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

by Lucy Worsley

  The historian Margaret Homans argues that in fact there was nothing unconsidered, or foolish, about Victoria’s withdrawal from public life. For a queen, for Victoria, ‘being is a form of doing’.94 In 1862, she was discovered to be in arrears to the vast number of 16,000 signatures on officers’ commissions for the army and navy. She’d simply failed to get it done. But Britain hadn’t been invaded, there had been no terrible consequences and an Act of Parliament was passed to excuse her from doing it in the future.95 When a queen appeared at the opening of Parliament, even if she remained silent, it was reported in The Times. When a queen did absolutely nothing more significant than going for a pony ride, that too got reported in The Times. If the queen was still alive, and if the life of the nation was going on regardless, then all would be well. ‘Her absence,’ Homans argues, made the monarchy ‘unthreatening’. To the political classes, anxious about the upheaval of the Second Reform Act of 1867, a queen who was out of sight but not out of mind was perfect. To them, ‘the best possible occupant of the throne was a widow’.96

  And in time it would turn out that being a widow might suit Victoria too. Before the twentieth century, to be a widow was perhaps to be in the most potent of a woman’s life stages. For the first time, a widow was answerable to no one. For the first time, she could own property. For all women other than the queen, a woman’s worldly goods, and even her children, had up to that point been not hers but her father’s or her husband’s. Gladstone’s contribution, then, must be downplayed in Victoria’s emergence into the third stage of her life. Her most decisive political interventions would begin to be made as she began to re-possess her power.

  And even at rock bottom, when her doctors had thought she would go mad with grief, Victoria had spoken of endurance. She was ‘determined’, she wrote, that as a widow ‘no one person, may he be ever so good … is to lead, or guide, or dictate to me’.97 In other words, she was saying that no one would ever again have the mastery over her that Albert had possessed. And she was right. From now on, she stood, and ruled, alone. Lord Clarendon came to think that being queen was in fact the saving of her. ‘The best thing for her,’ he thought, ‘is the responsibility of her position & the mass of business wh: She cannot escape from & wh: during a certain portion of the day compels her to think of something other than the all-embracing sorrow.’98

  Bertie’s illness had also, in an unexpected way, done them all good as a family. It had brought Alix’s husband back to her. Their household noticed that she was ‘so affectionate, tears in her eyes talking of him, and his manner to her so gentle’.99 Victoria also noticed a new maturity in her son. ‘There is something different which I can’t exactly express. It is like a new life … he is constantly with Alix and they seem hardly ever apart!’100 And Victoria herself was affected for the good. ‘How it touches one,’ wrote Augusta Bruce, ‘to read of the poor dear Queen sitting holding the P. of W.’s hand! Is it not affecting? I quite long to see Her thus, Her best self, by being taken out of herself – taken out of Doctors and maladies (I mean her own) and nerves.’101

  With Bertie’s illness, Victoria’s return to her best self, the self she had lost in Albert, had begun.

  19

  Lunch with Disraeli: Hughenden Manor, 15 December 1877

  On 15 December 1877, Europe was at war, and Victoria was at work. In the foggy early morning, a telegram from Constantinople reached Windsor Castle.

  ‘Very interesting,’ she thought as she read it. Telegrams like this one passed across her desk every day, and she consumed the most important immediately before consigning them to the ‘dainty silk-lined waste-paper basket’. The daily contents even of her bin ‘would be more interesting than a year’s file of The Times,’ people said.1 This particular morning, her hawkish ambassador to the decaying Ottoman Empire, a former archaeologist named Sir Austen Henry Layard, used his telegram to pass on a personal message from the Sultan. The Sultan requested that Victoria should in turn request the Russian Emperor to come to an armistice in the ongoing conflict with the Turks.2

  This was the so-called ‘Eastern Question’ bursting dangerously back into life. The peace treaty at the end of the Crimean War had marked only an intermission, not a conclusion. Tsar Alexander II, Emperor of All Russia, still believed that he could grab more land and influence in the Ottoman Empire’s troubled Balkan regions. Earlier in 1877, Russia had destabilised Bosnia, Herzegovina and Bulgaria by supporting a rebellion against the Sultan.

  The Sultan had failed to quash his discontented subjects, but not for want of trying. Back in England, the Manchester Guardian reported on a stream of Turkish atrocities in Bosnia: villages burned, people slaughtered. Britain’s Liberal Party, under Gladstone, were disgusted by the way the Turks had treated their Balkan Christian subjects. Bulgarian Horrors was the title of an inflammatory book Gladstone had published denouncing Turkey. But although his book had been a wildfire success, Gladstone was now out of power, and the governing Tories under Benjamin Disraeli took the opposite view. Disraeli feared that if Britain failed to intervene to help Turkey, the Russians would do what they liked in the Balkans, moving on eastwards towards British India, amassing lands and threatening Victoria’s global dominance.

  In Britain, impassioned debate had resulted in stalemate. Both ‘sides’, Gladstone and his peacemongers, Disraeli and his warmongers, were growing angry. Back in Constantinople, Layard was getting desperate simply to be told what the British position was. ‘I am in very great anxiety,’ he admitted to a friend. ‘We have no policy, no definite views, consequently no influence, no power.’3

  Victoria, however, knew exactly what she wanted, which was to support the Sultan and to act against Russia. ‘It maddens the Queen,’ she told Disraeli, that Britain had not yet intervened.4 She was too laissez-faire, too Tory at heart, to engage with projects to better the social conditions of her people. And while she was personally charitable, she did not believe in anything approaching a welfare state. But foreign affairs were the one part of her job guaranteed to get her feeling fanatical.

  By holding and acting upon such violent personal views, Victoria was in fact behaving unconstitutionally. British foreign policy was now the business of Parliament, not the monarch. Yet diplomacy was still nevertheless a personal business. Not only had Victoria, at twenty, danced with Tsar Alexander II during a visit of his to London, but also her son Affie had recently married his daughter.

  Victoria’s desk, then, stood right at the nexus of power in Europe. And despite her ties of family and friendship with Russia, Victoria instinctively understood what her subjects really wanted, which was war.

  ‘We don’t want to fight,’ they were singing in pubs and music halls,

  … but, by Jingo, if we do,

  We’ve got the ships,

  we’ve got the men,

  we’ve got the money too …

  ‘The Dogs of War’ are loose

  and the rugged Russian Bear,

  Full bent on blood and robbery,

  has crawl’d out of his lair.

  Victoria was with them all the way. But immediately after reading Layard’s telegram, she made one of her surprising switches from world leader to housekeeper. She now picked up a ‘violet ink-pencil’ to correct the proposed menus for Windsor Castle’s meals that day, which had to be sent ‘back to the kitchens, confectionary, and other departments, before ten o’clock’.5

  And after that the casual observer might have thought that politics were over, and that the rest of the queen’s business for 15 December was the simple matter of going out to lunch. She had an engagement with Disraeli himself, at his Buckinghamshire home of Hughenden Manor. The writer of an editorial in The Times believed that Victoria, now just short of sixty, had grown passive through age and inactivity, a mere meddler in constitutional affairs. Today would be a nice jaunt for her, ran its rather patronising editorial. ‘We may be sure that it was literature rather than politics’ that monarch and Prime Minister would discuss during th
eir lunch together, The Times pronounced, and that ‘the wars of nations may for a season be forgotten’.6

  But they could not have been more wrong. As she prepared to leave for her lunch, Victoria had a clear foreign policy objective to achieve. No one in Britain wanted more than she did to put the Russian Bear back in his lair. Unlike her predecessors, she could not give the order for war. But she could create the right conditions for such an order to be given. Never had she been more experienced, nor more committed to acting as sovereign.

  Over at Hughenden Manor, two counties away, Disraeli would have been up since his habitual half past seven. The first sight he saw as he opened his eyes was the queen. In his bedroom were pictures of Victoria’s children Bertie (two different ones), Louise, Arthur (again two versions), Leopold, Affie and Beatrice; and her daughters-in-law, Russian Marie and Danish Alix. There were pictures of Victoria with Albert, of Victoria and Albert separately, of Victoria on horseback, of Albert in Highland dress and finally a statuette of the queen. It was a shrine to the royal family, and no royal stalker could have been more assiduous. ‘I love the Queen,’ Disraeli once admitted to her lady-in-waiting Jane Ely, ‘perhaps the only person in this world left to me that I do love.’7

  When he was at home at Hughenden for the day, Disraeli off duty usually wore his ‘rustic hat’ and his velveteen breeches. Today, though, he was more formally dressed. He’d been a dandy in his youth, and even in old age he was fond of white coats, and lavender kid gloves. When he was about to make a striking statement, which happened very often, he would ‘give a nervous cough’ and pass a ‘handkerchief lightly under his nose, hardly touching it’.8 He was vain about his figure, and it was sometimes possible through the back of his coat to discern the outline of ‘an unquestionable pair of stays’.9 This morning he was doubtless going through his correspondence at his standing desk as usual before his customary ‘saunter on the terrace’ and review of his peacocks.10 He found being Prime Minister a heavy burden. He was seventy-two and in poor health, and the constant crises in the east made it impossible for him ‘to do anything but attend to them and brood over them’.11

  ‘He is very peculiar, thoroughly Jewish looking,’ Victoria had thought upon first meeting Disraeli properly in 1852, ‘a livid complexion, dark eyes and eyebrows and black ringlets. The expression is disagreeable, but I do not find him so to talk to.’12 He and she took to each other, and enjoyed lengthy conversations about ‘poetry, romance and chivalry’. When he knelt to kiss her hand, he would seize it in both of his and embrace it, as he said, ‘in loving loyalty’.13 Disraeli presented himself as Victoria’s swain, promising her that it would be ‘his delight and duty to render the transaction of affairs as easy to your Majesty, as possible’.14

  This was a careful strategy on Disraeli’s part. He had seen how Gladstone had fallen foul of her socially as much as politically, and worked out a more effective means of handling his boss: ‘I never deny; I never contradict; I sometimes forget.’ Only occasionally did he remind her that their joint powers were not limitless. ‘Were he your Majesty’s Grand Vizier,’ Disraeli once wrote of himself, ‘instead of your Majesty’s Prime Minister, he should be content … but, alas! it is not so.’15 Victoria adored all this flattery, and perhaps did not realise just how much he was manipulating and talking down to her. Her Private Secretary Henry Ponsonby had much less time for Disraeli, thinking him ‘bright in sparkling repartee but indolent and worn out … how anyone can put faith in Dizzy is what I don’t understand.’16

  Yet Victoria particularly liked Disraeli’s energetic colonial policy, which had seen him smooth the way to her becoming empress of India in 1876, and which would see Britain pursue a multitude of conflicts in Africa. Victoria thought that the high cost of ambition overseas was worth it in terms of security for the existing empire and for global prestige. Britain and its colonies must, she considered, ‘be prepared for attacks and wars, somewhere or other, CONTINUALLY’.17

  Her aim today, then, was to hasten yet another conflict, in the Middle East, and to stiffen Disraeli’s will to bring it about. But 15 December 1877 was not an auspicious day for doing so. In Disraeli’s post that morning was a letter that Victoria had written first thing and sent over from Windsor ahead of her visit. It was a note of apology, begging his pardon for a mistake she’d made. She’d only just realised that she was coming to lunch on a day of ‘sad recollections’, the fifth anniversary of the death of Disraeli’s much-mourned wife, Mary Anne.18 And a good deal of Disraeli’s affectation and whimsy can be forgiven in the light of his deep love of this rather extraordinary woman he’d lost. Another bond that queen and Prime Minister shared was their bereavement.

  Back at Windsor, after writing her letter of apology, Victoria would have made a substantial breakfast. A sample menu from the 1870s lists ‘sausages with potatoes, grilled whiting, poached eggs in stock, hot and cold roast fowl’.19 She did not, however, eat it all. She liked to have alternatives ‘to see about her and to know are there’.20

  After breakfast, Victoria told her daughter Beatrice to get ready to leave. Beatrice was reluctant, for she had a cold and ‘was suffering much from her head & throat, & again feverish’.21 But the queen’s unmarried daughters who lived at home were essentially permanent ladies-in-waiting whose personal circumstances must always give way to duty. At half past twelve it was inevitable that both queen and sniffing princess set off together for Windsor railway station.

  It was now thirty-five years since Victoria had taken her first trip by train. In June 1842, she’d walked along a crimson carpet laid on the platform at Windsor station to climb aboard and travel to Paddington with the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel himself driving the engine. There was ‘great applause’ when, twenty-five minutes later, they ‘reached the terminus’.22

  Although rail travel was by now well established, Victoria remained slightly nervous of it. She’d first seen what she called a ‘Rail road’ when she was seventeen, the ‘steam carriage’ passing with ‘startling quickness … enveloped in clouds of smoke, and making a loud noise’.23 In 1861, a member of her medical staff had been killed in an accident while travelling towards Osborne. The train had just been pulling out of the platform when it stopped especially for Dr Baly to board. During some miscommunication it moved off too soon, and he was crushed to death.24 From her purpose-built saloon car Victoria had access to a lever to operate a signal on the roof commanding the train driver to ‘go slow’ or even to ‘stop’.25 There was supposedly a speed limit of forty miles an hour for royal train travel, though Victoria’s recorded actual journey times suggest that it wasn’t observed.26

  Her train took forty-five minutes to make this particular journey to High Wycombe, Hughenden’s nearest station. On the crowded station platform, a military band played ‘God Save the Queen’.27 Victoria now had to endure an address from the mayor, and receive a bouquet from his daughter.28 The mayor must have enjoyed himself, though, as greeting the queen made a pleasant change from his overriding preoccupation, the town’s new sewerage works.29

  Victoria then drove slowly along High Wycombe’s high street in a landau, a carriage with very low sides to allow its occupants to be seen. She was accompanied by Beatrice and her lady-in-waiting Jane Ely. The road was lined with schoolchildren and the church bells ringing. The landau passed under several specially constructed ‘triumphal arches’, the most curious of them ‘entirely composed of chairs, which is the staple industry of the town’.30 It was such an odd sight – a ‘unique and artistic structure’, according to a proud local historian – that Victoria ‘stopped her carriage to inspect and admire it’.31

  High Wycombe had become a furniture town because of the fine local beech, which was so abundant that people called it ‘The Buckinghamshire Weed’.32 The town’s woodturners were known as ‘bodgers’, and High Wycombe was capable of fulfilling enormous orders, such as the 19,200 chairs required in 1874 for the vast audience expected when a pair of celebrated American evangelists
visited England. Many a bodger was married to a ‘caner’ or maker of cane seats, and their offspring were perhaps polishers or packers. Working at its hardest, the little town could produce an astonishing 4,700 chairs each day.33 The biggest arch now erected across the high street consisted of a carefully calibrated hierarchy of seats. At the bottom were common Windsor chairs, the town’s biggest seller. Then came drawing-room, library and rocking chairs, topped by the state chair of the mayor.34 All along the high street the bodgers and caners cheered Victoria. They cheered too for their own chair arches, one with a banner reading ‘HAIL, EMPRESS OF INDIA’, another spelling out ‘LONG LIVE THE QUEEN’.

  Now the landau passed through Disraeli’s park, climbed a hill and set the queen down outside the red-brick front of Disraeli’s manor. It had become ‘a fine day, and with some gleams of sunshine’.35

  In the eighteenth century, a monarch visiting her Prime Minister would most likely have found herself at the estate of a great landed peer, but Disraeli was a new type of more meritocratic politician. Hughenden was ‘the pleasant but modest home’, as The Times put it, ‘of a country gentleman of literary tastes’.36 Disraeli had borrowed thousands of pounds to purchase it, a debt he thought worth incurring because owning property was an essential qualification for achieving his ambition of becoming leader of the Conservatives. His home was an ugly eighteenth-century house made even uglier by changes he and his wife had carried out in the 1860s. The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner found the house ‘excruciating, everything sharp, angular and aggressive’, while Disraeli’s own guests described the interiors as ‘very gaudy’.37