A LOYAL SCRIBE CORRECTS A ROYAL SCRIBE
I received the following letter which might be of interest to those who attended the TFS 1984 Summer Series:
Mr. R. Anger
c/o Toronto Film Society
128 Glen Road
Toronto, Ontario
M4W 2W3
Dear Mr. Anger:
Since you are one of the Royal Scribes, I thought I should write to you.
I have been reading the notes for the Summer Series on Royal Reels and find them most interesting and full of information, However, on reading about Sixty Glorious Years, I was surprised to see the statement “Coming in 1837 as a young and inexperience girl from a minor German principality to take the throne of the greatest empire…”. On the contrary, Victoria was born in Kensington Palace in London and lived there until she came to the throne in 1837. Her father was the Duke of Kent, fourth son of George III. Thus she was undoubtedly a British princess, though of German ancestry. Her mother was the sister of the Leopold who later became King of the Belgians.
It seems too bad that people should be given the wrong information on our famous Queen. Could you perhaps make a correction?
Yours truly,
Dorothy A. Lee (Miss)
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Miss Lee is absolutely correct. It was Queen Victoria’s Mother, who was from the minor German principality, Victoria of Saxe-Coburg, Princess of Leiningen. How curious that I should have harboured this confusion between the two Victorias all of my life. It just shows that one should always research even when writing about things “you know you know”.
Although readily acknowledging the technical inaccuracy of what I wrote, I stoutly maintain that the sense of what I wrote was accurate. Queen Victoria’s parents lived in Germany. On the eve of Her birth Her Father rushed his wife to Kensington Palace, presumably so that his child would be born in England, in fact arriving in just the nick of time! Although raised in Kensington, Her family spoke German all around Her, a language which She consequently learned before She learned English, and She was raised by German governesses. Although Her parents had been married in England, their marriage service had to be bilingually printed in German and English. Her upbringing could not have been more German if She had been raised in Saxe-Coburg as I erroneously thought.
As to her inexperience, it is obvious from what one reads about Her that She had nothing even approximating the training in kingship that is being accorded, for example, Prince Charles. It was only through an extraordinary series of deaths among the Hanoverians that Victoria ever came to the throne. At the time of Her birth, Her grandfather, King George III, had no less than 12 of his 15 children still living and many of his children had children. Of this large group, many were males who would therefore take precedence over females in the line of succession.
As Victoria was growing up and this small army ahead of Her in the line of succession began dying one after the other, one senses that She saw the approach of the throne closer and closer to Her with much the same trepidation as Pearl White observed the approach of the buzz-saw she was powerless to avoid in 1830, when a chance encounter with a table of the succession showed the 11 year-old just how close the “buzz-saw” had approached, She is said to have burst into tears.
by R.R. Anger
