Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  As destiny was to ordain, however, Edward White Benson was one of the many people of his time who died before the Queen. Though he was ten years her junior, he would expire aged sixty-seven during Morning Prayer at Hawarden Parish Church, in the company of the Gladstones, while the congregation was reciting the Lord’s Prayer, on 11 October 1896.2 Although, ever since the Golden Jubilee, the Queen’s subjects had been haunted by the sense of an Ending – of their century, of their Queen, of their age – she lived a vigorous existence during the 1890s, albeit one in which she was frail, her eyesight became poor, and her stout frame became so obese that by the end of the decade she could hardly walk. And she continued to speak an unreformed Regency English. In Osborne, on Christmas Day 1891, she asked Sir Henry Ponsonby, ‘Why the blazes don’t Mr Macdonnell telegraph here the results of the election? He used to do so and now he don’t.’3 If William IV had lived in the age of the telegraph, it is just the sort of question, with ‘don’t’ for ‘doesn’t’, and the blunt ‘why the blazes’ which he would have asked. One sees here how much she had in common with her cousin the Duke of Cambridge, who likewise appeared in many ways to be a pre-Victorian. During a drought, he went to church and the parson prayed for rain. The duke involuntarily exclaimed, ‘Oh God! My dear man, how can you expect rain with wind in the east?’ When the chaplain, later in the service, said, ‘Let us pray,’ the duke replied, ‘By all means.’4

  While Benson planned her funeral, the unwitting Queen, still very much alive, was extending her house on the Isle of Wight. Osborne House, designed by Prince Albert, was an airy, Italianate conception, having corridors adorned with classical statues, with cool spaces, with room on the walls for his exquisite collection of Trecento masters. Since the death of her aesthete husband, Victoria had managed to clutter all the interiors, crowding the tables with photographs in frames and plaster casts of her children and grandchildren’s limbs. (Lord Rosebery once said that he thought the drawing room at Osborne the ugliest in the world until he saw the drawing room at Balmoral.5) But now her new interest in India must find architectural expression, so the Durbar Room was added to the house, a whole new wing in which Moghul-style plasterwork and arches festooned the great chamber. The design was that of Bhai Ram Singh, with the assistance of the director of the Lahore Museum, Lockwood Kipling, father of Rudyard. The carpet, like the Munshi, came from Agra. The Queen’s Indian tastes were decidedly Moghul, and Punjabi in locality.

  A Durbar is a court (the word comes from the Persian darbar), and at Osborne, Queen Victoria was embodying in plasterwork what Lord Beaconsfield had engineered in politics, a claim to British dominion of India and, by implication, the world. It was an extraordinary imaginative and political journey for the only child of Kensington Palace, with her dolls and her lonely German mother, to have made. A strange journey, too, for Britain. When Victoria was born, the King was the man who had lost the American colonies. When the time came for her bishops to enact the obsequies written out by Archbishop Benson, Victoria would be handing to her successor a global imperial sway.

  The 1890 Durbar at Delhi, with its great procession of elephants through the Mori Gate, though it has perhaps been overshadowed in memory by such pageants as the 1911 Coronation Durbar, which we can see in film, must, nevertheless, have been a stupendous affair, and it gave this unambiguous message to the Indians: the British, the new Moghuls, are here to stay.

  It was a message which both was and was not absorbed – as is starkly revealed in just one journal entry made by the Queen during one of her visits to the South of France, in March 1891. ‘Received bad news from India, of a revolt at Manipur. The Commissioner from Assam, on his way there, was attacked & forced to retreat.’ But then, on the very same day, she received a visit from the man who had called upon all 250 million of his fellow Indians to rise up against their Empress.

  Louise came to luncheon, after which I saw, in the small drawing-room below, the poor misguided Maharajah Duleep Singh, who had asked to see me, having some months ago humbly begged forgiveness for his faults & rebellion. He is nearly paralysed down his left side. He was in European clothes, with nothing on his head, & when I gave him my hand, he kissed it, & said, ‘Pray excuse my kneeling’. His second son Frederick, who has a very amiable countenance, came over from Nice with him. I made the poor broken down Maharajah take a seat & almost immediately afterwards he broke into a most violent fit of weeping. I took & stroked his hand & he became calm & said, ‘Pray excuse me & forgive my grievous faults,’ to which I replied, ‘That is all forgiven & past.’ He complained of his health, & said he was a poor broken down man. After a few minutes’ talk about his sons & daughters, I wished him goodbye & went upstairs again, very thankful that this painful interview was well over.6

  No pain could be felt, by the Queen at least, in the presence of the Munshi, and nor could he be described as broken: indeed, with each promotion and increase in salary, he became plumper and more self-satisfied. In the spring, he developed a carbuncle on his neck, and the Queen kept up a steady flow of letters to Dr Reid: ‘The Queen is much troubled about her excellent Abdul, who is so invaluable to her, and who has hitherto been so strong and well. She trusts Dr Reid is not anxious about him? He has always been so strong and well that she feels troubled at the swelling.’7 Not content to leave the Munshi in the doctor’s capable hands, the Queen visited him in his bedroom, which raised a few eyebrows. ‘Queen visiting Abdul twice daily,’ noted her doctor testily, ‘in his room taking Hindustani lessons, signing her boxes, examining his neck, smoothing his pillows, etc.’ No one suspected the Munshi, as they had evidently suspected John Brown, of impropriety with the Queen, but they were made anxious by so glaring a departure from the conventional. Queen Victoria was oblivious to conventions when it suited her, and she was besotted with her favourite. To Vicky, she gushed about the portrait of the Munshi which she had commissioned by the Austrian artist Heinrich von Angeli: the artist ‘was so struck with his handsome face and colouring that he is going to paint him on a gold ground’.8

  Fully aware that her children and courtiers would not treat Abdul kindly when she herself left the scene, Victoria determined to provide for him, and wrote to the Viceroy of India commanding him to give ‘a grant of land to her really exemplary and excellent young Munshi, Hafiz Abdul Karim, who is quite a confidential servant – (and she does not mean in the literal sense, for he is not a servant) – and most useful to her with papers, letters, books, etc.’9 Lord Lansdowne was uneasy about the request, since there was no precedent for such a grant being given to an Indian attendant. Land grants were normally only given in recognition of long military service. Then, some old soldier might be given land yielding a rent of, say, 300 rupees a year. Since he was often on tour, covering vast distances, the viceroy did not put the grant of land to the Munshi high on his list of tasks, but his sovereign did not allow him to forget it, and throughout that summer she sent a regular stream of letters and telegrams, insisting that the Munshi be given land yielding at least 600 rupees. Land was eventually found in the suburbs of Agra, and she also made it plain to Lord Cross, the Indian Secretary in the Cabinet, that the Munshi must be recognized officially as the Queen’s Indian Secretary. It was a remarkable rise for a man still in his twenties, and who had only been hired so short a while previously as a waiter.

  The Munshi was not the only young man on the Queen’s mind. She wanted to make Prince Albert Victor (Eddy), now aged twenty-six, a peer, but the difficulty was in the choice of a title. In considering the possibilities, she found the spirits of her ‘wicked uncles’ rising up to haunt her, like the ghosts in some Shakespearean play. York she ‘positively refuses’. ‘She would rather not Kent.’ ‘She would like Rothsey, but the Prince of Wales says no. And Gloucester raises shadows of Silly Billy.’ In the end, the family agreed on Clarence and Avondale. ‘Avondale is Scotch – George I was I believe Baron Avondale.’10

  It was to be assumed that Eddy, the eldest son
of the Prince of Wales, would one day become the King of England. His upbringing had not been without struggle – on behalf of his tutors and minders. Effort was not something he had ever demonstrated himself. Privately educated, he found difficulty with most academic subjects. Able to speak a little Danish (his mother’s language), he was barely competent in French or German. He joined the 10th Hussars, but his army career was completely unsuccessful. They promoted him as far as major, and then his coevals began to be promoted above him, which caused embarrassment but no surprise. Indeed, the Prince of Wales thought Eddy’s remaining in the army was ‘simply a waste of time – & he has not that knowledge even of Military subjects which he ought to possess. His education & future has been a matter of some considerable anxiety for us & the difficulty in rousing him is very great.’11

  Eddy was every bit as scandal-prone as his father. The old Queen complained to Vicky about Eddy’s ‘dissipations’, causing Knollys, the Prince of Wales’s private secretary, to exclaim to Ponsonby, ‘I ask who is it tells the Queen these things?’12 A good question, but the Queen was always a very accomplished collector of family gossip, and there was not much which passed her by.

  In July 1889, the Metropolitan Police had raided a homosexual brothel in Cleveland Street, and the rent boys had given them the names of various illustrious clients, including an equerry of the Prince of Wales called Lord Arthur Somerset. Arthur Newton, the somewhat sleazy solicitor employed by Somerset, hinted to investigators that if too much heat were put upon his client, he would reveal the name of an even more illustrious customer at the Cleveland Street establishment: P.A.V. (namely, Prince Albert Victor). There was never any firm evidence that Eddy was bisexual, let alone homosexual, but he was the sort of man to whom scandalous stories stuck like burrs. (In 1962, upon no evidence whatsoever, it was even claimed that he was Jack the Ripper.)

  Eddy’s emotional life on the surface took a more conventional pattern, with a succession of unsuccessful pursuits of women. He fell in love with Alicky, the sixth child of Princess Alice, but hers was to be a stranger destiny: to be Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna of All the Russias, who would die in the cellar at Ekaterinburg. The Queen told Arthur Balfour that, apart from Alicky and Princess May of Teck, there were only three Protestant princesses in Europe who were suitable, and they were ‘all three ugly, unhealthy and idiotic’.13

  Eddy, with his instinct for the unsuitable, promptly fell in love, not with a Protestant, but with Princess Hélène of Orléans, daughter of the Count of Paris. Salisbury was horrified, and told the Queen that marriage to a Frenchwoman, even if she were to renounce her religion, would be highly unpopular with the British public. Because this seemed to be a genuine love match, however, it caught the fancy of the Queen, and when they went in person to plead with the old lady at Balmoral, she was almost tempted to accede to the match.

  Almost, but not quite. She told Alix ‘how troubled and agitated’ she felt about the pair. Probably, if it had not been for Lord Salisbury, the Queen might have been tempted to let them marry. She promised that she would not give up hope ‘and will do what I can’. As she told Alix, with whom she felt ever closer bonds,

  I fear you greatly understate the difficulties and obstacles which are manifold. By changing her religion only to be able to marry him, she will be furiously attacked and may be tormented by the Roman Catholics and may be mistrusted by the Protestants, for the English and the Scotch think Roman Catholics (foolishly I admit) quite wicked and I fear they will be very angry. Then politically it might become very serious and involve the country in quarrels with France. If that foolish brother of hers were to make some attempt again [to become King of France] and fail, and came here and she were possibly Princess of Wales or even Queen and he went to her, it might involve England in war . . .14

  It was a sad situation, since the Queen was, as she said, ‘deeply’ fond of Eddy, and liked Hélène ‘so much’ when she met her. Hélène, for her part, was genuinely in love. ‘Je l’aimais tant,’ she told the Queen later, when Fate had dealt its hand with full cruelty, ‘et j’ai peut-être été imprudente mais je n’ai pas pu faire autrement, je l’aimais tant’.15(‘I loved him so much, and perhaps I was unwise but I could not have done otherwise, I loved him so much.’)

  As well as being warned off marriage by the politicians, the lovebirds were forbidden to marry by Pope Leo XIII, and a new bride had to be found for Eddy.

  1891–2 was an annus horribilis for the Queen. Even the usually enjoyable jaunt to the Riviera was blighted. From the Grand Hotel in Grasse, Ponsonby wrote to the Prime Minister,

  In this ‘health’ resort, we stand thus:

  Pss. Beatrice Cough and cold

  Pce Henry Measles

  Lady Churchil Cough

  Miss Adeane Swelled face

  Sir H Ponsonby Cough

  Major Bigge Cold

  Worse was to follow. Four days later, the Queen’s housemaid developed blood poisoning, having pricked herself accidentally with a needle. Dr Reid called in Dr Frank of Cannes and Dr Vidal of Grasse, and to everyone’s horror they pronounced the poisoning to be incurable. The woman died. Then the Queen caught the cold which everyone else was suffering, ‘but denies it. However she has lost her voice and it is very hoarse.’16

  When they came home, it was to the seemingly unending cycle of scandal in which the Prince of Wales found himself. In September 1890, Bertie had been staying at Tranby Croft, the Yorkshire house of a shipowner called Sir Arthur Wilson. After dinner, the men played baccarat and a well-known clubman called Sir William Gordon-Cumming of the Scots Guards raised his stake having surreptitiously peeped at his cards. Five of the players saw him do this, and they decided, when the game was complete, to make him sign a statement promising that he would never play cards again. They in turn were sworn to secrecy to preserve his good name. Bertie was not one of the signatories, but he was a member of the party. Rumours hovered that it had in fact been Bertie who cheated at cards, and that Gordon-Cumming was covering for him. It was a puzzling affair, and as Bertie’s biographer Jane Ridley suggests, it is superficially surprising that Bertie sided with his nouveaux-riches hosts and friends against an old Scottish family, the Gordon-Cummings. One possible motivation is that Bertie was angry with Gordon-Cumming, who had won £225 off him on an earlier evening, and had the temerity to be found in the arms of the prince’s favourite mistress, Daisy Brooke.17

  Daisy was not present at the Tranby Croft party. With her husband, she was attending the funeral of her stepfather, Lord Rosslyn, but when Bertie met up with her again, he spilled the beans about the card cheat. Not for nothing was Daisy known as the ‘Babbling Brooke’. Within weeks, le tout Londres was gossiping about it. To preserve his good name, Gordon-Cumming brought an action for slander against the Wilson family. Bertie was to be summoned as a witness.

  The Court was thrown into panic, and attempted damage-limitation. Would it not be possible to pre-empt a court case by having a secret military tribunal to establish the truth of what had happened at Tranby Croft? Would Gordon-Cumming’s colonel-in-chief – none other than Bertie’s brother Arthur, Duke of Connaught – not be able to put pressure on the man? The answer to both these questions was ‘No’. Prince Arthur refused to intervene. ‘Being the prince’s brother it was more than ever incumbent on me not to allow myself to be used in a way that might cause the world to think that Cumming was to be sacrificed to the prince.’18 Gordon-Cumming himself resigned from the army, so that scotched the idea of a military tribunal. The case was heard in public, on 1–2 June 1891. The solicitor general, Sir Edward Clarke, represented Gordon-Cumming, and he made mincemeat of the witnesses against him. One of them, Sir Edward Lycett Green, broke down altogether and admitted he could not remember the details of the baccarat game. As he won the case for his client, Clarke did not let the Prince of Wales off lightly. ‘There is a strong and subtle influence of royalty, a personal influence which has adorn
ed our history with chivalrous deeds; and has perplexed the historian with unknightly and dishonouring deeds done by men of character.’19

  It could not have been worse publicity, not merely for the prince, but for the entire Royal Family: a Tory solicitor general, exposing the sleazy world in which Bertie moved, with its new-money house parties and its casual sexual mores.

  Far worse than the Tranby Croft incident was the public exposure of Bertie’s adulteries with Daisy Brooke. Some years earlier, Daisy had been in love with one of the Prince of Wales’s equerries, Lord Charles Beresford. (One of his brothers, Lord Marcus, was Bertie’s stud manager.) Though she had married Francis Greville, Lord Brooke (heir to the earldom of Warwick), when she was twenty, she had quickly tired of him and had many admirers, including Lord Randolph Churchill, Lord Blandford and Sir William Gordon-Cumming. Her passion for Charlie Beresford was something more serious. The pair were separated by his naval career. (He was the captain of HMS Undaunted, and it was his naval brigade which was sent, too late, to rescue General Gordon in 1882.) By 1886, Charlie’s passion had died down and he had returned to his wife.