I, Victoria

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  (Amongst those sworn, as a matter of interest, was one Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the Tyrant, who within a very few years was to make himself Emperor of the French, and who later became quite a friend of ours; and a very fascinating man he was too. When yet another revolution – oh, these French! – drove him from France, I invited him and his Empress to make their home in England. He lived here at peace until his death in 1873, and she is still one of my dearest friends.)

  On the morning of the 8th I looked out of my window and saw soldiers in the Palace Gardens. The sight of them brought home to me the danger we were facing, and I found my palms damp and my stomach churning. Only six weeks ago a peaceful demonstration in Paris had turned, at the firing of one shot, into a revolution, and the King of France now languished, a penniless exile, in my uncle’s house in Esher. If the same were to happen here, where would we go – always assuming we escaped with our heads still attached to our necks? I most passionately did not want to go into exile, away from my beloved country – and besides, who would take us in? There was only Uncle Leopold, and I didn’t want to live the rest of my life in Belgium. Death – as long as it was the death of all of us – would be preferable to that.

  Albert and I breakfasted almost without talking, and then we went to see that the children were ready. The atmosphere had affected them, too. They were quiet and subdued, far from their usual noisy, boisterous selves. Dear Lady Lyttleton was a monument of calm. Alice ran straight to her papa as soon as he appeared, but Vicky, for a wonder, remained by Laddle’s side, holding tight to her hand. ‘Mamma,’ she said urgently, ‘what if the baby cries? Won’t it give us away?’

  I met Laddle’s eyes above her head. Since the French exiles had arrived, the children had all been playing together, and she had plainly absorbed too many narrow-escape stories of hiding from the gens d’armes.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Puss, we’re not running away in disguise,’ I told her. ‘We don’t have to hide who we are from anyone.’

  ‘But we are escaping, aren’t we, Mamma?’ Bertie said anxiously. I could not tell if he wanted reassurance, or was hoping we really were having an adventure.

  ‘We’re just going in our own carriages to the station, and taking an ordinary train and steamer to Osborne,’ I said.

  ‘You will like to see how Mr Cubitt’s men are getting on, won’t you, my son?’ Albert said.

  Bertie nodded, though not with any great enthusiasm, but Affie burst in, ‘Can we help the man mix the concrete, Papa, like last time?’

  ‘Yes, if you are very good, and do exactly as Laddle tells you all the way down,’ Albert said. He drew out his watch. ‘The carriages should be ready. I think we should go downstairs.’

  A cold rain was falling steadily as the horses trotted out of the gates. Why did these familiar streets seem suddenly threatening, unreal? I stared from the windows, thinking one moment there were more people about than usual, and the next fewer, and finding a horrid significance in either state. Albert held my hand, and I could feel his tension like electricity in the air: I thought that if I ran my hand over him, he would crackle. The scene around the Palace of Westminster looked the same as on any day, the crowds and the traffic, the workmen whistling and crashing about on the scaffolding as Pugin’s delicate Gothic spires rose painstakingly towards the skies. It was nearing completion now – but perhaps, I thought with a shiver, it never would be completed. Perhaps the mob would throw it down, set fire to it all over again in their frenzy of revenge. The artillery on Westminster Bridge was both reassuring and alarming, and a frigate was moored just below against the Charing Cross embankment, rocking gently on the flow, looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth – just as if she were not crammed as full of men as an egg is of meat.

  We arrived at Waterloo station exactly at half past ten, trotting between two lines of special constables to a welcoming committee of Richard Mayne and several senior officers.

  ‘We thought it as well to clear the station completely, ma’am,’ he said. ‘The train is ready for you, with steam up. It can depart as soon as you are all on board.’

  We walked quickly across the empty concourse, and its very emptiness frightened me, for our footsteps seemed to echo unnaturally, and the silence invited some violent rupture. At any moment, I thought, there would be the loud report of an assassin’s gun – I had heard that before. A rifleman somewhere up in the rafters might be taking aim at this very instant, looking down on me as the French sniper looked down from the crosstrees at Admiral Nelson on the afterdeck of the Victory. The thought stiffened my spine. If there was such a one, he should see a soldier’s daughter, not a refugee. I held my head higher and slowed my steps a little. If I was going to die, it would be with dignity!

  All the same, I was relieved to find myself aboard the train, and felt so exhausted that I was glad to be laid down on a couch in the royal compartment and propped with pillows. As soon as the last door was slammed, the train jerked and chugged forward, and we were soon racing through the grimy suburbs and out into the fair, green, wet countryside – going much faster than Albert liked. He sat beside me, holding my hand, and for once had no complaint to make about the rushing speed and the frantic rocking of the carriage. Our speed excited the children, who soon forgot their fear and began to be as noisy and troublesome as usual; and then Louise began to cry.

  We reached dear Osborne at a quarter past two in the afternoon. It was still raining, the evergreens were dripping most dismally, and the quiet and isolation seemed oppressive after all the excitement and worry of London. To be coming here in this way – not longing for it, and having planned how we would spend our precious time here, but all in a panic, against our will as it were, and leaving behind events of such moment which we could no longer affect in any way – seemed bewildering, almost painful; certainly not pleasant. By the evening reaction had set in. Now that we were all safe, I was feeling very strongly that we should not have left at all.

  ‘My place at such a time is in my capital, alongside my people,’ I grumbled at dinner, ‘not running away like this.’

  ‘It is your people you are running away from,’ Albert pointed out, gloomily prodding at a cutlet.

  ‘Nonsense! My people love me. It is one or two wicked, wanton men – agitators – who are causing the trouble, that’s all. I have never run away from danger. What will people think of me?’

  ‘I’m sure they won’t think anything, my love,’ Albert said.

  ‘They must think something,’ I retorted. ‘What if they should decide it was cowardice? I am a soldier’s daughter – I could never bear to be thought of like that. When people are wavering it could be the very thing to turn them against the monarchy.’

  ‘But you said your people loved you,’ Albert objected, putting down his fork with a weary air. ‘Now you say they are wavering. Are these the same people, or some others, I wonder?’

  ‘Why do you pick at everything I say in that disagreeable manner? You know exactly what I mean.’

  ‘Do I? But I have never claimed to be a thought-reader.’

  It was not a good evening.

  The following day, in response to an urgent telegraph message from me, Albert’s equerry, Colonel Phipps, who had remained in London, went out into the streets to see what people were saying about my departure for Osborne. He reported back, very much to my relief, that ‘Her Majesty’s reputation for personal courage stands so high, I never heard one person express a belief that her departure was due to personal alarm.’ That point settled, there was nothing to do but to await events. For everyone’s sakes, Albert and I tried to ‘keep up our peckers’, but the forty-eight hours between our arrival on the Isle of Wight and the news of the monster meeting were, I think, the longest in my life.

  At last, at two o’clock exactly on the 10th of April, a telegraph message was relayed to me from Lord John Russell via the Victory, lying in Portsmouth harbour. I opened it with trembling hands, and the paper vibrated so much I co
uld not focus at first on the words. I thrust it at Albert.

  ‘Read it,’ I begged him. ‘Tell me the worst.’

  ‘For the Queen,’ he read, and then, his eye running ahead, he began not quite to smile, but to lighten, like a sky when the clouds roll away. ‘The meeting at Kennington Common has dispersed quietly. The procession has been given up. The petition will be brought to the House of Commons without any display. No disturbance of any kind has taken place and not a soldier has been seen.’

  By that evening, we had had the full story: the monster meeting had been a complete failure. To begin with, nothing like the numbers O’Connor had expected arrived. Estimates varied, but Russell’s figure was about fifteen thousand. (The Times said twenty, but that many of them were spectators rather than demonstrators.) The waggon containing the mountain of paper which was the petition set off from Chartist headquarters at ten o’clock, drawn by six carthorses. Shops were shut, special constables lined the roads, but no soldiers were in sight. Through the morning small processions converged on Kennington Common, the Irish prominent amongst them, and the people watched them go by with mild curiosity rather than with any fervent or fellow feeling. When the protestors had all assembled on the Common, a few speeches were made, rather lacking in fire, and then the procession formed up behind the petition waggon and began to roll slowly back towards Westminster.

  Before more than a few waggons had even got off the Common, the leading one was stopped by a constable, who asked O’Connor, very politely, if he would kindly come and have a word with Mr Mayne. O’Connor followed him to a nearby public house, where Richard Mayne and Lord John Russell were seated in comfort beside a good fire (and probably with a glass or two of something warming on a table between them!). Mayne told O’Connor that the meeting could continue but that the procession would not be allowed to cross the river, and Russell suggested genially that a cab – or rather two or three cabs – might be summoned to carry the petition to Westminster, if O’Connor was still desirous of delivering it.

  O’Connor – looking white as a sheet, Russell said – thanked them, shook Mayne by the hand, and hastened out to tell the meeting that it had much better disperse. A heavy rain had started to fall, and the crowd began to fray and thin at the edges as the less enthusiastic slipped away to seek shelter. One or two formed small groups and tried to get up some speeches, but by a quarter to two the common was almost deserted, and the police allowed the last stragglers, wet to their skins, to cross the bridges and go home.

  Three cabs, kindly summoned by a police constable, carried the petition, O’Connor and one or two lieutenants to Westminster, where it was handed over and disappeared at once into some or other ante-room – the equivalent of eternal oblivion. It was later discovered that many of the signatures were patently false (Victoria Rex was amongst them, with Sir Robert Peel, the Duke of Wellington, H. Nelson and Mr Punch) which further discredited O’Connor; and in a few months the movement had entirely collapsed from lack of support and lack of funds.

  ‘All the same,’ Albert said to me, ‘we must not forget the legitimate grievances of the poor. Some of the working classes live in the most appalling conditions – filthy, insanitary, without education, without enlightenment, without hope. If we are to avert a real revolution, we must show ourselves worthy of our great position by protecting the weakest in our society.’

  ‘You are right,’ I said, catching fire from him. ‘It is what every Christian should do for his neighbour – and we have more neighbours than the ordinary man. But what must we do?’

  ‘Bad housing in particular is a great evil,’ he said, pacing about the room like a cat. ‘You cannot think how I long to see all those evil places torn down – like the “rookeries” behind Westminster – and replaced with rational housing. It is a most bitter disgrace that such horrors exist within a stone’s throw of Buckingham Palace. Overcrowding alone accounts for so much of the misery and degradation of the poor. How can any family be respectable and decent when all share one room, and do everything in it? When they may be as many as seven sleeping in one bed?’ I could see that for him this was a particularly horrible idea – but then he craved solitude and space around him. I wondered if sometimes the working classes might not actually like huddling together, especially when it was cold – and as to seven sharing one bed, if they disliked it so much they could surely sleep on the floor? But then when I thought of the happiness and real value of family life, I agreed with him absolutely. A clean, decent house, with sufficient separate rooms to protect the young ones from immorality, ought surely to be the least any family had the right to.

  ‘What must we do, then?’ I asked again. It seemed to me such a vast task. There were so many of the poor, and they were so very poor. Albert did not immediately find an answer, but it came to me a moment or two later. ‘We must have advice,’ I said. ‘We must send for Lord Ashley.’

  So that’s what we did. The great philanthropist and reformer (later Lord Shaftesbury) came down to Osborne on the 19th and spent the whole day with us, walking about the grounds and talking about the condition of the working classes and what we could do to help them.

  Ashley agreed with me about their disposition. ‘They are good people, and very loyal, and all they need is a few comforts and some improvements to make their dwellings more healthy. They want no “Charter” – just a little sympathy and kind feeling.’

  As to what we could do, he suggested that the Prince was the one to show the way, as my representative, by putting himself at the head of all social movements in art and science, especially as they bore on the poor; and as a practical beginning he offered to take Albert to visit some of the worst areas in the vicinity of the Strand, and to invite him as guest of honour to a meeting of the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes.

  This Albert did, with great success and acclaim, and it was the beginning of a new interest in his life. I mean, of course, interest in the active sense, for both of us had long been concerned by the way the rapid advances of the nineteenth century had left so many behind, and outside the scope of the benefits the progress conferred. It had always seemed to me wrong that those who had the most toil had the least enjoyment in this world. The obvious lack amongst the poor was of enough to eat and a decent place to live, of course, but beyond that I felt it wrong that they had so little in their lives except toil. For that reason I have always been very much against our dull, dreary Sundays. It is well enough for the middle classes, who have comfortable homes to do nothing in, to talk about ‘keeping the Sabbath’; well for them to say there must be no games on Sundays, no galleries and museums open, no bands playing in the park, no fairs, no dancing – but when else can the working classes have any enjoyment of such things? I would have them go to church, of course – but Sunday ought to be a day of happy amusement for everyone. To deprive the lower orders of their innocent pleasures will not make them better people, or make them more receptive to Christian teaching. Certainly I have always tried to make Sunday a pleasant day in my family, without unnecessary restrictions. (A very impertinent Evangelist once wondered that I allowed my children to play tennis on a Sunday. I replied coldly that I had told them on Sundays they must retrieve their own balls, and not ask a servant to do it for them.)

  So to his own concern for rational housing and proper sanitary arrangements for the working classes, Albert added mine for the fuller use of their leisure, and for helping them to better themselves. Public libraries, parks, promenades, museums, reading-rooms, Institutes of all kinds – where they wanted encouragement, Albert gave it. He headed subscription lists, attended meetings, performed opening ceremonies, spoke at banquets for the raising of funds, accepted honorary presidencies. It added another burden to his already overtaxed time, and took him away from me far more often than I liked, but we both knew that we were not put upon this earth merely to please ourselves; and to see the good that we did, and to receive the gratitude of those whose lives were uplifted, was mo
re than ample reward.

  AUTUMN

  Sixteen

  20th August 1900, at Osborne

  I DREAM that I am all alone in a vast building stocked with magnificent treasures, walking slowly along the aisles, gazing about me at the white and gold and red, the marble and crystal, all glittering in the radiant air. A luminous mist obscures the distances; the air is mild and perfumed like a day in May; a feeling of delight, and peace, and pleasure pervades the vast spaces around me; and most of all, best of all, his presence hovers over everything. I stroll and stare and marvel, but I am puzzled. Why am I here? Not for pleasure alone, but for instruction. What do you learn from all this, Victoria? – his voice, benign, wise, solemn yet touched with joy. I look about me, considering. Yes, I see it now – that nothing is lost.

  Nothing is lost. Nothing walks the earth aimlessly. It is all intended, and everything is to God’s glory. His dear voice, near and all around me in the vastness; and then the touch of his lips upon my brow, the bliss of his real presence again. Be at peace – I am near.

  I wake with tears on my cheeks, for it is only a dream, and I am old, and all alone. Oh, Albert, why did you leave me? For a moment, in the agony of my loneliness, I stretch my arms out to the empty air and cry out for him, gone from me so long ago. I know I shall not sleep again, so I climb from my empty bed and go to the window, draw back the drapes and look out. Dawn is coming, and there is a sea mist like thin milk, luminous towards the east, through which the tops of the junipers he planted stand up dark and strong. To every grieving soul morning comes with its small deliverance. And the dream was strangely comforting. If I am quiet, I can still feel his kiss, and hear his dear voice, though they will fade like this mist with the broadening of the day. Be at peace – I am near. Yes, it’s true, his presence is everywhere to be found, and his influence. I know what it was that I was dreaming of, and it is time now to write about it; and as it was a joyful thing, I must take myself back in time and write about it with a glad heart and a lively pen.