QUEEN VICTORIA A Personal History

by Christopher Hibbert

  Prince Arthur, who was created Duke of Connaught and Strathearn in 1874, had never caused his mother the anxiety which his elder brothers had. Indeed, ever since Winterhaher had painted him on his first birthday receiving a present from his godfather, the Duke of Wellington, whose birthday it also was, Prince Arthur had given his mother little trouble at any time. She 'adored little Arthur from the day of his birth', she once told his governor. 'He has never given us a day's sorrow or trouble.' It was clear that he was her favourite son, dearer', she once confided in his father, 'than any of the others put together, thus after you he is the dearest and most precious object to me on Earth ... It gives me a pang if any fault is found in his looks and character, and the bare thought of his growing out of my hands and being exposed to danger - makes the tears come to my eyes.'6 He was her 'precious love', really the 'best child [she] ever saw'.7

  Well-behaved, polite, obedient, modest, he was a model child. He gave excellent performances in the children's plays when his younger brother, Prince Leopold, turned his back on the audience and General Grey's son was 'a stick'. Prince Arthur's one fault seemed to be that, as he grew older, he was rather too formal with servants. His mother urged him, as she had urged Prince Alfred, to remember that 'stiffness' was not requisite in her house 'This,' she said, 'applies especially to my excellent Brown, who ought to be treated by all of you, as he is by others, differently to the more ordinary servants (tho they should be treated with great friendliness).'

  The Queen told Prince Arthur much else besides. His governor, Sir Howard Elphinstone, who had won a Victoria Cross at Sebastopol, was bombarded with instructions on all manner of points on the boy's upbringing. Notes, either delivered by a servant or screwed like billets-doux to be passed to him personally, perhaps as she went into dinner, were handed to him almost every day. The Prince was not to be allowed to mix with Eton boys of his age: the sons of courtiers could play with him if he needed companions. Eight to ten minutes were 'more than enough time for him to dress in'. 'As Prince Arthur has a little cold he had better not go out unless it clears up, and then not on the wet grass. Perhaps Major Elphinstone will take care he takes exercise at home and the rooms are kept cool as it is very mild.' 'Why did Prince Arthur not go out with his sister and brother this afternoon, and why did he come in so early?' He should 'write Mama with one M in the middle and Papa with a large P at the beginning'. Yet if the Queen wished to take the boy on an outing, the note took the form of a request rather than a command: 'May Prince Arthur go with his sister and little brother to the play with us tonight? Has he been good?'

  Even when he had come of age the reprimands, instructions and admonitions continued: he must not keep his hands in his pockets; his father had hated the habit. He must not smoke too much; he must forswear racing and gambling; yachting attracted the worst kind of people and was also to be avoided; he must 'BREAK' with the higher classes. When his charge was nineteen, Elphinstone received a note to say that he looked rather poorly and should be 'dosed'. Every room at the Ranger's House, Greenwich Park, where Prince Arthur lived with his governor, his tutor and his valet, should be kept at a steady sixty degrees and 'never exceeded' - she usually stipulated fifty-six - and when its temperature rose higher than this one November day in Scotland, with the benefit of a fire in the room, she gave orders for a wash-basinful of water to be poured on the offending flames.8

  As he had always wanted to do, Prince Arthur joined the Army, passing 'very well' in 1866 into the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, but still living in the Ranger's House in Greenwich Park, separate from the other cadets. He obtained a commission in the Royal Engineers in 1868, transferring to the Rifle Brigade the following year. A conscientious soldier, he pleased his mother by telling her that, having worked his way up 'through every grade from Lieutenant to Lieutenant-Colonel [he] should not wish to skip the rank of Colonel'.[lx] He subsequently gave her further pleasure by marrying Princess Louise of Prussia, daughter of Prince Frederick of Hohenzollern. At first she had opposed the match, disapproving of the girl's unpleasant father, as well as her ugly nose and mouth and her bad teeth: 'he should see others first.' But as soon as she saw the eighteen-year-old girl, she changed her mind. 'Had I seen "Louischen" before Arthur spoke to me of his feelings,' she wrote, 'I should not have grieved him by hesitating for a moment in giving my consent. She is a dear, sweet girl of the most amiable and charming character ... I feel sure dear Arthur could not have chosen more wisely.'9

  Prince Arthur felt so, too. He and his wife settled down happily together at Buckingham Palace.

  The life of the Queen's youngest son was far less content. Rarely complimentary about her children when they were babies, she described Prince Leopold as being 'ugly' and 'very common looking', 'very plain in face'. He was also naughty and disobedient. Would it do to 'whip him well', she had once wondered in the presence of her mother. No, the Duchess had thought: the sound of a child crying was too distressing. 'Not when you have eight, Mama,' the Queen had said. 'That wears off. You could not go through that each time one of the eight cried.'10

  Prince Leopold's looks improved somewhat as he grew older and he turned out to be cleverer and more studious than his brothers, a competent linguist, a capable musician with a pleasant singing voice, and with a precocious interest in early Italian painting and English literature. But he was certainly not prepossessing as a child: he suffered from a pronounced speech defect; he was, in his mother's words, 'very absurd' and 'dreadfully awkward'; and the more the Queen showed how concerned she was about his health, the 'constant fear' she felt about it, the more difficult, argumentative and pert he became.

  'I heard your musical box playing most clearly this afternoon,' she once complained.

  'Impossible. My musical box never plays.'

  'But I know it was yours, as there was a drum in it I recognized.'

  'That shows it wasn't my musical box. There is no drum in it.'11

  The Queen compared Prince Leopold with her darling Arthur, who was 'so lovely & engaging, so sensible and so clever & such a very good little Child', whereas Leopold was 'quite the reverse'.12 Admittedly he was 'very clever' '& (when amiably disposed) amusing enough'. But he was very plain and difficult, constantly asking questions, 'excessively quizzical'.13

  When he was five years old she told the Crown Princess, 'He is tall, but holds himself worse than ever, and is ... an oddity - and not an engaging child'. 'He walks shockingly,' she added the following year, 'and is dreadfully awkward ... His manners are despairing as well as his speech - which is quite dreadful ... His French is more like Chinese than anything else; poor child, he is really very unfortunate.'14 Lady Augusta Bruce, who thought him 'a dear', had to admit that he was 'passionate and always frightfully naughty in the presence of his parents, who think him quite a Turk! ... I do not think they know how to manage him.'15

  'However, it is very difficult,' Lady Augusta added, the symptoms of haemophilia having already appeared in the boy, 'for the battles are usually to avert some danger. He is perfectly restless and fearless.' He bruised himself with alarming frequency and became quite lame after falling over. 'Your poor little namesake is again laid up with a bad knee from a fall - wh appeared to be of no consequence,' the Queen had written to the King of the Belgians not long after the boy's third birthday. 'It is very sad for the poor Child - for really I fear he will never be able to enter any active service. This unfortunate defect ... is often not outgrown - & no remedy or medicine does it any good. '16

  Before accepting the seriousness of her son's condition the Queen had been less sympathetic than irritated by his frailties and behaviour. But once she understood how incapacitating and dangerous the illness was, her attitude had changed. 'Poor Child,' she had told King Leopold, 'he is so very studious & so very clever but always meeting with accidents, which with another child would not be mentioned even, but which from the peculiar constitution of his blood vessels, which have no adhesiveness, become dreadful. He has now a bump on his f
orehead which is as big as a nut ... Unfortunately all the "faculty" say nothing whatever can be done for it ... He is very patient. '17

  After suffering a coughing fit which made his nose bleed alarmingly, it was decided that he should be sent abroad to a warmer climate for a while; and so, on 2 November 1861, he left for France from Windsor where, on the Castle steps, he said goodbye to his 'dear Papa' whom he was never to see again. Upon his return his mother made it clear that, while he could never hope to replace him in her affections, he was to do what he could to take his father's place. She hoped that, if he was spared, he might grow up to 'resemble his precious father in character - in many of the qualities at least and ... [might] go on with His work'.18

  In order to ensure that he was, indeed, spared to fulfil this destiny, the Queen watched over the child, now eight years old, as diligently as she urged Elphinstone to watch over Prince Arthur. After an attack of internal bleeding brought on, so she thought, by riding, he was forbidden to ride again 'except at a foot's pace'; he was not to play games with other boys in which he might get hurt; he was not to be removed from the watchful eye of his mother and 'from his own Home'. He was to be entrusted to the care of a Highland servant, John Brown's brother, Archibald, who could carry him about when he could not walk, and of a governor, a young officer in the Royal Horse Artillery, Walter George Stirling, who, his mother hoped, would 'take real care of our poor dear Boy'.19

  Prince Leopold liked Stirling. So did the Queen at first. But he did not get on well with the Highlanders, particularly not with Archie Brown; and in the summer of 1866 she found an excuse for getting rid of him, much to the Highlanders' satisfaction. Stirling, she declared, was 'unsuited' to his post. 'He has not,' she told Major Elphinstone, 'enlarged views or knowledge enough to lead and develop so clever a boy as Leopd - without a father.'20

  Leopold was greatly distressed and angry with his mother. There was an embarrassing scene one day at luncheon when the thirteen-year-old boy appeared with 'a great gold ring on his finger. His mother asked him what it was and who had given it to him. 'Someone,' he replied. Pressed, he 'grew very red & said "Mr Stirling"'.

  'I cannot say how I miss you,' he wrote to Stirling. 'I always expect to see you coming in the morning as you always did, and as I was carried down to breakfast Louise and I missed you looking over the banister at the top of the staircase at us.'21

  Having lost the company of Stirling, Leopold was also forbidden to spend so much time with his sister, Louise, who also disliked the 'dreadful Scotch servants', as her brother called them. 'I am no more allowed to stop with Louise as I used to do,' he told Stirling in one of several letters which he contrived to have delivered to him without the Queen's knowing. 'And this morning I got a message that I was never to ask anybody to come into the railway carriage in going to Scotland without first getting Mamma's permission.'

  'Poor little fellow,' Princess Louise wrote to a friend, 'he is never allowed to come to me now, it is a great grief to us both. He said to me one day, "Lucy, I don't know what would happen to me if you ever went away, all would be over for me then."'22

  Fortunately the boy's new tutor, the Revd Robinson Duckworth, a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, was kind and understanding with his charge. He also took the trouble to be charming to the Queen, who was struck by both his manner and his good looks, and to establish satisfactory relations with the Highlanders, as his predecessor had failed to do.

  Soon after Duckworth's appointment, Prince Leopold fell dangerously ill, bleeding from the bowel, and his mother sat anxiously by his bedside, fearing that he would die. When he began slowly to recover and the 'dear child' was given back to her 'from the brink of the grave', his mother decided that he must henceforth be the 'chief object' of her life, and that he and Princess Beatrice and their mother would be 'three inseparables'. The destiny of the two children was to be of help to her in her work. This was employment which Leopold at least seemed likely to become well qualified to do. 'He learns besides French and German, Latin, Greek and Italian,' the Queen told their eldest sister; 'is very fond of music and drawing, takes much interest in politics - in short in everything. His mind and head are far the most like of any of the boys to his dear Father.'23

  This plan for his future was far from what Prince Leopold wanted. The thought of spending the rest of his life cooped up at Windsor and Osborne and that 'horrid', 'detestable', 'more vile and most abominable' place, Balmoral, appalled him, particularly as he would for so much of the time be in the hands of the detested Browns. 'I am rather in the grumps just now about everything,' he told Stirling in September 1868 when he was fifteen. 'The way in which I am treated is sometimes too bad (not Mr Duckworth, of course not, he is only too kind to me) but other people. Besides that "J.B." is fearfully insolent to me, so is his brother; hitting me in the face with spoons for fun, etc - you may laugh at me for all this; but you know I am so sensitive, I know you will feel for me.'24

  'I am altogether very low about myself,' he wrote from Osborne in another letter to Stirling after a recurrence of his terribly painful illness in February 1870, 'as no sooner had I recovered from my last tedious illness ... than here I am laid up again ... This life here is becoming daily more odious & intolerable. Every inch of liberty is taken away from one & one is watched, and everything one says or does is reported.' He greatly feared, he added, that Mr Duckworth was going to be treated in the same way as Stirling himself had been, that his dismissal was soon to be engineered by the dreadful Browns who added so much to the misery of a life which was already 'so empty and idiotic' that he confessed to contemplating suicide.

  'That devil Archie,' he told his new tutor, Robert Hawthorn Collins, after Duckworth's foretold departure, 'he does nothing, but jeer at, & be impertinent to me everyday, & in the night he won't do anything for me ... not even give me my chamberpot, & he is so insolent before the other servants, the infernal blackguard. I could tear him limb from limb I loathe him so.'25

  'H.M. has grown more tyrannical over me & indeed over everybody than ever,' the Prince added in a letter the following year. 'I must say that I am getting heartily tired of my bondage & am looking forward to the day when I shall be able to burst the bars of my iron cage & fly away for ever.'26

  He was eighteen now and saw a means of escape in persuading his mother to allow him to go to Oxford, writing her a skilful letter to point out the advantages of a university education, emphasizing that he wanted to follow in 'dear Papa's footsteps as much as possible' and that 'to meet with such companions of my own age as would be carefully selected would tend to take away that shyness of manner, & general dullness of spirit in conversation' of which she 'so naturally & so much' complained.

  The Queen initially opposed this suggestion which she was greatly annoyed to discover had been discussed by others 'behind [her] back' before being proposed to her. His dear father would certainly have disapproved of the idea, she told the boy; and she herself had her own objections to both Oxford and Cambridge. St Andrews might have been considered but, of course, there could be no question of his going into residence anywhere. 'You fancy,' she told him, 'you are stronger than you really are.'

  Eventually, however, she was persuaded or, as she put it, 'forced' to give way and to allow Prince Leopold to study at Oxford, hedging her consent about with numerous conditions, on the clear understanding that it was 'merely for study & not for amusement', that Leopold would return to Windsor at weekends when the Queen was there, go with her to Osborne at Easter and to Balmoral in May, even though this would mean missing most of the summer term, and that he realized how inconvenient it would be for her 'not having a grown up Child in the House in case of Visitors'.27 Leopold's happiness at Oxford was marred by what he called the 'bullying letters & telegrams' which he received from 'Home, sweet home', by the necessity of returning so frequently to 'headquarters' where, on one occasion at least, he and his mother had a 'screaming row', and by the strict limitations placed upon his activities at Oxford so t
hat he should not fall prey to temptation as his two eldest brothers had both done. He was limited in the number of men he could have to dinner and was forbidden to 'have any at all of the softer sex', which, as he told Stirling, 'is a great pity, as there are such awfully pretty girls here unmarried as well as married, & you know I am always a great admirer, & more than that, of fair females.'

  He did, however, contrive to fall in love with one of the daughters of the Dean of Christ Church, the Revd Henry Liddell; and this made the wrench of leaving Oxford for Windsor, Osborne or the detested Balmoral all the more unpleasant. At Oxford he was, so Liddell's friend, Charles Dodgson, who wrote under the name of Lewis Carroll, said,' a universal favourite', whereas when required to be at 'headquarters' he was repressed and exasperated by his mother's anxious watching over him, her reluctance to allow him to do any public duties outside the house, her insistence that he must reconcile himself to remaining at home as a kind of private secretary.

  After he came of age in April 1874, his mother, while continuing to fret and fuss about his health, allowed his life to become rather less restricted. Archie Brown was given other duties; the companionable and amusing Alick Yorke was appointed his equerry, and he was delighted to be able to tell his tutor, Robert Collins: 'Eliza found a servant for me, a good one! An Englishman!!! Oh Ye Gods! What a marvel!' After her son had recovered from an almost fatal attack of typhoid fever, the Queen even allowed him to rent a country house with Mr and Mrs Collins, Boyton Manor in Wiltshire, though she expressed her deep regret that he rejected the home that she had done all she could to make comfortable for him and declared that if he had talked about his plan of taking Boyton Manor to his brothers or sisters before discussing it with her, she would 'never forgive it'.28

  She still maintained that, because of his poor health, he must have no thoughts of a public role in life; and, when grudgingly granted permission to attend some public function, she took it upon herself to supervise the details. For instance, upon his accepting an invitation to become a Freeman of the City of London, she first of all tried to have the ceremony performed at Windsor, then instructed the Lord Mayor that 'everything should go thro' her'. And, upon his being appointed a Younger Brother of Trinity House, she not only told him not to stand too long during the ceremony but also directed him to wear Highland dress rather than the Trinity House uniform. Indeed, he was required to consult her about the clothes to be worn on all public occasions.29