Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  When Tait died in December 1882, the Queen was of course anxious for ‘every detail’ of the deathbed, and this Davidson was able to supply. General Ponsonby, hovering by the door of the Queen’s drawing room, commented, ‘What on earth is happening? I don’t know when the Queen has had such a long interview with anybody.’ ‘I feel,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘that Mr Davidson is a man who may be of great use to me for which I am truly thankful.’1 This was indeed to be one of the closest friendships of her later life. Although not brought up in the Church of England – or perhaps, because of this fact – Davidson, while Tait’s chaplain, had built up an obsessive and detailed knowledge of Who was Who in the Established Church; he was a fund, among other things, of information and gossip about likely candidates, whenever deaneries and bishoprics fell vacant.

  The immediate consequence of Tait’s death, of course, was that a successor must be found for the see of Canterbury. Edward White Benson, bishop of the new diocese of Truro, was chosen. Gladstone had approached that old Tractarian R. W. Church, the Dean of St Paul’s, who refused the post; and he also asked Browne of Winchester, who was dismissed by the Queen as being much too old. She favoured Benson, partly because he had been the first Master of Wellington College, the school near Aldershot founded by Prince Albert in memory of the Iron Duke for the education of officers’ sons, and partly because she had a natural sympathy with those who were not of the Establishment. Benson, like Davidson, came from a comparatively modest background, and his family life was the reverse of conventional. (His wife, who liked to be known as Ben, was in love with Lucy, one of Archbishop Tait’s surviving daughters, and their children included Fred, who grew up to be the amusing chronicler of Mapp and Lucia, melancholy Eton beak Arthur, who wrote ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and edited Queen Victoria’s letters, and Hugh, who became a Catholic monsignor and in his day also a famous historical novelist.)

  Victoria found Benson a charming man – not everyone did – perhaps empathizing with his profound heartbreak. (Shortly after he accepted the see of Truro, he lost Martin, his favourite son.) She asked that Davidson should stay on as archbishop’s chaplain, so that she could have a close sense of what was going on at Lambeth Palace.2

  Ponsonby observed to his wife that the Queen ‘always laughs at Episcopal garments and dislikes Bishops’. He was writing from Presbyterian Balmoral, where the new Bishop of Salisbury had arrived in late October to kiss hands. Until they swore fealty to their sovereign, new bishops could not begin to receive their enormous emoluments, so there had been strong inducement for the bishop to make the long journey north. The bishop decided to take a walk. ‘Rather a clamber,’ Ponsonby reported, ‘but he was quite up to it. In the evening, H.M. asked the Duke of Richmond about the walk & he told her of the Bishop struggling thro’ the brushwood in his shovel hat. She laughed & said, “But I hope not his apron too – that would be too ridiculous”.’3 If her Anglican Orthodoxy was questionable, and if, as she once admitted, she did not like bishops, she had a growing sense that the Church of England by law established was something in which she needed, as sovereign, to be involved. From the time of Gladstone’s second administration, formed in April 1880, she had a clear sense, which would not leave her for the remaining twenty years of her reign, of the values and ideas which it was her place to sustain. Throne and altar were allies.

  If proof were needed of this, and if the menace of international terrorism had shown its hand in Russia, Italy, Ireland and even in London, she had the profoundest distrust of Gladstone and his radical agenda.

  Gladstone himself, an old-fashioned High Churchman, a Free Trader who yearned to do away with income tax, a landed gentleman, or would-be gentleman living on his wife’s estates at Hawarden in North Wales, was in many ways the same man in old age that he had been in youth. In other respects, however, he was completely different. His foreign policy and his Irish policy could not have been more different from that of Beaconsfield and the Tories. And, moreover, in order to achieve his aims of promoting Irish Home Rule, he needed the votes of radical backbenchers. His tour of the North, culminating in the Midlothian campaign, had been the triumph of the People’s William. Any natural Tory, like the Queen, must have dreaded what was going to fly out of the Pandora’s box opened by this election victory.

  One of the first manifestations of revolution in the new House of Commons was the appearance of the newly elected radical member for Northampton, Charles Bradlaugh. Each MP has to profess loyalty to the Crown, and this usually takes the form of a religious oath. Bradlaugh was well known as an atheist lecturer and campaigner, and he asked, which he was legally entitled to do (even at this date), to make an affirmation of allegiance (that is, a solemn declaration without invoking the name of God), and the Speaker, Sir Henry Brand, bungled the matter. He referred Bradlaugh to a committee of the House. The matter was to rumble on for years, and Bradlaugh, who kept being re-elected by the people of Northampton, ended his days in 1891 as their MP, but he did not actually take his seat until 1886. ‘The Queen has read with interest the discussion of that dreadful Mr Bradlaugh,’ she told the Prime Minister, ‘and she cannot help rejoicing at the feeling of indignation exhibited agt. [against] such a man sitting in the House. It is not only his known Atheism but his other horrible Principles which make him a disgrace to an assembly like the House of Commons.’4

  She watched with intense interest as Gladstone chose the members of his Government and took personal exception to each and every appointment which smacked of radicalism. ‘The Queen regrets to see the names of such very advanced radicals as Mr Chamberlain and Sir Charles Dilke,’ she told Gladstone, when he had advanced Joe Chamberlain to the presidency of the Board of Trade and given Dilke the chairmanship of the Royal Commission on Honours.5 Much would be heard of both these men in the coming years. Chamberlain, who had been the Mayor of Birmingham and a pioneer of radical local government, providing housing and schools of a much higher standard than in other parts of the country for the citizens, was also, like Bradlaugh, an unbeliever, an anti-aristocratic modern man. By great paradox, Chamberlain actually emerged as a champion, later in life, of many of the Queen’s favourite causes. Time would usher him onwards as an imperialist and an opponent of Irish independence. Dilke was a more complicated case, as far as the Queen was concerned. He was a friend of Bertie’s, and he and Lady Dilke stayed at Sandringham.6 Apart from the fact that he mixed in the same fast-living set as the Prince of Wales (though Victoria was not fully aware of Dilke’s scandalous way of life at this juncture), he was seen by the Queen as a Judas. His father had been one of those few who gave support to Prince Albert when a majority were pouring scorn on the idea of a Great Exhibition. But young Dilke (he was the grandson of Charles Wentworth Dilke, the antiquary and man of letters who had been a friend of Keats and Shelley) had developed ideas which were openly republican. Keats, probably, and Shelley, certainly, would have approved. The Queen, however, questioned whether such a person should not in all honesty serve in the administration of a constitutional monarchy. Shortly after taking office as an Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office in 1880, Dilke had written to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville, to say that ‘he thought the Republican Government best for France’. He stubbornly refused to budge from the position, and three years later7 the Queen was still asking for his resignation on the grounds that the republican French Government was composed of violent revolutionaries who had threatened with murder her friend the Empress Eugénie.

  The tide of violence was not a figment of the Queen’s imagination. Returning from London by train, she was met at Windsor Station by a carriage and driven off in the direction of the Castle. ‘Just as we were driving off from the station there, the people, or rather the Eton boys cheered, & at the same time there was the sound of what I thought was an explosion from the engine, but in another moment, I saw people rushing about, & a man being violently hustled, rushing down the street.’ Princess Beatrice, who was sitting b
eside her mother in the carriage, had actually seen the man take aim and fire with a revolver, but she had remained calm, so as not to scare the Queen. The Duchess of Roxburghe, also in the carriage, assumed at first that it was all a joke. But the man, a lunatic called Roderick Maclean, was set upon by Eton boys with umbrellas and taken to the police station. It was John Brown, ‘with a greatly perturbed face, though quite calm’, who told Victoria that the man had fired at her. While she was having her tea at the Castle, and telegraphing ‘all my children and near relations’, Brown came in to tell her that the revolver had been found loaded, with one chamber discharged; and the next day he brought the gun to show her. Two days later, the Judge Advocate came to the Castle and ‘was most warm in his congratulations, & said I could have no conception of the intense feeling for me, the cabmen, & sweepers at the crossings in London, enquiring after me. He thinks the state of Ireland still very bad.’8

  Even allowing for the pardonable sycophancy which must form part of conversation with royalty, what the Judge Advocate said about the people’s love was true. Victoria had – you might almost say in spite of everything – become intensely popular, and would continue to be so. ‘It is worth being shot at,’ she wrote to Vicky, ‘to see how much one is loved.’9

  The Judge Advocate was wrong to imply that the lunatic Maclean with his revolver was an Irish Fenian, but right to say that the state of Ireland was very bad. On 3 May, Gladstone wrote what looks like one of the thousand routine letters any Prime Minister might have written to a monarch. ‘Lord Frederick Cavendish is humbly recommended to Your Majesty by Mr Gladstone to be Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.’10 Lord Frederick, now aged forty-five, Liberal MP for the northern division of the West Riding of Yorkshire, was married to the Queen’s Maid of Honour Lucy Lyttelton. Such was the tight-knit world of the Victorian governing classes, Lucy was the niece of Mrs Gladstone. Lord Frederick’s elder brother, Harty Tarty, was that Leader of the Liberal Party who had stood down to make way for the Grand Old Man, and Lord Frederick in his young manhood had been Gladstone’s private secretary. The letter to appoint him as Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland was actually, though neither Gladstone nor the Queen could have guessed as much, a death warrant.

  Four days after it was signed, he was walking in Phoenix Park in Dublin with the Under-Secretary, Thomas Burke. Several men burst out from the bushes behind them and stabbed and hacked them to death with long surgical knives. A group calling themselves the Irish National Invincibles were responsible. They had wanted to kill Burke, but they did not even know of Lord Frederick’s identity. Such was the confused, violent state of Ireland and Irish politics.

  Inevitably, those who wanted Irish independence by peaceful means felt tainted by the murders. Charles Stewart Parnell, a Protestant landowner from County Wicklow, was now the leader of the Irish nationalist cause, having entered Parliament in 1875. He was quick to make a speech condemning the Phoenix Park murders, which increased his popularity, both among Irish nationalists and among English Liberal voters. But Parnell had Fenians, and men of violence, among his followers in the Irish Land League. The Queen’s Speech of 1880 had resolved to abolish the Conservative coercion measure, which suspended Habeas Corpus in Ireland. In the event, the Liberals kept coercion, and the situation was permanently on the verge of anarchy. The economic depression in the agrarian world meant, inevitably, that many Irish tenants were unable to afford the rent, and were driven off their land. Parnell and the Land League introduced a system of protest by which anyone taking a farm from which a tenant had been evicted should be ‘isolated from his kind as if he were a leper of old’. Captain Boycott, the agent of a rich landowner in County Mayo was one such, and thereby gave his name to the English vocabulary.

  The Irish countryside was in chaos. Hayricks were burnt, cattle maimed, houses looted. Parnell himself was for a while imprisoned under the draconian Coercion laws. Every time a Fenian was released from prison – such as the collectivist Michael Davitt, who campaigned for the nationalization of land – the Queen expressed dismay. ‘She does not like to see her law defied and peaceable persons frightened by the terror exercised by the Land League,’ Ponsonby told Dilke.11

  The open republicanism and violence displayed in some quarters by the Irish was matched, in a more minor key, by lack of deference among radical MPs, and the Queen monitored their remarks with close, and disapproving, attention. The paradox of the Queen’s position in life was that she cherished John Brown precisely because he showed her affection, without sycophancy; but that she considered it necessary, for the maintenance of the monarchical idea, for royalty to be respected. A comparatively trivial matter, such as the raising of a memorial for the Prince Imperial, killed in the Zulu War, threw up a despicable willingness on the part of backbench MPs not to take royalty seriously.

  It was initially suggested that a statue which had already been executed of the Prince Imperial should be erected at his old Army College at Woolwich. He had, after all, died wearing British uniform in a British war against the Zulus. It was perhaps more gallant than prudent for the Queen to get involved with this matter, on behalf of the Empress Eugénie. But when no better place could be found for the memorial, the Queen impulsively decided that it could go in Westminster Abbey. Whether her lady-in-waiting Lady Augusta Stanley, or Lady Augusta’s husband the Dean of Westminster viewed the matter in so favourable a light, is not recorded. The proposal lit a touch-paper of anti-French and anti-royal prejudice in the Commons, with William Briggs, the Liberal MP for Blackburn, rising to complain that ‘the people of this country were now paying millions of money, the legacy of the Napoleonic Wars between France and England. If there must be a statue, let them put one up to a great and glorious Englishman, the man who armed in a nation’s authority, overturned a corrupt throne; the soldier who stayed a civil war at home, and made England respected abroad, the patriot who handed down to us as a precious heirloom our civil and religious freedom – Oliver Cromwell.’ These were fighting words, and they made the Queen ‘shocked and disgusted’. She pointed out that the young prince had died ‘because of the cowardly decision of a British officer... But where is chivalry and delicacy to be found these days among many of the Members of Parliament?’12 Gladstone’s reply to Mr Briggs in the Commons was so inadequate that one is forced to wonder whether the clumsiness was deliberate. He hastened to deny ‘the question of court influence in this matter’ – thereby making it clear to everyone that the guiding force behind the idea of a Napoleonic memorial was indeed the Queen. ‘But I must observe,’ he went on, ‘that if I am correctly informed, with respect to the burial of a person in the Abbey, the prerogative of the Dean is absolute.’13 Gladstone had muddied the water. No one was suggesting at this point that the young man should be buried in the Abbey, and everyone knew that the Dean of Westminster was married to one of the Queen’s closest friends. It is a trivial but typical example of how Gladstone carried on his everlasting warfare with the Queen, appearing to defend her in public, while actually sowing difficulties for her in the minds of would-be, and actual, republicans. In the event, the Prince Imperial’s statue was erected at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.

  The second Gladstone administration was, to date, the Government with which Victoria had the most abrasive relations. In 1881, she had, for the first time in her reign, vetoed a Queen’s Speech, announcing in advance the decision to withdraw from Kandahar. Hartington, knowing her strong views on the war in Afghanistan, had tried to conceal the speech from her. When the constitutional impropriety was laid bare, the Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt, bluntly asserted that the Queen’s Speech was merely the speech of her ministers, and the sovereign was obliged to approve it. ‘Harcourt showed his customary tact (?)’14 was Prince Leopold’s comment. The following year, she refused even to attend the State Opening of Parliament. She was reverting to her pattern of behaviour during Gladstone’s first administration.

 
; It was partly because of Prince Leopold, however, that the Queen had to keep lines of communication open between herself and the Liberals. Gladstone continued to keep her informed of all Cabinet meetings, and sent to her every day Parliament was in session a summary of its proceedings in his own hand.

  Leopold – who had been granted the dukedom of Albany on the Queen’s birthday, 24 May 1881 – was married, on 27 April 1882, to Princess Helen of Waldeck and Pyrmont. It was essential, in his eyes, and those of his mother, before this event, that Parliament should increase his allowance. Gladstone would not have been human had he taken no pleasure at all in the parliamentary debate on this matter, during which robust republican views were aired by the ‘usual suspects’, such as the Irish nationalist T. H. Healy and Henry Labouchere. ‘She must own,’ the Queen wrote, ‘that she thinks Messrs Strong and Healy were atrocious – truly vulgar and ignorant as well as republican . . . Mr Labouchere showed great ignorance as to facts – but was far less offensive.’ Writing from the safety of an hotel in Menton, she resurrected the question of whether royal finances needed to be debated openly at all. She believed that these ‘offensive and humiliating discussions only went upon each occasion to enable people to say things which are unfortunately but too often believed by the poorer classes’.

  If Gladstone had hoped that the embarrassing parliamentary debate would have made the Queen shy of broaching the question of money and the Royal Family, he was to be sadly disappointed. Warming to her theme, in the mild sunshine of southern France, and with the leisure of a holiday-morning giving her time to expand herself, she went on to point out that ‘these ignorant and ill-conditioned radicals’ could not distinguish between the position of the very rich landed proprietors and the Royal Family. The former inherit huge fortunes – ‘and yet have no status or Court to maintain. Whereas we have no property – Nothing of our own – & must maintain this status; & and are expected to give largely to Charities &c &c.’ The Queen omitted any mention of the income she personally received from the Duchy of Lancaster.