Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  SIXTEEN

  ‘MEIN GUTER TREUER BROWN’

  SOME ACCOUNTS OF the relationship between Gladstone and Queen Victoria speak as if the animosity between them was of a purely personal nature. Victoria made everything personal, and so, of course, she came to make her resentment of Gladstone into one of the most notorious battles of wills in English political history. As in the case of her unwillingness during her girlhood to come to terms with the resignation of Melbourne and the arrival of Peel, there was a strong element here of disappointment at losing a Prime Minister whom she was coming to like enormously – Disraeli – to be replaced by one whom she found uncongenial. But the fifty-year-old Victoria, when she was allowing her mind to operate politically, was a much more astute figure than her girlhood self; and she used every weapon, including her psychological and physical illnesses, to stall what she believed to be attacks on the monarchy itself. Little by little, however, though she never grew to like Gladstone, she recognized the direction of the political wind, and she did usually have the common sense (often after many hysterical displays, and dozens of ink-splodged exclamation marks on black-bordered writing paper) to do as he suggested – just as she had conceded in the earlier part of her reign to the quiet reforms of Peel.

  The primary problem for Gladstone, in his relationship with the Queen when he first became her Prime Minister, was, however, the Queen herself: whether she was any longer willing or capable of doing the work of a constitutional monarch.

  It was not particularly surprising, when the new Liberal Government’s suggested army reforms were laid before Her Majesty, that she should have used her weapon of first resort, the explosion. G. O. Trevelyan, nephew of Lord Macaulay and a Liberal MP of the radical persuasion, had risen in the House of Commons to state the obvious: namely that the ‘tremendous influence of the Court’ was one of the obstacles to be overcome by anyone who desired a reform of the War Department.

  ‘Mr Trevelyan simply states what is not true,’ she spluttered. It was ‘a most outrageous speech to have been made by any member of the Government . . . Though he may have a perfect right to entertain the opinion he expresses, he has no right as a subordinate member of the Govt. to make such a public declaration of it without knowing what the views of his official superiors may be upon the subject.’ She insisted to Gladstone that Trevelyan be made to resign for his impertinent suggestion that it appeared that ‘a Royal Duke’ must be in permanent command of the army.1

  The army reforms were the responsibility of the Secretary of State for War, Edward Cardwell. It was impossible to look at the success of the Prussian Army, during its two recent wars, and not to see that triumph had not come by accident. There was no question of Cardwell introducing conscription, as the Prussians had done, thereby building up a huge army; but there was a case for building up reservists. Cardwell reduced the length of service ‘with the colours’, but introduced a corresponding period of service on reserve, with a payment of 4d per day. He also transferred more and more men from the militia to the regulars.

  Cardwell’s particular innovation was the so-called linked battalions. Rather than being sent to any part of the army which the War Office required, a new recruit would now be trained at local depot barracks, thereby linking the army to different areas of Britain. Different regiments would find themselves sharing more or less local fortresses: for example, the 34th (Cumberland) regiment and the 55th (Westmoreland) were linked, with a depot in Carlisle Castle.2 The huge fortresses used to house these Victorian army depots are a feature of the landscape to this day. The reform was disliked by the War Office, and in particular by the commander-in-chief. Since the resignation of Lord Hardinge in 1856, this role had been occupied by Queen Victoria’s cousin George.

  As far as army reform went, the diehards would accept the abolition of the sale of commissions and the more barbarically eighteenth-century features of the Victorian army such as flogging. But the reformers would lose their case when it came to getting rid of the ‘tremendous influence of the Court’. It was no mere figure of speech when the Queen liked to say she was a soldier’s daughter. She took a deep interest in her armed forces, regarding them as her army and her navy. Moreover, she had always enjoyed a cordial relationship with her cousin George William Frederick Charles, 2nd Duke of Cambridge (1819–1904). Far from giving his job to a commoner as the Liberals thought he should, the duke did not resign until he was seventy-six years old – in 1895. Even then, he did so reluctantly.3 His name and features survive on many an inn sign to this day.4 One senses his tone, as well as his views, coming through many of the Queen’s letters on the subject of army reform. He remained a man of legendarily bluff opinions, expressed with vigour. He used to say that he saw no reason why one gentleman should not command a regiment as well as another. It was once brought to his attention that there had been an outbreak of venereal disease at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. He set off at once ‘en civil, carrying as ever a rolled umbrella, to deliver a rebuke. When the cadets were all assembled, the Duke of Cambridge waved the umbrella above his head. He thundered, “I hear you boys have been putting your private parts where I wouldn’t put this umbrella!”’5

  Nevertheless, there was some justice in his resentment of interference in military affairs by civilian politicians and civil servants. Cardwell (Winchester and Balliol) was, like Gladstone, the son of a rich Liverpool merchant, a Peelite, a cerebral, decent man for whom administration was a calling, an opportunity to improve the world. While President of the Board of Trade, he had collated – an intricate and massive task – all 548 pieces of legislation relating to the Merchant Navy, thereby greatly increasing the welfare of ordinary merchant seamen, as well as making trade more efficient. He had also introduced – in that era of many railway fatalities, and chaos as all the different railroad companies expanded all over the kingdom – a rationalization of the railways. With the armed forces, he would find reform less easy. The two measures which were immediately recognized were the abolition of flogging and of purchase. Henceforth, the British Tommy could serve without being thrashed; and the officer could be promoted on merit, rather than simply by producing great sums of money. But it would be unfair to represent the Duke of Cambridge as a purely obscurantist reactionary. It was he, and not Cardwell, who, guided by the tremendous success of German staff colleges, helped found the Staff College at Camberley, and he introduced modern German training at Sandhurst. He had, after all, been a colonel in the Jäger division of the Hanoverian Guards since he was nine years old.6

  Judging from the journals, I should say that the Queen and the Duke of Cambridge met every two or three weeks of their grown-up life, except when she was in Scotland. They were close. Trevelyan was absolutely right to discern that there was a ‘tremendous’ influence from the Queen personally, and from her cousin, on the day-to-day management of the army, as well as such questions, always of interest to the Queen, as who should become colonel-in-chief of which regiments. The correspondence between the two, preserved in the Royal Archives, is copious and businesslike.

  The death of Albert had created vacancies at the head of several of the grander regiments. It was a delicate matter for the duke, getting the Queen to sign the necessary papers appointing to Albert’s colonelcies, since the usual formula on such occasions was to refer to the appointee’s predecessor. She did not object to the appointments, but ‘would wish it done . . . without allusion to whom they belonged before – that the Queen could not sign – as in her bitter agony (which only seems to increase every day) she can’t allude even to such things which she tries to ignore’.7 (This, from a letter to General Grey by the Duke of Cambridge, explaining, in 1867, why the Queen found the whole matter so painful.) In the event the Duke of Cambridge took over the colonelcy of the Grenadier Guards, in succession to the Prince Consort, only without the usual formula of ‘vice etc etc’.8

  At the Queen’s request, in March 1869, as Cardwell’s reforms began
to take shape, General Grey was instructed to tell Cardwell how little his sovereign liked them. She disliked, and considered unwise, the reduction of troops in the colonies, many of whom were brought back to serve at home. She deplored, as did the Duke of Cambridge, the moving of the duke’s offices from the Horse Guards, and his being forced to work under the umbrella of the War Office. Above all, she deplored the low esteem in which the sneering Liberals regarded her cousin.

  ‘A disposition exists in some quarters (she fears even among some of the subordinate members of the Government, as for instance Mr Trevelyan) to run down the commander-in-chief and generally to disparage the Military Authorities, as obstacles to all improvement in our Army Administration . . . Ever since he has been at the head of the Army, HRH has deserved the Queen’s entire confidence & is entitled to her best support.’9 He certainly got it – and without fail.

  In the case of the Irish reforms, Victoria knew herself to be powerless, and so, as she usually did, she conceded to Gladstone’s wishes, though not without a fight. ‘Regret, however, is now useless.’10 In the same spring that she was expressing herself so strongly about Cardwell’s army reforms, she was fuming about the proposal to disestablish the Irish Church, and wrote, ‘Mr Gladstone knows that the Queen has always regretted that he should have thought himself compelled to raise this question as he has done and still more that he should have committed himself to so sweeping a reform.’11

  The question which she was avoiding was the more troubling one of what the incoming Liberal Government expected of her as their Head of State. Victoria, who was still in a rocky state emotionally, was torn between two contradictory positions, equally strong. On the one hand, a deep distrust of the radicals made her wish to emphasize the vital role of the monarch in constitutional life, and to interfere with and question almost every measure Gladstone undertook. On the other hand, her loathing of business and her desire to lead a quiet life had led her to withdraw from the centre of Government, and to spend months of each year at Osborne and Balmoral.

  The press, the Queen’s own children, monarchists and republicans were all finding themselves beginning to ask the same sort of questions. If it was possible for a country to function when its Head of State spent half the year in her Scottish retreat or on the Isle of Wight, was this not a sign that it could function without a monarch at all? If she refused to undertake even such rudimentary duties as taking part in the State Opening of Parliament, were they not entitled to wonder why she was paid huge sums by the Civil List?

  Her private secretary, General Grey, used the arrival of a new Prime Minister to utter what began as a series of frank inquiries, man to man, and ended as a doleful cri-de-coeur from one who had reached the end of his tether.

  In June 1869, Grey copied out one of the Queen’s ‘stinkers’ to the Prince of Wales, accusing him of self-indulgence and failure to do his duty. As he did so, the patient Grey realized that this ‘excellent good advice . . . would have been more applicable here’.12 Grey was convinced that claims to be too ill to perform her duties were totally without foundation. ‘In spite of Sir William Jenner [the doctor], I believe that neither health nor strength are wanting, were the inclination what it should be. It is simply the long, unchecked habit of self-indulgence – that now makes it impossible for her without some degree of nervous agitation to give up even for 10 minutes, the gratification of a single inclination or whim.’13

  It was Grey’s view that Victoria was simply Bertie without the beard and cigars – a totally selfish, childish person without any of the sense of the duty which motivated her courtiers and statesmen. He had discovered that the Lord Mayor of London had asked the Queen if she would come to open the new Blackfriars Bridge when it was completed. Determined to wriggle out of such an odious appointment if she were able, the Queen had ‘told no one in the house but the Duchess of Atholl’.14

  This drama would drag on throughout the summer and autumn, with various figures – Gladstone, the royal children, Grey – all imploring the Queen to consent to open the bridge. She responded as if every such request was a stabbing. ‘She thought she had clearly expressed that it was impossible for her to open Blackfriars Bridge – but as Mr Gladstone seems still in doubt – she will repeat her sincere regret that it is quite out of the question for her to do anything of the kind in the heat of the summer.’15 (An objection to attending the State Opening of Parliament in November was that it was too cold for her to appear wearing the ceremonial clothes.) In July, when more and more pressure was being put upon her, she protested, ‘The Queen is much surprised at being again teazed [sic] & tormented about this Bridge – having – 3 weeks ago – nearly – been asked by Mr Gladstone that as the Queen cld not open the Bridge & Viaduct the fatigue of the whole thing being much too gt & a day [sic] commencing in the HEAT.’16 In the event, when November came, she opened the bridge.

  Yet, even in this tormenting matter of whether she would open the bridge, one senses that Grey – whose exasperation with her moods and whims is more than understandable – was being insensitive to what exactly was going on. True, by the standards to be expected of public-spirited Victorians such as Grey, Gladstone and all the males around her, she was behaving deplorably. But there is also more than a hint in Grey’s realization that she and her dissolute rake of a son Bertie were the same character, that her idleness was attributable to the self-same vice. While Bertie amused himself with chorus girls, or the wives of his clubland aristocratic friends, the Queen spent hours of every day with John Brown.

  Whatever the truth of Grey’s suspicions – and we can be sure that any hint of it which survives in written sources will, wherever possible, have been hidden or destroyed – there is written evidence that Grey, the Queen’s children and the politicians were being somehow unfair to Victoria. If you go to the actual written records and see the letters she was writing throughout this period, there is undoubted evidence of a woman who was on some occasions perfectly rational, and then quite out of control. Out of her mind.

  It is perhaps not possible at this distance to imagine, or to explain, exactly what was happening on the days when this was the case. But the paper evidence is there before us. In the Gladstone Papers, for example, in the British Museum, we see, in the letters of 1869, a vast disparity between the letters in which Victoria, however strong-willed and contradictory, was in control of herself and commenting upon affairs, and those in which she is hardly able to wield a pen. Indeed, some of the letters, roughly scrawled in pencil or blue crayon and barely legible, consisting of only a few words, are evidence of complete loss of control. Whether the reasons for this are purely psychological or hormonal, or whether she had been prescribed too much laudanum or some other opiate by Jenner (a doctor who, Gladstone said, he would not have let loose on his cat), or whether the Queen reached for the whisky bottle, or whether all these things were the case at once, these strange scrawls are disturbing evidence that the Queen was, for much of the time, ‘not herself’. One of the notes scrawled to Gladstone in blue crayon while he was staying at Balmoral reads, ‘It is not to Tahiti but to Honolulu that the complaints relative to Prince Alfred refer.’ That is all the note says. Another scrawl, written on the same day, says, ‘It is very wicked to have again attacked Prince Alfred for it is quite false. But it shd not be heeded.’17

  These weird scrawls are in a quite different idiom from the admittedly semi-legible, brisk commentaries which her letters to courtiers and politicians offered when she was in a more composed frame of mind, as, for example, on 1 November in the same year, 1869. She ‘thanks Mr Gladstone not to press the subject of Sir L. Rothschild’s peerage. The Queen really cannot make up her mind to it. It is not only the feeling, of which she cannot divest herself, against making a person of the Jewish religion, a Peer; but she cannot think that one who owes his great wealth to contracts with Foreign Govts for Loans, or to successful speculations on the Stock Exchange can fairly claim a British Peerage.’18
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  This letter, however distasteful to modern sensibilities, is scarcely deranged, as were the notes scribbled in the summer. In a political history of the period, it would be right to sympathize with the male Establishment in wishing this woman, with her whims and self-indulgence, would be more assiduous in the exercise of public duty.

  Clearly, what was causing General Grey so much anxiety was something much more serious than simple laziness, or unwillingness, on the Queen’s part, to take part in public ceremonials. In fact, the Queen was right to insist that, in her own fashion, she worked hard – though with lapses, and always with the proviso that she was allowed to do so for much of the year at Balmoral or Osborne. Twenty-first-century monarchs would probably feel it to be a duty to be on parade, to cut ribbons, open hospitals and shake the hands of subjects. But, then, a twenty-first-century monarch would probably be less intimately involved in the political decision-making processes. A survey of the Queen’s correspondence with her Prime Minister during this difficult year for her private secretary shows that Victoria was very far from taking no interest in politics or affairs of State. It was public duties from which she shrank; and it was the demands of the Government and her secretary that she should leave those places where she could lead her life in private – Balmoral and Osborne. This by no means diminished her daily interest in the measures of the Liberal Government, many of which she deplored. As well as going through legislation about army reform and Ireland with a fine-tooth comb, she scrutinized all senior Church appointments and she kept a close eye on those proposed for honours. Equally, she watched the international scene, and monitored the situations in India, Afghanistan and Egypt.