She received Wilberforce-though, to be sure, she did not ask him to sit down.  She declared in public that she put her faith in “the liberties of the People.”  It was certain that the young Princess would be brought up in the way that she should go; yet there, close behind the throne, waiting, sinister, was the Duke of Cumberland.  Brougham, looking forward into the future in his scurrilous fashion, hinted at dreadful possibilities.  “I never prayed so heartily for a Prince before,” he wrote, on hearing that George IV had been attacked by illness.  “If he had gone, all the troubles of these villains (the Tory Ministers) went with him, and they had Fred. I (the Duke of York) their own man for his life.  He (Fred. I) won’t live long either; that Prince of Blackguards, ‘Brother William,’ is as bad a life, so we come in the course of nature to be assassinated by King Ernest I or Regent Ernest (the Duke of Cumberland).”  Such thoughts were not peculiar to Brougham; in the seething state of public feeling, they constantly leapt to the surface; and, even so late as the year previous to her accession, the Radical newspapers were full of suggestions that the Princess Victoria was in danger from the machinations of her wicked uncle.

But no echo of these conflicts and forebodings reached the little Drina—­for so she was called in the family circle—­as she played with her dolls, or scampered down the passages, or rode on the donkey her uncle York had given her along the avenues of Kensington Gardens The fair-haired, blue-eyed child was idolised by her nurses, and her mother’s ladies, and her sister Feodora; and for a few years there was danger, in spite of her mother’s strictness, of her being spoilt.  From time to time, she would fly into a violent passion, stamp her little foot, and set everyone at defiance; whatever they might say, she would not learn her letters—­no, she would not; afterwards, she was very sorry, and burst into tears; but her letters remained unlearnt.  When she was five years old, however, a change came, with the appearance of Fraulein Lehzen.  This lady, who was the daughter of a Hanoverian clergyman, and had previously been the Princess Feodora’s governess, soon succeeded in instilling a new spirit into her charge.  At first, indeed, she was appalled by the little Princess’s outbursts of temper; never in her life, she declared, had she seen such a passionate and naughty child.  Then she observed something else; the child was extraordinarily truthful; whatever punishment might follow, she never told a lie.  Firm, very firm, the new governess yet had the sense to see that all the firmness in the world would be useless, unless she could win her way into little Drina’s heart.  She did so, and there were no more difficulties.  Drina learnt her letters like an angel; and she learnt other things as well.  The Baroness de Spath taught her how to make little board boxes and decorate them with tinsel and painted