Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  We see from Queen Victoria’s journals in the first three years of her reign that she spent almost every day with Melbourne, and that for much of the time he was actually living at Windsor Castle or travelling with her to the Brighton Pavilion. When she was at Buckingham Palace, he often sat up with her until half past eleven, and would then go home and sit up till two or three in the morning to complete his work, in order to give himself time for his royal passion.

  But, as in Doyle’s cartoon, Palmerston, though not enjoying anything like the degree of intimacy with the Queen enjoyed by Melbourne, was a frequent visitor, dining with her twice a week at least, and keeping her fully abreast of his political thinking abroad.

  There is another visitor whose name appears in the journals several times a week, and that is Dr Stockmar. ‘“Clever man, the Baron,” remarked Melbourne. “He seemed to say ‘You English, it’s some time before you’ll allow a foreigner to be of the same flesh and blood as you are, but when you know him you like him very well’, and there’s some truth in that.” Asked if he had ever told the Baron what he thought of the Germans [a running joke between the Queen and Lord M.]. “Oh! he quite admits it”, was his reply; “all Europe admit it.” I said the Germans were just as good as other nations; which he wouldn’t allow.’27

  The Duchess of Kent, egged on by Conroy, had quarrelled with Baron Stockmar. (‘I never saw so foolish a woman,’ Melbourne told the Queen, ‘and we laughed at Stockmar’s calling her “such a stupid woman”.’ 28 Conroy had poisoned the duchess’s mind against Stockmar, and told her lies. Conroy told the Duke of Sussex, which Victoria vigorously denied, that she had found Stockmar sitting with the Queen ‘with all the boxes open!’29

  With more than a touch of absurdity, given the fact that she had yet to master the English language, the Duchess of Kent purported to find sinister the ‘Foreign Influence’ at Court. There was, no doubt of it, such influence, and it came from a combination of Stockmar and the duchess’s own brother, the King of the Belgians, who wrote to Victoria every week, often several times a week, with minute directions about her conduct of affairs.

  Rather than ‘dawdling’ with Lord Melbourne, the Queen could at least provide one of the traditional functions of a monarchy if she were to marry and establish a dynasty. After the near-disaster of George III’s inheritance – his madness, the fifteen children hardly any of whom came even close to producing canonically regular offspring – the zoological function of monarchy was surely closely to be linked with the constitutional. But it was not a limitless field. The violently anti-Catholic passions which came to the surface when Roman Catholics were allowed the vote ten years before had demonstrated that there would be no possibility of the public tolerating a repeal of the Act of Settlement to allow Victoria to marry a Catholic prince. She was therefore limited to a choice of three: these were the Dutch Royal Family, her cousin George Cambridge and the Coburg cousins. In February 1839, ‘I made Lord M. laugh very much by saying it was odd the late King should have fixed upon three such ugly clumsy fellows (for Prince Adalbert is also very plain) for me . . . Talked of the Cambridges . . . of George, his being a disagreeable young man.’30 George himself would ungallantly say in later years that there had been no possibility of his being attracted by his ‘plain little cousin’, the Queen of England.

  This left the Coburgs. Melbourne must have known that a belief in the desirability of this match was one thing which united Stockmar, the Duchess of Kent and King Leopold. Perhaps a little desperately, he tried to tell Victoria that the Coburgs were ‘not well thought of, and that Aunt Julia was not well thought of; and I made him laugh by saying that Mary had said to me, that when Mama spoke with astonishment about our suspecting Lady Flora, that it seemed so odd to her that a Coburg should be so surprised at it.’31

  The inference here was that Coburg, with its notoriously dissolute duke – father of Ernst and Albert – its divorced and banished Duchess Luise (the boys’ mother) – and its history of illegitimacies and sexual disease – could scarcely claim to be shocked by love affairs and intrigues in England.

  The ‘suspicions’ surrounding ‘Lady Flora’, however, to which Victoria callously alluded in her journal were only one of the signs that her immaturity, her lack of judgement and her detachment from public opinion were in danger of causing big trouble unless she could somehow be reined in, and given such benign distraction from ‘dawdling’ as only marriage could provide.

  The Lady Flora in question was Lady Flora Hastings, an old childhood acquaintance of the Queen, a close family friend of the Conroys and now a lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Kent. As a Conroy friend and a supporter of the Tories, Flora Hastings was fair game, as far as the childish malice of the Queen was concerned. She enjoyed mocking Lady Flora to Lord M. ‘I asked him if he thought Lady Flora plainer than Lady Mary: he replied, “Why, I really do; she is more disagreeable.” I am quite of this opinion.’32

  When limited to catty remarks about Lady Flora’s appearance, the Queen’s malice could do little harm. But rumours began to circulate that Flora was too close to Sir John Conroy. When the Tory Lady Flora’s waistline altered, and a swelling was visible, Lady Tavistock, Whig of the Whigs, put it about that she was pregnant. The Queen, with an intrusiveness which even at this distance in history makes us gasp, insisted that Lady Flora be examined by a royal doctor: Sir James Clark.

  Clark, like many of Victoria’s medical advisers throughout her life, was an incompetent, but even he could see that the young woman was a virgin. He failed to diagnose a malignant tumour, which was eventually to kill her in July 1839. Not only was it a profound tragedy for the Hastings family, it showed the Queen and her circle in an appalling light. On the very day that the news of Lady Flora’s miserable death reached the Court, the Queen continued to stay up late, giggling with Lord M. The Duchess of Kent, whose relationship with her daughter had never been worse, bombarded her with letters of remonstrance that ‘we were too merry last night’.33 The duchess put on mourning for Lady Flora, which – in the Queen’s view – ‘is too ridiculous’. There followed an absurd, and rather heartless, discussion of whether different members of the Royal Family should send carriages to Lady Flora’s funeral, which was held in Scotland. Lord M. thought that sending a carriage was tantamount to attending the obsequies in person, and that the Queen should not send one. But the duchess sent a carriage and so did the Queen Dowager and Lord Howe. While Victoria airily doubted whether the Flora Hastings business was ‘really making such a sensation as people said it did’,34 the French Ambassador was reporting home that ‘L’affaire de Lady Flora Hastings s’envenima et donne beaucoup de tourments à la Reine.’35 She received a vicious press, especially in the Tory newspapers, and Conroy made sure that the affair rumbled on and on, with the Morning Post publishing, posthumously, Lady Flora’s letters, spitting venom against the Queen and ‘violent against Lehzen’.36 It could not do the Queen, or the monarchy, any good.

  The so-called Bedchamber Crisis, which had preceded the Flora Hastings debacle, was in a sense more damaging because it revealed the absolute lack of political nous on the part of the young Victoria. She really was what Conroy so crudely dubbed ‘an ignorant little child’.

  The political year was dominated by events in Jamaica, with the planters showing great severity to their slaves, with overcrowding in the prisons, and a repeated danger of outright anarchy and rebellion. It was decided to bring in a parliamentary measure to suspend the Jamaica Constitution. The Government had a majority of only five in the Commons when the matter was put to the vote, a significant number of radicals having withdrawn their support from the Whigs. Melbourne felt he had no option but resignation.

  Lord M. told the Queen to call for the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel and ask them to form a Tory administration. When she called for Wellington, he referred her to Peel, who had, after all, been the last Tory Prime Minister (1834–5). Peel told the Queen that he could
not serve as her Prime Minister unless she made some concession to the political sensibilities of the Tories, by changing the personnel at Court. Melbourne, when consulted, advised her to make ‘some changes’ in the ladies. ‘You must remember that [Peel] is a man who is not accustomed to talk to Kings; a man of a quite different calibre; it’s not like me; I’ve been brought up with Kings and princes which gives me that ease. I know the whole Family, and know exactly what to say to them; now he has not that ease and probably you were not at your ease.’37 This was indeed the case, and Victoria had been nervous and shaking when she gave audience to Peel. Nevertheless, when she stubbornly refused to offer a Tory lady a position as a lady of the bedchamber, and when Peel therefore said he that he could not serve under her, she believed she had achieved a sort of triumph.

  ‘You will easily imagine that I firmly resisted this attack upon my power,’ she wrote to her uncle Leopold, who replied, ‘I approve very highly of the whole mode in which you proceeded.’38

  Far from demonstrating her power, she had managed in two years, after the glad accession of a young, popular Head of State, to make the monarchy into an institution which was hated. Tories, of all people, no longer felt the monarchy was theirs. Melbourne quietly admitted to her that his Government would have difficulty limping on. This ridiculously trivial matter was in danger of provoking a General Election, since at any moment the Tories could force a vote on some other issue in the Commons and defeat the Melbourne administration.

  It was fairly widely agreed that the Queen was neither a wise nor a competent Head of State. Melbourne himself, much as he loved her, must have cringed as she wrote him such letters as, ‘The Queen is ashamed to say it, but she has forgotten when she appointed the Judge Advocate; when will the Cabinet be over?’39 He could see, and feel, her youthful charm. He loved her. The greater political world saw only a capricious little incompetent, and the press, both Tory and radical, saw no reason to be merciful to her.

  It was at this stage of things that Stockmar was able to play his trump card. Melbourne and the Queen both agreed to dismiss as an absurdity the notion, put about by Conroy, that Stockmar was exerting a ‘Foreign Influence’ at Court. But he plainly was doing so; and although the baron’s bons mots are not quoted as often as Lord M.’s (perhaps because he never made any), he was almost as frequent a visitor at Buckingham Palace and Windsor. She was informed of her accession at six o’clock on the morning of 20 June 1837. At 7.30, while she was having her breakfast, ‘good, faithful Stockmar came and talked to me’. After a solitary dinner she saw Stockmar twice, once before and once after the visit of Lord Melbourne.40 Thereafter, Stockmar was an absolutely repeated and habitual visitor.

  If the summer of 1839, with its Bedchamber Crisis and its Lady Flora Hastings affair, had not been so disastrous, Melbourne might have been able to stave off the Coburg match. The Queen, after all, was only twenty. He might have been able to do so anyway, had it not been for the fact that when she met her cousin Albert again in the autumn of that difficult year, she felt an overpowering sexual attraction.

  There was no doubt of it being a Coburg-arranged affair. Victoria’s only doubt was whether the boy himself had been made ‘aware of the wish of his Father and you relative to me’, as she put it to the King of the Belgians in July 1839. She made it clear to her uncle that she did not regard herself as engaged to Albert.41

  The two brothers, Albert and Ernst, arrived in London in October. ‘Albert’s beauty is most striking, and he so amiable and unaffected – in short, very fascinating’, were her initial reactions.42 Within a fortnight, she was telling her journal, ‘Dearest Albert took my face in both his hands and kissed me most tenderly and said, “ich habe dich so lieb, ich kann nicht sagen wie!” [I love you so much, I can’t say how much.] Dearest Angel, so kind of him, and he said we should be “so glücklich” if I can only make him happy.’43

  There was considerable opposition among the Queen’s English family. The Duchess of Gloucester supposed it had all been arranged behind everyone’s back by the Duchess of Kent, and the old Duke of Cambridge said that Victoria ‘was only brought up for the Cobourg [sic] family and not for the English family’ – which was largely true. She skittishly asked Albert himself whether his father had expected things to move forward so quickly and he replied, ‘Nein, im Gegentheil, wir haben alle geglaubt dass würde nicht seyn.’ (‘No, on the contrary, none of us believed it would happen.’) ‘He clasped me in his arms and pressed his lips to mine again and again, and leant his head on my shoulders,’ and murmured more sweet German nothings in her ear.44 By 9 November, Albert was showing her his illustrations to a story he had written of ‘Herr v. Pumplemus und Herr v. Zigeuner’, which she thought ‘delightful and so funny’. But they were not funny as Lord M. was funny.

  The genuine playfulness and humour in the Queen’s nature was not to find companionable outlet for over twenty years, when she began to befriend John Brown; and it would not know a complete flowering until Disraeli became Prime Minister in 1874.

  She was so besottedly enraptured by Albert, his beauty and his accomplishments, that she had a far less vivid sense than we do – who know the future – of how much, in this infatuation, of her own freedom and personality she was surrendering. ‘I love him more than I can say,’ she gushed to her uncle Leopold, ‘and I shall do everything in my power to render the sacrifice he has made (for a sacrifice in my opinion it is) as small as I can’.45

  Leopold replied, ‘Lord Melbourne has shown himself the amiable and excellent man I always took him for. Another man in his position, instead of your happiness, might have merely looked to his own personal views and imaginary interests. Not so our good friend; he saw what was best for you, and I feel it deeply to his praise.’46

  There could be no doubt that for Melbourne himself it was a personal tragedy. Throughout their three years of conversations, he had ribbed his young monarch about the Germans, and his distaste for the race in general, the Coburg Royal Family in particular. Once the Coburg prince had arrived to claim his cousin as a bride, there would be no more of their old jokey familiarities. He felt as the father of a doted-upon daughter might feel when she meets her first serious lover: but more excluded than this, for they had been half-lovers. Moreover, when the Whigs lost the election in 1841 and Melbourne continued to correspond with the Queen, it was firmly pointed out, to both sides of the correspondence by Stockmar via Albert, that this was constitutionally inadvisable. They slowly began to lose touch. When she met him in 1843, she was shocked to find him an old man. ‘Lord Melbourne seemed very nervous, and there is a strained altered look in his face, which it pains me to see. He is grown very thin, and uses his left hand with difficulty. But he talked on all subjects very well and quite like his old self. He said “I am very weak. I am so crippled”, but I assured him he looked very well and only begged he would take great care of himself. “Well I will try”, he answered.’47

  He turned down her offers of an earldom, and of the Garter, accepting in preference some lithographs of the Queen, which she gave him: he could not have made it clearer that their relationship had become a purely personal one for him. Driving past Buckingham Palace became an unbearable experience for him. Through lighted windows he caught glimpses of familiar pictures, or saw someone lighting a candle. The feeling of rejection was so acute because it was real – he had been rejected. Her future was elsewhere.

  SIX

  ‘TOO HASTY AND PASSIONATE FOR ME’

  VICTORIA AND ALBERT. The very phrase conveys something institutional: the words gave the name to a royal yacht and, as they do today, to a venerable London museum. Although they were married when it was technically possible to take photographs, no camera was present at their wedding, and the images of their early life together have been immortalized in glossy formality by the German painter Franz Xaver Winterhalter.

  In Queen Elizabeth II’s private sitting room at Balmoral,1 however, hang two
altogether less formal likenesses of the royal pair – chalk drawings by the Hungarian-born painter Charles Brocky. They formed part of the glorious exhibition ‘Victoria and Albert: Art and Love’, which was displayed at the Queen’s Gallery in 2010. The figures whom Brocky depicted in 1841 are conveyed with a realism which is palpable and instantly recognizable as two likenesses. They are so alive, vibrant, young, sexy, that it almost shocks us to see them. What Brocky captured, before Winterhalter made them into lustrous icons, was, as it were, the raw materials of the legend. We see Victoria as her husband must have seen her on her wedding night when they were alone together. We see Albert as a bright, slightly amused boy, quizzical about the world which he was about to conquer. He is so young that his whiskers are no more than fluff. It is a supercilious face, and his expression suggests that he does not expect us, or his wife, to aspire to his level of intelligence. Victoria looks like someone who has scarcely emerged from childhood; but she is bursting with sexual vitality. Her hair has been dressed but it nevertheless, at the edges of its ringlets, is slightly tousled. The eyes and nose, a little disconcertingly, are those of her grandfather George III. You could not look at this drawing and think she was any other lineage. The eyes, however, are young, joyful, amused. The very moist red mouth is open, just a little.

  This pair of extremely strong characters was in for an extraordinary journey together when they married. Both wanted power. Neither wanted to surrender their independence. More than in most marriages, there was a thunderous clash of wills. There was also, however, a deep bond from the very first. Furious as they would be with one another in the first stormy two years, as they were also in the tired last year, they remained everlastingly a team. The strength of their personal attraction, and the Queen’s physical stamina, led to the birth of nine children, all of whom survived birth and childhood. This was in itself something of an achievement in the nineteenth century. It was also a political statement. Their private life was not really a private life, however much they might wish it to be so. For each coition was not only an act of love, but a gesture against the swell of European republicanism. Each pregnancy brought forth a potential German empress, the would-be parent of a Russian tsar, the potential for a queen of Spain or a tsar of Bulgaria. In fact, when Brocky drew them, they had already started to have children, and they were twenty-two years old. They look younger. The chalk likenesses show teenagers who have just sprung up from a sofa when their parents came home early. Brocky also immortalizes a couple who are mythological progenitors, like Abraham, the father of many nations. Albert was first photographed in Brighton by William Constable in 1842; the daguerreotype is so dark and indistinct, you can hardly make him out. In 1848, he commissioned William Kilburn to take a daguerreotype which was subsequently coloured. To compare the Brocky drawing of 1841 and the Kilburn photograph of only seven years later is to register a shock. The young man, not yet thirty, in that photograph, taken in the Year of Revolutions, has aged a lifetime. But he had done his bit to stave off the Revolution.