by A. N. Wilson
Twenty-three years had elapsed since she had met the King of Italy, and she had never in reality been at all close to him, but when old Victor Emmanuel died in June, she wrote that ‘the Queen has felt the death of King Victor Emmanuele deeply. He was so consistently kind to her . . . when he was in England in ’55.’2 She was avid for the details in this case, wondering whether the new Pope, Leo XIII, had visited the King – there had been estrangement between Victor Emmanuel and the Vatican – and also, slightly salaciously, whether the new King had brought the old King’s bastard, his son by the Contessa de Mellefleur, to the bedside. And – could she have a souvenir, perhaps a lock of the King’s hair? Clearly, the ambassador did not know how to respond to this strange request, since it was met by silence. Lady Ely telegraphed Sir Augustus the next day: ‘The Queen desires me to say she would much like a little bit of the late King of Italy’s hair; could you mention this and say how much Her Majesty will value it? If the answer is, yes, will you telegraph it, as the Queen is very anxious about it.’ The request for hair was ‘gratefully acceded to’, but as for the Queen’s other intimate questions, the Pope had ‘removed all difficulties in regard to the Administration of the Sacrament but His Majesty [the new King, Humbert] did not enter into further details’. He added that he had heard so many rumours that the contessa had indeed been brought to the late King’s bedside that he ‘cannot help thinking it is true, but is unable to affirm it positively’.3
Was she thinking of what would happen when her own moment came to die? On 6 December 1875, she had written a memorandum for Sir William Jenner at Windsor Castle, ‘that in the case of serious illness she should only be attended by her own doctors’. With what difficulty the King of Italy had been allowed to die in the company of the woman he loved. Was Queen Victoria thinking, as she mulled over his death scene, of how her sons would try to exclude Brown from the room as she lay on her deathbed? ‘She absolutely forbids anyone but her own four female attendants to nurse her,’ she had written, ‘as well as her faithful Personal Attendant, John Brown, whose strength, care, handiness and gentleness make him invaluable at all times, and most peculiarly so in illness, and who was of such use and comfort to her during her long illness in 1871, in lifting and leading her, and who knows how to suggest anything for her comfort and convenience.’4
The nineteenth-century Cult of Death had no more operatic votary than Queen Victoria. The experiences of dreadful bereavement, rather than making her shy away from the horror of deathbeds, invariably awoke in her a fascination. The distant deaths of foreign prelates and potentates, however, aroused something which was in reality little more than necrophiliac curiosity. Meanwhile, the hammer blows of the real thing continued to pound against her family’s doors.
In November 1878, diphtheria struck the Grand Ducal palace at Hesse-Darmstadt. At first, the fifteen-year-old Princess Victoria complained of a stiff neck. Her mother Alice thought initially it might be mumps, but the next day, her daughter was pronounced to have diphtheria: a disease which Alice knew, from her nursing experience, to be highly infectious and potentially deadly. Young Victoria was strong enough to survive the disease but within a few days her six-year-old sister Alix showed the deadly patches of white membrane on her throat. In the worst form of the disease, these membranes swell to the point when breathing becomes impossible and the patient chokes to death. While Alice was nursing Alix, little May toddled into the room, and climbed upon her sister’s bed to kiss her. Only a few hours later, the deadly spots appeared on her throat too. Irene and Ernie also caught the disease. Only Ella appeared to have escaped among the children. Then Louis, Alice’s husband, went down with the disease. ‘Well Katie,’ said Alice to Miss Macbean, the children’s governess, ‘you and I are the only ones who are not ill, and we must not be ill, there is so much to be done and seen after.’ ‘Husband and four children between life and death,’ Alice wrote to her mother, and then – the cynicism forgotten, which she had displayed in Bertie’s near-death-chamber when she said there was no Providence, she added, ‘May God protect them and teach us to say, Thy Will Be Done.’5
Exhausted, she went to bed, but was woken in the night to be told the news that the membrane had crossed little May’s windpipe and that she had choked to death. In the next two weeks, Alice had the double burden of scalding grief, and the felt need to conceal May’s death from the other children. From their beds of recovery, the others kept asking for May and trying to send her books and toys. When she at last broke the news to ten-year-old Ernie, he sat up in bed with tears streaming.6
What happened next was so like a scene in the most painful Victorian novel, that it is perhaps best to leave the description of it to the novelist-Prime Minister. Two weeks later, Beaconsfield told the House of Lords:
The Princess Alice – for I will venture to call her by that name, though she wore a Crown – afforded one of the most striking instances that I can remember of richness of culture and rare intelligence combined with the most pure and refined domestic sentiments . . . My Lords, there is something wonderfully piteous in the immediate cause of her death. The physicians who permitted her to watch over her family enjoined her under no circumstances whatever to be tempted into an embrace. Her admirable self-restraint guarded her through the crises of this terrible complaint in safety. She remembered and observed the injunctions of her physicians. But it became her lot to break to her son, quite a youth, the death of his youngest sister, to whom he was devotedly attached. The boy was so overcome with misery that the agitated mother to console him clasped him in her arms – and thus received the kiss of death. My Lords, I hardly know an incident more pathetic. It is one by which poets might be inspired and in which the artist in every class, whether in picture, in statue or in gem, might find a fitting subject of commemoration.7
What was even more like fiction was the baleful fact: Princess Alice, who had been so devoted a daughter to Prince Albert, died on 14 December, the very day on which her father had died seventeen years earlier.
Alice had been popular in England and in Germany and her death could not but cause widespread grief and shock. The Royal Family had been summoned to Windsor, as was usual, to observe the anniversary of their father’s demise, so they were all together when the telegram came from Darmstadt. Bertie was hurried out of his room to be told the news by Sir William Jenner. He was still in his dressing gown as Queen Victoria kissed him; he said, ‘The good are always taken and the bad remain.’8
The German Emperor forbade anyone to attend the funeral in Darmstadt, for fear of further infections, but Bertie, Leopold and Prince Christian, Lenchen’s husband, defied the ban, crossing to Flushing and spending the next day in a train. The Prince of Wales, as chief mourner, followed her coffin, draped in the Union Jack, to its last resting place in the mausoleum at Rosenhöhe.
Her husband, the Grand Duke Louis, lived on until 1892. Of her surviving children, Victoria, the first to go down with diphtheria, survived until 1950. She married Prince Louis of Battenberg, elder brother of Sandro of Bulgaria. If, on paper, their consanguinity looked close – this Louis (Ludwig) was her first cousin – no fears were felt or expressed. Prince Louis was the son of Alexander of Hesse by Rhine, who had morganatically married Countess Julia von Hauke. He grew up trilingual – his mother speaking French to him, his father German, and his English nanny her own tongue. In 1917, the Battenbergs, who took their name from a small town in Hesse, changed their name to Mountbatten, to appear less German. Battenberg became Louis Mountbatten, Marquess of Milford Haven. Their daughter Alice was the mother of Prince Philip of Greece who married Elizabeth II.
Elizabeth, the only child not to contract diphtheria, married the Grand Duke Sergei of Russia, who was murdered in Red Square in Moscow during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. Ella, as she was always known in the family, became a very pious Orthodox, founding an order of nuns. When the Bolsheviks threw her down a mineshaft in 1918, they could still hear her singing h
ymns when she reached the bottom. She is today revered as a saint in the Orthodox Church. Ernie, whose tears tempted his mother to receive the Kiss of Death, lived on until 1937. A month after his death, his widow, son, daughter-in-law and two grandsons were killed in a plane crash. Alicky, the most celebrated of the siblings, became the Tsarina of Russia. She and her husband Tsar Nicholas II produced the haemophiliac son Alexei, and it was largely through her distress at this fact that she fell under the bewitching spell of Rasputin. By any standards, the inheritance of the House of Hesse was what Lady Bracknell would call crowded with incident.
24 May 1879 found the Queen at Balmoral, where she recorded it was ‘My poor old 60th birthday’. She made a long list of her presents, and rounded off the three-page journal entry with the thought, ‘It was a sad birthday, but I feel much and am cheered by the kindness of those left on earth. The other dear ones, my beloved Husband & our darling child, surely bless me.’9
Although she felt that the experience of losing Alice had ‘aged and shaken the elasticity out of me’,10 she was in fact one of those fortunate human beings who are good at being old. Whereas her middle age had been scarred by mental illness and overwhelming depression, she was visibly a new woman by the time she was sixty; much more robust than she had been at forty-five. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the political challenges which faced her – above all the revival of Mr Gladstone as a force in British politics – she was in a buoyant, or, what was for her indistinguishable, a belligerent mood.
‘If we are to maintain our position as a first-rate Power – and that no one (but people of the [radical] Bright or rather Anderson Jenkins etc. School) can doubt – we must, with our Indian Empire and large Colonies, be prepared for attacks and wars somewhere or other CONTINUALLY. And the true economy will be to be always ready.’11
This was what she dictated to Lady Ely on 28 July 1879 and had posted to Beaconsfield, as a sort of manifesto, in the painful event of the Liberals returning to power. It is one of the most perceptive things ever written about the British Empire. As a military historian has written, ‘there was not a single year in Queen Victoria’s long reign in which somewhere in the world, her soldiers were not fighting for her and for her Empire’.12 Victoria had no illusions. The Empire depended upon the willingness to use force. It depended upon violence. In this, she eagerly supported Beaconsfield in all his jingoistic adventures, and deplored the shilly-shallying and dithering and lily-livered men in her Cabinet or in her far-flung dominions who shrank from acts of warfare.
In foreign policy, Beaconsfield was almost Palmerston by another name. Nothing more vividly reveals the difference between Albert’s wife of the 1850s and the independent widow of the 1870s than in her ‘jingoism’. Whereas Palmerston was content to be a sort of buccaneer policeman to the world, Beaconsfield had developed into an imperialist, and the Empress of India watched with some satisfaction as her domains extended across the globe.
In the matter of South Africa, for example, whereas even the Conservative Cabinet was critical of Beaconsfield’s policy, and his Foreign Secretary, Lord Carnarvon, actually resigned because of it, the Queen never abandoned her loyalty to Dizzy. The British had taken it upon themselves to intervene in the fighting between the Dutch – Boer – settlers in the Transvaal and the indigenous Zulus. The Boers had performed appalling acts of violence on the Africans, using German mercenaries to attack black women and children. The Africans had reciprocated, and it was decided in London that the border disputes between the Europeans and the natives could only be solved by Britain annexing Natal. The Indian civil servant Sir Bartle Frere, who had accompanied the Prince of Wales on his Indian adventure, was put in charge.
Frere issued the Zulus with an ultimatum, that unless they agreed to the boundary drawn up by the British, dividing Zulus and Boers, the British would enter the territory and impose the arrangement by force. General Thesiger (Lord Chelmsford) was in command, with a force of 5,000 Europeans and 8,200 Africans. He grossly underestimated the tactical brilliance of his opponent the Zulu King Cetshwayo, with his well-trained army of 40,000 men. Above all, Chelmsford had ignored all advice, that when fighting the Zulu it was necessary to laager the wagons. He led an expeditionary force out of his camp at Isandhlwana in the first ten days of the war, and when he returned, he found that almost every person left behind had been slaughtered, and all his equipment destroyed. All the slain had been disembowelled. Face was saved on the same night a little way away in Rorke’s Drift when 103 British soldiers, 35 of them sick, had created a laager. They held out successfully against a massive Zulu force and effected heavy casualties upon them. But the news of the massacre reached Britain and it went down badly in the press, and in the Liberal Party. Huge reinforcements were sent in – five battalions of infantry. Sir Garnet Wolseley, first as Commander-in-Chief, then as Governor-General of Natal, broke Zululand into eight parts, each under the control of a separate chief. But yet another hostage to fortune had been taken, with the British landing themselves with the task of policing and keeping the peace in South Africa. This mistake would come home to haunt the Victorians before the end of the reign.
Among the casualties of the war was the Prince Imperial, the son of Napoleon III and the Queen’s great friend the Empress Eugénie. He was speared by Zulu assegais. Beaconsfield had not even been aware that the prince had taken part in the war. ‘I am quite mystified by that little abortion the Prince Imperial,’ he wrote to Salisbury, admitting that ‘H.M. knows my little sympathy with the Buonapartes’.13 Ernst of Coburg, Prince Albert’s brother, tactlessly said it was probably a happy thing for France. Victoria responded with her characteristic vigour that he could not be more wrong. ‘He was so clever, so peace-loving, and thanks to his English education, so mature.’14
The prince’s body was brought back to England for burial at Chislehurst. Protocol decrees that royal personages do not attend the funerals of commoners. This was a sad deprivation for Queen Victoria, who would clearly have loved to do so. Luckily for her, she regarded the Bonapartes as of imperial status. This enabled her to revel in the obsequies of the young man. Her journal entry for the day covered pages of description, of the coffin, attended by the band of the Royal Artillery playing the ‘Dead March’ in Saul, and of the richly robed clergy. Whereas the thought of her own clergy dressing ceremonially filled her with abhorrence, she thought the Bishop of Constantine’s mitre ‘had a very fine effect’. Mitres were clearly in order if worn by foreigners.
The imperialist adventure of the Zulu War, from which Britain had only just managed to emerge without humiliation, highlighted the vast canyon of difference which had now opened up between the two great political players on the English stage. (Similar disaster occurred at the same period when Afghan soldiers stormed the British residency at Kabul and the unwinnable war against the Afghans broke out once more.) Whereas Beaconsfield, in whatever spirit of cynicism, supported the Empire, and jingoism, and maintenance of the status quo in Ireland, Gladstone had moved radically to the left in his political thinking, and now supported self-government for the Irish (even if he had not yet quite come round to open support for Home Rule); a cautious attitude to colonial adventure; and, with regard to the Eastern Question, an anti-Turkish, pro-Russian Orthodox line. There had probably never been a time in the history of British politics when the division between the chief protagonists was so strong. But even if the divisions between Pitt and Fox in an earlier generation had been of comparable seriousness, what there had not been was an appeal to modern-style electioneering, with a major political figure storming around the country making speeches to his followers, regardless of whether he was speaking in their constituency or not.
This is what Gladstone had been doing ever since the tearaway success of his Bulgarian atrocities pamphlet. If Victoria thought that the ‘mad’ old man had been safely put out to grass, studying Homer in North Wales, she was sadly mistaken. Although he had made it clear that he woul
d not stand at the next election for his old constituency in Greenwich, he was prevailed upon by Lord Rosebery and others to contest the seat of the county of Midlothian against the Tory Lord Dalkeith (son of the Duke of Buccleuch). Between 24 November and 9 December 1879, he moved in a great progress from Liverpool, to Glasgow, and finally to Edinburgh. He drew huge crowds. At seventy years old, his orotund voice, with its depth and varied tone, and its very faint hint of a Liverpool accent, was as strong as ever. He denounced the Zulu War and contended that the British people had been misled into supposing that the Boers wished to become British subjects. He denounced the British presence in Afghanistan. He denounced British policy in Ireland. He deplored the conduct of the Government in its relations with Turkey and Russia. With every subject, he was denouncing not merely the views of Beaconsfield but also of the Queen. Nor could Beaconsfield, half choked with asthma and seeming even older than his seventy-five years, possibly compete with this performance, even if there had not been an ingrained Conservative tradition which deplored ‘stump oratory’. How did the crowds, often of thousands, hear Gladstone’s voice? They did not, but punctuated through the multitudes were speakers who repeated what was being said by the chief speaker on his podium.
When the tour was over, Gladstone returned home to North Wales and awaited events. The Queen and Beaconsfield read of ‘Mr Gladstone’s mad unpatriotic ravings’,15 as she called them, without being able to believe that they could attract a greater following than the flag-waving of Beaconsfield. On 5 February, Victoria attended a State Opening of Parliament. The woman who wrote of it in her journal is scarcely recognizable as the unhappy creature of the 1860s who could not contemplate public displays of herself. This was what Beaconsfield had done for her. ‘I wore the same dress, black velvet, trimmed with minniver, my small diamond crown & long veil. Got in, at the Great Entrance, & went in the new state coach which is very handsome with much gilding, a crown at the top, & a great deal of glass, which enables the people to see me.’ There was a good family turnout. ‘Beatrice stood to my right, Leopold to my left. Bertie, Affie & Arthur were all there.’16