Queen Victoria

by Matthew Dennison

  Their happy family life, however, was always in part a convenient fiction, like those eternally sunny turquoise skies supplied on request by Winterhalter as a background to the family portraits. It overlooked those separations between parents and children imposed by Victoria’s position. It ignored the time the children spent in the company of other adults: nurses, governesses and tutors, variable in their sympathies. Most of all, it obfuscated the nature of Victoria’s own pleasure in her family, her occasionally limited enjoyment of the company of her children individually, her resentment of the part unwittingly played by those children in diminishing further ‘the rare happiness of being alone with my beloved Albert’.21 For his part, the high-minded Albert was capable of playfulness towards his children and embraced the rough and tumble of childrearing with greater conviction than Victoria, turning somersaults in the haystacks of the Osborne fields at harvest time, for example. The Swiss Cottage at Osborne was Albert’s inspiration: today it stands as a symbol of that large and loving family of princes and princesses. Happily its miniaturised domesticity accommodated opportunities for learning and its wooden walls were inscribed with improving quotations in German, including, ‘You will carry your load more easily if you add patience to the burden’, a killjoy coda to lives of privilege. For it was Albert, too, who oversaw for his elder children exacting educational regimes fine-tuned by Stockmar: among their objectives was ‘the submission to the supervision & authority of one person for the Development of Character’ – an unwritten principle of his own relationship with Victoria.22 Victoria deferred to his judgement, and neither husband nor wife heeded Melbourne’s advice that education ‘may be able to do much, but it does not do so much as is expected from it. It may mould and direct the character but it rarely changes it.’23 That shortsightedness blighted the growing up of several of the royal children, none more than Bertie, whom his mother decried as her ‘caricature’. Aware of her own shortcomings, she tolerated Albert whipping their eldest son and Stockmar’s constant fault-finding with the boy. For Victoria cherished no higher aspiration than that her children should emulate their father: most eventually preferred her path of flawed obstinacy and kindly hauteur. But Albert is markedly absent from those albums of sketches in which, through two decades, Victoria commemorated the idle moments of her vigorous brood. She offered posterity no explanation for the omission.

  Albert’s martinet tendency was central to his mirthless concept of duty. He applied the same rigorous standards to himself, perpetually selflessly in pursuit of self-improvement, and also to Victoria. ‘I have become extremely pleased with Victoria during the past few months. She has only twice had the sulks … She puts more confidence in me daily,’ he had written to his brother Ernest in September 1840.24 The couple had been married less than a year; Victoria was two months away from giving birth to their first child. Already in Albert’s letter the expectant mother occupied the role of child in her relationship with her ‘perfect’ husband: appraised, painstakingly corrected, found wanting or commended, her submission growing. In the ‘Angel’s’ treatment of his spirited young wife were pedantry and a degree of detachment at odds with Victoria’s effulgent idolisation. ‘If only,’ he wrote, ‘you were rather less occupied with yourself and your feelings …’25 He recoiled from the Sturm und Drang of Victoria’s unregulated emotions, the magnificent self-indulgence of her anger – ironically, given that Victoria herself traced the origin of her passionate nature and uncontrollable temper to Augusta, Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, the grandmother whom she and Albert shared. At intervals he would treat his children with similar exactingness. It is a measure of Victoria’s love for Albert, as well as the limitations of her self-confidence and the strength of prevailing ideas about the respective roles of men and women, that she responded without effrontery to treatment that with hindsight suggests systematic undermining. Victoria’s continuing willingness to play Galatea to Albert’s Pygmalion became a prerequisite for their married bliss. In time she noticed it only to applaud it.

  It would be wrong to discount love. Nothing suggests that Albert’s affection for Victoria ever attained the tsunami-like force of Victoria’s own feelings: it did not need to. Yet theirs was a relationship centred on reciprocity, albeit Albert found it easier to reciprocate Victoria’s feelings when she behaved in a fashion he condoned. Sir Robert Peel, we know, had earlier remarked on Victoria’s ‘manner …, her apparent deep sense of her situation, and … her firmness’. The didactic aspect of Albert’s love lessened neither his wife’s firmness nor her deep sense of her unique position, but he tamed her manner, especially towards himself. The pill was carefully sugared. During the fortnight Victoria remained in bed after the birth of their first child, she eulogised his care for her as ‘like that of a mother, nor could there be a kinder, wiser, or more judicious nurse’,26 one of several references to Albert as her ‘mother’. It is indicative of the trust she placed in him and, in part, of the nature of the feelings he inspired in her. It suggests too vulnerability beneath her royal bombast, a lapse which would develop into full-scale dependency. She ‘leant on him for all and everything – without [him] I did nothing, moved not a finger, arranged not a print or photograph, didn’t put on a gown or bonnet if he didn’t approve it’. After his death, Victoria itemised the nature of his supremacy, lamenting the loss of ‘his pure and perfect spirit … guiding and leading me and inspiring me’, herself always the object, never the subject, of those dominant ‘Albertine’ participles.27 In the same way, communications with ministers and memoranda on government policy, copied out in Victoria’s hand, issued mostly from Albert’s, not Victoria’s, unflagging pen. Albert’s thoughts became Victoria’s, Victoria’s influence on government Albert’s influence. Victoria’s monarchy was moulded by Albert’s conception of a vigorous, engaged sovereign involved with every aspect of policy: informed, consulted and, ultimately, attended to. It was surely as Albert had always intended, though hardly the version of sovereignty the Manchester Guardian had in mind for Victoria in 1837 when it welcomed her accession as that of a monarch shaped by the discourse of the 1832 Reform Act.

  Victoria and Albert did not ignore the brave new world around them. Their visits to the industrial cities of the north and the Midlands signalled a gear shift in royal practice. Melbourne, whose ministry finally fell in 1841, had dampened Victoria’s enthusiasm for Oliver Twist, deploring depictions of wretchedness, and dismissed with flippancy her questions concerning the fate of evicted Irish tenantry. Disdainfully he lamented the affectation of the middle classes, whom he professed to dislike. (The Times, by contrast, in 1844 referred to ‘the middle classes, who may now almost be considered the ruling class of England’.28) Victoria and Albert symbolically embraced these representatives of an emerging order. Under Albert’s tutelage, Victoria learnt to recognise the qualities of Melbourne’s successor, Sir Robert Peel, himself a man of manufacturing stock. Amid waving flags and cheering crowds in Manchester or Liverpool, husband and wife congratulated barrel-chested merchants and rubicund industrialists; they shook hands with councillors and corporations, listened to tens of thousands of Sunday School children drilled in the National Anthem, and knighted the mayors who welcomed them. But they did something more, too, as we have seen, for in rebranding the monarchy they sought out common ground with those men and women whose lives of provincial endeavour so greatly differed from their own.

  It may have tended to their own benefit. Victoria justified her throne in terms of proximity to the divinity and advocated for her subjects, as she told Lord John Russell in 1848, ‘obedience to the laws and to the Sovereign’, ‘obedience to a higher Power, divinely instituted for the good of the people’.29 This unassailable confidence came less easily to Albert, the penniless offshoot of a gimcrack Saxon crown. He dreamt of an active, effective throne, in the vanguard of enlightened patronage and liberal thinking for the good of the world. He dreamt of a united Germany irradiated by political liberalism, a natural partner for Britain, soli
d and reliable between volatile France and Russian despotism. He dreamt of Britain and Germany together, showering the blessings of justice, reason – in the form of constitutional government – and peace on an unenlightened continent: to that shimmering chimera he eventually sacrificed his favourite daughter. He dreamt … and not content with dreaming he did … and then he did more. He worked unceasingly. As he wrote to his brother Ernest on 6 April 1861, ‘I go on working at my treadmill, as life seems to me.’30 In pursuit of that boyhood espousal of usefulness, Albert’s habit of remorseless service began early in his marriage; in time he simply tired himself out. In his beginning was his end.

  There were compensations along the way. The overwhelming success in 1851 of The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations saw Albert acclaimed as an individual of superhuman power. ‘By a wizard’s rod/ A blazing arch of lucid glass/ Leaps like a fountain from the grass/ To meet the sun!’, Thackeray wrote of the Crystal Palace, packed full of tens of thousands of gaudy and grandiose exhibits. On a heroic scale, worthiness and earnest aspiration were displayed together in Paxton’s magnificent glass structure, which sought to represent the world and enforce amity through trade. Its opening ceremony became ‘the happiest, proudest day’ of Victoria’s life. ‘Albert’s dearest name is immortalised with this great conception, his own, and my own dear country showed she was worthy of it.’31 Even in the glow of Albert’s triumph Victoria attested the deceit of the dual monarchy: while the Exhibition was all Albert’s doing, the country that acknowledged its success belonged to Victoria. It was the language of entitlement and Albert remained excluded. In the public mind he was still his wife’s subordinate.

  Victoria’s own sterling qualities were stimulated not by dreams of peace but the nightmarish actuality of war. On 28 February 1854, the 1st Battalion Scots Fusilier Guards gathered at Buckingham Palace to present arms before the Queen. They ‘gave three hearty cheers, which went to my heart’, Victoria recorded in her journal. ‘May God protect these fine men, may they be preserved and victorious.’ The soldiers were on the eve of departure for the Black Sea and a war, declared that day, which would highlight vividly the shortcomings of Britain’s armed forces, shocking inadequacies in the chains of command and supply. From the inglorious and ill-conceived progress of the Crimean War emerged the legend of Florence Nightingale and the ‘noble six hundred’ of Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’; it hastened overdue army reforms and new-minted the bond between sovereign and troops.

  In her country’s bid to defeat the Tsar of Russia’s determination to entrust to the Orthodox Church guardianship of the Holy Places in Jerusalem – itself understood as a metaphor for Russian expansionist tendencies towards the crumbling Ottoman Empire – Victoria became obsessively martial. ‘Exceedingly’ she regretted that her sex prevented her from fighting. She was frantic for news of the war’s progress. To Leopold she wrote on 13 October 1854, ‘We are, and indeed the whole country is, entirely engrossed with one idea, one anxious thought – the Crimea.’32 She regarded the troops with maternal propriety: like a mother she brooded on their youth and ‘the entire want of all method and arrangement in everything which concerns [their] comfort’.33 Her fury at ‘the arrogant and dangerous pretensions of that barbarous power Russia’34 was unbounded. Temporarily her instinct for tub-thumping exceeded even that of the Prime Minister who for almost a decade had been a thorn in her side, Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston. Egotistical, arrogant, at heart a Regency buck and high-handed to boot, with a calculated recklessness which repeatedly endeared him to an electorate smug with chauvinism, Palmerston had previously frittered limited energy in winning Victoria’s good graces. At a moment of national crisis, monarch and minister found common ground. Victoria suggested the motto of a new medal, the Victoria Cross: ‘For Valour’. She also presented in person Crimean service medals to veterans regardless of rank. ‘The rough hand of the brave and honest private soldier came for the first time in contact with that of the Sovereign and their Queen,’ she wrote.35 She confessed to feeling ‘as if they were my own children’.36

  The war had been fought alongside the French. State visits from and to Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie cemented this uneasy alliance between old enemies. At the tomb of the first Napoleon in the chapel of the Hôtel des Invalides, listening to ‘God Save the Queen’ by torchlight as thunder crashed outside, Napoleon III seduced Victoria with an instinct for drama and his lickspittle charm; the Empress delighted her sturdy guest with her chic and her dolorous beauty. Eugénie introduced the crinoline to Britain, a frou-frou distraction at a time of unsatisfactory war. In return Victoria astonished Parisian eyes with a series of sartorial surprises: a bright green umbrella, an oversize handbag embroidered with a sequinned poodle and a ‘[Paris-made] white net dress embroidered with gold and trimmed with red geraniums, and (as were all my evening dresses) very full’, which the Emperor assumed was of English design.37 The figure she cut was that once described by the novelist Charlotte Brontë: ‘She looked a little stout vivacious lady … not much … pretension about her.’38 Yet observers on both sides of the Channel agreed that, of the two women, Victoria was the more truly regal. When at last, in March 1856, peace broke out, it brought with it little victory for the Queen whose attitude of unwavering belligerence had suggested a second Elizabeth. Lugubriously she dismissed the entire year as ‘gloomy’. On the horizon she may have imagined she discerned bright spots, the war concluded, the happy yearly round of Windsor Castle, Osborne and Balmoral again upon its course. In one of those moments of stock-taking in which she habitually indulged in her journal, she had lately assessed her own advance towards that state of ideal personal development advocated by Albert: she celebrated ‘the happy conviction that I have made great progress and am trying energetically to overcome my faults’. Her gratitude, of course, sought out her husband who made all things possible: ‘How can I thank my dearest Albert for his unchanging love and wonderful tenderness …’39

  She was unable to glimpse the future. There was worse to come.

  6

  ‘The pain of parting’

  TO HER JOURNAL, Victoria had confided her desire that the clock stop. ‘When one is as happy as we, one feels sad at the quick passing of the years, & I always wish Time could stand still for a while.’1 She was contented and fulfilled. She asked only that nothing should change, that this bud of happiness should open unfettered and blossom for ever, no worm within it. It was not to be.

  As the 1850s drew to a close, Victoria suffered a loss in her close family. In this instance it was a loss which became a gain. The marriage of her eldest daughter, Vicky, Princess Royal, to Prince Frederick William of Prussia, called Fritz, took place on 25 January 1858. Afterwards prince and princess departed for Potsdam and Berlin and a life in which, as Victoria observed, military uniforms were worn day long and, as Vicky noted, the plumbing did not suit. Vicky was seventeen: ‘all the childish roundness still clung to her’, recorded her new Prussian lady-in-waiting.2 She was emotionally young too. A flotilla of her mother’s letters pursued her across the chill wastes of the North Sea: for forty years they would flow unstaunched. In the long term, Vicky’s absence provided Victoria with the most significant of several epistolary relationships. In the short term, it inspired first essays in the language of abandonment, that lexicon she soon mastered with maudlin but determined relish. Victoria acclaimed her eldest daughter as ‘the object of our tenderest solicitude for 17 years’:3 her written response to their parting suggests inconvenience over broken-heartedness, and her thoughts were not so much solicitous as peevish. ‘And now I must end, my beloved child, the separation from whom I can not accustom myself to – and at times get quite angry about it. I think it quite wrong you should have been carried off.’4 Recrimination coloured regret. With more conviction, and foolhardy tactlessness, Vicky responded to her mother’s initial tears by addressing herself to Albert: ‘The pain of parting from you yesterday was greater than I can d
escribe … I miss you so dreadfully, dear Papa, more than I can say …’5 Yet it was Albert who had let this daughter go, Albert’s plan, his vision. She was his protégée and a prodigy to boot. As he had tamed Victoria and reformed the throne of England, so would Vicky help Fritz bring light into the militant darkness of militarist Prussia, a conduit for her father’s intransigent benignity. As it fell out, death shielded Albert from the unravelling of his plans and the chasm of unhappiness into which opinionated but well-intentioned Vicky, ‘always clever, never wise’, rapidly blundered. It was Victoria who survived to witness joy give way to tragedy.

  The Prussian marriage was the single great dynastic union forged by a child of Victoria and Albert. Stockmar encouraged the scheme, Leopold too; in John Philip’s painting of the marriage service, Leopold is surely whispering in Albert’s ear, attentive at his nephew’s shoulder. Albert was motivated by idealism: his airy plan became as dandelion clocks in the harsh blast of Bismarck’s cynicism. Victoria shared his dream. On a less exalted level, in intervals between harrying and chiding, she enjoyed Vicky’s promotion to the status of grown-up with whom she could exchange confidences and reflections on the lot of wives and mothers. It was ironic that only through separation did mother and daughter discover the intimacy and easy devotedness which had eluded them so often during Vicky’s childhood, letters – even from Victoria’s forceful pen – more emollient than the reality of daily contact. Not for the last time Victoria succeeded in her own mind in bringing order to a disorderly relationship by committing that relationship to paper, its dialectic safely confined within the bounds of her own writing. She expressed herself with characteristic frankness in the first summer of Vicky’s absence: ‘Doubt your real affection and your love, I did not, dearest child – but you did all you could to make me doubt it; for a more insubordinate and more unequal-tempered child and girl I think I never saw!’6 So easily in Victoria’s mind was the score settled and laid aside.