Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  It was surely inconceivable that, if given the choice between the Queen and the mad ravings of Gladstone, the electors would vote Liberal? The Queen did not, in any event, imagine that Lord Beaconsfield would have asked her to parade through the streets in a state coach, and undertake a State Opening if he were contemplating almost instantaneous dissolution.

  But this, mysteriously, is what he did do. Parliament was dissolved on 24 March, and an election was called. Seizing upon the Liberal support for Irish Home Rule, Beaconsfield wrote an open letter to the Duke of Marlborough on the subject of Ireland. He guessed, quite wrongly, that this would be a subject to rally the instinctive conservatism of the British people. Queen Victoria felt so confident that the Conservatives would be returned ‘stronger than ever’ that she set off for Germany as soon as Parliament had risen. While there she was able to see Vicky’s son Willy – at twenty, still sprouting adolescent acne. ‘His complexion was rather in a distressing state,’ his unsparing grandmother told his mother.17 Vicky managed a quick dash to Rome, where she visited the new King and Queen before returning to her mother at Baden.The election results reached her while she was there, staying at the Villa Hohenlohe. She considered the Liberal majorities small, and the Conservative majorities ‘in the City and other important places – so overwhelming that I hardly know how they will form a Government’.18 It was true that the Conservatives held three out of four seats in the City of London, and that they held nearly every constituency in Kent, but for the most part, they had done very badly indeed. In Wales, they held on to a mere two seats. In Lancashire, where there was a strong Orange vote which might have responded to Disraeli’s anti-Irish rhetoric, they suffered heavy losses. Commerce had not been strong in the later years of Beaconsfield. There had been many bankruptcies. A couple of wet summers had destroyed crops, making imported grain much cheaper than home-grown cereals, which had all the inevitable consequences of agrarian depression. There could be no doubt about it, large parts of the electorate had rejected ‘Beaconsfieldism’. Moreover, the strong point of Beaconsfieldism – namely its foreign policy – seemed to have come unstuck, with the Russians not seriously weakened by the Congress of Berlin, and with British troops all but trounced by the Zulus.

  The Queen saw no immediate reason to return to England, and she enjoyed her visit to the Continent, in spite of the harrowing need to see Darmstadt and the tomb of her daughter Alice.

  Gladstone had forsaken the leadership of the Liberal Party in 1874. His triumph in the Midlothian campaign was a personal one. No one could have any doubt, from the moment that he began his tour of the North, that he was the dominant political figure of the age, nor that, if victorious, he would once more resume leadership of the party. But the Queen was technically within her rights to ask lords Hartington (Leader in the Commons) and Grenville (Leader in the Lords) if either of them would form an administration. Hartington (‘Harty Tarty’) went through the motions of offering Gladstone a place in Government. The Grand Old Man replied that he could not serve in a subordinate position. This message went back to the Queen. It was by way of being a sort of revolution by electoral means. ‘Mr Gladstone, too, as Prime Minister seems hardly possible to believe. I had felt so sure he could not return and it is a bitter trial for there is no more disagreeable Minister to have to deal with.’19

  Fuelling her intense personal dislike of Gladstone was the knowledge that many in his party were republicans and radicals. For Victoria, as for many other conservative-minded people, radicalism was merely the respectable face of dangerous revolution.

  No monarch in Europe could be indifferent to the growth of revolutionary communism, terrorism called by whatever name. The war had radicalized many young Russians who had volunteered to fight for the independence of Bulgaria, Bosnia and Serbia, and they now wanted greater political freedom in their own land. The movement Zemlya i volya – Earth and Will – wanted to give more power to the peasantry; the mere liberation of the serfs was not enough; as in Ireland, they wanted to be able to farm land and make a decent living. Various other dissident groups, whom the Church and the Government in Russia were trying to suppress with the utmost brutality, fought back, and many were committed to assassinating the Tsar.20 In February 1880, while Affie and Marie were staying there, nihilists planted bombs in the Winter Palace, causing huge explosions – eleven dead and forty-four seriously injured.21 ‘We are so much occupied with Irish affairs at home,’ wrote General Ponsonby, ‘that we do not pay proper attention to the Mediterranean where there are so many explosive materials constantly fizzing.’22 Many Europeans believed that Italy was the nurse of revolutionary internationalism – and Queen Victoria was among them: ‘Does Sir Augustus,’ she asked Paget, her ambassador in Rome, ‘think that Italy is more infested with Internationalists than any other foreign [sic] country? There is, she fancies, much discontent, especially at Naples and Florence, & much distress.’23

  Having passed her ‘poor old’ sixtieth birthday, the Queen was gradually finding herself in a new position. She herself had become more self-confident and robust. She was not an intellectual, like Gladstone or Salisbury, but she now had a lifetime of experience of the international political stage and, as her children and grandchildren grew up, she had an ever-widening network of connections with the European dynasties. Was mere anarchy to be loosed upon the world; or would it be possible for moderate, traditionalist governments, respectful of the old hierarchies, to continue? The actual executive power of the British monarchy had been slowly but definitely curtailed, especially by the Reform Act of 1867. But the influence of Queen Victoria, and what she stood for, remained one of the ingredients in the British political story, and that is what makes the latter part of the reign politically so much more interesting than its inception. In her early days, she was little more than a pawn of Melbourne, Stockmar and Albert. Now, she was her own woman, and her capricious, but not entirely unthought, decision to hitch the monarchy’s destiny so firmly to one political vision – that of Beaconsfield and the Tories – determined the direction in which it was to move. The quiet lessons of moderate Stockmar were ignored or forgotten; the pretence that the monarchy was politically neutral had now been set to one side.

  As someone who had been shot at several times, albeit most recently by a deranged boy with a dummy pistol, she was aware of the perils into which political extremism could take a country. Even when the revolutionaries became respectable and formed governments, she continued to view them with undiluted suspicion. Ponsonby wrote on the Queen’s behalf to Sir Charles Dilke, then one of Her Majesty’s ministers, that he should have nothing to do with Clemenceau because of his part in the Paris Commune of 1870. (‘I abominate people who shoot Generals.’24) She let it be known that there was ‘astonishment’ at the Court of St James’s when Monsieur Paul-Armand Challemel-Lacour was appointed as French Ambassador: ‘It is repeated of him that he holds communistic opinions, that he was the Communist Prefet at Lyons, and you may remember that there was a Debate in the French chambers as to his conduct when there, and as to a charge which was brought against him, that while acting in that capacity, he ordered a large number of prisoners to be shot.’25

  On 13 March (Old Style) 1881, a bomb was thrown at Tsar Alexander II’s carriage as he returned from a military parade. He was not hurt, and he got out of the carriage, asking after anyone who might have been injured by the explosions. A second bomb was then thrown, which killed him.

  ‘A sense of horror thrills me through and through! Where such a criminal succeeds the effect is dreadful,’ the Queen wrote to Vicky. ‘The details are too terrible . . . Poor darling Marie [Affie’s wife] on whom her poor father doted, it is too much almost to bear. But she is very courageous.’26

  If the murder of the Russian Emperor was horrifying, there was an almost equal horror in reading that many revolutionaries actively supported it. ‘Have you seen that monstrous paper published here called “Freiheit” [Freedom]?’ the Qu
een asked the Crown Princess. ‘It is to be prosecuted for it openly preaches assassination and the language is beyond anything I ever saw.’27 Johann Most, the German editor of this magazine, was in fact prosecuted, and sentenced to sixteen months’ imprisonment with hard labour. The twenty-first-century reader perhaps differs from that of the twentieth or the nineteenth century. Our perspective is enabled to see the whole appalling drama of European history about to unfold – the struggle of the revolutionaries for justice leading to the revolutions of 1917 and beyond, the subsequent rise of the fascist states, the Gulags spread all over Eastern Europe, the massacres and destructions engulfing first an entire continent and then a world. In embryo, we see horrors beginning, and it would be an unimaginative reader of these events who did not recognize both sides as having its victims – the idealist revolutionaries, horrific as their violent deeds might be, representing millions of people whose rights were oppressed, whose poverty was enforced, whose voices were silenced. At the same time, the crowned heads at the tops of these edifices began to look and speak like victims. Victoria was surely right to speak of ‘poor, kind Emperor Alexander’.28

  At home, as the British absorbed the extraordinary news from Russia, they also witnessed not merely the routing of Beaconsfield in the polls, but the death of old Dizzy himself. For forty years, this mysterious man had been one of the giants of the political scene. Whereas Gladstone was a natural Tory who had somehow responded to events in such a way as to make himself into the wildest of radicals, Disraeli was a natural radical who had somehow found himself refashioning the Tories; a cynic who had willy-nilly become the most eloquent defender of altar and throne; a unique novelist whose books, combining political wisdom and social satire, still stand up and are well worth reading29 – and the most skilful of backroom political fixers. By any standards, he was one of the most fascinating Prime Ministers in British history. The septuagenarian had been for many years – certainly since the loss of his wife – a physically weak man, prone to asthma, unable to lift heavy objects. It had seemed to many sadly apt, having paraded his Faery Queen through the streets of London in a new state coach and persuaded her to open Parliament in a fanfare of pageantry, that Lord Beaconsfield was unable to carry the heavy Sword of State in the House of Lords.

  He remained his sovereign’s dining companion, even after he had been voted from office. The last time he saw Victoria was on 1 March 1881. Three days later, in the House of Lords, he delivered one of his most powerful speeches, attacking Gladstone’s Government for authorizing the withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan.

  When a contingent of British troops were besieged in Kandahar they were relieved by Lord Roberts, who escorted 10,000 fighting men and 8,000 camp followers, marching a distance of 313 miles in 23 days. Roberts dined with the Queen when he came back to England and, as Ponsonby told the new Viceroy of India, Lord Ripon, ‘the Queen was much pleased with him – the more so, perhaps, as he strongly supported her views as to the retention of Candahar . . . Her Majesty believes you think so too in your inner mind.’30 Ripon, whatever was in his inner mind, authorized the withdrawal from Kandahar.

  Denouncing the decision in the Lords, Beaconsfield’s speech contained the phrase, in fact borrowed from a conversation with the Russian Ambassador, ‘the key of India is London’. The key of London, it could be added, was not merely the political Establishment and Parliament, but also the monarch – and the Queen’s love of the Empire, and in particular her obsession with India, was a vital part of the late Victorian political structure. Her sympathy with Indian people, her love of their languages and culture, was perhaps only matched by her love of Scottish Highlanders. If John Brown had been Irish, how different history might have been.

  Beaconsfield’s last speech in the House, on 15 March, was in support of a vote of condolence to the Queen on the assassination of the Tsar. A week later, a chill from which he was suffering developed into bronchitis, and he slowly declined. On 28 March, he wrote a shaky letter in pencil to the Queen: ‘At present I am prostrate though devoted – B.’31

  As he lay dying, the Russian police were using torture to extract confessions from the nihilist associates of the Tsar’s murderer. As poor Dizzy coughed and coughed, he said, ‘I have suffered much. Had I been a Nihilist I would have confessed all.’32

  One of Beaconsfield’s last acts as Prime Minister had been to raise his friend Monty Corry to the peerage as Lord Rowton. A few eyebrows were raised, not because Monty had not been a faithful friend, and not because he was not already a member of the aristocracy; but because, like so much about Disraeli, it was enigmatic. The intensity of their friendship was obvious to all, yet, like many obvious things about Disraeli, it was also swathed in veils, questions, paradoxes.

  Hearing that his friend and mentor was dying, Monty rushed home from Algiers. At first, Dizzy felt too ill or too weak to see him, perhaps fearful of the emotionalism of the parting. But Monty was eventually admitted and spent the last few days of his friend’s life at his side. The last recorded words Beaconsfield spoke were, ‘I had rather live, but I am not afraid to die.’33

  He did so at half past four in the morning of 19 April – Easter Tuesday. Corry was desolate, and he was not the only one. ‘Dear Lord Rowton, I cannot write in the 3rd person at this terrible moment when I can scarcely see for my fast falling tears,’ wrote the Queen.34

  To Lady Waterpark, she wrote, ‘I know you will feel for me in my very great and irreplaceable loss – I have lost so many, but none whose loss will be more heavily felt than this of dear Lord Beaconsfield.’

  It was an extraordinary confession, coming from one who had quite recently lost a beloved daughter, and whose grief for her husband was demonstrated by the Frogmore Mausoleum and Albert memorials galore. But love and grief can never be measured and the hyperbole reflected how very close she had become, both in heart and in politics, to the great charmer. ‘He was so wise, so kind & sympathetic,’ she added.35 That was the clue. Although she was able to feel reciprocal love for some of her children, and although she enjoyed an epistolary friendship with Vicky, Victoria had an avid appetite for friendship. It is perhaps the hardest of all the loves for a potentate to sustain. Friendship is a union between equals, which makes it all but impossible for popes, kings and queens to have friends as others have them. Victoria did, and this is one of the things which both enraged her jealous children and baffled those in her Court. Much as she was sometimes mocked for her choice of friends, it was friendship which gave her some of the enormous strength which she possessed as a constitutional monarch. Dizzy had amused her, flirted with her, and – in so far as it was possible to see what he believed – encouraged her political convictions.They had been on the same side in the battle of Life. Alas, because Bertie destroyed as much of their correspondence as he could get his hands upon when he became king, we shall never know all that the two friends shared, but we can be sure that in that particular bonfire, many hilarious asides by Disraeli will have been lost to posterity. The twenty or so volumes of ‘correspondence’ between the Queen and Disraeli kept in the Royal Archives contain almost nothing written by Victoria. Someone has done a thorough job of removing the evidence.

  For reasons of protocol, she could not attend the funeral, at which she was represented by Bertie, Arthur and Leopold. The obvious place for it had been Westminster Abbey, but Disraeli had given firm instructions that it should be held at the parish church at his home, Hughenden Manor in Buckinghamshire, that he should be buried with his wife, ‘and that my Funeral may be conducted with the same simplicity as hers was’.

  Victoria visited Hughenden when he was safely interred. They reopened the vault, so that she was able to lay a china wreath of flowers on his coffin. She later paid for a marble monument to be erected in the church, inscribed with the text from the Book of Proverbs, ‘Kings love him that speaketh right.’

  PART SIX

  TWENTY

  �
�GRACIOUS CONFIDENCES SO FRANKLY GIVEN’

  WHILE SHE SANG an endless requiem in her journals and letters for those who had gone before, Victoria had a robust and recurring capacity to fill up the gaps left by bereavement. No one could ever replace Prince Albert, but Brown was a constant and much-adored companion. Disraeli’s loss was a cause of acute grief, but in 1882, she made a new friend, and a lasting one: Randall Davidson. It was all the more striking, since, apart from her dependence on old Dean Wellesley, her devotion to Norman Macleod, whom she scarcely ever saw from one year’s end to the next, and her admiration for Dean Stanley, she tended to be impatient with the clergy, fearing that they would be too High Church, too Low Church, too bigoted, or, as preachers, too boring.

  Randall Davidson, the son of a Leith merchant, had the advantage of being wholly Scottish, and, until he was sent to Harrow and Oxford, a Presbyterian. There was nothing intimidating about his levels of academic attainment (he got a third class degree in law and modern history) but he had acute antennae for the ways of the world, an instinctive feel for the Establishment, and a kindly temperament. He was an ideal clerical-courtier, who first came to the Queen’s attention when he was the young chaplain to Archbishop Tait, whose daughter Edith he had married. (It was one of those classic Victorian courtships, since he married the sister of his best friend at Oxford – Crauford Tait, who died young.)