by A. N. Wilson
The Indian crowds had cheered the fireworks, but it took little to divert the householders of the Punjab into hostility towards the Christian missions, when they had read Duleep Singh’s ‘proclamations’. The crowds of London were loyalist, but there were many in the East End more inclined to boo. And likewise, the potentates of Europe who came to salute the Queen’s fifty years on the throne were deeply divided among themselves, and profoundly ambivalent in their attitudes to British domination of the world.
What a glorious sight, however, these potentates made as they processed, uniformed and helmeted, through the streets of London. The sun shone gloriously. Triumphal arches festooned with crowns, shields and evergreens marked the parade route, and greenery and flags were intertwined round balconies. The procession was led by the Prince of Wales Hussars, the Horse Guards and the Life Guards, with drawn swords, brilliant in the sunlight. The Court, her children, the politicians had all implored the Queen to wear a crown as she processed in ‘a handsomely gilt landau’,13 but she insisted upon wearing a bonnet. She was preceded by her aides de camps and equerries on horseback, and six carriages, a phalanx of military leaders, then six more carriages containing members of the extended Royal Family, the Master of the Horse, and then seventeen princes on horseback – three sons, five sons-in-law and nine grandsons. The old German Emperor Wilhelm I, aged over ninety, was too ill to attend, but all eyes in the crowd fell upon his son Fritz – Queen Victoria’s son-in-law. For weeks beforehand, Willy had been bombarding the Queen his grandmother with telegrams, questioning his father’s fitness to travel. When they reached London,14 Willy and his wife Dona took great offence at one of the receptions at Buckingham Palace, since Dona was ‘placed behind the black Queen of Hawaii!!’15 But, although Willy’s greed to succeed to the imperial title was tactless in its candour, he was right to warn Victoria: Fritz was a sick man, suffering, though he did not know it, from throat cancer.
Lord Lorne, Louise’s husband, who had an eye for a beautiful soldier, believed that Fritz, who wore the pure white uniform and silver breastplate of the Pomeranian Cuirassiers, a steel, eagle-winged helmet on his head, the Order of the Garter slashed across his chest and a gold-inlaid field-marshal’s baton in his hand, resembled ‘one of the legendary heroes embodied in the creations of Wagner’.16 Alas, even as he rode to the Abbey this latter-day Amfortas could feel death closing around him.
The Abbey service was beautifully conducted, with the ceremonial robes, worn forty-nine years earlier by the eighteen-year-old Victoria, draped symbolically over a chair as the choir sang Prince Albert’s setting of the Te Deum. Of course, she would not have been Queen Victoria if, in the midst of so much jubilation, she had not felt ‘great pain’ as she thought of ‘above all, the dear husband and father, two dear children, my dear Mother, my sister and so many others – and, also, [John Brown], the loyalest, best friend who so loyally and lovingly looked after me!’17 As these thoughts passed through her head, the surviving children and grandchildren processed to kiss the old lady as she sat on the Coronation Chair of Edward III. Then it was back to the Palace to eat. The procession took so long that they did not sit down to luncheon until 4 pm, with the Queen seated between the King of Saxony and the King of Denmark. After a short rest to read her telegrams, she was led in to dinner, wearing a dress with ‘the rose, thistle & shamrock embroidered in silver on it, & my large diamonds’.18 On this occasion, she sat between the King of the Belgians and the King of Denmark. Similar junkettings took place the next day, when she distributed Jubilee medals to the assembled kings, princes, maharajahs and potentates. By evening, she had taken off for Windsor, where she took comfort in the presence of her two new Indian servants. ‘The one, Mohamed Buxsh [sic], very dark with a very smiling expression . . . & the other, much younger, called Abdul Karim . . . much lighter, tall, & with a fine, serious countenance. His father is a native doctor at Agra. They both kissed my feet.’19
It is so typical of the Queen that the beginnings of this new passion, her last attachment, for Abdul Karim, began after the wearing days of public Jubilee ceremonial. Ever since childhood, she had been used to seclusion and quiet, and she needed people who were special to her alone. What did it matter if this child of someone who was little more than a prison pharmacist should have become ‘the son of a doctor’? Already, as all her favourites had been, he was being scattered with Victorian fairy dust.
While Queen Victoria was having her feet kissed by Abdul Karim, the Crown Princess Victoria of Germany had retired to an hotel with her exhausted husband. The Wagnerian hero was suffering from a growth on his vocal cord, and one week after the Jubilee, this was removed surgically by Dr Morell Mackenzie. The growth was sent for examination in Berlin by Dr Rudolf Virchow, who found no evidence of malignancy, and the Queen conferred a knighthood on Dr Mackenzie, at his patient’s request, for his agreement with this optimistic diagnosis. Vicky and Fritz took off on a restorative trip, extending into the autumn, in the Italian Tyrol. Since his father, Wilhelm, was visibly dying, there was great pressure placed upon them to return to Berlin, but Vicky thought ‘It would be madness to spoil Fritz’s cure’. He was all but speechless, and another lump had appeared on his throat. They moved south to the Italian Riviera at San Remo, and Sir Morell Mackenzie came out to examine the putrid throat again. This time, he was less sanguine. By now Professor von Schrötter from Vienna and Dr Krause from Berlin had descended on San Remo. Schrötter pronounced that the Crown Prince had incurable cancer. Krause, who knew Fritz’s medical history, had insisted upon large doses of potassium iodide being administered before surgery. This was because, in 1869, at the opening of the Suez Canal by the Empress Eugénie, Fritz had been to bed with a Spanish beauty named Dolores Cada and contracted syphilis. Krause still held out a hope, albeit a small hope, that the throat condition was syphilitic, rather than cancer; but this hope was soon abandoned.20 Mackenzie and the other doctors agreed that the growth was in fact malignant. When he was left alone with Vicky, Fritz broke down and wept. ‘To think that I should have such a horrid, disgusting illness! That I shall be an object of disgust to everyone and a burden to you all! I had so hoped to be of use to my country . . . What will become of you? I have nothing to leave you! What will become of the country?’21
They returned to Germany very low in spirits.
Queen Victoria watched these developments with a very heavy heart. She was sympathetic to any woman on the verge of losing her husband; how much the more was she sympathetic to her firstborn daughter. Moreover, she had always sided with Fritz and Vicky’s liberal political outlook, maintained with great courage and difficulty against the barrage of vilification and outright libels put out against them by the Bismarck camp. Nevertheless, the Queen still retained some affection for Willy, and she was not 100 per cent against him, as Vicky was. She still believed, furthermore, that she had a role to play in the pacification of Europe and the moderation of the German militaristic right wing.
Meanwhile, only four years after the demise of John Brown, the courtiers had new cause to squirm while, shamelessly eccentric as ever in her choice of favourites, the Queen wallowed in the company of Abdul Karim. Down the corridors of Osborne wafted the delicious aromas of spices which Abdul had brought with him from Agra: cloves, cinnamon, cumin, nutmeg and cardamom drowned out the pong of overboiled cabbage and mutton. To the amazement of the cooks, Abdul Karim had entered the kitchen and prepared the Queen a fine chicken curry, daal and fragrant pilau. She considered it ‘excellent’ and decreed that curries should be prepared regularly. Coming out of the dining room one day, she had said to Karim, ‘Speak to me in Hindustani, speak slowly that I may understand it, as I wish to learn.’ She had soon acquired a special scarlet morocco notebook from the royal stationers in which she noted down Hindustani phrases, and she and Abdul began to sit down, while he taught her the language. She arranged for him to have an hour’s English lesson each day, so that he could converse with her. He explained to h
er the differences between Hindus and Muslims – he and Buksch were Muslim. He told her about the conflicts between Hindus and Muslims at Agra. By the time the autumn leaves were falling, the Empress of India found that, in the space of a few weeks, she had learned more of India, its languages, religions and customs, than she had known in seventy years of life.22
The Jubilee had demonstrated the huge popularity of the monarchy – in some quarters. It had not done anything to eliminate the differences in society, nor the inequality between rich and poor, nor the intractable problems of Ireland. Ample proof of this was given on 13 November 1887, known forever afterwards as Bloody Sunday. There had been a long depression in trade, the economy was languid, there was unemployment among the dockers, and disgruntlement in the East End which had booed the Queen earlier in the year. A massive demonstration formed in Trafalgar Square to protest against the Government’s Irish policy. William Morris, the designer, poet and artist, was there with his fellow socialists and, as his future biographer, and Burne-Jones’s son-in-law, J. W. Mackail wrote, ‘no one who saw it will ever forget the strange and indeed terrible sight of that grey winter day, the vast, sombre-coloured crowd, the brief but fierce struggle at the corner of the Strand, and the river of steel and scarlet that moved slowly through the dusky swaying masses when two squadrons of the Life Guards were summoned up from Whitehall’.23
The soldiers who a few months before were conducting a little old lady in a bonnet through a pageant of imperialist patriotism, were now turned against the people of London. Alfred Linnell was one of those injured in the fight with police and soldiers, and when he died in hospital a huge public funeral was organized. It became a mass protest ‘against what they described as the autocracy of the police . . . hired murderers in uniform and a ruling class trembling in its shoes’.24
1888 was, for the Germans, the year of the three emperors, or, as they called them, der greise Kaiser, der weise Kaiser und der reise Kaiser: the very old Emperor, the wise Emperor and the gadabout Emperor. This was because, in the very first few months of his reign, Wilhelm II made a visit with his navy to St Petersburg, went to Sweden and Denmark, and then in October passed through Austria, called on the Emperor Franz Josef, en route for visits to the King of Italy and the Pope in Rome.
The spectacle of a young man passing out of his mother’s or grandmother’s control is often to be seen in families. But the gadabout Emperor Willy’s decisive rejection of his parents and their liberal values had immense consequences beyond the family circle of Hohenzollerns and Saxe-Coburgs, vast as that circle now was. Europe was now in a countdown to world war. In February 1888, there was yet another moment when it looked possible that Austria-Hungary and Russia would go to war over Bulgaria. Count Herbert Bismarck – son of old Otto – who had been voted immense sums by the Reichstag to increase the size of the German Army, made a bold diplomatic gesture. He published the secret contents of the Treaty which had been drawn up between Germany and Austria-Hungary after the Congress of Berlin in 1879. He was sabre-rattling, to persuade the Russians, on this occasion, to stand down. But, as Queen Victoria immediately saw, the terms of this treaty were calamitous. They committed Germany, in the event of war, to fight on the Austrian side against Russia. This, combined with the equally calamitous entente cordiale urged on by Bertie a little later in the century (which locked Britain and France into similarly precipitous treaty obligations) was the recipe for universal conflict which caught flame in 1914. On 25 February 1888, the Queen wrote from Buckingham Palace to the Prime Minister that she thought ‘you should remonstrate with Count Bismarck on this rash act which after all will probably end in trouble’.25 How horribly right she was.
The willingness of the Germans and the British to hate one another was manifested by an unseemly wrangle, after Emperor Frederick’s death, between Sir Morell Mackenzie and his German doctors; the case quickly turned into an international incident. Fritz’s death of throat cancer, following a tracheotomy performed by Dr Bramann, was painful in the extreme. The tubes which they inserted into his throat did not fit, and however often they were changed, the discharge was stinking. Astonishingly, the German doctors who performed the operation were not, unlike Mackenzie, laryngologists.
After he died, on 15 June 1888, the doctors, in defiance of every medical code and all royal protocol, went public in their analysis of the case. Mackenzie gave an interview to a Dutch newspaper, in which he blamed the clumsy German surgeons. They responded with a sixty-two-page, black-bordered pamphlet entitled Die Krankheit Kaiser Friedrich des Dritten, in which the toadyism of the English doctor and his raising of false hopes were all spelt out. Mackenzie, not to be outdone, then published The Fatal Illness of Frederick the Noble, which sold 100,000 copies in a fortnight, and simultaneously there appeared an American and a French edition. He also threatened libel proceedings against any publisher who threatened to translate Die Krankheit. Behind the ultimately pointless question of which was the worst doctor on the case, and who was to blame for Emperor Frederick’s horrible death, aged fifty-six, was the cruel suggestion that the Englishwoman – die Engländerin – Vicky had hastened his demise, or even wished it. It was all part of the general pattern of German politics from now onwards. ‘Darling, darling unhappy Child,’ wrote the Queen in Balmoral to the widowed Empress Frederick, ‘I clasp you in my arms and to a heart that bleeds, for this is a double, dreadful grief, a misfortune untold and to the world at large.’ ‘It is too dreadful,’ she wrote in another letter, ‘to think of Willy & Bismarck & Dona being the supreme head of all now! Two so unfit and one so wicked.’26
The character of the new Emperor was partly to blame. In some moods, he was more English than the English, proud to be an admiral of the fleet, and affectionate about his grandmother on the Isle of Wight. On other occasions, the vehemence of his anti-English feelings appeared unbalanced, as when he had a nosebleed, and hoped he was losing every drop of his English blood. If you were English, it was never easy to know which Wilhelm you were going to meet. He could be genial, even humorous in a heavy kind of way. When he visited the British Fleet in the Mediterranean, he came on board a vessel and when he had been shown round, he said to the captain, one John Pipon, ‘You are the only Captain in the British Fleet who has not offered me champagne.’ The following New Year’s Day, Captain Pipon received a postcard signed, ‘With the best wishes of your thirsty friend William R and I’.27 On the other hand, especially when he was dealing with his family, Wilhelm II could be vicious and mischievous. There was never any love lost between him and his uncle Bertie. When Bertie went over to Berlin for Fritz’s funeral, ‘nothing could have been nicer than his manner towards me . . . and we parted the very best of friends.’28 Buoyed by the unusual cordiality of the relations between them, Bertie told his nephew that he was going to be in Vienna at the same time as Wilhelm in September. This letter received no reply, but the British Ambassador in Vienna – now our old friend from Rome, Sir Augustus Paget – was informed by the German Ambassador, Prince Reuss, that Wilhelm would not meet his uncle there, and indeed, ‘preferred his room to his company’.29
It was hard to disentangle the reasons for this calculated insult. Some said that Bertie had been speaking too freely of his belief that Alsace and Lorraine, appropriated by Prussia in the war of 1870, should be returned to France. Others said that Willy had taken offence because his uncle had not written direct to express his wish to meet in Vienna, but had sent the message via a military attaché. Bertie replied that his words had been misrepresented, and that he had never said that Alsace and Lorraine should be given to France. ‘It takes two to make a quarrel! And as I never had one with William in my life, I think I have reason to complain of the treatment which I received, which created a scandal at Vienna, when I was guest of the Emperor of Austria, and everybody imagined I was on bad terms with William, which as far as I was concerned was not the case.’30
Meanwhile, in Queen Victoria’s life, the quiet routines of
the Household continued. In the Jubilee Year, she took on, as well as the two Indian servants, a new Maid of Honour called Marie Adeane, aged twenty-four, the granddaughter of Lord Hardinge, a former lord-in-waiting, and the great-niece and niece of two equerries – Augustus Liddell and Alick Yorke. She was very nervous to begin with, but as she was led up to the Queen by Lady Ely, she met an old lady who ‘kissed me most affectionately on my cheek – and pinned a Maid of Honour badge – a miniature of herself in early days, surrounded by diamonds and mounted on a ribbon bow, the same texture and colour of the Order of the Bath – on my left shoulder’. Marie had the qualifications which were specified – fluency in French and German, ability to play piano duets with Princess Beatrice in the evenings, and with ‘no shadow of any prospective engagement or incipient love affair’.
She quickly discovered the Queen’s energy and appetite. In April 1888, when she and Lady Churchill, ‘half dead with fatigue’, had just arrived at Windsor, they were looking forward to a quiet dinner when, unannounced and unexpected, ‘the Queen arrived at 8.30, looking as fresh as a daisy and not a bit the worse for her long journey; a few minutes later we were summoned to dine with her’. She was immediately struck by how much the Queen enjoyed her food and drink, and promised to get her mother to send cider for Her Majesty to sample. ‘I have never tasted Perry and only cider once or twice in my life. Do you think your Mama would send me some?’
Marie was one of those who witnessed at first hand the grief of the German Empress when she arrived at Windsor in November – ‘it was too sad for words, she came with the Queen and the Prince of Wales and walked into the hall quite slowly, all draped in crape, and her face quite invisible but I could see her trembling with grief and agitation, she shook hands with all of us, and kissed Ethel and Lady Ely, but never spoke a word. Then she pulled herself together and shook hands with each of the gentlemen before going upstairs.’31
