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

by Lucy Worsley

  Interestingly, it wasn’t just the highly placed who were involved in the bullying. Also present in the room during this epic row was Victoria’s long-time dresser, Annie Macdonald. ‘Your Majesty sits there,’ Macdonald said, ‘and hears nothing of what is being said. No one tells you the truth about this.’64 It’s a fascinating glance under the bonnet of Victoria’s life, included among newly published selections from Reid’s diary by historian Kate Hubbard. Here was the queen being harangued by both her doctor and her dresser. Yet from Beatrice’s edited version of Victoria’s journal, you would never know it. Dr Reid described the harrowing scene as a ‘very painful interview’, and not the only one at that hotel during that holiday to conclude with ‘the most violent passion’.65

  Victoria was distressed, and her household were greatly distressed, but ultimately Reid’s arguments, ranging from snobbery to treason to madness, were all in vain. As John Conroy had discovered long ago, it had always been hopeless to try to coerce Victoria. She would not dismiss Karim, and in her service he remained. She simply issued a memorandum that her gentlemen must stop ‘talking about this painful subject’.66

  Abdul Karim’s biographer, Shrabani Basu, points out that he may have lied about his family origins. He may have had venereal disease. He may have been overfond of reading about himself in the newspapers. But all this was worth it to Victoria. Like John Brown, Karim gave a grieving, ageing woman a new lease of life. In the wake of Brown’s death, she’d raged against her immobility: ‘How can I see people at dinner in the evening? I can’t go walking about all night holding on to the back of a chair.’67 For all his drawbacks, Karim gave the Empress of India an insight into this empire she governed, he encouraged her to move about and take physical exercise and he rejuvenated her in the final decade of her life. And in the end even the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, was forced to admit after making a personal investigation that there was no evidence for Karim’s supposed treason.68

  It was only after Victoria’s death that her household and family were able to take their revenge. Then, her daughter Beatrice and daughter-in-law Alix went down to Karim’s cottage at Windsor, burned all the queen’s letters to him and sent him back to India.69 ‘They will be the sufferers thereby!’ Bertie threatened, should the Munshi or his family attempt to keep any letters back from the blaze.70 However, Karim did indeed successfully smuggle a personal diary out of Windsor and off to India. It would have been tragic if it had been destroyed, for it completely redeems him from any charge of treason, and reveals him to have been faultlessly devoted to his queen.

  Because of the terrible argument about her Munshi on 4 April 1897, Victoria spoke later of the ‘dislike’ she had taken against her room at Cimiez, ‘from the scenes I had there … and from the pain I suffered’.71 Yet Lord Salisbury had a sneaking suspicion that she enjoyed rows. He told Dr Reid that ‘she really likes the emotional excitement, as being the only form of excitement she can have’.72

  The Regina still stands today, impressively enormous, like a slightly seedy ocean liner beached on the top of a mountain. Despite Victoria’s patronage, it never quite ‘succeeded in attracting a very aristocratic clientele’, perhaps because its size and ostentation was just a little bit vulgar.73 Today its 400 rooms have been divided into 100 flats, many of them occupied by workers from the nearby hospital. Yet while Victoria may have turned against the Regina, the French Riviera in general remained her happiest place. ‘Alas!’ she wrote of it, ‘I grieve to leave … I shall mind returning to the sunless north.’74 In 1901, as she entered into her final illness, she felt she would surely recover ‘oh, if only I were at Nice.’75

  23

  Apotheosis: London, 22 June 1897

  Midsummer’s Day 1897 ended in a warm, close night. Londoners slept poorly, their city clamped under clouds. Their queen also tossed and turned. Her private rooms at Buckingham Palace were hung with red silk. Every piece of furniture was crowded with reminders of the past, tables completely hidden under a ‘fascinating confusion of books, photo-frames, and bibelots of all kinds’,1 In her bedroom the subject matter was Albert, Albert, Albert. ‘Photographs and pictures’ of him buried each surface, standing ‘conspicuously on every hand’.2

  Lying amid the nostalgic clutter, Victoria was ‘rather restless’ and ‘very hot’.3 She’d become a poor sleeper, often fussing about ‘the shawls and the cushions – then the lamps to put out – then again, it felt too hot … Annie [her dresser] was called many a time – to bring her something to drink.’4 This particular night, there was ‘such a noise going on the whole time’ outside the palace that it was almost impossible to sleep. Thousands of people did not go to their homes, ‘but slept and ate in the places which they had secured along the pavements’ to see the following day’s Diamond Jubilee procession.5 Victoria did snatch some rest before the dull dawn of 22 June finally arrived.6

  If she’d had any doubts about the burden that the coming events would place upon her, The Times that morning was keen to remind her. ‘To-day the eyes of the whole Empire,’ its editorial ran, ‘will be fixed upon London, and upon the great and inspiring ceremony in which we celebrate the sixty years of the Queen’s reign.’ At the heart of it all was an overheated, tired old lady of seventy-eight.

  Rising from her bed, Victoria dressed, as always, in black. The crowds who saw her today would consider her ‘dress of black silk’ to be modest and widowly, almost dingy. Her taste in clothing had become ever more subdued. Departing from Windsor Castle to travel to Buckingham Palace for these few days of the Jubilee, she’d been worried about the stains the sooty train to Paddington might leave on her outfit. ‘I could have cried,’ said the woman who ran the draper’s shop in Windsor, ‘to see Her Majesty start for the Jubilee in her second-best “mantle” – after all the beautiful things I had sent her.’7

  If you’d had the chance to examine the queen’s outfit closely, though, you’d’ve seen that it was in fact sombrely splendid, her black cape embroidered with swirling silver sequins, huge pearls hanging from each ear and upon the gown itself decorative ‘panels of grey satin veiled with black net & steel embroideries, & some black lace’.

  Round her neck now went a ‘lovely diamond chain’, a Jubilee present from her younger children, while her ‘bonnet was trimmed with creamy white flowers & white aigrette’.8 This bonnet, worn with resolution, had caused some upset. Her government had asked its queen to appear more … queenly. ‘The symbol that unites this vast Empire is a Crown not a bonnet,’ complained Lord Rosebery. But Victoria stoutly refused, and ‘the bonnet triumphed’. She would wear it today, just as she’d worn it at her Golden Jubilee a decade before.9 The queen looked just like a ‘wee little old lady’. The only touch of colour about her black-clad figure was her ‘wonderful, blue, childlike eyes’.10

  Once dressed, Victoria tottered through to breakfast with her daughters Vicky, Lenchen and Beatrice. The meal took place in the Chinese Room, dead centre in the front of the palace and part of Edward Blore’s wing that Victoria had added to provide extra space. It’s the room still used today for royal balcony appearances at Buckingham Palace, every twitch of its net curtains closely analysed by expectant crowds. From it, Victoria and her daughters were now able to watch a procession of the 25,000 colonial troops who had come to London for the Jubilee, most of them camping in Hyde Park. It took forty minutes for them all to pass by. She’d missed a good number of them because they’d already been and gone before she got to breakfast, ‘but there were still a great many, chiefly British’ still passing.11 Masticating mournfully upon omelettes, fried soles, beef fillets and cold fowl, Victoria ‘watched them for a little while’.12

  The Chinese Room was decorated with exotic oriental furnishings, recycled in the 1850s from the bizarre seaside pavilion built in Brighton by George IV. Since Albert’s death, a gloom had fallen over Buckingham Palace and its magnificent gilded state apartments were opened up only when Victoria felt she really couldn’t avoid it. At one family weddi
ng Alix, Princess of Wales, found that the Chinese Room had not been prepared, and quickly ripped the covers off the furniture herself. The dust made her gloves ‘black as coal’.13

  The frozen palace came back to life only when Victoria could be coaxed out of Windsor, Balmoral or Osborne to make an appearance in the capital, and Bertie thought the place a ‘sepulchre’. Toys from his youth still crammed the attics, including a stuffed lion that swallowed a Russian soldier when its tail was pulled.14 ‘There are naturally many things lying about on tables, chairs, and on the floor,’ noted one palace denizen, ‘books, for instance, shawls and old envelopes.’ The servants picked them up for cleaning purposes, then put them all back in their exact places according to chalk marks ‘made upon the carpets’.15

  When the elderly queen did make the effort to entertain guests at Buckingham Palace, the balls of her youth had by now given way to sedate afternoon garden parties. But the celebration of sixty years on the throne required something grander than a picnic. ‘Now comes my swan song,’ she claimed.16 No one knew quite how to celebrate the occasion, as no previous monarch had ever lived or reigned for so long. People didn’t even know what to call it. It was Victoria’s Private Secretary, Arthur ‘Better NOT’ Bigge, who came up with the term ‘Diamond’ to signify sixty years.17

  The true anniversary of her accession fell on Sunday 20 June 1897, but the Sabbath wasn’t appropriate for a celebration. Instead, Tuesday 22 June was selected to become a special Bank Holiday, and a year-long process of planning had begun.18

  One of the parameters was cost. The celebrations for Victoria’s Golden Jubilee ten years previously had left her £50,000 out of pocket, and she was determined that this should not happen again.19 The Jubilee of 1887 had been marked by an influx of royal guests. Since then, though, some important relationships, including with Germany, had turned sour. Victoria was adamant that in 1897 her eldest grandson, Vicky’s son Wilhelm, or Willy, should not attend. She thought him a ‘hot-headed, conceited’ young man, strutting around in his ridiculous military uniforms. If he came to London, her courtiers warned, he ‘would arrive with an enormous suite & would try & arrange things himself and endless trouble would arise’.20 A clever solution to the problem of how to get out of inviting Willy was presented by the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain. He suggested that instead of foreign royalty, delegations from far-flung corners of Victoria’s own empire should take centre stage.

  This was agreed, and festivities were planned not just for a queen but for an empress. After breakfast, Victoria ‘touched an electric button’ that set off a starburst of telegrams to destinations all round the world. In Grant Land, an island east of Greenland, in the Punjab and in Victoria, Australia, her subjects received her message, and 1,310 of them sent telegrams of congratulation straight back again. ‘From my heart,’ Victoria’s message had said, ‘I thank my beloved people, may God bless them.’ At the very moment she sent it, ‘the sun burst out’.21

  By quarter past eleven, the morning had become bright and hot: ‘The Queen’s Weather’, people called it. Victoria got into her low-sided landau by shuffling up a ‘green baize plank slanting up from the doorstep’ with the help of one of her Indian servants.22 The windows of the Buckingham Palace courtyard and even the roofs of the building were precariously packed with servants and household staff who wanted to see their mistress drive off.

  This landau was the very same one Victoria had used to travel to St Paul’s in 1872 to give thanks for Bertie’s recovery from typhoid fever. It had no driver, as such, and the eight cream horses were managed by a team of red-jacketed, buckskin-breeched postillions on horseback and on foot. Just as Victoria had refused to wear her crown, she’d also declined to use the golden state coach. But no one would be left in any doubt that her landau would provide the climax of the procession, coming as it did after a seemingly endless succession of marching and mounted troops, an escort of Indian princes on horseback, then an entourage of other members of the royal family. The landau’s creams were ‘very nervous animals, and exceedingly delicate and restive’. They’d been specially trained for the procession by being driven ‘day after day past every kind of military band’.23 Even so, ‘I felt a good deal agitated,’ Victoria admitted, as her driverless carriage moved off, ‘for fear anything might be forgotten or go wrong.’24

  Her nerves were for the stage management of the occasion, rather than her personal safety. This was despite the fact she’d been attacked seven times in her sixty-year reign by would-be assassins. Some of them were clearly mentally ill rather than politically motivated, but during the previous thirty-two years, the Tsar of Russia, the Presidents of America and France and the Prime Minister of Spain had all been assassinated.25 Victoria herself possessed a green parasol with a lining of steel mesh, to deter murderous bullets.26 It must have been an inventor’s gimmick rather than something of practical use, for it is enormously heavy. Today she was holding instead a black chiffon parasol. It was a gift from the House of Commons, presented to her two days earlier by its oldest member, who was ninety-five.

  More than three million people had poured into London to see this Jubilee parade, and they all wanted a good view. The newspapers advertised a novelty item: ‘a cork galosh’, 4½ inches high, to be worn over the shoes of ‘short persons, who wish to view the procession and find themselves in the back rows’.27 The route had been closed to vehicles three days earlier so that seating, bunting, banners and a host of other decorations could be installed. (The novel electrified decorations attempted in St James’s, though, had been taken down after catching fire.)

  By eleven, the galleries and stands of seats had been occupied for some time by happy crowds, while the windows of the houses and offices along the way were ‘as snugly packed as boxes in a theatre’.28 The spectators had, for the most part, brought provisions with them, ‘coffee, claret and champagne, cold meats, salads, cake and sandwiches’. Opening their lunch baskets and chatting to their neighbours, they were thought ‘a remarkably decorous crowd’. This was something that could not be taken for granted in a century of violent, street-based revolutions. The alternating soldiers and policemen who lined the route ‘almost touching elbows’ would not tolerate any pushing or shoving.29 They must have been mindful that through the mismanagement of the coronation of the Russian Tsar, the previous year in Moscow, more than 1,000 people had been crushed to death.

  The procession was led by the tallest man in the British army, all 6 feet 8 inches of him. Spectators could follow the various troops who followed by the means of a printed programme identifying each unit. Mark Twain, watching from a seat in the Strand, came to the conclusion that ‘this procession could not be described. There was going to be too much of it, and too much variety in it, so I gave up the idea. It was to be a spectacle for the kodak, not the pen … the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Africans, the Pacific Islanders – they were all there.’30 ‘Up they came, more and more,’ wrote one journalist, ‘new types, new realms at every couple of yards an anthropological museum – a living gazetteer of the British Empire. With them came their English officers, whom they obey and follow like children. And you begin to understand, as never before, what the Empire amounts to.’31

  The spectators were intended to feel that the whole world had come to their city to honour their queen. Yet some of them may have detected something rather desperate in this parading of British might. Earlier in her reign, Victoria’s empire been expanding in a manner that seemed inexorable. When Disraeli had won Victoria the title of Empress of India, it had merely set the seal upon an informal colonisation of the subcontinent that the East India Company had carried out for mercantile reasons. In the last decade, though, Victoria’s government had pursued more of a policy of ‘Empire for Empire’s sake’, snapping up territories simply so that other great powers could not have them. Germany, now subject to Victoria’s personal animosity, and America too, were threatening Britain’s previously unchallenged economic dominance
. At Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 there’d been no need to celebrate her empire; it was taken for granted. Now, in 1897, Britain’s empire was beginning to seem both more precious and more precarious.32 Many of its subjects were fed up of being described, and treated, as ‘children’.

  After the soldiers, and the gorgeously attired phalanx of Indian princes, the royal family started to appear. One spectator noticed that some of Victoria’s grandchildren, while ‘bowing their little best’, were already ‘beginning to look as if they had had almost enough of it’. It was awfully hot. Then came five carriages, each with four horses, ‘filled with the well-known Princes and Princesses’, and then, at last, behind her eight horses, came the queen. Much of the warmth of the occasion was reserved for her personally. ‘We beheld the dear old Queen – and what a cheer they gave her, it made the tears come to my eyes. She was sitting quite upright and brisk in the carriage not looking flushed or overcome, but smiling.’33 Victoria carried her parasol high, so the crowds could see her face; her outriders were her field marshals Lord Wolseley (veteran of the Indian Rebellion, and reliever of the besieged garrison at Khartoum) and Lord Roberts (who’d served in Afghanistan, and who’d go on to serve in the Second Anglo-Boer War). The message was clear: this was not just a queen but an empress.34

  But the doubts of those who did not quite believe in the empire were partly assuaged by the fact that its empress did not look like one. She may now have ruled over a quarter of the globe’s land-mass, but the woman the crowds cheered was not physically impressive. ‘She is short, stout, and her face rather red,’ remembered one person who met the queen in later life.35 ‘A big round ball on wobbly legs,’ recorded Tsar Nicholas II.36 ‘I had pictured to myself a dazzling apparition arrayed in sumptuous robes,’ recalled another, who was desperately disappointed when she turned out to be just ‘a middle-aged lady, simply dressed in widow’s “weeds” and wearing a widow’s cap’.37