A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy

by Helen Rappaport

  50. The Times, 15 December 1864.

  51. Morning Post, 16 December 1864.

  52. Balliol College Oxford, Morier Family Papers, K/Box 2/1, letter of 19 August 1864.

  53. Vincent, Disraeli, Derby, p. 214.

  Chapter 12: ‘God Knows How I Want So Much to be Taken Care Of’

  Title: Queen Victoria to Vicky, 5 April 1865, in Fulford, Your Dear Letter, p. 22.

  1. House and Storey, eds, The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 10, p. 425.

  2. Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal, vol. 37, January 1864, p. 27.

  3. Wiebe, Letters of Benjamin Disraeli, vol. 8, p. 270.

  4. Art Journal, 1866, vol. 5, p. 203; Tomahawk, vols 4–5, 3 April 1869, p. 148. This was indeed the case. By the time Foley’s statue was finally positioned under the canopy in 1875 the monument was already blackened by ten years of London soot.

  5. Pall Mall Gazette, 11 September 1865.

  6. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 196; Fulford, Your Dear Letter, p. 109; Punch, 15 December 1866, p. 238; Morning Post, 1 December 1866; Illustrated London News, 8 December 1866.

  7. Ladies’ Companion, vol. 28, 1865, p. 324.

  8. Friend of India, 15 October 1865, no. 1605.

  9. Fulford, Your Dear Letter, p. 22; Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 187.

  10. Lamont-Brown, John Brown, p. 79.

  11. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 189; Fulford, Your Dear Letter, p. 290.

  12. In his travels through England in 1869 and published in 1870, Daniel Joseph Kirwan, a reporter for the New York World, painted a vivid and idiosyncratic portrait of the Queen, gleaned from his conversations with people at Windsor and elsewhere, as a result of which he felt compelled to ‘lift the veil’ on the true reason for the Queen’s continuing seclusion. It was, Kirwan claimed, due in part to her serious ‘fondness for liquor’, a fact that was ‘continually hinted at obscurely in the more liberal organs’. What is more, Kirwan had it on good authority that the Queen ‘was in the habit of drinking half a pint of raw liquor per day’. The fact that the Queen had found comfort in the bottle in her widowhood is no real surprise; it is an acknowledged fact that she enjoyed whisky, and entirely plausible that her need for its anaesthetising effect to counter the pain of grief may have grown in her widowhood. It would also explain the physical changes noted by many – of her increased weight (partly the result of a voracious appetite that she soon recovered) and her reddened and puffy face. But in the absence of further substantiating evidence, we only have Kirwan’s word for it. See Daniel Joseph Kirwan, Palace and Hovel or Phases of London Life, reprinted by Abelard-Schuman in New York, 1963. See also Charles Morris & Murat Halstead, Life and Reign of Queen Victoria, International Publishing Society, 1901, p. 223.

  13. Longford, Victoria RI, p. 325. Rumours abounded during the Queen’s reign and after her death that Brown had acted as a spiritualist medium in séances held in the Blue Room, during which the Queen had made contact with Albert on the other side. Despite exhaustive research, Victoria’s biographer Elizabeth Longford found no evidence of either the Queen’s indulgence in spiritualist practices or of Brown’s role in them, nor did she of a sexual relationship between them. But unsubstantiated gossip and rumour – going so far as allegations of a morganatic marriage having taken place – persist to this day. No supporting evidence, however, survives in the Queen’s journals – if it was ever there – though these were edited and bowdlerised by her daughter Beatrice after her death. Nor is there a mention of it in her thousands of uncensored letters to Vicky. All of the Queen’s letters to Brown and his to her, as well as his diaries, which might have provided an answer one way or the other, were destroyed after the Queen’s death, on the orders of Edward VII. See Rappaport, Queen Victoria, entries on John Brown, pp. 75–81, and the Paranormal, pp. 285–8; also Longford, Victoria RI, pp. 334–9; Cullen, Empress Brown, pp. 97–9; ‘Victoria and John Brown’ in Thompson, Queen Victoria, pp. 61–86; Lamont Brown, ‘Queen Victoria’s “Secret Marriage”’, in Contemporary Review, December 2003, available online at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mim2242/is1655283/ai12095011/Perhaps the best summary of Victoria’s relationship with John Brown, and one that clearly defines it in personal and social terms, comes in a letter she wrote to Viscount Cranbrook after Brown’s death in 1883 and which recently came to light. In it she wrote, ‘Perhaps never in history was there so strong an attachment, so warm and loving a friendship between the sovereign and servant’ (my italics). Those three words – ‘attachment’, ‘friendship’ and ‘servant’ – define a close romantic friendship built on trust and mutual respect, but one that was nevertheless contained within the parameters of Victoria’s own very clear understanding of class difference. She was right to feel ‘that life for the second time is become most trying and sad’ after Brown’s death. She had lost a friend, and true friends were a rare thing indeed to a lonely monarch, isolated by her position. Nevertheless some commentators appear to have totally misread this statement as alluding to Brown having taken the place, sexually and maritally, of Albert. Victoria in fact totally disapproved of the remarriage of widows. See Bendor Grosvenor, ‘Dear John’, History Today, January 2005, pp. 2–3.

  14. For a discussion of Victoria’s chronic grief, see Parkes, Recovery from Bereavement, pp. 129–31, 134–5; Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, ch. 16, ‘Chronic and Abnormal Grief’, pp. 318–22.

  15. Sylvain Van de Weyer died in 1874. Madame Van de Weyer (who died in 1878), was formerly Elizabeth Bates, daughter of a Barings banker, and had with her husband been a very particular friend of Victoria and Albert since 1840 and, with their close links to Uncle Leopold, were favourites at court. Victoria was godmother to their first child and after her widowhood frequently visited Madame Van de Weyer at her home, New Lodge, four miles from Windsor. Written evidence of their relationship is, however, extremely scant. See Paul Bishop, Synchronicity and Intellectual Intuition in Kant, Swedenborg and Jung, New York: Ewin Hellen Press, 2000, p. 314; Spiritual Notes, 1993, p. 52; Stanislaw Przybyszewski, Erinnerungen an Berlin und Krakau, 119, p. 123.

  16. Crawford, Queen Victoria, pp. 327–8; Whittle, Victoria and Albert at Home, p. 142.

  17. Longford, Victoria RI, p. 321.

  18. Fulford, Your Dear Letter, p. 48; Thompson, Queen Victoria, p. 76.

  19. Morning Post, 9 April 1866.

  20. Lamont-Brown, John Brown, p. 69.

  21. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 191.

  22. Justin G. Turner, ed., Mary Todd Lincoln – Her Life and Letters, New York: Knopf, 1972, p. 230.

  23. Fulford, Your Dear Letter, p. 66.

  24. Ibid., pp. 90–1.

  25. Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 211; Fulford, Your Dear Letter, pp. 56–7.

  26. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 193.

  27. Hudson, Munby, p. 218.

  28. Crawford, Queen Victoria, p. 328.

  29. Russell, Amberley Papers, vol. 1, p. 466.

  30. Crawford, Queen Victoria, p. 319.

  31. Conway, David Moncure, Autobiography, Memories and Experiences of Daniel Moncure Conway, vol. 2, London: Cassell & Co., 1904, p. 65.

  32. Ibid.

  33. Crawford, Queen Victoria, p. 320.

  34. Buckle, I: 299.

  35. Longford, Victoria RI, pp. 348–9.

  36. Arengo-Jones, Queen Victoria in Switzerland, p. 21.

  37. Russell, Amberley Papers, vol. 1, p. 515; Pall Mall Gazette, 24 May 1865.

  38. Punch, 7 July 1866; Tisdall, Queen Victoria’s John Brown, pp. 105–6.

  39. See, for example, Examiner, 7 September 1867.

  40. The Light Blue: A Cambridge University Magazine, vol. 2, 1867, p. 330.

  41. Tomahawk, 11 May 1867.

  42. Ibid., 30 May 1868.

  43. Martineau, Selected Letters, p. 212.

  44. Cullen, Empress Brown, pp. 94–6.

  45. Kuhn, Henry and Mary Ponsonby, p. 98.

  46. Tisdall, Queen Victoria’s John Brown, p. 109.


  47. Ibid., p. 111.

  48. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 197; Fulford, Your Dear Letter, p. 120.

  49. Kuhn, Henry and Mary Ponsonby, p. 97; Bailey, Diary of Lady Frederick Cavendish, vol. 2, p. 10.

  50. Tomahawk, 8 June 1867; Huddersfield Chronicle, 30 June 1866; Russell, Amberley Papers, vol. 1, p. 515; Cullen, Empress Brown, p. 94.

  51. Longford, Victoria RI, p. 374; Tooley, Personal Life of Queen Victoria, pp. 217–18.

  52. Cullen, Empress Brown, p. 113.

  53. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 198.

  54. Cullen, Empress Brown, p. 104; Jerrold, Widowhood of Queen Victoria, p. 97.

  55. Daily News, 13 June 1867; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 21 July 1867.

  56. Arengo-Jones, Queen Victoria in Switzerland, p. 24.

  57. Downer, Queen’s Knight, p. 170; Vincent, Disraeli, Derby, p. 242; Wake, Princess Louise, p. 75.

  58. Fulford, Your Dear Letter, pp. 169, 51.

  Chapter 13: ‘The Queen Is Invisible’

  1. Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 219.

  2. For a detailed discussion of the extent of the Queen’s involvement in the compilation of The Early Years, see Homans, Royal Representations, pp. 115–31.

  3. Medical Times and Gazette, 3 August 1867.

  4. Quarterly Review, 1867–8, vol. 29, pp. 199, 304, 280.

  5. Medical Times and Gazette, 3 August 1867.

  6. Fulford, Your Dear Letter, p. 166.

  7. Lee, Queen Victoria, p. 410.

  8. Victoria, Leaves from the Journal, p. 106.

  9. The Times, 10 January 1868.

  10. Fulford, Your Dear Letter, p. 169.

  11. Vineta and Robert Colby, The Equivocal Virtue: Mrs Oliphant and the Victorian Literary Market Place, Hamden: Archon Books, 1966, p. 117.

  12. Gail Turley Huston, Royalties: The Queen and Victorian Writers, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999, pp. 148, 142. In a study entitled ‘Queen Victoria: A Personal Sketch’, published in 1900 after her own death, Oliphant was less equivocal. In literary matters, the Queen was, she argued, ‘no student of style, nor does she ever, we imagine, ponder and wait for the best word’. See also entry on Margaret Oliphant in Rappaport, Queen Victoria, pp. 271–3.

  13. Fraser’s Magazine, vol. LXXVII, February 1868, p. 154; North British Review, vols 5–6, 1868, p. 196.

  14. Daily Telegraph, 10 January 1868.

  15. Tomahawk, 18 January 1868.

  16. Chronicle quoted in York Herald, 25 January 1868.

  17. Reynolds’s Newspaper, 19 January 1868.

  18. Fulford, Your Dear Letter, p. 172.

  19. Ibid., p. 171; Helps, Correspondence of Sir Arthur Helps, pp. 265–6.

  20. Fulford, Your Dear Letter, p. 169; Hudson, Munby, p. 249.

  21. Martin, Queen Victoria As I Knew Her, p. 28; Fulford, Your Dear Letter, p. 169.

  22. Georgina Battiscombe, Shaftesbury A Biography of the 7th Earl, London: Constable, 1974, p. 298.

  23. Cullen, Empress Brown, p. 128.

  24. Windsor & Bolitho, p. 65.

  25. Helps, Leaves from the Journal, p. 128.

  26. Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900, Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1998, p. 388.

  27. Tooley, Personal Life of Queen Victoria, p. 236.

  28. Fulford, Your Dear Letter, p. 178.

  29. Windsor & Bolitho, p. 73. For a detailed discussion of Leaves from the Journal, see Homans, Royal Representations, pp. 131–52.

  30. Fulford, Your Dear Letter, p. 173.

  31. Martin, Queen Victoria as I Knew Her, p. 29.

  32. Ibid., pp. 38–9.

  33. Fulford, Your Dear Letter, pp. 173, 171.

  34. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 90.

  35. Fulford, Your Dear Letter, pp. 174, 175, 176.

  36. Moneypenny & Buckle, Life of Disraeli, vol. II, p. 389; Fulford, Your Dear Letter, p. 174.

  37. Helps, Correspondence of Sir Arthur Helps, pp. 264–5.

  38. Nevill, Under Five Reigns, p. 177.

  39. Bailey, Diary of Lady Frederick Cavendish, vol. 2, p. 49.

  40. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 205.

  41. Ibid.

  42. Arengo-Jones, Queen Victoria in Switzerland, pp. 29–30.

  43. The Times, 20 May 1868.

  44. Wake, Princess Louise, p. 81.

  45. Arengo-Jones, Queen Victoria in Switzerland, p. 32.

  46. Ibid., p. 43.

  47. Duff, Queen Victoria’s Highland Journals, p. 141.

  48. Guedalla, Queen and Mr Gladstone, vol. I, p. 47.

  49. Kennedy, My Dear Duchess, p. 248.

  50. Arengo-Jones, Queen Victoria in Switzerland, p. 26.

  51. Benson & Esher, I: 213.

  52. Magnus, Gladstone, p. 200; Weintraub, Queen Victoria, pp. 351–2.

  53. Magnus, Gladstone, p. 199.

  54. Wake, Princess Louise, pp. 86–7; Bailey, Diary of Lady Frederick Cavendish, vol. 2, p. 69.

  55. The Times, 6 November 1870.

  56. Dasent, Delane, p. 252.

  57. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 209.

  58. Morning Post, 6 November 1869.

  59. Martin, Queen Victoria as I Knew Her, pp. 39–40.

  60. Fulford, Your Dear Letter, p. 263.

  61. National Reformer, 18 September 1870.

  62. Williams, Contentious Crown, p. 37.

  63. Magnus, Gladstone, p. 111

  64. Ramm, Political Correspondence of Mr Gladstone, p. 170.

  65. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 212.

  66. Reynolds’s Newspaper, 25 December 1870.

  67. Hudson, Munby, p. 292.

  68. Hibbert, Queen Victoria, p. 332.

  Chapter 14: ‘Heaven Has Sent Us This Dispensation to Save Us’

  1. Tisdall, Queen Victoria’s Private Life, pp. 106–7; Kuhn, ‘Ceremony and Politics’, pp. 160–1; Ponsonby, Henry Ponsonby, p. 71.

  2. Ponsonby, Henry Ponsonby, p. 71.

  3. Ibid., p. 72.

  4. This accusation was entirely unfounded. Any monies saved from the Queen’s Civil List income were returned to the Exchequer and did not go into the royal privy purse. Ponsonby, Henry Ponsonby, p. 76. See also Kuhn, ‘Ceremony and Politics’, pp. 138–40.

  5. Charles Bradlaugh, ‘The Impeachment of the House of Brunswick’, 1871, quoted in Thompson, Queen Victoria, p. 106.

  6. For an exhaustive account of the ceremony, see for example Daily News, 30 March 1871.

  7. Cullen, Empress Brown, p. 135.

  8. Hibbert, Queen Victoria, p. 339, and Pakula, Uncommon Woman, p. 293.

  9. It is possible that the abscess under Victoria’s arm had been caused by germs spreading from her severely inflamed throat. No official diagnosis was ever announced, though it has since been suggested by Weintraubc (Queen Victoria, p. 363) that she was suffering from quinsy.

  10. Magnus, Gladstone, p. 209.

  11. Longford, Victoria RI, p. 382; for Henry Ponsonby’s memorandum on the Queen’s seclusion in 1871, see Ponsonby, Henry Ponsonby, pp. 73–6.

  12. Ponsonby, Henry Ponsonby, p. 75.

  13. The loyal Emilie Dittweiler finally retired in 1892, after thirty-five years’ service; Annie Macdonald remained with the Queen for an equal length of time, till her death in 1897. Both women were commended by the Queen in More Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, from 1862 to 1882, published in 1884.

  14. Weintraub, Queen Victoria, p. 366; Longford, Victoria RI, pp. 384–5; Cullen, Empress Brown, p. 140.

  15. Cullen, Empress Brown, p. 141; Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, p. 320.

  16. G. T. Wrench, Lord Lister, His Life and Work, pp. 227–8. See also Godlee, Lord Lister, pp. 305–6. Lister was honoured by the Queen with a baronetcy in 1893 and a peerage in 1897 for his pioneering medical work.

  17. Godlee, Lord Lister, p. 306. The use of India-rubber drainage tubes for wounds had first been described in France in 1859, but Lister was the fir
st to apply them in the UK. He finally described his procedure on the Queen in The Lancet, 1908, vol. I, p. 1815.

  18. Longford, Victoria RI, p. 385.

  19. Ponsonby Papers quoted in Cullen, Empress Brown, p. 143.

  20. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 226.

  21. See The Times, 9 November, and Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 11 November 1871; the speech was subsequently published as ‘The Cost of the Crown’. For Dilke’s accusations, see also Kuhn, ‘Ceremony and Politics’, pp. 140–3; Jerrold, Widowhood, p. 162–3.

  22. Pall Mall Gazette, 9 November 1871.

  23. Fulford, Darling Child, p. 29; Ramm, Political Correspondence of Mr Gladstone, vol. 2, p. 264.

  24. One of the other guests, Lord Chesterfield, as well as Bertie’s groom, Charles Blegg, contracted the disease. Both of them died.

  25. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 213. In addition to extensive newspaper coverage of the Prince’s illness, the best first-hand accounts are to be found in the Queen’s journals and in the letters of Alix’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Macclesfield, written from Sandringham at the time, to be found at RA VIC/ADDMSS/C/18. See also Sheppard, George Duke of Cambridge, vol. 2, pp. 302–5.

  26. Windsor & Bolitho, p. 148.

  27. RA VIC/ADDC18, Lady Macclesfield letter: 8 December 1871.

  28. Hibbert, Queen Victoria, p. 343.

  29. Windsor & Bolitho, p. 149.

  30. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 213.

  31. Sheppard, George Duke of Cambridge, vol. 2, p. 304.

  32. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 213.

  33. Buckle, II: 177; Tisdall, Unpredictable Queen, p. 111.

  34. Henry James Jennings, Chestnuts and Small Beer, London: Chapman & Hall, 1920, p. 81.

  35. Hudson, Munby, p. 300.

  36. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 214.

  37. See ‘The Royal Fever and Our Feverish Constitution’, Reynolds’s Newspaper, 10 December 1871.

  38. Daily Telegraph quoted in Cullen, Empress Brown, p. 156.

  39. Morris, ‘Illustrated Press’, p. 118.

  40. Reid, Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid, p. 157.

  41. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 214.

  42. Cullen, Empress Brown, p. 157; Sheppard, George Duke of Cambridge, vol. 2, pp. 301–11.

  43. Fulford, Darling Child, p. 20.

  44. Sheppard, George Duke of Cambridge, vol. 2, p. 307.