Queen Victoria's Mysterious Daughter

by Lucinda Hawksley

  After their return to London, Louise threw herself into her work, trying to finish items to be exhibited both at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and the Grosvenor Gallery, in the same year. Louise had become close friends with Blanche Lindsay. The two women would paint and sketch together and talk for hours and Blanche painted a portrait of the princess. Louise was welcomed into their circle, and also became friendly with Sir Coutts Lindsay’s cousin, a fellow artist, Violet Lindsay (who would become the Duchess of Rutland and one of the Souls). Violet was renowned as a great beauty and Louise immortalised her looks in a small statue; it was reviewed by the New York Times in 1879 while it was being shown at the Grosvenor Gallery. It was described as ‘one of the prettiest bits of sculpture [in] the exhibition’. The princess had seldom been happier, her life was full of things and people she loved and she was free to create great works of art. When Disraeli attended a dinner party at the Belgravia home of Percy and Madeleine Wyndham, Louise was one of the guests, as was Robert Browning. Disraeli, himself a well-received novelist, wrote afterwards that at the dinner no one talked about anything except ‘pictures and art and Raffaelle’. For years Louise had longed to be a part of this world: now, finally, she had her wish. It helped that one of her sisters-in-law was the beautiful Aesthetic beauty Janey Campbell (née Callander), the wife of Lorne’s younger brother Archie. The couple had been married since 1869, but marriage to the son of a duke did not prevent Janey from keeping up with her artistic friends and their circle and she was thrilled to be able to present the princess to so many of her friends.

  Not everyone in the artistic elite, however, was pleased to welcome Louise. Many considered that she was accepted only because she was royal, and felt she had not done enough to ‘prove’ herself as an artist, despite her training. There were many who refused to believe that any of her work was her own, but there were also plenty of artists who recognised the princess’s talent and treated her as a fellow artist; the latter consisted mainly of those who had worked alongside her and knew that she did not, as was rumoured, give every one of her projects to be finished by her tutor. Those who were not so close to her wanted to scorn a princess for daring to attempt to be bohemian. One who was scathing about Louise’s work was William Rossetti, the only non-professional artist of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was the younger brother of Dante Rossetti, and lived his life in awe of his sibling and his talented friends. William longed to be an artist and described himself as one, but in reality he was the chronicler of the group, the man of letters who dabbled with painting but would never be an artist. By the late 1870s, he was filled with self-importance and jealously guarded his position as the ultimate authority on Pre-Raphaelitism in particular and art in general.

  In 1878 William Rossetti reviewed an exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery, at which Louise had exhibited Geraint and Enid; he wrote contemptuously that it attracted the ‘most attention’ of any of the sculptural exhibits, not because of its style but for being the work of a princess: ‘There are seven horses close together here, and an eighth in the distance: of course, anything but an easy matter for even a skillful [sic] hand to manage. The movement is instantaneous, not however particularly vigorous; but the work of a lady and a princess is assessed from a point of view rather different from that which applies to a professional sculptor.’ As a member of the royal family, Louise was prohibited from becoming a professional artist, but amongst her peers she was considered amateur only in name. She insisted on being paid for her work and on being taken seriously.

  Louise exhibited paintings as well as sculpture at the Grosvenor Gallery, and was gratified, some years after William Rossetti’s damning review, to read in the Illustrated London News the following description of her portrait of Colonel Charles Lindsay:1 ‘The work is far above that which one is accustomed to find amongst amateurs’ (again, her royal status had refused her the privilege of being called a professional). A couple of years later, in 1882, the London correspondent for The Argus in Melbourne, Australia, wrote glowingly of Louise’s portrait of her friend Clara Montalba: ‘The “prentice-hand” is not seen here at all; the work is firm and assured, full of character, and the colouring is of a superior order.’ (The same critic praised the work of Louise Jopling and Walter Crane, but was scathing about paintings exhibited by Lord Leighton, Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Edward Burne-Jones.) Despite an undercurrent of sniping from those artists and critics who disliked a princess attempting to enter their sphere, Louise made strong and lasting friendships within the London art world. Everything was turning out as she had hoped, but, frustratingly, just as she was making her entrance into the ‘real’ world she had so longed to be a part of, her life was about to be turned upside down.

  At the end of May 1878, Lorne’s beloved mother, Elizabeth, died. The family was distraught. Lorne and his siblings had adored their mother and they would be horrified when their father, the duke, announced his second marriage less than a year after Elizabeth’s death. Like several members of his family, Lorne had long believed that he had the gift of ‘second sight’ and, shortly after Elizabeth’s funeral, he had a vision. He told Louise that he had been drifting in a boat on a quiet loch when he saw with perfect clarity Disraeli offering him a post overseas. Some months later, his psychic vision came true.2 In the autumn of 1878, Lorne was invited to become the next Governor-General of Canada.

  CHAPTER 15

  The first year in Canada

  When [Princess Louise] returns to England, she will be able to boast herself above all her sisters. She will have seen more of the world than any of them. She has seen the Continent pretty well. She knows Canada better than most wives of Governors-General, for she is an artist and strays into its forests. She has also seen something already of the States, and she is now on her way to California where she will discover what a canon is, and learn something of the people who live in the wilds.

  Portsmouth Evening News, 12 December 1882

  Shortly after Lorne’s appointment as Governor-General of Canada was announced, Lady Dufferin, whose husband was just coming to the end of his time as Governor-General, confided to Henry Ponsonby that she did not think Louise and Lorne’s appointment was a good idea. As Ponsonby recorded, ‘the real difficulty was, how Louise would treat people in Canada – if as royalty, there will be trouble, but if in the same way Lady Dufferin did, they will be flattered’. The newspapers had more faith in Louise than Ponsonby; as the Montreal Gazette declared: ‘With a Princess as chief lady of the dominion, her Royal mother would be as fully represented as by a Prince, and by all accounts, Her Royal Highness is … just the one we should choose … Accomplished, intellectual, and amiable.’

  Despite the fact that this was, at last, Louise’s chance of the independence she had craved for so many years, she was nonetheless perturbed at the thought of going to Canada. This was not because she feared the people would not take to her, but because she was leaving all her friends, her family and Boehm to spend five years on the other side of the world with a husband she was not in love with. If she and Lorne had had a different kind of marriage, the prospect would have been less daunting. On 7 November 1878, Louise gave a farewell dinner party at Kensington Palace. The guests included a saddened Leopold, the Coutts Lindsays, and Benjamin Disraeli who noted that Lorne was ‘rampant’ with excitement but that Louise was ‘in low spirits’. Lord Ronnie Gower also wrote in his diary that ‘[Louise is] very sorry to go and looks forward apparently with great dislike to her life there.’

  Louise was leaving London at a time when the artistic world was in uproar and when Aestheticism was reaching its most exciting heights. Before she left, however, she helped her friend Whistler with a problem he was having. He had commissioned their mutual friend Edward Godwin to design his new home, the White House on Tite Street, but was having trouble with the Board of Works, which was reluctant to agree to such a modern style of building. In his correspondence, Whistler recorded: ‘[Princess Louise] greatly sympathized – and I mad
e a grand stroke! I said that if her Royal Highness would only drive past and say how beautiful she thought the house that of course that would put an end to the whole trouble – She laughed saying that she didn’t believe her influence was [as] strong as that! but afterwards said in a reflective way that “Lorne knows Sir James I think”…’ Louise persuaded Lorne to speak to the head of the Board of Works and Whistler and Godwin were granted permission to carry on with the building works.

  The day after Louise’s farewell party, Whistler wrote a chatty but poignant letter to Louise which he sent with one of his paintings as a gift (a landscape which he took great pains to point out was without fog, unlike so many of his London scenes). Although purporting to be formal, it is a teasing, flirtatious letter, which demonstrates how at ease Whistler felt with her: ‘Madam – I feel it incumbent upon myself, as your Painter – by devotion, if not by office – to right myself, if possible, in the eyes of my Royal Mistress.’ The letter was written while Whistler was embroiled in a famous court case with John Ruskin, the art critic who had accused Whistler of ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’. The painting Ruskin so abhorred is now considered a masterpiece, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875). In 1877 it was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, which was where Ruskin saw it. He then published his scathing letter, in which along with his damning description he called Whistler a ‘coxcomb’. The artist was incensed and sued the critic. The court case divided artistic London. Both men were well known and had many friends and colleagues in common. Ruskin, who was beginning to suffer mental health problems, was decreed by his doctors unfit to appear in court and an unhappy Edward Burne-Jones was deputised to appear on his behalf. As Ruskin’s legal team instructed him to say, Burne-Jones gave as his expert artistic opinion that the painting was a ‘failure’ in its effort to recreate night and he did not consider it worth the asking price of 200 guineas. When cross-examined, however, he was compelled to comment that ‘Whistler had an almost unrivalled appreciation of atmosphere, and that his colour was beautiful, especially in moonlight scenes’1 which seemed to give the lie to his earlier statement. Like many of his fellow artists, Burne-Jones had hated taking sides. William Rossetti was asked to appear for Ruskin and reportedly pleaded not to be made to do so, saying it was hard to take either side. His sentiment echoed that of many London-based artists.

  In the letter to Princess Louise in which Whistler begged her not to believe Ruskin’s defence team’s arguments, he described himself as

  one, who, if indifferent absolutely to the judgement of all others, has the ambition to be seriously considered by the Artist Princess whose high opinion he has made it his duty to acquire. It saddens him to think that she, who has been so often most gracious and indulgent in her protection, should at all accept the popular belief of meretricious and wilful eccentricity in the work of the painter she has been so kind to! May I venture to offer Your Royal Highness as a tribute of devotion and gratitude a favourite picture of my own – which has successfully resisted the danger of sale on more than one occasion – and which I send herewith? In it, I would timidly hint that, while I recognise nature’s masterly use of fairy fog – ‘when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil’ – I still do love to look at her when she is beautiful without it.

  His efforts appear to have worked, as Whistler – or his defence team – leaked a story to the papers. In a section entitled ‘London Gossip’ local newspapers around the country published a sarcastic paragraph declaring that ‘Princess Louise has turned Whistlerite, and is now an enthusiastic admirer of Nocturnes and Symphonies and “arrangements”.’

  While Louise was saddened at the prospect of leaving her life in London, Lorne was enthusiastic about Canada. He had longed to travel widely. As a young student at Cambridge, Lorne had grown bored with the stuffiness of academia, so had left university early and travelled to Jamaica, America and Canada with his close friend Arthur Strutt. His father had then paid for him to study for a year in Berlin, where he developed a superb social life but few academic skills (and where he had renewed his family acquaintance with Vicky and Fritz), before travelling on to Austria and Italy. He had also visited Canada on that trip, although his impressions then had not been favourable. This was about to change.

  Louise’s introduction to her new life was not auspicious: she had never been a good sailor and the November seas on the journey between Liverpool and Halifax were extremely rough. The Sarmatian was a luxurious ship fitted with every modern convenience. Journalists had been invited to view the ship and the Liverpool Mercury ran a long article about it, describing the ship as ‘in every respect a most substantial specimen of marine architecture … The saloon … a gorgeous palatial apartment … [is] copiously lighted by a lantern cupola … This is augmented by an abundance of side lights … which, united with the gorgeous furnishing, produces an effect at once gratifying and dazzling. The ceiling is delicately panelled in French white, enriched with golden mouldings.’ The bedding was the most remarkable feature of all. It was made of a special material (which the Allan Line was in the process of patenting). Rather disconcertingly the pillows – of a material ‘with a greater floating power than cork [and] a softness almost equal to feathers’ – could also be used as a floating life preserver, should the need arise. Despite the newspapers’ fulsome reports, the princess was horribly seasick for a week.

  Included in the party’s entourage were Sir Richard Moreton (Lorne’s Comptroller), his Greek wife Janie (acting as Louise’s lady-in-waiting), and their eight-year-old daughter Evelyn. Janie’s mothering style seemed to be similar to that of Queen Victoria: she was far more interested in her husband than her child. In her memoirs, published under her married name Viscountess Byng of Vimy, Evelyn recalled a funny but poignant story about how disappointed her mother was when she was born, as she had been longing to have a son she could call Rupert, and had been insistent that her child should be blond and beautiful like her husband. According to Evelyn, her mother never quite forgave her for inheriting her dark Greek hair and features. When Evelyn was three, her mother ordered the nanny to bleach her daughter’s hair so she could finally have the blonde child she craved. Whenever anyone commented on Evelyn being pretty, her mother would say, in front of her child, what an ugly nose she had and that it ruined her face. As a result, Evelyn grew up, in her own words, ‘fiercely resentful of my appearance’. As Evelyn recalled, ‘I was reared in that same fear of my elders which had characterized [my mother’s] own youth.’ Louise empathised with the little girl and befriended her; she was always happy in the company of children, and the presence of Evelyn made those first months in Canada more bearable.

  Several decades had passed, but her adoration of the princess remains palpable. The young Evelyn would lie in her cabin and listen to the groans of her seasick mother and governess; she could even hear the moaning of the princess in a cabin some way off. Louise was so ill that a ‘special bed’, which sounds from descriptions like a hammock, had to be suspended from the ceiling of her cabin. Evelyn remembered that a man fell, or threw himself, overboard on the journey and that, despite the crew’s best efforts, he was never seen again. ‘A short time later more hurrying and talking … A baby had been born!… I knew nothing of it then, since it was the era when the young were told that babies were found under gooseberry bushes, and there were no such things in mid-Atlantic.’

  On Saturday 23 November 1878 the Sarmatian arrived at Halifax. The weather was so appalling that the ship was unable to make it into the harbour for several hours. Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh – already in Halifax, on his ship The Black Prince – became frustrated by how long it was taking his sister’s ship to appear. The fog was thick, and telescopes were useless, so he ordered his ship to set sail and try to find the Sarmatian. He was unsuccessful. Eventually, the captain of the Sarmatian, whose signals for a pilot to guide them to the shore had gone unanswered, took the brave decision to enter the har
bour without a pilot. Some months later, a story emerged that Louise first set foot on Canadian soil incognito, that she borrowed her brother’s launch and went in secret to Halifax so she could attend church, heavily veiled, to give thanks for surviving the horrendous crossing and to compose herself before her official arrival and the pomp and ceremony that would attend it. On the Monday, 25 November, the new Governor-General and the princess were officially welcomed to Canada, by Prime Minister John Macdonald. Louise wore a black dress and kept her face veiled throughout – the woman renowned for her beauty was not prepared, after so many days of seasickness, to show her face in public quite yet.

  Lady Dufferin’s concern that the people of Canada would not like Louise could not have been more wrong. From the moment she arrived, Canadians were thrilled to have a child of Queen Victoria living amongst them. Louise’s relationship with Canada would become a love–hate relationship on both sides for a large part of Lorne’s term of office, but she started and ended her years there with Canadian adoration.

  From Halifax, Lorne, Louise and their entourage journeyed to Ottawa, the seat of the Governor-General, by the Inter-Colonial Railway.2 They arrived at the beginning of December, but the rain was so heavy and the weather so cold that the planned welcoming ceremonies had to be postponed for twenty-four hours. It was not a propitious start for a princess who always felt happiest when the sun was shining. Added to this, she was soon to receive the very worrying news that her sister Alice and Alice’s baby daughter, May, had contracted diphtheria. Alice died in Darmstadt on the anniversary of their father’s death, 14 December 1878.3 Alice’s baby died too. Louise grieved for the loss of her gentle sister and niece thousands of miles away from the rest of her family. She and Lorne spent a subdued Christmas in Ottawa. The queen was moved to write in her journal on New Year’s Day 1879, ‘My poor dear Loosy far away in a distant land, in another quarter of the globe.’ The deaths of Alice and her daughter would be followed just three months later by more tragic news from Germany: that of the death of Vicky’s eleven-year-old son Waldemar, from a heart condition.