by A. N. Wilson
6. King Leopold I of Belgium, ‘Uncle Leopold’, one of the key influences on Queen Victoria. Note the wig.
7. Prince Albert’s intimate circle – (from left to right): The Hon. Charles Phipps, Mr Frederick. W. Gibbs, the Prince of Wales, Prince Albert, Baron Stockmar, Dr Ernst Becker and Baron Ernst Stockmar.
8. The Prince of Wales, Bertie, before he plumped out.
9. Princess Alice, who looks as if she is in mourning for her life, even before her deepest tragedies began.
10. A daguerreotype of the Royal Family on the terrace at Osborne in the 1850s.
11. Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, dressed as a private in the Grenadier Guards, Princess Helena (Lenchen) as a Chasseur de Vincennes, and Princess Louise as a Vivandière. Costumes for a tableau entitled ‘The Allies’.
12. The mausoleum at Frogmore under construction.
13. The children of the Duke of Edinburgh in mourning – Prince Alfred, Princess Marie (on the pony), Princess Victoria and Princess Alexandra.
14. Queen Victoria and the Empress Frederick (Vicky) in mourning for the Emperor Frederick III, who died in June, 1888.
15. Queen Victoria seated with (from left to right) Princess Louise, Prince Leopold, the Marquis of Lorne and Princess Beatrice.
16. Princess Beatrice (Baby) and her mother in the library.
17. The Queen with her grandchildren Prince Arthur and Princess Margaret of Connaught.
18. 19th April 1894 at the marriage of Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse and Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg. Five of the Queen’s children, ten grandchildren and one great grandchild may be seen. The German Emperor (Wilhelm II) sits in the foreground in front of the Russian Emperor.
19. Four great Prime Ministers (clockwise, from top left): Palmerston, Disraeli – perhaps her favourite, Salisbury, and her bête noir W. E. Gladstone pictured with his axe at the root of the old order.
20. Victoria resplendent with a fur stole.
21. George Duke of Cambridge, always a trusted friend and cousin.
22. Her brilliant secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby.
23. Her last doctor, Sir James Reid.
24. Dr Norman Macleod – did he perform a marriage service at Balmoral for the Queen and John Brown?
25. Four generations – Queen Victoria, Edward VII, George V and Edward VIII.
26. Always a keen dog-lover, Victoria is here pictured with her Pomeranian, Turi, outside one of the continental hotels where she liked to stay.
27. John Brown with another of the Queen’s dogs.
28. The Queen with Abdul Karim, the ‘Munshi’, her last favourite.
29. Ponsonby, the ‘Munshi’, Princess Beatrice and others enacting a tableau of ‘The Queen of Sheba’.
30. The Queen’s bedroom at Osborne, where she died, being held by the German Emperor. The room still possesses an electrifying atmosphere of her presence.
31. In this late photograph may be seen the passion, caprice, vulnerability and humour that Queen Victoria retained from early childhood.
NOTES
1 AUTHORS
1 J. A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of His Life in London 1834–1881, London, Longmans, Green, 1884, Vol. I, p. 90.
2 Ibid.
3 Roger Fulford, Royal Dukes: Queen Victoria’s Father and ‘Wicked Uncles’, pp. 226 ff.
4 Froude, Vol. I, p. 135.
5 ‘Did he really say, “We authors, Ma’am?” The story has never been authenticated, but it deserves to be true’. Robert Blake, Disraeli, n. p. 493.
6 Yvonne M. Ward, Censoring Queen Victoria, p. 9.
7 Giles St Aubyn, Queen Victoria: A Portrait, p. 601.
8 The Times, 19 December 1890.
9 Papers of the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield, Sir Henry Ponsonby to Lord Salisbury, 22 December 1890.
10 Battersea Papers, BL Additional MS 47,909, 24 April 1922.
11 Ibid., 29 February 1931.
12 A recent lively biography of Princess Louise by Lucinda Hawksley – the great-great-great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens – rehearses many of the rumours: that Louise had affairs with, among others, the sculptor Joseph Edgar Boehm, with her brother-in-law Prince Henry of Battenberg and with the courtier Sir Arthur Bigge. When the author applied to the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, she was told, ‘We regret that Princess Louise’s files are closed.’ (Hawksley, The Mystery of Princess Louise, p. 2.) So, the rumours remain rumours.
2 ZOOLOGY
1 Letters of Countess Granville, pp. 196–7, quoted Cecil Woodham-Smith, Queen Victoria. Her Life and Times, Volume 1, 1819–1861, p. 51.
2 See Daniel Schönpflug ‘One European Family?’ in Karina Urbach (ed.), Royal Kinship, Anglo-German Family Networks, 1815–1918, quoting Andreas Kraus, ‘Das Haus Wittelsbach und Europa’, and Lucien Bély, La société des princes XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris, Fayard, 1999).
3 John Martin Robinson, The Dukes of Norfolk (Chichester, Phillimore, 1995), p. 1, says that the family line ‘cannot be traced further than the reign of Edward I’ and quotes Gibbon: ‘The proudest families are content to lose in the darkness of the middle ages the tree of their pedigree.’
4 Though the source of the huge increase in royal wealth was the Duchy of Lancaster; see p. 341.
5 John Davis, ‘The Coburg Connection’, in Urbach (ed.), Royal Kinship, p. 102.
6 Karl Marx, Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts, 1843: Werke, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (eds.), Vol. I, p. 310.
7 Dulcie Ashdown, Queen Victoria’s Family, p. 36.
8 Sidney Lee, Queen Victoria, A Biography, p. 17.
9 David Duff, Edward of Kent, p. 85.
10 Ibid., p. 109.
11 See the excellent The Prince and His Lady by Mollie Gillen.
12 Both quoted in Duff, Edward of Kent, p. 238.
13 Quoted ibid., p. 230.
14 Quoted Elizabeth Longford, Victoria R.I., p. 20.
15 Dulcie Ashdown, Queen Victoria’s Mother, p. 48.
16 D. M. Potts and W. T. W. Potts, Queen Victoria’s Gene: Haemophilia and the Royal Family, p. 64.
17 Ibid., p. 72.
18 I espoused it in my book The Victorians, acknowledging my debt to Potts and Potts.
19 Kate Williams, Becoming Queen, p. 139.
20 Ibid., p. 140 (slightly emended).
21 All the above, Duff, Edward of Kent, p. 224.
22 Lee, p. 18.
23 Duff, Edward of Kent, p. 279.
3 ‘IT IS ONE STEP’
1 A. C. Benson and Viscount Esher (eds.), The Letters of Queen Victoria 1837–1861, Vol. I, p. 10.
2 RA/VIC/MAIN/Z/128/185.
3 Lee, p. 30.
4 Roger Fulford (ed.), Dearest Child: Letters between Queen Victoria and the Princess Victoria 1858–1861, pp. 111–2.
5 RA/VIC/MAIN/Z/128/1.
6 RA/VIC/MAIN/Z/128/2.
7 RA/VIC/MAIN/Z/128/3.
8 Fulford, Royal Dukes, p. 58.
9 Benson and Esher, Letters, Vol. I, p. 10.
10 Ibid., p. 11.
11 Ibid.
12 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 13, p. 76, K. D. Reynolds, ‘Elizabeth, Marchioness Conyngham’.
13 J. G. Lockhart, Life of Sir Walter Scott, p. 690.
14 Lee, pp. 29–30.
15 Quoted Woodham-Smith, p. 54, quoting RA Y 203/81.
16 Quoted ibid., p. 73.
17 RA/VIC/MAIN/Z/128/7–9.
18 Conroy Papers, Balliol College, Oxford.
19 www.measuringworth.com
20 Benson and Esher, Letters, Vol. I, p. 18.
21 Woodham-Smith, p. 72, quoting a translation of RA M4/16, Duchess of Clarence to Duchess of Kent, 12 January 1830.
4 ‘WHITE LITTLE SLAVEY’
1 Marquess of Anglesey,
One Leg: The Life and Letters of Henry William Paget, First Marquess of Anglesey, KG, pp. 227–30; see also Prochaska, Royal Bounty: The Making of a Welfare Monarchy, p. 54.
2 Anglesey, p. 230.
3 Viscount Esher (ed.), The Training of a Sovereign, p. vii.
4 Charles Greville, The Greville Memoirs, 1814–1861, ed. Lytton Strachey and Roger Fulford, Vol. II, p. 119.
5 Ibid., p. 307.
6 Ibid., p. 36.
7 Prochaska, p. 58.
8 Greville, Vol. III, p. 147.
9 Ibid., p. 192.
10 Lee, p. 31.
11 Viscount Esher (ed.), The Girlhood of Queen Victoria: A Selection of Her Majesty’s Diaries between the years 1832 and 1840, Vol. I, p. 29.
12 Jane Ridley, Bertie, p. 9.
13 David Cecil, Melbourne, p. 388.
14 Conroy Papers, Balliol College, Oxford.
15 All the strongly phrased insults come from various documents in the Conroy Papers, Balliol College, Oxford.
16 RA/M7/67, Prince Charles Leiningen’s memorandum, quoted Longford, p. 56.
17 RA/VIC/MAIN/ADD/A11/18, Lord Liverpool’s memorandum, quoted Longford, p. 57.
18 Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People?, pp. 430–1 and Antonia Fraser, passim.
19 Dugald Stewart, Lectures on Political Economy, ed. Sir William Hamilton (Edinburgh, 1855, 2 vols.), Vol. II, p. 374.
20 Jonathan Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain, pp. 43–4.
21 Esher, Girlhood, Vol. I, p. 44.
22 Ibid., pp. 134–5.
23 Ibid., p. 133.
24 Katherine Hudson, A Royal Conflict: Sir John Conroy and the Young Victoria, p. 62.
25 RA Y79/35, King Leopold of the Belgians to Queen Victoria, 9 March 1854, quoted Hudson, p. 104.
26 Journal, 26 February 1838.
27 RA M7/42, Baron Stockmar to the Duchess of Kent, transcribed Hudson, p. 102.
28 Benson and Esher, Letters, Vol. I, p.48, 13 May 1836.
29 RA Y88/11, 17 May 1836.
30 Esher, Girlhood, Vol. I, p. 159.
31 Ibid., p. 161.
32 Benson and Esher, Letters, Vol. I, p. 19.
33 Greville, Vol. III, pp. 309–10.
34 Esher, Girlhood, Vol. I, p. 190.
35 Ibid., p. 191.
36 RA/VIC/ADD/A11/12.
37 Woodham-Smith, p. 135.
38 Esher, Girlhood, Vol. I, p. 193.
39 RA Melbourne papers, 20 June 1837, quoted Philip Ziegler, King William IV, p. 289.
40 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 13, p. 78, K. D. Reynolds, ‘Elizabeth, Marchioness Conyngham’.
41 Greville, Vol. III, p. 375.
42 Esher, Girlhood, Vol. I, p. 196.
43 Ibid.
5 ‘THE IGNORANT LITTLE CHILD’
1 Conroy Papers, Balliol College, Oxford.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Journal, 7 February 1838.
5 Lord Byron, ‘Remember Thee, Remember Thee’.
6 David Cecil, p. 227.
7 Superficially, because beneath the surface Melbourne and all the Whigs would have fought to the death to defend themselves against radicals, plebeians, trades unions – anything which diminished their power in any way. Their only reason for siding with the liberals was self-preservation.
8 Quoted L. G. Mitchell, Lord Melbourne, 1779–1848, p. 211. Hertfordshire Record Office, Panshanger MSS, D/ELb, f. 35.
9 Journal, 15 October 1838.
10 Journal, 22 April 1838.
11 Journal, 21 January 1838.
12 Journal, 10 October 1838.
13 Journal, 3 December 1838. This Mrs Lamb was the natural child of Lady Elizabeth Foster, later Duchess of Devonshire.
14 Journal, 5 July 1839.
15 Journal, 6 February 1839.
16 Journal, 1 January 1839.
17 Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People?, p. 558.
18 All the quotations, unless otherwise stated, relating to this day come from Queen Victoria’s journal, 28 June 1838.
19 Journal, 24 June 1838.
20 Journal, 19 April 1838.
21 Benson and Esher, Letters, Vol. I, p. 121.
22 Ibid.
23 Journal, 16 July 1839.
24 Journal, 8 July 1839.
25 Journal, 5 November 1839.
26 Journal, 3 July 1839.
27 Journal, 1 November 1838.
28 Journal, 6 February 1839.
29 Journal, 1 August 1838.
30 Journal, 3 February 1839.
31 Journal, 10 July 1839.
32 Journal, 25 April 1838.
33 Journal, 7 July 1839.
34 Journal, 10 July 1839.
35 Quoted Mitchell, p. 241.
36 Journal, 10 August 1839.
37 Journal, 12 May 1839.
38 Benson and Esher, Letters, Vol. I, p. 175.
39 Ibid., 11 May 1839, p. 172.
40 Journal, 20 June 1837.
41 Benson and Esher, Letters, Vol. I, p. 177.
42 Ibid., 12 October 1839, p. 188.
43 Journal, 1 November 1839.
44 Journal, 5 November 1839.
45 Benson and Esher, Letters, Vol. I, 15 October 1839, p. 188.
46 Ibid., 24 October 1839, p. 190.
47 Journal, 26 July 1843.
6 ‘TOO HASTY AND PASSIONATE FOR ME’
1 See the Daily Telegraph, 24 September 2013, where the monarch was photographed in conversation with the Prime Minister of New Zealand. A photograph in frame of the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall is on the table. Toy corgis are to be seen in the foreground. And on either side of the chimneypiece hang the Brocky drawings. The images themselves are to be found in Jonathan Marsden, Victoria & Albert: Art and Love, p. 62.
2 T. R. Hooper (ed.), Memoirs of Ebenezer and Emma Hooper, p. 185.
3 Hooper, p. 186.
4 Journal, 1 January 1840.
5 Robert Rhodes James, Albert, Prince Consort, p. 90.
6 Journal, 10 February 1840.
7 Journal, 11 February 1840.
8 Sir Theodore Martin, The Life of His Royal Highness The Prince Consort, Vol. I, p. 55.
9 Quoted Robert Rhodes James, p. 104.
10 Ibid., p. 107.
11 RA/VIC/MAIN/Y/54/3, quoted Frank Eyck, The Prince Consort: A Political Bigraphy, p. 24.
12 Journal, 1 December 1840.
13 Robert Rhodes James, pp. 126–7 quoting RA/VIC/MAIN/Y/154/100, RA/VIC/ADDU/2/4, ff.2 and 5.
14 Ibid., p. 127 quoting RA U2/4.
15 Paul Thomas Murphy, Shooting Victoria: Madness, Mayhem, and the Rebirth of the British Monarchy, pp. 54–64.
16 Ibid., pp. 181–2.
17 Ibid., p. 207.
18 Hermione Hobhouse, Thomas Cubitt, Master Builder, p. 375.
19 Ibid., p. 135.
20 Peel Papers, BL Additional 40,437, f. 251, 2 November 1843.
21 Ibid., f. 376, 2 November 1843.
22 Ibid., f. 193, 7 September 1843.
23 Ibid., f. 201, 8 November 1843.
24 Journal, 2 December 1843.
25 Kate Colquhoun, A Thing in Disguise: The Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton, p. 123.
26 Ibid., pp. 124–6.
27 Hobhouse, Cubitt, p. 316 and passim.
28 Quoted ibid., p. 377.
29 J. N. D. Kelly and M. J. Walsh, Oxford Dictionary of Popes, p. 313.
30 Albert to Peel, Peel Papers, BL 212, f. 280, 19 October 1841, quoted Emma Winter, ‘Albert and Fresco Painting’ in Franz Bosbach and John R. Davis (eds.), Prinz Albert. Ein Wettiner in Grossbritannien, p. 152.
31 Leah Kharibian, Passionate Patrons: Victoria
and Albert and the Arts, p. 43.
32 Ibid., p. 41.
33 Winter, in Bosbach and Davis, p. 158.
34 Journal, 6 May 1842.
35 Journal, 2 September 1842.
36 Ibid.
37 Journal, 5 September 1842.
38 Journal, 7 September 1842.
39 Journal, 1 October 1844.
40 Journal, 1 May 1843 – the German for ‘wheelchair’ is Rollstuhl.
41 Journal, 4 May 1843.
42 Journal, 1 June 1844.
43 Journal, 3 June 1844.
44 Journal, 22 June 1846.
45 Journal, 23 January 1846.
46 Hansard, Third Series, Vol. LXXXIII, p. 94.
47 Ibid., p. 310.
48 Hansard, Third Series, Vol. LXXXIV, p. 347.
7 I PURITANI
1 Peel Papers, BL Additional 40,441, f. 324.
2 Ibid.
3 Journal, 8 September 1846.
4 Ibid.
5 Journal, 25 June 1846.
6 Journal, 10 June 1846.
7 Journal, 6 July 1846.
8 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 48, p. 300, John Prest, ‘Lord John Russell’.
9 E. L. Woodward, The Age of Reform, 1815–1870, p. 352.
10 Journal, 5 July 1846.
11 See Karina Urbach, ‘Albert and Palmerston’ in Bosbach and Davis, pp. 83–93.
12 Ibid., p. 86, quoting Staatsarchiv Coburg LA A7206.
13 David Brown, Palmerston and the Politics of Foreign Policy, 1846-1855, quoting PRO 30/22/7 ff. 343–5, Russell Papers.
14 Urbach, in Bosbach and Davis, p. 88.
15 Quoted Brown, Palmerston and the Politics of Foreign Policy, p. 93.
16 Hansard, Third Series, Vol. XCVII, 1 March 1848, pp. 121–3.