QUEEN VICTORIA A Personal History

by Christopher Hibbert

  Most important of all, Ponsonby understood as well as anyone the Queen's contradictory character. She did not, he said, 'belong to any conceivable category of monarchs or of women. She bore no resemblance to an aristocratic English lady, she bore no resemblance to a wealthy middle-class Englishwoman, nor to any typical Princess of a German court. She was not in the least like the three queens regnant her predecessors ... Moreover she reigned longer than the three other queens put together. Never in her life could she be confused with anyone else, nor will she be in history. Such expressions as "people like Queen Victoria" or "that sort of woman" could not be used about her.'3 It was Henry Ponsonby's understanding of the Queen's character that made him so useful a private secretary. Like General Grey he knew just how far he could go on any particular occasion in persuading her to act against her own wishes, and he refused to jeopardize his influence over her by pressing her too hard when he well knew such pressure would merely result in her refusing to discuss the subject again. 'When she insists that 2 and 2 make 5,' he wrote, 'I say that I cannot help thinking they make 4. She replies there may be some truth in what I say, but she knows they make 5. Thereupon I drop the discussion. It is of no consequence and I leave it there.' He contrasted this method with that of a colleague who pursued such controversies, bringing in proofs, arguments and, worst of all, former sayings of her own. 'No one likes this,' Ponsonby added. 'No one can stand admitting they are wrong, women especially; and the Queen can't abide it. Consequently she won't give in.'

  Ponsonby's way of dealing with the Queen, in contrast to that of the unnamed colleague, frequently did result in her giving in, or, more often, quietly allowing a matter to drop rather than admitting that she had been wrong.

  One trivial, if time-consuming, incident well illustrates Ponsonby's way of dealing with a mistress to whom, he said, advice had always to be given 'in a most gingerly way'. It concerned the arrangements for a holiday abroad, every trifling detail of which had to be submitted for the Queen's approval. Taking the register of servants who were to accompany her she struck all but one off the list of housemaids, maintaining that one housemaid would be quite enough. The staff objected and, as usual, asked Ponsonby to intervene. He did so, and thus recorded the result:

  Of course quite right that only one housemaid should go. I would send to her [another] girl from the Hotel. But stray girls were not always very honest. So I hoped the Queen would not leave things about to tempt her. I got the answer that another housemaid should go from here.4

  Towards the end of her life, when Ponsonby had become rather forgetful and his handwriting, so she complained, had become difficult to read, she began to find his circuitous way of approaching problems rather irritating. 'He has no backbone,' she complained to her doctor, James Reid, 'is always placid and easily talked over by anybody. He has no courage, but agrees with me, and then is talked over by others and agrees with them. He agrees with everybody.'5

  As General Grey had done, Ponsonby tackled Sir William Jenner about the Queen's refusal to perform her royal duties in the way Ministers required.

  Jenner said he had charge of her health and would do his duty [Ponsonby recorded in a memorandum] ... He would not advise her to do things against her health for a political object. If Ministers did not believe him [when he maintained she was ill] there was nothing he could do about it ... 'But,' I said, 'you could ask her to try - perhaps it would not do her harm. Besides which, it is not for the good of the Government but the existence of the Queen.' No, he would not hear of that.

  'People ask how can she attend Gillies' Balls at Balmoral [which she did, staying up until one o'clock in the morning] and not stand a little of London balls?' Ponsonby protested.

  'He said (which is very true) that at Gillies' Balls she speaks to none but at London Balls she would be expected to speak to many.'

  'But why shouldn't she live more in town and drive about there?'

  'Because it makes her head ache.'

  'Well, if she is ill how can it be good for her to travel so far to Balmoral?'

  'Of course, it is. When people are ill they are often ordered off to a distance at once.'

  So, while Jenner stood firm, maintaining that 'his care was her health and not her actions', Ponsonby could do nothing. Nor could her children. Jenner 'positively refused the Crown Princess, Princess Louise and Prince Arthur's entreaties, saying he could be of no use.' Nor could Ministers persuade her to do what she did not want to do. She told the Lord Chancellor that 'she had seen from long experience that the more she yielded to pressure and alarm ... it only encourages further demands and that she is then teased into doing what is bad for her health.'6

  When she was asked to open Parliament in January 1866 she wrote the Prime Minister a letter of extravagant but not atypical protest:

  The Queen must say that she does feel very bitterly the want of feeling of those who ask the Queen to go to open Parliament ... Why this wish should be of so unreasonable and unfeeling a nature, as to long to witness the spectacle of a poor, broken-hearted widow, nervous and shrinking, dragged in deep mourning, alone in State as a Show, where she used to go supported by her husband, to be gazed at, without delicacy of feeling, is a thing she cannot understand, and she never could wish her bitterest foe to be exposed to! ... She owns she resents the unfeelingness of those who have clamoured for it. Of the suffering which it will cause her - nervous as she now is - she can give no idea, but she owns she hardly knows how she will go through it.7

  'It is impossible to deny that H. M. is drawing too heavily on the credit of her former popularity,' Lord Halifax, the Lord Privy Seal, wrote to Ponsonby, 'and that Crowned Heads as well as other people must do much that was not necessary in former days to meet the altered circumstances and altered tone of modern times ... The mass of the people expect a King or a Queen to look and play the part. They want to see a Crown and Sceptre and all that sort of thing. They want the gilding for the money. It is not wise to let them think ... that they could do without a sovereign who lives at Osborne and Balmoral as any private lady might do.'8

  Referring to 'the Royalty question', Gladstone lamented that 'a meaner cause for the decay of thrones cannot be conceived. It is like the worm which bores the bark of a noble oak tree and so breaks the channel of its life.' One of the Queen's own equerries observed to Gladstone, 'There is only one great capital in Europe where the Sovereign is unrepresented and that capital is London.'9 Joseph Chamberlain, the Radical politician and future Cabinet Minister, expressed the view in 1871 that 'The republic must come, and at the rate at which we are moving, it will come in our generation.'10 Charles Bradlaugh, proprietor of the republican weekly periodical, the National Reformer, expressed the view that 'the experience of the last nine years [since 1861] proves that the country can do quite well without a monarch and may therefore save the extra expense of monarchy. '11

  The Queen's seclusion was a recurring topic in almost every newspaper. 'The living have their claims as well as the dead,' a characteristic article in The Times averred. 'Every honour that affection and gratitude could pay to the memory of the Prince Consort has been offered [and the time had now come] for the Queen to think of her subjects' claims and the duties of her high station, and not postpone them longer to the indulgence of an unavailing grief.'

  The general public agreed. Lady Amberley, Lord John Russell's daughter-in-law, noted in her journal, 'Everyone is abusing the Queen very much for not being in London or Windsor ... No respect or loyalty seems left in the way people allow themselves to talk of the Queen, saying things like, "What do we pay her for if she will not work?" and "She had better abdicate if she is incompetent to do her duty." '12

  Occasional support came to the Queen both from expected and unexpected quarters. John Bright, the Radical orator and Member of Parliament for Birmingham, in a speech at St James's Hall on 4 December 1866, had declared that he was 'not accustomed to stand up in defence of those who are the possessors of crowns. But I think there has bee
n, by many persons, a great injustice done to the Queen in reference to her desolate widowed position'; and he 'ventured to say this, that a woman - be she the Queen of a great realm, or be she the wife of one of your labouring men - who can keep alive in her heart a great sorrow for the lost object of her life and affection is not at all likely to be wanting in a great and generous sympathy for you.'13

  The Queen was so touched by this declaration in her favour by Bright, the death of whose first wife had left him 'in the depths of grief, almost of despair', that, when Bright agreed to become President of the Board of Trade in Gladstone's cabinet, the Queen proposed that, as an old man and a Quaker, he should not be required to kneel and kiss hands at the formal ceremony of acceptance of office. Bright accordingly did not kneel but, wearing knee breeches especially made for the occasion, he did kiss the Queen's hand, something Quakers 'in general never do'.[xlviii]14

  But Bright's views were shared by few others. Most of his fellow-politicians, of both left and right, agreed with The Times and those other newspapers which voiced the same opinions.

  Chapter 44

  'THE PRINCELY PAUPER'

  'She must solemnly repeat that unless her Ministers support her ... she cannot go on.'

  The repercussions of the Mordaunt divorce case had scarcely died away when in the summer of that year of 1870 war broke out between France and Prussia. At first France was seen in England as the aggressor; but, later, the Queen was once more in trouble for her widely reported sympathy for the Germans which flew in the face of the sympathies of her people who became, as she put it, 'very French'. At a meeting of republicans in October, after Napoleon Ill's army had been beaten at Sedan, a French border fortress on the Meuse, and France had been declared a republic, the Queen's Court was described, not for the first time, as constituting a mere 'pack of Germans'. Even so, when the defeated French Emperor arrived in England in March 1871 the Queen greeted him warmly:

  I went to the door with Louise and embraced the Emperor 'comme de rigueur'. It was a moving moment, when I thought of the last time he came here in '55, in perfect triumph, dearest Albert bringing him from Dover, the whole country mad to receive him, and now! He seemed much depressed and had tears in his eyes, but he controlled himself and said, 'Il y a bien longtemps que je n'ai vu votre Majeste.' He led me upstairs and we went into the Audience Room. He is grown very stout and grey and his moustaches are no longer curled or waxed as formerly, but otherwise there was the same pleasing, gentle, and gracious manner. My children came in with us. The Emperor at once spoke of the dreadful and disgraceful state of France.1

  The month before the Emperor's arrival the Queen had consented to open Parliament and she agreed to wear a new crown; but it was said that once again she was stirring herself only because she wanted more money: Prince Arthur, soon to be created Duke of Connaught, was twenty-one that year and in need of an annuity, while, on 21 March, Princess Louise was to marry the Marquess of Lome, son of the Duke of Argyll, and had to have a dowry.

  Yet, having opened Parliament in February, the Queen was most reluctant to delay her departure for Balmoral to prorogue it in August, in spite of a plea from Gladstone and hints from her eldest daughter who composed a letter which was signed by all the Queen's children and children-in-law but which, in the event, was never delivered to her. 'No one has prompted us to write,' this letter ran. 'No one knows except we ourselves ... It is we your children, whose position in the world had been made so good by the wisdom and forethought, and the untiring care of yourself and dear Papa, who now feel how utterly changed things are, and who would humbly entreat you to enquire into the state of public feeling, which appears to us so very alarming.'2

  The Queen had not prorogued Parliament in person since 1852, she protested. 'What killed her beloved Husband?' she asked in a letter to the Lord Chancellor, Lord Hatherley. 'Overwork & worry - what killed Lord Clarendon [Gladstone's Foreign Secretary who had died suddenly the year before]? The same ... & the Queen, a woman, no longer young [she was now fifty-two] is supposed to be proof against all and to be driven and abused till her nerves and health will give way with hurry and agitation ... She must solemnly repeat that unless her Ministers support her ... she cannot go on & must give her heavy burden up to younger hands. Perhaps then those discontented people may regret that they broke her down when she might still have been of use.'3

  Four days after this letter was written the Queen developed a sore throat. She was, she said, feeling 'extremely unwell'. The Household had so often been told that she was poorly when an unwelcome duty was to be performed that few believed her. But when she left for Balmoral on 17 August she really did look ill; and at Balmoral for the whole of the rest of the month and the beginning of the next she filled her diary with accounts of a very painful arm, sleepiness during the day, a 'choking sensation with violent spasms', rheumatic pains and gout. She had never felt so ill 'since typhoid at Ramsgate in 35'. She 'reluctantly agreed' that Joseph Lister, at that time Professor of Clinical Surgery at Edinburgh, should be sent for. On 4 September Lister lanced an abscess in her arm, an operation which, she confessed, made her 'dreadfully nervous' because, so she said, contradicting an earlier assertion, she bore 'pain so badly'. That night she could 'hardly turn over' in her bed, while the next day she could not walk because her gouty foot was so painful. John Brown was required to carry her to bed because she was too heavy for the maids to lift - Lord Stanley had recently described her as 'very large, ruddy and fat'. On 18 October she recorded in her journal:

  A most dreadful night of agonizing pain. No sedative did any good ... Had my feet and hands bandaged. My utter helplessness is a bitter trial, not even being able to feed myself ... Dictated my Journal to Beatrice, which I have done most days lately ... Was unable all day hardly able to eat anything.4

  By the time she was on the way to recovery towards the end of the month she had lost two stone.5

  Meanwhile, attacks upon the invisibility of the grasping miser, the 'princely pauper', continued apace. A copy of an anonymous pamphlet, attributed to the historian G. O. Trevelyan, Liberal Member for the Border Burghs, entitled What does she do with it?, reached Balmoral. In it the author condemned the Queen's parsimony and hoarding of money and calculated that she was squirrelling away no less than £200,000 a year. On 6 November, another Member of Parliament, Sir Charles Dilke, delivered a loudly cheered speech in which he declared that the cost of the Royal Family to the nation had risen to £1,000,000 a year - ten times, so another speaker claimed, the income of the President of the United States - and Dilke suggested that this enormous expense was 'chiefly not waste but mischief. Even the middle classes, he said, would welcome a republic if it were to be 'free of the political corruption that [hung] about the monarchy'. When, referring to the extravagant number of officials at Court, which still included a salaried Lord High Falconer and a Lithogra-pher-in-Ordinary, Dilke said that one of them was a Court undertaker, a man in the crowded audience called out that it was a pity there was not more work for him to do.[xlix]6

  A fortnight after Dilke's speech was delivered, on 21 November 1871, a telegram arrived at Balmoral from the Prince of Wales's country house at Sandringham in Norfolk which led the household to fear that this man's wishes might soon be fulfilled. The Prince, at the age of thirty, was dangerously ill with typhoid fever contracted during a visit to Lord Londesborough's house near Scarborough where the noisome drains were soon to be responsible for the deaths of the Earl of Chesterfield as well as the Prince's groom.

  Chapter 45

  TYPHOID FEVER

  'They were suddenly nearly carried away by a stampede of royalties, headed by the Duke of Cambridge and brought up by Leopold, going as fast as they could.'

  The Queen - while still declining to allow her heir to play any part in the business of government on the grounds that he was both irresponsible and indiscreet - had at last come to view the Prince of Wales in a less disagreeable light, even though it continued to rile her that her eldes
t son was now so much more popular in the country at large than her far worthier husband had ever been. He was really 'so full of good and amiable qualities'. She could not help wishing that he was not always 'gadding about' all over the country and on the Continent; but, when he was at home, she was sure 'no heir apparent ever was so nice & unpretending as dear Bertie'. 'I am always glad & happy to have him a little with me,' she wrote, '& I only wish I could see him oftener.'1 The news of his serious illness shocked her deeply; and on 29 November 1871 she hurried to Sandringham to be with him.

  Princess Alice was already there, a severe trial to her sister-in-law, the Princess of Wales, who found her bossy and unsympathetic. Prince Alfred was also there. His brother, Prince Leopold, was soon to come. So was the Duke of Cambridge. When the Prince of Wales's two youngest sisters, Princess Louise and Princess Beatrice, arrived as well, they were obliged to sleep in the same bed, so crowded had the house become with courtiers, servants, visiting Ministers and anxious members of the patient's family. And what 'an extraordinary family' they were, thought Princess Alexandra's Lady of the Bedchamber, Lady Macclesfield. She found it 'quite impossible to keep a house quiet as long as it is swarming with people and really the way in which they all squabble and wrangle and abuse each other destroys one's peace'. The one exception, Lady Macclesfield decided, apart from the Princess of Wales, was the Queen who remained 'charming, so tender and quiet',2 though not so quiet as to refrain from objecting to her son's habit of keeping all the clocks at Sandringham half an hour fast because of the Princess of Wales's chronic unpunctuality. 'She had them all put back. She thought it a ridiculous habit and a "lie" - so characteristic of her!'3