QUEEN VICTORIA A Personal History

by Christopher Hibbert

  The Queen, who had long been fascinated by India and proud of it as the 'jewel in her crown', was appalled to read reports of what was happening there. 'We are in sad anxiety about India, which engrosses all our attention,' she told King Leopold. 'I know you feel much for us all. There is not a family hardly who is not in sorrow and anxiety about their children, and in all ranks - India being the place where everyone was anxious to place a son!'

  Her thoughts, she told Lady Canning, were 'almost solely occupied with India'; and she urged Palmerston and his Government to display a more urgent sense of the gravity of the mutiny. 'The Queen must repeat to Lord Palmerston,' she wrote soon after learning of the murders at Meerut, 'that the measures taken by the Government are not commensurate with the magnitude of the crisis.' She and the Prince, so he said, had to be 'constantly digging [their] spurs' into the Government's side.2

  The Queen read of such tragedies as the massacre of the women and children at Cawnpore with horror: they made 'one's blood run cold'; they haunted her 'day and night'. 'The horrors' of Cawnpore 'surpass all belief, she wrote, '& it was a great mercy all were killed!' Yet, 'It shd. never have been made known, for that no good can be done any more, & it can only distract for life the unhappy relations'.3

  She read with equal horror of the reprisals exacted upon the rebels, the mass executions, the firing of mutineers' bodies from the mouths of cannon, the cries for more and more bloody revenge, the disgraceful attacks upon Lord Canning, now derisively known in India as 'Clemency' Canning, who refused to give way to persistent demands that even harsher punishments should be imposed upon captured rebels, that, in the words of one Assistant Commissioner, they should 'all be shot like dogs'.4

  'There is a rabid and indiscriminate vindictiveness abroad, even among men who ought to set a better example, which it is impossible to contemplate without a feeling of shame for one's own countrymen,' Lord Canning wrote to the Queen. 'Not one man in ten seems to think that the hanging and shooting of forty thousand or fifty thousand men can be otherwise than practicable and right.'5

  The Queen was entirely in agreement with the Governor-General. She considered the shouts for a bloody revenge 'too horrible and really quite shameful'. There must, of course, be suitable punishment for the perpetrators of these 'awful horrors', but the 'greatest kindness' should be shown to the 'many kind and friendly natives' who had helped the British. 'They should know that there is no hatred to a brown skin - none; but the greatest wish on the Queen's part to see them happy, contented and flourishing.'

  'Justice, and that as stern and inflexible as law and might can make it, I will deal out,' Canning told Lord Granville, Lord President of the Council. 'But I will never allow an angry or indiscriminate act or word to proceed from the Government of India as long as I am responsible for it.'6

  In this spirit he firmly refused to agree to accept a petition suggesting that martial law should be proclaimed throughout Bengal; and, to the satisfaction of the Queen and the Prince, he passed a resolution to ensure that captured sepoys should not be punished without regard to the gravity of their offences. Such compassion seemed misplaced to most Europeans in Calcutta; they petitioned the Queen for the recall of the Governor-General who, they contended, was no fit person to deal with the monsters who had perpetrated the horrors witnessed in India. But the Queen was not impressed by the petition. She knew that Canning was well aware of the dangers of racial animosity and she recognized that stern justice for the rebels had to be tempered with understanding of their fears. 'I think that the greatest care ought to be taken not to interfere with their religion,' she told Lady Canning, 'as once a cry of that kind is raised among a fanatical people - very strictly attached to their religion - there is no knowing what it may lead to and where it may end.'7 She was entirely in agreement with the Governor-General and his supporters that what was needed now was a spirit of reconciliation, not retribution, and that the friendship of the Indian people was to be sought, not their enforced submission. After all, the rebellion had affected only a small part of the country and the mutiny had been largely confined to various regiments in Bengal; many disarmed sepoys had returned quietly to their homes; and thousands of Indian soldiers and camp followers had fought with the British, who could not have survived without their support.

  On 1 November 1858, preceded by military salutes and followed by thanksgiving services and firework displays, a proclamation had been read out at every military cantonment in India. The document declared that the East India Company had been abolished, that the Queen and her Government now ruled India directly, that religious toleration would be observed and ancient customs respected, and that the Queen offered pardon to all rebels who had not taken part in the murder of Europeans.

  She and Prince Albert had played a significant part in the wording of the proclamation. They had objected to certain passages in the Government's draft which seemed to them too severe and unsympathetic. They particularly objected to a passage which referred to the Queen's power to 'undermine native religions and customs'. The proclamation, Prince Albert decided, 'cannot possibly remain in its present shape'.8 'Such a document,' the Queen wrote, 'should breathe feelings of generosity, benevolence and religious toleration.' It should endeavour to 'draw a veil over the sad and bloody past', to remove the fear of so many Indians that the British wanted to interfere with their religion, and endeavour to persuade them that the 'deep attachment which Her Majesty feels to her own religion, and the comfort and happiness which she derives from its consolations, will preclude her from any attempt to interfere with the native religions'.9

  Within a fortnight of the proclamation of peace in India, the Prime Minister of Piedmont, Count Camillo Cavour, wearing dark glasses and carrying a passport in the name of Giuseppe Benso, crossed the French frontier and was driven to Plombieres to discuss with the Emperor Napoleon HI the reopening of conflict in Europe.

  Having recovered from the shock of his attempted assassination, the Emperor had come to believe that Orsini's plot was a sign that the decisive moment had come for him to fulfil a long-held ambition 'to do something for Italy'. As a young man, he had belonged to the Carbonari, a secret society dedicated to the ultimate unity of the various kingdoms, duchies and republics into which Italy was then divided. He had risked his life fighting against the misgovernment of the Papal States. And it was as though his former doubts and speculations, concealed as always behind an atmosphere of contrived mystery, had suddenly been swept away by a brilliant vision of his preordained path.

  He could find it in his heart to admire Orsini, and for a time considered the possibility of reprieving him. In the words of the British Ambassador in Paris, Lord Cowley, the Emperor was 'regularly bitten with this miscreant'. He had always remained a conspirator himself at heart and in Mazzini, Orsini's former master, he recognized a fellow spirit. So it was that he and Cavour came to be driving together in the hot sun at Plombieres, discussing war and the fate of Italy.

  Cavour's master, King Victor Emmanuel II, was a squat man with enormously strong, thick legs and an immense moustache which swept up towards his little grey eyes in a ferociously intimidating crescent. Untidy in his dress and blunt in his speech, he was coarse in his habits. Detesting official banquets, through which he would sit glaring about him, his eyes rolling alarmingly, his hand on his sword, he preferred to eat huge peasant dishes of steaming ragout smothered in garlic and hot onions. His appetite for women was equally voracious and uninhibited.

  As an ally in the Crimean War - in which his army had fought, on Cavour's advice, in order to obtain a say in the peace negotiations - King Victor Emmanuel had been invited to England in 1855. Charles Greville described him as being 'frightful in person, a great, strong, burly, athletic man, brusque in his manners, unrefined in his conversation, very loose in his conduct, and very eccentric in his habits'.10 But, although he was expected to behave as he had done in Paris - where he had terrified everybody and enquired of the Emperor as to the price of a dancer wh
o struck his fancy at the Opera - he was on his best behaviour at Windsor. Indeed, he became quite a favourite at Court where the Queen seemed intrigued by him, though she was given a hint of what was to come when he told her that he did not like 'the business of a King'. He would become a monk if he could not make war; there was no need to worry about that, though: another war was inevitable.

  Kings had to make sure that wars were just, the Queen observed. They would have to answer to God for men's lives.

  Yes, one had to aim for a just war, the King conceded. But God would always pardon a mistake.

  'Not always.'11

  He seemed like a character in an opera buffa as he showed the Prince of Wales his sword which, he told him, could cut an ox in half at a single stroke. The Duchess of Sutherland felt sure he could easily wield it for such a purpose. King Victor Emmanuel seemed to her to be the only Knight of the Garter she had ever seen who 'looked as if he would have the best of it with the dragon'.12

  He took what seemed to be an unconscionable time before he consented to bend down when the Queen held up her face to be kissed; then, having planted a kiss upon her cheek, 'he began upon her hand, and bestowed upon it three kisses that resounded throughout the room'. When he was installed as a Knight of the Garter, he put forward one leg, then the other until 'at last he asked the Queen in his loud voice, "Laquelle?" She nearly let fall the Garter from laughing, the Prince was in fits and all the KG's at the table began to titter.'13

  The Queen was in no such jolly mood, however, when she heard that, in accordance with the agreement reached at Plombieres in July 1858, Europe was to be 'deluged with blood', as her Foreign Minister, Lord Malmesbury, put it, 'for the personal ambition of an Italian attorney and a tambour major, like Cavour and his master'.

  The conduct of King Victor Emmanuel, with whom she had felt herself to be on such good terms, and of the French Emperor, whom she had once so greatly admired, produced, so she said, 'universal indignation amongst all right-thinking people'. She believed that, although her people for the most part approved of the idea of Italian independence, they disapproved strongly of the Emperor of the French attacking another Empire 'without rhyme or reason'.

  She and Prince Albert went to France again in August to meet the Emperor at Cherbourg, where the Prince was 'conscious of a change' in him and worried by the obvious indications that France was preparing for another war.14 There were hundreds of workmen labouring in the port where the breakwater was being extended, the harbour was being fortified and warships were under construction in the docks. The Queen could not but feel concerned about the identity of the enemy the Emperor had in mind, but he was unforthcoming, 'boutonne' and evasive.15

  A year earlier, when he and the Empress had been guests at Osborne, their relations with the Queen and the Prince had been perfectly friendly. They had enjoyed a pleasant outing together to Carisbrooke Castle; and the Emperor had intrigued the Queen by his account of the strange powers of a spiritualist medium, Daniel Dunglass Home, the inexplicable phenomena of whose seances had so mystified guests at the Tuileries and at Fontainebleau.

  Now the former, easy atmosphere had become clouded by suspicion. The Queen made it clear that she disapproved of the Emperor's liaison with Madame Walewska, the beautiful, ambitious, Florentine wife of the French Foreign Minister, while the French were suspicious of a gentleman-in-waiting in the visitors' entourage, a man who was suspected of being - and who, indeed, was - an officer in the Royal Engineers. The Emperor complained of his military and naval rearmaments being reported in English newspapers as intended for a possible onslaught on England: would not Her Majesty take steps to correct these misrepresentations in the London press? The Queen replied that, as a constitutional monarch, she had no power to do so.

  On her return home, the Queen spoke to the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston's successor, Lord Derby, about the Emperor's clear intention of going to war; but Derby did not seem much concerned. Prince Albert, whose distrust of the French was much increased by what he had seen in Cherbourg, was exasperated. 'The war preparations in the French marine are immense!' he told his mother-in-law. 'Ours despicable. Our Ministers use fine phrases, but they do nothing. My blood boils within me.'16

  Prince Albert was still more disturbed when Cavour succeeded in provoking Austria to declare war and the Emperor Francis Joseph's forces were defeated by the French and Piedmontese at Magenta on 4 June 1859, then at Solferino three weeks later. By the Peace of Villafranca, Parma and Lombardy were ceded to France for subsequent cession to Piedmont.

  Throughout the war the Queen and Prince had found themselves at odds with public opinion in their country. They saw the French Emperor as 'the universal disturber of the world' and the Emperor Francis Joseph as the legitimate ruler of those lands in northern Italy which had been dominated by Austria since the eighteenth century and which had been confirmed as Austrian by the Congress of Vienna after the Napoleonic wars. To make matters worse, the Government of Lord Derby - who had personally been much abused in the press for his supposed support of Austria - resigned in June 1859 after the introduction of a contentious Reform Bill; and the Queen, obliged to recall Lord Palmerston, whose support of the movement for Italian unity was well known, had also to accept the unappealing Mr Gladstone as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Lord John Russell as Foreign Secretary.

  Chapter 33

  THE GERMAN GRANDSON

  'You say no one is perfect but Papa. But he has his faults too.'

  Political problems and the war in Italy, England's unpreparedness for war herself, and the immense amount of work which Prince Albert undertook with such ceaseless assiduity that he could often be seen actually running down the corridors at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle with papers in his hands and files under his arm, had taken sad toll of the Prince's health. He looked increasingly worn; his trim figure had thickened; he had long been going bald; he wore a wig and fur-lined coat in winter in the rooms which his wife insisted on keeping so cold; and, before he could hold his pen, he had to warm his hand over the flame of his lamp.

  He was Prince Consort now, having been granted that title by the Queen by letters patent in 1857; but the title had given him scant pleasure. As he told his brother, it should have been granted at the time of his wedding but prejudice against him had prevented that and now it came too late. In fact, it might not have come at all had there not been a fear that 'wicked people might later on succeed in bringing up the Prince of Wales against his father, and tell him that he should not allow a foreign prince to take a place before him'.1

  It was, however, concern for the happiness of his beloved daughter, whose presence he missed every day, which occupied his thoughts more than the possible future behaviour of his son. And in his anxiety about the child, and his longing for her responsive, affectionate, stimulating company, he came close to quarrelling again with his wife. Already before their daughter's marriage, following some difference of opinion about Prince Frederick, the Queen had received an angry and unjust letter, dated 5 November 1856:

  Fritz is prepared to devote his whole life to your child whom you are thankful to be rid of - and because of that you turn against him ... This is not a question of bickering but of attitudes of mind which will agree as little as oil and water and it is no wonder that our conversation on the subject cannot end harmoniously and I am trying to keep out of your way until your better feelings have returned and you have gained control of yourself.2

  Within a short time of her marriage Vicky was pregnant as she had much hoped to be.[xxxvii] It was an ambition which much distressed her mother who, when she learned of her daughter's pregnancy, wrote to say how the 'horrid news' upset her 'dreadfully'. 'I am so sorry about you,' she added a day or two later. 'It is well Fritz is not in sight just now or he would not have been graciously received.'3 'I own I cannot enter into that,' she continued in the same vein when Vicky wrote to say how proud she was to be giving birth to an immortal soul. 'I think much more of our being a cow or
a dog at such moments.'4

  She wanted to go to see Vicky and to take her other daughters, Alice, by then fifteen years old, and Helena, twelve, with her. But there was opposition to this plan: 'Papa says that I should be fidgeting myself about your sisters all the time, which would be very unpleasant as it would take my mind from you.'5 There was also opposition to a suggestion that the two sisters might go to Germany later: Papa, who was 'very hard-hearted and a great tyrant on all such occasions', would not hear of it. It was disappointing, Vicky agreed; but her Papa was an oracle, she thought, and what he decided 'must be right'.6

  Then there was trouble over the Queen's correspondence with her daughter. Before the Princess left home it was understood between them that letters would be exchanged most regularly as they were, indeed, to be. The Prince considered this correspondence excessive; and he told his wife so: it would be quite enough, he said, if she wrote no more frequently than once a week. So her mother wrote to her to suggest that when she next wrote to her father she should tell him what she herself wanted. 'Just tell him what you feel,' the Queen suggested, 'for I assure you -Papa has snubbed me several times very sharply on the subject and when one writes in spite of fatigues and troubles to be told it bores the person to whom you write, it is rather too much.' Nor was this all. Not only did his wife write too often, so did his daughter in reply: 'Papa says you write too much ... If you knew how [he] scolds me for (as he says) making you write ... He is sure you make yourself ill by it, and constantly declares (which I own offends me much) that your writing to me at such length is the cause of your often not writing fully to him.'7

  By this time the Queen was further aggrieved by the Prince's insistence that her second son, Prince Alfred, although no more than thirteen years old, should go to sea after he had taken the usual navy examination; and for months on end she would be deprived of the sight of his 'dear face which shed sunshine over the whole house, from his amiable, happy, merry temper'.