
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


We tend to think of royal upbringings as fairly entitled, but for the future Queen Victoria, her childhood was more like a hostage situation. After her father's death when she was just an infant, her mother and (maybe) her mother's lover went to great lengths to control every aspect of her life. Young Victoria was simply never allowed to be alone, including sleeping in her mother's bedroom until the day she became Queen, and was not permitted to walk down stairs without holding the hand of either her mother or her governess. This so-called Kensington System, invented by her mother and Sir John Conroy, also kept her isolated from other children and her Hanoverian relatives, with the intent of making Victoria dependent on them for the rest of her life. In that, it was a colossal failure. As Queen, Victoria barely maintained a relationship with her mother, and Sir John Conroy was specifically banned from her apartments in one of her first acts as monarch.
Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
By Hemlock Creatives4.7
283283 ratings
We tend to think of royal upbringings as fairly entitled, but for the future Queen Victoria, her childhood was more like a hostage situation. After her father's death when she was just an infant, her mother and (maybe) her mother's lover went to great lengths to control every aspect of her life. Young Victoria was simply never allowed to be alone, including sleeping in her mother's bedroom until the day she became Queen, and was not permitted to walk down stairs without holding the hand of either her mother or her governess. This so-called Kensington System, invented by her mother and Sir John Conroy, also kept her isolated from other children and her Hanoverian relatives, with the intent of making Victoria dependent on them for the rest of her life. In that, it was a colossal failure. As Queen, Victoria barely maintained a relationship with her mother, and Sir John Conroy was specifically banned from her apartments in one of her first acts as monarch.
Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

8,016 Listeners

1,407 Listeners

737 Listeners

754 Listeners

2,065 Listeners

477 Listeners

13,610 Listeners

370 Listeners

11,062 Listeners

591 Listeners

2,084 Listeners

818 Listeners

514 Listeners

93 Listeners

1,009 Listeners

19 Listeners