QUEEN VICTORIA A Personal History

by Christopher Hibbert

  Another of Frederick Ponsonby's duties was to look after the Queen's birthday books by which she set great store, taking the latest volumes about with her wherever she went so that people on occasions mistook them for Bibles, and insisting that all the people who visited her should sign their names on the appropriate page. The German Secretary was nominally in charge of these books and was responsible for compiling their indexes. But he did not carry out his duties as well as he should have done, and the onus of keeping the books up to date fell upon Ponsonby. Once when the Queen was staying in Nice at the Hotel Regina it was suggested to her that Sarah Bernhardt, who was acting at the theatre in the town, should be invited to give a recital in the hotel. The Queen was at first reluctant, knowing that Bernhardt's morals were far from being above reproach. Later, however, she changed her mind, attended the recital of Theuriet's Jean Marie which she thought 'quite marvellous, so pathetic and full of feeling', and, much impressed by the virtuosity of the great actress whose cheeks were wet with tears, she asked one of her ladies to present her to her so that she could compliment her. On Bernhardt's leaving the room the Queen sent to enquire if her autograph had been procured for the Birthday Book. Ponsonby was proud to have remembered to ensure that it was. He had watched with satisfaction mingled with astonishment as Bernhardt had taken the book from him, placed it on the floor, knelt in front of it, and scrawled across it, 'Le plus beau jour de ma vie', followed by a flamboyant signature. Ponsonby proudly sent up the book for the Queen to see. But, having done his 'duty nobly', as he thought, he got 'no marks'. First of all it was the wrong book: he ought to have used the artists' book. Second, he should have prevented Miss Bernhardt from taking up the whole page.2

  Towards the end of her life the Queen became an increasingly trying mistress because of her failing sight for which surgery was unsuccessfully proposed by 'one of the greatest oculists in Europe', Professor Hermann Pagenstecker, the Queen preferring to rely on belladonna to disperse the film. This proving less than satisfactory, her handwriting became increasingly difficult to read, while her secretaries were obliged to write in larger, more clearly formed characters and, therefore, more slowly.[lxxi] Ponsonby, resourceful as ever, bought some copy-books printed for girls' schools with the help of which he perfected a completely new hand. He also bought 'some special ink like boot varnish'; and, having used this to write his document, he dried it over a copper tray heated by a spirit lamp, an invention of Sir Arthur Bigge's. But this method did not satisfy the Queen. Since the thick black ink showed through the paper, only one side could be used which rendered the documents she had to read too bulky for her taste. She, therefore, issued instructions for Ponsonby to revert to his former practice of writing on both sides of the paper. So Ponsonby applied to the Stationery Office for a supply of paper the same size as the sheets then in use but very much thicker. At first the new paper was acceptable; but, as the Queen liked to keep all messages in her room for some time, she soon found that the accumulation of paper was inconvenient: would Captain Ponsonby kindly revert to the ordinary paper.

  'I grasped then that it was hopeless', Ponsonby recorded, 'and I consulted Sir James Reid as to whether it would not be possible to explain all the difficulties to her, but he said he feared her sight was going and that any explanation would therefore be useless. So I went back to the ordinary paper and ordinary ink, and of course received a message to say would I write blacker, but as it was hopeless I didn't attempt to alter anything.'[lxxii]

  In the end documents had to be read to her. Much of this reading was done by Princess Beatrice, her youngest child, which led to what Ponsonby called 'absurd mistakes'. Ponsonby wrote to his mother:

  The Queen is not even au courant with the ordinary topics of the present day. Imagine [Princess] B[eatrice] trying to explain ... our policy in the East. Bigge or I may write out long precis of [such] things but they are often not read to HM as [Princess] B[eatrice] is in a hurry to develop a photograph or wants to paint a flower for a Bazaar ... Apart from the hideous mistakes that occur ... there is the danger of the Q's letting go almost entirely the control of things which should be kept under the immediate supervision of the Sovereign ... The sad thing is that it is only her eyes, nothing else. Her memory is still wonderful, her shrewdness, her power of discrimination as strong as ever, her long experience of European politics alone makes her opinion valuable but when her sole means of reading despatches, precis, etc. lie in [Princess] B[eatrice], it is simply hopeless.3

  Before going down to dinner all the men dressed up in knee-breeches and stockings even if they were going to the Household dining room rather than joining the Queen's dinner-party.[lxxiii] 'The silence in the house was almost oppressive at dinner-time,' Ponsonby said, 'and those who were asked to dine with the Queen solemnly walked down the corridor, with mosaic floors and statues, talking almost in a whisper... At Balmoral the Queen's dinners were necessarily not large as there were not many people to ask. The conversation was supposed to be general, but the custom was to talk to one's neighbour in very low tones, and those on the right and left of Her Majesty were the only ones who spoke up.' Occasionally, as the Queen's eyesight worsened, there were embarrassing moments when she failed to recognize her neighbour, as she did one evening in 1899 when the Master of the Household made a mistake in compiling the seating list which led her to turn to the French ambassador and, supposing him to be the Italian as the list had indicated, asked him, 'where is your King now?'4

  At these dinners a great deal depended upon what kind of mood the Queen was in: when she was rather preoccupied and silent the meal was a dismal occasion. Ponsonby's father described a particularly depressing one. The Queen, who had a cold, sat between her son, Prince Leopold, who 'never uttered', and Lord Gainsborough, who was deaf. The prolonged silences were broken only by various types of cough, 'respectable', 'deep', or 'gouty', and by 'all the servants dropping plates and making a clatteration of noises'.5 No doubt they were drunk, as they often were, the Queen, as Dr Reid said, being astonishingly lenient about drunkenness among her servants, and instructing him 'on no account to tell the Ladies and Gentlemen that Hugh Brown [John Brown's brother] had died of alcoholic poisoning!!'[lxxiv]6

  Softly as those further away from Her Majesty spoke, she would often overhear a word and ask what they were talking about. Once, having heard Alick Yorke, the groom-in-waiting, mention something about a queen, she called across to him to ask which queen he was talking about. Told that it was Mary Tudor, she commented, 'Oh! My bloody ancestor.'

  It was Alick Yorke who, at another of the Queen's dinners, amused a German guest so much that a loud guffaw was heard at the other end of the table. The Queen asked Yorke to repeat the joke. Unwisely he did so; it was rather a risque story; the Queen looked at him with her basilisk's stare and, mindful that there were young ladies present, delivered herself of her most celebrated reprimand: 'We are not amused.'[lxxv]7

  Chapter 61

  DINNER PARTIES

  'The tears ran down my cheeks which set off the Queen. I never saw her laugh so much.'

  The Countess of Lytton, who arrived at Court in 1895 to fill a vacancy which had occurred among the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, found most of Her Majesty's dinners rather irksome affairs. On her arrival one bitterly cold October afternoon she was greeted by Harriet Phipps, the Queen's Personal Secretary, who, like all the bedchamber women and maids-of-honour who did not have titles, was given the rank of a baron's daughter and was therefore known as the Honourable Harriet Phipps. Miss Phipps took Lady Lytton into a small room, formerly the Prince Consort's dressing room which was used for receiving visitors upstairs. She was presented with the Victoria and Albert Order which all the Queen's ladies wore, attached to a white ribbon, on their dresses. And, on returning to her room, she was told by a servant who knocked on the door: 'You are invited to dine with the Queen, miladi.'

  She went down to the dining room where she waited with the other guests until the announcement, 'The Queen has arrived
' drew them all to the door. The Queen came into the room, leaning on the arm of an Indian servant, went through to the dining room and took her place at the table. 'The beginning of the dinner was rather solemn,' Lady Lytton recorded in her diary. The Queen hardly spoke at all during the early courses; and it was not until she made some remark about the Spanish Ambassador having 'come in the afternoon and [expecting] to be received at once without making an appointment' that the atmosphere became more relaxed as the guests laughed 'for some little time' at this odd ignorance of protocol.1 At a subsequent dinner the atmosphere was 'very solemn and the room so cold'. On such occasions the Queen rejected dishes she did not like with 'a peevish moue with crumpled brow more eloquent than words', and she spoke little, and, when she did, her remarks were far from memorable. Indeed, Lord Ribblesdale said they were conventional in the extreme. 'One way or another,' he wrote in his memoirs, 'I must have dined many times at the Queen's dinner party, and I personally never heard her say anything at dinner which I remembered next morning.'2

  At least the smaller and less formal dinners did not last very long since, throughout her life, the Queen continued to eat a great deal very rapidly, the courses of soup, fish, meat and pudding soon being despatched together with a large amount of fruit, preferably pears, oranges - which she ate with a spoon having scooped out a hole in the top -and apples grown in an orchard at Windsor extending to four acres.3

  The food served was generally agreed to be excellent at all the four separate dinners which were served each evening, those for the lower servants, the upper servants, the Household and the Queen with her chosen guests. A kitchen staff, including a chef, four master-cooks, two assistant cooks, two roasting cooks, two yeomen of the kitchen, sixteen apprentices, as well as bakers, confectioners, pastrymen and some half a dozen kitchen maids, provided menus which the Aga Khan described as long and elaborate:4

  Course after course, three or four choices of meat, a hot pudding and an iced pudding, a savoury and all kinds of hot-house fruit ... The Queen, in spite of her age, ate and drank heartily - every kind of wine that was offered [she usually drank Scotch whisky, distilled especially for her by John Begg, with Apollinaris, soda or lithia water] and every course, including both hot and iced pudding.5

  She preferred plain food, such as boiled chicken and roast beef, haggis and potatoes (twelve acres of these were devoted to their growth at Windsor), to anything exotic, but she liked a good helping and she liked her brown Windsor soup made no longer simply with ham and calves' feet as served to her children in the nursery, but including game, Madeira and shell-fish; and she loved her creme de volatile, her puddings, her cranberry tarts and cream, her chocolate cakes and chocolate biscuits, her 'stodgy trifle of jam and sponge cakes'.6 Marie Mallet complained that slow eaters like herself and Mr Gladstone 'never had time to finish even a moderate helping', because the servants, in Lord Ribblesdale's words, had 'a menial trick of depriving us of our plates as soon as the Queen had finished'. The lords-in-waiting, being 'mostly of the deferential breed', did not complain and were, therefore, all the more astounded when one evening a guest did complain. This was Lord Hartington who was in the middle of enjoying some mutton and green peas.

  'The Queen could dispose of peas with marvellous skill and dexterity [Lord Ribblesdale said], and had got into conversation with Lord Hartington, thus delaying his own operations. They got on very well together. Though Lord Hartington, like Peel and the Duke of Wellington, had neither small talk nor manners, yet he seemed to me less shy with the Queen than with his neighbours. This may be accounted for, perhaps, by their both being absolutely natural and their both being in no sort of doubt about their positions.

  'Well, anyhow, in the full current of their conversation the mutton was taken away from him. He stopped in the middle of a sentence in time to arrest the scarlet-clad marauder: "Here bring that back!"'

  The members of the Household held their breath, but when Lord Ribblesdale looked up at the Queen he saw that she was amused. 'I knew this,' he said, 'by one of the rare smiles, as different as possible to the civil variety which, overtired, uninterested or thinking about something else, she contributed to the conventional observations of her visitors.'7

  Mrs Mallet confirmed the observation of others that the atmosphere at the dinner table - as Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had found - was dependent upon the Queen's mood. Sometimes her conversation would take the form of a rigorous cross-examination; at others she was very gloomy and silent, especially when an uncongenial Minister was in attendance such as Charles Ritchie, at one time Home Secretary, a tall, dark Scotsman whom Marie Mallet described as being 'very vulgar and unrefined in all his ways, in short he has not the manners of a gentleman. He lifts up his loud voice at dinner and shouts under her very nose and last night I heard him deliver a lecture on Socialism to Her Majesty which I could perceive was not relished.'8

  Dinners were equally uncomfortable occasions when members of the Queen's Household or family died. On the occasion of the death of her lady-in-waiting, Lady Ely, she came into the dining room in deepest mourning and 'hardly uttered';[lxxvi]9 and when, again at dinner, she heard of the death of Prince Henry of Battenberg, who had gone out to serve in South Africa, she 'hardly uttered' throughout the meal.

  Yet normally in these last years she was more often cheerful and talkative than gloomy and silent. The Aga Khan found the 'facility and clarity' of her conversation 'astonishing'. 'She had an odd accent,' he added, making a comment not endorsed by others, 'a mixture of Scotch and German' with 'the German conversational trick of interjecting "so" pronounced "tzo" into her remarks'.[lxxvii]10

  Often she would laugh until the tears rolled down her cheeks. The letters which Marie Mallet wrote to her mother and her husband contain many references to the Queen's spontaneous and sometimes uproarious laughter when at a 'hen dinner' with her ladies: 'the Queen laughed very much'; 'the Queen laughed more than ever'; 'she was immensely amused and roared with laughter, her whole face changing and lighting up in a wonderful way'; 'she was very funny at the evening concert... in excellent spirits and full of jokes'.11

  Another of her maids-of-honour, Susan Baring, also wrote of the Queen's good humour during these ladies' dinners: 'It was rather amusing the Queen doing puppets of the German ladies, too killing!!'12

  The celebrated comedian, J. L. Toole, who was well known for his imitation of the Queen, was once invited to Windsor and, after dinner, was summoned by Her Majesty who commanded him, 'Now, Mr Toole, imitate me.' Toole, aghast, demurred, but the Queen persisted. After the performance she was 'for a little while silent and serious, but then began to laugh, gently at first, and then more and more heartily. At last Her Majesty said, "Mr Toole that was very clever, and very, very funny, and you must promise me you will never, never do it again."'13

  The Queen also still much enjoyed the theatricals and tableaux vivants performed by members of her family and Household, all the more so when Henry Ponsonby was no longer there to spoil them by having neither the time nor the inclination to learn his part.

  The Queen did not take part herself. Yet, although Alick Yorke was nominally the director of most productions, she dominated the proceedings, not only choosing the play but attending the rehearsals, altering and censoring the dialogue, acting as costume adviser, supervising the making and painting of the scenery, and seeing to it that members of her immediate family were given all the leading parts.14 On the evening of the performance she would enter after the rest of the audience and take up her position 'a little forward from them in a low armchair', so one of her servants recorded. 'A footstool is placed before her, and a small table holds her fan, opera-glasses, programme and book of the words. The applause is always led by the Queen, who taps either her hand or table with her fan.' She led the laughter as well as the applause; and frequently, to the great annoyance of the performers, she would explain the plot to her neighbours in an all too audible voice during the course of the production.15

  When pro
fessional performances were staged she did not hesitate to censor the script if she considered it too outre. She made no objection to the Covent Garden production of Carmen; but when in 1893 the cast from the Lyceum of Henry Irving's production of Tennyson's tragedy Becket was summoned to Windsor she expressed misgivings to Ponsonby:

  The Queen is rather alarmed at hearing from the pce of Wales & pce George that there is some very strong language (disagreeable & coarse rather) in Becket wh must be somewhat changed for performance here ... Prss Louise says that some scenes or perhaps one are very awkward. What can be done?

  The Pr of Wales thought Sir Henry shd see & speak to Irving.

  The Queen hates anything of that sort.16

  In the event 'Irving acted well and with much dignity, but his enunciation is not very distinct, especially when he gets excited. Ellen Terry as "Rosamund" was perfect, so graceful and full of feeling and so young-looking in her lovely light dress, quite wonderfully so, for she is forty-six! '17

  As well as performances of plays by professional companies and amateur theatricals, there were also concerts - once Ignacy Paderewski played for her at Windsor 'quite marvellously', proving himself 'quite equal to Rubinstein', and in 1898 she was 'simply enchanted' by a performance of Wagner's Lohengrin, 'so poetic, so dramatic ... full of sadness, pathos and tenderness, a most glorious composition';18 and she was equally delighted by a performance of Cavalleria rusticana 'by a young Italian composer of the name of Mascagni'. It was 'a great success,' she said. 'I loved the music, which is so melodious, and characteristically Italian.'19 She was later heard humming the 'wonderfully descriptive and plaintive airs' to herself.20