Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  Some years later, in 1889, Daisy wrote Beresford an impassioned letter, begging him to return to her. In this letter, she represented his wife’s pregnancy as a betrayal of herself, she told the story of their love, and she claimed that her children were in fact fathered by him. It was the sort of letter which almost begged to be read by the man’s wife. Mina Beresford did indeed read it, and was appalled. She was also frightened that Daisy would be successful in persuading Lord Charles to resume his relations with her.

  Clearly, the two women were heading for the most sensational public spat. It was time to call for that know-all, and manager of Victorian society secrets, George Lewis. This legendary solicitor (he would act for Bertie in the Tranby Croft case) had a finger in every pie, and knew everybody’s secrets – a little like Mr Tulkinghorn in Dickens’s Bleak House.

  Bertie now entered the story. He had joined the queue of roués who were in love with Daisy, and her plight wrung his heart. In an unmarked cab, he visited George Lewis at 2 am, rousing him from his bed and begging him to destroy the letter which Daisy had so ill-advisedly written to Lord Charles. He then, a few days later, and more brazenly, called at the Beresford house, 100 Eaton Square, and asked them to show him the letter. Lord Charles upbraided the prince for ‘a most dishonourable and blackguard action’ in referring to the letter. He castigated Lewis for his ‘sycophantic servility’ in breaking a client’s confidence by discussing the letter with Bertie.20

  Charles Beresford rejoined HMS Undaunted, and was expected to be at sea for several months. Anyone who hoped that matters would die down in his absence was disappointed. His wife, and her sister Mrs Gerald Paget, wrote a spoof novelette of pamphlet length entitled Lady River about the Babbling Brooke. Not only did it reveal her amorous propensities, it actually quoted from the letter which Bertie had been so anxious to suppress, and it revealed her new position as the prince’s mâitresse en titre. The pamphlet was soon being copied and handed round London drawing rooms, where guests, amid splutters of laughter, would be treated to readings after dinner.

  As the annus horribilis of 1891 drew to a close, the Queen and the Prime Minister were directly involved with the affair. Lady Charles Beresford actually wrote to the Queen repeating a stipulation which she had already laid down to Bertie: that Daisy should be sent to live abroad for a year, as a quid pro quo for the return of her incriminating letter. ‘My sister will not stop till she is exposed,’ she warned. ‘We can get rid of her with a scandal: those in authority can do without one.’21

  After negotiations which involved Lord Salisbury, the Queen, Sir Schomberg McDonnell, Salisbury’s secretary, and the two royal Private Secretaries, Francis Knollys and Henry Ponsonby, the letter was returned to Lady Brooke, and the society gossips found other things to chatter and giggle about. The stench of scandal was, nevertheless, overpowering, and, as Salisbury told the Queen that Christmas, ‘The Prince and Princess of Wales are in terror that the whole row will crop up again, and I am afraid that Lady Charles Beresford won’t remain quiet.’ That was Salisbury. And, in a sentence which was so very highly revealing, Ponsonby replied, ‘my path is clear at this moment. To prevent the Royal Family from rushing into any course without Lord Salisbury’s advice.’22

  But the horrors were not yet complete, and misery was to be brought not by scandal but by two other tragedies. In the same letter in which he was still agonizing about the Beresford affair, Ponsonby wrote from Osborne to the Prime Minister, ‘There was a shoot in the covers yesterday. Four of the princes went out. Prince Christian was not shooting – only looking on, but close to his son who was shooting. A pheasant flying low came near him. The Duke of Connaught killed the pheasant but two of his pellets struck Prince Christian. One in the eye through the middle of it. We telegraphed to Lawson. But he said Eye must be taken out – and he took it out this morning. I believe we don’t say it was the Duke of Connaught but everyone knows – and he’s wretched about it.’23

  This unpleasant episode was quite enough to cast a blight over the royal Christmas holiday, but worse was to follow. On the last day of the year, Queen Victoria’s nephew Victor – son of her sister Feodore – died at St James’s Palace – dear good honest Victor, who was only fifty-eight.

  The one good piece of royal news that month had been the announcement, at the beginning of December, of Eddy’s engagement to Princess May of Teck, the niece of the Queen’s peppery old cousin the Duke of Cambridge.

  George Cambridge’s sister Mary Adelaide, May’s mother, was a woman of extraordinary proportions. In 1857, when she was twenty-four, the American Minister to the Court of St James’s had noted that Princess Mary Adelaide was a ‘very fat, very thick set and very proud young lady’.24 Later in life, Lord Cranborne (son of the Prime Minister) noted, when going on an expedition to see an Alpine glacier in the company of the princess, ‘Of course, qua Royalty, she goes first, and where she can go, we may safely follow; neither is there any danger because no crevasse is large enough to swallow her up.’25 Fond as she was of clothes and jewellery, and easy as it was in those days to swathe a female form in expensive stuffs from neck to toe, the obesity did pose problems when it came to finding her a husband. Even when she was seventeen, old King Leopold of the Belgians had been shocked by how she had ‘grown out of all Compass’. Although she had hoped to marry a British peer, the Queen preferred the idea of ‘some German Kammerherr or young officer! It wd. really be the best thing.’26 They had eventually lighted upon Prince Franz of Teck, son of the morganatic marriage of Duke Alexander of Würrtemberg, with the Hungarian Countess Rhédey de Kis-Rhéde. Queen Victoria dismissed all worries about the pair not being ebenbürtig – of equal status. Such things did not matter in Britain. The pair had four children, of whom Princess May was the only daughter. (Her brothers were Dolly – Adolphus – Francis and George.) Their father had an ‘almost feminine’ delight in interior decoration, which would be inherited by May.

  The family grew up in Kensington Palace, where they survived on Princess Mary Adelaide’s modest parliamentary annual emolument of £5,000. ‘Fat Mary’, as she was ungallantly known at Court, was an accomplished player on the Queen’s good will, and Victoria found it hard to refuse, when confronted with open requests. She had to retrench in writing. ‘The Duchess of Teck may have a carriage tomorrow,’ the Queen had written as late as 1888 to Ponsonby, ‘but Sir Henry must make it very clear it must not be asked for again.’27 The Tecks were familiar figures at public functions, Drawing Rooms or Courts, he pencil thin and dark and trim, she ever-billowing, and, when she sat, often crunching, for she kept about her person a packet of Abernethy biscuits lest hunger overcame her between meals.

  While she ate and swelled, and Duke Franz elegantly arranged cushions and rehung paintings in his exquisite interiors, Princess May had grown up to be a rather stiff but pretty girl, devoted to good works. The chief drama of her adolescence consisted in keeping the peace between Princess Mary Adelaide and her lady-in-waiting, Lady Geraldine Somerset, who hated Fat Mary, and was still painfully and unrequitedly in love with the brother, the Duke of Cambridge, who was morganatically married to an actress named Mrs Fairbrother and who had a succession of mistresses.

  The Cambridges were very much poor relations, but Queen Victoria had always got on well with George. Although all her biographers stress Victoria’s need, in marrying the virtuous Prince Albert, to escape the dissipations and clumsiness of her ‘wicked uncles’, there was always a distinctly Hanoverian side to her. George Cambridge was a throwback to the world of William IV and George IV, to a lack of stiffness and a lack of side which was always part of Victoria’s character also. Though anxious for Princess May’s brothers to join the Würrtemberg army,28 a marriage between Eddy and May would keep things in the family at home. It also had the added advantage of annoying the Germans. Willy, now an open hate-object to his mother Vicky, had rather taken to Princess May of Teck, noting her beauty and charm. He had been pleased when
his wife’s brother, Ernst Gunther, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, had previously proposed to May. Vicky was triumphant when he met with a refusal: ‘I am much amused that Dona turned up her nose at the idea of her charming brother thinking of May, whereas I know it as a fact that he made démarches to obtain her hand wh. May refused at once!’29

  This hugely increased May’s value in the marriage market. After initial fears that May was a superficial person – oberflächlich, some people had called her – Queen Victoria came to think she would make an ideal future Queen of England – for that, in choosing a wife for Eddy, was what they were selecting. ‘I think she is a superior girl – quiet & reserved till you know her very well, – but she is the reverse of oberflächlich. She has no frivolous tastes, has been very carefully brought up & is well informed and always occupied.’30

  The obvious hope was that this elegant young woman, much given to visiting soup kitchens and hospitals, would find some occupation for the feckless, chain-smoking Eddy, and somehow raise the sordid tone which hovered over the Prince of Wales’s family and household. She seemed to be fond of him, as was Queen Victoria, but they were in a minority at Court, Randall Davidson, for example, being wearied by Eddy’s ‘readiness to talk at a moment’s notice on any and every subject, and the inanity of his voluble platitudes gave one a painful notion of the encouragement he must usually meet with if he is led to chatter so sententiously’.31

  In January 1892, that family assembled at Sandringham for a shooting party to celebrate Eddy’s twenty-eighth birthday. It was bleak weather. The Princess of Wales and Princess May both had heavy colds, and many in the household actually had influenza. On 7 January, the day before his birthday, Prince Eddy felt ill while out shooting, and when his temperature soared, he went to bed in his little bedroom off a sombre, cold corridor – a room so small that when he lay in the bed by the window, he could stretch out and touch the mantelpiece. Princess May sat beside him. The next day, his birthday, he got up and tottered downstairs to look at his birthday presents, but he felt too ill for the entertainments which his parents had kindly, and rather childishly, arranged – a ventriloquist and a banjo-player. The next day, he developed inflammation of the lungs and the doctors recognized incipient pneumonia. By 13 January, he was delirious, yelling out ‘Hélène, Hélène!’ and talking wildly of Lord Randolph Churchill and Lord Salisbury and how much he loved his grandmother, the Queen. At 9.35 on the morning of 14 January, he died.

  Even today, a visitor to the Albert Memorial Chapel at Windsor will feel a sense of shock when surveying Sir Alfred Gilbert’s beautiful carved effigy of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale on his tomb, a figure in Hussars’ uniform, unambiguously young and dead. Eddy’s death was universally shocking, perhaps the more so because it came after so many scandals. In East Anglia, a ballad was circulated, and sung to the tune of ‘God Bless the Prince of Wales’. For many years after Eddy’s death, it was sung in pubs and at village gatherings:

  Alas, his soul it has departed,

  How solemn came the news,

  His parents broken hearted,

  Their darling son to lose.

  With sympathy and feeling,

  We one and all should say,

  God rest his soul in silence,

  And bless the Princess May!32

  As must often be the case in a dysfunctional family, the tragedy exacerbated feelings of alienation and anger between Queen Victoria and the stricken Bertie. ‘The poor Parents, it’s too dreadful for them to think of! & the poor young Bride!’ she wrote to Ponsonby. Princess May responded fulsomely to the Queen’s letter of condolence: ‘How too dear & touching of you in the midst of your sorrow to write to poor little me.’33

  Bertie begged his mother not to attend the funeral at Windsor because of the cold weather, and illness. Victoria took offence. ‘I have read your letter which has distressed me very much. You have stopped my going . . . I feel quite ill at not going. Everybody expects me to go.’34 Bertie responded with, ‘Your telegram has deeply pained us as you have misunderstood the motive which urges us to beg you not to undertake a journey for so painful a ceremony on account of incurring considerable risk while this illness is flying about.’

  Princess Beatrice and Princess Helena attended the funeral on behalf of their mother. The Prince and Princess of Wales received telegrams at a rate of 1,000 per day.35

  Lord Salisbury’s second administration, from 1886 to 1892, was one which had seen no major foreign war and comparatively easy diplomatic relations with the ‘usual suspects’ – Russia, Turkey, Germany. His hostility to Irish nationalism won him few friends in Ireland or America, but, as an exercise in holding the pass, it was successful. No socialist could have applauded Bloody Sunday, and many people must have considered that the manner in which a peaceful demonstration in Trafalgar Square was put down by armed mounted soldiers was, to say the least, draconian. There was a major London dock strike in 1889, led by the Irish-born Ben Tillett, which threatened the entire economy of the greatest commercial port in the world; both sides were so adamant that the dockers themselves came close to starvation, and the dispute was only solved through the patient mediating skills of Cardinal Manning. It was not surprising that within a year of Salisbury leaving office, the Independent Labour Party had been formed.

  But neither Salisbury nor the Queen were under any illusions about the need for any Government, even one as benignly intentioned as theirs, to put down its opponents, at home or abroad, with violence where necessary.

  Purging the mind of any sentimental illusions about the Salisbury Government of 1886–92, it is yet possible to see it as the most perfect example of the Victorian constitutional monarchy in action. Salisbury revered Queen Victoria, but he knew how to manage her. Though their relationship lacked any of the girlish excitement which animated her relationship with Disraeli, it was both a friendship and a near-perfect working relationship. When you read the correspondence between this pair, who were at the apex of the world’s richest and most powerful Empire, it is like watching a mighty, well-oiled machine in motion. Of course, there were tensions – whose journey with the Queen was there which lacked potholes and interruptions? She was everlastingly on the cadge for more funds – for children and grandchildren; and even for Lord Salisbury, she felt she could get away with a minimalist public programme of engagements. But it was a machine which worked.

  From the moment he took office as Secretary of State for India in the late 1870s, Salisbury had mastered the technique of asking her advice on trivial matters while he pursued his larger policies. He recognized how passionately the Queen, in common with most royal personages, was obsessed by honours, titles, medals and uniforms. The question of whether British officers should wear medals bestowed upon them by foreign potentates, and upon what occasions such lacked tact or dignity, could keep the old lady going for weeks. And there was also the simple question of who should receive knighthoods, baronetcies, deaneries, bishoprics and the many other baubles in her gift. A particularly comic instance of this – which actually occurred during Salisbury’s brief first period of office – was the awarding of a knighthood to Chubb the locksmith. Ponsonby complained, ‘Sir Chubb is the locksmith. I presume he was knighted for his Politics or Philanthropy and not for his locks – Hart the Queen’s locksmith is furious, and sneers at Chubb’s philanthropy.’36

  So they happily worked together, the aristocratic Prime Minister and the Queen Empress. By the time of the General Election, in the summer of 1892, Salisbury had become as invaluable to the Queen in her old age as a sage and trustworthy personal adviser, as had Melbourne been to her in her youth.

  The most dramatic episode, in this phase of the unfolding Irish tragedy, was undoubtedly the divorce of Mrs O’Shea from Captain O’Shea. Quite unknown to the political classes, let alone the public, Charles Parnell, the leader of the Irish Home Rulers, had been living with Mrs O’Shea since 1880. She was long estranged f
rom her husband, a spendthrift officer in the Hussars. In 1889, Mrs O’Shea inherited a fortune from an aunt, and O’Shea wanted a share of it. He sued for divorce, citing Parnell as the co-respondent. The Catholic Church in Ireland and the Northern Nonconformists who formed so sturdy a part of Gladstone’s Liberal power base were alike scandalized. Home Rule was made an even remoter possibility. ‘You cannot remain Parnellite and remain Catholic,’ one Meath priest told his congregation.37 Parnell defied public opinion and married Katherine O’Shea, but it was a short-lived marriage. Having addressed a political meeting in the rain at Kilkenny in September 1891, he became ill, returned to England and died in Brighton on 6 October. Another death which had its effect on the fortunes of the Liberals was that of the 7th Duke of Devonshire. His heir, Harty Tarty, left the Commons and took his seat in the Lords. He was succeeded as Liberal Leader in the Commons by Joseph Chamberlain, a figure even more violently Unionist than he. Hartington himself, before he became 8th duke, had already appeared on a platform in Liverpool with Salisbury, defending the Union, thereby scuppering any chances of a reconciliation between Liberal Home Rulers and Liberal Unionists. With all this in the background, it was in some ways surprising that the Conservatives lost the election in August 1892. The Queen was dismayed by the results: 268 Conservatives, with 272 Liberals and 45 Liberal Unionists, 81 Irish Nationalists and, for the first time in history, 2 Independent Labour MPs, Keir Hardie and J. W. Burns.