Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  Her last day at home was 1 February. Vicky told her mother, ‘I think it will kill me to take leave of Papa!’25 But Albert was calm. ‘Vicky is very reasonable,’ he wrote to his brother Ernst, ‘she will go well-prepared into the labyrinth of Berlin.’26 They left in thick snow, and floods of tears, from Gravesend in the Royal Yacht Victoria and Albert on 2 February.

  Queen Victoria’s mother had done it; Queen Adelaide had done it; it was the lot of royal women to be exported, for political purpose, into strange courts and foreign worlds. Vicky at least took with her a husband she loved, and a perfect understanding of his language. (It was indeed the language in which she had habitually spoken to her father.) Posterity, while reserving tender thoughts for the young teenager snatched from home and put into the truly frightening world of Bismarck (‘who was never ill, but once lost a tooth biting through the hind leg of a hare’27) and the Prussian Court, can nevertheless be grateful, since the separation necessitated the beginning of one of the most fascinating exchanges of letters in history. To Prince Albert, Vicky wrote, ‘I thought my heart was going to break when you shut the cabin door and were gone – that cruel moment which I had been dreading even to think of for 2 years and a half were past – it was more painful than I had ever pictured it to myself.’28

  Prince Albert was now at the zenith of his powers. There did not appear to be any area of life in which he did not have an interest; and scarcely any aspect of public life in which he did not consider it his duty to offer advice. Yet he remained, in many quarters, disliked simply because he was foreign. This in itself was a fairly useful quality, from the point of view of the monarchy’s standing with the public. When the public liked something which the monarchy did, it could cheer the Queen. When it disliked a thing, it could blame that German prince. So it was that, at the beginning of 1855, Albert, in seeing what was happening in the Crimea, had begun to draw up the idea of a special award for the highest gallantry, to be called the Victoria Cross. ‘1. That a small cross of merit for personal deeds of valour be established. 2. That it be open to all ranks. 3. That it be unlimited in number. 4. That an annuity (say of £5) be attached to each cross. 5. That it be claimable by an individual on establishing before a jury of his Peers, subject to confirmation at home, his right to the distinction.’29 It was in 1856 that the first crosses were awarded, and, despite the complaints by conservative-minded officers that all soldiers were required to be brave, it was an innovation which redounded to the Queen’s glory. (In the event, it carried an annuity of £10, twice the prince’s original hope.)

  It was inaugurated on 26 June 1857, the day on which it was also finally declared, after the Queen’s years of waiting and cajoling politicians, that her husband could be known as The Prince Consort. (He was actually awarded the title by Letters Patent four days later.) As well as being the first day of her awarding the Victoria Crosses, it was also the first time she had ever conducted a review on horseback. She was in full uniform, accompanied by Albert, who was also mounted. Little Prince Leopold appeared for the first time in public, and all his elder siblings were present, except Affie who was away on his naval training. Vicky, still unmarried, was accompanied by her fiancé, who appeared in public in London for the first time. As the Queen pinned on forty-seven medals, on a blazing hot day, she had never been more popular. Yet the new Prince Consort remained unpopular. A pamphlet of 1856 called Prince Albert. Why is he Unpopular? stated that the unpopularity was ‘a feeling shared by almost anyone . . . The consort . . . of the most amiable Sovereign that has ever sat on the throne of these seagirt isles, is the most unpopular man in them!’30

  So it was that he received no credit for inventing the Victoria Cross, but was blamed for the appointment of the Duke of Cambridge as Commander-in-Chief of the army after the resignation of Lord Hardinge. Again, there was a supreme irony. It was Victoria, ‘the most amiable Sovereign’, who had insisted that her cousin George take over the position and sit in his office in Horse Guards. But the cartoon in Punch showed the Duke of Cambridge riding to Horse Guards on Prince Albert’s back, and saying, ‘Now then, Albert, Jack in your Tupenny’. In fact, Albert and George Cambridge were not especially fond of one another and Albert was a meritocrat, not a nepotist as his wife was.

  His impressiveness remains on so many levels. When Theodore Martin wrote his great multi-volume biography of the Prince Consort (published 1875–80), he received hundreds of letters descanting upon Albert’s virtues. A moment typical of the man occurred in Leeds, where he went to open the new Town Hall in 1858. The next day, when the ribbon-cutting and hand-shaking with aldermen had been completed, he went back to the Chamber of Commerce on a private visit. On the table of the President of the Chamber there were some pieces of a wool-combing machine which the prince had been shown the day before. It had been an exhibit in Hyde Park in 1851. The machine had been demonstrated to the prince in another part of the building, but, as the inventor (Mr Donisthorpe) recalled, the prince ‘needed, however, no explanation, at once understanding the complex and most valuable invention; but looking closely at the machine, he remarked that there was a wheel or something of the kind wanting, pointing out where it should be introduced – to the great surprise of Mr Donisthorpe, who said it was so, it had been accidentally left out, but that not one man in 10,000 would have noticed the omission’.31

  When he was dead, Victoria found herself making lists of all the things Albert had been good at – his construction of the beautiful new dairy at Windsor, the laying out of the superb kitchen gardens, the brilliance at the piano, the musical compositions, the building up of the royal art collection, the Great Exhibition of 1851, the creation of the Royal Horticultural Garden, the Kensington Museums, the foundation of Wellington College . . . And there was all his political involvement, both in Germany and in Britain.This was not to mention his productive work as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, his programmes of social housing in Kennington, his fascination with scientific discovery, and his wide reading in contemporary literature and in philosophy.

  Although courtiers and officials could find Albert a stiff person, he loosened up when mixing with his intellectual peers – whether with an engineer such as Mr Donisthorpe of Leeds, or the historian Thomas Carlyle who found him ‘very jolly, and handsome in his loose grey clothes . . . He was civility itself in a fine simple fashion.’32

  On the Isle of Wight, he again demonstrated an easy lack of pomposity with his near-neighbours the Tennysons. (Tennyson lived at Freshwater, which the prince liked to visit by boat from Osborne.) ‘Prince Albert called on me the other day here,’ Tennyson wrote to his aunt Elizabeth Russell, ‘and was very kind in manner, shaking hands in quite a friendly way. We were in the midst of packing bustle, things tumbled about here and there . . . he stood by the drawing room window admiring the view which was not looking its best, and on going away, said, “I shall certainly bring the Queen – it’s such a pretty place”.’33 The Tennysons also liked to tell the rather charming story of the Prince Consort visiting when they were out, and saying to the housekeeper, ‘Merely say, Prince Albert called.’34

  TWELVE

  NERVE DAMAGE

  DURING THAT EXCITING political year of 1848, Prince Albert had written to his brother, ‘You cannot imagine how my fingers itch at being separated perforce from Germany at this moment.’1 A decade on, and he now had his beloved daughter planted in the Heimat. When Vicky visited her uncle Ernst in Coburg in April 1858, his wife Alexandrine wrote ecstatically to the Queen, ‘The adorable Vicky brightens everyone with her cheerful being, her lively sympathy, and her bottomless charm . . . She wins all Hearts.’2

  It was true that the scattered German states could take hope from the arrival of youth, and that the Kingdom of Prussia in particular was in desperate need of a monarch who displayed health of mind and body. In the year before Fritz married Vicky, his uncle the King – Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who had been displaying signs of mental weakness for s
ome time – became incurably mad, and then suffered a stroke. Fritz’s father, Prince Wilhelm, took over as Regent, becoming King Wilhelm I when his brother died in 1861. Neither of the brothers was liberal by the standards of English liberalism, and, egged on by the ultra-reactionary Count Otto von Bismarck, who was coming increasingly to the fore as the greatest power in German politics, the Prussian monarchy had no truck with progressivism. They would have more or less shared the view of Queen Victoria’s uncle, the King of Hanover (also Duke of Cumberland, who died in 1851), that Prince Albert was ‘a terrible Liberal, almost a radical’.3 King Friedrich Wilhelm IV had been contemptuous of anything which smacked of modern democracy. He deplored the fact that the Hohenzollerns had been given back the Crown in 1848 after a conservative coup d’état. He felt he ruled by right, and it was humiliating to think he actually did so on the say-so of a Parliament. He jestingly called his crown ‘the sausage roll’ and said he ruled, ‘by the grace of bakers and butchers’.4 During those alarming days in 1848, Wilhelm had fled to England, but when he returned to Germany he had become even more entrenched in his conservatism. He saw the army as serving the Crown, not the nation; he conceived it the monarch’s function to determine foreign policy, and to uphold (the Protestant) religion. When he became king his first speech from the throne promised, ‘Kingship by the grace of God, adherence to law and constitution, loyalty of the people and of the triumphant army, justice, truth, faith and fear of God’.5 Queen Victoria believed in all these things, but she would somehow have trod more gently when proclaiming them in public, and Vicky, who had learned her political wisdom at the knee of Prince Albert, would find Prussia an unsympathetic environment.

  During Vicky’s first year in Prussia, in which she became pregnant, her native land underwent a change of Government. It was prompted by the very contemporary subject of political assassination. There were no fewer than eight assassination attempts against Queen Victoria during her reign. The two contemporary rulers who may be said to have liberated their slaves – Abraham Lincoln in the United States and Tsar Alexander II – both died at the hands of assassins (in 1865 and 1881 respectively). Being Head of State in the nineteenth century was a dangerous occupation. Ten days before Vicky’s wedding in London, Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie were trotting past the Paris Opéra in their carriage when 3 grenades were thrown, killing all their horses and injuring 102 bystanders. The leader of the plot, Felice Orsini, had travelled to France with a British passport under an assumed English name, carrying bombs which had been manufactured in Birmingham. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon, feared this would lead to an anti-British backlash in France, perhaps even a fracturing of the entente cordiale, and a reforging of the French alliance with Russia.

  It was felt necessary to bring in hasty anti-terrorist legislation in order to advertise to the French how seriously the British took this breach in security. Clarendon had a long conversation with the Conservative Leader, Lord Derby, who gave the assurance that he would not oppose a Conspiracy to Murder Bill, increasing the penalties for crimes which were intended as well as for those which had been perpetrated. He warned, however, that there would be difficulty in passing such a Bill through the Commons. Palmerston’s old foe Lord John Russell then announced that he would oppose the measure ‘to the utmost of his power’.6 When Palmerston proposed the Bill in the Commons on 5 February, his majority dissolved into anarchy. The radicals denounced the Government for kowtowing to French bullying. One member spoke of Napoleon III himself as the failed assassin of the Duke of Wellington. Russell denounced the measure as contrary to the ‘whole course of modern enlightened legislation’. There was even talk of war with France within six weeks.

  The next week, the Commons debated the mishandling of the Indian Mutiny by the East India Company, and the question of the Company’s abolition, and a Viceregency being established in the subcontinent. This measure was passed. But on the Second Reading of the Conspiracy to Murder Bill, Pam was routed by nineteen votes. Having been defeated roundly, by his own followers in the Commons as well as by the Conservatives, Palmerston had to resign.

  As the Queen tartly wrote in her journal, the two possible candidates were Lord Derby and Lord John Russell – ‘the one, having no party, & the other, in a minority!’7 The fifty-eight-year-old Lord Derby made the short journey from his handsome house in St James’s Square to Buckingham Palace to kiss hands for his second administration.

  In the previous year, Aberdeen had remarked to Gladstone that, ‘there is now no such thing as a distinctive Peelite party in existence’.8 Derby’s second administration, therefore, short as it was – a little over a year – possesses an historical significance, since it shows us the emergence of the modern two parties, Liberals and Conservatives. Since the Prince Consort was a more or less confirmed Peelite, this left the monarchy without a party to support, and it was perhaps easier for the prince and the Queen to see themselves as above politics. Derby was never a Peelite: he had resigned from the Cabinet rather than vote for the repeal of the Corn Laws. But his moderate approach wooed some seventy Peelites to support him in the Commons and he thereby reconstituted the Conservative Party as a plausible electoral entity. Other Peelites, such as Gladstone, after some vacillations, allied themselves with the Liberals.

  Before the Government left office, there was just time to vote through the Commons a vote of thanks to those who had suppressed the uprisings in India. The Opposition endeavoured to remove the Governor-General, Lord Canning, from those who were thanked by name. His nickname, ‘Clemency Canning’ – because of his supposed softness towards ‘rebellious’ Indians – was intended as an insult. Those of a pacific or gentle disposition, such as Lord Aberdeen, read the news of British reprisals against the Indians with horror. ‘The exhortations of our [news] papers recommending indiscriminate slaughter, are abominable; but they are also suicidal; for we could never long exist in India, after having taken such means to create the most inveterate spirit of revenge.’9

  It was not until March 1858 that Lucknow was recaptured, and it was only in July that peace was formally declared. By the end of the year, the East India Company had been wound up, and on 1 November, Queen Victoria’s proclamation declared that India was now a British dominion. This declaration was ratified by the Government of India Act in Parliament. The Raj, which many British people believed to be eternal, would last eighty years, a very short interval in the long history of India. To the Queen, though she never visited India, the place, its people and languages were of increasing significance and interest with each passing year.

  In this, it could be seen that she was demonstrating that instinctive sympathy with the spirit of the times which was one of her hallmarks as a monarch. But whereas the popular newspapers and many British people, Liberal and Conservative, took a view of India which was racist and patronizing, Victoria’s attitude was always different, always one of fascination; she felt a diffident sympathy for the deposed maharajahs, especially when they were as handsome as Maharajah Duleep Singh, and she was devoid of racial prejudice. That there had been atrocities perpetrated on English men, women and children by Indians was not in question. It was the scale of the reprisals which shocked, and which Canning did his best to restrain. Russell, the Times correspondent who had covered the Crimean War, witnessed Sikhs and Englishmen looking on while a bayoneted Indian prisoner was turned on a spit and roasted. Rape and pillage in villages which had no direct connection with the Mutiny were openly encouraged by British officers. One officer wrote home cheerfully that ‘peppering away at niggers’ was a sport which he and his friends ‘enjoyed quite amazingly’.10 The Queen wrote indignantly to Clemency Canning that she shared his ‘feelings of sorrow and indignation at the unchristian spirit shown – alas! also to a great extent here – by the public towards Indians in general and towards Sepoys without discrimination!’ She emphasized that Indians should be assured ‘that there is no hatred to a brown skin’.11

 
While these troubling events unfolded in Asia, the Queen and the Prince Consort, young as they were, witnessed the ending of their elder children’s childhood. With Vicky in Germany, they exchanged a deluge of letters. At the end of March, the sixteen-year-old Prince of Wales was confirmed in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. He was examined for a full hour by the Archbishop of Canterbury on the Catechism, the Articles of Faith and the Sacraments. To his parents’ enormous relief and surprise ‘Bertie really answered very well’,12 so the archbishop told the boy’s parents, but they did not need to be told since, alarmingly, they sat in on the viva. Perhaps the old man, knowing how anxious they were to find fault, was a little generous in his assessment of Bertie’s theological interests. ‘Oh!’ exclaimed the Queen, ‘how earnestly did I pray to God for help & for blessings on that poor Boy who causes us from his character & position such immense anxiety!’13