Childhood at Court, 1819-1914 by John Van der Kiste Read Free Book Online

after the birth, Mrs Lilly was woken shortly after 1 a.m. by a noise in the Queen’s sitting-room. She called a page, Kinnaird, to help her investigate. Kinnaird looked under the Queen’s sofa, and hurriedly backed away without saying anything. Meanwhile the ever-faithful Baroness Lehzen had appeared. She pushed the sofa aside, to reveal a boy curled up on the floor. He was recognized as ‘the boy Jones’, who had paid a similar clandestine visit to the Palace two years previously. Proudly, he claimed that he could get over the wall on Constitution Hill and creep through one of the windows. When asked why he entered Her Majesty’s apartment, he said that he wanted to know ‘how they lived at the Palace’. He had no weapons or stolen property, but boasted that he had sat on the throne, ‘that he saw the Queen and heard the Princess Royal squall’. He had slept under one of the servants’ beds, and helped himself to food from the kitchens.
    Home Office officials established that he was Edmund Jones, the son of a Westminster tailor. Aged seventeen, he was stunted in growth and looked very young for his age. He was sent to a House of Correction in Tothill Street as a rogue and vagabond for three months, and put to work on the treadmill. Undaunted, he paid another such visit after his release in March the following year, and after a similar punishment he was sent to sea.
    Meanwhile the Queen and her daughter throve. The Queen sat up for the first time since the birth on 6 December and got out of bed again the following day. On 19 January 1841 the hereditary style and distinction of Princess Royal was conferred on the new Princess. The previous holder of the style, Charlotte, Queen of Württemberg, had died in 1828.
    Three weeks later, on the Queen’s first wedding anniversary, the Princess was christened in the throne room at Buckingham Palace. She was given the names Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa, the second after the Queen Dowager, the third and fourth in honour of the Duchess of Kent, both of whom were among the sponsors. The others were the Queen’s aunt Mary, Duchess of Gloucester, her uncles the Duke of Sussex, Leopold, King of the Belgians, and Albert’s father, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg Gotha. The latter was so offended by Albert’s refusal to demand a personal allowance for him and his dissipated lifestyle from the Queen that he did not even answer an invitation to attend the ceremony. In his absence, the Duke of Wellington was asked to stand proxy for him.
    Also present was Lord Melbourne, who remarked about the Princess, ‘How she looked about her, quite conscious that the stir was all about herself. This is the time the character is formed!’ 2
    A new font was used, made of silver gilt in the shape of a water lily supporting a large shell. Inside the rim of the small shell were water lilies floating around the edge, and water was brought specially from the river Jordan.
    ‘The Christening went off very well,’ Prince Albert wrote to the Dowager Duchess of Saxe-Gotha Altenburg. ‘Your little greatgrandchild behaved with great propriety, and like a Christian. She was awake, but did not cry at all, and seemed to crow with immense satisfaction at the lights and brilliant uniforms, for she is very intelligent and observing.’ 3
    Although this daughter was the first of nine children, Queen Victoria was not particularly maternal by nature. Until a baby was six months old, she thought it ‘froglike’ and ugly. The very idea of childbirth revolted her; to her it was ‘the shadow-side of marriage’, or die Schattenseite , an indelicate subject which sounded less repulsive in a different language. According to Elizabeth Longford, memories of the Flora Hastings affair* may have accounted for ‘her almost Jansenist disgust for the things of the body, which combined strangely with her healthy Hanoverian nature.’ 4
    The Queen firmly refused to breast-feed her children. Prince Albert begged her to, and the