Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  The Jameson Raid left many South Africans, on both sides, with the impression that the matter would not end there; that a war between the British and the Boers was now inevitable. What gave the issue an even more dangerous international colouring was the reaction of the German Emperor. Chamberlain went through the motions of denouncing the raid; but he must surely have been in on the plot beforehand. He must have said, in effect, to Rhodes – if it succeeds, the Jameson Raid is a British triumph; if it fails, it is Rhodes’s and Jameson’s disaster. Wilhelm II raised the temperature of the whole affair by sending Kruger a very public telegram: ‘I sincerely congratulate you that, without appealing for the help of friendly Powers, you with your people, by your own energy against the armed hordes which, as disturbers of the peace broke into your country, have succeeded in re-establishing peace and maintaining the independence of your country against attacks from without.’2

  Wilhelm sent this telegram having held a Council of State with his Chancellor, Foreign Minister and three others, as that Foreign Minister, Marschall von Biberstein, admitted, a quarter of a century afterwards.3

  Queen Victoria had by now become a complete jingoist. Cecil Rhodes was received at Court as a great hero. When the Empress Eugénie met him at dinner with Queen Victoria in 1894, she was agog to converse with him, but could scarcely get near, so eager were the English royalties to monopolize him.4 The Queen, in this fever of imperialism, was therefore happy to receive that republican radical Joseph Chamberlain, her Colonial Secretary, at Osborne House and considered him ‘very interesting in all he told me about the Transvaal, and is very firm and sensible’.5 Fritz Ponsonby was amused to see Joe, with his slicked-back, pomaded hair, his monocle and his winged collar, ‘talking earnestly and deferentially to the Queen, when I remembered the firebrand he had been’.6

  Rhodes was clearly guilty. He resigned his premiership of the Cape. Rhodes’s brother and four others involved in the raid were put on trial in the Transvaal and condemned to death. The world now saw Britain as a buccaneer race who had colluded in the raid. ‘Dr Jim’, as Jameson was nicknamed, was brought back to London for trial and served fifteen months in Holloway Prison. He returned to South Africa, and later in life became a privy councillor and a baronet; as Premier of the Cape he was one of the key figures in the unification of South Africa. It was often said that Kipling wrote his poem ‘If’ as a celebration of Dr Jim’s character, and even if that were not true, it is surely revealing that anyone said it at all: it shows Jameson’s standing in the eyes of the British public.

  Beatrice Webb was one of the founders of the Labour Party, of the London School of Economics and of the New Statesman. Admittedly, she was biased by a passionate and unrequited love for Joseph Chamberlain, but she was not far from the truth when she wrote in her diary, ‘Joe Chamberlain is today the National Hero . . . In these troubled times, with every nation secretly disliking us, it is a comfortable thought that we have a government of strong resolute men, not given either to bluster or vacillation, but prompt in taking every measure to keep us out of a war and to make us successful should we be forced into it.’7

  If Queen Victoria’s eyes were upon the Transvaal at this time, they were also on West Africa. It was here, on what was known as the Gold Coast, in Ashanti, that a very different type of British imperialism was on display from the swashbuckling antics of Cecil Rhodes and Dr Jameson. In the strange way in which quite disparate events coalesce, the crippling dullness of the Queen’s daily life and the violent doings of some West African tyrant kings conjoined to produce a Victorian family tragedy.

  By now, the tiny household at Balmoral and at Osborne was locked in routines of a quite numbing tedium. Marie Mallet, maid of honour, wrote to her mother from Balmoral in November 1896, ‘our life is as monotonous as possible and were it not for the little jokes amongst ourselves, we should expire from dullness’.8 General Sir Michael Biddulph, when groom-in-waiting, frequently got upbraided by his monarch for not being able to think of sufficient synonyms for ‘went for a drive in a carriage’, when composing the Court Circular. Sometimes she was accompanied by Princess Beatrice and her children, the golden-haired Ena, one day to become Queen of Spain, and the eldest, Alexander, who resembled Little Lord Fauntleroy.9 The truth was, she did the same thing every day. She breakfasted at ten, then she went for a drive in a carriage. She lunched at two, then she went for a drive in a carriage or her little pony chair. ‘It was a great crime,’ Fritz Ponsonby remembered, ‘to meet her in the grounds when she was out in her pony chair, and of course we all took very good care that this should never happen. If by any unlucky chance we did come across her, we hid in the bushes.’ As the younger Ponsonby made clear, this was not just applicable to the equerries and junior courtiers. Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt, while walking with old Sir Henry Ponsonby, considered taking cover on such an occasion, but since he was over six feet four inches in height, the two distinguished gentlemen turned back on their walk, rather than committing the solecism of meeting the Queen.10 The dinners were usually attended by very few people. ‘A great deal... depended on what mood the Queen was in; when she was rather preoccupied and silent, dinner was a dismal affair, but when she was inclined to talk and interpose with witty remarks, it went with a swing. Once an earnest clergyman described what he had seen in the East End of London, and by way of showing how overcrowded the houses were, said that in one house he visited, he found that seven people slept in one bed. The Queen dryly remarked, “Had I been one of them I would have slept on the floor”.’11 Usually a tiny number would assemble at dinner and if an abrasive character such as the Empress Frederick was not present to check the Queen’s assertions, they would sit politely while she displayed what the cleverer present considered her ‘deplorable’ literary taste. ‘On the subject of Marie Corelli, the Queen said she would rank as one of the greatest writers of the time, while the Empress thought her writings were trash.’12 Sometimes, the equerries were allowed off and the Queen simply dined with Princess Beatrice and her husband.

  The strain on Liko’s patience was immense. This extremely energetic, handsome and perfectly intelligent man, aged thirty-seven, had nothing to do. It was at this point that troubles in West Africa came to a head.

  King Prempeh of Ashanti had seized power after a bloody civil war. His ‘election’ as monarch was endorsed by the British-controlled Gold Coast Government. But no one pretended that Prempeh was a model of Prince Albert-style constitutional monarchy. Human sacrifices were commonplace, and raids were made on neighbouring tribespeople to replenish Prempeh’s supply of slaves, in which he did swift and ruthless trade. The Ashanti people came to the Gold Coast administrators and begged the British to intervene. At first they refused, but the situation was so extreme that the case for intervention became overwhelming. An ultimatum was issued to Prempeh, which he ignored. And it was then that an expeditionary force, under the command of Colonel Francis Scott, was formed. It consisted of the 2nd Yorkshire regiment, a special service corps made up of several British regiments from the United Kingdom, the 2nd West India regiment and some African soldiers from the Gold Coast and Hausa.

  On 11 November, Lord Wolseley asked the Queen’s permission for Prince Christian Victor, son of Princess Helena and Prince Christian Victor of Schleswig-Holstein, to join the expedition, and the Queen granted the request. Christian had been given a modern education, by the royal standards of the time; he had attended Wellington (where he captained the XI), Sandhurst and Magdalen College, Oxford, and he became an officer in the 60th King’s Royal Rifles, doing active service in India. (‘We are going to punish some frontier tribes who have been firing on and robbing British subjects,’ he wrote excitedly, aged twenty-three, to his grandmother the Queen, from Rawalpindi in 1891, ‘it will be rather a novel experience for me to see shots exchanged in reality, but I must say I am looking forward to it immensely.’13)

  When he reached the West African coast, Christian Victor wrote
to Queen Victoria, ‘I can’t imagine how people live here; there is nothing to do.’14 His uncle Liko, who had often suffered from the same failure of imagination on the Isle of Wight, was now in danger of some kind of marital trouble in London. Whether it was an affair, or whether, as his son the Marquess of Carisbrooke later said, he was being ‘pursued by a woman’,15 Liko felt it would be a good thing to get out of England, and he asked Victoria’s permission to join the Ashanti expedition. She answered firmly that it would ‘never do’. But, in spite of trying to get Sir James Reid to pronounce that the West African climate would not suit him – and how right she was – the Queen eventually yielded to Princess Beatrice’s plea that Liko ‘smarted under his enforced inactivity, and this was about the only occasion which presented no difficulties, as he would go as a volunteer without usurping anyone’s place’.16

  On 6 December, he knelt before the Queen and kissed her hand, and the next day he boarded a troop train at Aldershot. The Royal Family at home entered that ominous week of the year which would culminate on the dreaded 14 December, anniversary of the deaths of the Prince Consort and of Princess Alice. On that date in 1895, however, Princess May went into labour at York Cottage, Sandringham, and gave birth to a boy, who was named Albert, and later became George VI.

  On Christmas Day, two troop ships, the Coromandel and the Manilla, arrived at Cape Coast Castle – the latter boat containing Prince Henry – Liko. The previous day, Major Pigott, of Prince Christian Victor’s regiment, had been shooting in the bush and secured a good bag which ‘swelled the menu very opportunely’ when they ate their delayed Christmas dinner. Next day, accompanied by 1,000 bearers, the expedition made its way inland towards Jakuma and Akroful. Commanding the native levies was a Major R. S. S. Baden-Powell – later to be famous in the South African war, and as founder of the Scout movement. As they proceeded, two of the African kings sent their submission to the British without fighting. The heat and humidity were oppressive – as Christian Victor wrote to his colonel from the swamps, ‘the climate here is beastly’. Baden-Powell, with his native forces, marched through thick jungle to Bekwai, which cut off King Prempeh, who, with his Queen-mother, immediately sought palaver with the British. This was not granted until they reached Kumasi.

  If the Jameson Raid and the attitudes of Rhodes represent the British Empire at its most questionable, the march of Sir Francis Scott and such men as Baden-Powell surely showed the British at their patient best, as a peacekeeping force. Not a shot was fired, and the appalling violence and tyranny of King Prempeh was replaced by a much more humane and better organized colonial regime.

  The cost, in the first stage of the enterprise, was the health of those Europeans who had exposed themselves to the swamps. At Prahsu, Liko’s camp commandant Major Ferguson died of swamp fever, and a few days later, Prince Henry was himself overcome by malaria. Prince Christian Victor reached Kumasi, which Liko did not, and he there also succumbed to fever. He was ill for three days and recovered. His uncle, Prince Henry, however, was less lucky. He was put aboard HMS Blonde, and it was hoped he would reach England alive. He died on 20 January. The cable between Bathurst and Accra had broken down, and it was only on 22 January that the news reached Osborne, and the Queen poured out sorrow into her journal: ‘Our dearly loved Liko has been taken from us! Can I write it? He was so much better, and we were anxiously awaiting the news of his arrival at Madeira. What will become of my poor child [Beatrice]? All she said, in a trembling voice, was, “The life is gone out of me.” She went back to her room with Louischen [Duchess of Connaught] who as well as dear Arthur, has been most tender to her.’17

  Since he had died on board ship, and no adequate funerary arrangements were in place, a makeshift tank was constructed out of biscuit tins, and when the body was placed into it, the metal casket was filled up with rum. Some fool told his children, who had nightmares for months afterwards. It was a miserable time. Princess Louise arrived and terribly upset her sister by calmly announcing that Liko had always been her confidant and that Beatrice was ‘nothing to him’. Louise’s husband, Lord Lorne, after his stint in Canada where his Governor-Generalship had been less than successful, was now a Unionist MP for South Manchester. The couple saw less and less of one another, and she was a ‘loose cannon’. Her deliberately bitchy remark to her sister was no doubt prompted by the fact that, only five weeks before, Beatrice had persuaded the Queen to summon Randall Davidson to ‘talk to’ Louise about her embarrassing closeness, not to Liko, but to Sir Arthur Bigge – now the Queen’s private secretary.18 Meanwhile, at Sandringham, there was the awkward question of whether to go ahead with the christening of the new baby.

  The burial took place on 5 February, an icy day, at Whippingham Parish Church, where they had been married. In the darkening afternoon, the relentless drive still had to take place, and Lady Leila Erroll was lady-in-waiting at the Queen’s side. The Queen was slumped in morose silence. Lady Erroll tried to say that we should all meet our loved ones in Heaven. The Queen answered monosyllabically, ‘Yes.’ Warming to her theme, Lady Erroll added, ‘We will all meet in Abraham’s bosom.’ The Queen snapped back, ‘I will not meet Abraham.’ In her journal that evening, the Queen wrote, ‘Dear Leila, not at all consolatory in moments of trouble.’19

  Probably the most important item on the domestic political agenda that year was the Education Bill – which was eventually dropped because the Liberals threatened to filibuster it. The Bill was intended to improve the general condition of education, and to remove some of the abuses in the system left by the original 1870 Act. Instead of the elementary schools being under the control of local boards (some of which were of Dickensian ineptitude), it proposed a centralized system in which school inspectors could guarantee the quality of local schools throughout the kingdoms. Most crucially, the new Bill intended to give strength and encouragement to the Nonconformist schools – the so-called Voluntary schools. It was in some ways strange, given this fact, that the Liberals, who were supported by so many Nonconformists, should have opposed the Bill. The reason was that Asquith, who led the opposition in debate, was primarily a secularist, and he hoped to drive a wedge between the Churchmen and the Nonconformists in the House. In fact, as the Bishop of London said, ‘in 1870, the State cut itself off altogether from religious instruction in its schools; it would not recognise the subject, it would not inspect the children in their knowledge of it’.This was all very much in accordance with that great schools inspector (and poet) Matthew Arnold’s ‘liberalism’, that is agnosticism. ‘In 1896,’ went on the bishop, ‘the State comes forward to declare by Act of Parliament that it abandons this neutral attitude, that it recognises the right of the parent to decide the religious teaching which his child shall receive.’20 The Queen was very much of this view also, and when the Government decided to drop the matter she wrote in the first person – very unusual in official communications with Prime Ministers and always a sign of extreme strength of feeling – ‘I cannot refrain from expressing my deep regret at the Cabinet’s decision to drop the Education Bill.’21

  In the same session of Parliament, the Conservatives repealed the Red Flag regulations relating to the newfangled automobiles. In 1896, Parliament decreed it was now possible for drivers of the new contraptions to do so without a pedestrian parading in front of them with a warning scarlet banner. Thus it was that Victoria, who had been born in the Pickwickian age of stagecoaches and seen the birth and growth of the railways, should have lived to see motor travel recognized in English law. In the same year, 1896, Karl Benz built his first car.

  Many of these parliamentary events were chronicled to the Queen not by the Prime Minister, but by his languid tall, nephew, First Lord of the Treasury Arthur Balfour. (The ease with which he found political promotion – and he succeeded his uncle Robert Salisbury as Prime Minister – gave rise to the expression ‘Bob’s Your Uncle’.) A fascinating figure, Balfour, who wrote one of the best works of religious philosophy in En
glish – The Foundations of Belief (1895) – was much liked by the Queen. He was probably one of the first, if not the first, politicians to cycle in London. One aspect of his character dismayed her, however – his fondness for golf. One Sunday afternoon at Osborne, he was planning a round of golf: a foursome with the Duke of York (later George V), Sir Arthur Bigge and Ponsonby junior. The Queen sent for Balfour to discuss some political matter after luncheon and then asked him what he was about to do. Balfour replied that he was going for a walk. Unfortunately, she then sent for the Duke of York and asked him the same question – in the case of the honest sailor-prince, eliciting a completely truthful answer. ‘The Queen was much amused at catching him out, as she expressed it, “telling a fib”.’22

  The death of Archbishop Benson23 precipitated the inevitable fall of episcopal dominoes: for if Bishop X was translated to Canterbury, his see had in turn to be filled with Bishop Y, and nearly all the senior appointments in the Church were filled by translation, rather than by the consecration of a candidate not yet a bishop. The Queen would have liked Davidson either to fill Benson’s role at Canterbury, or to fill the role of Bishop of London – for it was London’s Dr Temple who was eventually sent to Lambeth Palace. Lord Salisbury had been minded to promote the Bishop of Peterborough, Mandell Creighton, to Canterbury. He was undoubtedly the cleverest and wittiest bishop on the bench. (His Life of Queen Elizabeth remains a classic.) But there were too many things against him from the Queen’s point of view. He was distinctly High, and he was rumoured to be something of a lady’s man. ‘His manner is not good,’ admitted Salisbury.24 The Queen was against promoting Dr Temple: ‘His age is far too advanced to undertake such an arduous post; and his eyesight is most defective, he can hardly see anything below him.’25 She urged Salisbury to promote her favourite Davidson, the forty-eight-year-old Bishop of Winchester. (She had chosen Davidson as Bishop of Rochester in 1891, and he was translated to Winchester in ’95.)