Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  Thus, at the age of twenty-three she was a remarkable personage, impressing the Venetian Ambassador by her intellect and by her ‘astute and judicious’ behaviour, and a perpetual menace to her sister. Some of the most interesting letters in the collection are the Bedingfeld papers concerning her imprisonment at Woodstock, which Froude, it seems, had never read. They show that Sir Henry Bedingfeld, far from ill-treating her as is commonly said, very much disliked his task and did what he could to help her. But Elizabeth was a formidable prisoner, very observant, silent if crossed, capable of a ‘most unpleasant’ manner, and so Royal in her demeanour that it seemed impertinent to restrain her. There was nothing for her to do save to embroider the covers of a Bible and scratch plaintive verses on the window panes; she asked for books, a Cicero and an English Bible; she wanted to walk freely and demanded to write her complaints to the Council. Sir Henry had to check her in every way; he was made uneasy if a servant bringing presents of ‘freshwater fish... and two dead pheasant cocks’ stayed too long gossiping with the servants. But such was the tone in which she issued ‘an importunate command’ that in spite of all injunctions Sir Henry not only gave her pen and paper, but wrote at her dictation, although he spelt very badly, the Princess ‘saying that she never wrote to your Lordships but by a secretary’. He pointed out the inconveniences of Woodstock as a residence in winter - how the wind and rain would come through the chinks, and how the villagers grumbled already at the soldiers who were quartered upon them. It is clear that he only wished to be rid of her.

  When Mary died three years later no more seasoned woman of her age could be found in Europe than Elizabeth. She had known love, and seen death very close; she had learnt to suspect almost everyone, and to let men struggle and plot before her without taking part. Her intellect was trained to wrestle with intricate arguments and to delight in flourishes of ornament. Her poverty had taught her to hoard money and to hint for gifts. In short, her education and her adventures had equipped her with a complete armour of cold and harsh feelings, under the control of a perfectly dauntless bravery. Thus, splendid and inscrutable, she rode through London on the day of her Corpnation; arches, pyramids, and fountains stood in her way, from which boys sang greeting; a fine snow kept falling over her, but the gems and the golden collars shone clearly through the whiteness.

  The Diary of a Lady in Waiting.

  Lady Charlotte Bury was the daughter of the fifth Duke of Argyll, and her beauty and her wit made her at once the talk of London when she came up to town in the last years of the eighteenth century. But her head was full of romance, and she preferred a marriage with her kinsman. Jack Campbell, who was handsome, ‘a great fellow’, but badly off, to an alliance with some rich nobleman in England. They lived in Edinburgh for the most part, and Lady Charlotte was queen of the literary society there, scribbling her own verses, and receiving the compliments of Walter Scott, C. K. Sharpe, and Monk Lewis. Their circumstances, however, were never easy; nine children were born to them, and, when she was thirty-four, her husband died, and left her to bring them up as she might. The natural profession, for a woman with her connections, was about the Court; and it is characteristic of her that she sought service with the Princess of Wales, with whom she had long sympathized, although the Princess was then in an uncomfortable situation, separated from her husband and estranged from the Royal family. At the same time Lady Charlotte began to keep a diary, and it is this work which is now reprinted, with the omission of certain unnecessary parts, and the addition of a great number of names which the discretion of previous editors thought fit to conceal beneath a dash. As it is, the size of the volumes is sufficiently formidable, and were it not for the watery Georgian atmosphere which they preserve we might wish that Lady Charlotte’s sentiments had been curtailed. ‘Those evanescent emanations of spirit which are only cognisable to the very few, and which thrive not unless under the influence of congenial feelings’ have fallen, to continue her metaphor, upon a barren soil, and are withered by the cold blight of criticism.

  The Princess of Wales’s court, if it has a right to the name, was a comfortless and incongruous place. She kept up all the forms of royalty at Kensington and Blackheath, but she was constantly meeting with some insolence from the great nobles, and flouting them with an irresponsible outburst of wild spirits. She would walk solemnly with her ladies in Kensington-gardens and suddenly ‘bolt out at one of the smaller gates and walk all over Bayswater and along the Paddington Canal’, asking at every door whether there were any houses to be let, and chuckling at her own ingenuity. Some respectable people stood by her, and gave her parties the semblance of dignity, but as soon as these gentlemen left she ‘felt a weight’ off her. ‘She calls it dull’ observes Lady Charlotte, or, in her own phrase, ‘Mine Gott! Dat is de dullest person Gott Almighty ever did born!’ ‘and true enough’, the moralist proceeds, ‘good society is often dull’. Brougham and Whitbread were always coming with documents for her to sign, and good advice for her to follow. There was perpetual talk of policy, whether she should go to the opera, whether she should accept the Regent’s terms, or hold out for her own rights; she was always acting on the spur of the moment, and upsetting calculations that were not, as Lady Charlotte guessed, entirely disinterested. They go over the whole story of her wrongs again and again, at those dreary dinner parties; and when that subject becomes intolerable, she chatters about books, or talks scandal, wishes people dead, or sings - ‘squall - squall - squall’ - with the Sapios, for she loved to imagine herself the centre of a brilliant society. Lady Charlotte had much to deplore from the first, although her kind and sentimental heart was constantly touched by the poor lady’s miseries, the cause, she guessed, of much of her levity; and she had sense enough to see that a little good management at this crisis might have invaluable results. The Princess occasionally would act with the utmost dignity, or endure some insult without a word, so that Lady Charlotte herself felt humiliated. A friend reported on one occasion that the Tsar of Russia meant to call upon her, an honour for which she said she would give both her ears, though they are ‘very ugly’. She dressed in delight, and waited all the afternoon, with Lady Charlotte beside her, till it was seven o’clock. For four hours they sat opposite each other keeping up a miserable small talk; and, though the Tsar never came, the Princess would not own that she was disappointed. It was not wonderful, perhaps, that she should relapse after these fruitless efforts into wilder dissipation than ever. When there was no company she would sit over the fire after dinner modelling a little figure of her husband in wax, transfixing it with a pin, and holding it over the flames so that it melted away. Was one to laugh, or was it not unspeakably tragic? Sometimes, says Lady Charlotte, she had the feeling of one who humours a mad woman.

  But advice and sentiment had no power to stay the course of the uneasy woman; she was too sensitive to ignore the slights which people who, as she observed, would eat her food thought fit to put upon her, and she was foolish enough to seek redress by making friends of her inferiors. The description which Lady Charlotte gives of ‘that incongruous piece of patchwork’, the villa at Blackheath - ‘It is all glitter and glare and trick; everything is tinsel and trumpery about it; it is altogether like a bad dream’ - represents very well the impression which her life makes upon us; it is like Cremorne or Vauxhall by daylight, when the lamps are out, and the pale minarets and pagodas are exposed to the sun, with all their stains and frivolities and their midnight grimace. Lady Charlotte’s proprieties were constantly shocked; and, as she could in no way prevent the disaster, she left her mistress in 1814, without offending her, in order, she pretended, to take her children to Geneva. She was little more, however, than a correct and kindly woman, with a diffuse taste for sentiment of all kinds, whether in people, or art, or letters, and, when she had no point to concentrate her mind upon, her observations become insipid. The Princess of Wales, vulgar and flighty as she was, had the quality of making people interested in her, not for her fate alone, but because
she had lively feelings and expressed them nakedly.

  Lady Charlotte when set adrift upon the Continent and exposed now to a picture, now to a church, now to the historical associations of Versailles, floats, with all her sails spread, upon a leaden sea. ‘I gazed once more at the undying beauties of the immortal Venus. I felt a spark of inspiration emanate from the divine Apollo... Time and circumstance tore me away.’ She came at length to Geneva, and settled herself in the midst of the ‘literary and scientific republic’, smiling and sighing when she remembered the ‘great stage of life’ upon which she had acted so lately. But she was not to philosophize for long. The rumour spread that the Princess, with a motley court, was upon them, and some of the English ladies hastily made up a ball in her honour. With what an expression Lady Charlotte gazed upon the figure of her late mistress, dressed ‘en Venus’, waltzing all night long, we can imagine; it is a delightful picture. ‘I was unfeignedly grieved... and thought it would be my own fault if she caught me again in a hurry.’ But Lady Charlotte was too good-natured to desert anyone in difficulties; she had a family to support; and after a few months she joined the Princess at Genoa as her lady in waiting. She found that Mr Craven and Mr Gell, her respectable English friends, had left her, and her own position was more odious than ever. Bergami, the tall Italian courier, was now the favourite, and the Princess drove about in a carriage shaped like a sea-shell, lined with blue velvet and drawn by piebald ponies. She protested that she meant to travel on and on, to visit Greece, and never to return to England. Lady Charlotte had to shut both eyes and ears; but her charity was at length exhausted, and she finally left the Princess in 1815, the last of the English courtiers to stay with her. Lady Charlotte went to Rome, and the Princess wandered about Italy, adding doubtful countesses ‘of decayed nobility’ to her train, and abbés who could speak forty-four different languages, both living and dead, in perfection - so ‘they assure me’. The last sight of her was reported by an English lady living at Florence, who came upon a procession of carriages at some little country village, drawn by the piebald horses, and occupied by a ‘rabble rout’ of low-looking men and women, dressed like ‘itinerant show players’, of all nationalities; among them was ‘one fat woman’, who was said to be the Princess of Wales. Most readers will be tempted to skip the reflections which Lady Charlotte has to record about Rome, for she echoed the taste of her time, and it is not ours; but she corresponded still with the Princess and received from her a number of those odd ungrammatical letters, where all the t’s are d’s, which still sound so lively, so absurd, and so unhappy.

  All de fine English folk leave me [she writes]. I not send them away, though, bye the bye, some of dem not behave as civil as I could like.

  ... I detest Rome. It is the burial-place of departed grandeur. It is very well to see it once, like a raree show... I shall die of de blue devils, as you English call it... Very often we cook our own dinner! What voud de English people say if dey heard dat? Oh, fie! Princess of Wales.’

  Lady Charlotte returned to London in 1819, in order to introduce an orphan niece to the world. She was forty-four, and the diary, though it is still as profuse as ever, describes merely the respectable life of a lady living in good society, with the remains of beauty, and many memories of happier days. Major Denham described the interior of Africa; Tom Moore sang ‘The Parting of the Ships’, ‘each to sail over the lonely ocean! How very true it is to nature! How thrilling to those who have witnessed the scene!’ Once she met Mrs Mee, the miniature painter, and ‘another eccentric little artist, by name Blake’, who talked to her about his painting, and seemed to her full of imagination and genius. She saw Sir Thomas Lawrence sneer as he watched them. But the diary ends, fitly enough, with the death of Queen Caroline a few days after she had knocked at the door of Westminster Abbey in vain. Many people felt that there was an end to an awkward situation; Lady Charlotte, as one might expect, had a final word of regret for the poor woman, and in this case, at least, we may believe that she meant it, for she had been a good friend.

  Queen Adelaide.

  ‘I request not to be dissected nor embalmed, and desire to give as little trouble as possible/ wrote Queen Adelaide characteristically when she was considering the disposition of her dead body; and all the industry of Miss Sandars has not been able to violate the privacy of her spirit. For if Queen Anne is dead, we must invent some more absolute form of annihilation for Queen Adelaide. We cannot boldly affirm, after reading 289 pages about her, that she never existed; but we feel much as though we had been to visit someone in a large handsome house, and after wandering through all the state rooms and up the grand staircase and through the attics had heard only the swishing of a skirt and once - that was the most vivid moment of all - caught a glimpse of a ‘wonderful red and grey parrot’, but never met the owner of the house, or heard more than the murmur of her voice in the next room. It is not Miss Sandars’s fault. She has done her best to produce the Queen for us, and, as the Queen is dumb, has imagined what her feelings must have been on several very important occasions, as for example when she landed in England to marry a husband she had never seen.

  The sea was rough... and the Princess Adelaide’s spirits were doubtless at a low ebb... Nothing is reported of the interview between him and his future bride, and we can only guess the feelings of the Princess when, at the end of what must have been for one of her delicate physique a most exhausting fortnight, she was introduced to her middle-aged, garrulous, unpolished bridegroom. We may guess, however, that even were her agitation great, nothing of it appeared on the surface. Her manners were good, she was possessed of much reticence and self-control, and she doubtless behaved suitably and with the sense of propriety natural to her.

  That is the style of the volume. We are made to feel that it is not permitted in the case of a great lady so recently dead to impute to her any feelings save those that she might show to the public through the windows of her crystal coach on her way down the Mall when, although in constant fear of assassination, she made a point of sitting rather forward and very upright. She was always on her guard with the English, who disliked her, and she never lost the traces of her long girlhood in the pious, secluded Court of Meiningen, where a paternal Government issued decrees about coffins, and begging, and dancing on Sundays and wrestled, unsuccessfully it appears, with the problem of geese who stray from the flock. The Princess was well suited to pet and bully a state of devoted retainers, but only the arbitrary exigencies of politics could have forced a woman so trained to become the bride of William the Fourth, with his large family of illegitimate children, and given her the most corrupt Court and the least reputable Royal Family in Europe for her circle and surroundings.

  As fate would have it, she became Queen Consort when England was struggling for reform. The mere thought of reform, were it merely the introduction of gas in a palace, affected Queen Adelaide like an explosion of gunpowder, and suggested immediate death on a scaffold. She would accept William and George the Fourth, and a large impertinent family of Fitz-Clarences with angelical sweetness and submission, as part of the lot of womanhood, but the idea of giving power to the people stiffened her into something like self-assertion. All the influence she had she brought to bear on the King against the Reform Bill, and drew on herself such hatred from the people that William paced the room anxiously if she were late home from the opera, and the newspapers bespattered her with names which nowadays would not be applied to any woman in the land. But the Reform BUI passed and there was no martyrdom for Adelaide. Her head, that is, remained on her shoulders; but the discomforts of her lot surely amount in sum of agony to a beheading if it were possible to extract them and compute them. Doubtless, to borrow a very useful phrase from Miss Sandars, the manners of the Royal Family afflicted her considerably. They remind us of those astounding scenes in Dickens and George Eliot when uncles and aunts behave in such a manner at the dinner table that we are inclined to think it is put on for the reader’s benefit; but William the F
ourth had exactly the same method. At a birthday dinner he took the occasion to jump up and abuse the Duchess of Kent, who was sitting next to him: ‘I have no hesitation in saying that I have been insulted - grossly and continually insulted - by that person now near me’ upon which the Princess Victoria burst into tears, and the Duchess ordered her carriage. At another dinner party, to annoy the same lady’s brother, he pretended to be deaf; and we have an appalling picture of the scene after dinner, when the chairs were placed in such a way that conversation was impossible, and the only diversion apparently for that silent company was to listen to the snores of the Duke of Somerset happily sleeping behind a pillar. But the domestic evenings of calm were no less trying, according to poor Lady Grey, who hoped that she might never see a mahogany table again after sitting for two evenings round the one at Windsor, while the Queen netted a purse, and the King slept, ‘occasionally waking for the purpose of saying, “Exactly so, Ma’am” and then sleeping again’. When he kept awake for any length of time, the King would pull out a ‘curiosity” for the company to look at, and then wander about signing papers, which a Princess blotted for him, while the Queen beckoned a small society of intimate friends into a corner and handed round her sketches. The nearest approach to the hypnotized boredom of that assembly is to imagine thirty people gathered nightly in a dentist’s waiting room, with its round tables, and albums, its horsehair chairs, and diamond spotted carpet, and without even the excitement of the anticipated summons. This dreary scene dragged on until 1837, when the Queen found herself a widow, with an income of £100,000 a year. But her perpetual colds in the head and other indispositions had now developed into chronic ill health, which made her ‘rather fidgety about due attention being shown her’, and her chief interest seems to have lain in seeking health, in suppressing dissent and providing Colonial Bishops, in smiling graciously upon assembled multitudes and, let us hope, in admiring the gifts and cherishing the plumage of that remarkable bird, the red and grey parrot.