Sons, Servants and Statesmen

by John Van der Kiste

  Another constant bone of contention between the Queen and her heir was their differing attitude towards public appearances in order to keep the monarchy in the public eye. He appreciated, as she did not, that the public would like and respect their royal family more if they saw them regularly. When she told him that he ought to spend more time quietly in the country with his wife, especially when she was with child, he retorted that not only did they have certain duties to fulfil, but ‘your absence from London makes it more necessary that we should do all we can for society, trade, and public matters’.20 In the end they compromised, and she asked him to forgo the Derby for once; perhaps he would like to come to Balmoral for a night or two, and ‘spend my sad birthday with me’.

  Yet less than a year later he found it necessary to admonish her again for remaining in seclusion so much, willingly admitting that her appearance in public would be far better for public relations than the regular spectacle of himself and Alexandra (‘Alix’). If his mother would only sometimes come from Windsor to London for luncheon, he suggested tactfully, then drove for an hour in the Park, where there was no noise, the people would be ‘overjoyed’. It was all very well for him and Alix to do so, she replied, but it did not have the same effect when she did. They lived in radical times, he reminded her, ‘and the more the People see the Sovereign the better it is for the People and the Country.’21

  Not only were the Prince’s friends and way of life criticised, but his and Alix’s more liberal attitude towards parenthood also incurred maternal disapproval. By March 1869 they had two sons and two daughters, with a third daughter on the way. While they were visiting Alix’s family in Denmark, the Queen asked her son why no governess had yet been appointed to discipline them. The Prince replied that they would be considering one on their return, adding that if children of that age ‘are too strictly, or perhaps too severely treated, they get shy, and only fear those whom they ought to love; and we should naturally wish them to be very fond of you’.22

  Though the Queen was generally much more indulgent to her grandchildren than she had been to her own children when small, she did not always welcome new additions to the new generation. For her, the novelty of ‘happy events’ wore off all too soon. When her seventh granddaughter and fourteenth grandchild, the Prince and Princess of Wales’s daughter Victoria, was born in July 1868, the matriarch commented to her eldest child, Vicky, the Crown Princess of Prussia, that it ‘becomes a very uninteresting thing – for it seems to me to go on like the rabbits in Windsor Park!’23

  In late middle age, the Queen was saddened at the way her sons changed as they became adults. ‘Alas!’ she wrote to Sir Howard Elphinstone, ‘she feels more and more how her children become strangers to her and no longer seem to fit in with her ways and habits (which she thinks are simple and good) when they once go out a great deal into Society.’24

  As both Bertie and Affie had had ‘falls’, the Queen relied on their next brother, Arthur, to uphold the spirit of his father’s purity. In her eyes, he could do no wrong, and rarely if ever did the often hard-to-please matriarch ever find fault with him. To the Prince of Wales she wrote that he ‘seems to see the point of view of others, however widely their views may differ. In this he follows his dear father, and I love him most dearly for it.’25 But there must have been times when he found her all-pervading, ever-demanding presence as suffocating as his brothers did, and once he was old enough he tried to avoid spending long periods at Balmoral and Windsor with her, knowing that in the family circle he had to take care to be on his best behaviour, and that any lapse would not be readily forgiven.

  He found a limited measure of freedom at the age of sixteen when he went to begin his Army training at Woolwich. A soldier’s life was well-known for exposing young men to considerable temptation, as the Prince of Wales’s sojourn at the Curragh (Ireland’s Sandhurst) had proved, so the Queen ordered that he should live at the Ranger’s House in Greenwich Park, and not at the barracks. In 1869 he was transferred to the 1st Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, then stationed at Montreal. He was greatly impressed with the people and countryside of Canada, and exhilarated at being able to take part in an action against a band of Fenians who had entered Canada. After a year he rejoined his battalion at Woolwich.

  Soon after he came of age in May 1871 he managed to displease the Queen, though there was never anything approaching a rift in the relations between mother and son. He had the temerity, or good sense, to join the rest of the family in urging her to show herself more during her long period of seclusion. Greatly pained that he should side with his elder brothers, she wrote to him severely on what she called the subject of good manners – which, in her case, meant not arguing with a mother who had the experience of having been thirty-four years on the throne. To Elphinstone, she wrote that ‘he must be set right upon that point of her appearing . . . or she will inevitably get ill again’.26 His tutor replied with the utmost tact, suggesting that it was but a temporary change which was probably caused as much as anything by an unconscious attempt to imitate his brother officers. It would pass off gradually and disappear with a change of companions; he would never knowingly act unkindly to others. The Queen was reassured by Elphinstone’s words, while admitting that she could not deny ‘that her good Arthur causes her some anxiety as she thinks he is wanting in reflection and stability of purpose. These are no doubt some of the many defects of youth but still they are dangerous in his position.’27

  As expected, Arthur soon grew out of some, if not all, of ‘the many defects of youth’. In 1873 he was attached to the staff of an infantry brigade at Aldershot, and during manoeuvres there he was promoted to the rank of brigade-major. In May 1874 he was created Duke of Connaught and Strathearn and Earl of Sussex.

  Leopold had become an intelligent but often frustrated young man. Like most over-protected children he chafed at the fuss made of him and was ever ready to argue with and contradict his mother. With every major attack of internal bleeding that he suffered she was most distressed, but still she managed to find a strange consolation in his ill-health. After one attack when he was aged ten, she told Vicky that ‘the illness of a good child is so far less trying and distressing than the sinfulness of one’s sons’. The transgressions of Bertie and Affie weighed heavily on her mind, and to her ‘death in purity is so far preferable to life in sin and degradation!’28 Protecting him from what could be ‘corrupting conversation’ with other men, even his own flesh and blood, was vital. When Leopold took up smoking he was banned from the smoking-room at Balmoral, and when the Duke of Edinburgh arrived back from his second cruise on Galatea, she gave orders that Leopold could not go fishing with his elder brother.

  He had undoubtedly inherited his father’s brains and thirst for knowledge. From an early age he learnt Latin and Greek, and enjoyed reading poetry in both languages as well as in English. He adored the work of Shakespeare, and when he was fourteen a special new edition of the playwright’s work was dedicated to him. More than his brothers, he had inherited a love of painting and fine arts, and among other things he collected china, autographs and, later, card-mounted photographs of celebrities of the day. As a musician he showed some promise, playing the piano (including duets with his mother or sister Beatrice), harmonium and flute. Science, current affairs and politics fascinated him equally, and, when kept in bed by attacks of internal bleeding, he read newspapers from cover to cover and eagerly discussed contemporary issues of the day with anyone who could spare the time.

  These activities must have been some consolation for being forced to lead such a protected life, but all too often Leopold railed against the restrictions placed on him by his well-meaning mother. Not surprisingly, in time he would rebel and astonish her with his defiance.

  All but one of the princes who were destined to become Queen Victoria’s sons-in-law were German, though Fritz was the only sovereign heir among them, being second in line to the Prussian crown. In 1860 Alice was engaged to Prince Louis of Hesse and
the Rhine. It was not such a grand match as that of her elder sister, though Louis was to become Grand Duke of Hesse fifteen years later. Their wedding, delayed by Court mourning because of the Prince Consort’s death, took place at a subdued ceremony in the dining-room at Osborne House in July 1862. The ceremony was dominated by Winterhalter’s vast painting of the royal family in 1846 which hung on the wall behind the improvised altar, as if to symbolise the Prince Consort’s blessing of their union.

  Even less prestigious still, though in the end a far more contented marriage, was that of Helena in July 1866 to the penniless Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, whose family had been deprived of their duchy by the machinations of Prussian politics and military might. He was fifteen years older than his wife, and when originally told that he had a chance of marrying the Queen’s daughter he misunderstood the message and thought he was going to marry the Widow of Windsor herself.

  Nevertheless, ‘the Christians’ settled down to a relatively uneventful and untroubled fifty-one years of married life in England, first at Frogmore House and then at Cumberland Lodge, both in the grounds of Windsor Castle. Despite the difference in their ages, they were the only couple among Queen Victoria’s children who lived long enough to celebrate their golden wedding. He demanded little except a happy, comfortable family life, and this he found with his wife and their children. With his passion for literature, he taught them to share his love of poetry and German fairy tales, telling them stories as they gathered round his armchair before they went to bed. He also had several outdoor interests, and loved shooting, riding, gardening and flowers.

  If he was ever bored with his existence, he was careful enough not to show it. The Queen gave him what she termed ‘light duties’, mainly as Ranger of Windsor Castle Park. This was hardly an arduous post, especially as it rarely involved much more than general supervisory duties or looking after the place in the most general terms. Once, at the appropriately named Frogmore, there was a plague of frogs with which he was required to deal. He consulted the naturalist Frank Buckland, who advised him to introduce more ducks.

  The Queen insisted he should have nothing to do with shooting arrangements. It would have been as well for him if he had denied himself the pleasures of such a sport. In 1892 the Duke of Connaught – who should have known better, as a senior Army officer – accidentally shot Christian in the eye, which subsequently had to be removed under anaesthetic. Magnanimously, he forgave the Duke for his carelessness, and amassed a large collection of glass eyes to fill the socket, one of them a bloodshot specimen which, he proudly told visitors when showing them his ocular assortment, he wore whenever he had a cold.

  In March 1871 Louise married John Douglas Sutherland Lorne, Marquess of Lorne, heir to the Duke of Argyll. It was a controversial match, as Lorne was a Liberal member of parliament, representing Argyllshire from 1868 to 1878 and, after an interval, Manchester South in the Unionist interest from 1895 to 1900. No such marriage between a British princess and a subject had been given official recognition since the wedding of King Henry VII’s daughter to the Duke of Suffolk in 1515, though the literary-minded Lorne was a backbench politician whose membership of the House of Commons never embroiled the royal family in any political issues of the day.

  In terms of Victorian royal marriages, this one proved popular with the public. There had been increasing resentment of Germany and German marriages, and so when one of the Queen’s daughters married a Scotsman it made a welcome change. Radicals who were displeased by a parliamentary grant of £30,000 towards the couple were mollified by the thought that at least it would be spent ‘at home’.29 Punch had hailed news of the engagement as ‘a real German defeat’, and when the court at Berlin expressed indignation that Louise had not taken one of its princes as her husband, Lorne good-humouredly told the Queen that his ancestors the Argylls were kings when the Hohenzollerns were parvenus.30

  Sir Henry Ponsonby never ceased to be surprised, or sometimes amused, by Queen Victoria’s attitude to her sons and sons-in-law. Her affection for her children, he observed, ‘does not appear in their manner when they are grown up’, although she generally adored her grandchildren. Her sons were ‘all in terror of her’, while she tended to give the impression that she did not like her sons-in-law.

  Sometimes she was positively irritable towards Christian, whose hardly avoidable lack of purpose and activity grated on her. One morning at Osborne, she looked out of the window, watched him pottering about aimlessly in the garden and promptly ordered an equerry to take him a message saying he must either occupy himself with something or else go for a ride somewhere. This was probably down to temporary low spirits on her part, when she felt she had to have something or someone to vent her irritation on. She was ‘terribly bored with Christian’, Sir Henry wrote to his wife, and could not understand why Helena liked him, as he was ‘bald and fat and it’s nonsense their being so affectionate with each other’.31 By and large, though, her children’s spouses rarely found her anything less than kind and affectionate as a rule, so her secretary had evidently caught her on a bad day.

  On the whole, her relations were more amicable with the sons-inlaw, who either saw less of her or else did not find her particularly intimidating, than with the sons who saw her regularly and were often summoned to the matriarchal presence as adults for a dressing-down, or received billets-doux informing them of some slight they had committed – or to take care they avoid committing one. Like most women, Victoria was particularly drawn to good-looking men. She was often critical of her sons as children or adolescents, particularly the Prince of Wales and Leopold, because she thought them ugly or objected to some physical characteristic such as the way they did their hair.

  Her sons-in-law were all mature men, and therefore not subject to such fault-finding. Moreover, most of them were blessed with strikingly handsome looks, Christian being the exception. Though it is hard to imagine the Queen being so small-minded as to hold his ugliness against him in any way, his unphotogenic appearance may possibly have been an additional minor irritant at times when she already had some reason to take him to task. Once, when she was looking after their infant daughters, she sent a rather tactless telegram to Helena and Christian, who were wintering in France, informing them that the children were very well, ‘but poor little Louise very ugly’.32 Perhaps it is only fair to the Queen to add that Princess Marie Louise, ‘poor Louise’, and her sister Helena Victoria as adults were indeed probably the least attractive of her grandchildren.

  ELEVEN

  ‘We are a very strong family’

  In November 1871 the Prince of Wales fell ill at Sandringham with typhoid fever, the disease which had claimed the life of his father ten years earlier. Before that, Queen Victoria had never visited her son’s Norfolk country house, but as soon as she was advised of the seriousness of his condition, she quickly joined the rest of the family who had gathered there. Naturally, she took charge, frequently guarding his bedroom door, it was said, like a sentry. At other times she sat by his bed, holding his hand and willing him to pull through. For a few days, he hovered between life and death, and at one stage his mother, wife and sister Alice turned to each other with tears in their eyes, all but convinced that his case was hopeless as he raved deliriously between fearful fits of coughing. The illness reached its crisis on the eve of 14 December, the tenth anniversary of the Prince Consort’s death. To the astonishment of family and doctors alike, he rallied, and from the dreaded fourteenth onwards, he began to recover.

  It was probably during this time that one small but amusing episode occurred, proving that while the Queen’s male relatives might be grown men, she could still quite unintentionally strike fear into their hearts. Sir Henry Ponsonby recalled with great relish the day when he and Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Haig, equerry to the Duke of Edinburgh, were going out into the garden at Sandringham by a side door when they were almost knocked down by a stampede of royals, with the Queen’s cousin George, Duke of Cambridge, two mon
ths her senior, in the front, and Prince Leopold bringing up the rear. They were running so fast that Ponsonby and Haig thought there must have been a mad bull pursuing them. Instead, they cried out, ‘The Queen, the Queen,’ and all of them dashed, either from fright or because it was obviously the done thing, until the diminutive figure in black bombazine walked past. Once the cowed royals had slunk off, secretary and equerry ‘laughed immensely’.1

  Prime Minister Gladstone suggested that the Queen should take advantage of the national mood by proclaiming 27 February 1872 Thanksgiving Day, and that the royal family should attend a service at St Paul’s to mark the Prince of Wales’s restoration to health. The Queen had little enthusiasm for the idea and objected particularly to the length of the planned service, but the Prime Minister would not be deflected. Eager crowds, cheering the royals as they made their way to the cathedral, bore evidence to the lack of any deep-rooted republican sympathies. As the press noted, ‘an extraordinary reversion of feeling towards the Prince has taken place during the last few months, and he has suddenly come to be one of the most popular men in the country’.2

  The Queen was particularly struck by the apparent transformation in her son. A few days before the service, while he was recuperating at Osborne, she wrote to Vicky, the Crown Princess of Prussia, describing him as very weak and drawn, but ‘quite himself, only gentler and kinder than ever; and there is something different, which I can’t exactly express’. Even the trees and flowers ‘gave him pleasure’, which they had never done before, and he was ‘quite pathetic over his small wheelbarrow and little tools at the Swiss cottage’.3 The most encouraging sign of all was that he was spending so much time with Alix, and they seemed rarely apart. Victoria must have nursed hopes that at last he was about to become a model of family domesticity like his father.