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

by Lucy Worsley

  All of Victoria’s children had been kept in ignorance of the mechanics of human reproduction. When Affie, aged fifteen, encountered a pregnant lady, he commented on how ugly her dress was. ‘She is expecting an addition,’ he was told. ‘What for?’ he asked, surprised.49 Bertie’s biographer Jane Ridley explains how his Latin tutor, discovering that Albert had not explained sexual intercourse and reproduction to his son, found himself doing the job instead.50 And Bertie then improved his theoretical knowledge through fieldwork. At sixteen, he was sent on a mini-version of the conventional aristocratic Grand Tour, and in Germany he managed to snog a girl. This was something that the future Prime Minister William Gladstone heard all about, and referred to as a ‘squalid little debauch’.51 Next Bertie succeeded in falling in love with one of his mother’s married ladies-in-waiting, Jane Churchill.

  Belatedly coming to realise that Bertie was experiencing disruptive hormonal urges, Albert decided that the solution was to get him married as quickly as possible. He and Victoria began to look around for a suitable bride, someone royal, healthy, good-looking and docile. Vicky, now living in Berlin as the wife of the Crown Prince of Prussia, was asked to scout about. ‘God knows!’ Victoria told her daughter, ‘where the young lady we want is to be found!’52

  The answer, as it turned out, was Denmark. Vicky’s parents approved her recommendation of Alexandra, or Alix, daughter of the Danish king. While she had the qualifications of youth and birth, her disadvantage was the conflict between her native country and the Germany that Victoria and Albert loved. But she seemed of good character, and with her long nose and tiny waist she was beautiful. When he was shown a picture of Alix, Albert announced that ‘from that Photograph I wd marry her at once’.53

  Bertie, though, was less than enthusiastic about being hustled into marriage, and asked if he could think it over.54 In fact, he was thinking harder about someone else. Bertie rarely filled in the pages of his printed engagement diary, and in June 1861 his entries petered out altogether, one day being much like another at the camp. On 6 September, though, with his mother safely out of Ireland, Bertie’s diary kicks back into life. He records just the words ‘Curragh’ and ‘N.C. 1st time.’ But Jane Ridley has deduced that this laconic comment was code for having taken the major life step of losing his virginity.

  Bertie’s first time with ‘N.C.’ was an encounter with a lady called variously Nellie or Nelly, Clifden or Clifton, although her most likely surname was Clifford. He climbed out at night through the window of his quarters to enjoy ‘intercourse with her at another officer’s hut’.55

  Historians usually describe ‘Nellie’ as an ‘actress’, though a friend of Bertie’s pronounced her to be ‘a well known “London Lady” much run after by the household brigade’.56 The decade that would become known as ‘The Gay Sixties’ had just begun, with its language of ‘swells’ and ‘houris’. The best places to find yourself a ‘London Lady’ (also known as a ‘soiled dove’) were the dining and dancing clubs like Mott’s in Foley Street, named for its proprietors, who ‘had some connection with the ballet department of the Opera’ and where ‘one generally found some pretty members of the corps among the dancers’.57 Between two and three in the morning, the riotous crowd at Mott’s would call for cold fowl, ham and champagne to fuel the ‘revelry fast and furious’.58 Many of the ‘London ladies’, sniffed the Daily Telegraph, were merely the daughters of stablemen, who sold their ‘miserable bodies’ to ‘wealthy profligates’ so that they could ‘dress splendidly, and drive handsome equipages’.59 Their number included the celebrated ‘Baby Jordan’, ‘Shoes’ and ‘Skittles’ and, indeed, Nelly Clifford. She was present at Mott’s the legendary night that Lord Hastings, after ordering six cases of champagne, released 200 sewer rats into the ballroom as a joke.60 Bertie obviously liked ‘N.C.’ enough for two further appointments recorded in his diary on the nights of 9 and 10 September.61

  But Nellie was not an uncommon name. Bertie and his friends were also in thrall to another ‘London Lady’ called Nellie Fowler, and then there was also Nellie Farren, a variety actress who sang her songs in the ‘purest and most delicious Cockney’. She had the secret of eternal youth, people thought, and ‘dances in tights on the Gaiety stage, and she, a grandmother!’62 This profusion of ‘Nellies’ has caused some confusion, and in recent years another intriguing possibility has emerged. Perhaps Bertie’s ‘Nellie’ wasn’t a ‘London Lady’ shipped over from the nightspots of London after all, but instead one of the Irish camp followers of the Curragh known as the ‘Wrens’. The lives of this community of women who existed alongside the British army have come into focus as historians search harder for those whom the official records have forgotten.

  Communities entirely made up of men, from palaces to army bases, have always been accompanied by a shadow, transient, female version of themselves, and the Curragh camp was no different. Its female camp followers – some of them common-law wives to the soldiers, others who might sometimes support themselves through prostitution – inhabited makeshift, shanty-like structures that resembled nests. That’s why the respectable folk of the Curragh Plain called them after birds. ‘Wrins!’ said one local. ‘That’s the name ov ’em! Wrins! … and a dridful life they lade. Most distressing, believe me!’63

  The army authorities did little to stop prostitution within the camp’s bounds. In just six months of 1866, there were 556 cases of prostitutes being caught trespassing. Each time a woman got caught, she had to pay a fine of a shilling to the Newbridge magistrate. But this was no deterrent and appears to have been regarded simply as a tax on business. ‘If I turn them out one end of the camp,’ complained the camp’s sergeant in 1866, ‘in ten minutes they are at the other.’64

  These prostitutes and other camp followers, roughly 100 in number, inhabited burrows constructed out of ‘rough, disshapen domes of furze’ strengthened with pieces of corrugated iron. The ‘nests’ were hard to spot at first among the hillocks at the edge of the Curragh Plain until you had seen one of them for what it was. After that you noticed that you were standing amid an entire village of them. ‘The smoke of the fire which burns on the floor of the hut has to pass out of the door,’ we hear, which itself is ‘a slit … kept open by two rude posts, which also serve to support the roof’. The ‘Wrens” homes therefore resembled nests, ‘big, rude birds’ nests compacted of harsh branches, and turned topsy-turvey on the ground’. Space within was so limited that ‘suspended against the prickly sides’ of the ‘nests’ you might see a crinoline, ‘an article so bulky and intractable that it could not well be got inside’. It was ‘put on or taken off, as occasion required, at the hole that served for a door’.65

  This description of shanty-type dwellings forged from nature is the work of a sensationalist journalist and must be treated with care. At the very least, it must be exaggerated or romanticised. Yet it does remain true, even today, that the rolling hills of the Curragh grasslands continue to bristle with clumps of prickly furze, beneath which it is possible to creep and to make out a shelter. The evidence of empty food cartons and Jameson whiskey bottles even suggests that the Wrens’ ‘nests’ are sometimes still occupied.

  It was an article in Dickens’s publication All the Year Round that first exposed the difficulties of the lives of these women of the Curragh camp. It recounted the tale of a priest who encountered one of the ‘Wrens’ on the street of the local town, and ‘threw her down, tearing from off her back the thin shawl and gown that covered it, and with his heavy riding-whip so flogged her over the bare shoulders that the blood actually spirted over his boots’. The same writer also saw ‘four women lying in a bit of a hole they had scooped out … wet, cold, and perishing from want of exposure’, and was taken aback when they spent his alms on whiskey.66

  There is no denying that these women had hard lives, but care needs to be taken with these articles about them because they were written in a Victorian genre known as ‘slumming’, a semi-salacious relishment of the misfortune
s of lower-class people. In 1867 another investigative journalist, James Greenwood, wrote the account of the lives of the Curragh Wrens that secured their lasting recognition. Greenwood’s special selling point was that he would spend the night with his subjects, in a workhouse, for example, observing their lives at first hand. He was writing for large amounts of money, and doubtless overstated the horror and squalor of what he saw. He described the Wrens as frighteningly independent, with a look of ‘hard depravity … determined and defiant wickedness’.67

  Despite their melodrama, though, Greenwood’s works had a colour and immediacy that brought the plight of poor people more vividly to life in the minds of his middle-class readers than any government report could do.68 And Greenwood also paints a picture of a real community among the Wrens. Living as a cooperative of women, they enjoyed freedoms that would have been unavailable to them in a traditional family, subordinate to a husband, or within a religious community subordinate to the Church. Some of the Wrens might eventually end up in the care of the Magdalene nuns who specialised in the redemption of ‘fallen women’.69 Their modern historian, Maria Luddy, points that the Wrens and the nuns were flipsides of the same image: a woman defined mainly by her sexual habits. Whether by having sex outside marriage or abstaining altogether, both groups had placed themselves beyond society’s control.

  Greenwood more precisely quantifies the Wrens’ community as about ‘ten bushes’ containing roughly sixty inhabitants, mainly aged between seventeen and twenty-five. The Wrens, he says, pooled their resources and labour: the older ones stayed behind and looked after the babies, while the younger ones were dressed up and sent out for sex work. Greenwood met one young lady who was, despite the living conditions, ‘a perfectly neat-looking girl, washed, combed, and arrayed in a clean starched cotton gown, and with bright white stockings and well-fitting boots’.70

  And among these Wrens of the Curragh is another candidate for the role of the deflowerer of the Prince of Wales. An Irish family historian has pointed out that an ‘Ellen Clifton’ was baptised in County Waterford in 1844, which would have made her seventeen if she really was Bertie’s first sexual partner.71 She appeared in poor law payment records. Perhaps ‘Nellie’, then, was really an Irish girl, orphaned by the Great Famine, whose bright white stockings caused her to be picked up by Bertie’s friends to entertain the son of the Famine Queen.

  Whoever Nellie really was, Bertie’s romantic future lay in a very different direction. On 11 September, he made a farewell speech to his regiment. ‘I shall ever look back to my intercourse with yourselves,’ he said, ‘with feelings of unmingled pleasure.’72 That night he attended a grand ball at the Mansion House in Dublin, before leaving Ireland. He was off to Germany, to attend a review of the Prussian army.73 Then it was on to Speyer Cathedral, supposedly for a bit of sightseeing, but really to take part in a carefully contrived ‘accidental’ meeting with Alix. This encounter was his chance to play his princely part and to fall in love. He did his best. ‘I can now candidly say,’ Bertie wrote the next day, ‘that I thought her charming and very pretty.’74

  The pressure placed upon Bertie to marry Alix was dramatically increased a few weeks later when his father had the misfortune to hear, through London clubland gossip, what had really happened in the huts of the Curragh. As ever, under stress, Albert picked up his pen. He tackled his son on the subject, writing him an astonishing, enormously long and highly intemperate letter laden with reproach and regret. Albert had always known, he claimed, that Bertie was ‘thoughtless & weak’, but he now understood that the reality was much worse. His son, he thought, had ‘sunk into vice & debauchery … deception & profligacy’. The knowledge that his twenty-year-old son had become sexually active had given Albert, he claimed, ‘the deepest pain’ he’d yet experienced in the whole of his life.75

  What was worse, Albert feared that Bertie’s ‘vice’ hadn’t been a one-off. Albert’s letter also outlined rumours that Nellie had actually come to Windsor Castle for an assignation on Bertie’s birthday the week before (becoming known, in consequence, as ‘The Princess of Wales’). In fact the ‘lady’ who visited Bertie at Windsor Castle that autumn looks like one Mrs Green, a successful blackmailer, who got £60 a year for keeping quiet and going to live in New Zealand.76 It looks as if Nellie Clifford perhaps spread the scandal of her seduction round London because she too was unhappy with her side of whatever financial deal had been done. Once the secret was out, and had done its damaging work, she was certainly paid off more handsomely and effectively. By 1862, a ‘Nelly Clifford’ had a glamorous new life on the other side of the Atlantic, as a star of the Metropolitan Concert Saloon in Wilmington, Delaware.77

  Albert’s letter revealed just how disgusted, shocked and hurt his son’s immorality had made him feel. On a more practical note, he thought Bertie had stupidly put himself into a woman’s power. Nellie, Albert thought, would ‘probably have a child’ and pursue Bertie as the father through the courts: ‘she will be able to give before a greedy Multitude disgusting details of your profligacy for the sake of convincing the Jury, yourself cross-examined by a railing indecent Attorney and hooted and yelled at by a Lawless Mob!! Oh horrible prospect, which this person has in her power, any day to realise!’78

  Given that Bertie’s actions were not particularly out of place for his class and time, it does seem that there was something over-the-top, unhinged, almost hysterical, about Albert’s reaction. Victoria was spared the details, but she too found it agonising. She decided that the best story for public consumption was that ‘wicked wretches’ had seduced a ‘poor, innocent boy into a scrape’. What really concerned her, though, was ‘the agony and misery’ that Albert himself experienced when he ‘first heard of poor Bertie’s misfortune!’ ‘Oh!’ Victoria wrote, that had been ‘so dreadful to witness!’ And Bertie’s shame in the huts of the Curragh would place a lasting strain upon his relationship with his mother. He was tainted, and she could never again look at him, she thought, ‘without a shudder! Oh! that bitterness – oh! that cross!’79

  Why did Albert, and therefore Victoria, react quite so strongly? Benjamin Disraeli, for example, thought the incident ‘undignified’, but ‘not seriously discreditable’.80 It was Albert’s upbringing that explains his violent reaction to even the slightest sexual incontinence. ‘You know well the events and scandals that had always happened in Coburg Castle,’ Albert once wrote to his brother Ernest, regretting the many and lurid affairs of their father, and the single but catastrophic dalliance of their mother.81 Albert had never been able to process the consequences of his parents’ divorce. He was locked in a state of cognitive dissonance: he loved his mother, he missed his mother, but he’d lost her because she’d done wrong. But he could also see that his father was unbearable, indulging his appetites for women with seigneurial swagger.

  Albert had good reason to suspect that Bertie would be blackmailed, because that was exactly what had happened to his father too. One of his mistresses had published her memoirs after he’d failed to pay her off. This woman, Pauline Panam, was ‘scarcely fourteen’ when the Duke of Coburg seduced her and left her pregnant. ‘Never,’ she claimed afterwards, ‘did a woman fall more blindly into the abyss.’82

  And in fact, it wasn’t just Albert who thought that the pleasures of the 1860s were deeply, utterly wrong. His view that the loss of virtue meant falling into an abyss was typical of the binary way in which the respectable Victorian family considered morality. Albert’s reaction shows how the royal family had once again fallen into alignment with the slice of their subjects who’d become their most important supporters.

  If Bertie was not good, then he must be wicked. And his mother would come to believe that Bertie’s wicked night with Nellie had fatal consequences. One might almost see it as Ireland’s revenge upon its Famine Queen.

  17

  The Blue Room: Windsor Castle, 14 December 1861

  It was one o’clock in the morning of 14 December 1861, just a month after Alber
t had learned about ‘N.C.’, and Victoria was feeling very, very slightly better. She had just received a message from her husband’s doctors that he was doing well. Albert had been seriously ill for weeks, but his condition seemed finally to have stabilised. In the hope of quickening his heartbeat and slowing his breathing, his medical team were giving him brandy every half an hour.

  Victoria was spending the night in her Windsor Castle dressing room. She’d been sleeping there ever since Albert had moved, some days ago, out of their private suite. Doctors brought her updates at intervals throughout the night. Their news continued fair at 2 a.m., and at three as well. By sunrise, the spirits of the whole household were definitely on the rise. ‘We are allowed again a hope,’ Albert’s Private Secretary informed the Prime Minister, Viscount Palmerston, by telegram. ‘The Prince has had a quiet night and all the symptoms are somewhat modified.’1

  Victoria even managed a little sleep before being woken at 5.30 to be told that there ‘is ground to hope that the crisis is over’. Her husband, the doctors said, had even been strong enough to get out of bed and walk across the room to answer a call of nature.2 Victoria’s daughter Alice, now eighteen, was lying on a little bed next to her mother’s. They learned in their dressing gowns that Albert’s breathing was still far from normal, but that ‘if he could get over that day … he might recover’.3

  The relief was enormous. Albert had been raving and talking nonsense in his delirious sickness. Feeling courage return, Victoria began in her mind to store ‘up all the things he had said and done … to amuse him on his return to health’.4 ‘My Husband won’t die,’ Victoria explained to Dr Clark, ‘for that would kill me.’5