Queen Victoria's Mysterious Daughter

by Lucinda Hawksley

Falling in love with the Cult of Beauty

  According to Mr. Boehm, we cannot be Greeks, for we have no mythology. Our art must be Christian and modern. ‘It is vain to complain of the paucity of inspiring subjects in our age, of our ugly costume and the dearth of suitable figures for sculpture. You may regard objects and compose like Homer, but you may not inanely copy the antique. Do not return from Rome with some more bad nymphs, another Venus or another Cupid. Try to use the much-abused dress. Treat a coat-sleeve, a woman’s gown, con amore, ennoble it by art, and it will be a pleasing object in the sight of those whose praise is worth having’.

  W. Meynell, ‘Our Living Artists – Joseph Edgar Boehm, A.R.A.’, Magazine of Art, 1880

  It is unsurprising to find that Princess Louise had a host of admirers. Not only was she the daughter of the queen, but she was elegant, pretty and charming. Louise could turn heads because of her looks, her unusual dress sense and her refusal to conform to conventionality, whether in her clothes or in the way in which she asked her maid to dress her hair. While her sisters wore the most ‘safe’ fashions and inherited family jewellery, Louise dressed in a style influenced by Pre-Raphaelitism – which meant less corseted, more loosely structured, flowing dresses, inspired by those in paintings by Pre-Raphaelite artists (which were, in turn, influenced by medieval fashion). By the late 1860s, Louise had started to ally herself to the artistic movement of Aestheticism. This was an exciting trend that had grown out of Pre-Raphaelitism and the Arts & Crafts Movement (founded by William Morris). By the 1870s Aestheticism was the most fashionable movement in London. Amongst its most famous exponents were Dante Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Frederic, Lord Leighton. The movement, which became known as ‘the Cult of Beauty’, embraced not only painting and sculpture, but architecture, interior decoration and fashion. It brought to the forefront of public consciousness the art of China and Japan,1 as well as that of bohemian France. The Aesthetic movement’s famous motto was ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ – their works did not need to be instructive or historic; they simply had to be beautiful and worth looking at. One of the most liberating aspects of the Aesthetic movement was its belief in ‘rational dress’, which meant not constricting the body with tight corsets, impeding crinolines and painful high-heeled shoes. Although Louise had to follow a very muted form of Aestheticism (her mother would never have allowed her to appear in public dressed in the style of the subjects who sat to G.F. Watts for his fashionable portraits), she became fascinated by the movement and particularly by its emphasis on beautiful objects, such as painted screens, fans and jewellery.

  In the 1860s, when Louise, Helena and Beatrice were with their mother at Osborne, a local family was invited to visit the queen. They met all three of the princesses and were rather disappointed at first. Beatrice, who was still very young, struck them as slightly nervous and silent. Helena was pleasant but rather uninteresting, dressed in her dull mourning clothes. The visitors – especially the children – had expected something more glamorous from a princess. In their memory, it was Louise who stood out as ‘delightful’, ‘gentle’ and ‘gracious’. She was ‘tall and graceful … far the most perfect in beauty’, and they agreed that, even if Louise hadn’t been a princess, ‘everyone would praise [her]’. They also noticed that she was wearing a beautiful large silver cross of an unusual beaten-metal design; she had made it herself.

  Although Joseph Edgar Boehm’s sculpture was not Aesthetic in style, he was closely linked with the movement, as he was friendly with so many of its key figures. In turn, he introduced Louise to many prominent artists of the time. Boehm’s work had first been lauded, in Britain, in the early 1860s and, in 1864, when he submitted to the Royal Academy a bust of the popular novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, he became instantly in demand. His work was refreshingly modern and realistic: instead of the customary ‘classical’ style of clothing of portrait busts, Boehm had depicted the author wearing the fashion of the time. Boehm’s exhibiting of the work in 1864 was a timely decision, as Thackeray had died a few months previously. The sculpture was an instant sensation, not least because it was modelled in terracotta. Before moving to London in 1862, Boehm had lived and worked in Paris, where terracotta sculpture was popular. He enjoyed working with the medium and continued to do so in London; it was a refreshing new way of looking at sculpture2 and was one of the techniques he would pass on to Princess Louise.

  I was surprised to discover how difficult it was to investigate Boehm, as an artist; remarkably little information is contained in the usual art gallery archives. I made an appointment at the National Gallery in London to look at the files concerning three of Louise’s art tutors: Edward Corbould, Mary Thornycroft and Joseph Edgar Boehm. The day before my appointment, I received a phone call from a bemused archivist. He had been attempting to find the relevant files before my visit, but had discovered that everything, for all three artists, had ‘been appropriated by the Royal Archives’. His archives contained a single letter written by Boehm – it was two lines long and the archivist read it to me over the phone: it concerned the placement of one of Boehm’s statues during an exhibition. Yet again I had encountered problems in trying to find the real Princess Louise; quite why the Royal Archives felt the need to appropriate all information on Boehm from other archives was intriguing.

  It is not at all surprising that Joseph Edgar Boehm fell for his illustrious and very attractive pupil; and equally unsurprising that the attraction was mutual. The couple was the object of a number of rumours in the late nineteenth century. Rumours about their relationship gained momentum in the second half of the twentieth century after the death of the Victorian writer and diplomat Wilfred Scawen Blunt, who had lived a full and scandalous life, which he recorded in great detail. On his death in 1922, his papers and diaries were bequeathed to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, with the stipulation that they should be locked away for several decades. As soon as researchers were allowed to access Blunt’s files (in the 1970s) a story about Princess Louise began to emerge. Blunt loved gossip and his diary is full of it. The source for several stories about Princess Louise came from a woman named Catherine Walters, better known at the time by her nickname of ‘Skittles’ (allegedly because her first job was in a bowling alley). She was born into a working-class family and became a high-ranking ‘courtesan’. Amongst her lovers was Princess Louise’s brother, Bertie, the future King Edward VII. Blunt was another of Skittles’s lovers; she was the woman to whom he lost his virginity, and he remained a loyal friend to her, visiting her when she was elderly and very ill and writing down, at her request, all the stories she told him. When she related to Blunt the gossip about Louise, Skittles revealed that she had heard the stories from her friend Dr Laking, the royal physician, and from Bertie himself.

  Skittles revealed that in 1869, when Boehm was working on a statue of John Brown for the queen,3 he began to grow more ‘intimate’ with Princess Louise and that they eventually became lovers. Although when Louise had begun her private classes with Boehm, the queen had insisted she be chaperoned in the studio, by the time they were in Balmoral in 1869, sculptor and pupil were no longer chaperoned. Skittles believed that the first time Louise had met Boehm was at Balmoral, but in reality the couple were continuing a friendship and mutual attraction that had begun at the National Art Training School. Skittles related that during Boehm’s three months at Balmoral, he and Louise ‘became intimate, though not to the extent of actual love making’. This is not surprising; if Louise had recently given birth to a child she had been forced to give up, it would be natural for her not to want to risk getting pregnant again. Boehm was far more sexually experienced than Louise and moved in a world of courtesans and sexual freedom; when their relationship became fully sexual he would have been able to give her advice on avoiding pregnancy.

  Skittles told Blunt that she had heard the following version of events from her friend Dr Laking, the royal physician. Laking told her that the queen and John Brown went
into Boehm’s Balmoral studio unexpectedly and found Louise and Boehm being ‘intimate’, whereupon a ‘violent scene’ ensued. Not only did the queen ‘scold’ her daughter, but John Brown was presumptuous enough to do so as well, causing Louise to react furiously. According to Laking, almost all the queen’s children were convinced the queen and Brown were lovers and resented him deeply. When a servant saw fit to reprimand a princess, Louise decided the situation had gone much too far. As Blunt recorded in his diary: ‘she told the Queen that she was not going to stand for [John Brown’s] impertinence any longer and that either he or she would have to go away … whereupon the Queen too lost her temper and threatened to have her locked up’. In response, Louise threatened to cause a ‘public scandal’ about the queen’s relationship with Brown. The row became so heated that a member of the household was dispatched to contact Bertie, who was then called upon to act as intermediary between his mother and sister.

  A letter survives from Bertie to Louise. Written two years later, in 1871, it suggests that Louise had had yet another explosive row with John Brown while at Balmoral: ‘I am so sorry to hear that that brute JB made himself disagreeable during your stay at B. I wish you would tell me what he did.’ The popular belief about the queen’s adored ghillie, ever since he was immortalised by the actor Billy Connolly in the film Mrs Brown (1997), is that he was a lovable rogue brave enough to stand up to an indomitable queen. In reality, his behaviour towards the queen’s children, attested to by their letters and reminiscences, suggests he was a far more unpleasant character, who took pleasure in hurting the royal children both physically (when he was able to) and emotionally.

  Despite the fraught circumstances of his stay in Balmoral in 1869, Queen Victoria took a great interest in Boehm. It seems likely that she had no choice. Louise was no longer as compliant as she had been during the Walter Stirling affair. She was older, wiser and had been hurt too much already to let another lover be forced out of her life. Her mother must have been aware that these were very different circumstances and that Boehm was not bound by the same loyalty to the royal family as a British army officer had been. The situation needed to be handled entirely differently. Boehm was accepted as a friend of the family; in 1881 the queen would name him her Sculptor in Ordinary (a similar honour to that of Poet Laureate). Louise’s fury and the way she had stood up, not only to John Brown but also to her mother, worried the queen. She knew her daughter well enough to realise that she had reached the limit of her tolerance, so it seems she colluded in Louise and Boehm’s relationship (just as it was suggested by Skittles that Louise had been forced to become privy to her mother’s secret love life). Following the great row, Boehm continued to teach Princess Louise and, within artistic circles, their affair was talked about quite openly.

  When Elizabeth Longford wrote Darling Loosy, she touched briefly on the rumours of the affair but rejected them, solely because Louise knew that Boehm was married. Longford refused to believe that either Louise or Boehm could have been what she described as ‘the most extraordinarily insensitive hypocrites’. Longford, however, was looking at a nineteenth-century marriage from her twentieth-century viewpoint; her brief hypothesis does not take into account the unusual circumstances of Louise’s birth: that even if Boehm had not been married, he could never have been considered as a husband for a princess, nor the fact that Victorian society insisted on hypocrisy in love affairs. Nor does her comment take into account the personalities of either Louise or Boehm. She admits that it was strange that the queen insisted, after they had initially been permitted to work alone together in the Balmoral studio, on Louise and Boehm again being chaperoned by Fräulein Bauer – for which she is unable to find an explanation.

  Throughout this period of time, Louise turned down all proposed husbands and insisting she would only marry if she could find someone British and not move abroad. The queen eventually came around to the idea that her daughter might have to marry a ‘commoner’; she began to consider the families of dukes and earls. In this she was encouraged by Bertie, who wrote to his mother, ‘I must candidly confess that what I know of her character [Louise] would not be happy if she remained too long unmarried.’ Bertie recognised in his sister the same sexual needs and appetite as he himself possessed – and perhaps he feared another unmarried pregnancy – yet despite his early approval of his mother’s plans, he would soon try to prevent Louise’s marriage.

  CHAPTER 10

  The people’s princess

  The classes for drawing, painting, and modelling include architectural and other ornament flowers objects of still-life, &c., the figure from the antique and the life, and the study of anatomy as applicable to art. These courses of instruction are open to the public on the payment of fees; the classes for male and female students meeting separately.

  ‘The National Art Training School’ entry from The Dictionary of Victorian London, Charles Dickens Jnr, 1879

  While her mother was searching through family trees, Louise was trying to establish her independence. She was beginning to make more friends and acquaintances outside her expected royal circle. She sought out, actively, the companionship of writers, musicians, thinkers and social reformers, as well as fellow artists. In March 1869, Louise was invited with her mother to a tea party at the Deanery of Westminster Abbey.1 There they met the poet Robert Browning and the writer and historian Thomas Carlyle. The latter commented that the princess was ‘decidedly a very pretty young lady, and clever too as I found out in talking to her’.

  On the day of the tea party, Louise was looking forward to celebrating her twenty-first birthday. She intended to wear a beautiful brightly coloured outfit, as the queen had finally relaxed her rules on mourning for her husband (in 1869 she permitted her servants to stop wearing the black armbands they had been wearing since Albert’s death in 1861). By the time Louise’s birthday came around, however, on 18 March, the family had been plunged into mourning again, this time for their relation the Duke of Schleswig-Holstein.

  The people of Britain had become used to the queen performing few public appearances and now actively looked forward to seeing the princes and princesses instead. Louise was always popular and after she visited the dockyards in Deptford, where she christened the HMS Druid (on 13 March), a laudatory article appeared in the Illustrated London News. The Prince and Princess of Wales and Princess Louise were rapidly becoming the royal family’s most important PR tools. In the same month, the queen made a rare public appearance, when she visited the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens. A few weeks later, she and her family attended the opening of the new Royal Academy, which had recently moved from its home at Somerset House to Burlington House on Piccadilly (where it remains today). Louise was particularly nervous about this visit because a bust of her mother that she had sculpted was to be unveiled at the Academy.

  During the official visit, she was thrilled to meet the President of the Royal Academy, Sir Francis Grant, and to talk both to him and to other artists about her work. Louise’s position in the art world was certainly helped by her royal status, but she was also beginning to be taken seriously as an artist. She was working on a bust of her mother at the same time as Boehm was working on a full-length statue of the queen; his would shortly be unveiled at Windsor Castle to great acclaim. In 1868, Louise had been elated when the Royal Academy exhibited one of her pieces for the first time, a bust of Prince Arthur. In 1869, she exhibited the bust of her mother and in 1874 the Royal Academy accepted her bust of the recently deceased General Grey. She also produced Queen Victoria in 1876, a beautifully executed work in marble showing her mother as a stern but stoic queen (she donated this to the Royal Academy in 1877). The contours of the face and of the drapery that curls over the queen’s left shoulder and ties beneath the bust (forming part of the pedestal) demonstrate just how talented Princess Louise was as a sculptor. Although she was often criticised for being slapdash in her approach and sometimes leaving Boehm to ‘finish off’ her work – usually because her roya
l duties never left her enough time to work the hours a professional sculptor could – her raw talent and the reason that Mary Thornycroft had recommended she be allowed to study at the National Art Training School is apparent. Louise captures the essence of the queen’s personality in this bust. It is a fairly flattering depiction, compared to photographs of the time, but there is a realism to it, evinced in the slight double chin and the discreet but nevertheless present bulge of fat around the neckline. Louise has made the queen look better than she did in real life, but has not eliminated all her flaws. The expression on her face, especially the set of the lips, shows a woman of forceful personality.

  In addition to her time in the studio and her long hours working with her mother, Louise was becoming increasingly interested in social reform and in deciding how she could use her position for good. She wanted to change the way that royalty viewed ‘causes’, to become properly involved, instead of simply viewing from the sidelines as her mother had always done. On 9 March 1861, when Louise was nearly thirteen, she and Alice had been taken to Wandsworth to visit the Female Military Orphan Asylum. The queen noted in her journal: ‘delighted to find it all going on so well. It was a holiday & all the children looking so clean & happy & healthy, many pretty ones amongst them, were playing. The building is admirably arranged. We saw the fine Dining Hall, the nice tidy kitchen … the bakery &c – all attended to by the girls.’ All the royal children were used to paying such visits, but they were always mere observers expected to say nothing unless directly addressed and to pass no comments nor add any ideas of their own. Visits such as these had engendered in Louise a desire to do something, to be constructive and useful. Now she was approaching the age of majority, Louise was determined to express her views.

  The princess’s friends General and Sybil Grey were closely related to a woman with whom Louise had become fascinated, the social reformer Josephine Butler (née Grey). The cause of women’s emancipation was one that Vicky, tucked away in Prussia, had longed to be more active in and she encouraged her younger sister to take an interest in it; Vicky had already begun her own correspondence with Josephine Butler and suggested Louise do the same. At around the time of Louise’s twenty-first birthday, Butler (encouraged by Vicky) contacted the princess and asked for her help. Louise asserted her independence by writing back and offering any assistance she could give: ‘I do take great interest in the happiness and well-being of women and long to do everything that I can to promote all efforts in that direction … I feel pleasure in thinking you will let me know whenever any question arises in which my assistance and sympathy could be of any use to you.’ Louise had started to realise that in spite of the many frustrations attached to her royal status, she could also turn it to her advantage. She longed to be useful. Understandably, Josephine was elated and she sent Louise a signed copy of her book, Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture, as requested.