Queen Victoria's Mysterious Daughter

by Lucinda Hawksley

  When Skittles told Blunt the earlier story about Boehm and Louise and the queen discovering them at Balmoral, she went on to recount how the queen had decided Louise should be married as soon as possible. The first two men she had hoped would marry the princess, Lord Cowper or Lord Hastings, were already taken, so the queen turned in desperation to Lord Lorne. As Skittles summed up, ‘The marriage however was not a success as Lorne was unsatisfactory as a husband, and the Princess took other lovers, especially Sir John McNeill whom she took to Canada with her when Lorne was Governor General there, and Boehm with whom she renewed her intimacy, going to visit him constantly at her studio in London.’

  Skittles’s summing up of Boehm’s death was told by Blunt as follows:

  while he was making love to her Boehm broke a blood-vessel and died actually in the Princess’s arms. There was nobody else in the studio or anywhere about, for she had sent her lady in waiting away, and the Princess had the courage to take the key of the studio out of the dead man’s pocket, and covered with blood as she was and locking the door behind her, got a cab and drove to Laking’s whom she found at home and took him back with her to the studio. Boehm was dead and they made up a story between them to the effect that it had been while lifting or trying to lift one of the statues that the accident had occurred. Princess Louise was so shocked at this that she has not since had a lover. She busied herself to such effect about Boehm with the Prince and his friends that she got him buried at Westminster Abbey.6

  Skittles said that it was Laking who had told her the full story, but that Bertie also knew all about it and had helped Louise to hide the scandal. Skittles said of Bertie, ‘He was fond of his sister and says he and she were of the same temperament.’ Blunt’s summing up of the situation mocks the hypocrisy of Queen Victoria’s reign: ‘So all has been hushed up and Boehm lies sepulchered in the Abbey [sic]; and a memorial is being built for “Victoria the Good” in front of Buckingham Palace, and the Queen’s life is held up as a model for us all, and for future generations.’

  Blunt was aware that Skittles embellished the stories she told him, but whereas most accounts of this story (in books whose manuscripts have been checked before publication by the Royal Archives) dismiss everything the former lover of Edward VII said as mere gossipy lies, Blunt considered the situation differently. He wrote in his diary: ‘I don’t suppose all that she says is accurate but I fancy it is mainly true. Her memory is good in spite of all her bodily infirmities.’

  The story is often discredited, but the persistent rumours did not originate with Skittles’s story in Blunt’s diaries. They were hidden away in the bowels of the Fitzwilliam until 1972 and yet the story was being discussed decades before the Blunt files were opened to the public. The inconsistencies in the story of Boehm’s death, such as those in the confusing newspaper reports, added to the lack of transparency right from the beginning; it is these inconsistencies that ensure the rumours still exist. The closing of Princess Louise’s files in the Royal Archives only serves to make this story seem more likely.

  During my research I was very fortunate to be introduced by a mutual friend to a writer whose work I admire and whose area of research takes her close to mine. Henrietta Garnett is the granddaughter of the Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. One of her books is a biography of William Thackeray’s eldest daughter, the novelist Anny Thackeray Ritchie. I wrote the biography of one of Anny’s closest friends, Charles Dickens’s younger daughter, the artist Kate (usually known as ‘Katey’) Perugini. In conversation with Henrietta, I told her I was researching Princess Louise, who inhabited the same artistic and bohemian world as Anny, Katey and their circle. Henrietta told me that her grandfather, Duncan Grant, had related to her the story of Joseph Edgar Boehm’s death as he had heard it. Bearing in mind that Grant was born in 1885, just a few years before Boehm died, he had heard the story second hand, but the death had long been gossiped about within the Bloomsbury Group – almost all of whom were blood relations of people who were a part of Boehm’s, Louise’s and Gilbert’s inner circle. Duncan Grant also heard his, albeit outlandish, version of the story long before any researchers had been able to read Blunt’s diaries.

  Grant told his granddaughter that Boehm and Louise were not at his studio, they were at Louise’s studio in Kensington Palace. They were having sex, with Boehm on top of her. While he was still physically inside Louise, Boehm had a stroke, or an aneurism, and died very suddenly. Louise, trapped underneath him, was terrified. Louise was tall, but she was far more slender than Boehm and she found it extremely difficult to get him out of her and to roll him off her. Duncan Grant’s version of the story is that Louise then had to call her ‘most discreet lady-in-waiting’. He claimed that, together, the two women rolled up Boehm’s body in a carpet ‘Cleopatra style’ and hired a discreet cab to take them to the doctor’s house. From there, they took Boehm back to his own studio and pretended he had died there while lifting a heavy statue.

  The story has many typically Bloomsbury embellishments, not least the moving of the body – we know from the employees of the studios that Boehm was working in his own studio that day and had told them when they left at around 5p.m. that he was expecting ‘the princess’ to visit him. That was mentioned in several of the earliest newspaper reports and is something that doesn’t change. The story of Boehm dying in the middle of having sex with Louise and of her being unable to get out from underneath him has been reported by several sources and seems likely to have been true, not least because of Alfred Gilbert’s chivalrous attempts to cover up the fact that Louise was in the studio alone with Boehm.

  In a tactic she had learnt from her mother, Louise began to blame her lover’s death on the queen herself. In an ironic parody of the way in which the queen had blamed Bertie for Prince Albert’s death, Louise blamed her mother and a statue of her father for Boehm’s untimely demise. Writing to a friend and warning ‘we must not tell the queen’, she surmised that Boehm had been overexerting himself through work for so long that he had made himself ill and that the ‘cause of his death’ was having to work so hard on the enormous equestrian statue of Prince Albert that had been unveiled in Windsor Great Park just a few months earlier. The Graphic, which wrote of the statue that its likeness to the prince was ‘considered excellent’, mentioned that it was 33 feet high including its pedestal of Aberdeen granite, ‘which weighs nearly twenty tons’.

  Louise wrote that ‘the shock and the whole thing made me very ill, I am not yet strong’. Her mother also commented that she was worried about Louise following Boehm’s death. She wrote to friends that it was quite natural for Louise to be so upset following the death of a ‘very kind friend’ and emphasised to her correspondents that Louise had been a ‘pupil’ of the dead sculptor, placing their relationship entirely on a formal, respectable footing.

  Louise longed for her lover to be given the full honours he deserved, and although many were against it, Boehm was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral, thanks to Louise petitioning the queen. A letter written on 15 December 1890 begins in a rushed fashion and goes into pleading:

  Dearest Mama, I telegraphed you the feeling there was in favour of good Sir E. Boehm being buried at St Paul’s. Frank Holl the painter was, and young Caldecott, the man who drew those charming illustrations of children’s books, a very clever young fellow. I think you ought to express your desire that he should be buried there, as he did more for modern art, than any one of the day. If you remember 22 years ago it was dull heavy and bad classic, he was almost the first to introduce life and action into his work, also it is very important that those who want to try and ignore him, should be shown by you, the Queen, what you thought. It is not asking an unusual thing, as you see these two artists who died so lately were buried there.

  Perhaps in a bid to prevent Beatrice from interfering, Louise requested in the letter: ‘Please communicate direct with me, it will save time, and is better.’ She also praised Alfred Gilbert for his care and help and f
or his ‘thoughtfulness and devotion to the memory of his friend’. Gilbert had been to the chapel of rest and sat with his friend’s body for a long time. He had also re-dressed Boehm for burial in the clothes he had been wearing on the day he died; it was decided that he should not be dressed up in finery for his coffin; instead he should be buried in his working clothes ‘as he fell’.

  Louise praised John Everett Millais and William Blake Richmond too, who had been ‘most kind’ to her; she was not, however, impressed with Frederic, Lord Leighton, the President of the Royal Academy, who had ‘not shown much generosity, or feeling!’. The queen agreed to Louise’s pleas, writing to Vicky that ‘good and ever-to-be-regretted Sir E. Boehm will be laid to rest in St Paul’s’. Much was made in the newspapers of Louise ‘breaking protocol’ to attend Boehm’s funeral; although the newspapers should really have been used to the princess ignoring royal protocol, just as her eldest brother had been doing for so long.

  A few weeks after his father’s death, the sculptor’s son, Edgar C. Boehm, wrote letters to Louise; very stiff and formal but gracious, the style suggests he was extremely nervous about writing to royalty and was not quite sure how to address her. In the letters he talks about his father’s work and wants to know which things from his father’s studio the princess would like and which he could be permitted to keep for himself. He commented in one letter, in a manner which suggests that Louise might have heard otherwise, ‘I also beg to assure Your Royal Highness how deeply sensible I am of the kindness which you have shewn to my sisters and to me.’ What Boehm’s son really felt about the princess is debatable.

  CHAPTER 23

  Trying to dull the pain

  Aunt Louise … got on well … with any man – she ran after everything in trousers. Louise liked Louis Battenberg too … oh, all the men.

  Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, in conversation with Nina Epton

  Louise entered the second year of the ‘naughty nineties’ in a daze of mourning her tutor, friend and lover. Even Elizabeth Longford, who disliked to think that the two had been anything other than teacher and pupil, wrote in Darling Loosy, ‘Boehm was curly-haired, blue-eyed, urbane … Louise, like many an art student, fell under her master’s spell.’ At around the time of Boehm’s death, Louise was photographed by the fashionable photographer Frederick Hollyer (the photograph is in the archives at the V&A). She is exquisitely fashionable, in a dress richly embroidered with what appear to be pearls; it has a low-cut neckline, leaves her arms exposed, and she is heavily corseted. She wears a very pronounced bustle and looks every inch the woman of fashion. She also looks extremely serious and severe.

  While everyone else was gossiping about Bertie and the Marlborough House Set, in particular the ‘baccarat scandal’ that hit the headlines in early 1891,1 Louise did what she always did when in pain: she went overseas in search of sunshine. The queen and Beatrice were visiting Grasse, where they stayed at the Grand Hotel. (There was an outbreak of smallpox nearby and Dr Reid insisted on vaccinating the royal party Louise also went to Grasse, with her close friend Constance, Lady Battersea,2 and stayed with Constance’s cousin, Alice de Rothschild (who offered the entire royal party use of her private gardens to walk in, in case they could find no privacy at the hotel). Constance, like Louise, was a fervent social campaigner and the two women shared a number of interests. Constance had grown up in a home with both Christian and Jewish relations and had an intriguingly honest and refreshing view of religion. She described Louise as ‘truly attractive and gifted’, though sometimes despaired of her mercurial nature and worried about her ‘queer and capricious character’.

  To Alice de Rothschild, Louise was a less than perfect guest. She demanded stimulation and amusement to bring her out of her gloom. On discovering that a regiment was stationed nearby, and on meeting an attractive young officer, Louise immediately invited him and his fellow officers to a tea party at her hostess’s house. Alice complained that Louise (who, despite believing herself to have egalitarian principles, enjoyed pulling rank) ordered her about constantly, and was also irritated – as many would be throughout Louise’s life – by the princess’s constant lateness. Louise complained that Alice pestered her and was tiring. In most circumstances, the princess far preferred the company of men. She could be acidly disapproving of women she was jealous of, once commenting that the successful composer Ethel Smyth ‘advertises herself and thinks more of her talents than others do’. In Serving Victoria, a study of the royal servants, Kate Hubbard comments of Louise: ‘Men found her “fascinating”; women mistrusted her.’ It would be unfair, however, to assume that Louise did not like other women; she had many very close female friends and was able to inspire just as much admiration from women as from men – as long as they were women she liked. A letter from the 2nd Lord Tennyson (son of the poet), sent on 6 November 1894, comments, ‘How can I thank you enough for all your kindness to my wife … she writes that she was very heavy-hearted at leaving your Royal Highness. If I may venture to say so, you have certainly inspired a romantic and devoted affection in her.’ Lady Ashburton wrote to Thomas Carlyle in 1875, ‘I am quite bewitched by her – [she has] so much intelligence.’

  Throughout Louise’s life, there are numerous mentions of her being a ‘flirt’, a term generally used in an icily derogatory manner by disapproving women. Men found her ‘charming’, which was the word used time and again about her, up to the end of her life. In 1870, Lord Granville wrote to the queen that ‘Princess Louise was charming last night, and won the hearts of everybody’, listing the men who had appeared to be enamoured of her. William Ewart Gladstone wrote to thank the queen for allowing Louise to attend one of his parties and commented on her ‘gracious demeanour’ and how popular she had been. In 1891 Lady Wolseley, a guest at an entertainment at Osborne House, wrote angrily to her husband that Louise broke protocol to sit with the ‘members of the household’ instead of her family (and Lady Wolseley). She was convinced Louise’s behaviour had nothing to do with the princess’s desire to treat everyone in the same way, and everything to do with Louise’s desire to ‘flirt’ with a member of the royal household.

  In Darling Loosy Elizabeth Longford noted that ‘Louise’s very natural capacity for falling for any handsome young man in her entourage … was beginning to attract attention.’ Louise certainly enjoyed being surrounded by attractive men. When she and Lorne had set up their first home, assisted by Henry Ponsonby, Louise told Ponsonby that the most necessary members of their household staff were footmen. She was insistent that she be allowed to choose the servants herself as she had a horror of ‘an absurd man in a kilt following me about everywhere’. In Grasse, the discovery of a regiment stationed nearby was enticing. Her much-adored lover had died. Her husband was unable – or unwilling – to sleep with her and she found him physically unappealing. She was more than happy to be surrounded by attractive young officers. It was not only the soldiers who had excited her interest; Louise also found herself increasingly drawn to Beatrice’s husband, the dashing Liko. In turn, Liko was bored out of his mind at having to be one of the queen’s lapdogs and eager for excitement.

  In the summer of 1891, six months after the death of Boehm, the New York Times made much of the fact that at a special performance at the Royal Opera House in London, in the presence of the Emperor and Empress of Germany, Louise chose to sit not only separately but ‘far away’ from her husband. Louise sat beside her niece, the former Princess Louise of Wales, now the Duchess of Fife, while Lorne and the Duke of Fife sat some way off. People were still talking about the Lornes’ marriage – and even though the scandal and stories continued to attend the Colin Campbells, the papers longed to have another sensation in the now much-derided aristocratic Scottish family to write about. Louise never forgave Colin for the way he had behaved. Several royal historians have claimed that she was surprisingly conventional in her views on divorce and that was why she shunned her brother-in-law. The suggestion, however, that the thoroughly modern wo
man who had been bold enough back in the 1870s to want to help Josephine Butler in her reform of the Contagious Disease Acts, and had actively angled to meet the scandalous George Eliot who was openly ‘living in sin’ with a married man, was offended by the mere idea of divorce, seems puerile. Louise may have been living in the puritanical Victorian age, but she was anything but a puritan herself. That she refused ever to see Colin – for the rest of his life, if she were expected in Scotland, he had to leave the castle before she arrived – seems to have had far more to do with the way in which he had treated his wife, than with Louise being offended by his divorce. The fact that Colin had knowingly infected his wife with a dangerous and painful sexually transmitted disease would have been far more likely to have angered Louise, the champion of women’s rights, than the fact that he had exposed the family name to the shame of the divorce courts (although she was furious that the scandal touched on her via her husband – she and Lorne had plenty of their own sexual secrets they did not want people to pry into).

  Even the queen, who was so rigid in her views on divorce and scandal, felt compassionate about Lady Colin, writing in a private letter to Prince Arthur, ‘Ld Colin must be a horrid creature. Whatever faults Ly may have, she has been most cruelly used, & the case trumped up agst her.’ It was an unusual stance for the queen to take; Louise’s opinions about the matter influenced her mother. That the queen wrote so kindly about Louise’s sister-in-law seems doubly extraordinary when one considers that while the Campbell v. Campbell case was being fought, Victoria was still refusing to accept the wife of John Everett Millais, one of her favourite artists and a pillar of the establishment. Millais had married Effie three decades earlier, but the queen had never forgiven Effie for having been previously married to John Ruskin. Even though John and Effie Ruskin were not divorced – Effie sought and received an annulment, a respectable agreement from the Church that the marriage had never existed – the queen was still disapproving. The scandal of the court case (in which Effie had petitioned for annulment on the grounds of ‘non-consummation’ of their very strange marriage) had been enough to persuade the queen that Millais’s sweet, unassuming, shy Scottish wife was persona non grata. Why, when she continued to invite Millais but not Effie to royal events, did the queen write such understanding words about Lady Colin Campbell? Was it perhaps because Lord Colin was a member of the clan Campbell with whom the queen was now extremely angry? Or was it because, like Louise, she was disgusted that a man should have knowingly infected his wife with ‘a loathsome disease’?