Queen Victoria--Twenty-Four Days That Changed Her Life

by Lucy Worsley

  Duleep Singh – indeed any visitor – could reach Victoria’s holiday home of Osborne House, just outside Cowes on the island’s northern tip, in less than three hours from London. Her guests usually made the journey by train and then steamboat. The narrow seas between the mainland and the island were always busy. You could embark for the Isle of Wight at Southampton, where the port was always full of ‘merchant ships, many of them bound for America’, or else from Portsmouth, packed with ‘numerous large warships … they bristled with sailors everywhere, up the highest topmast, on ropes and rope ladders’.1 The Maharaja’s steamer probably chugged past ships of Victoria’s Royal Navy that were destined for Crimea, where British guns were slowly wearing down the gigantic but ill-equipped army of the Russians.

  Osborne House, encircled by wooded hills, seemed remote from such concerns. At Cowes, a carriage waited to take visitors the last mile uphill to the property. Finished only four years before the Maharaja’s visit, Osborne had been Albert’s most demanding creative project thus far, and he had put a great deal of himself into it. When the skies were blue, the house looked like a romantic Italian villa commanding a lovely view folding down to azure waters. ‘The endless expanse of the sea,’ wrote the maidservant who occupied the bedroom right at the top of Osborne’s tower, ‘looks so smooth that the ships seem to be standing on glass or ice.’2 On the island’s frequent wet days, though, when its cement-covered walls became stained with rain, the Italianate design looked oddly out of place on the Isle of Wight.

  As the Maharaja’s carriage emerged from the tree-lined drive through the park and drew up before the house, he was met by a ‘Footman in scarlet & gold, powdered hair, & silk stockings’ before one of the queen’s gentlemen conducted him into the main downstairs drawing room.3 There he waited by himself, until Victoria’s arrival into the otherwise empty room was announced by the ‘quiet shy opening of the door’. She would slip in unannounced to greet her guests. One visitor found herself ‘on my knee kissing the hand which was given to me but I do not know how I came there’.4 She kept visitors standing up.

  A pair of profile portraits dating from this very same year of 1854 reveals that Albert by now had become distinctly jowly, his hair scraped forward to cover his balding forehead, while Victoria was beginning to develop her unique hamster cheeks. But the woman the Maharaja saw before him still looked younger than her thirty-five years. In the photograph, at least, her hair shines, she hardly looks like a mother of eight and her white dress is demure and girlish.5 Despite Albert’s cutbacks, Victoria’s spending on her wardrobe had crept up again, to roughly £6,000 annually, or six times a very good annual income for a professional gentleman.6 But she and Albert – for Albert must approve every outfit – were conservative in their taste. A Frenchman found her frumpy, and laughed at her old-fashioned handbag ‘on which was embroidered a fat poodle in gold’. It was probably the work of Princess Vicky.7

  Although Duleep Singh had once ruled a kingdom, he was only three years older than Vicky, and Victoria now gave him an informal, maternal welcome. At Osborne, she was completely happy, comfortable and on her own ground. The idea that the royal family needed a rural retreat had first come up in 1843. ‘Albert & I talked of buying a place of our own, which would be so nice,’ she’d written.8 ‘God knows how willingly I wd. always live with my beloved Albert in the quiet and retirement of private life & not be the constant object of observation and of newspaper articles.’9 It was the then Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, who’d become Albert’s ally and friend, who first suggested that they might buy the estate at Osborne. ‘It is impossible to see a prettier spot,’ Victoria enthused, ‘valleys and woods which would be beautiful anywhere; but all this near the sea … We have a charming beach quite to ourselves.’10

  Osborne was restful, and refreshing, but Victoria came to receive her Indian guest straight from a morning’s immersion in the business of the Crimean War. She’d spent the time reading telegrams and discussing the progress of the campaign against the Russians. Her officers – to her mind inexplicably – seemed reluctant to attack Sebastopol, and cholera was racing through their men. But now, in one of those switches of gear that Victoria had to make several times a day, she offered the young Maharaja the conventional Osborne afternoon entertainment: a drizzly drive to nearby Carisbrooke Castle.

  At dinner later that night, Victoria and Duleep sat next to one another, and she began to talk to him more seriously than had been possible in the carriage. He engaged her at once with his romantic story. ‘I observed that he must have seen many terrible things,’ Victoria recorded. ‘He answered sorrowfully, with a very expressive look. “Oh! Your Majesty,” he said, “I’ve seen dreadful things; when I think of it, it makes me shiver. I am certain they would have murdered me too, had I remained.”’11

  He was referring to his notoriously nasty childhood. In a bloody succession struggle before the British had taken over his lands, Duleep’s uncle had been murdered before his eyes and two of his brothers died in mysterious circumstances.

  Duleep himself was parted from his mother. The British intention had been to bring him to England and thoroughly to anglicise him, and part of this process included a supposed ‘conversion’ to Christianity. The first time Victoria had met Duleep Singh, a few months previously in London, his plight had made a profound impression. ‘There is something too painful,’ she wrote, in the spectacle ‘of a young deposed Sovereign, once so powerful, receiving a pension, and having no security’. Victoria decided that as the chief of the princes of India, Duleep Singh should come immediately after the royal family in order of precedence. It ‘will be a pleasure to us’, she wrote, ‘to do all we can to be of use to him, and to befriend and protect him’.12

  The intention may have been good, but the reality was to deprive him of his patrimony and culture. In a gesture towards blending into British society, Duleep’s hair was shorn off. It had previously been ‘as long and abundant as a woman’s’, and Duleep’s short new style must have been a daily reminder to him that he was no longer a Sikh.13 His British minders thought it best not to send him to school to get a useful education, for fear that ‘he might be thrashed’.14 It gradually emerged that Duleep’s role in his new London life was simply to be present at grand occasions, looking decorative and submissive. It tickled British pride to see the queen’s pet Indian prince being led about, glamorous in his Indian clothes. The Times admired the way the ‘easy and graceful folds’ of his attire made ‘the garments of civilised Europe’ look ‘infinitely prosaic and devoid of taste’.15 He was taken to see the opening of Parliament, while Albert designed him a coat of arms.

  The motto Albert chose for Duleep Singh’s arms was ‘to do good rather than be conspicuous’, yet being conspicuous was the unfortunate prince’s destiny. At Osborne Victoria now observed that her dinner-table companion was once again ‘very handsomely dressed & with his jewels on’, and she completed her journal entry with one of her competent little sketches to record his appearance.16 The Maharaja’s jewels were a potent subject, and over the years have become a focus for the resentment his former people still feel towards the British. For the most famous among them was the Koh-i-noor diamond, still displayed in the Tower of London today. And it was very firmly no longer in the possession of this young boy.

  Earlier the same summer, Victoria had decided that her pet prince in his silken pyjamas and pearls should be painted by Franz Xaver Winterhalter. (Winterhalter added a few inches to Duleep Singh’s height to make him look more imposing.) During the sittings at Buckingham Palace, Duleep had given a masterclass in the art of making a pleasing gesture. One day while Winterhalter was at work, Victoria came into the room and, as a surprise, handed Duleep Singh the Koh-i-noor.17 It had been given to her as an (inveigled) gift after the takeover of his kingdom.18 The diamond was displayed in the Great Exhibition of art, science and manufacture that Albert had arranged in 1851, and the queen had worn it herself on her thirty-fifth birthday earlier in 185
4.19 Duleep Singh took some time to recognise it for what it was, because since he’d last seen it, it had shrunk. The great diamond was now cut and polished, in western fashion, to flash in the light.

  Once he’d identified it, though, everyone in the room waited anxiously to see how Duleep would react. This jewel was a former prized possession, something he’d worn upon his arm as a child. ‘For all his air of polite interest and curiosity,’ wrote the lady who’d been looking after the boy, ‘there was a passion of repressed emotion in his face.’ What might he do? Burst into tears, throw it out of the window? ‘It was to me one of the most excruciatingly uncomfortable quarters-of-an hour that I ever passed!’

  In the end, though, Duleep had remained inscrutable. He moved quietly over to Victoria and handed it back, claiming that it gave him the ‘greatest pleasure’, as her loyal subject, to tender ‘to my Sovereign the Koh-i-noor!’20 After all, his pension and position was dependent on his remaining loyal to the British. Lord Dalhousie, governor general of India, later described this piece of theatre as ‘arrant humbug’. The diamond, he thought, was not Duleep Singh’s to give.21 But the gesture won Victoria’s heart.

  She concluded her Osborne evening with Duleep Singh with the soothing notion that removing him from his throne had probably saved him from being murdered like his relatives. ‘This thought reconciles me with having had to despoil him of his Kingdom,’ she wrote, ‘& he is convinced of the wisdom of this himself. We were struck by his anxiety to improve himself, his intelligence, & at the same time liveliness & gaiety.’22

  Winterhalter’s portrait, and Victoria’s own sketch, show Duleep Singh as westerners saw him: brimming over with exotic romance and an eagerness to please. During this present stay at Osborne, though, Victoria’s German secretary Dr Ernest Becker would take a less formal photograph of Duleep, which leaves a very different impression. The young man is sullen, almost miserable, standing awkwardly. He is turbaned, yet wears European trousers. Caught between two cultures as he was, the well-meaning fussing would never solve his problems. Victoria herself recognised that with his new Christianity he was ‘for ever cut off from his own people’.23 Looking at Dr Becker’s photograph today, we don’t see the innocent, naïve, beautiful boy that Victoria saw. We see an adolescent caught in a terrible trap.

  On the second day of Duleep Singh’s stay, Victoria and Albert woke in their airy bedroom with views of the sea. Soon after their purchase of Osborne, it had become clear that the existing Georgian house was too small. Privy Council meetings had to take place in the entrance hall, or else outdoors. The Privy Councillors got fed up with being brought from the steamer pier in a one-horsed ‘small bathing carriage’, designed to take at most two swimmers down to the beach.24 Osborne was to be a holiday home, but royal business must continue, and it demanded better facilities.

  And in truth Albert was attracted to the project of rebuilding the house as much as to the island itself. On visits to Osborne, he enjoyed becoming ‘partly forester, partly builder, partly farmer and partly gardener’, and relished being ‘a good deal upon [his] legs’.25 Convinced by Albert that he knew far more about it, Victoria deferred to him in all the creative decisions. She ‘had no taste’, she told third parties, ‘used only to listen to him’.26 It was hard to avoid listening to Albert if he wanted to tell you something, especially something about art or design, as even the Pope discovered. During his brief papal audience in Rome, Albert recorded how ‘in spite of his infallibility’ he had ventured to put the pontiff right on a point of art history.27

  In 1845, the foundation stone for Albert’s new house was laid. Osborne’s architecture divides people today. Some find it institutional and grim. But its many fans see it as the triumphant achievement of Albert’s orderly, logical, Renaissance-loving mind, brought to fruition by the Victorian über-builder Thomas Cubitt (the man who’d made his name building Belgravia). The first part of the house to be completed was the pavilion, containing matching suites for both queen and prince. It looks like a Belgravian town house detached from its neighbours, and plonked upon a seaside hilltop.

  The family moved in with enormous excitement and some trepidation: this was to be a new kind of royal living. The ‘dining room looked very handsome’, wrote the children’s governess that first night. ‘The windows, lighted by the brilliant lamps in the room, must have been seen far out to sea.’28 When the shutters of these windows were closed, mirrors attached to their insides cleverly magnified the light of the chandeliers. The house was full of ingenious Albertian touches like this, as well as the ‘fireproof’ structure of iron girders, the bathrooms and the flushing toilets. Albert’s own bath was hidden beneath a wooden lid, which makes it look curiously like a coffin, while Victoria’s was hidden in a cupboard. A furnace in the basement provided hot water. Victoria’s dressing room also had the novelty of a plumbed-in shower, while her commode, off her bedroom, was hidden behind a door discreetly disguised as part of the built-in mahogany wardrobe.

  Downstairs on the principal entertaining floor of the pavilion, architectural historian Mark Girouard has noted how the billiard room, drawing room and dining room all flow one into another, round corners. This allowed the court and guests to be present in one space, as politeness demanded, yet able to choose their own entertainments: equerries playing billiards on the special table designed by Albert himself, ladies sewing in the drawing room. Or indeed, Victoria and Albert could send their court out of sight round one of the corners so that its wearier members could simply sit down – something they weren’t allowed to do in the royal presence.29

  But Osborne’s interiors were not to everyone’s taste. ‘You cannot think,’ wrote one unusually subversive maid-of-honour, ‘how some of the atrocities here strike me. It certainly is the oddest combination of upholstery; hideous presents they have received, and as ill-arranged rooms as I ever saw.’30 The colours are mauve, maroon, blue and gold, a discordant jangle to modern eyes, while the carpets are luridly flowered. Every surface remains encrusted with ornaments and knick-knacks, as if Victoria and Albert had only just finished arranging their eccentric palace. Their servants found remote Osborne dull and inconvenient. The male servants had to be taken to their own quarters, separate from the main house, by a wagon that departed every night at eleven, and ‘the Queen’s staff, without exception, dislike staying there’.31

  While Victoria and Albert began the day in the main pavilion of Osborne House, Duleep Singh woke up in his own separate suite. It lay in an extension, a bulky block in a rather cack-handed classical style. It had been found necessary to add this block to provide enough room for the household. Lofty and gloomy corridors, with icy-white marble statues and the dull gleam of bronzes at intervals, had led him here after his first night’s dinner. Victoria’s mother also often occupied rooms in this extension. Brought back into sympathy with Victoire by her own experience of childbearing, and the strong relationship that Albert had built up with his mother-in-law and aunt, Victoria now liked to have her mother around.

  The Indian prince joined the royal family’s outdoor breakfast, during which the queen proudly watched her visitor ‘playing so nicely’ with her children. Afterwards Duleep was given another Osborne ‘treat’, a tour of the royal farm.

  His hosts noticed that what particularly interested him at the farm was ‘the Machinery’. Duleep had grown up in a country of swords, spears and subsistence agriculture, and now he was coming up close to Victorian technology. After lunch, the party set out for the royal yacht (in fact a paddle steamer) named Victoria & Albert. They steamed off to the Needles at the western end of the island, to observe the navy testing a new gunboat. It was a further lesson to the Maharaja in how soundly he and his people had been beaten.

  On the return journey, the heavy swell made Victoria ‘feel rather giddy’, but she still managed to have ‘a most interesting conversation’ with Duleep about Christianity. Duleep’s new religion had estranged him from his family. His sister-in-law, for example, wo
uld no longer touch or hug him.32 But Victoria wanted to believe that her protégé’s conversion was sincere and lasting. He’d been listening to an account of the stoning of St Stephen, Duleep explained, when he’d found his eyes filling with tears. He’d come to the sudden realisation that ‘this religion must be true’. This was exactly what Victoria wanted to hear; she also reassured herself that he was ‘aware of the difference & defects of the Catholic Religion’.33 The merchants of the East India Company who’d first established links with India had not particularly cared about religion; they were more concerned about making money. But in the nineteenth century, a flood of British Christian missionaries to India had brought with them a new sense of moral purpose that had deepened the clashes with Indian indigenous cultures. And what else could Duleep Singh say about religion, anyway? His Christianity was certainly a precondition of his pension.

  The third day of Duleep’s stay dawned dull, but everyone hoped it would turn fine later. This was the day of the annual Osborne servants’ beano in honour of Albert’s birthday. After breakfast, Victoria’s children took Duleep off her hands, and dragged him along to their Swiss cottage.34

  This was, and is, a wooden chalet imported from the Continent and only just finished by the time Duleep saw it. The cottage was intended to be an educational facility for the royal children, where they were encouraged to acquire the practical skills of baking and gardening. They were supposed to learn the value of money by selling goods to each other from the miniature counter of Spratt’s Grocer. Vicky was now nearly fourteen, and at seventeen she would marry. She’d already known her future husband, a Prussian prince, for three years. After Vicky’s wedding, her siblings kept her supplied with the pies they’d once all baked together at the Swiss cottage. The queen’s messenger took them weekly to her new home in Germany, a poignant gift from children to a married woman who was still really a child herself.35