I, Victoria

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  28th February 1900

  BERTIE AND Alix called today, and Alix stayed to luncheon, though Bertie had to rush away as usual. She is very beautiful still, in spite of the passing years, and there is something added now of remoteness and serenity which suits her style very well. She seems like a creature from another world. Little Alicky, Alice’s girl, has it too, as I noticed last time she visited – with Nicky in ’ninety-six. But with Alicky it comes from a remoteness of spirit which started when her mother died. Before that she was a bubbling, merry little creature (her mother used to call her ‘Sunny’) but she became very thoughtful and, I’m sorry to say, very religious after she lost her mother. I am all for people having a faith, but that very intense piety, which gives itself to ‘adoration’ and ‘contemplation’ and a preoccupation with beads and candles and so on, is most unhealthy, and can prove very inconvenient to other people. Back in the year ’eighty-nine I hoped she would marry Eddy (she was always a favourite of mine, with such a look of Alice about her, and I’d have liked to keep her near me) but she couldn’t fancy him. It probably wouldn’t have worked out well, though. If Eddy had lived, I expect he’d have made her very unhappy – though she’d have made a beautiful queen.

  Alix’s remoteness, however, comes from deafness, which is as inconvenient in its way as piety but not half so dangerous. I am quite worn out with shouting. Poor Alix had rheumatic fever after the birth of Louise in 1867 and it left her as deaf as an adder, but she doesn’t like to admit it, so conversing with her can be tiring. She answers what she thinks you’ve said, and you then have to decide whether to go on with what you were saying or to change to her subject.

  Deafness can give rise to amusing situations sometimes. I remember once at Osborne I was entertaining to dinner a very deaf old admiral who was in charge of salvaging a ship which had gone down in Sandown Bay. After he had talked about it for a while, I decided to change the subject, and asked after his sister, who had been a lady-in-waiting of mine. The old sailor replied, ‘Well, ma’am, we’ve had her up on the beach, rolled her on her side and had a good look at her bottom, and now we’re going to scrape it.’ I thought I should choke to death, trying not to laugh! I had to pretend to have a fit of coughing and rummage in my bag for a handkerchief.

  I was looking through some old papers after luncheon, trying to find a letter I wanted to show to Alix, and I came across the famous account, written by my dear old Lehzen, of how I came to learn that I would one day be Queen. According to her it happened on the 11th of March 1830, when I was not quite eleven years old. My tutor had gone home for the day, and I opened Howlett’s Tables of the Kings and Queens of England to begin my history lesson with Lehzen, to find that (with Mamma’s agreement) she had slipped in a new page – an up-to-date genealogical table of my father’s family.

  ‘Why, I never saw this before,’ said I.

  ‘No, Princess, it was not thought necessary that you should,’ said Lehzen.

  I then studied the table, which had had the dates of death written in by hand beside the names of my various deceased relatives, and I saw that only my uncle Clarence stood between me and the Throne (Uncle York was dead by then, of course).

  ‘I see that I am nearer the Throne than I thought,’ I said in surprise.

  ‘That is so, madam,’ Lehzen confirmed, and as the realisation of what it meant sank into my consciousness, I burst into tears.

  After some moments, when I had regained my calm, I studied the table again and said, ‘Now, many a child would boast of this, but they don’t understand the difficulty. There is much splendour in the situation, but there is more responsibility.’ And then I placed my little hand in hers, gazed up at her earnestly, and vowed, ‘I will be good!’

  It is a poignant story, written by my old governess after she had left my service and gone back to Germany, and sent to me by her for my approval; and in the margin of the original there is a note in my beloved Albert’s hand saying, ‘The Queen perfectly recollects this circumstance, and says the discovery made her very unhappy.’ Well, I must have told him so – and indeed I have always publicly agreed with Lehzen’s account of the momentous occasion. I even allowed it to be included in Martin’s Life of my darling as a true thing, and it makes very pretty reading. But the fact of the matter is that dear, sentimental Lehzen, lonely in her old age, living a life of dull seclusion, banished far from me and my Court and all she cared about, wanted to make herself important again, even if only in memory. I don’t say she made up the whole thing, but I certainly do not remember the incident, which does not have the ring of truth to me – and if it happened as she says, surely I would remember it. I would not have dreamed of owning as much to Albert, however. Much as I adored him, I would not expose poor Lehzen to him: she deserved my loyalty for the long and bitter years when she alone stood by me. So I let her have her moment of triumph, as the one who revealed the Truth to me. I owed her that much.

  But the knowledge did not come to me suddenly one day like that. How could it? How could I have grown up, even secluded as I was, without understanding what my position was in the family? I knew my uncle was the King. I knew my father had been the fourth son and that the second and third sons were childless. And I could not possibly have studied the history of England as I did and not have understood the rules of succession. Queen Elizabeth was a great heroine of mine, and the Tudor period is riddled all through with questions of genealogy and succession – and particularly with the position of females in the succession.

  Then again, from my earliest childhood servants had been calling me Princess and Your Royal Highness, curtseying to me – a little child – and treating me with a respect bordering on reverence. Strangers addressed me as Ma’am, and gentlemen doffed their hats to me, though they did not do so to Feo who was older than me and almost grown up; and when on rare occasions I was allowed to play with another child, they were sternly invoked not to call me by my Christian name, though I might freely use theirs. I don’t know when it was that I fully understood my destiny, for I suppose it must have come upon me gradually over the whole course of my life, but certainly I understood well enough, that summer at Windsor, what it was that I shared with my uncle the King – that solemn, thrilling, fearful thing that I saw recognition of in his eyes.

  Yet if Lehzen had made occasion to inform me of it openly, there is nothing more likely than that I would have burst into tears. When you are a helpless child it is one thing to know something formlessly from your own observation, and quite another to have it confirmed officially and irrevocably by your own ultimate authority.

  In her account, Lehzen went on to say that she reminded me that my aunt Adelaide was still young and might yet have children; and that if she did they would ascend the Throne instead of me. I am supposed to have replied that if it happened so, I should not be disappointed, for I knew how much Aunt Adelaide loved children.

  The last part is certainly true – I loved her dearly, and grieved sincerely for her childless state. Thank God that it was God’s business to bring me to the Throne, for I could never have been hard-hearted enough to eliminate all the lives and hopes between me and it.

  But not be disappointed? No, no! Though my sovereignty has not always been a pleasure to me – though it has been a heavy burden, heavier than anyone can know – I would not have changed it for any consideration in this world or the next. I was meant to be Queen of England, and I could not contemplate any other life for Victoria, and that’s the truth of it. That is why I said earlier that I could not imagine any Prince of Wales giving up his place in the succession for the sake of marrying an Unsuitable Person. Kingship is everything. Papa, who went to such lengths to secure me the Throne, even giving up his own life, understood that; and I was Papa’s true daughter.

  I am tired, and must stop and resume tomorrow. I think I will sleep now.

  1st March 1900

  I WROTE a good deal last night, being unable to sleep, though I doubt whether anyone will ever be abl
e to read it. I had a ‘fine, free’ hand once, carefully taught by my writing-master; now it is excessively free and not at all fine – it has deteriorated with my eyesight and the increasing stiffness of my fingers. Well, perhaps I shall not need to destroy this essay after all: my horrid old scribble is as effective as a cypher! But this insomnia is a great nuisance, for I fall asleep at last in the early hours and then do not wake at my usual time, which puts me behind all day. I have so much to do, and have become a creature of habit, and I dislike my routines to be put out. Indeed, bowed under the burden of sovereignty, and with no-one to help me now, it has been routine that has saved me – that, and the ability to apply myself.

  Application did not come naturally to me. It does not to most children. But Lehzen instilled it into me. She was quietly insistent that what I began I must finish – a most valuable lesson to learn. My formal education began in 1827 when George Davys was appointed as my tutor. He was an evangelical clergyman, though not of the campaigning sort: I have never liked evangelicals, but he was a liberal and tolerant man, and most careful not to indoctrinate me. He was a quietly spoken, truly good person, who was very fond of me, and once I had got over rebelling against his discipline (for wilfulness was always my strongest fault) I came to appreciate his excellent qualities. When at last I became Queen, I was glad to be able to reward him by advancing him in his clerical career: I persuaded Lord Melbourne to make him Bishop of Peterborough (what Lord M. used to call ‘the dead See’!). When Davys died in 1864 The Times said of him, ‘His ambition through life was to be good rather than great.’ A muted epitaph, perhaps, but I do not know what truer praise anyone who loved God could want.

  Davys taught me English, poetry, history, geography, use of the globes, Latin, and of course Scripture and the Catechism. My writing-master, Mr Steward, also taught me mathematics, and found me very quick at it: I always had a good understanding of numbers (and consequently of money, something both my parents would have benefited from).

  Other tutors came in to teach me singing, drawing and dancing, all of which I enjoyed and consequently excelled at. My dancing mistress, Madame Boudin, taught me to move gracefully – something strangers always notice about me, and which has allowed me, in spite of my small size, to display the bearing of a queen. That grace of movement did not, thank God! desert me even when I grew old and stout, although now, alas, I do not do much of any kind of movement, graceful or otherwise! But as recently as October 1891, despite being seventy-two and rheumatic in my legs, I danced a reel with poor dear Liko at Balmoral, and Sir Henry Ponsonby marvelled at my light, airy steps, and said he wished he could move as well himself, though eight years my junior! (That was at the ball to celebrate little Maurice’s birth, of course – Beatrice and Liko’s youngest – one of those impromptu affairs that dear Liko so loved to organise. He was truly my Master of the Revels. I grieve for my own loss as much as Baby’s. How little any of us thought on that occasion how soon we would have to do without him!)

  The other thing that strangers have always noticed about me is my clear speaking voice – silvery, I have heard it called. It has stood me in very good stead over the years. Someone, I cannot now remember who, once said I spoke English like a foreigner – by which I think he meant more carefully and distinctly than a native-born English person would bother to. I’m sure it stems from those early singing lessons I had from John Sale. He was the organist of St Margaret’s Westminster, and he gave me a very thorough grounding in how to control my breathing, project my voice, and enunciate clearly. These are valuable assets to someone whose speeches must always be listened to!

  But I think I may also thank the fact that Mamma was German for my good diction. It is not true, by the way, that I spoke German at home as a child: I learned it, as I learned French and Italian, from a tutor, as a foreign language. Indeed I was much more fluent in French and Italian than in German, and when Albert and I were first betrothed we had to speak together a good deal in French. Mamma was determined that I should be brought up in every respect as an English child, and so all conversations with me at home were held in English. But Mamma and Späth (her waiting woman) both spoke with strong accents, and I believe that because of that my own accent became more consciously correct than it would have been had they been native English speakers. This clarity of my diction has always been a great asset on public occasions, as I have said, and it has been particularly useful when meeting foreign dignitaries with imperfect English. I’ve always found they understand me far better than my ministers, who will swallow their consonants and use colloquial phrases!

  Altogether my education was well planned and carefully undertaken; and I did try hard to apply myself, but dear Mr Davys said my besetting sin was ‘absence of mind’, a tendency to drift away into my own thoughts. This, I must say in my own defence, did not stem from laziness but from the peculiar circumstances of my upbringing, the lonely isolation of my existence – especially after my darling sister Feo married in February 1828 and left me to go and live in Germany.

  By that time the happiness of my early childhood had already melted away, and together with Feo I had entered a dark period which was to change my life, my character, my fortunes – everything! Some years afterwards Feo wrote to me, ‘When I look back upon those years, which ought to have been the happiest in my life, I cannot help pitying myself. Not to have enjoyed the pleasures of youth is nothing, but to have been deprived of all intercourse and to have not one cheerful thought in that dismal existence of ours was very hard. My only happy time was driving out with you and Lehzen; then I could speak and look as I liked. Thank God I am out of it! I escaped some years of imprisonment which you, my poor dear sister, had to endure after I was married.’

  She escaped – the word is not overdrawn – into marriage with the nice, handsome Prince Ernst of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, and I am glad to be able to record that they were very happy together. ‘Often I have praised God that He sent me my dearest Ernst, for I might have married I don’t know who, merely to get away.’

  They were as poor as church mice, and the court at Schloss Langenburg, a desolate, echoing place of huge empty rooms and icy corridors, was isolated from society and exceedingly dull. It is sad to think of lovely, vivacious Feo living a life of dreary economy, with no dancing or fun or pretty clothes; but though she was plagued by the lack of money all her life, she and Ernst loved each other dearly, and his death in June 1860 was a great grief to her. They had five children, and it was joy and satisfaction to me when Feo’s grandson Ernst recently married my granddaughter Sandra (Affie’s daughter), thus uniting our blood-lines.

  ‘The misery of our lives at Kensington,’ Feo’s letter continued, ‘was almost as nothing compared with the observation of the error – almost the impropriety – into which our mother was led by a Certain Person.’

  There is no getting round it. I shall have to speak of him if I am to tell my tale. Name him, Victoria! The Mephistopheles of our household – my mother’s evil genius – my tormentor – destroyer of our household peace and of my childhood’s innocence. The evil creature who estranged me from my own mother and kept me from the right and proper relationship I should have enjoyed with my uncle King and my uncle Clarence.

  Name him: John Conroy! There, it is out, and I wonder the page does not sizzle under the ink of those two words!

  1st March 1900 – later

  THE WONDERFUL news we have waited for have come at last, and are confirmed by telegraph from Buller, who has been into Ladysmith, and reports the Boers all gone like mist sucked up by the sun! The besieged are in poor case, all hungry and many of them sick after living on their horses and mules for weeks past, and White’s soldiers are not fit to campaign again until they have had some nursing – but the relief and gratitude is enormous, and our joy not to be measured. There is to be a thanksgiving service on Sunday and I have told the Dean to choose a cheerful hymn: we are all in need of some cheerfulness after weeks of worry. Hundreds of loyal telegrams have
arrived from people of all degrees. I am to go to London, drive about the streets, and be received at Buckingham Palace by both Houses, who will assemble in the courtyard to give me a hearty cheer. This will be a very novel proceeding! With all the excitement my private writing must be put aside for a while.

  Four

  10th March 1900, at Windsor

  I HAVE had my two State visits to the capital, on Thursday to Blackfriars and yesterday a drive through the streets of West London, and the crowds lining the routes on both days were quite astonishing, even greater than for my Diamond Jubilee. The loyalty and affection the people displayed was most thrilling and touching. It is a great and glorious privilege to have won the devotion of so many millions.

  The only inconvenience I encountered was that the horse trotting just behind my carriage would keep tossing its head and throwing foam over me. It reminds me of the drive to St Paul’s during my Diamond Jubilee celebrations: Lord Dundonald was riding just behind me, and he kept shouting out, ‘Steady, old girl! Keep calm, old lady!’ It was only when I turned round to glare at him that I realised he was addressing his rather frisky mare, and not me!

  Despite the pleasure of the last few days, I am suffering under a personal disappointment: I am not to go South this spring after all. After the long, dark winter all my senses yearn for the sunshine, the bright air, the clear colours of the flowers, the smell of pine! It will be the first time for fourteen years I have not gone; but the French have behaved so badly, supporting the Boers all along against what they choose to call our ‘oppression’. Not a day goes by without some scurrilous abuse of us, and even of me, in their newspapers, and on that account, and with the war still going on and so much still to be settled, it does not seem wise or even safe to be going abroad. The saddest thing is that I was to have met darling Vicky at Bordighera, and now I shall not see her at all. I have begged her, if she can, to come to England and visit me. If she made the journey by easy stages it might be done, though this wretched pain of hers makes it hard sometimes for her to move from her bed. The doctors don’t seem to know what causes it, and another reason for wishing to get her here is to consult an English doctor. I hope she will come. I am very uneasy about her health.