by A. N. Wilson
It was typical of Salisbury’s ability to get his own way, and to manipulate the Queen, that within a week she had abandoned her objections to Temple ‘though she retains her personal opinion as to his fitness’.26 The point she made about Temple’s age – eight years older than his predecessor who had just dropped dead during Matins – was surely a strong one. In a certain way, though, in so far as the later part of this reign was working towards a climacteric, a mighty change in which, before she died, she was to set her seal upon her age, there was some fittingness in choosing Temple. Bushy-eyebrowed headmaster of that school which knew its glory age in Queen Victoria’s reign and supplied so many of its bishops, soldiers, imperial administrators and poets – Rugby – Temple represented Prince Albert’s religion: Liberal Protestantism. So liberal had he been, indeed, as a contributor to the famous Broad Church collection Essays and Reviews, that there were protests at his consecration to the episcopate. His was not the austere High Churchmanship of Salisbury, but it represented perhaps the Christianity most representative of the governing class, who had not quite abandoned the Faith, but did not like anything which smacked too strongly of dogma, still less of Catholicism. Creighton, with his sense of humour and his taste for the grotesque, was a much better Bishop of London, much better at providing leadership to a diocese by now so full of ‘bells and smells’. His successor at Peterborough, equally apt as a representative of another aspect of the age, was Edward Glyn, married to Lady Mary Campbell, a sister-in-law of Princess Louise. Post-First World War, there would be little room in the Church of England for Trollope’s Archdeacon Grantly.
With the right bishops in place, with a politician whose views so conveniently dovetailed with the Queen’s in her final years, what a pity they did not make Rudyard Kipling the Poet Laureate. He would probably have refused it, as he did when offered it by George V, but Tennyson was surely right to say he had fire in his belly, and he was the perfect unofficial laureate of late Victorian imperialism. Instead, cynical Salisbury, a brilliant man who could afford from a great intellectual height to be amused by philistinism, placed the laureate crown on the brow of the absurdly moustachioed Alfred Austin, a Catholic journalist of High Tory persuasion with scarcely even pretension to poetic gifts. Alfred Austin’s poem ‘Jameson’s Ride’, the first published after he had succeeded to Tennyson’s laureateship, surely scraped into a new low point, even by the undistinguished history of laureate verse.
I suppose we were wrong, were madmen,
Still I think at the Judgment Day,
When God sifts the good from the bad men,
There’ll be something more to say.
We were wrong, but we aren’t half sorry;
And as one of the baffled band,
I would rather have had that foray
Than the crushing of all the Rand.
Even Salisbury was a bit embarrassed, pretending, when he wrote to the Queen (who had been ‘surprised’ by the poem), not to have seen it, but ‘he has heard it strongly condemned by many persons both from a political and a literary point of view’.27 The wag Sir Owen Seaman explained the appointment neatly when he wrote:
At length a callous Tory chief arose,
Master of caustic jest and cynic gibe,
Looked round the Carlton Club and lightly chose
Its leading scribe.28
On Wednesday, 23 September 1896, the Queen noted in her journal, ‘Today is the day on which I have reigned longer by a day than any English sovereign, and the people wished to make all sorts of demonstrations, which I asked them not to do until I had completed the sixty years next June.’29 She was in Balmoral for the momentous day. On every hill, there were bonfires. Every church rang its bells. The men of the Crathie and Ballater Volunteers lined the darkened roads with blazing torches, to greet an illustrious pair who had come to visit the Queen: the new Emperor and Empress of Russia. The welcoming party consisted of the old Duke of Cambridge, the Duke and Duchess of York, and a Guard of Honour of the Black Watch.
The figures who stepped from their carriage into the Scottish night air were not the same as the carefree lovers Alicky and Nicky who had enjoyed their courtship at Osborne and Windsor two years before. With sadly little preparation, they had been thrust into the role of absolute autocrats, aged only twenty-seven in his case, twenty-three in hers. Their Coronation, in May 1896, had been a disaster. Half a million people had assembled on the Khodinsky Plain, a large park outside Moscow. As Coronation mugs, cakes and sweetmeats were distributed, people surged forward and began to be trampled underfoot. As some were pushed forward, and others tried to escape, the crowd got out of control, and mounted troops were brought in. They were meant to restore order, but they made things worse, with hundreds now being trampled underfoot. In the end, more than 3,000 people had been killed. This terrible accident cast a pall of gloom over the opening of the reign, as the newly crowned Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna appeared on this scene of chaos and were shown into the Imperial Pavilion in the park, even as corpses and wounded were being carried away by the hundred. Their distress was deep, they visited hospitals and the afflicted, but no one had felt happy on their day of crowning.
The Alicky who had grown up in Darmstadt as Princess Alice’s little English girl, fed on rice pudding and baked apples, was not recognizable in the stiff, sad Russian Empress who stayed at Balmoral. Her grandmother the Queen had, with crashing tactlessness, noted that the day of their visit coincided with the anniversary of the Fall of Sevastopol, and put on a small exhibition of trophies won from the Imperial Russian Armies in 1855. The young people viewed them with humourless solemnity. Nicholas II hated Balmoral; he hated being surrounded by all his wife’s extended German family; and he disliked being taken out for sport in the freezing wet weather. They had no luck in finding a stag and only managed to shoot a brace of grouse. As the rain pelted against the windows, Alexandra Feodorovna was morosely silent indoors. Her sister, Lady Milford Haven (‘Victoria B.’), wrote:
I watched Nicky once at a luncheon saying to Ernie [their brother Ernest Ludwig, last reigning Grand Duke of Hesse and the Rhine], how he envied his being a constitutional monarch on whom the blame for all the mistakes made by his ministers was not heaped. Under other circumstances, Nicky would have made a remarkably good constitutional Sovereign, for he was in no way narrow minded, nor obsessed by his high position. If you could have boiled down Nicky and William [Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany] in one pot you would have produced an ideal Emperor of Russia. His father’s dominating personality had stunted any gifts for initiative in Nicky.30
Davidson had, with perhaps pardonable gush, given the Queen’s fondness for him, and her longevity, remarked that ‘your Majesty should wield a personal and domestic influence over the thrones of Europe absolutely without precedent in the history of Christendom . . . It can be no small matter to the world’s life that the occupants of the imperial thrones of Germany and of Russia should at such a juncture bear the relation they do to your Majesty.’31 But, as the Balmoral visit made clear to everyone, the influence of ‘Gangan’ – as the toddler David, future Edward VIII, was calling her during this bleak holiday – was on the wane.
Nicky and Alicky were being transformed, by the rigidity of the system into which they had been forced, and by the weakness of their characters, into unsuccessful autocrats, doomed to become martyrs. Today, they are actually saints of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the faithful queue in Russian churches to light candles before their icons. Such a transformation of their grandmother is never quite imaginable, partly because, however much in small and domestic matters she liked to be an autocrat, the system in which Victoria was operating was not one which could ever freeze her into an icon or hack her down as a martyr. Not that confusion was always to be avoided. Arthur Wagner, the eccentric and wealthy Brighton clergyman who built so many High churches in that seaside town, grew short-sighted and a little vague in his old
age. Being driven past the statue of Queen Victoria erected to commemorate her Diamond Jubilee, he murmured, ‘To think that I should have lived to see the day when the Brighton Corporation erected a statue of Our Dear Lady.’32
In Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, Protestant devotees such as Edmund Spenser had made her into a Faerie Queene, almost an ersatz Madonna. Queen Victoria, who was horrified by churches such as ‘Father’ Wagner’s in Brighton, had, nevertheless, developed into a figurehead: not a gilded icon such as would one day depict the Russian Emperor and his wife, but a potent symbol all the same. ‘L’histoire d’un homme, c’est l’histoire d’une époque’,33 as one of his most fervent admirers began his biography of General de Gaulle. For many who lit the bonfires in Britain in September 1896, Victoria had come to embody their own experience of their times. This is different from personal admiration, just as it is certainly different from the veneration owing to a saint. But for hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world, Queen Victoria had become something more than simply an old lady in a bonnet. She had transcended autocracy and become the role model for all future successful constitutional monarchs, a beloved figurehead reflecting back to the people themselves their own experiences of passing time and, perhaps also, their own values, their own sense of the sacred. These things are very hard to define.
Nor is it to belittle such feelings, still less the old lady who was the focus of them, to enjoy, as her courtiers did, the rich comedy of the Queen’s character, which remained in all its vivid outline until the end of her days.
What a pity she never met Proust!34 Her life on the Riviera was abounding in the sort of characters about whom he wove his imaginative web. As when, in 1887, the Countess of Paris passed through Biarritz and told Princess Beatrice that her mother-in-law, the Queen Regent (soi-disante), was ‘burning with desire to visit our Queen, but would not put her foot in a country which had insulted her husband’.35 At Cimiez, in April 1897, the Queen found herself staying in the same hotel as the great Sarah Bernhardt: as venerated for her acting as she was celebrated for her rackety life of love. (Bertie, as the Queen was no doubt completely aware, had become obsessed by her when she did a London season in 1879, attending her performances night after night; though she was only a flirtation, she was invited to his Coronation years later, and placed with Mrs Keppel, Jennie Churchill and the other mistresses in the chancel gallery nicknamed the ‘King’s Loose Box’.36)
Inevitably, therefore, Queen Victoria was a little torn when she found herself staying in the same hotel: the side of her nature which relished the theatre, and which liked to have set eyes upon contemporary celebrities, was at war with the prudish mother of the prodigal son. In the end, she relented, and a small stage was erected in her reception room in the hotel. Bernhardt performed a half-hour piece entitled Jean Marie, and the Queen found it ‘quite marvellous... She appeared much affected herself, tears rolling down her cheeks. She has a most beautiful voice and is very graceful in all her movements.’ The two legends met for a few moments after the performance, and Victoria said she hoped Bernhardt was not tired. ‘Cela m’a reposé,’37 was the reply. The Queen removed one of her pearl bracelets and put it on the wrist of La Bernhardt, and the actress took off one of hers and presented it to the Queen, together with a photograph.
The hotel they had chosen for the 1897 Riviera jaunt, the Excelsior Regina Hotel at Cimiez, near Nice, was a new one. Lord Salisbury was himself a devotee of the Riviera, where he had a house, and where he enjoyed tea parties with the Queen. Salisbury had ‘questioned the salubrity’38 of a place as yet untried. The punctilious Dr Reid, however, had visited the building site during construction to make sure that they were installing proper drains, and could assure the Prime Minister that ‘I have for nearly a year been giving constant attention to the progress of the new hotel’. It had electric lighting, and superb views of the Mediterranean. He had also found a doctor in Cimiez whom he deemed to be ‘a physician of the highest standing’.39
As it happened, this holiday, for all the pleasure which the Queen invariably derived from the scenery, and the company, on the Riviera, was clouded by a row brought to a head by James Reid himself. For, the Household had reached boiling point over the question of the Munshi. Before they all set out, Reid had told the inner circle – Marie Mallet, Jane Churchill, Fritz Ponsonby, Arthur Bigge, Harriet Phipps – that the Munshi was yet again suffering from gonorrhoea; that the Queen was insisting upon the Munshi, yet again, accompanying the royal party to Cimiez; and that it was expected that they should dine with him. A majority of the Household, led by Fritz Ponsonby, said that if this happened, they would go on strike; and it was agreed that the Queen should be told. They fixed on Harriet Phipps as their spokesperson.
With very great courage, Miss Phipps crossed the courtyard at Windsor and approached the Queen’s sitting room. The Queen was seated at her writing table behind a large pile of state papers, which she was closely perusing through the spectacles which – though she had been given them some years before – she had only recently consented to wear. As Harriet Phipps falteringly explained the position, the Queen’s anger mounted. Her hand came out across the table and she swept everything onto the floor – papers, mementoes, pens, glass ink-pots, framed photographs all went flying. The child was mother to the woman; just such storms by the infant in Kensington Palace had alarmed her widowed mother, the Duchess of Kent, and convinced Lehzen that she had never known so ‘passionate and naughty’ a child. The Queen had her way, and the Munshi came with the Household to the South of France.
Although he had not been invited, the Munshi’s radical friend Rafiuddin Ahmed joined the party after two days. At the Prime Minister’s request, the Household expelled him after forty-eight hours; the Queen demanded that Salisbury apologize, or at least explain to Ahmed that he was being expelled because he was a journalist, and not because he was suspected of being a spy.
By now there was a formidable anti-Munshi alliance: Fritz Ponsonby and Dr Reid were the most vociferous among the courtiers, but none of the courtiers liked the Munshi, and the Prince of Wales, who, together with all Victoria’s children, hated the man, proposed that they should collect details about the Munshi’s family to discredit him in the eyes of the Queen. The viceroy was appealed to, and once more, details of the Munshi’s original deceptions were wired back to England: the father being a pharmacist at the jail in Agra and not a doctor... But nothing new was unearthed.
Reid then tried a truly extreme measure. So stubborn was the Queen being, he said, in a formal letter to her, that ‘there are people in high places, who know Your Majesty well, who say to me that the only charitable explanation that can be given is that Your Majesty is not sane’.40 If Reid thought this would cow the granddaughter of the mad George III, he was very much mistaken. She flew into a ‘most violent passion’ and said she thought they were all behaving ‘disgracefully’. Reid then wrote to the Munshi himself accusing him of being a liar. In words which can still make the reader cringe, over a century after they were written, Reid wrote, ‘You are from a very low class and never can be a gentleman. Your education is nil. To be called “Secretary” is perfectly ridiculous.’ He went on to say that the police were investigating him, and to accuse the Munshi of trying to cheat the Queen. ‘If the Queen were to die and any letters of hers were found in your possession no mercy will be shown you. The Queen does not know all I have told you because it would shock her greatly to know how completely you have deceived her and what a scoundrel you are, and she hopes it may be possible for you to stay with her still. But this can only be if your “position” is altogether taken away.’41 The Munshi did not know that the police, and the Prime Minister, suspected Rafiuddin of spying, so much of Reid’s letter would have been incomprehensible to him. He retreated into silence.
The Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria must represent, in the eyes of many, the very summit of British power in the world. The British dominated Asia –
not only did they govern India, but they had annexed Upper Burma in 1886. In West and East Africa the British had colonized far greater areas than had any other European power. In spite of the setback of the Jameson Raid, few could have seen that the Boers, even when armed with German weapons, provided much of a rivalry to British power in South Africa. The enormous fertile tracts of Bechuanaland remained under British sway. Further afield across the globe, the dominions of Australia, New Zealand and Canada looked to the Queen as to their Head of State. Although the balance of power in Europe was precarious, Britain remained, not least because of the strength of her navy, a superpower, and Victoria was the grandmother of two of the most powerful European emperors.
Yet the poetic antennae of that most imperialist of all great British writers sensed that an apex was what it was: that after the Diamond Jubilee, Britain had nowhere to go but down. In one of his finest political hymns, Rudyard Kipling, thirty-two years old, wrote:
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!42
The situation in Europe was by now so tense that an assembly of crowned heads, such as had marked the Golden Jubilee of 1887, posed diplomatic problems. How would the German Emperor be received, only a year after the calculated insult of his telegram to Paul Kruger? Europe, moreover, was in the middle of a major crisis, in some respects the most dangerous it had seen since the Crimean War. In February 1897, Colonel Vassos landed in Crete and hoisted the Greek flag in defiance of Turkish occupation of the island. By April, Greece and Turkey were at war, a war which Turkey would win. But it had a far wider effect than in the actual areas of conflict – namely, on the alliance of the European powers. Although liberals in Germany, such as the Dowager Empress (Vicky), supported Greece, her country was heavily committed to Turkey. ‘What my feelings are when I read of the encouragement given to Turkey by Germany and by the German officers in the Turkish Army, you can imagine,’ Vicky told her mother. ‘The Turks are a fearful foe, not for Russians or European troops, but for the Greeks. They are like wild beasts in their cruelty.’43 The matters unresolved by Gladstone’s pamphlet on the Bulgarian atrocities once more flared up to divide Europe. Did the Europeans – as cynics such as Salisbury and power-brokers such as the German Emperor desired – simply back Turkey? Or were there issues of human rights, and of a common religion, which meant that in the end Christian must side with Christian against Muslim? These matters would shake up, and split up, the Concert of Europe, with Russia, endlessly hungry for influence in Turkey and emotionally in favour of strengthening Orthodoxy, fatally, but naturally, inclined to side against Germany.