Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  Marie was among the courtiers who could watch at first hand the Queen’s growing devotion to Abdul Karim, or, as he was now to be called, Munshi Hafiz Abdul Karim, the Queen’s official Indian clerk and Muslim teacher. (‘Munshi’ is Hindustani for language teacher and/or secretary.) Other Indian menials were now engaged to wait at table. The Munshi’s salary was increased to £144 per annum, and would rise to £250. Her Hindustani was improving. She could now say, ‘You may go home if you like’, and ‘You will miss the Munshi very much’ and ‘Hold me tight’ (‘Ham ko mazbut Thamo’).32 Visitors and correspondents were treated to encomiums: ‘I take a little lesson every evening in Hindustani and sometimes I miss writing by post in consequence,’ she admitted to Vicky. ‘It is a great interest and amusement to me. Young Abdul (who is in fact no servant) teaches me and is a vy. strict Master and a perfect Gentleman. He has learnt English wonderfully – and can now copy beautifully and with hardly any faults. He will I hope remain and be vy. useful in writing and looking after my books and things.’33 The Munshi was ‘very intelligent & useful’, ‘He is so good & gentle & understanding all I want & is a real comfort to me’, ‘such a good influence with the others . . . he and all the others set such a good example and so respectable’. She either did not notice, or for the time being chose to ignore the snobbish and racist feelings of the English servants and the courtiers, none of whom liked Karim, and some of whom already felt was John Brown in a turban.

  Cordial as her personal relations always were with Lord Salisbury, Queen Victoria did not hold back from admonishment or disagreement. Traditionalist and monarchist as Salisbury was, he was also a shrewd housekeeper and he had his eye on the sheer extravagance of the Queen residing in Windsor, Balmoral and Osborne, and the Prince of Wales occupying the palatial Marlborough House and Sandringham; while the historic palaces of Kew, Kensington and Hampton Court remained unused. His attempts to make Her Majesty address this issue were not met with much success. He used Ponsonby as the conduit through which he fed to the Queen his cautious suggestion that she might consider getting rid of Kensington Palace. Her response was that ‘it would never do to sell any Palace’. Ponsonby ventured to remind her that he had, ‘by her order suggested to Mr Gladstone’s and I think Lord Beaconsfield’s Governments that they should buy Kew Palace and that both were ready to listen to some proposal. But it did not go further. The Queen said that the proposal was not to sell it outright but to sell it to the Crown Lands so that it should be taken in to Kew Gardens. This is true. Still, the Palace would have gone from the Sovereign.’34 As the weeks trundled past, the matter surfaced from time to time. The Queen reiterated her refusal to contemplate selling either Kensington Palace or Hampton Court, but she was prepared to consider selling her interest in London’s public parks, ‘but would wish for a stipulation that Constitution Hill should not be converted into a public thoroughfare for omnibuses, carts and cabs’.35

  Less salubrious London thoroughfares also came to the attention of the Queen, as of everyone else, that year, when the grisly murders of prostitutes in Whitechapel seized the public imagination. Salisbury, who felt that the Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, had demonstrated his inadequacy at Bloody Sunday, was now under pressure from the Queen. When Jack the Ripper – as the unknown murderer was nicknamed – carved up his third victim, the Queen wrote to complain that the Home Secretary’s ‘general want of sympathy with the feelings of the people are doing the Government harm’.36 Matthews was eventually sacked and given a viscountcy to keep him out of harm’s way, but not before a fifth woman fell victim to the Ripper’s knife. The Queen upbraided Salisbury for not ensuring that there was better street lighting in the East End. ‘All these courts must be lit and our detectives improved,’ she said to him, while to the useless Matthews himself, she itemized the procedures which he should have instituted:

  —Have the cattle boats and passenger boats been examined?

  —Has any investigation been made as to the number of single men occupying rooms to themselves?

  —The murderer’s clothes must be saturated with blood and must be kept somewhere.

  —Is there sufficient surveillance at night?

  These are some of the questions that occur to the Queen on reading the accounts of this horrible crime.37

  In the modern vogue for historical detective fiction, almost every ingenious variation on fact has been tried: it is fascinating to think of the Queen herself as a detective. Meanwhile, it was to a prison far, far away that her attention was diverted. The Munshi returned from Agra after a visit home to ask her to obtain promotion for his old boss, the prison superintendent Dr John Tyler. And while she was about it, perhaps she could put in a word for his father Wuzeeruddin. Never one to beat about the bush when it came to helping her friends, she wrote, not to any mere district commissioner, but to the Viceroy of India himself, Lord Lansdowne, instructing him to give a pension to the Munshi’s father. When he was slow in his replies, and then expressed some misgivings, Lansdowne received a series of telegrams. If promotion for Dr Tyler had to wait, well and good, but would the viceroy not see that it was a matter of urgency to help the Munshi’s father? ‘As regards Dr Wuzeeruddin,’ she wrote, ‘he wants nothing, the Queen believes, but a pension to live comfortably after 30 years’ service both as Military and Civil Doctor or rather Hospital Assistant.’38

  Throughout the early months of 1889, Salisbury’s Government and the Queen were agonizing over the German Emperor’s expressed wish to make a State Visit to Britain. Wilhelm II had still not apologized for the insult to Bertie in Vienna, and Salisbury felt that, until some apology was forthcoming, the British would lose face by accepting the Emperor in an official capacity. Wilhelm wanted to come to the Isle of Wight in Cowes week, and intended to arrive accompanied by a good number of German naval vessels. Salisbury wondered whether the visit could not be classified as ‘private’, a mere wish by a grandson to visit a grandmother while on a boating trip. Wilhelm replied, not unwittily, that ‘he did not understand how the Emperor of Germany coming in his fleet and being received by the Queen of the greatest naval power, with hers, could be called private’.39 Ponsonby was sure that, by the time summer came, the quarrel with the Prince of Wales would have been ‘made up’, but as April drew to its end, the Queen remained adamant. ‘The Emperor William refuses to take any step towards a reconciliation and the Prince of Wales cannot receive him. Her Majesty asks how, in that case, can she receive him. An affront to the Heir apparent is an affront to her and the Queen will not be trampled upon by her grandson who is instigated [sic] by two bad men.’40

  In the event, it was Bertie who backed down. He withdrew his objection to the emperor’s visit, provided that the Emperor withdrew his imputation. Wilhelm persisted in pretending that he had made no such imputation, and that therefore there was nothing to withdraw. While his grandmother wrote to him in official language, and, when quarrelling with him, used the third person, he always replied, ‘Dearest Grandmama’ – and signed himself ‘Willy’ thereby deflating her. ‘The whole affair is absolutely invented,’ he wrote to her at the end of May, ‘there being not an atom of cause to be found. The whole thing is purely a fixed idea, which originated either in Uncle Bertie’s own imagination or in somebody else’s.’ He added that, whoever put this idea in his uncle’s head, ‘I am very glad to hear that this affair has at last come to an end.’41 Insult was added to injury when it was discovered that the Emperor was bringing in his suite his infamous adjutant, Colonel von Kessel. When the cipher went missing which was used to decode foreign messages, von Kessel had accused the Empress Frederick herself of having stolen it, in her capacity as an English spy. He had then mysteriously ‘found’ the key to the code in a drawer in his own table. ‘Gustav von Kessel, with a wickedness & audacity I could hardly have credited even in him, now swears . . . that the cipher . . . was not there when he last looked through the table drawers & insinuates that it has been put there by someone in
this house!!’42 spluttered Vicky to her mother.

  If the Vienna insult to Bertie and the accusation of espionage against his own mother were not enough to sour feelings against the young Emperor, there was in progress a painfully unseemly quarrel between his father’s doctors. This was no academic disagreement about the possible treatments for throat cancer. It was an unbecoming public row, fuelled in part by the worsening diplomatic relations between Britain and Germany, and also by the characters of those involved. Sir Edward Malet, the British Ambassador in Berlin, confided in Ponsonby, over a game of billiards at Osborne, that Dr Mackenzie was ‘a most unprincipled and designing man’, who had done no end of mischief, political and otherwise. Malet blamed Victoria’s weakness; for, ‘in spite of all her cleverness, anyone can get round her who fawns upon her’.43 The symptoms of the poor late Emperor were now the stuff of international wrangling and unseemly half-truths being aired in the newspapers. Yet, in spite of all this, and in spite of the quarrel between Willy and Bertie, the German Emperor’s planned visit to Britain went ahead.

  Before his arrival, the Queen sent word to Berlin that she intended to make him an admiral of the British Fleet. Willy, when told of this honour by Malet, declared that he felt as Macbeth must have done when hailed by the witches as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor and ‘Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter!’ He meant, simply, that he felt honour upon honour was being heaped on his head, but the words had unintended omen. The fine portrait of the kaiser in his admiral’s uniform now hangs, rather hidden away, in a corridor of what was once the wing of Osborne House used – after the Queen’s death – as a convalescent home for officers. How salutary it would have been if it had been on public display – in, say, the National Portrait Gallery in London – to remind the British and German public of their closeness. The Queen had made her grandson a British admiral because she wanted, almost above all things, to preserve the peace between the two peoples. Wilhelm appeared to take his rank quite literally, since he immediately drafted to his grandmother proposals for the navy of which he was now an officer. She should deploy more ships in Mediterranean waters; the Naval Vote should be £21 million, spread over four years, to counter the American navy-building. Such a programme was already in place. Whereas previous wisdom, since the Battle of Trafalgar, had decreed that the navy should be one-third bigger than the world’s next largest (usually France), there was now a new yardstick, known as the Two-Power Standard. The Royal Navy was to be kept ‘to a standard of strength equivalent to that of the combined forces of the next two biggest navies in the world’.44 The arms race was on.

  By the time he arrived at Osborne for Cowes week, the new admiral was in benign mood. To show that Germany could build ships too, the Emperor was accompanied by no fewer than twelve warships. He inspected the British Fleet – to some eyes it looked more as if he was snooping upon it – and throughout his visit, when presented to fellow naval officers, he lectured them about guns and armaments. To repay the courtesy paid to him by the British Crown, he made his grandmother colonel-in-chief of the Prussian First Dragoon Guards. He presented her with a bust of himself by Reinhold Begas, and on his cousin George, the future King George V, he bestowed the Order of the Black Eagle. Bertie, through gritted teeth, made the German Emperor a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron, the highest of accolades in sailing circles – equivalent to membership of the MCC in cricket.

  It was a successful visit to Grandmamma in her ‘quiet comfy old house’, and even included a few nights with the Prime Minister in the rather grander setting of Hatfield. When he got home, he was still hugging himself with delight to be an admiral in the Royal Navy, ‘and with keenest sympathy shall I watch every phase of its further development, knowing that the British ironclads, coupled with mine and my army, are the strongest guarantees of peace which Heaven may [sic] help us to preserve!’45

  His was not the only arrival that summer in Britain of a foreign potentate. A month after the German Emperor had come to Cowes, the Shah of Persia visited Windsor. When the visit was in prospect, the Queen had immediately foreseen the hideous possibility that she might be expected to foot the bill. ‘This is odious,’ she wrote to Salisbury. ‘She positively refuses to be put to any expense on account of this political visit.’46 Thereafter, whenever Salisbury tried to discuss arrangements about the shah’s visit, she invariably responded with an account of royal poverty, pleading for Government money to be given not merely to her children, but to her grandchildren. ‘Her Majesty believes that in the first year of her reign,’ Ponsonby was asked to write to the Prime Minister, ‘the Parliamentary Grants to members of the Royal Family amounted to nearly £300,000 a year whereas it is scarcely half that sum.’47 (Those who have followed this narrative thus far will remember that in addition to her private money and income from the Duchy of Lancaster, the Queen received £385,000 from the Civil List, and that she had persuaded successive Prime Ministers to give at least £6,000 a year to each of her children.) This was simply her instinctive reaction when asked to part with any money.

  As often happened with an event long dreaded, she quite enjoyed the shah’s visit. He was stouter than when last seen, but spoke better French.48 But they were all fatter. When the shah had gone, and she was spending a quiet day at Frogmore, she had to be carried up the steps of the mausoleum to commune with the spirit of the Prince Consort. Though the shah’s visit had presumably cost some money, she had somehow managed to survive it without bankruptcy.

  It was decided that there should be a new image of the Queen Empress upon the coinage. This must have stirred memories for Gladstone, who would almost certainly remember, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1860, an indignant Queen sending back designs for a new coinage again and again to the long-suffering modeller at the Royal Mint until a satisfactory image of herself was produced. ‘The portrait is so frightful,’ she had written in 1860, ‘that the Queen cannot sanction it. She has given many sittings, corrected again and again, and still it is so bad . . . The Queen wishes more to be done, as all her corrections have proved utterly useless, and she really cannot allow so bad a likeness of herself to be put into circulation.’49 Her correspondence with Lord Salisbury upon the subject was conducted with less heat but no less fascination: she was, after all, superintending her last self-image. The three-quarters-view veiled matriarch was to be reproduced on coinage throughout the Empire. A coin is an enduring image; at the same time, it is a marker in an impermanent world. To be fixed on a coin is to be part of a succession of monarchs all of whom have passed onwards. As she grudgingly approved the new images of herself, she was yet again contemplating mortality.

  There was a painful, and strange, incident in the second half of 1890, relating to the Queen’s Indian servants. One afternoon in June, while staying at Balmoral, she climbed into the carriage which would take her to her Summer Cottage, wearing a certain brooch which had been given to her by the Grand Duke of Hesse. On the way back, the brooch was missing. It had been pinned to her shawl by Mrs Tuck, her dresser, who was upbraided by the Queen for forgetting the brooch. A search was then made of the cottage, and of the gravel outside, but no brooch turned up. Rankin, the footman on duty, said that he had seen Abdul Karim’s brother-in-law, Hourmet Ali, who worked as one of the Indian servants, lurking around the cottage while the Queen had tea.

  A month later, the servants were travelling back from the Earl of Fife’s wedding at Buckingham Palace, and one of the other Indians, Mahomet, told Mrs Tuck that Hourmet Ali had stolen the brooch, and sold it to Wagland the jeweller in Windsor for six shillings. The next day, Mrs Tuck went to Wagland and asked if he had bought the brooch from an Indian, and the jeweller returned it, with a note stating what had happened. He said that the Indian had visited the shop several times and that he had eventually succumbed to his nagging and bought the item to ‘save himself further annoyance’. Mrs Tuck thereupon took the note, and the brooch, to the Queen, and explained what had happened. The Qu
een was furious at the imputation that the dear Munshi’s brother-in-law was a thief. Hourmet was a model of honesty. In India – so it was claimed later – it was considered perfectly honest to pick up items which had fallen on the ground and claim them as one’s own. Mrs Tuck was abashed that the Queen was so ‘dreadfully angry’. She was also taken aback by the words which the Queen had used. ‘That is what you English call justice.’50 You English. The Queen Empress had just celebrated her Golden Jubilee. She was nearly seventy years old and she had lived in Britain all her life. But with a part of herself she had never felt at home. Her empathy with the outcasts, and the non-English, with Highland Scots and with Indians, was natural, when one remembers her mother’s loneliness and sense of strangeness in her years of widowhood in Kensington Palace. You English.

  PART SEVEN

  TWENTY THREE

  ‘HER EXCELLENT YOUNG MUNSHI’

  ANYONE IN THE Reading Room of the British Museum one April day in 1889 would have noticed the distinguished figure of the Archbishop of Canterbury, with his long grey hair swept back behind his ears, and his manly legs clad in black gaiters, taking the Annual Register for 1820 from the shelves. Had Mr Sherlock Holmes been there, he might have guessed what Archbishop Benson was doing, but luckily for the prelate, his morning’s research went undetected. He was looking up the funeral of King George III. Having read the description, he then reached for the volume of 1837 and read the entry for the funeral of William IV. ‘Ceremonial order and procession given, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, the Heralds and the other dignitaries in the procession. The Dean of Windsor moved from the Communion Table to read the service after the sentence on committing the body to the grave . . . ’ He copied down the details, but this would never do. William IV had been king for little over seven years, and they could easily get away with giving him a quiet funeral at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. What had happened to the man who gave away the Queen in marriage, the old Duke of Sussex? When did he die? ’42? Ah, yes, 1843. The archbishop noted that Sussex had thought William IV’s funeral was such a shambles that he had insisted upon being buried in the public cemetery at Kensal Green. His funeral, on 4 May 1843, followed ‘the full service of the Established Church, read by the Bishop of Norwich, Clerk of the Closet to the Queen’. Once again, while this was of historical interest, it was scarcely of any use to Benson. He was being prudent, and planning Queen Victoria’s funeral. There was no precedent in living memory. Not since George III had there been a monarch of comparable longevity; not since Queen Elizabeth had there been a sovereign so intimately bound up with the life, the politics and the collective emotions of the people of Britain. Of course, a responsible archbishop must make a plan.1