Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  In fact, it was Lady Churchill who would die first. The Queen was weak throughout Christmas, and, most uncharacteristically, had almost no appetite, often taking only a little whisky in her milk (or milk in her whisky). On Christmas Day, Dr Reid came to tell her that Lady Churchill, who had been a lady of the bedchamber since 1854, had died of heart failure during her sleep. The Queen took the news quite calmly. Four days later, to broth, Benger’s Food and warm milk, she was able to add ‘a little cold beef, which is the first I have had for weeks and I really enjoyed it!’6

  The death of Lady Churchill, and appalling weather, did little for the Queen’s spirits. She was well enough on New Year’s Day, 1901, to go with her son Arthur, Duke of Connaught, and her granddaughter Thora7 to visit convalescent soldiers in a nursing home nearby. Tiny Lord Roberts, his arm still in a sling, eventually arrived. It was forty-two years since he had been one of the first recipients, at her hands, of the Victoria Cross. She now invested him as a Knight of the Garter, and told him that she intended him to have an earldom. But when he returned for another audience on 15 January, the Queen had taken a turn for the worse. She was confused in her mind. The next day, she took to her bed. Reid noted that the right side of her face appeared to be partially paralysed. He also noted that it was the first time in twenty years as her personal physician that he had seen her in her bed. She had clearly suffered a stroke, and for the next week, as she stayed in bed and became weaker, the family began to make its way to the Isle of Wight to take their leave. Among them was Willy, who, although virtually estranged from his mother, was devoted to his grandmother, and determined to speak with her before she died.

  By 26 January, the Queen, now blind and semi-conscious, was only just able to swallow. The three daughters – Lenchen, Louise and Beatrice – knelt at her side, telling her who was coming and going: Randall Davidson reading the prayers for the dying; the doctors – Reid, Powell, Barlow; various ladies-in-waiting. Reid administered oxygen.

  Reid also whispered to the Prince of Wales, ‘Would it not be well to tell her that her grandson the Emperor is here too?’8 Bertie decided not. ‘It would excite her too much.’ His sisters had been right to keep the fact from dear Mama that the hated Willy was in the room.

  Wilhelm was, however, her grandson, and the son of her beloved firstborn. He had been standing next to her bedside all day, without telling the Queen that he was there, and without remonstrating with his uncles and aunts for their possessive behaviour. Inevitably, during a protracted death, there are breaks in the proceedings, when the onlookers obey calls of nature, and when maids and nurses attend to the bedding. Later in the morning, Reid went up to the Emperor and told him he was going to take him to the bedside when no one else was there. Wilhelm asked Dr Reid, ‘Did you notice this morning that everybody’s name in the room was mentioned to her except mine?’

  There was a phase later in the day when, for about three hours, the Queen was alone with maids and nurses. During this time, she awoke and asked for the Vicar of Whippingham, Mr Smith, to be brought to her. While this was being arranged, Dr Reid went to ask the Prince of Wales’s permission to take the German Emperor to see his grandmother. At last, Bertie relented. When Reid told the Queen that Wilhelm was there, she smiled, through her hazy dream, and said, ‘The Emperor is very kind.’

  By 4 pm, Reid gave his verdict to the family – ‘The Queen is sinking.’ Emperor Wilhelm had remained throughout this period. The Queen opened her eyes and said, ‘Sir James, I am very ill.’ The doctor assured her she would soon be better. She turned her eyes towards the picture of the Entombment of Christ which hung over the chimneypiece. Her pulse remained steady, regular. As the end approached, Reid moved her into a sitting position. The German Emperor knelt on the opposite side of the bed. Scotland and Germany, the two lands in which this most English of monarchs felt most at home, clasped her in her final breath. She died at 6.30 pm, supported by the arms of James Reid and her grandson Willy. Vicky, the Dowager Empress, had been too ill to be present. She lay in Schloss Friedrichshof in Kronberg, dying of cancer, learning Greek verbs: modern Greek, since she was vainly hoping to visit her daughter Sophie, Crown Princess of Greece, in Athens. She died in August that year. She too, like her mother and namesake, gave strict instructions about her laying out. The corpse of this German Empress was to be stripped naked and wrapped in the Union Jack, and buried according to the rites of the Church of England.

  Queen Victoria’s body had never been seen by her doctors. They were forbidden, in her lifetime, even to touch her with a stethoscope, an instrument from which she felt a peculiar aversion. Dr Reid was astounded to see, as he prepared the Queen for her last journey to Windsor, that she had had a ventral hernia and a prolapse of the uterus. It is not uncommon, especially for a woman who bore nine children, but it must have been in the highest degree uncomfortable, and there is no way of knowing at this distance of history how long she endured the condition.9

  The elaborate instructions regarding her coffin arrangements were followed to the letter, the doctor and dresser filling the casket with the required collection of votive offerings and souvenirs before the lid was sealed. Of course, the family knew nothing of what the coffin contained. This was in itself emblematic: there was so much of the Queen’s inner life which would always remain a mystery to her children. Reid placed a bunch of flowers in the Queen’s hand to conceal the photograph of John Brown which it was clutching, and then he allowed her children to come to pay their respects. The Prince of Wales generously let the Munshi come in to say goodbye. Then the lid was put on, and screwed down. The box which contained Victoria, her childhood memories, her loves and passions, the inner consciousness of which she had an artist’s awareness, and an almost novelistic skill at recording in her journals, was now hidden away. What was being borne from the Isle of Wight to the mainland was the Queen Empress, the Emblem of Empire, the Crowned Head of a beleaguered nation still at war.

  The coffin was taken to Trinity Pier and borne across the Solent in the Royal Yacht Alberta, followed by King Edward VII, aboard Victoria and Albert. The Emperor Wilhelm followed in his imperial yacht, wearing the uniform of an English admiral. As they approached the ships of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth Harbour, they were also dwarfed by the gigantic German battleships which had accompanied the Emperor. Throughout the voyage, guns thundered their salute. The sea was choppy. Mist had cleared from the morning, and as the Alberta came within the shadow of Nelson’s Victory, the sun was beginning to set in a glorious blaze.

  Next morning, the coffin continued its journey to London by train. People knelt beside the railway track10 as they saw the train pass. When she reached the capital of her Empire, the Queen was, rather typically, just passing through. Not for her an elaborate State Funeral at Westminster Abbey. Londoners could merely see the procession of a woman changing trains – a coffin being borne from Victoria11 to Paddington Station. As befitted the head of the army, and the daughter of a soldier, she had ordered that it should be a military funeral, and that it should be white, not black. The coffin was placed on a gun carriage at the station and accompanied by eight cream horses. The coffin was covered with a white pall, with the Imperial State Crown, Orbs, Sceptre and Collar of the Garter upon it. She was followed by the King of England, and by his brothers, all in uniform, by the German Emperor, by King George I of the Hellenes, by King Carlos of Portugal, King Leopold II of Belgium, by the crown princes of Germany, Romania, Greece, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Siam, by the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary (whose assassination thirteen years later would precipitate the outbreak of world war), by the Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, and by the Duke of Aosta.

  At the Queen Empress’s request, hangings from the London windows were not black, but purple, tied with white satin bows. The music was not Handel’s funeral march, but Chopin, Beethoven and Highland laments. The music was far from continuous, and what struck many observers was the silence of the capital
as the coffin passed by. An Empire was almost numb with surprise. Only the very old could remember a time when there had been no Queen Victoria.

  Another gun carriage was waiting at the station in Windsor. Here the horses were frisky, kicking and plunging so violently that they managed to break their harness. The front of the procession had already set off and reached Windsor High Street. Admiral Sir Michael Culne-Seymour, meanwhile, back in the station forecourt, was shouting, ‘My boys will soon put things right.’ Fritz Ponsonby obtained the King’s permission to unharness the gun carriage, and have it dragged up the hill by the Blue Jackets. Sir Arthur Bigge exploded with rage and said he was ‘ruining the ceremony’.12 The gun carriage was, however, manhandled up the slope to the steps of St George’s Chapel. The Duke of Cambridge, whose views of this muddle can be very readily imagined, shuffled along behind on the arm of his son Adolphus. More or less a full complement of the Royal Family were present, except for the Duke of York – the future King – who was suffering from measles.

  The late Queen would have been delighted by the sub-arctic temperature of St George’s Chapel. After a short service, her coffin was taken to the Albert Memorial Chapel, where it remained, surrounded by the recumbent effigies of the Prince Consort, of Prince Leopold and of Prince Eddy. Officers of the Grenadiers and the Life Guards shared the honour of standing guard, four at a time, one at each corner of the coffin, for two days and two nights. As they changed the guard, the senior member of the old guard would say, ‘I commit to you the charge of the body of her late Majesty Queen Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India, together with the Regalia of the British Empire.’

  On Monday afternoon, the coffin – which everyone could now see was very small, like that of a child – set off on its last journey to Frogmore, where the final part of the burial service from the Book of Common Prayer was read. Above the door of the shrine, the Queen had had inscribed, in 1862, the words, ‘Farewell most beloved! Here at last, will I rest with thee; with thee in Christ I will rise again’.13 Of the mourners, the two most visibly affected were the Princess of Wales – our future Queen Mary – and the sixteen-year-old Duke of Albany, Charlie – Prince Leopold’s son. His was to be perhaps the strangest destiny of all the grandchildren of the Queen. An Old Etonian who had grown up at Claremont, he became the Herzog Karl Eduard when still a teenager. He did sterling work for the Red Cross, and magnificently restored the Veste, the old castle at Coburg where Luther had taken refuge during the religious wars. A German patriot, he fought against his grandmother’s family in the First World War, and in the 1920s was a supporter of the right against the tide of republicanism and communism. Fatefully, he became an Obergruppenführer in the SA, perhaps the only Old Etonian so to do.14

  All these strange things lay in the future as Charlie dabbed his sixteen-year-old eyes at Frogmore, and as the other mourners came outside the afternoon air was flecked with light snow.

  Before he went home, the German Emperor was given a dinner at Marlborough House in London by his uncle the King. In his speech of thanks, Willy, that divided personality, had left his Prussian militarist self in his luggage with his swords and helmet. He spoke with the conciliatory vision of his grandfather Prince Albert. ‘We ought to form an Anglo-German alliance,’ he said. ‘You to keep the seas while we would be responsible for the land; with such an alliance, not a mouse could stir in Europe without our permission, and nations would, in time, come to see the necessity of reducing their armaments.’15

  The fates heard his words and mocked. With the kindliest and most peaceable of intentions, his uncle Edward VII urged his politicians not merely to promote an entente cordiale with France, but to forge alliances from which, in the end, there appeared to be no escape; so it was that when, within less than fourteen years of Queen Victoria’s funeral, the Russians and the Austrians went to war, nearly all the nations represented at her funeral were drawn, on different sides, into the self-destructive inferno.

  A different, a new, a post-Victorian world was coming into being, as the snow fell upon the locked mausoleum. The Boer War was brought to an end. Edward VII defied all his parents’ worst fears and, for his short reign, became a popular King.

  For him, and for his surviving siblings, the sheer strength of Queen Victoria’s personality was almost overwhelming. He closed Osborne House. Half of it became the Royal Naval College for young cadets, and the other half, a convalescent home for retired officers. In the years after his mother’s death, he did his best to gather up as much written evidence as he could in order to destroy it. The correspondence with Disraeli was brought over from Hughenden, and heavily pruned. Her letters to Dr Profeit concerning John Brown were eventually tracked down and destroyed. ‘Baby’, aka Princess Beatrice, busily set to work ‘copying’ dear Mama’s journals and censoring as she went. Within days of his mother’s death, Bertie, with his pot hat on his head and his wiry long-haired white fox terrier, Caesar, at his heels, strode around the rooms at Windsor Castle, and at Buckingham Palace, destroying as he went. ‘Alas,’ Queen Alexandra wrote to the dying Empress Frederick, ‘during my absence, Bertie has had all Beloved Mama’s rooms dismantled and all her precious things removed.’16 Busts and statues of John Brown were smashed. (His statue at Balmoral was removed to a remote corner of the estate.) The papers of the Munshi were burned. All the relics of the Prince Consort were sent to Windsor Castle. In rooms where smoking had always been strictly forbidden, the bronchitic King coughed and blew cigar smoke. ‘I don’t know about A-rr-t but I think I know something about Arr-angement,’17 he said in his guttural German voice, as he rehung pictures, and heaped framed photographs into bins.

  He could not, however, remove her from the one place where she caused him the most torment – the inside of his head. Edward VII’s iconoclasm could destroy a few shreds of evidence, and he had it in his power to ‘re-aRRange’ some rooms. Victoria herself, however, would not go away. She remains a figure of extraordinary vividness. Those who had lived in the later part of her reign tried to articulate the paradox, from Kipling’s bitter ‘Widow of Windsor’ poem, to many a more sentimental tribute. The frisson, the paradox, was to be found in the contrast, between the ‘funny little woman’ in a bonnet, who appeared to do next to nothing, and the mighty Empire whose hub and, in a sense, controller she was.

  There were many during her lifetime, just as there have been many since, who took it upon themselves to expound the secrets of a successful constitutional monarchy. Victoria confounded, and confounds, most of these wiseacres, by actually doing extraordinarily little, and by entertaining views of the monarchy which were sometimes ‘sensible’ and Whiggish, and sometimes as capricious as W. S. Gilbert’s Mikado. Whether the system helped to save her or she the system is probably an unanswerable question. Her fascination increases, rather than diminishes, with the passing of the years. This is partly, when we view her funeral procession, because constitutional monarchy is so obviously a system to be preferred to the ones adopted in many of the countries over which her unfortunate descendants tried, vainly, to exercise jurisdiction. As Europe discarded its monarchies and moved through the 1920s and ’30s, the refugees tended to be moving from communist Russia and Nazi Germany towards monarchist London, and not the other way around.

  So Victoria as the great defender and womb of European monarchies remains of perennial interest. It would not be so extraordinarily fascinating, however, were it not for the fascination of the Queen Empress herself. Those who visited her in the latter decades of her life might have made pleasantries about her, smiled at the vehemence of her opinions, observed her vacillations between well-grounded common sense and sheer caprice. In her presence, however, they felt something like awe. Anyone who has tried to write about her develops this sense too. It is something quite other than sentimental deference to royalty for its own sake. Almost none of the crowned heads who followed her coffin through the streets of Windsor could inspire it. The awe is
for Queen Victoria the woman. Step over the carpet to that plump little figure who sits at her table, state papers or a Hindustani grammar open in front of her, the Munshi or Princess Beatrice at her side. You are approaching someone of great kindliness, someone of a far sharper intelligence than you would quite have guessed, and someone who – contrary to the most tedious of all the clichés about her – was easily amused. But you are also, if you have your wits about you, more than a little afraid. You are in the presence of greatness.

  1. One of Thomas Sully’s portraits of the young Queen Victoria ascending her throne, 1838.

  2. Victoria and Albert in their thirties. Already the bloom of Albert’s youth has faded, while she retains her girlishness.

  3. Queen Victoria reading with four of her grandchildren, Prince Albert Victor of Wales (Eddy) (1864–1892), Princess Victoria of Hesse (1863–1950), Prince George, later King George V (1865–1936), and Princess Elizabeth of Hesse (1864–1918).

  4. Queen Victoria’s mother, Victoria, Duchess of Kent, with Prince Alfred and Princess Alice.

  5. Miniature of William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne (1779–1848) by William Charles Bell. ‘The best-hearted, kindest, and most feeling man in the world.’