Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  For Gladstone, it was a matter of simple principle, and, as it was on the other side of the political divide for Lord Carnarvon, principle was not purely theoretical. If Home Rule would please the great majority of the Irish people, and bring peace to that troubled island, it was surely the practical as well as the idealistic solution? Invoking the prayer of Virgil’s Aeneas, Gladstone repeated a tag which had been on the lips of Pitt when the Act of Union (of Irish and English Parliaments) was established:

  Paribus se legibus ambae

  Invictae gentes aeterna in foedera mittant.

  (‘Under equal terms, let both nations, unconquered, enter upon an everlasting compact’ – Aeneid XII.190–1.)

  The Queen had nothing but contempt for party politics, and would have been perfectly happy to have a succession of coalitions, provided they promoted the agenda of popular Toryism: a strong monarchy, a strong Empire, a United Kingdom. During the tense days of April and May, she found it incomprehensible, both that the Liberal Unionists should hang back from open support of Lord Salisbury, and that he, for his part, should have gone silent after the Haymarket evening for fear of ‘repelling a single Radical or Liberal auxiliary’. He did not want to split the anti-Gladstone vote.42 To Goschen, a staunch Unionist and First Lord of the Admiralty in Gladstone’s first administration, she wrote, ‘It is sad, and I cannot help saying not creditable or pleasant fact [sic] that the Liberals do not wish to unite with the Conservatives at such a supreme moment of danger to the best interests of my great Empire.’43

  One of the reasons that Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to Ireland on 17–20 May 2011 made such an enormous impact was that, ever since Gladstone’s attempt to pass Home Rule, there had been a perception that the British monarch had sided with the Unionists. Elizabeth’s acknowledgement of faults and mistakes on both sides, and her bowing her head in silence beside a war memorial for the thousands of Irish servicemen who had given their lives in the First World War, was perhaps also a silent admission that Home Rule might not have been such a ‘supreme danger’ to the Empire, at that moment when Queen Victoria was emerging, in the 1880s, to be just such a public figurehead as Gladstone had wished her to be in the 1860s: a public monarch, who was prepared to parade herself before the people as a reassuring figurehead.

  In March, she went to lay the first stone of the Medical Hall in London University. On 4 May, she opened the Colonial and Indian Exhibition at South Kensington with a formal entourage including ‘the Duchess of Bedford, the Great Officers of State etc.’. She processed through huge marquees as the band played ‘God Save the Queen’. She inspected serried rows of Lascars and Parsees and Indians in exotic costumes and uniforms. She teetered down an Indian carpet into the Albert Hall where an Indian choir sang the second verse of the National Anthem in Sanskrit. Lord Tennyson had composed a ‘beautiful’ ode, set to music by Sullivan, the solo being sung by Albani. After Albani had sung ‘Home Sweet Home’, there were rousing choruses of ‘Rule Britannia’. 44 The Queen was an impenitent imperialist. She saw herself as the Mother of Nations, and had simply ceased to be the shrinking violet who would not appear in public. The wish of the Irish to regulate their own affairs and have their own Parliament was the first step towards the dissolution of the Empire. ‘Lord Salisbury earnestly trusts,’ he wrote, ‘that your Majesty has not been fatigued by your great recent exertions. The ceremony in the Albert Hall was singularly successful, and gave an enormous deal of gratification to your Majesty’s loyal subjects.’45

  Far from being tired, Victoria headed off to Liverpool on 11 May to open the International Exhibition of Navigation, Commerce and Industry, the brainchild of the Mayor of Liverpool, David Radcliffe. ‘The crowds were marvellous,’ she wrote, ‘ . . . the enthusiasm and perfectly deafening cheering inside the Exhibition as well as outside was more than I have ever seen . . . And they behaved so well – never pushed or crowded. And they looked so delighted only to see their little old Queen.’ She knighted the Mayor on the steps of a high throne, and 80,000 schoolchildren were amassed to sing ‘God Save the Queen’, and the next day, Arthur and Liko were sent to St George’s Hall to preside over a banquet.46 This was monarchy such as had not been made visible for a generation, and the Queen was loving it.

  When she saw the politicians who were staggering from all-night sessions in Parliament and watching the Irish Home Rule Bill being torn to shreds, she saw figures who were exhausted. Gladstone, when he came for his weekly audience, looked ‘ill and haggard’.47 Nor was she entirely confident yet in Salisbury’s competence to carry the anti-Home Rule cause. Whereas she considered Gladstone’s manifesto – ‘Trust the Irish!’ – ‘a very foolish one’, she was appalled by Salisbury’s speech, which had ‘done harm’ itemizing nations that could not govern themselves: ‘the Hottentots couldn’t, the Indians couldn’t and the Irish couldn’t . . . Most unfortunate.’48

  The vote on the Second Reading of the Home Rule Bill occurred during the night of 7–8 June. Parnell made a measured speech, and in his account of the proceedings, Gladstone wrote to the Queen, ‘He was particularly impressive in the expression of the necessity for keeping within that body [an Irish Parliament] every Irishman, and he held that the Protestants would be a most valuable and essential element of the new system. Mr Gladstone humbly thinks that this speech, quietly delivered, which defies analysis, well deserves your Majesty’s attention.’ Gladstone himself made a speech of immense length ending, ‘Think, I beseech you; think well, think wisely, think, not for the moment, but for the years that are to come, before you reject this Bill.’ The rejection was quite narrow – only 30 votes in it (341 against 311).49

  The night after she received this account at Balmoral, the Queen was sleepless – ‘so worried and anxious’.50 Gladstone asked the Queen to dissolve Parliament. Rosebery went to see the Queen in person on 10 June to explain that in view of Gladstone’s age, he felt he could not resign over the issue, but should force a General Election instead. The Queen liked Lord Rosebery and found him ‘excessively agreeable’.51

  Gladstone then came North, making a slow progress, with speeches in South Lancashire and in Glasgow before reaching his constituency of Midlothian. The Queen wrote to upbraid him, saying that she was ‘surprised’ – always an opprobrious term in her vocabulary – ‘that he should visit other places totally unconnected’ with his constituents. He hit the shuttlecock back over the net, saying – not entirely convincingly – that he shared the Queen’s dislike of the practice of speaking outside his constituency, and wondering whether she had noticed of recent years how figures such as Lord Salisbury and Lord Iddesleigh (formerly Sir Stafford Northcote) ‘have established a rule of what may be called popular agitation by addressing public meetings from time to time’.52 Touché. Only a week later in Leeds, Salisbury was rallying the anti-Irish faithful, a crowd of 5,000 in the Coliseum Theatre, during which he ridiculed Gladstone’s ‘spasmodic ejaculations’.53

  Both men were on the hustings in all but name. British politics had changed, and the Queen’s own willingness to play to the gallery and appear before massed audiences was part of this. Salisbury went to the Auvergne while the election was held, in June, his body scalding all over with eczema. The election was during harvest. Not surprisingly, the agricultural workers did not vote, and the overall turnout was low: 2,974,000 as opposed to the 4,638,000 who had voted in the November election.The results were: 316 Conservatives, 77 Liberal Unionists, 192 Gladstonian Liberals and 85 Home Rulers. Salisbury asked Hartington – a Liberal Unionist – to take the office of Prime Minister, offering to serve as his Foreign Secretary. But Harty Tarty ‘combatted my arguments in his usual sleepy manner’.54 So it was, that on 25 July, Lord Salisbury kissed hands and became the Prime Minister for the second time. He told his son, ‘It is an office of infinite worry, but very little power.’55

  Queen Victoria could not but be glad that her old enemy Mr Gladstone was to be relieved of that particular source
of worry in this, of all years. For, as she had written in her journal on 20 June, at Balmoral, ‘Have entered the fiftieth year of my reign and my Jubilee Year.’56

  TWENTY TWO

  ‘YOU ENGLISH’

  PUBLIC DISPLAY, THAT aspect of her role which Victoria had found so unbearable in the first decade of her widowhood, was something which she learned to exploit in order to strengthen the monarch’s hand. Her instinct was still to shy away. When that radical stronghold, Birmingham, requested a royal visit in the Jubilee Year, she ‘emphatically refused’. A week later, however, Salisbury, who knew how to manage her, persuaded her otherwise. She ‘smiled on the proposal’, and, as Ponsonby said, ‘this change was entirely owing to Lord Salisbury’s persuasion’.1 It was a propitious beginning to the Jubilee, which was not merely a retrospective celebration, but also a demonstration of political intent. There was plenty of opposition in Britain to the very idea of monarchy, and in the world at large to the British Empire. The Golden Jubilee would be Lord Salisbury’s answer to them, though he personally kept out of the limelight. When the new Dean of Westminster, George Bradley, put up a huge screen which made the Queen invisible in the Abbey, Lady Salisbury said she would like to hang him,2 since the whole point of the celebration was to have the sovereign, and all that she stood for, on display.

  The Jubilee Year started early in India, with a magnificent firework display in Calcutta in February. The viceroy was able to tell Queen Victoria, ‘The natives of India are passionately fond of pyrotechnic displays, and on the 16th they were shown fireworks far superior to any that they had ever seen before. The principal feature was the outline of your Majesty’s head, traced in lines of fire, which unexpectedly burst on the vision of the astonished crowd. The likeness was admirable, and caused an enormous shout of pleasure and applause.’3 If the crowds in India showed such enthusiasm for their Empress, it was only to be expected that the good-hearted folk of London Town would do the same. In May 1887, however, when the Queen opened the People’s Palace on the Mile End Road in the East End, she heard what she described to the Prime Minister as ‘a horrid noise (quite new to the Queen’s ears), “booing”, she believes it is called’. Salisbury hastened to remind her that ‘London contains a much larger number of the worst kind of rough than any other great town in the island’4, and she could assure herself that the booers were ‘probably Socialists and the worst Irish’.5

  All the same, those organizing the Golden Jubilee celebrations must have felt a little nervous, lest the population might be less ecstatic in their delight than the more enthusiastic royalists might hope. Nor was it only the ‘worst kind of rough’ who were republican in sentiment. Only the previous year, at a parliamentary dinner held by the Liberal Party, over 100 of the guests had failed to stand for the royal toast, and hissing had been heard when it was proposed.6

  There was scarcely an atmosphere of political stability. Lord Randolph Churchill had exhibitionistically resigned as Chancellor of the Exchequer because Salisbury would not let him spend enough on the navy. He was eventually succeeded by the Liberal Unionist Goschen – though only after Goschen had been shooed into Parliament via the safe Tory seat of St George’s Hanover Square, vacated by its unselfish occupant Lord Algernon Percy. Stafford Northcote, the Foreign Secretary, had a heart attack and dropped dead in Salisbury’s presence. At a time when, as Salisbury himself told the Queen, ‘The prospect is very gloomy abroad, but England cannot brighten it . . . We have absolutely no power to restrain either France or Germany, while all the power and influence we have will be needed to defend our influence in the south-east of Europe.’7

  Moreover, the Irish Question was not going to go away, simply because the Liberal Party – the one English party which had any chance of solving the problem – had just smashed itself into smithereens.

  Nor could the Empress of India rest in the certain knowledge that all her Indian subjects were content with her dominion over them. Even as London was preparing for the Jubilee Parades, and the Jubilee Service in Westminster Abbey, the Emperor of Russia was reading the following letter addressed to himself: ‘I am a patriot and seek only to deliver some 250,000,000 of my countrymen from this cruel yoke of the British rule.’ The same pen had earlier issued ‘proclamations’ from a printing press in Paris, calling for the liberation of the 250 million, and asserting that he would return to the Punjab to reclaim his rightful inheritance. When flown with drink in the Irish and American Bar in the rue Royale, he had even been known to refer to the English monarch as ‘Mrs Fagin’, for, said he, ‘she’s really a receiver of stolen property’.8 Who could this be, but the Maharajah Duleep Singh?

  If anyone was entitled to complain that the British had stolen from India, it was he – for his precious and sacred diamond, the Koh-i-Noor, had been delivered as a gift from the East India Company to ‘Mrs Fagin’ in 1849 and was now locked up in the Tower of London. Lord Dalhousie had so rightly and memorably said, ‘I regarded the Koh-i-Noor as something by itself, and with my having caused the Maharajah of Lahore, in token of submission, to surrender it to the Queen of England. The Koh-i-Noor has become in the lapse of ages a sort of historical emblem of conquest in India.’9 The owner of the diamond had been depicted as a beautiful boy by Winterhalter, and his portrait hung on the walls of the Queen’s palaces. He had been so entirely assimilated as to have undergone baptism, to have been established as a landowner with a great shooting estate at Elvedon in Suffolk, and to send his sons to Eton. But the svelte youth whose fleeting beauty was captured by Winterhalter had lost his hair and developed a paunch, and as well as becoming an old roué who haunted theatres and bars in London. He was also confronted by death. And he wanted to revert to the religion of his youth. He converted back to Sikhism, and dreamed of reclaiming his old territories in the Punjab. It was a threat which the British authorities took extremely seriously – so much so that when he set off for India by ship, he and his family were waylaid at Aden and sent home again. His long-suffering wife and children went to spend their few remaining thousands of pounds living at Claridge’s. The maharajah went AWOL in France, and then, with a false passport, and a chambermaid from a London hotel who was carrying his baby, he set off for Russia to throw himself on the mercy of the Russian Emperor.

  In the event, Duleep Singh’s rebellion was a damp squib, but it provided an embarrassing sideshow to the Jubilee. The Amritsar police superintendent wired back to the India Office in London that, since the issuing of the maharajah’s ‘proclamations’, ‘the behaviour of the Sikhs has quite changed in the villages. They are defiant and insolent now to Mission ladies and order them out of their houses saying, “We do not want you”’.10

  Queen Victoria, who had always nursed a soft spot in her bosom for the maharajah, urged her ministers and their underlings in the army and the Secret Service to proceed with gentleness. ‘Some kind person should meet him at Paris and set him straight,’ she said, ‘pacify him and prevent his ruining his children.’ She sagely cautioned that it would have ‘a very bad effect in India if he is ill used’. Why not give him a peerage, she suggested, ‘and then they could live as any other nobleman’s family?’11 The idea fell on Lord Salisbury’s deafest of ears. Nevertheless, whenever she could get a letter through to him, the Queen persisted in calling herself ‘your friend and perhaps the truest you have’.12

  She had always felt awkward about taking the Koh-i-Noor; her fondness for Duleep Singh was personal and strong; and she had, in general, an affection for Indians. The English habits of circumlocution and understatement and suppressing feeling had never been hers. The Victoria who liked Brown’s directness of talk and physicality, who wallowed in Disraeli’s exotic vein of fantasy and poetic flattery, was revivified by contemplating her Indian subjects, much more so than when listening to the dry-stick pronouncements of Oxford-educated bishops and politicians. Moreover, did not the sacred city of Agra contain the most famous shrine of marital bereavement, the Taj Mahal, a mo
nument which even the mausoleum at Frogmore could not quite rival? It was to Agra that application was made for two Indian servants to join Her Majesty’s household.

  One of the men selected was Mohammed Buksch, a sort of butler to General Thomas Dennehy, the political agent in Rajputna. The other was Abdul Karim, a clerk to the supervisor of Agra jail. Hearing that he had been chosen to serve as an orderly to Her Majesty, Karim supposed that he would be riding as her escort; this was what ‘orderlies’ did in the Indian Army. Kitted out in the most splendid uniforms which the best tailor in Agra could run up in a short time – deep red and blue tunics, with matching pugrees or waistbands, white trousers or salwars, and bejewelled turbans – Buksch and Karim were actually being hired to wait at table. They were to be little more than junior footmen, designed to add a little colour to the Queen’s entourage as she received the homage of the many Indian dignitaries visiting London and Windsor for the Jubilee. These included the prodigiously rich (and largely westernized) Maharajah and Maharini of Coch Behar, Niprendra and Sunity Devi Narayan, a beautiful, dashing pair in their twenties, who brought their three children with them; as well as the very different, and deeply traditional Maharajah and Maharini of Baroda in modern-day Gujarat, the Maharajah of Indore, the Maharajah of Bharatpore, and many others.

  When the Jubilee Parade was held in London, culminating in a Service of Thanksgiving in Westminster Abbey, Victoria found herself at the head of a divided, troubled nation. This fact was largely disguised by the pageantry which triumphantly displayed her as the grandest monarch in Europe and the Empress of the farthest-flung dominions in the world.