by A. N. Wilson
Bertie proved more than a match for his tutor Mr Gibbs – just as he had been the ‘despair’ of Gibbs’s predecessor Mr Birch.14 The parents made the sensible decision to supplant Mr Gibbs and to put the boy in charge of a ‘governor’. For this role they selected the brother of Lady Augusta Bruce – the much-loved and admired young lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Kent. Colonel Bruce was ideally suited to the task. He showed ‘a clear insight into poor Bertie’s difficult character, so full of anomalies! Oh I feel full of anxiety for the future!’15 ‘You will find Bertie grown up and improved,’ the Prince Consort told his daughter, who was expecting her brother for a three-week visit to Berlin. ‘Do not miss any opportunity of urging him to work hard.’16 It was a successful visit, as far as his German hosts were concerned. They were able to see the boy’s charm, his affability, where his parents only saw idleness, stupidity, interrupted by periodic fits of the Hanoverian rages. It baffled Prince Albert that Bertie made no comment on the buildings or works of art in any of the European cities he visited. ‘He takes no interest in anything but clothes and again clothes.’17 If his father but knew, this was not the case. While abroad, Bertie took the opportunity to write, not a connoisseur’s notebook of favourite Old Masters, but letters to one of the Queen’s prettiest ladies-in-waiting, Jane Churchill. During that visit to Berlin, he remained his unregenerate self, according to his mother ‘playing practical jokes of a shameful nature on his poor valets!’ The Queen added, ‘He has been unable to vent it on any one else (formerly he had his poor animals) and this is the result.’18
His parents did the obvious thing and decided to give the undisciplined young loafer a military training. Although Victoria’s soldier-father had trained in Germany, where real military skills and discipline could be forcefully instilled, in the case of the Prince of Wales, it was decided, with very predictable results, that he should merely be enlisted in the British Army in the lazy pre-Crimean fashion. On 9 November, he got his commission as a lieutenant colonel, but he could not be a proper soldier since he had no military training of any kind. They sent him for three months to Edinburgh University, then for a term at Oxford. It was a haphazard existence, and in marked contrast to the way they were training his younger brother Alfred for a professional career in the Royal Navy. The contrast between the way that Affie buckled down to his training as a naval cadet only served to make their mother the more indignant with Bertie’s perpetual indolence. ‘When I see him and Arthur and look at . . . ! (You know what I mean!) I am in utter despair! The systematic idleness, laziness, disregard of everything is enough to break one’s heart, and fills me with indignation. Alice behaved so admirably about it – and has much influence with him – but to you, I own, I am wretched about it!’19
The Queen was writing to Vicky in Germany, adding in a letter the following week that she was making Bertie read aloud to her in the mornings (Dr Arnold’s Sermons).20 The letters she wrote to Vicky are a spontaneous stream of consciousness, and we read them as she wrote them – unlike the journals, which were transcribed and censored by Princess Beatrice. For whatever reason, it is in these letters that we find Queen Victoria without any mask or inhibition. The young girl’s marriage set off in the mother a candid series of recollections about her own difficulties in the early years of wedlock. Within weeks of the wedding, the Queen checked that Vicky was not pregnant.
I cannot tell you how happy I am that you are not in an unenviable position. I never can rejoice by hearing that a poor young thing is pulled down by this trial. Though I quite admit the comfort and blessing good and amiable children are – though they are also an awful plague and anxiety for which they show one so little gratitude very often! What made me so miserable was – to have the first two years of my married life utterly spoilt by this occupation! I could enjoy nothing – not travel or go about with dear Papa and if I had waited a year, as I hope you will, it would have been different.21
Only a month later, however, on 26 May 1858, she wrote, ‘The horrid news contained in Fritz’s letter to Papa upset us dreadfully. The more so as I feel certain almost it will come to nothing.’22 Many a mother would have held back from telling a child aged seventeen that her birth had ruined the first year of marriage; and many a mother, also, would at least pretend to be pleased when hearing of that child’s first pregnancy. But Queen Victoria was not any mother. As well as describing the pregnancy as ‘horrid news’, she predicted a miscarriage, for no clear reason. Later in the pregnancy, when Vicky spoke of her pride at giving life to an immortal soul, her mother retorted, ‘What you say of the pride of giving life to an immortal soul is very fine, my dear, but I own I cannot enter into that; I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments; when our poor nature becomes so very animal and unecstatic.’23
Prince Albert visited his daughter in June on his way to and from Coburg. In August he came back for an extended visit of two and a half weeks, but this time, bringing Queen Victoria, Sir James Clark and – despite their assurances that it was a purely private, family visit – Lord Malmesbury, the Conservative Foreign Secretary. The Queen was nearly always happy when abroad. The crowds in Berlin cheered her in the streets. And they were enchanted by the Schloss Babelsberg, Prince Wilhelm’s neo-Gothic summer palace, set among rolling lawns which sloped down to the river and conveniently near the military barracks where Fritz reported most days. (Sir James Clark, who was less impressed than the Queen by the atmosphere of the Prussian Court, complained of the ‘perpetual uniform . . . none of the Royal Family, or princely class, ever appear out of the stiff military dress, the whole country seems occupied in playing at soldiers’.24)
Prince Albert had been ill, on and off, throughout the summer, a fact which Sir James attributed to overwork. The death of his old valet Cart – the last link with his Coburg childhood – threw him into a decline, and the visits to Vicky, delightful as they were to him, were tarnished, inevitably, by the stab of parting.
In September 1858, back in the Schloss in Berlin which she found so depressing, Vicky caught her foot in a chair and fell ‘with violence on the slippery parquet’. She always afterwards blamed this fall for the baby being in a ‘false position’ in her womb. She kept the fall from her mother. The Queen continued to bombard Vicky with advice, while keeping the news of their sister’s pregnancy a secret from the other children. When Affie, the naval cadet, aged fourteen, visited Vicky, he pointed to her extended stomach, but did not know what this signified. She did not dare to tell him, since the matter had not been cleared with their parents, who were still in Balmoral – ‘while Papa was after the stag – and good J. Brown was so attentive to us and so careful – he is now my special servant’.25 Picnicking among the heather, little Princess Helena (Lenchen) told Brown that it was the birthday of Fritz (Prince Friedrich Wilhelm). Mishearing or misunderstanding, Brown thought she was saying that the birth had already happened, and exclaimed with delight, ‘Aye! Has she got a girl or a boy?’ The Queen would have been outraged had an English flunkey presumed to suggest that her daughter had given birth seven months after her wedding; but she merely laughed, and was amused at Lenchen’s bafflement, since ‘she suspects nothing’.26
From Windsor, on 27 October, the Queen confided her grief that Affie – still ignorant of the facts of life – had gone off to sea for ten months. She also gave notice that she was interviewing midwives and nurses to care for Vicky and the baby when it came. So amused was she by ‘the mistake of good J. Brown’ that she repeated it, adding that she still had not told Vicky’s siblings – ‘those things are not proper to be told to children’.27 She eventually found a very reliable-seeming maid, Mrs Hobbs; but in common with most of her Punch-reading contemporaries, the Queen found Mrs Hobbs’s Cockney accent irresistibly funny, calling her a ‘Hatcher’, that is, someone who misplaced aspirates. A letter from Mrs Hobbs assuring Princess Beatrice’s nurse, Mrs Thurston, that ‘the princess his[sic] getting on very well’ struck the Queen as
side-splittingly amusing, and she reported that Mrs Thurston ‘is horrified at the prospect of the little individual speaking Cockney English’.28 Had she been allowed to mix, during her girlhood, with the British aristocracy in the 1820s and 1830s, Victoria would have noticed that many of them spoke Cockney too, as they continued to do into the twentieth century. (Listen to the early radio broadcasts of her grandson King George V for traces of this ‘upper-class Cockney’, which was very strong, too, in King Edward VIII’s diction. Was it attributable to the fact that this class was all reared by nannies?)
Lord Clarendon, now out of office, happened to be in Berlin in October, where he encountered Baron Stockmar. ‘I want to talk to you,’ said the old doctor, ‘on a very important matter and to invoke your aid. It relates to “this poor child here”’ – Vicky. Stockmar told Clarendon that the Queen ‘wishes to exercise the same authority and control over her that she did before her marriage: and she writes her constant letters full of anger and reproaches, desiring all sorts of things to be done that it is neither right nor desirable that she should do’.29 Stockmar asked Clarendon, when he returned to England, to pass on their concerns to the Prince Consort.
Roger Fulford, the editor both of the Queen’s letters to Vicky, and of the Greville journals in which this incident is recorded, points out the unfairness of Stockmar’s confiding in Albert, and putting all the blame for ‘interference’ on the Queen; for, wrote Fulford, ‘if she was “meddling with trivialities” [Stockmar’s phrase] the prince was attempting to guide the young couple on political matters’.30
Albert continued to be ill as autumn turned to winter. Just before Christmas he took Bertie to the Latin play at Westminster School and, for once, was relieved by the boy’s ignorance of the ancient tongues, since the drama was ‘very improper’. As Bertie and his siblings moved into their sexual maturity, the still-young parents became ever more fastidious. This pair, who had produced nine children, and enjoyed hymning the delights of connubial love to one another, were prudish even by the standards of that generation of Podsnaps. Does the excessiveness of their disapproval of any hint of bawdry suggest a crisis, or even a cessation, in their carnal relations? It is clear that the Queen had not yet reached the menopause. It is equally clear that she had hated her final two pregnancies and confinements even more than the previous seven; that a line had been drawn. For whatever reason, Victoria and Albert had turned into parodies of hypersensitivity where sex was concerned. Even that arch-puritan Cardinal Newman rehearsed the pupils of the Birmingham Oratory with a Latin comedy each year, usually Terence, though with some of the more flagrant crudities excised.
The Crown Princess’s confinement was at the end of January. ‘God be praised for all his mercies, and for bringing you safely through this awful time!’ wrote the Queen on 29 January, but she did so because Vicky had kept her mother in ignorance of the full nightmare of the experience, described by Cecil Woodham-Smith as ‘one of the worst recorded in obstetrical history’.
Labour began shortly after midnight on 26 January 1859. The rest of the night was spent either on the bed, or walking around the room, supported by Fritz, or two of her German ladies, Countess Blücher and Countess Perponcher. When labour began the house physician, Dr Wegner, called for Dr Martin, the specialist. By a series of mischances, the note did not reach Martin until 10 am, and by the time he arrived it was almost too late. After eight or nine hours of screaming and writhing, and begging for everyone’s forgiveness, Vicky had consented to have a handkerchief put in her mouth to prevent her from grinding her teeth and biting herself. Countess Blücher and Mrs Innocent, the midwife sent over by Queen Victoria, were in despair. One of the doctors in the room was openly saying that the baby would die. It was a breech birth, and it seems doubtful that the deferential Dr Wegner had conducted the necessary examination to establish this fact. When Martin arrived, he told Sir James Clark to give Vicky chloroform, though she still complained of ‘unbearable pain’ even after being dosed. Martin gave her a uterine stimulant to increase the frequency and intensity of the pains. He then extracted the child, who appeared to be dead. It took some time to start the child’s breathing, which could have resulted in loss of oxygen to the brain. Shortly after the infant began to cry, a 101-gun salute told the Prussian people that a new heir to the throne had been born. It was a boy.
Such was the relief in the room that the child was alive that no one seemed to notice, at first, that the baby’s left arm hung useless from its socket. Nerve damage is common in breech deliveries, but it was three or four days after the birth of the boy – named Wilhelm – before Mrs Innocent noticed the lifeless arm. The doctors, anxious not to be blamed, minimized the extent to which the arm was useless.31 Pascal perhaps exaggerated when he wondered if the course of world history would have been different had Cleopatra’s nose been a hint shorter. It would not, however, be an exaggeration to say that the dangerous psycho-history of the future German Emperor Wilhelm II was affected most profoundly by his useless arm, and by the misplaced guilt which would poison his mother’s relationship with him.
THIRTEEN
‘ARME FRAU’
THOMAS HARDY, THE architect-turned-novelist who was born three years after Queen Victoria came to the throne, borrowed a phrase from the Greek tragedian Aeschylus to conclude his most celebrated book. ‘The President of the Immortals, in the Aeschylean phrase, had finished his sport with Tess.’
Those who follow the life of Queen Victoria must feel, as they approach the year 1861, a comparable sense of doom. The characters in the tragedy step ineluctably towards a dreadful fate. It is a drama in which even the comic elements, such as young Bertie’s irresponsible burgeoning erotomania, seem like ingenious plot-devices which can lead only to the cataclysmic unravelling.
The outward events of the story were to be sad by any reckoning. But before they unfolded, the Queen’s own state of mind was something which had already caused anxiety to her medical advisers.
When Albert tried, as delicately as he could, to pass on Stockmar’s advice to the Queen, about toning down her bossiness in letters to Vicky, there was an explosion of wrath against the baron. It led to a series of rows with Albert himself, who, plainly, found it difficult to restrain his anger with a completely unreasonable Victoria.
‘You have again lost your self-control quite unnecessarily,’ he wrote to her.
I did not say a word which could wound you, and I did not begin the conversation, but you have followed me about and continued it from room to room. There is no need for me to promise to trust you, for it was not a question of trust, but of your fidgety nature, which makes you insist on entering, with feverish eagerness, into details about orders and wishes which, in the case of a Queen, are commands, to whomsoever they may be given. This is your nature; it is not against Vicky, but it is the same with everyone and has been the cause of much unpleasantness for you. It is the dearest wish of my heart to save you from these and worse consequences, but the only result of my efforts is that I am accused of want of feeling, hard heartedness, injustice, hatred, jealousy, distrust, etc. etc. I do my duty towards you even though it means that life is embittered by ‘scenes’ when it should be governed by love and harmony. I look upon this with patience as a test which has to be undergone, but you hurt me desperately and at the same time do not help yourself.1
Ticking in the background, while they bickered, was another time bomb: Victoria’s unexplored emotional history with her mother. Ever since her daughter had married Prince Albert, the Duchess of Kent had been a more or less exemplary royal parent. It is clear from her voluminous correspondence with the Queen (Victoria answering about one letter in three of her mother’s) that Victoire of Saxe-Coburg was grovelling in her acknowledgement of the monarch’s absolute right to command or dismiss her. From the beginning of the reign, when the teenaged Queen had banished Conroy, there was always the dread, on the mother’s part, that she would also be spurned. Not an ann
iversary was missed by the old lady. Every grandchild’s birthday was remembered. Presents were sent, wherever they happened to be. Permission was always sought to visit them. Deferential thanks were always sent when she had so much as been allowed to sit at the dinner table. It is clear from the many notes and letters which the duchess sent her daughter that no actual estrangement occurred. The pair were in the same room together during much of the year, except for those months of the summer when the duchess tended to return to Germany to spend time with her son Charles and her daughter Feodore. At the same time, the notes and letters tell a consistent story of studied neglect by the Queen. A typical letter, going through arrangements for the summer of 1853, says, ‘As I can never find a quiet moment to speak to you, I will better put down my plans in writing, that you and Albert may say if you approve or disapprove.’2 (There follows a series of requests, asking permission to have Feodore to stay, and acquainting the Queen with the comings and goings of the duchess’s ladies-in-waiting.) The letters cannot conceal the fact that, although she was nearly always accompanied by her ladies – and the Baroness Späth was a constant presence – the duchess felt intense loneliness. ‘O, Victoria, why are you so cold and indifferent with your Mother; who loves you so dearly?’3 She asked the question when Victoria was a little over twenty years old, but it would have been just as relevant to ask it when she was turning forty.
Victoria had poured all her emotional energy into her marriage, and, almost literally, she had no time for her mother. In order to make this possible to her conscience, Victoria had told herself a story – that her mother had been cold and unfeeling during an ‘unhappy’ childhood. The Queen had chosen to view her childhood through the screen of those unhappy months and years when, as an adolescent, she had clashed violently with Conroy, and blamed her mother for not keeping him under control. By telling herself this story, and then acting upon it for twenty years, Victoria gave herself the freedom and time to neglect her mother emotionally, while concentrating upon Albert, her marriage and her role as Queen.