by A. N. Wilson
In Albert’s lifetime, Victoria had been persuaded to turn away from her partisan love of Lord Melbourne and the eighteenth-century Whigs, to a belief in the progressive conservatism of Robert Peel. Such a creed did not suit her temperament. She was an impulsive romantic, not a moderate; she was by nature an autocrat. And a world in which journalists or pamphleteers or Members of Parliament could tell the Royal Family how to behave was not one to which she ever recognized herself as belonging.
Unfortunately for those who felt themselves responsible for advising the Queen about what would now be called her ‘public image’, Victoria had no coyness in the face of popular opinion. She continued to micromanage political affairs, commenting in detail upon every Cabinet appointment, and every vacant bishopric, while following international affairs with anguished and close attention. But she refused to be paraded in person on the public stage, and in so far as the public were becoming aware of her private behaviour, she retained a haughty indifference to this fact which reduced courtiers and politicians to despair. When one uses the word ‘haughty’, however, it is not to suggest that she dismissed the advice of her private secretary or her Prime Minister from a position of strength. For much of this period, she was deeply ill – mentally ill, and plagued by psychosomatic pains, neuralgia, sleeplessness and fear. The last years of the 1860s constitute the shadowiest and most impenetrable period of Victoria’s life.
Yet, though reduced to panic by public ceremonials, and resistant to the bossy advice of Government ministers, the Queen was not unaware of the public. Far from it. Victoria was an historical figure of profound paradox. On the one hand, she could be viewed as someone who was deeply resistant to the political progressivism of her times. She viewed political radicalism with horror, and came to feel that Gladstone, by embracing it, or using it for his own political ends, was actually insane. She stubbornly resisted the attempts by politicians to make her into a modern ‘constitutional monarch’. Indeed, the more time elapsed from the deaths of Peel, Prince Albert and Baron Stockmar, the more she seemed to lay aside their lessons. Some of her retorts to Prime Ministers about such varied matters as the Civil List, army reform and foreign policy could have been made by Charles I before the First Civil War. She was at her happiest with large-C Conservative Prime Ministers, and in many ways her happiest political collaboration was not with Disraeli – the most famous of her political flirtations – but with that highest of high Tories, Lord Salisbury, at the end of her reign.
But there was another side to her mercurial personality which is curiously modern. Resistant to opening Parliament, or new bridges, or being ‘on parade’, she might have been. But she was not at all reluctant to come forward as an author. In an age when the printed word was the only means of popular communication, the published word was the most immediate and intimate means of communication. Victoria, who was shy of appearing in the House of Lords with a crown on her head, was prepared to have her journals put up for sale in bookshops alongside the popular novels of the day.
In the last ten years of the life of Diana Princess of Wales, and in the aftermath of her untimely death, it was said by conservative-minded commentators that Diana had introduced a new and rather un-British element into the formula of modern monarchy. As well as being a star performer on the public stage, which Victoria never was, Diana was also someone who hugely increased her personal popularity, not by hiding, but by displaying her emotions. ‘Feel my pain’ was a motto which had not been part of the royal vocabulary in the twentieth century. After the abdication of Edward VIII, Queen Mary, his mother, broke with protocol. It used to be the case that the widowed consorts of previous sovereigns did not attend Coronations. But, since the monarchy had just passed through so appalling a crisis, Queen Mary did attend the Coronation of George VI, who, with his wife Elizabeth, was faced with the task of rebuilding the monarchy after the debacle. At that ceremony, Queen Mary openly wept: it was a fact which was officially censored in all accounts of the ceremony, but in her diary, she wrote, ‘We were all much moved . . . A wonderful day.’3
‘Feel my pain’ was not the invention of Diana Princess of Wales as a royal message to the public. Queen Victoria chose to convey that message to her public in the most modern method available to her: through publication. In 1867, she made a private publication of Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, from 1848 to 1861. It was dedicated to the beloved memory of Prince Albert, and circulated among courtiers and close friends.
The contents were indeed written by the Queen’s own hand, but the book had been compiled from her journals by Arthur Helps, Clerk to the Privy Council. Helps had already prepared The Principal Speeches and Addresses of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort for publication in 1862, and by assembling selections of her journals he excluded the many references to ‘political questions and affairs of government’ with which she peppered her writings.
She did not actually decide to go public with the journals until the summer of 1867, when she visited Abbotsford, the former home of Scotland’s grandest man of letters. She was staying with the Duke and Duchess of Roxburghe at Floors Castle, near Kelso, in the Scottish borders, and it was suggested that the Queen would like to visit the treasure-house on the banks of the Tweed built by Sir Walter Scott. The present inhabitant was Scott’s grandson-in-law, James Hope-Scott, who had converted to Rome and built a Catholic chapel in which John Henry Newman, another avid reader of the Waverley novels, had offered Mass. Hope-Scott had married, en secondes noces, in 1861, one of Queen Victoria’s god-daughters, Lady Victoria Fitzalan-Howard (daughter of the 14th Duke of Norfolk).
It will be remembered that the great Sir Walter had met Victoria on 19 May 1828, during the festivities for Victoria’s ninth birthday, and dined at Kensington Palace. The Library at the Schloss Rosenau was largely inspired by Duke Ernst I’s mania for Scott. And as a child Victoria had enjoyed dressing some of her large collection of dolls as characters from Scott’s Elizabethan fiction Kenilworth. ‘Walter Scott is my beau ideal of a poet,’ the Queen once said.4
Abbotsford has been described as a Waverley novel in stone. Here may be seen the study where Scott wrote many of the novels. Here is to be found his unsurpassed library of Scottish lore and history, and his collection of mementoes – Archbishop Sharp of St Andrew’s grate, the rosary of Mary Queen of Scots, Rob Roy’s dirk, and so forth. And here too was that, in some ways, most remarkable of all treasures, Scott’s journals, the record of his bankruptcy following the crash of London banks in 1826, and his heroic decision to save his estates, and his creditors, by a fervid five years of writing, an act of scribal hyper-energy which led to his premature death in 1832.
The Queen was asked to sign her name in Scott’s journal, ‘which I thought hardly right’.5 The royal party then entered the dining room, with its pretty Coalport china and its view of the babbling Tweed, where fruits, ices and other refreshments had been prepared. ‘Her Majesty partook only of a cup of tea and “Selkirk bannock”’.6 (For the uninitiated, the Selkirk bannock is a deliciously fruity flat bun, crammed with currants and raisins.)
Scott, who was a Sheriff-Depute for Selkirk, and an Edinburgh lawyer of distinction, had initially kept his identity as a novelist quite secret. The publication of his biography in 1837, by his son-in-law Lockhart, contained copious extracts from the journal; this made him the reverse of an anonymous Enlightenment lawyer. Instead, he became, in the pages of his incomparable7 journals, a character as vivid as any he drew in his fiction. Classicist and son of the Enlightenment as he was, he was now, like any of his Romantic heroes, a man whose own struggles and pains and inner thoughts had become the most fascinating thing about him.
The Queen was to follow this pattern. She was not only the Head of State. She was also a woman screaming inside the royal straitjacket and sometimes longing for release.
Of course, Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands was very mild, being a chronicle of pi
cnics and sketching parties among mountainous scenery. Their excitement was not in what they revealed, but in the fact that they had been published at all. Not since Royalist propagandists published Charles I’s pious reflections on the eve of his execution, the Eikon Basilike, had there ever been published in Britain a book purporting to be the work of a monarch. And the Leaves was a good deal more intimate than the Eikon Basilike.
Bound in embossed, moss-green covers, decorated with antler motifs in gold, the book was first published in January 1868. It sold 20,000 copies almost immediately. It was soon to sell 100,000 and to be translated into several languages. The royalties accrued were all given to charities. Theodore Martin, the biographer of the Prince Consort, was responsible for administering the royalties, but it was typical of Victoria that she micromanaged the sums involved:
The Queen thanks Mr Martin very much for his two letters and for the cheque which she has sent this day to Mr Helps. She quite approves of what he intends doing with the remaining £4,016 6s. Of this the Queen would wish him to send her a cheque for £50 which she wishes to give away. £2,516 she wishes absolutely to devote to a charity such as she spoke of, and the remaining £1,450 she wishes to keep for other gifts of a charitable nature, at least to people who are not rich. Would Mr Martin just keep an account of sums he sends her so that we may know how and at what time the money has been disposed of? The Queen will keep a copy of the names which she does not wish others to know.8
Like Sir Walter Scott’s journals, the Queen’s abound in reflections on the sturdy, earthy and amusing nature of the Scottish character. And it might be said that the hero of the Leaves is the man who, next to that of the Prince Consort, is forever associated with her memory. There are twenty-one separate references in the book to John Brown. When the Prince of Wales received his copy, he complained that, while Brown was so frequently mentioned, he, her firstborn son, was not. She tersely replied listing the pages in which the prince was in fact mentioned. The frosty exchange demonstrated the painfulness of the subject. Bertie had not properly read the book (does evidence exist that he ever read any book through, except East Lynne by Mrs Henry Wood?). The royal children all felt excluded by their mother’s adoration of Brown, and embarrassment at the innocence, or brazenness, with which she flaunted it.
Victoria and Albert had both found enormous refreshment, when at Balmoral, in escaping the stultifying formality of court life. She loved the Highlanders’ lack of side. ‘I’m happy tae see ye lookin sae nice,’ said old Mrs Grant – the mother of one of the gillies – to the Queen one day. It made Victoria glow with pleasure. Many people, including Victoria herself, feared at times for her sanity. It could be fairly said that without Balmoral, and the friendship of Brown during the 1860s, Victoria probably would have gone mad – or even madder than she actually was.
‘Remember Brown? Aye that I do; and a very good fellow he was too. Sometimes when I was a’ mowin’ the lawns – it used to take me fourteen days to go right over all of ’em – anywhere near the house if he seed me, he’d put up his hand in the air and call, “Hi, Jackman!” and he’d say when I come up: “Don’t stay thirsty out in the sun an’ heat; you just go in the hall and say I sent you in for a good draught”’. So remembered William Jackman, one of the Balmoral estate workers.9
Brown took a similarly protective attitude towards his Queen, and his own dependence upon alcohol would lead him to apply similar counsel to her in her troubles. ‘Don’t stay thirsty.’ It is an essential part of the story. Without recognizing the presence of the whisky bottle, there is much about the behaviour of both Brown and Victoria which is difficult to fathom. (Much is difficult to fathom even with the whisky bottle, but of this, more later.)
It was during that summer of 1864 that Princess Alice had the discussion with Dr Jenner and Colonel Phipps, and Brown became a permanent fixture at Court.
His arrival brought back a vital element of stability to the Queen’s life. No one could replace Albert. That was a given. But at last she had what she had always so very much felt she needed: a man at her side. Though it would have been a blasphemy to whisper it, a blasphemy, that is, against the Religion of Albert which was her professed creed, history can also see that Brown represented a refreshing change. Albert, for all his greatness, was a fussy man, a stickler, a pedant, a sickly man who could not overindulge in food or drink. Prince Albert’s most ardent admirer10 would not look to him for laughs. Victoria saw in Brown one of the bluff, honest sons of the earth depicted so humorously by Sir Walter Scott. She was surely right to do so. Here was a man with the no-nonsense common sense of Edie Ochiltree, the passionate integrity of Jeanie Deans, the common sense of the Bailie Nichol Jarvie. The English Establishment protects itself by two weapons: pomposity and facetiousness. Victoria was entirely lacking in both qualities; Brown was proof against both. He also possessed, or appeared to possess, a quality which was extremely rare. He was unafraid of the Queen. From early childhood, Victoria had her mother cowering before her. The duchess had only dared to remonstrate in writing when the adolescent Victoria had been foul to servants. And even intimates like Lord M. had minded their Ps and Qs. There was an aura of impressiveness about her which made her more than a little frightening, even when she was in a good humour. It must have been lonely to produce this effect in everyone, including her children and her closest ladies-in-waiting. Brown simply treated her as another human being. Once a young footman came into the room and nervously dropped a silver salver. With her characteristic Hanoverian petulance, the Queen ordered that he be demoted to the kitchens. Brown remonstrated. ‘What are ye daein’ tae that puir laddie? Hiv’ ye never drappit onything yersel’?’ The footman was reinstated.11 His directness of approach was all part of his power of sympathy. On the fourth anniversary of Prince Albert’s death, the Queen took her children to pay their respects at the Frogmore Mausoleum. Brown came too – for the first time.
When he came to my room later, he was so much affected; he said, in his simple expressive way, with such a tender look of pity while the tears rolled down his cheeks; ‘I didn’t like to see ye at Frogmore this morning; I felt for ye; to see ye coming there with your daughters and your husband lying there – marriage on one side and death on the other; no I didn’t like to see it; I felt for ye; I know so well what your feeling must be – ye who had been so happy. There is no more pleasure for you, poor Queen, and I feel for ye but what can I do though for ye? I could die for ye.’12
When she became queen, Victoria had thought solitude a luxury. After eighteen years in which she had shared a bedroom with her mother and never been out of another human being’s sight, she took pleasure in independence. Such feelings did not last. Solitude cast her adrift and she was not good at it. Her years of marriage had been ones in which she scarcely let her husband out of her sight. Her widowhood placed intolerable burdens on her younger daughters, since Victoria needed companionship which was literally constant, night and day.
The arrival of the faithful Brown as a permanent feature in the Court caused intense irritation to the Queen’s elder children, and ruffled the pomposity of the courtiers. But it supplied a deep need. Russell had been Prime Minister eight months when she reminded him of her frail condition, and her need for the safety valves provided by Balmoral and Osborne:
She must say that she feels she COULD not go on working as she does, without any real relaxation (for she never is without her boxes and despatches etc., which her Ministers often are, for a few weeks at least) IF she did not get that change of scene and that pure air, which always gives her a little strength, twice a year. Nine or ten days are very short, but they will still do her some good, and she will have more courage to struggle onwards, though every year which adds to her age, finds her nervous system and general strength more and more shaken. She always fears some complete breakdown some day; and she is just now greatly in want of something to revive her after an autumn, winter, and spring of great anxiety, and many
sorrows of a domestic nature, which shake her very nervous temperament very severely.13
When she penned this letter to her Prime Minister, the Liberal Government was being assailed by the Conservatives about the Distribution of Seats Bill – the important matter of how the new constituencies would be divided after the franchise was extended to the industrial cities – and Europe had erupted into the second war of the decade. It was one Russell could do nothing to avert. The Danish–German war of 1862–4 had demonstrated British impotence. The war of 1866, in which Prussia took on Austria, was one in which that impotence was now a fact of life.
Lord Clarendon was the Foreign Secretary when Bismarck pushed Prussia forward in her war against Austria. Clarendon wrote to the Queen’s secretary, General Grey, ‘I cannot believe that there would be the slightest use in the Queen’s again writing to the King of Prussia. I wish I did. Her Majesty could not express herself more strongly than she has already done and she would only again be told that it is all the fault of Austria and that Prussia is always innocent and always in the right.’14
The Austrian War was the second act in Bismarck’s successful campaign to unite Germany behind a dominant Prussia, and to exclude Austria altogether from the loose union of German-speaking peoples. It brought to a decisive end the vision of German unity envisaged by Prince Albert and Baron Stockmar in earlier days. Clarendon was right to say that the Queen could have done nothing to stop it. The Queen probably shared Vicky’s view of Clarendon: ‘touchy, irritable and cross’.15 Stanley noted, after a conversation with Victoria about Germany, that ‘she cannot endure the idea of her country (for she feels it as such) being threatened’.16
With these dreadful events unfolding, the Queen felt isolated on the European stage. Without Albert at her side, ‘we are as sheep without a shepherd’,17 as she wrote in May 1866; and her other great political mentor, King Leopold of the Belgians, was also dead – he died on 10 December 1865.