of letters from Feodora to cheer up Victoria, with news of her growing family, or the outburst of advice from her Uncle Leopold, who imagined himself as mentor to the future Queen. Although the Duchess had not encouraged visits from her own German family in the early years, she had made sure that Victoria learned a lot of devotion to her unseen aunts and uncles to make up for her loss of closer ties. When the Princess was in her early teens, several of the German relations were invited to Kensington Palace, including, in the summer of 1836, her cousins Ernest and Albert, sons of Victoire's eldest brother, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Victoria was open to teenage enthusiasms and she threw herself whole-heartedly into entertaining her cousins and could not adequately praise their looks and accomplishments. However, King William was not so overjoyed. He had dark suspicions that the Duchess, or the King of the Belgians (whom he had never liked), was angling for a Coburg match for Victoria, which was certainly not to his tastes. “His reception of the Prince of Orange and his eligible sons was timed to coincide with that of the Coburgs. For once, Victoria did not side with her English uncle against her mother, and she assured her Uncle Leopold that Ernest and Albert were perfectly to her liking while the Oranges were detestable.” (Miller, P.3, 1999) On May 24th, 1837 Victoria celebrated her 18th birthday. At last she was free but she had only made a narrow escape: by that date her Uncle William was already close to death. “Conroy panicked. In the last days of William IV's life, he stepped up his battle. He tried to convince Lords Liverpool and Melbourne, the leading politicians of the day, that Victoria was totally unfit to govern, but they were not taken in. He put pressure on the Duchess of Kent and her son Charles of Leiningren, Victoria's half-brother, to force the Princess into signing away her independence.” (...
