I, Victoria

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘The Prince has conducted your affairs in Cabinet in the most excellent manner during your absence,’ he told me, ‘and he has an immense capacity for taking pains.’

  ‘Yes, I know that,’ I said. ‘Nothing could have been clearer or better than his reports to me.’

  He looked at me shrewdly and came at the heart of my difficulty, for he knew me very well; better, at that time, than anyone else. ‘Anson, as you know, thinks very highly of the Prince,’ he remarked, as though casually. ‘He says that it is the most remarkable good fortune for the country that Your Majesty has chosen a Prince whose desire is to aim at no power for himself, but to sink his own individual existence in that of his wife, solely in order to be able to assist and advise her.’

  But I was not ready for such a compounding of identities, for I had a strong suspicion it would be mine which would be required to do the sinking!

  I recovered so well and so quickly that the Court was able to move to Windsor for Christmas. It was a happy season, with the present tables and the German Christmas tree with its radiant candles (Queen Charlotte was the first to bring this German custom to England, I believe, but it was I and Albert who made it popular) and great feasting with meats and pies and sugar plums, and merry games. Our new baby, Vicky – or Pussy as we called her at first – was healthy and lively, and Albert proved especially adept at handling her and soothing her crying. It was he who carried her on Christmas Day to look at the Tree, and he remarked with pride that her lovely blue eyes shone like stars as she stared at the glittering, glowing thing. Mamma, I need not add, was already besotted with Pussette; and even I was finding her an agreeable subject for sketching.

  The season was marred only by the death of one of my dearest childhood friends. We buried him with many tears, and raised his likeness in effigy in marble over his grave. A tablet below was inscribed,

  HERE LIES DASH, THE FAVOURITE SPANIEL OF HER MAJESTY QUEEN VICTORIA, IN HIS 10TH YEAR. HIS ATTACHMENT WAS WITHOUT SELFISHNESS, HIS PLAYFULNESS WITHOUT MALICE, HIS FIDELITY WITHOUT DECEIT. READER, IF YOU WOULD BE BELOVED AND DIE REGRETTED, PROFIT BY THE EXAMPLE OF DASH.

  It seemed that Time was detaching me from my old life and old ties, pushing me out on to the stream of a new one, and it made me a little nervous. I adored Albert, would have gone to the ends of the earth with him, but still I felt an insecurity; and the year that followed was to be a particularly trying one.

  SUMMER

  Eleven

  26th May 1900, at Balmoral

  IT HAS been quite a time since I had the leisure to take up my pen, for we had Henry’s Christening on the 18th, and then on the 19th the wonderful news came that Mafeking had been relieved. A flying column under Colonel Mahon, which had been told off for the purpose, had joined up with Plummer’s detachment and had driven off two thousand Boers and marched into Mafeking on the 16th to lift a siege of two hundred and seventeen days.

  To say the news was well received would be an understatement! The people really went ‘raving mad’ with delight, the papers were full of nothing else, and General Baden-Powell’s picture appeared everywhere as the hero of the day: dogged, resourceful and brave, the very stuff of which our great Empire is made. I was visiting Wellington College on the 19th (Drino has just started his first term there – poor Liko would have been so proud!) and when we got back to Windsor the streets were full of shouting, cheering, singing crowds, and all the Eton boys were out – many of them, I fear, in a reprehensible state! The patriotic fervour of our people led to some indescribable goings-on in London (and I dare say in other places too) and the people were so thoroughly ausgelassen that I have already heard a new word being used – mafficking, meaning to celebrate wildly and without restraint.

  And after all that, we came up to Balmoral in time for my poor old birthday on the 24th – my eighty-first, which is very hard to believe. There were more than four thousand telegrams, so touching! and some of them quite amusing. One, unsigned, simply read, ‘Sincere congratulations. Poem follows.’ I await it still, with bated breath!

  I am feeling very well and cheerful in spite of the difficult times we have had over the winter and spring; though I’m not looking forward to Baby’s holiday next week – she is going to the Scilly Isles, and I do not like to do without her. But I shall have Thora here, and she is a dear girl, and keeps me very much amused. Last night she read to me very nicely from one of Scott’s novels. The book she read from once belonged to Albert, but Thora is very good with books and handles them so carefully I had no fears for it. I once knew a chaplain who used to lick his fingers before turning a page – a disgusting habit, as I had no hesitation in telling him. I expect he came to a bad end. I often warn the children of that – a person who has no respect for books is not one to be trusted. We give away our deeper characters in all sorts of little surface ways that the wise person can discern.

  I like to have her talk to me, too, for she tells me all about what young women like and do in these modern times. Their lives are so much more full and varied than in my young day, what with bicycling and tennis-parties, roller-skating, tea-dancing, and riding about in motor-cars (I have just banned them from Hyde Park, much to Bertie’s annoyance, but they frighten the horses, and besides, one must draw the line somewhere!). Thora was quick to remind me of the modern inventions which I make use of myself, like the telephone and telegraph and electric light; and the ‘rising room’ (what the Americans amusingly call an ‘elevator’!) – which I have had put in at Osborne for taking my chair up and down; though I don’t use it often, preferring to be carried. And that led us to talk of the last visit Alicky and Nicky spent here, at Balmoral, in 1896, when they brought their first child, Olga, to see me – the most gloriously fat and rosy-cheeked baby I have ever seen, a positive bolster of a baby, with a row of tiny teeth like seed-pearls! (They have two more daughters now, but no son still, which is a worry to them, Russia being what it is; but they are young yet, and healthy.) I found Alicky sadly changed from the dear, friendly child who used to spend long holidays with me: she seemed so remote as to be almost a stranger. And Russian ways are peculiar – they brought the most enormous retinue, including such a number of detectives and policemen I felt almost offended – what did they think could happen to them here, on my own estate? Bertie did his best to be hospitable by taking Nicky out stalking every day, but Nicky only complained that he never got a stag (which was hardly Bertie’s fault!) and said he would sooner have spent the time in his wife’s company, which was not tactful. He also complained that Balmoral was colder and bleaker than Siberia; but when they went, he left a ‘tip’ of a thousand pounds to be shared out amongst the servants! However, the subject of the visit came up in my conversation with Thora because on the last day we all went out on to the terrace and were photographed by the new ‘animatograph’ process, which makes moving pictures by winding off a reel of photographs all joined together. We had a viewing of it later, in November at Windsor, and there we all were walking up and down and the children jumping about, just as if we were alive! Thora and I agreed it is a very wonderful process, and wondered how it would have been if it had been invented sooner. The photographic process has already changed the way we all think about war, but imagine seeing the charge of the Light Brigade on animatograph!

  I have a little cottage here where I work – it used to be the gardener’s cottage – and where I come to be alone, and since it is a fine day today I have brought my ‘magnum opus’ down with me, to take up where I left off – which I see was the Christmas of 1840. At the beginning of 1841, it was plain that my Government was in difficulties, though 1840 had ended in triumph with the successful resolving of the Middle Eastern crisis. Lord M. had been reported at Woburn after Christmas ‘like a boy escaped from school, in roaring spirits’. But there is an adage that the People have no interest in foreign affairs, and will always judge a government by its performance at home. I have always found that to be very true (except in times of war when a different sort o
f spirit prevails, and a multitude of domestic sins can be covered by one glorious victory of our men abroad).

  At home things did not look good for the Government. The harvest of 1840 had been bad, which meant hunger and unrest amongst the poor. Tea and sugar prices were unusually high, which upset the middle classes. Trade with both America and Europe was slack, and – most serious of all – government expenditure had outstripped revenues by a frightening one-and-a-half million pounds. I did not understand how a government could spend money it did not have in the first place, but I knew all about debt from members of my own family, and I knew it meant nothing but misery, and must be corrected with all haste.

  Lord M., in his droll way, put the blame for the budget deficit on the introduction of the Penny Post.

  ‘But I thought the Penny Post was supposed to pay for itself?’ I said indignantly. ‘You told me it was a good idea.’

  ‘Oh, certainly, ma’am, it is; and it will – in time,’ he replied. ‘Once it works itself out, it will generate enormous revenue. But it is like all new ideas: someone must pay to set it up and get it going.’

  As well as the money troubles, there was trouble from the Chartists, the Irish (as usual), and the Anti-Corn Law League, which was stirring up the industrial areas. Then three by-elections in February and another in May went against us, and Lord M. was plainly beginning to feel the strain. He looked tired, and suddenly frighteningly old. ‘I’m nearly sixty-one – many men die at sixty-three,’ he said to me one day. ‘People like me who have been rather young for their age, grow old all at once.’ This sort of talk frightened me very much; I was terrified of losing him. But when the Government was defeated in the spring over the Irish franchise, Lord M. said comfortingly that ‘they would not go out on such an issue as this.’ But the comfort was spoiled when he added that if they were beaten on the budget, it would be a different matter.

  It was about this time that Albert sent George Anson to have secret discussions with both Lord M. and Sir Robert Peel about the likelihood in the near future of a Tory Government led by Peel, and what could be done to ensure a smooth changeover. If I had known about these negotiations I would have been very angry indeed; and in a way, that was one of the reasons the negotiations were kept secret.

  The fact was that there had been a previous occasion, two years ago, when my Government had been badly defeated. That had been in May 1839 in the middle of the Lady Flora Hastings scandal; and when I had been told that the Whigs must go out and the Tories come in, I had fought it tooth and nail. I could not bear the thought that my beloved Lord M. was to be replaced by the horrid, frozen-faced industrial baronet Sir Robert Peel (someone once said Peel’s smile was like the silver fittings on a coffin!). I absolutely refused to change my Ladies of the Bedchamber, as Peel demanded, for his own appointees, and Peel gave the ultimatum that if I did not accept new ladies, he would find it impossible to form a Government: it would, he said, appear that I had no confidence in him. The last thing he expected me to say was that indeed I had no confidence in him; but he mistook his mark, and within a week he had admitted defeat and I had my Whigs and my Lord M. back again.

  At the time I felt very strongly that I had acted within my rights: my ladies were Whigs, but they were not political Whigs, nor did I ever discuss politics with them. However, what I did in effectively refusing the change of government was really shockingly unconstitutional; and if my Prime Minister had been anyone but Lord M. there would have been a dreadful uproar and scandal; but everyone liked him, and no-one could believe for a moment that he had anything but the country’s good at heart, so we escaped only a little tarnished.

  All this had happened before Albert arrived in England, of course, but he had heard about it from Anson and from Stockmar, and he thoroughly disapproved. He believed that the Sovereign should be above party politics, and deplored my open favouring of the Whigs, which he thought lowered my standing to that of a grubbing political patron. He had advocated from the beginning that my Household, or at least the senior appointees, should be a balanced mixture of both parties, so that the Court could be seen not to be partisan, and was also not dependent on the parliamentary distribution.

  All these were admirable ideas, and I came in time to accept them as right and proper, likely to strengthen rather than weaken the Throne. Moreover, once I had accepted Sir Robert Peel and got used to his very different manner, I found him an excellent man, with fine qualities, and in some ways he was my best Prime Minister. (Dear Disraeli once said to me it was a mystery how Peel ever came to be leader of the Tories, for he was a natural-born Whig by inclination, which I suppose helped me to become reconciled to him.) But I never loved him as Albert did, and at first I did not find him easy to trust: in the early years of my escape from Conroy, I was always on the look-out for double-dealing, plots and deceit, and anyone whose manner was not open, frank and confiding (and Peel’s certainly was not!) I suspected of duplicity.

  So when it looked as though the Whig Government must fall, Albert wanted to ensure that there was no repeat of the ‘Bedchamber Crisis’, which he believed would be very damaging to the Crown. This was the overt reason for his sending Anson to Lord M. and Peel behind my back; but in retrospect I can see that Albert welcomed the change of government because he wanted to be rid of Lord M. He liked Peel (whose manner, being reserved like his own, did not offend him), and admired his intelligence and integrity; but he always undervalued Lord M.’s abilities, simply because his manner was not such as Albert could ever take to. That lounging grace, that levity, that sly, cynical humour, that apparent indolence, were all incomprehensible to my darling, who took them as signs of degeneracy.

  But more than that, most of all, Albert wanted to rid us of Lord M. because he was jealous of him; because he wanted me all to himself.

  At this distance from events it is hard to say how much I appreciated at the time what was really happening. When one is young, one is so much more attached to one’s body. One lives inside it, seeing through it with a natural distortion like the refraction of water; affected by its ebbs and flows, like a sea anemone on a rock swayed this way and then that by the great sighing tides. In old age, one wears one’s body more lightly, for all its aches and pains, and as it becomes less important, so it becomes more transparent. I can see now many things about myself, and about Albert, which I did not know, or only dimly sensed when I was young. It is a great pity one cannot go back in time, armed with that disembodied wisdom, and correct the mistakes that were made when one was, shall I say, physically distracted.

  And I was very distracted by my body that year, which was another reason that Albert and Anson were anxious to have a smooth transition, should it come. Hysterical scenes must be avoided; I was not to be upset if possible, because I was pregnant again. Peel, who had locked horns with me once and lost, was ready to compromise and sent word to Lord M. that if I would ‘spontaneously’ give up my three most senior ladies – the Duchesses of Sutherland and Bedford, and Lady Normanby – he would forgo any further changes.

  So one day at his regular audience Lord M. told me that I must be prepared for a change in government. His budget, he was sure, would bring him down; and when the time came, I must not hesitate to send for Peel.

  I trembled a good deal at the thought of a change, but kept control of myself pretty well, though I said at once that I had sooner send for the Duke. ‘I have come to like him really very well,’ I said. ‘In fact, I think he is a good friend to us.’ He had stood proxy for Albert’s papa as godfather at Pussy’s Christening in February, and had unbent sufficiently to smile and say she was a beautiful and intelligent child, which had warmed me towards him. ‘And I know he is honest, that is the greatest thing.’

  ‘Why, ma’am, so is Sir Robert,’ said Lord M. ‘And you know the Duke will not do it. He will give you the same answer as he gave in ’thirty-nine – that he is too old and much too deaf.’ He smiled. ‘A little political deafness can be a great advantage to a Prime Min
ister – I enjoy it myself from time to time – but the real thing is a great drawback.’

  I did not respond to the smile. ‘I do not like Sir Robert,’ I said, clenching my hands. ‘I do not like him. And he will take away all my ladies and leave me with no-one, and I shall be quite forlorn.’

  ‘Well, as to that,’ Lord M. said casually, ‘I think there will be no difficulty. In fact, I know it. Sir Robert has very chivalrously declared that three new appointments will quite satisfy him – and I think, ma’am, you may change three without feeling too forlorn.’

  ‘Do you mean you have seen him? You have asked him about it?’ I said in surprise.

  There was the slightest hesitation. ‘Anson has seen him – spoke to him yesterday, in fact.’

  ‘You sent Anson?’

  ‘Not I, ma’am. It was the Prince, anxious for your comfort and security, who asked Anson to sound out Sir Robert on the subject. And Anson was so eloquent on the Prince’s behalf that Sir Robert’s eyes filled with tears. He exhibited, I’m told, the most proper feeling!’

  This image so caught my attention that I quite forgot to be angry. ‘Did he really? But whenever I have seen him he has always shown me a horrid, cross face. It is the case with all the Tories. I do not want cross-faced ministers about me.’