by A. N. Wilson
The Queen intervened in this crisis, begging the Liberals to offer the Conservatives some room for manoeuvre, some compromise. Ponsonby, his sympathies with the radicals, looked on with some excitement. The whole incident put him in mind of the moment in Livy’s Roman Histories when the Samnites lured the Romans into a mountain pass called the Caudine Forks. They had the chance of massacring the Romans, but honour made them magnanimous. The release of the Romans was, if anything, more humiliating. ‘Who now holds the Caudine Forks?’ asked Ponsonby excitedly. ‘Will they make the same mistake as the Samnites and take a middle course? Those who passed the Caudine Forks won, but not with honor [sic]. I hope neither party will break their faith as the Romans did.’46 In a sense, it was the Tories who were humiliated by the experience. The Queen persuaded Gladstone to accept a Redistribution Bill at the same time as the Franchise Bill. (Gladstone was happy with that, reckoning it would give him eighty Home Rulers at the next election.) But when Salisbury went to the panting heart of Conservative London, the Carlton Club, to announce the settlement, Lord John Manners, a High Tory of High Tories, merely rolled his eyes in disbelief.
Gladstone told the Queen that many Liberals objected to the party leaders quietly settling so grave a dispute in secret. It was a bad precedent. Victoria, by contrast, believed it was ‘a good precedent to avert serious dangers so much desired by Radicals and Republicans’.47 Salisbury felt he could have achieved greater things if the Queen had allowed him to fight. She retorted, ‘But at what a price!’48 She was keenly aware of what lay behind Lord Salisbury’s argument. If the aristocracy were rejected, then the hereditary principle was rejected; and if that was the case, where did it leave the hereditary monarchy?
TWENTY ONE
‘AN INFLAMMATORY ATMOSPHERE’
LOVE WAS IN the air, and the Queen’s grandchildren were reaching an age when they could be married. Only a month after the death of Prince Leopold, the daughter of Princess Alice – Victoria of Hesse – was to be married to Prince Louis of Battenberg. Though the Queen regarded herself as ‘a poor desolate old woman’ whose ‘cup of sorrow overflows’,1 she was not willing to pass up what promised to be a gala-gathering of her descendants and German cousins. Far-flung relations from all over Germany and Russia were converging on Darmstadt. The little town was adorned with bunting. A substantial contingent of the Prussian Royal Family came over from Berlin – Vicky, Fritz and Willy were the star turns here, even though Willy was feeling estranged from his liberal parents, and furious with the House of Hesse for allowing Ella to marry the Grand Duke Sergei of Russia. Sergei was himself at the wedding, with several other Russian royalties. The Prince of Wales came, and the Grand Duke, Louis, his brother-in-law, Alice’s widower, was waiting at the railway station to greet them all.
None was grander or more powerful, perhaps, than the matriarch herself, the little Queen Empress, who strode down the red carpet, her limp more or less cured, accompanied by her entourage of ladies – Lady Ely and the faithful Baby among them.
The presence of so many illustrious royalties in the town at once enabled the grand duke to put on a magnificent few days of ceremonial. There was a confirmation in the church, a royal baptism and several military parades. After his daughter had been married to Louis Battenberg, they all crowded into the glorious Kaisersaal for the wedding banquet. The Crown Prince of Prussia proposed the health of the bridal pair, and the grand duke mysteriously slipped away.
He had a most dramatic secret. Having informed his children and sworn them all to total secrecy, he went to a room in the Schloss where there was waiting for him his Prime Minister, Starck, and the divorced spouse of a fomer Russian Chargé d’Affaires, the Countess Alexandrine Hutten-Czapska, usually known by her maiden name of Madame de Kolémine.
Starck now married the grand duke to Madame de Kolémine before two witnesses.
It is difficult to imagine worse timing, and no one ever quite understood what the grand duke thought he was playing at. Madame de Kolémine, as a divorcee and a commoner, could not be the grand duchess; it was a morganatic marriage. Even so, the choice of his own daughter’s wedding day to ratify his union was about as tactless as possible. Rather pathetically, he said that he ‘could hardly bear the thought of further loneliness in his life’ when his daughter married and ‘left him’.2 He had not reckoned on the near-absolute power – at any rate in the family, if not in her own kingdom – exercised by his former mother-in-law, the Queen Empress.
Naturally, the secret was out within hours. Vicky told Bertie and they were then confronted with the appalling dilemma: who was to break the news to Queen Victoria that, on the day of her granddaughter’s wedding, her beloved daughter’s clumsy husband had contracted this ridiculous liaison?
With conspicuous lack of gallantry, Vicky and Bertie asked Lady Ely to be the bearer of the bad news. The Queen took it calmly. There was no explosion, but there was a demonstration of her steel. She summoned Bertie and told him to interview the lady at once. Madame de Kolémine was to be told that her marriage was to be annulled. The Prussian royals were sent back to Berlin that day and the Russians left very soon thereafter. The bunting hung limply from the lamp posts of the deserted Darmstadt streets. The party ended, and Victoria and her group returned to Britain. Within a month, her former librarian and German secretary at Osborne, Hermann Sahl, was writing to her, ‘You will be glad to hear that substantially the untieing of the morganatic knot is now accomplished, and by degrees the formal severance will be pronounced by a Court of Law convened for this purpose. Diplomatists and Lawyers are never embarrassed about finding a suitable form – as soon as they have secured a convergence of views and aims in substance.’3 The unfortunate lady, Madame de Kolémine, or whatever you choose to call her, lived deep into the twentieth century; she was last heard of in Paris in 1930 but was thought to have died in 1941.4 The Daily News described her as ‘one of the most beautiful and highly-accomplished women of her time’ and Lady Ely concluded that she was ‘depraved and scheming’.5 She could, of course, have been all these things.
One surprising development, after the Hessian wedding farce, was that Princess Beatrice, Baby, decided that she did not want to spend the rest of her days as the celibate companion of a widowed, ageing Queen. The lucky man was Prince Heinrich von Battenberg, as he continued to print his name on his visiting card.6 He was the brother of the bridegroom at that wedding, Louis of Battenberg. ‘The young people fell in love at Darmstadt,’ reported the satirical Lord Carlingford, ‘an inflammatory atmosphere, it seems.’7 Queen Victoria was enraged by what she considered to be Baby’s selfishness. For seven months, though the two women lived side by side, she addressed no word to her youngest daughter. Communication was by note, pushed across the table, with eyes averted. In December, however, the mother relented, provided the young people accepted her terms. ‘Liko’, Prince Heinrich – from now on to be known as Prince Henry of Battenberg – must give up his career in the German Army and come to live in England.8 Baby must continue to be in constant attendance on the Queen. These terms were accepted. The young couple had no choice, since Beatrice’s mother held the purse strings. ‘And now [the Queen] seems very happy about the thing. They are to live entirely with her . . . ’ Perhaps unkindly, for few would have regarded the boring Henry of Battenberg as much of a catch, Carlingford added, ‘the princess seems to have done pretty well’.9
The Prussian Royal Family were snobs about the marriage, and the Empress wrote a fussy letter to Queen Victoria, pointing out that the Battenbergs were only the product of a morganatic union, their father Prince Alexander having married the Countess von Hauke. (For this reason, although Queen Victoria granted Prince Henry the title of HRH there were many German royalties who refused to use it.10) With robust common sense, Queen Victoria told the German Empress that ‘morganatic marriages were unknown in England and if a King chose to marry a peasant girl she would be Queen just as much as any princess’.11 The pai
r were to produce four children – Drino, or Alexander, Marquess of Carisbrooke, who lived until 1960; Queen Ena of Spain, the grandmother of King Juan Carlos, who lived until 1969; Leopold, who volunteered for service in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and died in 1922; and Maurice, who gallantly joined the King’s Royal Fusiliers and died at Ypres in 1914. The latter two brothers were both haemophiliacs, Beatrice being a carrier, as was her daughter Queen Ena, who passed on the condition to two of her sons, Alfonso and Gonzalo.
Tennyson was commissioned to pen a nuptial ode for the pair, who were married at Whippingham Parish Church in July 1885. The Queen explained that ‘Dear Beatrice will live with me as heretofore, without which I never could have allowed the marriage.’12 Tennyson incorporated this unusual theme into his ode:
The Mother weeps
At that white funeral of the single life...
but Thou,
True daughter, whose all-faithful filial eyes
Have seen the loneliness of earthly thrones,
Wilt neither quit the widow’d Crown, nor let
This later light of Love have risen in vain . . . 13
As she began her married life, Princess Beatrice must have regretted the demise of Brown. The marriage would appear to have been a success and her mother showed none of the snobbery felt about the Battenbergs by the German Emperor and his family. When Vicky’s daughter Victoria of Prussia became attached to Prince Sandro of Bulgaria, Henry of Battenberg’s brother, there was great curling of lips among the Hohenzollerns. In the event, it was Sandro who broke this betrothal, when he fell in love with an opera singer, Johanna Loisinger. He gave up public life, retired from his position as the ruler of Bulgaria and was granted the title ‘Count Hartenau’. The occasion provided a nice example of Queen Victoria’s complete unpredictability. Rather than expressing shock at Sandro’s behaviour, she said, ‘Perhaps they love one another.’14
Much as her domestic happiness depended upon the companionship of Princess Beatrice, however, and fascinated as she was by the continuing soap opera of European royalties, their amours and demises, the Queen was deeply preoccupied by events in North Africa and in Ireland.
The situation in Egypt and in the Sudan had reached a crisis point. When Gladstone and the Liberals took office, they found themselves responsible for implementing a foreign policy with which they completely disagreed. In South Africa, for instance, the Conservative Government had pursued an aggressive anti-Boer policy, in an attempt to annex the Transvaal. Gladstone did not believe in the annexation, and made every effort to withdraw. In the event, they were left with the precarious compromise of an independent Transvaal, subject to British suzerainty. In Afghanistan, the Liberals decided upon an instant withdrawal (this was what had provoked Beaconsfield’s last speech denouncing the withdrawal from Kandahar). In Egypt, things were less simple, not least because the khedives had run up such colossal debts to European creditors. When Khedive Ismail suspended payment, the Four Powers – France, Britain, Italy and Austria-Hungary – put pressure on the sultan to withdraw the khedive and replace him with his son Tewfik. The new khedive’s difficulties spiralled out of control after only a few years. He was unable to pay his army, which led to a mutiny. Colonel Arabi Pasha, an Egyptian, not a Turk, roused nationalist feeling both against the Turkish control of Egypt and against European, especially British, interference in Egyptian affairs. In 1881, Arabi had surrounded the royal palace and demanded the dismissal of all the Cabinet, and an increase in the army from 4,000 to 18,000 men.
Many members of the Liberal Party in Britain sympathized with Arabi and thought of his nationalist aspirations as on a par with those of the Bulgarians or the Irish, but the unrest was turning into anarchy, and in 1882, Gladstone, a third of whose personal share portfolio consisted of Egyptian stock, had taken the decision to send in British troops, headed by Sir Garnet Wolseley to keep order, to maintain Khedive Tewfik on his throne, and, if necessary, to keep down both mutinies in the army in and around Cairo, and Islamist uprisings in other parts of North Africa. The poor tenements of Alexandria were bombarded by the Royal Navy. Charles Dilke, Colonial Secretary, remarked, ‘The bombardment of Alexandria, like all butchery, is popular . . . ’
By 1883, the Government had decided that it wished to withdraw British troops. Sir Evelyn Baring, who was working as an assistant to Lord Ripon, Viceroy of India, was ordered to Cairo, with the rather nebulous rank of consul general. His task was to reorganize the Egyptian administration, and British withdrawal. The financial expertise of this scion of the famous banking family was also thought to have been useful in what remained, au fond, a financial crisis. Baring believed that ‘there remains nothing in the area of fiscal reform that can’t be done by the Egyptians themselves’.15 The mutinies and rebellions were, patently, all directly the consequence of the khedive’s being on the edge of bankruptcy. Far from being able to settle the matter in a few months and then return to London, Baring was to stay for twenty-three years, and the British presence in Egypt lasted until 1956.
Baring recognized, after a very short time in Egypt, that the British were more deeply embedded than the London Government had allowed themselves to realize. In one area, however, he saw the chance for the British to loosen their hold: in the Sudan.
A rebellion against Egyptian rule had been raised by the religious leader Muhammad Ahmad, known as the Mahdi, a charismatic figure who wished to establish the rule of sharia law against the secularism of the invader. The Egyptians had sent a well-trained army out against him, under the command of a retired British officer, Colonel Hicks. Despite being a smaller army with less armament or equipment, Ahmad was able to defeat – entirely to wipe out – Colonel Hicks’s army. The Islamists had now occupied the town of Berber, some 250 miles to the west of Cairo, and they had spread their strength to the Red Sea coast – it looked as if there was nothing to stop them marching on Cairo. Baring saw trouble, and warned the Government at home to get out of the Sudan rather than suffer humiliation. He recommended that the Egyptians abandon their claim to territory south of Aswan and for British troops to withdraw completely from the Sudan. It would be a vast undertaking. Over 21,000 troops were occupying the Egyptian garrisons in the Sudan, and they were accompanied by 11,000 civilians. Baring’s inclination was to send Egyptians to carry out the withdrawal, but the new Egyptian Government believed there was a danger, if this happened, of the Egyptian Army being carried away by the Mahdi’s rhetoric. It would be better, they argued, for the evacuation to be conducted by a British officer.
The name which emerged, much to Baring’s distaste, was that of General Charles Gordon. He felt forced into accepting Gordon because ‘English public opinion seemed to be unanimous on the subject’.16 Baring’s worries about Gordon were understandable. His private notes reveal that he believed Gordon to be a drunken fanatic, hovering ‘between sanity and insanity’. One manifestation of his unbalanced state of mind was his habit of speeding round London by taxi on Sunday mornings, taking Holy Communion over and over again at different churches. His religious interests had led him to discover what he believed to be the authentic tomb of Christ in Jerusalem, just underneath a rock whose features do indeed remarkably resemble a skull. He rose to fame in China for his part in suppressing the Taiping rebels against the forces of their emperor. He accomplished his Chinese triumphs when he was barely thirty years old. Thereafter, he had very grand ideas of himself. It was Gordon who had established British dominance in the Sudan in the late 1870s – hence his sobriquet, Gordon of Khartoum. By the time he left Khartoum, he had covered 8,500 miles by camel. He had subsequently offered his services to the King of the Belgians, suggesting the King should place him in charge of the Congo Free State. And now he was chosen by the Government to solve the crisis in the Sudan. He was seen off by a deferential Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville, who actually bought his ticket for him at Charing Cross Station, with the Duke of Cambridge in attendance. Queen
Victoria followed all subsequent events with the closest interest. Like the Great British public, she idolized the hero of Shanghai and Khartoum, and believed that ‘General Gordon is a most extraordinary man and certainly has a wonderful power over these half savages’.17
Gordon stopped off at Cairo to discuss his brief with the khedive, with Nubar, the Egyptian Prime Minister, and with Baring. He asked them for two firmans, which he carried away with him: one confirmed his position as Governor-General of Sudan, the other announced the policy of total evacuation. He believed that it would be possible to persuade the Mahdi to help him in his plans, and that he would leave the Sudan in the hands of the Sudanese. He reached Berber by steamer in February 1884, and there he dismissed all his Egyptian troops and officials. In doing so, he also made public the firman stating that he had come to arrange the evacuation of troops from the Sudan.
Most historians now agree that this was Gordon’s fatal error. Far from rallying to him as to a saviour, the Islamist rebels and the Mahdi himself now believed that there was nothing to stop them taking over the Sudan. By the time Gordon reached Khartoum, far from greeting him with enthusiasm, the local sheikhs were all dithering about whether to accept him at all, or whether to join forces with the Mahdi. Moreover, when he wired London to tell them to accept Abd-al-Rahman Munir Zubayr as the new Governor of Sudan, they refused to accept this. Many of Gordon’s telegrams, either to Baring in Cairo or to London, were self-contradictory.