QUEEN VICTORIA A Personal History

by Christopher Hibbert

  Calm as she contrived to be at Sandringham, however, the Queen could not disguise her apprehension. 'Somehow,' she wrote in her journal on 6 December, 'I always look for bad news & have not much confidence.' Her son had rallied a little soon after her arrival and she had felt able to leave Sandringham for a time; but grave reports had brought her hurrying back and by the 7th he was reported to be 'as bad as ever or worse'. Lady Macclesfield reported to her husband: 'The doctors say that if he does not rally within the next hour a very few more must see the end.'4 That night Prince Leopold was called to his brother's dressing room and on his way there passed numerous relations and servants and members of the Household, all in their night clothes. 'It was,' he wrote, 'too dreadful to see the poor Queen sitting in the bedroom behind a screen listening to his ravings. I can't tell you what a deep impression it made on me.'5

  The doctors' subsequent bulletins, five of which were issued during the course of a single day, inspired a poet - generally thought, though probably mistakenly, to be Alfred Austin, later to be appointed Poet Laureate - to write those lines that were to confer upon him an immortality which all Austin's later writings would certainly have denied him:

  Across the wires the electric message came:

  'He is no better; he is much the same.'

  On 12 December the Queen, who was in fearful dread that the Prince would die on the anniversary two days later of his father's death, went to bed 'with the horrid feeling' that she would 'be called up'. The next day the end seemed imminent: her son's temperature had risen to 1040. 'In those heart-rending moments,' she wrote, 'I hardly knew how to pray aright, only asking God if possible to spare my Beloved Child.'6

  She did not often leave the house, though all the windows were kept tightly closed against the snow and there was such a fusty smell in the crowded rooms that the Duke of Cambridge became convinced that they were all in danger of catching typhoid fever, too. He rushed about the house, sniffing in corners, and jumping up with a startled cry of, 'By George, I won't sit here!' when the Prince of Wales's Private Secretary said that he also had noticed a bad smell in the library. For days the Duke remained 'wild on the subject', insisting on examining all the drains of the house until a man came from the gas company and discovered a leaking pipe.7

  Fearful as he was of catching typhoid fever, the Duke seemed quite as much alarmed by the Queen. So apparently were the rest of the family. One day Henry Ponsonby was walking in the garden with Prince Alfred's equerry when 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'. Ponsonby thought that a mad bull must be on the rampage. But the stampeding royalties 'cried out: "The Queen! The Queen!" and [everyone] dashed into the house again and waited behind the door until the road was clear.'[l]8

  The Queen herself continued to endeavour to keep calm and controlled, but distress at her son's plight and concern for her daughter-in-law sometimes proved too much for her. One day she burst into tears and cried out, 'There can be no hope!' Indeed, for days on end there seemed little reason to expect that the Prince could recover as he lay tossing and sweating in his bed, frequently in delirium, making all kinds of wild remarks, revealing guilty secrets of his past.

  But then the crisis passed. On 14 December he was, as his mother said, brought back from the 'very verge of the grave'. The next day, when she went into his room, he smiled, kissed her hand, and said, 'Oh! dear Mama, I am so glad to see you. Have you been here all this time?'9

  Two months later the Prince, 'quite himself again', went to recuperate at Osborne. He was 'gentler and kinder than ever', the Queen contentedly told his eldest sister. 'And there is something different which I can't exactly express. It is like a new life - all the trees and flowers give him pleasure, as they never used to do, and he was quite pathetic over his small wheelbarrow and little tools at the Swiss Cottage. He is constantly with Alix, and they seem hardly ever apart.'10

  The Queen was naturally much against the sort of public thanksgiving which Gladstone suggested would be appropriate to the occasion. But the Government, sensing the mood of the people, insisted that a procession through London followed by a service in St Paul's Cathedral would satisfy a universal demand for some such celebration. Princess Alexandra agreed with them. So the Queen gave way; and having done so, she saw to it that 'the show', as she sardonically termed it, was carried out properly. There would be an open carriage; there would be banners and flags in the streets; the bells would ring in the church towers and steeples. Of course, John Brown would be sitting on the box of her carriage 'in his vy handsome full dress'.

  The subsequent celebration, so Gladstone gratefully declared, was perhaps the most satisfactory that London had ever witnessed. It was a quite 'extraordinary manifestation of loyalty and affection'. The royal carriage, an open landau drawn by six horses, was greeted by deafening cheers all along the route. The Queen, her black dress trimmed with miniver and a white feather in her bonnet, obligingly entering into the spirit of the occasion, waved and nodded to the crowds and, raising her son's hand up in her own, kissed it with fond tenderness.11 'People,' she said, 'cried.' It was 'a day of triumph ... Everywhere troops lined the streets, and there were fifteen military bands stationed at intervals along the whole route, who played "God save the Queen" and "God bless the Prince of Wales", as the carriage approached which evoked fresh outbursts of cheering. I saw the tears in Bertie's eyes ... It was a most affecting day. '12

  The enthusiasm was nearly universal. The feelings of the country towards the monarchy had changed almost overnight. Republicanism as a significant force in British politics, already damaged by the excess of the Paris Commune, had suffered a blow from which it was never to recover. As the Prince of Wales's friend Lord Carrington said, the monarchy was now safe. When Charles Dilke again brought up the question of the Queen's expenditure in the House of Commons, he was shouted down.13

  Despite her cheerful demeanour on that day of thanksgiving, however, the Queen was still not yet ready to show herself in public or to grant audiences to her Ministers more often than was strictly necessary. When in the summer of 1872 Edward Cardwell, the Secretary for War, enraged her by paying a tribute to the troops in his own name rather than in hers, Henry Ponsonby was brave enough to suggest that she must be prepared to accept that such things were bound to happen so long as her Ministers saw her so rarely.

  Nor was the Queen yet prepared to allow - even after twelve years of widowhood - any more of those splendid entertainments that had formerly been given to such royal visitors as Tsar Nicholas I, the King of Saxony, King Louis-Philippe, Napoleon HI and King Victor Emmanuel II. Before the Prince Consort's death, in 1841 alone, no fewer than 113,000 people had been entertained to dinner at Windsor. But after 1861 the Queen had persistently declined to have strange foreign royalties to stay at Windsor. She was, she said, 'UTTERLY incapable of entertaining any Royal personage as she would wish to do, except those who are very nearly related to her, and for whom she need not alter her mode of life.'14

  To welcome the Sultan of Turkey, who had come to England in 1867, she had permitted some appropriate celebrations and had allowed her band to play for 'the first time these 6 sad years'. But she had done so reluctantly; she had declined to come down from Balmoral a single day early - even though warned that English influence, which was then paramount at Constantinople, might well be damaged if the Sultan were shown less respect than he had been in Berlin and Paris - and she was very glad when it was time to say goodbye to her 'oriental brother' whose visit was concluded by a naval review in a turbulent sea at Spithead during which he had to go repeatedly below deck to be sick.15

  The Queen of Hawaii, a 'peculiarly civilized ... savage', who later arrived on an official visit, was asked to come to Windsor at three o'clock in the afternoon so that the Queen, who gave her no more than a few minutes of her time, would not have to ask her to luncheon.

  She had been equally unwelcoming
towards the King of Sweden, who had had to stay at the Swedish Legation, Prince Humbert of Italy, who was told there was no room at Windsor Castle and had been put up at the White Hart in the town, and Khedive Ismail of Egypt who was grudgingly granted a night's hospitality at Windsor (provided his entourage was small) with a strong protest 'against the pretension raised that she should at her own expense, in the only Palace of her own ... entertain all Foreign Potentates WHO choose to come here for their own amusement'.16

  In 1873 the Queen was with great difficulty persuaded to welcome the Shah of Persia for reasons which Gladstone assured her were of the utmost political importance. She was very irritable and fidgety before his visit, so Henry Ponsonby recorded, insisting that the Government must contribute to the cost of the entertainment of the Shah's entourage, asking crossly why he was termed 'Imperial'. 'Because he is the Shah-in-Shah,' Ponsonby replied. 'Well, that's no reason!' she snapped and had the title removed from the programme.17 Then she twice changed her mind about the date of a military review to be held in the Shah's honour in the Park.

  The Queen, Ponsonby had to admit, had some reason for her agitation. Reports had reached London of the Shah's 'uncivilized notions and habits', his custom of 'wiping his wet hands on the coat-tails of the gentleman next to him without compunction', of sacrificing a cock to the rising sun, of his clumsiness with knife and fork and his habit of drinking out of the spout of a teapot. It was rumoured that he intended to leave three of his wives behind but that several other ladies would be included in his suite to console him in their absence, that he generally dined alone and preferred to have his meals, which usually included roasted lambs cooked on tripods, served on a carpet. 'For this purpose,' the Household were warned, 'a movable carpet [which, after he had gone, was found to be severely burned] should be kept ready whereupon his servants will put the dishes etc. brought to the door by the English servants ... The Shah does not like to have his meats cut up. Rice, lamb, mutton, fowls are favourite dishes. The cuisine should be somewhat relevee.' It must be expected, the British Ambassador in Berlin added, that the Shah might throw his arm round the Queen's chair at formal dinners, 'put his fingers into dishes, or take food out of his mouth to look at it after it has been chewed, or fling it under the table if it does not suit his taste'.18 He might also make improper suggestions to the Queen's ladies; and might well be rude to them: when Baroness Burdett-Coutts was presented to him he looked in her face and, summing up two of the few words of French he knew, exclaimed, 'Quelle horreur!'19

  As it happened, however, the Shah turned out to be not as outre as the Queen had expected. He was 'fairly tall and not fat', with a 'fine countenance and very animated', dignified and pleasant. At first she felt 'very shy' with him as they sat next to each other in full state in the middle of the White Drawing Room, surrounded by English and Persian Princes and Princesses; but since he was not in the least shy with her, she soon overcame her embarrassment. He showed no inclination to eat strangely in her presence, contenting himself mostly with fruit and iced water handed to him by his cup-bearer. He was covered with jewels, with immense rubies serving as buttons in his diamond-studded coat, with epaulettes of emeralds, and an aigrette of diamonds in his astrakhan hat. But she, too, wore splendid jewels, the largest of her pearls and the Koh-i-Noor diamond; so she did not feel overshadowed. On the advice of the Prince of Wales she invested him with the Order of the Garter, although he was a Moslem; and, having kissed her hand, he presented her with two orders in return while the Grand Vizier helped to save her headdress from falling off. She also gave him a miniature of herself set in diamonds which, so she heard with profound satisfaction, he had kissed publicly 'with reverence' before his departure from Windsor railway station. Most gratifying of all, at luncheon in the Oak Room, as bagpipers marched up and down, he had told her that he had had her Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands specially translated into Persian.20

  Chapter 46

  MAIDS-OF-HONOUR

  'I was more than astonished, I was rather angry. I did not expect my Maids-of-Honour to be snapped up before my very nose.'

  Such excitements as were afforded by the visits of the Sultan and the Shah to Windsor were still very rare. Yet by the time of the Shah's visit in 1873 the Queen had at last outgrown the worst of her grief. She was seen to smile more often, and to laugh. She began once more to record in her diary incidents that had amused her; her letters became more cheerful; she brought herself to play nostalgic tunes on her piano, and she began to dance again - she was still dancing ('like a pot', a German prince whose English was not strong enough for the compliment informed her) at Windsor when she was seventy - she told funny stories about herself and was fond of relating how one clear and starlit night she had opened her bedroom window to look out into the dark sky and a sentry at the foot of the Castle wall, thinking she must be a housemaid, 'began to address her in most affectionate and endearing terms. The Queen at once drew her curtains but was simply delighted at what had happened. '1 She was still capable of exercising an undoubted charm which Randall Davidson described as 'irresistible'.2

  There was no relaxation, though, in the propriety that the memory of Albert's strict moral sense had emphasized. The Queen, as her husband had required of her, demanded impeccable discretion in conduct as well as in conversation. To satisfy her sense of decorum people whose birth or duties brought them into her presence must not merely be innocent, they must never have appeared to be guilty. They must also conform to those rules of conduct she had established for her household. Gentlemen, for instance, must wear black frock coats in her presence, even at Balmoral; maids-of-honour must never receive any man, even their brothers, in their own rooms; they must entertain them as best they could in the waiting room downstairs; and they must always be ladylike in their demeanour and conversation: one of them who was indelicate enough to complain of rheumatism in her legs was coldly informed by the Queen that, in her own youth, ladies 'did not have legs'. Another was considered to be wearing too much make-up. 'Dear General Grey' will tell her so, the Queen commanded. But the General himself bravely objected when Her Majesty's message was conveyed to him. 'Dear General Grey,' he said, 'will do nothing of the kind.'

  Much was required of the eight maids-of-honour besides propriety of behaviour. Paid £300 a year, they were divided into pairs and expected to be on duty a month at a time for three months of the year. When she was appointed, Marie Adeane had to answer the following questions:

  1. Could I speak, read and write French and German?

  2. Play the piano and read easily at sight in order to play duets with Princess Beatrice?

  3. Ride?

  4. Was I engaged or likely to be engaged to be married?'3

  It was also understood that maids-of-honour would additionally be competent at needlework and sketching and be familiar with the rules of card games. They would be expected to converse amiably and intelligently to their neighbours at dinner, to be agreeable companions to the Queen when required to accompany her in her morning or afternoon rides, and, at all times, to be models of discretion. They must not keep diaries.4

  It was also taken for granted that neither the maids-of-honour nor any other member of the Household would get married without the risk of incurring the Queen's strong disapproval. When James Reid, who was appointed her Resident Medical Attendant in 1881 and knighted in 1895, had the audacity to become engaged to one of her maids-of-honour, Susan Baring, Lord Revelstoke's daughter, the Queen was 'dumbfounded'. For weeks she refused to allow the engagement to be announced, while Reid complained to his fiancee that it was 'ridiculous to have to submit to be treated like children'.5

  I must tell you of a marriage wh. annoys me vy. much, [the Queen wrote to her eldest daughter] Sir J. Reid !!! and my M. of H. Susan Baring. It is incredible. How she cld. accept him I cannot understand! If I had been younger I wld. have let him go rather - but at my age it wld. be hazardous & disagreeable so he remains!! ... It is too tiresome and I can't
conceal my annoyance. I have never said a word to her yet. It is a gt. mesalliance for her but he has money of his own.6

  To another of her maids-of-honour, Elizabeth Bulteel, the Queen remarked, 'I was more than astonished, I was rather angry. I did not expect my Maids-of-Honour to be snapped up before my very nose.'7

  It was five weeks before the Queen could bring herself to offer Reid her good wishes and then she felt compelled to add that she thought their future position would present 'many difficulties'. She trusted that they would 'both do their utmost to lessen as much as possible the unavoidable inconvenience to the Queen' and that Reid would 'still faithfully devote himself to his duties as in the past', in accordance with a set of regulations which she had already submitted to him.8

  It was said at the time that the Queen forgave Reid only when he amused her by apologizing for getting married and promising never to do it again.

  Annoyed as she had been with Sir James Reid, she was equally so when Marie Adeane asked Princess Beatrice to tell the Queen that she 'hoped to be married' to Bernard Mallet, A. J. Balfour's Private Secretary. 'This raised such a storm,' Marie Adeane wrote after receiving a cross letter from the Queen accusing her of inconstancy and informing her: 'You will easily understand that this has disappointed me very much.' The Queen 'told Lady Churchill that she was terribly vexed'; and weeks later the matter was 'still a sore point'. Eventually, however, all was forgiven, and when Miss Adeane went to say goodbye the Queen was so kind that the young girl burst into tears. 'I really do love the Queen so much,' she told her mother, 'and it pains me to vex her.'9