by A. N. Wilson
Raglan had given orders that, in the event of an attack at Balaklava, two divisions should be moved down from the windswept plateau above the port. Raglan’s divisional commander, Lord Lucan, moved the cavalry further inland, to the top of a valley. His brother-in-law, one of the most detested officers in the army, was Lord Cardigan, loathed by his men for many reasons, not least that, rather than endure the hardships of the soldiers on land, he always slept aboard his luxurious yacht in Balaklava harbour. Two remarkable charges took place during the Battle of Balaklava. The first was when the Heavy Brigade charged uphill against 3,000 Russian cavalrymen.
The second charge happened by accident. Raglan told Lucan to send his cavalry to recapture some guns seized by the Russians. Lucan took the order to mean that he should ride a mile and a quarter distant to attack the Russian guns. The order was brought to Lucan by a Captain Nolan. With the absurd courage of the hunting field, Cardigan and his men cantered into the Russian guns. While Nolan desperately gesticulated, trying to stop them, he was shot down. Cardigan’s Light Brigade took the Russian guns but at terrible cost. Of the 673 horesemen who began the charge, 113 were killed, 134 wounded; 475 of the horses were killed and 42 wounded.
A little over a week later, the Russians attempted another attack, this time further up the plateau at Inkermann. By now the weather was wintry. There was thick fog, and 12,000 Russians were killed, and some 2,500 British. Ten days later, blizzards more or less blew the British camps away, the hospital marquees were destroyed and the ships in the harbour were all but wrecked by bad weather. By the time the siege of Sevastopol had begun, cholera had swept through the British and French armies, 14,000 men were in Florence Nightingale’s hospital at Scutari, back on the other side of the Black Sea in the outskirts of Constantinople, and the situation on both sides was desperate.
The Queen, watching from home, noted how the war began as a prodigiously popular thing; but this was the first war at which photographers, and a good war reporter (William Russell of The Times), had been present. When the inefficiency, and the sickness, and the sheer horror of the conflict became known, the public turned their wrath on the politicians.
The Queen’s journal conveyed little of this. She wrote always with a consciousness that she was the Queen. When the first news came in of the Battle of Balaklava, she was ‘much annoyed’4 that such setbacks had been reported in the newspapers. Then, when the telegraphic dispatch reached Windsor, during dinner on 11 November, her natural talent as a diarist photographed the scene. ‘It was a curious sight to see everyone listening to the Despatch, (which was printed) the Gentlemen all standing in a group round the one of them who was reading & all, listening with such interest and anxiety.’5 Then, she told the tale to her journal, as Tennyson would immortalize it in his poem on the Charge of the Light Brigade, and as the English have been telling it to themselves ever since: ‘All behaved like heroes, & not one better than poor Lord Cardigan, who led them to the murderous fight . . . I trembled with emotions, as well as pride, in reading the recital of the heroism of these devoted men.’6
Ten days after they heard the news of the Charge of the Light Brigade, it was the Princess Royal’s fourteenth birthday. Throughout this war, happening so far away, the Queen’s domestic life went on undisturbed.
Vicky’s birthday (‘a clever, warm-hearted child’) was spent at Windsor. The Queen spent the day quietly with the children and ‘sketched Gouramma’. This was her god-daughter, the Princess Gouramma, now Victoria Gouramma, of Coorg. Her father, the deposed rajah, driven from his lands in Southern India, had for a while resided at Benares. In 1852, the rajah brought Gouramma, then aged eleven, to London and offered her to the Queen for adoption ‘if the Queen would take charge of my daughter & treating her with honour and kindness grant her an education complete in every respect & suitable to her rank, and bring her up according to English customs in the Christian faith’.7 It was a tall order, but the Queen always felt sheepish about the deposed Indian maharajahs whose wealth had been seized by the East India Company. At first she replied to the rajah that ‘it would not be in accordance with the usages of this Country that Her Majesty should take the charge of his daughter’.8 The India Board offered to pay for the upbringing of the child and to pay him a stipend while he was in England. Prince Albert suggested giving the rajah £40 per month for the child,9 and the rajah’s response was that ‘your Majesty has been graciously pleased to grant me much more than I prayed for with regard to my little daughter’.10 It was suggested that the child be made a ward in chancery of Sir James West Hogg, baronet, chairman of the East India Company. This was not quite what the rajah had in mind. He felt that a ‘lady of rank’ should be found to look after the child. Moreover, the little girl was staying with her father in an hotel. The culture shock was mighty. He complained of ‘people lurking in the passages to see her’, and threatened that if she were further ‘humiliated’, he would have no alternative but to put her to death.11
The background was as painful as any colonial story could be. On the one hand, the Rajah of Coorg was getting a very poor deal from the East India Company. He had provided the British with ‘many thousands’ of his own subjects, to act as coolies for the Bombay army; he had supplied ‘upwards of 3,000 pack bullocks . . . 40,000 bottles of rice, 5 elephants, and 3,000 sheep. For all these supplies the Raja received no pecuniary indemnification.’12
There could be no doubt that the rajah had been swindled by the Company. On the other hand, he was no saint. Evidence had been collected of atrocities perpetrated under his regime. Lord William Bentinck had decided, as far back as 1834, that ‘the interests of humanity’ would be served by removing a man who, though open and friendly in his manner and a skilled horseman, performed such cruelties as forcing his subjects to act as human stockades around wild elephants during his hunting expeditions. Any who let the elephants escape were put to death. One witness, Richard Royle, ‘himself a half-caste’, said that he had been present when twenty-five heads were chopped off in one session at the rajah’s command, and he knew of sixty families where daughters had been hastily married off to absolutely anyone to avoid their being recruited into the rajah’s overcrowded seraglio.13
Little Gouramma had hardly grown up in the sedate atmosphere of Vicky, Bertie and the other royal children at Windsor. The Queen agreed to stand godmother to the child, who was baptized by Sumner, the Crumpet, in the chapel at Buckingham Palace on 1 July 1852. It was no hole-in-corner affair. Lord John Russell’s clergyman half-brother, Lord Wriothsley Russell, and Dean Gerald Wellesley, the nephew of the Duke of Wellington, assisted. The princess was, in effect, adopted by an Indian army couple, Major and Mrs Drummond, who took her riding, read her Gulliver’s Travels and tried to make her have the enthusiasms of an upper-class Scottish aristocrat. To some extent they succeeded, but Princess Victoria Gouramma was neither a demure nor a healthy person. Coquettish from the moment of her arrival in Britain, by the time she was sixteen the Drummonds found her as interested in stable boys as in ponies, more than once finding her wrapped in the arms of a groom. At the Juvenile Ball held at Buckingham Palace in April 1856, Gouramma danced merrily with the boys, and clearly attracted the Prince of Wales, but this was the first time she began to cough blood.
The Queen, who was really only a puritan when it came to considering the behaviour of her own children, never lost her affection for the Indian princess, however much of a scamp she was. For a confirmation present, she gave her a coral and diamond necklace, hoping ‘that these ornaments, instead of gratifying the vanity of the young Princess, may serve, when she looks at them, to remind her of the high duties and responsibilities which she has taken upon her’.14 The hope was a little optimistic. Some time in 1859, her father gave her a bag of jewels, before expiring and being buried in Kensal Green. The Drummonds, slightly unable to cope with the princess’s latest attachment (to an under-butler), applied to the Queen, who was entirely unshocked by the girl’s am
orous propensities and merely recommended that they take her on a continental tour.
Gouramma was not the only Indian child in whom the Queen took an interest. In 1854, the Maharajah Duleep Singh, the Lion of the Punjab, had arrived in England. He was a charming boy, as Hardinge had observed when bringing the Kingdom of the Punjab to an end, at the close of the last Sikh wars in 1850, and appropriating Duleep Singh’s greatest treasure, the Koh-i-Noor, which means ‘Mountain of Light’. This enormous uncut diamond, the size of a pigeon’s egg, had for generations been passed from conqueror to conqueror as a symbol of power in the Punjab. By stealing it for the Queen, Hardinge made a significant gesture, demonstrating – if further demonstration were required – that the British regarded themselves as lords of the Indian subcontinent.
When Duleep Singh was presented to Queen Victoria in July 1854, she felt decidedly embarrassed, and in later years, when the Koh-i-Noor had been recut, she felt shy of letting the maharajah see it. She was instantaneously enchanted by the boy who was as beautiful as he was charming, and it was fortunate that the young maharajah had arrived when Winterhalter was in England. The great painter was immediately commissioned to immortalize Duleep Singh in his youthful beauty. The painting, which hangs in a corridor at Osborne House, is one of Winterhalter’s best.
Duleep Singh, who grew up to become a country squire, with a large estate at Elveden, Suffolk, and a shoot much enjoyed by the Prince of Wales, had been baptized already, so there was no need, as in the case of Gouramma, to get bishops into Buckingham Palace to perform that ceremony. Until his ‘mid-life-crisis’, when he reverted to the Sikh religion, he was a practising member of the Church of England. The Queen’s hope was that Gouramma would marry her new protégé, but Duleep, at this stage at any rate, was too strait-laced for her, and when the pair were introduced, at Lord Normanby’s seat of Mulgrave Castle, it was not a success. At that house party, however, Singh introduced her to a Thackeravian roué called Colonel John Campbell. Meanwhile, the diligent Drummonds pursued an unsuccessful legal case against the East India Company to restore the maharajah’s appropriated property. A child was born to the marriage, but it was not a happy union. Princess Gouramma died of consumption, in not very salubrious lodgings in Jermyn Street. Colonel Campbell was seen slipping out of the house carrying a bag, presumably of the maharajah’s jewels. The Queen kept up with the daughter, whose name was Edith.
But all this was far in the future, and, as she sat sketching the fourteen-year-old Princess Gouramma, the Queen’s mind was on the war.
The dispatches in the press told a terrible story, which the public was not slow to grasp. It was not simply that tens of thousands of young men had been killed for no purpose, nor that many of them were languishing with disease in appalling conditions. This news, utterly distressing as it was, could almost have been endured had the accumulation of mistakes and disasters not trumpeted to the world that Britain was no longer capable of fighting a European war. The implications of this would take years to sink in, especially among the military top brass; but the stinging shame was almost immediate. When a radical MP, James Roebuck, put down a motion of censure on the Government’s handling of the war, the Foreign Secretary, Lord John Russell, resigned that very evening, and Aberdeen’s credibility, never strong, was in tatters. When his ministry fell, the Queen asked Lord Derby if he could come back and form a coalition War Cabinet, but was not able to do so. Little as Prince Albert (and to a lesser extent the Queen) wanted to admit it, there was one man whom the public wanted as Prime Minister, and only one man who could form a Cabinet. With one very short interruption (in 1858), he would be the Prime Minister for the next ten years.
The agitation in the Queen’s journal, as in the parliamentary world at large, before this fait became accompli, reads like one of Trollope’s political novels. ‘Much overpowered by the state of affairs, which is in the highest degree fatiguing, exciting and worrying,’ she wrote on 2 February, when Albert was still hoping against hope that Lord Lansdowne, Russell, anyone, might form a Government rather than his old enemy. The next day, Lord Palmerston came in person to Buckingham Palace and told Queen Victoria he was ‘at my orders’. The reverse was true, and she and the prince, a little oddly in the circumstances, decamped to Windsor. Lord Clarendon had already told them that he would not ‘step over the dead bodies of colleagues in order to join the man who had killed them’.15 The next day, with the blood still dripping from his dagger, Palmerston wrote to the Queen that he was in the position to form a Government. He further informed her that the Peelites were no longer prepared to serve under Aberdeen – a fact which she found ‘startling’ and ‘incomprehensible’.16 Palmerston was demonstrating to her in no uncertain way that his presentations of humble duty, his attendance upon the sovereign’s orders, were a mere form of words. He was the one who now exercised power in Britain. He did so under his sovereign, but there was no resisting that power. He promised her that he would try to negotiate a peaceful end to the war, and that he would not massacre all the Russians in Sevastopol. ‘That so good a government has been able to be formed is entirely owing to my dear kind, excellent friend, Lord Aberdeen, but to change him for Lord Palmerston is somewhat of a trial,’ she told herself. ‘Still, as matters now stand, it was decidedly the right and wise course to take.’17
Albert had been urging the Cabinet for months to bring in two measures – the completion of the militia by ballot, and the enlistment of foreign mercenaries. Both ideas were rejected. He then pointed out to them the incredible fact that there was no system of regular returns or statements from the Crimea about the numbers of men available for action, or what supplies they required – horses, clothing, guns, ammunition. Albert urged such a policy upon the Secretary of State for War, the Duke of Newcastle, but with little immediate effect. The message, however, did get through. When the duke resigned in February 1855, Lord Panmure, his replacement in Palmerston’s Cabinet, wrote to Lord Raglan in the Crimea in words which echoed the prince’s memorandum precisely.
By the time Palmerston became Prime Minister only a little more than half the British troops who had been dispatched to the Crimea still survived. Less than a month after Palmerston kissed his sovereign’s hands as premier, the Russian Emperor, hearing the news of yet another setback in the war (the failure of the attack on Eupatoria), succumbed to a minor illness and died. He had lost the will to live. The war, which had been so popular in England twelve months before, was now seen to be the pointless, bloody mess which the peace party had always predicted. The arrival of Palmerston as Prime Minister did not please either Albert or Victoria, but they had no choice in the matter, and relations between the new premier and the Court, at least in the matter of war policy, was unclouded by personal animosity. Now that Pam had what he wanted – unbridled power – he became more amiable to them. In one aspect at least, Palmerston acknowledged Albert’s help. When Lord Raglan died in June 1855, it was obvious that the most suitable replacement was General Codrington, but there were three other generals with higher claims of seniority. Albert suggested that the British force be divided into two army corps, and that two of the senior generals be given command of each corps under Codrington’s supervision. ‘I and all the other members of the Cabinet feel greatly obliged to your Royal Highness,’ wrote Palmerston, ‘for having suggested an arrangement which had not occurred to any of us.’18 It was a moment which might have reminded some Cabinet members that the old Duke of Wellington had thought so highly of the prince that he had proposed, in 1850, that Albert should succeed him as Commander-in-Chief.
There was not much which was amusing about the war, but one delightful consequence of the military alliance between France and Britain was the friendship which blossomed between the two Heads of State. The State Visit to Britain of Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie in April 1855 was, in Victoria’s words, ‘a most curious page of history’.19 The night before the imperial pair’s arrival, Prince Albert ate ‘a small
dinner’ at Windsor Castle: already, the ominous signs were apparent that moments of stress and tension disrupted his already weak digestion. He went to spend the night in Dover, and the next day, through a thick fog on the Channel, the Emperor and his wife arrived, to be conducted directly to Windsor. Both prince and Queen had gone to immense labour to ensure that the apartments were furnished appropriately. Only on the 13th, they had received a visit from the exiled Queen Marie-Amélie and Clém, and watched them drive away ‘in a plain coach with four miserable coach horses’.20 By the 15th, they had put the finishing touches to the room, ‘all hung with red satin, with the fine old pictures, handsome furniture, & a really beautiful bed, with feathers at the top of the canopy, the same as it was when it was in George IV’s State bedroom’.21 However much she had loved her Orléanist relations, Victoria was realistic enough to know that furniture, pictures, gold knives and forks and a state banquet must be used to reflect the political realities, and a profound change had taken place in European politics.
When Prince Albert arrived at the Castle with Napoleon and Eugénie, there was a guard of honour waiting for them. The band could scarcely play the republican anthem, ‘La Marseillaise’, in such a setting, so they played the old Napoleon’s march which had been composed by Napoleon III’s mother, ‘Partant pour la Syrie’. It is a song about a crusader departing for the Holy Land, so perhaps its pseudo-medieval piety was a bow in the direction of Napoleon’s provocative gift of the Silver Star to the Bethlehem shrine.