John Conroy

John Conroy controlled Queen Victoria's childhood so completely that her first act on becoming queen was to remove him from her presence. He was an Irish army officer of modest means who became equerry and then comptroller to the Duke of Kent, and on the Duke's death in 1820 made himself indispensable to the widowed Duchess and to her daughter's prospects. With the Duchess he devised what Victoria later called the Kensington System: the child was never left alone, slept in her mother's room, was allowed no unsupervised contact with other children, was escorted downstairs by an adult holding her hand, and was watched constantly for signs of a temperament that could be managed. The purpose was to make her dependent, keep William IV's court at a distance, and position Conroy as the power behind an eventual regency should she inherit before eighteen. He pressed her repeatedly, including during a serious illness at Ramsgate in 1835 when she was seventeen, to sign a paper appointing him her private secretary. She refused, ill as she was, and never forgot it. William IV, who loathed the arrangement, announced publicly at his birthday dinner that he intended to live until she came of age so that the Duchess and her advisers should have no regency; he managed it by less than a month. Victoria became queen in June 1837, banned Conroy from her household immediately, and moved her mother to a distant apartment. He retired on a pension and a promised baronetcy that never came, and died in debt, having also mismanaged the finances of everyone who trusted him. He was created a baronet in 1827, before Victoria's accession rather than after it. Victoria's journals, which she began at thirteen, record the Kensington System in her own words and are the main source for it. His son later published a defence of him that convinced almost nobody.

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