Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol III (1901).djvu/406

 console and counsel her. Deprived by death some four years before of wife and child, he had since led an aimless career of travel in England and Scotland, without any recognised position or influence. It was congenial to him to assume informally the place of a father to the duke's child. Although his German education never made him quite at home in English politics, he was cautious and far-seeing, and was qualified for the rôle of guardian of his niece and counsellor of his sister. He impressed the duchess with the destiny in store for her youngest child. Her responsibilities as regent of the principality of Leiningen in behalf of her son by her first marriage weighed much with her. But strong as was her affection for her German kindred, anxious as she was to maintain close relations with them, and sensitive as she was to the indifference to her manifested at the English court, she, under Leopold's influence, resigned the regency of Leiningen, and resolved to reside permanently in England. After deliberating with her brother, she chose as 'the whole object of her future life' the education of her younger daughter, in view of the likelihood of her accession to the English throne. Until the princess's marriage, when she was in her twenty-first year, mother and daughter were never parted for a day.

Of her father the princess had no personal remembrance, but her mother taught her to honour his memory. Through his early life he had been an active soldier in Canada and at Gibraltar, and he was sincerely attached to the military profession. When his daughter, as Queen Victoria, presented new colours to his old regiment, the royal Scots, at Ballater on 26 Sept. 1876, she said of him: 'He was proud of his profession, and I was always told to consider myself a soldier's child.' Strong sympathy with the army was a main characteristic of her career. Nor were her father's strong liberal, even radical, sympathies concealed from her. At the time of his death he was arranging to visit New Lanark with his wife as the guests of Robert Owen, with whose principles he had already declared his agreement (, Autobiography, 1857, p. 237). The princess's whiggish proclivities in early life were part of her paternal inheritance.

It was in the spring of 1820 that the Duchess of Kent took up her permanent abode in Kensington Palace, and there in comparative seclusion the princess spent most of her first eighteen years of life. Kensington was then effectually cut off from London by market gardens and country lanes. Besides her infant daughter the duchess had another companion in her child by her first husband, Princess Féodore of Leiningen, who was twelve years Princess Victoria's senior, and inspired her with deep and lasting affection. Prince Charles of Leiningen, Princess Victoria's stepbrother, was also a frequent visitor, and to him also she was much attached. Chief among the permanent members of the Kensington household was Louise Lehzen, the daughter of a Lutheran clergyman of Hanover, who had acted as governess of the Princess Féodore from 1818. Princess Victoria's education was begun in 1824, when Fräulein Lehzen transferred her services from the elder to the younger daughter. Voluble in talk, severe in manner, restricted in information, conventional in opinion, she was never popular in English society; but she was shrewd in judgment and whole-hearted in her devotion to her charge, whom she at once inspired with affection and fear, memory of which never wholly left her pupil. Long after the princess's girlhood close intimacy continued between the two. At Lehzen's death in 1870 the queen wrote of her: 'She knew me from six months old, and from my fifth to my eighteenth years devoted all her care and energies to me with most wonderful abnegation of self, never even taking one day's holiday. I adored, though I was greatly in awe of her. She really seemed to have no thought but for me.'

The need of fittingly providing for the princess's education first brought the child to the formal notice of parliament. In 1825 parliament unanimously resolved to allow the Duchess of Kent an additional 6,000l. a year 'for the purpose of making an adequate provision for the honourable support and education of her highness Princess Alexandrina Victoria of Kent' (Hansard, new ser. xiii. 909-27). English instruction was needful, and Fräulein Lehzen, whose position was never officially recognised, was hardly qualified for the whole of the teaching. On the advice of the Rev. Thomas Russell, vicar of Kensington, the Rev. George Davys, at the time vicar of a small Lincolnshire parish—from which he was soon transferred to the crown living of St. Hallows-on-the-Wall, in the city of London—became the princess's preceptor. He was formally appointed in 1827, when he took up his residence at Kensington Palace. To reconcile Fräulein Lehzen to the new situation, George IV in 1827, at the request of his sister, Princess Sophia, made her a Hanoverian baroness. Davys did his work discreetly. He gathered round him a band of efficient masters in special subjects of