Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  Meanwhile, in Germany, Vicky kept her mother informed of the machinations of Bismarck and the anti-British policy of the Prussian Court. ‘Bismarck makes more mischief every day – party spirit is rising on both sides alarmingly, the King makes the most imprudent and ill-judged speeches and is more deluded than ever. He wanted to go to England but was prevented by his ministers of course. I wish those last-named dear people were at the bottom of the sea with millstones round their necks!’26 That autumn, Bismarck had made the speech which would be seen to typify the whole of Prussian politics up to and including 1914. ‘It is not with speeches or with parliamentary resolutions that the great questions of the day are decided . . . but with blood and iron.’27

  The dreadful anniversary, 14 December, passed. A melancholy Christmas ensued. Bertie’s marriage to Princess Alexandra of Denmark was fixed – in defiance of canon law – during the penitential season of Lent. The beauty and charm of the princess, and her attractive docility – always a quality which the Queen admired, especially in members of her family – allowed them all to overlook the diplomatic awkwardness of the Danish–Prussian hostilities.

  The public were determined to regard the marriage of the Prince of Wales as cause for high celebration. The Royal Yacht Victoria and Albert brought the Danish party from Antwerp. Bertie went to greet it at Gravesend. He arrived late, and ran up the gangplank, causing a storm of cheering from the onlookers when he openly kissed the beautiful eighteen-year-old princess. In an open carriage with the princess and her parents, the prince drove over London Bridge and made his way to Paddington Station by way of Temple Bar, Pall Mall, St James’s Street, Piccadilly and Hyde Park. Princess Alexandra wore a grey silk dress and a violet jacket trimmed with sable and a white bonnet adorned with red rosebuds. She was by any standards a stunner. In the city, so many office workers came out to see the carriage pass that people were crushed. At one point the Life Guards drew sabres to make them draw back.

  When the train reached Slough, another carriage procession formed, passing through Eton where the boys cheered themselves hoarse.28 Through all the vicissitudes of the monarchy’s reputation over the next half century, Alexandra remained a deeply loved figure in England. The Queen shared in the general adoration. ‘She is so nice – so sympathetic – quiet, but gay and clever. I cannot thank God enough for having given us such a daughter,’ she told her sister-in-law in Coburg.29

  She was too ‘desolate’ to have dinner with the Danish party on their arrival; but before dinner, Princess Alix went to the Queen’s apartment, ‘knocked at the door, peeped in & came & knelt before me with that sweet, loving expression which spoke volumes. I was much moved & kissed her again & again.’30

  The next day, Princess Alice accompanied the Queen to the mausoleum to receive the blessing of the dear departed Angel. And on 10 March Alix and Bertie were married at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Weeping as she took leave of her mother, Alix said to her, ‘You may think that I like marrying Bertie for his position; but if he were a cowboy I would love him just the same, and would marry no one else.’31

  The choir sang a chorale of Prince Albert’s composition, and Jenny Lind sang a solo. The Queen sat in a Gothic box high on the wall of the chapel, looking down on the proceedings – wearing widow’s weeds and a cap ‘more hideous than any I have yet seen’, in the eyes of Lord Clarendon. She also wore the blue sash and star of the Order of the Garter. For the first time since the death of the Prince Consort, the Court, though not the Queen herself, knew an atmosphere of festivity. There was a resumption of court balls and concerts. In London, Disraeli said it felt as if their honeymoon was going on for months, with a ‘whirl of fetes and receptions, processions and ceremonies’.32

  While the young couple went off to their life of enforced idleness, the Queen was still suffering; and she was compelled to work. ‘You say that work does me good,’ she had written to her uncle Leopold in February, ‘but the contrary is the fact with me, as I have to do it alone, and my Doctors are constantly urging upon me rest. My work and my worries are so totally different to any one else’s: ordinary mechanical work may be good for people in great distress, but not constant anxiety, responsibility and interruptions of every kind, where at every turn the heart is crushed and the wound is probed! I feel too visibly how much less able for work I am than I was.’33

  The Schleswig-Holstein Question was a personal one. Vicky supported the Prussian claim to Holstein. Alix and Bertie, obviously, supported Denmark’s claim at least to Schleswig. Meanwhile, were it not for the intransigence of the Danish King, Holstein would have been under the jurisdiction of the Duke of Augustenburg, who was the Queen’s nephew – the son of Feodore. Anyone in the Queen’s position would have been torn by this desperate international situation, even if they were not in the deep troughs of sadness caused by bereavement.

  In July, the House of Commons voted by 287 to 121 against purchasing the Exhibition buildings at South Kensington. These were to have been Prince Albert’s cultural legacy to the nation – becoming the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. So much for their sense of his contribution to the intellectual progress of the nineteenth century. ‘A crushing defeat,’ Disraeli said to the Queen’s private secretary (formerly Albert’s) General Grey. ‘The House was really mad or drunk.’34

  The Queen wrote to Palmerston, ‘However, we have got the land and we must now not lose a moment in preparing plans and estimates for the necessary buildings to replace the present Exhibition one, for the purposes contemplated. As it is, the folly of last night will by and by be repented of.’35 One should not underestimate the part played by the Queen herself in getting those museums built.

  Stockmar died six days later in Coburg.

  One thought alone sustains me – it is the blessed one of the reunion of those two blessed spirits who loved each other so dearly, and understood each other so well, for dear old Stockmar said to me last year, looking at my darling’s picture: ‘I shall be so glad to see him again, my dear good Prince.’ And now they are together – looking upon us poor mortals struggling on alone in a most imperfect and sad world – ‘with larger other eyes than ours, making allowance for us all’, as Tennyson says. They see the end of what seems interminable to us!36

  Once again, that summer the Queen visited Germany. The Duke of Edinburgh preceded her, going to spend time with his uncle and aunt in Coburg. He in turn was preceded by ardent letters from the Queen to the Duchess Alexandrine. Her heartbreak was real, but she was not ashamed to use it for moral blackmail, especially in matters about which she felt as strongly as the evils of smoking: ‘One request which I direct to Ernst from the bottom of my broken Widow’s and Mother’s heart! As regards Alfred – that Ernst shouldn’t encourage him to smoke, which has been strictly forbidden by his doctor.’ She also implored Alexandrine not to allow Ernst to indulge in ribaldry with the lad or to speak to him ‘man to man’. Dirty jokes and smoking would be an insult to the Angelic Memory, ‘and I know that he holds that memory too sacred, not to follow Our wishes’.37

  The late summer visit to Germany, however, was not merely a family trip. A great Congress was taking place at Frankfurt, attended by the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville, on the future of Germany, and on the European crisis caused by the Schleswig-Holstein affair. Exhausted, grief-stricken, and overpoweringly shy as Victoria was, she found herself at the epicentre of this political maelstrom. On almost every day of the Schleswig-Holstein crisis and the Danish–German war, Victoria, both in Germany and in England, was with her half-sister, ‘dear Feodore, who is such a comfort’38 – that is to say, with the mother-in-law of the Augustenburg claimant. She was, on the other hand, increasingly fond of her Danish daughter-in-law Alix.

  It was the Queen herself, before any British diplomats, who, at the end of August, saw first the King of Prussia and then, on 3 September, the Emperor of Austria to discuss Prussian–Austrian riv
alry.39

  It was a nerve-wracking occasion, the first major public event in which she had been centre stage since she was widowed. She found it ‘very trying’.40 The grand staircase of the Schloss Ehrenberg was decorated with flowers. ‘Felt so nervous, all being in state and I alone!’ She was followed up the stairs by Alice and Lenchen and together these three small women entered the Hall of Giants, the stupendous room where her parents had been married, to meet Franz Josef, the Emperor of Austria.

  The two monarchs were shy with one another. He ‘talks but little’, and such a major diplomatic encounter, without a minister or Prince Albert at her side, was out of her experience. She saw it was necessary, however, and the two bravely went through the motions of a public meeting. In recollecting it, her grasp on the English language seemed to go adrift. ‘I then mentioned Mexico, & Max going there, which I discouraged, & which the emperor does not either seem to like.’41 (Maximilian was married to Charlotte, the daughter of King Leopold of Belgium, and ‘very like angelic Louise’ – i.e. her mother.) Over the matter of Poland, the Emperor thanked her Government for their support. ‘Before & after luncheon I managed to say to the Emperor that I found the King of Prussia much irritated & fearing that Prussia would be passed over, which the Emperor said no one dreamed of. I added that I hoped I might assure the King of this, which he affirmed.’42 It was a relief, when the formal luncheon was over, to drive back ‘to the dear, peaceful Rosenau’. Her wish to sleep in Albert’s birth-palace meant that she did not have the chance to sample the modern conveniences of the Schloss Ehrenberg. In readiness for the imperial arrival, Ernst had imitated his brother Albert’s modern innovatory approach to domestic hygiene and installed a water closet in the emperor’s bedroom. Two wooden chambers, similar in design and proportion to those at Osborne, were erected right next to the pillow-end of the bed. The modern polished mahogany doors of these ‘thunderboxes’ detract from the baroque splendour of the room. The lavatories themselves, manufactured by Thomas Crapper of Chelsea, had to be ordered direct from London.43

  The next day, Ernst and Alexandrine drove out in their landau to visit Victoria and her daughters at the Rosenau. Ernst and the Queen discussed how the meeting had gone with the Emperor. Ernst believed that the Emperor would accept the strengthening of the German federation,44 but perhaps Victoria – in constant touch as she was with Vicky in Berlin – had a closer sense than Ernst of the chill in the air, the change in the political climate. Events were fast moving to the point where what the Austrian Emperor approved or disapproved of would be of less consequence than the will of Chancellor Bismarck.

  The Schloss Rosenau is a house of stupendous beauty, and the adjoining parkland was deliberately planted to resemble an English meadow. The whole place was soothing for the royal party. Leopold, who was well on this occasion, acquired a new dog, a dachshund called Waldmann or Waldi.45

  The period of the Queen’s ‘seclusion’ had begun. This was going to last at least for the duration of this decade. There was no doubt an accumulation of reasons for the seclusion, chief of which was heartbreak for Albert, and the nervous breakdown which it precipitated. Another factor, however, to which neither her ministers nor her biographers were always sensitive, was the sheer amount of time taken up by Prince Leopold’s sickliness. It was not that she stopped work altogether but she withdrew from public life: the work of conferring with politicians and diplomats and with other European Heads of State continued as much as before the Prince Consort’s death, even though she found this a very great physical and psychological burden. But she did not stop functioning altogether. The routines of life went on. Before she left the Rosenau, she assured Ernst, who was coming up to Balmoral that autumn for the sport, ‘The Hunt is something which comes entirely under my jurisdiction, and the children can do nothing about stalking or shooting without my permission.’46

  Back in England, she was reassured to find Palmerston ‘wonderfully fair’ in his views of the German situation; and when Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, visited Balmoral on 26 September, she found that ‘About German Unity, he seems very sensible.’47

  The Queen deeply and intelligently engaged with her ministers in all the day-by-day developments of the Schleswig-Holstein crisis. Then the King of Denmark died – ‘a terrible business’, said the Queen.48

  The new King, Alix’s father King Christian, took a much more belligerent attitude towards the Duchies. Fritz and Vicky, too, on the other side, were, noted Victoria, ‘very excited about this luckless business, which drives me half wild, for I have no longer my beloved Albert to guide, cheer, advise & pilot me through the great difficulty. I know what he would have felt about it. I still cannot help hoping that the Great Powers will recognize the Treaty, as that is the only way I can see of avoiding war!’49

  She spent Christmas at Osborne. Shortly thereafter, the thirty-four-year-old Professor Max Müller came to give lectures to the Household on the origins of Indo-European languages. His presence presumably allowed the Queen to speak in German for a few days, a fact suggested by the un-English expressions in her journal, such as when she says that Müller was ‘now since 15 years established at Oxford’.50 ‘He has a very soft voice, and his intonation and train of thought, as well as beautiful language, reminded me and others of a voice that is ever sounding in my ears and which is silenced now forever!’51

  Another memory of the Prince Consort was stirred by a more grotesque experience. In 1845, the royal pair had visited Parkhurst prison on the Isle of Wight (then a prison for juvenile boys, but now used to incarcerate women) and, nineteen years on, she decided to repeat the trip. There were 354 female convicts – ‘only five for murder. These are the saddest cases & as far as character goes, not the worst, for they are poor young girls who from shame, & desertion have destroyed their newly born children.’52

  She went through many parts of the prison, but was only allowed near the prisoners who were well behaved. (‘The dress worn by the women is not unbecoming, a tidy white cap or handkerchief & a not ill-shaped blue serge dress and apron.’) The governor told her that there was one wing which she should not visit – that in which the Irish were locked up. The visit during the previous week of a Roman Catholic priest had left them ‘unmanageable & excited’.

  Although, naturally, the governor knew the identity of his visitor, it was in no sense an official visit and the prisoners were not told the Queen was coming. Then, in the laundry, one of the women recognized her. ‘In an instant many threw themselves on their knees, crying & sobbing, calling on me to pardon them. It was a most painful scene & I hurried up the flight of stairs in the long ward, to where the nursery was.’53

  This was surely one of the strangest incidents in Victoria’s early widowhood. It is also historically revealing, insofar as these women had not all instantly recognized the Queen. Before the days of newspaper photography, let alone films, newsreels or television, public figures were not necessarily recognizable to the population at large. (One remembers the walk in the rain from Claremont, when Victoria and Albert sheltered with a cottager and were not identified.) How many men and women in England in 1864 could have recognized Gladstone or the Prince of Wales? Far fewer, proportionately, than would today be the case with comparable figures. It was partly for this reason that the politicians were so anxious, as Victoria developed habits of private grief and hidden introspection, that she should be encouraged to be on parade, as she had been when she was Sir John Conroy’s puppet as a teenager; and as, rather more willingly, she had allowed herself to be in the lifetime of the Angel.

  On Wednesday, 27 January 1864, Russell, now Earl Russell, failed to secure agreement to armed assistance for Denmark from Britain in the event of German aggression. This left the Government with no clear policy to recommend to Parliament. The Queen was at one with the majority of the Cabinet, and with public opinion, that Great Britain should not be dragged into a war with Prussia over the question. She wrote to
the Prime Minister:

  The Queen has read with the greatest alarm and astonishment the draft of a despatch to Sir A. Buchanan and Lord Bloomfield in which Lord Russell informs them that he has stated in conversation to Count Bernstorff that, in the event of the occupation of Schleswig by Prussia to obtain a guarantee for the withdrawal of the proclamation of the joint Constitution, Denmark would resist such an occupation and that Great Britain would aid her in that resistance. The Queen has never given her sanction to any such threat, nor does it appear to agree with the decision arrived at by the Cabinet upon this question.54

  For a broken-hearted widow who is written off by so many biographers as a mental ‘case’ at this period, she was doing rather well at restraining Palmerston and Russell’s last gasps at Whiggish gung-ho foreign policy.

  Partly as a result, perhaps, of worrying about the hostilities in which her native land was engaged, Princess Alix went into premature labour on 8 January 1864. The prince was born weighing only three pounds and twelve ounces.55 The parents settled on the name Albert Victor Christian Edward, though confusingly the child was always called Eddy. It would have been impossible not to name the child Albert, and every time one of her grandchildren was born, the parents had to tread carefully if they did not include either the names of Albert or Victor in the case of boys, or Victoria for girls. The Queen recommended to Bertie that she would reserve ‘Edward for a second or third son’ – the advice was ignored.56