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

by Lucy Worsley

  In former times, it had also been a maid who signed for the red leather boxes – brought by a messenger with his badge of a silver greyhound – that contained the day’s government business.21 But now the boxes were handled by Abdul Karim, employed by the queen as her confidential Indian clerk.22 Even at the Regina he went about this business just as usual, laying the boxes on her table. Towards eleven, Victoria opened them up and began the work of going through them, seated in her ‘capacious writing-chair’ with footstool and back cushion.23

  Each morning she read reports and, if the topic interested her, sent her own detailed commands back to her ministers. Extra police patrols must be sent out, she insisted, when the supposed serial killer ‘Jack the Ripper’ was on the loose. The next draft of a bill outlining the punishments for homosexuality must omit all mention of females; it was unnecessary for ‘women don’t do such things’.24 Any threat to Britain’s status abroad was guaranteed to get her excited. Domestic affairs bothered her less, as did the whole concept of democracy. She could not see, she complained, why an admirable government like Lord Salisbury’s (a Prime Minister with whom she shared a great rapport) should fall ‘merely on account of the number of votes’.25

  Much to the disgust of Arthur Bigge, now promoted from Assistant to Private Secretary, Victoria abhorred the typewriter, and insisted on everything being handwritten. As her eyesight grew ever worse, she complained ever more loudly that the ink was not ‘as black’ as formerly. This had caused Bigge’s predecessor Henry Ponsonby (now deceased) to obtain ‘a sort of little spirit stove’ to cook the paper and therefore darken his writing. Meanwhile, Victoria’s own handwriting became notoriously difficult to read, not least when her words strayed into the black borders of her mourning notepaper, and there became completely invisible.26

  As she read or wrote, Turi, or Turri, a little white dog acquired in Florence, would usually sit at her feet, and the spirits of dead dogs lived on in the marble or bronze effigies of them that crowded her rooms. ‘One of the worst signs of wickedness in human nature,’ she thought, was cruelty to animals.27 The local street musicians, knowing that she would reward them generously, gathered to play and sing just below her balcony. They were watched with anxiety by her Head of Security.28 Living in a public hotel like this, Victoria was closely guarded by detectives, who ‘generally adopted the dress and manners of tourists’.29

  From her balcony, Victoria could look out over a marvellous view of five kilometres of beaches below. Her servants found her more relaxed, more easily pleased, on these Mediterranean holidays. She was delighted by the ‘masses of olives … orchards laden with lemons … eucalyptus as high as elms’, and above all, the ‘deep blue sky and the calm sea from which you have delicious breezes’.30 After work, she would roll in her wheelchair along the smooth paths between the cypresses, palms and urns overflowing with flowers that crammed the Regina’s paradisical garden. Some afternoons she would drive out, followed by children calling out ‘Madame la Reine!’ On one such drive, her pony trap raced Charles Alberique, Nice’s celebrated one-armed beggar, in his own tiny cart pulled along by two dogs. The funny scene happened to be sketched by a newspaper artist, and was reproduced round the world.31

  Victoria would climb into her little carriage up carpeted steps, accompanied by ‘an infinity of rugs, shawls, parasols’, and leaning upon the arm of her new favourite servant: her clerk, Abdul Karim. She trusted him to help, lift and handle her. People observed him getting in close enough to use ‘his delicate brown hands’ to lower ‘the Queen’s gauze veil over her face’.32 Karim had been promoted to the extent that Victoria now considered him the equal of the gentlemen of the household. They, for their part, disliked him, which meant that he had no friends among them, and had to sit in solitary splendour when he went out for a drive of his own.

  The local Niçois believed that Abdul Karim was ‘a captive Native prince, attached, as it were, to the chariot-wheels of the Empress of India’.33 In reality he was very far from royal. Twenty-four years old when he entered the queen’s service in 1887, tall, bearded and Muslim, Karim came from a family living in Agra. He was a fine physical specimen. ‘Six feet in height’, according to The Times, he spoke ‘broken English in a melodious voice’. He clearly had enormous personal charisma. ‘To look upon his face and hear his voice,’ continued this entranced reporter, one would think that he ‘could tame lions and silence tigers’.34

  Karim, along with a colleague named Mohammed Bakhsh, had first come to Britain to play a part in the celebrations for Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887. In 1886, Victoria had opened the spectacular Indian and Colonial Exhibition at the Royal Albert Hall, which brought Indian architecture and costume – and indeed Indian faces – to London. She was increasingly drawn to all things Indian, and wanted her new status as Empress of India to be visually reflected in the composition of her household. After the Jubilee, Karim and Bakhsh did not return home, but instead stayed in royal service as table waiters. The two men continued a long royal tradition of employing exotic-looking servants to add visual drama to the court.

  Soon the two Indians were serving the queen as intimately as John Brown had once done: ‘so clever when they help me out of my chair or into a carriage … they never pinch me.’35 Yet just as Brown had been distrusted by the rest of the household, so it was with Karim and Bakhsh as well. They formed their own ‘little set apart from the others’. They were described as ‘impenetrable, impassive and supercilious persons’, attentive and silent in their ‘big turbans and wonderful cashmere garments of dazzling hues’.36

  Victoria’s courtiers generally shared the views of her administrators and colonial staff in India, which were that Indians were decidedly inferior to Europeans. Victoria, however, perhaps having less cause to worry about her status being challenged, was less prone to this. ‘There is no hatred to a brown skin – none,’ she wrote, even in the wake of the Indian Rebellion of 1857.37

  Wanting to know more about the India of which she was now the titular head, Victoria began in 1887 to take language lessons from Karim. She decided to learn a few words of Hindustani, or Urdu, she explained, as ‘it is a great interest to me for both the language and the people’.38 The Empress of India, who could not travel to visit her dominions, could nevertheless welcome something of the subcontinent into her own home.

  Two years later, Karim entirely gave up his duties as a waiter and was promoted to the position of ‘Munshi’, meaning teacher or secretary. Victoria called him her ‘Personal Indian Clerk’ with the job of looking after her ‘boxes, letters, papers’.39 When they travelled to Nice, the French papers called him ‘le professeur de la reine’, or else ‘Le Munchy’, which incensed the other members of the household who were themselves rarely mentioned in the press.40

  Some of the household suspected that Karim’s level of literacy and skill in Urdu was not as great as he claimed. Indeed, in his own private journal, recently analysed and partially published by historian Shrabani Basu, Karim admitted that as his mother’s favourite he had been ‘rather over-indulged’, and that his youthful studies had been ‘very irregular’.41 Whatever his precise educational attainments, he was well-attuned to the subtle clues to status that were so important in court society. He was certainly ambitious. As time went on, he asked for, and was given, better accommodation, including furnished cottages at Balmoral and Osborne. This annoyed those who had to make way for him. ‘I hear the Queen has given Abdul not only my old room but also the large central sitting room off it, which she declined to give me last year!’ complained the latest royal doctor, James Reid. He felt that this reflected ‘the relative estimation in which Abdul and I are held!!’42

  When the queen granted Abdul Karim the right to go into the billiard room of an evening with the other gentlemen, there was an outcry. Henry Ponsonby, before his death, had experienced great difficulty in controlling it, and indeed admitted sharing personally in the racism that motivated his fellow household members. ‘As long a
s it was English or European work I got on fairly,’ he wrote, ‘but these Injuns are too much for me.’43 Victoria also had to reprimand Lord Salisbury for describing the Indian servants as ‘n—rs.’44

  Early in 1897, when the queen’s spring holiday to the South of France was being planned, it was announced that the Munshi was to come too. This further annoyed the household, for if he stayed in the Regina with them, they would be expected to eat with him. This was a recognition of his status they were not willing to make.

  Dr James Reid was particularly annoyed. Having joined the household in 1881, he was by now reaching the height of his influence as Victoria’s trusted physician. Son of a puritanical and hard-working local physician, Dr Reid came from the ‘small, grey, granite’ town of Ellon in Aberdeenshire.45 Having studied in Vienna, Reid had first encountered the royal household when a ‘resident medical attendant’ was required for Balmoral. His plain speaking was highly valued by his colleagues. He had a notable ‘absence from the Royal Culte and a delightful way of stripping the leaves from the trees’, wrote a colleague. He was short, balding, moustachioed and pince-nez’d, and his colleagues came to think that Victoria ‘was guided more by him than anyone else’ in this last decade of her life.46 One of them went so far as to say that ‘she takes advice from no one else’.47

  Dr Reid now compiled a long list of grievances against her other favourite, the Munshi. Abdul Karim had requested that his photograph for the newspapers be retouched to make him look ‘thinner and less dark’. Dr Reid did not approve. In a small hotel, Abdul Karim had ‘deprived H.M.’s maids of bathroom and W.C.’ by insisting ‘on having it entirely reserved for himself’. Dr Reid was furious.48 His reaction was not only racist. It also encompassed a courtier’s atavistic jealousy of a rival for the position of royal favourite. The fact that Karim was a handsome young man and Victoria an older woman made it all seem doubly wrong.

  And there was worse to come. On 20 February 1897, just before they all left for Nice, Dr Reid had some distasteful news to pass on to Victoria. Karim was ill again. When her Munshi had been sick previously, she’d been greatly concerned, visiting him twice a day and spending time ‘in his room taking Hindustani lessons … examining his neck, smoothing his pillows, etc.’ Reid had previously treated Karim for venereal disease, and now, he told the queen, the gonorrhoea had returned.49 Was this true? We do not have a record of whether Victoria believed him or not. Dr Reid’s colleagues certainly admired him for his integrity. But maybe he wanted to think the worst of Karim.

  Yet Victoria refused to listen to any suggestion that the Munshi be left behind. On 10 March 1897, when Victoria departed for Nice, Karim went too. Dr Reid, though, had not exhausted his arsenal of weapons to use against the Munshi. Despite the queen’s seemingly endless litany of complaints – her knee, her nerves – she was in fact in fairly robust health in her late seventies. Yet Dr Reid would now once again resurrect the spectre of Hanoverian ‘madness’.

  The passage to Cimiez was planned by Ernest Dossé, who had the enviable job title of ‘Director of Her Majesty’s Continental Journeys’. The train that took Victoria south through France included two custom-made coaches that belonged personally to her. Her sleeping car lacked the usual brakes, as they might shriek in the night and wake her up.50 Her daytime saloon was decorated in pearl-grey silk brocaded with roses, thistles and shamrocks.51 The train also transported Victoria’s own carriage and pony cart, her mobile hospital and her ‘mahogany bedstead, that old-fashioned, high, narrow bedstead that had accompanied her on all her journeys over the past forty years’.52 The food on board was Irish stew, brought from Windsor and kept warm(-ish) in cushions made of red flannel. A footbath filled with ice provided rudimentary air conditioning.53 Her Head of Security described the royal train as a ‘rolling palace’, everything in it ‘heavy, large and comfortable’.54

  Karim, meanwhile, travelled in his own private saloon, and when the President of France came aboard the train to welcome her, Victoria seized the opportunity to introduce him to her Munshi.55 Although she was travelling incognito, which meant that the ceremonies normally paid to a sovereign need not be observed, the station at Nice was nevertheless carpeted in crimson when she descended on Karim’s arm.

  The trainload of courtiers driving in her wake up the long wide boulevard to the Regina conferred and complained about Karim’s presence. Victoria knew what was going on, and sent her grand-son-in-law, Prince Louis of Battenberg, to instruct them that they must include Karim in their social activities. But the rest of the household agreed that if she forced the matter they would resign en masse.

  It all came to a head on 4 April. The day at Cimiez dawned as fine as usual, if ‘not very bright’, as Victoria recorded in her journal. She described a church service at eleven, to which her sons Bertie and Affie both came, and a visit to the beautiful Liserb garden near her hotel. After lunch, she drove out with two of her granddaughters. She dined with a small party of three, meeting the Bishop of Ripon after dinner. It sounds like a normal, quiet, pleasant holiday day.56

  Nothing in Victoria’s journal suggests the terrible storm that broke at the Regina that evening. But this should serve as a reminder of how deceptive the journals can be. Not only did Victoria know that they would be read, but the actual surviving text mostly consists of what her daughter Beatrice thought it appropriate for posterity to know. She sometimes condensed her mother’s words, which had the effect of deleting details and reducing pungency. Beatrice has sometimes been accused of censoring Victoria’s journals, but she was more probably motivated by the wish to preserve them, and to simply to get through the gargantuan job of transcribing them.

  Either way, other sources reveal that the quiet Sunday in Cimiez had also seen a blistering confrontation between Victoria and her household. It began when Dr Reid came in to report new information about the misdeeds of the Munshi. A telegram had arrived from India with damaging details about the family history of the Karims. Reid and others had been asking questions in order either to confirm or challenge the background Karim had himself supplied. Karim had said, or at least implied, that he was the son of a doctor. But now this inflammatory message from India revealed that Karim’s father was merely employed in the ‘Subordinate Medical Service’ as a hospital assistant, paid sixty rupees a month.

  Karim had also claimed to have worked as a clerk or paper-pusher in India, rather than in a lowly job like that of table waiter, as he had on his arrival at Windsor. He had indeed been a clerk, Reid discovered, but only an inferior sort of ‘vernacular clerk in Agra Gaol at 10 rupees a month’. In a final twist, the telegram concluded that there was ‘no information about wife or there being more than one’.57 Karim had a wife in England, so obviously someone had also been hoping to find out that he was a bigamist.

  Reid now pounced with glee on the fact that he appeared to have caught the Munshi out. Karim’s father was not a qualified doctor. To my mind, though, the telegram can also be read the other way: as proof that the senior Karim certainly was associated with medicine, and that Abdul Karim himself had held a job as a clerk. Reid and the household simply made the least generous possible interpretation of the data.

  But what Reid forgot, as he now confronted her with this ‘evidence’, was that Victoria didn’t really care about the social class of her servants. After all, she’d known ‘two Archbishops who were the sons respectively of a Butcher and a Grocer’.58 And Karim was obviously more to her than ‘just’ a servant. In the written records of their Urdu lessons, it’s clear that he taught her how to say phrases such as ‘You will miss the Munshi very much’, and she signed notes to him as ‘Your loving mother’.59 She was in need of someone to love, and in Karim she’d found a substitute son.

  Like others before him, Dr Reid didn’t understand that this feeling could not be destroyed by logical argument. Just as when she’d ignored John Brown’s drinking, Victoria was determined to believe the best of Abdul Karim. At Windsor Castle Karim now occupied the
very room formerly used by Brown himself. He’d inherited the same protected status.60

  But Dr Reid was undaunted. He came back to the fray in Victoria’s private rooms at the Regina with further ammunition. He’d also received, he claimed, additional worrying news from government sources. On 2 April, information had come in that Karim was suspected of associating with the Muslim Patriotic League, an organisation that sought to undermine British rule in India. Karim had a raffish friend: a journalist, and possible spy, named Rafiuddin Ahmed. He’d also been staying at the Regina until the household managed to get him expelled. Ahmed was suspected of espionage on behalf of the Amir of Afghanistan, and was certainly associated with the Muslim Patriotic League.61 In other words, he was someone who wanted the British out of India. Could it be, Reid now asked, that Karim was not only low-born, but a traitor?

  It is true that her closeness to Karim had made Victoria damagingly over-partial to his fellow Muslims at the expense of the Hindus. She thought Islam ‘when well known and understood, contains so much that is fine and to be respected and admired’.62 It was a valid viewpoint, but it had the downside of making her, unfairly, less keen on her Hindu subjects.

  But this was hardly treachery, and straight-talking Dr Reid did not have the subtlety of a Randall Davidson in putting his case. In stating things so baldly, in using logic so harshly, he caused grave offence. He then tried to excuse his conduct with perhaps the cruellest accusation of all.

  Many people, he said to Victoria, in increasing desperation, ‘say to me that the only charitable explanation that can be given is that Your Majesty is not sane’.63 This was a low blow, and a hurtful one. ‘The time will come,’ Dr Reid warned, ‘when to save Your Majesty’s memory and reputation it will be necessary for me to come forward and say so.’ What’s more, he told her that Bertie was also worried about the same thing.

  Victoria’s son and heir, then, and her trusted medical advisor, and other unnamed ‘people in high places’, appeared to be in league to tell Victoria that unless she laid off her Munshi-mania, they would reveal to the world that she had gone mad. The fear that the queen might lose her mind had been at its greatest in the years of her early widowhood and menopause, then it had died away. Victoria must have been horrified to hear the words ‘not sane’ once more.