0;She was bright enough, quick at her lessons and shrewd in personal relationships: when her uncle George IV whisked her off to hear the band at Windsor one day, and gave her choice of a "number", the artful child requested "God Save the King." (Farley, P.4, 1998) But Queen Victoria's childhood was not picturesque by any means. As she grew up, she came to realize how narrow the circle admitted to Kensington Palace. She agreed with her half-sister that only at Claremont, on their holiday, had she been completely happy. The darkest part of her young life was one John Conroy, the Comptroller of the Duchess's household at Kensington and the virtual controller of all the Duchess's attitudes and aspirations. Conroy was a military man who was a flamboyantly good-looking Irishman, possessed of an ample measure of charm and an arrogant ambition. The Duchess of Kent was no simpleton, but she was used to having her life ruled by men and could not accustom herself to having to make independent decisions. A better guide would have been her brother Leopold but, he, after a few years of carefully supervision of his sister's affairs, took a mistress of whom she could not approve, which drove a wedge between them. Then, as he tired of inactivity in England, he began to travel abroad more frequently. Finally, in 1831, he departed permanently to take up the crown of the newly created kingdom of Belgium. Left alone in England, frightened by her responsibility as mother of a future Queen, Victoire of Kent relied increasingly on the soothing blandishments of Conroy. “It was Conroy who insisted that Victoria should be strictly guarded, playing on her mother's fear of a fatal "accident" at the hands of the Duke of Cumberland. It was Conroy who urged a suitable match for Feodora with a German prince, when it seemed likely that the widower King George IV himself might offer for her hand (thus snatching the little Victoria's chance of a crown by begetting h...
