The Captive of Kensington Palace (32 page)

He accepted the King’s challenge and set about forming a government.

There was no great excitement about Grey’s departure. Melbourne was a good Whig and the Whigs had passed the Reform Bill. As long as Wellington – that arch enemy of Reform – was not brought back, the people were content.

Adelaide had a cough which persisted and William was worried about her.

She worked too hard, he said. That Reform business had upset her. She did not understand the English; she had believed that the country was on the edge of revolution and she was to be executed like poor Marie Antoinette.

She needs a holiday, said William to his daughter Lady Alice Kennedy, who had made Windsor Castle her home and brought her children there with her.

Lady Alice, who like all the FitzClarence family seemed to have grown very resentful of Adelaide since she had become Queen, said that a trip to her old home would be a good idea. There was that old mother of hers who could not live much longer; she was sure Adelaide would like to see her.

‘I’ll tell her she shall have a holiday,’ said William.

‘Will you go with her?’

‘A King has to govern his country, Alice. He can’t go dancing all over the Continent.’

‘I thought so, but she’ll protest and say she can’t go without you. You should arrange the trip for her and then tell her what you have done. She’ll be grateful to you for doing it that way and it will do her the good she needs.’

‘Capital idea,’ said William. ‘Leave this to me.’

He sent for Earl Howe who was still a member of the Queen’s household and, although at the time of the passing of the Reform Bill he had been forced to resign from the office of the Queen’s Chamberlain, he continued to serve unofficially in that capacity.

‘I want a trip arranged for the Queen,’ said William. ‘She’s not well. She wants a holiday. She shall go to her old home and see her mother. It’ll do her good.’

‘Has her Majesty agreed to this, Sir?’ asked Earl Howe incredulously.

‘No, no. It’s a secret. I shall just present her with the finished plans.’

Earl Howe was dubious as to the success of this, but he knew that the King was in too touchy a mood for him to suggest he might be wrong.

The King had been behaving even more oddly than usual lately and upsetting all sorts of people. Only the other day at a dinner where he insisted on making one of his interminable speeches he had talked of the changes in the Navy and how it was possible now to rise from the lowest rank to the highest. On his right, he pointed out, was a member of a family as old as his own, on his left, his good friend an Admiral who had risen from the dregs of society. The speech was received with astonishment and acute embarrassment by the Admiral on his left, but William was unaware of it. It seemed that there were times that if he could blunder he would do so. And he appeared to pass through periods when his mind was really unhinged.

No, decided Earl Howe, he dared not disagree with the King.

When Adelaide heard what plans had been made she was dismayed. As for the King his asthma had been worse than usual and he had felt most unwell. He hated the thought of losing her and would never have thought of a separation – however brief – if Alice had not persuaded him of the Queen’s need for a holiday.

‘I don’t want to go,’ Adelaide told him, when he explained the plan to her.

‘You must. You need a rest. That cough of yours … I don’t like it.’

‘I feel I should be here with you.’

‘I’ll miss you,’ said William. ‘I can’t think how I’ll get along without you. The Government … this fellow Melbourne … It’s all very shaky. I shouldn’t be at all surprised if the Government fell, and you know what, Adelaide, the people would blame you for it. They always blame you. They seem to have got it into their silly heads that I’m a dolt you lead by the nose.’

‘They’re fond of you,’ Adelaide told him. ‘They want a scapegoat so they’ve chosen me as the French chose Marie Antoinette.’

‘It’s not the same. You don’t know the English. Still, I’d rather you were away. There are those fellows from Tolpuddle … or some such place … those six Dorsetshire labourers taking oaths about trade unions … They’ve been transported and the people are making something of it. It’s nothing. Talk … just talk … All the same it upsets you, but I wouldn’t want you to be here. You’d like to see your mother, wouldn’t you? And your brother’s coming over to travel with you. I’ve arranged it all. There, you’ll like to see your home.’

‘My home is England now,’ she said. ‘My pleasure is in looking after you.’

He was deeply affected. ‘I don’t know what I shall do without you. There are a hundred ways in which you are useful to me.’

‘Then I shall stay.’

‘No, no, I can’t allow it. You must go. It’ll do you good. Go … and come back soon.’

So she left St James’s with her brother, the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, and some members of the FitzClarence family; among the party was Earl Howe.

The Cumberlands had come home from Germany very sad because Baron Graefe had been unable to do anything for George.

Victoria wept when she heard the news.

‘Poor, poor George Cumberland. I must ask Mamma if I may call on him. He will be in need of comfort.’

The Duchess thought there could be no harm in Victoria’s visiting her cousin. No one would expect her to marry a blind man, she said to Conroy.

So Victoria called on her cousin and found him not in the least depressed. He knew that he would never see again. Victoria tried to imagine it. Never to see the flowers and trees, never to embroider, never to see Feodora and the dear children, Lehzen, Uncle Leopold’s letters, the beautiful singer Grisi. How tragic. How very, very sad.

‘Oh, Lehzen,’ she cried, when they were driving back to Kensington, ‘he looked so beautiful so serene, it made me want to weep.’

  Chapter XIV  

‘THE QUEEN HAS DONE IT ALL’

W
hen Adelaide returned to England after her trip on the Continent it was to find the King ill and fretful. He was, however, delighted to see her, and when she arrived at St James’s Palace hurried out to welcome her and embrace her warmly.

‘I’m glad to see you back,’ he cried. ‘It’s not the same without you.’

It was a wonderful welcome home.

Many ceremonies had been arranged for her and by the end of a week she was exhausted; so that when the day came for her to go to the City to receive a congratulatory address on her safe return she was unable to attend and the King went alone. Adelaide’s detractors preferred to see this as an insult to the City although it passed off without much comment.

The FitzClarences had grown to dislike her actively, the main reason being that she had been so good to them, and their arrogant natures would not allow them to admit her generosity while they did not hesitate to accept it. Adelaide was the Queen; and they were the children of their father’s mistress. This was a fact they could not forget. They hated her for being in the position which they reckoned should have belonged to their mother; and they were constantly reminding each other of what life would have been if their parents had been married. The fact that the King acknowledged them as his children, that they had titles and honours, did not satisfy them. They wanted more, and to appease their frustrated anger, like the people, they chose meek Adelaide as their scapegoat.

At one moment she was a fool with no intelligence; at another she was possessed of great cunning. She led the King and she was responsible for his opposition to the Reform Bill; she was an alien – a German, and there had been too many Germans in the royal family.

Those who had accompanied her to Saxe-Meiningen reported that the Castle of Altenstein where she had spent her childhood was certainly not worthy to be known as such. They had seen the room which Adelaide and her sister had shared – a little room without a carpet and containing two small beds with
calico
curtains. An English maid would complain at being given such a room. And this was the woman who sought to manage the affairs of England!

While aware of this hostility Adelaide pretended not to see it because she did not wish to upset William. He loved his wife; he loved his children; in the early days of his marriage the harmony which had existed between them – and which was of Adelaide’s making – had delighted him; and his mind was not strong enough, Adelaide decided, for her to introduce new conflicts. She must forget the unkindness of William’s children and delight with him in the adorable grandchildren who made no secret of their love for her.

Windsor Castle and St James’s were the homes of many of them; they ran about shrieking and playing their games, and no one restrained them, for the King and Queen enjoyed hearing their noisy play; and if there was silence, began to fret that they might be ill.

Soon after her return London was shocked by the fire which destroyed the Houses of Parliament. The King grew overexcited and many people said it was an omen. The verdict was that had the fire been dealt with promptly the building might have been saved. But nothing had been done and a minor outbreak had resulted in a mighty conflagration.

There should be some means of preventing fires spreading, the Government decided; a kind of brigade which could go into action with the minimum of delay was needed.

William was excited and discussed it with Adelaide.

‘They seem to think there should be some sort of Fire Brigade – men just waiting for a call with everything ready to deal with the flames before they’ve done too much damage.’

Adelaide thought this was an excellent idea; and was very interested in the formation of the London Fire Brigade.

It was much more comforting to discuss the building up of such an organisation than the depressing affairs of the Government.

‘That fellow Melbourne has been to see me again,’ William told her. ‘He says he can’t get the support he needs and that he thinks the Government will have to make concessions to these radical ideas if it’s to stay in power.’

‘They cannot make concessions. It will be the Reform Bill all over again.’

‘That’s what I tell him, but he stands firm. Melbourne will have to go.’

‘Will this bring Wellington back?’ asked the Queen hopefully.

‘We’ll have to see.’

Shortly after this the King dismissed the Melbourne Ministry, an action which was ill-timed, for he had played straight into the hands of the Queen’s enemies.

It was well known that she had opposed the Reform Bill; she had no sooner returned from her trip abroad than Melbourne was dismissed. It was easy to see that the Queen wanted to bring back the Tories and that she was against reform.

The Times
was the first with the news.

‘The King has turned out the Ministry and there is every reason to believe that the Duke of Wellington has been sent for. The Queen has done it all.’

It seemed that all London was against the Queen. The FitzClarences discussed her in their Clubs and the houses of their friends with venom. The dismissal of Melbourne was an attempt to obstruct a Government influenced by the people. And this had been brought about by an ugly woman with a German accent who had come from a ‘doghole’ in Germany and had slept in a room which an English housemaid had scorned!

Adelaide was wretched. She almost wished that she had stayed abroad. William, oddly enough, was less excitable over major events than over small domestic difficulties.

‘Stuff!’ was his comment.

The people were parading the streets with banners on which were painted the words: ‘The Queen has done it all.’

‘You see,’ said Adelaide, ‘that is what happened in France. They chose the Queen because she was a foreigner to them, just as the people here have chosen me. I hope that I shall be as brave as Marie Antoinette when my time comes.’

The King’s ‘Stuff!’ was some consolation. ‘We all get mud thrown at us now and then. My brother George was the most unpopular man in the country but he died in his bed. Stop fretting.’

Wellington advised that the King should send for Sir Robert Peel and ask him to form a Government, and messengers were immediately sent to Rome where Peel was at that time. Meanwhile Wellington became First Lord of the Treasury and Home Secretary, and carried on the Ministry until Peel’s return. Then Wellington took on the post of Foreign Secretary.

Such a hastily formed Government was an uneasy one, although it sufficed to carry the country through a rather ugly situation; it did last for four months, and the campaign against the Queen subsided.

The Times
even went so far as to publish an apology to her, and the Queen was relegated to the position of a rather stupid woman, a nonentity who had failed to give the King the heirs for which he had married her, who was not even handsome enough to grace ceremonies; and therefore was to be regarded with contempt.

The FitzClarences added their criticism. She was a fool; she had an execrable German accent; she was no use nor ornament to the throne.

Adelaide, painfully aware of her unpopularity, grew thinner and her cough returned to trouble her.

Buckingham Palace had now been completed and even that was used as a condemnation against the Queen.

There had never been such a lack of taste displayed in any of the royal palaces. Did the people remember George IV? He might have been extravagant and a voluptuary controlled by women, but at least he had good taste. Think of Carlton House; think of what he had done to Windsor; think of the buildings round Regent’s Park and Nash’s Regent Street. And then think of Buckingham Palace!

‘Every error of taste imaginable has been committed.’ The pillars – and there were many of them – were painted in a shade of raspberry. Thomas Creevy, the old gossip, had had a look over it and said those raspberry pillars made him feel sick and that instead of being called Buckingham Palace it should be called Brunswick Hotel.

The most vulgar thing of all was the wallpaper for the Queen’s apartments which she had chosen herself.

And this was the palace on which a million pounds had been spent!

William himself did not like it when he went to look over it with Adelaide.

‘I suppose we’ll have to move in. They’ll expect it of us … after all that money’s been spent on it.’

William was thinking of the FitzClarence grandchildren playing hide and seek behind the raspberry pillars. They would not like it he was sure. Not like Old St James’s for all its gloom, or Windsor for all its grandeur. And there was nothing like Bushy with its homeliness and memories of the old days with Dorothy when the children were all growing up and were much more respectful and affectionate towards the Duke of Clarence than they were to the King of England.

‘Why not offer it to the country?’ suggested Adelaide. ‘It could take the place of the Houses of Parliament.’

‘Capital!’ cried the King. ‘That’s what we’ll do.’

He was disappointed when the Government announced that it did not believe that Buckingham Palace would be suitable as the Houses of Parliament. Moreover, plans were hastily going ahead to rebuild them on that spot on the river where the old ones had stood.