Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  In one of their long talks, Victoria complained to Davidson about the lack of sympathy which she had encountered for her past sorrows. Davidson, who had clearly seen the smirks and suppressed grins of politicians and visiting dignitaries as she expounded the simple virtues of John Brown, decided ‘to speak with freedom and very strongly as to the risk of laying bare the heart to those who don’t understand’.30 He had put his finger on one of her besetting, though rather endearing, faults, and it was never one which she quite saw the necessity to correct. All that was interesting about her was brought out by sympathy, but, such was her combative and difficult nature, such sympathy needed to be combined with the skill and courage of knowing how to stand up to her.

  Within a very short time of becoming Dean of Windsor, Davidson was confronted with just such a difficulty. In Lambeth Palace Library, wedged among the copious papers of the great archbishop which Davidson was to become, is a scurrilous pamphlet, published in New York by Norman L. Munro, entitled John Brown’s Legs, or Leaves from a Journal in the Lowlands by Kenward Philip.

  It bears the dedicatory inscription, ‘To the memory of those extraordinary Legs – poor bruised and scratched darlings – the writer dedicates this little volume, in the full belief that while John Brown’s body undoubtedly lies mouldering in the grave, his Legs go marching on. WINSORAL, March 1884.’

  The pamphlet is slapstick, rather than biting satire: ‘A dreadful calamity has happened to disturb the serenity of our Life to the Highlands. My servant, John Brown, while attending me yesterday in a walk to Kshruballanachtwister stubbed his toe’ is the opening sentence. As well as mocking Victoria’s Brown obsession (‘Have written a note to Tennyson commanding him to write a sonnet on Brown’s legs’) it also notes her notorious greed. The spoof-Queen feels sorry for her son Arthur, serving in the army: ‘it is dreadful to think of his privations,’ she wrote, listing a Sunday dinner eaten by the prince which starts with oysters and mock turtle soup, and includes lark puddings, saddle of mutton, roast pheasants and ice cream. There is a scene which is perhaps a little too knowing, in which Bertie punches Brown in the face.

  It is interesting that the (on the whole) serious-minded Davidson kept this squib among his papers. He was certainly acutely aware of the Queen’s unawareness of how the public regarded her relationship with Brown: that is, as simply ridiculous – ‘painfully absurd’, to use Lord Carlingford’s phrase. Since Davidson was the man who seemed to have the Queen’s ear at that moment, he was delegated by the courtiers to tell her what was generally thought of her latest literary scheme. For she did actually intend to publish a volume, if not entitled John Brown’s Legs, then a third volume of her Leaves from her Highland journals. The book was to be, in effect, a biography of Brown.

  Most of the politicians during her long reign had been anxious for the Queen to play a more conspicuously ceremonial part in public life. They wanted more opening of bridges and railway stations, more visits to hospitals, as they extended their own executive power. The correspondence, stretching over thirty years, between Victoria and Gladstone enables its readers to watch the Queen trying to control her own purse strings and exercise influence over Cabinet appointments, while her Prime Minister urges her to attend a State Opening of Parliament.

  Her more confiding and intimate tone with Dean Davidson, however, suggests an altogether different monarchical function: one which really only came into its own during the era of the television interview in the late twentieth century, and one which many monarchists deplore. This was for the royal person to come before the public as a human being and ask them to ‘share my pain’.

  The Queen showed Davidson the manuscript of her John Brown book, and he had clearly been left more or less speechless. She wrote to him from Osborne in June 1884, promising to send him finished copies and thanking him for his advice about omitting ‘a few trifling things’.31 ‘The Queen feels that the sacredness of deep grief should never be desecrated by unholy hands.’ She emphasized to her young dean that she had found widespread sympathy, however, among those who ‘quite understand and know what she suffers’.32

  Davidson had in fact been trying to dissuade his monarch from ‘sharing her pain’ with the general populace. ‘Such a spirit of ready response to the gracious confidences so frankly given, is not always to be found, and I should be deceiving Your Majesty were I not to admit that there are, especially among the humbler classes, some (perhaps it would be true to say many) who do not show themselves worthy of these confidences, and whose spirit, judging by their published periodicals, is one of such unappreciative criticism as I should not desire . . . ’33 He had clearly already seen John Brown’s Legs, and must have been wondering what would happen if a copy of the scurrilous spoof ever found its way into Windsor Castle.

  Clearly, Davidson’s weak attempts at dissuasion had no effect whatsoever. When she went to Balmoral in June, the Queen summoned Dr Hamilton Lees of Edinburgh to help her put the leaves she had written into publishable order. He wrote to Davidson, ‘Miss Stoppard has told that you and she have tried your best to stop this publication of a memoir of John Brown. The Queen, however, is determined that it shall be done.’ Lees concluded, ‘It is a sad business altogether but we must make the best of it.’ In August, Lees wrote to Davidson that if the book were ever published ‘it will make a greater sensation’ than John Brown’s Legs. ‘Her Majesty has a firm belief that John Brown was popular, with all the classes, and offered, when I ventured to doubt this, to lend me a volume of letters received at his death from the “highest in the land” . . . It is a most absurd fancy altogether, and I wish it would pass away. Her last message to me before I left Balmoral was “Tell Dr Lees that whether he likes it or not I am determined it shall be done!”’ He added, rather ominously, that from the material already put into his hands by the Queen, he could have produced a more amusing brochure than John Brown’s Legs. She was still ‘determined’ in November, though she was beginning to concede that there would be some advantage in keeping the memoir short.

  Davidson had one last, brave try. He told the Queen that the Leaves from the journal already published had a good effect. ‘To feel sympathy with human sorrow is good. To be the means of evoking such sympathy is a privilege which for more than twenty years has been Your Majesty’s in no common measure, and the privilege, however sad a one, is a sacred power for good.’ He warned her, however, that her grief for a husband, while being widely shared, was something different, in the eyes of ‘the ordinary upper class newspapers’, from her grief for Brown. ‘I feel I should be wanting in my honest duty to Your Majesty who has honoured me with some measure of confidence were I not to refer to this, for Your Majesty’s consideration, in connection with what Your Majesty in the same letter was good enough to tell me as to some further publication which Your Majesty has in contemplation.’

  The Queen eventually snapped. She took offence at the dean’s tone, and she ordered him through one of her ladies-in-waiting, Lady Ely, to withdraw his remarks and to apologize. Instead, Davidson offered his immediate resignation as dean.

  A long silence followed. Then, he was sent for. He was received by his old friend. All was smiles, and the memoir was never mentioned again. It was, according to the son of Henry Ponsonby, quietly destroyed.34

  This strange episode revealed, among other things, the Queen’s resilient capacity to forgive, and even seemingly to forget, old grievances. Sandro Battenberg noted how warmly she received him – having believed him to be a Russian spy. Lord Carnarvon was in disgrace for resigning from the Cabinet over the Russo-Turkish War. Yet in 1884, the Queen asked him and his wife to dinner – ‘just as if all the last six years had gone by and as if all cause for offence with me was entirely blotted out. She talked to Elsie [Lady Carnarvon] after dinner for a considerable time, & evidently with great kindness: about the children, and herself, and all kinds of people and things... It was a real personal pleasure to myself to feel that the Q
ueen was completely reconciled to me: for the alienation of so much kindness to me in former years pained me. However the reconciliation was complete.’35 In 1881, Ponsonby kept a score card of the rows between Gladstone and the Queen over events, some of which we remember, some of which are forgotten. ‘1. Candahar speech. She gave in. 2. Peers at Easter. He gave in. 3. Wolseley peerage. She will give in . . . IF 4. He will give in over the question of Wolseley continuing to serve as Quarter-Master General.’36 Davidson was perhaps painting too rosy a picture when he wrote that she ‘never’ bore a grudge, but he was on the whole fair to say that she preferred those who, for the highest motives, ‘occasionally incurred her wrath’.

  No one, of course, incurred her wrath in quite the withering, scorching doses which she dished out to her children. Prince Leopold had recovered some points after his marriage to the charmingly dull Princess Helen, and produced a child – a healthy baby girl called Alice – whether after his late sister, or after his celebrated Oxford dancing-partner, Alice Liddell, who could say? Leopold had then slipped down a few notches in the League Table of royal favour when his mother had discovered that he had been making independent approaches to politicians for help in finding a useful occupation. Surely he was contented working as her secretary, writing letters, and doing light, ceremonial duties, such as laying the foundation stone of the Oxford High School for Girls?

  Evidently, he was not. When rumours reached him that his brother-in-law Lord Lorne was thinking of resigning as Governor-General of Canada, Leopold wrote to the Colonial Secretary ‘to implore you to appoint me as his successor’.37 It was impossible to discuss the matter with his mother that year since she was entirely taken up with grief for Brown, and with her plans to write her Brown memoirs. Leopold’s ambition to go to Canada was, nevertheless, somehow ‘leaked’, and became a subject of public debate in the press. Gladstone, in the House of Commons, pronounced the dictum that princes should be content to ‘perform great decorative offices’, leaving the real jobs to Government appointees. The radical Reynolds’s Newspaper described Leopold as a feeble-minded invalid who would not even be able to find Canada on a map.38

  The next year, Leopold lowered his sights a little. He had formed what Queen Victoria would no doubt have considered a very undesirable friendship with Sir Charles Dilke, whom he had invited to Claremont. There he poured out his ambitions to do something useful, and told Dilke he had been writing to Lord Derby, Lord Granville and to Mr Gladstone, asking for some position in the colonies. His brother Arthur was serving in the army, Affie was in the navy, Bertie, sidelined as he was by the Queen, at least enjoyed the status of Prince of Wales; Leopold could surely be given something to do. He had heard that they were looking for a Governor of Victoria in Australia, and he asked Dilke if he could help. ‘I believe you have been in Australia and are therefore a more competent judge than some others of the ministers as to the adviseability [sic] of my appointment.’39

  Poor Leopold. He had not yet learned how the world worked. Charles Dilke mentioned it to Lord Derby, Lord Derby spoke to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville, who told the Prime Minister, who in turn told the Queen at their next audience. Leopold had not warned his royal mother, and there was, naturally, an eruption.

  ‘Please, dear Mamma,’ wrote Helen from Claremont, ‘don’t be angry with him!!! & do remember how very much he wishes for that post!’40

  No doubt behind the Queen’s wrath was the everlasting gnaw of worry about Leopold’s condition. It was obvious to her, though not to him, why he would not have been suited to arduous administrative tasks. In fact, as spring advanced in 1884, he was feeling ill, with painful swelling in his joints, and the doctors advised a break from a fairly strenuous routine of royal duties – distributing certificates in Liverpool schools, presiding over the Windsor Tapestry Works, which had financial problems, and doing quite long hours with his mother’s correspondence. He decided to go to the South of France, even though they said that Helen, pregnant again, could not accompany him, having suffered a previous miscarriage.

  Cannes was one of his favourite places, and he wrote home excitedly to tell his wife he had decided to buy a plot of land at Golfe Juan, a little way along the coast, and there build a house for his family. On 24 March, he went to Nice for the Bachelors’ Ball at the Club Méditerranée, planning to return to his wife and baby in Esher at the end of the week. There was to be a ‘Battle of the Flowers’ procession along the Promenade, and he rushed back to his room at the Cercle Nautique to change. He slipped on the stairs and knocked his right knee against the bottom step. ‘Such pain it was!’41 he wrote to Helen.

  He died of a slow, painful haemorrhage. It was baffling to the press, and to almost everyone, who did not know of his condition. Bertie, who heard the news on Aintree racecourse, immediately wired his mother for permission to go to Cannes and bring the body home.

  ‘The Queen is wonderfully calm,’ wired Leopold’s old governess. ‘Her Majesty is gone to Claremont. It is too terrible.’42 Victoria, at sixty-five, had now outlived two of her children.

  When Sir Charles Dilke wrote a letter of condolence to the Queen, she responded with complete courtesy. ‘She knows that you were a personal friend of the Duke of Albany who will feel his death.’43 Except for moments during the period in the 1860s when she was mentally ill, and with the exception of the case of Gladstone, the Queen hardly ever displayed bad manners.

  The calmness is so different from the operatic grief of 1861, yet more testimony of the fact that Victoria was, truly, an almost completely different woman from the person who had been married to Prince Albert. These years, which saw such extraordinary personal turmoil, with the loss of Brown and of her son, also witnessed some of her closest, and deftest, political involvement. If there was something a little icy in her immediate response to Dilke’s expressions of sympathy, it perhaps had less to do with his raffish way of life and his friendship with Bertie, and more to do with his political radicalism.

  1884 was another milestone in the journey Britain was making from the aristocratic oligarchy of pre-1832 to the parliamentary democracy and universal suffrage extended by the Representation of the People Act of 1928. The 1884 Franchise Act did not pass, however, without a major clash between the House of Commons and the House of Lords and here, as in the controversy over the disestablishment of the Irish Church, the Queen played a vital role in defusing the political heat.

  The 1867 Reform Act had created a two-tier voting system. Those urban voters who lived in boroughs now had the vote, if they were householders. Rural voters, however, remained in effect feudalized; they had to accept the candidates imposed upon them by their landlords, invariably aristocratic, though not always Tory. The radicals had been campaigning for at least a decade to remove this anomaly, and the Whiggish Lord Hartington had, in principle, accepted their point.

  By 1884, the unquestioned leader of the radicals in the House of Commons was the Birmingham firebrand Joseph Chamberlain, who was not some wild-eyed backbencher, but President of the Board of Trade in Gladstone’s Cabinet. He wanted to fight a class war, not a merely technical point of voting procedure. There were plenty of peers, Whig and Tory, would have agreed with Chamberlain that there was indeed a class war in progress. If the lower and middle orders of society were given voting power, and executive power, this could only have the effect of diminishing the inherited power of the peers. Lord Salisbury, the Leader of the Conservatives, moved that the Commons should be asked to accept a Redistribution Bill, by which the boundaries of the constituencies should be redrawn. He reckoned that there would be so many squabbles at local level about the exact make-up of the constituencies that both the Redistribution Bill and the Franchise Bill would founder. Gladstone would not hear of this, and insisted that the Lords pass a Bill which had been unambiguously passed through the Commons.

  Salisbury knew that he was only playing for time. He was a man of prodigious intelligence and political s
kill. The fact that he knew his viewpoint was doomed to defeat, however, did not make him adopt a different opinion. He still believed, as he had written a quarter of a century earlier in Bentley’s Quarterly Review, that ‘The classes that represent civilisation . . . have a right to require securities to protect them from being overwhelmed by hordes who have neither knowledge to guide them nor stake in the Commonwealth to control them’.

  Chamberlain had eloquently put the other side of the argument, not only in his parliamentary speeches, but to rallies in Birmingham which drew thousands. ‘Lord Salisbury constitutes himself the spokesman of a class – of the class to which he himself belongs, who toil not neither do they spin; whose fortunes – as in his case – have originated by grants made in times gone by for the services which courtiers rendered kings, and have since grown and increased, while they have slept, by levying an increased share on all that other men have done by toil and labour to add to the general wealth and prosperity of the country.’44 One of the things which makes the next fifteen years some of the most interesting in the entire history of British politics is that these two men, Salisbury and Chamberlain, would find themselves in the same party, with Chamberlain serving in Salisbury’s Cabinet as Colonial Secretary. They came together over the great issues of Ireland and the Empire. Salisbury, whose family had been exercising power since his great ancestor William Cecil was the secretary (in effect Prime Minister) to Queen Elizabeth I, was past master at the manipulation of power. He had no doubts, however, about the direction in which the Franchise Act of 1884 was leading. As he wrote to the Queen, Gladstone and Chamberlain ‘insist that the House of Lords has no right to say that it will not pass the Franchise Bill till a Redistribution Bill accompanies it, and they do so on the ground that the Franchise Bill has been sanctioned by certain popular demonstrations. This doctrine, if accepted, would reduce the House of Lords to impotence.’45 He was of course right, and almost all subsequent history of the hereditary peerage in power, including the Peerage Act of 1911–2, and concluding with the virtual exclusion of hereditary peers from the Second Chamber by Tony Blair, has been a series of footnotes to this observation. But in 1884, the peers were still technically entitled to block legislation coming up from the Commons, even if it had overwhelming popular backing.