by A. N. Wilson
By way of reparation, at the State Funeral in Westminster Abbey, two of the pall-bearers were Bertie, the Prince of Wales, and his son George, Duke of York. Bertie made a point of speaking to Mrs Gladstone after the service.19 Gladstone himself, to the end, had persisted in finding the ungraciousness and the vitriol of the Queen’s animosity difficult to understand. There was, he wrote, ‘something of mystery, which I have not been able to fathom, and probably never shall’.20
Perhaps the simplest explanation was one she gave to Marie Mallet, her Maid of Honour. ‘She said she has always disliked politics & does not consider them a woman’s province, but that the Prince Consort forced her to take an interest in them, often to her disgust & that since he died she has tried to keep up the interest for his sake . . . Mr Gladstone had caused her more pain & anxiety than any of [her Prime Ministers], so often insisting upon measures which she felt & knew were mistakes & dangerous & which have turned out to be so!’21
When Gladstone finally resigned, the Queen defied convention and did not ask the incumbent Prime Minister’s advice about his choice of a successor. It was in effect Ponsonby who had to consult with the senior Liberals, and act as an intermediary with the Queen.22 There was tremendous in-fighting in the Liberal Party, between radicals and imperialists, pro- and anti-Home Rulers. Before the old man went, Sir William Harcourt – who frequently dined with Ponsonby – told Gladstone that he must ‘bring up his heaviest guns to cover our retreat and proclaim war against the H of Lords’.23 Those on the left of the party wanted Harcourt as Prime Minister, even though Rosebery, as well as being the Queen’s choice, was undoubtedly the more popular politician in the country at large.24
The Queen was watching the march of radicalism with horrified fascination. The Independent Labour Party had been founded in Bradford in 1893 – ‘the most important political event of the nineteenth century’, according to one of its founder members, Philip Snowden. Keir Hardie, a working-class Lanarkshire miner and son of a Clydeside shipworker, took his seat in the Commons in August 1892. He refused to wear parliamentary ‘uniform’ of a silk top hat, frock coat and starched collar. Instead, he wore tweeds and a deerstalker hat. He was actually the sort of straight-talking Scotsman that Queen Victoria in other contexts would have liked, but she could not like what he said in Parliament.
On 23 June 1894, the Duchess of York gave birth to a son, and the House of Commons drafted a congratulatory address. Keir Hardie asked that they should add to this address a message of condolence to the families of 251 miners who had just been killed in a pit disaster at Pontypridd, South Wales. The request was refused, and Hardie made the speech which undoubtedly cost him his seat (West Ham) at the next election.
From his childhood onward this boy will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers by the score. [Cries of ‘Oh! Oh!’] and will be taught to believe himself as of a superior creation. [Cries of ‘Oh! Oh!’] A line will be drawn between him and the people whom he is to be called upon some day to reign over. In due course, following the precedent which has already been set, he will be sent on a tour round the world, and probably rumours of a morganatic alliance will follow [Loud cries of ‘Oh! Oh!’ and ‘Order!’] – and the end of it all will be that the country will be called upon to pay the bill. [Cries of ‘Divide!’]25
The Queen talked about this speech ‘with great horror’.26 She would have been even more horrified if she had known with what uncanny accuracy Keir Hardie was predicting the life and fortunes of the future King Edward VIII, whose antics landed the monarchy in what his mother called ‘a pretty kettle of fish’.
‘Nothing can prevent Asquith from leading the Liberal Party when I am out of the way,’ said Harcourt to his son Loulou, and this would eventually prove to be the case. H. H. Asquith, a clever, Balliol-educated Yorkshire lawyer, and a young Welsh solicitor called David Lloyd George, who had entered the House in a by-election in 1900, would dominate the politics of the left in Britain until the Independent Labour Party of Keir Hardie had assembled enough seats to become the Opposition, and eventually the Government, after the First World War. No monarchist at this date would ever have been able to predict that these developments would not lead to a British republic. Victoria’s ‘horror’ at Keir Hardie was understandable, as was her belief that Gladstone’s gerontic radicalism had opened the doors towards it. She would entirely have endorsed Lord Salisbury’s view that ‘Gladstone’s revolutionary appeals to the jealousy of the poor will do much harm’.27
For the Queen’s part, although she did not approve of Rosebery’s politics, she was very fond of him ‘personally . . . and prefer him [in] certain [respects] to Lord Salisbury. He is so much attached to me personally’.28
She had an almost maternal feeling towards him, and felt able, as she would never have done to Disraeli, to tell him to curb his cynical sense of humour, which animated many of his public utterances. It is not true that Victoria was humourless, but when it came to irony or country-house larkiness, she drew a blank. Everything she heard, for example, about the Souls – the ‘set’ who included Arthur Balfour, Margot Asquith, the Duchess of Rutland et al – made her say, ‘they really should be told not to be so silly!’29 She detected some of this ‘silliness’ in Rosebery. She presumed to speak in the name of his late wife, ‘one who can no longer be a comfort and support to him and who she [knows] felt very anxious on this subject [radicalism]’.30 As for his speeches out of Parliament, ‘he should take a more serious tone and be, if she may say so, less jocular, which is hardly befitting a Prime Minister’.31 Far from resenting these pieces of advice, Rosebery evidently liked his monarch’s motherly attentions, and her repeated worry that he was not getting enough sleep – which was a persistent problem throughout his year or so of premiership.
Naturally, she protested when his ‘Communistic’ opinions went against her better instincts. As he told her in the autumn of 1894, ‘the cry in the Liberal Party is for the abolition of the House of Lords or of its veto’. For his part, he had long believed that ‘the House of Lords, as at present constituted, cannot continue to exist’. The Queen was ‘much put out and perturbed’32 by the suggestion of modifying the power of the Lords over the Commons. While Rosebery pointed out how intolerable it was that a largely Tory House of Peers could always veto the resolutions of an elected House of Commons, the Queen felt any gesture towards Lords reform was ‘mischievous in the highest degree. Is Party to go before the interests of the Country?’33 As it happened, she need not have worried. The difficult question of dealing with the Tory bias of the House of Lords, as opposed to the elected Commons, was to be addressed by George V in the early years of his reign; and advocates of root and branch reform of the Lords waited over 100 years before their dreams were realized.
A matter over which the Queen was surprisingly much more sympathetic was the resignation as commander-in-chief of her dear old cousin the Duke of Cambridge. The Duke was seventy-six and he had held this post for the past thirty-nine years. Many was the letter which the Queen had fired off on his behalf to the first Gladstone Government, protesting at the abolition of purchase as a system of selecting officers; protesting against the abolition of flogging; howling against the winds of change whenever they blew.
A Royal Commission, set up in 1888, had delivered a report on army reform in 1890, recommending the abolition of the post of commander-in-chief, to be replaced by a group of five senior officers responsible to the War Ministry. This was a recommendation only partially implemented by the Rosebery Government, and the post remained. Although the Queen agreed in principle that Cousin George should be replaced, she probably understood better than the younger politicians that it would be difficult to get him to go quietly. Having said he would leave, the duke then asked for a pension of £2,000 p.a. on top of the £12,000 voted to him annually by Parliament merely for being the Duke of Cambridge. ‘I am not a rich man, but a very poor one’, spluttered the duke. ‘I will lose my occupation and po
sition. And for what? Because the Government thinks a change is necessary. The Queen sent me a Patent in 1887 giving me the office for life and I have done nothing discreditable since then. As to the question of my age it is an unmerited insult’.34
The Queen, naturally, assumed that Cousin George would be succeeded in the role by her son the Duke of Connaught. When the truth dawned on her that they intended to appoint a non-royal commander-in-chief, she confessed that it was ‘painful’ to her, and asked for Rosebery’s assurance that ‘the Duke of Connaught will not later on be debarred from that office’.35 They gave the post to one of the Queen’s bêtes-noires, Garnet Wolseley, and he was succeeded in 1901 by Lord Roberts. On both occasions, poor Arthur, Duke of Connaught, always Queen Victoria’s favourite son, felt ‘vexed’.36 He was the longest-living of all the Queen’s children, surviving until 1942. One of his sons-in-law became the King of Sweden.
It was exactly twenty years before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, and we can watch the characters in the drama involved in the outbreak of world war growing into their roles. In the Liberal Party, Asquith, Grey, Lloyd George – members of the fateful Cabinet which could see no way out of their doom-laden treaty obligations with France and Russia and against Austria-Hungary – were all coming to the fore. In the wider Royal Family, we see the players waiting in the wings.
In April 1894, Queen Victoria visited Coburg. ‘When the dear old Festung came in sight, I could but think of my beloved Albert’s joy when we approached Coburg the first time’.37 The German Emperor was in town, and had brought with him a squadron of the Prussian regiment of Dragoons – of which his grandmother was colonel-in-chief – for her to inspect when she dismounted from her train.
Her son Affie, Duke of Edinburgh, was now the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. He had been more successful in his naval career, than Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, was in his army career. In June 1893, he was Commander-in-Chief of the British Fleet, stationed at Devonport, and an admiral of the fleet. But then Prince Albert’s dissipated old brother Ernst died in Coburg, and Affie’s naval duties came to an end. Since Bertie, for obvious reasons, had resigned the title of heir to the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and since Ernst II and Alexandrine were childless, the title passed to the Duke of Edinburgh.
He immediately lost his £15,000 per annum as an English royal duke, and as a German one he did not find it always easy – there was much resentment in Germany against the arrival of a foreigner, as he was perceived. When his mother arrived to see him in April 1894, he was already installed as the duke with his nice Russian wife Marie. A huge contingent of the family was staying at the Schloss Ehrenberg for the wedding of Ducky – Affie’s daughter Victoria Melita – to Ernst Ludwig of Hesse-Darmstadt, the son of the ever-lamented Princess Alice. He was the last person, as it happened, ever to hold that office. It was not to be a happy marriage: Ducky found the constraints of an unreformed petty German Court at Darmstadt intolerable. She forgot to answer letters, forgot to return visits to boring old relations and was regarded as too skittish; Louis was irascible with her, and there were many rows. She was horse-mad, and would ride out into the woods, forgetting appointments. Louis particularly hated a frisky stallion called Bogdan, her favourite horse whom no one but she could ride. Eventually, the squabbling pair divorced in 1901.
Even on her wedding day, poor Ducky was less interesting to the rest of the family than her sister Alicky. The day after Ducky and Ernst were married, Queen Victoria had just had her breakfast in the Schloss Ehrenberg when Ella burst into the room: ‘Alicky and Nicky are engaged!’38
So, while Ducky went off for seven years of stultifying boredom in Darmstadt, her two sisters were now both bound for Russia. Ella was already the Grand Duchess Elisabeth. Alicky was to become Alexandra Feodorovna. Queen Victoria took an active role in training her for her new role, for her husband, Nikolai Alexandrovich, as Tsarevich, was the heir to the Empire of All the Russias. Quite how soon he would become the Emperor, and Alicky the Empress, none of them could have guessed. It is almost unbearably poignant to see the photographs taken in the summer of 1894 of the betrothed Nicky and Alicky. He, more or less the double of his cousin George, Duke of York, stares heedless at the camera, while she, blank-faced, clutches the handle of an umbrella.
Shortly after the wedding in Coburg, Alicky came to England to spend an extended period with her elder sister Victoria (mother of the future Earl Mountbatten of Burma and grandmother of the future Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh) and with her grandmother the Queen. She was accompanied by Mlle Schneider, who was teaching her Russian, and after initial religious instruction by the Bishop of Ripon, Dr Carpenter, an expert on the Eastern Churches, she was handed over to the emperor’s confessor, Father Yanishev, who received her into his Church. Queen Victoria oversaw all this, and also arranged for the sisters to enjoy themselves; the great Eleonora Duse performed in Ibsen’s The Master Builder in a special performance at Windsor Castle, and they went into London to see Sarah Bernhardt act in a play called Adrienne Lecouvreur. Both sisters agreed that La Duse was infinitely the more impressive of the two theatrical legends.39
The carefree life did not last long. The forty-nine-year-old Emperor, Nicky’s father Alexander III, was an autocrat who made Queen Victoria’s occasional outbursts against radicalism seem mild. He regarded parliamentary government as ‘the great lie of our time’. As for juries, he thought they should be abolished ‘in order to restore the significance of the court in Russia’. He was scarcely preparing his son, or his people, for the progressive future, and with his mentor, the Ecclesiastical Censor Pobedonostsev – the mastermind behind the excommunication of the novelist Tolstoy – he would happily have undone all the comparatively liberal reforms of his father. ‘The voice of God orders us to stand boldly by the task of governing,’ he wrote in one of his royal proclamations.40 Even Lord Salisbury would have appeared radical beside Alexander III.
Rosebery stayed at Balmoral with the Queen for two nights in October 1894. It was as unlike Mr Gladstone’s farcical visits as possible. Whereas the Grand Old Man was sometimes not spoken to at all during his visits to the Deeside Schloss, Rosebery spent the afternoons and evenings freely chatting with the Queen, about the Chinese–Japanese war then in progress, and about the sudden deterioration in health of the Russian Emperor, which, apart from the personal grief which it would cause Victoria’s granddaughter Alicky, was clearly a potential calamity in terms of international politics. He had nephritis, and, as the medical bulletins became more and more pessimistic, the Prince of Wales set out to pay his last respects. The Emperor died at Livadia on 31 October. Nicky was now the Tsar. Less than a month after his father’s death, he married Alicky in an elaborate ceremony at St Petersburg. Victoria was now the grandmother of two of the most powerful imperial houses in Europe – Germany and Russia. Two of the central players in the tragedy of 1914, Wilhelm of Germany and Nikolai Alexandrovich of Russia, were now on the stage. In the Tobolsk province of Siberia, a weird sexual maniac-cum-mystic named Rasputin was beginning his married life and fathering three children. In Alicky’s genes, though she did not know it, lurked the fatal capacity to pass on haemophilia to a male child.
In each of the years he was Prime Minister, Rosebery’s horse won the Derby: Ladas in 1894, and Sir Visto in 1895. The Queen’s lady-in-waiting, Eliza Waterpark, was an aunt by marriage of Rosebery, married to his uncle Bouverie Primrose. It was very much through Uncle Bouverie that Rosebery had developed his interest in racing and horses. ‘What do you say to Lord Rosebery winning the Derby and to his being Prime Minister,’ Eliza wrote proudly to her sister in June 1894.41 But within a year, though his luck as a racehorse owner never seemed to desert him, he was a political spent force. There was a characteristic witty acknowledgement of this in Rosebery’s choice of title when he was elevated to the English peerage in 1895 – Baron Epsom of Epsom. ‘I never did have power,’ he bitterly remarked of his time in offic
e.42
Rosebery was premier for little over a year. He was too thin-skinned for the office, and when his popularity waned, he had not got the necessary insensitivity to withstand the unceasing criticism of him coming from Labouchere and the other radicals. Moreover, the year of his premiership, 1894–5, coincided with one of the most unpleasant scandals of the Victorian era, the persecution of Oscar Wilde by the ‘Scarlet Marquess’ of Queensberry.
The son of the Scarlet Marquess was Viscount Drumlanrig – Drummy, a blond, blue-eyed, rather dim Guards officer who had been educated at Harrow. When Rosebery was still at the Foreign Office, it was suggested that he take on Drummy as a private secretary, and that Drummy be made an English peer. He was given the title Lord Kelhead, and made a lord-in-waiting, a courtier’s role, but one which entitled him to vote, and swell the all-too-thin Liberal ranks, in the House of Lords.
It was a definite risk, to reward Drumlanrig in this way. His father had been excluded from the House of Lords on the grounds of his atheism. Scottish peers did not all sit in the House as of right. They elected a fixed number from among their group, and Queensberry, who had made himself offensive in many ways, scuppered his chances of election when he insisted upon distributing atheist literature on the red leather benches before prayers.