I, Victoria

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  The Big Four came tumbling into the world almost on top of each other. The year 1842 turned out to be one of respite for me, and desperately I needed it after the first two pregnancies and the marital storms I had endured. But the new closeness and trust I shared with Albert after our reconciliation, and the help I now allowed him to give me with my public duties, meant that my nerves were much improved by the time I discovered, in the autumn of ’forty-two, that I was pregnant again. I took the news calmly; the pregnancy was straightforward and the birth relatively easy, and our second daughter arrived on the 25th of April 1843. We called her Alice. It was a nice old English name, I told Albert, and he agreed; but I had not forgotten that it was Lord Melbourne’s favourite name, the one he had said he would give to a daughter, if he had one. It was, I suppose (though I did not think of it that way at the time), a sort of farewell gift to him, for after Alice’s birth our old intimacy was much diminished. I hardly ever saw him, and though I continued to write to him, it was more for his sake than for mine. Albert was everything to me now.

  When she was born, we thought Alice would be the beauty of the family. She did not quite fulfil that promise (her face was too long and her eyes just slightly too close together, which gave her a rather horse-like appearance – oh, but a dear, gentle, fine horse!) but she was the child of ours who looked most like Albert, and therefore I thought her beautiful. She grew up to be exceptionally graceful, with a gentle charm and a sweet, silvery voice very like my own. I have such a lovely portrait of her at the time of her wedding, all in white gauze with a black lace shawl and a wreath of roses round her head. That sweet, sad expression on her face reminded me so much of him. Her eyes and eyebrows were shaped just like his, and she had the same delicate, porcelain skin. Alice had much of Albert’s character too: she excelled at music and painting, and had besides what is most unusual in a child, a selflessness, a dedication to others which made her a treasured child and an exemplary wife and mother. (Laddle called her ‘an angel in the house’.) She adored her father, and dreaded parting from Papa when it came time to marry, though she loved her Louis of Hesse dearly. But in the event, it was Papa who left her, and her marriage took place just a few months after his death. She was with him all through his last illness, and devoted the rest of her life to living as she thought he would have wished. She worked herself nearly to death on behalf of her new people, supporting Hessian hospitals, lunatic asylums, orphanages, and pursuing better education and housing for the poor (oh, how like Albert!).

  Poor, sweet Alice, gentle Alice, was the first of my children to die, of that awful curse diphtheria. Nursing had been her first love since her father’s last illness, and during the Franco-Prussian war she turned her own house into a hospital and dressed wounds and emptied slops with her own hands. So when her children went down with diphtheria she insisted on nursing them herself. She tended them devotedly, but still the youngest, little May, died. Her only son, Ernst, was too ill to be told of his favourite sister’s death, and when he asked his mother to give May one of his books to read, she was overcome with pity, covered his poor face with kisses, and took the infection herself. Oh, I still remember the horror of that dreadful, dreadful morning when they handed me the incoherent telegram from Louis at breakfast! ‘Poor Mamma, poor me, my happiness gone, dear, dear Alice!’ Bertie, weeping brokenly, said, ‘It is always the good who are taken.’ (There had always been a special tenderness between him and Alice.) Loving her father above all mortals, she died, like him, on the 14th of December, on the seventeenth anniversary of his death. It was too, too awful and mysterious!

  To lose a child is a terrible grief, for we are not designed by nature to outlive our children. But there, I have her still in my mind as she was when a baby – quite a different Alice, so different that they cannot be the same person. The baby we used to call ‘Fat Alice’, or ‘Fatima’, for she was a complete little barrel – I have sketches of her I made when she was eighteen months old, looking like a square stuffed pillow with a stout little limb sticking out at each corner. She was full of chuckles, Fat Alice, and full of mischief. I firmly believe it was often her who led Vicky into their naughty escapades rather than vice versa – such as the time they found a housemaid black-leading a grate in a remote part of the palace, and daubed the blacking all over the unfortunate girl’s face. I marched them down to the kitchens and made them apologize when I found out about it – I would never tolerate unkindness to servants – but by far the worst punishment to them was to witness their papa’s disapproval, his sadness at being ‘let down’ by them.

  After Alice I actually managed to go for seven months before falling pregnant again, and Alfred was born on the 6th of August 1844. We had needed a second son, for Albert had long anticipated that his reprobate brother would not produce an heir (not a legitimate one, at any rate), in which case the Dukedom of Coburg would pass to Albert. Self-evidently Bertie could not go to Coburg, so Albert would need a second son on whom to devolve the dukedom. Affie was a very good child, handsome and clever, passionately musical – he taught himself secretly to play the violin and surprised me one day on my birthday by playing me a composition of his own, which was very pretty (though I think Affie thought more of it than anyone – he always had a very good conceit of himself). For as long as any of us could remember, Affie was mad to go to sea, and when he was only fourteen Albert, much against my will, arranged for him to go into the Navy. I was very angry about it at the time, for he was really much too young to leave home; and afterwards he was to all intents and purposes lost to me. I saw him only when he came home on leave, and when he grew older he took to spending his leave as often as possible with Alice at her married home in Darmstadt. He and Alice had always been fond of each other, but I think the main reason he went there was that being away from home had given him a taste for freedom, and he knew I would not approve of the bad habits he had picked up from the other sailors, such as drinking, smoking and consorting with women. There was a scandalous affaire with a young woman in Malta in 1862, for instance – but I will not dwell on that. He did not marry until 1874, and then he must needs (as if on purpose to annoy me) pick on a Russian princess, Grand Duchess Marie, daughter of the Tsar (whom he met at Alice’s – her mother was a Hessian princess). I have never liked or trusted Russia, but Affie was in love, so I grumbled but did not oppose it. But the Tsar was against the match, behaving as though it were disgraceful for a Grand Duchess to marry the son of the Queen of England! (Marie herself has always given one to understand that marrying poor Affie was a great condescension on her part. However, they settled down together in the end, and I must say she has been a good wife to him, and a good daughter to me, though offending many by her pride and display. It must have been a terrible grief to her to have lost her only son last year in such painful circumstances. He shot himself after a violent quarrel with her, and when she defied the doctor’s advice that moving him might be fatal and sent him to the Tyrol to recover, he died a few days later. Well, they say pride goes before a fall, but surely that is too great a price to pay for a little common conceit.)

  12th June 1900

  IT IS good to remember our little ones when they were little ones, and their troubles all unimagined and far in the future. Vicky and Alice were Albert’s favourites; he always got on better with his daughters than his sons. Vicky particularly was his pet. We knew from the beginning she would be intelligent, but she surprised even our particularity, growing up so quick and clever (and pretty and charming too) that it seemed as if our very first effort had produced the perfect child. Certainly Albert felt he could not have got one better suited to him if he had ordered it from a shop! Vicky had my ear for languages (and my voice too – everyone said we sounded absurdly alike) and by the time she was three she could speak French and German with fluency. Standing one day on a hilltop, she remembered and quoted a line from a French poem: Voilà le tableau qui déroule à mes pieds! which I thought remarkable in a three-year-old. Her grammar was s
ometimes a little shaky, but she used French with the readiness of one to whom it is not a foreign language. One time when she was in one of her rages I heard her scream at poor Lady Lyttleton, ‘N’approchez pas moi, moi ne veux pas vous!’

  She inherited my temper too, you see – indeed all the first three were much given to tantrums and ‘roaring’ which put poor Laddle, who would not whip them, in a quandary. Pussy, being clever and the firstborn, and thinking quite as well of her own abilities as Papa did, was convinced for many years that it was she who would inherit the Throne, and not Bertie. She told him so many times, and poor dull Bertie, who freely acknowledged her superiority, was perfectly willing to believe it. (He was not disabused until he was twelve years old, and then, when we realised how things lay, it took a great deal to convince him that she had been mistaken. He cried dreadfully about it and wished it need not be, which annoyed his father considerably, for he liked fine, manly little boys who stood up to responsibility.)

  Believing herself to be the Heiress, Vicky had a very strong sense of her own importance, and would not let anyone behave towards her with what she considered familiarity; while towards people beneath her station she could sometimes show an unbecoming arrogance. She referred to my younger maids-of-honour as ‘these girls’, for instance, and even expected my senior ladies-in-waiting to fetch and carry for her. I was quick to stamp on that sort of thing. At one time she refused to call Doctor Brown (who attended the nursery and some of the servants) by his full name – she had heard me call him simply ‘Brown’ and took to doing the same herself. I rebuked her several times, and told her if she did it again, she would be sent to bed. The very next day she came into the room while I was talking to him and greeted him breezily with ‘Good morning, Brown!’ and then catching my irate eye the naughty girl curtseyed and said quickly, ‘And good night, Brown, for I am going to bed,’ and took herself off. I was very angry, but had difficulty all the same in not laughing at Brown’s expression of bafflement, for he hadn’t the least idea of what was going on!

  But it was high spirits with Vicky, not vice, and she had the warmest heart in the world. As soon as she had enough to do to occupy her mind, these little awkwardnesses were smoothed out (though her quick temper remained, along with her argumentativeness). She loved to learn, and devoured mathematics, philosophy, chemistry, history and political economy the way lesser children do stories. She spent all her pocket-money on books, and by the age of ten was better educated than most adults. Albert said she had ‘a man’s head and a child’s heart’, and we loved to see newcomers to the palace fall under the spell of her astonishing mind and her sparkling charm – beginning by treating her as a child and ending by falling in love with her. Certainly it was so with Fritz, the son of the Crown Prince of Prussia, whom Albert had picked out from the beginning for her future husband. I was very glad of it, for I would never have forced a child of mine into a marriage without love; I always wanted them to know the same sort of absolute confidence and intimacy that I had with my husband. So my plan has always been to make sure they meet the right people, and leave the final choosing to them, which I think is the right and proper way for a parent to go about these things.

  But when we invited the Crown Prince and Princess with their family to London in 1851 for the Great Exhibition, dear Fritz tumbled head-over-heels in love with Vicky, for all that he was twenty and she was only ten. ‘You cannot form an idea of what a sweet little thing she was,’ he told me many years later. ‘Such a childlike simplicity, combined with a woman’s intellect. She seemed almost too perfect.’ They walked together about the exhibits at the Crystal Palace, and she explained them all to him, engaged him in witty, lively conversation, and flashed her dazzling smiles at him until I think the poor young man had no idea if he was on his head or his heels. He went away prepared to wait for as many years as it took to gain Vicky’s hand, and spent the interim in studying politics and the British Constitution in order to make himself more worthy of her.

  After their marriage he told her that he had fallen in love with more than just her: he thought England the most enlightened country in the world, Albert the best and wisest man alive, and had been glad and astonished to see what a happy family we were. The Prussian Court and his own family circle was full of acrimony, bickering and intrigue; but Albert and I, he said, were so devoted that it might be supposed we had only just married; while he had never seen children before on such affectionate terms with their parents. (Poor Fritz lived to see his own son Willy turned against him by court faction, taught by his grandparents and Bismarck to despise his father and scorn his mother, and espouse the illiberal, ‘blood and iron’ policies which were everything gentle Fritz was against.)

  13th June 1900

  THE WEATHER vastly improved, and everyone’s temper with it! I am out in my little hut again, going on with my writing, and with the door and windows open, to enjoy the delicious air. The white rose outside the window is in full bloom, and smells almost too sweet. It makes me want to cry: beauty can affect one so, almost like sorrow. If my darling could only be here to share it with me! ‘They are not long, the days of wine and roses’ – no, no, I must think of bright, happy things on such a lovely day. I resume my story.

  It was always our intention that the children should have a happy childhood.

  ‘Yours, I know, Liebling, was unhappy,’ Albert said to me one night as we lay in bed together, face to face and holding hands – our ‘discussions in the dark’, he called them – ‘and though I cannot say mine was so, I lost my own mother, and did not enjoy the kind of tender intimacy with my father I would have liked. I should wish our children to grow up frank and unafraid, able to talk to us freely, regarding us as friends rather than gaolers. I want to guide them and mould them, of course – but I also want to play with them and hear them laugh.’

  ‘You will amaze everyone,’ I remarked. ‘In this country children live apart from their parents, in nurseries tucked away at the top of the house, and only see them on formal occasions. And the boys are sent to boarding-schools, and never see them at all.’

  ‘But that is so wrong!’ he cried. ‘Who in that case will influence the child? Not his own parents, but the servants who attend him and the hirelings who teach him. As well not have a child at all, as give its shaping over to inferiors!’

  ‘Well, I agree with you,’ I said. ‘I do not think being shut up and kept silent and ignored makes a person better. Happiness is the best teacher. I want my little ones to laugh and romp, as I was never able to do.’

  ‘You want to laugh and romp with them,’ he said teasingly. ‘You would have them be the brothers and sisters you never had.’

  ‘They will not grow up suspecting their mother of plotting against them,’ I said firmly. ‘But Albert, there is one aspect of my childhood which I think Mamma got right, and that was the simple, domestic background I had. No hint of the purple, no luxurious surroundings and elaborate dinners – everything as plain and economical as possible. I don’t want them to grow up filled with pride and contempt of others. They will be exposed to flattery enough when they get out into the world – let them be humble while they are with us.’

  ‘By all means,’ he said easily – for things of the flesh had little weight with him anyway – ‘but I think you may have your labour in vain. Our children cannot help knowing they are the sons and daughters of the Queen of England. If they learn not to be above their station, it will be because of what is put into their hearts and heads, not on their table and on their backs.’

  But I had my way, and my nursery must have been one of the plainest in the kingdom. Clothes were unadorned and made for wear, and when outgrown were passed on to younger members of the family, or put into mothballs for the grandchildren. And the nursery food was of the boiled beef and boiled mutton, rice pudding and semolina order. (Affie once complained that the hands on board ship had better food than he had at home! And in more recent times Ena, Baby’s daughter, has complained that v
isiting children get meringues and éclairs while they, the resident children, get only plain biscuits. Once when it was her turn to say Grace she folded her hands and said, ‘Thank God for my dull dinner!’ and was sent away from the table in disgrace and without it.)

  But I wanted to be sure that they would not develop luxurious tastes which might run them into debt later in life; and that whatever station in life they were called to, they would be able to survive. I must have forgotten by then how much I had disliked the regimen when I was a child; or if I remembered, thought it would be good for them, as I assumed it had been good for me. But from the other end of my life now I am not so sure it was a good plan. Certainly in my own case, I like rich food, and especially the pudding and cake, chocolate ice, apricot tart, macaroon, trifle and syllabub part of the meal – and I have done ever since I was released from the tyranny of boiled mutton in 1837. Reid says I overload my stomach with rich things, and just lately he has persuaded me to try Benger’s food. I was reluctant at first – I cannot bear the idea of ‘slops’ – but once I tried it I found I liked it. So I have started to have a large bowl of it before meals – and now Reid says that he meant me to eat it instead of the rich food, not as well as! Lenchen and Louise both had a word with me about it – but I am the Queen after all, and there’s not much point in being Queen of England if you can’t at least eat what you like.

  I sometimes think I have not been quite fair to Bertie. The trouble is, I think, that I always wanted him to be like his father in every respect; and since, as I have often stated, Albert was both perfect and unique, Bertie was bound to fall short. But how far he fell short! To begin with the poor unfortunate child quite soon began to look like me rather than like his papa – no heavenly porcelain beauty, but the bulging blue eyes, curved-over nose, pendulous lip and receding chin I had mourned in the looking-glass day after day. When I looked at him I saw my Hanoverian blood peeping back, I saw my Wicked Uncles thinly disguised in a child’s frame.