Victoria Victorious: The Story of Queen Victoria Read Online Free Page B

cold day, my father went for a tour of the cathedral. He caught a cold and by the time we reached Sidmouth it had not improved.
    An alarming incident occurred there that might have been the end of me. I was in my cradle when suddenly the glass of the window was shattered and an arrow sped into the room coming so close to me that it pierced the sleeve of my nightgown. By a miracle—Providence, they all said—I was not hurt, but if the arrow had pierced my body, as it might well have done, it would most certainly have killed me.
    I could imagine the consternation that must have spread through the household. Some must have given thought to the uncles, particularly Cumberland and his wife, who had both been involved in mysterious deaths. But finally it was discovered that the arrow had been shot by a mischievous boy. He had meant no harm, he insisted; he had only been playing wars.
    Everyone was so relieved that I was unharmed that after being sternly reprimanded, the boy was forgiven.
    Meanwhile my father's cold was developing into something worse; in a week it had turned to pneumonia and he had taken to his bed. Uncle Leopold came hurrying down to Sidmouth with young Dr. Stockmar, in whom he had the utmost trust, but it soon became clear that my father could not survive.
    It was a great shock to all for he had always been more healthy than any of his brothers.
    What disturbed him more than anything was the prospect of leaving us. He had had such hopes of grooming me for the throne; and he was very worried as to what would happen to my mother with a young child—and in the position that I was—to care for.
    Naturally he turned to Uncle Leopold.
    It was from my mother that I heard of those anxious days. She was always dramatically vehement in her hatred of her husband's family, tearfully affectionate toward her own. In those days when I was very young I thought of my father's family as monsters and the Saxe-Coburg relations as angels.
    “There we were,” my mother told me, “in that little house in Sidmouth…your father dead. What was to become of us? We had so little… not even enough to travel back to Claremont. And Claremont, of course, was not our home. It had only been lent to us by your dear Uncle Leopold. I was frantic. There was one matter that gave me some relief. Your father had appointed me your sole guardian, which shows whattrust he had in me. Do you know, his last words to me were ‘Do not forget me.' So you see he was thinking of me until the last.”
    I wept with her and wished as I always have done that he had lived long enough for me to have known him.
    “He was a great soldier,” she told me. “He wanted you always to remember that you are a soldier's child.”
    “Oh I will, Mama,” I said. “I will.”
    “He was a great liberal too… and a friend of the reformer, Robert Owen. He was talking about visiting him at New Lanark just before his death. For him to die… he, who was so strong…His hair was black and so was his beard. Mind you, he did color them a bit…but never mind. They looked fine and so did he. So young, so full of vigour…and there he was…in such a short time… dead.”
    Mama loved drama and although at that time I wept with her I did wonder afterward whether she really did feel so strongly about his death. She was one who liked to have her own way, although she did bend a little to Sir John Conroy. I was told that Sir John looked something like my father, so perhaps that was one of the reasons why she thought so highly of him.
    Mama went on to tell me how she was left bereft … no husband, very little money, in a strange land where she could scarcely speak the language.
    “I could hope for little help from your father's family,” she said with that snort of contempt she often used when speaking of them. “True, the miserly Parliament had granted me six thousand pounds a year in the event of my widowhood. I daresay when they granted me that—it was a year before you