Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  The Prince of Wales was welcomed to Christmas at Windsor, where bright winter sunshine lit up castle windows thick with crystalline hexagons of frost, where the lakes were frozen so thickly that the young could play ice hockey, and where the Prince Consort, always at his happiest during these days of the year, supervised the hanging of giant Christmas trees from the ceilings, festooned with candles and decorations.

  The great German Christmas was celebrated, as it happened, for the last time. The presents were arranged, each on a special table for every recipient – though now Alice shared her table with young Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt. The dinner was eaten – though the grown-ups found themselves without much appetite that year, even Victoria, who normally found it difficult to resist good food even when anxious – cold baron of beef, brawn, game pies, stuffed turkey, wild boar’s head, always the prince’s favourite, with a particular German sauce which Öhm, the chef at Coburg, had invented – mince pies, bonbons of all kinds.

  New Year was ushered in, with everyone anxiously looking at the fingers of the clock before it struck midnight. Then they kissed one another. Albert had tears in his eyes this year as he embraced his wife, even before he went to his bed and found that she had kept to her mother’s tradition of writing a New Year’s letter, this time begging him to forgive her for her faults.25

  The happiness of the Christmas period made both partners in the marriage resolve to try not to bicker. ‘I willingly testify that things have gone much better during the last two years,’ Albert said.26

  Afterwards, in her bleak widowhood, Victoria would remember that Christmas as the last time they had enjoyed thick snow together. She tenderly listed the dates when he had taken her for a ride in a sledge – ‘in 45 at Brighton, in Jan and Feb 47, in 55 . . . and then for the last time Dec 27, 1860 at Windsor when Louis was still there. My Angel always drove me from a seat behind, sitting astride with his feet in large boots – he wore a fur coat with fur gloves – and he enjoyed it so much.’27

  Her Angel. He was always ‘my Angel’. She was ‘mein liebes Kind’ – ‘my dear child’. 1861, that year of disaster, and not 1837, was the date which would mark the end of her childhood. She who had been so dependent upon Albert as a parent-substitute would lose mother and husband within a space of months. It was also a year of painful estrangement. In the Reminiscences which she wrote down at Osborne in January 1862, she recollected that in previous years they had enjoyed playing the piano and singing together. ‘Sometimes we sang (not at all last year) but formerly very often.’28 The last song she remembered Albert singing had been at Balmoral the previous summer – ‘Eine Thrane’ (‘A Tear’), with its question, ‘ob sie wohl kommen wird zu beten auf mein Grab’ (‘whether she will come to pray at my Grave’).29

  The condition of the Duchess of Kent was clear to the doctors, but although they had explained matters in depth to the Prince Consort, the Queen had not been kept fully informed. Perhaps if she had been observing the illness of any other old lady – unable to eat, increasingly uncomfortable in her movements – she would have begun to fear the worst. But instead, she drugged herself with hope. The letters she wrote to the duchess during March 1861 are addressed to herself as much as to her mother. On 2 March, ‘We are truly happy to hear a favourable account: of you, tho’ grieved that the poor arm should be so troublesome, but Brown is sure it will soon improve.’ Two days later, she wrote of her pleasure in hearing a positive and favourable report, and recommended her to read Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss.30 There was talk of having the duchess to stay at Osborne during that week, but she was too ill to move. When the Royal Family came back to Buckingham Palace, the Queen reported, ‘we are all well & prospering but find London very stuffy & close after dear, sweet, Osborne’. She spoke of wanting to have the duchess to stay at the Palace. Clearly, she was referring to what a tongue-tied doctor had told her, when she wrote, ‘altogether the report of your precious self is favourable as regards the progress towards decided relief’. Then reality broke in as she wrote, ‘but it is terrible to be so plagued, so tired – I can’t bear to think of all you have to go through . . . if only I could be near you . . . & see you very often and long to beguile away the dull hours when you can’t amuse yourself!’ Presumably, the sheer business of the Queen’s working routine made her believe that she had to postpone devoting herself to a few days at the sickbed. ‘Very soon we shall be close at hand, & then later after Easter, we hope you will come here as long as you like and stay here as long as you like. I wish I cd. send you any thing you might fancy to eat.’ But the elder Victoria was beyond eating, and the Duchess of Kent would not live till Easter.31

  She threw herself, literally, on Albert. When she wanted to go back, the day after her mother’s death, to look at the corpse once more, he dissuaded her, saying that any change in the appearance of the body could only be distressing. All the painful funerary business was conducted via the Prince Consort. On the Sunday evening, he came to ask when the duchess could be placed in her coffin. Victoria told him that she trusted him to do anything that was necessary. She cast herself into his arms, and he said, ‘Arme Frau’ – ‘poor woman’.

  When her mother was dead, Victoria collected up all the letters which the old lady had ever written to her. In the Royal Archives at Windsor there are six32 stout volumes, bound in black morocco; the first two volumes are pricked in gilt: ‘LETTERS FROM DEAR MAMA’. They begin with the little love letters on bright pink paper which the duchess, still uncertain of the English in which she wrote, had penned to Victoria as an infant. They ended with pathetic pencilled scrawls to her ladies-in-waiting: ‘Thank you, I slept well, but these pains torment me very much’33 and – what is noted by Victoria to be ‘Beloved Mama’s Last Writing’ (the annotation on it reads, ‘HRH’s last writing with her dear right hand’) – ‘Write by Telegram to the Queen you may write some part out of this note.’ The words, like the life, slither out into incoherence.34

  It was not possible, as she read these outpourings of maternal affection which cover four decades, to sustain the personal myth that she had been an unloved child. On Victoria’s eleventh birthday (1830), the duchess had written, ‘Although I am sure you will always mind what your affectionate Mother tells you: and particularly on such an occasion as your birthday: I like to write to you these few words, that when the years pass away, you may read them over and over again: and that in comparing these notes, you will find, my beloved Victoria, that your Mother’s love never changed.’35

  It is not an exaggeration that the recognition of her mother’s love unhinged the Queen, and that the bereavement precipitated something which was far, far worse than her usual ‘nervousness’ – to use Prince Albert’s tactful word.36 His remedy – ‘You must try to make up by being as loving to others as you can’37 – might have been good advice for the morally robust, but Victoria was in a state of extreme emotional fragility.

  In her widowhood, the Queen would remember how, when he came in, whether from sport or work, she always had something to show the prince. ‘I was always so vexed & even nervous if I had any foolish draft or despatch to show him as I knew it wd. distress & irritate him & affect his poor dear stomach.’38 There is abundant evidence that Albert was suffering for years before his death from ‘nervous’ stomach attacks. He scarcely ever ate luncheon, and became increasingly ‘careful’ about what he could eat, cutlets, game, potatoes, but all eaten in tiny quantities (or tiny by the Queen’s heartier standards), chicken casseroles, and ‘oeufs à l’allemande’ which was made with eggs, sugar, wine and biscuits. From the autumn of 1860 onwards, his stomach was frequently ‘deranged’, as Victoria put it.39 They increasingly ate their meals separately, leaving Albert ‘well-nigh overcome’ with work which she felt obliged, through grief, to neglect.40

  If Albert’s stomach was ‘deranged’, as is now believed, by Crohn’s disease, and possibly with abdominal cancer,41 there was much to exacerbate his nervous system. Hi
s teeth and gums were in an appalling condition. ‘Poor Papa has been suffering badly with toothache since three days,’ the Queen told her eldest child.42 And the toothache, to which were added the agonies of gumboils, remained a feature for the rest of his life. It left him ‘despondent and weak and miserable – I would so willingly have borne it all for him; we women are born to suffer and bear it so much more easily, our nerves don’t seem so racked, tortured as men’s are!’43 Victoria, who remained all her life in basically robust health, could simply not appreciate the fact that Albert’s constitution was wrecked, that he was fundamentally weak, and that the worries caused by overwork and by the worsening international situation made every symptom seem worse. In Europe, tensions between Prussia and Denmark over the Schleswig-Holstein Duchies was threatening to reach crisis point. In April, the American Civil War broke out, an event calamitous in itself, but with dire effects upon British industry, since the textile mills of Lancashire depended upon cheap cotton from the Southern States. While events in the great world worried Albert, all the old moral anxieties about the Prince of Wales resurfaced.

  Bertie had been transferred from Oxford to Cambridge, and during the Long Vacation it was decided to continue his military life – the use of the word ‘training’ would scarcely be appropriate – by sending him to Ireland. He was there when the Queen and the Prince Consort made an arduous visit to the island. Coming as it did after a painful spell of bereavement, and coinciding with Albert’s birthday on 26 August, it felt like an occasion for self-pity. ‘Alas! So much is so different this year,’ the Queen told her journal, ‘nothing festive, – we on a journey & separated from many of our children. I am still in such low spirits.’44

  Crippled by stomach troubles, Albert was on the verge of collapse when he visited the military encampment at the Curragh, the military grounds near Dublin where Bertie was stationed. Although supposedly a colonel, Bertie merely took command of a company – of the Grenadier Guards – during the march-past in the Queen’s honour. The symbolism was noted – his superior officers did not feel that the prince merited a responsibility above that of a captain.

  The royal visit to Ireland was stiff and, for both Bertie’s parents, unhappy. They would have been even unhappier had they known of a prank played upon a thankfully compliant prince by his fellow bloods. They secreted into his bed a pretty actress called Nellie Clifden.

  Victoria and Albert repaired to the healing air of Balmoral. When Bertie returned to England, he was very happy to see Miss Clifden again... and again.

  When Victoria and Albert left Balmoral that autumn, John Brown, in his bluff tactless way, wished them well, and hoped ‘above all you may have no deaths in the family’.45

  It had been a period when deaths came thick and fast. Ever since the death in childbirth of Victoire Nemours, Victoria’s cousin, at ‘unhappy Claremont’, there had been a series of shocks. ‘Good Cart’, a valet from Coburg who had been with Prince Albert since childhood, had died towards the end of 1858. Shortly before the Duchess of Kent died, her secretary and helpmeet of twenty years, Sir George, had died. Their kindly, if incompetent, old doctor Sir James Clark had retired the previous year and been replaced by a clever young physician named William Baly. In February 1861, Baly was killed in a railway accident at Wimbledon in south London. The prince felt it to be ‘an incalculable loss’.46

  When, in November 1861, news came from Portugal that typhoid fever was sweeping through the Court, and that it had killed King Pedro, and Albert’s Coburg cousin Dom Ferdinand, aged fifteen, Queen Victoria recalled Brown’s prophetic words in Balmoral. Brown ‘spoke of having lost (12 years ago) in 6 weeks time [she means in a period of six weeks] of typhus fever three grown up brothers!’ Brown’s words ‘keep returning to my mind – like as if they had been a sort of strange presentiment.’47 Already, as she contemplated Albert’s weak, and weakening, constitution, the Queen was looking to the Highlander with second sight; the sturdy, kilted Brown as a prophet.

  Although Albert urged his daughter Vicky – who had also been unwell – to ‘spare yourself, nurse yourself, and get completely well. The disaster in Portugal is another proof that we are never safe to refuse Nature her rights’,48 it was not advice which he heeded himself.

  The story of the Prince of Wales and Nellie was by now circulating the gentemen’s clubs of St James’s. That compulsive gossip Lord Torrington was the man who felt constrained to pass on the news to Prince Albert. It was an occasion where some fathers would have smiled indulgently at their foolish son sowing a few wild oats, and where a disciplinarian might have felt the need to remind Bertie of the consequences, in a royal personage, of public indiscretions. For Albert, however, who was in a depleted state of health, exhausted by sleeplessness, perpetual gastric troubles, gumboils and toothache, the escapade of a sensual boy with a pretty woman awoke demons. Twenty years of serious schooling, of filling every minute with botany, grammar and mathematics, twenty years of thrashings and punishments, and verbal admonitions, and readings aloud from the sermons of Dr Arnold, appeared to have been powerless against the Prince of Wales’s inheritance. Albert had flogged and talked, and admonished, he had spoken to Bertie till he was hoarse, about the history of Charlemagne, the great masters of the Italian Trecento and the German Gothic cathedrals, about the developments in modern geology and the fascinations of Hegel; and all he got for his pains as a dutiful father was the whole succession of sensualists and vulgarians, on both sides of the family, who now leered at him through Bertie’s oyster eyes. Here was old George IV with his collection of erotic prints; here was William IV with his ten illegitimate children; here, oh horror, was Albert’s own mother Luise with her lovers, banished from Court by an equally libidinous father – Duke Ernst I, with his foul language, heavy drinking and syphilis.

  A modern adviser to Prince Albert might have begged him to keep the affair of Nellie Clifden in perspective. But it was from precisely the perspective of his own family’s past, and that of the Queen, that he saw Bertie’s escapade with Nellie. He wrote in fury to the prince, who had returned to Cambridge under the supervision of General Bruce. The letters spoke of ‘profligacy’, and envisaged a future King of England dragged into the courts in paternity suits. He thought of Nellie’s ability to plunge the whole Royal Family into embarrassment. ‘Oh, horrible prospect, which this person has in her power, any day, to realise! And to break your poor parents’ hearts!’49

  Albert then told the Queen. She confided in her journal that she would never again be able to look at Bertie without ‘a shudder’. The Prince Consort’s health seemed as if it were going to collapse altogether under the strain. ‘Ich hange gar nicht am Leben’, he told her melodramatically; ‘du hangst sehr daran.’ (‘I do not hang on to life, but you do – very much so.’)

  It was a completely accurate account of their two natures, but she could not guess that it would be proved correct within a few weeks. Suffering from all his usual symptoms, made much worse by a heavy cold, he nonetheless refused to cancel engagements and went, as scheduled, to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst on 22 November, in what he described as ‘dreadful rain’. Though this day’s work turned his cold into something like influenza, Albert felt it to be his duty to go to Cambridge and to speak to his son man to man. They walked near Madingley Hall. Somehow, in spite of the appalling weather, it was too awkward to face one another indoors, so they paced through the downpour, squelching through muddy puddles, as Bertie penitently promised his father that he had put Nellie aside, that he bitterly repented of the evil, and of the pain he had caused everyone. The talking was so painful, and so all-absorbing, that Bertie, who had believed himself to know the way they were walking, lost his path and they arrived back at Madingley Hall both soaked to the skin. Prince Albert spent the night there, sleepless and shivering, with ‘rheumatic’ pain in his back and legs. The Queen blamed these pains on ‘Bertie’s mistaking the road during their walk’. When the Prince Consort
returned to Windsor on 26 November, he was a seriously sick man.

  The next day, 27 November, a transatlantic British mail packet called the Trent docked at Southampton. The captain had a tale to tell. When she left Havana, the Trent had on board two envoys of the Confederate Government, James Murray Mason of Virginia, and John Slidell of Louisiana, with their secretaries, who had intended to come to London and to Paris to petition for armed help in the Civil War. Knowing that the two Confederate envoys were on board, the Federals set out in pursuit and fired on the Trent on 8 November, claiming that enemy communications were ‘contraband of war’. The Federal Captain Wilkes had boarded the Trent, threatened violence, and captured the two Confederate envoys with their secretaries.

  The reactions of the British premier, Lord Palmerston, can be readily imagined. It was said afterwards that if The Trent Affair had occurred in the era of international telegraph, it would almost certainly have led to war between Britain and the Northern States. As it was, the British had to wait nearly three weeks before the affair was revealed to them. The strength of feeling against the ‘Yankees’ was in any case strong in England, especially in the Liberal North, where Lancashire was beginning its ‘cotton famine’ in consequence of the war. Despite the popularity in Britain of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and a general revulsion against slavery among a majority of British people, it was felt by most English newspapers, and by the Northern Liberals most affected by the cotton famine, that neither side in America had begun the Civil War with the declared avowal to abolish slavery. To this extent, the North was no more virtuous than the South, and British instincts (quite apart from the cotton famine) sided with the more old-fashioned states of the South and with their desire for the independence of a republic.