Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  The Prince of Wales, at thirteen, was too young to marry, even by the almost oriental standards of the Royal House. To achieve absolute balance of power he could, perhaps, have been betrothed, in medieval fashion, to the new Russian emperor’s most eligible daughter, Maria Alexandrovna: but she was not yet three years old. She must wait to be married to the English Prince Alfred when she grew up.

  Queen Victoria, who believed herself to be the loyal wife who left the political thinking to her husband, was, by virtue of who she was, in a rather different position. She was three-quarters German; she looked, as Albert did, to King Leopold and to Stockmar for political guidance in European politics . . . but. There was always a ‘but’. There was always the fact that she was also the Queen of England, working alongside her Prime Ministers, and conscious of Britain’s position as an imperial power. This sense of the British dominions beyond Europe was sharpened by the Crimean debacle.

  1856 was a dark year for the royal pair. The Queen felt depleted and fussed by having so many children. Naturally, she had help with them: indeed, during the daytime scarcely saw them, and only ate with them when they were almost grown-up. But she felt ‘agitated’2 when separated from them, and exhausted by them when they were present. Profoundly in love as she was with Albert (even when they were not in a state of harmony), she resented the children’s intrusion upon her marital intimacy.

  ‘It is indeed a pity,’ Albert wrote to her in October 1856, ‘that you find no consolation in the company of your children. The root of the difficulty lies in the mistaken notion that the function of a mother is to be always correcting, scolding, ordering them about and organizing their activities. It is not possible to be on friendly terms with people you have just been scolding, for it upsets scolder and scolded alike.’3 On top of all this, there was the simple fact that being a conscientious Head of State involved a Herculean workload. The civil service and the diplomatic service were, by modern standards, skeletal. Huge quantities of paperwork, which in a modern constitutional monarchy would pass through one of the Government ministries, came to the Queen, at least notionally for her approval or comment. Colonel Phipps, who was doing three jobs – Keeper of the Privy Purse, Treasurer to Prince Albert and Cofferer to the Prince of Wales – was receiving 14,000 letters a year.4 The prince, who attributed the Queen’s short temper and volatile mood swings to pressure of work, told Sir James Clark, her doctor, that although he personally now drafted all the Queen’s official correspondence, she had to copy it out, since the letters – to Prime Ministers, ambassadors, the commander-in-chief of the army, and so on – had to bear at least the appearance of having come from her. The prince also retained the fear to the end of his life that he would make mistakes in his written English, and would bring his drafts to the Queen saying, ‘Ich habe Dir hier ein Draft gemacht lese es mal . . . ich dächte es wäre recht so?’ (‘I have made a draft here – read it through – is it all right?’) ‘So few faults were there to be found,’5 the Queen recalled, which shows us that, even through her rose-tinted spectacles, Albert’s written work was noticeably not that of an English-speaker.

  The doctor, whom she regarded as ‘that kind fatherly old friend’,6 was evidently as worried as all the older generation were by the possibility that the Queen’s volatility might be an early-warning signal of her grandfather George III’s insanity about to burst out. On 5 February 1856, he noted, ‘Queen’s health has not improved. She has complained of feeling weaker than usual more especially of late, & has been at times frequently low & nervous. I have never seen her weaker than this day . . . I feel at times uneasy regarding the Queen’s mind unless she is kept quiet and still amused, the time will come when she will be in danger. She told me today that if she had another child, she would sink under it. I too have my fears, but they are more for the effect on the mind than the health.’7

  Needless to say, within four months of making this dramatic prediction, the Queen had gone down to Osborne in sweltering weather. On the Isle of Wight, her children – who in Buckingham Palace were only a worry – seemed delightful. Affie was twelve years old. Little Prince Arthur charmed everyone. The weather was tropical, calm and hot. At night they sat out on the terrace, and in the mornings, after late rising, they breakfasted in the Alcove.8 She became pregnant again – this was the last time – and Princess Beatrice, always called ‘Baby’ by her mother – was born on 14 April 1857.

  A glimpse of the volatile, downright irrational behaviour which troubled the kind old doctor can be seen in one of Albert’s many letters to her, written that autumn:

  I don’t yet know why my question, while we were slowly and quietly reading the Princess’s letter, ‘what makes you so bitter?’ produced such an outburst. It is my duty to keep calm, and I mean to do so, but unkindness or ingratitude towards others makes me angry, like any other kind of immorality. Fritz is prepared to devote his whole life to our child – whom you are thankful to be rid of – and because of that you turn against him: Stockmar, who has shown us nothing but kindness for as long as we can remember, is suddenly asked, old and ill as he is, to drag himself over here, and his coming is taken as an offence. This is not a question of bickering, but of attitudes of mind, which will agree as little as oil and water, and it is no wonder that our conversations on the subject cannot end harmoniously. I am trying to keep out of your way until your better feelings have returned and you have regained control of yourself.9

  This was one of the many rows about Vicky. Naturally, in 1856–7, it was the two eldest children who occupied the minds of the parents. Bertie was the despair of his tutor, Mr Gibbs. Idle, and with a poor attention span, he caused his serious-minded parents ‘immense anxiety!’10 For her clever firstborn, Victoria felt no such worries, but her emotions about Vicky were complex, and the fact that they were contradictory did not prevent her feeling them very strongly. First, she felt the classic envy which mothers so often feel for a daughter, on the verge of womanhood, who deeply engages the emotions of her father. There were tensions between the mother and daughter. The Queen complained of Vicky’s ‘wayward temper, her want of self-control, sharp answers – contradictoriness & dislike of any observation’11 – which makes one want to ask, ‘Yes, but what observations were you making?’

  Then again, Victoria was in awe of the princess’s cleverness – again, something which bound her more closely to her father than to her mother. In other moods, the Queen felt about Vicky, who was only nineteen years younger, ‘more as if it were my sister rather than my child’.12 At the same time, she felt the inevitable cluster of emotions which passes through the mind of any parent confronting a daughter’s loss of virginity – ‘she will no longer be an innocent girl – but a wife – & – perhaps, this time next year already a mother!’13 and the no less painful realization that, once Vicky was married and living abroad, ‘she will return but for a short time, almost as a visitor!’14

  At the same time, the Queen was capable of realizing that these worries were only a magnified version of what all parents worry about as their children are growing up, and could not be compared with true horrors. There were plenty of those in the world, and in 1857, attention was focused on India. Britain’s infiltration into the entire subcontinent had been gradual and piecemeal. The commercial interests of the East India Company; the military need to drive out the French (from the mid-eighteenth century onwards); the zeal of Christian missionaries to convert Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims to membership of the Church of England: all these things coalesced in India in the decades after the Napoleonic Wars. Little by little, India ceased to be a collection of independent princedoms and kingdoms in which the British exercised influence, and became ‘British India’, with a British Governor-General ruling from Calcutta. A key moment in the history of modern India was in the 1830s when, acting upon the recommendation of Thomas Babington Macaulay, the historian who joined the Council of the East India Company as law member in 1834, the Company decreed that English b
ecome the common language of India. It replaced Persian as the language of the Higher Courts, and thereafter, the British felt more entrenched in their positions as the Governors of India.15

  The ending of the Crimean War did not altogether diminish British paranoia about the possibility of Russia infiltrating India from Afghanistan. Russian influence had been growing in Persia, decade by decade, and it was a fear which would only be fully overridden when, in the early years of the twentieth century, the British began to fear German infiltration, possibly by an extension of the Berlin–Baghdad railroad.

  There was never a time in the nineteenth century when matters in India were entirely stable, and in the mid- to late 1850s, many areas were ripe for trouble. The outbreaks of Indian resistance to the British, known for decades afterwards as the Indian Mutiny, did occur, at first, as a piece of simple military insubordination; it was Indian insubordination in reaction to gross insensitivity on the British part. The East India Company had at its disposal an army of 238,000, of whom 38,000 were European. Each presidency or locality had its own army, and the only part affected by the Mutiny was that of Bengal, with 151,000 troops, 23,000 of whom were Europeans. Very many of the sepoy, or Indian, officers in this army were of high caste, Brahmins or Rajputs, down on their luck, and pursuing careers as army officers faute de mieux (the British having in many cases appropriated Indian land and property).

  Two new measures were brought in at about the time that Dalhousie (a relatively successful Governor-General) was replaced by Lord Canning (son of the statesman who was briefly Prime Minister in 1827). One of these hated measures was that members of these local armies would no longer be confined to their own areas and might be required for service anywhere in the world, not just in India. The other was the introduction of Enfield rifles. It came to be known that the cartridges for the new guns had been greased with the fat of cows and/or pigs. It was a symptom of the volatility of the times that this story was so widely believed, even though it was not immediately denied or confirmed. In fact, at the Woolwich Arsenal, animal fat had been used to grease the cartridges and, naturally – no Hindus or Muslims living in Woolwich at that date – no one had thought to consider what would happen when a Muslim or Hindu officer was asked to bite off the end of a cartridge, before loading. The casual way in which the British expected a Muslim to let pig-fat touch his lips, or a Hindu beef-dripping, was what caused the outrage, as much as the forbidden meat-substances themselves.

  By the beginning of 1857, the authorities realized the danger of the situation. All further orders for cartridges from England were cancelled until it could be made clear that they did not contain forbidden grease. But unrest had begun – first in Barrackpore, near Calcutta, in January, and gradually spreading to Meerut and elsewhere. By May, the ‘mutineers’ had taken Delhi. At Jahnsi, British men, women and children were butchered by sepoy regiments. At Cawnpore, the British Governor Sir Hugh Wheeler was confident in the loyalty of Nana Sahib, the local Indian bigwig, but the place was surrounded by sepoys. When food supplies ran low, Wheeler accepted the offer from the treacherous Nana of safe conduct down the river for the 400 or so women and children. As soon as they had left, the remaining European men were shot, and the women’s boats were then fired on. When brought to shore, many of the women and children were killed with sabres. The rest were imprisoned in hideous conditions, and in spite of the protests of sepoy officers, they were, on the Nana’s orders, hacked to pieces and thrown down a well.

  It remains a matter of contention between scholars whether the tragic events of 1857 were the first rumblings of Indian nationalism, or merely localized expressions of outrage. Lord Aberdeen himself said, in August 1857, ‘The important question which is not yet clearly answered, is whether the revolt is a military mutiny, or a national movement. Should it be the latter, our tenure cannot be very secure.’16

  When the news of the Mutiny began to filter through to the West, the Queen, along with everyone else in England, read the accounts with mounting disgust.

  Oh! When I think & talk of my own sorrows . . . & reflect on the fearful appalling horrors wh. have taken place in India, & on the hundreds of families who have lost sons – Husbands – brothers – & what is so infinitely worse had daughters – sisters – wives – (I hope few have survived this [illegible]) & friends murdered, butchered, tortured – with a refinement of fiendish atrocity wh. one couldn’t believe – & exposed to every outrage wh. a woman must dread more than death and wh. makes me tremble – how unbearably small does every suffering of ours appear!17

  As the Queen read ‘dreadful details in the papers of the horrors committed in India on poor ladies & children’,18 they prepared for an informal visit of the Emperor and Empress of France to Osborne. Eugénie looked ‘lovely in a light organdie dress, embroidered all over with violets, a wreath to match, in her hair, and pearls’.19 Palmerston came to stay for a few days, bringing Clarendon, the Foreign Secretary, while the Empress and Prince Albert were locked in talk with Napoleon about ‘Principalities, – difficulties, – rapprochements, alliance, &c.’, as the Queen noted rather vaguely. On the Sunday of his visit, Napoleon III went into Newport for Mass at the Roman Catholic church, accompanied by his much more pious wife this time looking ‘lovely in simple white embroidered cambric dress, with lilac ribbons’.20 The wistfulness with which Victoria described Eugénie’s outfits whenever the two met is touching. She was the Queen of England and could have afforded the finest couturier; but she was tiny, increasingly rotund, much of the time depressed or petulant. Her homely dress sense reflected a growing dissatisfaction with her appearance: clothes were for swathing a body which was by any ordinary standards a very peculiar shape, not for adorning it or drawing it to people’s attention. Albert was beginning to grow bald and to develop a paunch. Youth was very definitely, and somewhat prematurely, behind them. On 25 August, she told her journal she had ‘talked much of its being my adored one’s last evening when 37! Every “Lebens Abschnitt” [phase of life] makes one sad, when one is so blessed as I am’.21 Young as they both were, from now onwards there are strange gusts of cold in the atmosphere, coming from time to time, as if they half sensed the coming of calamity.

  Later in the year, the Queen and the Prince Consort, while in Scotland, went to stay as the guests of Lord Aberdeen at Haddo. In true old Highland fashion, he assembled all his tenants on horseback to welcome her: some 600 of them escorted her to the fine Georgian house which struck her, with her more ‘baronial’ tastes, as ‘plain, about 100 years old’.22 She had recently bestowed on the bony old Scottish peer the Order of the Garter. Although she did the same for Palmerston, it was surely a token of the Prince Consort’s misgivings about Pam’s swashbuckling foreign policy that they should also have honoured the quieter, more pacific Aberdeen.

  While the young Princess Royal spent her last summer and autumn with her family in Britain, the British were fighting for the reclaim of the ancient capital (Muslim and Hindu at different phases) of Delhi. It was a desperate campaign, culminating in six days of heavy street fighting, during which Brigadier-General John Nicholson was killed. Some 30,000 mutineer troops were eventually scattered to surrounding hill villages, and when the British reclaimed Delhi, the danger of the Mutiny was over. What remained was what has sometimes euphemistically been called the ‘cleaning up’ or ‘clearing up’ operation.

  The Queen felt more nervous on the day of her first daughter’s wedding than she had on her own nuptial day.23 Vicky was now just a few weeks past her seventeenth birthday. She was dressed in a white silk moiré gown over a petticoat flounced in lace and wreathed in sprays of orange blossom and myrtle.24 Orange blossom symbolizes eternal love and fruitful marriage; myrtle bestows good luck in marriage. Vicky had the good luck to marry a man who loved her and whose love was fervently returned; but there was not much else which was lucky about the marriage – she was going into a country which was hostile to her; her children were to cause her grief
; and her beloved Fritz would die hideously.

  On the wedding day, however, the message of the flowers was almost convincing. On that brilliantly sunny winter day, the streets between Buckingham Palace and the Chapel Royal in St James’s Palace were thronged with crowds. In the chapel itself, there was Lord Palmerston bearing the Sword of State, and a very nervous Archbishop of Canterbury. The young couple spoke their vows clearly, and they were the first British royal pair to leave the altar steps to the air of Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March’. They were also the first, before a wedding breakfast in the Palace, to appear on the balcony to wave to the crowds. In spite of the presence at the breakfast of old Lotharios such as the Prime Minister and Uncle Leopold, the bride’s parents must have felt vindicated. Their Respectable Revolution, after the dissipated days of Duke Ernst in Coburg and William IV in London, was now complete. A respectable pair had spawned another respectable pair, and the crowds who cheered them could return to respectable homes, feeling that the monarchy and the decent majority had buried forever the scandalous days of the past. No one needed to know that when Fritz’s mother, Princess Augusta of Prussia, had entered the chapel accompanied by two ladies-in-waiting, one of these women, Countess Louise Oriola (dressed garishly in bright orange), was one of the several mistresses of Prince Wilhelm – the groom’s father. Later that evening, London lit up, with illuminations twinkling from the major public buildings and fireworks exploding in the parks as the bridal pair took the train to Windsor.