Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  The money received by the Queen from the Treasury, however, was only a small part of her actual income. True, Prince Albert had managed very efficiently with what assets and incomes they possessed. True, Victoria’s parsimony in such matters as heating and wardrobe helped. But ‘Solomon Temple, Builder’, and critics since, missed a trick by suggesting that the Queen was squirrelling away the Civil List. As anyone could tell from considering the expense of running the horses and households and palaces, such a squirrelling exercise would be profitless. The real source of Queen Victoria’s wealth, and what made her so much richer than any monarch in previous British history, was the Duchy of Lancaster, whose assets and incomes the Queen took over upon her accession. John of Gaunt – ‘time-honoured Lancaster’ – bequeathed the Duchy with its vast holdings to Henry IV, and ever since they had been the possession of the Crown. Until the reign of Queen Victoria, the wealth from the Duchy came largely from the rents in agricultural land, but with industrialization and the growth of the cities, these incomes rocketed. The Duchy owned – and still owns – huge tracts of London, including the Savoy district (though not the hotel!) as well as much of south London. The Duchy held land in the Midlands and the North. Most of the foreshore of the Mersey belonged to it as did the Mersey Docks, with all their warehouses and valuable moorings for export vessels. As did, in that era of increased leisure and holidaying, the Blackpool Promenade. The Duchy owned Kidwelly in South Wales – in George IV’s time a sleepy market town with a picturesque ruined castle painted by Turner – but in the era of Albert and Victoria a coal-mining district. The Duchy owned coal mines throughout South Wales, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Staffordshire and Lancashire.

  At the Queen’s accession, the Exchequer had considered absorbing the Duchy’s income into the public purse. The Duchy’s Council argued forcibly against this, and it was this happy chance which was the foundation of Victoria’s immense wealth. Cockfosters and Handley Wood, and other acres of cheap grazing land north of London in 1837, became urban real estate in the following decades. In Birmingham, Manchester and Staffordshire many of the new industrial estates, mines and factories were now enriching the Royal Family. The two Yorkshire spa towns of High and Low Harrogate were ‘developed’. The Duchy was the direct beneficiary of Harrogate’s expansion into the principal spa town of health- and leisure-obsessed Victorian Britain. Though the Queen never visited the town which she in effect owned, by 1861 its rateable value soared to £30,000, having been worth very little when she came to the throne. The expansion of the nation’s population, its industry and its leisure facilities all enormously enriched the sovereign. And these assets were indeed stored away for the personal enrichment of herself and her successors. By the 1880s, Victoria would have a personal annual income in excess of £300,000 (on top of the Civil List), making her easily the richest person in Britain, with only the dukes of Westminster (on £290,000) and Bedford (£225,000), with their huge estates in London and the country, even approaching her levels.21

  Ponsonby in 1870 had been playing a slightly duplicitous game in revealing the details of the Privy Purse to the indiscreet Gladstone, but if there was an extenuating circumstance, it was that the Prime Minister had just visited Balmoral and had taken a battering. Ponsonby felt Gladstone deserved a little compensatory reward. Both Gladstone and the Queen dreaded the annual ritual of the Prime Minister’s visit to Balmoral. When Gladstone arrived at the Castle, it was six weeks since he had seen his sovereign, and it was noted that she was too ill to see him. Leaping perhaps a little too eagerly at the chance of not having to see her at all, Gladstone wrote to her, ‘Mr Gladstone, in announcing with his humble duty his arrival at the Castle, aware of Your Majesty’s habitual condescension and courtesy intreats [sic] Your Majesty, after so serious a derangement of health on no account to make any effort for the purpose of seeing him during his stay.’22 Ludicrously, nearly all the communications between the two, while he was staying under her roof, were conducted in writing, and this was to be the pattern of future visits. What was the point of his being there at all?

  When she did surface, it was to excoriate Gladstone about the reforms of the army. When the Prime Minister left, and wrote a note to Ponsonby while sitting on the platform at Ballater Station, the Queen’s secretary thanked Gladstone for ‘a tone and temper which few would be able to boast of under such trying circumstances’.23

  Psychosomatic illness was a weapon which the Queen unashamedly used whenever she felt Gladstone was bullying her or fighting her into a corner. She had by then been suffering for months with attacks of rheumatism, and with a mysterious sore throat, which apparently made it impossible to undertake any duties or attend any public functions. She spent much of the summer in bed being attended by the useless Jenner and by the distinguished Dr Joseph Lister, the pioneer of antisepsis. Jenner blamed the ‘advancing democracy of the age’ for all the complaints about the Queen’s withdrawal. (Over fifty republican clubs or organizations grew up in England during this period.) But it was not only the democrats in Parliament who found her behaviour verged on the indefensible. ‘Yesterday . . . ’ wrote Colonel Ponsonby to Gladstone, ‘I saw a strong man, Lord Essex, rolling about in the extremest agony. He fought bravely against it, and a little while after, still in much pain, he was discharging the duties of courtesy to his guests. What strange contrasts does this world afford!’24 This was when she had not even warned the Lord Chancellor that she was too ‘ill’ to prorogue Parliament or to summon the necessary Privy Council meeting. It meant that the entire Establishment of Great Britian was awaiting Her Majesty’s pleasure – Parliament could not be prorogued while the Queen remained in bed in Balmoral. ‘Worse things may easily be imagined,’ wrote Gladstone, ‘but smaller and meaner cause for the decay of Thrones cannot be conceived. It is like the worm which bores the bark of a noble tree and so breaks the channels of its life.’25

  In 1871, she managed to open the Royal Albert Hall on 29 March, but limited herself to speaking just one sentence, and felt ‘quite giddy’, confronting the huge crowds. She also mysteriously felt well enough to open Parliament; but then Prince Arthur, her favourite child, had just turned twenty-one, and she wanted Gladstone to vote him an annuity of £15,000. The vote for the annuity was passed on 3 August but with an unprecedented fifty-four votes cast against it. On the day of the first vote in the Commons, there was a demonstration in Hyde Park against Prince Arthur receiving his grant, and the meeting moved to Trafalgar Square. In the Commons, there were speeches which could only embarrass the royalist cause. Tories tried to justify the Queen receiving £385,000 per annum by saying that she had surrendered the Crown Lands upon her accession, and that had she held on to them, she would now be receiving rents of over £1 million per year. But this was beside the point. As Mr Dixon of Birmingham told the House, ‘there was growing up in the minds of the people in large towns an increasing feeling in favour of Republicanism’. Mr Disraeli had told them that the money paid to royalties was in order to ‘keep up the pageantry of the Crown’. But, a rueful Sir William Lawson ‘was not in a position himself to say whether that pageantry had been kept up to the satisfaction of the country or not’. Ominously, Sir William said that the Crown was now ‘in a different position from that which it occupied 30 years ago’. And an even more sympathetic MP believed he spoke for ‘many who, Englishmen as they were, loyal as they were, most anxious in every way to support the Sovereign of this country in that high position in which she was placed, were yet particularly anxious that the Sovereign should come more among her people’. He pointed to ‘what was going on in Dublin at the present moment’ as evidence of what happened when a people felt detached from their sovereign ruler.26

  The MP who mentioned what was happening in Dublin had put his finger on one of the sorest points in the body politic. The whole question of Ireland, which had dominated British politics since the famine, could not but make an impact on the position of the Royal Family.

  It was
a period of extreme personal embarrassment and difficulty for the Royal Family. The British public, on the whole, had been pro-French in the war, and the Queen’s firstborn daughter was the Crown Princess of Prussia. The Queen’s pro-Germanism was no secret, though it was perhaps as well that some of the sentiments she expressed in her private correspondence to Vicky were not read by the public: ‘My whole heart and my fervent prayers are with beloved Germany’, for example.27 Though she was desperately sorry for Napoleon and Eugénie having to escape Paris, she could not restrain herself from feeling that ‘it is quite marvellous how the Germans carry everything before them and how wonderfully well the campaign is being conducted’.28 The invasion of Paris by Prussian troops was surely ‘a just judgement – a just retribution on a very guilty government and a very frivolous vain-glorious people, and the fulfilment of beloved Papa’s most earnest wishes’.29

  Meanwhile, as she contemplated the ‘fearful extravagance and luxury, the utter want of seriousness and principle in everything’30 in the Parisians, Bertie was summoned as a witness in court in the sordid ‘Warwickshire Scandal’. Sir Charles Mordaunt had married an eighteen-year-old girl named Harriet Moncreiffe. A year later, she gave birth to a premature child – Violet, who grew up to marry the 5th Marquess of Bath. Harriet confessed to Mordaunt that the father was Lord Cole, and she also confessed to having had affairs with several other eminent figures, including the Prince of Wales. When Mordaunt broke into her desk, he found letters in Bertie’s hand. Bertie denied any wrongdoing, and his mother, superficially at least, accepted his word. But it was not a good time to be a royal private secretary.

  At Sandringham, in the cold spring of 1871, Alix, pregnant for the sixth time, went into premature labour, and produced a son, Prince John, who died after twenty-four hours. The distracted mother lay with the dead baby all day. A sobbing, kilt-clad Bertie, walking hand in hand with his sons Eddy and Georgie, buried the child in the Norfolk earth. The doctor afterwards gave him the news that his twenty-six-year-old wife, who was coughing blood, could not stand the strain of another birth, and that they should have a celibate marriage.

  The republican press were totally callous about Bertie and Alix’s loss. Reynolds’s Newspaper wrote, ‘We have much satisfaction in announcing that the newly born child of the Prince and Princess of Wales died shortly after its birth, thus relieving the working men of England from having to support hereafter another addition to the long roll of State beggars they at present maintain.’31

  The Queen recommended a long period of mourning for the child, but Bertie snapped back, ‘Want of feeling I never could show, but I think it’s one’s duty not to nurse one’s sorrow however much one may feel it.’32 He knew that for the Prince of Wales, as well as the Queen, to become recluses, shut away from public gaze, would be potentially catastrophic for the monarchy. His private life that year remained as messy as ever. Shortly before the death of his son, Bertie had impregnanted a mistress, Lady Susan Vane-Tempest, daughter of the Duke of Newcastle, and the estranged wife of Lord Adolphus Vane-Tempest, who had been imprisoned in a lunatic asylum with delirium tremens. She was five or six months pregnant in September when she confessed her condition to Bertie, and he behaved heartlessly, insisting she see his doctor, Oscar Clayton. Christmas 1871 found her in Ramsgate living in a large terraced house overlooking the sea. She was complaining to the doctor of ‘white discharge . . . backache . . . I am a cripple on two sticks and cannot move about!!!’ There is no mention of the baby. Had it died or, late as she was in her pregnancy, had Dr Clayton terminated it? She appeared to be showing the symptoms of tertiary syphilis, with leg ulcers and discharge. Four years later she was dead.33

  In the event, however, it was not his mistress’s ill health, nor his wife’s, but the Prince of Wales’s own which prompted a crisis that year. At a shooting party in Scarborough held for his thirtieth birthday, Bertie complained of a chill and called for cherry brandy and a hot bath. Dr Clayton was summoned – he was seeing a lot of seaside resorts that year – by which time Bertie had developed rose-coloured spots and a severe headache. Sir William Jenner was brought for a second opinion, and there could be no doubt. The prince was suffering from the disease they believed to have killed his father, typhoid fever.

  Once they had brought him back to Sandringham, the symptoms became more acute: vomiting, diarrhoea, headaches, delirium. The Queen had never visited Sandringham before, but, as the tenth anniversary of Prince Albert’s death approached, she went to her son’s bedside. All the royal children who were in England were summoned. Alice, who with her husband Louis had been staying with the Queen at Balmoral, had already arrived at Sandringham, at the stage when the prince’s ‘chill’ had developed more worrying symptoms.

  The atmosphere provoked friction among the anxious onlookers. Highly strung, dreading the death of her favourite brother, was the one member of the family with practical nursing experience. She sat with her sister-in-law Alix at Bertie’s side for longer than any of them. She gave vivid accounts to Louis of Bertie’s delirium:

  When Bertie was delirious the other day he said to Alix, ‘I have had a terrible scene, but I gave it one of them well’ – whereupon he hit Mrs Jones – then said, ‘that mad woman, I can’t stand her any longer’ . . . today he said to Mrs Jones . . . ‘Do you know who that is – he is a Swedish gentleman I know’. Then he gives orders that all gentlemen are to come in tights ‘because I am very particular about dress – and Gen. Knollys must kneel down and give me a glass of water, it was always done in former days’. Sometimes we can’t help laughing to see him like that in spite of all our worry and distress. This morning he asked me – ‘What does Louis do without you? Does he know you are here – he’ll never see you any more – sad state of affairs’. He doesn’t know Alix he calls her ‘waiter’ and says to her, ‘You were my wife, you are no more – you have broken your vows’.34

  Writing from Sandringham to the Prime Minister a week later, on 8 December, Ponsonby related that, ‘The bad symptoms came on last night and today he showed so much weakness that they feared it would not last long. The Princess [Alix] is wonderfully calm though tears sometimes force themselves out; yet she seems determined not to give way but to be with him, and he looks up with pleasure whenever she is near him. He is sometimes conscious. The Queen saw him as soon as she arrived, but I believe he did not see her.’35

  Three days later, the outcome was still uncertain. Sometimes a doctor expressed hope, which then evaporated. On 11 December, Ponsonby wrote:

  . . . every minute brings a change. The Queen up much of the night. It seems the lungs are not affected but the bronchial tubes are and the formation of phlegm which they tell me is one of the symptoms of the disorder increases while nervous strength is wanting, to enable him to cough up the obstruction. And the bronchial irritation swells the pipes and renders choking possible. This it is, if I understand the case, which now causes the danger, a danger which exhibits itself in painful paroxysms and the termination of which it is impossible to foresee. At six or seven this morning, he had one of these and all the family were summoned to the adjoining room but after a time, it passed off.36

  Lady Macclesfield, one of Alix’s ladies-in-waiting, was one of those who felt excluded by Alice’s constant attentions to the Princess of Wales. She piously expressed the hope that Divine Providence would rescue the prince. ‘Providence! There is no Providence, no nothing, and I can’t think how anyone can talk such rubbish’, was Alice’s outburst. Lady Macclesfield considered Alice to be ‘the most awful story-teller I have ever encountered, meddling, jealous and mischief-making’. Presumably, Lady Macclesfield resented Alice repeating what the prince had said in delirium. Given the state of the Waleses’ marriage, it must have seemed particularly tactless to laugh at his telling Alix she was no longer his wife. And Lady Macclesfield was appalled by the blasphemous tenor of Alice’s outburst about Providence. But the Queen was gracious enough to acknowledge public
ly, when the crisis was passed, that it was Alice’s nursing skill which had helped the prince turn the corner.

  On 13 December, the Queen was by her son’s bedside and for the first time he acknowledged her. Then he sank into delirium again. But her worst fear was not realized. The dreaded day 14 December came and went, and Bertie survived it. Although thereafter, he had days on which his temperature was high, he was past the crisis.

  Whether the monarchy was past its crisis was another question entirely. Colonel Ponsonby, Sir Thomas Biddulph, Keeper of the Privy Purse, and the Prime Minister held discussions and correspondence, even as the prince convalesced, about ways to improve public perceptions of the Royal Family. Ponsonby thought that he should give dinners at Buckingham Palace. ‘But this of course would be nothing unless he really took a lead. Would it not be difficult for any young man to do much in such a position and will it not be still more difficult for him to suddenly dismiss his Falstaffs?’37

  In a long letter to Colonel Ponsonby, Gladstone spelt out his gravest misgivings about the current position of the Royal Family. On the one hand, he regretted – quite apart from all their unspoken feelings about the Queen’s idleness – a grave concern about the position of the Prince of Wales. Surely Parliament should urge him to undertake philanthropic pursuits? Should he not imitate the example of the Earl of Shaftesbury? ‘Shaftesbury himself could not have done it had he not had the means by a seat first in the Commons and afterwards the Lords of giving a practical turn to his efforts and impressing them with a character of responsibility which has so to speak bridled them & checked a tendency to excess rarely separated in the imperfection of human nature from genuine enthusiasm.’38 It is hard to translate Gladstone’s verbosity, but what he appeared to be suggesting was that Bertie’s gross manner of life concealed an enthusiastic spirit which could be channelled into some great charitable purpose or some scheme of public improvement.