Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  As her own children passed through adolescence to adulthood, however, it was impossible to ignore the inaccuracy of this vision of things. Her kind, sentimental, needy mother had in fact been a constant supportive presence in her life. From the very beginning, it had been just the two of them, and much of Victoria’s monster-ego, her need to be Queen, not only in a constitutional sense, but in all emotional departments of life, had been allowed free rein by the duchess’s self-immolation. In May 1859, Sir James Clark warned Prince Albert that the duchess was suffering from a cancer which would one day prove to be fatal. For most of the month of May 1859, the duchess was ill, sometimes confined to bed in London. Victoria visited her in Clarence House, but she did not postpone her own planned visit to Osborne. The illness, however, began to concentrate the daughter’s mind. Her own firstborn child, Vicky, came to join her at Osborne in readiness for her fortieth birthday on 24 May. It was a very happy reunion, and Vicky, ‘so embellie!’,4 ‘only began to cry when she talked of her poor little boy’s left arm being so weak, which it has been from his birth’.5

  Then, the next day, came a telegram from her mother’s doctor, Mr Brown, in London, to say that the duchess was weak and unable to eat. Sir James Clark reassured the Queen (always rather an ominous signal, as her biographers, if not the Queen herself, could not help noting). On this occasion, Clark was right, and the duchess began to eat and pulled through. But she was in her seventy-third year, and there had been plenty of examples of mortality to nag at Victoria’s conscience. The day after the Queen was forty, she wrote to her uncle Leopold, ‘I am thoroughly shaken and upset by this awful shock; for it came on so suddenly – that it came like a thunderbolt upon us, and I think I never suffered as I did those four dreadful hours till we heard she was better! I hardly myself knew how I loved her, or how my whole existence seems bound up with her – till I saw looming in the distance the fearful possibility of what I will not mention.’6 It is a fascinating and ominous confession; the sort of sentences which in a later generation would emerge from patients undergoing psychotherapy. For all of a sudden, the most important relationship of her life was seen to be, not her relationship with her Angel, Prince Albert; and not with her children; but that with her poor spurned mother. With that epiphany came a tsunami of emotions – terror at what she was about to lose, tenderness for the vanished days of childhood, love for the mother who had been so constant a part of her life, fear for herself, watching her children and grandchildren emerging from their chrysalises, a phenomenon which is only able to fill a parent’s heart with uncomplicated joy in the most perfectly well-balanced personalities: in others, it brings, together with joy in the burgeoning of new lives in the family, a remembrance of past failures, a mental replay of one’s own childhood traumas, and a consciousness of mortality.

  The children, and Albert, naturally suffered the consequences of the Queen’s mental torments. Her tolerance for what she perceived as their faults was never strong, and she was never one to keep discontents or unhappinesses to herself. ‘You say no one is perfect but Papa,’ the Queen wrote truculently to Vicky, ‘but he has his faults too. He is often very trying in his hastiness and over-love of business, and I think you would find it trying if Fritz was as hasty and harsh (momentarily and unintentionally as it is) as he can be!’7 She was also vexed by Albert’s perpetual illnesses – ‘dear Papa never allows he is any better or will try to get over it, but makes such a miserable face that people always think he’s very ill. It is quite the contrary with me always; I can do anything before others, and never show it, so people never believe I am ill or ever suffer. His nervous system is easily excited and irritated and he’s so completely overpowered by everything.’8

  She who had been so ecstatically happy with Albert in their early years could baldly tell her daughter that ‘all marriage is such a lottery – the happiness is always an exchange – though it may be a very happy one – still the poor woman is bodily and morally the husband’s slave. That always sticks in my throat.’9

  Since Vicky was now herself a matriarch in Germany, and the mother of a future King of Prussia, she was well placed to help her mother in what was to be one of the chief preoccupations of her middle age: namely the marrying off of her children, as they grew to maturity. The Royal Marriages Act (1772) made it impossible for any of the children to be married to Roman Catholics, so the field was limited to the Greek or Russian Orthodox, but preferably to the Protestant royalties of roughly appropriate age. There was not such an enormous pool to draw upon, since until the marriage of her sixth child, Princess Louise, Victoria did not contemplate looking outside the European royal pool for her children’s consorts.

  Princess Alice, the Queen and Prince Albert’s third child, reached her sixteenth birthday ‘without any engagement, or even thought of one, and the longer we can keep this off the better’10 – that was the Queen’s view in April 1859. Alice had grown into a beautiful girl, much taller than her mother (which was admittedly not difficult), serious-minded and inclined, even more than most teenaged girls, to melancholy. Although the Queen professed relief that Alice was not yet engaged at sixteen, her father never ceased to see her as merchandise in the marriage market. He deplored a lithograph of her – much liked by other members of the family – because ‘it will do Alice harm if it is seen by those who don’t know her’ – that is, by potential suitors. Victoria, who found Alice ‘a very dear companion’, was glad that she ‘is not at all anxious to marry’.11 Nevertheless, it was essential to place her in the European Court. Prince William of Orange was considered, but he was quite a bit younger than she was. When they were placed next to one another at dinner in Buckingham Palace, he was ‘very dull and positively rude’.12 Vicky was asked to sound out the suitability of Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt. As well as being extremely plain, the youth was a bore, but when invited to the Palace in June 1860, he made a good impression on the Queen.13 Alice formed an adolescent crush on this unprepossessing dullard, and she mistook it for love. The pair were engaged. It was a blow to her brother, the Prince of Wales, since Bertie and Alice had always been friends.

  It was decided by both parents that, in addition to being made a colonel without any military training, the Prince of Wales too should be married off as soon as possible before he was tainted by the experience of life. The Queen followed the Hanoverian tradition of having the strongest possible antipathy towards her heir; but, being Victoria, she took this to operatic heights, never neglecting the opportunity to denigrate him or to find fault. ‘I am glad that Bertie is amiable and companionable towards you,’ she told Vicky back in 1858. ‘I own I think him very dull; his three other brothers are all so amusing and communicative.’14 In April 1860, having received the Sacrament with Bertie at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, the Queen felt constrained to observe that ‘he is not at all in good looks; his nose and mouth are too enormous and he pastes his hair down to his head, and wears his clothes frightfully – he really is anything but good-looking.’15

  The Queen’s language about the Prince of Wales became so intemperate that Vicky, after an extended visit to her mother in England, felt the need to expostulate. ‘Only one thing pains me – when I think about it and that is the relation between you and Bertie! In the railway carriage going to Dover I thought so much about it, and wished I could have told you how kindly, nicely and properly and even sensibly he spoke, his heart is very capable of affection, of warmth of feeling and I am sure it will come out with time and by degrees . . . I know, dear Mama, you will forgive my saying all this and not be offended.’16 Such remonstrances had little or no effect, and the Queen – with a few rare intervals – would maintain her hostility to Bertie until her dying day.

  Prince Albert had made the more general point to the Queen, time and again, that if she persisted in scolding the children, and having only negative thoughts about them, it could only poison her relations with them. ‘You are quite mistaken if you think I am not concerned to maintain
your maternal authority with the children,’ he wrote. ‘On the contrary, it is my consistent care to safeguard it and preserve the warmth of the children’s feeling for their Mother, and that is just the reason why I have felt it my duty to warn you of the rocks on which all our efforts are wrecked. I admit it was an error of judgement to speak to you yesterday about Alice’s weeping, for I ought to have remembered the state of your nerves, but I really did not think they were shaken to the extent they have since shown themselves to be, and there was nothing in what I said to excite a healthy person to such an outburst.’17

  ‘Dear Darling’, she recollected in bereavement. ‘I fear I tried him sadly.’18

  Sensing that Bertie was likely to find himself in trouble with women, his puritanical parents were keen to see him married very young – as they themselves had been. By the end of December 1860, Vicky thought she had found someone – the daughter of Prince Christian of Denmark – who might be suitable on some levels. That is, ‘she was beautiful and healthy, and amiable . . . though I as a Prussian cannot wish Bertie should ever marry her’.19 She was referring to the long-standing quarrel between Denmark and Prussia about the status of the Schleswig-Holstein Duchies. It was, indeed, as Vicky warned her parents, a diplomatic hot potato, which for some reason Bertie and his parents conspired to ignore. But many a tempest would blow across the sky before the obviousness of this fact was borne in upon them.

  Political events at home and in Europe, which had nothing to do with Schleswig-Holstein, occupied much of this period. In Britain, there was the unfolding story of how far parliamentary reform could be allowed to go. For the Tories, and many of the old Whigs, the matter was a holding operation, attempting, against the tides of time, to resist the movement towards a representative democracy in Parliament. For other Whigs, for Liberals and radicals, it was a matter of urgency to extend the franchise. It was over this issue that Lord Derby’s short-lived second premiership foundered. The Liberals came back in, and the Queen was in a dilemma: whom should she ask to form the administration? Both Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston had been Leaders of the Liberal Party. Both had been Prime Minister. Her instinct was to ask neither, and she turned to Lord Granville. She was ‘much shocked’ to open her copy of that newspaper she in any event deplored, The Times, on 13 June 1859 ‘to find her whole conversation with Lord Granville yesterday and the day before detailed in this morning’s leading article’.20 The leak, which Granville denied, was a terrible blunder, and by 1 July, Pam was back as Prime Minister, with Russell as Foreign Secretary and Mr Gladstone as the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  The Queen had, as yet, no reason for disliking the tall, clever, eagle-eyed figure of William Ewart Gladstone, who was one of the surviving Peelites – a political position which she – or at any rate the Prince Consort – found sympathetic. She did not know that Gladstone had made it a condition of his joining Palmerston’s Cabinet that the Government wished to ‘see the Germans turned out of Italy’.21

  The cause of Italian nationalism was dear to the heart of English Liberals. Henry Cary’s translation of Dante into English had made the father of Italian poetry as popular as the English Romantics themselves in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Gladstone, the scion of a rich merchant family of Scottish origin who had made their fortune in Liverpool, had been educated at Eton. It was there, and later at Oxford, that while imbibing the whole of classical, and much modern, literature, he also became an enthusiast for the works of Dante. Gabriele Rossetti, the Italian exile in London and father of, among others, the famous painter Dante Gabriel and poet Christina, saw Dante’s medieval works as allegories foreshadowing the political liberalism and freethinking of the nineteenth century. Though Gladstone deplored Rossetti’s religious freethinking, he ardently embraced the cause of the unification of the Italian states, the depriving of the Pope of his secular powers, and the expulsion of the Austrians from cities and territories in the Veneto and Northern Italy. In this, he echoed the majority of enlightened English opinion. Gladstone’s visit to Naples in the winter of 1850–51 had convinced him that the rule of the Bourbon King Ferdinand was ‘the negation of God erected into a system of Government’. The pro-Italianism of the Brownings – Robert and Elizabeth Barrett – was popular with the reading public. Many a middle-class English household possessed a copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows of 1851 – ‘Life throbs in noble Piedmont!’ The Queen had asked Robert Browning to dine at the British Embassy in Rome when the Prince of Wales made a visit in 1858.

  Lord John Russell, as Foreign Secretary, received a full account from his nephew, Odo Russell, of an audience he had had with Pope Pius IX. ‘Caro mio Russell,’ said his Holiness, ‘what is to become of us with your uncle and Lord Palmerston at the head of affairs in England?’22 Russell sent a copy of the memorandum to the Queen. He well knew that, on this single but important issue, the Prince Consort was entirely at one with the Pope. Albert deplored the idea of the Austrians being driven out of Italy, and felt that the cause of Italian nationalism set a dangerous precedent. For whom? Well, for the Irish to start with . . . Albert was not to survive long enough to see how forcibly the success of Italian nationalists would inspire Bismarck and the Prussians to force forward their own version of German nationalism – a version very different from anything taught to Albert in his youth by Baron Stockmar or Uncle Leopold. The English liberals felt that the best hope for a united, liberal Italy was to be found in the Kingdom of Piedmont, under the kingship of King Victor Emmanuel and the country’s leading statesman, Camillo, Count Cavour. But there was many a hazard to overcome before the modern state of Italy as we know it today was achieved. Napoleon III waged war on Austria in the summer of 1850 for a few months, notionally in the cause of Italian nationalism, in fact to emphasize France’s claim on Nice and Savoy. He left the Veneto in the hands of the Austrians, despite his promise to Cavour that he would fight until Italy was free from the Alps to the Adriatic. In May 1860, Garibaldi – immensely popular in Britain – landed in Sicily with his 1,000 volunteers and overthrew the Bourbon Government. Cavour sent forces to Rome, and Victor Emmanuel marched down to Naples to meet Garibaldi – half to show solidarity, half to ensure that the old republican did not establish a southern Italian repubblica. Whatever the outcome in Italy, it was fairly clear that the era of the Bourbon control of the South was over, and it was only a matter of time before the Austrians were cleared out of the Veneto, and Pius IX surrendered his temporal power over the Papal States. All of this was good news to the Protestant British – and to the Queen when in British mood, though not when attending to Albert’s pro-Austrian hopes.

  The last Christmas before tragedy broke up the family was that of 1860, and it was a happy one. Even Albert and Victoria, everlastingly on the lookout for faults in the Prince of Wales, were pleased with their eldest son. He had just fulfilled his first major public engagement on his own – a four-month tour of Canada and the United States. The nineteen-year-old young man, who had travelled with a distinguished suite including the Duke of Newcastle, Secretary of State for the Colonies, General Bruce, his governor, Henry Acland, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford and the prince’s personal physician, and others, had conducted himself with remarkable charm and maturity. Any gaffes had been minor ones – the Roman Catholic bishops at the University of Laval, Quebec, had objected to the prince addressing them merely as ‘Messieux’, but others in the audience were delighted by his flawless French. (The Orangemen at Ottawa had then objected to the Duke of Newcastle’s apology to the bishops!) At Niagara, the prince had watched Blondin cross the Falls from the American side on a tightrope. In the United States on the verge of Civil War, he was an instant social success, and in Chicago, St Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Washington it was the same story – civic dignitaries and crowds found a young man whose jollity and friendliness were instantly appealing. When Bertie had attended the opera at Philadelphia, the whole audience stood u
p and sang ‘God Save the Queen’ – a spectacle which might have surprised the ghosts of those who had rung the Liberty Bell in that city, or had so ingeniously crafted the republican Constitution. On the final leg of the trip, General Bruce had written to the Queen, ‘The reception at New York has thrown all its predecessors into the shade. I despair of its ever being understood in England... Believe me, however, that exaggeration is impossible.’ Bertie had been driven down Broadway in a barouche next to the Mayor, Fernando Wood, ‘amid an ocean roar of cheering’.23

  Thomas Carlyle once said that if it had been possible to unite the two great ‘half-men’ of the eighteenth century, David Hume and Samuel Johnson, a perfect individual would have been formed. Similarly, in the nineteenth century, had a monarch been found with Victoria’s emerging political nous, her peculiar intuitive sense of national mood and feeling, and her punctilious willingness to work hard behind the scenes, and had this figure also been endowed with Bertie’s geniality, his friendliness with strangers and his lack of shyness, then an ideal monarch would have been born. As it was, the very workable monarchy which Victoria and her heir handed on to the twentieth century was created not out of such a magical fusion but out of the conflict between the pair. The Queen recognized that the visit to America had revealed qualities in her son which she would never possess herself. She generously acknowledged that much of the credit for this must be given to General Bruce, and she suggested to Lord John Russell and to Palmerston that she should make Bruce a knight commander of the Order of the Bath. They poured cold water on the notion, saying that it was inappropriate to recognize Bruce’s private service to the Royal Family by a public honour. At least the Queen made the Duke of Newcastle a Knight of the Garter.24