by Simon Schama
Mill was not, of course, arguing for women members of parliament (although he saw no reason why, one day, that too should not come to pass). But he believed it both absurd and manifestly unjust that half the otherwise qualified suffrage should be barred from exercising their right to vote solely on grounds of their sex. What was already an uphill battle was made more difficult when the Liberals fell from power in August 1866. When, under a Conservative government in February 1867, Disraeli presented his version of the bill, Mill stuck to his guns, if anything even more adamant than the Langham Place campaigners in his demand that women (not just single women) be admitted to the franchise. In March he presented another petition (one of three that arrived in the Commons), bearing over 3000 signatures from Manchester. On 20 May 1867, in an eloquent and moving speech, Mill formally submitted his amendment to the Representation of the People Bill, proposing to substitute the word ‘person’ for ‘man’ in the clause dealing with criteria for extending the franchise to householders in the counties (not achieved until 1884). The surprise was not that the amendment went down to defeat, but that Mill actually managed to persuade no fewer than 73 members to vote for it (81 including pairs). His supporters included some eminent Mancunians – the Radical Thomas Bayley Potter and Sir Thomas Bazley, manufacturer and self-styled workers’ friend.
In a Manchester by-election in November 1867 (when John Bright’s more radical brother Jacob stood on a platform that included women’s household suffrage), a widowed shopkeeper, Lily Maxwell, became the first woman to cast a vote in a British election. She was only on the register as the result of a clerical error; but once she was discovered by Jacob Bright and the suffrage campaigner Lydia Becker, they were determined that she should go through with it. Escorted to the poll, she cast her vote to a round of loud applause. An obviously disconcerted pioneer, Lily must none the less have had a great deal of gumption, not to mention sympathy with the aim of the suffragists (who had been campaigning peacefully for the vote since 1866), to play her part in what became an elaborately staged event. A surviving photograph certainly suggests a woman with a good deal of flinty determination. As far as Bright and Becker were concerned, she was a gift to the cause. Like the Chartist Land Company settler Ann Wood, Lily Maxwell was a classic example of gritty Scottish thrift: an ex-domestic servant who had saved enough to become a shopkeeper, and who paid the respectable weekly rent of 6 shillings and 2 pence for her place in Ludlow Street, a mix of artisan and lower middle-class, two-up, two-down brick dwellings. When her case became famous – or, to the conservative press, shocking – Lydia Becker wrote a dignified letter to The Times on 3 December 1867, describing her as a model voter of the kind intended to be emancipated by the Reform Act, ‘a widow who keeps a small shop in a quiet street in Manchester. She supports herself and pays her own rates and taxes out of her own earnings. She has no man to influence or be influenced by, and she has very decided political principles, which determined her vote for Mr Jacob Bright at the recent election.’ As a result of the publicity around Lily Maxwell’s vote, Lydia Becker was able to open a register to enrol qualified women householders. By the end of 1868, her list numbered 13,000.
All this appalled Queen Victoria. She may have occasionally voiced her own reservations (at least privately) about the distance between the sentimental dream and the harder realities of marriage. She may even have sympathized with measures designed to restrain physically violent and flagrantly licentious husbands, or to take care of cruelly abandoned wives. But addressing injustices and cruelties was, to her mind, emphatically not a licence for any degree of political emancipation. In October 1867 she had been surprisingly liberal on the need to expand the suffrage to the ‘lower classes’ since they had become ‘so well informed and are so intelligent and earn their bread and riches so deservedly’ in contrast to ‘the wretched, ignorant high-born beings who live only to kill time’. But any discussion of women’s fitness to exercise political rights made her apopleptic. ‘It is a subject,’ she wrote, referring to herself as usual in the third person, ‘which makes the Queen so furious she cannot contain herself.’ And again she vituperated against ‘this mad wicked folly of “Womens’ Rights” with all its attendant horrors on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety’.
How did the queen feel about the other great feminist cause: work for middle-class women? She continued to be a dutiful reader of dispatches and papers. But, after marriage and motherhood, she never felt that it was more than a painful chore imposed on her by her constitutional obligations, and (until it started to kill him) that Albert was in every way much better suited to the work. For the most part, too, she subscribed to the middle-class truism that marriage was woman’s profession. So it is extremely unlikely that Victoria would have given much thought to another revelation of the census of 1851, that there were (and, according to the demographic statisticians, there seemed always likely to be) around half to three-quarters of a million more women of marriageable age than men. This ‘spinster surplus’, thought the Manchester political economist and manufacturer William Rathbone Greg, might be reduced by projects of emigration to the colonies. But that would none the less leave around half a million single women who were to be either condemned to a permanent sense of their own redundancy, or trapped in notoriously underpaid and little-respected jobs such as governesses. In the late 1850s the Englishwoman’s Journal and its editor, Bessie Rayner Parkes, had taken up the call of middle-class women to be employed, as paid professionals rather than genteel volunteers, in a broader variety of fulfilling professions: teaching in girls’ schools and colleges; prison and reformatory work; ‘deaconess’ visits to the homes of the poor in country and town; and the one profession that had been officially declared a ‘noble’ field for women: nursing.
Nursing was the one single-woman’s profession that the queen felt perfectly fitted with the feminine qualities of tenderness, solace and healing. And the carnage of the Crimean War, of course, had everything to do with this. The genuinely epic history of Florence Nightingale, the single woman par excellence who had spurned marriage for the sake of a higher calling; who had brought her band of 38 young women to the hell of the barracks hospital at Scutari; who had taken on the mutton-chop whiskered medical corps and the army bureaucrats to wring from them the barest necessities: bandages, splints, soap; who had made the washtub her personal escutcheon – all this had stirred the nation, not least the queen herself. Many times Victoria had expressed her bitter regret that she was not the right sex to be able to join the soldiers in their heroic privations and combat. She knitted mufflers, socks and mittens; and sent letters to the front, and visited returning soldiers in hospital, so that the troops should know that no one grieved more deeply for their suffering or felt more warmly for their sacrifices. The heavy losses suffered at Balaclava and Inkerman kept her and Albert awake at night. And as the news, reported in October 1854 by one of The Times’s war correspondents, Thomas Chenery, of incompetent management and command, and of shortages of basic supplies became more and more appalling, so Victoria’s sense of maternal concern grew more acute.
The nurses at Scutari were surrogates for her own presence. When Florence Nightingale returned to Britain after the armistice in 1856, Victoria invited her to Balmoral to hear, first-hand, her account of the ordeal. But there was another heroine of the Crimea whose work was unknown to the queen (until her own step-nephew Captain Count Victor Gleichen told her) but who was the soldiers’ own favourite pseudo-mother. In the same year that Nightingale met the queen, a gala banquet and concert, with 11 military bands, was held by guards regiments at the Royal Surrey Gardens to benefit Mary Seacole, who had been declared bankrupt. There was a good reason why the returning soldiers so admired Mary. If you had been sick or wounded and managed to get taken to her ‘British Hotel’, you stood a decent chance of surviving. It was not so at Scutari.
But Mary Seacole was the wrong colour to be an officially canonized Vi
ctorian heroine. Born Mary Grant, she was the mulatto child of a Scotsman and his Jamaican wife. After marrying one of Nelson’s godsons, Edwin Horatio Seacole, she had run an establishment in Jamaica that was part hotel, part convalescent home; during both the cholera epidemic of 1831 and the even more serious yellow-fever outbreak of 1853 she had acquired a reputation for working miracles of recuperation among the critically sick. Her antidotes for dysenteric diseases and the associated dehydration, which almost always proved fatal, were all drawn from the Caribbean botanical pharmacopeia. This origin guaranteed that they would be ridiculed as ‘barbarous’ potions by the medical establishment and that Mary’s application to go to the Crimea to treat the cholera and typhoid victims (which accounted for the vast majority of fatalities) would be dismissed out of hand, not least by Florence Nightingale herself.
Unlike Nightingale, Seacole had no Baron Sidney Herbert at the War Department to argue her case. But, using her own funds, she somehow got herself to the eastern Mediterranean along with two of her most trusted Jamaican cooks. Once there she made, not for the barracks hospital in Turkey where it was clear she was unwelcome, but for the Crimea – the theatre of war itself. About two miles from Balaclava, Mary spent £800 of her own money building – presumably in imitation of her Jamaican establishment – the British Hotel: a combination of supply depot, refectory for soldiers about to go into action, and nursing and recovery station for the sick and wounded. Unlike the Scutari wards, the British Hotel was kept warm and dry. The best thing that could happen to a soldier laid low with cholera or typhoid was to be cared for on the spot, rather than endure the excruciating, sometimes three-week passage across the Black Sea to the deathtrap hospital at Scutari.
There were rats, of course, at the British Hotel too – caught in legions by ‘Aunty Seacole’s’ exterminators at first light. Once they were dealt with, she would begin the morning routine. Coffee and tea by 7 a.m.; then chickens plucked and cooked, hams and tongues (where did she get them?), broth, stewed rhubarb, pies and Welsh rarebits prepared, and the pièce de résistance – her patented milkless (and therefore safely transportable) rice pudding. Even without the milk there was something especially maternal about that pudding: comfort food spooned out to soldiers who, amidst all the terrors of war, were allowed to become small boys again, fed by their big mulatto nanny. ‘Had you been fortunate enough to have visited the British Hotel upon rice pudding days,’ wrote one returning soldier, ‘I warrant you would have ridden back to your hut with kind thoughts of Mother’s Seacole’s endeavours to give you a taste of home.’
Alexis Soyer, the celebrity chef of the Reform Club who in 1855 had come out to provide his own brand of stews for the soldiers (Mary watched him ladle it out with his fleshy, bejewelled hands), approved her fare as wholesome and her courage as heroic. Once the convalescents had been taken care of, she would saddle up two mules and load a wagon with hot and cold food and basic surgical supplies – bandages, blankets, splints, needles, thread and alcohol. She would then set off straight into the thunder of the siege and, guided by a Greek Jew who knew the lines of the trenches and the positions of the camps, would disappear into the smoke, looking for wounded men – sometimes enemy Russians as well as British and French – who needed rescuing along with a mug of tea, a word of consolation and, as she instinctively understood, the touch of a clean handkerchief. Mortars whizzed past the old lady and her mules plodding through the fire. More than once, when she heard shouts of, ‘Lie down mother! Lie down’, ‘with very undignified and unladylike haste I had to embrace the earth’. She became inured to horror. One soldier whom she found had been shot in his lower jaw. Mary put her finger in his mouth to try to open it enough to get some fluid down, but the teeth clamped down on her finger, cutting through it, and she needed help to prise them open.
Those who did manage to survive the nightmare of sickness and slaughter seldom forgot Mary Seacole. When she came back from the Crimea to London there were no invitations to Balmoral; only a press of creditors. But the fundraising events – at Covent Garden and Her Majesty’s Theatre, as well as the Royal Surrey Gardens – saved her from bankruptcy. Alexis Soyer and William Russell both made sure her work would be given public recognition. And Queen Victoria’s half-nephew, Prince Victor of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, who had served in the war and was an amateur sculptor, made a bust of the woman he knew as ‘Mami’. It was probably through him that she eventually became known to Victoria, who in 1857 wrote to Seacole officially recognizing her work. Seacole lived on until 1881, and left an estate worth £2000 – all subscriptions from those whom she had cared for. But her memories were still haunted by the casualties: the frostbitten and the hopelessly mutilated; young men she thought should have been playing cricket, but who died in the mud, their eyes ‘half-opened with a quiet smile’ or ‘arrested in the heat of passion and frozen on their pallid faces, a glare of hatred and defiance that made your warm blood turn cold’.
The Victorians – especially leathery old nurses like Mary Seacole – ought to have been hardened to death. It was all around them: in the typhus-riddled barracks of soldiers; in the cholera-infested slums of the poor; in the sputum-stained handkerchiefs of the tubercular middle classes. The high-minded salons would be reduced to silence by sudden, terrifying fits of uncontrollable coughing while well-dressed guests stood suspended between compassion and terrified self-preservation as the mucus droplets misted the aspidistras.
The omnipresence of death seemed disproportionately chastening to a generation breezy with not entirely undeserved confidence that they had done more than any of their predecessors to master their physical environment. A civilization that had made steam-driven ships float on the oceans, that had thrown great iron spans across broad rivers, and that had shrunk the world by electric telegraph must soon, surely, conquer disease. It was indeed at this moment that advances in lensed microscopy were revealing, for the first time, the existence and culture of pathogens; although not (other than by the use of the scrubbing brush) how their multiplication might be checked.
In this tantalizingly slight gap between knowledge and mastery, mortality entered to mock the Victorian sense of control over life. Perhaps the shock of translation from apparently omnipotent physical presence to the dumb inertia of death – the grievance of mortality – explains the extreme peculiarity of their rites of mourning; their determination to make the dead commandingly visible amidst the living. The immense scale and grandeur of Victorian tombs, with their passionate, hyperbolic masonry – so much more flamboyant than anything allowed for the living – are all attempts to postpone oblivion and absence. With every ton of alabaster and porphyry, every weeping cherub and crepe-draped portrait, the lost one seems evermore available, waiting in some recoverable world just around the corner.
No one wanted this more desperately than Queen Victoria, vexed with God for reneging on what she felt sure had been his promise never to have Albert abandon her to the woeful burden of her constitutional toil. To see our pure happy, quiet, domestic life which alone enabled me to bear my much disliked position CUT OFF at forty-two – when I had hoped with such instinctive certainty that God never would part us, and would let us grow old together – is too awful, too cruel!’ Part of her anguish was precisely because the manner of Prince Albert’s decline and death seemed to testify to the indispensability of partnership as the only way to make the duties of both family and sovereignty supportable. By doing more than his share – for their family, for the country and for (she would not hesitate to say) humanity – he had worked and worried himself to death. Nor did it help that he had been under-appreciated in Britain. Instead of being granted the ‘King Consort’ title she had wanted, he had had to make do, in 1857, with ‘Prince Consort’ (as Wellington and the Tories, fearing foreign, even papal interference had blocked ‘King Albert’). Nor, for all the town halls and model factories he had visited, the innumerable hospital foundation stones he had laid, was Albert the Good and Great ever regarded as other tha
n a foreigner; the very seriousness with which he took his duties being further proof of that for the drawling aristocracy, who still, to Victoria’s chagrin, seemed to set the tone for Society.
Not all of this was the widow’s fantasy. Albert’s obsession with the ‘Eastern Question’ and the Crimean War did seem to age him. Just because he had been suspected in the Russophobic years before the war of being soft on the Tsar, he over-compensated by throwing himself into a madness of statistical investigations, plans, inquiries. His comments on the state of the army (not good); on the need for a proper training camp; on the horrors of military medicine; on the pitfalls of logistics; on the condition of the Ottoman government; on naval issues at the Bosphorus, and so on and so on, fill 50 folio volumes. By the time Victoria arrived at her desk each morning there was a neat tower of pre-sorted, pre-screened papers for her to peruse, approve, sign. After the war was over Albert turned his attention to the complications of the Peace of Paris and relations between the two allies; the implications for Britain’s economy of the likely civil war in the United States; not to mention plans for the improvement of native cattle; schemes to use urban sewage for agrarian manure; and his work for the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Always an early riser, Albert now took to getting up in deep darkness to work in the green glow of his desk lamp. Even in more easy times he ‘enjoyed himself on schedule’, according to one court commentator, noting that it was at lunch and only at lunch at Balmoral or Osborne that heavy puns were allowed. By the late 1850s, although Albert stalked the deer at Balmoral with unrelenting devotion, even the plodding jokes seemed fewer and further between. More and more time was spent by himself or lost in his own anxieties. They were turning into the royal Jack Spratt and his wife. Albert, ever more sallow and gaunt and on a hair-trigger of anger; Victoria, the perpetual mother, her wrists now disappearing into bracelets of flesh, sitting solidly by his side. He worried for Britain and she worried for him.
