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

by Lucy Worsley

  Yet Benjamin and his Mary Anne didn’t care. He was extraordinary in so many ways, a Jew of Italian background who’d converted to Anglican Christianity at twelve. He regretted not being sent to one of the great public schools, but nevertheless considered himself a classical scholar: ‘in the pride of boyish erudition, I edited the Idonisian Eclogue of Theocritus, wh. was privately printed.’ After stints as a solicitor’s clerk and a speculator, he made his mark as the author of sensational novels about high society. Yet eventually he decided that politics interested him more. He campaigned as a Radical before settling down as a Conservative.

  A flamboyant, contradictory man, Disraeli had drawn great support from his wife. Twelve years older than him, wealthy, if slightly disreputable, Mary Anne picked Disraeli from among her suitors not least because of his gracious way with words. The odd couple were deeply devoted. ‘More like a mistress than a wife’ was how he described her. ‘Dizzy married me for my money,’ Mary Anne admitted, as she entered old age, yet ‘if he had the chance again, he would marry me for love.’38 But she’d died in 1872, leaving Disraeli, like Victoria, in the position of having lost the great love of a lifetime.

  As soon as she arrived, Disraeli invited Victoria into the ‘pretty Italian garden’ behind the house to plant a commemorative tree.39 Disraeli proudly kept and cherished the commemorative spade she used. He loved inviting his friends to plant special trees. He did it so frequently that the trees’ foliage eventually darkened all the downstairs rooms of his house, and the forest had to be felled.

  But then it was back inside, to the library, and to business, namely the crisis unfolding in the East. ‘Be bold,’ Victoria had enjoined her Prime Minister, ‘call your followers together … tell them … that Russia is as barbarous and tyrannical as the Turks. Tell them this, and that they should rally round their sovereign and country.’40 But Disraeli was finding it hard, in the light of the atrocities they’d committed in Bulgaria, to get his colleagues to agree to a policy of intervention in favour of the Turks. ‘In a Cabinet of twelve members,’ he explained, ‘there are seven parties or policies.’41

  Now Disraeli gave Victoria a detailed account of the previous day’s ‘very stormy’ Cabinet meeting. When he’d proposed that British should step up and mediate between Russia and Turkey, his words had fallen into ‘a dead silence’. Then Lord Derby ‘spoke with unusual fire’ against the proposal and ‘hard remarks were made’.42 Victoria wished they would just get their act together. ‘Oh, if the Queen were a man,’ she groaned on another occasion, ‘she would like to go and give those Russians … such a beating!’43 But she was pleased to discover that Disraeli was ‘determined to bring things to an issue’ at the next meeting, in two days’ time. Only having dealt with international affairs did they go ‘in to luncheon.’44

  This lugubrious meal, just Victoria, Beatrice, lady-in-waiting and Disraeli, took place in the Gothic dining room. There was a ten-minute break between each course for the benefit of Disraeli’s notoriously disarranged digestion.45 According to Hughenden tradition, he’d had the barley-sugar legs of one of his chairs specially shortened for his tiny sovereign to sit upon, and indeed one member of the set is still smaller than the others.

  But Disraeli was not noted for such domestic thoughtfulness. Hughenden had long held a poor reputation among High Wycombe’s tradesmen, who were disappointed by the meanness of the grocery orders they received.46 There’s no doubt, though, that the Prime Minister of Jewish background and his older, childless wife were considered a little odd by the locals. After lunch, Disraeli showed Victoria his pictures, which included a gallery of portraits of dead relatives and friends.47 Disraeli noted afterwards that ‘The Faery’ (his private name for Victoria) ‘seemed to admire, and be interested in, everything.’48

  She departed from Hughenden at half past three and was back at Windsor soon after four, one of those astonishingly quick Victorian journeys that simply wouldn’t be possible today except by helicopter.49 She left laden with a small statue of her host. ‘The Faery took away my statuette,’ he says, implying that it had been seized rather than proffered, while Beatrice walked off with ‘the most beautiful bonbonnière you ever saw, or fancied: just fresh from Paris.’50

  According to that pompous Times editorial, its readers ‘will scarcely, perhaps, think that the visit was paid for the purpose of determining any question of domestic or foreign policy’.51 But Victoria’s journal entry for the day, as she completed it that evening, is in fact completely dominated by politics and the Eastern Question, in much more detail than quoted here. And her visit to his house was read by some as a political action. It was seen, as she’d intended, as a vote of confidence in Disraeli and therefore in the policy of intervention. Some anti-Semitic supporters of Gladstone sniffed that she ‘gone ostentatiously’ to eat ‘in his ghetto’.52 They took the lunch party as it had been meant: as an attack upon their ambitions.

  And as politics, Victoria’s lunch at Hughenden worked. ‘The great struggle is over,’ Disraeli reported to a friend four days later, ‘and I have triumphed.’ He persuaded his Cabinet colleagues that Britain should take a more forceful role: Parliament was to be summoned, £6 million was to be committed, action was to be taken. ‘The Faery,’ he claimed, ‘is delighted.’53 Two months later, Britain agreed to send ironclad ships to the Dardanelles to deter the Russians from invading Constantinople. The tottery Ottoman Empire was kept intact, and the ‘atrocitarians’ (as Disraeli termed Gladstone and his friends) were beaten. Victoria was so delighted she made Disraeli a Knight of the Garter.54

  It’s customary among historians to suggest that Victoria’s greatest achievement was to negotiate the last stages of the monarchy’s transformation from absolutist to purely constitutional. That’s what contemporary writers such as Walter Bagehot truly believed had happened. But it’s not quite that simple. Even in the very earliest days of her public life, Victoria was already making ceremonial appearances and ‘popularity tours’ just like a symbolic, constitutional monarch. And even in these later years she could still exert enough influence to act a little like a tyrant.55

  For indulging Victoria’s jingoism like this came with a cost attached. Working so closely with Disraeli, she’d occasionally – and quite wrongly – negotiated with the Tsar behind the backs of the Cabinet. Disraeli was a false friend in failing to challenge her when she did this. The ultimate pragmatist, to the point of cynicism, he was storing up future trouble by letting her think she had more power than she really did.

  In Disraeli’s Hughenden hallway, there still stands a small statue of Victoria’s favourite pony. He’d positioned it there, where his Faery would see it, because it also features the figure of her favourite Scottish servant. And in the matter of this man, John Brown, Victoria could also have done with some tough love.

  20

  John Brown’s Legs: 6 March 1884

  Six years later, on 23 February 1884, Victoria asked her Private Secretary Henry Ponsonby for help with a book she had been ‘trying to write’. Progress had been slow, the queen explained, because she got so ‘continually disturbed and interrupted’.1 This book was a ‘memoir’ of a deceased friend, and Victoria had taken the story as far as 1865. The subject was her celebrated ‘Highland servant’ John Brown. He’d initially been employed at Balmoral as a guide for expeditions on the moors and mountains. But he’d gradually become such a favourite that he was given indoor duties too. Over time, he started to join the household when it travelled back down south to Windsor, and indeed ended up accompanying the queen everywhere she went.

  Ponsonby was known among his fellow courtiers for holding particularly liberal views. But even he concluded at once that Victoria’s proposition for a book was a terrible idea. It would open her to ridicule and worse. Like everyone at Windsor, though, he was all too aware of the difficulties involved in going against the queen’s increasingly eccentric and imperious commands. She’d been aided and abetted by Disraeli, her officials muttered, to t
he extent that there was ‘extreme difficulty’ in contradicting her even in ‘the slightest degree’.2 ‘The Queen,’ grumbled one of her politicians, ‘is enough to kill any man.’3

  Henry Ponsonby, an appealing character, was tall, quiet, bearded and slightly scruffy in his tailcoat and elastic-sided boots. Despite his loyalty to his queen and the exceptional service he gave her, he secretly took pleasure in the occasional absurdities of court life.4 Victoria’s self-confidence, her indomitable refusal to countenance any gainsayer, was rather magnificent. But for well-intentioned men like Ponsonby it was also rather troubling.

  On the frosty morning of 6 March, then, he went walking round the battlements of Windsor Castle with a trusted colleague, the Dean of Windsor, Randall Davidson. They talked about the business of the biography of John Brown and, together, they made a plot to defy the queen.

  Victoria herself spent the morning quietly in the Upper Ward, unaware of the intrigues going on in the outer castle below the Norman Gateway. Life at Windsor ran along an unvarying and increasingly narrow course. ‘Everything else changes,’ wrote one of the maids-of-honour, returning to duty from a spell in the outside world, ‘but the life here never does, and is always exactly the same from day to day and year to year.’5 Many of her household’s members might never even see the queen except on Sunday mornings, when she attended St George’s Chapel.

  On Sunday afternoons, every week like clockwork, she was rolled in her chair among the flower beds of the private East Terrace to the strains of the military band that played (and still plays) for the inhabitants of castle and Windsor town alike.6 She could reach the gardens unobserved along an underground tunnel to the orangery from her private suite in the Victoria Tower.7 She was wheeled in a chair because she now, at sixty-four, had great difficulty in walking. She complained constantly about her ill health, but there was much debate in her household about how far she was genuinely ill, and how much of her malaise lay in her mind.

  It was, however, perfectly true that her body had never quite recovered from giving birth to nine children. Although nobody but her dressers knew it, she suffered pain from a painful ventral hernia, a condition where the internal organs force their way through a point in the stomach wall weakened, in her case, by multiple childbirths. Her serious illness of 1871, and a subsequent fall down stairs at Windsor, had certainly contributed to her increasing immobility, which meant that she was now gaining weight. Victoria was never parted from her green-velvet-lined medicine chest, which her pharmacist kept filled with ‘opium pills’ for pain and ‘rhubarb pills’ to stimulate the digestive system that opiates clogged up.8

  But she still believed in the power of fresh air. On the cold morning of 6 March, while Ponsonby paced his battlements, Victoria went out into the park in her little pony cart. Her youngest, stay-at-home daughter Beatrice walked dutifully beside her. They sat for a while ‘in the old summer house by the water’, but the outing’s real destination was ‘the dear Mausoleum’ containing Albert’s remains.9 This was a white, Italianate, cross-shaped building. Inside there lay – and still lies – the sculpted figure of a sleeping Albert, modelled from a single piece of granite. Wearing bulky and uncomfortable-looking robes, he nevertheless occupies a delightfully soft-looking bier.

  Victoria paid him almost daily visits. ‘After the Prince Consort’s death,’ she once said, ‘I wished to die.’10 And in many ways, it was as if all the clocks at Windsor Castle had stopped in 1861. She carefully kept her boudoir in exactly the same state as it had been at the time of his illness. On its door, a plaque recorded the fact that ‘every article in this room my lamented husband selected for me’. Within, Miss-Havisham-like, ‘the Queen’s bridal wreath and the first bouquet which the Prince presented to her lie withered in a glass case’.11

  The isolation of her position, her lack of friends and equals, a lifelong feeling that she could not afford to trust other people, helps to explain why Victoria turned instead to the consolation of objects. She also kept the Blue Room itself preserved as a sort of shrine to Albert. Two days after his death, the favoured royal photographer William Bambridge of Windsor had been called in to photograph it, not least as a record of the layout so that the furniture could be put back in precisely the same positions after cleaning.12 Bambridge had also experienced a huge demand for memorial photos of Albert’s corpse, and during the short winter days of December 1861 he’d had to race to fulfil a deluge of orders. One of these photos of her husband’s dead body hung on the headboard of Victoria’s bed.13 It seems macabre to us, in an age when we like to pretend death doesn’t exist, but this was the Victorian way.

  Yet, as the years went by, there began to be something unusual and particularly extreme about Victoria’s mourning. So rarely did she experience denial from the people around her that she thought that she might countermand even death, and a wraithlike version of life continued still in Albert’s suite.

  This maintenance of the scene of a death was a German tradition, although Victoria wrote that the Blue Room was not to be a ‘Sterbe-Zimmer’ or ‘death-room’, but instead ‘a living beautiful monument’. ‘On the table in the ante-room,’ reported one visitor, ‘there were laid out his gloves and his white wide-awake hat as on the day when he had last used them’.14 A painting from 1864 shows that the Blue Room was kept full of fresh flowers. In the evenings, if the door was open, people passing in the passage could glimpse the ghostly gleam of the white marble bust of Albert’s head, placed just about at standing height upon a column. As many as forty years later, a visitor to the room could still see ‘all his things – uniforms, walking sticks, the bed he died in … the palms laid on his coffin, and casts of his hand and foot’.15 The Blue Room became a kind of long-running work of performance art dedicated to Albert’s memory, and Victoria had his favourite artistic advisor, Ludwig Grüner, decorate its ceiling with angels.16

  Hot water was still delivered to Albert daily, not because Victoria had ordered it, but simply because she had never given the order for it to stop. Her servants did not dare to challenge her. ‘Two of the old pages’ of the castle wished that someone would have the courage to bring it up. ‘Such a pity Her Majesty does not give us orders to stop this,’ they said, ‘it makes people mock, and yet nobody likes to say anything to her about it.’17

  Since Albert’s death there had been just one person within the walls of Windsor who did have the gumption to ‘say anything’. That had been the queen’s Scottish servant John Brown. The gift he’d possessed for treating Victoria like a normal human being had brought him both great power, and great unpopularity, within the royal household. Even now, despite his death, Brown’s spirit lived on as the cause of the kerfuffle that had brought Ponsonby and Davidson to their anxious conference.

  Despite the intensity of Victoria’s grief, it was not possible that it could remain at the same high pitch for ever. And slowly, gradually, she began to recover. Some years later, she told a lady-in-waiting that although she’d once wished that she could die too, ‘now I wish to live and do what I can for my country and those I love’.18 Brown’s greatest achievement had been to help bring about this change.

  He’d begun to make a good impression upon Victoria even during Albert’s lifetime. In 1861, during the couple’s last stay together at Balmoral, she noticed that Brown was ‘invaluable’ and ‘so handy about cloaks and shawls’. ‘He always leads my pony,’ she explained, and ‘attends me out of doors.’19 When in 1864 Brown began to travel with the queen beyond Scotland’s borders, she tried to describe his uniquely sympathetic qualities. His constant presence was ‘a real comfort’, she wrote, ‘for he is so devoted to me – so simple, so intelligent, so unlike an ordinary servant’.20

  Those final four words held the lasting key to his charm: he wasn’t like an ordinary servant, but more like an equal. He was plain-speaking, fitted by temperament to perform the ancient court role of a jester, or fool, with the capacity to speak truth to power. One insider account tells us that the que
en’s servants had ‘the strictest possible orders on no account to look at Her Majesty’.21 But John Brown was permitted to look, even to speak, without the usual royal rigmarole. Many examples survive of his reported words, and perhaps some of them are real. ‘Hoots, then wumman,’ he was supposed to have said to her, along with ‘Take me arm, ’tis slippery.’ What provisions did he and the queen take on their picnic expeditions onto the moors around Balmoral, Brown was once asked. Did they drink tea? ‘Well, no,’ he replied. ‘She don’t much like tea. We tak oot biscuits and speeruts [spirits].’22 Brown was a drinker, and neither was Victoria abstemious: ‘she drinks,’ reported William Gladstone, ‘her claret strengthened, I should have thought spoiled, with whiskey.’23 Brown was also – and this was significant in her canine-heavy household – the only person who could keep Victoria’s terrifying and bad-tempered pet dog Sharp ‘in some sort of order’.24 In short, such was the bond between them that Brown was ‘the only person who could fight and make the Queen do what she did not wish’.25

  In 1865, Brown was given a special job title of ‘The Queen’s Highland Servant’. Gradually his extended family also began to creep into positions of influence within the royal household, at their native Balmoral but also at Windsor. Certain long-serving families developed over the decades into household dynasties, with the Scottish Grants, Browns and Clarks being increasingly common below stairs.26

  But in 1866, Victoria’s special favour towards Brown began to cause serious and lasting damage to her reputation. That year, a Swiss newspaper printed a report that she and her favourite servant had secretly married.27 Scurrilous slanders like this would dog the queen for the rest of her reign. In July 1866, the satirical magazine Punch went so far as to produce a Brown-related spoof of the Court Circular, as if he were a member of the royal family: