Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  So, it was a changing world to which a radically altered Britain, now with an extended franchise, must respond. Not least of the new Government’s worries were the precarious situation in Ireland and an uncertain peace in Afghanistan, with a worry that Russia was extending its power following the fall of Tashkent (1865) and Samarkand (1868) into Russian hands. At home the expansion of the urban population in the previous two decades had led to acute housing shortages, the spread of epidemics and the urgent need for programmes of education. The Franco-Prussian War dominated the summer of 1870, and it is against the background of that conflict, and of the convulsions in Italy, that the Queen’s personal life story during this year must be seen.

  For some years now, General Grey had been looking for a way to resign as the Queen’s private secretary. Although relations between the wise old soldier and his monarch had deteriorated – she found him ‘often very irritable and excited’3 – she would not hear of his resignation. The burden of work was heavy. Grey kept to Prince Albert’s system of filing, which required multiple copies being made of important documents. Clerks were kept on hand at Buckingham Palace and at Osborne for the purpose, but anything of a confidential character needed to be copied by Grey himself. As noted in the previous chapter, the Queen was indignantly resistant to Grey’s suggestion that she play a more public role. He in turn was exasperated by what he considered to be her selfishness and sensuality. It was particularly frustrating to Grey, during this period of political change and turmoil, that she forbade any political discussions at dinner – even though contemporary politics had been the stuff of the late Prince Consort’s table talk. So, while the Government of Gladstone came to terms with the convulsions in Europe, and such crises at home as the threatened peace and stability of Ireland, with educational and army reform, Grey was obliged, during his many dinners with the Queen, to keep off all these subjects. As the nephew of the author of the 1832 Reform Bill, Grey must have found this worse than exasperating.

  On 26 March, Grey suffered a stroke. He was paralysed down one side, was unable to recognize anyone and on 31 March he died. The next day, accompanied by Princess Louise, Colonel Henry Ponsonby and Jane Churchill, a lady-in-waiting, the Queen went up to town from Windsor. The party went at once to Grey’s house. The Queen found his widow ‘wonderfully resigned and patient in her grief. How I feel for her, having gone through the same terrible misfortune myself!’4

  It is not recorded how Mrs Grey felt to be visited by the Queen on the very day after her husband’s death. ‘After talking for a little while, she took me into the room where the dear General lay, looking so peaceful, nice and unaltered, without that dreadful pallor one generally sees after death. His bed was covered with flowers, of which he was so fond. Poor dear General, I could not bear to think I should never look again on his face in this world.’5

  Grey’s departure, or merciful release, had been something which the Queen had anticipated; and she does not appear to have had any doubt about who should succeed him. This was Colonel Henry Ponsonby, who had been at Court since 1857. Ponsonby, himself from an aristocratic Whig family, was married to Mary Bulteel, a niece of General Grey.

  The Ponsonbys were, on superficial levels, surprising choices for the Queen. While she was increasingly Tory, they were unabashed Gladstonian Liberals. In religion, they were High Church, like Gladstone, whereas the Queen was her own distinctive brand of Broad Church Pantheist/Presbyterian. Mary Ponsonby was highly educated, and a feminist; Queen Victoria deplored feminism.

  Only in January 1870, the Queen had told Gladstone that she had ‘the strongest aversion for the so-called & most erroneous “Rights of Women”’.6 Later in the year, she would make clear her disgust at the idea of female medical students. She hated ‘the awful idea of allowing young girls & young men to enter the dissecting room together’.7

  The Ponsonbys would probably have smiled, as would those who love Queen Victoria to this day, at the vehemence of this viewpoint. (Connoisseurs such as they would surely have savoured the underlining of the word ‘enter’ – why that word, rather than, say, ‘together’?) Although the Queen would cause both of them years of slightly disloyal amusement, and a great deal of embarrassment, nevertheless it was a triumphantly successful relationship. It is, indeed, difficult to imagine the Queen having a better private secretary than Henry Ponsonby, and much of the reason for his success in the role, which he exercised for the next quarter of a century, was because of his happy partnership with his wife.

  Both Ponsonbys were loyal, in all important respects, to Queen Victoria, and they both warmed to her spontaneity. Victoria was a difficult woman to like, but an easy woman to love. Speaking of Prince Albert, Mary once said, ‘There was a complete absence of that frankness which was such a charm in the Queen’s manner.’8 And this, surely, is the clue to why Ponsonby and the Queen worked so well together. Neither had any ‘side’. Rather like a master angler, who knew when to give the salmon plenty of line and when to reel her in, Ponsonby was able to manage the Queen’s moods without being reduced, as Grey so often had been, to exasperation, and finally to apoplexy. Unlike Grey, Ponsonby got on well with Brown, and found his antics and brusqueness amusing. Above all, the Ponsonbys both possessed that essential quality in a courtier: a finely developed sense of humour. They loved the Queen, and they would not betray her. But they knew when laughter behind her back, and apologies to politicians to whom she had been spectacularly unpleasant, were among the weapons they needed to deploy to save the Queen from herself.

  Henry Ponsonby became her private secretary immediately upon Grey’s demise. At once, much of the tension was taken out of the atmosphere at Court. A small example occurred in the autumn of 1870 when the Duke of Westminster became a Knight of the Garter. This is the sort of matter where Grey would have nagged and nagged the Queen – probably to no effect – to hold a formal ceremony of Investiture. This was precisely the sort of ritual which made the Queen shy, and about which she was lazy. Ponsonby accepted this. After a few attempts to make the Queen perform the ceremony, he shrugged, remarking to Gladstone, ‘So, Westminster must put on his Garter in his bedroom.’9

  The monarchy survived the turbulent and difficult years of the early 1870s. That it did so was chiefly because the public and the politicians wanted it to do so, in spite of the obvious faults of the Queen and the Prince of Wales. But it was in no small measure owing to Ponsonby that it survived so triumphantly, and that the Queen moved from being deeply unpopular in some quarters, at the time of his appointment, to being the beloved idol of an entire Empire of nations.

  The Franco-Prussian War and its revolutionary aftermath in France were stark reminders of how easily thrones could be toppled, how quickly monarchs could find themselves to be vulnerable human beings. At one moment, the Empress Eugénie was in the royal palace in the Tuileries. The next, the imperial standard was pulled from the flagpole and she was told that the mob was at the door. Hurrying to the back entrance, they found it locked, and it was a long time before they could find the key. Then, quite suddenly, Prince Metternich, who had been accompanying her, had gone, and she was alone on a Parisian pavement with a companion, Madame de Breton.

  They found their way on foot, without being recognized, to the surgery of their American dentist, Dr Evans, who took them on a train to Trouville. At one point, when they had changed trains and were travelling by fiacre, the driver asked if they had come from Paris. When they said yes, the driver clenched his fists and said, ‘Oh! If I could but catch the Empress!’ It was only because of the courage of her dentist that she eventually reached Trouville, where Dr Evans got her on to a yacht belonging to Sir John Burgoyne.10 Her husband, who had surrendered at Sedan with 80,000 French soldiers, spent six and a half months as a prisoner of war at Wilhelmshöhe in Germany. He was eventually allowed to join his wife and son in England, and they settled in Chislehurst. (He died on 9 January 1873.) As Dr Evans remarked in his memoirs, ‘There is
no country in the world where the distance between the sublime and the ridiculous is so short as in France!’11

  So it might have seemed to the American dentist. But was it true? Charles I had been put on trial and beheaded in Whitehall, even though he questioned the legitimacy of the proceedings. James II had been in effect12 dismissed from government in 1688. Following the defeat of Louis Napoleon at Sedan, Paris had fallen into a state of civil war, and the communists had set up a Revolutionary Government by spring 1871. The Queen watched these developments with horror. ‘The Commune have everything their own way, and they go on quite as in the days of the old Revolution in the last century, though they have not yet proceeded to commit all the same horrors. They have, however, thrown priests into prison etc.’ By June, she was reading, ‘Most dreadful news from Paris. The wretched Archbishop, another Bishop, a Curé, and sixty-four other prisoners have been shot by these horrid Communists’.13 The governing classes of Europe have all thought alike on one question since 1789, and that is that revolutionary fervour is virulent, it is catching. No one had yet tested the political views of the ever-expanding proletarian populations of the British manufacturing towns. Nor was there any way of testing, in Ireland, whether the Fenians represented a majority opinion or whether they were representatives of the hothead extremes. There could be few more nervous times to be extending the franchise, nor a more troubling era for the Queen to be, as Gladstone and his colleagues feared, making the monarchy unpopular. Victoria, who was personally very fond of the Empress Eugénie, could not fail to find the story alarming. On what, after all, did her own authority rest?

  The political triumph of Prussia, and the creation of the German Reich, was made possible by the size, efficiency and professionalism of its army. The Prussians used the most up-to-date methods of armament – and, vitally important, of transport. They were the first people in the world to make use of the railway to transport troops – most notably and triumphantly in 1870, but they had been doing it since 1846.14 The Prussians had a system of conscription which helped to swell their unconquerable army of a quarter of a million men. But they also had a system of officer training which was without compare, and officers were promoted on merit. The British Army, by contrast, in the early years of Mr Gladstone’s administration, was in effect unchanged since Waterloo – in terms of its administration and discipline.

  Some time in the early 1880s, the Prince of Wales and Prince Leopold asked Ponsonby who should command the army – the Royal Family or the Government? ‘They seem to ignore the fact that this was settled by the late Charles I,’15 observed Ponsonby wrily. Although this matter was, indeed, settled in 1649, with grisly consequences for Charles I, it was not always easy for Queen Victoria to know where her authority began and ended. Clearly, since 1689, no British monarch had been an absolute autocrat. On the other hand, the army and navy were, technically, in the service of the Crown, and this was something which she regarded as rather more than a technicality.

  When Cardwell began his sweeping reforms of the army, she became incensed with rage that he should do so without consulting her. So sensitive was this matter, that when Philip Guedalla published his edition in 1933 of the correspondence between the Queen and Mr Gladstone, the more intemperate of her letters were censored from the printed version. As with the army, so in the case of naval appointments; it enraged her that G. J. Goschen, as First Lord of the Admiralty, should oversee the appointment of senior naval personnel.

  ‘You consider . . . ’ Goschen wrote to Ponsonby in August 1871, ‘that Admirals are appointed by the Queen, but that is not so. If that were the case, it would, of course, be incumbent on a First Lord to take the pleasure of Her Majesty as to cancelling an appointment made by Her Majesty. But flag officers are not appointed by Her Majesty either in fact or in name, as in the case of other departments to which you allude, and the appointments under which are gazetted as having been made by the Queen. All naval appointments are made by the Lord Commander of the Admiralty in virtue of the powers delegated to them by the Patent under which they execute the office of Lord High Admiral of the United Kingdom.’16

  As late as 1880, the Queen was still writing to her ministers as if she had direct control over what happened in the armed forces. ‘The Queen was surprised,’ she wrote from Balmoral, ‘to see the announcement of the abolition of flogging in the Navy. Perhaps a few words from the Admiralty would explain this to the Queen.’17

  The clash between the War Office and the army, whose commander-in-chief was stationed in Horse Guards, was a perennial one. What needled the Queen – as well as her cousin the Duke of Cambridge – was the insistence of Liberal ministers that they, as elected representatives, rather than the sovereign, were ultimately in charge of the armed services. ‘The superior control of the Queen, exercised through her Minister, and the responsibility of that Minister have never been denied,’ she said, ‘and no man admitted this more cordially that the Duke of Wellington.’ It was a sentence which was crying out for an almighty ‘but’, or ‘however’, and she let rip at Gladstone:

  The Queen must, however, record her opinion that if Doubt and uncertainty have been thrown of late years over the system of military Administration, the fault seems to be chiefly with the War Office [i.e. with Cardwell] when there has been a constant succession of changes – old offices abandoned – & again restored – amalgamated – & again replaced – new offices created and modified & again abolished, till it is very difficult to define or understand what the existing system is. One thing only is clear, viz. that the fault does not lie with the Horse Guards [i.e. the Duke of Cambridge], where the duties purely military are well defined and efficiently executed.

  Gladstone robustly replied, finding himself ‘surprised at Your Majesty’s language’.18

  If Trevelyan’s views on army reform had upset the Queen, his intrusive interest in her personal finances was even more troubling. The Queen was voted £385,000 annually from the Civil List. Trevelyan, writing under the pseudonym ‘Solomon Temple, Builder’, penned a pamphlet entitled What Does She Do with It?

  The Gladstone Papers are full of letters, none of which found their way into the official, printed edition, in which the Queen wheedled, pleaded, cajoled, begged and squirmed, to get her Chancellor of the Exchequer and her Prime Minister to provide more money for her children from the Civil List. The parsimonious Gladstone knew that money was her weak point, and he deliberately allowed his radicals a free rein in asking awkward questions about the royal finances which he could never ask himself.

  For example, in 1862, Lord Derby’s Cabinet proposed an annual allowance for all the Queen’s younger children, in the event of their not marrying, of £20,000. At the time of the proposal there were six unmarried children, and this allowance was intended to cover the expenses for all of them. Disraeli endorsed this arrangement in 1868, making the assurance that although the allowance could be diminished, as more and more of the children married, it would never sink below £10,000. The Queen had beadily spotted that Sir Charles Dilke, a noted radical, had abstained when this measure was passed through the Commons, and indeed was still recalling Gladstone’s mind to Dilke’s abstention in a letter she wrote to Gladstone fourteen years later in April 1882!19

  What, indeed, did she do with it? From the relative poverty of her upbringing in Kensington Palace, when her mother had been kept on tight purse strings by George IV and William IV, Victoria had seemingly squirrelled away what was in effect public money, voted to her by Parliament for the exercise of her monarchical duties, and appropriated it as her private fortune. She had built up Osborne House and Balmoral as her private domains and supplied Bertie with his house and substantial estates at Sandringham. The distinction between the sovereign’s private wealth and the wealth of the Crown had been blurred by the way that Victoria had chosen to live. Clearly, as far as she was concerned, there was no distinction between her private wealth and that of the State she held as sovereign.
She was the Queen, and that was the end of the matter. Although her private fortune gave her a measure of independence from the whims of her politicians, it also made her more vulnerable to the charge, from radical quarters, of being insensitively rich. She had perhaps not given as much thought as a sovereign should to the memory of the affair of Marie Antoinette’s Diamond Necklace.

  When the pamphlet reached Balmoral in the autumn of 1870, Ponsonby spent several weeks considering it before writing to Gladstone. The Prime Minister was much too wily to admit that he had known Trevelyan was writing it. Instead, he consulted with Ponsonby how they might best limit the public damage of ‘Solomon Temple’s’ investigations. And, no doubt to Gladstone’s satisfaction, Ponsonby disclosed to the Prime Minister the extent of the Queen’s actual fortune.

  In 1852, she had been left £250,000 by a miser named Nield. (‘Solomon Temple’ had exaggerated the sum.) Nor was Trevelyan right in suggesting that he knew what the Prince Consort had left, since ‘Prince’s wills are never proved’. But it was grossly exaggerated, said Ponsonby, to suggest that Albert had been able to save £1 million from his annual allowance. He had in fact left the Queen £25,000, with a charge on it of about £2,000 or £3,000 for pensions – presumably to dependents. Meditating upon the question years later, Ponsonby said to his wife that most of the Civil List was spent on upkeep – out of the £384,000 or so which Parliament granted to the Civil List ‘the Lord Chamberlain saves very little. [The Lord Chamberlain, in charge of the Household, would have paid for upkeep of the fabric, wages and stipends, etc.] The Lord Steward does, but not above 3 or 4 thousand and the Master of the Horse exceeds his allowance.’20