a girl of seventeen, living a retired life at Kensington Palace, with her mother and her tutors, with little retinue and less ostentation. He was but a lively lad, not grown to his full stature, and unbecomingly fat. But now how different were they both!
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