heavy contributions to the purchase prices of his residences and supporting his family in a style he judged appropriate to their position. Conroy ultimately received £148,000 in gifts and money from Sophia. In 1850, the Duchess of Kent's new comptroller, Sir George Couper, studied the old accounts. He found huge discrepancies. No records for her household or personal expenses had been kept after 1829. There was also no record of nearly £50,000 the Duchess had received from her brother, Leopold, nor of an additional £10,000 from William IV. Historiography After Conroy's departure from Victoria's service in 1837, a popular song read: Following his death in 1854, The Times published a positive obituary that declared "the name, person and character of Sir John Conroy are so well and, in many respects, so favourably known in British society that we have no doubt the announcement of his death will be received with feelings of general regret". The article briefly summarised his lifetime and praised Conroy for "considerable shrewdness, no small knowledge of human nature and a very winning address" as well as "devoting himself with great zeal and assiduity" to members of the royal family. Described in his own lifetime as a "ridiculous fellow", Conroy has not been the recipient of much recent positive historical opinion. Twentieth-century historian Christopher Hibbert writes that Conroy was a "good-looking man of insinuating charm, tall, imposing, vain, clever, unscrupulous, plausible and of limitless ambition." For her part, 21st-century historian Gillian Gill describes Conroy as "a career adventurer, expert manipulator and domestic martinet" who came to England with "small means, some ability and mighty ambition." In 2004, Elizabeth Longford wrote that Conroy "was not the arch-villain Victoria painted, but the victim of his own inordinate ambition." Suspected lover of the Duchess Conroy's relationship with the Duchess was the subject of much speculation both before and after his death in 1854. When the Duke of Wellington was asked if the Duchess and Conroy were lovers, he replied that he "supposed so". In August 1829, Wellington reported to court diarist Charles Greville that Victoria, then ten years old, had caught Conroy and her mother engaged in "some familiarities". Victoria told her governess, Baroness Lehzen, who in turn told Madame de Spaeth, one of the Duchess's ladies-in-waiting. De Spaeth confronted the Duchess about the relationship and was immediately dismissed. All of this was recorded by Greville; his subsequent diary entry