Flash’d from his bed, the electric tidings came,
He is not better, he is much the same.
Yet at the time there was only unadulterated relief that another heir had not gone the way of Princess Charlotte half a century before. The thanksgiving service at St Paul’s the following year sealed Bertie’s rehabilitation. Thereafter, he was readmitted after a fashion into his mother’s affections and into the nation’s respect.
This same benediction never quite occurred for the two other men most markedly and in these latter days, famously, admitted into the Queen’s presence during her long years of widowhood. The Balmoral ghillie John Brown and the ‘Munshi’, the ‘teacher’, Mohammed Abdul Karim.
What John Brown did for the Queen is not exactly known beyond the fact that he lifted her from her grieving gloom, a blessing evident to her family at the time and a reason why the gruff Highlander was readily accepted by them and the Royal Household. Deathbed confessions by Presbyterian ministers of illicit marriage ceremonies seem absurd and fanciful but they do underscore the existence of persistent gossip, at the time and since, that there was a good deal more to this very odd relationship than simply one of servant and mistress. Certainly it is the case that the friendship between these two ostensibly mismatched individuals was every bit as real as her love for Albert.
However, the clearest sign that Brown was no illicit Royal lover lies in the fact that Victoria’s children were comfortable enough in his presence. There were jokes made about ‘Mama’s lover’ and they spoke affectionately of Brown. Though Victoria finally retained a private secretary from 1861 on, Brown came to discharge many of the same essential functions as Albert had previously done, in terms of managing access to the Queen and conveying her wishes to others. His death in turn, in 1883, produced another paroxysm of high Victorian mourning, every bit as sincere as that Albert triggered. Why should the Queen not weep for her best friend and most trusted confidant?
On the supposedly overly familiar servant/mistress relationship, the portraits Victoria commissioned of them together were one thing but the biography Victoria proposed to write of Brown after his death was something else. It necessitated the Household stepping in to persuade the Dean of Windsor to dissuade her. As for the apparently telling signs of love, such as the fact that on her own death the Queen instructed that a photograph of John Brown be placed in her coffin in the fingers of her left hand, these, taken in isolation, can be read as a sign. However, they signal only that the Victorians treated death much as the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt had done, for their coffins were loaded with as many mementoes and trinkets as they could carry for their journey to the underworld. Into her coffin, for example, the Queen also asked to be placed plaster casts; a shawl knitted by Princess Alice, a daughter who had predeceased her; sundry rings and other curios, and locks of hair; and the Queen herself, arrayed in her wedding dress. Victoria, in short, was very Victorian. So her coffin was as cluttered as her office had been in life.
As for the ‘Munshi’, her next and last familiar, Karim was a private secretary brought into the Royal Household to help teach the Queen the languages of her Indian Empire. Like Albert and Brown before him, he in time became a mainstay of the ageing Victoria, as she dealt through him with the formal bureaucratic and courtly world round her. Unlike Brown, who was variously indulged, tolerated and even respected by her family and courtiers, the Munshi was simply loathed by all concerned. In this, the truth is that is it difficult to acquit them of racial prejudice. The Munshi’s character may well not have been as flinty and upstandingly Presbyterian as that of John Brown. There were fabulous, positively Victorian tales of illustrious origins and siblings brought into the Household to make hay while the sun shone but these were petty and common vices in all Royal establishments. There were plenty of individuals eager to make hay and most of them were British.
One telling tale, as related by her biographer A. N. Wilson, is that at one point, revolted by having to sit with the Munshi and treat him as an equal, cowardly, older, male courtiers fixed on a Lady of the Bedchamber to tell the Queen that the Household would go on strike, should the Munshi accompany them on an upcoming holiday to the Riviera. Victoria was well able to handle such trifling opposition. She swept everything off the table in front of her, ornaments and state papers, as in her fury she faced down her petty-minded courtiers – and won, naturally. The Court ultimately had its revenge. The first thing Edward VII did on succeeding his mother was to dismiss the Munshi and seize and destroy all the letters between him and the Queen.
If the Munshi and John Brown were the two private men of Victoria’s later reign, the two public men were undoubtedly two of her Prime Ministers and the Queen was certainly not shy about expressing her prejudices about both Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone.
*
Where Disraeli had the good sense to make Victoria an Empress, Gladstone drove the Queen, amazingly, to threaten abdication. These two men were not, in fact, utterly dissimilar, at least in background. Disraeli as Prime Minister was proof of the social and political progress on offer to talent in Victorian Britain while Gladstone, the Etonian descendant of slave owners and industrialists, was only slightly less so. The Queen was aware of the status and background of both men. Disraeli’s father had been, as she noted, ‘a mere man of letters’ and occupying Number 10 was therefore a ‘proud thing for a man “risen from the people” ’.
Disraeli knew very well how to use a trowel to lay on his flattery with virtuosic skill. He was keen to tell the Queen that in constitutional and foreign-policy matters in particular he was so fortunate to have her. ‘How great is the power of the Sovereign in this country, if firm and faithfully served,’ he assured her. Disraeli was exactly the Prime Minister any Queen would want. ‘He repeatedly said whatever I wished SHOULD be done,’ the Queen happily recorded of Disraeli. He proclaimed himself delighted to benefit from the Queen’s stock of wisdom. She in her turn delighted in the coups he carried out in her name, from acquiring control of the Suez Canal to formally having her name Empress of India proclaimed by Act of Parliament, an innovation the Daily Telegraph called ‘a sinister revolution’. Disraeli had ‘very large ideas, and very lofty views of the position this country should hold,’ the Queen wrote. ‘His mind is so much greater, larger, and his apprehension of things great and small so much quicker than that of Mr Gladstone.’
Unfortunately for the Queen, she was obliged to suffer Gladstone’s company through four terms as Prime Minister and with her least favourite politician the Queen’s manner was different. She was ever eager to remind him that while she had no opposition to constructive reform, ‘she also thinks [that] the great principles of the Constitution of this great country ought to be maintained and preserved’. Gladstone paid little attention to this, indeed, he did little to endear himself to the Queen. She was sceptical of his campaign against the Bulgarian atrocities and was contemptuous of his Midlothian campaign, agreeing entirely with Disraeli that it was ‘rhodomontade and rigmarole’. Even worse than his election rhetoric was what he did in office, which was to retreat where Disraeli had advanced. His actions in Afghanistan and South Africa were dreadful and his attitude to Gordon in the Sudan was regarded as indefensible.
Victoria even probed the limits of constitutionality, such was her dislike of Gladstone. She manoeuvred to avoid appointing him Prime Minister in 1880. Instead, she invited Lord Hartington, later the Duke of Devonshire, to form a government but the Liberal Party caused her to see the limits of her authority and Gladstone was summoned in the end. This ‘half-crazy enthusiast … ruining all the good of 6 years [of] peaceful, wise government’ was the Queen’s description of her new Prime Minister, as she mourned the departure of Disraeli into the political darkness.
When Salisbury, her last public favourite, lost office in 1892, forcing Gladstone upon her one final time, bitter were the Queen’s lamentations. She wailed of ‘a defect in our much famed Constitution, to have to part with an admirabl
e Govt like Ld Salisbury’s for no question of any importance, or any particular reason, merely on account of the number of votes’. How very differently things were done in the German Empire, when compared to the realms of our own dear Queen.
*
William of Prussia was the only grandchild Albert ever saw and this was not a fortuitous omen. In her later years, Victoria had become the ‘Grandmother of Europe’ but Europe did not constitute a happy family. It had begun so well, Albert and Victoria had built up high hopes of the marriage of their eldest child Vicky to the soon-to-be Crown Prince of Prussia in 1858. In 1888, on his accession as Emperor Frederick III of a united Germany, her son-in-law told the Queen: ‘My feelings of devoted affection to you prompt me … to repeat to you my sincere and earnest desire for a close and lasting friendship between our two nations.’ It was not to be, for even as he sent the telegram Frederick lay dying of cancer. His son and heir would blame Vicky for appointing an English doctor to treat her husband. In other words, he would blame her for the death of her husband.
It is impossible to overstate the tragedy which Frederick’s death meant for Europe. Prince Albert, in contracting a marriage worthy of his wire-pulling Uncle Leopold, had sought to secure Prussia and then Germany for the cause of liberalism, constitutionalism and peace. Had, as almost happened in 1862, William I of Prussia abdicated in favour of his son, near thirty years of Anglo-German amity and German progress could have occurred. As it was, in stepped Bismarck and William ruled on until the age of ninety. More accurately, Bismarck ruled on, for it was the Iron Chancellor who truly ruled the united Germany he had forged. As part of his rule, he made the life of the Crown Prince and Princess as desperate as only he could.
Alienating their son William from his parents was hardly the least of Bismarck’s crimes. William endured a still more suffocating childhood than Bertie, or Victoria come to that, and in addition he had been born with a withered arm. His iron will led him to master horsemanship regardless of this infirmity and this determination marched together with a deeply restless nature. He was a fiery, deeply temperamental and profoundly complicated individual. He oscillated wildly between idolising his grandmother, her country and its power – upon being made an admiral of the fleet, he gushed that he too was to ‘wear the uniform of Nelson!’ – and hating his British antecedents. Upon having a nosebleed, he wished famously that every drop of English blood in him would drain out. The contrast between cultured, thoughtful father and half-mad son was painful for Vicky and Victoria alike. Frederick William was a veritable second Albert, while William epitomised everything wrong and impulsive and weak about princes and kings.
Victoria felt the sufferings of her daughter, her brilliant Vicky, her brightest child, as sharp as her mother but without the security of her mother’s position and all the more so when Vicky retreated into widowhood too after 1888, the traumatic ‘year of the three emperors’ in Germany. Even after William sacked Bismarck in 1890, Vicky’s situation did not improve. Her son’s treatment of his mother was wicked in its cruelty. Vicky and Victoria had been devoted correspondents. Their letters are the best guide to the minds of both and they open a window into the Victorian world and it is impossible to escape in the pages of correspondence the sorrow of Frederick William’s brief reign. In so many senses, the only problem with the Victorian age is that it did not go on long enough, as it easily could have done, had Germany enjoyed a long and healthy reign under Frederick William and Vicky.
*
The closing years of Victoria’s life were jubilees. Golden and diamond, they confirmed the Queen Empress’s place in the heart of the nation and empire beyond the seas. Victoria, having had enough of the European royalties who swamped her palaces in the course of the Golden Jubilee year of 1887, insisted on having none in her Diamond year of 1897. This in turn gave Joseph Chamberlain, ever the innovator, a chance to organise something entirely novel. He summoned the first Colonial Conference, where eleven of her Prime Ministers, leaders of her self-governing colonies, from New Zealand, Newfoundland, Canada and the Australian and South African colonies, joined their Queen in London to celebrate the most powerful nation on earth.
In the face of these public celebrations, Victoria did not change. Although she privately exulted in the reaction of the crowds to her, she did not perform at the diktat of her ministers. ‘She will not be teazed & bullied ab[ou]t the Jubilee’, the Queen had her private secretary tell her ministers, ‘w[hich] seems to be considered only for the people and their convenience & amusement while the Queen is to do the public and the newspaper bidding. She will do nothing if this goes on.’ Indeed, she only agreed to the Golden Jubilee in the first place as a kind of Jubilaeum, the German 50th wedding anniversary she had been denied by Albert’s death.
*
It is worth concluding on what the figure and idea of Victoria meant, both to those who were eminent in her time and to those who were not. It is right to dismiss the historians’ myth that she was truly threatened by some ‘surge’ of republicanism. Such disquiet as manifested was only ever relative and fleeting. Victoria sat as securely on her throne as almost any British monarch ever has done and certainly any long-serving one. While sitting there, she did not spend her time reading Bagehot. This constitutional theorist may have formulated doctrines but there is no evidence the Queen either read them or subscribed to them. Yet she must have understood them, for Bagehot declared that public life is theatre and ‘the climax of the play is the Queen’ and Victoria understood her fame and understood her part in the play.
To understand the Victorian age, it is necessary to see it as they did. Their time was not the age of stolidity so many now imagine. The nineteenth century was rather a century of unparalleled, dynamic change. The world was made anew. Conditions which had, to a greater or lesser extent, prevailed since the dawn of civilisation gave way in the face of modernity to new modes of being. Amid this whirl, Victoria was a still, constant centre of the world which was being made and remade around her. She supplied the stability and the continuity. She provided the foundations, as the nation worked and grew during this extraordinary, revolutionary time of change.
It is easy to lose sight of the discontinuity that occurred in Victoria’s time. It had its downsides which were visible at the time and not least to the Queen herself. While its great gains came slowly, they did come, and that they came down to this generation securely is in part a tribute to the country and empire over which Victoria ruled. For it would be a worse world today had she and the Victorians never existed.
Victoria inspired those over whom she ruled to do the best they could. This is a simple story but its extraordinary achievements built the world in which we still live today. There could so easily have been worse ones and terrible efforts were made after Victoria to bring them into being. The late Queen deserves gratitude for what she and her subjects did to hold off barbarism, decline and defeat. Victoria was the Queen for a great empire, who viewed all her subjects equally and allowed the Constitution to develop peacefully rather than clinging to the remnants of monarchical power. This was at the heart of her success and secures her place as a Great Victorian.
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been produced without a considerable amount of help. First from Adam Gauntlett, my agent who persuaded me to write and then Jamie Joseph the editor who agreed to take it on and proved patient as political events regularly overtook publisher deadlines.
Christopher Montgomery was a particular help on a number of chapters and provided me with many good ideas. It was my eldest son, Peter, who persuaded me to write the chapter on W. G. Grace and leant me his copy of Wisden on Grace to help with the research.
A particular debt is owed to those who typed up my words from either dictation or manuscript. Most of this fell on my private office, Elizabeth Davis and Yasmin Mostafa with help from Fiona Oldfield-Hodge, who can always decipher my scribbles, and Alice Rule, who assisted with some of the initial research.
/> P. G. Wodehouse dedicated The Heart of a Goof to his ‘daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.’ Fortunately, my troop did not delay this work, I managed that all by myself, as Peter, Mary, Thomas, Anselm, Alfred and Sixtus were kindly looked after by my wife Helena and, of course, nanny, and all deserve thanks.
Finally, it was Heaven’s Command by Jan Morris that sparked my interest in history, and learning about Gordon and Sleeman aged fourteen has influenced two chapters in this book.
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Arnstein, Walter L. Queen Victoria. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
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———. Disraeli. Faber and Faber, 1966.
Bogdanor, Vernon. The Monarchy and the Constitution. Oxford University Press, 1998.
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———. Palmerston and the Politics of Foreign Policy 1846–55. Manchester University Press, 2002.
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