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Duchess of Kent’s retinue, declared it was too large and ordered Conroy out of the chapel. The comptroller bitterly resented this public indignity and never forgave the King. A power struggle was going on at Kensington, and the Princess was aware of efforts to dismiss the faithful Lehzen. ‘I was very much affected indeed when she came home,’ she wrote in her journal, evidently not just through religious awe, but also overcome by misery at the thought of her security being taken from her.
    A month later the royal progresses began again with a grand tour of the north. The Princess looked forward to them with scant enthusiasm. The ‘Kensington system’ was preying on her emotions; she knew the effort of travelling would make her ill, and that the King would be upset. The Duchess and Conroy brushed her objections aside impatiently, and on 3 September 1835, in heat and dust, suffering from headache and backache, Princess Victoria set out for Yorkshire, taking in the York Musical Festival, Doncaster races, and the Belvoir mausoleum. Her health had not improved, and by the time they reached Holkham, she was so exhausted she nearly fell asleep over dinner.
    At the end of September they moved to Ramsgate for an autumn holiday. The Princess’s spirits rose, for King Leopold of the Belgians was coming to stay for a few days. She had not seen him for several years, and had never met his wife, Queen Louise, daughter of Louis-Philippe, King of the French. Only seven years separated the Queen Consort and the future Queen regnant, and Louise immediately put her niece at ease, telling her to treat her as an elder sister. Victoria had a delightful time trying on her aunt’s Parisian clothes while King Leopold, as yet unaware of the darker aspects of the ‘Kensington system’, went for a long walk with Conroy, assuring him that with tact, he might still win himself ‘a very good position’.
    Two days before the King and Queen were due to depart, Princess Victoria awoke feeling sick. By the time they left, she was too ill and wretched to eat. Her physician Dr James Clark, appointed to the Duchess of Kent’s household the previous year, examined her and thought it was ‘a slight indisposition’ which would pass in two or three days. Lehzen was concerned that it was more than that, but the Duchess told her that she and the Princess were exaggerating. In fact, the illness worsened, and the Princess was confined in her room for five weeks. Whether it was typhoid, tonsilitis, or collapse from strain, has never been ascertained.
    Although ill, the Princess was a fighter – as she needed to be. Backed up by the Duchess, Conroy strode into her room one day carrying a pencil and paper which he asked the sixteen-year-old invalid to sign. It was a pledge by which she would agree to appoint him as her private secretary on her succession to the throne. Fortunately Lehzen was in the room as well, and despite his fiery temper, Conroy was forced to leave the room, muttering angrily, without the signature.
    The Princess had recovered by January 1836 and they returned to Kensington Palace. Four months later, a few days before her seventeenth birthday, her Coburg cousins, Ernest and Albert, were invited to come and stay. She was very taken with them, ‘particularly Albert, who is the most reflective of the two’, and she felt wretched when they returned home.
    In August King William IV celebrated his seventy-first birthday. The Duchess of Kent had declined to attend Queen Adelaide’s birthday on 13 August, but she could not refuse the royal command to attend that of the King the following week. Enraged by the Duchess’s appropriation of a suite of rooms at Kensington Palace, he made a rambling speech at the end of the dinner in which he trusted that his life would be spared for nine months longer, in order that no regency would take place; ‘I should then have the satisfaction of leaving the royal authority to the personal exercise of that