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

by Lucy Worsley

  It was the success of Osborne that inspired Victoria and Albert to seek another home even more distant from their London life and responsibilities. Victoria first set foot in Scotland in 1842, having travelled there by sea, and instantly adored it. Albert also liked Scotland because it reminded him of Germany, the towns ‘very German-looking’ and the people ‘like Germans’.21 ‘The people,’ he thought, ‘are marked by that honesty and sympathy, which always distinguish the inhabitants of mountainous countries.’22

  As readers of Scott’s stirring, chivalric stories from history, they both liked the way that every Scottish spot seemed connected with ‘some interesting historical fact, and with most of these Sir Walter Scott’s accurate descriptions have made us familiar’.23 One of the great Scottish lords, welcoming Victoria into his home, gave her such a ‘princely and romantic’ reception that she was left feeling ‘as if a great chieftain in olden feudal times was receiving his sovereign’. This particular host, Lord Breadalbane, conducted the couple through a hall and staircase ‘lined with Highlanders’, and as dusk fell, the words ‘Welcome Victoria – Albert’ were spelt out in lamps on the hillside while bonfires blazed on the mountain peaks beyond.24 For them both, it felt like a spiritual homecoming. At their costume balls at Buckingham Palace, Victoria and Albert had played out the chivalric fantasies they knew so well from Sir Walter. But now, visiting Scotland, they seemed to be stepping into a living world of the past.

  It was Dr Clark, already responsible for Victoria’s love of fresh air, who introduced the idea that they should acquire a permanent Scottish home. In 1848, Albert opted to rent Balmoral, an estate that had come onto the market after its owner died choking on a fish bone. He made the decision after completing a thorough study of the Scottish weather, which revealed that it rained less on this eastern side of the country. Even so, Dr Clark’s own journal, recording autumnal stays at Balmoral and his borrowed home at Birkhall nearby, reads repetitively: ‘a drizzly rain … a drizzly rain … scarcely a day has passed without some rain, some days very wet.’25

  After purchasing the lease for Balmoral, Victoria and Albert discovered that living there delighted them. The estate, and that of neighbouring Birkhall, encompassed miles of bleak Cairngorm hillside, including the noble peak of Lochnagar and the deep, remote, black loch of Muick.

  The new house that Albert now set about building at Balmoral was inspired by the Schloss Rosenau, a much-missed home of his childhood, and he persisted in thinking the wild country of Deeside to be just like Thuringia. (His brother Ernest, however, insisted that it was not.) The completed castle was rather a jumble of architectural styles, and even the loyal Dr Clark secretly admitted in his journal that its colossal tower was ‘rather too high for the House, or rather the House too low for the tower’.26

  Arriving there herself in Dr Clark’s carriage, Florence Nightingale was probably surprised – as other visitors were – by the low-key, casual nature of the reception at the castle. There was ‘not even a sentinel to be seen’, wrote one bemused German count, who was astonished to have been allowed to drive straight up to the door. ‘As I entered the hall,’ he continued, ‘which is ornamented with stags’ antlers, I was received by the tones of a bagpipe.’27

  But Victoria and Albert revelled in the informality of their Highland life. They were protected by just ‘a single Policeman … who walks about the grounds to keep off impertinent intruders’.28 Victoria’s journal shows the delight she took in covering many miles by foot. Rain gear was highly necessary. The royal family got theirs, made from ‘Shetland home-spun Tweed’, from the appropriately named Scott Adie, ‘Waterproof Cloak and Jacket Maker to Her Majesty’.29 ‘Heavy boots,’ wrote one Balmoral visitor, ‘and a blue cape … with one’s skirt hitched up high, and a mighty stick in one’s hand – that is how one goes out walking here’.30

  Once inside the castle, Dr Clark sent Florence on through to the drawing room overlooking lawns down to the Dee. This room made such a striking impression on one visitor that he was heard to say that while he’d formerly thought the drawing room at Osborne the ‘ugliest in the world’, he’d changed his mind upon seeing its equivalent at Balmoral.31

  The walls were painted in the ‘pale, cold tints which were so fashionable in the ’50s’, with colour provided by carpets and curtains of Royal Stuart tartan, a theme that ran throughout the whole building.32 The castle’s tartan furnishings made an effect ‘more patriotic than artistic’, in the words of one of Victoria’s grandchildren, while another visitor thought them proof that being Queen of Scotland ‘involves painful aesthetic considerations’.33 Some visitors experienced ‘tartanitis’, for the ubiquitous checks ‘had a way of flickering before your eyes and confusing your brain’.34 Albert had even designed a special new Balmoral tartan of lilac, red and black. His children went about in plaid kilts, and there was even tartan linoleum in the servants’ quarters.

  Meanwhile the Highland theme continued in many additional forms: ‘the wall-lights are silver antlers, guns or game-bags, and if one’s pen needs dipping, one must look for ink in the back of a hound or a boar.’35 Thistles were important too, sprouting in stone along the castle’s roofline, and incorporated into the design of candelabra, dessert plates and wallpaper. The abundance of thistles, claimed one visitor, would ‘rejoice the heart of a donkey if they happened to look like his favourite repast which they don’t’.36 But Victoria and Albert couldn’t care less about the mockery of their guests. The castle for them meant golden days, a less formal, more natural life. Victoria’s staff were highly aware of her ‘passionate admiration for the Highlands. Leaving them is always a case of actual red eyes.’37

  Victoria and Albert’s family and household, however, were far from loving Balmoral with an equal fervour themselves. ‘That most VILE and most ABOMINABLE of places’ is what their youngest son Leopold called it, while both upper and lower servants got bored.38 ‘We have no duties to perform to occupy our minds,’ they complained, ‘and the weather is horribly cold and wet … we just exist from meal to meal and do our best to kill time.’39 ‘It is very cold here,’ wrote one disgruntled guest. ‘I believe my feet were frostbitten at dinner, for there was no fire at all there, and in the drawing room there were two little sticks which hissed at the man who attempted to light them.’40 Whichever government minister was appointed to be in attendance dreaded the task, for he had no sitting room, and ‘was obliged to transact all his work in his bedroom’.41 This lack of space had been a deliberate ploy to make the house as holiday-orientated as possible.

  It was partly because they were bored that the household were now full of excitement at the prospect of seeing Florence Nightingale for themselves. More importantly, though, the heroine of Scutari had long been the subject of admiring letters to and from court. These letters told of her ‘knack of getting round people and bringing them to think as she does, in a remarkable degree’.42 Now it was to be seen if Florence could ‘get round’ the queen.

  Victoria had first met Florence on the latter’s presentation at court in 1839 when they were both in their late teens. Florence had then found the young queen ‘flushed and tired’, but self-possessed, ‘not nearly so much frightened as I expected’.43 But now, nearly twenty years later, their roles were reversed. It was Florence who had the more self-assurance, and the queen who was flustered.

  Doubtless Victoria had her usual ‘half-a-dozen dogs’ in tow, who accompanied her ‘when she moved anywhere’.44 To receive her guest, she was likely wearing something like her surviving day dress of lilac silk from this same year of 1856, which has grey silk ribbons running between waist and hem inside so that the skirt can be drawn up for convenient walking.45

  During this particular Scottish holiday, though, Victoria hadn’t been out walking as much as usual. She was pregnant, again, with Beatrice, her ninth baby. The recent weather had been so rainy, ‘without ceasing for a week’, all the children had colds, and she hadn’t been getting on well with Albert.46 Both she an
d he were chagrined that she’d been advised to withdraw her proposal to make him ‘Prince Consort’, on the grounds that Parliament were most unlikely to allow it.47

  Victoria now found the woman approaching her across the tartan carpet to be ‘tall, & slight, with fine dark eyes, & must have been very pretty’, even if she’d become ‘very thin & care worn’.48 Despite the helpful presence of the pets, communication between the two women proved difficult. Victoria was unable to keep up the conversation for more than ten minutes before she resorted to calling Albert into the drawing room to help. Florence began to think, somewhat contemptuously, that Victoria must be ‘the least self-reliant person she had ever known’.49 Dr Clark had earlier that year fretted that the queen was still ‘frequently low and nervous’, noting that much ‘depends on the Prince’s management’.50 Victoria had been encouraged to believe that she was weak, inadequate and unable to cope without him.

  And the truth was that she was both tongue-tied and star-struck. Victoria admired Florence immensely, not least because despite her power and charisma she had successfully maintained her maidenly manner, ‘travelling under a feigned name, so as not to be known, & refusing all public demonstrations’. Victoria also actively wanted to share the experience of Miss Nightingale with Albert rather than keep it all to herself. ‘I had expected a rather cold, stiff, reserved person,’ she admitted later, ‘instead of which, she is gentle, pleasing & engaging, most ladylike, & so clever, clear & comprehensive in her views of everything.’51 Victoria sometimes found it difficult to keep the conversation going even in a meeting with her Prime Minister (‘fog and rain and [her] coming journey to Italy all did their duty and helped’).52 But Victoria found Florence a particularly daunting conversationalist because the latter simply didn’t waste time with small talk. ‘Her mind is solely & entirely taken up with the one object,’ Victoria noted, ‘the subject of medicine.’53 Florence, then, was the sort of woman of whom Albert had taught Victoria to approve: rational, focused, yet modest.

  Now, to both queen and her husband, Miss Nightingale began to expound upon the need for the reform of the army’s medical practice. Eighteen thousand men had died in Crimea, but the majority of them were the victims of disease, not the Russians. She ‘talked principally of the want of system & organisation which had existed, & been the cause of so much suffering & misery’. And then Florence came on to the meat of her business: ‘the necessity for this being improved’.54 Albert, of course, grew engaged at once, and he and Florence began to discuss the matter thoroughly. Victoria watched and listened, while ‘Albert stated in his usual clear, comprehensive way, where, in his opinion, the root of the evil lay.’55 Florence realised immediately where power lay. ‘Albert was really a Minister,’ she noticed, ‘this very few knew.’56

  Before she left the Balmoral drawing room, though, Florence did at last find the key to ‘getting round’ Victoria. She could see that the queen was less interested in the correct placing of hospital beds, and royal commissions, and she found just the right thing to say to put Victoria at ease. ‘She thanked me for my support & sympathy,’ Victoria proudly recorded in her journal, ‘saying, that to a man, the soldiers had all deeply felt & appreciated my sympathy & interest.’57

  After the sticky start, the afternoon had gone so well that Florence was asked to come back, to stay overnight. During this second visit, everyone under Balmoral’s roof fell under the spell of their sombre visitor. Victoria was emboldened to show her a book of photographs she’d commissioned of wounded soldiers, and Florence entreated that their pensions be continued.58

  Miss Nightingale ‘is wonderful’, gushed one courtier, praising ‘the sweetness of her smile and the grace of her every movement’. Even Victoria’s mother was enraptured. ‘After dinner,’ wrote a lady-in-waiting, ‘H.R.H. confided to me that she had wished to propose her health, but was too shy!!! … Poor Miss N. would have been tolerably overpowered – it was just as well … The servants were all in such a state to see her.’ The ladies recorded the conversation at dinner about the hospital at Scutari:

  We asked how many times she went around at night. ‘Three’, she said (sometimes there were 2,000 patients).

  ‘Then when did you sleep?’

  ‘Oh! That first winter we did not feel as if we needed much sleep.’ I suppose she never went to bed!!59

  Despite the awe of the household, though, the rest of the meal was rather silent, and Miss Nightingale certainly seemed thoroughly out of place at the ball that followed dinner.

  It took place in the vast high-ceilinged ballroom added onto the Deeside flank of the house. This room had antlers on its walls, and tall windows with tartan curtains. There was an elevated alcove for the royal family to sit and watch their ghillies and tenants performing reels, but Victoria did not make much use of it. It was only in the Highlands that she felt able to release the pent-up love of late nights and dancing that had caused Albert to despair before he coached her out of making an exhibition of herself before London society. In the privacy of a Scottish ball, though, ‘Her Majesty was very much amused throughout the whole evening. She scarcely ceased laughing and kept time with her hands and feet in true Highland style to the music.’60 Victoria had learned Highland reeling from the Balmoral household dancing master, who would treat her like any other pupil: ‘now gently, me deare, try and dance like a lady.’61

  It was quite a compliment to Florence, then, to have been invited to one of these intimate Balmoral balls, especially as the new ballroom was looking ‘extremely pretty’ with its lamps ‘decorated with wreaths of flowers’. Miss Nightingale was, as usual, ‘dressed in black’, but Victoria herself would dress for dancing in ‘gray watered silk, and (according to the Highland fashion) my plaid scarf over my shoulder’.62 She was never so happy as when pretending to be Scottish, and the ball came to an end only when refreshments were served at one the next morning.

  But Florence had not enjoyed herself. ‘Flo says,’ recorded a correspondent who heard from her afterwards, that ‘Balls are dull affairs & the Queen ought not to dance.’63 ‘Flo’ would perhaps have preferred to have spent the evening talking with Albert, who could also be a bit sniffy about the rowdy behaviour of the Highland servants on these occasions, with their ‘veritable Witches’ dance, supported by whiskey’.64 Albert was much more engaged by the insights Florence had been able to give him. ‘She put before us,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘all the defects of our present military hospital system, and the reforms that are needed. We are much pleased with her; she is extremely modest.’65

  Despite her own admiration of Albert, though, Florence could also see that there was something awry with his personality. With his precise, Teutonic rationality, all ‘prizes and exhibitions and good intentions’, Albert seemed cold, even soulless. He looked, Florence thought, ‘like a person who wanted to die’.66 It was a remarkable intuition, for no one else there that night of the Balmoral ball had an inkling that indeed he might not live much longer.

  In the days that followed, Victoria and Albert decided to give Florence their support in trying to get the army’s medical service completely overhauled. Victoria instructed Florence to remain as Dr Clark’s guest until Lord Panmure, Secretary of State for War, could be summoned to Scotland. Victoria, or possibly Albert drafting in her name, had already been harassing him for change.67 She now insisted that Panmure come to Balmoral to hear Florence’s views ‘from her own lips’, promising that he would be ‘much gratified and struck’.68 Florence was more sceptical that this would produce any results, but felt herself ‘obliged to succumb’.69

  However, after a couple of meetings with Panmure, she was to be surprised by the warmth of his response to her ideas. ‘You fairly overcame Pan,’ wrote Dr Clark’s son to tell Florence of the impression she had made, claiming that she’d turned the embattled Secretary of State’s frazzled ‘mane absolutely silky’.70 Panmure asked Florence to draw up a confidential report on what she felt ought to be done, and she set to work immediat
ely. 71

  ‘We are delighted,’ was Victoria’s conclusion on the whole visit, ‘I wish we had her at the War Office.’72 But in fact she had no constitutional power to impose such a thing and nor – according to Nightingale’s biographer Mark Bostridge – did she quite share Florence’s vision for reform, feeling that a change of personnel should be enough.73

  And indeed, despite Florence’s admirable, masculine grasp of business, and her gleeful anticipation of ‘hard work & time spent in London & elsewhere to see men & Institutions’ in the cause of reform, something was not quite right with her either. Gradually her health would break down until she was forced to carry on her detailed, almost obsessive written plans for administrative improvement from her bed. But Victoria’s admiration remained strong, and in the 1860s she would offer the increasingly sick Florence Nightingale accommodation in her own old home of Kensington Palace.74

  And Parthenope, the sister whose mental illness and treatment by Dr Clark had introduced the whole encounter at Balmoral, felt sad that her younger sibling’s magnificent achievements had effectively broken their family bond. ‘Flo,’ she wrote sadly, ‘is not my sister any more, but the Mother of a great army.’75

  Neither Victoria, nor Florence Nightingale, both of them ‘mothers of a great army’ in their different ways, fitted easily into Victorian family life.