op – and the baby – waited.
That was the scene in the Cupola Room at Kensington Palace on June 24, 1819.
It was the strangest Royal christening on record. The first name, Alexandrina, was accepted by all. The second christian name, the father demanded, must be Elizabeth.
Although the baby girl was only fifth in succession to the Throne, the Duke of Kent firmly believed that his daughter would one day be Queen of England. He wanted a name that would be fittingly regal, and he had set his heart on her becoming Queen Elizabeth the Second.
The Prince Regent thought that “Elizabeth” was too regal. He did not want people looking forward to a new Elizabethan age when other relatives were so much closer to the Throne than this baby girl. It was asking for trouble, he believed.
The argument ended when the Prince suggested his mother’s name – Victoria. The relieved Archbishop quickly intoned “Alexandrina Victoria” and it was too late for further discussion.
So it was that a tiny baby, exactly one month old, was given a name that was to mark an age of unparalleled material progress and social change for Britain – the Victorian age.
Yet the family background of the baby girl who was to become ruler of the great world-wide British Empire and the most powerful woman on earth, was one of financial distress and even poverty.
It is impossible to imagine today a member of our Royal Family being in the position in which the Duke of Kent found himself. He had debts of nearly £250,000 and the House of Commons refused to help him by increasing his grant. So in order to economise he rented a small house at Sidmouth in Devon. There he lived in very poor circumstances with his wife, a former German princess, and their baby daughter.
Before Victoria was a year old her father died from a lung infection. Six days later King George the Third died, and his eldest son, the Prince Regent, became George the Fourth.
The Duchess, mother of the child who was now third in succession to the Throne, was penniless. She did not even have the fare from Sidmouth back to London, and money for this, together with the Duke’s funeral expenses, was sent from the Continent by her brother, Prince Leopold.
For Victoria life was lonely. Almost no friends to play with, and no pretty clothes to wear, for her mother was too poor to provide them. Little Victoria wore darned and patched dresses as she wandered alone with her watering can tending the flowers in the gardens of Kensington Palace.
As she worked at her school lessons Victoria had no idea she might one day be Queen. When the death of the Duke of York in 1827 brought her another step nearer the Throne, she noticed that she was becoming a centre of attention. Lords and gentlemen always raised their hats to her, never to anyone she might be with. She asked her governess why.
The governess slipped a table of genealogy into one of Victoria’s history books. Victoria saw it and understood at once. And when George the Fourth died in 1830, what had once seemed a distant possibility had become almost a certainty.
Read the rest of this article »
Posted in Architecture, Arts and Crafts, Famous landmarks, Historical articles, History, Industry, London, Royalty on Tuesday, 4 February 2014
This edited article about the Great Exhibition first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 541 published on 27 May 1972.
'Great Exhibition Polka', a typical sheet music cover from 1851
The Victorians, outwardly at least so prim and proper, did not believe in exhibiting themselves in any shape or form. They had heard vaguely of the curious affairs across the Channel, where in Paris the French had put on no less than a dozen international exhibitions in the first half of the 19th century.
But it was not the way British people went about things . . . and therefore when, in 1849, the idea was put forward that all the nations of the world should be invited to take part in a vast exhibition in London, there were considerable misgivings.
As it happened, the inspiration came from no less a personage than Prince Albert himself. Queen Victoria’s beloved