by A. N. Wilson
The Queen felt stage fright before the imperial arrival, and was half-reassured to notice, when the Empress Eugénie arrived at Windsor, that she too was ‘evidently very nervous’. The nerves evaporated, however, and certainly as far as Queen Victoria and the imperial pair were concerned, what had begun as an official occasion melted into a personal friendship. It was not just flannel when, in his thank-you letter for the visit, the Emperor spoke of the impossibility of spending a few days in her intimate circle without being overwhelmed by her charm.22 Perhaps one of the reasons biographers return so often to the subject of Queen Victoria is that her extreme diffidence, and stiffness when shy, and abrasiveness when riled could make her seem to many people an unsympathetic figure. When she was engaged with another personality, the charm was total. The Victoria resented by Conroy and the Victoria loved by Lehzen were almost two different girls; the Victorias seen by Melbourne and Peel (in his early days) were, likewise, two different people, one a playful coquette, eager to learn the political game from a flirtatious elder; the other a stubborn, politically stupid person who unsuccessfully stamped her foot and played the tyrant.
The little emperor – even Victoria, at less than five feet in height, considered him ‘extremely short’ – was a peculiar sight, ‘with a head and bust, which ought to belong to a much taller man’.23 He knew how to be charming, however, and he had the classic, ‘come closer’ seducer’s manner of speaking very quietly to women. The Queen almost had to brush his cheek to hear what he was saying at their first dinner in the Castle, and discovered that ‘we got on extremely well . . . & my agitation soon & easily went off’.24 Napoleon told her that he had first seen her eighteen years earlier, when she was proroguing Parliament, and it had made a deep impression to watch ‘une jeune personne’ exercising that role. He asked tenderly after Queen Marie-Amélie and told Victoria that the exiled Queen was at liberty to cross France unmolested, if she wished to make the journey from her brother-in-law in Belgium to her brother in Spain. Since the Emperor was well read in the works of Scott, he and the Queen could discuss the Waverley novels and Bonnie Prince Charlie. The next day there was a military review in Windsor Great Park of infantry and cavalry who had been serving in the Crimea. Among them were a dozen fine horses which the Emperor had sent from France as a present to Victoria. Himself on horseback, Napoleon was presented to the ‘hero’ of Balaklava, Lord Cardigan.
Even as the royal personages got to know one another in Windsor, the Great Powers were again assembling in Vienna to negotiate an end to the war. Britain, France and Austria demanded a reduction of Russian naval power, but as long as Sevastopol held out, the Russians refused to accept this. There continued to be threatening ship movements in the Baltic throughout the summer.
When Napoleon and Eugénie went into London the next day, the crowds were immense. The beauty and stylishness of the Empress were immediately attractive. This was the first time London had seen a woman in a crinoline dress, grey with black lace and pink bows, and a wreath of pink chrysanthemums in her red hair.25
Victoria and Albert took their guests to the opera – Fidelio – where the orchestra struck up ‘Partant pour la Syrie’, and where, at the end of the performance, the chorus sang a specially composed verse of the National Anthem. The Times thought it should have been sung as a solo by the great Jenny Lind:
Emperor and Empress
O Lord, be pleased to bless
Look on this scene!
And may we ever find
With bonds of peace entwined
England and France combined
God save the Queen!
It would have been difficult to say, exactly, what the words meant, but the sentiments of entente cordiale were impossible to mistake. The Emperor had taken the visit to the opera as an opportunity to tell the Queen all about his experiences in London as a Special Constable, perhaps to distract her attention from the distress of the prisoners in chains. Only one Londoner raised a protest at Napoleon’s autocratic style of government – a bookseller called Truelove in the Strand displayed the works of Victor Hugo in his window, including a pamphlet denouncing Napoleon III and his undemocratic style of politics. He was hardly noticed among the bunting, the flags, the enthusiastic hordes. The Times reckoned that there were more than 100,000 people assembled to see the French ruler. On the day of Napoleon’s forty-seventh birthday, 20 April, little Prince Arthur, aged five, presented him with a posy of violets, the Napoleonic emblem. Although the Crystal Palace had been reassembled at Sydenham, it was not yet open to the public, but Albert and Victoria took the imperial pair to a preview. Again, huge crowds assembled – over 20,000 on the terraces at Sydenham. Napoleon was wistful about Victoria’s many children. He wrote in the album of the Prince of Wales a poem of his own composition in slightly wonky German, which could scarcely have been less appropriate, given the boy’s subsequent development:
Jüngling mit der reinen Seele,
Mit der Unschuld freiem [sic] Gefühle,
Prüf und Wahle,
Aber Lob sei nie dein Ziel!
Ob dir Beifall jauchzt die Menge
Ob sie lästrt, wanke nicht,
Trüglich oft sind Preisgesänge,
Doch des Wahrheit Pfad ist enge,
Zwischen Klüften geht die Pflicht . . .
(‘Young lad with the pure soul innocent and free! Make your choice, but may you never seek simple praise. Whether the crowd shouts applause to you, or whether it insults you, have no fear. Songs of praise are often deceiving, straight is the path of truth, Duty traces a path through narrow gaps.’26)
There would be many a cuckolded husband, nightclub proprietress and casino croupier in later decades who would have raised an eyebrow at Bertie being described as a pure soul; but the song was right to predict that he would be a man of personal charm, with a gift of appealing to crowds. His inability to tread the path of duty would, however, be the despair of Queen Victoria, and, when he was old enough to have them, also the despair of his advisers.
How very unlike his father the Prince of Wales was growing up to be! The Queen had occasional spats with Prince Albert, and sometimes worse than spats – deep fallings-out. The pattern of her relationship with her husband, however, was docile and submissive. She (nearly always) deferred to him in matters of taste, and usually in matters of public policy. They remained, nevertheless, very different characters, and perhaps this was shown to glaring effect during their return visit to the Emperor Napoleon, who insisted upon repaying their hospitality.
They arrived in Paris in the broiling heat of August, a strange month to visit the French capital, since it is the month when all fashionable French society is out of town. Nevertheless, there were huge crowds. The royal pair were accommodated in the Palais de Saint-Cloud. Pictures had been brought from the Louvre to show that the French could rival the royal collection at Windsor. The Empress Eugénie had had works by Rubens, Van Dyck, Andrea del Sarto and Madame Vigée Le Brun hung on the Queen’s bedroom walls.
The Queen immediately gave herself up to the delights of the Parisian visit – the happy crowds, the luxurious foods, the entertainments all delighted her. They went to the opera and displayed the difference between a true-born queen and a parvenue empress. When the national anthems had been played, the Empress looked behind her to make sure that her chair was in place. The Queen of England, confident that the chair would be there, sat down without turning. Mary Bulteel, her Maid of Honour who noticed this detail, was also able to reassure Eugénie’s baffled entourage that the Queen was always ‘badly dressed’. It did not prevent Victoria from being unaffectedly enraptured by Eugénie’s range of gorgeous outfits. Victoria adored the Empress and it was a friendship which lasted for life. ‘Altogether,’ she told her diary, ‘I am delighted to see how much my Albert likes and admires her, as it is so seldom I see him do so with any woman.’27 Perhaps it was so, or perhaps he was being polite. The Qu
een’s dowdiness and (by the exacting standards of Parisian journalists) poor dress sense were more than outshone by the splendour of her jewels.
The high point of the social week in Paris was the grand ball in the Hôtel de Ville, choreographed by the Prefect Baron Haussmann. As they approached from the Palace of the Tuileries, the royal party came down a rue de Rivoli heavy with banners and dense with crowds cheering ‘Vive La Reine!’ Housetops and balconies twinkled with Chinese lanterns and stars of gas. The Tours Saint-Jacques had been lit by electricity. In the square before the Hôtel de Ville were sixteen gigantic pyramids, each illuminated by variegated lamps. ‘The air was as luminous and hot as that over a furnace from the blaze of gas,’ said The Times.28 No expense had been spared. A special staircase, a copy of that at Fontainebleau, had been erected by Haussmann. Beneath it were splashing fountains and naiads representing the Seine and the Thames. The courtyard, thickly carpeted, had been roofed with glass. All over the carpet, the ill-bred guests had dropped the envelopes from their invitation cards.29 There were 8,000 guests in the overpowering heat. The dancing, which had begun at eight, paused, when the Emperor and the Queen took the floor to execute a quadrille. The crowds were patronizingly astonished by the delicacy and skill with which she danced.30
We know from Victoria’s subsequent reflections (written at the time of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870) that Prince Albert had been reminded, on this visit to the French capital, of the worst excesses of Sodom and Gomorrah. Victoria was an owl, Albert was a lark, and he always found late nights wearisome. Moreover, the visit awoke in him melancholy memories of his boyhood. The Emperor and Empress took the Royal Family to see the ruins of Louis-Philippe’s favourite summer residence, the Château de Neuilly, which had been destroyed in the Revolution of 1848. Albert had been brought here as a boy by his father. ‘Nineteen years ago,’ he wrote to his mother-in-law, ‘I was in Paris with Ernst and Papa, and I have not been there since. You may imagine what a strange impression so many changes must have produced. Neuilly, where we were then received, now lies in ruins, and the grass grows upon its site. The Duke of Orleans was then alive and unmarried; Marie and Clementine, daughters of the house; Nemours, Aumale and Montpensier were at school; Joinville a naval cadet. All this is vanished as if before the wind, and in its stead, we brought with us two children, almost fully grown.’31
Vicky was fourteen, Bertie a year younger.
Three weeks after they returned from Paris, the Royal Family were in Balmoral, awaiting the arrival of the Prussian Crown Prince, Friedrich Wilhelm. The King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, was fully aware of the political dangers of what was intended. Prussia was pro-Russian, anti-French, and completely against the Crimean War. Nevertheless, he knew that his wife, Queen Augusta, had been in correspondence with Prince Albert, and that there would be advantages in a marriage between the Queen of England’s eldest child and the heir to the most powerful of the German kingdoms. The Queen added to her own personal reflections and her husband’s loftier dynastic dreams: the girl had, she told Queen Augusta, ‘developed amazingly of late’. She spelt out that menstruation had begun earlier in the year, and that she ‘did not suffer even the slightest indisposition’.32
Fritz, the figure who arrived at Balmoral, nine years older than his potential bride, had been reared, in true Hohenzollern style, as a soldier from boyhood. The twenty-three-year-old prince was accompanied by his aide de camp Colonel Helmuth von Moltke, a worldly socialite in his mid-fifties.
Vicky was late for dinner on the first evening. When he looked up at his prospective bride, Fritz saw a child in a white dress, tied with scarlet ribbons. She laughingly excused herself, and chatted merrily to him, sometimes in German, sometimes breaking into French. He noted that ‘we looked at each other a great deal’.33 As well they might. They had a very complicated journey to tread together.
She was an extremely intelligent person, and she was devoted to her father: the only one of the nine children with Albert’s range of intellectual and imaginative gifts. The life which Prince Albert, Stockmar and Queen Victoria were plotting for the child was more difficult than they could possibly have foreseen, and much of the reason for this would be connected with the German politician they had met at the ball in Versailles – Otto von Bismarck.
The couple were sent for a walk on their own the next day up the slopes of Craig-na-Ban. Fritz picked her a sprig of white heather and they had their first kiss. That evening, Vicky ran into her mother’s room, ‘very much agitated’, to say, ‘I am very fond of the prince.’ It did indeed turn out to be an arranged match, like that of Victoria and Albert themselves, which was also a love match. The Queen specified that they must wait until Vicky was seventeen years old.
The Crimean War dragged on much longer than any of the participants would have wanted. Sevastopol eventually fell, but only after the British had suffered an humiliating defeat at the Redan fortress. The British Army was losing between twenty and thirty soldiers a day to cholera; and although Cavour had persuaded Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel to declare war on Russia, and send troops from Sardinia, and although Palmerston was trying to enlist some Swiss mercenaries, by the end of 1855, there simply was not the will to continue among the exhausted, disease-ridden troops. Palmerston asked the Archbishop of Canterbury for a National Day of Thanksgiving to be proclaimed on a Sunday in the near future. Sumner refused, rightly pointing out that the fall of Sevastopol was not, like the Battle of Waterloo (the last time such a Thanksgiving had been declared by the National Church), a decisive event, bringing an unambiguous end to the war. The Queen was disappointed that the war should end on a British setback. In the event, the Congress of Paris, which negotiated the terms of the peace, simply reiterated the six points which the supposedly ‘wet’ Lord Aberdeen had suggested two years earlier. If they had all been able to agree on those when proposed by Aberdeen, tens of thousands of lives would have been saved. But that is not the way that war or politics functions. The British public shared the Queen’s disappointment that the war ended so unsatisfactorily. The heralds who proclaimed the peace in the City of London were hissed. It was the last really popular war in the British collective psyche. The cardigan, the Raglan overcoat and the balaclava are all reassuring garments. Most English towns have a street or a square which alludes to it: Alma Street, Inkermann Crescent, and the like. There are no Somme Streets, no Mons Squares.
Another Prime Minister would have been crushed by the humiliation of the Treaty of Paris, but Palmerston bluffed it out, announcing it as a triumph to anyone who chose to believe him. Because he was liked, many wanted to believe him. The Duke of Argyll felt that the cheery manner in which the Prime Minister told the Cabinet about the peace was a mask. If it was, it was successful, since the inner doubt, angst or self-reproach, if these things were ever part of Palmerston’s nature, certainly did not show. Cheeriness, the capacity to move on to the next thing, not too much concern for the truth, these are wonderful assets in a statesman. There is more than one way encourager les autres. The Queen had entirely come to overlook Palmerston’s defects. In April 1856, she awarded him the Order of the Garter.
ELEVEN
‘SCOLDER AND SCOLDED’
THE ENDING OF the Crimean War was a fudge; a compromise. It was to this extent a minor war. It wasn’t like the ending of the 1914–18 War, when the whole world order was palpably changed forever. Nevertheless, the world had changed. France and Britain were now allies, for the first time in centuries, and this would have a powerful influence on the future. Britain had revealed itself as militarily incapable of decisive action in Europe: this too would have enormous consequences. Russia had been bloodied, but not crushed. Austria-Hungary, having stood on the sidelines in the war, was itself about to be sidelined by a more energetic, more modern, German-speaking power. Prussia, increasing monthly in industrial and military prowess, watched askance as her Royal Family allied its crown prince, Fritz, with the English princess
(as she would be known in anti-English German newspapers).
Once the hostilities ceased, however, the Powers restored diplomatic relations, and the vital glue of royal familial relations played a large part in restoring normality. It was even possible to watch the Coronation in Moscow of Alexander II with some optimism. He was comparatively young, at thirty-seven years old. He was married to a German – a princess of Hesse-Darmstadt who had been rechristened as an Orthodox and become Maria Alexandrovna: but there was here a window into the West. He had travelled widely not only in Europe, but also in his own Empire – he was the first Russian Emperor of modern times to visit Siberia. He was destined to be known as Alexander the Liberator, for he would liberate the serfs. Fritz, Vicky’s betrothed, was sent as the Prussian representative at the splendid Orthodox Coronation ceremony in the Cathedral of the Dormition in Moscow’s Kremlin. In Russia, which was literally behind the times and had not yet adopted the sixteenth-century papalist Gregorian Calendar, it was 26 August. At Balmoral, it was 7 September. Prince Albert wrote to his future son-in-law,
It is impossible to imagine a greater contrast than the way in which you and we are living: you in the Oriental splendour of the Moscow festivities and we in the quiet isolation of the Scottish Highlands . . . I understand that your future alliance is looked on askance in Russia . . . The German stands in the centre between England and Russia; his high culture and his philosophic love of truth drive him towards the English conception, his military discipline, his admiration of the asiatic greatness . . . which is achieved by merging of the individual into the whole, drives him in the other direction.1
It is clear from this very revealing letter that Prince Albert, for all his adoration of Vicky, was prepared to lose his most beloved daughter, and send her to live in Germany, in order to forward the Stockmar-inspired Coburg-federalist vision of a Europe in which Germany played the central role. Close as Albert was to the Queen – and no one could doubt their closeness – he was in some ways closer, intellectually, to the Princess Royal. She was his equal in terms of reading, intellectual passion and vision. As a grown-up, she would share his view of Europe blessed by an enlightened, liberal-conservative German centre. This would be based upon the varied states of the German Vereinigung coming together to form a single nation, if it could ever be decided whether Prussia or Austria would be the senior partner in such a confederation. Prussia was key, and Prince Albert was placing the burden of influencing these political movements on a child of fourteen. It was, however, his best throw of the dice. He could scarcely have guessed, while still in his late thirties, how little time he had left to play international politics; but the Prussian match between Fritz and Vicky was by far the biggest catch of which he would be capable – it equalled in significance his grandmother Auguste’s legerdemain, in engineering first Leopold’s marriage to Princess Charlotte, and then, when that ended in premature death, the marriage of her daughter Victoire to Edward, Duke of Kent, thereby ensuring the Saxe-Coburg place at the head of the most powerful country in the world.
