QUEEN VICTORIA A Personal History
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At the end of January 1855 the Government agreed to act. In Parliament, Ministers affirmed their complete trust in the Prince and their gratitude for his hard work in furthering the interests of the Queen and the country. Their declaration of trust was echoed in the House of Lords by Lord Derby.
The Queen was delighted by this 'triumphant refutation' of all 'the atrocious calumnies' and 'mad delusions' that had been voiced about the Prince: the position of her 'beloved lord and master', she reported to Stockmar, 'had been defined for once and for all'.
Neither the Prince nor the Queen provided any valid excuse for adverse criticism of their behaviour during the war. The Prince occupied himself with formulating detailed plans - rejected by the Government - for the raising of a force of fifteen thousand foreigners, and with writing memoranda, letters and papers of all kinds so voluminous in number that they now fill some fifty volumes in the Royal Archives. The Queen, often accompanied by her husband, reviewed regiments and naval squadrons on their departure for the Dardanelles. She set an example by knitting woollen socks, mittens and scarves. She wrote letters of condolence to the bereaved, and this she found 'a relief, since she could express 'all that she felt'. She inspected hospitals, including Chatham Hospital where, so she complained to Lord Panmure, the Secretary for War, the wards were 'like prisons' or 'robbers' dens', the beds being so closely packed together that there was 'hardly space to walk' between them. The sight of the wounded, she wrote, 'such fine, powerful frames laid low and prostrate with wounds and sickness on beds of suffering or maimed in the prime of life, is indescribably touching to us women who are born to suffer and can bear pain more easily'.2 She spoke to each man in turn, questioning them about their wounds, and had intended 'to make some kind of general speech', but she was 'so agitated that it all stuck in [her] throat'.3
She offered the royal yacht as a troopship, money to buy artificial limbs for disabled soldiers, and pensions for the wounded. She urged that they should all be told that 'no one' took a warmer interest in them or felt more for them than she did. She took a particular interest in the quick distribution of medals, a subject which is mentioned in almost every one of her letters to Lord Panmure during the three months before she was able to award them herself to her wounded Guards. 'At first I was so agitated I could hardly hold the medal,' she recorded of this occasion. 'Many of the privates smiled, others hardly dared look up ... Many said, "Thank you, your Majesty", and all touched my hand, the first time that a simple Private has touched the hand of his Sovereign and that - a Queen! - I am proud of the tie which links the lowly brave to his Sovereign. Nothing could exceed the good manners of the men.'4
'Day and night' she thought of 'her beloved troops'; and this was quite true. 'What an awful time!' she wrote in her journal. 'I never thought I should have lived to see & feel all this. If only there was more reliable news from the front. If only,' she exclaimed, 'one knew the details!' She did hear of a victory on the Alma river, 'and never,' she wrote, 'in so short a time, has so strong a battery, so well defended, been so bravely & gallantly taken'. Then came news of the heroic charge and destruction of the Light Brigade under the command of the brave and dreadful Lord Cardigan, then of the fearful losses suffered in the battle fought on 5 November 1854 in the fog at Inkerman. 'The victory is no doubt a very brilliant one,' she wrote. 'But I fear dearly bought... what suffering from cold and what privations are already being endured ... The Russians lost in killed, wounded and prisoners, 15,000!! The Guards, however, lost fearfully! The anxiety and uncertainty increase sadly.' It was all so 'heartbreaking'.5
She 'never regretted more' that she was a woman and could not go to war with her brave soldiers who were suffering such appalling hardships. 'I assure you,' she told Princess Augusta, 'that I regret exceedingly not to be a man and to be able to fight in the war. My heart bleeds for the many fallen, but I consider that there is no finer death for a man than on the battlefield.'6 Particularly did she feel so in a war against the Russians who shamefully abandoned their wounded, did not bury their dead, and shot at 'our soldiers as they were tending' their own wounded men.7 Albert might not think so; but she agreed with General Bentinck, the Guards Brigade commander, that the Russians were 'so cruel and savage and fighting in a stupid, dogged way'. With enemies like these it was foolish of the Government to propose a Day of Humiliation and Prayer - prayer, perhaps, but humiliation, certainly not.
She envied Florence Nightingale who had gone out with thirty-eight nurses to organize a military hospital in Scutari. She herself would have liked to 'do so much good and look after the noble brave heroes whose behaviour [was] admirable. Dreadfully wounded as many [were] there [was] never a murmur or a complaint'.8
She sent Miss Nightingale a letter of warm thanks with an enamelled and jewelled brooch designed by Prince Albert; and after the war was over she invited her to Balmoral where, in the Prince's words, 'she put before us all that affects our present military hospital system and the reforms that are needed. We are much pleased with her. She is extremely modest.'9
So long as the war lasted, the Queen signed the commissions of every officer so that the 'personal connection between the Sovereign and the Army should be preserved'; and she was often to be seen, despatches in hand, studying maps of the theatre of war. General Canrobert, the French commander-in-chief, who met her in August 1855, said that she seemed as familiar with the allied positions in the Crimea as he was himself. Despite her grief at the losses her army suffered, her imagination was stirred by the drama and excitement of war, an emotion which her husband could not share. 'You never saw anyone,' said Lord Panmure to the British commander, Lord Raglan, 'so entirely taken up with military affairs as she is.'10 'Whenever any instructions of any importance are sent to Lord Raglan,' she told Panmure, 'the Queen would wish to see them, if possible before they are sent.' She wanted to be 'told everything.11
For this reason she invited Lord Cardigan, a notorious adulterer, to Windsor three weeks after his return to England to give her a first-hand account of the charge of the Light Brigade and of the general situation in the Crimea. He described the charge 'very simply and graphically - very modestly as to his own wonderful heroism - but with evident & very natural satisfaction'.[xxxvi] He repeated his account the next day for the benefit of the royal children and other members of the family.12
At the beginning of the war the Queen had had every confidence in Lord Raglan, a kindly, patrician officer who had served as an aide-de-camp to Wellington at Waterloo and had been close to the Duke ever since. She had written grateful and friendly letters to him. 'The Queen's letter is most gracious. It is impossible to be more so,' he had written home to his daughters upon his promotion to field marshal after the battle of Inkerman, 'and Lord Aberdeen's expressions towards me are most flattering. '13 But later everything had changed. The Queen's letters were still polite and gracious, but there was in them an undertone of accusation. Writing from Windsor on New Year's Day in 1855, she briefly acknowledged his previous letter, then, without further preliminaries, came straight to the purpose of her own.
The sad privations of the Army, the bad weather and the constant sickness are causes of the deepest concern and anxiety to the Queen and the Prince. The braver her noble Troops are and the more patiently they bear all their trials and sufferings the more miserable we feel at their long continuance.
The Queen trusts that Lord Raglan will be very strict in seeing that no unnecessary privations are incurred by any negligence of those whose duty it is to watch over their wants. The Queen heard that their coffee was given them green instead of its being roasted and several other things of the kind. It has distressed the Queen as she feels so conscious that they should be made as comfortable as circumstances can admit of. The Queen earnestly trusts that the larger amount of warm clothing has not only reached Balaclava but has been distributed and that Lord Raglan has been successful in procuring the means of hutting for the men. Lord Raglan cannot think how much we suffer for the Army and
how painfully anxious we are to know that their privations are decreasing...14
Raglan replied at length; but the Queen was not satisfied; and when Lord Panmure sent her a copy of a highly censorious despatch he had written on behalf of the Government, categorizing the Commander-in-Chief's perceived failings, she expressed herself as being 'much pleased with it'. 'Painful as it must be to have to write or receive it,' she wrote to Panmure, 'the truth of everything stated there is undeniable.'15
At the end of the week the Queen wrote again to return the 'Morning State of the Army in the Crimea' which Panmure had sent her, and to agree with him in expressing 'astonishment at the meagre and unsatisfactory reports from Lord Raglan which contain next to nothing'.16 This reluctance of Lord Raglan's to use expressions of either enthusiasm or alarm, and his reliance on the bare figures of the 'Morning States' to give the Government the information it required, were a source of real anxiety to the Queen. Her patience, 'indeed she might say nerves', were 'most painfully tried' by it.17
By this time Lord Aberdeen had resigned as Prime Minister. Before war had been declared he had struggled to keep the peace, endeavouring, in the Queen's words, 'to obtain more from the Emperor of Russia than he is justified in hoping'. And, when war seemed inevitable, he suggested to the Queen that Palmerston would be a far better leader of the Government than he could hope to be. But the Queen objected: she would not feel safe with Palmerston.
'If it comes to being safe,' Lord Aberdeen observed, 'I fear Your Majesty would not be safe with me during war, for I have such a terrible repugnance for it.'
'This will never do,' said the Queen.
'I'm all for patching up, if we can.'
'This is unfortunate.'18
Lord Aberdeen struggled on for about a year until, in the early hours of 30 January 1855, the House of Commons divided on a heatedly debated motion, moved by John Roebuck, the radical Member for Sheffield, 'that a Select Committee be appointed to enquire into the condition of our Army before Sebastopol, and into the conduct of those Departments of our Government whose duty it has been to minister to the wants of that Army. '19
Sydney Herbert, the Secretary-at-War, in replying for the Government in the Commons, clearly implied that the whole responsibility for what was happening in the Crimea lay with that 'collection of regiments which called itself the British Army and not with the Government'. 'When you come to the staff,' he said, 'can you expect men who have not only never seen an army in the field but have never seen two regiments banded together, to exhibit an acquaintance with the organization of an army?'20
The House was not impressed by this determined effort to shuffle the whole of the blame on the Army. Mr Roebuck's motion was carried by a two-thirds majority. The next day Lord Aberdeen resigned. The Government had fallen with 'such a whack', as Gladstone, Chancellor of the Exchequer, put it, that 'they could hear their heads thump as they struck the ground'.21
Although he was over seventy, Palmerston was the obvious choice as Lord Aberdeen's successor. But the Queen was determined not to have the rude old man whom she and the Prince, translating his name into German, called 'Pilgerstein' as her Prime Minister if she could possibly help it. Having consulted the elderly Lord Lansdowne, a former Lord President of the Council, she sent for Lord Derby; but he refused to take office. She even sent for Lord John Russell, whose resignation from the Government as soon as he had heard of Roebuck's motion had filled her with 'indignation and disgust'. Russell accepted, but he could not find sufficient support. So she was obliged to send for 'Pilgerstein'.
He was deaf and short-sighted, he dyed his hair and had 'false teeth wh[ich] w[ould] fall out of his mouth when speaking if he did not hesitate & halt so much in his talk'.22 But he still had much life and vigour and sound sense in him. And he knew a good deal about the Army. He had been Secretary-at-War when he was twenty-four, and he had worked hard and well in this appointment for nearly twenty years, though earning the dislike of practically all his colleagues and of everyone connected with the Horse Guards. 'It is quite extraordinary,' Mrs Arbuthnot had said, 'how he was detested.'23
To her surprise and relief the Queen did not find 'Pilgerstein' nearly as troublesome and high-handed as she had expected. He was even quite accommodating: when he proposed that he should appoint Henry Layard, the archaeologist and outspoken liberal Member for Aylesbury, as Under-Secretary for War the Queen objected. Her cousin, the Duke of Cambridge, who had commanded the 1st Division without notable authority at the battle of the Alma, warned her that Layard's appointment would be most unpopular in the Army; while she herself objected to him on the grounds that he was not 'a thorough gentleman'. Evidently prepared to make amends for his tiresome behaviour as Foreign Secretary in the past, Palmerston gave way.
In her relief at finding him so accommodating, the Queen grew quite fond of him. Eventually, indeed, she and the Prince agreed that, of all the Prime Ministers they had had, Lord Palmerston was the one who gave the least trouble. 'He is most amenable to reason,' she added, '& most ready to adopt suggestions. The great danger was foreign affairs, but now these are conducted by an able & impartial man [the Earl of Clarendon] & that [Lord Palmerston] is responsible for the whole, everything is quite different.'24 It was particularly gratifying to her that Palmerston came to have a very high opinion of Prince Albert's talents. 'I had no idea,' Palmerston declared, that he possessed 'such eminent qualities'. He was 'an extraordinary man'; how fortunate it was that the Queen had married 'such a Prince'. In July 1856 she was to reward her reformed and valued Minister with the Order of the Garter.25
Chapter 30
NAPOLEON III
'His lovemaking was of a character to flatter her vanity without alarming her virtue.'
Soon after Lord Palmerston's appointment as Prime Minister, it was decided to invite Britain's ally, the Emperor Napoleon III, to make a state visit to England. He had announced his intention of going to the Crimea himself to take command; and in both London and Paris it was considered necessary to do all that could be done to prevent him undertaking a mission which would be as much of an annoyance to the British Army as it would to the French generals.
Before operations had begun in the Crimea, Prince Albert had been to Boulogne to see the Emperor and had dictated a memorandum about the visit to his secretary. Surprisingly, Napoleon spoke French with a German accent, the result of his having been educated at a gymnasium in Augsburg after his mother had been banished into exile upon the defeat of his uncle, Napoleon I, at Waterloo in 1815. Prince Albert found him humorous and lazy, rather quiet, not very well informed, but quite without pretence. His entourage was undistinguished and seemed afraid of him. He was certainly the 'only man' who had 'any hold on France, relying on the "nom de Napoleon". He does not care for music,' the Prince added with some disapproval, 'smokes a great many cigarettes [which the Prince refused], was proud of his horsemanship in which [the Prince] could discover nothing remarkable'.1
The Queen - who had confessed that she was 'really upset' at having to part with her husband, though he was away for only three days - was reassured by her husband's report. She had heard other far less favourable accounts of the Emperor, and had been horrified when the French Ambassador, Count Walewski, had made it known that his master wished to marry the seventeen-year-old Princess Adelaide of Hohenlohe, daughter of Queen Victoria's beloved half-sister, Princess Feodora. Relieved beyond measure when Princess Adelaide refused the Emperor's offer, the Queen wrote to her half-sister:
Now that this terrible affair about our dear Ada has been decided by herself - I can write to you what I have felt ... Your dear child is saved from ruin of every possible sort. You know what he is, what his moral character is - (without thinking him devoid of good qualities and even valuable ones) what his entourage is, how thoroughly immoral France and French society are - hardly looking at what is wrong as more than fashionable and natural - you know how very insecure his position is - you know his age, that his health is indifferent, and nat
urally his wish to marry Ada [is] merely a political one, for he has never seen her ... I ask you if you can imagine for a moment anything more awful than the fate of that sweet innocent child.2
Ten days after this letter was written the Emperor announced that he was to marry instead a Spanish lady of twenty-seven, Eugenie de Montijo, who lived in Paris for much of the year. This, in the Queen's opinion, was a much more suitable match. The woman was beautiful by all accounts and, while not born or brought up to be an Empress, she was said to have charm and intelligence. When her engagement to the Emperor was announced, one of her admirers had committed suicide and she herself had attempted to kill herself when another suitor had proposed marriage to her sister instead of to herself. Yet, if she was an adventuress, so was he an adventurer. 'Had the lady been unexceptionable in character and conduct and had she been French,' Lord John Russell, at that time Foreign Secretary in Lord Aberdeen's Administration, had observed to the Queen, 'it would perhaps have been the best decision the Emperor could take. As it is, the character of the Court will not be improved, and the best part of France will keep away from it.'3
There were those who thought the English Court would have been well advised to keep clear of both the Emperor and Empress. But the Queen was determined to ensure that his visit to her country was a success. The day before their arrival she inspected the suite of rooms in Windsor Castle which had been prepared for them, noting with approval the new carpets, the regilded furniture, the bright colours, the embroidered monograms on the bed curtains, the dressing table on which her own gold toilet set was to be placed.
The next day, 16 April 1855, she awaited their arrival with anxiety. 'These great meetings of sovereigns,' she thought, were 'always very agitating'. But once the Emperor had walked into the Castle her nervousness began to disappear. She received him at the State Entrance while a band played the music of a song, made popular by the French Army, which had been written by the Emperor's mother, Hortense de Beauharnais Bonaparte, step-daughter of Napoleon I. 'I cannot say what indescribable emotion filled me,' the Queen recorded, having overcome her nervous apprehension, 'how much all seemed like a wonderful dream. I advanced and embraced the Emperor, who received two salutes on either cheek from me ... I next embraced the very gentle graceful and evidently very nervous Empress.' She then presented her two eldest children, first Vicky, the Princess Royal, who, 'with very alarmed eyes', made 'low curtsies', then Bertie, the Prince of Wales, whom the Emperor embraced.4