Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  As was now so often the case, because of the wide net of royal intermarriage throughout Europe, it was not merely political: it was a family affair. During the last Jubilee, Sophie, the seventh child of Vicky and Fritz, had met the Crown Prince Constantine of Greece. ‘Is there a chance of Sophie’s marrying Tino of Greece?’44 the Queen had loosely asked a year later, while busily encouraging the match. It had duly taken place, and Sophie, the sister of the man who was now the Emperor – Willy – had married in Athens, with half the crowned heads of Europe present. ‘Tino of Greece’ on his father’s side was the nephew of the King of the Hellenes and, on his mother’s side, of the Tsar of Russia. When Sophie converted to the Orthodox faith, Willy and Dona banished her from Germany forever. ‘Sophie made an awful scene in which she behaved in a simply incredible manner,’ Willy wrote to Queen Victoria, in an attempt to justify himself. But for his grandmother, his behaviour was that of ‘a tyrant and bully’. ‘It is all grievous and sad and if I do not say more about it all it is because I do not wish to add fuel to the flames,’ Victoria wrote.45

  With this familial and political rift ever-widening, there would be too much diplomatic complexity for the uniformed princes of the European dynasties to trit-trot behind the old lady’s landau and be mistaken for Lohengrin. The world was a very different place from that of 1887.

  ‘I feel deeply for the Queen’s anxiety,’ Salisbury told Sir Arthur Bigge.46 It was Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, who came up with the idea that the Diamond Jubilee should be made into a gigantic celebration of British imperial power: that, rather than inviting any European Heads of State, they should parade through the streets of London the different races of the Empire – soldiers from Borneo, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa. Rather than the European powers sitting down and trying to work out a way to avert total calamity, how much easier it was, in Salisbury’s great dictum, to ‘leave ill alone’, and to put on a parade.

  Rather than heeding the sombre mood of the young Kipling’s words, they hired a dud bishop – Bishop Walsham How of Wakefield – to write a Jubilee Hymn, and Sir Arthur Sullivan set it to music. Today, the hymn is forgotten, and How (who died on a fishing holiday in County Mayo a couple of months after the Jubilee) is now remembered only for two things: one, he wrote the popular hymn ‘For All the Saints, who from their Labours Rest’; and two, he was the fool, in 1895, who solemnly ordered a fire to be lit in his grate by a parlourmaid, so that he could burn Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure. Hardy, a parsimonious man, was scandalized that a fire should have been lit in the summer months. If the bishop was going to burn his book, it would surely have been better to wait until the first cold day of autumn.

  Very few people in London, on the day of the Jubilee itself, would have had any of Kipling’s misgivings about the durability of Empire. The Queen came up from Windsor on 21 June 1897, and stayed the night at Buckingham Palace. £250,000 had been spent on London street decorations,47 mingling thousands of tiny gas jets – a novelty when the Queen was young – with the totally newfangled electric light bulbs. In Whitehall, London County Council had erected an immense stand, costing £25,000, which illustrated the material progress of the reign. It was equipped with ladies’ rooms and flush lavatories and telephones. One witness, sitting on the right wing of the stand set up under the National Gallery – to the north end of Trafalgar Square – looked down upon a ‘sea of horses and men, forests of plumes and lances’. As far as you could see, on either side of the enormous stand in Whitehall, ‘it was one mass of galleries and people to the very roofs’.48 The Queen was terrified that there would be a repetition of the disaster which had attended Alicky and Nicky’s Coronation in Moscow, and she sent repeated letters and telegrams to the Home Office. She need not have worried. Although the crowds were immense, there were no calamities.

  At quarter past eleven, the others being seated in their carriages long before, and having preceded me a short distance, I started from the State entrance in an open State landau drawn by eight creams, dear Alix, looking very pretty in lilac, and Lenchen sitting opposite me. I felt a good deal agitated, and had been so all these days, for fear anything might be forgotten or go wrong. Bertie and George C. rode one on each side of the carriage, Arthur (who had charge of the whole military arrangements) a little in the rear. My escort was formed from the 2nd Life Guards and officers of the native Indian regiments, these latter riding immediately in front of my carriage. Guard of Honour of Blue-jackets, the Guards, and the 2nd West Surrey Regiment (Queen’s) were mounted in the Quadrangle and outside the Palace.

  Before leaving I touched an electric button, by which I started a message which was telegraphed throughout the whole Empire. It was the following: ‘From my heart I thank my beloved people, May God bless them!’49

  Such moments in London’s history happen rarely, which is perhaps why they are so powerful. Modern royalty appears publicly much more often than Queen Victoria did, and even then, the effect is extraordinary on the Big Days, such as Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee, or the funeral of her mother Queen Elizabeth. On such occasions, there is a palpable demonstration of union between Monarch and People, in which the politicians and the state functionaries play only an incidental role – even though it is by construction, or evolution, of a relatively benign political system which allows to flourish the almost organic relationship between Crowned Head and populace.

  In the case of Queen Victoria, the intensity of crowd reaction was especially strong, because she made public parade of herself so seldom. The emotional atmosphere was overpowering on that hot, sunny day. The Queen, dressed in grey and black, but smiling and bowing, held a parasol above her and bowed her smiling head to left and right as the landau passed through the streets of London – Constitution Hill, to Hyde Park Corner; then along Piccadilly, down St James’s Street to Pall Mall, past all the clubs, into Trafalgar Square, up the Strand and into Ludgate Hill to St Paul’s. (‘One misses Temple Bar,’50 she noted.) Often, as the landau made its way, the procession stopped, and the crowd sang ‘God Save the Queen’ over and over again. She was now too stout and too arthritic to contemplate moving into the cathedral, let alone negotiate the aisle. She therefore decreed that the Service of Thanksgiving should be held on the cathedral steps while she sat in her landau, while the old favourites – the Te Deum, the Old Hundredth and, yet again, the National Anthem – were sung.

  There followed a gruelling series of events, all of which, however tiring, she seemed to enjoy. On the day after the Jubilee Parade, she went to the swelteringly hot Ball Room in Buckingham Palace to receive loyal addresses from the two Houses of Parliament. The journey to Paddington Station in the afternoon was, once again, through dense crowds – 10,000 elementary schoolchildren had been brought to sit in the stands occupied the previous day by grown-ups, and loyal addresses from London School Boards were presented. Upon arrival at Slough, there were more loyal addresses, with the Lord Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire standing on a special dais, and children from the British Orphan Asylum presenting a bouquet. At the end of the week, there was a garden party at Buckingham Palace; for, although there were no crowned heads attending, London had swarmed with royalties and Russian, Italian and German princes and princesses mingled with the likes of Sir Henry Irving and great musicians such as Albani and Tosti. At Windsor, there were more inspections of colonial troops and police – from Hong Kong, a delegation of the police force; from West Africa, a troop of Houssas [sic] – ‘fine looking men, but very black’.51 Best of all, she liked the Sikhs, ‘very fine, handsome men’, and she was able, with the Indian troops, to exchange words of Hindustani.52 Then, at Windsor, there was a garden party for Members of the House of Commons. In the first week of July, there was a Council at Windsor to swear in the colonial premiers as privy councillors. On 8 July, Mandell Creighton, now the Bishop of London, wrote a memorandum to the Queen about the Jubilee Ceremonies that ‘no ceremonial recorded in hist
ory was ever more impressive, more truly national, or expressed more faithfully sentiments which were deeply and universally felt... The proceedings throughout were charged with strong personal feeling. It was not the grandeur, the dignity, or the display which were impressive: it was the intimacy and the sincerity of the respect and affection towards the Queen which was in the air.’53

  What Creighton wrote was surely true, and it was a tribute to the very distinctive nature of the Queen’s character: this ability, which she had tapped since the publication of her Highland journals, while living the life of a virtual recluse, to communicate with her people. For a busy monarch of the twenty-first century, the round of garden parties following the 1897 Jubilee would read like Business as Usual. For Queen Victoria they were a rarity. One of her biographers, Giles St Aubyn, says that ‘the ensuing fortnight was one of the busiest of Queen Victoria’s life’.54 It is quite a funny sentence, partly because it is probably true. In terms of public engagements, and fulfilling functions which a modern royal personage would take in their stride every single month, this probably was one of the Queen’s busiest fortnights. It is a sentence which also gives the modern reader pause. If you have been reading this book from its beginning, you will have been noticing that this is one of the most remarkable of all the remarkable features of the Queen’s character: the idleness, which in the 1860s and early 1870s drove ministers to despair, and at times appeared to threaten the very existence of the British monarchy.

  It was not, as we have seen, a total idleness, since she kept a gimlet eye on foreign affairs and on domestic politics throughout, even at her lowest moments of despair. But the diurnal tedium of her life, which drove courtiers to distraction, is in itself a very remarkable fact. Apart from being the Queen, she had done so very little. It is one of the things which make her such a completely fascinating figure for a biographer, since she compels us to concentrate upon her, rather than upon her deeds. The tempting thing, when trying to make sense of any human life, whether famous or obscure, is to concentrate upon outward activities. Queen Victoria does not allow us to do that, since, apart from being expert in watercolours and a fairly avid reader of popular fiction, she did not really ‘do’ anything: certainly not in the second half of her life. What a poet of her times once called ‘those years and years of world without event’ made up her drama. So, as well as her life being that of her own times, as must be the case of a monarch in her position, her life was also that of the inner woman, of whom – from the letters and the journals – we have so vivid a sense.

  Meanwhile, all through the summer came yet more signals of mortality. The old Duchess of Atholl – one of the first friends Victoria and Albert had made in Scotland, and later a Mistress of the Robes – had died in May. And in October, Mary Adelaide, Duchess of Teck – Fat Mary – was called to her reward, from White Lodge in Richmond Park, surrounded by a loving family, including her son-in-law the Duke of York, the Princess of Wales and her children. Her husband, the poor Duke of Teck, was present in body, but the mind which had planned the exquisite garden and chosen so many beautiful wallpapers and cushion covers, was now wandering, no one knew where.

  Though her Cambridge parents were buried in the family vault at Kew, Princess Mary Adelaide had often expressed her dread of its damp, and her hope that she would be allowed to repose in the Royal Vaults at St George’s Chapel, Windsor.55 It was for permission that this might happen that the Duchess of York now wrote to the Queen, who was at Balmoral. Of course, the permission was granted, but the intestate demise of her old Cambridge cousin sharpened Queen Victoria’s mind, and she realized that she should leave very detailed instructions for her own burial.

  On 9 December, at Windsor, as the solemn season approached in which Prince Albert’s death was always commemorated, the Queen wrote out instructions, and gave them to Reid, with the command that they were to be carried always, by ‘the one who may be travelling with me’.

  When Michaela Reid – the doctor’s granddaughter-in-law – wrote her excellent account of Queen Victoria’s relationship with her last medical practitioner, and revealed this wish list to the world, the strongest possible pressure was placed upon her by the Queen’s descendants to keep them secret, with, for example, Princess Margaret writing to Lady Reid trying to prevent publication. To those who are obsessed with John Brown, the motive for this unsuccessful blocking-attempt would be a simple one. Among the many and detailed instructions which the Queen gave was that she should be buried with ‘a plain gold wedding-ring which had belonged to the mother of my dear valued servant and friend Brown and was given him by her in ’75 – which he wore for a short time and I have worn constantly since his death – to be on my fingers’.56

  This is indeed a striking request, suggesting that, whatever the nature of her deep devotion to Brown, it was something much more profound than that felt by many old ladies for their servants. Like all the other evidence relating to Brown, however, it is far from definitive, and it certainly does not prove, or disprove, the truth of the strange deathbed confession of Norman Macleod that he had married the pair when Minister at Crathie. For beside the coffined figure, with the ring of old Mrs Brown on her finger, there were to be wedged a whole crateful of mementoes, including ‘the hair of our valued friend Baron Stockmar who died in 1863’, another locket ‘containing the hair of the late Countess Blücker [sic]’, and another ‘containing the hair of my dear friend Lady Augusta Stanley’. Together with ‘a pocket handkerchief of my faithful Brown’ and ‘a coloured profile photograph in a leather case of my faithful friend J. Brown’ was to be ‘some souvenir of my faithful wardrobe maid Annie McDonald to be near me, & anything else which Beatrice should wish to add’.

  Parents who put a certain type of imaginative child to bed find they are unable to do so without adding not merely one favourite teddy bear, but the favourite book, the favourite dog on wheels, the much-needed and half-chewed blanket: so many things crammed into the bedding that it is hard to know where the child will find to sleep. Beatrice and the doctor would have found it very hard to fit the casket out with all the treasures with which the Queen wished to be tucked up – ‘a piece of Balmoral heather, a painted profile photograph of my dearest Husband, always on my dressing table, & a coloured photograph of my dearest Beatrice, & one of her dear husband, and photographs of all my dear children, & their husbands & wives & of my grandchildren in frames’. There was also to be one of Prince Albert’s cloaks, a shawl ‘worked by my dearest daughter Alice’.

  The glorious lack of minimalism about these instructions, the fervent need to carry clutter into the vaults of the Frogmore Mausoleum and, emblematically at least, to take them with her into eternity, shows the extent to which Queen Victoria was a be-er more than a do-er, a contemplative not an active personality. She never ceased to be the solitary child with a hundred dolls, imprisoned not only in her mother’s apartments at Kensington Palace, but also inside her own overpowering psyche. The clutter of trinkets was but the outward and visible sign of the cloud of witnesses she carried in her head – her mother, her husband, her children and her friends.

  Strangely enough, the intensely personal quality of the Jubilee ceremonial, noted by Mandell Creighton, and her secret wishes for her burial tell the same story. She was not an artist or a poet, but she had the poet’s ability to recreate the world on her own terms, to carry it around with her, up to and beyond the grave. Far from alienating her people, in the end, by some weird paradoxical royal magic, it drew them. There remains something not merely fascinating, but loveable about this intensely strong character.

  TWENTY SIX

  ‘THIS ENGLAND’

  WHEN SIR HERBERT Kitchener came to Balmoral in 1896, he did not make a good impression. After dining with the Queen, her Maid of Honour, Marie Mallet, felt that he was

  either a woman hater or a boor, for he would hardly utter to us ladies, in spite of many and tremendous efforts... To the Queen after dinner h
e talked much and showed off some Sudanese trophies he has brought as presents to Her Majesty – chain armour, probably medieval, hammers, spears & a crusader’s sword with the motto “Do not draw me without reason. Do not sheathe me without honour” in old Romanesque [sic] on the blade . . . My own impression of K. is that of a resolute but cruel man, a fine soldier, no doubt, but not one of the type that tempers justice with mercy – he has a low, narrow forehead – very blue eyes & a fine figure.1

  The first stage of the reconquest of the Sudan had been accomplished by Kitchener just before this visit to Balmoral. He went back the following year, with a much bigger army, and with the full backing of the Queen and Parliament – and with the backing of Salisbury, who had hitherto been sceptical about the wisdom of burdening Britain with the government of the Sudan. Having been converted, Salisbury was determined to make its conquest quite unambiguous, and at the end of 1897, he instructed Major J. R. L. Macdonald to advance northward along the White Nile from Uganda with a force of Sudanese askaris, while Kitchener came down from the north-west. By 1898, the army of the Khalifah, against whom Kitchener had now been fighting for over two years, on and off, had still not been overcome. With 7,500 British and 12,500 Egyptian troops and a flotilla of gunboats transported by the Nile, Kitchener now advanced upon the Khalifah, and confronted him on the plains of Omdurman. He had the Maxim gun: the first machine gun, pioneered in Britain in the mid-1880s and used with great effect in colonial wars since that time – for example, by Lugard in subduing Buganda.