Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  She and Clarendon, however, were among the very few people in British politics who appeared much concerned with what was happening in Europe. Stanley noted that the Queen ‘interferes little’ in his work as Foreign Secretary, ‘and only where Germany is concerned’.18 Cut off from London as she might have been during her sojourns at Balmoral and Osborne, she was in thrice-weekly touch with Vicky, who tartly and accurately commented to her mother that the British politicians and diplomats ‘are not so perfectly informed of European affairs as they ought to be’.19

  A charming illustration of this was provided for Clarendon later that year, in November, when he came across the Chancellor of the Exchequer, W. E. Gladstone, having a holiday in Rome at the same time as the Duke of Argyll and the Cardwells – Cardwell was Chief Secretary of State for Ireland at the time and Argyll (soon to become father-in-law of Victoria’s daughter Princess Louise) was Lord Privy Seal.

  ‘Italian art, archaeology and literature are Gladstone’s sole preoccupation,’ wrote Clarendon. ‘Every morning at 8, he lectures his wife and daughters upon Dante and requires them to parse and give the root of every word. He runs about all day to shops, galleries and persons, and only last night told me that he hadn’t time for the reading room and had not seen an English paper for three or four days!’20

  For the British governing classes, and for the Establishment generally, Europe was a series of landscapes to be captured in watercolour, an architectural background to their great works of literature, just as much as it was a living political reality. Gladstone and his fellow Liberals supported the aspirations of Mazzini, Garibaldi and the Italian nationalists largely because they had persuaded themselves that it was in accordance with Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia, just as Byron in an earlier generation had supported Greek independence as an extension of his classical education at Harrow and Cambridge. The machinations of Bismarck were not quite overlooked, but they were secondary to the cultural echoes of times past. To the Queen, the future of Germany was being fought out, quite literally, by members of her own family. Fritz, her Prussian son-in-law, was a cavalry officer in the war of 1866. Her other German son-in-law, Duke Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt, was a cavalry officer fighting for Austria on the opposite side. She rightly summed up Bismarck’s action as ‘a war – which is in fact a civil one’. The experts, including Friedrich Engels and Louis Napoleon, predicted that it would be a long war, and that Austria would win it. In fact, it was settled by one battle.The Prussian troops triumphed over the Austrians at Sadowa/Königgrätz on 3 July. ‘I fear this great victory, which I think of doubtful happiness to you all, has been most dearly bought,’ she wrote to Vicky.21 She was referring not only to the losses – 9,000 Prussian dead – but to the political consequences for the future of German-speaking peoples. Fritz had been marginalized by Bismarck, and the Prussian Court, in the run-up to the war, because he was married to ‘die Engländerin’, that liberal enemy of so much that Bismarck stood for. But in the war, he had acquitted himself as a gallant officer in the field.

  In the midst of that turbulent summer, Victoria’s family had also extended itself into European life. Vicky herself gave birth to a daughter on 12 April (‘Though it is very naughty of me,’ the Queen had written, ‘to show dearest Fritz’s English up to you, I must tell you as you will laugh so, he telegraphed you were “happily delivered from a strong and healthy daughter!”’22), and Francis, Duke of Teck – ‘thoroughly unassuming and very gentlemanlike’23 in the Queen’s view – had become engaged to Princess Mary of Cambridge. They were destined to become the parents, on 26 May 1867, of Princess May, future Queen of England and grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II.

  Princess Mary of Cambridge’s brother George had, like their cousin the Queen, viewed events in Germany since the rise of Bismarck with alarm and dismay. ‘To see all our old German associations knocked on the head, and our friends and relatives, I may say, scattered to the winds, is indeed a state of things which may make the stoutest heart shudder at the bare thought,’24 he wrote to Victoria. The Schleswig-Holstein war had seen humiliation for the Augustenburg claimant and military defeat for the Danes – with both of whom Victoria had marital connections. But the 1866 ‘civil war’, in which Austria was defeated, saw more widespread humiliations and political defeats for her blood-relatives. George V, the blind King of Hanover, and a grandson of the English George III, had, as the Duke of Cambridge put it, been ‘driven from his Kingdom by his neighbour the King of Prussia. Frankfurt had been invaded by the Prussia army. The citizens were told that they must pay six million guilders on the spot and a further twenty-five million guilders within a day. Unable to comply with the request, the mayor of Frankfurt hanged himself.’25

  Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, had during the previous five years of childbearing, suffered from headaches, rheumatism, depressions and nervous strain. While her husband had ridden into battle for Austria, she had watched appalled as not only her brother-in-law Fritz, but also her uncle Ernst (Prince Albert’s own brother) had put himself forward, and taken a command to fight for the Prussians. Hesse had suffered particularly badly in the war and was full of wounded soldiers. Many philanthropists are those with particular inner demons to conquer. Alice, clearly an extremely unhappy person, established a network of women’s groups across the whole of Germany. They were committed to nursing in times of war, and in peacetime to medical training. She was in correspondence with Florence Nightingale. The Germans found difficulty in pronouncing her name, but soon the Alice-Frauenverein für Krankenpflege – the Princess Alice Women’s Nursing Association – had spread across wide areas. There were over seventy of its hospitals before it merged with the German Red Cross in 1867.

  Hesse also suffered extreme financial hardship because of the war. There could now be no doubt of who was boss in Germany, and Prussia exacted painful financial reparations from those German states that had stood against her. By far the smallest of the remaining independent states, with its own grand duke and duchess, Hesse could only survive by paying Prussia money which it simply could not afford. It meant that Alice’s good causes, above all the Alice-Frauenverein, suffered as a consequence. She begged her mother for help, requests which caused Queen Victoria ‘horror’.26 By 1871, Victoria had decided that ‘Alice’s greediness for money was terrible’.27

  Queen Victoria and the Royal Family could see nevertheless that Prince Albert’s plan, for a benign Germanic federalism held together under Austrian control, now lay in ruins. Prussia ruled, with her vast, well-trained army and booming economy. Even the British politicians could see it – some of them, at least – when, in the following year, 1867, France and Prussia began sabre-rattling: Emperor Napoleon III began negotiations to purchase the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg from the Dutch Government, even though it was part of the German Bund, and garrisoned with Prussian troops. He was providing himself with an excuse for a war against Prussia, which he foolishly thought he could win. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Stanley, airily, and very wrongly, supposed that ‘neither party, I believe, wants a war, and they are glad on both sides to have a decent excuse for remaining at peace’.28 He thought that in April 1867. By the end of the year, he had cynically decided that he was indifferent to the question which so agitated the Queen. ‘A war between France and Germany, though disagreeable, would not for us be dangerous,’ he confided to his journal.29

  Besides, in that year, there was much else in the world to distract attention from Luxembourg and its future. Napoleon III had dispatched troops to Rome to help the Pope resist the Italian nationalists and the volunteers who had massed behind Garibaldi. In Mexico, the French forces had withdrawn, leaving the Emperor Maximilian (the brother of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, and son-in-law to the late King Leopold – he was married to Leopold’s daughter Charlotte) to fight on his own against the republicans. He was condemned to death by a Council of War and shot at Querétaro, the subject of famous canvases by Manet. Irish Fenians invaded Canadian
territory in 1866, and these convulsions were partially responsible for the British Government’s decision to bring all the North American colonies of Great Britain into one ‘Dominion of Canada’.

  At home, the two most urgent concerns of the political classes were the future of the proposals for electoral reform, and the future of Ireland. Reform was a complicated business, taking hours of parliamentary time, as they debated not only the extent of the franchise, but also such crucially decisive questions as the boundaries of the constituencies.

  Reform of the voting system had been long overdue in Liberal eyes, but it was a slow process. The problems concerned less the diehard opponents who seemed to have history, as well as the Liberal Party, against them as in the fine points. It was less a question of when, than of how, reform would happen.

  Ireland was different. The Irish Question did not creep up; it exploded. It did not quietly nag; it forced itself upon the attention of the Westminster politicians. The ending of the American Civil War released from the Federal Army many Irish Americans who did not feel tempted to return to a peaceful civilian life. The Italians had formed themselves into armed bands behind Garibaldi to fight for their national freedom from Austria. The Polish nationalists were resisting the Russians. Why should Irishmen hold back, particularly since the Fenian Brotherhood was started in the United States in 1858 with a mission to fight for the home country?

  Throughout the 1860s, there had been outbreaks of violence in rural Ireland, in protest against the tenancy arrangements. There was still a tithe; that is, the Irish were still obliged to pay a tax towards the Protestant Church, regardless of the fact that the majority of them were in fact Catholic. Perceived injustices of this sort fuelled the feelings of those Irish Americans who had escaped the famine of twenty years earlier.

  As would so often happen in the unfolding century, it was outbursts of violence by Irish nationalists which triggered the liberal English conscience into thinking something must be done about Ireland. Two Fenian prisoners, being conducted through Manchester by the police, were rescued, and one policeman, Sergeant Brett, was killed on 18 September. Three men – Allen, Larkin and O’Brien by name – were executed for the crime, instantaneously joining the Irish Republican martyrology. Then, on 13 December, a bomb was placed in Clerkenwell Prison in an attempt to rescue more Fenian prisoners.

  Luckily for the Irish, one English politician felt it was his ‘mission’ ‘to pacify Ireland’. Even more fortunately, he was also at the vanguard of the English Liberal Party, in favour of reform at home, the promotion of liberalism abroad, and in Ireland, in favour of allowing the Irish a greater say in the running of their own affairs. This was William Ewart Gladstone. He had begun his political life as a ‘stern unbending Tory’, whose chief interests, beyond Homer and Dante, were Church politics. But he was also the son of a go-getting merchant, and he had intense political ambitions. The combination of contrarieties in his character makes him one of the most fascinating figures in British political history. He resigned from Peel’s Cabinet over the – to us – esoteric question of whether the Government would give a grant towards the training of Catholic clergy at Maynooth, near Dublin. Esoteric, because of Gladstone’s motives: the point of his resignation was to emphasize his High Church belief that the Church of England was the rightful branch of the Catholic Church in Britain, and that for the Queen’s Government to give money to a Roman Catholic seminary was to undermine the National Church. So he abandoned his position as President of the Board of Trade in 1845, and went to Buckingham Palace for an audience with the Queen.

  She was gracious enough to express regret at Mr Gladstone’s decision, though it is rather doubtful whether she understood it, having a detestation of the High Church position which was his lodestar and raison d’être. (‘I am very nearly a Dissenter – or rather more a Presbyterian – in my feelings, so very Catholic do I feel we [i.e. the Church of England] are,’ as she once confessed to one of her daughters.30) Even in that 1845 interview between Gladstone and the Queen, we can see the beginnings of their famous estrangement twenty years later. ‘I have had the boldness to request an audience, madam, that I might say with how much pain it is that I find myself separated from Your Majesty’s Service . . . ’31 This tall, fanatical, verbose man was the reverse of anything she found charming. He made no effort to flatter her, nor did he speak directly. When she tried to draw him out on the subject of the Chartists, he said he believed ‘the main feeder was want of employment’. Before Gladstone left the audience, she asked him about his friend Henry Edward Manning – then a High Church Archdeacon, but about to defect to Rome. Within a short space, Gladstone was back in Peel’s Cabinet, as Secretary for War and Colonies, a move which allowed cynics to wonder what had happened to the conscience which, only months before, had made him resign over Maynooth.

  All this was decades back in the past. Gladstone, and his great political rival Disraeli, had been obliged to wait for the political bigwigs to grow older and older before they could take power themselves as party leaders. Gladstone was in his late fifties before leadership of the Liberal Party was within his grasp.

  Had she been able to read Gladstone’s assessments of her, the Queen might have been flattered by the occasional phrase, but she would surely have been repelled by his constant need to pass pompous judgements on her, as though he were entitled to read her soul. Many of these judgements were made to the Duchess of Sutherland – Mistress of the Robes. In 1862, he expressed the hope that the Queen’s refreshment from a Scottish holiday would be morally improving: ‘Such contact with Nature’s own very undisguised and noble self, in such forms of mountain, wood, breeze and water! These are continual preachers.’ In 1863, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he pronounced the Queen’s tone ‘delightful’ and her physical strength ‘satisfactory’. The next year, at the height of the Danish war, he again gave her high marks. ‘Often as I have been struck by the Queen’s extraordinary integrity of mind – I know of no better expression – I never felt it more than on hearing and reading a letter of hers on Saturday (at the Cabinet) about the Danish question.’32 Gladstone himself clearly felt fully entitled to make such judgements, but they all read as if he were marking his monarch out of ten. His manner would grow no less awkward with the passage of the years, and by the time he took office as Prime Minister he was on a collision course with the Queen.

  Before the Gladstonian tragi-comedy began in earnest, however, the Queen had a foretaste of political happiness of a kind undreamed-of since the demise of Lord M. The Reform Bill passed. Lord Derby resigned through ill health, and he was succeeded as Prime Minister and as Conservative Leader by the bizarre, pomaded figure of Benjamin Disraeli. ‘Mr Disraeli is Prime Minister! A proud thing for a man “risen from the people” to have obtained!’ commented the Queen. ‘And I must say – really most legally; it is his real talent, his good temper and the way in which he managed the Reform Bill last year which have brought this about.’33

  Vicky shared her mother’s feeling that ‘it is absurd to have an aristocratic prejudice against Mr Disraeli – on account of his being a Jew and an adventurer . . . My fear was that his other qualities were not such as to enable him to fill the place well.’34 The Queen saw no reason to fear. Disraeli had one quality which covered a multitude of sins. He was ‘certainly . . . loyal . . . to me’.

  Gladstone, meanwhile, as Leader of the Liberal Party, had come out in favour of disestablishing the Irish Church. He, who a quarter of a century before had wanted to deprive the Irish of the Maynooth grant, now felt the position of Established bishops (Anglicans) in Ireland to be untenable. The Queen felt his position would do ‘immense mischief’.35 Disraeli’s religious views were eccentric. He was a baptized member of the Church of England who used to take the Sacrament at Easter, but he once rather bafflingly told the Queen, ‘I am the blank page between the Old and the New Testament.’36 Whatever this meant, he could see that the natural Tory position
on the Irish Church was to oppose any attempts to undermine it, or to remove the Queen’s power to appoint the Irish bishops. The Queen’s dislike of Fenians was intensified, meanwhile, by an Irishman named O’Farrell shooting the Duke of Edinburgh in the back in Sydney. ‘I fear the wound must be a severe one, though please God it will leave no permanent effect on his health.’37

  Disraeli considered that there was a chance of easing the Irish crisis through the mediation of Manning – now Cardinal Manning – but once Gladstone had proposed disestablishing the Irish Church, an idea which had been encouraged by the cardinal, the Tory Leader dropped the Roman Catholic cleric like a stone. He made good use of his acquaintanceship with Manning, however, in his most amusing political novel, Lothair, in which the figure of Cardinal Grandison swans about the drawing rooms of London in a watered-silk scarlet ferraiolo, scheming to convert duchesses to his creed.

  Sadly for the Queen, who had taken a great shine to Disraeli, his Government was short-lived. His own party contained many who disliked him. Lord Cranborne, who had now succeeded as the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, was only the most feline, intelligent and politically astute of those who winced at the idea of the English Tories being led by that Blank Page. The question of the Irish Church led to the Tories’ defeat in the Commons. There was a General Election, after which, with what one imagines to be very gritted teeth, the Queen was obliged to send General Grey to Hawarden, Gladstone’s house in North Wales, with this letter: ‘December 1st 1868 – Mr Disraeli has tendered his resignation to the Queen. The result of the appeal to the country is too evident to require its being proved by a vote in Parliament and the Queen entirely agrees with Mr Disraeli and his colleagues in thinking that the most dignified course for them to pursue, as also the best for the public interests, was immediate resignation. Under these circumstances, the Queen must ask Mr Gladstone, as the acknowledged leader of the liberal party, to undertake the formation of a new administration.’38