Queen Victoria
Page 13
Happy for Victoria that she could not see into the future: the septuagenarian Gladstone still had three terms of office ahead of him. From 1880 to 1885, in 1886 and from 1892 to 1894, sovereign and premier consistently found causes of disagreement. Victoria’s preoccupations remained foreign policy and, to a lesser extent, Ireland: both provided ample grounds for exasperation. Victoria cavilled at what she considered Liberal reluctance to maintain British prestige overseas (described by Victoria as a ‘high tone’). Over Afghanistan, Egypt and the Sudan she berated the elected member. In January 1885, she held him personally responsible for the death of General Gordon, the maverick British commander charged with the defence of the Sudanese capital Khartoum, and took the unprecedented step of telegraphing her disapprobation to Gladstone and members of his Cabinet in a form guaranteed to leak the contents to the public. To Tennyson she wrote with her habitual bustle of ‘the death of that noble Hero Gordon (whose abandonment is an eternal blot on our crown …)’.20 As Laurence Housman’s Victoria tells Bertie in The Superlative Relative: ‘In politics, and still more in foreign policy, the less you rely on people’s honour the better.’21 In private, she was polite, occasionally even friendly towards her premier. She had invited him to Arthur’s wedding to Princess Louise Margaret of Prussia in March 1879; invitations followed to Windsor Castle to dine and sleep. Gladstone rightly attributed her behaviour to her ‘beautiful manners’22 and did not confuse good behaviour with kindliness or warmth of feeling. To his wife he maintained, ‘She will never be happy till She has hounded me out of office’ – an accurate estimation.23 With that goal beyond Victoria’s reach, Gladstone discovered that he had increasing occasion to find his thwarted royal mistress ‘somewhat unmannerly’.24 On 30 January 1886, Victoria invited Gladstone to form his third ministry only after enquiries into her preferred option, a Whig–Tory coalition under G. J. Goschen and Lord Salisbury, proved fruitless. Six years later, as he prepared to take up office for the fourth and last time, Victoria toyed with pre-empting the Grand Old Man by sending for Lord Rosebery, who she insisted be appointed Foreign Secretary.
In the event, Gladstone would plague her only briefly in 1886. His government collapsed in June over proposals for Irish Home Rule. Bluntly Victoria had made clear to him the impossibility of her giving ‘her Prime Minister her full support … when the union of the Empire is in danger of disintegration and serious disturbance’.25 On that occasion, Gladstone was replaced by Lord Salisbury, ‘in whom she could confide, and whose opinion was always given in so kind and wise a manner’.26 Salisbury’s administrations during Victoria’s final years – from 1886 to 1892 and from 1895 to 1901 – were characterised by a degree of harmony between monarch and premier every bit as sincere as her dislike for the ‘deluded old fanatic’ he replaced. Seeing them together, Lady Milner commented, ‘I never saw two people get on better. Their polished manners and deference to and esteem for each other were a delightful sight and one not readily forgotten.’27
1886 was otherwise distinguished for Victoria by the public announcement of celebrations for her forthcoming Jubilee, scheduled to culminate in London on 21 June 1887, with a spectacular procession. From inception plans aroused controversy. Victoria’s refusal to travel to Westminster Abbey in state or, as her son Arthur encouraged her, to make herself ‘smart’ in her velvet robes and crown, alongside government fears that overspending on the Jubilee would generate hostility, inspired plans dismissed by the Standard as ‘utterly inadequate, mean, pinched and narrow’.28 It was an unpromising beginning.
Victoria’s first thoughts in connection with her Golden Jubilee were of loss. In her journal on 20 June 1886, she recorded: ‘Have entered the fiftieth year of my reign and my Jubilee year. I was upset at the thought of those no longer with me, who would have been so pleased and happy, in particular my beloved husband, to whom I owe everything, who are gone to a happier world.’
Death had made its impress on the ageing Queen. Canon Baynes’s ‘Hymn for the Jubilee’ asserted, ‘It is not all of brightness/ That gathers round the Throne;/ The chalice of deep sorrow/ Full oft our Queen has known.’29 From among her family and close circle not only Albert, but her mother, Melbourne, Uncle Leopold, Stockmar, her half-siblings Charles and Feodore, the Duke of Wellington (‘so devoted, loyal, and faithful a subject, so staunch a supporter’),30 Lehzen, Napoleon III, his only son Louis Napoleon, Alice, Disraeli, John Brown and Leopold were all gone, a tidy rollcall of mourning obsequies. An inventory of recent deaths had dominated her journal entry for 31 December 1878, from the Kings of Saxony and Hanover to a child and a grandchild.31 If Victoria had learnt lately to leaven her sadness with optimism, that sadness persisted. With grim punctilio she observed the anniversaries of those many deaths. Tokens of the departed – on canvas, in marble, bronze and silver gilt, in cairn and granite – clustered close about her like the trappings of an ancient pharaoh preparing to meet his gods in conclave. Her behaviour had changed during the last ten years: she remained recognisably the same. Only in her journal and in her letters is the gulf between the reality of a woman unable or unwilling ever fully to escape the shadows and the bland serenity of the mythologised Jubilee Queens of 1887 and 1897 so starkly revealed. Posterity has inherited a biscuit-tin vision of an elderly monarch who reigned, as Kipling has it, over ‘’alf o’ Creation’, with soft focus benignity: a gentle Britannia whose battles lay predominantly behind her. The truth was more complex. For while the Jubilee Queen of trinkets and penny eulogies basked in a glorious present, many of the real Victoria’s thoughts – as Albert had identified so long ago – continued to be drawn ineluctably backwards.
With that backward glance came conflicting emotions. John Brown’s death in the spring of 1883 inspired a second sortie into authorship. More Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, published in 1884, was dedicated to Victoria’s ‘devoted personal attendant and faithful friend’. Like Leaves, it was an elaborate homage to her yesterdays. Victoria’s wreath on her servant’s coffin had been inscribed, ‘A tribute of loving, grateful and everlasting friendship from his truest, best and most faithful friend, Victoria R&I’.32 The need for faithfulness in her relationships, and her insistence that they last for ever, represented a familiar impulse and one that would continue to cause her mingled joy and pain.
But the focus of the Golden Jubilee was the public rather than the private Victoria. For the first time commemorative stamps were issued. In booths lining the Strand, street vendors sold a patent automatic bustle which played ‘God Save the Queen’ when the wearer sat down. Carrying flambeaux and Japanese lanterns, Etonians processed through the Quadrangle of Windsor Castle, singing as they marched, ‘Sing together, one and all/ Shout together, great and small/ Victoria! Victoria! Victoria! Our Queen!’33 In London the sky glittered with a firework portrait of Victoria created by manufacturers James Pain & Sons, 180 feet high and 200 feet wide; technical glitches caused the right eye to flicker uncontrollably. Inscribed on the presentation box of the Golden Jubilee necklace of pearls and diamond trefoils purchased with donations from three million ‘daughters of the Empire’ and formally presented to Victoria, on 30 July 1888, by the Duchess of Buccleuch, was, ‘To Victoria Queen & Empress A Token of Love & Loyalty from the Daughters of Her Empire in remembrance of Her Jubilee’.34 Across the Empire, selected prison sentences were remitted in honour of the anniversary and Victoria’s clemency: each was signed personally. Among cascades of telegrams came the acclamation, ‘Empress of Hindoostan, Head of all Kings and Rulers, and King of all Kings, who is one in a Hundred, is Her Majesty Queen Victoria’.35 All were tributes to a fifty-year reign. Perhaps only the necklace, which she herself had approved at the suggestion of the Women’s Jubilee Offering Committee, touched Victoria personally: she was determined to avoid the short change of a brooch.
She did not admire ceremonial. She had no appetite for the spectacular pageantry which, for an enthusiastic public, distinguished the last years of her reign. ‘I don’t w
ant or like flattery,’ she confided to her journal.36 Mostly she meant it. As in 1872, when she had resisted Gladstone’s plans for a public celebration of Bertie’s recovery, she jibbed at the Jubilee proposals. As in 1872, her obstructiveness was overmastered. Lord Halifax protested that the public needed ‘gilding for their money’, Lord Rosebery that a bonnet rather than a diadem was inadequate apparel for the service of thanksgiving. Both men failed to recognise that the very homeliness of Victoria’s dress, eschewing the swagger of her Continental cousins, could be deeply reassuring to those crowds of well-wishers who endorsed her domesticity but opposed the political engagement of more flaunting kings and princes. (Afterwards, Rosebery made good his lapse by presenting Victoria with a miniature of Elizabeth I and a ‘flattering’ letter. She admired the miniature while admitting, ‘I fear I have no sympathy with my great predecessor.’37) The peers’ criticisms made her nervous; they also served to remind her of who was Queen of England. In March, in high dudgeon, she wrote to Henry Ponsonby: ‘The Queen hopes he will speak strongly to the Ministers, saying she will not be teased & bullied [about] the Jubilee & wh[ich] seems to be considered for the people & their convenience & amusement while the Queen is to do the public and newspapers bidding. She will do nothing if this goes on.’38 It was the Jubilee equivalent of earlier abdication threats and similarly empty. It suggested too the grieving Victoria of the 1860s, for whom duty was a matter of inclination.
On 21 June, after a day of entertaining ‘all the Royalties’ at Buckingham Palace – sovereigns and their suites from Savoy to Siam – she drove in an open landau with an escort of Indian cavalry to Westminster Abbey. Surrounded by a mob of royal relations, enormous crowds and what she described as ‘such an extraordinary outburst of enthusiasm as I had hardly ever seen in London before’,39 Victoria nevertheless found time for bereftness: ‘I sat alone (oh! without my beloved husband, for whom this would have been such a proud day) …’ The previous morning, in a journal entry which recalls that of the first day of her reign, she told herself, ‘The day has come, and I am alone, though surrounded by many dear children.’40 That reiterated ‘alone’ was more than empty rhetoric, a linguistic tic acquired through long habit, transformed by the events of 1861 from exultation to despair. It expressed enduring truths about Victoria’s view of queenship and something of her detachment from the glittering but unwelcome roundelay of which she found herself the centre. Four years would pass before she took delivery of the painting she had commissioned from John Charlton of The Golden Jubilee, 21 June 1887: The Royal Procession Passing Trafalgar Square, with its careful delineation of happy, pilchard-tin crowds and ceremonial uniforms. On receipt it hung briefly at Windsor Castle. Afterwards it was removed to Buckingham Palace, the home Victoria avoided. Its fate was markedly different from that of Tuxen’s painting, in which a domestic Victoria, plumply affectionate, is surrounded by her family: ‘mother of many nations’, ‘Grandmama of Europe’. It was exactly as the public wished it. In its post-Jubilee commentary, The Spectator noted that the popular attitude to Victoria demonstrated ‘a change indescribable, but unmistakable; an increase of kindliness and affection, but a decrease of awe. It was a friend of all who was welcomed, rather than a great Sovereign.’41
The death of a dog was the subject of a letter from Victoria to her granddaughter, the former Princess Victoria of Hesse, in the autumn of 1887. In the aftermath of the Jubilee came this unlooked-for blow. ‘It is indeed a grievous loss to me of a real friend whom I miss terribly,’ Victoria wrote.42 Noble was a favourite among her many dogs, described in the photograph album devoted to the royal kennels as ‘a collie of the Cheviot breed’.43 He had been given to Victoria at Balmoral on 24 May 1872, as spring turned to summer following the seismic shift attendant on Bertie’s recovery. Fifteen years later, his death on 18 September inspired gloomy reflections on the part of a still-lonely woman who, half a century ago, at a moment of similar rejoicing, had returned from her coronation in Westminster Abbey, cast aside her robes and hurried upstairs to bathe her beloved spaniel Dash.
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‘All that magnificence’
LIKE MANY PUBLICLY modest people, Victoria was capable of conceit in private. On 23 September 1896, she noted in her journal: ‘Today is the day on which I have reigned longer, by a day, than any English sovereign.’1 She dismissed ideas of public commemoration. Exertions of that variety must wait until the Jubilee of the following summer, for she recognised, even if she could not embrace it, that ‘English people … like all that magnificence, just as they like descriptions of jewels or scenes in the “Arabian Nights”,’ and it could not be shirked indefinitely.2
Yet it was not her preferred expression of sovereignty. For that she had three more years to wait, until the outbreak of the Boer War in October 1899. At first, that distant and unlovely conflict energised the octogenarian Queen into her customary martial bravado. From her wheelchair she inspected troops, a lump in her throat as she waved off the Gordon Highlanders, and that Christmas authorised for those same brave fighting men the distribution in her name of 100,000 tins of chocolate. In time she visited the inevitable wounded. Famously she asserted to future prime minister, A. J. Balfour, ‘We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist,’ though in private the war news caused her acute anxiety, the casualty lists reducing her to tears. Plagued by rheumatism and poor digestion, her eyesight failing rapidly, her mobility strenuously impaired, she summoned that spirit which had stirred her during the Crimean War, through the Balkan Crises of the 1870s and in trenchant dealings with any number of her ministers and children ever since. Her private secretary claimed that she was all ‘in favour of teaching Kruger [the Boer president] a sharp lesson’;3 high casualties, unexpected reversals and the creeping passage of time awakened in her a sense of war’s futility. On the Continent, caricaturists hostile to Britain pounced on what they regarded as Victoria’s bellicose and acquisitive intent. With partial accuracy they attributed to her aspects of the braggadocio and greed of her swollen empire, proof of the extent to which she had become a symbol, a figurehead Queen of England. In 1882, the Daily Telegraph had described Victoria as ruler ‘of the greatest and mightiest empire ever submitted to a woman’s sway’.4 In 1899, that ‘woman’s sway’ combined compassion with conviction and the yearning for victory of a soldier’s daughter, as well as the natural feelings of wife, mother and grandmother. (Helena’s soldier son Prince Christian Victor of Schleswig-Holstein, called Christle, died of enteric fever at Pretoria in October 1900. The news reduced Victoria to sleeplessness and an infantile diet of arrowroot and milk.5) She celebrated victories at Kimberley and Ladysmith and eventually, in May 1900, the relief of Mafeking, but she died before the cessation of hostilities and confirmation of British victory in the costly Treaty of Vereeniging in May 1902. Among her final official duties had been an audience with Lord Roberts, former British commander and victor of Paardeberg, Poplar Grove, Diamond Hill and Bergendal. She conferred upon him the Order of the Garter.
Before the Boers, Victoria found herself embroiled in fighting of a different order. It was the final instance of that maladroit approach to her own domestic affairs which had previously threatened her early married life, when she pitted Lehzen against Albert, and the years of her seclusion, when she failed to check the boorishness of John Brown and so imposed upon her household and her intimates a tyranny more exacting than her own obdurate caprice.
The offender on this occasion was a twenty-four-year-old khidmutgar, or male waiter, called Abdul Karim. He was one of two Indian attendants sent to Victoria in May 1887 by Sir John Tyler, governor of India’s Northwest Provinces. Victoria described him as ‘tall, and with a fine serious countenance’;6 afterwards she added that he was ‘a perfect gentleman’ and ‘in every way such a high-minded and excellent young man’.7 Events would show that she was mistaken. Neither her family nor her household shared her estimation of the blandly supercilious outsider, who quickly acquired the favoured s
tatus of ‘a sort of pet, like a dog or cat which the Queen will not willingly give up’.8 Victoria did indeed treat Karim as a pet. She commissioned his portrait on at least four occasions, including, in the summer of his arrival, from Tuxen, then engaged in the eight-month process of painting The Family of Queen Victoria in 1887. She herself made a painstaking copy in watercolours of a portrait executed in 1888 by Rudolph Swoboda, one of her last and best, and hung his photograph with that of John Brown in her dressing room. She presented Karim with houses at Frogmore and Osborne and the purpose-built Karim Cottage at Balmoral. Persuaded by his story that his father was a surgeon-general in the Indian Army and he himself a well-paid clerk, Victoria was inveigled into releasing him from serving duties. Instead she appointed him her munshi, or Indian secretary. In return he taught her Hindustani. Her Hindustani diaries survive in the Royal Archives.