I, Victoria

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  9th August 1900

  THERE WAS no doubt that the revolution in France made us nervous; we had the victims living under our noses, and in those days the memory of 1793 haunted every sovereign’s darkest thoughts. Albert was very much cast down by the whole thing, and I grew quite worried about him, but it was not until early April that the danger of our own situation really came home to me. From the middle of March I was too much preoccupied with childbirth to think about anything else, in any case. The new baby – our sixth – was born on the 18th of March; another girl, a large baby who gave me a very bad time. But I was growing used to the business now, and, as Albert said to comfort me, we had been very lucky in six pregnancies to produce six live, healthy babies. It would have been the outside of enough to have had all that labour for a stillbirth, or a child that lived only a few days, which was the experience of so many women.

  (We named the new baby Louise, after Albert’s adored and lost mother. She has turned out the handsomest of our children, the most vivacious and the most artistic – she is a very fine sculptress – but she has a sharp tongue and a ‘difficult’ personality. In fact, she has a reputation for being a mischief-maker: Ponsonby – Sir Henry, that is, not Fritz – once said, ‘Princess Louise plays old Harry with every household and person she touches.’ But she has not had the easiest of lives, poor thing. When she was sixteen she almost died of tubercular meningitis, which we have since learned causes infertility, and I fear that may have been at the bottom of the unhappiness of her marriage. She and Lorne simply couldn’t get on together, although I have always said that as long as they keep up appearances in public, I accept their right to spend their time apart. Of course, she can’t have been easy to live with – she always was dreadfully contradictory, even as a child – but if what I have heard about Lorne is true, she has had her provocations. But things have been much better between them in the last few years, and I’m happy to see they are rediscovering their common interests, and becoming friends, as husband and wife ought always to be.)

  But to return to my story: on the 3rd of April 1848 I left my confinement, and was able to have breakfast with Albert again in our dear old way. No breakfast egg ever tasted so good as that first one after each baby, when I sat opposite my husband again, and had him smile at me across the table.

  ‘Oh, this is good!’ I said. ‘I feel as though I had been in prison. I can quite see why they call it confinement!’

  ‘It is a prison for me to be without you,’ he said. ‘But the new baby is very handsome. She has the most remarkably white skin. Perhaps she will be as beautiful as my mother was.’

  ‘She is bound to be something extraordinary, born into such stirring times,’ I said.

  He gave me a quizzical look. ‘I wonder if you know how stirring? The Chartists are all stirred up by events in Paris, and there have been parades and meetings almost every day in various parts of London.’

  I frowned. ‘But it will not come to anything, surely? It is just a few troublemakers. They have no real support amongst the ordinary people.’

  ‘I don’t wish to alarm you, my love, but it is more than that. The organisation of these people is amazing. They have secret signals, and spies everywhere, and they correspond from town to town by means of carrier pigeons. There is no knowing how many of them there really are, but they have the support of the Irish Nationalists, who are always looking for a revolution—’

  ‘Revolution?’ I cried, not knowing whether to laugh or be afraid. Was he joking me?

  But he looked serious. ‘The troubles all over Europe have repressed trade, and Europe is our market. With no-one buying our goods, there are thousands out of work and starving. They are the tinder only waiting for the spark.’

  I put down my egg-spoon in dismay. My lovely white Dorking egg was suddenly Dead Sea fruit. ‘Have I been living on the moon?’ I said. ‘I did not think things were so bad – just little disturbances, nothing really to worry about.’

  ‘It was natural for you to be otherwise preoccupied.’ He hesitated. ‘I have to confess to you that I am very worried. I believe we are in danger.’

  Well, I had seen he was worried ever since the news first came from France, and it had puzzled me that he was so much more alarmed than I saw reason for. I think now, with hindsight, that it was a proof of his ‘foreignness’ which I always tried to deny even to myself, but which every now and again revealed itself in a sort of mutual incomprehension between him and the English. In the present instance I think he was afraid because he did not have the instinctive feeling for the people which I have always had, the ability to judge their underlying mood, which often proves more valuable to a monarch than all the intellectual analysis and ratiocination in the world.

  However it was, he was nervous and it communicated itself to me. Later that day it seemed he was not the only one who was worried, for I was asked for a special audience by Russell and the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, and when they were admitted, their expressions were very grave indeed. They had come to tell me that the Chartists were planning a monster meeting in London for the 10th of April – only a week away.

  ‘Their idea, as we understand it so far,’ Russell said, ‘is to have deputations from all the different quarters meet on Kennington Common, and then march to Westminster to present a petition of a million and a half signatures.’

  Albert paled. ‘A million and a half men marching on Parliament?’

  ‘It won’t come to that,’ Russell said quickly. ‘The signatures will have been collected all over the country. But I’ve heard that O’Brien has said there will be half a million at the meeting.’ He shrugged indifferently. ‘I dare say he exaggerates. You know what these Irish are like.’

  ‘You do not seem to be taking this meeting very seriously,’ I said severely. His attitude to Albert sometimes bordered on the disrespectful.

  It was Grey who answered. ‘Oh, we do take it seriously, ma’am, I assure you. But we have been given a week’s warning, and that is everything. It gives us plenty of time to make our arrangements.’

  ‘The meeting must be banned,’ Albert said decisively. ‘It must not be tolerated.’

  I glanced at him, frowning. That was how the trouble in France had begun, with the banning of a meeting.

  Grey said, ‘If you will forgive me, sir, that would only add fuel to the flames – give the leaders ammunition to use against us.’

  ‘You should never have let the leaders out of prison in the first place,’ Albert growled. I loved him when he was defending me! ‘You had them locked up, and you should have kept them locked up.’

  Russell answered almost scornfully. ‘We don’t do things that way here, sir. O’Brien and the rest were imprisoned for public order offences according to the law, and when they had served their sentences they were released according to the law. It has always been my opinion that if these people have real grievances, they have a right to express them; and if they don’t, they will not keep their following. Repressing them only makes them struggle harder; very often these things fizzle out if you don’t inflate their self-consequence by paying too much attention to them.’

  ‘Evidently you do not think this will “fizzle out”, or you would not be here,’ I said.

  ‘Well, no, ma’am,’ Russell said, raising a cool eyebrow. ‘That there will be a monster meeting seems certain. Our business is to contain and control it, not forbid it.’

  ‘There will be no march on Parliament, ma’am,’ Grey said soothingly. ‘That we can and will prevent. There is a law on the Statute Books dating from the seventeenth century which forbids the presentation to Parliament of a petition by more than ten persons, and we shall invoke it.’ (And a very handy law it has proved, too, on several occasions!)

  ‘The law may forbid it, but how will you prevent it?’ I said. ‘Half a million men will not be easy to convince.’

  ‘I assure you it will not be half so many,’ Russell said in his annoyingly lofty way.

  ‘Th
en you should not have mentioned the figure at all,’ I snapped.

  He was impossible to snub. ‘That is the figure the Chartists are mentioning. I merely thought it my duty to keep Your Majesty informed.’

  Grey intervened again. ‘Without wishing unduly to alarm Your Majesty, an event of this sort inevitably attracts mischief-makers, and I think it would be wise to be prepared for the worst.’

  Now I did begin to feel alarmed. ‘Then we must send for the Duke,’ I decreed, and about that there was no argument. In any crisis, England always turned to him.

  Albert walked off with the two ministers, but did not immediately return, and in his absence his fear began to work on me. Half a million Chartists meeting on Kennington Common? A multitude beyond imagining! I saw them in my mind’s eye, brutish, low men, their uncultured minds inflamed by revolutionary language; I saw them marching across the bridge, surrounding Parliament, stones and iron bars ready in their hands, their voices hoarse with animal violence. And Westminster was a notorious slum area, narrow streets of the worst sort of tenements, inhabited by beggars, thieves, prostitutes, murderers, all the dregs of society. Those people would see their chance and seize it, emerge from their rackety hovels like rats surging out of a sewer and overrun the streets, pour like a plague over the houses of the rich nearby, looting, smashing, burning.

  And just up the hill was Buckingham Palace, its walls notoriously easy to climb. They would come pouring through the gardens like the Paris mob through the gardens of the Tuileries; they would swarm into the Palace, tearing down pictures and curtains, smashing windows and looking-glasses, ripping the clothes from our backs as we tried in vain to escape, our helpless children stumbling beside us, sobbing in terror …

  In my own defence, I must say that I had just emerged from a very trying confinement, and my spirits were often low at this point in my recovery. By the time Albert came back, I was in floods of tears and shivering with fear.

  ‘Where have you been?’ I cried. ‘How could you leave me?’

  ‘I was walking in the garden,’ he said. ‘My nerves were a little disordered by the news, and I needed to calm myself.’

  ‘You needed to calm yourself!’ I raved. ‘What about me? What about my nerves? You simply disappear and don’t tell me where you are going, leaving me here all alone, to think about what might happen to me! How can you be so selfish? It’s me the mob will be after, you know, not you! I am the Queen! And what about my poor children? What about my helpless little baby? Not a month old, and torn limb from limb by revolutionaries! Oh, what will become of us?’

  There was more of the same, I’m afraid. When I am in a passion I say anything that comes into my mind, and poor Albert had much to do to quieten me (though perhaps the storm had the advantage for him of taking his mind off his own fears). When I was calmer, he told me that on the way out, Russell and Grey had said that in view of the late events in France, it might be advisable for me and the children to go out of London for a few days.

  ‘They want me to run away?’ I gasped. Such a thing would never have occurred to me.

  ‘Oh, not run, I think,’ he said in his funny, precise way. ‘Just quietly leave, you know, perhaps two days before the meeting, and go down to Osborne. You will be quite safe there with the children, on our own estate, with our own people about you. And it will make the Government’s task easier if they do not have to worry about defending you. Of course, it may all come to nothing, but there is no sense in making things difficult for them—’

  I had quite stopped crying now. My eyes narrowed. ‘You speak of me and the children. What about you?’

  ‘Oh, I stay here, of course,’ he said lightly, as though talking about taking a bath or going early to bed.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘But someone must take care of your interests,’ he said, eyeing me cautiously.

  ‘I have a government to take care of my interests. We go together, or not at all. I will not be separated from you.’

  ‘Now, little Wifey—’ he began, but I cut him off.

  ‘I will not be argued with. I don’t care what happens, we can go or stay, but we will remain together. Good God, do you think I would have a quiet moment at Osborne if you were here? Do you think I would want to be safe if you were in danger?’

  He saw that it was no use, and shrugged, and left it at that. Perhaps he thought that the Duke might side with him and persuade me, but the Duke, when he came to discuss the arrangements with us, was of my opinion. He brought with him Richard Mayne, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police – a very capable, intelligent man whom I liked very much.

  ‘What I think is most important, ma’am,’ said the old soldier, standing with his hands clasped behind him (as I’m told he stood when planning many a military strategy), ‘is to keep the temperature down. I am at one with Russell in that. To have the streets filled with troops would likely provoke more trouble than it prevented. Besides, it would present a very off appearance. We’re not Frenchmen, after all.’

  ‘Our idea, ma’am,’ said Mayne, ‘is to have only police officers on duty, so as to make it appear a purely civil operation. We don’t want a repetition of Peterloo.’

  ‘Quite so, Sir Richard,’ I said, ‘but can your men cope? I understand the numbers involved will be quite extraordinary.’ I had had my moment of wild weeping, and was completely rational again. Great events, in any case, make me calm; it is only trifles that irritate my nerves.

  ‘Special constables, ma’am,’ said Mayne. ‘We mean to enrol as many as we can – a hundred and, fifty thousand if possible. Every gentleman in London will be under oath if I have any say in it.’

  I nodded. ‘Excellent. But is there to be no military presence, Duke?’

  ‘The troops will be there, ma’am, but out of sight until required. I have given my orders, and by the day itself I shall have nine or ten thousand in the capital, including yeomanry and artillery.’ He began to walk about, clearly excited by this return to arms, like an old war-horse scenting gunpowder. ‘The men will be concealed at strategic points about the city, and there will be a detachment inside every government building, with the windows barricaded. Warships will be commandeered, and moored on the Thames with men and artillery on board ready to come ashore if they are needed. And there will be a battery of artillery stationed at every bridge. The man who holds the bridges holds the town – that is one of my aphorisms.’

  I was feeling much more comfortable by now. Somehow one could not be much afraid of anything as long as the Duke was in charge – and the Chartists would know that too, of course.

  ‘The Palace will be well defended,’ he went on. ‘I shall put a battery in the Royal Stables, and a detachment of foot in the gardens, as well as doubling the normal guard. Your Majesty shall not suffer the inconvenience of so much as a broken window.’

  ‘Thank you, Duke,’ I said. ‘But as to my own movements?’

  ‘If Your Majesty pleases, we should like you to leave two days before the meeting, on the 8th. A train will be laid on for half past ten in the morning for Gosport, and the party will consist of Your Majesty, His Royal Highness, the royal children, and your personal suites. No military escort or presence, if you please: we wish it to appear that Your Majesty is merely taking a holiday.’

  ‘But we shall have plenty of constables on duty, ma’am,’ Richard Mayne put in, ‘though I doubt there will be any need of them.’

  ‘You seem to have everything very well arranged,’ I said.

  ‘We shall be prepared, whatever happens,’ the Duke said decisively. ‘Your Majesty may rest assured that nothing will get past me. But to make sure no false reports are spread to alarm or inflame other parts of the kingdom, I propose to seize the telegraph system on the day itself, and all transmissions will be passed through me.’

  I smiled inwardly at that, for the Duke’s reports were renowned for their brevity and lack of emotion. The story has often been told that his first report of victory at Waterloo h
ad been so muted that many had taken it for a defeat!

  When my two brave defenders had gone, Albert came to take me in his arms. I rested my head against his chest and we stood like that for a while, drawing comfort from each other’s nearness.

  ‘I still think it would be easier just to arrest the ringleaders,’ he said at last.

  ‘You can’t arrest them until they’ve done something,’ I said.

  ‘You can,’ he said. ‘You could order it so.’

  ‘No, no, I’m sure they’re right – Russell and the Duke. If we made martyrs of the ringleaders, the ordinary people would never see how worthless they are.’

  ‘But all this trouble – and danger –’

  ‘Even if the ringleaders were arrested, it would not necessarily stop the meeting,’ I pointed out. ‘It might even be worse without them.’ We were silent a while, and then I said, ‘My one comfort is that all this protest is not directed against me.’ But even as I said it, I knew it was false comfort. Revolution, if it came, might not be against Victoria, but it was certainly against the Queen.

  Over the next few days we prepared for our flight, and Albert brought me back reports of the progress of the Duke’s campaign and snippets of news. The great landlords who had houses in London were taking the threat very seriously, and many had brought up men from their estates to defend them. Lord Malmesbury, for instance, had six gamekeepers all armed with double-barrelled shotguns on permanent sentry-duty. As it was April and the middle of the Season, most families had been in residence, and there was a considerable exodus of wives and children down to the country, and cartloads of valuables were being smuggled out under cover of darkness. The troops were being marched in in small detachments and stationed very quietly and out of sight; but the artillery batteries on the bridges could not be hidden of course, and their presence had certainly made Feargus O’Connor nervous, for he stood up in the Lower House to assure his colleagues that no violence was intended and that he would not allow the meeting to take place if he thought any breach of the peace was likely to result. Meanwhile there was an enthusiastic rush of gentlemen to take the oath of the special constable: I suppose since we had been at peace since 1815, they were all eager for the chance to break a few heads in a just cause.