At two P.M. precisely, the Victoria and Albert cast off her lines from the Portsmouth quay and her paddle wheels began to turn. Steaming out of the harbor, the royal yacht flew five huge flags, each the size of a baronial tapestry. Atop her foremast stood a dark-red banner with an anchor in yellow, the emblem of the Lords of the Admiralty. At the peak of her mainmast flew the Royal Standard of Great Britain, golden lions and silver unicorns on quartered fields of red and blue, and the German Imperial Standard, a black eagle on gold. At the mizzenmast floated the Union Jack and from the stern waved the White Ensign of the Royal Navy. Behind the yacht followed a procession of ships, large and small, carrying special guests. Immediately astern was the pale-green P & O line Carthage, her deck ablaze with the colorful uniforms and flashing jewels of foreign and Indian princes. Their guide was Captain Lord Charles Beresford, hero of the naval service. The Admiralty yacht Enchantress came next, bearing the Lords of the Admiralty and their guests. Next came the Danube, freighted with members of the House of Lords. She was followed by Wildfire, carrying the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, surrounded by the prime ministers and governors of the colonies and territories which made up the British Empire. Near the end, steaming very slowly “lest she tread on the toes16 of some of the little ones,” came the huge Cunard liner Campania, biggest and fastest of Britain’s transatlantic greyhounds, her immense bulk dwarfing even the battleships’. Steaming down from Southampton, where she had embarked 1,800 passengers—the members of the House of Commons and their friends and relations—the Campania had followed in the wake of the much smaller Danube, carrying the Lords. At one point in this passage, John Burns, a Radical M.P., had quipped with a smile that if the Campania’s master would increase speed, many constitutional questions between Commons and Lords would be settled permanently. Last in line was the Eldorado, which bore the foreign ambassadors accredited to the Court of St. James’s.
The fleet was ready. As soon as the boom of Victory’s signal cannon was heard announcing that the royal yacht was under way, a flag soared to the peak of Renown’s signal halyard: “Man ships!” In the days of sailing vessels, the result was the most dramatic of naval spectacles: seamen standing at regular intervals along every yardarm of the towering masts. Now masts and yards were gone, but the signal still created a memorable transformation. Great steel ships, previously grim and silent, now boiled with running men. Within a few minutes, lines of seamen stood motionless along the edge of every deck and on the tops of gun turrets and barbettes. Here and there, on the bridges and in the fighting tops, a splash of red showed where marine detachments were stationed.
As the royal yacht entered the lines, each warship boomed a salute and soon clouds of white smoke were drifting over the green water. (Sharp eyes noted an exception in the salutes from the French cruiser Pothuau, which was using the new smokeless powder.) Steaming slowly, the yacht came within easy hailing distance of the black behemoths. From the warships, it was easy to see the Prince of Wales surrounded by his party. His brother and his son stood beside him, and the Crown Prince of Japan and Sir Pertab Singh, huge jewels flashing in his silken turban, were nearby. Not far off was a mass of other officers, wearing scarlet, blue, and green tunics decorated with gold and silver. The ladies clustered around the German Empress and the Princess of Wales. Most were in yachting costumes of cream and navy blue, or sky blue and yellow, or maroon, or pale green. “No one looked better17 than the Countess of Warwick, in her dark blue alpaca, the neck of white embroidered batiste, the whole exquisitely fitting her beautiful figure,” one correspondent described the Prince of Wales’ former mistress.
As the royal yacht drew abreast each warship, officers and men removed their hats and shouted three cheers. If the ship carried a band, the band played “God Save the Queen.” Observers noted pleasurably that the American sailors on board the Brooklyn cheered as lustily as any British crew and that the band on the deck of the König Wilhelm followed the anthem with a brisk playing of “Rule Britannia!”
While the Prince was inspecting the fleet, the lanes between the warships were kept clear of pleasure and spectator boats by naval tugs and patrol boats. But once Victoria and Albert had passed, an impudent maverick craft made a sudden appearance and began to race up and down the lines, weaving and darting between ships with astonishing speed and maneuverability. Patrol boats, attempting to overtake or intercept the intruder, failed. This strange craft, painted gray, shaped like a torpedo one hundred feet long and nine feet in beam, was Turbina, the world’s fastest vessel, capable of thirty-four knots. Her performance was intended to persuade the navy to give up the heavy reciprocating steam engines which powered its warships and change to the steam turbine which sent Turbina knifing across the water. The boat’s designer, Sir Charles Parsons, was on board, standing just aft of the tall midships funnel, which belched a flame at least as tall as the funnel itself. Racing among the towering men-of-war, defying authority, Turbina dramatically upset protocol. “Perhaps her lawlessness18 may be excused by the novelty and importance of the invention she embodies,” grumbled The Times.
Finishing her tour of the lines at four P.M., Victoria and Albert drew abreast of the Renown, dropped her starboard anchor, and signalled all British and foreign flag officers to come on board to be received by the Prince of Wales. The admirals had been waiting in steam pinnaces and launches bobbing alongside their flagships, and when the signal came there was a race to the port gangway of the royal yacht. The behavior of the Russian admiral in this respect was much admired: disdaining to race, abjuring steam, he arrived in his barge pulled by the oars of sixteen sailors in white. While the guests were still on board, Victoria and Albert released a pigeon carrying a special message from the Prince to his mother at Windsor Castle: “Admirals just presented.19 Beautiful day, review unqualified success. The only thing to have made it perfect was the presence of the Queen.”
At five, the visitors went down the gangway. Victoria and Albert pulled her anchor out of the Solent ooze, backed engines, and steamed away in the direction of Portsmouth. As she departed, another three cheers rolled out from the fleet. Turbina then made another surprise appearance. She had been lolling astern of a cruiser, but as the royal yacht got under way, Turbina fell in behind. At first she followed at moderate speed, but suddenly her propellers spun, she raised her bow, buried her stern in a mass of seething white foam, and blazed away on a tangent from the royal yacht. Leaving the fleet astern, the Prince of Wales ordered a welcome signal run up the halyard: “Splice the mainbrace!” and the Commander-in-Chief ordered every ship to distribute an extra tot of grog (rum and water) to every seaman.
Even as the Prince was receiving the admirals, menacing clouds were gathering on the southern horizon. As he left the fleet, the black hulls stood on black water with a bank of dark thunderheads towering overhead. Before Victoria and Albert reached Portsmouth Harbor, the sky was green and black and the first large raindrops had begun to fall. By the time the yacht was berthed alongside the quay, rain was lashing the decks with tropical violence. Lightning split the air with prolonged, crackling bolts of fire, and thunder rumbled like cannonade. Out in the fleet, curtains of rain blotted out the sight of ships in adjacent lines; decks and turrets became a tumult of dancing water. Ashore, where the drains were unequal to the deluge, great sheets of water lay on the Esplanade, and Southsea Common became a swamp. All shops were closed and crowds of people huddled under whatever shelter they could find. The thunderstorm, which lasted an hour, was one of the most severe ever recorded in southern England.
During the storm, it had seemed that the illumination of the fleet, the feature of the evening, would have to be cancelled. But at sunset only a canopy of heavy clouds darkened the twilight of the summer sky. To watchers on shore, the fleet was gradually fading into the deepening shadows. Then, at nine-fifteen, a signal cannon boomed. Renown suddenly jutted out, traced in fire, against the gloaming. A second later, every warship in the anchorage burst into outline, traced
against the black sky by hundreds of electric lights. Strung the length of each ship, following the outlines of hull, bridge, funnels, masts, and turrets, the lights appeared as “lines of fire,20 which in the light haze which still hung above the water after the storm, took on the golden color of glowworm.” Seasoned naval correspondents grew rhapsodic: The lights were “a myriad of brilliant beads,”21 the ships “a fairy fleet22 festooned with chains of gold... lying on a phantom sea that sparkled and flashed back ripples of jewels.” British flagships carried a large electrical display at their mastheads: a red cross on a white background announcing the presence of an admiral. Foreign ships created special effects. The Rossiya bore the Russian Imperial Double Eagle in lights. The Brooklyn spelled out electrically “V.R. [Victoria Regina] 1837–1897” along her armored side. Another Brooklyn feature was the fixing of the British and American flags floating at the top of her masts in the beam of powerful searchlights.
For almost three hours, this unique technological and imaginative accomplishment glimmered in the darkness. From shore and aboard the ships, people stared. Around ten P.M. the Prince and Princess of Wales came out again from Portsmouth in the small royal yacht Alberta to cruise through the fleet. The Alberta carried few lights and attracted little formal attention as she passed slowly down the stationary lines. At eleven-thirty, however, as the yacht departed, bands again played “God Save the Queen.” Then, in a final salute to the Queen and her Heir, all the warships in the anchorage fired a royal salute. The ships were wreathed in curtains of smoke, illuminated by lurid red flashes from the guns. It was a spectacular climax: the continuous roar of a naval cannonade, tongues of bright flame leaping from multiple broadsides, smoke rolling in red clouds across the myriad of glowing electric lights.
The Prince returned to Portsmouth and the illuminations continued a little longer. Then, as the clock touched midnight, the flagship switched off and the rest of the fleet was plunged into darkness. From ashore, an observer standing on a hotel balcony recorded, “At the stroke of twelve,23 the golden, fairy fleet vanished. Was it a dream? Overhead the clouds pulled away and the stars twinkled above. The dim masthead riding light of countless vessels became visible. It had not vanished. The fleet was there.”
Part 1
The German Challenge
Chapter 1
Victoria and Bertie
Queen Victoria was mostly German. Her father, Edward, Duke of Kent, fourth son of King George III, was a Hanoverian, a descendant of George Louis, Elector of Hanover, brought to England in 1714 and placed on the throne as King George I to ensure the Protestant succession. All of Queen Victoria’s Hanoverian forebears—King George II, his son Frederick, Prince of Wales, and his son King George III—married German wives, reinforcing the German strain on her father’s side. Queen Victoria’s mother, Princess Victoria Mary Louisa of Saxe-Coburg, was German. Queen Victoria herself then redoubled the German fraction in the royal family by marrying her German cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, the son of her mother’s older brother. The Queen’s early environment was mostly German. Her governess was German; the cradle songs by which she was lulled to sleep were German; she heard nothing but German and spoke only that language until she was three. Her eager sympathy with most things German was due to her husband. “I have a feeling for our dear little Germany1 which I cannot describe,” she said after visiting Prince Albert’s birthplace.
The British monarchy, in the years before Victoria’s accession, had come on hard times. Queen Victoria’s immediate predecessors on the throne—George III, George IV, and William IV—have been described as “an imbecile, a profligate, and a buffoon.”2 Victoria’s father, the Duke of Kent, looked scarcely more promising. Retired from the British Army because of a taste for harsh discipline which had provoked a mutiny at Gibraltar, permanently in debt, a bachelor at forty-eight, he lived mostly abroad with his mistress of twenty-eight years, a French-Canadian woman named Madame de St. Laurent. Inspired in 1818 by an offer of an increased parliamentary subsidy if he would marry and produce a child, he ushered Madame de St. Laurent to the door and proposed to a thirty-year-old widow, Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg. They married and within ten months, on May 24, 1818, a daughter was born. Eight months later, the Duke of Kent, having made his contribution to English history, died of pneumonia.
The princess, second in line for the British throne, lived with her mother in practical, red-brick Kensington Palace, whence she journeyed from time to time to visit her aged uncle, King George IV. Early, she knew how to please. Climbing into the lap of the gouty, bewigged monarch, she would give him a beguiling smile and plant a whispery kiss on his dry, rouged cheek. “What would you like3 the band to play next?” the old gentleman once asked. “Oh, Uncle King, I should like them to play ‘God Save the King,’” piped the child. “Tell me what you enjoyed most of your visit,” King George said when it was time for her to go. “The drive with you,” chimed little Princess Victoria.
She understood that she was different from other children. “You must not touch those,4 they are mine,” she announced to a visiting child who was about to play with her toys. “And I may call you Jane, but you must not call me Victoria,” she added for emphasis. An exasperated music teacher once presumed to lecture, “There is no royal road to music,5 Princess. You must practice like everyone else.” Abruptly, Victoria closed the piano cover over the keys. “There! You see? There is no must about it!” When she was ten, she discovered and began to study a book of genealogical tables of the kings and queens of England. Startled, she turned to her governess and said, “I am nearer to the throne6 than I thought.” When her governess nodded, Victoria’s eyes filled with tears. Solemnly, she raised her right forefinger and made the famous declaration, “I will be good.”
In 1830, when Victoria was eleven, the death of “Uncle King” brought the Princess even closer to the throne. The new King, her sixty-five-year-old uncle William, had sired ten children, all illegitimate; Victoria, accordingly, was Heir to the British Crown. King William IV reigned for seven years, but at five A.M. on June 20, 1837, a group of gentlemen arrived at Kensington Palace, having come directly from Windsor Castle, where the King had just died. A sleepy young woman in a dressing gown, her hair still down her back, received them and they kneeled and kissed her hand. A reign of sixty-four years had begun. “I am very young,”7 the new Queen wrote in her diary that night, “and perhaps in many, though not all things, inexperienced, but I am sure that few have more good will and more real desire to do what is fit and right that I have.” The eighteen-year-old Queen, bubbling with youthful high spirits, provided a tonic for the British people, surfeited with foolish old men on the throne. On political matters, Victoria scrupulously followed the advice of her Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. Their relationship was a blend of daughter and father, adoring younger woman and elegant, urbane older man—and sovereign and subject. The world thought Melbourne a cynic, but he charmed the Queen with his sophistication, his dry wit, and his deep devotion. She proclaimed him “the best-hearted, kindest,8 and most feeling man in the world,” praise endorsed when her beloved spaniel, Dash, came up to lick Lord Melbourne’s hand. “All dogs like me,”9 the Prime Minister said, and shrugged, but the Queen would not believe it.
The vicissitudes of politics removed Lord Melbourne but, in 1839, Victoria herself chose the male counselor who was to have the greatest influence on her life. Her first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, three months younger than Victoria, had grown up a serious, purposeful child. “I intend to train myself10 to be a good and useful man,” he had written in his diary at age eleven. Victoria had first met her cousin before she came to the throne, when both were seventeen. “Albert’s beauty is most striking,”11 she told her diary. “His hair is about the same color as mine; his eyes are large and blue, and he has a beautiful nose and a very sweet mouth with fine teeth.”
Subsequently, she noted further details: the “delicate moustachios and slight but very slight whisker
s,” the “beautiful figure,12 broad in the shoulders and a fine waist.” Both knew that their elders hoped for a match. Still, the choice was up to her. She was almost ready to make that choice after watching him climbing the stairs at Windsor in October 1839. “It is with some emotion13 that I beheld Albert—who is beautiful,” she told her diary. A few days later, she invited Albert to come to her private audience room, where she proposed. Albert consented and began the difficult task of becoming the husband of the Queen of England. When he suggested, before the marriage, that it would be nice to have a longer honeymoon than the two or three days set by the Queen, she reminded him, “You forget, my dearest Love,14 that I am the Sovereign and that business can stop and wait for nothing.” The marriage ceremony took place at St. James’s Chapel in London and the wedding night at Windsor. The following morning, the Queen rushed to her diary. Albert had played the piano while she lay on the sofa with a headache, but “ill or not I NEVER NEVER15 spent such an evening!!!. My DEAREST DEAR Albert sat on a footstool by my side and his excessive love and affection gave me feelings of heavenly love and happiness, I never could have hoped to have felt before!—really, how can I ever be thankful enough to have such a husband!”
In the early months of marriage, Albert’s position was awkward. Victoria adored him and had insisted that the word “obey” remain in their marriage service, but, as he wrote to a friend, he remained “the husband, not the master16 of the house.” His position improved when, nine months and eleven days after the wedding, he became a father as well as a husband. The child was a daughter, Victoria (called Vicky by the family), rather than the hoped-for Prince of Wales, but this disappointment was overcome eleven and a half months later when Prince Albert Edward (known as Bertie) arrived on November 20, 1840, at Buckingham Palace. The Prince was baptized at Windsor on January 25, 1842, in the presence of the Duke of Wellington and King Frederick William IV of Prussia, who bestowed on his godson the Prussian Order of the Black Eagle. After the ceremony, Victoria wrote: “We prayed that our little boy17 might become a true and virtuous Christian in every respect and I pray that he may become the image of his beloved father.”
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