Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > Queen Victoria > Status Update

‘Victoria had not yet seen him, but at three that morning, Bertie had arrived at Windsor from Cambridge, summoned by telegram by his sister. She hadn’t contacted Bertie herself, for she blamed him for his father’s illness. Albert’s discovery of ‘that dreadful business in the Curragh’, Victoria believed, had burdened his mind so heavily that his resistance to illness was reduced.’

‘Bertie, her second, brought with him an episode of severe postnatal depression. Victoria began to see visions, ‘spots on peoples faces, which turned into worms’, while ‘coffins floated’ before her eyes. Even Albert grew worried... Victoria came to understand that her depression was a distinct malady that came and went, but which affected her particularly during and after pregnancy.’

‘“I fear it will create great disappointment,” Victoria replied, immediately seeing the implications of the baby’s gender. It would have been better politics to have produced a male heir straight away, as she and Albert “had so hoped & wished for. We were, I am afraid, sadly disappointed.”‘

‘In modern times people might worry about the generic consequences of first cousins mating, but in a century when people believed that they could only marry within their social class, the pool of potential spouses was smaller - for royalty, the pool was a puddle - and needs must. It would be impossible for Victoria to find a socially acceptable suitor to whom she wasn’t in some way related.’

‘Flora might be pregnant despite her virginity: ‘one could not tell if such things could not happen.’ Indeed, the London Medical and Physical Journal had recently reported on the curious case of a pregnant woman who had not experienced penetrative sex. After all, there were other forms of sexual intimacy.’

I have no words for this.

‘Despite these precautions, when Victoria was weighed at the end of her first year as queen, she found - to her ‘horror’ - that she weighed 8 stone 13 (56.6kg)... Her reported weight would give Victoria, at 1.52 metres tall, a modern body mass index of 24.4. It is healthy, but only just. She was very close to being classed, in today’s terms, as obese.’

‘Budgeted at £70,000, it was to be cheap, but not cut-price like the previous coronation, which had been staged for Victoria’s uncle William IV. Costing just £30,000, this one had caused disappointment, and subsequently became known as the ‘Half-Crown-ation’. Yet Victoria’s would nowhere near approach the £240,000 cost of the one before that, her uncle George IV’s, which was considered over the top.’

‘But the typhoid wasn’t even the worst of it. Conroy and her mother now tried to take advantage of Victoria’s weakness to bully her into consolidating their position. Although she was ‘very ill’ Victoria wrote, they now attempted to force her to promise that she would make Conroy her Private Secretary and chief advisor. He wanted to be the power behind her throne.’

‘Everyone knew that the Regent must make the final choice.
“Alexandrina,” he pronounced. The name would be a compliment to the baby’s godfather, the Tsar of Russia.
But it was quietly suggested that she needed more than one name.
“Give her the mother’s name also then,” he conceded, grumpily.’

‘Edward’s prayers were answered. After a short, smooth labour of six hours, it was 4.15 on the morning of 24 May 1819 that ‘a pretty little princess, plump as a partridge’ was born. Edward’s ‘Mayflower’, as he called her, was perfect in his eyes, ‘truly a model of strength and beauty combined’.’