Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  There was, therefore, a strange paradox at work in British political life during the 1860s. For largely inner, psychological reasons, Victoria turned towards Germany in this decade, visiting and revisiting the palaces where her mother and Albert had grown up. She became increasingly aware, not least through letters to and from her daughter Vicky, the Prussian Crown Princess, her daughter Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse-Darmstadt, and her sister-in-law, Duchess Alexandrine of Coburg – with all of whom she engaged in more or less weekly, sometimes daily, correspondence – of the monumental changes which were taking place in Germany, and hence in the world. When many of the senior British statesmen of the age thought that the chief story of these years was to do with electoral reform at home – or with changes in Irish–British relations, or with the effects of the American Civil War on British trade – Victoria was one of only a small handful of people in the British Isles who was aware of the enormous convulsion brought to pass by the strength of Prussia and the career of Otto von Bismarck. The rumbling and complex question of who should rule over the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, in Southern Denmark or Northern Germany (depending upon your point of view), concealed the much bigger question of who would control not merely these little bits of territory in the Baltic, but the whole of Germany, and indeed the question of whether there might now actually be a political entity called Germany. Victoria, who by the end of the decade would have one child married to a Dane, and another to a Schleswig-Holsteiner, and several others to Germans from different parts of that land, possessed within her own family living evidence of the huge significance of the Schleswig-Holstein Question. Palmerston’s famous joke about it9 seems as crass, in hindsight, as Neville Chamberlain’s view that Czechoslovakia was a faraway country of which we know nothing. As we enter the 1860s, therefore, we need to hold several matters in our head at once: the Queen’s deep unhappiness, leading at times to an unbalanced state of mental health; the political changes coming to Britain as the old guard of ‘dreadful old men’ gave place to the rivalry between Disraeli and Gladstone; but also the new Europe which was coming into being. Seen through the prism of a biography of Queen Victoria, the paradox is that the supposedly ‘out of touch’ monarch, with her purely personal reasons for clinging to her German husband’s beloved memory and her German roots, was sometimes more politically aware than the old and middle-aged men who threw up their hands in despair because she was too weepy, and too far from London, to give what they considered sufficient attention to domestic politics.

  In 1848, when the Prussian prince had taken refuge in England, and so many convulsions had shaken the German states, Prince Albert had longed to be in Germany alongside his brother Ernst. To Stockmar, then a member of the Frankfurt Diet, Albert had sent his carefully drawn ‘plan for the new Germany’. It proposed a union of the German states with Austria, and an acceptance of the Austrian Emperor as the elected or constitutional head. Albert’s proposal was published posthumously as a pamphlet in 1867 – Zum Verständniss der deutschen Frage10 (‘Towards an Understanding of the German Question’) – but by then, events had moved on. Far from accepting a Habsburg Emperor as the unifying symbol of the German people, Prussia had inflicted upon Austria a military humiliation. Germany was moving towards another type of unification altogether with Prussia as the dominant partner. As for Albert, his influence could only survive from beyond the grave in the persons of his widow, his daughter Vicky, the Prussian Crown Princess, and her husband Fritz – ‘this fool of a Crown Prince’,11 as he was regarded by the man who was in fact to dominate German politics for the next decade and beyond – Otto von Bismarck.

  The rise of Bismarck was the central event of European political history in 1862. Wilhelm, Vicky’s father-in-law, who as the Prussian prince had taken refuge in London with Victoria and Albert during the Year of Revolutions, had been ruling as Regent in Berlin while his brother was mad. In 1861, that brother died, and Wilhelm succeeded as King of the Prussians. 1861, which had been so doleful a succession of bereavements for Queen Victoria, was for King Wilhelm I one of repeated constitutional crises. He was not by nature a democrat and the demands for constitutional reform, army reform and limits on his powers were more than this volatile and frequently tearful sixty-year-old monarch could tolerate. He drew up a deed of abdication in favour of his son Fritz. It was an astute political move by a natural conservative, causing as it did a closing of ranks by the right wing. The last thing required by the Junkers and the diehards was a Dummkopf Kronprinz, his head stuffed with English liberal ideas, sitting on the throne of Frederick the Great and offering votes to Jews and Poles, or Budget decisions referred to Cabinets. The Prussian Minister in Paris was called home to become the Prime Minister: this was Bismarck aged fifty and at the very height of his political energy. The King did not abdicate. Any dream that Prussia, or a United Germany, would become a liberal State based on British parliamentary principles, was firmly snuffed out. But this was not obvious at first, and for Queen Victoria, as for her daughter the Crown Princess – the very opposite of a Dummkopf, she! – there was now a sacred duty to continue Prince Albert’s work on earth.

  ‘Heaven forbid,’ wrote the Crown Princess to her mother at the beginning of 1862, ‘beloved Papa’s work of 20 years should be in vain. God requires immense sacrifices of you and has imposed most difficult duties on you but He has given you adored Papa for a pattern. His bright example will be your guide!’ This letter makes clear that Vicky expected her mother to play an active role not merely in British but in German politics. ‘Who can know his feelings and opinions on all things as well as you, beloved Mama! Who could carry out his plans better?’12

  The conflict between private heartbreak and public duty was, however, all but intolerable. When the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gladstone, made a public speech in Manchester in April 1862, the Queen poured out her feelings to him. Their later relations were strained and frozen, but in these bleak months, she could write from ‘the depth of a heart which bleeds more and more to tell Mr Gladstone that his speech touched and satisfied her much’. Gladstone, who as a follower of Sir Robert Peel, had been close politically to the Prince Consort, was also, like Albert, a person of relentless seriousness, filling every minute with intellectual research, or good works, or attempts to improve and reform the political system. For him the death of Albert had been a personal and political tragedy. The Queen could therefore write to him that

  He well described the love that bound and binds the poor heartbroken Queen, and that adored and perfect Being who was and is her All but without him, Life is utter darkness. The Queen struggles and works and will devote herself hourly to what her precious Husband wished . . . and do her duty – to the last hours of her life – but her faithful servants and kind friends must not deceive themselves by thinking her efforts will carry her on – for the continual longing – and pining – the void and suffering! which never ceases [sic] by day or night – accompanied by the amount of work and responsibility weighs alone upon her health and strength – she gets considerably weaker, her health worse, & her nerves terribly shattered . . . Mrs Gladstone who the Queen knows is a most tender wife – may in a faint measure picture to herself what the Queen suffers.13

  The old spectre which haunted her ministers was not the late Angel Prince Albert, but the ghost of mad King George III, Victoria’s grandfather. She warned Lord Derby that ‘three times at Balmoral she had thought she was going mad’. Lord Clarendon noticed that when she spoke of the state of her mind, her eye and manner ‘became excited’ and that she was ‘evidently in a highly nervous state’. More than once, she murmured, ‘My reason, my reason’ and tapped her forehead.14

  That March in Windsor, Clarendon was dismayed to note that she repeatedly referred to the prince and his opinions as if he were in the next room. His writing table, with fresh ink in the inkwell and a vase of flowers, was kept as if he were about to sit and pore over dispatches.15

  After her visit t
o Coburg in the first year after Albert’s death – in September 1862 – she wrote, ‘I miss dear, dear Coburg so much! It was full of all precious recollections – in fact I felt it like the home of my childhood (which you know is swept away in England). I miss the dear German language, all which I feel necessary to my very existence. Do you all cherish it, and do so when I am gone – promise me all of you? Tell Bertie how pleased I am to hear he loves our precious Coburg.’16

  Though her own marriage was over, the Queen could not neglect to attend to the marriage prospects of her growing children. Eighteen-year-old Alice’s betrothal to Prince Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt had been arranged by July 1861. A dowry of £30,000 had been voted by Parliament for the girl, as well as an annual allowance of £6,000;17 wracked by grief as Victoria was, she knew that this was not a marriage which could be passed over. So, on 1 July 1862, the wedding took place in the drawing room at Osborne House. ‘The Archbishop of York [Longley] read that fine service (purified from its worst coarsenesses) admirably, and himself had tears running down his cheeks – for he too lost his dear partner not long ago. I sat the whole time in an armchair, with our four boys near me; Bertie and Affie led me down stairs. The latter sobbed all through and afterwards – dreadfully.’18 The coarsenesses of the Prayer Book to which the Queen objected were those lines in the service suggesting that holy matrimony was ordained ‘for a remedy against sin and to avoid fornication’, even though it was not to be undertaken merely ‘to satisfy men’s carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding’.19

  Alice, who had borne the brunt of her mother’s wildest grief in the previous seven months, now went to her new life in Germany. Lady Augusta Bruce had noticed that the nineteen-year-old had become ‘a different creature’20 since her father died, wise beyond her years, but also – she had inherited her father’s intense seriousness and her mother’s sense of tragedy – a solemn creature, plagued with depressions and doubts. It was almost as if she intuited that hers was to be a tragic destiny. In Darmstadt, she was often extremely homesick. Particularly, she missed Bertie, her favourite sibling. A carrier of haemophilia, she would become the mother of seven children, at least three of whom were affected by the cursed gene. Her married life was pitted against the background of German civil war. Two of her daughters, Elisabeth and Alix, had unhappy fates: Elisabeth, as the wife of Sergei, Grand Duke of Russia, saw her husband murdered, and was herself hurled into a lime pit by revolutionaries. Alix, as the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna, was the last of the tsarinas, massacred at Ekaterinburg. Alice was a woman with a devoted social conscience, and a great promoter of nursing. She was in full correspondence with Octavia Hill, the social reformer, about the condition of the London poor. Royal biographies abound with sycophantic hyperboles about figures who would not attract any notice were they not of illustrious descent. Alice was not one such. She was a genuinely interesting nineteenth-century woman – acutely alive to all the changes in society going on around her, not least in the position of women; a kind and attentive friend and mother and, like her sister Vicky, highly intelligent; but carrying this strange doomed feeling. 14 December, that day of dread when she lost her father, would be a date of doleful significance in her own life too.

  It was essential to marry Bertie to a suitable bride, and Victoria continued, somewhat strangely – given her strong views about Schleswig-Holstein – with plans to wed him to the Danish princess. The Queen never entirely shook off the belief that the Prince Consort’s death had been Bertie’s fault, that the saintly Albert had been forced to an early grave by the lechery of his son. She needed Bertie out of her sight in the immediate aftermath of Albert’s death; and she needed to make him respectable. It was therefore decided to dispatch him on an improving tour of the Levant, with General Bruce and that unworldly scholar, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, the ‘Arthur’ of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, who shamed the rough dormitory at Rugby by kneeling down to pray before getting into his bed. It is hard to think of any three men less different in character than Stanley, an ethereal aristocrat scholar, the bluff General Bruce and Bertie, whose chief interests at this date were women and horse racing. To the credit of all three, they made a fist of it, and the tour was far from disastrous. Bertie recommended the older men to read East Lynne, a trashy novel by Mrs Henry Wood, and Stanley, rather as if he were discussing one of the Dialogues of Plato with Benjamin Jowett on a Balliol reading party, gave his great mind to the intricacies of Mrs Wood’s sensational tale.

  While Bertie was away, Victoria and Vicky set to work to expedite his wedding arrangements: for it was obvious that continence was impossible to him, and they believed – with unfounded optimism, as history would quickly make plain – that if he were happily settled with a good wife, he would stop philandering. Sure enough, when he returned his mother could report, ‘He is much improved, and’ – what amounted to a synonym – ‘is ready to do every thing I wish.’21

  The victim of the trip was Bruce, who succumbed to liver failure and died shortly after their return, aged only forty-nine. Whether the tedium of Bertie’s expositions of East Lynne had forced the general to apply himself too liberally to the brandy bottle or whether he picked up ‘gippy tummy’ from some Levantine swamp will never be known. Victoria, of course, held Bertie responsible. ‘Dear, dear General Bruce!’ exclaimed the Queen, ‘he has sacrificed his valued life for our poor dear child! And Bertie is quite overwhelmed by it. Poor dear child! He is indeed very forlorn. Oh! God! For what purpose is all this?’22

  After Alice’s wedding – ‘more like a funeral than a wedding’23 – the Queen took off for Germany. She was accompanied to Coburg by her sons, twelve-year-old Arthur and the haemophiliac Leopold, aged nine. The journey came to an abrupt halt in Reinhardtsbrunn, the Gothic hunting lodge built for Victoria’s uncle and father-in-law Duke Ernst I on the edge of the Thüringer Wald. Leopold, presumably sucking a sharp steel pen in the carriage out of boredom, pierced the roof of his mouth with the nib. The bleeding could not be controlled. Dr Jenner got to work with his usual remedy – emetics and laxatives – which had no effect on the bleeding. Rudolph Loehlein, Prince Albert’s former valet, did his best to keep the child comfortable, and they eventually sent for Professor Wilms, a specialist in Berlin, who painted a strong cauterizing solution on the roof of the child’s mouth and ordered finger pressure on the wound, no matter what the difficulty, at the first sign of any bleeding.

  ‘He has not lost near as much blood as frequently before,’ the Queen wrote to Alice, ‘but the fear was – the bleeding cd. not be stopped & then – you know he cld. not have lived. On Tuesday night I went in at 1/2 p. 11 & there he was – nursed by Loehlein – very sick – bringing up blood – & it was an anxious sad sight.’24

  The prospect of losing her sick son, however, was less terrible to her than the dissolute behaviour of his two elder brothers, Bertie, with his clubs, mistresses, late nights of gambling, and Affie, who, having recovered from typhoid in Malta, seemed hell-bent on pursuing a life of dissipation which was scarcely more edifying. ‘But oh!’ exclaimed the Queen in a letter to Vicky a year later, as she contemplated another instance of poor little Leopold’s painful bleeding, ‘the illness of a good child is so far less trying than the sinfulness of one’s sons – like your two elder brothers. Oh! Then one feels that death in purity is so far preferable to life in sin and degradation!’25

  Professor Wilms’s treatment, however, worked and the child lived. The royal party reached Coburg on 3 October.

  Queen Victoria was in Germany during one of the most crucial months of its history, the very week when King Wilhelm I of Prussia tried to abdicate in favour of her son-in-law Fritz, and Bismarck, recently installed as Minister President, the most powerful man in Prussia, talked him out of it. Bismarck was from now on, throughout this pivotal decade, in control of events. Albert’s vision of Europe and the future of Germany is laid to one side in favour of the policy of the extreme right.

>   In October 1862, news reached London of the deposition of the unpopular King Otto of Greece. The vacant throne was offered by the army to Nicholas, Duke of Leuchtenberg, a cousin of the Russian Emperor. The mass of the Greeks, however, favoured a constitutional monarchy on the British pattern. A plebiscite was held, and Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh – Affie – was chosen by the Hellenes by a huge majority as their monarch of choice. Greek politics, however, has never been easy, and the three Great Powers had taken a self-denying ordinance that they would not supply a monarch for Greece. Greatly to his relief, therefore, Affie was ineligible. It was offered to his uncle Ernst – Prince Albert’s brother – who turned it down. Eventually the Greeks were given Prince Wilhelm of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, who was crowned as King of the Hellenes the following year. As an inducement to the Greeks to accept this arrangement, Lord John Russell arranged that the Ionian Islands, which had been a British Protectorate since 1815, should now be ceded to Greece. The new King was seventeen. He ruled as King George for nearly fifty years until his assassination in 1913. He was the grandfather of Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, husband of Queen Elizabeth II.