by A. N. Wilson
Even if this were unrealistic, Gladstone also felt that ‘society has suffered fearfully in moral tone from the absence of a pure Court. [In the days of Prince Albert, he suggested . . . ] It was like Arthur’s Round Table in its moral effect. It did not directly influence many, but it influenced the highest – those who most need it – their influence acted upon others, and so onwards in widening circles. It is a great and important question whether and how this want can be supplied.’
There is little doubt that Gladstone’s letter does reflect the sort of thinking which Prince Albert himself would have approved of and developed.
The Prince of Wales’s illness undoubtedly made some newspapers feel they had gone too far in their criticisms of the monarch. On 27 February, the Queen, accompanied by the Prince and Princess of Wales, were paraded through the streets of London to attend a service of thanksgiving for his recovery. Gladstone certainly did not share Princess Alice’s view that there was ‘no Providence, no nothing’. Even if he had done so, the service was the first step in teaching the Royal Family that they must put on public displays to remain plausible. Queen Elizabeth II is supposed to have remarked, ‘I have to be seen to be believed.’ Queen Victoria was loth to learn this lesson, and had, as usual when asked to do anything in public, vigorously resisted the idea of ‘public religious displays’.39 A triumphal arch was, however, erected at Oxford Circus, festooned with banners and with the legend ‘ENGLAND REJOICES WITH HER QUEEN’, as Victoria and the ill-matched Bertie and Alix trotted beneath it in the open landau.
The rejoicing at Bertie’s recovery, if not as universal as might be supposed from such carefully manipulated propaganda, was nonetheless widespread and heartfelt. ‘From the highest to the poorest “rags”’, said Victoria, ‘there was but one and the same feeling! It was, of course very fatiguing – bowing all this time.’40 But, once Bertie was better, the question remained – what should he do?
One suggestion, emanating from Gladstone himself, was that the prince should be sent to Ireland. Victoria’s initial reaction was disapproval. ‘It does not seem desirable to introduce violent changes into the Government of Ireland at a moment when that country appears to be in a state of fermentation and requires a steady, firm and quiet administration to enable it to settle down.’41 She had either never read, or chose to ignore, the speech in the House of Commons by Sir William Lawson suggesting that the presence of royalty on Irish soil would help to ‘settle’ things, and give to moderate Irishmen and women the sense that the Government was aware of their concerns. Eventually, Victoria, having discussed the matter with Bertie, was candid enough to turn it down flat. The prince, she told the Prime Minister, could scarcely go to Dublin and perform the function, in some sense, of the viceroy, ‘for it would be impossible to pay to the Pce [sic] of Wales the Salary voted for the Vice Roy’. Besides, the pleasure-loving prince could scarcely be expected to forgo the pleasures of trips to Paris, membership of the Jockey Club, to the great English houses, to the London clubs, in favour of a post which ‘compels him to reside in a second-rate Town where his sole duty wd. seem to be to entertain a second-rate Society & to attract the people who will know that he has no real power whatsoever, and that his position is inferior to that of the Lord Lieutenant!’42 It is easy to see why Philip Guedalla, in his 1933 edition of the Queen’s correspondence with her Prime Minister, felt constrained to censor this observation by omitting it from the printed text.
The Irish situation was not going to solve itself. It needed new initiatives and ideas, promoted by British politicians to answer the grievances felt by Irish tenant farmers, and Irish politicians who did not feel they had a voice. Even as she was preparing to go to St Paul’s for the service of thanksgiving, Victoria received long memoranda from the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Earl Spencer – about the trial of one Kelly, who had shot a policeman and was sentenced to fifteen years’ penal servitude; about more shootings in the streets of Dublin; about two elections, one in Galway and another in Kerry, both of which returned candidates in favour of Home Rule for Ireland. Spencer was desperate for the introduction of the secret ballot in Ireland, since both the Kerry and the Galway elections were already being contested on the grounds of alleged intimidation of voters.43 (It was introduced that year, 1872.)
Two days after the thanksgiving service, there was another attempt on the Queen’s life. She set out for a drive in Regent’s Park, accompanied by Lady Jane Churchill, Prince Arthur and Prince Leopold. General Arthur Hardinge and Lord Charles Fitzroy were her outriders and John Brown was on the box of the open landau. Watching their departure was an eighteen-year-old youth called Arthur O’Connor of Houndsditch. He worked for an oil and colour manufacturer in that district noted, by Henry Mayhew, for its ‘Jewish shopkeepers, warehousemen, manufacturers and inferior jewellers’. O’Connor had attempted to get a petition to the Queen during the St Paul’s service but he had been removed by the cathedral vergers. Now, armed with a flintlock pistol, he climbed the ten-foot-high railings around the Palace and without being noticed, he sprinted across the courtyard, and waited beside the Garden Entrance.
When the landau returned from the park, the equerries dismounted, Jane Churchill got out of the carriage, and Brown was coming round to let down the steps, when O’Connor appeared at the Queen’s side, with an ‘uplifted hand . . . It is to good Brown & to his wonderful presence of mind that I greatly owe my safety, for he alone saw the boy rush round and followed him!’44 Brown kept hold of him until the police arrived. When the youth had been taken away, it was discovered that he had a history of mental derangement, that he had bought the pistol in a pawnshop and stuffed its barrel with wads of blue paper. He was given twenty strokes of the birch and a year’s hard labour.
Bertie resented the fact that Brown had been made the hero of the hour. Had not Prince Arthur also behaved gallantly in the landau? Yet the Queen, who gave Arthur a mere tiepin as a reward, made a public announcement that she would give Brown a gold medal, with an annuity of £25 attached to it. Brown was the chief witness in O’Connor’s trial at the Central Criminal Court, and it was the first chance the public had to hear his distinctive voice as he related the alarming incident: ‘The carriage stopped at the entrance for the purpose of allowing Her Maa-dj-esty to alight . . . The prisoner . . . placed his hand upon the carriage and I seized his neck.’45
The Queen was peeved about the birching of the ‘wretched boy’. Much too lenient. She deemed the judge to have ‘behaved very stupidly’46 and took herself on a restorative holiday in Baden-Baden and a comforting round of visits to German relations. She also saw her half-sister Feodore, who appeared to be dying. (Poor O’Connor, who emigrated to Australia, and then came back to London, was finally committed to Hanwell Lunatic Asylum in 1874.) She took no notice of the pathetic piece of paper which O’Connor had left in the hands of Sir Thomas Biddulph at the time of his arrest: a document which he expected the Queen to sign, offering release to the Fenian prisoners.
All this was disturbing evidence that Ireland was the most pressing problem on the political agenda. Earl Spencer felt that the Fenian press was ‘very poisonous, leading the people on to dislike to England and the British Government’. He did his best to censor and prevent the distribution of American newspapers in Ireland. But, even when this allowance had been made, he was clear in his mind. ‘The mainspring of all Irish discontent is the long-standing feeling of oppression and injustice, of which Lord Spencer feels that England in many cases was guilty towards Ireland in former days.’47
Governments run out of steam. Small blunders and scandals which would inflict no great damage upon a buoyant administration can be bruising to one which is tired. The Lords threw out Cardwell’s proposals for army reform, and Gladstone responded by imposing the royal prerogative to by-pass the Upper House. To many, this seemed high-handed. Two very minor cases revealed Gladstone’s tiredness. One was where he offered the living of Ewelme to a Cambridge man when by
special Act of Parliament (1871) it had been decreed that the Queen could only present an Oxford man to the rectory. Gladstone’s enforcement of his own candidate was seen as high-handed, as was the rather different one – where Gladstone appointed Sir John Collier as one of the Judges in Privy Council without following the correct procedures.
Small matters, but they caused storms in Westminster and the Tory opposition began to scent blood. Gladstone’s attempts to create a Catholic university in Dublin provided Disraeli and his backbenchers many opportunities to stir up anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudice.
The Queen could look forward to an end to what was for her the nightmare of having Gladstone as her Prime Minister. But the year was clouded by personal more than by political matters. In June, she observed the thirty-fifth anniversary of her accession. But what should have been an occasion of some joy was entirely overshadowed by the death of Norman Macleod, the Minister at Crathie. ‘Many bitter tears has she shed over his loss, and she feels she is poorer again in this weary world without him! She saw him generally only twice a year, at dear Balmoral, sometimes even only once, but she looked eagerly forward to those meetings, for those words of love and truth and wisdom which remained in her heart to strengthen and comfort and cheer her.’48
Inevitably, we pause and remember the truly extraordinary statement, by Lady Ponsonby to the Home Secretary, that Norman Macleod had actually married Victoria to John Brown. ‘His truly,’ Victoria mused, ‘was the religion of Love. He wished to impress all with the feeling that God was our loving father and not a hard judge.’49 She never spoke with such warmth of any Church of England clergymen, even of the few she liked. Does not the phrase ‘the religion of Love’ suggest a particular bond, a particular role which Macleod and no other had played in her life?
By the end of the year, she had sustained another loss. It was the final severing of the link with her childhood. Feodore died at the beginning of October. ‘Her loss is quite irreparable,’ she told Gladstone. ‘Her only and most admirable Sister and the vy. last Link (for no one is left now) with her Childhood and Youth gone. Life becomes more and more dreary.’50
We are all of us different people when there is no one left on earth who can remember us as children. Victoria was now in that bleak position. No one was left who would address her by her first name. There was no one who could remember the nursery at Kensington, or the dolls, or the funny old uncles. She had lost the woman with whom she shared a mother. From now on, she was a matriarch, though one who had, for all the unsatisfactoriness of her children, at least one faithful companion – ‘Brown, in his very fullest and very handsome full dress’. She remembered him in his splendour as they rode to the thanksgiving service that spring, and that brought comfort.
EIGHTEEN
‘YOU HAVE IT, MADAM’
QUEEN VICTORIA’S SUPPLY of maternal affection was small. There was not enough to stretch to all nine children. If one child was in especial favour, this had the consequence of increasing her distaste for the non-favourites all the more. Other monarchs in Europe, dysfunctional as their marriages and families might be, looked on aghast at the British Royal Family’s failure to conceal their rifts and rows. ‘What a tender relationship!’ exclaimed the Tsarina of Russia sarcastically after a meeting with Bertie. She noticed that the Prince of Wales took no notice of his mother ‘even on the anniversary of his father’s death’.1
Bertie, naturally, was a constant source of worry. The latest embarrassment for his family at home was his dalliance with the nineteen-year-old Patsy Cornwallis-West – known as the Irish Savage – who would bear a child by the end of 1874 wrongly,2 but widely, believed to be his.
Lenchen, living blamelessly at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park with her thunderingly boring husband Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, was a constant irritant to the Queen. She once saw Christian lolling dreamily under a tree while staying at Osborne, and took the trouble to write him a note to say he should find something better to do with his time. She considered that he ‘pampered’ Lenchen and ‘did not understand in the least how to manage her’. (The 15th Earl of Derby neatly summed up Christian as ‘an honest, quiet gentleman, who will not set the Thames on fire’.3) As for their children, who were ‘excessively plain’, the Queen was irritated by their ‘cold upon cold and unbecoming stoutness’; a ripe case of the pot calling the kettle black, since the Queen was by now a positive balloon of bombazine. It astounded Victoria that Lenchen was so ‘touchy and offended’ by her mother’s remarks, and felt that her touchiness ‘(partly from health and partly from Christian’s inordinate spoiling and the absence of all actual troubles and duties) . . . makes it very difficult to live with her’.4
Leopold, an undergraduate at Oxford, was still in disgrace because he had refused to take Presbyterian Communion with his mother at Crathie during the previous autumn. She suspected him of having picked up High Church views at Oxford. ‘Indeed I have never known any one refuse to take the Sacrament with a Parent – and especially the Head of the Country – if asked to do so.’5 As the New Year began, he wanted to return to Oxford. The Queen had developed a dislike of the Dean of Christ Church – Liddell – with whose daughter Alice Leopold had enjoyed dancing and flirting. (Lewis Carroll had written a satirical squib about Mrs Liddell nicknaming her the ‘King-fisher’.6) And Leopold’s health continued to give cause for alarm. His sister – the other Alice in his life – had sent him a bust of her son Frittie, who had died the previous year, aged three, of the same haemophilia which had plagued Leopold’s life. ‘Oh dear Alice,’ he wrote with clumsy candour to the broken-hearted woman, ‘I know too well what it is to suffer as he would have suffered, & the great trial of not being able to enjoy life, or to know what happiness is, like others.’7 Presumably, the domestic happiness of Lenchen and Christian, visible on the Queen’s very doorstep at Windsor, was what helped to make them so irritating to the mother; but also their independence. Victoria really got on best with servants, or friends and relations who were prepared to behave like her servants – such as Princess Beatrice, ‘my beloved Baby – who really is the apple of my eye’.8
Princess Louise, too, was causing anxiety. Her marriage to the Marquis of Lorne was childless. Louise blamed her mother for forcing her into the match.9 Society gossips claimed that Lorne was leading a secret homosexual life, and this was the reason for the princess bearing no child. Lorne’s father, the Duke of Argyll, had come to suspect that the Queen knew Louise to be barren when she married – because of her having contracted mumps as a child.
As for the Duke of Edinburgh, Affie, who as a youth had been (in Louise’s eyes at least) ‘clever, bright and beautiful’,10 he was becoming a difficult person. He was short-tempered, and after several years of naval service, he had developed peremptory manners, rudeness to servants and irascibility. His mother, who had never cared much for him, now felt free to say she found Affie ‘not a pleasant inmate in a house and I am always on thorns and gêne [discomfort] when he is at dinner’.11 (He met his match in Brown and the pair had many quarrels, which did not endear him to his mother.) Affie did not cause quite so many scandals as Bertie did with women, but this widely travelled naval officer ran the Prince of Wales a close second and, when in London together, they haunted the same disreputable parties, and chased a similar brand of actresses and tarts. Affie was a much cleverer man than Bertie, however, with a real eye, and an impressive collection of oriental and European ceramics and Venetian glass, which is now on public display in Coburg.
Thickly bearded, as befitted a sailor, Affie had a plausible naval career, reaching the rank of captain by the age of thirty, and sailing the world. But he was in need of a wife. His first choice had been Frederika, daughter of the blind King of Hanover, but the blindness had been hereditary for three generations, and on these grounds Queen Victoria forebade the match. There were other women whom he had loved, but he eventually fell for the Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna, daughte
r of the Emperor Alexander II of Russia.
It was a match which had been vigorously promoted by Alix and her sister Dagmar, who had married Marie’s brother Alexander (the Emperor Alexander III from 1881) in 1866. The Tsarina – the one who exclaimed ‘What a tender relationship!’ about Bertie and Victoria – was another Marie – the daughter of the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt.12 Since the Prussian triumph in 1870, European politics was now governed less by the rivalry between France and the Germans, and more by the domination of Europe by the Triple Alliance, the Dreikaiserbund of Russia, Prussia and Austria. It was upon the strength of this alliance that the future peace of Europe depended. When the alliance was threatened with fissure, the peace of Europe itself was at stake: indeed, Europe in these few years of Disraeli’s premiership came as close to world war as at any time before 1914, and for the same broad reasons: the almost capricious forming and severing of alliances in the Bund, and an inability to agree about the future of the Balkans.
When Russia, with its territorial ambitions fixed on the Balkan and Eastern European satellites of the decaying Turkish Empire, clashed with Austria over the question, that peace was threatened. It was to be in the Balkans, one August day in 1914, that all that fragile peace would be destroyed by a Serbian assassin. For Queen Victoria and her children, in 1874, the rivalries between Austria and Russia would have as personal, as familial, a quality as had the Danish–Prussian rivalries of the 1860s. Vicky, the firstborn, was Crown Princess of Prussia. Alice, of Hesse-Darmstadt, had drifted away from her Austrian allegiances since 1866 and was more inclined to side with Prussia against Austria and Russia. Alix’s sister Dagmar was about to become the Tsarina of Russia, and Affie was about to marry Dagmar’s sister-in-law, so the family could not have been more divided.
